August 30, 2013 by Michael Lane

BREAKFAST WITH THE CATS

Bandit on the left, Hooper on the right.

Recently I found this video that someone sent me a while ago (re-posted below), and it reminded me of my first two cats, Bandit and Hooper, and how they would wake me in the morning.

I adopted both cats in the days when I was drinking a lot. Bandit was part of a litter of black kittens that was thrown into a dumpster. Luckily the dumpster was behind an animal grooming business, so the kittens’ mewling complaints were heard by the right people. Bandit was my first cat.

Hooper I got at a pet store adoption event, but it took two tries. The first try he purred, nuzzled, and licked me when I petted him—and I chose a beautiful gray kitten with blue eyes over him. The gray kitten didn’t give me anything, no affection, he hardly even acknowledged that I existed on the ride home. He was like a beautiful painting of a kitten. But men are like cats in that I went for the shiny sparkly one over the one that was the best for me.

When I got home there was a message on my answering machine—this was in the 90’s—informing me that I had inadvertently kidnapped the gray kitten. He was supposed to be at the pet store for a grooming, and he got mixed up with the adoption cats. I probably could have ransomed him back, he was that beautiful.

When I returned the gray stunner, Hooper jumped into my arms—to make sure I got the message this time.

When I brought Hooper home to meet Bandit, it was the easiest cat introduction I’ve ever had in my life (and I’ve gone through a few by now). They both liked each other almost immediately. They made a good team.

Based on some information I had, it was likely that Bandit was part of a Hispanic family—until they decided to throw him out. Hooper’s origins were a complete mystery, though he had an odd bent tail that I thought might point to a wild and dangerous time out on the streets.

Of the two of them, Bandit was slightly dominant, but he was laid back about it—the cool, behind-the-scenes leader.

I was an erratic father to the two of them because of the drinking. I had a lot of love to give, but it was stuffed under twenty layers of armor. I was a knight stumbling blindly along, always about to teeter over… and land on a yowling cat.

I was terrible about feeding them breakfast on time, especially on the weekends. My hangovers were like bombed-out buildings, and on some weekends you couldn’t dig me out of the rubble before two o’clock.

Feeding time for the cats was at eight in the morning.

I suspect after the first dozen or so times of me feeding them so starvingly late, they figured something had to be done. Here’s how I imagine it might have went down, with my Mexican-American black cat, Bandit, and my streetwise one, Hooper:

BANDIT: Hooper, my compadre. look at eem. He’s not moving.

HOOPER: Yeah, no shit. He drinks like a fish. Stinks like one, too.

BANDIT: Ohh, compadre… don’t say fish. Please, my friend…

HOOPER: Oh, give me a break. I’m fucking famished too. You know, I’ve been thinking… maybe it’s time to do some serious pooping outside the litter box. Send him a message.

BANDIT: Um… do you mean “thinking”? Thinking outside the box?

HOOPER: No, I mean Cheesing the Mousetrap. Down-Periscoping the Submarine. Warming the Porcelain Globe.

Bandit sits on his haunches, blinking at Hooper.

HOOPER: Trumpeting an Elephant? Chumming the Chocolate Water? Dropping the Ring into Mount Doom?

Bandit blinks…

BANDIT: Ohhhh—pooping. You mean literally pooping.

HOOPER: Well shit, yeah. I mean, what the hell, did you go to cat finishing school or something? I’m from the street, my friend. Look at this tail. Of course I’m literal. I could literally eat a fucking dead horse right now.

BANDIT: Yes compadre, me also… but I don’t think Dropping a Doom Ring would do anything except get us sent to the vet…

HOOPER: Hmm, you’re right about that. Don’t you love how he throws a treat into that cat carrier prison when he tries to get us to the vet? Like that’s gonna fool us. Oh yeah—no thanks, dude. I ain’t going to jail for some Fred Flinstone-looking vitamin shit treat. Seriously, who does he think he’s dealing with?

