Provincetown Follies, Bangkok Blues

by Randall Peffer

  “With half of Provincetown.” Michael finds his water bottle and takes a long gulp.

  Votolatto coughs.

  “So it goes, counselor.”

  FIFTY-NINE

  It takes Michael the better part of the day to get his head together, zip out to P-town to collect Chivas, and drive to Boston. But by three forty-five in the afternoon, he and Chivas find their way to Tuki’s bedside in Mass General.

  She looks like hell. Her skin is ashen. Someone has combed out her braids and most of her curls so her hair falls over her shoulders like Morticia in the Addams Family. She has an oxygen mask over her mouth and nose. Her neck is a swollen mass of red and blue streaks. Her eyes are closed.

  When Chivas sees all this, she turns to Michael and rolls her eyes. The old queen has on her version of a gypsy costume, complete with a red silk headscarf and monster hoop earrings. She thought the outfit might make Tuki smile, but now she just feels like a fool. A Halloween party leftover.

  Michael can hardly believe this is the same person he met just three weeks ago in another hospital. But he tells himself, buck up, pal, it could be worse. She could be dead.

  He moves close. Takes her hand. “Hey, I brought someone to see you.”

  Her hand rolls slowly into his. Squeezes a little. Eyes open three-quarters. They look bloodshot and drugged. Now her lips are spreading. Starting to move. Saying words as she looks into his eyes.

  But he cannot read her lips. Not through the opaque plastic of the oxygen mask. And who knows if she is even speaking English. He feels something rising in his throat. He is about to gag when Chivas rallies, comes up right alongside the bed, bends, kisses Tuki on the forehead.

  “What a girl won’t do to get her name in the news, love. You are a scandal, you delicious little bitch! All the papers are calling you a heroine, an absolute superstar.”

  Tuki smiles a little, knows Chivas is bluffing, but does not care. She reaches up and runs the back of her right hand against the old girl’s cheek.

  “You’re free,” says Michael. “You broke the case. The D. A. dropped all charges.”

  Tuki does not seem to be listening. Her left hand is flailing around, searching for something on the nightstand next to the bed. He sees what she wants. There is a white erasable tablet, with a magic marker tied to it with a string. But it is just out of reach. He circles the bed and slides it into her hands. She blinks her eyes and mouths three words. “Thank you, la.” He sees that.

  She holds the tablet up in front of her, writing in big green letters.

  WHAT IS WRONG WITH ME???

  He tries to think positive thoughts. “You are going to be all right. It will just take a few days for you to get your energy and your voice back. You got a tough bruise on your neck.”

  Tuki scribbles something on the tablet, hands it to Chivas.

  I WANT TO GO HOME.

  “You’re going to be out of here in no time, honey. We’ve already moved your drag to my place. We are going to throw a victory party for you at the Tango, the likes of which the Magic Queendom has never seen. And a welcome home parade down C Street. The only question is whether pretty boy here, or yours truly, will be your escort. Personally I’d go for age over beauty, but you …”

  There is a pained, urgent look on Tuki’s face as she takes up the tablet and starts writing furiously. You can hear her wheezing through the oxygen mask. A shrill little alarm starts beeping.

  FIND MY FATHER. PLEASE!!

  “I’m already working on that, and I—”

  “You have to leave!” A nurse has Michael by the shoulder, steers him and Chivas toward the hallway. “She can’t take too much of this. She’ll go into respiratory distress again.”

  An intern swoops into the room with a syringe in his hand and closes the door.

  “Crap. Just crap!” Michael rocks back against the wall of the corridor.

  Chivas eyes him like she knows that as of today, as of the D. A. dropping all charges, the court stops paying his salary. Anything he does now, including this visit to the hospital, is pro bono. “You going to keep your promise, good looking?”

  “Are you?”

  “The long lost knight returns from the crusades!” Filipa stands in the entrance to her flat in Cambridge, one arm braced against the door jam as a blocking maneuver. It is after six on this steamy summer evening.

  “It’s over. They dropped all the charges. I’m off the hook. Tuki’s off the hook. I just have to make some calls, help her get documented as a U. S. citizen.”

  He searches her eyes for anger. But all he sees is sadness.

  “We need to talk, Michael.”

  He inhales. Steadies himself for what he knows he has to say. “Yeah, we do. This isn’t going to work out with us, is it?”

  “I told my mother this morning to cancel everything. You can deal with the apartment.”

  A sack of rocks drops in his gut. “This is a little awkward, standing out here, trying…. Can I come in?”

  “No. I don’t think so.”

  “I don’t understand. It doesn’t seem right, after all these years to end it like this. Here.”

  “It was over yesterday. There is nothing more to say. You’ve already said your piece. I’ve heard it loud and clear. Goodbye, Michael. I’m all done crying.”

  “I don’t understand.” He is sinking.

  “Your cell phone. Don’t you remember? I called you yesterday. You shouted at me, ‘Not now!’”

