by Tom Robbins
Dickie was in love, he explained. He had a fiancée, traveling now thousands of miles from Bangkok. “Okay.” She’d smiled as if he were noble and she understanding, but to her Thai mind it made no sense whatsoever. His girlfriend had gone far away, Miss Ginger Sweetie was right here. There was an opportunity for pleasure. Where was the problem?
Then she reminded herself that Dickie hadn’t gone to Patpong seeking pleasure. Men went to Bangkok’s entertainment district (a little Las Vegas without gambling or glitz) for the sex shows, the girlie bars, the disco, the go-go, the booze, the speed pills, the smack, the full-body massage, the freelance larks of the night. But Dickie, her Dickie, had gone there to buy a guitar.
Not that the purchase of the guitar hadn’t made him happy. So delighted was he with the new instrument—a cheap Thai knockoff of a Martin D-28—that she suspected he’d picked her up primarily to have someone with whom to share the delight. There would have been secondary reasons, too, she thought: undercurrents of loneliness and yes, even desire, never mind how successfully he’d suppressed it. Consider. When he took her to his room at the Green Spider, a room aromatic with oiled teak and moldering silk, he’d tuned the guitar and performed for her that song she liked about a river and oranges and a girl with a perfect body, and while he sounded nothing like Leonard Cohen, he wasn’t half bad. She’d applauded, and he might have gone on strumming and singing through his whole repertoire except that she’d slithered out of her underwear and the distraction was more than his musicianship could bear.
Miss Ginger Sweetie turned over. Dickie had appeared a bit sad when she kissed him good night, torn as he was, she supposed, between wanting her and wanting not to want her, but now he was propped up in bed with a jowl-splitting grin on his face. Dickie was beaming like an overlit showcase in a jewelry store. Maybe he’d made up his mind about something. “Why so smile?” she inquired. “I worry you explode for happy.”
She was both mildly stung and mildly relieved when his joy proved to have nothing to do with her. “Ah, Miss Ginger Cookie,” he said, getting her name wrong but smiling on, “let you be the first to know.” He cleared his throat. “You see,” he announced, “as of last night—this morning, actually—I have dropped out of dream school.”
It was a reflection neither upon Miss Ginger Sweetie’s English nor her intellect that she was totally mystified. She asked him to repeat it in French, which he did, but it was bad French, worse than her own, and she regarded him curiously as, with a long crimson nail, she scratched a grain of sleep from her eye.
“Well, you see,” said her handsome but perplexing faux French Faulknerian bedmate, “for years, for my entire adult life, I’ve been plagued by a recurring dream, a nightmare, I think you could safely call it. In this dream, I’m always back in school. Sometimes college, but mostly high school. There’s a test that day, an important final exam, and when I get to the classroom I realize that I haven’t studied for it, not at all. I’m not going to know a single answer, and I can’t find my textbooks for a last-minute cram. Sometimes, I can’t even find the right classroom.” He slapped his forehead to illustrate what a predicament it was.
“Or else,” he continued, “I’m supposed to give a presentation in front of the class, and when I stand up, it’s suddenly clear to me that I’m totally unprepared, I’ve got nothing to say. Or, I’ve lost my homework, or neglected to do it, and everyone is turning it in but me. You get the picture? There’re variations, but the theme is always the same: frustration, embarrassment, anxiety, failure.”
Miss Ginger Sweetie nodded. She enjoyed a discussion of “themes.”
“You couldn’t count the hundreds of nights that that dream has ruined for me. The times I’ve woken up in a sweat, in a panic, and even felt bad the next day. And the thing is, you can never graduate from dream school! Not ever! You’re doomed to repeat those embarrassing failures until death, and maybe they continue in Hell.
“However—however—last night (or this morning), I dropped out. I threw down my bookbag and just walked out the door. And I wasn’t coming back. I was gone for good. And now, I’m through with dream school. I know—I feel it and I know it—I’ll never have that horrible dream again. It’s over for me. I’ve dropped out.” His smile widened. “You have no idea, sweetie cookie, how incredibly liberating it is, what a burden I’ve shed. I haven’t felt this free since that day twenty-five years ago when I made the decision to stay in. . . .” He fell silent. His smile lost a modicum of wattage, but it was still bright enough.
