“So what’s with the air conditioners, Zig?”
Turning a page, he shrugged and grunted. End of analysis.
Captain Papersmith swaggered outside in jungle fatigues and an Aussie bush hat. We didn’t recognize him till he climbed into the Jeep. We couldn’t look at him or we’d crack up. Next stop was the U.S. Navy Commissary.
The captain handed us each $6.25. We knew what to do. Each GI in
Vietnam
was entitled to five cartons of American cigarettes per month at a commissary or PX. They sold for $1.25 per. They went for $5 on the black market and wound up on the street in individual packs for somewhat more, which was why they were rationed. American smokes were like gold. Ruby Queens, the domestic brand, tasted like asphalt and stunk like a car fire.
Ziggy, the captain, and I bought our allotted five cartons of Salems. I decided to hold onto a carton for Charlie, Ziggy’s and my Vietnamese buddy. The captain bought all the Tide detergent we could carry (Tide and Salems were the nylons and chocolate bars of the Vietnam War). He also bought Royal Crown whiskey, frozen chicken parts, canned peaches, toilet paper, Louisiana hot sauce, and Tampax.
He steered us toward Cholon, Saigon’s Chinese district. Ziggy winked, letting me know he knew what was going on in case I didn’t.
The Dragon Lady!
My brainstorm had borne fruit faster than I dreamed. My heart pumped supersonically. I was woozy, barely able to stay in my lane, not that it much mattered in
Saigon
traffic.
We parked on an alleyway of a street. The captain ducked under a low doorway, making several trips in with his contraband. The neighborhood people, whether squatting or strolling by or hanging up laundry or emptying buckets, if they gave us a glance, it went right through us. We were a million miles from
Tu Do Street
and we were unwelcome.
We were as inscrutable to them as they were to us. We were The Unfathomable Occident. “East is east, and west is west, and never the twain shall meet” ran in both directions.
We figured the captain would be taking his own sweet time, to hell with us sitting out here, broiling under a relentless sun, smelling the consequences of an inadequate sewage system. I’d like to’ve brought a book on the French Indochina War I was reading, so I got caught up on doing nothing by thinking of the Dragon Lady and her cartoon counterpart. My flesh-and-blood Dragon Lady was down that alley, accommodating Captain Papersmith’s needs.
I took out her photo again and sighed.
I didn’t care if Papersmith was paying her with cash and PX goods, she was mine. I was jealous beyond words.
She was no longer a comic strip and a photo. She was baby-smooth skin and the slightest of overbites and long silken hair. I pictured her beneath the captain, stifling a yawn and doing her nails as he inexpertly rutted.
A lovely Vietnamese woman in a black and white
áo-dài
emerged from where Captain Papersmith had entered, shaking a small rug. Her cheekbones were high, her hair glossy and long. The set of her mouth indicated displeasure.
It was
her
.
I must’ve levitated, for I found myself standing on the driver’s seat without awareness of bolting up. She looked up from her chore. She had been waiting her entire life for her true love. She was waiting for me.
I saw what the Polaroid only hinted at. My Dragon Lady was exotic because she wasn’t exotic at all. She was as wholesome as wholesome could be. She was a little older than me, not old but intriguing, alluring, mature-woman old. There was something in her eyes, a blend of lust and wariness. Those eyes did not deviate from mine.
As if playing a knuckleheaded character out of a Frankie Avalon-Annette Funicello beach party movie, I blew her a kiss. Expressing no emotion, she squinted at me,
then
went inside.
“Ziggy,” I said hoarsely as I sat.
“My Dragon Lady.
I blew it by blowing a kiss. I was a witless dipshit dork right out of
Beach Blanket Bingo
. Oh man, I fucked up royally!”
Ziggy hadn’t seen her. He jabbed a finger at the cover of his new pulp, a picture worth at least a thousand words. The She-Devil of Alpha Centauri had tights, a whip, a sneer and three breasts.
“The captain’s gal,” said Ziggy. “I betcha this here gal’s finer.”
Ziggy and his love of the moment, his tri-
titted
Amazon from outer space.
He was putting more and more distance between himself and reality.
I looked at him. A parking strip of eyebrows shaded small dark eyes that seemed to narrow as he concentrated intensely on his sci-fi. A glance at the overall package, and you might gauge the Zigster as a retard.
Big fucking mistake.
“Dragon Lady from another planet.
It’s gonna be tough to get a date with her, man,” I said. “My woman is
earthly
. Didn’t you see her, Zig? How could you’ve missed her?
The captain’s gal, my Dragon Lady, who maybe isn’t the captain’s gal.
I mean, what’s he doing while she’s shaking that rug?”
