The Big Buddha Bicycle Race, page 16
In the limbo-land between worried thought and troubled dreams, I feared these loneliness attacks would keep worsening until one day I would lose my mind completely. I grew ever more certain of my impending madness when I started flying and my memories grew more confused—were those old dreams that tormented me as I lay there, or were those remembrances of real parties and places and friends and lovers that were mixing together like bad chemicals at the photo lab, incapable of bringing up a clear image? Once-critical pieces of reality were fading away into the dark sludge at the bottom of the developing tank.
Most troubling of all for me was the Perfect Lady. I might have met her on a weekend at the Cape during my two years at Holy Cross. Or it could have been anywhere in New England during the junior and senior years I spent at Brown playing drums on the weekends in a drunken haze and taking film classes on the side at Rhode Island School of Design. I could barely picture her—she was more like a shadow and a feeling—but a certainty lurked within me that we had once had a brief, perfect love affair. How could this faint memory of a college girl from Boston fill me with dread that my engagement to Danielle was a mistake? How could I doubt Danielle’s commitment when I had her letters and her picture in my locker just a few feet away? What was happening to my mind after the lights went out?
Tonight, while Leo snored, I drifted off and once again saw the familiar dreamscape. I’m home from the war and searching every corner of a strange Northeastern city for her, my perfect backup, my ace in the hole now that Danielle has finally called it off. I can almost remember her golden summer skin and her Swedish international movie star lips. Still in my jungle fatigues, I am desperately certain that she has been real and wonderful. I ache at the memory of losing her phone number forever in the back pocket of a pair of jeans in some forgotten Laundromat. I keep finding what looks like her old apartment building—a gray three-story wood-frame townhouse that has been divided into flats. But when I wander up the stairs and through the hallways inside, I can’t find her. Further down the street I find another building, exactly the same, another old home turned into student slum apartments, and I go inside and again find nothing. The night grows colder and a thin film of ice and snow begins to cover the letters on the street signs. I am about to give up when out of the corner of my eye I find her blurred name on a mailbox outside a decrepit tenement house. I go inside, feeling a rush of excitement as I climb the stairs, a smile forcing itself upon my pursed lips. The door to her flat is open, and as I approach, it seems like I am floating, drawn inside by a powerful magnetic force. A warm, contented feeling is beginning to wrap itself around me: instinctively I know where my slippers and robe are waiting, and I can hear the crackling of the hot embers in the fireplace. Inside, it is dark and empty. The Perfect Lady has vanished again.
The scene dissolves into a party full of student artists in a shabby apartment near Rhode Island School of Design, full of dope and half-finished bottles of Scotch and men and women in black turtlenecks talking seriously between puffs of cigarette smoke about Larry Rivers and Jasper Johns and how it all means so much, how the emptiness is the message, and through it all a Dark Woman in a black leather overcoat keeps appearing in the labyrinth doorways and finally I stumble upon her alone in the kitchen, a kitchen strewn with the refuse of a hundred postmodernist, postpubescent desperadoes but which has been abruptly evacuated, a miniature Dunkirk left for the bomb squad to defuse. I sweep her into my arms and she melts into me and devours me with kisses that are deeper and softer than any I have known or dreamed were possible—deeper and softer than the Perfect Lady’s unless she is the Perfect Lady—except, too like a zephyr, her warm kisses disappear. At the very moment my heart opens, gaping and vulnerable to this mysterious action-painter, this flinger of pigment and palette-knife slasher of canvas, my aorta is severed. Fatally wounded, I try to follow her home through the foggy New England night, staggering as a trail of blood streams behind me. But on that cruel Halloween night the Belle Dame Sans Merci disappears, leaving only the echoes of her knee-length jackboots to torment me and lead me dumbly into an alley behind the Faculty Club where I shiver, lost and confused, until morning when I wake up in my own proper bed on a tranquil street in divine Providence, my body unscarred.
