Читать книгу The Big Buddha Bicycle Race - Terence A. Harkin - Страница 15

14 May 1971

The Ghetto

The sun looked like a juicy apricot floating in the thick syrup of tropical evening air. Tom Wheeler and I sat regally in a pair of high-backed wicker throne chairs on the second floor porch of Unit #4, Bungalow Ruam Chon Sawng, passing some especially smooth and potent Laotian weed between us and chasing it down with Mekhong and soda. Lek, Tom’s part-time girlfriend, was cutting up fruit on a chopping block nearby, squatting on the floor as naturally as Tom and I were sitting in our chairs. As we neared the end of the joint, I watched Tom pull out his roach clip and take a drag, and I recalled how in the past year the Pentagon brass had denied there was any drug use among GIs in Southeast Asia. I remembered how a month or two later, after the press had proved them wrong, the same brass claimed their drug eradication programs were a great success. Neither the press nor the brass had ever visited the GI denizens of Bungalow Ruam Chon Sawng, a motley assortment of hippies and soul brothers who called their dead-end alleyway the Ghetto.

Unit #4 was one of five newly constructed stilt-shacks that ran down the left side of the alley. We called the bungalows stilt-shacks because like traditional village huts all over Thailand and Laos, they were elevated on teakwood pillars that for centuries had provided protection from flooding in monsoon season and, the rest of the year, a source of shade from the scorching sun. Wheeler lived there along with Zelinsky, my boss, and Phil Groendyke, the Det 3 lab tech. I was just visiting.

For the average GI, Bungalow Ruam Chon Sawng was an adequate place to hang your hat if you were sentenced to a year in Thailand. Wheeler, Zelinsky and Groendyke considered it a bargain. Sixty bucks a month bought them a stilt-shack made up of four slat-walled rooms with ceiling fans, a bathroom, and a wide, shaded front porch. The bathroom, or hong nam, featured cold running water for shaving and lukecold water stored in a large klong jar that you dipped a plastic bowl into for something like a shower. Zelinsky explained to me how in the tropics this was pleasantly refreshing—most of the year. Electricity was relatively new in upcountry Thailand and brownouts were not uncommon, but enough juice reached Ruam Chon Sawng to run a stereo and a mini-refrigerator twelve hours a day, more or less. A Thai with half a brain would not have paid more than twenty dollars American to move his entire family in, but Wheeler, Groendyke and Zelinsky didn’t mind splitting their sixty a month three ways.

A long, unelevated structure ran down the opposite side of the Bungalow Ruam Chon Sawng complex. It might have passed for a barracks, more easily for a chicken coop, but it was in reality a row of one-room apartments. Each unit on the long, squat barracks side had a bed-sitting room, a private bath and a little area outside, boxed in with a cement wall and containing a cement bench, that passed for a patio. The chicken coops ran ten or twenty-five dollars a month, depending on whether you were getting the Thai or the American price.

There was nothing Tom and I enjoyed more when we were stoned than perusing the little world below us from our second floor perch. The two Thai national policemen who squeezed their families into the studio apartments closest to the gate often spent the late afternoon relaxing with their wives and children outside on their little patios. On our side of the alley across from the policemen, Mama-sahn, the brains behind Ruam Chon Sawng, often sat out in front of her two-story cottage with her son and a covey of half-naked grandchildren. Mama-sahn’s little palace had once been a stilt-shack like Tom’s, but the first floor was now finished off and the interior pine-paneled, a sign that she had done well in the war. She had done so well, in fact, that Bungalow Ruam Chon Sawng literally meant “Bungalow People Come Together Two.” Number One, the original, was located downtown near the post-telegraph office.

Tom and I especially enjoyed gazing across his little cul-de-sac in the late afternoon and watching the most beautiful woman in Ruam Chon Sawng sitting out on her patio dressed in a silk kimono drying and brushing out her hair. Water was abundant in Thailand, and taking two or three showers a day was not uncommon. She spoke no English and was once visited every day at noon by a Thai soldier who was married and could not leave his wife. At one o’clock she helped him button up the shirt to his uniform and returned to her job giving manicures in a nearby beauty shop.

