Jim Morrison & Me & Bangkok
Street Food
Thai Time
The World's Most Exotic Wines
The World's Fastest Elephant
Frank Zappa's Bicycle Debut
Father Joe
On the eat-a-bug trail in Bangkok
Food That 'Broke Da Mout'
The Littlest Money-Changer

Jim Morrison & Me & Bangkok
Jim Morrison was more than an acquaintance and less than a close friend. Ours was a relationship that developed when we found ourselves drinking in the same seedy Los Angeles bars back in the 1960s and I interviewed him for Rolling Stone following his arrest for allegedly exposing himself while in concert in Miami, Florida. (He did not, although he was later convicted in a witch hunt trial.) During the two or three weeks it took to do the longest interview he ever gave, some of the sessions ended in a topless bar where Jim was a regular customer and, inevitably, "Love Me Two Times" dropped onto the jukebox and one of the dancers came up to him, sat in his lap and shook her "two times" in his face.

We also discovered that we had the same literary agent, Sylva Romano, when I drove Jim to her office to sign a contract for what became his first book of poetry, for Simon & Schuster. His editor was named Jonathan Dolger. That same day, Jim said he had read a small rock music history that I'd published recently and asked if I was writing another book. I said I was looking for a subject for a biography. Maybe Frank Zappa, I said, as I'd known him for many years and thought him smart and articulate. Jim said, simply, "I'd like to read a book about Elvis."

That planted the seed and a year later, in 1969, my (Jim's) agent got me a contract to write what became the first Elvis biography, selling the idea to, of all people, Jim's poetry editor at Simon & Schuster. At the time, Elvis was still making all those awful movies in Hollywood, hadn't even returned to performance in Las Vegas, and everyone asked, "Why do you want to do a book about him?" Then, in the summer of 1971, with the Elvis book on the presses, Jim (to whom the book was dedicated) died in Paris, prompting Jonathan to ask if I'd like to write a book about him. I said yes and after interviewing about 200 people in the US and Europe---many of whom asked why I wanted to write a book about him---I submitted a manuscript about three inches thick. Jonathan asked me to shorten it to about an inch and a half and by the time I did that, Jonathan said interest in Jim had waned and he rejected the manuscript.

For the next six years, copies of the manuscript were submitted to some thirty publishers in the US and UK. Sometimes, an agent represented the book. Jann Wenner at Rolling Stone tried as well. Other times, the manuscript went in cold.

Among the companies that turned it away was Warner Books, part of a growing media conglomerate that included three record companies, Warner, Elektra, and Atlantic (WEA), Elektra being Jim's (and the Doors') old label. I asked Jac Holzman, who had been the founder/president of Elektra and now was on the WEA board, if he would do me a favor and resubmit it to Warner Books, but this time to the guy at the top.

He did and the president, Max Kaminsky, sent me a one-line reply: "We still don't want it." Wow, I thought, those guys have got memories! Time passed and after the number of publishers who said no reached thirty, I decided to hang it up, figuring I'd given enough time and energy to Mr. Morrison.

One of the people I'd interviewed researching the book was Danny Sugerman, who at age fourteen was a Doors groupie befriended by Jim. He was now working for Ray Manzarek, the now defunct band's keyboard player, who was paying him to do whatever he could to keep the Doors name alive. When I told Danny I was giving up on the biography, he asked if he could try to find a publisher. I said, "Sure, and if you find one, you get ten per cent, agent's commission."

Not knowing the history, he sent it to Warner Books, the last place I would've sent it. I thought it was funny when he told me. But it landed on the desk of a young editor named Marcie (I can't recall her last name) and that made all the difference. When she took it to the editorial committee, she was told, "We've rejected this turkey two times already and we don't want it." Marcie was only a few years out of university, but she had a good track record at Warner; every book she brought in either broke even or made money. So they told her okay, but don't give Hopkins and Sugerman any money. We accepted a pitiful $1,500 advance.

Next, Danny said he thought there was stuff in the first draft that should be put back into the second and asked if he could shuffle the two together, and maybe take a few of the nastier bits out. He also volunteered to write an introduction, get poet Michael McClure to write an afterward, compile the discography, and coordinate all the photographs, as well as add a few new anecdotes of his own. I said go for it, now you're the co-author and in for thirty per cent of the royalties and fifty per cent of the movie rights, which at that time we thought were worthless. The $1,500 went to a typist to put the final manuscript together.

In the winter before publication, I was in New York and arranged to meet our editor, Marcie, who suggested we have drinks at the Algonquin Hotel, known as a literary cocktail place since the 1920s when people like Robert Benchley and Dorothy Parker drank there. Marcie arrived late and in a hurry, a bundle of energy wrapped in a bulky overcoat and trailing scarves, her arms laden with purchases, her hair style in the same neighborhood frequented by Whoopie Goldberg and Bob Marley. Once settled into our first drinks, I asked her what she had done before she became an editor. "Oh," she said, matter-factly, "ten-thousand mikes [micrograms] of acid and two years in a commune in New Mexico." I knew why she had taken the book.

When the book was published in June the following year (1980), there was zero budget allotted for advertising or promotion, so Danny and I decided to host a launch party at the Whisky a Go Go, the club on the LA Sunset Strip where the Doors really got their start. When we said we expected 600 guests, the owners of the place agreed to close the club for one night if they got whatever was spent on drinks. We didn't have a clue how we might pay for those drinks, but we went ahead, and when I arrived that night from Hawaii (where I was then living) I saw our names on the nightclub marquee where The Doors once had theirs. Danny had taken the liberty of putting his name on top.

It was a great party, a '60s reunion. Danny invited young rock bands and the three surviving Doors joined in. I was sitting in a booth with Tim Leary on my right, the ghost of Lenny Bruce on my left. And there were, as promised, at least 500 people, who were, more than a decade after Leary told everyone to drop acid, now throwing down the booze. How, I wondered, were Danny and I going to get out of this one?

Now we come to the unbelievable bit. Half-way through the party, a telegram arrived. I read it, then laughed all the way to the stage, where I stopped the band and said I had an announcement. I then read the telegram, saying it came from our editor at Warner Books: "Next week, NO ONE HERE GETS OUT ALIVE goes onto the New York Times bestseller list at No. 16. We'll pay the bar bill."

The room erupted in a roar and everyone in the place made a dash for the bar to place an order.

Within two months, the book was No. 1 and I got another note from Marcie. She was leaving the publishing business to go to Spain and learn how to play flamenco guitar and I haven't heard from her since. As for the book, it stayed on the New York Times list for nine months, was translated into a dozen languages, and when Oliver Stone's film The Doors came out in 1991, the book went back onto the bestseller lists, rising to No. 2. It's still in print today, with more than two-million copies in circulation.

Occasionally I'm asked to speak to young writers and I tell this story, saying there are three lessons to be learned from it.

One: if you believe in a project, hang in there, be persistent, don't give up.

Two: keep your fingers crossed, hoping for good luck. If our book hadn't landed on Marcie's desk when Danny sent it in, but had gone to the adjacent one, whose owner hadn't dropped acid or lived for two years in a commune, Warner might have rejected it for the third time.

Three: if someone asks why in hell you're doing a book about him (or her or that), you may be on to something.

This is a story with a happy ending that hasn't stopped, at least for me. For the past eight years, I've lived in Bangkok, famous for its topless bars, where royalties from the book are still paying for my beer and the disc jockeys in some of the joints I visit play "Love Me Two Times" when I walk in.

Street Food
In the west, street food is severely limited in both variety and imagination. One encounters a soft pretzel served with mustard outside the home of the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia. Roasted chestnuts near London's Big Ben. Tortillas with a filling in Mexico City. A hot dog here, a submarine sandwich there. And most people think "fast food" means you know whose hamburgers, fried chicken, and pizza. Or something nuked in a microwave. Ah, but take your hunger to the streets of the "developing" nations of the world, and especially to Asia, and there you find a level of culinary sophistication unmatched elsewhere. There are no cloth napkins. There are no waiters to take you to the table. There may not even be a table or chairs and if there are, they may be so close to the ground they seem made for small children. But, the food, oh, the food...isn't this what's important, after all, and so often is lost in overpriced, climate-controlled "ambiance"?