BANDIT: Yes, yes, compadre… But what we need is a plan… okay… here’s what we’re going to do…

Bandit raises a paw to cover his mouth as he leans in to whisper in Hooper’s ear… Hooper’s eyes widen as he listens to the details…

HOOPER: Yeah… uh-huh… okay… meow, that’s interesting…

Plotting.

And after that meeting, when I was in those dozes that were like drowning in my car at the bottom of the Chappaquiddick River, I would feel this wetness on my ear, like the kiss of an angel…

…actually, it would be the wet nose of my cat Hooper, as he tried to gently nudge me awake.

I’d swipe at him—not to hit him or anything, but to force him off the bed—and he would jump down.

Bandit would watch from a high place, like a window jamb or the top of a book shelf. He was the general on the mountain top, while Hooper would launch sorties into the lumpy fortress of my hangover. I imagined Hooper was disgruntled and resentful, assigned the dirty work of stirring me from the deep caverns of my boozy sleep… while Bandit would sit up there and egg him on: “You’re doing great, compadre, doing great… just one more time… don’t worry, my friend, I have your back…”

Generally, it would take five to ten tries. Hooper would wet nose-stamp my skin, paw my scalp, lick his lips in my ear, or—my favorite—my eyes would flutter open to witness the Cat Stare, that peeling metal look that cats share with convicts.

If that didn’t work, then Bandit would basically yank the “fire alarm”: he’d jump up on me and march back and forth over my body crying and yowling, the cat version of cursing a blue streak: “What the fucking-fuck?! Seriously, this shit is old! We’re so hungry we’re crapping mouse toys! My food bowl just laughed at me! Get up, you bastard! I mean, god damn it, what the hell does a cat have to do?”

“I still say we should start pooping everywhere,” Hooper would add. “Maybe poop on his head.”

Bandit takes a breath before unleashing another string of obscenities at me.

Bandit cursed at me like this whenever it took me really, really long to feed him and also when I played AC/DC on the stereo. Anything by them. The first chords would rumble through the speakers and he’d be in my lap, swearing up and down at me. “This godforsaken head-bashing shit again?! Can you please lighten up? I’d give my left paw for some Julio Iglesias. Seriously—turn that shit off!”—And I would.

One night the cat alert duo was pressed into duty in the middle of the night. I stumbled beer-soaked and blind into the apartment at three in the morning and had a sudden urge for a hard-boiled egg. I threw the egg into a saucepan with a few inches of water, blasted the gas flame…

… and passed out.

I dreamed of Redwood trees dancing on hardwood floors… John Wayne Gacy clowns tunneling underneath in the crawlspaces… fires in the middle of forests eating witches… smoke from the fires downing birds and bricking up my lungs…

… and cats screaming in my ear.

For real.

I woke up with the apartment filled with smoke. I stumbled into the kitchen. The water in the saucepan had long since burned away. The saucepan—it was metal—had scorched black through and through and cracked open. There was a deep greasy bomb blast scar on the ceiling. The egg had undergone a flash-rotting in the intense heat—it looked like the charred fetus of some hell-bound rodent.

And the fire alarm was shouting the neighborhood awake—but I had slept through that.

It was the cats that woke me up.

After that I didn’t swipe at Hooper any more when he tried to nudge me awake. I still was late feeding them a lot of times though.

It would go like this: After a few paw bats, nose kisses, and Cat Stares, Hooper would hang it up, slinking off the bed, and Bandit would descend from his perch to take over. At the instant of the tag-team paw slap—that’s when I would get my ass moving.

Now Bandit and Hooper are gone, and with them the best alarm clock I’ve ever had.

The cats I have now don’t wake me up like this. They don’t need to. I’ve stopped drinking. I’m punctual at their feeding times.

BANDIT: Yes, that’s because of us, dumbass. We taught you, compadre.

HOOPER: Damned straight. And we also noticed that you don’t try to pull that stupid throw-the-treat-into-the-carrier crap any more, either.