The most beautiful woman in Ruam Chon Sawng was proud of the fact that she spoke no English, but that did not mean she was not ambitious. She had carefully saved her money so that she could attend the really good beauticians’ school near the Chinese quarter in Bangkok. After she returned, she started saving money to open her own salon. She also made a change—a business decision really—in the boyfriend department, even though the Thai soldier had been very handsome.

Now a Thai kickboxer lived with the most beautiful woman in Ruam Chon Sawng. He got to smell the sweet, soothing incense that burned each night from the spirit house, a miniature temple that sat on a pedestal in front of the cinderblock wall that closed off the alley. I suspected that it had been a long time since the boxer had been surrounded with so much beauty. He was scarred and bruised and pasty-skinned from spending much of his life under the artificial light of gyms and indoor arenas. His wire-straight, close-cropped hair was thinning on top, his body seemed rough-hewn and gangly on his five-foot six-inch frame, and his flat face had been rendered flatter still by countless kicks and punches in the ring.

But now the most beautiful woman in Ruam Chon Sawng had a lover who might marry her someday and who promised to set her up in business when he won his next fight. Tom and I secretly admired how uncomplicated she had kept her life by never learning English. At the same time we were glad we had Lek and Pueng around to keep us up-to-date on Ghetto gossip.

Ruam Chon Sawng might have been considered a blight back in the States, but in May of 1971, young GI potheads and soul brothers lived in harmony there because it was cheap and far from the base—and because girls and drugs were plentiful. Thais lived there because, for bar girls and masseuses, for soldiers and policemen and petty civil servants, for musicians and the kickboxer and the beautician, for all these people the bungalows and studio apartments of the Ghetto were a great luxury after growing up in the thatched huts of rural villages. They now had tin roofs that never leaked, electricity instead of kerosene lanterns, and they no longer had to haul water in buckets from a well—they could fill their klong jars by turning a handle.

“Happy Happy Hour, dudes,” said Lek, who had finished slicing up a sapparoht, magically turning the ungainly fruit into a bowlful of sweet, watery pineapple chunks that she carried over to her boys. Lek always surprised me, looking and acting more Puerto Rican than Thai. She was petite, attractive, but the spit curls, the glossy lipstick and especially the intensity she radiated from her eyes brought to mind one of the sexy dancers in the chorus of West Side Story, if not Rita Moreno herself.

Tom took a pineapple chunk for himself and then put one into Lek’s waiting mouth, letting her lick his fingers before he slowly pulled them away. His eyes twinkled at hers, and hers twinkled back. We had started calling Tom Wheeler “the unenlightened Buddha” long before we left California for Southeast Asia. No matter where he lived, he wore a perpetual smile of gentle bliss unperturbed by the world that swirled around him. He wasn’t movie-star handsome, perhaps because he had brown eyes instead of blue to go with his long, straight blond hair, but his mellow good cheer and his endless supply of grass seemed to attract a steady stream of women. “What do you mean ‘unenlightened’?” he used to ask with a bemused smile.

Zelinsky and Pueng, the unabashedly plump Thai girl he had returned to marry, never let food sit around uneaten for long and soon came out of their room to join us. Pueng’s round face and sparkling eyes radiated warmth and naughtiness and gave her the kind of beauty that would age well into a Thai version of Mrs. Santa Claus. It was the kind of beauty that a guy like Zelinsky, who had been too shy to find a date for his senior prom, could feel secure with. No high rollers would be hitting on her back in the World. The two of them would keep it to themselves how great she was in bed. “Did we hear something about Happy Hour?” Zelinsky asked.

“Count us in,” said Groendyke, who came out of the third bedroom followed by a smiling, somewhat embarrassed young bar girl who looked from her disheveled hair and squinting eyes like she had just woken up. He was apparently on hiatus from his engagement to his high-school sweetheart back home.

The elevated porch began to rumble pleasantly. Tom looked off in the general direction of the base. “Here they come,” he said.

