“I think we should worry more about finding that damn Juanton and taking care of him. Worrying about the CIA is wasting time. It’s like worrying about being a Baptist. It’s either in your heart or not. What difference does it make who starts wars? People who need a war start wars. It’s more a budgeting matter, really. No war, no CIA. No CIA and you’ve got assassins selling cars down at Bertram Lincoln Mercury just outside of Cleveland. Would you want to buy a car from a guy that would rather be working on the overthrow of some African country?”
“I won’t know until you tell me, Gearheardt. You claim you’re CIA and that you swore me in, so now I’m CIA. I don’t think you can do that.”
I turned toward him and found that he had been watching television while he was talking to me, the sound off.
“Damn it, Gearheardt. I can’t figure out whether I did what I was supposed to do in Hanoi. It’s important to me. Can’t you see that?”
Gearheardt came off the bed and stood beside me, gazing out at the gray day, the mist obscuring most of Hong Kong Harbor. Boats appeared from the fog like magic tricks.
“They came to the orphanage after me,” he said. “I was the scrawniest kid there. No future. My parents both mad at me. I guess that’s why I was such an easy target for the agency. You know which agency I’m talking about, don’t you, Jack?” He looked at me.
“Well, since we’ve been talking about the Central Intelligence Agency for the past five minutes I could take a wild guess. Don’t go spooky on me, Gearheardt.”
“You’re close,” he said. “This was an auxiliary organization at the time, just for kids. I didn’t get into the real thing until I got into the Marine Corps and flight school. Just before I swore you in.”
“I’m not sure most people are aware there is such a thing as a CIA kids’ group,” I said, reining in my sarcasm. I wanted him to go on.
“It doesn’t exist anymore. Not with a Democrat in the White House. Funding was cut way back, and none of the kids could afford their own weapon. And there was a movement to let girls join. They finally just took the kids with a lot of promise and folded them into the senior agency. Luckily, I was one of them, or I’d still be at the orphanage.” He shuddered and I didn’t know if it was from the chill of the air conditioner—Gearheardt had only the shower curtain wrapped around him—or the thought of being left in the orphanage. “But what does that have to do with anything?”
“Gearheardt,” I said, turning to face him as he lay back on his bed, “I would just like to know … Why in hell were you in the orphanage? Didn’t you just say you had parents?”
“My parents were pessimists, Jack. Didn’t think they’d live from day to day. Still don’t. They were just being precautious. I’d rather not talk about it. Unless you want to.” He poked through the ashtray looking for a lightable butt.
“My mother always told me never to think bad thoughts, because they would come true if you believed them,” he said. “She was right, I guess.” He flicked his flame-thrower lighter.
“She didn’t know how to fry chicken like your mother, Jack. That’s the difference.”
“You’re full of crap, Gearheardt.”
He smiled and licked a finger and ran it over his singed eyebrow.
“What I want to know,” I continued, “is how the CIA influenced our mission to Hanoi. Thinking back, if it hadn’t been for that cockamamie story you gave me about them, we might have accomplished what we went to Hanoi to do.”
A knock on the door stopped his answer. He opened it to the two Chinese women, who grinned at us over a pushcart. They took the desk chair, the bedclothes, paintings from the walls, the lamp, the nightstand, and Gearheardt’s elephant-skin wallet, although, again, we didn’t find that out until much later.
“I can’t help it, I like enterprising women, Jack. They see an opening and they go for it.”
“The hotel will make you pay for all the stuff that’s missing. You know that, don’t you?”
“Think how much fun it will be arguing with them, though. First, I’ll deny it’s gone. Then I’ll claim that the maid took it. Then they’ll have to raise the uncomfortable issue of perhaps there were whores in the room. And you know the Hong Kong Hilton rules, Jack. No women in room. Presumptuous little bastards. As if having women in your room meant you were screwing them or something. I’ll claim they were my wife, by God. I’ll …”
“Save your ravings for the manager. What about the CIA? You told me they gave us a chance to be Kings of the Universe. Why didn’t they want us to complete the mission? What the President had sent us to do.”
Gearheardt sat cross-legged on the mattress in the center of the denuded hotel room. “Who’s Tom Dexter, Jack?”