BANDIT: A-men.

Direct link to the video on the creator’s website is here. Quality is better I think.

August 23, 2013 by Michael Lane

A CAT IN ELEPHANT TOWN

At the end of a long day of hiking and other activities in Thailand I would walk home alone. Sometimes it would be prairie wolf late and the other volunteers and the people of the village would be asleep. The air would be like thick glass and the cicadas would be in low throttle, probably fatigued from all the head crashing of the daytime. Sometimes I would walk by Lulu the baby elephant and she would be still. Elephants sleep only four hours a day and I would freeze when I walked by her because I knew this was one of the moments—that she was sleeping only a few feet away even though I couldn’t see her because the night crept out of a dark closet and around us both.

I’ve walked alone many times in life. I had a paper route when I was a boy and I would get up at five in the morning when the dark was still splayed out all over the neighborhood. I’d walk past the graveyard, the crosses spreading their arms in the shadows, past the corner store with the loud hum of the neon sign. I walked that paper route in the winters with the snow robing the trees and I could hear the snowfall. I could hear it sighing in the air and sometimes I would pause, maybe on someone’s porch. I’d sit there in the dark and watch and listen to the little hoof falls of the million snowflakes landing.

In college I wandered the USC campus, on my way home in the middle of the night in an L.A. ghetto, and I was lucky I guess because even the muggers, rapists, and killers would be asleep. I would be buzzed on a few beers so the edges of me would be soft but I still had a back pocket-type of awareness, and there would be a strange city-quiet accompanying me. The sirens, cars, crazy gibbering homeless people all muffled, all the crazy filtered through a wind sock. The city had a rat-eye clarity at three in the morning.

Later, walking in the Thailand jungle, fatigue drooping down the corners of me, a day full of elephants and a night with stars fender bendering in the sky, and in all these times and in all these places there was a danger in that silence. Anything could happen, a snake could swerve into me, a maniac could pogo stick out of my bad dreams and drive a blade into my spine, and the quiet was just like that—coiled violence and heavy breaths, a pirate waiting for you below decks.

In all these moments, of course, I was not alone. In these moments I was walking with divinity. I was holding the ace of spades in my hand.

This guy was my companion for many of my walks:

He was a stray from the village. He would dart ahead of me and cut me off at the ankles so I had to stop to pet him.

His coat was such that I didn’t know where the dirt ended and the black spots started. By the end of the trip he would look for me and I for him, even in the daytime. He would walk with me past the elephants, but stop laughing-dead before we reached stray dog territory.

He looks like the ace of spades, don’t you think?

August 15, 2013 by Michael Lane

INTERVIEW WITH AN ELEPHANT

This post is the next installment in a series about my trip to Thailand to volunteer helping elephants.

Speaking out for the first time.

In her mid-50’s now, Tong Dee is the matriarch of the man-made elephant herd here in Huay Pakoot. This is despite the fact that, with the recent arrival of Kam Suk, Tong Dee is not even the oldest elephant any more. I have been enamored with Tong Dee since I met her at a banana feeding during my first week in Thailand. I knew right then and there I needed to meet with her and try to conduct my first-ever elephant interview.

I didn’t think the interview was going to happen. When I first approached Tong Dee and asked her who her publicist was, she said, “What’s a publicist?” When I tried to negotiate the terms of the interview, including wardrobe suggestions, she balked. I felt like an elephant of her size would probably look best in a slimming black turtleneck. It worked really well for Sharon Stone. I thought some dangling silver hoop earrings might set off her eyes and jingle pleasantly when she flapped her ears. And I felt the best venue for our interview, and for an elephant of her stature, would be The Chedi Hotel Chiang Mai.

But I knew that being the matriarch, Tong Dee would be calling the shots.

