Profane Men (5 page)

“Over here you learn to live with death.”

— in-country wisdom

I wheel the jeep through a miniature version of Soul Alley, what Chi and I call Seoul Alley in Little Chinatown, scattering bicycles and b-girls, dodging axle-busting chunks of blacktopped road and tire-eating potholes, wheeling the battered four-wheel drive through the cycles and the street shit. Tu Do it ain't.

Ramshackle hootches, shanties, and corrugated tin roofs begin to thin out. I hang a hard right into a nearly invisible and improbably narrow side street that ends abruptly in a dark cul-de-sac between a pair of vendor's sleaze-stalls and a bar called, not without wit, Crazy Horse.

I abandon my jeep again with a Hail Mary and hit the bar. Nodding to a couple of the regulars and bar girls, I cut through the interior and go straight out the back door. Crossing a small courtyard about the size of three trashcans, I enter a plain, unmarked wooden door and climb the first flight of stairs, going up real loud and doing it so everybody knows I know they know. I have some real nervous neighbors here and there.

One of the brothers is always singing this song about how his papa is a Mau Mau, and I sing this lovely lyric as I hit the stairs, singing at the top of my voice so no one will suspect I am out of breath.

I open the door, and when I see her it happens as it always happens. My world just changes, brightens, then softens. Whatever load I'm carrying I leave back on those steps. It all lifts off me the moment I look at her.

Chi is about as far from the Western sex goddess image as you can get, though I always think of her as lovely. Tiny-boned and reed-slim, she has a body almost without curve. Even in her work clothes, slit cheongsams and miniskirts, tottering on three-inch high heels, her legs are just too thin to be spectacular.

Her ass is just a small rear end, functional but nothing too decorative. Walking away from you, she evokes few lustful thoughts. Even by Asian standards, her thin body is so flat-chested that at first glance the nipples appear to be nearly as large as the breasts themselves. Taken by itself, Chi has the body of a small, well-developed but relatively unattractive child.

Nor is her face particularly beautiful or even striking. The skin is pliant, almost rubbery to the touch, smooth and resilient over her whole body. From the physical aspect, her most noteworthy attributes are her gorgeous eyes and sleek, long hair that falls to her ass in a straight, shiny cascade of black silkiness. I love to feel that mane of hair, to cup my hand behind her neck and hold that sweet head in my hand.

She had learned early on to compensate for any physical endowments that she might have lacked. It was in her attitude that she dazzled and charmed. She had a personality so feminine that just her presence in a room could open me up like a tropical flower. I wasn't alone. Within a few minutes she'd have most men falling all over themselves trying to please her. And since her job was to please me, she was very, very popular.

“Hi, baby,” she said in that soft, hoarse whisper that I loved, coming to me and arching up on her tiptoes as I bent down to kiss her. God, it was so good to be home. We barely had to speak.

“Hello, love.”

“Ummmmm.”

“So tired.”

“Yeah.”

“Can you stay tonight?”

“Oh, yeah.” We kissed again and she went to get me a beer. Even a year ago, had someone told me that this would be happening to me, the notion would have been so alien that I would have been unable to respond.

“ — and you're going to fall in love with an Oriental prostitute . . .” (Say
what?)
Steeped as I was in the usual machismo, heritage, and social custom, the prideful baggage of vanity and ego that most American males lift as soon as they can reason, I would have been an unlikely candidate for Chi.

But as I learned more about who she was, who she really was, the things that had once seemed so important lost their relevance over here. And what had begun as pay sex had evolved into something quite dear. I'd learned to see traits, values, and skills once overlooked as inconsequential as coveted, rare gifts. I treasured her sweetness, wisdom, serenity, and the sweet-sour soulfulness of her tough vulnerability. I valued Chi's attentiveness, for example, the way I'd once valued big tits in a low-cut dress.

I was still enough of an asshole that I wanted the big tits just as much as ever. And the girls downstairs who had silicone jobs always got my attention right away. But Chi had become a helluva lot more than sex for me. I tried to think about a future for us, but nothing ever came to mind. Maybe I didn't really believe I had a future. To Chi's credit, there were no requests, no demands, only the good sweetness between us.

