2
THE BURNING MONK
VIVIENNE DRANK THE hot black coffee. She looked at her watch. It was fifteen minutes after one in the afternoon. It was winter in the desert. The sun would start to disappear behind the Spring Mountains outside her hotel room window by 4:20, even 4:17 p.m. How to start a conversation with the stranger?
He had a newspaper open to the weather page. “So, how are the temps for Death Valley?” Vivienne asked.
“You going out there, ma’am? Visiting Manson’s shack, I suppose.”
“Why does everybody say that?”
“Say what?” He turned his head slightly towards her.
“Say, ‘You going to see Charlie Manson?’ as soon as you say, ‘Death Valley.’”
“I don’t know, ma’am, I guess they’ve never been. You here with family? You all going out to have tea with Carla?”
Who was this guy? He was reserved but droll. He had great pale blue eyes.
“No, I’m working,” Vivienne said.
“You work in security, then.” He smiled. A smile that said, I don’t think you do, but I kind of like the idea you might. The Vegas Valley was not only a key military area, it was a global centre for security wonks. In the desert, everybody was watching. Maybe this guy had eyes in the back of his T-shirt.
“Yes, in a way,” Vivienne said. “I’m in photographs.”
“You model. Nice. Good money, I hear.”
“Only for myself. I’m the photographer.”
“Sounds interesting. So, no Manson on your agenda. Rock climbing?”
“I came to capture some soldiers,” she said.
“Ma’am, you better be careful what you say around these parts. People get in trouble.” He used his left hand to flip the paper back to the front page. “You see James Brown died yesterday?”
She hadn’t. “Oh boy, another titan bites the dust,” she said, leaning over, touching his shoulder, to get a better look at the photograph of James Brown on the front page. The Godfather of Soul in all his glory: bright fuchsia leather jacket with fringe hanging off, his right arm holding the microphone, captured singing in concert only a year ago. The life is short, the night train goes on forever. Vivienne ran her hand over the face of the master.
“I used to listen to ‘I’ll Go Crazy’ day and night in Saigon,” she said.
“You’re kidding, darling.” He swivelled around, his knees touching hers. “Not Saigon-Saigon. You must mean, ma’am, Saigon Elementary, in –”
“In Vietnam,” she said. “A lot of James Brown. You know, the bar that opened at three in the morning, in a place that wasn’t there, where everybody had conversations that didn’t happen, with people who swore on that bible stack they were never there. That bar. That turntable.”
“I personally favour ‘It’s a Man’s World,’” he said.
“You left out two ‘Man’s.’ It’s ‘It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World.’”
“So, all by your lonesome in Nevada,” the stranger said. “You have to be careful. There are all kinds of con artists around.”
“Don’t worry, honey. I cover war.”
He had swivelled back. He was watching the wait staff move in and out of the kitchen area. He was smiling that droll smile again.
Vivienne smoothed out the fold through James Brown’s pompadour. “I’d like to take a picture of you.”
“Go right ahead, ma’am. I don’t mind. I’m leaving tomorrow for another tour of Iraq. Knock yourself out.”
“You can’t use a camera on the gaming floor,” she said.
“So they caught you before? Eyes in the sky?”
“Oh yes,” she said. “Once upon another war. I was actually taking pics of the ceiling. They did not like that very much. But then, I did not like how that suited gorilla manhandled my camera very much. That’s my living.”
“But they let you go.”
“I’m here.”
“Well thank God’s grace for that.”
“Will you do it?”
“Sure. Why not?” he said. “Let’s go outside. I’ve got nobody to say goodbye to me, in any case. You could take whatever you need. Then say me a proper adios on the Strip.”
“Honey, that isn’t what I had in mind. That’s not how I work. I don’t want a snap of you; I want to make a portrait.”
“Oh I see. Fancy.”
“No, the opposite. Simple. It just takes a long time to get it plain. To bring out the feeling.”
“Ma’am, I wish you all well and good in your enterprise, your artiste endeavour, but I am afraid I am not signing on for feelings. Not today.”
“Not you. It’s the feeling of a moment. I want the moment, I don’t want you.” He was laughing. “I mean, I would appreciate it if I could but I – You know what? Why not forget it.”
