I was sitting in the bar on a Tuesday night in December when my old friend Billy walked in. He had been away for the past three months. His skin tone was sun-kissed, and his hair had the frail look it gets after too much time in the pool. I greeted him, bought him a beer, and we took our usual spot in the dark corner of the establishment.

“So,” I said, “how was Bali?”

“Totally overdeveloped and commercialized. It sucked. But. The little island just south of it, Lombok, was awesome.”

“Really?”

“Just off the coast of Lombok,” Billy said, “there are three small islands: Gili Trawagan, Gili Meno, and Gili Air. Small, cylindrical islands you could walk around in about an hour. Very rustic. I stayed on Gili Air in this tiny shack that barely had electricity. There was a single light bulb in the bedroom that cast this gnarly, axe murderer vibe in the place.”

“A stabbin’ cabin.”

“Totally. It was frightening. But I loved it.”

“Good snorkeling?”

“Incredible snorkeling. I met this Italian guy with the most ridiculous accent. He was trying to start this psychedelic trance scene there, which strangely works with that type of landscape.” Billy started making trance music sounds.

“That’s hilarious.”

“Yeah,” Billy said. “He had these mushroom chocolates. I took the littlest bite, and oh-my-GOD. I mean… the sunset was bleeding, my eyes were bleeding… I was bleeding out of my eyes and my asshole. I fucked a cow. I fucked a goat. I tried to fuck a sand dune. I got stung by a manta ray…”

“Holy shit, you got stung?”

“It was the most primordial scene you can possibly imagine. There were pagan sacrifices occurring before my very eyes. I was weeping at the savage beauty and utter brutality of it all. Weeping.”

“Sounds intense, man.”

“It was. I missed dinner. The thing is, on this island, if you don’t eat dinner by 9:00pm, that’s it. You missed it. Because after that, everyone goes home. Everyone closes shop.” Billy took a sip of his beer. “So I’m walking down the beach, feeling like a schmuck, thinking ‘oh man, I’m gonna have to wake up early tomorrow to eat,’ you know. All of a sudden, I see a bonfire in the distance. And I’m fucked. I’m like, ‘I’m going to that bonfire.’ I get there and these native Indonesians are chilling like… they just looked like the most hardest, crustiest, old school fuckers you ever saw. Their faces were just these curled up, gnarly ass, wrinkled prunes…”

“You sure that wasn’t the mushrooms?”

“It could have been the mushrooms, but these guys were dug in, man. Deep. And I’m just walking by, and one of them came right up to me like, ‘do you want a sweet potato?’ Just like that, in that funny voice. And I was like ‘yeah,’ and they gave me a potato. They were all smoking these cloves. Damn! I wish I brought back these clove cigarettes they all had. They were so fucking good! So I’m smoking a clove and eating a sweet potato, and I’m like, ‘I hope they don’t think I’m looking at them weird because I’m so fucked up.’ So we’re smoking, we’re eating potatoes, I give them some of my water, they dug that. I say, ‘Hey, you want to smoke some weed?’ I don’t even know how we were communicating, to be honest, because they couldn’t speak English. I think the mushrooms actually allowed me to speak their language. Anyway, so we smoke some weed… Then all of a sudden, this little kid runs out of the woods screaming. Turns out, the kid’s father was stung by a manta ray as they were prawn fishing. These people just walk along the sand bar with a lantern and a net at night, and the prawn are attracted to the light, so they scoop them up. Thing is, the manta rays embed themselves beneath the sand so you can’t see them until you step on them.

“That’s crazy.”

“So this kid’s screaming, I don’t know what’s going on, I’m about to split out the backdoor, kind of backing away little by little. Then all these people look at me and they are like, ‘you come with us.’

“So we go with the kid, and the father is lying on the beach, has a hole in his ankle from the manta ray the size of a dime, bleeding profusely. He’s covered in sand and seaweed and salt water and shit... I am like, ‘Oh my god, this is way too visceral.’ But I have to help out, so I pour some of my fresh water on it, which was good. They liked that. Then they all start speaking fast to each other, and the kid go running into the woods. He comes back a minute later with this mixture of like, plants and mashed up leaves and vines and shit, and they put that on the wound.”

“Some crazy jungle medicine,” I said.

“Yeah. So then we just kind of sat there for a minute. The dad seemed to be OK, and I was just like, ‘Ho kay, I think it’s my time to turn in.’ And that’s when this guy’s daughter comes out of the tent.”

“What?”

“Yes! This girl comes out of the cabana looking like fucking Pocahontas of Southeast Asia. I was like, ‘Oh my god, I wanna marry you.’”

“Holy shit, man. That’s crazy,” I said. We sat there in silence for a moment, and then I felt like I had to ask. “Did you fuck her?”

“What? No, I didn’t fuck her. Her fucking father is right there with a fucking hole in his ankle the size of a goddamn nickel. You think that’s the right time to proposition a girl to make mixed race babies? But they did give me this little wooden amulet here.”

Billy held up the modest medallion, which looked like the sort of cheap trinket native people sell to tourists.

“What’s the amulet do?” I said.

“How the fuck should I know? Probably nothing. But it got me back here safely, didn’t it?”

“Indeed it did.”

“Indeed it did. Cheers.”