I arrived early for our interview at a mud hole down from a dirt road in the village of Huay Pakoot. Tong Dee showed up only minutes later, naked and without any piercings in her flapping ears. Her size can only really be appreciated up close: she is about 7 feet tall at the shoulders and about 19 feet long, counting her tail. Her weight is a little over 6000 pounds. She carries it well. She has distinctive bowl-shaped cysts on her right flank and right foreleg—but they are benign.

It was late afternoon, the sun at its blazing worst, and Tong Dee sighed as she trundled into the shallow mud hole at the edge of a meadow in the jungle.

Her bearing was dignified but a little tentative, and her trunk wandered all over me, sniffing me a bit warily. Her past as a beast of burden in the logging camps has taken its toll, and her skin hung loosely and was wrinkled and leathery. A wooden bell was clasped around her neck. I guess she was going for an austere look. A look that seemed to say, “Sure, I’m a down-to-earth gal, approachable… but don’t mess with me”—and—“Get that makeup guy away from me before I step on his little head.”

Thong Dee at the mud hole.

We exchanged some pleasantries. I blew down her trunk and she snorted back at me. Then without so much as a word she settled into her mud bath, her feet clopping in the dank earth and her trunk spraying thick, cool mud all over her body. As she fielded my questions she constantly slung pies of the stuff onto her flanks and up over her lumpy spine.

ANIMAL GUY: I am honored to have you here, Tong Dee. From the first time I saw you… well, I just knew I had to meet you.

THONG DEE: It’s “Thong Dee”. There’s an “h” in there, though it is silent. You’ve been spelling it wrong for a long while. All these things you’ve been writing about me. Since I am here with you now I will correct you.

I flush red. My first interview with my elephant heroine, and it’s already going off the rails. I am pleased, however, that she’s reading my blog. This despite the fact that elephants, as a general rule, can’t read—though I understand that they do handle the internet well—which is the opposite of my grandmother.

THONG DEE: I can see you’re nervous. It’s okay. Humans make lots of mistakes. So many I could never count and never remember. And I have a very good memory. Well.

ANIMAL GUY: Yes. Yes, okay… thank you… I think. So how long have you been here in this herd at Huay Pakoot?

TD: I don’t know. I don’t count mistakes and I don’t count time. That’s another human thing. I stand with you here. Now. That is “time” for me. When the sun rises, I know it’s time to look for food. When it sets, I know I can rest for a while. That is time. For me, there is no time like you think. There is being. Anyway, I suspect you had the answer even before you asked me.

AG: Three years, I think. You’ve been here three years.

TD: You know the answer then. And yet you still ask it. Curious. I find you creatures endlessly fascinating. Always you are two opposites at once. Well.

AG: Okay, let’s talk about that—your relationship with humans. Maybe talk about you and Patty Sai-ee, your mahout. Mahouts are the trainers and often the owners of elephants, so your perspective would be valuable.

TD: That… that is complicated. Well.

Thong Dee’s eyes stare at me for a moment, then look away. The late afternoon sun is relaxing it’s grip a bit, and some of the mud is drying, turning her skin the color of a gravestone. With the gray-white mud encasing her, she looks like the ghost of an elephant. A brilliant blue butterfly, the color of lapus lazuli, alights briefly on her flank, before fluttering away.

TD: Patty Sai-ee, ah… We are like… how you say… twins. Separate but the same. Our paths—we go together, otherwise we lose our way. There is some love, but it is not even the point. And… ah… there are things between us that are not balanced, it is like… we are on a scale and I am big, I could crush him. But he is human. And because he is human he tips the scale his way always. In nature if there is no balance… ah… I say it like this: he will never be my brother. Well.

Thong Dee sluffs around in the mud, scooping up another trunkful of the stuff. She stops in mid-air, the clump of mud squeezed in her proboscis.