Our leader lurched outside, blinking in the sunlight and hitching up his trousers. He had one jungle boot on and the other dangling from his mouth by a lace. That guerrilla fighter hat was on sideways, Napoleon-like.
A woman chased out behind him, cackling and pinching his bare, skinny ass. She was a plain Vietnamese in black pajamas, well over thirty-five, far older than my Dragon Lady. The cackler was nothing to write home about, thin and shapeless, a Vietnamese Plain Jane, although a mild improvement to the captain’s horse-faced, slide rule heiress.
Definitely not exotic.
Not my Dragon Lady. Not even close.
Neighbors made sure to avert their eyes. Not because of Captain Papersmith, I sensed, but rather the cackler. Was she the neighborhood honcho?
“Captain, sir,” I said when he’d stumbled into the Jeep and we were underway. “The lady in the premises doing housework, who is she, sir?”
“My friend Mai,” he said with a belch and a hiccup. “Mai can be a prude.
Plays hard to get.
She arouses me,
then
pawns me off on her sister, who thinks that’s amusing. It was really Quyen’s idea. She bosses Mai and the whole neighborhood around.”
Mai
.
I’d heard her name for the first time.
He hiccupped again.
“The sister, Quinn.
That bitch has a man’s name, which figures. Everybody jumps when she says
boo
.”
“I believe that’s Q-u-y-e-n, sir, not Q-u-i-n-n.”
“Stop splitting hairs, soldier.
Have you ever been in love, Joe?
Achingly, intensely in love?”
“Oh, yes, sir.”
“And have you ever been treated this shamefully, after bearing generous gifts and all?”
“Uh, maybe Mai
is
hard to get. Maybe it isn’t an act, sir.”
“Good Christ Almighty, Private!” he slurred. “Is this your first day in-country? Vietnamese whores don’t play hard to get. White women play get to hard. I mean hard to
get. White women have convenient headaches.
My wife and her headaches.
Mildred has a migraine that automatically strikes when the sun goes down. I thought you were a man of the world, Joe.”
I didn’t reply. I was too elated to speak. Mai had rejected Captain Papersmith’s sexual advances. The good captain had a case of lover’s nuts and was forced to settle for a second choice, Quyen the Cackler and Neighborhood Boss.
He didn’t say anything the rest of the way and was curled in the fetal position on the back seat and snoring when we reached his BOQ. As we poured him into the lobby, each holding him by an armpit, a fantasy developed. Mai had seen me through the window before crossing her legs for the captain. She had orchestrated the switcheroo, not Quyen.
She had pledged her devotion to me, her true love.
THE 803RD Liaison Detachment had no barracks, so Ziggy and I were billeted in a fleabag hotel three blocks from our duty station. The room was furnished with two bunks, a sink, and a dresser. The crapper was down the hall. Rats on the prowl were as big and ugly as poodles. Water that dribbled out of our sink was an interesting shade of ochre.
We were slacking on our beds, sucking on Mr. Singh’s Johnny
Red,
me reading a letter and devouring my purloined Polaroid photograph of preeminent pulchritude (pardon my
Agnewesque
alliteration.).
The photo now had a name.
Mai.
Mai, my Dragon Lady.
I watched a gecko on the ceiling right above me. You could stare at them for hours and they wouldn’t budge. But look away for a few seconds,
then
look back--
they’ll’ve
moved two feet.
My one letter was my weekly average since my sort-of-fiancée had married my best civilian friend, Doug. Little did we know that if Judy had clung to me, she would’ve been the first of
six
wives, my first innocent marital
victim.
At her husband’s behest, contact was severed, despite it being friend-to-friend correspondence. No sweat. She’d done the smart thing.
The letter was from my mother.
Dear Joe:
Your brother has applied for three fellowships while he does his research and writes his dissertation. Boeing has been recruiting, no, hounding him to write his own ticket when he receives his aerodynamics PhD and moves on to postdoctoral work on Lord knows what.
So
so
many choices! I’ll let you know. Your stepfather and I remain on speaking terms.
Barely.
There is business to conclude when
a family parts
and we are accomplishing this amicably. To his credit, he arranges that his paramour be indisposed when we confer. Please be cautious. Vietnam is becoming more prominent in the news. I don’t care for what I see, read and hear.
Your concerned mother
It was a routine letter. We never were an intimate family. Our communication could have been notes from an insurance agent to a client. However, that colon after “Dear Joe” was a dagger through my heart. We’d been distantly polite for the longest time, but the affectionless salutations were always punctuated with commas. The colon meant movement. It meant increased coolness. It was businesslike, verging on iciness. The Pentagon would term it escalation.
