The Big Buddha Bicycle Race, page 33
I couldn’t keep my senses from devouring every inch of her—her fragrant hair, her sad eyes, her flawless skin, her high cheekbones and full lips, her delicate arms and perfect legs, her firm breasts and taut belly. I wanted to wrap her tiny body up in my long arms and hold her and protect her and make her sadness and loneliness go away. I wanted to make my own sadness and loneliness go away. I wanted my mind to stop reeling. I wanted to stop feeling drunk and crazy and afraid—afraid especially that I might be falling in love—except that I was afraid to stop feeling these feelings, afraid that if I stopped I might not feel anything at all. Worst of all, I was frightened that I did not know how to stop even if I wanted to. I kissed Dah on the cheek and said, “I want to do rock too.”
I picked up the paper. She clamped her hands around my wrists and said, “Bren-dan—don’t. Tom an’ I, we have to do. Don’ you get sick too—”
“You mean you’d cut off your best friend, Brendie-Bear? Deprive me of my own toot?” Tom took the bill and the packet out of my hands, snorted the rock and burned the paper. “Believe us, Brendan, you don’t wanna start.”
“How do you know what I want?” I started to say, but he wasn’t listening.
Dah had started swimming away from us to the middle of the deep end of the pool and soon Tom and I, her loyal retainers, were swimming after her, solemnly, obediently. Suddenly Tom pulled Dah three feet underwater, catching her completely by surprise. She stayed down a little too long, though, which started to scare me, and when she broke the surface, she was gasping for air. We rushed over to help, but it was a trick—she splashed a mountain of water at both of us, smiling wickedly. Soon mayhem was restored, childlike laughter was again filling the air and all three of us thought we could go on forever taking turns dunking and splashing each other.
“Shhhh,” whispered Tukada.
We could hear the sound of footsteps on cement. The iron gate creaked open and an intruder appeared in a thin veil of light. Tom and I felt our hearts jump a beat, but before we had time to react, Dah had already swum over to what turned out to be the night manager. They talked awhile in Thai too rapid for Tom or me to follow.
“Give him three dollar,” she called back to us softly.
I swam over and fetched the money out of my pants. The night manager was satisfied, as much by the magnified and distorted view he got of Dah’s body as by the crisp banknotes. Soon the manager’s footsteps had receded into the evening’s ambience of chirping cicadas, cackling jingjoks, gentle wind, light traffic and the tender lullaby of jet engines being tested a few miles away at the base. The three of us reverted to laughter and childish play that was even sillier than before. When we grew weary, we gathered up the old inner tubes and met together out in the middle of what had become our private lagoon, forming our own little desert island. Tukada kissed her vassals and leaned back luxuriantly.
“This night is so, so wonder-ful,” she purred. “Tom and Bren-dan, my two bes’ frien’ in the whole world—my dearly beloved…. We gazzer togezzer… like the day I get mar-ried to my cap-tain. Santa Cruz was so beau-ti-ful.” She closed her eyes and smiled, and I could imagine a sunny afternoon in a garden overlooking the Pacific. “So many flower!” she remembered out loud. And I could picture Tukada dressed in white, her gentle features softened further by her veil. The only thing I had trouble picturing was her “captain,” and I wondered if what Lek had told me was true about him only being an airman first class.
“My dearly beloved, let us gazzer togezzer tonight…to join in holy mat-ri-mo-nee.” She continued, opening her eyes dreamily. “Tom and Bren-dan, will you have zis woman for you’ wedded wife?”
“We will.”
“Will you love her, honor her, and comfort her even if she get sick again?”
“We will.”
“And, forget-ting all ozzer, never butterfly on her for as long as you both still live?”
“We won’t,” said Tom.
“We won’t,” I echoed.
“I, Tukada Maneewatana, take you, Tom Whee-lah and Bren-dan Lea-ry, to be my wedded hus-ban’, to have and to hold on to you from zis day forward, for bet-ter or for worse, for rich or poor, even if you get sick, to love and to care for you, an’ never butterfly on you until we die.”
She clasped hands with Tom and me, and Tom and I did the same, completing the circle. “I now pronounce us Men and Wife, in the name of the Faz-zer, the Son, and the Buddha. You may kiss the bride.”
