Pattaya Mail — Columns

Winebibber’s Grapevine  

Dolf Riks: The young man and his boat

Like the Leopard cat and the Pizza Lady, Joel came as a part of the inventory of the "Seagull" Restaurant when I took over from Walt and Bunny Kasdorf in August 1969. This after the fiasco of my employment at Charly’s Hideaway Restaurant, about which I wrote a few weeks ago. The Pizza lady, who was high strung and habitually burst into tears for no reason at all, was confined to the kitchen. The Leopard cat behind glass in the back of the dining room was not my idea but Walt’s and he did not know what to do with the beautiful animal. Joel was a different matter all together, he was not confined and just came in and out, completely at will and talked and drank cold beers.

After some minor refurbishing we called the restaurant the "Dolf Riks Restaurant". There was not enough money to do more than paint the place and provide the joyless large glass windows with lace curtains and red Thai cotton draperies to make it look more like a country inn. The "Seagull" was actually an old boathouse, converted into an "eatery", American style, and it even featured a jukebox which Walt sold to a collector after I had expressed no interest. It had a certain charm, although it could have done with a little less of that and more solidity. The corrugated iron roof was like a sieve and when it rained, we had to ask the customers to move their chairs in order to put several basins in strategic places to catch the water pouring in through the leaks in the roof. In those days, nobody seemed to mind and as soon as we opened, business flourished.

But let me tell you about Joel, a man with undeniable charm whom I missed thoroughly when he had to leave for the U.S. some years later. Joel was not what one would call handsome. He was a rather scrawny man with a comparatively large, bald head. He wore strong, heavy rimmed, thick bifocals through which he always seemed to look through the reading part, which made him resemble a bird always on the alert for predators from the sky. His usual code of dress was a pair of down trodden flip-flops on his bare feet and wide shorts of an indefinable colour which reached down to his wobbly knees. Over his skimpy shoulders he wore a loose, off-white shirt, which he kept unbuttoned at all times.

Photo: I regret not having a good picture of Joel, but here are my late friends Walt and Bunny Kasdorf, the former owners of the Seagull Restaurant.

It was during the Vietnam conflict and Joel worked for one of those huge American electronic companies which kept Utapao Airbase running. The verb "work" should be used loosely in Joel’s case as he detested any kind of manual labour. He was an electronics engineer and his schedules were a mystery to me. Most of the days, Joel would enter at nine in the morning and order breakfast. After solving the crossword puzzle in the Bangkok World, which took him probably not more than half an hour, he would look up, shove the empty plate and the coffee cup away, give me one of those profound looks through his glasses and he would say: "Dolf, I think it’s time for a cold beer." And that’s how the day usually began.

Joel was building a boat. A trimaran, one of those sailing vessels inspired by the ancient outrigger canoe. With this beautiful yacht he was going to say goodbye to all that, especially the Vietnam War, and sail away through the Indonesian islands, over the Indian Ocean to Madagascar. At least that was the idea but since Joel hated physical labour he had to find a solution for the problem: who was going to do the work and make the trimaran seaworthy. He found a way. Whenever he did things around the hulk, wearing a sailor’s cap to protect his pink scalp from the burning sun, he would attract onlookers and among them the so-called "travellers". These young westerners travelling the world on a shoestring admired the boat, and Joel would chat them up with fantastic tales of the travels he would make and had made, mentioning far away realms and islands like Madagascar.

Soon the young man would become starry eyed with a wistful look on his face and after Joel had manipulated the situation, the "traveller" promptly promised to start working on the boat that very day, in exchange for joining the crew once they would depart. As soon as that was done, Joel would put him to work and saunter back to me, at the restaurant, order another cold beer and discuss world affairs.

