The Language of Men (5 page)

I replay my father's description of the woman who was murdered in Long Binh:
She was one of the daily hires. Cleaned the hooches, policed up the area, scrubbed the head, shit like that. Then she'd walk by goin'
"Short-time? Short-time?"
Banged the entire engineer battalion and the next time I saw her, the MPs were draggin' her out the dumpster.
Loud German breaks through my father's voice and I look out the window of the hotel lobby to see two men stumbling out of
LePub
across the street. A cyclo driver slowly pedals by, ringing his bell. After bartering in a bastardized sign language, the two German men cram into the cyclo and are peddled away like babies in a big stainless steel carriage.

By the time my father arrived in Saigon, the bars and pool halls—leftovers from the French occupation—were revamped. Owners erected new signs like
Pussycat Café
or
USA Rock Club.
An explosion of Americana: vanity license plates; red, white and blue beer steins shaped like breasts; posters of Marlon Brando, James Dean, Frank Sinatra, Jim Morrison, Steve McQueen. Much like the inside of my father's hooch or my college dorm room. Vietnam was my father's version of college. It was the first time he lived away from home. He worked a low-wage job for beer money or to buy a gift to impress a girl. There are photographs of my father and Waller in Long Binh, leaning over a table made from plywood and milk crates. They both wear white undershirts and are holding records, trading them like baseball cards. If it weren't for the caption on the back, these photos look like they could have been taken in a record shop near my grandparent's house in New York.

Cyclos carried soldiers to and from the hottest clubs, each driver claiming to know the quickest route. Outside the clubs, Vietnamese teenagers, as if at a concert or sporting event, hawked t-shirts, stickers, patches, pins and coffee mugs with phrases printed in bold, capital letters:

MY LOVE FOR YOU IS RUNNING DOWN YOUR LEG.

ALL RIGHT, I LOVE YOU, NOW SHUT UP AND BUY YOUR OWN DRINK!

YOU WON'T GO DOWN IN HISTORY, SO MIGHT AS WELL GO DOWN ON ME.

Other items the teenagers sold were a bit tamer:
Shit Happens
inscribed on Zippo lighters; simple plastic American flags; or pins the bar girls wore that shouted: MONEY TALKS!

Inside the clubs, Janis Joplin offered another piece of her heart. My father leaned close to the sounds coming from a woman's lips, until she was quiet. She pressed her ear to the notes and vibrations in his mouth, his throat. He bought her several "lady drinks," expensive beverages on which she received a small commission. After she met her quota, the papasan allowed my father to pay her "bar fine," the bulk of which covered the room she rented above the club. Her room had to be furnished: a bed, a dresser, a fan, a sound system and a television. To pay for these required items, she took a loan from the owner at five, sometimes ten percent interest. The woman and my father ascended the stairs to her eight-by-eight room. Maybe he hummed along to Janis or maybe she, having heard the song over and over, mimicked the lyrics:
Didn't I make you feel like you were the only man?

I meet Vanessa after she gets off work at the clinic. I place the recorder on the table, stick the right earpiece into my ear and give her the left one.

She leans over the table and presses her finger into her open ear. I hit
Play.

"What's that clinking sound?" she asks.

"He kept flipping his silver dollar. He was kinda fidgety."

I had listened to the recording so many times I could recite it from memory. The din of the cafe seeped in through my left ear: the chatter of porcelain tea cups and saucers, motorbikes idling at the curb, the horrible Muzak that followed us everywhere, each song the synthesized sister of a familiar tune.

Eight weeks into Basic in South Carolina. Run run run. All day. Hit a few of the bars. All the locals knew you were military and the girls kinda stayed away from you. They could tell by your haircut or whatever and it was just like anything else. You hittin' on 'em, and they know. If you live in a base or around a base, it's the same crap. Guys come and go and they be hittin' on the girls and they ain't lookin' for romance or to go out and buy furniture. They just wanna pop ya.

There was a few places that the sergeant warned us about before we went into town the first time. Any hotels of, uh, ill-repute. Bordellos. If you gotta go—and I'll never forget him sayin' this—if you gotta go, go to the Hotel de Soto. Best one in town. And the cleanest.