On the street, at temporary stalls and rolling carts and from baskets hung from bamboo shoulder poles---here today, gone soon, back again same time tomorrow---is the world's most succulent and tantalizing moveable feast, where diners encounter unparalleled richness and variety, along with a speed in delivery unrivaled by all the efficiency experts behind the international fast food chains. Street food is the original fast food. And not only is the choice greater, it is also cheaper and tastier, and also in most cases likely healthier.

No one can say which "developing" nation's street cuisine is best, but in any argument, Thailand gets unchallenged respect from everyone. It is for good reason that Thai food has been the most popular cuisine to sweep the world since, well, chop suey and the sushi bar. Visitors to Thailand seeking The Real Thing make a big mistake if they don't eat some of their meals on the street.

Sitting on those tiny stools, knees cracking, struggling with chopsticks, puzzling over why Thais push their food onto a big metal spoon with the back of a fork, while trying to identify the sauces and condiments in the little carry-away rack where there ought to be (and isn't) salt and pepper, ketchup and mustard, can be a daunting, or enlightening, experience.

Why, the foreigner may ask, are cold drinks taken away in plastic bags tied off at the top with a rubber band, rather than in a cup? What are all those little pancakes filled with and why is that woman pounding green papaya so mercilessly in a mortar? Are those bananas being boiled in oil? What are those hairy red things piled next to the mangos? Why is so much wrapped in banana leaves or packed into bamboo before it is cooked? Is that toilet tissue being used for paper napkins? Are those insects, heaped high on the tray?

Eating on the street in Thailand is an adventure---noisy, vigorous, and for anyone unfamiliar with the widely ranging Asian diet, sometimes startling. There is no air conditioned hush found in most restaurants; a bus and a small pack of motorcycles go past instead. And the food doesn't appear magically from some mysterious location; you watch it being prepared as the smoke and odors wash over you, and if you stand too close to the huge wok full of boiling pig fat, probably it will stain your clothing. Eating on the street in Thailand is being a part of a show. Gastronomy as street theater.

This is the way food is consumed in Thailand by the local population. It is to the streets and the waterways (where floating kitchens dispense soup and other foods), carts, temporarily erected stalls, bicycles and women carrying baskets on their backs, that the rural villagers and urban poor go for a thrifty, nourishing nosh or snack.

Slices of green mango are dipped into a mixture of sugar, salt, and crushed or powdered chilies. Iced whole coconuts are "topped" and served with a straw. Beef (okay, maybe water buffalo) and pork and chicken chunks laced onto skewers are grilled over charcoal. Massive ears of corn are grilled in the same fashion, as are eggs and chicken thighs and whole fish (also skewered) and a puzzling array of twisted innards.

Dried, roasted squid on a bicycle rack is run through a set of hand-cranked rollers and reheated over a brazier balanced behind the seat. Lengths of sugar cane are treated to a similar pair of rollers to extract the clear, sweet juice, which is then mixed with water and ice.

Sticky rice is cooked with sweet beans in bamboo or banana leaf. A mixture of coconut milk and rice flour, slightly sweetened and slightly salted, is heated in concave indentations in a heavy iron pan over a portable gas burner. The juice of small oranges (never mind the greenish color; they're incredibly sugary) are squeezed and poured into plastic bags with crushed ice and tied at the top with a rubber band, the corner of the bag open for inserting a straw.

Crispy-fried grasshoppers, silkworms, crickets, beetles, tiny whole frogs, even scorpions are salted and spritzed with vinegar and carried away in small paper bags made from the morning newspaper. Better than popcorn, say Thai gourmands. And lower in cholesterol than many other protein sources, say nutritionists.

As for this being the original "fast food," some day I'd like to see a race staged between a McDonald's serf and a Thai street cook, see who can deliver my lunch first. I'll put my money on the midde-aged woman on Sukhumvit, Soi 4, who produces a healthy bowl of noodles with chicken, bean sprouts, chopped morning glory leaves and stems, garlic and spring onions, a selection of condiments waiting on the table with chopsticks and metal spoons, in about ten seconds flat.

Street hawkers---most but not all are women---are numerous where foot traffic is heaviest---for example, outside rail and bus stations, and along sidewalks where there are clusters of office high rises or, after dark, near the numerous entertainment venues. The food varies from one region of the country to another, but if there is a dominant influence, it is that of Northeastern Thailand, called Isan. Not so many years ago, dishes from this part of the country---the largest, the most densely populated, the poorest---were scorned by outsiders as fit only for peasants. Since then, thousands of food vendors from Isan have set up shop not only in Bangkok but throughout the kingdom and today, many Isan dishes are considered a part of the "national" cuisine.

In recent years, there have been arguments about how "clean" Thai street food is, or is not. Some wonder how often street vendors wash their equipment and note that few wear hairnets, or change the oil used for frying as often as they might. Contaminants and bacteria have been found in some dishes. (As they are in five-star hotels; four out of the five times I've been made sick by what I've eaten in Southeast Asia has been after dining at a "nice" restaurant or hotel, not on the street.) The water used by street cooks for washing bowls, plates and tableware was of questionable origin. The complaints go on and on.

It's all a tempest in a bowl of noodle soup, if you ask me. In a time of mad cow disease and foot-and-mouth and high cholesterol Big Macs, I find it difficult to worry about what I eat on the street in Thailand. How often is there the excitement and the joy of discovery when we eat?

When I moved to Thailand in 1993, I vowed to try at least one "new" food each week on the street, because I saw so many I wasn't being offered in restaurants, and often couldn't identify. What better way to get to know the country than to consume its vastly varied cuisine? I figure it'll be another five years, maybe longer, before I exhaust the possibilities.

Thai Time
Nittaya Phanthachat, a friend who stayed with me from time to time when she was visiting Bangkok (she had a home in Chon Buri), told me one morning as she left my flat that she'd be back in time for us to have dinner together. She called at four o'clock and said she was running late, but promised to be back at eight. We still had time for dinner. No problem.

She finally showed up two days later.

Was I angry? No, not really. I was concerned about her safety and health, as anyone might be, but the worry, if that's the correct word, was tempered by the knowledge that Thais don't have the same concept of time that westerners do. In fact, not only is it different, to many of us raised in the west, it makes no sense at all, as if we'd suddenly waked up on another planet.

Consider being on Mercury. Mercury moves with great speed in its journey around the Sun, averaging approximately thirty miles a second, it completes its circuit in about eighty-eight Earth days. Yet, this tiniest planet and the closest in the solar system to the Sun, rotates upon its axis so slowly, the time from one sunrise to the next is equal to about 176 days on Earth. Try setting your Swatch or Rolex to that. And think about how long Happy Hour might be.

Compared to Mercury's, Nittaya's sense of time was easy to grasp. I'd moved to Thailand after living for many years in Hawaii, where there was something called "Hawaiian time," a complex system of measuring the duration of all existence, past, present, and future, that was defined by a single word: late. So, "Thai time" was just another excuse. Yes?

That's the farang point of view, of course. Hawaiians are never late, according to "Hawaiian time." Identically, Thais are never late. They've merely been delayed, or perhaps distracted. The ancient Greeks advised us to be "ruled by time, the wisest counsellor of all" and as any fool knows, Greek thought is not included in the Thai primary school curriculum. End of discussion.

A little harder to grasp is the Thai's understanding of "time" as a concept. For this part of my tale, you need some patience, and perhaps a beer or a nice cuppa tea, so put this book down and get the drink of your choice---take your time!---and then take a deep breath and for just a minute, no longer, I promise, let me turn you over to William J. Klausner, a farang who came to Thailand in 1955, lived for a year in a village in Isan, was an editor of the annual publication of the Buddhist Association of Thailand, and taught at both Thammasat and Chulalongkorn Universities. A wise man.

"One of the central concepts of Buddhist philosophy is anicang: the transitory nature of the material world in which we live; the uncertainty and impermanence of all," he wrote in "Reflections on Thai Culture" (1981). "The Thai version of ma–ana, the tried and true answer to failed appointments and the lack of successful and timely task completion, is mai pen rai, or it is nothing,' never mind.' Sociologists have referred to the present-oriented aspect of Thai behavior and personality. Certainly, the Thai find more psychological fulfillment in the chase than in the attainment. It is the voyage, the journey that is fun; the end result is less important. Thus, one shouldn't be too concerned if one is some minutes or some hours late."

