“What did you expect?”
The notes of her voice go up and down like some kind of song. She says the song in her words comes from Asia, too, from her mayuh. In Vietnamese me means mother. It is the same word in Thai.
For just an instant an image flashes through his head. He sees an Asian woman in a red dress, clutching a child.
She is still explaining. Thai and Vietnamese people have many tones for their vowels. They talk as if they are singing even when they speak English. So it is not just Africa and America that he hears in her voice. There is a little Saigon, and a lot of Bangkok, too. She learned her English in Bangkok. Picked up the “la” thing from Brandy and Delta, and the other showgirls in the Patpong.
“My friend Nikki says I am a big sponge. I just soak up everything. I do not know about that, but I do know about all of this ‘la.’ It does not mean anything. Just an expression, an extra note in the song, I would not mind being through with it once and for all. It is not like I just got off the boat. For more than five years I have been totally an American girl. But Bangkok … and all the rest … maybe it never really goes away. It just hides for a while, waiting to surprise you.”
Brandy and Delta are telling the story of her me and father, helping to put together Tuki’s past.
She was born in late July 1973, and for the first couple years of her life she lived with her me in a room in the Saigon Hotel on Dong Du Street across from the Saigon Central Mosque. Tuki never met her
father because he finished his tour in Vietnam before she was born. He told her me that he would send for her to come to America. It was an old story …
He vanished. They don’t even have a photo of the man. But Brandy and Delta used to know him. They say he looked like Lou Gossett Jr. in An Officer and a Gentleman, so that is how she sees him in her mind … an unsung hero in somebody else’s war.
They were quite a couple. Brandy and Delta say her me was one of the most famous B-girls in the dance bars on the side streets off Dong Khoi in downtown Saigon.
“When she dance that Gladys Knight “Midnight Train to Georgia,” la,” says Delta, “everybody in Saigon thinking they must go get good lala quicky quicky. She was some sexy girl.”
So, that is how she pictures her me. Dancing in the shadows at the far end of some GI bar to ease her heart, to feed her baby. They called her Misty in the bars, but her real name was Huong-Mei. She vanished, too.
At the beginning of 1975, the armies of the North broke the peace and invaded South Vietnam. Town after town fell to the communists—Quang Tri, Hue, Da Nang, Nha Trang. Refugees poured into Saigon on Highway 1. Delta says the whole city was, “crazy crazy back then.” Everyone knew that the communists were coming. They were going to kill or arrest anyone who was friendly with Americans.
People in the government, the soldiers from the South, and the bar and the theater people were to be the first targets. So the owners of the bars and clubs, the dancers, the drag queens, the bartenders, and the whores put their money together to hire shrimp boats to take them to Thailand.
Everything was getting ready when the president of the country resigned and disappeared. Then the vice president quit, too. And the communists were right outside the city. Saigon was in chaos. Word up and down Dong Khoi Street was that everybody from the bars had to go to the boats. They had to leave that night.
But Tuki’s me said she had to go to the bank to get her savings. There were thousands of people trying to do the same thing, crushing toward the building. Tuki was just about two years old and into
everything, ready to run any direction and lose herself or get trampled. So Misty took her back to the Saigon Hotel to wait with Brandy and Delta. She said she would be back after she got her money. But she didn’t come back, and everyone else was heading for the boats that waited at the Ben Nghe Channel.
It was dark, and Brandy and Delta could hear explosions and gunfire in Cholon. They left a note for Misty, wrapped the baby in a blanket, took her papers, and left. No makeup, no costumes, no nothing. “Goodbye, la.”
Off they went with nothing but dark peasant clothes, straw hats, and a bag of Pampers.
“We escape. Go to Krung Thep,” says Brandy. “City of angels. Bangkok, la.”
FIVE
He is starting to get the picture. In his mind he sees the shadow of a woman standing in a small boat with her arms outstretched, beckoning or trying to catch something that has gotten away from her.
He is squinting, trying to make out the details of the figure in his brain, when he almost goes through a traffic light as the Jeep approaches Provincetown on Route 6. He jams on the brakes. The tires squeal. The Jeep skids to a stop at the red light.
“Heeey, sugar!” A note of alarm.
He shakes his head, seems in a fog.
“Aparecio, black?” he says almost to himself. “I’m not getting this. What aren’t you telling me?”
Tuki is silent and looks out the window again. She is thinking that if he lawyers like he drives, the monsoon has hardly even begun. This is Alby’s revenge. This cute wreck of a lawyer. She feels his eyes drift over her breasts, and she knows they look good. Maybe a little small, but perfectly symmetrical, with nipples that stand up and say hello under the black spandex.
The traffic light turns green. The Jeep seems to make the turn off the highway and head for the village on autopilot.
“You’ve got fabulous hair,” he says. He is hoping a compliment can get the conversation started again. They are just blocks from her drop off at the Follies.
He is not just stroking her, she does have amazing hair. She tells him that she has been growing it out since she was just a whisper, and she can do a hundred different things with it. Sometimes she uses wigs in her show when she does a Diana Ross or Whitney routine. The sisters use lots of wigs themselves when they perform. But mostly she uses her own hair.
