A legendary experience, even by my strict standards, was when me and a girlfriend had befriended a whole bunch of musicians. Most people know next to nothing about Indonesian music, but they live and breathe it, and there are some brilliant players out there, and they are all fucking mental. As a so called musician myself, for some reason, any gig we went to, every band would come and introduce themselves to me, I guess the tattoos helped.

We had met this lot of complete debauched fucked up would be rock stars, who all came from extremely rich families, and I mean rich. I’m talking family yachts, not a fucking caravan in Torquay. We were invited for a New Years Eve boat cruise to the Thousand Islands, where one singer had rented a cottage there on one of the most popular private islands in the area, Kotok. (One of the participants on the trip, who was a guitarist, also had briefly trained to be a doctor, before drug habits took hold, he would prove to be very useful later.)

There was an ulterior motive for the singer, he wanted to propose to his girlfriend under a starry filled sky. (I can’t give his name, you never know, he might still be alive and I’m now actually married to his then would be fiancé.) Unfortunately his plan went slightly wrong, actually completely wrong, a disaster of epic proportions in fact that had long lasting repercussions.

There is a very simple reason why the next lot of things happened. We were absolutely out of it, on anything you can imagine, and more. They were the funniest bunch of lunatics I’d met in a while, and they made Keith Moon look like a lightweight.

They were the funniest bunch of lunatics I’d met in a while, and they made Keith Moon look like a lightweight.

This guy was loaded in both senses of the word, and decided the great proposal would happen in a rowing boat in the sea (obviously.) Everyone agreed that this was a really bad idea, even me, but of course we helped undo the small boat which was being dragged along behind. Somehow, they managed to get in it, he, holding all the crates of booze, (you need that to propose,) diving equipment, (apparently that’s logical in the near dark and an approaching storm and being utterly fucked,) and a huge icebox. We were watching, crying with laughter, until they seemed safe. The rest of us then sailed to the Island and left the love-birds, shitfaced in a small wooden boat, they weren’t that far away from the harbour so we thought they would be fine.

This is when things went a little bit pear shaped, the little boat was made of traditional Indonesian wood, and doesn’t appreciate when a completely fucked local wannabe be rock star drops everything straight on the floor, there was a lot of booze, the ice box, the diving stuff, smashing the bottom of the boat and a piece of wood splintered and managed to cut his right leg so badly you could see bone. Nice… Naturally next, because of the gap in the floor, the romantic love nest fucking started sinking. Ha-ha. We had no idea so we carried on partying in the cottage. Guess who had to swim back, a bedraggled couple staggered in. It was not a pretty sight. But we were so high that everyone, apart from my girlfriend just carried on laughing. Then we noticed the leg, how the fuck he had swum back I don’t know. My future wife was panicking and crying like a baby.

That was the fun part, the next was just gruesome.

I didn’t know these people that well, but was worried. This guy had lost a lot of blood, and looked like the first white Indonesian I had seen. This was a private island, no doctors, hospitals, and now being dark and the weather getting worse, we couldn’t go anywhere especially in our state. We tried to stem the blood flow, but nothing was working, bandages, anything.

If I ever have an operation, call me old fashioned, but I don’t want it done by someone who has been drunk all day, and snorted half of Columbia, not to mention taken shitloads of pills.

Then our resident trainee ‘doctor’ made a comment that I hoped was a joke. It wasn’t. ‘I’ll sew him up.’ Fuck this was going to get interesting. If I ever have an operation, call me old fashioned, but I don’t want it done by someone who has been drunk all day, and snorted half of Columbia, not to mention taken shitloads of pills.

This cottage was packed full of booze, so Doogie Howzer (now more like Neil Patrick Harris in Harold and Kumar) poured about half a bottle of whisky down the poor guy’s leg and then downed most of the rest. Good start! When the screaming stopped, and most of the people there had stopped laughing, the real pain began. Doctor Death then started. The patient now really had a problem, bit of a dilemma to be said, he was given a complete bottle of Johnny Walker, which he was trying to frantically trying to drink, but because of the pain, he also had a wooden spoon shoved in his mouth to bite on when the ‘stitching’ started. I would rather have been anyone else than him at that moment.

There was claret everywhere, he’s lucky he still has a leg. (Doogie was so wired his hands were shaking all over the place.) My best memory was about halfway through the screaming and crying, my future wife fainted, and the singer, who now knew how to scream the real Blues sat up, necked nearly half the bottle in one slurp, then passed out. Doogie reassured us that he was probably still alive and continued.

The patient woke up about an hour later with no real memory of what had happened, and asked for a beer. He had lost all his booze, drugs, engagement ring and his diving equipment, and nearly his leg. Good work my son! He deserves to be English.

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