My sun-filled bedroom pleasantly dissolves into a dormitory lounge at Wellesley on a snowy night. The Perfect Lady is sitting there, leaning back regally in a wing chair, obscured in the highlights and shadows thrown by the flickering light of the fireplace, reading War and Peace. My heart pounding, I can smell the perfume on her neck and in her hair as I touch her perfect shoulder. “Thank God I’ve found you,” I cry. “I was afraid I would never find you again.” And I see in her eyes that our torrential love will never end—and at the precise moment she says, “I love you,” I am back in Boston, certain that I’m wide awake, traipsing in bare feet through the filthy slush along streets that are gray as Death. My jungle fatigues are soaked through and my flesh is numb, so chilled and wet that the sleet feels hot when it hits my face.
Tossing and turning in a moment of sleepy wakefulness, my T-shirt soaked with perspiration, I asked, Who was this Perfect Lady that I try so hard to remember? Who was the Dark Woman I want to forget? My dream began to slip away, and I remembered Danielle’s plans for a large family wedding in her hometown Episcopal church. A mosquito buzzed around my ear, ignoring the smoke from the green mosquito coil. After several misses I slapped the intruder and dozed off, only to be awakened again by three New Guys from the lab who turned on the lights, took a few beers out of the refrigerator and snapped open the tops, realized they were in the wrong hootch and left without switching off the lights.
I climbed down, turned out the lights and no sooner got settled back in bed than Washington, my bunk-mate, came in with one of the waitresses from the NCO Club. The waitress was an uncontrollable giggler. Just as exhaustion finally overcame the sound of her soft gurgles and I fell back asleep, she woke me up again with her moaning. I was wiped out, but the shaking of the bunk and the cries of ecstasy coming from below now kept me wide awake, staring again at the ceiling. I climbed down in a trance, trying not to glance into the wriggling darkness, and swapped my sweaty T-shirt for a clean cotton short-sleeve shirt, pulled on some jeans and slipped on my finest shower shoes. Through my aching eyes I could make out midnight on my tick-tocking Baby Ben. As I closed the creaky door to the hootch, I heard the girl give one last high-pitched tickly giggle, followed by bellowing from Washington that shook the flimsy quarters like the mating call of a lovesick water buffalo.
14 October 1971 (0015)
Everybody Comes to Niko’s
A little after midnight I climbed on board a cramped, pink, three-quarter-scale baht-bus, paid my Thai nickel and rode out to the main gate. The usual line of Datsun and Toyota taxicabs and the horde of sahmlaws that waited across the street had thinned to a handful now that the action had moved downtown. Two motorbikes and drivers were standing by in front of Maharaj Massage, waiting for midnight ramblers in a hurry. I climbed into the closest cab. It would be the last time I rode a late-night baht-bus out to the gate, but my late-night rambling was just beginning.
The driver stopped at the Soul Sister and the Club Miami, but the first was in brothers-only mode that night, and the other was too noisy and crowded to lure me in. Ubon was a small, dusty provincial capital. It didn’t take long to backtrack to the west side of town to check out the Corsair and the New Playboy Club, except the New Playboy was in the midst of an eerie lull, quiet as a crypt. Finally, at the Corsair I took an empty seat at the bar and looked around. Among the girls who were left, one looked stunning from a distance, but when she passed me on her way out with a tipsy GI, my mind’s eye flashed back to the night my booze-damaged eyeballs mistook a scrawny farm girl for a Vogue cover girl. The memory chilled me, but I continued to sit, fascinated, watching the hardest, most worn-out, most jaded of the girls go through the motions of their craft. The GIs out at midnight were generally the drunkest, most miserably married or most hopelessly single of a crowd that was suspect when it left the base. The nightly dance of death had begun, a last chance for an aging village girl to pay her rent, a last call for a rough-hewn farm boy on flight status to hold a human being close. I lied to myself that I was not a part of it, that I could watch dispassionately, gaining valuable life experience, that I was a future auteur taking mental notes for an anthropological documentary I might use for my PhD thesis.
At two the last of the bars would start closing, the trickle of sahmlaws and taxis to the Ubon Hotel would turn into a steady stream, and for three more hours the standoff would continue. I was already hungry, though, and the kitchen at the Corsair had closed, so I crossed the street, got into one of the cabs in front of the New Playboy Club, and headed off for the penthouse restaurant at the Ubon Hotel. On this, the night of my first real combat mission over Laos, I decided to treat myself to something a little better than street food.