“You know, it adds to the illusion. Right now, I am doing it in funky long ringlets and braids like Janet Jackson. But in Bangkok my hair was usually straight down my back. When it is not pulled up like this in a pony, it still goes way long. Black and silky. With twisted ribbons of curls. But when I straighten it, I can do Tia Carrere with some of those songs she rocks in Wayne’s World. And I have done serious opera in Bangkok.”
He pictures her in a red-and-white silk kimono.
She says that the suits that came to the Patpong on the charter flights from Tokyo and Singapore loved it.
“Please … please just tell me about the name Aparecio.” He needs closure on at least one of her mysteries. How the hell did she come up with a Southern European surname? Aparecio? It sounds like something the mob gave her.
She reads his mind, and grunts softly. “Hey, la, you think I get it from The Godfather or something?”
He shrugs, sucks some air through his nose, rolls down the window the whole way. The Jeep suddenly feels like an oven, and the AC doesn’t work.
“To tell you the truth, Tuki, I don’t know what to think about you. You mystify me. Help me here, okay? How can I defend you when all I get from you are pieces of stories and a boat-load of contradictions, huh?”
The Jeep is in the traffic creeping toward the center of the village where the bulldozers are still scraping four charred blocks of Provincetown into piles. This client interview is almost over.
Her pretty face frowns, her lower lip trembles.
“What did I do to you? Why are you so mean, la?”
“I don’t know who you are!”
She stiffens, pushes out her lower lip.
“It is my life! Not yours. Why do you care?”
“Because I don’t have a clue where to start with this case. Jesus. Murder and arson? They could put you away for a hundred years! And we only have twenty-nine days to get ready for court. Maybe you should get another lawyer. Maybe I should have stayed a fisherman. I don’t know.”
Traffic stalls.
For a minute she looks like she is going to cry. Then she
rises up in her seat, leans toward him.
“Go fishing. What do I care, la? I am home now. Tomorrow is tomorrow. I have a show tonight. Suwat di ka. Like siyanara, Joe!”
The Jeep door flies open with a loud crack.
She is living with Brandy and Delta in the back room of a little theater in the Patpong. It’s the kind of theater with live sex acts and women who shoot ping pong balls out from between their legs, and it’s the only place Tuki remembers as home.
She got the name “Tuki” after the motorized rickshaws, the tuk-tuks, that zoom along Sukkumvit Road. She loves the tuk-tuks, loves to zoom.
Brandy and Delta take their acts from theater to theater in the Patpong, but they call this cramped little room home, a place they can hang their hammocks, songbird cage, and clothesline. There are little cooking stoves in the upstairs rooms that are too nasty to rent to the whores, so they use those to cook their meals.
It’s really no place for a child, but it does not matter to Tuki. The theater is her playroom. She loves the music, the lights, costumes. But mostly she loves the fabulous girls, and she knows that this is what she was born to be. A showgirl. They come from all over the world. Olga from Sweden has real silicone breasts like pillows. Lili from Singapore gives Tuki candy and sips of her durian fruit shakes. She says “la” about a thousand times a minute. Passion from Indonesia is the first person to put lipstick and eye shadow on Tuki’s face. Everyone speaks English mixed with Thai from the streets. When the girls are working, Tuki listens to the American music that the girls bring back for her from the cassette vendors in the night market.
The next thing he sees after Tuki bolts from the Jeep is his client sashaying across the street in front of him. Her hips swing like a million dollars in that black spandex.
Ahead of her stands a rambling Victorian hotel, the Painted Lady, dressed in greens and gold and lavender. Miraculously, it has survived the fire intact. There are haunted-house turrets and widow’s walks that look out on Cape Cod Bay. The drag shows are in a huge ballroom on the first floor. And in big letters at the top of the Provincetown Follies marquis are the words, “WELCOME BACK, TUKI APARECIO, DIVA EXTRAORDINAIRE!”
The traffic starts to move again on Commercial Street. From the steps in front of the ballroom she shouts at him as he grinds past in first gear.
“My name is no lie. My daddy is Marine Private First Class Marcus Aparecio, Inglewood, California. Some goat-footed Italian, or maybe Portuguese, danced a tango with his mama-san. They were in love, la!”
Great. After a two-and-half hour drive, he knows her racial history and some odd bits of her life in Southeast Asia. About three mysteries solved, only about 9,997 to go. He cannot decide whether to head back to New Bedford to catch the next trip on the Rosa Lee or stick around in P-town to see her show.
SIX
During their first few weeks in Bangkok, Brandy and Delta sewed costumes, made wigs from human hair they bought on the black market, and fashioned falsies out of bags of bird seed. They liberated lingerie from clotheslines and stole women’s shoes from the doorsteps of hooker hotels. All in preparation for their stage debut.
Like Tuki, Brandy is luk sod. Her father is French. She has creamy skin, Western, blue eyes, with shoulder-length chestnut hair. Onstage she often does show tunes. Numbers from Jesus Christ Superstar, Godspell, and—especially—the nastier pieces from Hair. For a while she does Barbara Streisand.
