The world played chess, p.11
The World Played Chess, page 11
I didn’t. But I could tell from his facial expression and the tone of his question it was significant. “The other goes to UC Davis.”
“Yes, but did you ask out the one from New York who’s going to be making a lot of money?” William said, laughing.
I shrugged. “I told them we have a game tomorrow night and they should stop by Village Host.”
“You should have asked her out tonight,” William said.
I looked at Todd, who wore his ever-pensive smile that pierced right through my facade. I decided to quit while I was ahead. “Didn’t think about it,” I said.
“Let me give you some advice,” William said with his impish grin. “It’s just as easy to fall in love with a rich girl, Vincent.”
Todd dropped his cigarette butt, crushed it under the toe of his boot, and walked into the bar with his “I’m the baddest man on the planet” saunter.
Narrow, the bar had dark wood, paper shamrocks, and green-and-white décor. A crowd of young men and women filled the barstools and tables up front, drinking and talking above music playing from a jukebox. I hoped the crowd meant the waitress would be too busy to take the time to ask for my ID.
We walked to an empty table at the rear where the bar widened a bit and the sound didn’t echo. Guys played darts. On the wall, near a pay phone, hung a white sign with green lettering.
BAR PHONE FEES
$1 NOT HERE
$2 ON HIS WAY OUT
$3 JUST LEFT
$4 HAVEN’T SEEN HIM ALL DAY
$5 WHO??
A waitress approached our table and I prepared to reach for my wallet, but William put out his hand beneath the table to stop me and leaned across it. He raised his voice over the music and cacophony of other sounds. “Hey, Brenda.”
“Hey, William. Hey, Todd.”
“Hey,” Todd said.
The woman leaned in. “You meeting Monica?” she asked William.
William cupped his ear against the music and the din of the crowd. I had bad hearing also, my father’s hearing. I learned this when a bicycle tire I filled at a gas station on Broadway and El Camino exploded and my mother took me in to be tested. Brenda raised her voice and repeated her question.
“She’s working late,” William said. “We framed a job today and worked late also.”
I looked around, nonchalant, as if relaxing after a tough workday, and realized William had just set me up to get a drink.
“What can I get you?” Brenda flipped three coasters onto the table, each depicting a leprechaun in knickers. I was in.
“Jameson’s, rocks,” Todd said.
William ordered the same.
I didn’t know Jameson’s. My only criterion for hard alcohol was cheap. “I’ll have a Guinness,” I said and waited for the inevitable question. It didn’t come.
Minutes later, Brenda returned with our drinks and held out menus. “Are you eating?” she asked.
Todd shook his head. He had to meet his wife, but William nodded, so I did also. Brenda handed us menus and promised to return to take our food orders. We shot the shit and William kept on me for not asking out the New Yorker, but in a funny manner. Todd just smiled.
When Brenda returned, William ordered a club sandwich and a second Jameson’s. I ordered a hamburger and a second Guinness. Todd bugged out.
“Springsteen,” William shouted as the music changed songs. He rapped on the table edge like a drummer. “A good New Jersey boy.”
Mike had turned me on to Bruce Springsteen’s music. The prior Christmas he had bought me the eight-tracks Greetings from Asbury Park and The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle.
“We used to sneak into the bars on the Jersey Shore to hear Springsteen when he was a teenager with long hair and a shitty guitar,” William said. He smiled like he’d gone back to those carefree days.
I wasn’t a big music guy, I didn’t have money to spend on albums or eight-tracks, but I had installed an eight-track cartridge player in my Pinto; I’d even cut in the speakers in the back and run the wiring under the carpet. My tape selection was limited. The Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and the two Springsteen eight-tracks from Mike. Mif and I also liked Elvis, though I didn’t have a tape and wouldn’t admit it out loud. Billy called Elvis “a fat has-been” and said Springsteen was a yodeler. “Uh-uh-uh-uh-oh.” It wasn’t flattering.
I worried William and I would not have much to say to one another; this wasn’t just sitting around after work with a beer. After Brenda returned with our food and drinks, I said, “You have bad hearing?”
William nodded.
“I do, too. I got my dad’s hearing.”