TD: He sees me sometimes in the worst way—the way humans see many things in the world. He needs things: food, shelter… money. I believe he thinks he will not survive unless I am bent to his will. I think it would be easier for him if I was a thing, an object. I would have no feelings and no will and then I would do exactly as he wished. But of course I am not a thing. It’s okay. I am old and he is old and we have grown old together. There is a bond I share with him that cannot break. Well. A storm, you see—it destroys everything. Trees fall, shelters collapse, crops drown. Animals run in terror. But the biggest storm does nothing to our bond. Nothing.

Thong Dee and Patty Sai-ee.

AG: I think I understand…

TD: I would laugh if I knew how. Humans and the intellect. You believe the world is in the brain. Better to take in then to understand. Yes? Understand is all this work, this wheel spinning nowhere. Take in is better. It becomes part of you. Well.

AG: Okay… I am trying. So tell me a little about your past. You came from a logging camp? That must have been hard. Can you tell me a little about it?

TD: That is difficult. I will try. I was different. I was young. Men “trained” me—hah!–for a long time… for many years, to use your meaning. Always with the whip, the club, hovering over me. I was a baby and I was frightened. We were all frightened. They taught us to obey. To drag trees to the river or to the trucks.

As Thong Dee says this, she shifts on her feet. The chain around her right front leg jingles. We both look down at it, startled. It’s a reminder that even now she will be chained down for various reasons. I flush red, feeling shame, like I was the one who put it on her.

TD: As a female, I was forced to push the small trees… ah… logs… I pushed them with my head because I had no tusks. The males could not do this because of the tusks. They were forced to pick up logs, scoop them up. Their tusks sometimes would crack, break under the weight. And all the time my brothers and sisters would fall. Carrying a tree, a fall could be the end. Legs breaking and getting kicked to get up, to carry more. And the screaming. You make me think of it, the sounds of my family screaming. The humans don’t hear it with their ears, but the ground carries it far, the screams. All of us hear and know what is happening.

I sit for the first time, planting myself in the mud. Thong Dee towers over me. Her ears stick straight out from her massive head like flags in a gust of wind. Her tail is up and quivering. I know these are signs of an elephant in distress.

TD: All was black around my heart but I would see the sunrise and feel like all creatures feel upon seeing the sunrise—it would be a new beginning—it would be good this time, this day. But it was never good. The sun never got in through the blackness. I always expected it to, and it never did.

Her sunken eyes glitter at me. She becomes completely still, and I marvel at this. Three tons of nothing happening. A giant holding its breath. I can’t hold her look, shifting my gaze to the chain around her foot. Gray mud drips off a link in the chain. I look back up at her as she lowers her tail. Her ears resume their flapping.

AG: Let’s focus on perhaps a better story. What it’s like for you now in Huay Pakoot. How do you like it here?

TD: It is good. Better. I have peace here. I feel my time in this old body coming to the end. This is good, to be here at the end. The birds sing to me, the insects whisper to me as I fall asleep. The food is plentiful and good, and a lot of the time I can be slow. That is most important, do you know? To be slow. Do you take that in?

AG: I think so. To be more relaxed.

TD: Yes, I suppose. But it’s more than the absence of work or activity. Everything is in the stillness. Everything. All the senses. All that is inside you, and all that is outside you—all that makes your skin look like a big dead leaf, like mine. Well.

AG: The humans treat you okay here?

TD: Yes. They are impertinent sometimes. They get in the way. The young mahouts especially… I have no patience with them.

AG: Yes, I have heard that. I was told that you have swatted one or two of them with your trunk.

Thong Dee snorts. Her head moves up and down, a slow nod.

TD: They think they can tell me what to do. Babies. Let them live a little. Then perhaps I will listen. If I choose to!

AG: And what about the other elephants? Do you like them?

TD: It is not… I don’t know. It is not the right question. I am old. I prefer to be alone. Solitude is a treasure and I guard it always. I have taken many steps, had a few litters. My skin is heavy and dry from so many days in the sun, being beaten and driven. It is now my time. I have no anger with others. Kam Suk—maybe a little. She is my age and she has her ways and sometimes they cross with mine. It is okay. For the others I have neither like nor dislike. There is duty with the young ones. Sometimes I will seek them out in the jungle. Follow them. I want them to be safe, to have peace. It is what we want for each other.

