by Tom Bissell
“What a magnificent glass of wine, it sounds like.”
“No, the country. It's … just wonderful.”
“I'm really glad you're having a good time.”
“It's not just Vietnam. I like all of Asia.”
I sat next to him. “What do you like about it?”
His mouth screwed over. “Gosh. I have to think about that. I guess I like the people. Of course I like the food. The scenery. Asians are just indomitable. They don't feel sorry for themselves. They're not whiners; they do what has to be done. Always trying to succeed—like America used to be.”
“Oh, boy.”
He waved this off. “I'm starving. Let's eat next to the beach.”
We were escorted to our table. The late-supping expat crowd had not yet descended, and we had the porch almost entirely to ourselves. The unseen sun, not yet set, filled the sky to the west with diffuse auburn light. To the east, above the sea, the moon was set into the sky like a smooth pale marble. We looked at each other, my father smiling. Before us were two plastic sleeves that contained premoistened towelettes, which every Vietnamese establishment provided its customers. I opened mine Vietnamese-style, gripping one end of the packet to rush the trapped air to the other, and then popping the thin plastic bubble against my palm. My father peeled his open.
“I swear,” I said, “this entire country's economy runs on scooters and premoistened towelettes.”
“This country's economy doesn't run,” my father, or rather my father's wine, said grimly. “There's so much pointless waste here. It's depressing.”
“Cease-fire, Captain. I thought this was a ‘magnificent country’?”
He peacefully contemplated the ocean. “It is. It could be.”
I decided to throw out to him a conversational life preserver. “Did something happen to you today?”
He examined his thumbnail, checked his watch, scratched his nose. His stare, when it finally fell on me, had an odd ferocity. “The goddamned hospital, the Ninth Army hospital I got better in—Hien and I went to find it. I knew it's near the airfield because I remember being flown in and then immediately being placed on a gurney and taken to the hospital—all of which took two minutes. So we went to the airport. Of course a policeman was there. We asked him, a very affable guy, where it was, and he said, ‘Oh yeah, it's right down there.’ We pulled up to the hospital, and I asked Hien if he would take a picture of me in front of it. And he said no, it's not allowed. I asked why, and he didn't answer. Then he went in and talked to some local people, and they said absolutely not, no pictures. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. I said, ‘Well, why not? Tell the guards that I used to be a patient here, during the American War.’ And Hien said, ‘It does not work that way in my country’ That made me sad: ‘It does not work that way in my country’ “
“Dad, look at it from their side. How much hospitality do you expect these people to show you?”
“It's not that. I can live with that. It's this aura of… secrecy about going to a hospital.”
I shrugged. “It's very Communist.”
“It's not an antiaircraft battery, or a nuclear zone.” He shook his head. “When we were driving back, I asked Hien, ‘Why? Why is it like this?’ And he said, ? know, I know—but it is my government.’ So I don't even have a picture to show Carolyn.”
“What's the building look like?”
“Like it always did.”
“Then it's not a big deal. It's just a hospital.”
“But it's not just the hospital. It's this whole fuckin’ place. You remember the restaurant we stopped at, between Chu Lai and Qui Nhon?”
“The beachside place, with the toilets that drained right into the river?”
Once again, up floated his long, thick index finger. “That right there: Communism.”
“Communism?”
“This lovely little restaurant, and there's the water closet right next to you, and some young lady ducks into it, and I'm watching this with Truong, and pretty soon I see a big brown dragon fall through the floor and into the stream. I thought, ‘I'm glad I'm not downstream washing my clothes.’ “
“Dad, what can you do?”
“What I think is that there's no incentive for anyone to work at doing something like building a better sewage system. The State will take care of it.”
“Incentive has nothing to do with it. There's no money. Rural Vietnam struggles along on whatever pennies the government manages to throw its way.”
“What I'm saying is that private enterprise would not allow that to happen.”
“That's … forgive me, but that's nutty.”
“lust hear me out. After the hospital I went to the bar in our hotel. I said to the bartender, ? would like a bottle of wine.’ And this wonderfully nice man said, ‘Oh, good, which one do you want?’ I asked him for a wine list. He brought it to me and I said, ‘Oh yes, this is the bottle I want,’ and he said, ‘Sauvignon?’ and I said, ‘No, chardonnay’ I pointed it out again. Twenty minutes—no, twenty-five minutes later, because now I was keeping track—the man arrived with five bottles of wine. Four red, one white.”