“Good. Very good, Dickie.” She clasped her palms together, fingers pointing ceilingward, and saluted him in the Buddhist fashion. “I like story for have happy ending.” She glanced at her dainty wristwatch. There was time for a quickie, if he was inclined. Alas, the dropout was busy reveling in his newfound freedom. So be it. He was an odd one. She slipped out of bed, retrieved her panties (her steam-dumpling breasts did not require the services of a bra), grabbed her handbag, and padded into the bathroom to perform her toilette.
Mahidol University was in Nakhon Pathom, an hour’s bus ride from Bangkok. There was a seminar class at noon, during which she planned to present her original theory that Rimbaud, the precedent-shattering revolutionary French poet, was greatly influenced by Shakespeare; specifically, that he’d based his whole approach to poetry on Mad Tom’s speech from King Lear, and she wanted sufficient time before class to make sure her delivery was properly polished and prepared. She didn’t wish to be a character out of Dickie’s nightmare. She wished never herself to be troubled by similar dreams. For Miss Ginger Sweetie, failure in school couldn’t be an option. Learning not only satisfied some inner need, it was also her ticket out of Patpong.
Periodically, she would force herself to dwell on her cousin, Sup (nom de guerre: Miss Pepsi Please). Miss Pepsi Please had been lovely—truly movie-star gorgeous—but after seven years in Patpong . . . well, the last time Miss Ginger Sweetie saw her, Miss Pepsi Please’s face looked like a sink of dirty dishes: greasy, hard, worn, forlorn, and neglected. There were many others like her, and then there were the less fortunate girls withering away with AIDS. As she glossed her lips, Miss Ginger Sweetie reminded herself of her insistence that her own story have a happier ending.
Bladder drained, eyes shadowed, long black hair laboriously brushed, she returned at last to the bedroom. Dickie was sitting on the side of the bed watching TV, watching with great intensity, his dazzling dropout smile replaced now by an expression of shock, concern, and disbelief. “Jesus,” Dickie swore. “Jesus. Holy shit.”
From the announcer’s English, she could tell that Dickie was tuned to CNN. Perhaps there had been a huge natural disaster somewhere, or a terrorist attack. She’d sensed that Dickie was the empathetic type.
When she was in a position to see the screen, however, the image thereon was of a Western Catholic priest, handcuffed, surrounded by police. Miss Ginger Sweetie shrugged and raised her freshly penciled eyebrows.
But Dickie . . . Dickie sat there looking stunned. “Jesus,” he repeated. “They’ve got Foley. They’ve got him. They’ve got Dern.”
At about the same time, give or take a few hours, that Miss Ginger Sweetie was attempting to persuade an astonished instructor and a few disinterested classmates that some Shakespearean babble about whirlpools and ditch-dogs had directly inspired Rimbaud’s incandescent imagery in such startling poems as Une Saison en Enfer, another attractive Asian woman was also making a case. This woman was approximately a decade Miss Ginger Sweetie’s senior; was grander, keener, looked more Japanese than Thai, and was pacing the pavement in front of San Francisco’s Cow Palace while waiting for a taxi to take her to the airport.
“The show here in San Francisco three more day, right? Then it go Porkland.”
“Portland.”
“Okay, Portland. By time set up in Seattle, I probably be back. Back in show, same-o same-o.”
“No, you won’t, Lisa,” protested her companion. “You know you’ll b
e gone longer than that. And anyway, you signed a contract. You have legal obligations to the show. You’re featured in all the damn commercials. They’ve invested tens of thousands of dollars in those ads. You can’t just skip out whenever you get an ant in your pants.” The person confronting Lisa Ko was Bardo Boppie-Bip, the clown (not to be confused with any secretary-general of the United Nations, past or present). An onlooker wouldn’t have recognized Bardo Boppie-Bip, as she was out of costume, dressed, in fact, in jeans, a Harley-Davidson Motorcycles sweatshirt, steel-toed workman shoes, and a baseball cap set low on the apricot-colored hair that she wore mowed almost to the follicles in a commando crop.
