The Incredible Indelible Origin Story of Yawk

Part V - Strange awakenings and productive awakenings; the manifestation of a dream, a quest, an enterprise, and an empire, and all the subsequent fallout from what started as a couple of beers in Bangkok.

Written by Johnny Speedcakes | Lhasa, Tibet | May 5, 2022

When Brett came to, it felt like his head was lodged inside a vice somewhere in a back room of a 1970's Vegas casino. As if that weren't enough, he also felt as though a railroad tie had been hammered down into the middle of his cranium. He grimaced as he stirred about and surveyed his surrounds. Where the hell am I, he wondered to himself. Next to him he noticed a long cascade of dry, raven black hair. Uh-huh, he said groggily as his eyes painfully prowled around.

The room looked like utter hell - shabby, dim, and musty, paint peeling from the walls. It smelled like wet dog, cardamom, and sewage. Well, whoever she was, it had to be her room, he thought. Now, where in the world was that?

He imagined that perhaps by looking out the window he would get his bearings. His head throbbing in pain, almost to the point where he wanted to vomit, he gingerly crawled from scratchy, uncomfortable bed and limped toward the window. He drew apart the garish brown curtains. What he saw below made the railroad spike in his head twist and turn and dig even deeper into his mind in crippling disorientation.

Instead of high-rises and ubiquitous spindles of cables madly strung about the streets, he saw a teetering cacophony of low-rise, dingy brick buildings sloughed together amid rough-hewn streets like meandering muddy rivers. Instead of the congestion of Bangkok traffic, blue and yellow cabs, tuktuks and mopeds, he saw streams of men in dingy garb and women in myriad colorful clothes walking about, the odd ramshackle motorcycle or antique bicycle wobbling piecemeal through the throngs. The people themselves were distinctly non-Thai in appearance. What part of town am I in, Brett wondered. In Little India? Where in Bangkok is Little India?

Behind the sea of dingy brick buildings, Brett noticed a fervent crown of high, grand mountains hunched up on the horizon. What the hell? Brett looked about the room. On the dresser next to a massive square television of faux wood with knobs and strange dials called "Falcon Radio Vision" he found a beat up and tattered brochure. He picked it up and held it to his raw, burning eyes.

Hotel Smrtibhransa, Kathmandu, Nepal.

He held the brochure in his hand and stood there motionless, slack-jawed, incapable of remembering anything, the steel railroad tie pulverizing his brain like a stud thoroughbred bagging a mare. This can't be for real, he desperately thought.

Dismayed, his eyes darted around the ramshackle room. Ruby red Gorkha beer bottles lay strewn about the desk and floor, makeshift ashtrays, an odd bottle of Everest beer, and a bottle of Himalayas Ontop water lying on its side, contents spent, a large dent smashed into it. Just then, like an awakening apparition, the cascade of long raven hair stirred in the musty bed. It rustled momentarily, then sat up in a jolt, wildly casting off the blankets and ejecting itself from the bed.

Holy hell, Brett thought, is this a banshee?

The short, waif-thin woman with panicked, wild eyes stumbled awkwardly from the bed and caromed into the bathroom, slamming the creaking, rickety door with a loud whack that split Brett's head in half. Immediately he heard the woman begin vomiting into the toilet. Is any of this real, Brett wondered.

He reached over to grab the crumpled bottle of water. He held the bottle over his opened mouth and shook out the last few remaining drops. They hit his tongue like 3 drops of rain in the dessert. He threw the bottle towards the nightstand. Next, his interest came to the ruby red bottle of Gorkha. He picked it up and realized it was nearly a third full. Alright, he said to himself. He drained off a good, warm, stale hit and exhaled. Kathmandu, he said to himself. Kathmanfuckingdo.

Leaning up against the Falcon Radio Vision relic, he noticed what had to be the woman's bag. Quickly, he sprung into action while had the chance. He opened up the mouth of the bag and was immediately greeted by a bundle of pharmacy pills in various plastic strips. He held some of them up close for inspection. Adorned in flowing Sanskrit, he nonetheless was able to spy the key ingredients. Codeine. Whoa, he said to himself. Hello. Diazapram. Ok. Alprazolam. Oh, xany-time.