“Not sure I see your point here.”
“You need to listen. So he picked up the phone, he made a call. He said, ‘Lac, chardonnay, please.’ Twenty minutes later, another man, this Mr. Lac, arrives. Then a woman came in, and they brought the bottle of sauvignon. Now we have three people involved.”
“Okay. I hear you. Now, if I—may I say something?”
“The people themselves are marvelously wonderful. Don't misunderstand me. I mean, they're just down-to-earth, doing everything they can to succeed. But these rules that none of them—it takes so many to—”
“Dad, there's stuff that socialism or capitalism or whatever ism you want to bring up does not and cannot—”
“I'm not done yet, philosopher. So they bring the wrong bottle of wine. I say, ‘No,’ but I say this very gently. And we're conversing in pidgin English and Vietnamese. I had my dictionary out. And he said, basically, ‘This is not the right bottle of wine.’ He was talking about the one I ordered! It took me over an hour, because of the strictures they have, to finally get me the bottle of wine I ordered.”
“You're exaggerating. I know you when you're exaggerating and you're exaggerating right now.”
His face darkened. “Let me retrace things.”
“Look, I know what you're saying.”
“I was horrified! Horrified for the people. There's just no continuity, efficiency, productivity, or good service.”
“The service since we've been here has been tremendous. What the fuck are you talking about?”
Again he looked away. “Only you, my son …”
“I know you think I'm a Communist, but the fact is—”
“So then, when I asked for ice, it took another person. It took one more person. It took another person to get a glass. And it took three people to get the right bottle of wine. What I'm saying is that they're about as efficient as a snail trying to make pancakes. They're marvelous, they're friendly, but they have no initiative to do anything better.”
“You're being completely unreasonable. For one, Vietnamese operate under an utterly different set of cultural assumptions than you and me.”
“I knew you were a Communist!”
By now we really did have the porch to ourselves. The middle-aged couple sitting a few tables away had moved into the bar with much theatrically appalled shaking of head.
“Now listen to me,” my father said quietly, “because I actually know a little. I know a little bit more than you think.” He went thoughtfully silent. Then: “What is the basis of culture?”
“Art. Art is the basis of culture.”
“I think economics is the basis of culture. Economics. If you are well off, well fed, well clothed, well housed, and comfortable in your political situation, then—”
“What about poets or painters who don't care about being well fed or well off?”
&nb
sp; “They won't be able to write their poetry or paint their portraits until somebody comes along and is able to support them. Which is why I keep telling you to find some nice young lawyer.”
“A lot of artists have died in poverty just to be able to do their work.”
“Fine, but they had a chance to do their work because they weren't digging up rice paddies, because somebody gave them the latitude to be able to develop their artistic talents.”
“You're dodging the question.”
“All right, I'll start over. Economics, to my mind, is the basis of all development of all civilization.”
“I can agree with that. The development part. But art sustains civilization.”
“If I'm forced to defend my fort, there is no art. If I'm starving, there is no art. Art needs benefactors. People need to buy it, right? This art of yours needs an audience, however small. What is that, then? What provides this audience? Economics, solid economics. Only with a solid economic picture can your art develop.”
I tossed my towelette between us: truce. “Okay. I just resent the fact that you make me into a Communist sympathizer with your harebrained theorizing.”
“And I resent that you just called me a harebrained theorizer.”
“But it took four people to get your bottle of wine.”
“No, it took five, because you forgot about the guy who brought me my ice.”
Our slender, androgynous waiter approached, somewhat cautiously, and asked if we were ready to order. My father told him, “We're going to sit tight for a while. But we'd like another bottle of wine.” The waiter stood there looking at us, puzzled, then walked away.
As my father dumped the dregs of his wine into his mouth, I said, “You know, you shouldn't use so many idioms when speaking to Vietnamese.”
“What do you mean?”
“Idioms are usually the last and most difficult part of a language to master. And every English-speaking culture has different idioms. I don't think he had any idea what you meant by ‘sit tight.’ I'm just saying.”
“Well,” he said, “they should know them. It's his job to know idioms.”
I listened to the waves and watched the growing number of Nha Trang's prostitutes troll up and down the beach. Soon my father was biting his nails and smoking one cigarette after another. I knew I was sitting across from a different man now. Drinking emboldened him, made him sit up straighter, his voice louder, his stories longer, the ultimate point of these stories more opaque. The wine had colored all the cartilaged parts of his face bright pink. He was talking now, but I was only half listening. Instead I stared at the little red light of my tape recorder.