We tried to pull ourselves close enough together to hug each other, but the ungainly inflatables refused to cooperate. Tom and I managed only to peck her on the cheek before we bounced off in disparate directions, laughing so hard we had to gasp for breath. “An’ Dave an’ Mole an’ Lek an’ Sii-da can go to hell!” swore Tukada victoriously.
“To hell with them all!” Tom and I reprised.
We slipped out of our tubes, and when we met again at the side of the pool near the lounge chair that held our beach towels, we grew serious for a moment and took each other’s hands once more and held each other together tightly in a circle. For a moment we didn’t notice the chlorine burning our eyes and the mosquitos buzzing in our ears. For that fleeting moment we felt that we had made a true, lifelong commitment to each other.
“There is so much love here tonight—I can’t believe it really hap-pen. When we have so much love for each other like zis, it feel so good I sink maybe my heart explode.” She wove her limbs through and around Tom and me, weaving us into a basket of her happiness. “My Tom and my Bren-dan,” she said softly, giving us each a kiss on the cheek. “I sink maybe zis is the best night of all of my life.”
Out of the water, we dressed shyly. On the flight line at the base an F-4 engine was revved up to full throttle, a furious dragon-roar that Tom and Dah and I had long ago learned to ignore.
17 November 1971 (a few minutes later)
Stairway to Heaven
Riding back, Tukada again sat behind me, this time with both hands on my chest. “Do you want to make love to me?” she whispered.
I laughed. “Do we have any choice now that we’re ‘married’?”
When we arrived at Ruam Chon Sawng, the alley was ankle-deep in trash and absolutely stone-dead quiet. At Bungalow #4, we locked our bicycles at the bottom of the stairs and started up, letting Tom lead the way. Dah and I lagged behind, and halfway up, I stopped and pulled her to me and kissed her gently on the mouth. Kissing on the mouth was rare in Thailand in those days, a French practice that had only been performed in the brothels run by the Gauls along the Mekong River until the Americans came. It was still rare and I immediately understood why. If all Thai women parted their lips as warmly and tenderly and invitingly and drew in a man’s soul as simply as a bullfrog snatches its evening meal from the sky—I could easily imagine Thailand with the rice crop unplanted, heroin unsmuggled, bribes uncollected, long-distance buses parked meekly by the side of the road. It was too bizarre to think about, and as she continued to kiss me back, sucking out every ounce of self-control and rational thinking ability that I might have once possessed, I concluded unequivocally that kissing was far too dangerous to be practiced by the general Thai public.
“You sure you want to make love to me?” she asked. Her voice sounded like a gentle mountain breeze.
I kissed her again, on the forehead. I ran my lips across her sheer black hair. Her scent turned chlorine to perfume.
“First you have to shave your mus-tache, like I tol’ you before.”
I could scarcely comprehend. As I rummaged through the back alleys of my memory I began to recall a night that seemed like fifteen years ago when a wonderful hippie massage girl at Niko’s by the name of Tukada hinted at limitless joy and pleasure if only I would shave off what I had long thought of unflinchingly as the core of what was left of my identity. I couldn’t keep from smiling sardonically when I thought of the commotion I stirred up when I first raised a mustache back at the Pentagon. Careerists simply did not wear facial hair of any description, whether it was technically permitted or not. The Navy and Marine brass acted like they were eating glass when they discovered that under Air Force regulations, a pimply-faced enlisted man like me could raise a bush without asking their permission.
I thought how strange it was that during the Civil War you could not be an officer without raising a beard. Of course whoever wrote the Air Force regulations got his own perverse revenge, limiting the size of a mustache to precise dimensions that guaranteed its Hitler-like ugliness.
“If you go shave your mus-tache, I come to you. Promise.”
I followed her up the stairs like a trusting puppy. She opened the door to the music room, where Tom was already putting on a record, and turned back to me, gazing calmly into my eyes. “It’s up to you.”