Everybody who knew Joel just more than superficially always gathered around him, because that’s where one would be entertained with intellectual wit or any interesting subject at hand. We were reading an amusing book in those days called "The Sotweed Factor" and Joel had adapted some of the peculiar seventeenth century ship’s jargon. Peering through the windows he would exclaim things like "Shame, shame! The travelling virgins of Pattaya are being seduced in the riggings of the mizzen mast of yonder fair man o’ war!" Actually he said things much worse, but my customers thought that he had gone potty or spoke a foreign tongue, so they did not bother. Joel could tell you about Madagascar, the Hunza’s in the mountains of Pakistan or the people of the Danakil depression with the hottest climate on the globe. Joel assured us that he had been there himself on his travels.

Unfortunately "GREED" took hold of him. One day he came to me and confided that he had put the majority of his savings in gem mines, somewhere in the interior of Australia. I am the last to know about big money, as I never had it, but I did feel slightly uncomfortable by the idea that one would gamble his possessions on a deserted plot of sand in the land down under.

Now, every morning Joel would glance at the financial pages first, before the crossword, to see how much richer he had become overnight and it was smooth sailing for some time. He would exclaim: "Dolf! I’m a rich man! Get me another cold beer." During that period of affluence he gave up his job and spent less and less time on the boat, which was almost finished by now. Two or three travellers had become wise and saw no future in the project so they left. The boat was battered by rain and wind and bleached in the sun laying forlornly on the sand near where is now the Siam Bayshore Hotel.

Then, I seem to recall, within a few days the market in Australian gems collapsed and Joel was destitute once again. One morning he came in with a heavy heart to say goodbye. He had just enough money left for the trip back to the States, where he undoubtedly would meld into the grey masses of over stressed salary earners. The boat he generously gave to Walt Kasdorf, who finished it and we made many excursions to the islands on the beautiful yacht.

I heard from Joel once more after that. He had a good job. I believe it was it was in Detroit and he was together with his son from an earlier marriage. The young man was "a little genius" he wrote. I believed him and I wrote back but there was no reply.

Dear Hillary,
My boyfriend is a very kind man. We have been together for more than three years and when he took his job in Thailand, he asked me to come along. He always told me that life is not worth living without me and he wants to spend the rest of his life together with me. Back home, he’d ask me to marry him in the near future, but now, all of a sudden he says he needs more space. He starts to get impatient with me, accuses me of a lot of things, blaming me for everything what goes wrong, especially whenever I start talking about getting married. I really don’t know what’s going on anymore. Sometimes we spend a marvelous night together, but the next day he doesn’t even talk to me. It drives me mad. Whenever he’s got one of those ‘good’ days, I couldn’t think of a better person to be with, but when he goes trough one of his ‘moody periods’, I cry my eyes out and promise myself to end it all. I only forget my promises when he talks to me afterwards the same sweet way as I was used to. What could it be that makes him act like that?

Unhappy

Dear Unhappy,
Your boyfriend is probably infected by ‘commitment-phobia". People afraid of commitments will send out different messages: ‘Stay with me, Go away; You don’t care for me enough, Don’t bother me; Don’t abandon me, Don’t smoother me’. This can cause much anxiety and suffering for those who stay with them.

Keep in mind that these people are masters of contradiction. Their speech and action will drive you crazy. Those kind of people, and it sounds like your boyfriend belongs to them, will charm you with romantic prose and promises, but aren’t going to deliver them. A commitment-phobic person is all talk and no concrete, positive action. Judge your relationship by what he really does - and not by what he says. If you don’t see any way out, end this relationship - this might be the best for both of you.

  Thai Idiom: Koo Hoo

‘Ear Pair’

‘They got it wrong again. It should be au pair.’
‘Isn’t it that disgusting chocolate drink in a bottle?’

Khoo Hoo is the person to whom you can tell anything. They are a trusted friend and confidant.
If your girlfriend steals your money and all the furniture and runs off with a motorcycle driver, you can always call your Khoo Hoo and tell them. They won’t say ‘I told you so’ or blab to everyone at the TQ.
If your boyfriend tells you he has to work late and you hear that he’s been seen at the TQ with a luscious lovely, call your Khoo Hoo.
True Khoo Hoos are hard to find.
If you have one, you are a very lucky person.

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