Baby Joe smiled at him. “Yeah, Wal. You’re right. I know.”
“Too right. That was then and this is fucken now. So wadda we gonna do about this can o’ fucken worms? ’Ow can I ’elp?”
“Wally, you can help best by forgetting the whole thing. I told you I don’t want you to get involved. Bjørn Eggen and I will move on tomorrow.”
“My arse ya will, yer barstad. I don’t want to ’ear any more o’ that shit. Now ’ow can I ’elp?”
Baby Joe shrugged. “All right, then. You can start by getting the beers in. Then, I need to find out more about this Machine Gun Jelly. I have a friend here I can see who might know something. Then I need you to keep an eye on Bjørn Eggen for a day or so. And I’m going to need somewhere to put Asia and Crispin. Somewhere out of the way.”
“No worries, mate. Leave it to Wally.”
“Wal. You know this might get nasty.”
“Then you’ll need yer Uncle Wal to watch yer arse, won’t yer, yer fucken nong?” said Wally, grinning and waving to his son behind the bar.
It may have looked like dinner to the other people seated around the table, but to Monsoon it looked like the aftermath of a particularly nasty freeway pileup involving multiple dismemberments and at least one thorough cranial debridgement. Platters of unidentifiable animal parts, impaled fish, and various species of amputated birds’ feet, together with suspicious soupçons full of seething liquids, were spread among bowls of steaming rice and little packets of pastry, glazed in garish colors. Closest to him was a pig’s head, which kept staring at him, possibly in an attempt to elicit sympathy for its condition. Unfortunately for the pig’s head, Monsoon’s reserves of sympathy were entirely reserved for himself.
He had cramps in his feet from sitting under the long, low table, and some ancient fucker kept wafting smoke about and banging on a big gong every time somebody said anything. Despite having unwittingly disregarded or infringed upon every known rule of Vietnamese etiquette Monsoon was doing his level best to be polite and sociable, but he was just about sociable’d out and his face was aching from the constant grinning.
He had quickly realized that his Vietnamese wasn’t so much rusty as congealed, with the result that the conversation was making about as much sense to him as a Polish dyslexic. There were representatives of at least four generations around the table, to whom he was presumably related in some fashion, including the venerable old lady at the far end who was so far gone that her food had to be spooned between her gums and her jaw manually worked up and down by the youth sitting next to her.
The only one he actually recognized was his mother’s sister, who was sitting next to him being relentlessly polite. He got the impression that for all their hospitality, he was making them feel uncomfortable. He thought about his old man’s letter. Maybe he had been right.
He turned to his auntie and asked her in fractured Vietnamese if she could remember any English.
“Sure,” she replied brightly. “I like speak English. We long time no see you? Why you no come see family?”
“America’s a long way away.”
His auntie considered this while studying his face, and he had the weird and discomforting sensation of looking at his mother.
“No so far,” she said. “You go see mother?”
“You mean the grave? No. I don’t know how to find it.”
“Must go. Very important. You come me, tomorrow. I show you. Pay respect. She wait long time.”
Thinking that he didn’t have time for this superstitious bullshit, Monsoon reluctantly agreed to meet his aunt. Then he said, “I need to do some business while I’m here. Do you know somebody who can help me?”
“What kind business?” His aunt said, looking at him in a way that told him she knew exactly what kind of business.
“I just need some help with some local stuff.”
“Sure. No problem. You cousin. I send tomorrow after you go see mother.”
“Is he a good man?”
“You no worry. Very good man. Very clever. Whatever you want, he can do. Now no more business. Now eat.”
Monsoon’s aunt reached over and handed him a dish of suicide pie.
Take a picture of this. A Shau Valley. Operation Texas Star. The worst both-barrels, full-tilt boogie, shitstorm of terrifying insanity you can possibly imagine. Two determined, committed, well-equipped modern armies with their tail feathers up, going head to head for an ultimately meaningless piece of jungle real estate in some abandoned corner of Southeast Asia. Fifty mills, claymores, napalm, M14s, mortars, shells landing according to Chaos Theory turned mean, random geographic grid patterns turning healthy young men into soup. Phantoms zipping overhead like enraged hornets on steroids. Fire and heat, the stench of burning flesh, impenetrable smoke, abject and bowel-moving petrifaction, adrenaline-rush madness, shotgun, grenade, switchblade, hunting knife, stick and stone, eyeball-to-eyeball visceral death struggle.
