Dragon Lady (24 page)
“I like you, Joe.
Mama-san, you good to her.”
“She was nice, Charlie. Despite her profession, she’s a good lady.”
“Mama-san, she my mother me.”
That was a bulletin. I could not summon a reply.
We had a big hug and Charlie left.
It was my turn for glassy eyes.
***
Kind reader, I am so sorry. Remember when I walked away from Slick after my chicken or fish wisecrack and heard Smitty scream inside his house? And left you hanging?
Well, this is what happened….
Smitty
comes
flying out his front door, legs pumping, still screaming as he sees me and angles in my direction.
“Whoa Nellie,” I say, palms up.
He skids to a stop on the slippery grass and nearly takes a tumble.
“Joe, they invade.
All over my house.
I don’t know. I never see them before. I cannot turn without one in my face.”
“Who?
What?”
“I don’t know. They have these uniforms on.”
He’s gasping, incoherent. “Okay, okay. Go in my place and watch some TV. The Vietnam War is on. It’ll settle you down.”
He obeys and I walk into his place.
“Hello, young man.”
“Uh, hi, Sister.”
The nun in black-and-white habit is gray, bespectacled and plump. I shake her proffered flesh-and-blood hand.
“I’m Sister Agnes. And you, sir?”
More nuns are behind her, busying themselves with dust mops and lemon-scented waxes. The aroma of baking dominates.
“
Er
, um, I’m Joe.”
“It’s very nice to meet you, Joe. Would you like a chocolate chip cookie? Sister Mary Jean is a wonderful baker. They’ll be done shortly.”
I hear more activity upstairs. “I would very much, Sister. Thank you. May I ask where you came from?”
Sister Agnes frowns. “That’s the strangest thing, Joe. I know that I’m in The Great Beyond. My fellow sisters do, too. But we cannot recall the circumstances that brought us here nor the acquaintance of one another.”
“Very peculiar,” I say. “How many of you are there?”
“Seventy of us.
We counted.”
I smile, but do not reply. Bingo. Smitty’s promised seventy virgins.
“The young man who lives here, he is troubled.”
I nod. “He sure is.”
“He’s messy. We’ll clean up after him and cook, and try to be of comfort to him.”
“He’ll appreciate it when he calms down. I know he will.”
“Joe, I hear the oven door open. The cookies should be ready.”
“Lead the way, Sister Agnes.”
NEXT MORNING, I see no activity at Slick’s. I check the house out as I did upon meeting Madge.
Gone.
Him and the old sergeant both.
What the hell is this place, a halfway house?
I’m sitting on that porch, searching my brain for some logic in this. Yeah, our ringmasters have off-the-wall funny bones, but I’m failing to capture their reasoning. Is there reasoning?
I am in the midst of sadistic and well-planned chaos.
There is a relatively-new science in the Land of the Living known as chaos theory.
Where things are chaotic, except they really ain’t, something like that.
Whichever, it’s all about tormenting me and me tormenting Smitty. I can think of no other reason why he’s still around.
An hour ago, he came out to bitch about today’s elevator-music tune: “La Bamba.”
“Mr. Joe, what is this they are playing? It has a--how you say?--tempo, a beat that does not let me relax.”
I’ve been letting him stay with me in a spare bedroom, as the seventy nuns seem to have staked a claim.
“It’s Israel’s national anthem,” I tell him.
“Catchy, huh?”
“Are you lying to me again, Joe?”
“Smitty, I’d never lie to you,” I lie.
He cocks his head to his place. “Please, Joe, when will they leave?”
I smell baking in the air.
Oatmeal raisin.
I’ll have to mosey on over. “No time soon, I hope.”
He pouts and goes back inside.
The mail truck pulls into the cul-de-sac. TGBPS (The Great Beyond Postal Service) drives red, white and blue trucks like American USPS trucks in The Land of the Living. They’re also right-hand drive, so the driver can stick mail in mailboxes without getting out.