I didn’t change expression, refusing to get drawn into his game.
“Tom Dexter is the other you, isn’t it, Jack? The you that can do things that Jack Armstrong can’t do. Isn’t that right? That’s why the CIA was involved. So that we could do stuff that Marines couldn’t do. Sometimes we have conflicting missions.”
“Why don’t they just do a little bit of coordination, for God’s sake?”
Gearheardt smiled. “Well, we’d all be CIA then, wouldn’t we?”
“But the other us stopped us from doing what we needed, were ordered to do,” I said, realizing as I did that Gearheardt had won again.
“That was their job, Jack,” Gearheardt said. “Now let’s go find something to drink. Maybe today we’ll find a Brit.” He swung his legs off the bed and began singing “Gonna kill me a Cuban, Gonna shoot him by seven” to the tune of “Got a Date with an Angel.”
Of course we didn’t find the Cuban or a British spy to speak of. After a week or so of drinking and lecturing bar-women on politics—“These girls have the right to know the politics of people screwing them, Jack”—we flew back to Thailand and stayed in Bangkok before heading back up country where Air America awaited our expertise in moving stuff around Laos without looking like we were combatants. Never mind the occasional round through the forehead. I think I knew, flying out of Hong Kong, that we had only been trying to delay realizing the inevitable. We had failed in our mission for the Marine Corps and would fly for Air America in Laos until death or worse.
I had had Ho Chi Minh in my sights, slumped dead drunk in the driver’s seat of his Corvette, and I hadn’t pulled the trigger. With the leadership of the North Vietnamese army held at bay by the swinging breasts of an American movie star, I’d had the perfect opportunity to do more than my duty, and I hadn’t done it. How many men had lost their lives in the war because I couldn’t pull the trigger?
Probably plenty, according to the Thai psychiatrist that I sometimes visited in Bangkok when depression kept me out of the bars and massage parlors. My question to the psychiatrist—the cheapest in Bangkok according to the sandwich board on the sidewalk—had been, “Is it only because we don’t have a real plan that I don’t want to go back to Vietnam?”
“How should I know?” the doctor had answered.
I started seeing a Thai psychiatrist because I didn’t like whores. Actually I did like them. I just didn’t like sleeping with them. Centuries ago, before I left the U.S. for the war, I had been dating Mickey Mouse. Not actually the mouse himself but a girl who wore the outfit at Disneyland. Gearheardt thought that was why I didn’t like sleeping with whores. Not that I had been going with someone, but because it was Mickey Mouse, a symbol of something in America. I tried to explain it to the Thai doctor, but it was confusing to him, he said, and it gave him a headache. It was comforting that the psychiatrist’s English was poor, and he had an office that was air-conditioned.
“I don’t know if I chickened out because I was scared or because I truly didn’t think that it was morally right to kill Ho Chi Minh in cold blood when he was drunk,” I told him.
“No like chicken.” Dr. Boon leaned back in his chair and templed his fingers under his chin. His hands were tiny, and he wore thick gold bracelets on both wrists. Above t
he door I could see a tiny, gaily festooned Buddhist shrine. On the wall underneath, a framed picture of the King and Queen and beside that a sign for Hires Root Beer. Although I couldn’t see it from where I lay, I knew a black and white photo of Dr. Boon holding a skinned cobra, dripping its blood into a glass, hung next to that. It was my favorite.
“Chicken is a term that we use for cowards, you know, like ‘not brave.’ I mean maybe I wasn’t brave enough to do my duty,” I explained, not wanting him to think I was crazy.
“Gearheardt say maybe you scare whore. Too much hair. But Thai women—”
“You’ve been talking to Gearheardt?” I swung my legs to the floor and faced him.
“Gearheardt your good friend. He says you go back Vietnam, everything okay. I fix you pretty soon so you go back.”
Dr. Boon’s wife smiled up at me from where she sat cross-legged on her mat. She attended all of my sessions and seemed to add an air of domesticity lacking in U.S. medicine. If she had not been Dr. Boon’s wife, I might have suspected that Dr. Boon was gay. Every session at some point drifted back to the size of the American penis. An embarrassment in the first session, but Dr. Boon assured me that his wife spoke no English. She was pretty, petite, and always smelled clean.
