Hell, I didn’t even know Mai’s last name. Before the trip, I’d Googled Mai and gotten 450 kazillion hits, no help whatsoever. Perhaps if I’d pressed Mai harder for a last name, I could’ve narrowed it down. She had so many secrets, a significant component of her allure.
Vietnam’s population is 85,000,000, greater Saigon’s 6,000,000. I don’t know what I’d’ve done if I had her full name and address. And I had Sally’s feelings to consider, too.
Another surprise
awaited
at a two-day
Maui
layover on the return leg, to buffer our jet lag. In a Paia watering hole, I met an antique hippie, a florid white man in his early sixties. He had skinny arms, a W.C. Fields nose, and a pot gut. He wore a gray ponytail in braids, a tie-dyed shirt, a doo rag, the whole kit and caboodle.
He sat with a woman who wore earrings in her nose. Forty-something, she had abundant tattoos, stringy blond hair, and no bra under her sleeveless T-shirt.
Coincidentally, the hippie had gone to Vietnam, too, in the past year. It was his first visit. He’d been a draft dodger, sitting out the war in
Canada
. He wanted to see what he’d missed.
As he prattled on about air pollution and food poisoning and pictures of Uncle Ho all over the place, my instinct was to knock him off his barstool. Sally, reading me, stroked my arm, gently biting my shoulder, whispering, “easy,
easy
.” I had neither the strength nor sufficient inclination. We spoke further and he turned out to be a fairly decent person.
His woman, too.
After a second round (nonalcoholic beer for me), I felt no malice. I even bought them a drink.
…Ziggy and I walked into the GiGi and found the captain sulking alone in a corner, his back to the door, not a super-duper idea in that era of
plastique.
He was chasing shots of
Rhum Caravelle
with
Ba-mi-ba
. The girls in their skintight, slit-up-the-side Suzy Wong dresses swiveled at the bar, giving us the onceover. They weren’t hustling the captain to buy them Saigon Tea, which was plain bourbon-hued tea in shot glasses that you paid whiskey prices for. They knew him. Our intrepid commander was a GiGi regular.
Me leading the way, we went to him and stood at attention, sort of. The captain finally looked up and blinked at us.
“Private Joe? Private Zbitgysz? Aren’t you men on duty?”
“Yes sir. We came by to check on how the papers promoting us to PFC and our MOS change to clerk-typist are coming along, sir.”
“Uh,” he said, straining his pickled brain.
“Just kidding.
We’re worried about you, sir.”
“Worried about me?”
“Because of your obvious worries.
The weight of your responsibilities.”
“Oh, yes, thank you, men. Take a seat.”
I took a seat. Ziggy headed outside in search of a newsstand and the latest on Mariner 4.
The captain raised his empty glass and two fingers. In ten seconds flat, a Suzy
Wong’d
cutie-pie had drinks on the table. If the ARVN worked as quickly and efficiently as Saigon bargirls, they’d’ve kicked Victor Charles’s ass out of the South by 1961. The
Vietnam
domino would be upright, anchored in concrete.
I raised my shot glass in toast. “Thank you, sir.”
He drank. I did not, as the locally distilled
Rhum Caravelle
tasted to me like a mix of Bacardi and kerosene.
He stared at me. “I should be a happy man, but I am not. War is hell.”
It took a moment for it to sink in that he’d actually said
war is hell
.
“Well, sir, war or no war, you ought to be happy. Shouldn’t you?”
He smiled sadly. “Why is that, Private Joe?”
“You’re a commissioned officer with an important job, sir.
A company commander and unit adjutant.
You have a lovely wife and family at home. And you have, you know, the lady in the Polaroid.”
“Ah, my assignation.
I never did thank you men for your cooperation that day, not to mention your cigarette rations. It’s difficult in an inflated wartime economy for a Vietnamese national to make ends meet.
“Therein
lies
the crux of my dilemma, Private Joe. Mai has forsaken me, a circumstance entirely attributable to rank being pulled on yours truly by an officer of superior rank, although not of superior character. I do not wish to elaborate. My life is going nowhere and I endure a loveless marriage. Those difficulties are relatively trivial. Have you ever had the misfortune to meet the girl of your dreams?”
I looked over at Ziggy, who was still outside, and said, “Afraid so, sir.”
He sighed. “I have met my romantic
Waterloo
.”
“Sir, please spit out what’s bugging you.”
He drank as he pondered my request.