William grinned. “I have Vietnam hearing.”
“Oh,” I said.
“Blew out an eardrum during a shelling my first night in the bush.” He shrugged like it was not a big deal. “You know Vietnam?” he asked.
“No,” I said. “Not really.”
William grabbed his napkin and pulled out a pen from his pants pocket and drew what looked like the mirror image of a longer and thinner version of California.
“Saigon is here.” He put a star close to the bottom of the drawing. “I was up here near the Laos border at a firebase in the triple canopy jungle.”
I figured William wanted to discuss it. “What did you do?”
He shook his head. “Went out at night on recon missions and watched guys step on land mines and get blown to pieces. Then we’d get up the next night and do it all over again, like it never happened. Stupid.” He shook his head, so I did also.
William’s blue eyes looked to have turned a shade of gray. “You ever watch movies where the soldier is taking aim from behind a log and shooting the enemy? John Wayne shit?”
“Yeah.” I loved to watch movies with my dad. War movies had changed over the years. Movies like The Great Escape, The Dirty Dozen, and The Guns of Navarone, which emphasized American heroism and patriotism, had given way to movies like The Deer Hunter, which focused on the madness of the war in Vietnam.
“It’s bullshit,” William said.
“How so?”
“You don’t aim. Not if you’re smart. You lie down behind a log or a tree trunk or a rock—whatever you can find—lift your M-16 over your head, pull the trigger, and hope the spray hits something. You lift your head up and you’re dead.”
He proceeded to tell me about his first night in a foxhole, and how the guy he shared the hole with, Kenny, climbed out and took a bullet in the eye. “Didn’t even know he was dead,” William said.
I sipped my Guinness. “Were you scared over there?” It seemed a logical and harmless question.
William eyeballed me. “Have you ever been scared?”
“Yeah,” I said. “A lot of times.”
“No, you haven’t.” William shook his head. “You don’t know scared.”
I didn’t know what to say.
“You ever been so scared that your ass shakes? I’m not talking about shitting your pants. I’m talking about when the flesh starts quivering and you can’t stop it.”
“No,” I said.
“Then you don’t know scared.” He sipped his drink, and I noticed a slight tremor in his hand. “Growing up, I got in fights because I was bored; hell, sometimes my friends and I would fight each other, and not once did my ass shake.”
William finished his drink, which I took as my cue to finish my Guinness. I did and set the glass down, waiting for William to get up, but he had one more thing to say. “You know when my ass finally stopped shaking over there?”
“When you came home?”
“When I no longer cared.”
“Whether we won or lost?” I asked, confused.
“We were never going to win. That wasn’t the point. No. It stopped shaking when I no longer cared whether I lived or died.” William stared at me with such intensity I was certain he could see right through me and was looking all the way back to Vietnam.
“And that,” William said, “is when you really should be scared.”
As I drove from Behan’s back up the hill to home, I couldn’t imagine reaching a point when I no longer cared if I lived or died. I couldn’t imagine losing all hope, no matter the problem I faced, but maybe that was because, as William had said, I didn’t know scared, and I’d never faced a problem so big, so terrifying, that my ass shook.
I hoped I never would.
April 28, 1968
The supposed moratorium has not stopped Charlie from lobbing 60 mm mortars at our firebase at night or sniping at us during our day patrols outside the wire. The patrols are intended to get us FNGs acclimated to humping in the oppressive heat and humidity, help us identify ambush areas, and educate us on how to detect the many booby traps and ambush mines we will encounter. I’m sure they’re also to get us past our nerves and anxiety, as Cruz told me my first day.
I look forward to going outside the wire. Inside the wire, the monotony, boredom, and oppressive heat have caused a lethargy I’ve never felt before. The sun rises just before six—an orange-red ball that turns gold around midday and becomes a searing white globe for most of the afternoon. I can hardly get up from my rack, barely get moving, and do so only to get away from the putrid smells in the bunker that remind me of our forty-year-old high school locker room. Cruz said the temperature is only mid to upper 80s and will get hotter, but with the humidity and the lack of any breeze, it feels like 180. He also said the lethargy is not uncommon, that it will pass.