AG: Lulu is one of the new babies. She has spent her whole life in a tourist camp, but now she is here. What do you think of her?

TD: She learns. There is sunlight, how you say… ah… hope for her. I followed the babies not long ago. I see her then. She does not hide behind the others like before. I see the play in her. She is a baby and she is… ah… allowed to be a baby for the first time. It makes me glad.

AG: It makes me glad, too.

Thong Dee slowly turns away from me. Sunlight bleeds through the forest in the approaching dusk. The mud is drying up… and with it, perhaps Thong Dee’s patience. I try to get in a last question or two:

AG: So is there anything else you would like to say? Perhaps anything about what it’s like to be an elephant?

TD: Sometime you must teach me laughter. I would use it a lot with you. Well. I do not concern myself with “what it is like.” I have had many sorrows. Some joy and peace—and a hair on my tail’s worth of those things is enough in this world—this world that is dominated by humans. I have survived, and if all goes well I will die in my dreams. Not in a yoke or under a whip. Or from the hot wind of a bullet hitting me. The blackness that was around my heart—as a baby—it is less. Sunlight can come in sometimes. That is enough. That is. Well.

AG: One more thing. I don’t know if you are aware of this, but most of the volunteers who come here think very fondly of you. Me included. You are their favorite elephant. Many of them get tattoos of you…

TD: Tattoos. Yes. I know them, those paintings on the skin. Well. That is a good thing, I suppose. Perhaps one day I will get a tattoo of one of my favorite humans. Perhaps even you.

My eyes widen. One of the most amazing creatures in the world has just paid me the grandest of compliments. Bamboo trees shift and rustle as Thong Dee begins to shuffle back into the jungle, indicating the end of the interview. I call after her:

AG: Wait! Did you really mean that?

She stops. Her mammoth head swings toward me. She raises her trunk so it is level with my head. She sniffs, snorts, and lowers her trunk again. Her eyes blink slowly once. Twice.

TD: Don’t be ridiculous. Seriously, you must teach me how to laugh.

August 9, 2013 by Michael Lane

TATTOO ME

This post is the next installment in a series about my trip to Thailand to volunteer helping elephants.

At Base Hut one day a girl approaches me. She has a beer in her hand. It’s Chang beer, the most popular beer in Thailand. Chang means “elephant” in Thai. The logo on the label has two elephants facing each other.

“So Mike,“ she says, “Are you ready to take the plunge?”

I break out in a sweat. I’ve been sober for years now, but I am out in the middle of the jungle with a bunch of hard-partying kids.

Other volunteers are watching. Some of them move closer. I feel trapped.

Chang Beer.

Something about this feels familiar. –Ah yes… high school peer pressure. In my high school you weren’t cool unless you drank.

At sixteen, I didn’t want to drink. From my vantage point then alcohol tasted bad, made you stupid, and transformed merely weird relatives into downright deranged ones.

But at that age, I desperately wanted to fit in. The way everyone talked about drinking—the house parties, the keggers in the woods, the quarters games, the crazy stories—I definitely felt on the outside looking in on all the coolness. Plus I was a Dungeons and Dragons nerd, which was like being a coolness narc. If my D&D gaming was found out I’d be shot and found stuffed in a trunk somewhere, my mouth full of twenty-sided dice.

It took me a while, but I finally caved. I drank. And I guess I was a little cooler. For a while.

Back at Base Hut, the girl is smiling at me, waiting.

“Am I ready to take the plunge on what?” I say.

The girl’s eyes glitter. She taps my arm with her beer bottle. I take a step backward.

Drinking gave me years of trouble. My twenties were a blur. My thirties were a long slog to put my life back together. There was no way that now, in my forties, I was going to put my whole life at risk for some leftover teenage-fueled desire to fit in, was I?

