by Paul Theroux
Shuck wanted to see their papers: “We’re not taking any chances.” He made me fire three who had been born in China, one with a sore on her nose, and a Javanese girl, a willowy fellatrix with gold teeth, reputedly a mistress of the late Bung Sukarno.
Every five days, as on that first day, the bus swayed into the driveway and I could see the young faces at the green-tinted windows. I waved. They did not wave back. They stared. I learned that unimpatient stare. It was a look of pure exhaustion focusing on the immediate, fastening to it, not glancing beyond it. It was new to me. Once, I had been able to spot a likely client thirty yards off by the way he watched girls pass him, the face of a feller running a temperature wearing helpless lechery on his kisser; with that telling restive alertness as, turning around with tensed arms and eager hands, sipping air through the crack of a smile starting to be hearty, he looks as if he is going to say something out loud. Each fidget was worth ten dollars. But the faces of the boys on the buses that deposited them for what Shuck called “your R and R” were expressionless and kept that bombed uncritical stare until they boarded the same bus five days later. The boys sat well back in their seats; they didn’t hitch forward like tourists, and they didn’t chatter.
I expected uniforms the first day. Shuck hadn’t mentioned that they would be wearing Hawaiian shirts, but here they were getting off the bus with crew cuts, bright shirts, the white socks that give every American away, and staring with tanned sleepy faces.
“Jack Flowers,” I said, stepping forward. “Glad you could make it, fellers.”
“It’s sure as hell—” a feller began slowly.
“Excuse me, sir,” another butted in. “Are those girls—”
“The girls,” I said, raising my voice, “are right over there and dying to get acquainted!”
Florence, May, Soo-chin, Annapurna, and nutcracker Betty, hearing me, responded by ambling into the sunlight on the arcade’s verandah. The other girls moved behind them. The fellers carried their duffel bags and handgrips over to the verandah and dropped them, and almost shyly walked over to the girls and began pairing off.
“We’re in business,” said Shuck.
Later they walked in the garden, holding hands.
The soldiers’ five-day romance was a rehearsal of innocence, and then they went back to Vietnam. This all-purpose house was the only gentle shelter, halfway down the warpath, with me at the front gate saying, “Is there anything—?” My mutters made me remember: in the passion that caged us the issue was not escape—it was learning gentleness to survive in the cage, and never loutishly rolling against the bars.
“For some of these guys it’s their first time with a whore,” said Shuck. “What do you tell them?”
“Don’t smoke in bed.”
Was I serving torturers? I didn’t feel I had a right to ask. I believed in justice. The torturer slept with harm and stink, the pox would eat him up, his memory would claw him. I wanted the others to wrestle in their rooms until they were exhausted beyond sorrow—a happy bed wasn’t everything, but it was more than most worthy fellers got.
I write what I never spoke. Conversation is hectic prayer; it deprived me of subtlety and indicated time passing. It didn’t help much. At Paradise Gardens, by the bar, showing my tattoos and joshing the girls and soldiers, I was a noisy cheerful creature. But the mutters in my mind told me I was Saint Jack. Edwin Shuck, saying so casually, “We’re all whores one way or another,” was parodying an enormous possibility that could never be disproved until we had rid ourselves of the habit of slang, the whore’s own evasive language, a hard way to be honest and always a mockery of my mutters. I simplified, I used slang; I was known as a pimp, the girls as whores, the fellers as soldiers: none of the names fits.
I kept Paradise Gardens running smoothly, and what made me move was what had stirred me for years, my priestly vocation, my nursing instinct, my speedy hunger and curiosity, my wish to head off any cruelty, my singular ache to be lucky; and I did it for fortune. I had seen a lot of fellers come over the hill, and as I say, the drift then was away from all my old notions of sex. In Singapore my suggestions had long since been overtaken by wilder ideas, pictures, movies, devices, potions, acrobatics, or complete reticence; my vocabulary was obsolete and words like “torrid,” “fast,” “daring,” and “spicy” meant nothing at all. What had once seemed to me as simple as a kind of ritual corkage became a spectator sport or else an activity of nightmarish athleticism. It made me doubly glad for Paradise Gardens. The soldiers were happy with a cold beer and the motions of a five-day romance. I made sure the beer was so cold their tonsils froze and had Karim put four inches of ice in every drink. All afternoon we showed old cowboy movies in the theaterette. Some of the fellers taught the girls to swim. Every five days the bus came, and for five days most of the fellers stayed inside the gates. When they wandered it was up to the university, close by, to try out their cameras.