I finally interrupted him: “Tell me about Nha Trang. Tell me about what you remember.”
He fell back against his chair. “Gosh. There's a lot. I remember recuperating and I was on crutches and I was sort of a mess. I didn't have a lot of strength and I couldn't go to the beach, so I'd hire a taxi and the nurse at the desk would give me a chit, good for three hours, or four hours. I would come down here in a taxi, and get dropped off. All these hotels you see now? They weren't here, of course. But I'd go have dinner. And there was one place I looked for earlier today, but I couldn't find it. It's gone.”
“What was it?”
“A little restaurant. Now, this woman had the best abalone; she knew seafood. The fishermen here all brought all their best catch to her. And if you came in alone she fixed you up with a woman.”
“So you were getting laid a lot in your recuperation?”
“Uh, no. But I was feeling well enough to think about it. But I got involved with this woman, and we were having dinner there. We had abalone and lobster and this little thing would go, ‘Oooooooh!’ She spoke English. She said to me, ‘You are badly hurt.’ I said, ‘Yes, I am, but I'm getting better.’ “
“Can you remember her name?”
“I don't think I ever knew her name.”
Our waiter came back, and finally we ordered. Once he was gone, I said, “So you have fond memories of Nha Trang.”
“I made one friend here—this guy had been an engineer in Vietnam in the 1950s. Now he was back. He was very well known in Nha Trang— what you'd call a noncombatant. He knew all the local contractors, cement and et cetera. He knew it all. Sand. Brick. He said to me, ‘You wanna have some fun downtown?’ And I said, ‘Christ, yes. Get me the fuck out of here.’ So, we got passes and came downtown.”
“You were better by this point?”
“No. He was in the same ward that I was.”
“He was a fellow patient.”
“Yeah, and he liked me. I think his name was Bill or something. I'm John and he's Bill. We went out for two rollicking days. Ate in the best restaurants.”
“How was he wounded? Do you remember?”
“Yes. He had a very difficult disease called ‘not taking care of your dick.’ Well, one day, he's better, and I'm feeling great, and then that great leader of ours, General Westmoreland, came through our ward. This is the truth, and you may print it if you'd like. If you don't care to write about it, that's fine. But Westmoreland comes to the first guy he sees, a guy in an oxygen tent, and says, ‘Our country is honored by your sacrifice.’ He then proceeds to pin this great big medal—the Purple Heart— to the poor guy's oxygen tent, and the air starts escaping. Now the medics are running around trying to patch the thing.”
“William Westmoreland pinned a Purple Heart to an oxygen tent? Is that true?”
“It's absolutely true. General Westmoreland also gave me my Purple Heart.”
“Here? In Nha Trang?”
“Right here. Just a few blocks away. He said to me, ‘Congratulations, Lieutenant.’ “
“Wow. Did he kick you in the nuts while he presented it to you or something?”
“No. But I didn't finish my story. After puncturing the guy's oxygen tent, Westmoreland sees all the guys with swollen dicks and goes crazy. ‘What are you guys doing here? You're dishonoring your country!’ “
“Swollen dicks.”
“They were recovering from a severe form of enlarged penis, I guess you'd call it.”
“‘ Enlarged penis.’ Meet my father, the doctor.”
“I don't know what the hell it was; their dicks were as big as your fist. But Westmoreland gave them bloody hell, and these guys were embarrassed. These were Army chopper pilots who had been out in the bush for probably a year. And for him to denigrate them…. I was in my bed, listening. Not able to move very much, but I'm listening. And I'm getting angry. Nha Trang was a peaceful area, and these guys were the ones who'd made it that way.”
“It was calm here?”
“Oh yeah, we had it controlled.”
“When you got off your crutches, did you ever come down here and sit on the beach?”
“Yeah. Sit on the beach. Think.”
“Sit and watch stuff go by?”
“Sure. Lovely people would walk over and say, ‘Hi. How you?’ “
“You mean whores?”
“No, no. Get your mind out of the crapper. Just people—marvelous people.” He stopped for a moment, gazed over at the ocean, and started to talk again, but I stopped listening.
