Tony Orlando & Dawn
ZORRIES, BUDDIES & JUKEBOX
Cleaning out my closet a few years back, I found an old, well-used, long-forgotten pair of zorries. I had forgotten where they came from. I tried to remember. I wished I could recall the adventure we had in Ponape, Cop and I. If I could, I would tell you. All I could remember was Rose.
If I could remember the story, I would start by saying that it happened at the end of our two-year commitment as Peace Corp Volunteers in Micronesia. Micronesia, for anyone who is not familiar, was, for many years, the US Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands. Made up of The Marshall, Marianas, Yap, Truk, and Caroline Islands, Micronesia is spectacularly beautiful. It includes Guam and Saipan, although they are politically separate areas. Micronesia has about the same boundary area as the continental United States with a total land mass less than of the size of Rhode Island. Within that area, there are over two thousand islands in six linguistically and culturally distinct groups. The islands are tiny, far flung and overpoweringly beautiful.
I’d spent my time in Palau in the Western Carolines; Cop had been in Ponape, the Eastern Carolines. I’d lived and worked in Koror, the main town of Palau. Koror is the name of both the town and the island, itself. It is the main population center of Palau, about the size of large university campus and the population of a medium size college. Babeldaub, the neighbor island to the north, is the largest island in Palau, in fact, outside of Guam, it’s the largest Micronesian island. Thousands of people speak Palauan. 15 to 20 on a full day. Given the opportunity, Palauans, an amazingly wise and adaptable race, could easily rule the world.
Cop, by contrast, had spent his time working on Pingelap, one of the outer island atolls in the Ponape group. Pingelap’s size is measured in acres, the entire island is less than 500 acres at high tide. Larger, of course, when the tide is out. Cop didn’t speak Ponapean; he spoke Pingelapese with about 250 others in the world.
We had started our Micronesian adventures at the same time; we were closing out at the same time, as well. I was heading home to the East Coast. Cop was heading southwest to Australia. His adventures were not yet over. But together, we decided to have one for the road. I would travel throughout the island groups with a stopover in Ponape. He would be leaving Pingelap with a necessary check-out stop in Ponape on his way Down Under. We would spend a couple days together, catch up on two years apart and then continue on our separate ways.
I can’t really tell you where we stayed for the few days we were together. Cop had borrowed a house for us with someone – probably another volunteer – who was away from the island for a while. We house-sat a nice place, airy, shaded, well equipped, off the beaten path. It had a catchment system which allowed for running water inside. It took us a while to catch up, just the two of us. After two years of very different experiences in different cultures, acquiring different languages, there was a lot to tell. We stayed in the house for a full day, maybe two, just trading stories, comparing experiences, reconnecting.
Interestingly, it was as foreign for Cop to spend time in Kolonia, the capitol of Ponape, as it was for me. Oddly though, I had a bit of an upper hand. Cop was the Ponape volunteer, but he had lived his time on a remote atoll. I, on the other hand, had lived in Koror, the Palauan counterpart-capitol to Kolonia. Cop really had none of his friends on this island; his friends and family were back on Pingelap. Kolonia however, was filled with Palauans who had left their home district to attend CCM, the Community College of Micronesia. I had friends, heard a familiar language spoken, and felt quite comfortable.
On our last day together in town, we went out on the town. There were sights to see. As similar as the districts of Micronesia appeared on the surface, they were all very unique and uniquely beautiful. Each island group had its own attractions. Palau had Rock Islands. Truk had the lagoon. Ponape had Nan Madol, the ancient floating city, the Venice of Micronesia. We went there. I wish I could tell more about that amazing piece of archeology. The rocks, the canals, the story of the ancient peoples. It was a beautiful place.
It was hot, too, and on our last evening together, we needed to cool off. Kolonia had its share of local-flavored bars, so we found one which looked like a likely place to … cool off. I have no idea what the place was called, but, walking in, I heard the bartender call, “Bim tuu, Sechelei! Ngara so-am?” (Come on in, friends! What do you want?) It caught me off guard until I realized that we had entered just ahead of two other guys, two Micronesians. They were Palauans, and the bartender had been greeting them. As fate would have it, one of them, was an old friend of mine, Harper. Harper was a teacher at the elementary school in Ngchesar. “Hop!” I said, not hiding my surprise. “Kau a-ngarang?”
