I am alone. We all are, children of the universe, all. We come from dead stars and are destined to return to them.
He carefully put the manuscript back in its coffin, replaced the lid, and ceremoniously interred it in the small trash can beside the table. Peeking through the venetian blinds, he could see Vance sitting out there in his car, his long, serious face inclined toward what Richard assumed was an equally long, serious book. He’d told Richard he’d just wait for him. A weird kid. When he was Vance’s age, founding a fan club, let alone chauffeuring some asshole around town, was just about the last thing he would’ve been doing. When he was Vance’s age, he’d been far too busy flunking out of college, getting drafted, and grimly chasing poontang around Knoxville, Tennessee, in constant mortal terror over his impending deployment to Vietnam.
Shivering from the AC, he went ahead and put on his new suit, which he’d bought specially from Men’s Wearhouse for the tour. The pants didn’t button all the way, and the jacket was a size or two too small. It was a deep shade of forest green and made of a synthetic material that instantly caused him to pour sweat, but it had also been on sale—Drastic Markdown!—for thirty bucks. The amused clerk had thrown in a red polyester tie as a cruel lagniappe. He hadn’t worn a suit in decades, since an abortive stint in the early eighties selling appliances at a Sears in Fresno. After being fired on the showroom floor for failure to hard-sell defective washer-dryer combos to poor people, he’d headed directly outside across a blistering blacktop sea toward the fata morgana of a Holiday Inn lounge, where, after several gin gimlets, he swore a blood oath to the bemused bartender and the small audience of regulars that he’d never again wear a tie. Filled with the drama of the moment as well as six ounces of Beefeater, he’d wrenched off his tie and set it on fire in the toilet to the applause of two delighted old rummies. Yet here he was, in a Comfort Suites by Marriott, inexpertly tugging on a half Windsor. Well, you never knew, did you?
No, you never knew. Facing down his image in the mirror for a second time as he straightened the tie, he was again struck by the sense of having entered an alternate dimension. A dimension in which he had written a book people were buying, and reading, and wanted to hear him talk about. Hello, my name is Richard Lazar. Good evening. Hi. I wrote a book. He strode to the door, bravely facing up to the obvious fact that he needed a drink, badly.
Vance startled and looked up from his book when Richard tapped on the car window. He rolled it down, looking excited, or as excited as it seemed possible for his long, sad face to look. “Did you change your mind about that tour?”
Richard said, “I did. Let’s start with the nearest bar.”
“I don’t drink.”
“That’s fine. You can sit in your car reading”—he leaned into the car to see the cover—“Don Quixote there, too, if you want.”
“I’m not sure this is such a great idea.”
“If it would help, don’t consider it a request,” Richard said.
———
Vance took them to a place called J. T.S’ BULLS-EYE—the sign spelled exactly that way. Sitting in a red vinyl booth defaced with knife slits, Richard drank a series of scotches, and Vance bent to the straw in his Coke. A few rough-looking locals played pool and glanced in their direction, and Vance, with his soft hands and pimples and wispy-faun facial hair, seemed nervous, but Richard wasn’t worried. He had gotten old enough that no one messed with him anymore, not even rednecks or idiot teenagers. Too old to mess with, he thought—how depressing.
Vance said, “The manuscript I gave you was a first draft. It’s really rough.”
Richard said, “Look at her.”
A young blonde girl carried a couple of beers across the room. She had the type of cutesy elfin face that would be completely gruesome at forty, but she also had a big, swaying ass showcased by jeans at least two sizes too small. Small ridges of fat rode up over her waistband in the back. She walked over to the guys playing pool, who patted and goosed her around in a friendly way, and Richard was reminded of how long it had been since he’d gotten laid. Or, rather, the fact that he couldn’t even remember when the last time was. In his twenties, going a month without seemed like inhumane deprivation, a breach of the Geneva Convention. The text of some awful novelty T-shirt he’d seen a long time ago scrolled through his head: 20S: TRI-WEEKLY, 30S: TRY WEEKLY, 40S: TRY, WEAKLY. There wasn’t one for 50s.