One group of GIs bought me a pair of binoculars, expensive ones with my initials lettered in gold on the leather case, and a little greeting card saying To a swell guy.
“Now I can see what goes on in your rooms,” I said.
They laughed. What went on in those rooms, anyway? Aw honey, the purest cuddlings of romance, pillow fights; they tickled the girls, and they never broke or pilfered a thing.
“You won’t see much in Buster’s,” one said.
I turned to Buster. “That right? Not interested in poontang?”
“I can’t use it,” Buster said, with a lubberly movement of his jaw.
“Buster’s married.” The feller looked at me. “You married, Jack?”
“Naw, never got the bug—ruins your sense of humor,” I said. “Marriage—I’ve got nothing against it, but personally speaking I’d feel a bit overexposed.”
“Where’s your old lady, Buster?” the feller asked.
“Denver,” said Buster, shyly, “goin’ ape-shit. How about a hand of cards?”
“Later,” a tall feller said. “My girl wants a camera.”
My girl. That was Mei-lin. They all wanted cameras; they knew the brands, they picked out the fanciest ones. When the fellers boarded the bus for the ride back to the war the girls rushed to Sung’s Photo in the arcade and sold them for half price.
“Used camera,” said Jimmy Sung, when I challenged him.
“Cut the crap,” I said. It was a shakedown. From a two-hundred-dollar camera Sung made a hundred and the girl made a hundred; the soldier paid. But Sung ended up with the camera, to sell again.
“Full prices for the cameras,” I said to Sung, “or I’ll toss you out on your ear.”
In the kitchen Hing made up huge deceitful grocery lists which he passed to Shuck without letting me see, and he got checks for items he never bought. The arcade prices were exortionary, the girls were grasping. No one complained. On the contrary: the fellers often said they wanted to marry my girls and take them back to the States, “the world,” as they called it.
I did what I could to reduce the swindling. The arcade shopkeepers saw it my way and “Sure, sure,” they’d say, and claw at their stiff hair-bristles with their fingers when I threatened.
In Sung’s, on the counter, there was an album of photographs, a record of Paradise Gardens which thickened by the week. Many were posed shots Sung had snapped, tall fellers embracing short dark girls, fellers around a table drinking beer, muscle-flexers by the pool, group shots on the verandah, candid shots—fellers fooling with girls in the garden. There were many of me, but the one I liked showed me in my linen suit, having my late-afternoon gin, alone in a wicker chair under a traveler’s palm, with a cigar in my mouth; I was haloed in gold and green, and dusty beams of sunlight slanted through the hedge.
Shuck was right: the news was good, almost the glory I imagined. I was surprised to reflect that what I wanted had taken a war to provide. But I didn’t make the war, and I would have been happier without the catastrophe. In every picture in Sung’s album the war existed i
n a detail as tiny and momentous as a famous signature or a brace of well-known initials at the corner of a painting: the dog tag, the socks, the military haircut, the inappropriate black shoes the fellers wore with their tropical clothes, a bandage or scar, a particular kind of sunglasses, or just the fact of a farm boy’s jowl by the pouting rabbit’s cheek of a Chinese girl. In the lobby it was a smell, leather and starch and after-shave lotion, and a nameless apprehension like the memory of panic in a room with a crack on the ceiling that grows significant to the insomniac toward morning. “Saigon, Saigon,” the girls said; we didn’t talk about it, but the fellers left whispers and faces behind we could never shoo away.
