After a few months of being in Jakarta and coming to the choice to accept my fate, my friend and I started going out dancing a lot. We explored a few different places but finally landed on a place called CJ’s. They always had live music, and it was clean, but I think the real reason we landed on this place was that we always got free drinks.

We were the only white women in the bar, and we always dressed to impress. We had befriended one of the servers there, and he always brought us bottle service at no charge. Why? Because we attracted a crowd. If she and I were there, people would flock to the dance floor to watch us.

We often made a scene and didn’t think twice about it.  

We had been frequenting this particular bar for a couple of months when a new addition was brought into the teacher's house. A man from the UK was hired at the school and became our new best friend. The night he arrived, we offered him the opportunity to go out for a quiet drink with us and get to know each other. 

He didn’t want to at first. He was to start teaching the next day and was concerned about being hungover on his first day at his new job. We assured him over and over again that we would keep it tame and that he could choose to leave at any time. We made sure to give him a card for his wallet with the house address in case he couldn’t find his way home. 

Off we went, us girls dressed as slutty as possible, with a handsome new teacher in town. He had no idea what he was in for, and honestly, neither did we. Arriving at CJ’s we were immediately greeted by our favourite server.

He found us a table in the VIP section and brought us a bottle of tequila.

The new teacher was in shock, and made several cracks about us only having a ‘quiet drink.’ We fired back at him that it was a ‘quiet bottle.’

Several shots later, he was loosened up enough to begin exploring his surroundings and became aware of how much attention he was getting.  In these locations in Jakarta, a white man gets a lot of attention, and this particular bar had a reputation for the local women showing up to ‘serve’ these men. A group of these women was at the table beside us, and they were climbing all over each other to get his attention.

We laughed when he asked what the big deal was, and let him know that the only thing that mattered to them was the money in his pocket. He found that amusing as he joked there wasn’t any.  I don’t think it mattered, as he ended up on the dance floor with several of them at the same time, and pretty soon, he had forgotten his own name.

My friend and I decided to call it a night and let him know we were going to leave. He had already made the decision that he wasn’t going anywhere. 

And so, on his first night in Jakarta, he brought home a hooker and went to work on his first day still drunk.

Were we a bad influence? I don’t think so. I think we just showed him an option, and he chose his own path. It wouldn’t take long for him to be on antibiotics for all sorts of ‘conditions’ and to be hounded by women for his babies. At one point, he even had a model buying him clothes and spending hundreds of dollars on him simply so that she could bear his child with white skin.