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Sleepless

Thursday June 22, 2006

Posted In: Malaysia | Comments: 6 | Written By: Kai Conragan

The Coliseum Cafe, Bar, and Hotel.

Taking the first few dry swallows of what feels like a cold coming on, you lay your ahead against the pillow hoping for a good night’s rest. The pillow feels like someone rolled up a dozen dirty socks and stuffed them in a pillowcase. Your head works it’s way through the padding and finds the springs of the mattress below. It’s going to be a long one. Can’t sleep. Must sleep. Can’t sleep. Must sleep. Maybe it’s the heat. Maybe it’s the humidity. Maybe it’s the bright lights outside the window. Maybe it’s the incessant honking of horns from the street below. What the hell am I doing here? You keep asking yourself as the minutes pass. Can’t sleep. Must sleep. Can’t sleep. Fuck it. How long have I been laying here? 6 hours. Might as well get up. If sleep was coming it would have been here hours ago. Cold shower removes the grogginess just enough to realize you forgot your sandals and you’re standing barefoot in a public shower that’s certainly seen it’s fair share of piss on the tile. Only the piss ain’t yours. Breakfast will help. Down the creaky stairs, out the side entrance, and into the bright light. Damn, it’s hot outside. What time is it? 7am. Order breakfast and find a table under a fan. That oughtta help with the heat. Only it doesn’t. The fan is slow and decrepit and moves so slow that it barely disturbs the flies collecting around the lid of a hot sauce bottle on the table. It moves fast enough, however, to cause a strobing effect from the fluorescent lights directly overhead as the fan blades pass, one after the other. You feel dizzy, so you close your eyes. There you are again. Eyes shut and wide awake. The pulsing light finds its way through your eyelids. You feel like you’re in a nightclub. Only your not. It’s 7am, remember? and it’s the 4th night in a row you haven’t slept. Close your eyes. Breath deep. Keep telling yourself your living the dream. Fuck, I need to get out of this city.

Kuala Lumpur. 8 days have passed and I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve asked myself what the hell am I doing here?. What are we doing here, Julie and I? It seemed easy enough: Fly from Denpasar to avoid charges on an expiring visa, spend a few days checking out the city, and then regroup and figure out where to go next. Sounds simple. Only, nothing is simple when you’re in a foreign country and you don’t speak the language. Something that should take 10 minutes takes an hour; something that should take an hour takes a day. Before you know it 8 days have passed and your glorious trip around the world seems to have a taken a longer-than-expected pitstop. 8 days of walking the streets, seeing the sights, getting lost, being found, getting screwed by cab drivers. But let’s not forget the food. Good food. No. Great food. It doesn’t seem like 8 days, but 8 days nonetheless.

It’s not as bad as it sounds – in fact, it’s certainly quite better – but this is the way you feel at times on the road, especially when you haven’t slept. Let’s not forget that the word travel comes from the word travail, literally meaning to suffer. Suffer? I wouldn’t go that far. Kuala Lumpur has proved to be challenging though. It’s coarse. It’s grimy. It’s loud. It overwhelms you with smells. The people are not unfriendly, just indifferent. The public transportation is inefficient at best. Dead chickens hang from restaurant windows. Discarded durian fruit collects on street corners in the afternoon sun. If you’ve never smelled a durian fruit consider yourself one of the lucky ones. And yet, this is what we’re here for. We didn’t sign up for a packaged tour or a 5-star holiday. We wanted vernacular baby. And have we found it? You bet.

And vernacular has come perhaps in no better form than the Coliseum—a seedy old bar and hotel located in Little India. Built in the 1920’s to cater to the British, the Coliseum is an old building that still caters to the romantic at hear in a rapidly modernizing city of glass and steel highrises. Here you imagine Hemmingway, or Chatwin perhaps, scribbling away madly in a Moleskin notebook. It has tall ceilings and white, spartan walls. And the Coliseum doesn’t mess around with decorations. The only thing that breaks up those white spartan walls are a few, haphazardly placed frames holding clippings about the bar’s yesteryears. One frame features an old ad for the Coliseum cut out of a newspaper. The ad is printed right next to an article which headline states in big, bold letters: WHAT TO DO IF YOUR SERVANT GETS MALARIA. The bar itself was designed for the Brits, so it’s just a few inches too high for the usual Malays seated at the barstools, who tend to be a bit shorter, causing them to look childlike with their elbows resting level with their shoulders.

So what brought us to the Coliseum? Two things. First, sleeplessness. Several nights of staring up at a ceiling fan made us think a change of scenery might help. Second, before we came to Kuala Lumpur we met a man named Jan Bredsdorff, and Jan recommended the Coliseum.

Jan is a Danish writer, now in his 60’s, who has a permanent residence in Bali where he still works as a writer and a translator of Danish books. Jan is a character—when he tells you stories about his past you feel like your watching an old B-grade movie. He tells you of the time he spent teaching in China during the Communist Revolution, or the time he was thrown in a Russian jail on trumped up visa charges, or the time he was given a private island in Malaysia. Jan gets a gleam in his eye when he talks—a look of one who still sees this world with amusement and childish fascination. In other words, Jan is a writer’s writer, and a damn good storyteller as well. And for all his tales, Jan’s not a bullshitter. So when he said, Go to the Coliseum, it’s the finest hotel in Kuala Lumpur, there was little doubt where we’d be heading.

We’d meant to go there the night we arrived in Kuala Lumpur, but some poor advice from a cab driver near the KL Centre led us to believe the hotel portion of the Coliseum had been closed down. Never listen to the cab drivers in this city. A few days later, wandering through the narrow streets of Little India looking for a tailor, we stumbled upon the Coliseum and discovered that it was alive and well.

Fossilized

That was the word Jan had used to describe the waiters at the Coliseum. Order the steak, he said. A fossilized waiter dressed in a white jacket will tie a huge napkin around your neck. As usual, Jan was right.

The Coliseum is not for everyone. If you’re looking for a lobby full of eco-tour brochures go elsewhere. But if you want a lobby that’s actually a bar – the only thing seedier than the torn leather chairs being the drunk local who’s sitting in it – then go to the Coliseum. Remember that vernacular thing we were talking about? Yeah, it flows here like a river into the South China Sea. There are more Kerouacian Roman Candles here on any given night than in all the bars left in North Beach.

So to the Coliseum we went. And it’s here, listening to a drunk Chinese businessmen with his tie thrown over his shoulder and wedding ring stuffed in his breast pocket that you find yourself smiling and nodding even though have no idea what it is that he is talking about. And yet, for the first time, you understand completely. In this moment – when you are neither coming or going, leaving or staying – you realize exactly what in the hell it is that you are doing here. And, of course, you understand what Jan meant when he said it’s the finest hotel in Kuala Lumpur. You don’t go to the Coliseum for a quiet night’s sleep- there are other places for that. You go to the Coliseum for the steak. For the drinks. For the waiters. For the atmosphere. For the people.

Maybe it’s the sleep deprivation, maybe it’s your third gin and tonic, but you can’t help but laugh. When traveling, you can only see so many sunsets and so many temples before your mind starts feeling like a never ending postcard. And like all postcards, the pictures, though nice, lack depth and, more importantly, context. You smile, nod one last time, knock back the rest of your drink, and order another. It’s going to be another long night. But what the hell, I can’t sleep anyway.

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