The Language of Men (7 page)

"This is amazing, Teddy," I say.

"It is!" he says.

Teddy guides us into the room with his hands on our backs, then turns and shuts the door.

"TOM CRUISE!" Teddy shouts, eyes wide, as if he too is surprised to see the framed
Top Gun
poster hanging behind the door.

For several minutes, Vanessa and I walk around the room, looking at the airport's intricate detail. Lego men stand on the tarmac holding red batons or sit behind the wheel on handmade wooden baggage carts. I kneel down and inspect hundreds of holes that Teddy has drilled into the plywood, and see that he has inserted a small blinking light into each one. Behind me, on the wall, are at least a hundred small planes, each one on its own shelf, arranged alphabetically by airline.

The speakers in the corners of the room announce a connecting flight to Kennedy. Teddy nods when I smile at him.

"I record all this," he points to the speaker. "Every time I fly, I record new announcements."

He opens a small closet and shows me his tape recorder and the stacks and stacks of little tapes, the date and airport written on each label. Teddy holds up his pointer finger and reaches into a box with his other hand. The photo album is full of pictures of him posing in dozens and dozens of airports around the world. A newspaper clipping falls out. Vanessa picks it up and unfolds it. Another picture of Teddy, this time standing in front of his own airport, the caption beneath announcing his induction into
The Guinness Book of World Records.

Vanessa smiles. "You're famous!"

"Yes," Teddy says. "Celebrity."

There is a long pause. Teddy glances at his watch and yawns, which spreads to me, then to Vanessa.

"So," he says, a smile rising on his face. "Time for karaoke?"

IN LAOS, it costs one U.S. dollar to shoot an M-16 at a paper target. For ten U.S. dollars, you can throw a grenade into a haystack. For fifty U.S. dollars, you can fire a bazooka at a live cow. An Englishman on holiday showed me the brochure. There are rumors that, for a certain price, you can shoot at a human being.

The Demilitarized Zone (DMZ)—the border that once separated North and South Vietnam—is now a popular tourist attraction. Here, for thirty U.S. dollars, one can visit The Rockpile, an infamous Marine landing zone. On the same tour, one can also glimpse Khe Sanh, the small village made famous in 1968 during the Tet Offensive, when nearly forty thousand North Vietnamese soldiers surrounded six thousand Marines. In nine weeks, the U.S. dropped one-hundred thousand tons of bombs, in addition to hundreds of gallons of napalm and Agent Orange. Air strikes occurred every five minutes, resulting in the most intense bombing period of the war. Only recently has grass begun to grow.

Vanessa and I take a tour of the Vinh Moc tunnels, just north of the DMZ. A jeep carries us down a long dirt road, past vendors selling Coca-Cola and bottled water.
Very thirsty in tunnels! Buy now, save later! Some
of the vendors sell frozen Snickers or extra-large t-shirts exclaiming:
I survived the Vinh Moc tunnels!

At the end of the road is a small museum filled with U.S. artillery and pistols the Viet Cong made from bamboo that are capable of firing American bullets. Live ammunition once sprinkled the dirt roads and jungle floors, scattered like loose change. Some bullets are buried deep in the earth; others emerge like stones dug up by a farmer's shovel. Before we reach the tunnels, the tour guide pulls over, leads us a few feet off the main road, parts vines and tall grass and reveals an abandoned U.S. tank, undamaged save for patches of rust.

I think of a photograph of my father standing beside a tank in Bien Hoa. He looks like me when I was little, posing next to a purple stegosaurus. The tank is clean. The bright-white Army star below the gun barrel reflects the sun. My father smiles as if the tank is an animal at the zoo, a big beast that, for a moment, has allowed my father to touch it.

Images like these remind me that there was a war going on around my father. So many of his stories from Vietnam are about sex and boredom, as if he spent nineteen months inside a brothel, ticking off days on a calendar. He did keep a "short-timer's calendar," a color-by-number picture of a naked Asian woman. On the last day, my father filled in the space between her legs with a red pencil. I imagine my father sharpening each colored pencil, killing time before his shift in the kitchen. In the distance, bullets echo through the jungle.

The topographic maps of the tunnels on the wall look like giant ant-farms. A pair of German girls in short-shorts and tank tops bend over the rope barrier, gazing into the barrel of an AK-47. I want to pretend I'm not as curious as they are, but I am. Like everyone else, I have paid to be here.