  The rocks in his gut have turned to lead.

  “You didn’t shut off the phone. I heard everything!”

  “It was chaos. Cops, victims. People out cold. Crying. Screams. I couldn’t talk. I’m sorry. You wouldn’t believe it. Tuki almost died. It was crazy.”

  “It sure was, Michael. Especially the part where you started talking to her. Did you even listen to yourself? ‘Tuki, Tuki. Come on, sweetheart. Stay with me. Hold me. Look in my eyes …’ Jesus, Michael.”

  For a moment he wants to defend himself, say that she has misunderstood. Tuki was lying on the ground. In shock. Dying. Her throat swelling shut as he watched. He had no idea what he was saying. He might have said anything. He was just chattering, trying to keep her awake, alive, until help came.

  “Just tell me, what do you see in Tuki that you don’t see in me?”

  He does not know what to say.

  “Well?”

  “I’m so sorry, Fil. This is not about you. You’re an amazing person. You have been more than—”

  “Just shut the hell up, Michael. And leave me alone!” She steps back into her apartment. Slams the door in his face.

  For about five seconds he stands there staring at the aluminum numbers 302 screwed on the scratched and dented Luan door skin.

  “I’m sorry,” he says again. “I made a terrible mistake.” He almost adds, I was lonely, and I wanted to be like my father. But he knows that this is no excuse at all. So he swallows the words. Then, he turns away and starts down the hall. His chest aches like he has just come up for air from the bottom of the sea.

  SIXTY

  Saturday of Labor Day Weekend, the last hoot of the summer. Pangs of saudade are tearing at him. No more case. No more fiancée. No more wedding. And no idea when they will let Tuki out of the hospital. He talked to her once on the phone. Her voice sounded raw, stony. An octave lower. Depressed.

  Since his big drunk at the Squire, he has been staying away from booze. Trying to keep busy. He has been working on Tuki’s immigration issues. Learning buckets about the Amerasian Immigration Act of 1982, the Amerasian Homecoming Act of 1988, and new legislation in the works. He has found an advocacy group called the Amerasian Foundation online. Lots of links to other advocacy and support groups. A registry for children and parents searching for each other.

  Tuki’s father, Marcus Aparecio, does not turn up on the registry. But Michael has been in touch with advocates who have shown him how to use the web to find the guy. And last night he scored. Her father lives
in Van Nuys, California. Runs a heating and air-conditioning service. Michael has the address and phone number.

  But the research has not been all good news. Some sources claim there are more than 150,000 Amerasian children with American fathers, mostly former GIs, who have not been repatriated. Among this group, many are homeless. Few marry. Drugs, alcohol, and prostitution are common themes. The suicide rate among Amerasians is more than forty percent higher than the population at large.

  It almost seems like Tuki is one of the lucky ones. But he needs to talk about all this with someone. Needs to decide how to present to Tuki all that he has discovered.

  So at nine thirty in the morning he ends up on Chivas Regal’s doorstep at the top of the stairs leading above the Tango. When the queen bee answers the door, he almost turns to run. Chivas is not in drag. What he sees is someone who looks a little like Danny DeVito with plucked eyebrows and a pink orchid-print robe, standing at the doorway. Bald. Wearing fuzzy white slippers.

  “Don’t you be eyeballing me all funny,” Chivas says. “When you show up at this time of the morning, you have to take what you find, darling. So get over it … I just look old and scary; you look like the victim of an airplane crash. Get in here before you catch your death.”

  P-town’s Mother Superior hands him a mug, nods to a steaming pot of coffee in the coffee maker, and disappears to get into her uniform of the day.

  He had almost no sleep last night. But after half a cup of Joe, standing out in the sun on a little deck overlooking the harbor, he is beginning to feel a bit of okay. The wind coming off the bay has a fresh, crisp feel. But it is definitely not helping his mood that Chivas has the soundtrack from Pretty Woman playing on the stereo. Could this be intentional torture? He thinks maybe he is going to throw his mug through a speaker if he has to hear “Fallen”—his old cuddle-dance song with Filipa—one more time.

  “Just go ahead. Yell and scream, cute stuff!” She appears on the deck looking very Liz Taylor with a big black shag wig, killer blue eye shadow, a red satin pantsuit, black boa. And a little brown marijuana cigarette smoking from the end of a long gold holder.

  “Let the thunder roll!” she says.

  “Screw you,” he wants to say. Because he knows that sometimes beating your chest and wailing is no solution at all. So he turns his back on the queen, leans on the railing, stares out at the last piles of wreckage from the burned buildings just a few houses away from here. He thinks about Bangkok for some reason.

  “Try some of this, love. Sometimes it takes the edge off things.” She passes him the smoke. This is the first pot he has had since college. Dope was not his thing. He would never buy the stuff. But now he inhales and holds the serpent in his lungs.