Problem is
,
drivers and vehicles are holograms. I proved this once by laying down and letting one pass over me.
Nary a scratch.
TGBPS delivers lots of mail, much of it junk. As the mail is also air, our boxes are empty even when they’re stuffed.
I cannot stop myself from writing letters to family and friends, dead or alive. I realize it’s a waste of time, but I have time to waste. I seal them inside envelopes that, like my food, are simply there, usually on the dining room table beside the paper napkins.
The first-class postage on the envelopes is entertaining if useless. The stamps are decorative, many quite attractive. Those with portraiture do not depict world leaders or achievers―this is where the fun
comes
in―but notorious mail robbers.
Black Bart, who robbed a number of Wells Fargo coaches in the 1800s. Notorious 1930s outlaw Alvin Karpis.
Principals of England’s 1963 Great Train Robbery.
And more obscure scofflaws.
The best depicts a stand of bamboo, a professional-looking piece of artwork. The caption:
SOUTH VIETNAM
’S STATE GRASS.
I put the letters in my mailbox with the flag up. The mail truck comes by. Of course nothing happens.
Until I stop looking for as short a time as an eyeblink.
Then the flag is down, my mail gone, presumably dispatched to a black hole.
***
My 1965 hospital postal adventures were almost as bizarre.
Being wounded and hospitalized in order to increase one’s mail volume is to do it the hard way, but it sure as hell worked. My mail finally arrived. Volume had quintupled, from loved ones and from people I hadn’t seen in ages. I reciprocated, banging out four or five letters per day, a frenzy of communication.
In response to a bland, no-class telegram from the Department of the Army announcing that her son (name, rank, service number) had been “slightly” wounded, my mother wrote,
I LOVE YOU!!! I pray for you and your speedy recovery.
Your loving
mother.
I don’t think she’d prayed once in her life, so I was really moved.
I know Ziggy’s mother got a telegram, too. I know she received the same message, with the omission of “slightly.” As they say, there’s the right way, the wrong way, and the army way.
I initiated contact with Ziggy’s mom. It didn’t end until her death in 1988. I hope she’s been reunited with the Zigster. In her first letter to me after my first to her, she wrote that her Edward considered me the brother he didn’t have. She said she loved and admired his interests such as
astramony
(sic), literature, science, and the
solor
(sic) system. She was as heartfelt as she was unschooled.
My stepfather would’ve flunked her in a blink of an eye.
Step-asshole did not write me, but his Wendi sent me a get-well-soon card on behalf of them both. I wrote her to thank her for the card. She wrote to thank me for thanking her. I wrote to thank her for thanking me for thanking her.
We exchanged photos. The horn-rimmed glasses Mother had described were gone. Her permanent wave was gone, and her hair was long and straight. There was something unscholarly in her eyes. When I asked if I could bring home a gift from the exotic Orient and what would she like, she requested in detail a set of lingerie that’d drive any man out of his mind.
Our correspondence had moved to another level.
My brother Jack did not write. Mother had to spring it on me that he’d taken part in a campus anti-war demonstration and that a bad situation was brewing with unkempt new friends of his, including the girl he’s gaga over, who was totally unsuitable.
A girl who had hair longer than Cher’s.
A girl who wore dresses that were either too short or too long, and bracelets that jangled.
A girl who did not shave her legs and armpits, for Heaven’s sake.
Mother said that while Jack would never admit it, she felt that he was ashamed to write me.
If you can believe it, they’re planning to burn their draft cards in front of God and everybody. I swear, darling, I don’t understand either of you kids.
Jack enjoyed 2-S draft status. I knew by experience that as long as he was in school he’d retain it. They’d call him up after the women and children. I wrote him a postcard telling him that for a grad school prodigy, he certainly could be a dumb shit. Burning a 2-S draft card was like burning a one-hundred-thousand dollar bill.
Ten feet from the mail room, I stopped and tore it up.