There was an underlayment of crabbiness in the letter too, no doubt a result of the betrayal and separation. Frankly, I wish it’d happened long ago. Aside from her unhappiness, my only regret was that she was the
dumpee
, not the dumper.
On the plus side, the letter included last Sunday’s comics. Terry Lee was in topnotch form, yet another confrontation with the Dragon Lady brewing. It must have saddened Mother that I, at age twenty-four, had as my only passion a woman spun off from the funnies. Only Ziggy knew of my Dragon Lady obsession. Mother would have a cow.
In contrast, my brother Jack, a tender twenty-two, was a light shining as intergalactically bright as a plot line in a Ziggy magazine. Unfortunately, Jack was a helluva good guy. He made it impossible for me to hate him.
And don’t get me wrong, I’m not whining. Mother hadn’t reminded me lately that my IQ score was only fifteen points below my brother’s, who was the second smartest person I’d ever known. A bewildering waste of potential, she’d often said.
From where I am nowadays in The Great Beyond, with nothing earthly but memories, I’m glad she could enjoy Jack and her adoration of him while she could.
Poor Mother.
Not long after this glowing letter, Jack began to change. He fell head over heels for a hippie girl who knew all the tricks in and out of bed.
He went totally gaga and bohemian, no halfway measures for him. Jack had no further desire to spend his life in a wind tunnel. He smoked a variety of vegetation, burned his draft card,
told
the Establishment in many a way to go shit in its hat. Right when he had a Nobel in his sights.
Well, a Nobel was a stretch on Mother’s part, but you get the idea. Her disappointment with him was like a piano falling out of a sixth floor window on her. In comparison, I was a dull, lingering toothache. Jack eventually shaped up and went on to teach grad students at MIT.
My kitchen in my The Great Beyond pad and the rations that needed no cooking?
I finally get the gag. The inspiration for that jab by my keepers, the sadistic bastards, was my moderately successful career as a chef, a culinary career that was a long segue from army cook to civilian fry cook to dinner cook to sous chef to executive chef. My kitchens were cramped and crowded, and as hot as where everyone predicted I’d be now. When you were slammed out front, the job was a carefully frantic choreography to keep up with the orders while avoiding an accident with a hot spill or a stove burner.
Those celebrity chefs on the food channels and their cutesy stunts?
For the most part, that is one-hundred-percent USDA-prime bullshit. Those spacious kitchens and support staff behind the camera do not exist in the real world. To me, those people are in the category of dancing bears and leprechauns.
Yep, Mother’s little boys have done her proud.
My stepdaddy was a different story.
My mother taught algebra and differential equations. He taught freshman composition and creative writing at the same Seattle-area junior college. A frustrated, unpublished author, Stepfather wrote worse Hemingway than entries in the Bad Hemingway Contests that came along later.
Stepfather was contemptuous of JC academic standards, bitter that no four-year school had been at all impressed by his barrage of application letters. Not so contemptuous, it seemed, of the sophomore honor student for whom he left my mother to shack up with. I’d never seen her, so I couldn’t comment on my pseudointellectual stepdaddy’s attraction other than it was unlikely due to her intellect and superior grades.
Regardless how I felt about him, I did feel semi-badly when he
succumbed
young to a coronary in 1970. In spite of his professional bitterness (a factor in his demise?), he had led a useful life. I know I felt worse than Mother.
My mother reported that Stepfather’s “tramp’s” name was Wendi and that Wendi dotted the “i” with a bubble. According to her, Wendi was broad about the beam, wore horn-rimmed glasses, and had a permanent wave right out of a
Which
Twin Has The
Toni?
advertisement
.
I considered offering to put a move on Wendi when I got home, a son getting in a shot for his mama with a one-night stand, a slap in the wrongdoer’s face. But that was too crude, even for me.
Or so I thought at the time.
Oh, if I could reach Mother now! Our extra-worldly gagmeisters have provided telephone directories and she is listed. My father, late of
Inchon
, is too. However, no names I recalled from
Vietnam
were,
a growing puzzlement to me. Virtually everybody else is listed. Amelia Earhart, Judge Crater, Jimmy Hoffa, anybody and everybody. We have telephones, all cellular. You can call any number, anywhere, and never ever get anything but a busy signal.
I shouldn’t whine about my home life, not after meeting Ziggy. He’d had it much, much worse. A native of Detroit, a Hamtramck Polack, he, too, had scarcely known his dad. The old man appeared on the doorstep every Christmas Eve, to hit his mom up for a loan and a quickie, unwilling to take no for an answer to either. Ziggy’s three brothers had different pops they never knew.
If Zig kept in touch with any kin except his mom, it was news to me.
Naturally, Ziggy’s face was buried in a sci-fi magazine.