Silhouetted by the copper sky, a Spectre AC-130 gunship, an ominous black version of a Klong Airlines troop transport, took off over the south end of the base, droning as it floated past us, climbing out slowly for the hills of Laos. A few seconds later another appeared. “Ghost Riders in the Sky” wafted down the alley on somebody’s portable cassette player. It grew louder as footsteps began banging their way up the wooden stairway.

A third Spectre bird floated past as the song filled up the porch with twangy guitar, paused, and then disintegrated into the kind of acid country that Jimi Hendrix might have played had he transferred from the 101st Airborne into the Air Commandos instead of running off to England. “What the hell is that?” I asked, taking a long toke and finally looking up to see Harley Baker and his girlfriend, Mali.

“My brother got it from a bar band called the Outlaws that was playing around the Florida panhandle. He thought I might dig their arrangement of the Spectre theme song and sent it along.” Baker’s chalky white complexion and pink-rimmed eyes gave him the appearance of someone who’d spent some time in Transylvania. Between night operations with the 16th Special Operations Squadron and his off-nights spent in bars, he saw less daylight than the Thai kickboxer across the alley. Baker was the kind of walking bundle of contradictions who had no trouble blowing up trucks on the Ho Chi Minh Trail one night and playing soulful blues guitar the next. I admired his guitar playing and his fearless approach to life. At the same time he scared me, constantly walking a fine line between fearlessness and recklessness. We figured out early on to not talk politics.

Mali’s skin was as golden brown as Harley’s was pallid. Her face was as soft and sensuous as his was hard and angular. Her coal-black hair was as long and soft and wavy as the patch of straw that covered Harley’s head was greasy and straight. While Harley carried himself as aggressively as his gold prospector grandfather had swung a pickaxe, Mali carried herself with the grace of a village girl, even though her father was in fact a petty official in the provincial capital at Roi Et. I liked Harley’s music, but the Air Commando part made me uneasy, both the hawkish politics and the macho attitude. If he’d been a Thai guitar player and wasn’t earning flight pay and combat pay, I wondered if Mali would have given him the time of day.

“Let’s crank it up,” said Tom, opening up the chintzy leatherette case of Baker’s Norelco portable and taking the cassette inside to the music room. He pushed his system, the finest mixture of Sansui, Teac, Pioneer and Dual components the BX had to offer, to the limits of semi-fidelity, shaking the entire alleyway with nair nair nair nair’s shrieking out of the lead guitar and duga duga duga duga’s cascading down from the bass into explosions of cymbal crashes. Satisfied with the ear-splitting volume, Tom came out and sat back down, smiling blissfully as Lek rested her hands on his shoulder and nuzzled him from behind and they watched gunship after gunship take off that night. Zelinsky and Groendyke and their companions had settled in to watch the show from the chairs and pillows they had brought out with them. When I offered my seat to Harley and Mali, she slid into his lap and they leaned back comfortably in the high-backed chair. I drifted over to the porch railing and rested my hand high up on the wooden support post, soaking in the pleasant blend of music, Mekong whiskey, juicy pineapple and weed while watching a few more slow-moving Spectre birds pass us by. When “Ghost Riders” ended I went inside to turn down the stereo and came back out. I was by myself, but I wasn’t alone and I didn’t mind.

Finally, the last of the sixteen Spectre gunships taking off that evening turned right over downtown Ubon and lumbered off to the secret war in Laos that no one back in the World was seeing televised on the evening news. The sky had quickly turned indigo. Six forty-three p.m.—twenty minutes after sunset. Right on time in the tropics.

Tom finally broke the spell. “Hey, Baker, why aren’t you flying tonight? Isn’t that a lot of planes going out?”

“I had to rearrange my schedule. Didn’t Brendan tell you we’ve got a gig at the Soul Sister?”

“It’s the bass player’s birthday,” I explained. “You oughta catch it.”

“Tommm,” purred Lek, “can we go?”

“Should be a good show,” Harley said as he and Mali got up to go. “See you later.”

“See you there,” I replied.

“Later,” said Tom and Lek.