A petite Vietnamese woman enters the museum and gives a brief history of the tunnels. She is dressed in a black long-sleeved shirt, heavy pants, and boots. Vanessa and I are dripping with sweat, and so are the other people we've met on the tour: the heavy-set couple from Missouri in denim shorts and t-shirts, the young guys from Norway with thick eyeglasses and strappy leather sandals, the middle-aged widow from Vermont in weathered hiking boots.

Though expanded to accommodate Westerners, the tunnels are still very tight. My shoulders brush against the walls, and sometimes we turn sideways to squeeze through a particularly narrow section. The walls drip. Our guide leads us into a five-foot-wide room that was once the tunnels' hospital and birthing center. Clay dummies with broken ears sit in the corner—one pregnant, the other wearing a white surgical mask. An Indian man with a video camera holds his lens less than a foot from their faces.

I am suddenly reminded of my family's vacation to Howe Caverns in upstate New York. I was eight years old. My parents had recently purchased their first video camera, and my brother and I shot hours and hours of shaky footage that gave my parents motion sickness when they watched it. My mother often narrated the scene, talking to me or my brother, or describing the beautiful weather. Later, she'd complain about the sound of her voice. "If it bothers you so much," my brother said, "don't talk."

We took the camera inside the caverns, which were lit by yellow and red and purple flood lights, casting long shadows on the slick stone walls. Most of the footage looked like it was shot with the lens cap on. In the darkness, the tour guide's voice echoed. I asked my brother if it was my turn to hold the camera. My family wandered in the cave for almost an hour, whispering.

Here, our Vietnamese guide explains that many children spent their whole lives in the tunnels, surviving only to age three or four due to food and water restrictions. Some never saw daylight. The Indian man disappears around a turn, following his camera's red glow. I imagine him watching the footage when he returns home. His family will sit around a high-definition, flat-screen television, sipping tea, captivated by crystal-clear darkness.

At one point in the tunnels, I have to hold my breath to squeeze through a passageway. When we resurface on the shores of the South China Sea, the tour group is relieved.

"So sorry if you came here for guns," the guide says.

I stare at her, wiping my forehead.

"In Cu Chi Tunnel, south from here, you shoot gun after tour. But no here. Very sorry."

She smiles, turns away from the sea and leads us up the hill, as the Indian man's video camera captures our return to higher ground.

After buying bottled water from one of the vendors along the dirt road, I pull out
Lonely Planet
and look up Cu Chi. For a dollar a bullet, you can fire an AK-47, the official weapon of the North Vietnamese Army. Afterwards, you can eat boiled-root soup, drink bitter tea, and pretend you are the enemy.

IN HANOI, Vanessa works with a translator, Ngon, who is around our age. When she introduces herself to me, she tells me her name means "soft and nice communication," and asks me about mine. I hear Bruce Willis in
Pulp Fiction
answer for me: "I'm an American; our names don't mean shit."

"I looked it up once," I say. "Think it means 'priceless.'"

She nods, then turns to Vanessa. "Vanessa, I never asked what your name meant. What does it mean?"

Vanessa blushes. "Butterfly."

"Why are you embarrassed? That is very beautiful."

"My father used to call me that." I turn and look at Vanessa, but she's still looking at Ngon.

Ngon thinks for a moment and then her eyes light up as if she's made a great discovery. "Do you guys like pizza?"

That night, as Vanessa and I get ready for dinner, I skim
Lonely Planet's
restaurant index.
Apocalypse Now. DMZ Bar. The Raging Bull.
I imagine Ngon flipping through a guide to Vietnamese restaurants in the U.S. and reading:
Saigon Palace, Lucky Grasshopper, Pho Getta 'Bout It.
Ngon's parents often spoke to her in French. Perhaps Ngon remembers enough to walk through Boston, gaze at
Au Bon Pain
and imagine opening a restaurant in Hanoi called
To the Good Bread.

"Think Ngon would be up for a "roadhouse?" I yell to Vanessa while she's in the shower.

She laughs. "They serve pizza?"

"Of course," I say. "Just like a good Vietnamese roadhouse should."

"It's your call."

We tell Ngon we want the restaurant to be a surprise.

I hear The Cowboy Saloon before I see it. Michael Jackson had died the week before, so they are blasting a re-mix of "Smooth Criminal." As we approach the brightly-lit saloon—a two-tiered building with wooden railings, wrap-around porch, and spring-loaded doors—I see a banner advertising a Michael Jackson tribute show, an arm-wrestling competition, dollar drafts, and personal pan pizzas.