The strips were half-empty. It was clear the girl and he had been rifling through these like M&M's. Brett checked his forearms. No messages. Flying blind, huh. He dipped back into the woman's purse. Ah, there it was! Her passport. He promptly snatched it. Japan passport, it read. Japan, he said to himself, perplexed.

He flipped open to the information page. Name: Kagomi Mochizuki. He stared at the photo and the information. What in the flying fuck, he muttered. It was then that he heard the toilet flush in the bathroom and the water in the sink begin running. He stuffed the passport back into the purse, but kept the pills. Well, well, well. You didn't leave me any hints or notes on the forearms, so I'm not going to leave you any either. He popped a codeine and a xanax out of their plastic holders. We'll see where you wake up, fuckface. He hoisted up the lukewarm Gorkha beer and drained it down.

*****

Some would argue that history is rifely resplendent with examples of people encountering history altering ideas and perspectives when traversing the unknown territories of the supra-consciousness. Francis Crick is perhaps the most famous example, the molecular biologist who encountered the double-helix strands of DNA whilst tripping balls on LSD. Steve Jobs credits LSD with allowing him to breakaway from the myopic hive mind in regards to not only computer creation but its potential usage. Richard Feryman, noble prize winner for research into quantum mechanics, enjoyed a good frying balls session. Brian Wilson began his journey into the superunknown (never to really return) in 1965 and immediately wrote the opening to California Girls. The Beatles are famously known for the way psychedelics transitioned their music from "I Want to Hold your Hand" to "Strawberry Fields" and "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds". Mary Shelly came up with the idea for Frankenstein while on a hedonistic bender of wine and laudanum. Jack Kerouac cranked out On the Road in a kamikaze speed bender. Jekyll and Hyde was written in under a week by Robert Louis Stevenson and a vesuvial mountain of virgin white charlie. The pleasure and pain pathways in the brain were mapped by neuroscientist John C. Lilly while ball-tripping 5000. Recently we can all be grateful for the inventor of the PCR test, what with our mutually experienced Chinese virus scare-demic. His name is Kerry Mullis and he came up with the idea while swimming in the cosmophoric unknown.

However, although interesting tales, history isn't flush with these examples. Before you rush out to microdose believing that you are going to invent a social media platform or snuggle-kitty-themed crypto currency that will revolutionize the world, consider this: for every Francis Crick, we have perhaps 100,000 people running around the beach screaming, jumping out windows, staring at the wall, a tree stump, trying to watch The Wizard of Oz synced with Pink Floyd, chasing people around parking lots at Phish concerts, dancing with spaghetti tits in the mud at Woodstock, and in general contributing nothing to the world aside from being one dull tooth of a gigantic clog in a titanic machine going nowhere.

History is altered only by the select few with the proper wiring, the right type of intellectual hardware, the focus, and the wherewithal to extract these strange glimpses from the ultra-shrouded, understand their applicability, and wrest them away from the deep oceans of the ether, bringing them back into the terrestrial, down-tuned world, and putting them into use. They embark on the hero's journey, and they return home with the prize which allows the village to prosper; the medicine, the magic sword, the once-kidnapped princess, the blessings of fertility upon the land. Considering the billions of people who have lived and died on this planet, these heroic journeys are rare. In fact, ridiculously beyond rare. They are in the "lottery" realms; something more akin to hitting a hole in one while getting hit by lightning and receiving a phone call informing you that Bill Gates just wired you $1 billion and Margot Robbie is pregnant with your child.

This is one of those cases. Like Brain Wilson, who immediately went to a piano and let his fingers make a B-chord, followed by an E, and a swirling isosceles triangle melody, Serena wasted no time in sketching out the logo from her vision on her tablet once she arrived, one way or another, back in her hotel room. She wanted to collapse and sleep, but not until she had sketched the logo and hit save.

Then, in the late morning, when she groggily came to, the first thing she did wasn't to ask "what the fuck" or stare in the mirror while slapping herself trying to remember her name. No, instead she reached for her tablet and immediately hoped to return to the strange sense of inspiration she had had. It wasn't a dream, was it? Hadn't she come up with some idea for a business?