I had grown to like the Ubon Hotel because it was pleasantly noisy and modern and bright, and the food was good. Even sitting there after hours by myself, surrounded by wilting bar girls and tipsy GIs, I felt the same way I used to feel at home when the relatives were visiting at Christmas and the Fourth of July. I might have felt alienated and vaguely irritated at the small talk, the excessive drinking, the reactionary politics and the thinly veiled racism, but I never felt that worst of all feelings—I never felt alone.
And so it was that on the fateful night of my first genuine butt-puckering, truck-killing combat mission over the Ho Chi Minh Trail, I sat down at what had become my personal bar stool at the furthest end of the imitation-marble bar and ordered a somtom salad. Service from the kitchen was slow, however, and suddenly I was seized with a need to split, fearing for no good reason that I might be fooled again by a desperate teenager, made up to look twice her age, when what I really wanted was to be a good boy and return pristine to Danielle and the sanctity of marriage. The bartender brought me a beer, which seemed to calm me down. And as I continued waiting for my order, I slipped deep into one of my semihypnotic reflections, this time on the slowly revolving dance floor and its whirling patrons, wondering how the G’s they were pulling compared to the G’s we felt on an AC-130 gunship. And as my mind continued to drift, I laughed to myself when I realized that there was one other similarity between after hours at the Rongraem Ubon and being home for the holidays: they were both places where I would never ever find my Perfect Lady. My trance was broken by the plate of papaya salad clanking down on the bar in front of me, and I began to wonder what kind of tricks my mind was playing on me. Wasn’t Danielle my Perfect Lady after all? Wasn’t she a Good Girl whom I could take home for a family dinner, but who could, back in our mountain cabin, make torrid love to me in countless ways and then hold me tenderly, sleeping until the sun came up and we made love again?
Washing down my somtom salad with a second bottle of Singha, I noticed an old knee injury flaring up, and soon the rest of my body joined in. My butt went numb, my back ached and my neck throbbed with a pinching burn. When my legs started to cramp up, I knew it was time to get moving, even if it meant leaving half my salad. On the elevator ride down, every jolting start and stop gave me a shot of pain. I had been flying for a month, but tonight had been the real thing, combat photography, looking through a flickering eyepiece while in contact with the enemy. For a handheld movie camera, an Arri St with a four-hundred-foot magazine wasn’t all that light when you first picked it up. After long hours of flying, it felt like a forty-pound bag of cement.
I spotted an old Laotian sahmlaw driver not far from the hotel entrance. Using a lot of sign language, I asked him if he knew where I could get a good hard nuat for my aching shoulder muscles.
“Sahp, khrab,” he answered and off he went, peddling steadily with thick, muscular legs.
I felt a strange kinship with the sahmlaw drivers, which might have had something to do with my own family’s peasant roots. Some of the hill-tribe villages the drivers came from didn’t yet have the wheel, and here they were wrangling around three of them at a time. I suspected the level streets of Issan Thailand were a welcome respite for the Laotians after clambering up and down mountain footpaths that tired us out flying over. I hated to hear that some of them were suspected of collecting intelligence for the Pathet Lao, counting up takeoffs and landings from our base, something pretty simple to do since there was only a single runway to keep track of.
In any case, whether or not he was working part-time for the Pathet Lao, my driver was soon turning down an alleyway not far from the New Playboy Club. He stopped at a massage parlor that, judging from its faded, mold-streaked exterior, had been around since the Japanese Army was in town a war earlier. The name, Niko’s, seemed vaguely familiar, and then I remembered Perez raving about it a few weeks back.