Behind the bar, arms folded by the cash register, was the
GiGi’s
mama-san. The owners and managers pulled sentry duty at the money, that or be stolen blind by the hired help. This mama-san was somewhat older than her girls. She wore heavy makeup and had a beehive hairdo that’d put any sorority girl back home to shame. A little lumpy, she still had a few curves. Mama-san licked her upper lip for my benefit, to let me know the coach was capable of coming off the bench.
Was she the cackler, Quyen, Mai’s mysterious sister or whoever the hell she was? The They-All-Look-Alike Syndrome struck again.
I cocked a thumb toward her.
“She’s an attractive lady, sir,” I said. “The mature ones, they know all the tricks. They’ve written the book on tricks.”
“You misinterpret, Private Joe. I come here exclusively to drown my sorrows. She does not comprehend why I demonstrate no sexual interest in her or the GiGi staff.”
I wondered too. “Believe me, lack of interest in nooky happens to everyone occasionally, sir.
Unfortunately.”
Blearily, Captain Papersmith leaned forward on his elbows. “This is confidential, Private Joe.
Classified information.
The war is winding down in our favor. There’s no guarantee how long any of us will be in-country.”
Had he also patronized an opium den?
“Won’t utter a peep, Captain.
Is what’s going on in the Annex a factor?”
“Joe. Off the record, there’s a new wrinkle. It comes from the highest level and is accelerating the situation. You can say nothing, even to Private Zbitgysz.”
“Sir, honestly, you can trust my complete discretion.” I
lied
, such a blatant lie that I crossed my fingers under the table.
He whispered, “One word.
Statehood.”
Saying “statehood”
like
the lout and his “plastics” to Dustin Hoffman a couple of years later in
The Graduate.
Bless you, PFC A. Bierce.
I hoisted my eyebrows theatrically. “Wow!
For certain, sir?”
“
Shh
!” he said, giving me a spittle shower. “I don’t have the fine details.”
“Sorry, sir.
Mum’s the word.”
“The process is so advanced that they’ve even selected a state gemstone.”
“Which is?”
“Sorry, trooper.
Classified.”
“Of course, sir.
But come to think of it, there is a rumor to that effect circulating all over town. Just yesterday, a taxi driver told me that the state insect is to be the tarantula. I thought he was raving. I didn’t understand his context till now.”
“Poppycock!
What would a common cabby know of a high-level Pentagon and White House initiative?”
“Excellent point, sir.”
“I require advice, Private Joe. Man to man. I shall elaborate on what I said I did not wish to elaborate on.”
Captain Papersmith paused. This was a struggle for him.
Me too.
I sure as hell was no
Dear Abby
.
“Thank you, sir. I’m flattered.”
“You’re a man of the world, Private. Lord knows from your personnel jacket, you’ve lived.”
“I have
beaucoup
methods of messing up and
beaucoup
practice at it, if that’s what you’re driving at.”
“Exactly.
We learn by our mistakes and we learn from the mistakes of others.” He belched softly. “Colonel Lanyard ordered me to report to a senior chaplain he knows, a lieutenant colonel. How the colonel discovered my illicit love, I cannot imagine. Colonel Lanyard said I was immoral, a degenerate. A
degenerate
, Joe! I had no choice but to obey and report to the chaplain. The chaplain ordered me to end my illicit relationship and beg my wife for forgiveness.
Ordered
me.”
How slick. Discover his “illicit love.”
The officer corp’s means of eliminating competition.
Order the suitor of inferior rank out of the picture. Mai stoking this nutso soap opera, walloping the colonel’s bare ass, she was even craftier than I gave her credit for.
“A chaplain can’t order you in terms of religion and morality. Can he?”
“It may have been a figure of speech. He did, however, make his views crystal clear.”
“Ordering you to behave, sir, I’m not grasping that.”
“This is the army. What is there to grasp?”
I’d learned early on from guys who made the error of confiding their indiscretions to the wrong chaplain. You could bank on one-term chaplains maintaining confidence. Lifer chaplains, not all, but a small percentage, ingratiated themselves to their commanders by snitching.
“How did you leave it with this chaplain, sir?”
“I agreed and thanked him profusely for showing me the light.
Anything to terminate the session.”
I was getting pissed. “Wanna know what I think, sir?”
“Please.”
“Basically, sir, the chaplain was telling you to keep your pecker in your pants.”
“Crudely stated, Joe, but, essentially, yes.”
