Intimacy
(This story was delivered live as part of Tall Tales on September 10th, 2017. Tall Tales is India’s longest-running live true storytelling event series. More online at talltales.in.)
I want to tell you a story about the most intimate moment of my life. It was July 17th 2000 in Yogyakarta, Indonesia at a hotel. And no, it’s not what you’re thinking.
So to work my way towards there, I want to tell you about the second and third most intimate moments of my life.
The third one is from five years ago when I went to visit my great uncle, so my Mom’s uncle, and saw how old he was getting. 94 is just an abstract number that I can’t relate to really, even though I’m not getting any younger. So I saw my Uncle Steve and I always remember how even as he got older and retired he worked in his garden, cleaned his barn, and mowed his own grass — and when I went to see him this time, those things had stopped. These details hit you like a punch in the gut, like someone took the sun and just moved it to the wrong place in the sky. And so I had this idea to get out my audio recorder and interview him about his life. I asked him about his family, including his mother who had come to the US from the Ukraine at 15 years old never to go back again. And then I thought about how incapable I was at 15. So I recorded this for two or three hours and a few months later he typed up (on a manual typewriter) a timeline of important dates for his family, my family, and this list that he made, along with my interview, are pretty much my most cherished possessions in the world. If you have a relative in their 70s, 80s, or 90s, please think about doing this. It’s awkward for about 3 seconds and then you’re thrilled beyond words when you’re done, especially when your relative moves on, as my Uncle Steve did two years ago. Seriously. Please do this. That’s #3.
#2 was one night, 18 years ago when I went out to dinner with a teacher I idolized. This was my biology teacher from high school. I had long since graduated but we went out to dinner just to talk. And the funny thing is that nothing particular happened that night — it’s not something that he or I said that made it so memorable for me. Instead, it was the fact that here was this man I idolized, who I love, just sitting across from me — two adults trying to figure out this world. He’s no longer up here and me down here but it’s now more like we’re in the same place, trying to make sense of out a world that throws one absurdity after another at you. We happened to both be on the left wing politically, we both actually have the same chronic illness, Crohn’s Disease, and we both even had the same first name, so there were a lot of intangible things that bound us. One thing that I do remember from that night was that he was his normal razor-sharp witted self, but at the same time also in vintage form in terms of how grumpy and short tempered he was. And if anyone really knows me, I mean really knows me, then you know that I’m the exact same way most of the time. I wear that shit like a badge of honor. Michael moved on in 2004 and the world dimmed a little that day and every day since.
So that brings us back to the hotel in Yogjakarta, right in the middle of Java, the biggest and longest island in Indonesia, a country of over 14,000 islands in total.
So to give a little context, I was in the country with an American, my good friend Deepinder Mayell — I know, this is what it’s like in the US — he’s more American than I am. So Deep and I used to hang out at this Internet café every day in Rawamangun Jakarta — we were working on a funded research project there. We were actually ahead of schedule in our research and a month or so into the trip the currency value of the rupiah drops overnight — I think this is something you can relate to. So this was bad for Indonesia but good for me and Deep. Suddenly, our stipend almost doubled in value. So we found our only friends in town, Lukman and Okta, two guys who worked at the Internet café and we asked them to organize a road trip, which they did. We drove east about 600 kilometers, about half the length of Java, to get to Yogya. This is the home of Prambanan, one of the largest Hindu temple complexes in South Asia and it’s also home to Borobudour, the largest Buddhist structure anywhere on Earth. Surreal sights and I highly recommend them.
So the four of us stayed overnight at a hotel in downtown Yogya. I still remember that the hotel cost $22 a night but the guys kept saying how amazing it was. It was a solid three and a half star hotel. Normal for me and Deep but special for them. One feature that the hotel had was a pool — on the rooftop. So we all went in the water. I remember getting in and just kind of splashing around, as you do, and when you get bored of that you work your way into the deeper part. At that exact moment, Deep and Okta were out of the pool and looking out at the city and so it was just me and Lukman in the water. And as I started to move into the deeper part, I saw that Lukman wasn’t following me. I asked him if he was Ok and he said yes, but that he couldn’t swim. All these years later it still takes the wind out of me to think of a land of 14,000 islands filled with the most unbelievable vistas and sunsets and sparkling picture prefect beaches and all of it being inaccessible to tens of millions of citizens who never leave the city that they grow up in.
And so Lukman turns to me and asks, “Could you teach me to swim?” And so we started with floating, and I held him in my arms, almost like a baby, one hand on his shoulders and another one at his waist. The sweltering South Asian summer incubated us and the dancing ripples in the water blurred the lines where his body ended and mine began. He took a breath and nervously put his head straight back, shaking a little but sure that I would never let him go.
Michael Burns, Ph.D. is an author, film maker, and writing coach. Find out more about him at writewithmichael.com.