I wrote him a four-page, single-spaced letter, pouring my guts out.
OCTOBER 15, 1965, the day that there were 136,812 American troops in South Vietnam. Make that 136,811.5. While exiting a stairway from a 707 at Tan Son Nhat, a guy who’d been nipping on a pint of 151-proof rum fell down and broke his crown. He was loaded into an ambulance, condition unknown.
Pope Paul’s visit to
America
was the cover story on
Life
magazine’s
Los Angeles Times
celebrated the return home of their World Series champion Dodgers, after they’d defeated the Minnesota Twins, four games to three. It shared the page with a banner that screamed DRAFT CALL REACHES NEW HIGH.
October 15 was the birth date of Barry McGuire, who sang one of my all-time favorites,
The Eve of Destruction
, the
Dr. Strangelove
of tunes. October 15 was the birthday of Olympic gold medalist sprinter Bobby Morrow and actress Jean Peters and Arthur Schlesinger and Friedrich Nietzsche.
My medical release was held up until October 15, but not for medical considerations. Earlier in the week the generals who ran
South Vietnam
had a spat they settled with another coup d’état. Our MACV bigwigs were running out of patience. But what the hell were they gonna do? Send the Saigon generalissimos to bed without their supper? Life quickly resumed
Saigon
’s version of normality and I was free to go.
The War was building steam. “Escalating” would soon be the operative buzzword. “Imbedded” applied too, but the term wasn’t used until decades later in a similar clusterfuck on the opposite end of the Asian continent.
There were tanks and trucks and Jeeps and GIs in Saigon, an olive-drab gridlock, an increasingly volatile environment. I was amazed that the
Paris
of the Orient simply didn’t blow up like a cheap firecracker.
On October 15, 1965, I had fifty-two and a wakeup, fifty-two days in Vietnam to break the Joe family tradition of croaking in a war.
I had fifty-two fleeting days to find my Dragon Lady. Each passing day doubled my panic that I wouldn’t. I knew if those fifty-two passed and no Dragon Lady, I’d be a nervous, agonized wreck.
I doubt if I could step on that homeward bound 707. I’d go AWOL and door-to-door searching for her. Friends, that’s what equal overdoses of lust and love will do.
I took two days leave before reporting to my new unit. First stop was 421 Hai Ba Trung. Mai’s apartment had been rented to an American civilian bureaucrat, no forwarding address of prior resident given. Her Cholon digs were occupied by nobody familiar. None spoke English or admitted to. I wandered aimlessly to places my Dragon Lady and I’d been together―the zoo, the market, the riverfront, the Conti
terrasse
.
No dice.
The 803rd Liaison Detachment had been disbanded. The day the ding-a-ling outfit sent CAN-DO’s good news to the Pentagon and White House, the Vietcong overran a provincial capital by Tay Ninh. They also captured three town potentates and beheaded them, and cut off several major highways too. We bombed
North Vietnam
and had four planes shot down. We’d yet again forgotten to warn the ants that their efforts were futile and they’d lost the war. The
Vietnam
domino was tumbling to earth.
The 803rd’s computer’s proclamation (ordnance tonnage multipliers, confrontation vectors, escalatory intersects, et cetera) might’ve been forgiven if they hadn’t inserted a narrative with their numbers that South Vietnam’s impending statehood was validation of their conclusions. They thought it added a rich context.
It sure as hell did.
They said you could hear President Lyndon Baines Johnson from the D.C. Beltway, reaming every VIP from McNamara to the Joint Chiefs to MACV HQ.
“What kind of locoweed were those boys smoking? Did they pull this fifty-first state shit out of their asses?” LBJ was quoted as bellowing. “I’m gonna have somebody’s pecker in my pocket.”
The fifty-first state rumor petered out on its own. Our powers that be threw a bucket over the looniness, including VV Day. The cover-up was masterful. How CAN-DO stayed out of the press and remains hush-hush to this day is beyond me. Woodward and Bernstein types dug into it and hit a brick wall. Same with folks like Mike Wallace and his
60 Minutes
bulldogs.