“Chicken man have no penis, but American man have very large penis, right? Maybe this why you think that North Vietnam Army always no like you.”
I sank back on Dr. Boon’s hand-tooled almost-leather couch and closed my eyes, wondering if there was a universe somewhere where that made sense. I wished I was there. I felt Dr. Boon’s wife remove my shoes and then begin fumbling with my belt. At the end of each psychiatric session she always gave me a bath and massage. Or if she were too busy, she had one of the girls from the massage parlor downstairs come up and do it. After the first time—when I threatened to kill him—Dr. Boon had not tried to get into the bathtub with me. The warm bath and ensuing massage gave each session another element sorely lacking in American mental health treatment. It could be quite nice in that bathtub, being scrubbed by the lovely Mrs. Boon.
It made perfect sense for Dr. Sipsep (Boon) Kulichingchorn to have his office in the Suriwong Hotel, a combination massage parlor and brothel just a block off of Pat Pong Road in Bangkok. On one of my first forays into the enticing cesspools of Bangkok, after Gearheardt and I had been kicked out of the Marine Corps and indentured to Air America, I had stumbled over the sidewalk sign advertising CHEAP PSYCHIATRY HELP YOU. Who could resist?
“I see men all time,” he told me later. “They all time dirty or want have sex. I help them. They pay me. Never mind.”
His wife, although I did not know she was his wife at the time, was giving me a premassage bath when he slipped into the small, tiled room at the Suriwong.
“You want psychiatly man, chi mai?” he asked. “That me. Dr. Boon Kulichingchorn. Cheapest psychiatly man in Bangkok.” He showed most of his teeth and I relaxed. I didn’t like having people join me in the bath facilities when women were scrubbing me. But this gentleman seemed comfortable. He was a professional, after all.
“Who told you I wanted a psychiatrist—a psychiatry man?”
“My wife. She say you crazy as loon.”
The slight fellow with spotless white shirt loose over gray slacks gestured with a dainty hand, a small fake gold Rolex hanging loosely at his wrist, toward the woman kneeling at the side of my tub. “My wife. She scrub you bath.”
I sat up in the water smartly, bringing up a knee to discourage any localized scrubbing activity. “Your wife? This is your wife?” I might have added “whose small perfect breasts are exposed.”
“Also nurse and selling man. For psychiatly business.”
“Wait. Your wife, who is scrubbing—anyway, she is your salesman for your medical practice? Psychiatry business.”
I motioned his wife to bring a towel. She rose and fastened her onepiece cotton wrap, which had somehow come unwrapped. I looked at the doctor.
“Yes, yes. That right. You come lay down new almost-leather couch-bed. I fix you pretty good.”
Dr. Boon’s wife had pulled the plug in the bathtub when she rose and the empty tub left me cold and naked. Feeling foolish.
“My wife, she office. You come and she towel you.” He turned to the door while I searched for my clothes. As usual, they had been sent out to be washed and pressed while I was not needing them. I stepped out of the tub, picking up a magazine that lay on the small table along with various massage oils and powder. The magazine had the graceful flowing complexity of the Thai language on the front and photographs of young Thai women who seemed to have been dressed by the Mad People of Paris. Thai girls loved the latest fashions but never knew when they were being misled by hunger-crazed hermaphrodites.
Holding the Thai version of Seventeen in front of me, I followed Dr. Boon down the hall to his office, past a small replica of a Buddhist temple over the Thai-height door, banging my head as I walked in. The almost-leather couch was cold, but as soon as I lay down, the petite and freshly aromatic Mrs. Boon appeared with a warm towel and dried, then covered me. From below, the sounds of an early afternoon bar carried laughter and mellow good cheer to the office. For no good reason, I began to feel sad.
Dr. Boon noticed and leaned forward in his chair. He brought his small hands in front of his face, resting his elbows on skinny knees.
“Is guilty complexion,” he said. “You think you hot-ass pilot who can win war. Now you are guilty you cannot.”
“Hot-ass,” I said. “Is that a medical term?”
“It mean—”
“I know what you meant, Doc.”