Prostitution carries no onus of immorality in the lower-class Vietnamese family as it would back home. The exigent needs of survival are sufficiently obvious to the pragmatic Asian mind that it is simply viewed as obtainable work for a certain demographic percentage of the female population. No more stigma attaches to it than might to certain coal miners in Appalachia, foundry, factory, or mill workers in Indiana, or similarly throughout the American blue-collar substrata. You take what work there is. The work carried few imputations of rightness or ethical posture. In any event, the act of sex was perceived as more of a biological and less of a metaphysical phenomenon.

“Mercy boo-coo, Madame Gazelle,” I tell her in my redneck-impression voice as she sets the beer in front of me. Fractured French knocks her out for some reason. She holds a cool, damp cloth to the back of my neck, and I can feel her tiny, gentle fingers ever so lightly massaging my eyelids.

“Sic my butterflies on ya, woman,” I say, fluttering my eyelashes against her small, soft hand as she giggles. We have our small delights.

“How do you handle an elephant with three balls?”

— latrine set-up line

“You walk him and pitch to the hippo.”

— latrine punch line

— and then that scratched out and “You grab him by the cock.”

— and below that

“Grab Me by the cock, you fag!”

— and that scratched out and in big letters

“I eat pussy, you cheezdix.”

— Spec 4 Don 3/4

— and finally

“Don lick dick.”

— Dick, 1st NVA Regiment

We are at Chi's place, little more than a large walk-in closet, but hers. Beyond and above and just out of handgun range of the bar called Crazy Horse.

I look at my sweet lady. She looks at me and smiles.

“Hi,” she says in her softest whisper.

But I cannot pass a straight line and I reply, “Not quite yet.” I will remedy that immediately per Southeast Asian Unit/Covert Operation Group standing operating procedure for the pleasure of the Commander, U.S. Military Assistance Command, Vietnam, your basic SAUCOG(SOP)ComUSMACV. The smoking lamp is lit, and I tell her so.

“Fire 'em up if you got 'em.”

I feel like I'm stoned by osmosis, from proximity to the poisons of the hooded cobra, that somehow I've signed away my soul. Somewhere between “the farm” in Virginia, and the sand dunes of Cam Ranh Bay and here . . . I lost it. Maybe it left in the body bags, old meat going out — new meat coming in. Maybe it got up and booked the first time I heard a single-digit midget yell at a newby, “You only
got
three-six-fiver and a wake-up. Harrrrr har harrrrrrrrrrr.” What the hell have I gone and done. My reveries are interrupted by a clump of boots on the rickety stairs.

“Mus' be Jon,” she says.

“Come!” I say as he knocks loudly.

“If you say so, then it is,” D'Allesandro comes in and immediately lifts her up for a big smooch.

“You make some rady numbah one husban', Jon. You debbil!”

“All us horny GIs are just alike, Chi.” They have this sex number they both like to run on me all the time.

“What's to it, mano.”

“Nuttin' to it.” He looks up at me with eyes like midnight gravestones. I flash on the stare contest D'Allesandro and the colonel must have had, the cobra and the black mamba.

“Ugly guinea bastard,” I say.

“Dickeye fuck, ya.”

“Bammy-bam,
si'l vouz plait, my
cherry,” I request, using the familiar corruption of Ba Muoi Ba, and Chi goes off to fetch more bottles of poisonous Vietnamese beer.

“Ahhh-so.”

“I love it. Fuckin' thirty-seven guard dogs runnin' around shittin' all over themselves. Fuckin' slope bodyguards. Colonel's a fuckin' piece of work, ain't he? Shit. I always come away from him ready to fall down a fucking hole and find Judy Garland and the Tin Man down there.”

“Shit. You high already, ya fuck?”

“Not yet, but I'm fixin' to git thataway.”

D'Allesandro is another of those who strikes me as totally fearless. How the fuck can they be like that? Some of them, for all their tough guy airs, you figure their foolhardiness is simple stupidity. But others — Jon, for example — are intelligent, ostensibly sensible men who have just given themselves over to it.