“Mike? Mike! I’m fine,” he answered in Palauan. “What are you doing here?”
“I’m on my way home, Cholei. I’m heading back to America. What are you doing?”
“I was supposed to teach this summer, but I got sent to school instead. I’m taking a couple classes here at CCM.” He was referring to the Community College of Micronesia.
This whole exchange had been spoken in Palauan. Harper caught sight of Cop and asked, “Who’s this? Your friend?” We immediately switched to English. I explained how I had come to be in Ponape and who Cop was. My friend, my brother. That was all that needed to be said; Cop was a part of our Palauan group. The next question centered on the bartender. She had spoken Palauan. Harper told me that her name was Dilmei, she was from Melekeok. She had been here for about 4 or five years; this was her bar. Palauans were on their way to ruling the world. This was a great way to start.
I can’t tell you where Dilmei learned her trade. She ran a great bar, though. She served cold beers, well mixed hard drinks and even had some food to snack on. There was one attraction, however, which trumped the others. That was her collection of little, table-top juke boxes. Three or four were strung along the bar, itself; three of four others were scattered around the room. With the uncertainty of regular, full-time electric power, it was an act of faith to hope that they would be available on demand. And the demand was great.
The music selection on these machines was limited, 20 to 30 songs in all. But – and this was a big, risky but – each of these little music boxes had three or four songs which had little, tiny strip tease movies attached – for an extra bunch of quarters. Ancient music videos! Tony Orlando would sing, “Knock Three Times”, and the little stripper would bump, grind and take off some clothes. She didn’t get very far. The songs were all too short and she started over and over and over with every new set of coins. In the larger world of prurience, this was pretty tame but in the small world of Kolonia, Ponape, this was about as close to a California strip club as it could get. We drank beer, cooled off, pumped in quarters, hoped the movie would work one more time and heated up again. To this day, I have neither seen nor heard of these mini-bits of very soft porn anywhere else in the world. That seven-inch lady on the screen sure was a conversation piece, though.
PONAPE ROSE
It opened a particularly Ponapean conversation topic; it was Cop who brought her up, Rose. Ponape Rose. A living legend. Those guys who had been around Kolonia for a while had heard about her; the newer guys had not. I had not. Cop had only heard of her through tales which passed from one generation of PCV to the next. Her place, the Blue Rose, was famous. Infamous. Her story was the stuff of hyperbole. Cop suggested that we all go to the Blue Rose. It sounded like an adventure in the making; I was in. Harper and his CCM buddies declined, a very unconventional thing for them to do. So Cop and I went out on our own. Somewhere along the way, we acquired a friend, a red headed PCV from Yap named Art.
If I could tell how we got to the Blue Rose, it would be a story unto itself. We walked, we wandered, we asked. Asking was problematic. Cop spoke Pingelapese, I spoke Palauan. Art spoke Yapese – we think – and Ponapeans, not surprisingly, spoke Ponapean. And some English. Before long, though, we were at the entrance of Ponape Rose’s Blue Rose Bar.
From the outside, Rose’s place looked not unlike a lot of other nondescript buildings throughout much of Micronesia. With no distinctive architectural features, the rectangular cinder block structure could have been a house, a store, or an office building anywhere across the islands. With the bit of panache which Rose had used to draw folks in, there was no mistaking the place, however. A neon sign reading “Rose’s Blue Rose”, robin’s egg blue paint on the cinder blocks, and a tattering awning with a fading blue rose were surrounded by rock music rolling out the screened windows and wide-open door.