“I didn’t say no, ma’am.”
She put her hand out. “Vivienne. From Toronto.” They shook hands. His arms were long, his hands not large but strong.
“Andy,” he said, making eye contact. “San Diego. I’d just prefer to leave out the feelings in any picture you took of me. Can you do that?”
“I can. It’ll be lousy. It’ll be anybody’s. When I take a picture, hon, it’s another way to have a conversation. That’s all. Not scary. Just like we’re sitting here.”
“I bet you’ve got James Brown vinyl up in your room. Is that the idea? Get the boys up there and play them some ‘Bewildered’?”
“I left all my LPs in Vietnam.”
“You weren’t kidding. Was your dad in the army?”
“Canada didn’t send boys to Vietnam. I was working as a photographer.”
“In diapers?” His eyes were flashing light and dark connective tissue to his smile.
“I was fifteen years old when I started working wartime,” Vivienne said.
She was sweating. Her hands were getting the memory shakes. She felt the old roiling in her gut, from that May of ’69 in Vietnam when the US had taken Hamburger Hill, near Huê, then abandoned it to their enemy. The feeling of useless loss, of war being run by weak watery incompetents, rats with stars crazy in a commanding maze, Nixonitis and his five o’clock shadow, which began to stretch over the land from daybreak, these things had never left her. That summer of ’69, when Life magazine ran a photo spread showing every single soldier killed in Vietnam, two of the pics were Vivienne’s. Nixon on TV, Ho Chi Minh dies, William Calley is charged for My Lai, Tricky Dicky the despised one back on TV, they locate Manson in Death Valley, three days later the massive anti-war moratorium in DC. Vivienne motioned to Daysee the waitress for more hot joe. She drank it so fast it burned her lips.
Andy pulled a pack of smokes out of his Levi’s back pocket. The pack was a bright magnetic pink, with black and gold bows, brand name Pink in white letters. He took one, reached for a matchbox, flicked a stick match with the end of his thumbnail, inhaled, handed the smoke to Vivienne, kept the match going, lit one for himself and they sat there smoking. Vivienne was quitting, she had quit, she will have quit someday.
Andy got up, leaving the chair swinging. He walked around the curved counter to the end, where there was an empty seat. He stood drinking the dregs of somebody else’s coffee, dropping the cigarette into the coffee cup, looking at her with no smile, thirty, forty feet away now. Vivienne’s forearms went into a pain dance; she needed to have a camera in her hands. Andy pushed the coffee cup away. He walked back to her, rubbed her shoulders in the pink leather as if they were old pals and he was just arriving to meet her. He sat down. “Seriously, ma’am. Vivienne. How the hell did you get to Vietnam? You truly must have been in kindergarten.”
His face was dry. But his neck and his cotton neckline were soaking, like hers. “I like how you talk,” she said, unsure where she was going by saying this. “Your voice would make a good photo.” She could picture how the T-shirt would animate his upper body. How she could hone in on the secret life of an object. The T-shirt gave off an air that said, “I’ve been in fi
ghts, maybe even this morning, when I woke up in the wrong bed.” If that item of clothing was looking for trouble, it came to the right photographer.
“I’m under a little pressure right now,” Vivienne said. “I have a deadline for a book. Could you help me out? It is all servicemen on their way to war, their last night in town. It will only take twenty minutes. We could talk later.” He gave her that look: Sure it will, honey.
“Okay, one hour, tops,” she said. “You have a great face. I would love to see you in my book. I promise I will send you a copy, over to Iraq.”
“I miss shit,” he said. “You spend every day over there, ‘when will this shit end?’ and when it ends you want it more than the girl.” He was dancing around her proposition. He might want time. Time she did not have. She could eye the coffee shop, look for another subject. But she wanted him: the white T-shirt on good posture, a straight back, nice shoulders and chin held low, bright crazy-deep eyes, good indigo classic button jeans, dark lace-up shoes, short buzzed fair hair and cheekbones that could, like Elvis Presley, have some Cherokee grandmother in them.