He grinned, then became serious again. He reassumed his listening intently mode.
I continued, “But you think that I am so depressed because I have a guilt thing? Like a survivor’s complex? Is that what you’re getting at?” Without real logic, the men who came back could not shake the irrational feeling that they had not done their best, and if they had …
“I saying many people die America go Vietnam. Many baby and mother burn and blow up. People have no eye and no arm.”
I did not have a great deal of experience with psychiatry, but I was pretty sure there was a method more reassuring than this. My chest grew heavy and a tear escaped my eye and rolled slowly down my cheek.
The doctor began to cry also. “I make you feel bad, Jack. I shitty doctor.”
I wanted to comfort him, but I felt too depressed, and he was a shitty doctor.
“Jack, you tell me. You tell me story. Then you feel better. I feel better too.”
He rested his hand lightly on my shoulder.
“You number one, Jack. Never mind bad luck. You number one. Now you tell me story and I fix wagon.”
He smiled now and I felt worse that I needed reassurance from a pidgin-speaking, correspondence-school psychiatrist in an office above a whorehouse on Pat Pong.
I sighed, deciding to not hold back.
“It was Gearheardt. Without him, this wouldn’t have happened.”
I opened my eyes and looked at the doctor.
“Don’t get me wrong, Doc. Gearheardt got me through the worst of it. He’s a champ. He’s … golden.”
The doctor sat silent for a moment.
“He same same you, Jack. Gearheardt same same you.”
“I know. Great guy. He’d do anything for me.” Same same could mean anything from “similar” to “I can’t tell you round-eyes apart.”
“You sad man, Jack. Geelhot he afraid he make trouble you. You tell me, Jack. You tell me. I fix—not so sad. Okay, Jack?”
His delicate brown face was like a child’s, and I did not admonish him for talking to Gearheardt about me once again.
Mrs. Boon knelt at the end of the almost-leather couch and began massaging my feet. Her touch was as lovely and gentle as her smile.
“I guess you might say that Gearheardt did make trouble me, Doc. I don’t blame him or anything. He is my best pal. Good guy, you know. Very good
guy. Golden.”
Mrs. Boon was now massaging my calves. I shivered slightly in the air conditioning; the damp towel covering only a small part of me.
“You tell me, Jack.”
It was really quite peaceful in that room. The smell of the new almost-leather, the not-yet-beer-fueled sounds of the bathhouse. Incense burning, pungent and silent.
The now-to-the-knees tender touch of the lovely Mrs. Boon began to loosen my tongue. The story began almost reverently. Love for my country, the Marine Corps. It filled and drew. Images that I wasn’t aware that I could create. I felt myself shrinking as dams broke. I extruded and gushed. The sun climbed the wall behind the almost-leather couch of Dr. Boon, cheap psychiatly man extraordinaire.
The flotsam and jetsam of wars and whores rose and spilled onto Dr. Boon’s cheap oriental carpet. Hanoi and napalm and the care and cleaning of helicopter rotor blades. Directive 22-7G. The one that directed the pilots to wear camouflage face-paint. (The enemy was never totally convinced that bushes or trees were flying the aircraft.) The dead and the misled, the underfed. Politicians. Morticians. Hits and shits, near-misses, pants pisses, blood, mud, oh fuck, Duck! Oh, my God!
The good doctor sobbed into his hands. The sensual Mrs. Boon buried her face into my towel. A number of the idle masseuses, who had drifted into the room to see the naked American pilot blabbering on about the war and the politicians, held their tiny hands to their mouths, their eyes wide amidst cheap makeup.
My first meaningful session on the couch had most of the brothel staff morose and sniffling in the late afternoon darkness. Beneath us, a Thai band began singing “Raidy Macdonna.”
And I hadn’t even gotten to the part where Gearheardt and I tried to stop the war!
After that, the sessions seemed to end with Dr. Boon and Mrs. Boon crying. The masseuses all watched me get bathed. I didn’t even bother to hold the magazine in front of me when I walked from the scrubbing room to his office. Being naked in a Thai massage parlor didn’t seem to alarm anyone. And my shame was internal, anyway.
Nam-A-Rama Page 3
