Singha Beer, Don't Ask No Questions
Nepal, 1992. In case it’s not obvious, I’m wearing a Singha shirt. (Patrick is taking the photo and therefore not in it.) My friend Joe is at left, and to the right of the Shaivite sadhu is Brian.
It was the late winter of 1991 and my life was going nowhere. Six months out of college with a degree in religion, and I was working at an off-brand Starbucks called Café Roma. Oregon was in the midst of a recession and unemployment was 7.4%; the joke for graduating seniors a year earlier was whether to work at a coffee shop or the McMenamins.
Eventually I’d get transferred from the downtown office building to a Café Roma kiosk in the basement of the Good Samaritan Hospital. It was a moribund affair when I arrived, but a potential goldmine for the industrious worker willing to coax nurses down for a triple-shot latte. I worked the morning shift and did manage to build up the business, but that only emphasized my dead-end prospects. As I got to know the regulars, they would ask, “You seem like a smart guy—what are you doing here?”
Into this void I poured a lot of beer and music. In the evenings—or weekend afternoons—my friends and I frequented blue-smoke dive bars with pool tables. It is a bit hard to imagine now, but you could buy a pitcher of Hamm’s for something like five bucks back then. Portland had started to morph into Beervana, but brewpubs were expensive. Sometimes we’d stop by the Barley Mill for a game of pool and a pint of Terminator stout, but it was mostly too expensive for regular outings. We reasoned that the stout was dense enough it counted as a meal, so for special occasions it was all right.
Our soundtrack was varied but included the Pogues’ Hell’s Ditch, which had come out a few months earlier. Admittedly not one of their best, it nevertheless contained a few songs about Asian travel. We’d belt out the lyrics about Mekhong Whiskey, Thailand, Kathmandu breeze. In what became a call and response, someone would sing the first line of the chorus from House of the Gods: “Singha beer, don’t ask no questions...” and someone else would answer, “Singha beer, don’t tell no lies.”
Two years earlier, I had spent the better part of an academic year in Asia, mostly India. But I’d managed a short trip to Nepal and flown in and out of Thailand. In fact, the first time I placed my young foot on foreign soil, it was in Bangkok, where we stopped for a day en route to New Delhi. We stepped out into the fat yellow sunshine, still delirious from the plane ride and in the wrong time zone, and the heat and humidity hit us like a punch. A group of four of us, all nineteen and twenty-year-olds, set out to wring as much from the city as a day would allow. One of the first things we did was saunter up to a sidewalk stall selling Singa beer and order bottles, cosplaying adulthood.
Portland winters aren’t severe; they’re a marathon of gray. Particularly back then before the climate started bringing more winter sunshine, you might have two or three clear days a month starting in November. By February, having to contend with another barely-light day of 42 with a spiteful drizzle rattling down—it begins to wear on a mind. I’m not a huge beach guy (“Sipping Singha beer on Pattaya Beach…”), but the idea of a cold one amid the noise and bustle of a Bangkok bar sounded about perfect. Singha beer, man.
Patrick Emerson, current podcast co-host, Cornell Ph.D., and economics professor, was one of those three callow college students I’d shared a beer with in Bangkok—and he was also going nowhere. In fact, so dismal were his prospects that he’d also taken a job at Café Roma. Yet he was the one to take those lyrics and begin to form them into something tangible. Saving those dimes and quarters we found in the tip jar, hustling a little bit more—we could spend months in Asia on a thousand bucks. A quartet—a different quartet this time—we began planning and saving.
A year later, in January of 1992, we landed in Bangkok. It was a shoestring adventure, beginning in Thailand, wending south to Malaysia, over to India and then north to Nepal. In Thailand we managed to find our Singha beer and Mekhong whiskey (which is really just rum). We even bought bottles of whiskey to take on the road. It wasn’t easy or safe to drink in Malasia, but we found a beach on the eastern island of Tioman. I went to mass at Mother Theresa’s parish in Calcutta and met her afterward, and we met the Dalai Lama in Dharmasla. We got caught up in a Maoist revolt, complete with tear gas and riot police, in Kathmandu, and paddled around Phewa lake in Pokhara, Nepal.
Udaipur, not Jaisalmer. Yes, I was wearing a bandanna. It was the 1990s.
In an especially memorable outing, we rode camels through the Thar Desert in the far west of India and watched fighter jets patrol the Pakistani border. At the end of three days, we were very hot and dirty, and returned to the old city of Jaisalmer. At its center is a fort built in 1156, and our hotel was perched up on one of the walls. We’d been off the camels just minutes when we plopped down at a nearby restaurant for a fresh lime soda and lunch. An enterprising young man sidled up to our table with a cooler, the inside of which contained bottles of Kingfisher beer floating in ice. He knew a couple of marks when he saw them, and we paid an outrageous sum for those bottles of golden liquid. They were worth every rupee.
The trip was really the culmination of our ascent from being stuck. Patrick and I had applied to and been accepted to graduate schools. We’d go on our big Asian adventure, spend a summer back in Portland, and then restart our lives. I don’t know what would have happened if we hadn’t started dreaming about Singha beer. When Patrick suggested traveling, my world expanded. Just thinking about Southeast Asia, I could feel the gummy wet of sweat on my skin and it brought my eyes up off my toes and onto the horizon. Sometimes you need to get out of your rut to see possibilities.
Yesterday I felt a sharp pang of nostalgia and sadness—but not surprise—to learn that Pogue lyricist and singer Shane MacGowan had finally died. Anyone who knows the Pogues understands that “finally”—Shane lived a rough, whisky-soaked, tobacco-stained life and if you’d asked me back when Hell’s Ditch came out, I’d have said he wouldn’t see the end of the century. His life continued to be difficult, but it lasted a lot longer than anybody expected.
A life is filled with almost infinite experiences. We can never know in the moment how significant they may be. Yet when I look back, I can trace the germ of that transformational time in life to Shane’s lyrics. In that weird way of my life, beer is right there, perhaps not a central player, but like the Pogues’ Jem Finer, an insistent presence. The Pogues had a couple hits, but were never major stars. Yet I’m certain stories like mine are common. There was something about Shane’s blend of the boozy, jaunty, and wistful that made so many people feel things. It was poignant without sentimentality. It had the power to move—and move me it did, straight out of the dive bars and into adulthood.