Her sweat was cooling. Okay, the man wants to talk first. Talk to him about Vietnam. Younger men liked to hear about that gone day. The war that knocked America off true, the war that left a generation of homeless vets. The nightmare that still haunted their ancestors, their mommas and their poppas; they had grown up with Vietnam-haunted adults around them. Maybe if she told him a story about photographing in Vietnam she could entice him to come with her to the event horizon. To enter into the gravitational pull of the camera, where the only escape possible was through the lens.
“Okay,” Vivienne said. “How did I get to Vietnam? Blame it on Paris. The story: my Auntie Carole wanted to see an old flame from her gap year in Paris, so she says to me, ‘You need to see Paris.’” Vivienne held the cigarette to her mouth and inhaled. “Good thing I quit.”
Andy chuckled. Vivienne went on: “So, late May 1963, I’m fifteen. Auntie Carole has us staying at this thirty-room hotel in the old medieval quarter, the Mouffetard. Coffee in the morning at Café Delmas, then Auntie Carole takes me on a ten-minute walk to the Jardin des Plantes. She leaves me to go see her old squeeze, André, now a big gallery owner. So I walk around the Jardin and back to the street and there’s this big white low building straddling the corner and I go in.” She blew out some smoke, kept talking.
“That is it. You walk in. You decide, walk on by or walk on in. It was a mosque. There were, you know, fifty thousand French Muslim soldiers killed in World War One, the Grand Mosque of Paris was built to honour them. I was a nice Jewish girl from Forest Hill, and here I was at the Paris Mosque. I sat by myself on a rose-coloured banquette and had mint tea. The table was a round gold tray. The tea was amber in glasses, not teacups. The glasses had gold rims. They brought a small white plate, it was rectangular with sweets in paper. Things made of almond, pistachio, pale desert colours. There were paintings of the sky on the walls. I finished tea and decided ‘I want to see the Louvre.’ I was just burning up with a desire for beauty.”
Andy flexed his cheekbones.
“So now I am at the Louvre, in front of the Venus de Milo. A guy’s walking around and around Miz Venus, he asks me how I like the torso, do I like the proportions, the angles. He was an older guy, tall, desert boots, brown cords, beard. He invited me for tea – at the Mosque.”
“Did you tell him you’d just been?”
“No way,” she said. “He was too cute.”
“So you knew your way around men, at fifteen years old?” Andy said.
“I knew my way around something. I guess I was looking for its name.”
“So you go for tea with this guy who was how much older than you?”
“Maybe twice as old as me. You know, old. Like thirty-five.” They chuckled together. Her younger self was turning into a shared character in a story.
“When I walked back into the mosque courtyard with him, it all felt different. Even from an hour before. He said, ‘I want to take your picture.’ He posed me for a photograph sitting at one of the blue-and-white tile tables. I was wearing a pink oxford-cloth button-down shirt. That was my thing, then. Button-downs in every pastel. Sleeves rolled up; white jeans; black patent-leather Mary Janes on my feet. When he took my picture it was not the same as anybody ever taking my picture before. I wanted in on that.”
Andy was looking at her with listening eyes. “Tell me,” he said.
“The light went on forever in Paris in the long white nights of spring. The light felt soft in Paris. Maybe it was the Seine. We had more mint tea. He introduced himself. ‘I’m Marty,’ he said, ‘Marty Hirsch.’ So Marty tells me about his grandfather who dealt in silks and textiles, a Jew from the Shanghai Jews who had come to this very mosque café, the textile man in the 1920s. It was a city of Jews and Arabs even then, Marty said. It was Marty who told me that Paris is the city in Europe with the most Jews, and Paris is the city in Europe with the most Arabs. I never forgot that. I did not know Paris was Jewish. I knew nothing. I didn’t know North Africa was full of Jews. Who knew Casablanca was a very Jewish city?”
“Maybe Sam in Casablanca was Sammy,” Andy said.
“You know,” she said, moving her coffee cup to clink it against his, “ojalá, he could be. Maybe the first draft was: ‘Look. Do me a personal favour, Sammila, you should play it again.’” She shook her head. “Nah. You don’t have to play Jewish to be one.”
“I know,” he said. His eyes crinkled, his face was entirely subsumed by the smile.
And so she knew. Jew meets Jew in a desert café.