Did everybody follow that? Mai pen rai.

It all has to do with Oriental thought, and most specifically the Buddhist vision of constant and cosmic flow. That thing about the wheel that keeps turning without any real beginning and end. I don't know for sure, but this may be one of the reasons the Thai language doesn't have any tenses, and for that alone I'm grateful. While English speakers have the audacity to include such things as "past perfect" and "future perfect" but no "present perfect" in the way they speak. If you ask me, it's not a matter of Thai time making no sense, it's the other way around.

As for my friend Nittaya, she'd just run into some friends with whom she caught a bus to Bang Saen for a day at the beach. So her return to my flat two days late merely meant we had dinner on Tuesday instead of Sunday. No problem.

The World's Most Exotic Wines
How many books and articles urge a tantalizing Beaujoleis, a full-bodied Merlot, or a musky Chardonnay to accompany this or that dish? How many wine critics bicker over the best of the best of the latest Bordeauxs? How many sommeliers and other "experts" go purple in the face arguing over the vineyards, provinces, countries, and years of origin? Too many. Now, consider this: how many critics and wine connoisseurs have recommended a wine flavored with reptiles, fungus, chicken feet, or dog and snake penises? None? Some of these wines are quite tasty and there are millions who drink them every day, so why don't wine people take them seriously?

I believe it's because (1) most people don't want to see sediment in their wine, forget about an entire cobra coiled inside the bottle, head reared ready to strike, (2) the wines don't have years on them or fancy names, (3) there aren't any proper primers and pocket guides, competitions, and snake sommeliers championing the weird wine cause, and (4) visiting a wine cave in the south of France is one thing, but peering into a cage full of snakes in Southeast Asia probably is another.

Wine snobs criticize these most exotic of wines harshly. The alcohol content is too high, they say---39 per cent in the snake wine I'm drinking as I write this, contrasted with most table wine's 10-13 per cent---and since most of the consumers of this viper vino are in China and Southeast Asia, the tendency is to toss it back in one gulp---the traditional Chinese toast is Ganbei! meaning "empty glass"---we who drink it are regarded as barbarians. We make no attempt to test the wine's "nose" and "mouth" (wine snob talk for aroma and taste) or to judge the liquid by its viscosity and the way it was racked, aged, bottled, and corked.

The first time I encountered one of these strange wines was in southern China where the wine list itself was more intimidating than the wine waiters I'd encountered in France. It was at the oddly named Snake King & Completely Restaurant in Guangzhou, a half-four flight from Hong Kong and ninety minutes by train. When I visited there were 75 different snake dishes on the menu and seventeen different wine drinks that had snake as one of the ingredients. These included something labeled "Magnificant Packing Three Snake Gall Bladder Wine" and, mysteriously, "Toad and Snake's Seminal Vesicle." Timidly, I ordered the more modest "Small Three Snake Wine," a reference to the size of the drink, not the snake, as there was also a "Big Three Snake Wine" offered at double the price.

The waitress watched as I sipped it and applauded as I then emptied the tiny glass in a gulp. It burned going down as a straight shot of tequila---which it resembled in color---or brandy would, and left a residual warm feeling from my esophagus to my gut. Which is what it was supposed to do. Snake is categorized as a yang food, representing the positive, bright and masculine half of the Chinese yin/yang philosophy (yin being negative, dark, and feminine). Its consumption is especially recommended during the winter months, when it is believed it will warm the blood.

So, too, what happened next. I was the only Caucasian in the restaurant, making me as much an oddity as the menu was to me. Most of the customers at the other tables were male and all wanted me to join them for an after-dinner drink. As soon as I joined the first and we all swapped business cards, one of the men filled our glasses with a brown liquid with a worrying residue.

"Ganbei!" the man called loudly. The sediment wasn't so thick as to involve any chewing and the wine went down without the fiery glow I'd experienced earlier.

"Lovely," I said as I examined the bottle, surprised to find on the label some English text. The first thing that caught my attention was the fact that what I'd swallowed was Five Testes & Penises Wine. Besides pure rice wine---the common ingredient in virtually every exotic wine sold in Asia---it contained, I was assured, the genitals of snake, sheep, ox, deer, and dog.

The label went on to describe my drink as a "medical healthy-protective product." With a series of gestures and lascivious grins, my new friends made the promised benefits clear: I was drinking Viagra in a bottle. And so I moved from table to table, drinking glass after glass of the same liquid flavored and thickened with fermented genitalia.

"Ganbei!" they cried, group after jovial group.

Over the next couple of years, while writing a book about exotic food and drink, I encountered many other exotic wines. In the Imperial Herbal Restaurant in Singapore, a few steps from the Raffles Hotel, a resident Chinese herbalist diagnosed customer ills and imbalances, prescribing certain dishes or drinks on the menu as being helpful. The choice of wines included one with deer penis, starting at US$12 a glass, with a two-liter bottle costing $450!

I tried snake wine again at a sidewalk cafe in Sapa, Vietnam, in the mountains near the Chinese border. (I was told that they were out of "bee wine.") It was also in Vietnam, at the Hanoi airport, where I found a bottle of wine containing a gecko the size of a small kitten, priced at $2, next to a bottle that contained a coiled cobra for $80. In the lobby bar of the five-star Baan Boran Hotel in northern Thailand overlooking the Golden Triangle, the bartender poured a shot from a bottle of amber liquid that contained a single scorpion. Like the cobra, also ready to strike, though well past any ability to do so.

The difference between these and other wines is that the special ingredient---reptile or insect or whatever---is added after the drink has been fermented. Snake wine isn't wine made from snake genitalia, it's wine to which those parts have been added for effect, for the impact its presence will make on the drinker, probably only psychologically. Scientific studies are lacking and few if any western medical authorities go along with the health-giving or aphrodisiacal claims made by the wines' manufacturers. That doesn't stop the production.

No one knows better than the Hee Li family, founder-owners of the Sam Seng Wine Company, Hong Kong's biggest maker of traditional Chinese medicinal wines. The Li family started in southern China as small-time wine merchants a century ago, moving to Hong Kong after World War Two. Today, Li oversees a staff of 35 and boasts annual sales approaching $3 million.

Ingredients for the wines come from all over. A visit to the factory includes a look into ceramic urns containing everything from dead silkworm moths (a tonic for the kidneys) to the penises of seals and sea lions imported from Canada (known as "whips" in Chinese medicinal lingo, believed to increase virility) to fungus (for hypertension) and chicken feet (to strengthen the leg muscles).

Li, now in his late 60s, has turned much of his business over to his son Thomas, who introduced computerized stock and billing procedures and built a new factory to make the production of wine more profitable. With recent studies in the US showing forty per cent of the adult population using alternative medicines, he believes anything is possible and wants to introduce more accurate labeling to satisfy import requirements in the US and elsewhere in the west. These exotic drinks currently are not available there and Li would like to introduce them.

With modern business practices taking control of exotic wine production, can the nose and the mouth be far behind? The elder Mr. Li seems only concerned with there being a dead animal of some sort in the bottle to warrants it's potency and authenticity. With all the cachŽ attached to any drink's snob appeal, will the young Mr. Li now introduce modern standards to judge his wines? Will the wine snobs take over? When we go to our favorite restaurant, will we soon find a supercilious waiter ready to attest to the age of the snake and the origin of all that sediment?

The World's Fastest Elephant
"The question of the day is: how fast can an elephant run across a level, 30-metre field when not scared for his (or her) life, but motivated and reasonably fit?"

The person asking this question, and who had ten elephants lined up waiting to provide a possible answer, was John Hutchinson, a recent graduate of the University of California at Berkeley whose postgraduate work brought him to Thailand to find the world's fastest elephant, a query that not only was given credence. but paid for with an academic grant.

My question: is this a question a grown man should even ask?

It's widely conceded that the world's fastest animal is the cheetah, a sleek sprinting machine native to Africa that has been clocked in pursuit of its prey over short distances at an astonishing 112 km per hour.

The prong horn antelope, another African resident, comes second at 98 km, not fast enough to escape a cheetah's chase, except that the antelope is more suited for longer runs.