The hiss of dead air. Vanessa looks down at the table and slowly spins the salt shaker. My voice breaks the silence: "So did you guys go there?" My father speaks through a yawn:

Nah, we were still stateside. Wasn't necessary yet.

Vanessa looks up. "What does that mean? 'Necessary?'"

I open my mouth, but my voice on the tape speaks for me: "Right, it's not like you were on the other side of the world yet."

WHILE VANESSA is at work, I wander around Ho Chi Minh City. I can only walk for so long before the heat becomes unbearable and the straps of my backpack cut into my shoulders. Then the rain comes and cools the city and I watch, from beneath an awning, as motorbikes beep and slide, but never slow down. When the rain is gone and the sun returns, the streets steam like a giant manhole cover.

Sometimes while I wait for the rain to let up, I duck into a cafe and look at my father's old photographs. The city he caught on film was then called Saigon. Aside from the year, make, and model of the cars and motorbikes, Ho Chi Minh City looks very similar to Saigon, and many locals still call it that. There are differences, of course, but the old butts up against the new, and in some places it's almost possible to draw a line between the past and present: a crumbling pastel apartment building beside a nightclub whose entryway is guarded by a massive neon bull's head, or a rusted bicycle parked outside a gleaming Kentucky Fried Chicken. Many parts of the city look like Paris; French presence lingers in the architecture, the cafés, the language. The older generations speak French and some pass it down to their children.

My father sometimes uses words like
beaucoup. Boy, I put beau-coup mus'tid on ya sandwich.
Or in the summers he'd tell me I had
beaucoup time on my hands.
For years, I thought this was a goofy term my father invented, but then I heard it in movies and in French class and now it rings out on street corners or is shouted in restaurants in the middle of high-speed Vietnamese conversations. The first couple of times I hear it, I half-think my father is standing behind me, holding up cue cards from which the city is reading.

One afternoon, I sit in a park and read
Lonely Planet.
Across the street is an old hotel. The metal balconies bleed rust down the side of the building. Two Vietnamese women in tight, short skirts stand in the doorway, passing out flyers. A neon light in the window flashes the word MASSAGE. Some men stop and start talking to the women, take a flyer and leave. Couples or women do not stop and are not offered flyers. I can't hear what the women are saying, but the smiles they wear when talking to the men fade as they turn to face each other.

I cross the street. The women are older than I thought and their clothes seem like last-minute Halloween costumes, something pulled from the clearance rack. I walk by once and don't stop. Then I turn back and walk by them again. They call me
sir
and
mister
and say my shoulders
seem have beaucoup stress.
I smile, but don't say anything. They hand me a hot-pink flyer that is written in English but is nearly unreadable, a mish-mash of italicized terms and bolded phrases wrapped around headshots of Vietnamese women that seem oddly familiar, like the photographs that come with picture frames.
Relax for you after long
hard
business!!! Take
load
off and feel
comfort!!!
What's the hold up?

I almost laugh, partly because of the translation, but also because I can't help but read the last sentence in my father's voice as he waits in line at the auto parts store. I look up at the women, who are nodding and nodding and nodding and I think about how the Career Center in college told me to always nod when negotiating, that nodding is contagious and if I nod enough, I can convince my client to do what I want, to give me what I need. I shake my head at the women and their smiles fade, their eyes searching for someone else on the sidewalk.

"You weren't tempted? Not at all?" Vanessa asks as we search for a place to eat dinner.

I tuck the flyer back into my pocket and shrug. "No way. There was nothing tempting about it. Plus the place was gross."

"So if it was clean it'd be okay?"

I felt I was approaching a slippery slope where my words could no longer express my intentions. "No, it's not that. You know what I'm trying to say."

"Where is this restaurant?" she asks, looking up and down the street.

"I know as much as you do, babe. The place is owned by a deaf and mute family. Book says it's got the best
bun cha
in town."

She doesn't answer. I glance down at the map, then back at the street signs, then back at the map.

"Let's just ask someone," she says.