“With all due respect to this godly, high-ranking chaplain, sir, your pecker is your very own pecker, not his pecker, not Jesus’s pecker, not God’s pecker. Your pecker is government property only insofar as what it’s attached to for a given length of time. Your pecker has Constitution-mandated, inalienable rights that are none of the chaplain’s fucking business. He can do whatever he wants with his pecker and so can you within the parameters of the law.”
“Quieter, Private,” Captain Papersmith said, showing his baby’s-ass-delicate palms. “I do appreciate your concern.”
“Ever see the flick,
Elmer Gantry,
sir? You don’t know that this chaplain isn’t a Reverend Gantry. You don’t know how he uses his own pecker.”
“Granted, but keep your voice down.”
I leaned forward on my elbows. “Sir, impending statehood or not, everybody and his brother is saying the war’s heating up, so the VC may not surrender soon enough for any of us to go home except in a rubber bag, so no one can blame you for living for today. Piss on Lieutenant Chaplain Colonel Fire and Brimstone, sir. Fuck him and the horse he rode in on.”
“Your recommendation has merit, but there is a complication.”
“Yes sir?”
“I wrote Mildred asking if I might bring home a Vietnamese woman as a nanny. Our son has behavioral problems and our daughter is a budding nymphomaniac. The children are nearing adolescence. I argued that it might not be too late for the kids if a woman who has endured any number of hardships took them under her firm wing.”
I resisted shaking my head in disbelief.
“Yes, yes. I know, Private. Having my cake and eating it too. Our two-story home has a basement with a mother-in-law apartment that is suitable for Mai, and Mildred sleeps like a log. But Mildred immediately saw through my subterfuge and is demanding a divorce. To compound my woes, Colonel Lanyard denied my application for compassionate stateside reassignment to iron things out. I have a quandary, do I not?”
All I could do is confirm that he indeed had himself a moral and practical quandary. A woman he thinks he loves versus the slide-rule heiress, he couldn’t have both.
He shrugged helplessly and signaled for refills.
Abby herself couldn’t wriggle him out of this one.
LIKE
LAS
Vegas casinos, The Great Beyond has no clocks, no defined seasons that I have thus far detected, no encouragement of circadian rhythms. It logically follows that our new life spans are infinite as we’ve already expended our The Land of the Living life spans.
Make sense to you? I hope so. I hope I’m right, too.
The bad news is that my immediate neighborhood has gone to hell, even if there is no Heaven or Hell per se. Factor in the elevator music (today’s selection: “Sloop John B”) and the lifestyle jokes that seem to be at my expense, and I am in a state of limbo.
Smitty has become a full-blown pain in the ass. He has come to regard me as his mentor. Whenever he bugs me, I play along, partially because of loneliness--I haven’t seen Madge outside again--and partially to get under his skin.
Today, he comes to me and says, “Joe, something is wrong with my television programming. Can you help?”
For Chrissake, I can’t even help with my own. The only station running for the past week is Channel 82, the afternoon talk show. LBJ and Ho Chi Minh are having a marathon debate on the War, talking nonstop 24/7. Uncle Ho speaks in Vietnamese, Lyndon in Texan,
a
drawl that never forms complete words. I have no idea what they’re saying, but they understand each other well enough to interrupt and yell and shake fists.
I tell Smitty, sure, and fish a stack of TV dinners out of my freezer compartment. It’s time for another food swap anyway.
In his living room, he says angrily, “Look. What is this?”
What the black-and-white footage of deserts and tanks is, I think, a documentary on the Six Day War, which took place in June 1967, when Israel duked it out with Egypt, Syria, and Jordan. It was no contest. The Israelis rolled over them and wound up with a bunch of new territory.
Having to raise my voice because the sound is on so high, I summarize the war for Smitty and say, “Yeah, that was a couple of years after I was in Vietnam. There were jokes about Egyptian tanks having a reverse gear.”
He looks at me.
“Where’s your sense of humor, kid?”
He holds his remote control like a club. “I cannot turn it off or change channels or even mute the sound.”
“I have some maintenance issues with my boob tube too, Smitty.”
“What is this language they are speaking?”
Damned if I know. I open his fridge and say, “It’s all Greek to me, but it’s got to be Hebrew. Hey, how’s your bacon and pork chops holding out?”
***
Ziggy
and I were spending our nights in a different breed of limbo. Like children on restriction, we’d been ordered to new quarters: bunks in the 803rd Liaison Detachment’s supply room.