“No ant in no pant,” countered Lisa Ko, staring in the direction from which she expected the cab to arrive. “I tell you it is emergency.”
“Yeah, you told me, all right. But you still haven’t explained the nature of that emergency. I mean, you see something on the news—and there was nothing on about Laos because I checked—and you freak out, clam up, fret all night, practically ruin your act, and now you’re hopping a plane to Asia somewhere without even notifying management.”
“I leave note.” Nervously, she glanced at the Cow Palace, hoping that no one on the circus staff would emerge before her taxi came. The fog that wafted in from the bay wasn’t quite thick enough to conceal her.
“How gracious of you. How thoughtful. That’ll hold up in court. In this country, we say the show must go on. Personally, I think your ‘emergency’ has something to do with that guy you’re supposed to marry over there. If you’re so hot to see him, why don’t you just send him a ticket so’s he can come here? It’d be better for everybody concerned.”
Lisa shook her head, jostling every ebony layer of her piled-on hairdo, crinkling the high silk collar of her jade green dress. “Can’t happen. No way.” She paused. “And I not very sure I marry him.”
Bardo Boppie-Bip became pensive. Eventually, she said, speaking softly, with a smile about a centimeter on the vulnerability side of sarcasm, “Does that mean there’s a chance for me?”
Under her breath Lisa muttered something in Lao. (The primary language spoken in Laos is called Lao. Likewise, the properly informed refer to “the Lao economy,” “the Lao climate,” “the Lao civil war,” etc. Around 1960, when events in that small Southeast Asian nation forced Western media to start paying attention to Laos, the Associated Press, networks, and news magazines decided that it would tax the American intellect—rigid yet porous—to comprehend that Lao was the adjective form of Laos, and, always preferring the dumbing-down of an audience to challenging it, they invented the term Laotian. a rather ugly Ohioan-sounding word that naturally, not being bumpkins, we shall not use here.)
A yellow cab, like a smoker’s tooth in the cottony mouth of morning, flashed into view. Lisa, who’d been staring at the pavement, suddenly turned to Bardo Boppie-Bip with a pleading look. Her eyes were wet. “You take good care my kids? You will?”
“Yeah, you know I will.”
“Please.”
“Relax. Those little hams are so hot to perform I could put ’em through their paces myself. Hell, maybe I’ll take over your act. Next winter I’ll have tanukis on my cable TV show.”
“No, no, please. You only take care. You remember how do?”
“You wrote it all down for me. Relax. Just get your ass back here as soon as possible. I’ll watch after your critters and try to save your job.”
“Thank you.” It was a heartfelt thanks, but when Bardo Boppie-Bip went to embrace her, Lisa opened the door and followed her carry-on luggage into the taxi. She did, however, call “Good-bye!” Then the car pulled away, carrying “the glamorous adventuress, Madame Ko,” looking a bit less sure of herself than in the commercial, to the international terminal at the San Francisco Airport.
See you this evening, Sis.” Tin Winnie the Pooh lunchbox in hand, Bootsey was leaving for the bus stop, ultimate destination: Seattle’s Queen Anne branch of the United States Postal Service. She paused at the front door of their bungalow. “I have to say, my heart’s still in a tizzy over how much that French priest last night reminded me of Dern.”
“Forget about it.” Pru took a swallow of tomato juice. “A French priest is a French priest.”
Bootsey grasped the doorknob. “Are you going to look for work today?”
Pru, who’d been laid off from her drafting job during a downsizing at Boeing, smiled hesitantly. “Well . . . yes . . . and no.”
“What does that mean? Yes and no?”
“What it means,” Pru answered, a bit sheepishly, “is that I heard that the circus advance men are gonna be over at Key Arena today and they may be hiring a few temporary workers. You know, just for the run in Seattle. So maybe I’ll give that a whirl before I start hauling my resumé around again.”
“The circus? Doing what, for goodness sake? A gofer for the clowns? They’ll let you hang out in clown alley? Water the elephants, then? I thought only twelve-year-old boys did stuff like that.”
“Why the fuck should twelve-year-old boys have all the fun? Times have changed.”
“They sure have. When a decent middle-aged woman uses language like that.” Bootsey opened the door and peered outside. “Cloudy,” she announced. “And kind of chilly. Wouldn’t it be adorable if this was the day when the leaves start to turn?”