Baby Joe Young, seventeen years old, lied about his age to hustle himself into the uniform in which he now lies bleeding from a multitude of shrapnel wounds, some of which still sear and smoke in his flesh. The light, otherworldly and eerie, rotors chugging and churning overhead in seeming slow motion, shadows flitting at the periphery of his vision. Baby Joe in pain, and maybe dying.
And then, through the mist of smoke and hot breath and fine blood spray a man walks, upright and calm, making no attempt to protect himself or even acknowledging the carnage around him. A strange light glows around him, an aura, like a translucent shield that no bullet or malicious intent can pierce. He walks towards Baby Joe at a dreaming pace, lifts him to his feet, drapes him across his shoulder, and carries him unhindered, unchallenged, and unharmed, through Armageddon and down the hill to the medevac.
He is Jack “Hazy” Doyle, so mesmerically and invincibly stoned out of his stack on acid, marijuana, reds, greens, blues, and purple bombers, that he is not actually aware of the battle that is in progress around him, other than as a psychedelic backdrop to the Spanish guitar music that plays in his head. He floats on his unassailable island of tranquility—serene, majestic, and wise,the Prince of Peace wandering through his enchanted kingdom of light and color in his shimmering cloak of hummingbird feathers and python scales. For Hazy it is midnight at the oasis on Cloud Nine, somewhere over the rainbow, and as he lifts the stricken and frightened Baby Joe to his shoulder, tenderly wiping the blood from his ruined lip, he smiles beatifically and says, “Far out, man.”
Monsoon sat in the back room of the Pearl River Cabaret sucking on a noxious black stogie while having his own noxious blackish stogie sucked on by a seventeen-year-old Cambodian hostess. At least, she said she was seventeen. The fact that her teeth were on the bench next to his glass of industrial ether masquerading as vodka gave Monsoon cause to doubt the veracity of her calculations. Not that he gave a galloping fuck. He was too busy enjoying the experience to be concerned, thinking pleasantly that the girl could probably suck the lips off a bull moose.
Monsoon was killing time, waiting for the local muscle that his auntie had promised to organize for him. The meet was set for noon and he had a half-hour to spare, so he thought he might as well get his wick trimmed in the meantime. He closed his eyes so as not to let the bundle of jellied chicken feet that was suspended from a coat hanger in front of his face distract him from the erotic image of a foursome with Destiny’s Child that he was trying to conjure up to coincide with his ejaculation.
He was approaching the vinegar strokes when someone tapped him on the shoulder. He opened his eyes to see some kind of bonsai Sasquatch staring intently at him with yellow eyes.
“Eyeyoucussin,” it said.
“Say what now?” said Monsoon, as Destiny’s Child abruptly left the stage.
“Eyeyoucussin,” it repeated.
Monsoon tapped the Cambodian hostess on the top of her head, which was still moving rhythmically up and down. She stopped.
“Listen, Tokyo Rose, ask this yeti wh
at it wants, and then tell it to fuck off back to Nepal.”
The hostess addressed the newcomer politely, and then nodded sagely. “He say he you cousin. He name Ung. He say mama-san send him help you.”
“Oh, yeah, well, tell him he’s early, and that he can help me by getting the fuck out of my face till I finish shootin’ my load in yours, baby.”
“No me finish,” she said. “This one interrupt big time. No can work like this. It unprofessional.” She stood up abruptly, grabbed her teeth, and flounced out, leaving Monsoon scrabbling with his fly as he stared at her round retreating rear, mentally reminding himself never to pay up front again.
The Sasquatch stood, impassively staring. Monsoon examined him. He stood about four feet tall and was approximately as wide. Dense hair covered his body and, beginning from just above where his eyebrows would have been, thick, oily coils dangled almost to his waist. His tresses appeared to have pieces of bone woven into them. His arms and legs were knotted like hawsers, and he had the biggest hands that Monsoon had ever seen. Monsoon didn’t know whether to offer it a drink or throw it a bone.