Inside Niko’s was plush red, a little frayed, the seediness hidden in the shadows of the subdued lighting. My eyes were drawn to the girls who were still working at one in the morning, brightly lit, sitting like Kewpie dolls, scattered in three rows behind a one-way window. I stood there, looking them over in a daze, feeling for a moment like I had slipped back into a dream. The manager greeted me like a long-lost cousin and offered me a beer. After politely declining, I asked if any of the girls spoke English. He began to rave about the academic accomplishments of Number 18, but I was distracted by a girl curled up in the back row, half-watching the television. She was lovely in a quiet way, but what I noticed most was that she was wearing no makeup. Her hair fell over her shoulders in too much disarray to be a wig. And instead of wearing a small apron like the others, she had on a man’s navy work shirt. The manager assured me she too spoke excellent English. Her one concession to house convention was the badge she wore on her shirt pocket, Number 25.
As I followed Number 25 down the hall, admiring the rhythmic swaying of her hips, little bubbles of memory began floating up. Could she have been the girl I bumped into at the open-air market the day Zelinsky showed me around Ubon for the first time? Would that make her the girl with Dave Murray at the Soul Sister the night Harley’s buddies crashed and burned? I wished Dave and the gang had stayed longer and that whoever was with him spent less time lost in cigarette smoke and shadows.
Closing the door to our cubicle, Number 25 asked, “You want bath first, or massage?”
“I could use a good hot back and neck scrub. I worked late tonight.”
“You can get undressed while I run water.” She handed me a large white terry-cloth towel.
“What’s your name?” I asked, kicking off my flip-flops.
“Tukada. In English, it mean ‘Doll.’”
“Your parents named you well. A beautiful name for a beautiful woman.”
She gave me a jaded smile while she adjusted the temperature of the bath water. “My frien’ jus’ call me Dah.”
“Yindii tii dai rujak, Khun Dah,” I said, trying to get the tones right.
“Arai na?” she replied, confused by my terrible pronunciation.
“Pleased to meet you,” I translated as I took off my shirt.
“Oh. Pleased to meet you too,” she answered with an amused half smile. “Khun chu arai, kha?”
“Phom chu Brendan. I’ve seen you before, you know.”
“Jing ru—really?”
“Giving food to street kids begging down by the bridge.”
She looked up at me coolly, expressionless. “Oh zat. Zat is nos-sing.”
I hung up my jeans, wrapped myself in the towel and sat on the massage table, admiring the graceful way she moved while she finished running the bath. “I’ve got some pretty good pictures of you.”
“Did you get some at VD clinic?”
“VD clinic?” I replied, caught off guard by her directness. “No, I lost track of you.”
“Zat where I go next. Every week, get checked to keep my work permit.”
“I’m afraid I still have a lot to learn about Thailand.”
She led me to the oversized tub, took my towel, and helped me in. The warm soapy washcloth felt good against my neck and back. While she scrubbed me, she asked, “Are you GI or Peace Corps?”
“I’m afraid I’m a GI.”
“Zen how you get to grow your hair so long?”
“Lots of Groom and Clean,” I laughed. “And I mostly work nights.”
“You smoke pot?”
“Sometimes,” I answered, wondering if I was somehow being set up.
After rinsing off my back and chest, she helped me up and handed me my towel. While I dried myself off, she picked out a bottle of scented oil from a nearby wall cabinet and set it under the table. Wrapping me in a fresh towel, she led me over to the table and had me stretch out on my stomach. “Thai girls don’ smoke ganja,” she said condescendingly.
I expected her to tell me why. Instead she poured some oil into her palms and rubbed them together to warm it. “You look like a hippie freak to me,” I said. “Are you sure you never smoked?”
“Maybe,” Dah answered with an enigmatical smile. She began working on neck muscles that I didn’t know existed, and I began to relax. “Are you hippie?” she asked.
“Are you?” I replied.
“When I’m with hip-pies, I’m hip-pie.” She pressed her hands deep into my aching back muscles. “And when I’m with li-fers, I’m li-fer.”
“How’d you learn to speak such good English?”
“I finish high school,” she answered, somehow insulted. “We had very good ajahn from Peace Corps, Khun Bill. I was going to be tea-cher like my aunt.” She hesitated. “You know how much Thai teacher make? In coun-try my aunt make twenty dollar a month, for her and two kids. Zat not enough. So I do zis.”