She pushed the power button on her iPad. Nothing. Black screen. Dead. Now she said, what the fuck! Had it all been just a dream? No, it was a bar, right? She had had an idea for a bar? She couldn't precisely remember. But it was on the tablet. Wait, wasn't it? Or was that a dream too?

Shooting off her bed, she began rifling through her room looking for her charger. Cigarettes, socks, clothes, wrong charger, lipstick, more cigarettes...fuck!

She moved to the desk and went scorched earth on its contents. Receipts, coins, bracelets, rings, hotel menu, wet hand towels, ash tray. Motherfucker!

Then her eyes caught something. There, down near the floor, sheepishly curling out from a low outlet behind the trash can, like a little baby garden snake, was a charger. She dove for it. This was it! USB-C. I got you, she screamed. She knocked the trash can out of the way and yanked the charger out of the wall before scurrying back to the bed, unplugging the bedside lamp, sticking her charger in, and connecting her tablet to the juice. A pinpoint green light on her tablet started flashing. Yuuuussss, she exclaimed in glee. She pushed at the power button. And then again. And again. And again. But there was nothing.

You can't be serious, she fretted. The blood in her brain began to simmer in building frustration. Is it dead, she wondered. Is it broken? She tapped at the power button again and again. On, you fucker, she screamed. Turn on! Tap tap tap tap! It was like trying to turn on a dead slate of stone.

Finally, she screamed in frustration and threw the tablet down to the floor. It bounced, broke free of its charging teether like a jet departing from mid-air refueling, and rotated around in the air, reminding one perhaps of the femur bone spinning in the air before becoming a floating space station in Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. As it rotated and began its downward descent, something magical happened. The screen filled with colors, perhaps reminding one this time of the monolith in 2001. Animations took off, began spinning and swirling, and the screen glowed brightly. Serena's eyes nearly jumped out of her head as she saw it. The tablet crashed to the floor and Serena dove from the bed to cradle it. No, no, no, she cried. I'm sorry. But it mattered not whether she was remorseful or indifferent. The tablet was on. The apps were loading. The home screen was bursting in color. Serena's eyes began doing cartwheels. She jumped back to bed and tapped on the Adobe Fresco icon. Come on, she impatiently coaxed, come on. The app opened. Serena hit open recent. The most recent file was called "yaak$biyatc#he*s" last edited at 4:32am. She hit open. There it was. Kaboom! Yawk Bar exploding out of the cosmoses. Serena screamed in joy. It wasn't a dream! Holy shit!

She lay back in the bed pounding her fists and kicking her legs up and down in pure joy as she let out a long, gleeful cry of excitement.

"Yawk!" she cried, in surprise, relief, and total satisfaction. "Yawk! Of course. That's it! It's the name! That's the bar! I've got it!"

And, like Brain Wilson working at the piano, Serena lit a cigarette and got to work. She wrote a long list of action items, things to buy, things to do, things to go on the menu, people to hire, etc., and so forth. She didn't stop to think about how or even why she had been so wasted last night. She didn't care. She had a bar to build, a dream to manifest, an empire to rule.

*****

Early in the next year, as whispers of bat flu spread throughout the rat-infested back alleys and medieval fish markets of Chairman Mao's playground, Pee Tan, Pee Brett, and Nong Serena met in a cozy corner of Santitham, just south of the Santitham roundabout, in a sliver of paradise emblazoned with big screen TV's and refrigerators chock-full of Asahi and Leo. Liverpool banners triumphantly adorned the walls, and local university waitresses worked the floor as they slurped down whiskey sodas and bantered with clientèle.