“You like that?”
“What?”
“Come on. The girl that just walked by. The behind on her.”
“She’s all right. But I was wondering if you have any advice you could give me about revising your work. How many drafts do you do?”
“My second wife, Carole, had a behind like that. Bigger, actually. She was built like a tractor, big wheels in the back. Any physical exertion and her face would get splotchy, so it was like riding this big red tractor around when we made love.”
Richard turned his glass up and chewed the ice. Vance looked up at the Budweiser clock over the bar and said, “Do you want to go now?”
“No, damn it,” Richard said. “There’s an hour left.”
“We need to leave time to drive and park, for you to meet everyone, get set up.”
“Speaking of getting set up.” Richard initiated the process of standing and made a circular motion at the bartender.
“You’ve had four of those already,” said Vance.
“Getting limbered out. Up. You really don’t drink?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
Vance looked back over at the girl as she lined up a pool shot. “People do stupid things when they’re drunk.”
“Great things, too,” said Richard. “Every important moment of my life, there’s been alcohol around. Why do you think people get so drunk after weddings?”
“I don’t know why people get married at all,” Vance said.
“Touché.”
Richard got another drink and a Coke refill for Vance. They sat there listening to songs the locals were playing on the jukebox, all of them murkily familiar to Richard, as if he’d heard them once while he was asleep. One was about Mr. Saturday Night Special who puts you six feet in a hole, and in another, the singer shrieked about the jungle over a bunch of shimmery guitar parts that sounded like snakes being beaten into holes in the ground. He hadn’t listened to music in years, had completely stopped caring about music around the time of his second divorce. Carole had expensively—and needlessly, in Richard’s estimation—had their condo equipped with speakers in every room, even the closets. She was the kind of person who required a sound track at all times; even a trip to the bathroom for a number two had to be accompanied by some squelchy disco tune. When she divorced him, she pointedly kept all the music, a punitive maneuver wasted on Richard, who felt the silence in his new apartment as a Bedouin in his tent might feel a rare, delicious desert breeze.
Vance said, “Like I said, the thing I gave you is rough, but I thought you might have some pointers. It’s kind of a memoir, like your book. It’s about me and my mother.”
“Sounds like a barnburner.” The blonde girl walked back to the bar and smiled as she passed them. “She likes you.”
A deep crimson blazed from the hollow of Vance’s long neck to his jawline and thin cheeks. “I don’t think so.”
“So you don’t drink, and you don’t chase tail. What do you do for fun?”
“Fun?”
“Yeah, fun. ‘A good time.’ Things you do to distract yourself from the pain and terror of being alive.”
Vance sat there for a moment, and it occurred to Richard that the kid might really have no idea what he was talking about. Finally, Vance said, “Well, I read.”
“Oh boy.”
“What? Reading is fun.”
“Reading is great, but it’s not fun. People don’t read at parties.”
“I do.”
“Jesus Christ. I’m just saying, don’t waste your youth being too smart for beer and girl
s. What else do you do?”
“I write.”
“If writing is fun,” said Richard, “you’re doing it wrong.”
———
The smallish auditorium was full and getting fuller. But then, he reasoned, there wasn’t much else to do in this piece-of-shit town. He sat in the front row in his hot green suit, sweating and reeking and looking, he knew, like some kind of mentally impaired car-dealership employee at a Christmas Sale-a-Bration. People continued to file in and stare at him all the way to their seats. It was an awkward arrangement, and he was glad he was drunk enough not to care.
Richard looked around. Farther down the row, Vance sat and talked to an older guy with a Sundance Kid mustache and bolo tie. A creative writing professor if he’d ever seen one. Probably poetry—the lowest of the low. Eileen had dragged him to enough faculty parties for him to know. A bunch of worthless, forced eccentrics, he thought, not a wishbone of talent to snap amongst the lot of them. Get cornered at a party by that type and it’s all over, forget any hot nooky wandering around.