Delta is the opposite. She’s one of the really dark-skinned Vietnamese. Chocolate skin with long, black, silky hair that she saves for the street or a date. Delta’s act is strictly soul sisters. She uses a vast collection of wigs and falls for her acts as Dionne Warwick and Roberta Flack.
SEVEN
Tuki has worked a lot of clubs, most of them pretty much zoos. Queens prancing around singing to themselves, practicing routines … or lost in their own faces in front of makeup mirrors. Costume trunks everywhere. The smell of cigarettes, hair spray, eyelash glue, and the medical adhesive that some showgirls use to hold on their falsies.
But for the moment, things are quiet in the second-floor dressing room at the Follies. Tuki is showering in the plastic stall in the corner, soaking in needles of cold water. She is trying to free her head of dark thoughts of the murder, the fire, her trial, her lawyer. Trying to get her groove back for the show. But her mind is wondering whether it is someone from the club who is framing her, when she hears Richie, the manager, shouting at the door.
“Jesus fucking Christ. It’s Friday night. We gotta get it the hell up tonight, ladies. The hungry hordes descend … and it is only a month ‘til the season ends. If you want your bonus at the end of the summer, you better start making it tonight, girls. I want the lightning to flash, and every cock and nipple in the house hard as a whore’s heart.”
Suddenly she is feeling dizzy.
Just then Nikki and Silver bust into the dressing room laughing. They have been rehearsing downstairs on the stage.
“My god, you little slut,” exclaims a thick English accent. “Can’t you close the curtain? You’ve got water all over the floor. And it hurts my eyes to see you in there practicing some kind of Chinese water torture on that pathetic brown body. Sometimes you look absolutely like one of those under-fed Asian gods. Really. You are too much!”
So much for the welcome home. The voice is Silver’s. Even without looking, Tuki can smell that Silver is smoking weed because the dressing room reeks when she turns off the shower.
She feels a big purple towel fold over her shoulders and around her torso. A light pair of hands starts to pat down her back.
“Are you okay, padruga?” asks Nikki in her cute little Moscow voice. “You are freeeezing.”
Tuki’s back is still toward Nikki, so she takes Tuki’s hair in her hands, gathers it together, wrings out the water, and wraps a spare towel around her head and hair like a turban with a tail. It’s like she is back in Bangkok again.
When Tuki is five, Brandy and Delta take her to an American missionary school in a church. It is a girls’ school. That is what she is, because that is what she feels like. That is what her mothers are. Anyone can see that.
The other kids are mostly Thai and come from all over the city, but everyone speaks English in school. They wear little blue-and-white uniforms and sing songs like, “Amazing Grace” and “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” her favorite. Every day she rides to school in a tuk-tuk with Ingrid who lives in the Patpong, too. Her mother is an exotic dancer from Denmark and makes enough money to have her own apartment. Ingrid has a big explosion of strawberry hair, and she loves to sing. She and Tuki sing songs by the Jackson Five riding back and forth to school like two little princesses. Sometimes on their rides she is so tired from staying up to watch the show in the theater, she falls asleep with her head on Ingrid’s shoulder.
Growing up in the eighties, going to the missionary school with Ingrid, she feels like a flower in dark moist soil. But she is not stupid. In Thailand—or Vietnam—where the air is always wet and hot, children do not wear clothing very much until they are more than two or three years old. So, it is no mystery to her that boys and girls have different shapes between their legs. But when she turns six, she gets confused because Brandy and Delta are G-I-R-L-S … and she had seen their chaangs.
So she asks if they are really boys. Her mothers sigh and tell her to pay attention. “This is a Buddhist thing, la. What is between a person’s legs is not the only thing that makes a girl or a boy. They say that in this world many people are very ‘young’ souls. Like they were birds or animals in their past lives, and they are just learning what it means to live in the skin of a human. So those young souls still think a little like ducks or rats or kratai—rabbits—who believe male and female has to do with what is between the legs. But some people are much older souls, and they know that what makes a boy or a girl lies in the heart and soul of a person, not just the body … and each person holds the power to be both male and female.
“Look at
the Buddha, la—the oldest soul. A holy child. A love child. The Buddha shows that each human has shades of both male and female.” They point to a carving they keep on top of their only dresser, a male-looking Buddha with big breasts. Proof. This is Asia … where people seriously sit around for years wondering about the sound of one hand clapping.
“We very old souls, la,” says Delta, and gives her a kiss. “You very old soul, too. Your mother always say you special child. Holy child like Buddha. Love child. Understand?”
Maybe, she thinks.
Now it’s third grade. The end of the monsoon season. This year the school offers tai chi training for students to get some exercise and a little self-defense skill. Tuki and Ingrid are trying this. And while the rains have mostly let up for the fall, one afternoon there is a big storm that washes out the after-school tai chi training in Lumpini Park not ten minutes after it starts. Because they are far from a shelter, all of the kids are getting soaked. The teacher shouts for them to run back to the school to get out of the storm. But Tuki and Ingrid love the rain, so during all of the confusion they sneak off to slide in the mud like river otters.
Provincetown Follies, Bangkok Blues Page 3