What does your father do? A question young men are asked all the time. Women in particular ask it of young men, I suppose in the spirit of a kind of secular astrology. Who will you be in ten years, and do I want to be involved? The common belief is that every young man, like the weeping Jesus of Gethsemane, has two choices when it comes to his father: rejection or emulation. In some ways my father and I could not have been more different. While I had inherited his sense of humor, his sense of loyalty, and his lycanthropically hairy back, I was my mother's child in all matters of commerce and emotion. I am terrible with money, weep over nothing, and typically feel before I think. I could anticipate my mother because her heart was mine. My father remained more mysterious. What does my father do? I had always answered it thus: “My father is a Marine.” This typically resulted
in a pinch-faced look of sympathy. But the truth was, my father and I got along. We had not always gotten along—I maintained a solid D average in high school, he viewed my determination to be a writer (at least initially) as a dreamer's errand, and lurking in our history were various wrecked Chevys and uncovered marijuana caches—but we had always been close. As I grew older, I noticed the troubles many of my friends had with their fathers: the animosities and disappointments, held so long in the arrears of late adolescence, suddenly coming up due on both ends. But my father and I, if anything, had grown closer, even as I understood him less and less.
“So I got up there on crutches and they sat me down at this marvelous table, this beautiful lacquer table. Before I know it there's a woman alongside me. ? love you. You Marine? You GI?’ I said, ‘I'm a Marine.’ She said, ? love Marines more than GIs.’ So we began to order our food, and they did it right. They would bring out prawns, soup, a little plate of lobster. And we were on the beach. I remember walking across the road in my crutches, a couple of nights, and having this woman just talk to me. I wasn't so sure what she was saying all the time. But she was just … she made me feel good. She had this room, I think my major took care of it; I never paid a dime, I don't know. We did this for two nights. And I remember she'd say, ‘Shower now, shower now.’ So we'd go into this room and I can't even recollect if it was in our hotel room or in the commons, but I'd take a shower and she would wash me. It was one of the most marvelous things. She would lather me up, wash me head to toe. And she'd put me in bed, she'd look at the bandages and there was blood coming out and she'd say, ‘Not good, you must go hospital.’ The blood was coming out again, on my back, on my butt, on my arms and my legs and my feet. Let's just say I was a little too energetic in my recovery. God, it's coming back in floods now. I remember feeling this tremendous relief. No tension. Nothing to do, just be yourself. Recover.”
My father was a Marine. But how poorly that captured him. He was not a tall man, but he was so thin he appeared tall. His head was perfectly egg-shaped, which accounted for my brother's and my nickname for him: Egghead. (Although nothing explained his nicknames for us: Ringworm and Remus.) His ducklike gait, a strange combination of the goofy and the determined, saw his big floppy feet inclined outward at forty-five-degree angles. (I used to make fun of him for this until a girlfriend pointed out to me that I walk precisely the same way.) My father, then, was no Great Santini, no Knight Templar of bruising manhood. During the neighborhood basketball games of my childhood, which were played in our driveway, my father, for instance, unforgivably shot granny-style free throws. “Hugs and kisses” is how he used to announce that he was putting me to bed. Hugs and kisses. I unself-consciously kissed my father until I was in high school, when some friends busted me for it: “You kiss your dadV But we fought all the time. I do not mean argue. I mean we fought. I would often announce my presence by punching him hard on the shoulder, whereupon he would put me in a full nelson until I sang the following song, which for years I believed he had made up: “Why this feeling? / Why this joy? / Because you're near me, oh you fool. / Mister Wonderful, that's you.” I have told people these stories expecting a great burst of laughter only to find a room of people staring silently back at me. And it got worse. Once, after a particularly inhuman game of Rock, Paper, Scissors (the loser of each round received the arm twist popularly known as a snakebite), I called a child abuse hotline on him. It took about a week to straighten out. The torment was not just physical. When I was very young, my father would tell me he had invented trees and fought in the Civil War, and would laugh until he had tears in his eyes when my teachers called home to upbraid him. In return my brother and I simply besieged the poor man, pouring liquid Ex-Lax into his coffee before work, loading his cigarettes with tiny slivers of treated pine that exploded after a few drags. One went off in a board meeting at his bank. Another while he was on his way to church, sending him up onto the curb. He always got us back. In high school I brought a date over and was showing off with my smart-aleckry, only to be knocked to the floor by my father and held down while he rubbed pizza all over my face and called our dogs over to lick it off. There was, needless to say, no second date.