There was new furniture and new personnel inside the Fighting 803rd, but the Annex wasn’t guarded, as there was nothing to guard, no magical automatic brain, not even our scrounged plug adapters. The new lumber and new lumber smell was gone, too, replaced by mildew and a faint electrical stink.
The Annex and the 803rd offices were slated to become an information agency. The one six blocks away had been vandalized into rubble. A mob of neighborhood people still without electricity had objected to the information with which we were endeavoring to inform them. It was deemed that the change of informational scenery would give the locals a change of heart.
Yeah, right.
I made friends with the info agency’s morning report clerk, an authentic, genuine, bona fide, school-trained clerk who actually knew how to type. I innocently inquired on the whereabouts of his predecessor, PFC A. Bierce, who was an occasional former lunch companion of mine.
He had the answer at his fingertips, in a cabinet, precisely filed. For whatever reason, a copy of Bierce’s separation papers had been mailed here. Ambrose, father of the fifty-first state rumor, had received an honorable discharge from the nonexistent 802
nd
Liaison Detachment of Fort Huachuca, Arizona.
I pictured him now in a Nogales apartment, the aspiring novelist practicing the loneliest of crafts, pushing
Jesus of Capri
onward, a fitful keystroke at a time.
I wanted to learn where my other 803rd colleagues had gone. My new pal made a phone call to a MACV buddy who handled personnel records. Suspicion confirmed: the brass had promoted the entire gang to sweep the debacle under the rug.
Major Papersmith went berserk at
Clark
and had to be shipped to
Japan
to dry out. Electrodes were attached to his temples to quiet him down.
Colonel Jake Lanyard was Brigadier General Jake Lanyard. He commanded an infantry brigade. He was in the field where he belonged, kicking ass, and taking names. He was reputed to take enemy ears, too, charms for a necklace. I wondered who paddled Jakie’s pooper now. Female Cong POWs in tight black pajamas lashing him with fronds?
Major General Whipple commanded a National Guard armory in
Turpentine Springs
,
Arkansas
. He had been bound for there when he visited me in the hospital. He’d been booted upstairs where his career would not see the light of day. But the growing season in the South was long, and that should agree with him.
Ralph Buffet resigned his warrant. The rest of the oddballs did likewise. Not one uttered a peep about Cerebrum 2111X and CAN-DO.
Ever.
I presumed their severance packages cost a considerable chunk of taxpayer bucks.
Our hotel room hadn’t been rented out. It was empty, though. There was no clothing or toilet articles, no wilted lily, no Johnny Red, no books.
I moved back in, halfway afraid of the memories. Without Ziggy and my books, it was damn near haunted. After an hour-long crying jag, I felt better. The dump became livable.
My gecko hung out on the ceiling. I stared at it for hours before conking out.
***
I was assigned a bunk at Tan Son Nhat that was to gather dust. I had to wear fatigues, on which my brand-new PFC stripes were sewn, to go with my freshly-minted clerk-typist MOS. I wondered how long either would last.
I reported to my new unit there--USMACV-SHUFO. SHUFO stood for Strategic Headquarters Utilization and Flow Operations. They pronounced it shoe-full.
It was “shuffle” to me, for we did that to vast quantities of paper. We cranked out even more reports and documents than the 803rd had. Man, did we pump out that paper.
I didn’t know why USMACV-SHUFO was formed or what we accomplished, and nobody else did, but, were we busy. SHUFO had no shortage of shavetail draftees who could type. We had first-rate equipment, too. We had a telex, and I had my own wooden swivel chair at my own desk and my own
electric
typewriter I didn’t know how to operate, though I could switch it on and off.
Mother and I continued to write regularly. Jack, too.
And Wendi, our correspondence increasingly salacious.