Brave beyond any description in the field. Loving contact, whether they admit it or not. Not necessarily heroic — heroes get dead fast — but one of the rare breed that genuinely gets off on it. They evince a combination of talent and perilous self-assurance that typifies this brand of lithe, tough, uninjured youth. They usually burn out after a few firefights.

Jon affected the hero's sensibilities. Small-unit tactics and strategy. Fortifications and fields of fire. Camouflage and concealment. Escape and evasion. The gospels according to the mercenary testament. Their vital signs hummed and ticked and glowed. Mere work was their thrust. And the coldness was there, even in the youngest among them.

I can still see Jon D. all these years later, see him back there with Shooter Price and the others, guns up, barrels hot, surrounded by warm brass and death stink, and never a moment of fear showing. They would just look at each other and sort of go, “Well, smack it. Good fuckin' luck, eh? Next case.” They could just breathe deeply and step back from it and be right where they were before. Not me. I was fucking paralyzed. Scared shitless doesn't describe it.

“Merci, mon amour,”
I tell her as Chi laughs, setting the bottles of Luke-the-Gook “33” down on our scarred, chipped table.

“Here's looking up your address,” he says, taking a long pull at the beer. I do likewise. “Aaaaaaahhhh. Now
that's
formaldehyde.”

“You 'bout half wrecked already, right?”

“No.”

“Bullshit.”

“Really. I did a little hash with the magic man downstairs. I was waitin' on you, asshole.”

“Well. What the fuck are you waitin' on now, asshole?” We laugh. I get up.

“You get any of that good righteous dew?”

“Is piss yella?”

“Hey.”

“Say?”

“How's it feel to be drinkin' and smokin' witcher big-time, freelance gunman. Huh? Pretty exciting or what?”

“Huh? Oh, yeah. Shit. Golly. Gee. It's hard to put into words.”

“Uh-huh.”

“How about, lower than shark shit and it's on the bottom of the fuckin' ocean.”

“That's the way you feel too, eh?”

“I feel lower than a snake's dick.”

“That's pretty fuckin' low.”

“We got this big ugly motherfuck of a war goin' on, and here we're supposed to waste a fucking radio station? This is a mission? This is a hand job.”

“‘This is no mission, it's a fuckin' sentence.”

“‘Shit.” I pinch the twist off.

I flashed on the Mission Profile Acceptance. We had to sign a fuckin' contract, like we had some kind of fuckin' choice. What would they have done if we'd refused to sign the son of a buck, send us to fucking Vietnam? I barely glanced at the shit. My impression was that it was one of those contracts where the big print said you were forbidden to read the little print.

“I know how I feel.”

“'Zat right?”

“I feel like somebody butt-stroked me right between the running lights.”

“Fuckin' weird lash-up.” I ask him about the contract. “Is that some shit? Sign a contract for a mission. I've already signed every goddamn thing from an agreement that I never belonged to the Sons of Italy or the AFL-CIO or the German Dickbinders Club or whatever, to a fuckin' hazard waiver, what the fuck more is there to sign? They own our balls for the tour, man.”

“I didn't even read that mother raper. I'll sign anything. I don't give a rat fuck.” We down the last of the warm formaldehyde and I light up.

“Be with this — some good gangster.” He takes a big hit.

“Ummmmmmf.”

“Unnnnnnnn. I love that routine where he lays the ole eyeballs on ya and doesn't say anything for about a minute and a half. Whatever works for ya.”

“Som'bitch stared me
right
down,” I tell him. “I just said fuck it and looked around at the maps. Evil-eye motherfuck.”

“Whooofffff. Shit's all fucking right.”

“Ummmmm.” Room is starting to smell pretty damn fine.

“Win some hearts and behinds with this shit.”

D'Allesandro twirls his empty in a tabletop puddle, slowly letting out potent gangster in a stream of gray-green smoke. I pictured him and the cobra eyeballing each other. Paper covers rock. The old man was a tough, hardass spook who'd come from up around the Citadel, where he'd supposedly been running a secret cadre of headhunters near the big CIA station. He had these real hairy South Viets for bodyguards. Not the Marvin the Arvin pussies you hear about. Hard-core.