  He is still imagining Bangkok. Its golden pagodas, its teeming heat, its chocolate river. He feels wings spreading from the roots of his shoulders … and wonders if this picture in his head is the place Tuki meant when she wrote on her tablet that she wanted to go home. Or did she mean P-town?

  A new CD comes on, Graceland. His mind is starting to smooth out into a jet stream of soft, warm air. He and Chivas lean on the railing of the deck and stare out at nothing. They pass the golden joint holder back and forth to the rhythm of Paul Simon singing about a road trip to Memphis, Tennessee.

  After a long time, he speaks up. “I feel really low.”

  “I know,” she says.

  “I was supposed to be getting married today.”

  “Go ahead, blame me if it helps; it may well be my fault, love. I saw that you had it in you to rescue her. I promoted you. I took you to the ball. I didn’t think about the cost to you.”

  He feels something hacking into the back of his neck. Someone is chopping off his head. Slowly. With a dull blade.

  “You used me …”

  “She was in trouble. Terrible trouble. Like crashing and burning in that madhouse. And then, suddenly, here you come. Sir Lancelot.”

  “I’ve found her father.”

  “Of course, you can do anything.”

  “She wouldn’t answer her phone so I left the address on her voice mail.”

  “That’s one of the reasons she has fallen for you. You are persistent … and you really care. But she knows it can never work out. Because, you know?”

  There is a buzzing sound building inside his head, a tightening in his throat. Yeah, he knows. He is a little clearer about what he feels for her now. There were moments the night they danced together when he felt something tearing at his heart and deeper, darker places in him. But maybe it was just loneliness or something even more primal gnawing at him. He was far from sober and the longing died the moment Nikki came crashing into the bungalow streaming blood.

  Still, he feels more strongly for her than he ever felt for Filipa. He knows that. Maybe he does love her. Maybe it makes his heart sing to know that she walks the Earth. But somehow all of the violence has twisted things in his chest. Way too much violence … in Provincetown and in Southeast Asia. So he cannot love her the way his parents love each other. Like a fever. Like a drug. Like a miracle. This is not about his being straight or gay. In Tuki’s world those labels cease to be relevant. It is what he told his father. For some reason, when all is said and done, she just plain feels like blood. And someone who has shared this outrageous nightmare.

  “The girl is in agony, honey. She—”

  “Christ! Just stop! Stop it, Chivas! I don’t need to hear this! It makes me feel like hell. Why did I ever come here?”

  She gives him a lip-quivering look, like go ahead and spit at me. “What did you expect from me?!”

  “A saint,” he mumbles. “I expected an absolute saint.”

  “Maybe you thought I was somebody else.”

  “Wonder Woman,” he says, which is the first name that rises out of his mind.

  “No. Wonder Woman would be the princess coming home from the hospital this afternoon.”

  SIXTY-ONE

  The organ music swells. The spotlight is coming up blue. She feels Percy Sledge in her chest, and then she is in after eight bars, singing “When a Man Loves a Woman.” Her voice has changed. It has gotten lower, raspy. Sultry in a sort of Tina Turner way. She is not sure that she likes it. She will never do Gloria Estefan again. But at least she has a voice. At the moment, she can sing. But her vocal chords feel on fire. The doctor told her to speak in whispers for a month.

  He watches from a table near the back wall of the Tango, not certain what to feel. He just knows he is glad to see her, glad to be here for her return. She struts a slow pause-and-go. The girl in black makes her entrance through the curtained kitchen door, singing about crazy love, blind love. She holds the mike like a torch to her lips, weaves among the tables. She does not see him. But that is okay. He is just trying to get used to her new voice. He is thinking it has claws. And as she sings, he pictures a seaside carnival. A Ferris wheel turning and turning and turning to the music.

  The light-and-sound kid in the far corner is singing along, doing his own show for the shadows. And maybe she envies him because tonight, of all nights, the music is not carrying her into some private place. Tonight, she is searching, scanning her audience, hoping against hope that she sees the strong, dark, Portuguese face of the man who saved her life. The face that all but erases the smells of the River House and Prem.

  But she still does not see him sitting back there in the dark. She thinks he is never coming to save her again … could not save her even if he were here.

  Her heart is having a hard time leaving its misery. He can see it. Everyone in the audience can. It is like they are all holding their breath for her.

  The next thing he knows she is down by the bar sipping champagne and singing “Try A Little Tenderness.” Otis Redding himself is now rising like stage smoke from that black dress.

  The song starts out as a heartbreak hotel thing. But the tempo picks up with each new verse. Michael has seen the video of the Big O doing his thing to this number. The man is sleepwal
king at the beginning of the piece. But by the end he is wailing and screaming, and the drums are banging. The horns blaring. Sweat is busting out all over. His shirttail is torn out. And his arms, legs, head are shaking. He is having a seizure. The audience is on its feet as the entertainer goes down howling “Gotta, gotta, gotta try a little tenderness …”