And Sung’s photograph album, the size of a family Bible and bound with a steel coil, was our history.
A sky of dazzling asterisks: the Fourth of July. The fellers set off rockets and Roman candles in the garden with chilly expertness, a sequence of rippling blasts that had Dr. B. K. Lim screaming over the hedge and all the guard dogs in the neighborhood howling. The fellers ate wieners and sauerkraut, had a rough touch football game; that night everyone jumped into the pool with his clothes on.
Mr. Loy Hock Yin holding a huge Thanksgiving turkey on a platter. Fellers with napkins tucked in at the throats of their shirts. I was at the head of the table, and the feller next to me said, “How’d you get all those tattoos, Jack?” The fans were going, the table was covered with food, I had a bottle of gin and a bucket of ice beside my glass. “What I’m going to tell you is the absolute truth,” I said, and held them spellbound for an hour. At the end I showed my arm to Betty.
“What’s underneath that flower?” I asked.
She squinted: “Whore’s Boy.”
Me as Santa Claus, with a sack. Late Christmas afternoon we ran out of ice. I drove downtown in Shuck’s Toyota with four uproarious soldiers and some squealing girls. I was still wearing my red suit, perspiring in my cotton beard, as we went from shop to shop saying, “Ice for Santy!” On the way back, in traffic, we sang Christmas carols.
Gopi with an armful of mail. He said, “Nice post for you.” Postcards of Saigon I taped to my office wall. Messages: “It’s pretty rough here all around—” “When I get back to the world—” “Tell Florence my folks don’t care, and I’ll be down in September—” “We could use a guy like you, Jack, for a few laughs. This is a really shitty platoon—” “The VC were shelling us for two days but we couldn’t even see them—” “Richards got it in Danang, but better not tell his girl—” “What’s the name of that meat on sticks Mr. Loy made—?” “I had a real neat time at Paradise Gardens—How’s Jenny?” “It’s fucken gastly or however you write it—I know my spelling is beyond the pail—”
A Malay orderly in a white smock tipping a sheeted stretcher into the back of an ambulance.
“Fella in de barfroom no come out.”
I knocked. No answer. We got a crowbar and prized the lock apart. The feller had hanged himself on the shower spout with a cord from the Venetian blind. A whiskey bottle, half-full, stood on the floor. He was nineteen years old, not a wrinkle on his face.
“It was bound to happen,” said Shuck. What certainty! “But if it happens again we’ll have to close this joint.”
No one would use the room after that, and later the door grew dusty. All the girls played that room number in the National Lottery.
Flood. When a strong rain coincided with high tide the canal swelled and Bukit Timah Road flooded; muddy water lapped against the verandah. The photograph was of three girls wading to Paradise Gardens with their shoes in one hand and an umbrella in the other, and the fellers whistling and cheering in the driveway.
The theaterette. Audie Murphy in a cowboy movie. “He’s a game little guy,” I said. “He won the Medal of Honor.” A feller to my right: “Fuck that.”
A group photograph: Roger Lefever, second from the left, top row.
“What’s the big idea, Roger?”
“I didn’t mean it.”
“She came down crying and said you slugged her.”
“It wasn’t hard. Anyway, she pissed me off.”
“I got no time for bullies. I think I could bust you in the mouth for that, Roger. And I’ve got a good mind to write to your C.O. You wouldn’t do that back home, would you?”
“How do you know?”
I slapped his face.
“Smarten up. You’re on my shit list until you apologize.”
A group photograph: Jerry Waters, on the end of the middle row, scowling.
“You’re lucky, Jack. You were fighting the Nazis.”
“I didn’t see any Nazis in Oklahoma.”
“You know what I mean. It helps if the enemy’s a bastard. But sometimes we’re shooting the bull at night, tired as shit, and a guy comes out and says, ‘If I was a Vietnamese I’d support the VC,’ and someone else says, ‘So would I,’ and I say, ‘That’s for sure.’ It’s unbelievable.”