"Nah, we got this. Come on."

We walk down a long alleyway that leads to another one and another. The alleyway brings us to a street filled with restaurants, but none of them are the one we're looking for.

"Almost there," I say.

I look at the map again. Street signs. Map. Street signs. Map. The map is colorful and detailed, but when I hold it up against the dark city, it doesn't help. Vanessa shifts her bag from one shoulder to the other.

"I'm asking this guy," she says.

"Wait a second."

"Hi. Excuse me? Excuse me? Do you speak English? We're looking for this place." I pass Vanessa the guide book and she points to the name of the restaurant. The man squints at the words and nods. He opens his palm and draws an invisible map. He stops a few times to point at the map in the book, then points out into the street, then back at the map in his palm, then back at the map in the book. He smiles and nods. "Not far."

We head in the last direction he pointed and eventually come to a busy intersection. "According to the book," I say, "there are two restaurants. One is the real place and the other is a scam, run by people who aren't really deaf or mute."

"As long as they serve food," Vanessa says.

Somehow, we find the right street. It is packed with tourists. Two Vietnamese families, on opposite sides of the street, stand with their hands clasped in front of them. Two mothers, two fathers, two daughters, two sons. As we walk by, the families reach out their hands and speak in strained, warped voices. Their bodies appear strained, too; sinewy necks and stretched fingers, forcing each limb to speak. A small child tugs on my backpack and points to his family.

The real restaurant is also known for their homemade bottle openers, a long piece of wood with a bolt driven through one end so that you could fit it snugly around a beer cap, slap the opposite end, and send the cap flying off into the air. Each family member waves a wooden bottle opener. They hold them up as indisputable proof. We stand in the street, making our choice.

I lean forward and whisper. "Do you think this is it?"

Vanessa shrugs.

We feel mute everywhere in Vietnam, so I wonder what difference it makes if the family here really is deaf and mute. In a way, a weight is lifted, and we don't have to worry about talking. The children seem much more daring than other children we've seen. Instead of shying away, tucking their faces behind their mother's legs, the kids on this street hold menus and bottle openers high above their heads and run after us.

"So. Do we stay or do we go?"

"I don't know," Vanessa says. "I guess we're already here."

Our whispering excites the families, as if Vanessa and I have become a deliberating jury. By this point in our trip, we are used to shouts and stares, but this is new. Another child runs toward me, tugging on my shorts. Then the other kid who yanked on my backpack returns and pulls me in the opposite direction. Neither child says a word.

A man who looks like a Vietnamese Harvey Keitel steps out of his restaurant. He draws a piece of wood from his back pocket, digs a shiny silver bolt from his apron, punches the bolt through the wood, twirls a beer bottle in the air, catches it, fits the opener on the cap with one hand, slaps the wood and pops off the cap. He takes a long, audible gulp.

We follow his family inside.

Each time Harvey Keitel's little girl approaches our table, she points to the menu and nods. Vanessa and I smile and order another round of
bun cha
and two more beers.

"So if it wasn't tempting, then why did you stop?" Vanessa asks.

"Huh?"

"The massage place. Why did you stop?"

"I don't know," I say, chewing. "I just wanted to hear what they had to say."

That sounds like a lie and I know it, but I don't know what else to say. I don't know what I'm supposed to be doing in Vietnam and often, on very hot days when I am hungry and working up the courage to eat alone in empty restaurants, the voice in my head tells me I'm just tagging along with Vanessa, that she has a real purpose here and it just happened to work out that I am unemployed, again.

Some days I concoct fantasies where an old prostitute would see me sitting on a bench, shuffle across the street and take my hand. She tells me a story about my father, the expressions he wore as a teenager, the words he used, the plans he had, some hidden tale that would replace the shrugs and flippant responses he gave when I asked him what he wanted to do with his life:
Damned, if I know.
She tells me things my father had told her that he never told anyone else, and when she takes me back to her apartment, she tells me to sit on the bed. She pulls out a dusty old book filled with my father's secrets, printed in the same chicken-scratch I used to see on the notepad in our kitchen:
Pick up milk, boy.