“Man,” he said, “you is one unsightly-lookin’ motherfucker. How the fuck can you be my cousin?”
“Eyeyoucussin,” it said.
“For fuck’s sake,” said Monsoon, downing his vodka. Gesturing at the Sasquatch to follow him, he strode out of the back room into the noisy bar. The Sasquatch followed with surprising grace.
Looks like, on this side of the family, my family tree is a real fucking tree, thought Monsoon as the clamor of the streets engulfed them.
The guns have been silenced on that killing floor for almost forty years, but Hazy Doyle remembers it as if it were yesterday. He remembers that day, and many days like it. It’s just the present that old Hazy has a problem with. He has been fixed in place and time, like a photographer’s image on celluloid, locked into a permanent sixties groove, an endlessly repeating loop of reruns and recorded highlights that flickers to a stop in ‘69 and starts all over again from the beginning. A part of Hazy will forever remain on some foreign field…the part being the two-ounce lump of his brain which was scalloped out of his head by a rebounding piece of shrapnel and deposited neatly on top of a pile of fresh buffalo shit in a the bottom of a mud-filled paddy in the Mekong Delta.
Having survived, Hazy was a classic case about whom people always say, “He was lucky.”
If he had been lucky, he wouldn’t have been smacked in the back of the crust by a flying splinter of hot steel. If he had been lucky, he would have been in the back row of some fleapit in Charleston, SC, with his index finger embedded in the pudenda of the local homecoming queen and her tongue thrust halfway down the back of his throat instead of in some mosquito-infested swamp in Vietnam with a sizable portion of a full-strength NVA battalion seemingly intent upon obliterating him.
Hazy was fortunate in two ways, however. One was that he got hit right at the beginning of the assault, before the medevac crews were overwhelmed by the sheer volume of casualties, and was very quickly under the care of the skilled and courageous surgeons who saved his life. The other was that a couple of ounces of gray matter were neither here nor there to Hazy Doyle. His neurons and synapses being already so irremediably fried by constant exposure to every hallucinogenic and mind-altering substance known to mankind, he didn’t really miss the bit that was missing. Then, as now, Hazy was a walking pharmacological experiment.
Hazy had a steel plate in his head, which, rather than being the inconvenience it might at first glance appear, was actually a blessing in disguise. Hazy loved his steel plate. His steel plate absorbed the solar rays, which he used to power the intergalactic journeys he made every day on his psychedelic surfboard. Furthermore, it allowed him to receive interplanetary messages that gave him directions from one solar system to another, so he never had to worry about getting lost. Better still, he could tune in to some really groovy alien radio stations. Hazy knew that not only was there life on Mars, but there were some seriously funky bands as well, and that sometimes, Jimi sat in.
When Baby Joe pushed aside the beaded curtain that served as Hazy’s front door, and stepped into the diaphanous swirling cloud of incense and marijuana smoke, Hazy spoke to him as if no time had elapsed since their last meeting, as if he had just gone out for smokes again. Peering myopically through the round, wire-framed lenses of his shades, he said, “Hey, man. What kept you?”
Baby Joe had brought a crate of beer. “I went to buy beer,” he said, handing one to Hazy.
“Outta sight, baby. Shit, man, what happened to your hair, man? The Man come down on you, or what?”
Baby Joe regarded Hazy fondly. He sat cross-legged in the folds of something that looked like Jackson Pollock’s shower curtain. His gray hair hung almost to his waist, restrained by a bandana of purple silk. Looking down, Baby Joe could see the gleam of the partially exposed plate. The operation had saved Hazy’s life, but subsequent scalp grafts had not taken well. Baby Joe sat studying him, wondering what scenes played out in this ruined mind as Hazy set his beer down, untouched, and began to roll a joint.
“You need to chill out, man. You look wore down.” He smiled into the ether as he spoke, without taking his eyes from his task, sounding like Keith Richards with laryngitis.
“Ain’t that the truth?”