I haven’t taken too many pictures inside the wire. There are only so many shots I can take of guys doing nothing before they tell me to piss off.
The military tries to keep us alert with news that the peace talks are failing and the NVA is massing in the DMZ and along the Laotian border, but they can only say that so many times before it becomes the boy crying wolf. We sit for long hours in the shade and drink warm beer or get high. I gave up my goal of making it through Vietnam sober the night Kenny got shot. Besides, I don’t think I’ll have any trouble remembering, drugs or no drugs.
Cruz came to me yesterday and said I was to accompany him back to Da Nang on a top-secret mission. He said it was time to put this lull in the fighting to good use. I had no idea what that meant, but I would have done just about anything to get off this firebase.
At twenty-three, Cruz is considered the old man of the platoon, which is why he says he gets the plum assignments and can choose who to accompany him. He’s also tight with our captain, Dennis Martinez. They’re both from New York. Both Puerto Rican. Martinez is a good officer. The platoon likes him. “He treats us like men,” Cruz said. “And he never asks us to do anything he wouldn’t do himself. He doesn’t try to pretend he knows more than the guys who have been here in the shit.”
Cruz and I hopped on the supply chopper and flew back to Da Nang. After picking up supplies for Captain Martinez, Cruz told me we were making a detour. He had a long order to buy weed, and the piastres to back it up. He also knew where to go—a particular mama-san who can be trusted. That sounded to me like a contradiction in terms.
“She’ll haggle like hell and act like she’s insulted, but in the end, she’ll come around.” Cruz was looking to buy party packs, ten rolled joints for about five dollars. This mama-san also had what Cruz calls 100s, joints as long as cigarettes soaked in opium. Those sell for a dollar a joint. Cruz once told me you don’t smoke the 100s unless you’re on base or at the rear. “You can’t function,” he said. “They will literally knock you out.”
We traveled to the Hai Chau District and stopped in a hole-in-the-wall store below three-story apartments. The store had cut flowers for sale on the sidewalk. The inside was as big as my bedroom back home. An oscillating fan, a relic, did little to alleviate the suffocating heat. Maybe that explained why no one else was sitting at the two nicked and scarred tables and chairs.
The mama-san welcomed Cruz like he owned the place. Maybe he did, based on the amount of piastres he carried. The woman was plump and her face ageless. I couldn’t tell if she was fifty or a hundred and fifty. I also didn’t detect a drop of sweat on her, both of which led me to conclude she’d made a deal with the devil. She rarely looked directly at Cruz or at me. She did, however, have cans of Tiger beer, which were brought unopened to the table by a boy old enough to be fighting. I wondered if he could be Viet Cong and whether he was thinking this would be a good way to kill two marines. He delivered the room-temperature beers with a blank stare that only made me more nervous. I drank the beer with one eye on him and the other on the door, my spare hand on my .45.
Cruz’s deal with Mama-san involved haggling in both English and Vietnamese, which Cruz has picked up on his tours. Mama-san yelled and hollered and looked aggrieved, but each time Cruz stood to leave, she waved for him to sit. She wanted the money. She nodded to the boy when the deal was done, and he and Cruz left the room to secure the merchandise while I finished my second beer.
When Cruz returned, I stood, but we weren’t leaving just yet. “Shutter. That was a good day’s work, and a good day’s work deserves its reward. I know you’re strung out waiting to meet Charlie, and Mama-san has something to help.”
I expected him to light a joint, maybe one of the 100s. He took me behind the curtain covering the doorway. Two women were waiting. He explained that he’d haggled us two of Mama-san’s prostitutes. In addition to liquor and weed, Mama-san runs a “boom-boom” house.
I had not yet been with a Vietnamese hooker, or any hooker for that matter, and I still remembered all the negative information fed to us during boot camp about venereal diseases so severe they will rot our peckers. Cruz assured me Mama-san had assured him that these girls had assured her that they are checked regularly by a doctor.
“Well, if she says that they say that a doctor says, then it must be the truth,” I said.
“Bad for business,” Mama-san said.
