Hotel Kerobokan (12 page)

One morning, after a three-month stint in cell
tikus
, three guards arrived to release her back into Block W. They were ready for her inevitable angry spit. But when guard Herman opened the door, Black Monster was quiet as a mouse. When his eyes adjusted to the dark, he saw why. She had hanged herself. Three weeks earlier, a popular male inmate had also been found dead in a toilet cubicle. This looked like a copycat suicide. Black Monster was strung up in an elaborate noose, her head flopped to one side, her tongue hanging out of her mouth. She’d finally done it. Herman went in to grab her. But, just as his hand touched her, she sprang at him like a tormented ghost, screaming and clutching at him with tentacle-like arms. Herman flew back against the wall. The other two guards ran off screaming. Sonia was laughing as she casually untied the noose and pulled the cord up over her head. The guard sat on the floor, gasping for breath. The stunt had worked perfectly. Sure, she’d do a bit more time in purgatory, but it was worth it. Now she’d be the talk of the jail.

That girl is one of a kind. You ask if I’ve ever been afraid of anyone. Among all the men in Kerobokan, I’ve never been afraid of nobody, but I would be afraid to share a room with Sonia. She made me shit scared. I would be shit scared to share a room with her
.

Why?

Because she might stab me. I would never be able to relax and sleep with Sonia in my room, she’s a lunatic. She loves it in Kerobokan. Everyone is shit scared of her. The only woman, I think, who would face her is Australian Renae Lawrence. Renae would hit her harder but she would come and stab Renae. She is mean and she’s crazy. That’s the kind of person I’m afraid of
.

– Ruggiero

Everyone is fucking everyone in every corner they can find
.

– Mick, Australian inmate

Black Monster was unusually cooperative and solemn as the guards escorted her across the jail back to Block W after another long stint in cell
tikus
. She quietly slipped in through the steel door, almost unnoticed, with her head hanging and her eyes staring at the ground. Her subdued re-entry to Block W was because she’d got the shock of her life. She’d just been told she was seven weeks pregnant.

Inside Block W, the escorting female guard walked along the gravel path between the cells, breaking Sonia’s news as she asked who would take her into their cell. Black Monster trailed forlornly behind. No-one wanted her. She was too much of a headache. Finally, one cell agreed to take her in. The cellmates knew that life would be edgier and more disruptive with Sonia, but cell leader Trisna felt sorry for her. Black Monster was soon herself again, playing up the pregnancy to get attention, relishing the jail-wide speculation about who the father was and where the conception had happened.

I would rather cut my cock off … I wouldn’t do it. I would never get her pregnant
.

– Ruggiero

The cellmates spent many nights stroking Sonia’s belly, praying the baby would have a better life. But as her pregnancy progressed, she became more stressed. She was scared of giving birth and worried about who would take care of the baby, as she had nowhere to live and no family in Bali. Late one night, two months before she was due, she cried out in pain. Nobody thought Black Monster was faking it this time. She lay on a dirty mattress with her knees up in the birthing position, clutching at her stomach, gasping for breath between long, bloodcurdling screams. Tears poured across her temples and down the sides of her face. The cellmates screamed for help. They all thought she was going to have the baby that night. But the doctor finally arrived, gave her some medicine and settled her down.

Sonia gave birth in a local hospital two months later, two weeks after finishing her sentence and checking out. A few weeks later, she returned to visit her friends in Hotel K and to show off her tiny infant. Jaws dropped as prisoners took a look at Black Monster’s baby girl. She was beautiful, with milky white skin and curly blonde hair. Sonia’s stints in jail had always created talk, but this inspired frenzied gossip. Who the hell was the father? The intense intrigue was fuelled by Black Monster’s own stories. As the baby was being cared for by French inmate Michael’s mum, she convinced everyone that Michael was the father. Then her story changed to him being Brazilian drug trafficker Marco, the most wanted man in Indonesia. He was big news. He’d run like a crazy man out of Jakarta Airport when customs officials discovered thirteen kilograms of pure Peruvian cocaine hidden in his hang-glider frame. Sonia had never met him. But she now claimed he was the father of her child.