“A tattoo,” she says.

I blink at her. “A what?”

“A tattoo. Are you ready to get a tattoo?”

“Yeah, Mike,” one of the other volunteers chimes in, showing fresh ink on her ankle. “Everyone’s doing it.”

Oh… Oh!

Thailand is the land of a thousand smiles and the land of a million tattoos. Many of the volunteers planned out their tattoos before they even arrived. The price for a tattoo in Thailand is a fraction of what it would cost in most countries, and the experiences in Thailand tend to be worth commemorating. There’s something magical about this place–not to mention all the elephants walking around.

But I would have never imagined that the new version of peer pressure would revolve around getting one.

I still wasn’t comfortable in my own skin here. I talked very little. I felt a little bit at ease with the volunteers that I came in with—sharing a very long ride with them from Chiang Mai helped to break the ice—but the veteran volunteers frightened me.

That sounds weird, a 45-year-old man scared of 20-somethings. But there it is. One of the symptoms of alcoholism is that it can feel like I am walking around in perpetual high school-outsider status. By its very nature alcoholism separates, disconnects.

New situations can be tough.

Neil and Jess, a married couple in their mid-twenties, particularly scare me.

They are among the longest tenured of the volunteers, and are coming up on the end of a six-month stay at the village. They have lived and breathed the village and the elephants. Jess gives many of the lectures on the elephants that are part of the program here, and I make sure I don’t miss any of them.

From where I stand, Neil and Jess are like the prom king and queen of the volunteers. (And they’re British, so the king and queen part fits.) Guys like me didn’t hang with prom royalty.

Neil and Jess.

Weekends are free for volunteers to do whatever they like, and often people schedule trips either back to Chiang Mai or to Pai, a smaller city that is friendly to tourists. Almost always people return sporting new tattoos. At first I look at them more out of politeness than interest.

I get the appeal of them: to make a permanent life event marker, a physical manifestation of the emotional or spiritual. I considered getting some sort of cat tattoo when my cat of almost eighteen years died. The bond with him was closer than with many humans, and I wanted to honor him.

But I didn’t go through with it. Perhaps it’s because I tend to get lost in the details: if I’m going to paint a permanent picture on my body, even to honor an animal that I loved like a twin soul, then the tattoo had to be planned out carefully. It must be perfect. And perfection is the enemy of actually completing anything.

Raeah, a volunteer from Canada, returns from Pai to show off her new tattoo: two elephants ringed around her wrist, joined together trunk to tail. It’s colorful but simple, evocative. It’s beautiful.

I start to cave.

The next time I am asked if I want a tattoo, instead of laughing I grunt something like, “Hum,” and sort of shake my head no.

One of the two elephants in the ring around Raeah’s wrist.

After another city venture, Neil has added to his gallery of tattoos.

By this time Neil and Jess have begun to abdicate their thrones—the imaginary thrones that I put them on. We’ve shared some meals, gone on a couple of hikes, and Neil and I have played together in a couple of soccer games (or “football” games, as it’s known to everyone else except us Americans).

In the football game against the mahouts, Neil is a crazy demon running up and down the field and the de facto captain. He eggs me on and calls me the “football warrior”.

They are a warm, generous couple. I like when I can make Neil laugh, because his mouth gets big and his whole face seems to explode—he reminds me of a blissful little boy when he laughs.

Neil’s returned from Chiang Mai with the mother of all tattoos. It’s of Tong Dee, the matriarch of the elephant herd. It extends from his elbow all the way up to the top of his shoulder. Tong Dee pokes her head through the leaves of a lotus flower. The lotus blooms over Tong Dee’s head. Neil tells me the tattoo took seven hours to complete. I put that fact out of my head for a minute.

Views of Neil’s tattoo of Tong Dee.

Neil.

Tong Dee is my favorite elephant. Every time I am close to her in the jungle, I am struck dumb. She’s always in my thoughts.