Other maximum speeds, most of them measured over a 0.4 km distance, include the lion and the ostrich at 80 km; quarter horse, 76; coyote, 69; greyhound, 63; domestic rabbit, 56; giraffe, 51; grizzly bear, 48; and man, 42. Followed at some distance by the squirrel at 19, the domestic pig at 18, and the barnyard chicken at 14.

Back to the elephants and John, who told me he was trying to link evolutionary biology and bio-mechanics, two fields, he assured me, that hadn't been talking to each other lately. Which is what brought us to a field behind Rajamangala Institute of Technology in Surin, Thailand, during that town's annual Annual Elephant Round-Up.

"What," I asked, "do you do to 'motivate' the elephants?"

John said that on the first day's trials, they tried it both with and without the trainers called mahouts on top. They also tried shouting and banging empty plastic water bottles together as they ran behind the elephant. And they positioned other elephants---friends of the runner---at the finish line to give him (or her) something to run toward.

The idea was to get the elephant up to a full gallop when the animal crossed an infrared beam, starting the clock. Thirty meters and a few seconds later the elephant passed a second beam and the clock stopped. Identical tests with Asian elephants in California showed the fastest to move at four meters per second, or about 10 miles per hour. John said he thought that was the limit, a "wall," so to speak, comparable to the four-minute mile that humans once were thought never able to break.

Then John met, via the internet, Richard Lair, another Californian, but one who has lived in Thailand for about 20 years and is on the staff of the Thailand Elephant Conservation Center in Lampang, a small town about an hour's drive from Chiang Mai. He told John his elephants could, in a manner of speaking, run circles around the ones at the San Francisco Zoo, which is where John had tested his pachyderms while working on his doctorate. That prompted John to find some research money and come to Surin, where, indeed, on the first day's run, he timed an elephant running just short of 15 miles an hour. You have to understand that for John, this is more exciting than the consultancy he did on "Jurassic Park."

"The general question is, how does body size affect the range of an animal's movements," John explained when I asked why even bother. "How do big things handle being big? Another question is how do the elephants do what they do, because at 15 miles per hour, they should, like all other animals, including humans, when running at full speed, have all feet in the air at some point. But elephants always have one foot on the ground."

He said humans were able to perform certain "tricks" to move faster and keep one foot on the ground at all times. Speed-walkers integrated a hip movement that enabled them to walk fast. And then, John added, there was something called "Groucho-running." It was, he said, named for Groucho Marx, who stooped and sort of duck-walked in the movies, enabling him to accelerate his pace and maintain uninterrupted contact with the earth.

"Elephants are doing something we haven't figured out yet," John said. It was, he implied, the challenge of his young academic life.

As we talked, seven spots were painted on each elephant on the side facing the cameras that would record the run---on the top of the shoulder (or scapula), at the shoulder joint, and on the elbow and wrists on the front leg, and on the hip, knee and ankle of the rear leg. In this fashion, the movement could later be tracked by drawing stick figures based on the film showing their movement as if in slow motion.

The first elephant was led into position. This was a three-year-old named Pop and he calmly walked the measured distance in a little over twenty seconds, a preliminary timing made with which to compare a gallop. He was then returned to the starting position.

Now, his mahout stood behind him with two empty water bottles and started banging them together and screaming. Pop took off, the mahout in hot pursuit, still banging and yelling, and the tiny beast was at full gallop when he passed the first light beam, tail curled upward as is always true when elephants run, his fat little legs pumping. John stepped to the counter and read the finish time. "Four-point-nine-two seconds!" Not a record, but faster than a California elephant and I could tell that John's heart was beating faster, too.

The second elephant was led to the start position. This was May and she was six and she had no interest whatsoever in playing this silly game. She walked both laps.

"We'll give her another chance later," said Richard Lair, diplomatically.

I suggested to John that I thought maybe the reason Thai elephants ran faster than California elephants was the animals in San Francisco led a more sedentary lifestyle.

"That's a good word," said one of John's associates, who was standing near the clock with a clipboard. "Sedentary."

"Yes," said John, "but it still doesn't explain how the elephants always keep one foot on the ground."

I said I didn't think it was because the elephants were "Groucho-running."

In fact, the only thing I was sure of was that Groucho would've liked to have been there.

Frank Zappa's Bicycle Debut
It was one of those great moments in music that you don't recognize as such until a long while later. I was working as a talent coordinator for Steve Allen's five-times-a-week, late-night variety show in Hollywood in 1963. My job was to find someone unusual for him to interact with every night. Steve called me his "vice president in charge of left-fielders." Others used the phrase "kook-booker." Some of the acts I introduced were merely unusual, and all Steve had to do was ad lib. Thus, I brought a genuine flea circus out of retirement and on another night an octogenarian pulled three automobiles up the street in front of the television studio with his long, white beard.

Other guests were more interactive than reactive for Steve. Someone would "teach" the comedian how to do something, like walk a tight rope, or eat fire, or Steve might get a massage with a vacuum cleaner-like device that was supposed to reduce fat and tone muscles, or get tattooed. The rules for my job were simple. Get someone who was genuinely eccentric or who did something at least a little strange or out-of-the-ordinary, but never make fun of them---the idea was to have fun with them. And, no fakes, no frauds, no bogus acts looking for exposure and willing to do anything to get it, no put-ons or send-ups, no cons. Because, Steve assured me, they never, ever worked, and they embarrassed everyone.

Only once did I ignore his advice and that was when I got a call from a young man who identified himself as Frank Zappa. He said he wanted to teach Steve how to "blow bicycle." "Blow bicycle," I repeated.

"Yeah, you know, like, the bicycle is a musical instrument."

I thought it was a dumb idea, and a bad joke besides, and I felt somewhat uncomfortable about the caller's use of the jive vernacular (knowing that Steve had provided a jazz piano in recordings by Beat Generation poets), but for some reason I asked Frank to come in and a couple of days later he arrived with his old Schwinn. He was wearing a black suit (all three buttons buttoned), a white shirt, and a black knit tie. Still in his early 20s---and years before he became a pop music icon who bridged the gap between classical music and rock---he looked like a small town bank teller trainee.

He put his bike on its kick-stand in the lobby of the Hollywood theater where we video taped the show and plucked the spokes as if they were the strings of a harp, pitter-pattered on the seat as if it were Buddy Rich's tom-tom, and, removing the hand-grips, blew across the hollow chrome handle bars, creating the sounds of a wind instrument. He then played a short, improvisational piece and upon its completion, stood waiting for my reaction.

I laughed. "You've got to be kidding," I said. "You didn't like it?" he said, seeming genuinely wounded. "I can play another song."

We talked. I was sure it was a gag, but I couldn't get him to admit it, and I thought that might be the key to his pulling it off. At that point in his life, he had no album or club date to promote, so I suspected he wanted to appear on the show for the $235 that was paid every "performing" guest. Yet he seemed so damned serious. I also had to admit that what I'd heard was musical. Still, I worried about incurring Steve's wrath, so I told Frank I'd call the next week.

Concerned about failure, over the weekend I hatched a plan that I thought might guarantee chaos if not hilarity, and out of the mayhem some laughs. On Monday, I called Frank and asked, "How would you like to conduct a bicycle symphony?"

I explained that we'd fill up the television stage with bicycles---two-wheelers like the one he brought in with him for the "audition," tricycles, unicycles, those Victorian ones with the big front wheels, bicycles-built-for-two, everything we could find in the big "property houses" that delivered props to the Hollywood studios. The whole stage would be crowded with bicycles, I said, and Frank could do whatever he wished with them.

This was not my introduction to the use of ordinary objects to make music. Like many people coming of age in the 1950s, I saw musical spoons and saws played on television's "Ed Sullivan Show" and I remember someone playing Christmas carols on a table full of champagne glasses by rubbing his fingers around the wet rims.

At the same time, a hypnotically new sound was coming out of the Caribbean using hammered (and tuned) steel barrels, or drums. During the folk music boom that followed, musicians put metal thimbles on their fingers and played the corrugated iron surface of a washboard and blew across the open end of a ceramic jug (giving a name to jug bands).