“So, this Marty character, we’d spent a couple of hours together, he puts his Leica down on the table, and he says, ‘Come to Vietnam with me. I’m leaving for Saigon tomorrow. Carry my equipment.’
“Next thing I know I am flying Paris to Saigon, Vivienne Pink, the photographers’ mascot. Baby Pink they called me. ‘How did you ever get to Vietnam, at that age?’ everybody asks. ‘Easy, honey, I got on a plane. Paris to Saigon, fourteen hours.’ I was not brave, I just took the free ticket.”
She put her elbow on the counter, put her chin in her hand and leaned towards him. “Look, I so knew from nothing, I did not know Saigon from sayonara.”
His nostrils flared, “Oh yeah, been there. Boot camp ain’t Baghdad. It isn’t what you think.”
“So many maps, so little time,” she said, “then you are actually standing in the actual place. How it smells, how low sewer water smells, the rains, the food, meat on the street, smoke and sweet flowers, the wet trees. The sound of rain on a tin roof, how firearms sound. My Auntie Carole said, ‘Vivila, you’ve got moxie. Follow your moxie.’ She used to call me Queen Moxie. My parents? They were old rads, they were happy. I skipped two grades so I had two years in my pocket.”
This stranger Andy got up again, walked around the counter curve, came back behind her again, holding her chair back. “So what happened to Baby Pink in-country?” he whispered into her left ear.
“It was June in Saigon. A Tuesday. What is it with Tuesdays?” She didn’t find the set-up with him odd. How could it be odd, they were in Crazytown, talking about an old Indochina psychosis. “Tuesdays and Elevens. Tuesday, June 11, 1963. I was living with Marty. He gets a call. It was about seven in the morning. ‘Come to the corner of Phan Dình Phùng and Lê Văn Duyệt Streets, there will be an event, in one hour, at eight.’ The caller did not say what it was but all the news photogs got called. You know, everyone says, The Vietnam War, but years before that, the events were going on. The Vietnamese were conducting a war against the Buddhists, the Buddhists were marching pagoda to pagoda in protest. The Roman Catholics running the show were breaking the balls of the Buddhists, but good. Marty told me something I never forgot, ‘Before they come for the Commies, they come for the Buddhists.’ They come for the religion before the politics. So down we go, Marty and me, to the corner of Phan Dình Phùng and Lê Văn Duyệt Streets. There is a crowd of monks an
d nuns all in white, white is their mourning colour, behind a grey car that had pulled up. It stopped at the corner. Two men exited the car, two monks.
“They took a can of gas out of the hood. Three other monks get out. Marty has his Leica in his hand, you know holding it like a baby, and a bunch of cameras around his neck as backup. One of the monks places a cushion on the street, and a different monk sits on the cushion, quiet. Marty hands me a camera, saying nothing. He nods to me. I look through the lens –
“One of the monks takes a can of gas and he pours it on the monk sitting on the cushion in the middle of the street in a lotus position in his robe, soaking his robes and his head. I took a picture just as the one monk poured gasoline on the head of the sitting monk. I did not know it was going to go that way, but I was ready. I had never felt anything like that in my life. The lotus monk was sitting in a pool of gas.
“The street filled up with more Buddhist monks who had come in their white mourning robes. I could see ahead of myself, I was elevated, focused. I thought, I want to be in the world, right now. I want to see history. I want to tell the story. I have found my life. The lens was my teacher.
“I could see there was going to be a picture of his body, that I had to be ready for that. I had been called to this. I had walked in the door of the Paris Mosque and that was why I was in Vietnam. I walked in and I did not walk by, and now a camera owned me. I was picturing where his body would fall so the camera could be there; I stepped forward. I still have the image in my head of Marty watching me move away from him, to the picture.
“The lotus monk was not yet on fire and I could see his dead body’s position. I felt the immediate future in my fingertips, my forearms were on fire. It was the monk himself, soaked in gasoline, who lit the match to his own robes. It was a sunny day. It was self-immolation.”
Still standing behind her chair, Andy reached over to the counter, took the bright Pink smokes pack, lit one, gave it to her, lit another. “Tell me about the monk,” he said, close to her ear. She sucked in a long drag of the cigarette, and went on.
Death Valley Page 2