Sweet Uncle Edo... That Bastard

Sunday, 11 AM: I’m in Kuala Lumpur at the base of the Petronas Towers.

I’m doing my tourist thing (taking hundreds of pictures of everything in sight), when I noticed this old lady dropped her camera. I picked it up and ran over to her. She and her husband were extremely grateful to get their camera back. We started talking and the woman tells me I’m a very handsome boy (“aww shucks”, I replied) and that she would like to introduce me to her daughter and feed me lunch.

-- Let me pause for a moment... I am on the first day of my trip to Abu Dhabi and I’m full of that “Carpe Diem” spirit. I want to meet everyone and learn as much as I possibly can. Plus, when someone offers you their daughter, you should at least check her out… Am I right men???? :)

So in order to fully Carpe Diem, I accepted their offer and we were off to their home to eat lunch. When we arrived, their son was home sitting on the couch smoking a cigarette. No daughter though, but they assured me she was on her way home. They were great hosts; she made shrimp, chicken, and rice and prepared tea and coffee. After eating, her husband (who asked me to call him Uncle Edo) asked me if I would like to play cards. I accepted and he led me through the kitchen to another room.

The room we were in was furnished with nothing but a table, 4 chairs, a deck of cards, and some poker chips. It was also the only room with air conditioning. A little odd, I thought to myself... He taught me a strange form of blackjack where the dealer is separate from the house. And not only did Uncle Edo teach me the rules, he showed me the system of how he and his son cheat. Uncle Edo is the dealer, their victim is the house, and his son sits across the table as the player. To summarize really quickly, Edo uses subtle hand signals to tell his son what the other player has and what the next card in the deck is. His son then hits or stands accordingly.

I thought it was a pretty clever system, but didn’t understand why they would bother perfecting it for a harmless game of blackjack -- Until there was a knock at the door. As he got up to answer it, Uncle Edo casually remarked to me “Whatever I say, just go along with it.”
A man in a nice suit came in and sat down in the "house" seat. Sweet Uncle Edo told him the sad “news” that I had lost $5,000 earlier playing blackjack with him and was done playing for the day... But my driver (Edo’s son) was going to play the last of my money for me. Holy Shit!!! The man nodded his head in acceptance, pulled the equivalent of US$2,000 out of his pocket and joined the game. Meanwhile, I’m sitting there quietly trying to figure out what the f*ck just happened!!!

After a few hands, “my driver” suggested that I play the next hand…

Pause again: I had just learned at the airport that Malaysia is a country where drug trafficking is a capital punishment. So I knew the punishment for gambling and fraud was surely nothing pretty.

At this point I started to think this whole thing was a set-up, that they were trying to catch me on camera playing just one hand and then blackmail me. I politely told them “f*ck no”, and then repeatedly told “my driver” that I was late and that we needed to go - he shrugged me off while they continued to play. After he ignored me too many times, I finally just got up and started to leave, upon which Edo’s son had to either come with me or blow their cover – where was I going to go without my driver?

After we both walked out the front door I apologized to Edo’s son because they were down $200 when I left, and surely really mad about it. He tried to bullshit me about how he needed me to pay him the money I lost them and how his poor cousin was in the hospital getting a C-section. I felt the urge to punch him in the face, but I just apologized again and kept walking. He gave up asking and just let me go.

And I never met the daughter. :(

I’m not sure whether the moral of this story is “Don’t judge a book by its cover”, or just to not trust anyone – even the elderly! But the latter moral sucks; the next time an old man asks me for a favor am I supposed to tell him to go to hell?? Hopefully the lesson is just “don’t be in the wrong place at the wrong time”, because there’s no way to avoid that!

I hope Day 2 is less eventful.