“Zig, wanna go to mama-san’s for a short time?”
The inflection in his grunt translated to no.
“Yeah, me neither. I guess I’m not in the mood for poontang myself, but thought I’d ask.”
I was relieved. I had a fanciful sense that I’d be unfaithful to my Dragon Lady.
“Joey, I don’t mind if you wanna take the pitcher of that gal of yours to the latrine and pull your pud.”
“
Thanks,
Zig. I already have, twice.”
He laughed, thinking I was kidding.
Mama-san’s might be a nice diversion if just for a social call, to say hello, drink a beer or two, and pinch some ass before we barhopped. To her and her girls, we were friends as well as customers, even the young ladies who were probably Vietcong agents.
We couldn’t walk into Mama-san’s now without being asked by one or more girls when
South Vietnam
was going to become the fifty-first state. That rumor was now on everyone’s lips, and the majority view was that it couldn’t come soon enough.
Mama-san’s was an easy three-minute walk, down an alley across from a bicycle repair shop, in an unmarked building with a blanket hanging in the doorway. Mama-san wore black pajamas and a black-toothed grin from chewing betel nut for the past century. She charged the standard two-hundred piasters (approximately $1.60) for a short time. You were literally in and out.
Mama-san ran a quality cathouse. She maintained an orderly row of curtained cribs, and she changed sheets kind of frequently. Her girls were cute and they got weekly penicillin shots. Since we were regulars and mama-san liked us, we could take our shoes and pants all the way off without worrying that somebody’d rifle through our pockets. That was as close to romance as it got.
Thanks to Mama-san and her dedicated staff, Ziggy lost his cherry straddled by a ninety-pound wisp of a trollop who’d ridden him expertly, a rodeo champ on a bull. For him to be on top was unthinkable. I suspected that Ziggy’s ideal woman was a winged, bat-eared Martian siren, but Mama-san had none of them to offer at any price.
Mama-san’s was where we’d made friends with our Vietnamese buddy, Charlie. His relationship to Mama-san and his Vietnamese name were unknown. Charlie was a “cowboy,” a young Saigonese male who raced around town at night on a Honda motor scooter with his buddies instead of serving his country in the South Vietnamese Army--officially the Army of Vietnam (ARVN)--fighting or pretending to fight a fearless, fanatical, and terrifying enemy.
Charlie and Ziggy and I were of a consensus that confronting monolithic communism and propping up the domino were noble callings. We simply didn’t want the goddamn thing falling on our sorry asses.
Cowboys liked to buzz by a GI on a sidewalk and snatch the Seiko right off his wrist or to roll one for his wallet and kick in his ribs for the fun of it, but Charlie had not a mean bone nor the gumption for pure cowboy behavior. If he’d ever bent to
peer
pressure, his heart surely was not in it.
We hit it off immediately. Charlie spoke good English and spoke his mind with a sense of humor. When we first went out for beers, we learned that we smelled like butter to him, and he learned that he smelled like fish to us. He claimed he didn’t live on fish heads and rice as we’d believed most Vietnamese did. In fact, he’d developed a taste for hamburgers, hold the onions.
We all looked alike to him, even Ziggy.
“Me?” Ziggy asked. “I look the same as Joey and Westmoreland and every other round eye?”
“You look same
same
Joe, same
same
Westy, same
same
LBJ, same
same
Elvis, same
same
Beatles,” Charlie told Ziggy, looking him up and down. “Only you have more of you.”
I didn’t blame Charlie for dodging the South Vietnamese draft. ARVN soldiers were treated like week-old dog shit. Their commanders skimmed their pay, the piaster equivalent of fourteen Yankee dollars per month. What Charlie did when he wasn’t out goofing around with us, I hadn’t the foggiest. Charlie didn’t try to hustle us, and where criminal activity was concerned, well, you know the old saying about those who live in glass barracks.
“Hey, Zig, wanna go by just to see if Charlie’s there, see what he’s up to?”
Same grunt, different verse.
I asked, “The captain and his special assignments, what else do you think we’re gonna have to steal for him?”
“Dunno.”
“Enough air conditioners to drop
Indochina
’s temperature ten degrees going into the Annex is nuts, but this is the army, right?”
“Uh-huh.”
“What are they building in there that has to be so cool?”
“Dunno.”
“Price is no object, you know. Whatever it is they’re doing, they’re at the front of the requisitioning line.”
“Uh-huh.”
“They have their reasons even if they don’t have reasons. Remember what they told us in Basic? There’s the right way, the wrong way, and the army way.”
“Joey, I ever tell you? The Martians, they’re already out there amongst us.”
A startling change of subject and a new wrinkle.
“Uh, where?”