Inside my bedroom the air was hot and stale. I opened the shutters and put the ceiling fan on low, which produced a groaning, complaining sound like an oxcart on its way to market. The room’s construction was simple, the roughly finished framing remaining open, allowing the plank walls to breathe while providing extra shelf space in otherwise confined quarters. The screens were an exercise in wishful thinking, filled as they were with random rips and tears. An insect was already buzzing nearby when I knelt down to light a green mosquito coil and set it in an old pie tin on the floor beside my bed. It was a comfortable enough bed, constructed simply of a pine frame that supported thin slats laid side by side. They in turn supported three child-sized mattresses that, when placed next to each other, produced the Thais’ version of a queen-sized bed. My only other furniture consisted of an old card table that held my stereo gear, a small rattan nightstand for my Baby Ben alarm clock, a wicker chair and a flimsy armoire, which held my modest collection of clothes and toilet articles.
I picked up my shaving kit and went around to the hong nam. The bathing room was almost as large as my sleeping quarters, the floor and the first four feet of the walls covered with white tile. There was an Asian-style squatter toilet at one end, a wicked device I sometimes imagined the French invented from a broken bidet when they heard they were being supplanted by Americans. No toilet paper was provided and nobody bothered to steal any from the base. Instead, a spigot opened into a small klong jar that held a plastic dipper. Douching as only the French could enjoy, I thought, but damn if it didn’t work. In the corner stood a larger klong jar which held lots of lukecold water and a yellow plastic bowl that we used as a scoop to take our “showers.” The water drained out through a hole in the white tile in the corner by the toilet.
I turned on the light and stepped over to the warped, discolored mirror that was nailed to the wall above the sink. Always forgetting how booze and dope made my face look pale and my head misshapen, I scarcely recognized the reflection I was staring at. I took out my manicure scissors and began to trim. Only then did I begin to remember how long it had taken those hairs to grow and how much longer it had taken for them to fill themselves in to what might pass for adult consistency. I cut away the whiskers on the right side first, and I thought of the grunt I had heard about pulling LRRP duty—long-range reconnaissance—up on the Lao-Chinese border who had only grown half a mustache after he heard there was no regulation against it. The rear-echelon brass split a gut every time they saw him back at base camp. Within a few weeks, however, Sergeant Half-Mustache had survived being cut off and surrounded three different times by the Pathet Lao, and thereafter he was absolutely certain that his lopsided lip hair was a lucky talisman. His whole squad began to feel it was their good-luck charm too, and sure enough, shortly after he rotated back to the States, his replacement stepped on a landmine and they had to extract the whole unit.
I felt a brief kick of excitement at the thought of wearing half a bush around the base, especially at the paroxysms of high blood pressure I could give First Sergeant Link and the lunatic assistant base commander, but the faint echo of Dah’s voice wafting through the single-ply wallboards gave me a deeper sort of rush. Leaning in close to the mottled surface of the mirror, I snipped away at the last of the whiskers and lathered up.
When I began shaving, however, I suddenly felt ridiculous, filled with second thoughts about taking such desperate action on blind faith. Dah was alone with Tom back in the music room, achingly close to my own room, sharing the same landing, the doors at right angles, practically touching. So many evenings the gang had gathered there to smoke and drink and rap and listen to Tom’s stereo, only tonight it was just Tukada, alone. Through the thin walls I could hear her humming sweetly to the Temptations album he was playing. When “Ain’t Too Proud to Beg” came on, she knew the words by heart and sang along.
I took the last couple of strokes with my safety razor and rinsed off my face. My head reeled. I look like a goddamn Young Republican, I thought. For crying out loud, I look like my own son! The baby face I had been trying to hide with the mustache was now utterly exposed, looking ten years younger than young, practically prepubescent now that the thin stand of lip whiskers had been cleared away. I had originally hoped for a Hemingway macho look. The mustache had at least given me a sense of stiff-upper-lip British detachment. At times when I leafed through my well-worn volume of Wilfred Owen’s war poems, I was struck with how familiar his face looked on the back cover. That World War I infantry officer, with his dignified mustache, could have been a cousin or even a brother, but it was the picture of an older brother with eyes far too weary for a man of twenty-five.