Blues guitarists used the necks of bottles on the frets to create a "sliding" sound. More recently, in an oddball South Korean musical called "Nanta (Wild Beating)," performers beat knives on chopping blocks and hammered kettles and pots and pans to a frenzied rhythm that became a season's hit at Tokyo's Disney World, and then began a world tour. And let's not forget Karlheinz Stockhausen's "Helikopter-Streichquartett," a composition for string quartet and four helicopters. (Premiered above Amsterdam in 1995, with four choppers hovering over the city; imagine it!)

Ken Butler made his first instrument in 1978 when he added a fingerboard, tailpiece, tuning pegs and a bridge to a small hatchet. He went on to make music from tennis racquets and other sporting equipment, guns, brooms, and even a toothbrush, a rubber band, a plastic drinking straw. What elevates the music made on such objects above novelty is the fact that when you play the recorded sounds for a human audience---in isolation from any visual stimulus; in other words, the listener doesn't see the music being played---no one would guess that in this instance the musical "axe" really was one.

"Weren't all instruments, and, indeed, all inventions, a novelty at first?" Butler asks.

It is as if, since our less sophisticated ancestors first started banging rocks together, or maybe hitting tree trunks with sticks in some sort of organized pattern, we've been determined to make music by whatever means available. Music---something that is difficult to define but generally is believed to have melody, rhythm, harmony, and dynamics---was from the beginning and is now a part of every aspect of life, inextricably linked to all human activity---from religious ritual to frothy entertainment---and nothing is too outlandish or impossible.

Over the years, while many found music in the ambient environment, others, like Ken Butler and Frank Zappa, deliberately sought the unexpected and much to their and our delight, created new music in the process.

Sadly, I don't remember specifically what Frank and Steve did on that long-ago night in that Hollywood television studio, but I do recall that it worked and that afterward Steve suggested I not bring on any more put-ons.

He was smiling when he said it. One musician, after all, knows another when he hears one.

Father Joe
Once the Reverend Joseph Maier starts talking, he's like one of those wind-up toys on wheels that travel erratically around the floor, bumping into things, backing up, and starting off again. An American Catholic priest, he has lived in Thailand for nearly thirty years, most of that time in Bangkok's toughest slums. So it is no surprise that he has many tales to tell. He talked about a man who died of AIDS and was carried off by one of Bangkok's Buddhist benevolent societies that bury the poor. As an aside, Father Joe---as he is known---said one of the decisions that must be made is how to carry the corpse. Wrap the body in a prone position and it requires more than one person to carry it. But if you bend the body double at the waist, you can wrap it in cloth and carry if over your shoulder---except then you have to force the body into a prone position if rigor mortis sets in.

In another aside, he said the coffins used in the cremations had no lids; why waste the wood! Anyway, he said, returning to the point of the story, the man's wife told him she had AIDS, too, and thought she had a year to live. Father Joe told her not to worry, he would see that her eight-year-old was cared for.

Next came a story about another eight-year-old, the daughter of a prostitute who was raised in the brothel where her mother worked, where it was expected that she would work as well, when she reached the age of ten. Father Joe met the brothel owners and paid for the girl's release, paying what they agreed she cost to feed and clothe for eight years. She is now in a foster home and attending school.

In Bangkok, you don't mess with Father Joe. Especially when children are concerned. Father Joe, 56, tells a story about himself from 1964, when he and a few other outspoken students attending a seminary in the U.S. were regarded as troublemakers. "We asked too many questions," he said. "We were dreamers, we wanted a better world. They said, "No, you have to obey the rules." They were men of limited vision, they were men of their time. So we were sent far away to silence us."

Father Joe said he didn't want to come to Thailand, but took the assignment for the free trip. He assumed he could always go back. He has not, and following four years in the poor northeastern part of the country and in Laos (this, during the secret Lao war), he moved to Bangkok, where for the next twenty years he slept on an army cot in the slum where he preached, dressing himself from the church poor box. Not so incidentally, he also built an organization for his church, the Human Development Centre, which now has 240 employees working in 28 programs in 30 slums, one of which runs 31 schools providing books, uniforms, nutritious lunches, and kindergarten education for 4,500 slum children. Other programs include a 30-bed AIDS hospice; a medical clinic; five shelters for street children; over a hundred youth soccer teams; and a variety of fund-raising, skill-teaching projects that produce such items as Christmas cards and quilts. And he has done this despite all odds.

"I don't get any of the rich Catholic money," he said, a reference to wealthy Catholics, not the church itself, which is supportive and is legal owner of all he has built. "I don't fit the mold. I don't wear a cassock, sometimes I don't shave, I need a haircut, I say shit and fuck, and I live, by choice, in the slums with people with AIDS and amphetamine habits, with prostitutes. People say I may be respected, but I am not to be emulated, so the money goes somewhere else."

I asked to spend a day with Father Joe. It began in his two-room home in Klong Toey, Bangkok's largest and most infamous slum, between and expressway and the port. On one wall is a photograph of a man standing in front of four tanks near Tiananmen Square, a symbol that is reflected in the priest's own belief and defiant stance. Father Joe's parish is in the Slaughter House district of Klong Toey, where Catholics (many of them ethnic Vietnamese) butcher hogs for the city's dinner tables. "That's the worst of the worst in Thailand," he said, "---killing pigs. Buddhists don't and Muslims won't, and the nightly gore and noise and the washing out of the pig guts by hand just isn't fun. There are parrots and mockingbirds in Klong Toey. Do you know what sounds they make. The sounds of pigs being slaughtered and motorcycles." Father Joe was off the track again, but determined to make his point.

"Anyway," he said, using a word that would render him mute if removed form his vocabulary, "the kids are great, they play and skip rope, using a long string of braided rubber bands. Somehow they've stayed gentle amidst the violence."

Several of the children formed an adoring clot behind us as we picked our way between the clapped-out wooden shacks and the puddles of urine, blood, and excrement. Father Joe patted them and called them by name and gave them a few coins. Meeting the grandmother of an 11-year-old who was raped, he pulled the local equivalent of US$20 from his pocket. She had eight children, he said, and they should help. But they didn't, so the church paid her rent each month and that represented about half of it. "I'm a sort of Santa Claus," he said. "I don't know if that's good or not. But what the hell else can I do?"

We came to some government housing being built near the expressway and downwind of a canal so polluted methane bubbles rose from the sewage on the bottom. "These buildings aren't even finished yet," he said, "and everywhere you look there are structural cracks. We hope the stress is well enough distributed so the building won't collapse."

Next we traveled by car to the 18-month-old Mercy Centre, a facility for street children and AIDS patients constructed---without cracks and without cost to Father Joe's organization---by a Bangkok construction firm, Christiani & Neilson, erected in just 30 days with 400 men on the job to meet an unexpected deadline given to Father Joe to move his AIDS patients from another location.

Some of the beds in the building were empty. Father Joe said that was because seven men died the previous month. Near where we talked a man lay on a bed staring blankly, his face exploding with boils, his body a skeleton tightly wrapped in flesh, knees and elbows looking like knots on a tree. Father Joe talked with him, adjusted his blanket. The man's hands moved like the wings of a horribly wounded bird. He seemed frightened. "We will be with him, around the clock," Father Joe said. "No one dies alone here. Everyone deserves to die with dignity."

Outside, an old woman approached him and said she was poor. "Tell me something I don't know, mother," he said. He asked the kitchen to feed her, but said that was all he could do. "We can't help everyone," he said. "We spend US$1 million a year but we live day to day. We have about $300 in the bank right now and that's typical."

A man came up, looking for building materials so he could start a kindergarten. Father Joe told him he had some asbestos roofing to spare. "The more the merrier," he said. "No matter what, the important thing is to go to school. Give me the children, up to 12 or 13 or14. I'm sorry to say that after that life's patterns are in place."

We ate lunch and following a quick meeting to discuss a survey of Klong Toey women to learn their primary complaints---Father Joe knew what they were, but if he produced a survey, with statistics, he knew he could get more media attention; otherwise it was just same old slum priest making the same old speech---it was back into the car to visit two more slums. Part of his job, he said, was letting people who believed that no one cared know that someone actually did care, enough to show up and try to do something to help.

