Partying With Jockeys

If you've never been to Jakarta the term "three-in-one jockey" probably won't ring a bell, but if you have, you'll clap your hands and squeal with delight at the prospect of hearing about those guys on NPR. At least I did.

For the uninitiated, three-in-one jockeys are folks who stand at the roadside and will ride in your car with you so you can get through areas of the city that are closed to vehicles with fewer than three people during rush hour. It's a shitty job, but lots of people do it, and it's a classic Jakarta fix to the problem of government regulations threatening to prevent you from doing whatever the hell you want.

Just last week I engaged the services of what I now think is the New York equivalent to the three-in-one jockey: At the Clinton/Washington C stop, a guy was hanging out nonchalantly by the ticket machine on the city-bound side. When I went to put some money in he walked up to me.

"You buying a single ride?"

"Yes."

"How about you give me two dollars instead and I'll get you in."

"Ok then."

He took me to the emergency exit gate, grabbed a stick he'd hidden above the turnstyle, reached around and sprung the gate open. I handed him the $2 and we both went on our way, I having saved 50 cents and he having made a sale.

I'm all for city services, and I understand they won't get funded enough if we don't pay for them, but I still like these small-scale circumventions. As long as the MTA insists on raising fares while cutting service, I'm going to jump the turnstyle when it's convenient. And as long as Jakarta makes a bunch of traffic policies that it can't enforce instead of just building a subway system, I say three-in-one jockeys should be seen as the true heros of rush hour.

Photo via MSNBC

Sidewalks Ending in Little Italy

My complaining reflex got all fucked up in Jakarta. I never once shut up about little stuff like ticks of the service industry (fucking waiter, stop watching me while I count out money), the song choices of cover bands (I will stab the next person who plays Hotel California in the fucking face), or the temperature of beer (warm).

But I found I could easily suppress my bitching when it came to the big stuff. The city's entirely flooded and I can't get to work? Day off! Been sitting in traffic for two hours and moved a quarter mile? Catching up on my reading! There's a bloody riot uptown? North to adventure! And certainly not least: The sidewalks are completely covered in food and trinket vendors wherever they haven't collapsed into the semi-open sewer below. Convenience comes to me!

Now that I'm back in New York, I have little sympathy for the assholes on the train who huff and snort when it stops in the tunnel for two minutes. Nor do I care for these fucking people. I can't wait for the day that having to walk 18 inches out of your way because of all the awesome Italian restaurants crowded around is considered a problem in any other neighborhood on the planet.

BUT, As I do love to complain about the small stuff, I guess I'm siding with the inconvenienced Little Italians anyway. AND, it's totally sort of a pain in the ass. You're stuck behind some fairly slow walker just vaguely itching for a chance to pass and then they just rein up and stop? Fuck that. You might think sidewalks are a part of commerce but come on, I'm walking here!

Scoot Tweet

I'm probably going to talk a lot about my Vespa, a 1973 Sprint that I named Kelor after a visit to a supposedly haunted island in Jakarta harbor. I rode that thing everywhere when it was working, which was most of the time.

There's a real community among Vespa riders in Indonesia — moreso than I've seen among strangers anywhere else. Once, when Kelor broke down after I crashed it (him?) into the back of a minivan, a cabbie saw my friend Dan and me pushing the poor thing down Jalan Rasuna Said, one of the city's big, six-lane boulevards. He was on duty, wearing his uniform and everything. Nevertheless, he slowed and hailed us.

"What's wrong?"

"I don't know, it doesn't work."

"Broken?"

"Yeah, the throttle's loose like it's not attached." I twisted the limp hand grip to demonstrate.

"Alright, let me help. I have a bunch of Vespas at home. I'm crazy about them," the guy said. So I got out my tools and he took off the engine cover and the top of the carborator. "So many keys, but you don't know what to do with them!" he said, laughing at me.

Another guy pulled up on his Vespa and squatted next to the cabbie, unrolling his bunch of wrenches. The cabbie figured out pretty quickly that a tiny pin way inside the carborator had come loose and would have to be jury-rigged. He lit a cigarette, unhooked the fuel line and got to work.

With gas spilling out over the engine and carborator, our cabbie smoked and removed screws. Dan and I looked on nervously and I even suggested to him that he should put out the smoke. "No, it's fine," he said. The other guy laughed at our over-abundance of caution.

When he'd gotten a wire wrapped around the throttle cable and some wax melted onto the pin to hold it in place (I was disappointed he didn't use chewing gum), the heroic cabbie slapped the carborator back together and gave us a huge grin as he clapped his hands together. We tried to offer him money (he was on duty, after all), but he just said, "No, it's Vespas. We help each other."

Oh, and, the reason this post is called "Scoot Tweet" is that I named my twitter stream after Kelor since I had to sell him. So, please follow.

Let's Get This Train Wrecked

Last Year I started a blog about living in Jakarta and called it Just Off the Jet. It was supposed to be a funny and kind of wide-eyed account of living in the enormous, sweaty kampung that is the capital of Indonesia.

But, as so many of these things go, I wrote like three entries and then spent the rest of the year getting drunk, riding my Vespa around and playing in a hardcore band, documenting none of it except through the occasional fuzzy snapshot.
Now that I'm back in New York and unemployed, it's time to get some stories down. But there's plenty to cover here in the big crapple, and this place is perhaps just as ridiculous as Jakarta. Maybe more, even.

At least in Jakarta everyone knows each other and it's kind of just a bunch of small towns full of primarily modest self-described "simple" people squished together. Here in New York people revel in their big-city snobbery, their weirdness, their effete tastes (and yes, crabby Brooklyn good ol' boy, I'm including you in that last group, you ornery ass).

But both groups have some kind of communal energy, some greater-than-the-sum-of-their-parts magic that makes both cities nothing less than a miracle. And I think that's true for most places where people live in cramped, messy, imperfect quarters with millions of others for their whole lives.

So let's get on with the business of tickling the testicles of Jakarta and New York. And hell, if either of my readers wants to share a funny big-city story, from anywhere really, please don't hesitate to write.