From the inside, Rose’s business sense used every available square foot of floor space to encourage people to enjoy themselves. Save for a larger-than-usual dedicated kitchen area, there were no interior walls. There was a long, sturdy bar along the wall of the kitchen, ending about three quarters of the way down the length of the open room. The standard-size juke box was around the far corner of the bar, slightly tucked out of the path of regular bar fights. There were tables of various shapes and sizes throughout the room, but none touched the dance floor – a tiled ten-foot square at the far end of the bar, close to the music machine. Decorations were spare, enough to show that the place was for fun, not enough to distract. At the far end of the room, kitty-corner from the entrance, was a door which led to the benjo. The outhouse. For men. There seemed to be no companion place for women. It was not something which concerned us at the time.
I would love to be able to have you experience Rose’s men’s place to pee. As with so much of life, you sort of had to be there. It was outdoors, simple, functional. There was a corrugated tin roof loosely covering two stalls which were filled with ice at their back wall. About three feet of yellow ice. Chunks, large and small, puddled and slowly, naturally melted, the run-off draining away from the building. I had not seen that much ice in one place all the time I had been in the islands. With temperatures in the 80’s most of the time, what kind of ice maker Rose had at her disposal was a mystery. But ice she had for her naturally, continually flushing restroom for men.
And then there was Rose. Her perch was on the left, just inside the main entrance, a high stool on which she sat, observed, oversaw, reigned. Rose was a living legend. At about 5’7”, she was tall for a Micronesian woman, but she presented at about 6’2”. In real time, she was probably in her mid-forties. Or so. In life time, she was ageless. I would like to say that she was stunning. I would like to say that she had a Helen of Troy beauty. She was, after all, a legend. There was no mistaking the power of her presence – her pride, energy, her will to maintain her rightful place. But she was not beautiful. Handsome, perhaps, but not beautiful. She recognized everyone in her domain and permitted us all to enter and to remain.
The three of us walked through the door, Cop, Art and me. Since we had come from a bar, walked a ways and had not taken a pit stop, I looked around and discovered the way to the benjo. Art and Cop claimed a table. The place was fairly busy. Listening, the languages of the islands came from every table and every island district, Ponapean, of course, as well as Trukese, Yapese, Chamorro, Kapingi, Marshallese, Palauan and more. There was Japanese, too, and English to bridge any communications gaps.
Randy, a lonesome American who lived in Truk and was vacationing in Kolonia , saw us come in. He joined Cop and Art at our table while I was peeing. He’d not been Peace Corps, didn’t speak any of the indigenous languages floating through the room, and was relieved to see familiar Western faces. Three Americans together in a raucous bar, soon to be four, stood out like a beacon in rough sea. Rose walked to the table.
“Hello, boys,” they said she’d said in true Mae West form. “New in town?” The guys returned Rose’s greeting and did some quick intros. Pingelap, Truk and Yap. “Who’s that other guy?” she asked as I was making ice melt and had not yet come back into the bar. “He’s from Palau,” they told her. “Ahhh, Belau. When he returns, tell him I said this: ngsoak kau. He’ll understand.” She raised her eyebrows quickly a couple of times as if to say, “OK? Got it?” and left to circulate through the room. She also had a round of cold beers sent to our table.
I returned ready to walk the other two guys through the joys of Rose’s outhouse. I saw Randy, the third, and said hello instead. The three of them we almost giddy. “What’s up?”
“Holy crap, Dude,” Art blurted. “Rose came over to our table and talked to us.” I looked toward Cop. His slightly raised eyebrow both corroborated what Art had said and added to it. But what? I arched my eyebrow back.
“That’s right, man. And she said to tell you, “Tell him, ‘swakow’.” “Swakow? Swakow?” “No,” Cop corrected. “more like: nnso wak gau. What’s that mean? “Ngsoak kau”?
“She said, ‘Ngsoak kau’? She said to say that to me!? Aukiil chedilam!” (Palauan expletive!) That meant one or both of two things, I explained. “It means ‘I like you’ but it also means ‘I want you’. Depends on the context.”
“Damn,” said Art. “You must be hot. Walk in. Walk across the room. Walk out the door. She wants you.”
“Shut up,” I said. “Either you guys are messing with me or she was messing with you.” And we drank Rose’s beer. We then drank some more. In the heat of the Ponapean night, beer excreted through every pore. What didn’t ooze out we carried out the back to melt ice.