So is your prostitutes spending money on a doctor, I thought, but didn’t offer. I also didn’t offer that I had never been with a woman. I mean, there were two high school girls I fooled around with, and I reached second base with one, but that’s where they put up the stop sign. The two girls Mama-san had produced for us didn’t look much older than those high school girls, and far less interested. The heat looked to have zapped whatever enthusiasm they once possessed, if ever. I doubt it. They likely hate us as much as the VC, maybe more. The muscles in their faces never moved.
“Just like riding a bike, Shutter,” Cruz said as his woman led him behind one of two curtains.
That comment struck me as wrong—equating sex with these two women to riding a bike. But again, I didn’t say this.
The woman who took me to another bed was attractive, with a nice figure beneath a thin dress that didn’t stay on long. She had small breasts and thin hips and a red scar near her shoulder from a cut badly stitched. I wanted to ask her how she got the cut. I wanted to ask her why she was a prostitute, but I sensed I knew why. She was doing what she had to do, likely to support her family during a war that has disrupted everything. But given her look of bored indifference, I concluded that was not the time for deep discussion. I tried to make small talk, because I was nervous that I was going to mess up, but that, too, went nowhere. She told me to drop my pants and get busy. So I did. I figured this wasn’t going to last long when I heard someone yell, “Switch. Switch.” Cruz came running into my room naked and slapped me on the back like a Saturday morning tag-team wrestler. “Double your pleasure, Shutter.”
I didn’t have much choice. I switched rooms to an equally disinterested woman. It didn’t take long for me to complete my business, even with the sudden interruption, and based on the lack of any sound or facial expressions, I’m sure the moment was as anticlimactic for the woman as it was for me. It didn’t even feel like sex. It felt more like that first cigarette Cruz handed me to calm my nerves.
I had no sooner finished my business when the woman slipped on her thin dress and left the room. I took that as my cue to leave, except Cruz was still going strong in the bed behind the blanket where my clothes lay on the floor. I hoped to hell he wouldn’t yell “Switch” again. I figured I’d just wait in the room, but then the girl reappeared with another GI. She’d no doubt spent the minute in between the two of us getting a quick checkup and nod of approval from that doctor. If I didn’t have the clap by nightfall, it would be a miracle.
Cruz came through the curtain ten minutes later, but I told him I’d only been waiting a minute or two. We put on our clothes, took the merchandise, and left.
“Nothing like Vietnamese boom-boom to take the edge off, am I right?” Cruz said.
I smiled and nodded and generally played my part. I know I should be grateful. Cruz could just as easily have chosen one of the other guys in our squad to accompany him, but I just can’t help but be disappointed by my first experience, and to feel bad for the two young women, but mostly I fear that I’ll finally be out on a long patrol and I’ll suddenly be scratching like a bitch and crying when I pee.
Chapter 9
June 8, 1979
William moved slowly the following morning, and I deduced he hadn’t stopped at three Jamesons at Behan’s. Mike had told me cocaine was the drug of choice and prevalent among many of the Northpark Yankees, along with marijuana and hash.
On the other hand, I felt pretty good. I arrived home from Behan’s too late to catch up with my friends, which allowed me to drink a lot of water, spend the night watching television with my dad and younger siblings, and get to bed at a reasonable hour. I’d also consumed quality beer, not the piss water my friends and I frequently drank.
Regardless of how we felt, there wasn’t time for William, Todd, and me to discuss the prior evening. We had a huge glulam beam to set, and Todd said it would crush us if anything went awry. Setting the beam meant getting up on the second story, giving me a chance to peek into the bedroom window and peer down into the backyard pool for my Lucille. No such luck. My Lucille never showed. It was just as well. When the crane arrived, Todd was all business. While Todd guided the boom operator and put the beam at the exact angle, I worked with William to attach the walls, so the structure tied together and didn’t collapse. Once we had secured the framed walls, we put up joist hangers and slid two-by-six roof joists in place. Unfamiliar with the work, I had to learn on the fly watching and mimicking William. Eventually I got the hang of it. Getting the ridge beam in place, securing the walls, and framing out some joists took all day. We quit at five. William and I had a softball game to get to.