The curio shop. After a while the carvings changed. Once there had been ivory oxen and elephants, teakwood deer, jade eggs, and lacquer jewelry boxes. Then we got bad replicas, and finally obscene ones—squatting girls, heavy wooden nudes, carvings of eight-inch fists with a raised middle finger, hands making the cornuto.
The Black Table.
“I’d like to help you, George, but it’s against the rules to have segregated facilities.”
“We don’t want no segregated facilities as such, but what we want’s a table to sit at so we don’t have to look at no Charlies. And the brothers, they asked me to spearhead this here thing.”
“I don’t think it’s a good idea,” I said.
“I ain’t asking you if you think it’s a good idea. I’m telling you to get us a table or we’ll waste this house.”
“You only have three more days here. Is it too much to ask you to simmer down and make friends?”
“We got all the friends we want. There’s more brothers coming next week, so if you say no you’ll have to negotiate the demand with a real bad ass, Baraka Johnson.”
“Haraka-haraka, haina baraka,” I said. “Swahili. My ship used to stop in Mombasa. Nataka Tusker beer kubwa sana na beridi sana.”
“Cut the jive, we want a table.”
“What if everybody wanted a table?”
“That’s the nitty-gritty, man. Every mother got a table except us. You think them Charlies over in the corner of the big bar want us to sit with them? You ever see any brothers sitting along the wall?”
“Maybe you don’t want to.”
“Maybe we don’t, and maybe them Charlies and peckerwoods don’t want us to. Ever think of that?”
“What you’re saying is there are already white tables, so why not have a table for the colored fellers?”
“What colored fellers?”
“Years ago—”
“We are black brothers and we wants a black table!”
“The point is I didn’t know there were white tables. I would have put my foot down.”
“Go ahead, mother, put your foot down, you think I care? I’m just saying we want a table—now—and if we don’t get it we’ll waste you. Dig?”
It was true. Yusof said so: we had a wall of “white” tables. I gave in. Sung’s photograph showed smiling and frowning faces, all black, and the girls—the only ones they would touch—long-haired Tamils, because they were black, too.
“Give them what they want,” said Shuck.
“Up to a point,” I said, “that’s my philosophy.”
Me, in my flowered shirt, having a beer with three fellers. A middle-aged sentence recurred in my talk. “That was a lot of money in those days—”
A group photograph: Bert Hodder, fifth from the end, middle row. He got tanked up one night and stood on his chair and sang,
“East Toledo High School,
The best high school in the world!
We love East Toledo,
Our colors are blue and gold—”
Neighborhood kids from the block of shophou
ses around the corner. They were posed with their arms around each other. They lingered by the gate, calling out “Hey Joe!” Ganapaty chased them with an iron pipe. The fellers chatted with them and gave them errands to run. They came to my office door.
“Ten cents, mister.” This from one in a clean white shirt.
“Buzz off, kid, can’t you see I’m busy?”
“Five cents.”
“Hop it!”
Edwin Shuck. His blue short-sleeved shirt, freckled arms, and narrow necktie; clip-on sunglasses, sweat socks, and loafers.
“Got a minute?” he asked.
I was with Karim. “The cooler’s on the fritz. I’ll be with you in a little while.”
“That can wait,” he said. “I’ve got to see you in your office.”
“Okay,” I said, and wiped my greasy hands on a rag.
Shuck poured himself a drink at my liquor cabinet. He closed the door after me.
“I spent yesterday afternoon with the ambassador.”
“How’s his golf game?” I took a cigar out of the pocket of my silk shirt.
“He spent yesterday morning with the army.”
“So?”
“I’ve got some bad news for you.”
“Spill it,” I said. But I had an inkling of what it would be. A week before, a Chinese feller named Lau had come to me with a proposition. He was from Penang and had twenty-eight girls up there he wanted to send down. He expected a finder’s fee, bus fare for all of them, and a job for himself. He said he knew how to do accounts; he also knew where I could get some pinball machines, American sports equipment, a film projector, and fittings for a swimming pool, including a new diving board. I told him I wasn’t interested.