Time passed. Fights broke out. Rose broke them up and tossed the fighters. Customers began to dwindle. Rose had come by our table from time to time, sent us food and more drinks, gotten to know us better. For our part, we got to know her, as well. She was multilingual, engaging each of us in the language we had learned to speak. She threw a few extra comments my way; I don’t remember them all, but the other guys noticed. She told us her life story, or chunks of it, anyway.
She had been around a while. Before the war, World War II, that is, the Japanese had controlled the islands. During the war, their presence had multiplied. Being a resourceful kid, she’d learned to speak Japanese. We asked who had taught her, a young girl from an occupied island. The navy, she’d said. She learned Japanese from the navy. All of it. All the language, All the navy. Same with English. The Marines and the Seabees. Some things come in handy. She had learned what she needed to know and, from stories we’d heard, she had taught the Japanese navy, the Marines and the Seabees few things in return. University of Arno people said. We wished we knew what that meant. She shot me a look. I shot Cop a look.
KNOCK THREE TIMES
It was getting later, and I had a flight to catch the next day. If I missed the flight, it’d be several more days until the next one. Wordlessly, we began to plot an exit strategy. The Blue Rose was all but empty. Rose has sent her bartender, a young Trukese woman, to the back to clean up. “When you’re done, go on back to bed,” she called. Apparently, the bartender was live-in help. She disappeared through the kitchen.
“Let’s go eat,” Rose suggested. “You guys must be hungry.” We were not. Randy needed food, though; he was close to passing out. Earlier, Art had barely survived Rose’s wrath when he’d expectorated the juice of his betelnut chew onto the floor. Yapese did that; they spat on the ground. Palauans, and apparently Ponapeans as well, did not. They’d spit neatly into a container, any container, which they carried as they chewed. We had averted tragedy by reminding Rose that Art was from Yap, shrugging sympathetically.
“Come,” she ordered. “We’ll eat.” Cop and I wanted to run for the door, but we saw that it was already locked. When she did that, we didn’t know. Possibly as the last of her paying customers had left, and when she’d sent her Trukese girl to the kitchen. So the four of us followed Rose, through the kitchen, into her private living quarters. What the outside world never realized was that Rose’s rectangle of cinder block bar was the front face of a maze of interconnected buildings of similar construction. They had been joined over time by a series of covers, roofs, walls and half walls. What had been simple, four-corner geometry turned into a labyrinth of rooms, hallways, windows and doors, some inside, others out. Like any good maze, there was no obvious way out.
“Hey, if we get separated or if one of us finds a way out, just knock of a wall or a door so we can both leave,” Cop said. “Right, knock three times,” I added.
Rose took the four of us into an interior room with tatami mats rolled in a corner, and left. It would have been swelteringly hot but for a small electric fan, cracked windows high up near the ceiling, and open vents in the roof. We had barely enough time to pull out the mats when Rose returned. She took Randy by the arm and led him away. The rest of us stood stunned and speechless. We wished we knew what was going on. She came back. “You, spit boy, time to go.” With that, she grabbed Art by the arm and led him out of the room with the same determination she’d had shown when she removed brawlers earlier.
That left Cop and me. “Remember, knock. You gotta pee? Gonna be sick?” We were devising a plan; we didn’t need a lot of words. Rose returned a second time. “Come here,” she ordered. We did. She was standing next to a sort of built in piece of furniture which we had not noticed. It was a window seat, less the window. Rose stood on the seat and beckoned us to do the same. We did. “Look,” she ordered. She stood high enough to look through the open interior relight windows down onto the adjoining room. We did the same. There was no TV in Ponape at that time. No VCRs or movies to rent. And Rose had no juke box strip show.
What Rose did have, however, was her own, private home entertainment system. Below us, sprawled on a pair of tatami similar to the ones in our room, were Randy and the bartender from Truk. Randy, shirt gone, shorts pulled down, was also all but passed out. The girl was kissing him. Grabbing him. Rubbing him. But she was not getting the response she wanted. Nor was Rose. “Damn fool haole boy,” she hissed as she turned back in our direction. We knew the term, it was an expression from Hawaii for white guys like us. Time to make our move. Cop eyebrowed me.