The director of the English department, a friendly, serene fellow whose name Richard had thus far found completely impossible to remember, approached and patted him on the arm.
“I’m going to go up and say a few words to introduce you, then you’re on, okay?”
“And what happens?”
“Normally people read a chapter from their book.”
“Okay. That’s it?”
“Well, normally people take questions afterward.”
“Okay. Then normally what? Normally.”
The director gave him a complex, piercing look of amusement and concern, leaned in, and said, “Normally, we go get shitfaced at a restaurant afterward. You’ve done that part beforehand, though. Then, if you’re wondering, normally there’s a party at someone’s house and my wife takes her shirt off and embarrasses me. Normally.”
“Sounds good.”
The director patted him again on the arm, then walked to the podium. The crowd applauded loudly. He cleared his throat and spoke, occasionally looking at Richard.
“I’m going to keep this brief. The university is pleased to kick off our fall semester reading series with Richard Lazar. Richard’s book Without Leave—a memoir about his experience in Vietnam—was published earlier this year to widespread acclaim. It revived the career of a writer the Chicago Tribune called ‘a forgotten treasure, lost on the seabed of literary detritus, luckily reclaimed.’ Dan Rosenbluth from the New York Times said of Richard, ‘He is, perhaps, the most talented writer overlooked by literary culture in America.’ Ladies and gentlemen, Richard Lazar.”
Richard walked to the podium, to a welter of violent applause. Looking around the auditorium at people’s faces, he was struck by their general look of happy attention and interest. It seemed truly amazing to him that any of them cared what he had written, what he thought about anything. The crowd’s smiling indulgence reminded him of Eileen and himself watching two-year-old Cindy climb the stairs. It made him wish he’d brought along the pellet gun he kept at home for shooting coyotes, so he could fire off a few rounds into that unbroken wall of condescension. He suddenly felt very tired and wanted to lie down on the cool, tile floor.
He put the book on the podium. His book. It was a hardback, and the cover featured a picture of him in his army greens, taken by his father after Basic and before shipping out, the only time he could remember the old man being proud of him. His name was embossed across the bottom in a slick typeface. Looking down at the cover, his name, the podium, and the blur of faces in front of him, he momentarily forgot what he was supposed to be doing and just stood there.
“Sorry,” he said, shaking his head. There was a murmur of generous laughter as he fumbled the book open and thumbed past the table of contents and dedication page, the deckled edges conveying an authenticity and gravitas about his life that felt richly undeserved. Where was the goddamn chapter? An uncomfortably long silence ensued, but he eventually found the folded page corner, cleared his throat a few times, and began to read.
CHAPTER TWO
JULY 1971
I had been AWOL two days by the time I reached the outskirts of Saigon. The last stretch, I spent in the back of an old Datsun truck filled with burlap bags of rice. My lap was heavy with the rucksack that I cradled like a fat, lolling baby. The truck had no shocks, and at first I’d felt every pebble on the Nha Trang Highway as we clattered along. But I was so exhausted by two days of walking and hiding in the bush that I still managed to more or less immediately pass out against the aluminum ridging of the flatbed. Near the city, we hit a bomb crater in the road, and I jerked half awake in malarial sweat, staring at a cloudy sky, reacquainting myself with the unlikely fact that I was in the back of a Vietnamese jalopy hidden amongst rice bags.
The truck stopped near a tin-walled depot. The farmer came around back, lowered the tailgate, and let me out. I thanked him, but he was already hauling bags out of the back as though I wasn’t there. I’d paid him twenty dollars for the ride—boo-koo bucks—but I knew it was the sidearm I’d waved that had really bought the ride. I walked away, down a half-paved road lined with a combination of improvised hovels and unreliable-looking, unpainted concrete buildings. It struck me that I didn’t even know if this was Saigon. The farmer had nodded when I asked, but then he would have nodded at anything I said.