The colonel was a genuine field spook and not about to come in from the cold as mythologized in Cornwellian song and story. He was the kind of hardbark-connected fucker who could get you your own personal body bag without much trouble at all.

“Ummmmmm, goddamn.”

“Whatdya think.”

“I think this
is
some righteous shit,” D'Allesandro says, exhaling eighty-dollar Columbian. “Where the fuck you get this shit, roll a supply sergeant?”

“So goddamn it, what do ya
think,
man? I mean, are we gonna take some names or what? You see those grave makers. Motherfucker.”

“Couple them shines are goddamn big enough, that's for fuckin' sure. You check out that goddamn skinny boy? Where'd that ugly fucker come from? Look like they hauled his ass outta some damn garbage heap.”

“I hope you ain't talkin' bout my new bes' friend, Harold Grein. Don't fuck with me 'n' Harold, dude.” We laugh.

“Hey,” I say, “Howja like the li'l southern boy. Howdja like to kick some of his little booty?”

“He didn't took so bad to me, man. I just walked up to his ass and said, umm, let me uh introduce myself, dude. I'm a man of wealth and taste. If you want to live, you be sure not to get in my way, you punk cracker. My name is Jon D'Allesandro.” D'Allesandro laughs.

He had the mercenary's obsession with and love for weaponry. He was the type called a “rock 'n' roll freak,” meaning that some deep inner compulsion, some Fourth of July kind of smoldering firecracker of a lust tucked away down in there really got off on it.

Just since I'd known him, I'd seen him with a 14, an Uzi, a 16, and his latest close-range pride and joy: a Military Armaments Corporation Model 10 in full auto. This was the original, real McCoy, and Lord knows what goods or services he'd fragged to some company gunrunner for this baby. She was gunsmith-blueprinted, dead bang on, silenced with a Sionics type supressor/silencer, and capable of spitting out a stream of .45-caliber justice with the touch of a trigger finger. In D'Allesandro's expert hands the MAC/10 was one lethal, motherfucking hose of instant death up close and personal.

In Jon's hands, weapons of any kind took on another dimension. Like any craftsman, he always made it look so easy. He had none of the — what's the word, aversion? — to a tool that dispenses death and destruction that is natural for most men. Even that doesn't quite nail it down. You had the feeling that he was instantly at home with a slingshot, a .44 Mag, an over-and-under, a LAW, any damn thing from a crossbow to a surface-to-air missile. If you could put your hands on it and fire it, D'Allesandro was in harmony with it.

But it was one thing to be good with guns, and something else again to watch D'Allesandro with an Ingram. I'd heard he'd taken off two boatloads of Viet Cong with an improbable — hell no, call it miraculous — sequence of fast bursts, advanced algorithmic triggernometry, and watching him perform gave you a tingling feel that was akin to watching an artist at work. I would see him burn the Ingram out at an A Camp up in boonierat land, playing his instrument the way Diz blew riffs, with a totality of sureness and startling economy of energies. D'Allesandro was fire and ice.

“Yeah,” I said, sobering up in spite of my best efforts. “Grave makers.” We looked at each other.

“Yeah. But whose?”

“Somethin' wrong here, mano.” I shook my head. “Somediing very, very wrong.”

“You believe this shit.”

“Fuck no. I don' even believe this fucked-up country is here. I sure as shit don't believe this other bogus bullshit.”

“I feel a little tickle back in the seat of my pants — you know, like in the heinie region — feel something tryin' to sneak up the ole South American pipeline.”

“Comin' up the old choco-lah-tay highway, eh?”

“That's the one, dude. The telltale tickle. Somebody's waitin' for us to bend over and pick up the soap and —
wham-o!
”

“Right up the poop chute. I know the feeling well.”

“There's only one thing you can say about it, I mean, you got to look at the bright side, right?”

“Really.”

“They ain't gettin' no cherry.”