The true identity of the father was eventually revealed in a late-night drunken confessional between Australian inmate Mick and Scottish prisoner Robert. It transpired that Robert had simply grabbed some quick dirty sex when he’d been locked in an isolation cell in the tower next to Black Monster. A guard had come in and asked, ‘You want some fun, Robert?’ He was drunk. He did. The guard unlocked his cell, then stood back to watch. Black Monster was still locked up in her cell. She stripped, bent forwards and through the bars she and Robert had sex and conceived a beautiful baby girl.

Robert knew the baby was his. One night he told me, ‘I rooted her’. I said ‘What?’ ‘It’s my baby.’ How? I asked. ‘I was drunk. Guards say, “Do you want to have fun, Robert?”’ But the next morning, Robert said, ‘Don’t tell anybody, don’t tell anybody’. He already had two kids in Scotland. The baby’s mouth shape, the eyes, and the curly blonde hair were all like Robert. I gave the adoptive parents a photo of Robert and said, ‘In case one day the kid asks about the father, this is him’
.

– Mick

Within a couple of months, Black Monster was back inside Hotel K for biting a woman at a nightclub who was apparently trying to steal her new European boyfriend. She took her baby girl from Michael’s mum and with her into Hotel K, where there was no shortage of clucky females. But she changed her mind after a few days, and sold the baby to an inmate’s family for four bags of
shabu
.

As time passed, Black Monster did nothing to dispel the myths about the father. His true identity stayed an unusually well-kept secret inside Hotel K. Robert seemed to have a unique power to scare Black Monster into submissive silence, although the ongoing intrigue suited her as well. But most prisoners had accepted the little girl was Frenchman Michael’s baby.

Pregnancies didn’t usually provoke this much interest, as inmates often conceived, some giving birth and keeping the baby for a while, but many aborting their foetuses by self-inflicting rough daily stomach massages. Some girls, especially those who’d worked as callgirls in Denpasar and Kuta karaoke clubs, had shredded their wombs from so many brutal home abortions. One 22-year-old prisoner regularly awoke screaming in pain as her pureed insides started to slip out. Her cellmates knew the drill. Two held her arms and stroked her forehead, while another pushed a foot up between her legs to stop anything leaking out. She’d seen the jail doctor, who advised her that he could do nothing, but suggested it might help to wear a tight girdle. This seemed to do the trick temporarily but her insides were irreparably damaged.

Hotel K was a sex-crazed little world, despite a belief among inmates that the drinking water was spiked with libido-lowering drugs. A walk through the jail could be like walking onto the set of
Boogie Nights
, with prisoners giving blow jobs up against trees or fences, thrusting away behind Iwan’s furniture-building workshop or in the visiting room. Nowhere was sacrosanct. Prisoners banged away in the church toilet, the temple toilets, the library toilet, the cells, the medical clinic and even in the boss’s office. If the drinking water was spiked, the dose wasn’t strong enough.

When the jail boss unexpectedly turned up one Sunday afternoon, he walked into his office and straight into a porn show. A male prisoner and a woman were thrashing away under his desk. ‘Fuck off, get out,’ the inmate yelled without looking up, angry for the intrusion because he’d paid 50,000 rupiah ($7) for privacy. The boss walked to his desk, his black lace-up boots stopping right next to the prisoner’s head. The prisoner looked up, shocked. Suddenly the pair was scrambling for their clothes. The woman ran straight out the door, grabbing awkwardly at the sides of her dress as she tried to pull it down over her breasts. The prisoner was made to stay and explain. He stood uncomfortably in his underpants, clutching his shirt and shorts in a bundle against his chest.

He told the boss that the woman was his wife, who he rarely saw; they were lonely and missed each other desperately. The boss was lenient. He bellowed at the prisoner for fucking in his office, and then dismissed him with a casual wave of his arm, sending him back to his cell without punishment. But the boss soon heard he’d been conned. The woman was a hooker. The prisoner was sent to cell
tikus
for a few days until he was able to organise some cash to pay a guard to let him out.

As with drugs, mobile phones and plasma televisions, sex was officially not allowed in Hotel K. But this did nothing to stifle the prolific fucking; it simply forced prisoners to use their naturally devious instincts so they didn’t get caught. Some simply waited until the more amenable guards were on duty so they could sling them some cash. Many did it at the changing of the guards at midday, when there was a ten-minute blind spot in the supervision. It was a frenetic ten minutes of lunchtime fucking. But if prisoners got caught in compromising clinches by strict guards, they could suffer a brutal bashing.