It was not punishment for misbehavior, but rather to keep tabs on us and our strong backs, which were often required on minimal notice, as supplies and machines arrived at all hours, at an accelerated pace. The Annex must’ve been packed to the gills.
Cerebrum
2111X and CAN-DO had to be on the verge of being operational.
We were incarcerated slaves, secured by a front-door lock Ziggy could pick in the span of a yawn. The Annex’s stepped-up regimen also demanded our scrounging skills to acquire
matériel
neither shipped in nor previously anticipated. Our leashes temporarily cut, we filled shopping lists. They were eclectic, as if from a frat house scavenger hunt: copper wiring, plastic tubing, adhesive tape, odd-sized light bulbs, a miscellany of screws and bolts. We came through on these special assignments, with and without the aid of Mr. Singh. Brigadier General Whipple personally issued us the piasters I estimated we needed.
“Seed money,” he’d quip as I stood in his doorway at the position of attention, palm extended. “It is planting season.”
His terrarium/office smelled increasingly pungent and mossy. It was as choked with growing things as the deepest, darkest, triple-canopy jungle. Light from the windows did not filter inward. I swear I heard monkeys and exotic birds.
One evening, Mai knocked on the 803rd’s door and called to me. Mai, who I’d tried and tried to make go AWOL from my every thought. She’d slipped a note under it, saying she’d like to see me, friend to friend, an innocent outing,
my
choice of where and when.
I carefully analyzed this overture, and its possible consequences of dishonor, a general court martial, the death penalty, et al. I analyzed it for at least a hundredth of a second. My trepidation lasted a full one-thousandth of a second longer.
My heart and my groin overrode my brain. I slipped the note to my Dragon Lady, my Mata Hari, saying YES!!!
TOMORROW?
She asked when and where. I suggested eleven in the morning and would she like to go to the zoo? I’d been meaning to visit it anyway. Yes, she wrote back, she would love to. She’d meet me there, by the big cats.
When she was gone, I consulted Ziggy.
“Whadduya think, Zig?”
His face was in a story anthology. The jacket depicted a free-for-all battle of flying saucers and spacewalkers brandishing ray guns.
A wacky scene then, but commonplace decades hence in video games.
“It’s your ass they’ll fry.”
“I always cherish your advice, man.”
***
The
Saigon
Botanical Gardens
and Zoo, on the northeast edge of downtown by the
Saigon
River
and
National
Museum
, wasn’t as rundown as I thought it’d be, but it was getting there.
The larger animals, such as the big kitties, appeared moth-eaten and on short rations.
Some showed their ribs. I pictured French men and ladies in the 1920s taking their kiddies here, the girls carrying parasols, the boys in knickers, rolling hoops.
I’d halfway decided to bag it, to stand her up. I didn’t need her kind of trouble. But when I spotted my Dragon Lady at a distance, my heart rate accelerated to
the redline
.
To hell with the perils of associating with an enemy agent.
Fuck it, bring on the firing squad.
“My entire life,” she said when we met and shook hands, “I no go to zoo.”
Giving her a unique experience in her homeland puffed my chest.
“My first time here too.”
After the zoo, we both wanted to walk around, and central Saigon was compact. I showed her what was left of the U.S. Embassy. Boarded up and in the process of being cleaned out, it was ugly and chilling. I was gauging her reaction, a half-assed loyalty test. To be a spy was one thing, to wear the sapper’s hat quite another. She shivered in real or mock horror and made no comment.
At the
Port
of
Saigon
, vehicles and crates and pallets were filling up dockside space, with more ships queued up to unload. We came upon gray waist-high bales of raw rubber that caught my attention. They’d been trucked or barged in from plantations. And I’d thought all rubber was synthetic.
I told her about Ziggy, our bet whether he could sail a rock across the river.
“You were bored?”
“I’m not now.”
“Me neither, Joe.”
“Too bad it’s not earlier. The Central Market is closed for the day and hosed down,” I small-talked. “It has it all if you can stand the smell. I once bought a whole pineapple from a lady for three piasters. The lady peeled it for me like an apple and stuck it on a stick.”
Mai insisted on my trying an encore performance. We did find a pineapple lady on an adjacent corner, and to Mai’s delight, I ate it all and made a sticky mess of myself to boot. As she dabbed me with her hankie, laughing, I fought off wasps and various flying critters on the attack.
Great fun.
There were smaller markets and shops on nearby streets. I pointed at cans of cottonseed oil stacked at a sidewalk stall. Below the clasped hands on the label was DONATED BY THE PEOPLE OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. NOT TO BE SOLD OR EXCHANGED.