"Wow," I say.

"Nice work," Vanessa says.

Ngon giggles. "You picked here? This place is very loud."

I look up the block at the long row of dark store fronts.

"Give it a shot?" I ask.

They stare at me as if my question answers itself. We walk up the steps, pay the ten-dollar cover charge to the Vietnamese bouncer dressed in a pink cowboy shirt and Wranglers, and push our way through the saloon doors.

The inside is dark save for flashing neon lights. A massive disco ball spins above the bar. Vietnamese women in cowboy shirts knotted above their navels deliver glass boots full of beer to the dimly-lit tables. We appear to be under-dressed. The customers are mostly white men in suits, ties loosened around their necks, top buttons undone. On the wooden stage, beside haystacks and wagon wheels, several Vietnamese women move back and forth, swaying to the music.

We sit away from the bar, in line with the stage. The three of us lean close and yell in each other's ears. The laminated drink menu offers margaritas, sangria, Long Island Iced Teas, Sex on the Beach, Fuzzy Navels, and something called "Hot Screw against Wall." I pass the menu to Ngon and look around the bar.

"See anything you like?" Vanessa asks.

"Hey, I didn't know it was gonna be like this."

"I was talking about the menu." She grins.

"This place is different now!" Ngon yells. "One time, it was a family place! Now different!"

I can't imagine families sitting here, even if the lights were bright and the cowgirls only served juice. Our waitress, an older Vietnamese woman, moseys over and tips her white straw hat. We pass around the menu and point at each drink. Ngon speaks into the waitress's ear. They giggle.

"What did you say?" I ask.

"I say no tequila in Hot Screw."

We eat our pizza and have several drinks. A man dressed in black, wearing a heavy, rubber, Michael Jackson mask, moonwalks onto the stage. He grabs the microphone with one hand, his crotch with the other. The crowd goes wild.

As he brings the microphone to his lips, I notice the rubber jaw has been cut out, allowing him to sing without removing his mask. He sounds exactly like Michael Jackson. Even the yips and squeals seem as if they are coming from the jukebox, and not the speakers at his feet. His backup dancers are young Vietnamese women who move like this is the first time they've heard the song.

Perhaps it's the opening chords to "Beat It" or the several empty glass boots on our table that encourage me out of my seat and up to the bar to request another round. The place is jammed and many of the waitresses are no longer circulating among the tables. Instead, they are perched on stools, yelling into the mens' ears beside them. I peel a wet menu off the bar and point out my order to the bartender. She wears a black cowboy hat with an LED screen on the front that flashes H. O. T.

Beside me, a red-headed man who looks to be about my father's age balances a young Vietnamese woman on his knee. He shouts at her over the music. She also wears a black cowboy hat, as did each of the young girls talking to the men in suits. I look back at Vanessa and Ngon clapping and singing. The black lights at the foot of the stage flash on, illuminating the white cowboy hats on the older Vietnamese waitresses, as they wipe dirty tables and stick their fingers into empty glasses.

After the arm-wrestling match between a short Vietnamese man dressed as Rocky and a stocky Irishman pretending to be Ivan Drago, Ngon asks for the check. Vanessa and I pay the bill.

I feel embarrassed, but can't say why. I don't own the saloon. I didn't choose the entertainment. I don't know for sure that the waitresses doubled as prostitutes. But I feel connected with the jumbled, distorted assortment of American pop culture that pulsed between the faux-wood tables and plastic cacti. I grew up on it. I know all the lyrics and movie quotes by heart and, though I hate to admit it, a part of me was comforted by the sights and sounds of it all. It felt similar to seeing McDonald's golden arches rising high over New England back roads, how on a long scenic drive that bright "M" elicits a mixture of guilt and ease.

We walk Ngon back to her apartment and she thanks us repeatedly.

"I hope it wasn't too much," I say.

"No," she says. "The pizza was very tasty."

She and Vanessa speak for a few minutes. They hold hands. I watch them talk, amazed by Vanessa's ability to connect with people so quickly. She has only known Ngon for a couple of days. Perhaps the hand-holding is a custom I am unfamiliar with. But then I remember a photograph from Vanessa's trip to the Philippines: Vanessa sitting on an old woman's couch, their hands clasped tightly between them.