Coming out of the hong nam feeling naked and frail, I couldn’t help laughing. By raising a scrawny patch of lip whiskers simply to get into a Georgetown club without being carded, I had inadvertently entered a charmed inner circle—when you met a character with a mustache, a wristband, sideburns, or non–Air Force wire-rimmed glasses, you had found a fellow hipster. Instantly we shared a deep and profound bond that could only result from discovering identical loopholes hidden among volumes of Air Force regs. Even for a gung ho MiG-killer like Robin Olds, commander of the 8th Tactical Fighter Wing, a handlebar mustache hinted at unlimited potential as a hell-raiser. Why had Pentagon careerists decided that in my case it was a symbol of defiance? Why had I enjoyed playing along?
My ruminations turned into remorse as I walked barefoot over the splintery deck back to my room. Here I was—after being denied countless automatic promotions, after enduring all varieties of harassment from redneck sergeants and being forced to collect my mail at 2:00 a.m., all over this three-inch patch of individuality that I wore over my scarred upper lip—shaving it off in an instant for Miss Tukada Maneewatana. How could I so easily turn into a Pavlovian dog, salivating when I hear the faint trace of a female voice? How could my raging hormones so easily deliver a karate kick to the Catholic values—guilt and fear—drummed into me by Father Boyle? Goddamn, I thought, this had better be great.
I slowed down when I passed the music room. Light was streaming from the wide gap under the plank door. Dah’s humming stopped. I couldn’t keep from pressing my ear within a few inches of the door. “There is so much love in this house tonight,” I could hear her murmur. Back in my room, I stripped down to my boxers and stretched out on my bed, half expectant and half resigned. The ceiling fan groaned, but my attention kept going back to that door. I turned out my light and cracked the door open and saw that streaks of light were still leaking out of the music room. And then, with a stab of disappointment, I realized it had grown silent and had stayed that way for several minutes.
I tried to lie down again, but the silence was driving me crazy. I bolted out of bed and tiptoed out of the room. Unable to stop myself, I bent over awkwardly and looked through the keyhole into the music room. In a way the vignette I saw was lovely—Dah was giving Tom a massage, working her hands deep into his back the way she had with me that fateful night long ago at Niko’s. “What’s zat?” asked Tukada, turning her head toward the keyhole.
I almost fell on my fanny backing away from the door and retreating to my room. Peeking outside through my own keyhole, I saw Tom crack open their door, look around and go back inside. I stretched out on my bed again, but I was unable to relax, afraid I was going to go mad with an aching desire for Tukada and a fierce loathing for myself. At last, staring in darkness at the overhead fan, I was able to force my mind to slow itself down and focus on the steadfast turning of the blade. Finally I began to feel at peace, pleasantly exhausted as I lay there sinking into limbo land. The door opened. Coolly I watched Dah come into the room and undress in silhouette. She pulled down the sheet and sidled up to me. “Hurry,” she whispered.
Next door in the music room, Tom flipped the switch to his big Teac tape deck and headed back to his bed-sitting room. The voice of Joni Mitchell began filling Bungalow #4 with one after another of her melancholy ballads.
Dah and I simply touched our cheeks together at first, breathing in each other’s scent, before I brushed my lips lightly over hers and kissed her throat and neck. “Oi!” she cried out softly. And then she kissed me back, on my lips, warmly at first and then hungrily. Ripping her nails across my back, she began kissing my chest, and my whole body came alive, charged with an electric intensity by her incredibly satin-smooth Thai skin. And as I slipped off my shorts and slid deep into her, my mind’s eye turned my tiny hovel into a galaxy of endless miles of indigo illuminated with a million pinpricks of starlight. A waterfall of silk and velvet coursed over my body, and Dah transformed into a winged goddess who devoured me and at the same time melted to my touch. Rainbow colors exploded inside my head as she continued to shower me with warm kisses. The black velvet galaxy turned pastel, then blood red, then into sunshine.
“Hurry, Bren-dan, hurry.” I heard a soft, familiar voice but could not tell where it came from. And then I felt her legs pull tight together underneath, squeezing me, trying to deepen our pleasure. Or was she just trying to rush me? She pressed and squeezed and prodded, and like the one-celled amoeba I had been and still was, I finished quickly and pleasantly and felt warm and drained, relaxed and exhilarated. I closed my eyes again and the inside of my head turned black and quiet and empty. And the emptiness swelled, slowly and inexorably, and consumed me. “I really don’t know love at all,” sang Joni Mitchell’s muffled voice, bleeding through the paper-thin walls.