I spent my work days hunting and pecking replies on my new machine, getting to be semi-proficient with two fingers. Ziggy’s mom wrote me a letter, her excitement rendering it nearly illegible. Bigwigs were coming to her home to award her the Distinguished Service Cross for her son. They’d be bringing reporters. Her baby boy was going to be in the paper, on the front page. There’d be a photo, too, one taken when he was a sophomore in high school, his last year of formal education.
She asked me what Edward’s last words were.
I whipped the most commendable lie of my lifetime on her: “I love you, Mom.”
Joey, they killed me
would not do.
Paying homage to Ziggy, Sally’s and my last trip was to the Lowell Observatory at
Flagstaff
,
Arizona
. We covered the grounds slowly. The altitude (7246 feet) was tough on a dying geezer. Sally, bless her, indulged me, lending an arm when necessary.
The observatory was founded by Percival Lowell. In his twenty-four inch telescope, he saw Mars, its canals, its polar ice caps and oases. The telescope was inside a wooden dome that rotated using electric motors and tires-and-wheels from 1954 Fords.
Very cool.
I tingled. At this site, Lowell saw what Ziggy saw through his mind’s eye.
***
My USMACV-SHUFO boss was Major Blue, SHUFO’s Administrative Officer. Behind his back, they called him Old Blue, because he was.
Old.
And blue too, on most mornings when he was gruesomely hung over. Jowly and balding, he was my height and twenty pounds heavier. He was among the saddest-appearing persons I’d ever known.
A lifer and a Midwesterner, Major Blue was ancient, age forty-two, an eon older than me. A boozer and skirt chaser, he wasn’t around the office much. If it weren’t for the Vietnam War, Major Blue would be going nowhere even faster.
One day, the major invited me out for noon chow. Major Blue was a decent guy, but we hadn’t exchanged fifty words. Surprised, I said, yes, sir, my pleasure.
We rode a taxi to a hole-in-the-wall eatery two streets off Tu Do, for tasty roast pigeon that was served whole, head and neck too; noodles; and ice-cold
Ba-mi-ba
. Major Blue used chopsticks like a native and conversed in Vietnamese with the waiter.
Real Vietnamese words and sentences, not just slang and pidgin and obscenities and propositions.
This was his second
Vietnam
assignment. Stationed at Fort Riley, Kansas, in the process of his fourth divorce, he’d volunteered to return.
“From the fire into the frying pan,” Major Blue said.
We walked along the
Saigon
River
while our “
chow” digested.
“Joe, a little birdie told me you got things done at that screwball 803rd unit you were in, you and your late buddy.
My condolences, by the way.
He sounded brave.”
I nodded. “Yes sir, he was.”
There were barges on the river, a floating caravan. Air conditioners were stacked on one, the same model Ziggy and I had requisitioned from that Air Force flatbed in the deep distant past of not so many months ago. If they were piled any higher, they’d eclipse the sun. Can’t win a war without air conditioners, I thought. Things were getting crazier by the day, imploding into sheer chaos.
“Chaos,” I say absently.
“The whole shiteree, you’re saying?”
“Yes sir.”
“Joe, I’ve been around long enough to know that any master plan that comes out of the Pentagon and the White House, one hand often not knowing what the other’s doing, is certified to be a--I’m searching for the right word.”
“Clusterfuck,” I said.
“Couldn’t’ve put it better myself.”
A couple of GIs passed us. They had muscles, haircuts, and slick, embroidered shirts.
“Special Forces,” Major Blue said.
“Green Berets?”
I said. “How do you know?”
“Check out the lettering on the back of the shirts. They come out of whatever godforsaken place they’re serving at on R & R and get those shirts made for them at Cheap Charlie’s, a couple of blocks off Tu Do. Cheap Charlie can and does anything you want
stitched
on caps and shirts.”
Before they were out of range, I turned and read
: Special Forces Prayer. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for I’m the baddest motherfucker in the valley.