Hazy looked up, an expression of mild confusion on his face, as if he wanted something but he couldn’t remember what it was. He held up a finger as if he were about to disclose something important, then, reaching behind him, pulled out a frayed black beret, an authentic relic of the French occupation. Moving slowly and methodically, he placed the beret over the exposed piece of plate.
“Got to block the transmissions, man,” he said, pointing heavenwards. “The only way to do it. I can’t hear nothing otherwise. So, what say?”
“I said, how have you been, Hazy? Are you okay? Do you need anything?”
“Love is all you need, man,” Hazy said, smiling. Behind him, candlelight reflecting from the polished brass Buddha glowed around his head like a halo.
You are a saint, Baby Joe thought. A harmless, gentle man who was put into the grinding machine, into a place where he didn’t belong, where nobody belonged, and who never came back. Hazy Doyle never really survived the war at all.
Baby Joe drank down a beer and opened another. “I’d still be on that hill if it wasn’t for you,” he said.
Hazy had turned his attention back to the joint, which was assuming such proportions that it wasn’t clear whether he was going to smoke it or play it, and he looked up again when Baby Joe spoke. “We all still on the hill, baby. You dig?”
Baby Joe nodded. He understood that he should not talk about it.
“Hazy, you know what Machine Gun Jelly is?”
Hazy lit his joint, filled his lungs, and held the smoke for a long time, all the while looking at Baby Joe as if he was looking through him to something that waited in the light behind the beaded curtain. Baby Joe wasn’t sure if Hazy had understood what he had said, or even heard it.
Hazy released a voluminous cloud of sweet smoke and held out the joint to Baby Joe. “Sure, man. I’m hip to that shit. Bad karma, baby. Heavy traffic. The heaviest. A stone killer. That motherfucker kills people, man.”
“Lots of drugs kill people, Jack.”
“No, man. Dig what I’m putting down. You got to get your mind round it, bro. You don’t chase this dragon. It chases you. Ain’t nobody can ride this horse. It ain’t a white swan, it’s a crow. A black raven. This shit don’t blow your mind, bro. It blow your soul.”
“What do you mean?”
“Boom. Five thousand light years from home.” Hazy reached out and took the spliff from Baby Joe, filling his lungs again as he shuffled closer. Another swirling cloud filled the space between them, dissected by a vertical ray of light coming through a hole in the ceiling.
“Jack. I’m not following you at all here, man. What are you talking about?”
“What, like the V2s?”
“No, man. Nothing like that. This was way more uncool. Fucking Dr. Mengele stuff, man. The final fucking solution. You know that after that war, the big one, the Pentagon was worried about the Reds getting their nuclear shit together, and there was this, like, race, man, to see who could get hold of the most Kraut eggheads. Well, one of these guys has this formula, see, a chemical formula that he lays on the military. It gets him into the States, but his idea is just too radical to lay on the people, and it gets eighty-sixed. About the time of the Tet, when old Walter is saying the party’s over and the commies are all watching to see what will happen, somebody digs out this old Kraut’s formula and starts fucking with it, and all of a sudden the end is in sight. The most devastating new weapon since the Enola Gay torched old Tojo.”
“And what was it?”
“Machine Gun Jelly? It’s a like cipher or something. MGJ is the acronym for the actual formula of the chemical compound that, like, only three cats in the whole world can pronounce. It’s a drug, a, like, hallucinogenic aphrodisiac speed trip. The most mind-blowing trip since Neil Armstrong. The plan was to mass-produce it, and lay it on the gooks, man, drop it all over their positions, and into the villes. Even the big H, man, Hanoi. Get old Ho Chi high.”
“What the fuck is a hallucinogenic aphrodisiac supposed to do?”
“It’s beautiful, man. It messes with your mind and your manhood. LSD at warp speed, and Spanish Fly to the power of a thousand squared. Men become obsessed with their dicks, possessed by the demon reamer from Hades, oblivious to everything except the electric rainbow inside their heads, and the irresistible desire the fling themselves upon the nearest animate object—man, woman, or beast—and shag it senseless.”
Machine Gun Jelly (Big Bamboo Book 1) Page 27