"Holy shit!" Brett said. "You did it! This is your bar!"
Beaming ecstatically, Serena delivered hugs to Pee Tan and Brett.
"Yawk," Pee Tan looked at the sign glowing creamy and golden in the cool January night air like a friendly moon. "You called it 'Yawk'."
"Yawk..." Pee Brett scrunched up his eyes as he stared at the sign.
He was trying to recollect something.
"Do you recognize the name?" Pee Tan asked.
"Uhh," Brett said as he stared emptily at the sign.
He had just arrived in Chiang Mai following another jaunt in the jungles of Africa. That meant he was fresh off the 30-hour travel delight scenario. His head throbbed and his brain churned helplessly in sludge as he tried to recall. Why should he know Yawk? Booze, bender, blasted, bogus, bodacious, uhh..what was Yawk?
"How'd you come up with that name?" Pee Tan asked.
"It came to me in a vision."
"Wow," Brett said. "A vision. Cool."
"A vision?" Pee Tan asked incredulously.
"A vision," Serena said flatly.
"Oh!" Brett's eyes lit up and he shouted in exuberance. "It's uhh...wait."
He thought for half a moment more. Pee Tan and Serena looked at each other in bemusement and pity.
"It means 'cheers', right? Yawk! Cheers!"
"Correct," Pee Tan said. "You really brought your A-game today."
"Yeah, ok. That's a good name for a bar," Brett declared. "Good job, Serena."
"Thank you."
"We need to drink to your accomplishment."

Serena barked a few orders to a petite girl sipping a whiskey soda. Immediately, the waitress scurried behind the bar to fetch 2 bottles of Asahi, 3 glasses, and a red bucket of ice. The party set up camp at a small table on the veranda overlooking the street.

"This is amazing," Brett said, ecstatic at the bar and also the prospects of drowning his burning, jet-lagged mind in alcohol.
"Yeah, nice job. You were really inspired," Pee Tan added.
"Yawk!" Serena said, holding up her glass.
"Yawk!" the three of them said in unison as they clinked glasses and fired down some brew.
"Would you like some beer?" Brett asked the waitress.
The waitress removed her mobile from the back pocket of her mom jeans and tapped feverishly into Google translate. When she was finished, she held up the phone to Brett's face.
"I like smiling gecko," she had written.
"Well, that's interesting," Brett said. "Congratulations. Hey," he turned his attention back to Pee Tan and Nong Serena. "Where is the other lady? Kitty Bang Bang?"
"Kitty Boom Boom. Who knows," Pee Tan said, puzzled.
"What do you mean?"
"She disappeared."
"Didn't she go to China?" Serena asked.
"She went to China about 2 months ago for some job. I don't know. She never came back. That girl was weird."
"I thought she was nice," Pee Brett said.
"Who fucking cares," Pee Tan said.
"Yeah, who cares. We have this place. Yawk!"
"Yawk!" they all said, clinking glasses yet again and firing down the icy, golden brew.
"What are your big plans this year?" Brett asked Pee Tan.
"You know those ice hotels in Scandinavia? I've been obsessing about going there for like 6 months. I'm booking a flight for the end of February."
"That's awesome."
"What about you?"
"In May I'm flying to Sudan to propose to my lady."
"Holy fuck pants! Seriously?"
"Yeah, and I'm going to take her to France. Provided she says 'yes', of course."
"She's from Sudan?"
"Yeah, but we met in Saudi Arabia - the most romantic of places to meet your future spouse. You know, everyone goes there to meet the man or woman of their dreams."
"And you Serena?"
"I'm going to build up this bar and then take over the dingbat bar next to us."

Next to Yawk was a slim Shanghai tunnel of shadowy carousing, white whiskey imbibing, and ear grating karaoke. It had the charm and character of an abandoned boxcar on derelict tracks in the dregs of town decorated strangely with newspapers and feces and inhabited solely by hobos.

"Those fuckers are mine!" Serena swore.
"Alright!" the table laughed together. "Expansion! Global takeover!"
They held up their glasses again in the warm, golden glow of that January night in the year 2020, and brought their glasses together in cheerful, hopeful, merry exuberance.
"Happy New Year!"
"Happy 2020!"
"Yawk!"

Epilogue

Pee Tan has never been to an ice hotel, at least not in real life. Pee Brett never traveled to Sudan nor proposed. Nong Kitty Boom Boom hasn't been seen by anyone. Travis McCorkel's murder remains unsolved. Yawk Community Bar, even through the terrible years of the Bat Dance Virus, thrives. In fact, to commemorate Yawk's 1st anniversary, Serena bought the slum bar next to Yawk and expanded her empire, just as she had promised. Bradley Cooper has yet to visit, but he did send an autographed 8x10 glossy. It hangs in the Yawk Bar restroom above the men's urinal.