The first stop was where the city government had displaced fifty-three families and one of Father Joe's schools to make room for road construction. They were being moved only fifty meters, from one side of the railroad tracks to another---in an area where both sides of the tracks are the "wrong" side---but the move required the community to build its own new housing, on piles in a polluted tidal canal. There, we watched men standing waist-deep in green slime, constructing homes of wood and corrugated iron. In the meantime, the families were camped in the open under an adjacent expressway, living in small "rooms" separated by one-meter-high plywood walls.

Then it was back to Klong Toey, where a New Year's Eve fire had destroyed 202 homes and that community was setting up temporary shelters under another expressway, sleeping on pallets. "Where there were 202 toilets, now there are seven," Father Joe said. "Where there were 202 places to bathe, now there are three. Almost everything donated by people who heard about the fire isn't needed. Even the rice; everybody donates rice and the people can't eat it fast enough and have to sell it before the weevils get to it."

In both locations, Father Joe greeted people with jokes and strokes. In this one, where the smell of barbecued homes and memories still choked the sullen air, he conferred with community leaders. "We've had more than 20 fires in Klong Toey," Father Joe said, "and every time we've rebuilt. This is not just a slum, it's a community. Many of these people have lived together for generations. The teachers in our schools grew up in Klong Toey, they know the kids. We take care of our own. But property is valuable now and this little piece of the slum is next to an expressway. When the prime minister was here, he wanted to know what all the colored strings were, dividing the ruin into plots. I told him the people expected to rebuild and the string marked where their homes had been. The government wants to turn this into a parking lot for their trucks. So now we're trying to convince them to let the people stay. The fight may last a year, while they live in their little shacks under the expressway. It goes on and on."

We were leaving the slum now and he said that 200 meters back was one of the city's most notorious red light districts, where the sailors went for sex. Most people don't want to help women who work in such places. "It really burns my ass" he said, "when people decide which poor people they're going to help based on their own morality."

We got back into the car. Father Joe said he had been up until three the previous night, drafting a letter to raise money for a home for AIDS mothers and babies. ("Babies get it from their mommies, who get it from their daddies.") A nice home in a nice neighborhood had been donated, but he needed funds for furnishings, staff, and operation.

He read the letter aloud to me. "HIV AIDS is a community problem," it said in part. "We can't fix it. We cannot accept the responsibility. What we can do and what we actually do every day is tell the community: "You have a problem. You are carrying a heavy burden and we would like to walk with you a ways on your pilgrimage'."

As we returned to the center's headquarters, where quilts are stitched and money is counted and prayed for, Father Joe took a call on his mobile telephone. Afterward, he told me that ten minutes after we left the Mercy Center, the man with AIDS had died.

POST SCRIPT: Since this was published in 1996 in Asia Times, Father Joe's "Empire in the Slums" (as the story was titled) has grown exponentially. There are now five shelters for street children, a new AIDS hospice was constructed with 100 beds, five full time social workers joined the staff (representing 1,421 kids in police custody in 2001), a legal team was added (representing kids in court and conducting seminars countrywide in how police and others should properly question minors). Father Joe also opened three more schools and, over the span of a decade built 10,000 low-cost houses, becoming a pioneer in slum architecture. The Center is now called the Human Development Foundation. More information is at www.fatherjoe.org.

On the eat-a-bug trail in Bangkok
Go see the Grand Palace and spend an hour in a longtailed boat touring the river and canals. Visit the Jim Thompson House and take in an evening's ritualistic brutality at one of the city's kick boxing stadiums. Explore a dazzling Buddhist temple or Brahman shrine and be sure to get a traditional Thai massage. And by all means, go shopping. Then eat some of the people's food: insects.

Admittedly, it's not for everyone. When my daughter, Erin, a first grade teacher in California, visited me in Bangkok and I suggested she try some of the deep-fried crickets, grasshoppers, beetles, silkworm larva, and scorpions commonly sold on the street, she said, "Dad, you're more adventurous than I am. I won't eat anything that's cute or disgusting."

She was talking about what the creatures looked like when alive. Dogs and rabbits were cute, so she wouldn't eat them, and insects were disgusting. She was unmoved when I quoted an 18th century writer, Jonathan Swift, who said it was "a brave man who first ate an oyster." "Look," I went on, without result, "you eat lobster and crab, don't you? They're pretty ugly. And when you think about it, chickens are weird looking, too."

The truth is, I told my daughter, who was beginning to wander off to look at the counterfeit designer jeans for sale nearby, insects are eaten in much of the world, and not just as a quirky treat---like the chocolate-covered ants I ate when I was in college---or in Asia, Africa and Latin America for lack of money or anything else to eat. Insects in such places are not merely endured but enjoyed. In parts of southern Africa when the mopane "worms"---caterpillars, really---come into season the sale of animal meat actually drops.

My daughter said, "Um-hum." She now had her eye on what was purported to be a "Gucci" scarf.

That doesn't happen in Thailand, I went on. But of all the places in the world, even in Colombia, where there is a statue of an ant in recognition of its place in the local diet, nowhere outside Thailand were insects prepared and consumed with such year-round regularity and delight. I explained that most of the insects consumed were eaten in the northeastern region, called Isan, and that when residents of this area migrated to Bangkok looking for work they brought their cuisine with them. Yes, I said, it was true that Isan was the poorest region of Thailand, but even when the migrant workers had money in their pockets, they returned faithfully to the insect vendors.

I admitted that there were some insects I had trouble with at first. One was the giant water bug because it looked like a cockroach. Then one day when I met a Thai friend at an outdoor beer bar she had a bag of them. I knew my moment of truth had come.

"Have one," she said. It wasn't a question. So she showed me how to pick off the head and legs and peel away the carapace to get to the abdominal sack which much to my surprise contained a kernel of delight. Not only did it taste good, its fragrance was such that I learned it was routinely pounded in a mortar with garlic and chilis and fish sauce for use as a spicy dip for other foods. I bought a sack and said, "Erin, you've got to try one. You'll really love it. You used to like boiled peanuts when we lived in Hawaii. This tastes sort of like boiled cashews, with a bit of fishy after taste. And it smells like flowers."

"Dad," she groaned, "are you trying to make me sick?" So I let a couple of days pass before taking her to a restaurant called Bane Lao in Bangkok's Sukhumvit district, a place as its name implies where the cuisine of Laos is lovingly prepared and served.

"Oh, look," I said, after we'd been seated, "they have ant egg salad." My daughter rolled her eyes and laughed. "You don't give up, do you?" I pointed to another dish on the menu. "Okay," I said, "would you rather have the beef lips?"

I never did get Erin to eat a bug, but I'm happy to report that more and more foreigners appear to be trying them, and it's a darned good thing, too. Because it's the food of the future. As any environmentalist and scientist will attest, the time is fast approaching when cattle, pigs, sheep, and goats---the four leading sources of the world's protein today---will be so cost inefficient as to be unaffordable by anyone except the very wealthy.

Cows consume lots of fodder and water and take much time and effort to produce one hamburger, where insects require little room, don't eat much, and breed like crazy. And nutritionists say they're higher in protein and lower in cholesterol. (Some of them. My cardiologist says I should avoid ant eggs, as they have the cholesterol levels of red meat.)

As I explained the future food thing to Erin, I assured her the bugs wouldn't show up on her plate looking like grasshoppers and scorpions.

"Think bug burgers," I said, cheerily.

Food That 'Broke Da Mout'
My cardiologist wants me to stop writing about food, especially since spending two weeks in Hawaii rediscovering what's called "Local Food" Consider his dilemma. He's trying to keep my cholesterol level below 200 and five minutes from downtown Honolulu there's a place called Masu's Massive Plate Lunch. The "plate lunch" is an outgrowth of the Japanese lunch box, called a bento, and Paul Masuoka, is the champ. Consider, as Exhibit A, "Masu's Massive Banzai Bento," a meal that includes (quoting the menu) "Charcoal Broiled Sirloin Steak, Teriyaki Sauce, Fried Shrimp Tempura, Kalua Pig, Fried Chicken, Baked Spam, Shoyu Hot Dogs, and Crab Lobster Potato Salad" All for just $6.85. When I showed the menu to my doc, I thought he was going to have a heart attack.