“Our tax dollars at work,” I said.
Mai didn’t get it.
“See, we send
Vietnam
all these goodies,” I explained. “The cooking oil’s useful, but it’s in gallon tins. I’d be worrying it’d go rancid in the heat. Look beside it.
Canned sardines.
Catsup.
Mustard.
I’ve even seen peanut butter, which the average Vietnamese will upchuck at the sight of. Folks don’t always steal this stuff. They buy it from somebody who sells it to buy food they appreciate, like dried fish and rice.”
“I buy oil. I no have more oil. I fix you dinner again, Joe.”
As if nothing had happened, pun intended. As if our first dinner date hadn’t been a fucking disaster (adjective intended). Was I in for
an intelligence
grilling? Were her espionage colleagues lying in wait in her apartment to inject me with truth serum until I told all?
And/or to shove bamboo shoots under my fingernails?
I visualized nasty pieces of work
who
looked like Richard Loo in
The Purple Heart
and an Oriental Peter Lorre.
I recklessly blurted, “Okay, but my turn, Mai. I’m cooking.”
She smiled and nodded in acquiescence.
As a food preparation expert, I had one tiny problem. I hadn’t boiled an egg before the army made me into a cook. In their cooking school, my skills regressed.
“A gallon’s too big,” I guessed, delaying the subject by hunting for her oil.
We found a one-liter bottle of sesame oil from
Thailand
.
“You are expert army cook, Joe?”
“I can cook. Sort of,” I said. “Not as well as you, but the army made a cook out of me.”
Mai asked, “Have you ever cooked Vietnamese food?”
“No.”
“What food you most like to cook?”
“Uh,” I answered, stumped.
“When you boy-san, you dream of you a chef?”
Little did either of us know that the chef dream came far later. From this moment to my zenith as an executive chef at swanky downtown restaurants, it was a jump from kindergarten to grad school.
“No, and they don’t train chefs in the army, Mai. They train cooks. They assigned me to cooking school after Basic, not on aptitude or personal choice, but because there was a slot.
An opening to fill.
I was happy because it was preferable to the infantry. Mess halls are warm and have roofs and you don’t get KP because the KPs are accountable to you.”
“You proud of your work?”
“One time only.
It’s the highlight of my army career. Have you eaten Italian spaghetti?”
“No.”
“I love spaghetti. Not army spaghetti. The way they do it, you have a sauce mix that comes in powder in gigantic cans,” I said, stretching my arms, exaggerating slightly. “You cook hamburger in pots. You add water and the powder. You can drain the hamburger grease if you feel like it. Some cooks do, many don’t,
so
what they’re ladling up in the chow line is an island of red goo inside a moat of orange grease. It’s served on noodles that are
either wet and
mushy or stuck together like glue from being dried out.”
Mai made a face.
“One spaghetti day there was a crate of tomatoes we’d forgotten to cut up into a salad, and they were going overripe. I ran to the post library and checked out a cookbook. I chopped the tomatoes into the standard sauce to simmer. I cooked the hamburger and drained the grease. Added some herbs I found nobody’d touched in years. You had to wipe the dust off the labels and it was hard getting the lids off the bottles.”
“GI like?”
“Oh yeah.
The troops gobbled it down and asked for seconds. It’s unheard of to ask for seconds in a mess hall with the exception of lifers whose taste buds are shot. My timing was lousy. The post mess officer made a surprise inspection. He gigged us, saying my spaghetti didn’t follow regulations. He warned me not to do it again, and the mess sergeant chewed my butt royally.”
“I am not good cook.”
“Yes you are, Mai. You’re a wonderful cook. I know that to be a fact.”
“Cook Italian spaghetti for me, Joe.”
“Today?”
“Yes.”
We shopped, improvising: Chinese noodles, a can of clasped-hands stewed tomatoes, mushrooms that looked like eels, a long, skinny loaf of hot-out-of-the-oven French bread, and a jug of Australian red wine.
At an herb stall, the wares were aromatic and alien to me. After I sniffed my approval of a half-dozen of them, Mai negotiated in mile-a-minute Vietnamese, and I paid. In
Saigon
, shopping was same-same as buying a car at home. You did not pay the figure they wrote on the windshield with shaving cream.
At her place, hers and the colonel’s, I didn’t beat around the bush. I opened the wardrobe. No fatigues, no sign of “Jakie.” For whatever reason, the technical books were gone from her nightstand too.