The shoulder blade, I’m thinking. I want Tong Dee there. Simpler than Neil’s version of Tong Dee, of course—no way will I writhe under a tattoo gun for seven hours my first time—but I want Tong Dee there. I need her there.

Tong Dee. The face that launched dozens of tattoos.

Even after I took that first drink as a teenager years ago, I still didn’t fit in. I took a million drinks after that. I hated the peer pressure and vowed I would never exert that same pressure on anyone else.

(Years later, I was reminiscing with a friend who I went to high school with about how level-headed and tolerant I was with other people after I had found the magic elixir of alcohol. I looked back fondly on my “Buddha of Booze” period.

“Yeah,” my friend said. “You were real tolerant as you were yelling at everyone, ”DRINK, PUSSY!”)

DRINK, PUSSY!

One night at Base Camp I witness the ‘home school’ version of getting a tattoo. The tattoo artist is a local man named Root, one of the most colorful personalities in the village. Instead of a tattoo gun, Root uses a pointed bamboo stick. Root doesn’t charge very much, and most of the payment is usually in beer. Chang beer.

Most of the volunteers who get tattoos in Thailand will get at least one from Root. His tattoos are cruder than most machine tattoos, but they’re perfect if a person wants a minimalist tattoo or one that has a word or a phrase that means something to them.

Maressa, a young volunteer in her twenties, is a recipient of one of Root’s “homemade” tattoos. She is getting “plays with fire” in Burmese tattooed to the side of her foot.

I watch. Maybe this is the way to go. A simple tattoo first.

Maressa is nervous but excited. She’s never had a bamboo tattoo done before. She has a couple of Chang beers ready to use as her anesthetic.

First, Root draws the words on her foot with a marker. Then he takes his sharpened bamboo stick and dips it in ink. He bends down, tapping her skin with the sharpened bamboo.

If someone asks me now if I want a tattoo, I will say yes. This will be a great thing, a wonderful epidermal monument to my time here.

Then I see Maressa’s face. She is one of the friendliest volunteers, with one of the most genuine smiles I’ve ever seen. Now that smile is stretched tight, showing too many teeth.

She chugs the beer.

I ask her if it hurts and the way she says, “Yeah, it hurts”–sounding like her natural cheeriness has been punched out of her—tells me very clearly that there is no way in hell I will be getting a tattoo any time soon.

Maressa. Still smiling. Root is on the left.

Maressa’s tattoo after it was finished.

Jess worries that she will have some difficulty finding a job back in England after the trip. It’s because of the tattoo on her hand. She shows it to me.

It’s a tattoo of Ganesha, the elephant god. The Destroyer of Obstacles.

Hand tattoos. Jess’ tattoo of Ganesha is on the left.

It surprises me that someone might say no to her because she has a tattoo on her hand— especially considering that tattoos are generally accepted today. Jess’s tattoo is beautiful. It’s art. And It’s an elephant god. Who would say no to an elephant god?

Not me.

By the end of my trip to Thailand I will have a picture of Ganesha on my bedroom wall. I will have T-shirts of Ganesha and the Chang beer logo with the two elephants facing each other. I will have a simple elephant necklace. I like the feel of the little silver charm against my heart.

I will feel comfortable with everyone. I will be myself.

No tattoos though.

It’s okay. I know it’s not about being cool any more. It’s not about tattoos, or drinking, or fitting in. My age isn’t an issue either.

It’s about knowing I’m enough.

All it took to figure that out was forty-five years, plus a few extra weeks in Thailand. And a million drinks.

One day I am at Base Hut and another girl approaches me. She puts up her index finger like Caesar at the Roman Forum.

On her index finger is a tattoo of a smiley face.

ANIMAL

Life and love are gifts for ALL creatures to enjoy

Month: August 2013

BREAKFAST WITH THE CATS

A CAT IN ELEPHANT TOWN

INTERVIEW WITH AN ELEPHANT

TATTOO ME