Masu is not a culinary aberration. In Hawaii, he's a folk hero---a popular disc jockey gave him the "Massive" part of his name---and people all over the islands, in mom-and-pop joints and in the Plate Lunch Wagons that roll up every noontime wherever the lunch crowd works, are his acolytes. There's always a choice of plates, but all feature western protein (stew, meatloaf, chicken) swimming in gravy with two ice cream scoops of steamed rice and one of macaroni salad; the quantity of food is western, and the rice, style of cooking (katsu, teriyaki, Korean barbecue) and the chopsticks are all Asian.

I told my physician to take two nitroglycerine pills and call me in the morning. It wasn't always this good in Hawaii. The truth is, back when Hawaii really was a paradise---before the first humans arrived about 700 A.D.---there was nothing to eat.

Oh, there were fish in the sea, but on land there were only some fiddlehead ferns, a little fruit in the mountains, and the occasional bird, blown off course from the closest landfall, some 2,500 miles away.

That's what made Hawaii's pre-human cuisine virtually nonexistent. It's remoteness. Then the migrations began. First the Polynesians sailed from the Marquesas and Tahiti with seeds and cuttings for taro, breadfruit, sweet potato, sugar cane, coconut, mountain apple, and plenty of protein: chickens, pigs, and dogs. Thus, the first "local" cuisine was formed. The dogs, by the way, were fed a vegetarian diet and generally were cooked for royal feasts, their teeth strung together later to form rattles men wore on their ankles while dancing the ancient hula.

The second migration started in 1820 with the arrival of missionaries from New England, followed by whalers and plantation owners and ranchers who introduced western tastes in food and drink, bringing cabbage, beans, coffee, watermelon, pineapple, white potatoes, tomatoes, grapes, and, notably, cattle and distilled spirits. It was beginning to sound like everywhere else.

The third migration came ashore in two waves, first from southern China, Okinawa, Korea, the Azores, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines, from about 1850 up to the 1930s, to work in the sugar and pineapple fields, and from the 1970s, refugees from Southeast Asia, mainly Vietnamese, Thai and Lao. With their meager belongings, they all packed their individual food preferences.

The result is one of history's most remarkable creole cuisines, and purest creole language, "pidgin," where food is called "grinds" and when enjoyed declared "ono" (Hawaiian for delicious) or "da kine" (pidgin for "the best") or food that "broke da mout" Inevitably, and sometimes humorously, the two are as blended as the races who created them. In The Food of Paradise: Exploring Hawaii's Culinary Heritage, Rachel Laudan was tickled to find that the "vastly popular Japanese rice ball, the musubi, and the universally used soy sauce, called shoyu in Hawaii, are celebrated in greeting cards declaring, 'It musubi your birthday,' or 'Shoyu care'.

"But it is more than a matter of jokes and greeting cards," said Lauden, Hawaii's first true food historian. "In a society that has little in common except the language pidgin,' where neither religion, nor literature, nor art, nor music, nor social customs, nor a long shared history provide a common ground, Local Food serves as an important, indeed essential basis that glues the diverse peoples of Hawaii together"

Many of these people go to Ono Hawaiian Foods, a hole-in-the-wall just ten minutes by cab from Waikiki that was founded 40 years ago by a Japanese woman and her Korean husband. When I lived in the islands some years ago, the combo plate was my favorite because it included both kalua pig (oven-baked with liquid smoke to a sugary tenderness) and laulau (chicken or pork baked inside a fist-sized ball of taro leaves). Other dishes included lomilomi salmon (salmon belly finely chopped with tomatoes and green onion), a hubcap-sized plate of rice or a bowl of poi, the purŽed taro root that looks and tastes a bit like library paste but goes down superbly with sea salt and thick slices of Maui onion, always served on the side.

And this is the way it was until fairly recently. "Local Food" meant a "loco moco" for breakfast---a soup bowl of rice topped with a hamburger, a fried egg, and half a pint of brown gravy---followed by one of Masu's Angina Specials for lunch and to get you through the afternoon before deciding what to have for supper, a bag of Crack Seed, preserved Chinese fruits shiny with syrup, frosted with sugar, or so salty they made it impossible to speak for a half hour after eating one.

Stay with me, doc. Many agreed with you. Local people loved this stuff, mind you---still do---but the standing joke about a holiday in Hawaii was that the best food was on the jumbo jet. Some said the menus in Hawaii hotels were an argument to go to the Caribbean instead. Why, for years Dole dumped the pineapple juice into Pearl Harbor, considering it was a waste product, and the Royal Hawaiian Hotel had a fountain of the stuff in the lobby.

Then came the Gang of Twelve, island chefs who found themselves calling each other all the time in their quest for the perfect, locally grown tomato. The key words are "locally grown" Before the Dishy Dozen came along---ten men and two women, from a chop suey of ethnic origins, as is appropriate in the islands---most of that worse-than-inflight food was imported along with the tourists.

"We were just a bunch of chefs who got together to drink beer and share sources for fresh food," says Beverly Gannon, one of the original group. "Most of the fish arrived frozen from Japan and the asparagus spent a week in a warehouse in Los Angeles on its way to me"

The plan devised by the chefs, a majority of them working in upmarket hotel kitchens at the time, was two-fold. First, with the cooperation of the State Department of Agriculture, they produced a directory of sources, while taking advantage of the shrinking inventory of land dedicated to sugar and "pine" to encourage more farmers to grow fresh vegetables, and, significantly, guaranteeing their sale, even at high-end prices. They also commissioned local hunters to bring boar and venison from the mountains.

The second goal was to put Hawaii cuisine on the world map. They called their "movement" Hawaii Regional Cuisine (HRC) and it's no accident that one of the earliest photographs of the group was taken with an early supporter and sponsor: Shep Gordon, who bought his Maui beach house with money earned managing Alice Cooper, Raquel Welch, and other entertainment curiosities. This was a culinary campaign aimed at creating kitchen stars---at least, that's the way Gordon saw it---and some have become just that, with or without his help.

The distance between the Plate Lunch and what the HRC now decorously arrange on their plates is vast, of course; today you get culinary architecture, tablecloths, and the cup of macadamia nut coffee at the end of the meal may cost as much as Masu's Massive You Know What. However, the chefs have not forsaken their ethnic roots.

Say howzit (pidgin again) to Sam Choy, a 350-pounder whose Chinese great-grandfather on his dad's side came to the islands to grow taro and his German-Hawaiian great-grandfather on his mom's side immigrated to forge machinery to extract sugar cane. In what appears to be a desire to make us all as big as he is, his "sunrise specials" include a three-egg omelet with beef stew and a mound of white rice the size of half a soccer ball, and for appetizers in the evening, Baked Portuguese Sausage Crusted Oysters and Fried Brie Cheese Wonton. Order ice cream for dessert and you get a pint; another choice is ice cream pie with an Oreo cookie crust. Sam says he cooked in pots the size of kettle drums while growing up, because his father ran a catering service, so he didn't even know they made small pots until he went to culinary school. The motto on the tee-shirts and aprons sold at his six restaurants---stretching from San Diego to Guam---is "Never Trust a Skinny Chef"

Hey, doc. Sam told me he has a personal trainer nowadays, and in his second book he introduced "The Choy of Low-Fat Cooking," suggesting nonfat mayonnaise and the like, although I bet he doesn't use it in his own kitchens. Of the twelve, I hasten to add that Sam is the only really big one.

Roy Yamaguchi may have the most impressive resume, with more than 30 restaurants and a toque that says "The Iron Chef", where he represents Asian cooking. He's the son of a Maui-born Okinawan who met Roy's mom when he was in the U.S. Army in Japan following World War Two. Roy was trained at the Culinary Institute of America, apprenticed at L'Escoffier and L'Ermitage in Los Angeles, cooked at Michael's in Santa Monica, and was named California Chef of the Year before opening the first Roy's on Oahu in 1988, where young island chefs cook in an open kitchen, wearing backward-turned baseball caps, preparing dishes with what he calls "strong, assertive flavors and unusual combinations"

For example, doc---and I think this will make you feel a little better---blackened island tuna in a spicy, hot soy mustard and butter sauce (okay, ignore the butter), grilled chicken with black bean mango salsa and crispy taro, and curried lemon grass-crusted swordfish salad with red ginger-soy vinaigrette. At first, Roy called his food "Euro-Asian" and says that it might've worked to identify a mixed-blood actress in Hollywood---remember France Nuyen in "The World of Suzie Wong"?---but it confused diners. He substituted "Hawaiian Fusion" on his business cards two years ago.