Miss Ginger Sweetie, guiltily clutching a tip that she felt she hadn’t earned, had scarcely exited the Green Spider than Dickie was dialing a number on the vintage black telephone. He spoke to the answering party in Lao. The answering party did not comprehend, even though Lao is linguistically quite similar to Thai. Believing, reluctantly, that his southern accent must be at least partly to blame, Dickie switched to the singsong Anglo baby talk that in that part of the world frequently passed for English.
“I want speak Xing.”
“Uh?”
“Speak Xing. Xing!”
“Xing no here.” The voice belonged to a mature woman, possibly the mother of one of his contact’s confederates.
“Where Xing?”
“Uh?”
“Where? Where Xing? Very important.”
“Today I no know.”
“When? When he home?”
“I no know. Next day maybe.”
That wasn’t good enough. Dickie’s throat was tightening like a paw around a peanut. As he anxiously considered his options, mama-san volunteered, “Tonight Xing go Patpong.”
Okay! Great! Now they were making progress. “Where?” asked Dickie, cognizant all the while that Patpong was a large area, that there were actually three separate streets named Patpong, and that addresses there were about as useful as name tags on fruit flies. Before the answering party could say she no know, Dickie fired off another, perhaps equally futile, question. “What he do in Patpong?”
“Go see Elvisuit.”
Dickie almost whooped. Joy rose up in him like a champagne reflux. “Elvisuit!” All he’d have to do was find where Bangkok’s foremost Elvis Presley impersonator was performing that night, and, with any luck, Dickie would be on his way back into Laos to do . . . whatever at this point could possibly be done.
“Kaw roo nah,” he thanked the woman in Faulknerian Thai. “May the buddhas sing in your chili paste.”
The afternoon passed more slowly than a walnut-sized kidney stone. It was typically torrid and muggy, and the air conditioning in the Green Spider Hotel operated at less than maximum strength. Nude, perched on a rattan stool, Dickie tried to concentrate on his new guitar, keeping one ear tuned to the television audio. While CNN offered no further coverage of Dern’s arrest, Dickie did learn that an unexpected typhoon-strength storm had closed the Philippine airports on the previous day, which would account for Manila-bound Dern landing on Guam. His flight must have bypassed Manila and made an unscheduled stop—on an island that remained under American control, which meant paranoid security, overzealous narcs, and sniffer dogs. Well, maybe Dern had been asking for it. Stubblefi
eld, too.
The guitar Dickie had bought at one of those nighttime open-air markets where twenty-dollar “Rolex” watches and ten-dollar “Gucci” loafers were sold, and to the untrained eye, it looked exactly like a dandy Martin D-28, right down to the herringbone purfling.
“Is this decorative border made from real herring bones?” Dickie had asked the salesman.
The fellow had looked dumbfounded, but he quickly recovered. “Oh, yes! Real! Alla time bes’ real hurreen bow. Hurreen bow number one!”
“Excellent,” said Dickie. “But are the bones from virgin herrings?”
For a moment, the poor salesman appeared torn: was he ignorant in some area vital to the successful merchandising of knockoff guitars, or was his customer a dangerous lunatic? He hadn’t stalled long, though. “Yes! Okay! Hurring bow number one cherry virgin bow. Okay. Alla time bes’ ’Melican virgin. No problem!”
Remembering the exchange now, Dickie smiled that winning southern-boy smile. Then he went glum again. He thumped the purfled sound board. He caressed the inlaid peg head. He plucked each individual string. Eventually, stealing glances all the while at CNN, he attempted a Phil Ochs tune, but couldn’t progress beyond the first verse. Same for Bob Dylan and Neil Young favorites. He couldn’t even remember Cohen’s “Suzanne,” which he’d sung perfectly for that nice freelance girlie girl only the night before.
There was one song in his repertoire, however, whose lyrics no amount of anxiety would probably ever erase—and Dickie performed it, off and on, throughout the tic and trickle of that interminable afternoon.
Meet me in Cognito, baby,
We’ll soon leave our pasts behind us.
The present is always a mystery,
As the future never fails to remind us.