“I gotta go,” Cop said first. “Really gotta pee. Which way’s the benjo?”
ZORRIES AND MORE
Rose led Cop around and through her house maze to a back door. He went out and slipped on the first pair of zorries he came to. Randy’s maybe. He did have to go pee, though; this was his exit strategy. Later he told me that he played lost when tried to find a way back in. But that was later!
In half a heartbeat, Rose was back in the room with me. Wordlessly, she grabbed my hand and led me through a door into her bedroom. It was big, airy, comfortable looking, with an enormous bed against one wall.
She smiled. Wordlessly, deftly, she began to lift my shirt.
“Ngsoak kau,” she then whispered. “Ngarngi a soam, Sechelei?”
There really wasn’t time to think about it. Before I knew it, my shorts were undone and Rose was finding what she wanted. And getting the response she liked. She worked us toward her bed, all the while undoing and removing her own clothes. We were all but naked. I wish I could tell you how she did that, but in truth, I can’t.
All the while, in the background, I could hear faint “knock-knock-knock.“ “Knock-knock-knock.”
“Oh, my,” she whispered happily to no one. “So big.”
I’m not sure who landed on the bed first, who was on top, who on the bottom. What I do know is that it was all over before I could even think about it. I’d joined the navy.
“Oh, my,” she said again, less pleased. “So fast.”
Sheepishly I smiled, shrugged, and said, “I really gotta pee.”
This time, instead of leading me through her maze, she just pointed toward the door. I grabbed by shorts and T-shirt, thinking I would have to figure the way outside myself. And I did.
Once outside, this time I found a pair of zorries. Rose’s, I think. I pulled on my shorts and my shirt and slipped into the zorries.
The knocking had stopped. Cop, I figured, had begun to wend his way back to the house where we were staying. I eventually made my way to the front, the main entrance to Rose’s Blue Rose. It appeared to be the only real door in or out of the place. That gave me a bit of directional perspective.
It was dark. I ran. I headed in the general direction I thought we’d come, back toward the house we were staying in, and where all my clothes were packed for home. I wish I could tell you that I knew where I was going, the direction, the name of the area, the distance. Clawing my way through Kolonia late at night, I came across people in all states of being. I asked them all for directions…in English, in Palauan. I got stares, incomprehensible replies, pointed fingers, raised fingers. Somehow, pieces of the surroundings began to look more familiar. I was getting closer to the house. About the time it came into view, Cop called to me from back along the path. “Hey, man! You made it,” he called. “Me! You!” I called back. Major relief.
“What the hell happened back there?” he asked. “I pretended I couldn’t find my way back in – but I really couldn’t find a way to get you out!”
“After you left…I wish I could tell you…you don’t want to know. She came on to me. Now I know which meaning of “ngsoak” she had in mind. She handled me like she wanted …wanted…wanted…. more navy! You don’t want to know.”
“How’d you get out?”
“I said I had to pee – too. She just pointed to the door like, “You can go now, Boy.” I tried to remember the sounds of your knocks. I grabbed the first pair of zorries I came across and started to run. I think these are hers!”
I had not realized that Cop had still been outside Rose’s compound when I left. He’d been searching for a way to get a signal to me. But since Cop had been somewhat more familiar with Kolonia than I, when he did leave her place, he was able to pretty much head straight to the house. My roundabout, stop-and-ask route had taken me a bit longer to get to the same point along the path. Now, with little to no distance left, we quickly got to the house, and cleaned up a bit.
Cop then drove me to the airport in the beat-up old car which came with the house. The one we had not driven because we were hot, and the beer was going to be cold. Thanks to my friend, I made it to the airport in time for my flight. I headed home. Cop left for Australia a few days later. Truth be told, we have never spoken about that night since although we have passed a few knowing glances back and forth over the years.
What a night. What a story. I wish I could tell you about it. It was great fun. I wish I could remember the details. One final adventure.
I wish I could tell you more. But I can’t.
Back in the closet, I slipped the old, long-forgotten zorries on my feet.
Knock. Knock. Knock.