Alan Wong, whose mother was Japanese-Chinese and his father Chinese-Hawaiian, grew up near Oahu's pineapple fields, worked first as a dishwasher for Don the Beachcomber, graduated from an island culinary school, apprenticed at Lutece in New York, and opened his own restaurant in Honolulu in 1995, winning a Gourmet Top Table award four years later. Using phrases like "Culinary Melting Pot" and "New Wave Luau," the menu at the restaurant that bears his name offers Spiny Lobster Wonton Ravioli in Curry Potato Sauce, and Duck Tacos with a ginger-flavored guacamole that also contains sake from his own distillery, co-owned with Alice Cooper's manager.

"We broke away from continental cuisine," Alan says. "We became more ethnic. It's not authentic. Of course, it's not authentic. It's American!" One more. Beverly Gannon, one the group's two women and one of the minority of westerners, is a Texan who says she was raised in the Jewish tradition of "eat, eat, eat" She ran a catering business in Los Angeles, cooking for Liza Minelli, Joey Heatherton, and Ben Vereen on tour, then studied at Le Cordon Bleu in London and took classes with Marcella Hazan and Jacques PŽpin, settling in Maui in 1981 to cook for vacationing rock stars who didn't want the hassle of going out to eat. She now operates the Hali'imaile General Store, a restaurant named for the 75-year-old plantation grocery, post office, and dry goods market it was before she knocked out the walls, moved in seating for 130, and put bouquets on all the tables. She calls her food "Hawai'i Regional (with American and International Flavors)" and dishes such as Szechuan Barbecued Salmon topped with a sauce of caramelized onions, garlic, orange peel, Szechuan peppercorns and fresh herbs, and a rack of lamb marinated in hoisin, sesame, and Oriental black beans made hers one of Gourmet's Top Tables in 1997.

Remember how surprised we were, doc, when Wolfgang Puck put duck on a pizza? When I moved to Hawaii in 1972, some of the best food was on those jumbo jets. A charming Frenchman named Michel had a nice place in Waikiki, but beyond that there was only a commercial luau or two. Then came the Japanese tourists and in this fashion, Hawaii became America's sushi beachhead. But that was about it, until Bev and Roy and Sam and Alan and their pals came along, and with them people like Duc Nguyen and Keo Sananikone.

Duc was in the South Vietnamese army and escaped from Saigon a few days before the war ended in 1975, about the same time Keo was sneaked across the border into Thailand from Laos, with his well-connected but suddenly politically incorrect family. Today, their restaurants are generally accepted as flagships of island Vietnamese and Thai cuisine. That means that Duc's Bistro serves Escargot Chablisienne and Veloute d'Asparagus, but cooks with nuoc mam, the tangy, fermented fish sauce that's used in Vietnam instead of salt; the coffee is also from Vietnam, now the world's largest producer of robusta and the second largest producer to Brazil overall. While Keo, whose Waikiki restaurant, with photographs at the entrance of the owner posing with visiting Hollywood stars, is known for something you'll never find in Thailand or Laos, a chicken, chili, ginger, lemongrass and coconut milk concoction called Evil Jungle Prince. There are now 10,000 Vietnamese living in Hawaii, and no one knows how many Thais or Laotians. Hawaiians of Japanese descent are the largest ethnic group, at thirty-something per cent. Caucasians now comprise another 30 per cent, and more than half of all marriages are racially mixed. Michel still runs Michel's, but nowadays the competition is as fierce as it is international. When the Dishy Dozen gathered for their tenth anniversary last year, another band of chefs met simultaneously. They called themselves the HIC, for Hawaii International Cuisine. Bev Gannon's daughter, Teresa, who still works as her mom's pastry chef, is in the group, as are two of Alan Wong's former sous chefs.

Another sign of the times: every Thursday at Alan Wong's is devoted to what he calls "The Next Generation Dinner" "Anyone in the kitchen can do four dishes," he says. "If I'm in town, I'm in the kitchen six days a week, but Thursday belongs to my junior chefs" In the same mood, Roy Yamaguchi promotes his chefs within his network and makes them partners to keep them from defecting. The beat, as they say in rock and roll, goes on.

Masu's Massive Plate Lunch and all those low-cost, high-fat lunch wagons are not threatened, by the way. Where Spam has become a cultural icon---Hawaii's soul food, if you like---where there are two popular cookbooks devoted to recipes using it and four-million cans are consumed each year, more than in any other state, per capita, grease seems to be a way of life.

My cardiologist is thrilled that I don't live there any more.

The Littlest Money-Changer
Call him The Littlest Money-Changer. He came up to me last week in what is the largest of the temples in Bagan, one of the two-thousand 900-year-old structures that comprise one of Myanmarâs most popular tourist sites. He asked where I was from. I usually say America to that question and add that I live in Bangkok. That said, he dug into his pocket and showed me a number of Thai coins. "Change kyat?" he asked. I was on to his game immediately. Another youthful foreign exchange expert played the same clever game with me in Kathmandu. The way it works, the boy tells tourists one day that he collects coins, asking them for a contribution, and in this fashion amasses a pocket full of British pence, French francs, and so on. The next day he approaches other foreigners, learns where they're from, and asks if he can change the foreign coins from that country into his own currency, in Myanmar's case, the kyat.

The boy said he was named Yen Aumg. He told me he was eleven years old and said he'd learned to speak English in school, where he would begin the fifth grade in July. (School holidays here are scheduled according to the planting of rice.) When I asked him what he was going to do with all the money I gave him---about 800 kyat, nearly $2, an enormous sum for a Burmese child---he said 250 would go to his mother, another 260 to his school to help pay for his uniform and books, and the rest he'd probably spend giddily.

I donât know anything else about Yen Aumg. He seemed bright. Maybe life at home was good, maybe not. But I knew from his size and age that he hadn't been overfed. Surely there were other hardships, as well.

But none like those of Ploey, a twelve-year-old I've met who lives in the slums of Bangkok. She grew up with the rats and roaches, both human and the other kind. Mom and dad were heroin users and by the time they went to prison, Ploey was running drugs for them. Thus at six, she was given to an aunt, who used her in the same trade. Adults use children for this because it's difficult for a male cop to body search a little girl. And if a kid goes to jail, it's usually for just three years, where for a grown-up in Thailand the sentence is open-ended and maybe ends with death.

When Ploey started school, she was exceptional: first in her class in studies, and a natural in playground games. She even played marbles, a boysâ game, and beat them most of the time. First it was "walk" the product before school, and then after school, transporting Thailand's drug of choice, amphetamines. Then she began to miss some days and eventually her aunt kept her home all the time, afraid she might say something incriminating to her playmates. When Ploey balked, as she did sometimes, Auntie lied to her, said she should "walk" the product because Auntie was giving the money to help her mom and dad in jail.

Soon, she was making three or four runs a day. Then came the big hauls, between 600 and 800 "horses" that sold for a dollar apiece. The usual practice was to let the "walkers" get to like the product, to encourage an addiction dependency. Ploey was lucky. She was so young and small, her aunt worried she might "blur" and she wanted her clear-headed.

Finally Ploey got caught. She was in a taxi alone, making one of her evening runs, when she felt the call of nature, and asked the driver to stop where it was dark. She didn't know the cops were following her and when she got out and squatted beside the road to pee, a package fell out of her underwear. The cops didn't believe her when she said she was running drugs on her own. They arrested her aunt, and now she's in jail, too.

Little Ploey? The courts gave her to my friend Father Joe Maier, the American Catholic priest I hang out with and with whom I'm writing a book. He's been living and working in the Bangkok slums for more than 30 years and Ploey is now in one of his schools and spending her nights in one of his organization's street kidsâ shelters. Joe says her mom gets out of jail in five years, when Ploey will be 17. She's a pretty little thing. Maybe sheâll be working in the bars by then.

You might consider giving this to a kid you know who complains about not having a fancy new cell phone.