Assuming this was Saigon, I had no idea where I was going. I knew what I wanted to find—U.S. Army Command, which I’d heard was located somewhere in the city—but where was it? Had I thought there would be a map somewhere? Perhaps a friendly tour guide? An abundance of English-speaking locals happy to help the dumbass GI stumbling around? I don’t remember what I was thinking. What I do remember was the Vietnamese turning as I walked by, the feeling of horrible exposure. In places, the streets did become busier, but the bustle brought no sense of safety—instead, it was more eyes watching me, more heads turning as I passed. I was American, and filthy, dressed in camos and combat boots. Although I’d changed into a Miami Dolphins T-shirt, I looked exactly like what I was, a nineteen-year-old soldier who’d wandered away from his platoon.
I’m sure if I had been more self-possessed, not to mention less shit-scared, I could have stopped someone and asked, and kept asking until I found a local who spoke English and could have pointed me in the right direction. But I felt like the first person I talked to would scream or knife me or ring some silent alarm that would instantly summon ARVN military police. So lacking any better plan, I walked. I walked with my head down, superstitiously turning right whenever I could. I walked past the city limit, a place where grass and dirt visibly gave over to concrete, where the tensed and grasping fingers of the city took hold. I walked past a long, narrow shantytown near the Hue River, in whose churning water old women doing their wash crouched like gargoyles. I walked through an enormous unguarded yard of scavenged cars, past a half-burnt church or school—I couldn’t tell which—under a rusted and disused railway trestle that reminded me of where I grew up, in East Tennessee.
As I walked, I sometimes thought about Berlinger. I wished he was with me—Berlinger would have loved the spectacle of a dumb grunt loosed and lost in Saigon. No one enjoyed a clusterfuck more than Mitch Berlinger, and no one had a keener appreciation for the way army organization and superficial polish barely held back lurking, haywire chaos. I imagined his enormous form, the battering V of his crew-cut forehead, like the prow of a battleship, thrown back with wicked merriment at some fuckup or other, someone’s misfortune. There was certainly plenty of misfortune here to be merry about. I passed a piebald dog dragging a legless man on a makeshift dolly, the man staring up fixedly at the rising sun as though trying to burn his eyes out and be done for good with knowing what the hell was going on.
Gradually, my circle tightened and I spun back into the neighborhoods, the streets crowded with commerce. A million hunched and blinkered endeavors that didn’t even register my presence. Where before I had
felt conspicuous, I now felt—not inconspicuous so much as invisible, irrelevant. The swarming, chaotic bustle of late afternoon, half the population trying to get home after a long day at work, and the other half desperately trying to hawk them the last of their wares, quelled my fear of immediate calamity. No one cared about me. I relaxed, and even, at certain moments, found myself enjoying the inadvertent sightseeing. I drifted through downtown Saigon, a morass of long, curving colonial buildings. I walked close beside them in shadows, my head down, peering into storefronts that housed bars and gambling parlors and ad hoc temples and pho shops and God knew what else. The air buzzed jaggedly with the noise of hundreds of scooters and motorcycles, rice-burners. The bikes swarmed everywhere, whining dragonflies ridden by small men in caps: green army, Greek fisherman, Yankees, Giants. I watched them circle the central square in a never-ending loop of pursuit and escape.
All at once, I was completely exhausted. My feet ached horribly, and had I leaned against one of the nearby cement stanchions of the colonnade, I would have fallen asleep standing up. Just then, I heard live music playing from somewhere. The sound issued from the dark innards of a nearby bar—a place called Kosy Klub, if the hand-lettered sign next to the door was to be believed. I entered. The Kosy Klub was a long room, with a wooden bar on one side, and a rock-and-roll band playing loud in the back. The plywood stage was overlit, and you could see too clearly the room’s ceiling, which was also plywood. I asked the girl behind the bar for a beer, but she pointed at a line of bottled sodas. I bought a Coke and sat against the far wall, watching the band.
The Grand Tour Page 2