One afternoon, female inmate Komang got a pass out of Block W by telling a female guard she needed to talk to the jail security chief about her case. In truth, she’d just got a text message from her boyfriend in the men’s block, saying he’d be waiting for her in the music room if she could get out. Their little rendezvous started well; they met, stripped and started having sex. But it ended badly. The female guard noticed Komang was still not back in Block W twenty minutes later and went searching for her. She quickly realised she’d been conned. No-one had seen Komang go to the offices. The guard started to panic, thinking Komang had escaped on her watch.

She instigated a jail-wide search. It didn’t take long to find Komang in the music room. She was naked and alone. Her boyfriend had abandoned her. He’d dived though a window into the adjoining kitchen as soon as he heard someone tampering with the door handle. Guards grabbed the naked girl, dragged her outside and bashed her, smashing her in the face over and over. For the next week, Komang sat sobbing in Block W, with two black eyes and a bloated face. Her boyfriend had also been badly bashed after he was caught running naked through the kitchen.

The impact of making sex illegal in Hotel K was to turn it into a booming illicit business. Behind the backs of stricter guards, the sex industry in the jail thrived. The doctor rented out a room with a mattress in the clinic for sex. Guards as pliable as plasticine and hungry for cash sanctioned sex, some even partaking in it, many lining their pockets by working as pimps to book callgirls, organise sex nights and rent out offices.

The guards usually opened their offices for sex at around 3 pm, once they’d closed for the day’s administration work. If a prisoner had requested it, a guard could organise a hooker for the room for around 800,000 rupiah ($110). They’d show a selection of photos of three or four girls to pick from, who were usually from a local brothel, or they’d use a Block W inmate who used to work as a callgirl at a karaoke club but now took bookings within Hotel K. Most offices had only carpet or desks to use for sex – the mattress in the clinic was a luxury. On busy nights prisoners would line up waiting for their turn in the rooms. Prisoners were in and out fast. In the mornings, guards often found condoms left on the floor. Some guards gave their keys to a trusted prisoner to do the deals and split the profits. Brazilian inmate Ruggiero had two sets of keys to offices, which he’d sell in the afternoon, sometimes during visits, or at night, at hourly or half-hourly rates varying from 50,000 rupiah ($7) to 300,000 rupiah ($40), depending on the wealth of his client. He regularly used one room himself.

An Australian drug courier, Martin Stephens, caught at Denpasar Airport with more than three kilograms of heroin strapped to him, was one of Ruggiero’s friends and a good customer. He would book the office for rendezvous with his Indonesian fiancée, Christine. They’d met in the jail while she was visiting someone else. She was a slightly older woman, who had an eight-year-old daughter. He was part of a high-profile drug syndicate dubbed the ‘Bali Nine’, comprising nine young Australians. When the two made eye contact across the visitors’ room, he amorously poked his tongue out and that was it. Despite his life sentence, she began the rigorous routine of visiting her boyfriend daily in Hotel K.

Each morning she’d stand out the front of the jail in the blazing sun among a crowd of visitors, all pushing and shoving to get in first. Then she’d pay the 5000 rupiah (70 cent) fee to get inside the front door, some days having her bags rifled and her body searched. Inside, she’d pay the guards another 5000 rupiah to bring Martin from his cell. Her daily ritual was to bring his breakfast – fried chicken and chicken paprika were his favourites. Then she’d wait. When Martin arrived, they’d sit on the tiled floor, sweating, crammed among three hundred or so others, vanishing into their own little world wearing earpieces to listen to music. Oblivious to the people around them, including his devoted mother, Michelle, who would often be sitting right beside them, they’d passionately kiss. In the late afternoon or at night, Martin would pay to allow Christine to come in for sex. The two guards at the front door usually took 50,000 rupiah each, and he also paid Ruggiero for the office. The price went up when police were stationed out the front of Hotel K in a security boost. It simply meant an extra sling to the cops. However, Ruggiero sometimes waived Martin’s fee, offering him a gratis corner, so long as he didn’t mind sharing an office.