Jeff’s Pirate Cove is a local outside dive bar in Talofofo, a village on the eastern side of the island, which, according to my world-weary 24-year-old tour guide, a fellow reporter, is too far south to be a tourist attraction, but is one anyway.
The bar is a series of outside patios, underneath a main overhang and a peaked roof with a painted display of mermaid paraphernalia in between stone picnic benches. It’s only my second day here, and I’m being shown the sights. We’re going to the Rocktoberfest, an annual occasion that merits keeping the bar open until the late hour of 9pm. Jeff, I’m told, likes to go home at 6.
Despite an array of sloppily parked cars on the highway out front, the place is only half full. There’s a band in a tent playing on the green slope leading down from the main bar. I see an occasional Micronesian waitress, or perhaps simply Octoberfest enthusiast, wearing what can only be described as the traditional outfit of half-naked German wenches on beer steins everywhere. I’m jealous of the leather bustier and green short skirt, but assume that if all goes well, in a year or two, I may also join the ranks of girls wearing Bavarian-inspired slut attire in a tropical locale.
I’m told there’s a beach on the other end of the grass, but it’s dark, and all I can see are lights from the northern end of the island, where the hotels catering to Japanese tourists have taken over the skyline. Little kids swirl around in gaggles of hysteria, seeming to have almost as much fun as their bleary-eyed adult counterparts. They clamber along the sloped roof and run beneath our feet. One little girl grabs the coattails of a man, who swings her around while he or she, I can’t remember which, flash pictures of the merry-go-round effect.
I’m introduced to the “hash” guys – friends of my colleagues. They seem to be different versions of the quintessential American ex-pat, leathery men that seem to be made of gray and meet newcomers with half-leering glances, and seem attenuated to the finer points of hedonistic nihilism in a way that only years of practice can achieve. I miss their names – but on the car ride over I am told that the hashers have elected someone called “the tyrant,” and casually refer to each other by names such as “tampon” and “sex.” Or maybe that’s just what their names are, and have nothing to do with hashing.
Hashing is explained to me as an international sport that involves drinking and running hastily navigated trails, usually in the dark, sometimes in wholly inappropriate places like the middle of rivers. Here it seems to be the favorite activity of my new colleagues, and I’m told, along with boonie stomping, the weekly community hiking expedition, will quickly become a pastime for lack of else to do.
In between hearing the conversations of the hashers, and the drunken cheers as the cover band plays a favorite 80s retread, I pick up snippets of a coded and apparently long-running joke between one of my colleagues and a lawyer, a year and half into her tenure in the local government. The joke goes something like, “what does it take to get fired from GuamGov?” The answer is not, according to the local government, raping a child at work, because, well that doesn’t actually affect one’s job performance.
They laugh and then say, “It would be funny if it weren’t actually true.”
“I work for the mafia,” the woman says casually. “And by that I mean, GuamGov. Maybe I should have thought of that before taking this job. Ha.” She laughs.
My colleague launches into a story about the pitfalls of reporting in Guam. “The teachers’ union slashed my tires,” he says. “How do you know it was them?” the lawyer asks. “They used No. 2 pencils,” he quips back.
He’s joking, and not joking.
It’s early, but seems late, and around me the scene has achieved no more or less cathartic revelry than when we arrive. Work is tomorrow, and so I head out with another colleague, who will start her new job at the news desk.
I ask her if she’s nervous, moving into a position that might someday end in getting her tires slashed. She says yes, a little, and then I say something about the role of journalism, and how this is what, technically, we’re here to do.
She agrees, and sighs. “It’s good we cover stuff that we do. But sometimes I wonder if it matters. Because no one does anything.”
We drive back in the dark, contemplating years ahead.
The bar is a series of outside patios, underneath a main overhang and a peaked roof with a painted display of mermaid paraphernalia in between stone picnic benches. It’s only my second day here, and I’m being shown the sights. We’re going to the Rocktoberfest, an annual occasion that merits keeping the bar open until the late hour of 9pm. Jeff, I’m told, likes to go home at 6.
Despite an array of sloppily parked cars on the highway out front, the place is only half full. There’s a band in a tent playing on the green slope leading down from the main bar. I see an occasional Micronesian waitress, or perhaps simply Octoberfest enthusiast, wearing what can only be described as the traditional outfit of half-naked German wenches on beer steins everywhere. I’m jealous of the leather bustier and green short skirt, but assume that if all goes well, in a year or two, I may also join the ranks of girls wearing Bavarian-inspired slut attire in a tropical locale.
I’m told there’s a beach on the other end of the grass, but it’s dark, and all I can see are lights from the northern end of the island, where the hotels catering to Japanese tourists have taken over the skyline. Little kids swirl around in gaggles of hysteria, seeming to have almost as much fun as their bleary-eyed adult counterparts. They clamber along the sloped roof and run beneath our feet. One little girl grabs the coattails of a man, who swings her around while he or she, I can’t remember which, flash pictures of the merry-go-round effect.
I’m introduced to the “hash” guys – friends of my colleagues. They seem to be different versions of the quintessential American ex-pat, leathery men that seem to be made of gray and meet newcomers with half-leering glances, and seem attenuated to the finer points of hedonistic nihilism in a way that only years of practice can achieve. I miss their names – but on the car ride over I am told that the hashers have elected someone called “the tyrant,” and casually refer to each other by names such as “tampon” and “sex.” Or maybe that’s just what their names are, and have nothing to do with hashing.
Hashing is explained to me as an international sport that involves drinking and running hastily navigated trails, usually in the dark, sometimes in wholly inappropriate places like the middle of rivers. Here it seems to be the favorite activity of my new colleagues, and I’m told, along with boonie stomping, the weekly community hiking expedition, will quickly become a pastime for lack of else to do.
In between hearing the conversations of the hashers, and the drunken cheers as the cover band plays a favorite 80s retread, I pick up snippets of a coded and apparently long-running joke between one of my colleagues and a lawyer, a year and half into her tenure in the local government. The joke goes something like, “what does it take to get fired from GuamGov?” The answer is not, according to the local government, raping a child at work, because, well that doesn’t actually affect one’s job performance.
They laugh and then say, “It would be funny if it weren’t actually true.”
“I work for the mafia,” the woman says casually. “And by that I mean, GuamGov. Maybe I should have thought of that before taking this job. Ha.” She laughs.
My colleague launches into a story about the pitfalls of reporting in Guam. “The teachers’ union slashed my tires,” he says. “How do you know it was them?” the lawyer asks. “They used No. 2 pencils,” he quips back.
He’s joking, and not joking.
It’s early, but seems late, and around me the scene has achieved no more or less cathartic revelry than when we arrive. Work is tomorrow, and so I head out with another colleague, who will start her new job at the news desk.
I ask her if she’s nervous, moving into a position that might someday end in getting her tires slashed. She says yes, a little, and then I say something about the role of journalism, and how this is what, technically, we’re here to do.
She agrees, and sighs. “It’s good we cover stuff that we do. But sometimes I wonder if it matters. Because no one does anything.”
We drive back in the dark, contemplating years ahead.
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