The club was made up of two bars on different floors and a set of karaoke rooms off to the left of the bar on the lower floor. The upper room bar ran along the full length of the room and this area had a number of sofas and tables where patrons could sit and order food. While not exactly the height of luxury, this bar had a certain refinement to it and it seemed to be the place where genuine couples, rather than those who had just met, could come and talk and enjoy an evening out.
The downstairs bar was a little different. Both the entire room and the bar itself were a lot smaller than those upstairs, presumably because the upstairs bar also overhung the reception / entrance area, and it just seemed a little seedier all round. There were almost no chairs and certainly no sofas, and so the clientele had to stand. It seemed more like a pub than a club to me, not that I had had much experience of either at that point.
When Endy and I first walked around the club it was around ten-thirty and the place was still no more than about one third full, but when we had a second stroll around about an hour and a half later things were much different.
By then the club had filled up, especially on the lower level which was now really rather crowded. Music was blazing out again and it was hard to talk so Endy just led me around and pointed out a few things to me. First he pointed at a couple in the corner; a rather large gentleman, perhaps in his early fifties, was pawing at rather an attractive young girl who was trying to escape his clutches and who didn’t look that unlike my friend Devi (although it definitely wasn’t her). Endy just grinned and started counting on his fingers – ONE, TWO, THREE … before he got to FOUR the largest man, certainly the largest Indonesian man, I have ever seen had flown across the room and picked Mr-Gropey-Sweaty-Pants up by his collar and was ushering him out of the club.
Next Endy nodded in the direction of another couple. This time it was two men trying to talk over the noise of the club with little success and then suddenly one of them made a jerking movement with his head indicating that the other should follow him out to the gents’ toilet. I looked questionably at Endy who once again grinned, and then pinched his right thumb and index finger together and then put them up to his nose as if he was sniffing them. It took me a moment or two to work out exactly what he was saying, but then the penny dropped; the two men were off to the lavatory to take or sell drugs.
Then Endy took me through to have a look at the karaoke rooms leading off the lower barroom area. There was another small corridor to go, not unlike the one the other side of reception in which Pak Neil and Yusuf’s offices were located, but this corridor had about eight small rooms adjoining it, four on each side.
I looked in the first of these rooms and I was astonished. It was full with the most beautiful girls I think I have ever seen and they were all sitting on or around one single sofa watching television. There must have been around fifteen or twenty of these stunning looking girls and at first I couldn’t understand what they were all doing. Were they all customers, perhaps girls from a factory or shop or something all here for a night out? In that case why were they all here watching TV and not in the bar enjoying themselves?
Endy looked at me and gave me one of what I now realised was his trademark grins and then, once again, the old penny slowly began to drop.
Endy explained that these girls were not prostitutes as such; rather they were ‘companions’ for any man (or the occasional woman) who wanted some company while they sang in the karaoke rooms. What would happen, Endy explained, was a man (or a woman) would ask for a girl to accompany them while they sang and they would pay the club RP 65,000 an hour for the privilege, of which the girl would get RP 25,000. The customer would then invariably buy the girl some drinks and probably food too, and if both parties agreed, then they might hook up for more intimate relations later. If this happened, Endy explained, then the customer would pay the bar another RP 65,000 to take the girl away and once again she would get RP 25,000 and would be free to negotiate any ‘extra’ from the customer which she would keep.
I must have looked a bit shocked because Endy then explained a bit further that all the girls were well looked after and that none of them were ever forced or pressurised to go with any of the customers, or even to stay in the room for more than the initial hour. He told me that no physical contact at all was allowed in the rooms and that ‘the lads’ came to check discreetly through the outer windows every few minutes just to make sure nothing untoward was happening.
After one hour’s karaoke the girl had to make an excuse to leave the room and report back to the waiting room. Here she would give a quick report on what the customer was like, whether he was drunk, mistreating her or generally being obnoxious and if she was happy to continue for a second hour with him. If she didn’t want to, for whatever reason, then she would be replaced in the room
