Flawed Minds, Faulty Memory and Fatal Trips

[Phnom Penh, 11/22/23]

With my visa expiring, I must again leave Vung Tau. Next week, I’ll take a 4:30AM mini bus to Saigon, then walk several blocks to board a 7:30 bus to Phnom Penh. In Bavet 2 1/2 hours later, everyone will have lunch, then at 1:30PM, I’ll see, with relief and happiness, the magnificent Art Deco dome of Jean Debois’ Central Market! Hopefully, my $20 a night room at Zing will afford an awesome yet soothing view of this wonder. Nothing beats seeing it at dawn, then into an alley I’ll snake, past caged roosters and coal fires being stoked.

Travel is derived from travailler, meaning to trouble, suffer or be worn out. To tripaliare is to torture, preferably with the tripalium, a three-stake device to stretch your sorry ass into a stiff X. At the beginning of the 21st century, travel has become so carefree teenaged dorks can wander alone into unmapped jungle villages for duckfaced selfies. There, their odds of being robbed, raped or cooked are much lower than in Philly or Chicago. Seeing peasants having such a great time is revolting to global deciders, so they’re promising to tear down airports, ban flights, penalize driving and corral those not massacred by Jewjab Genocide or WWIII.

With even paper money being phased out, paperwork will become an archaic word, like penmanship, pen, pencil or eraser. Without knowing its literal meaning, “red tape” is still being used, however. Wearily, I applied for my Cambodia visa yesterday. This required proofs of hotel reservation and travel booking, and no, a photo of you naked and bleeding on a tripalium doesn’t count. This morning, I got my bus confirmation, but guess what? I had booked a trip from Phnom Penh to Saigon!

My 60-year-old brain is already uncoiling. At this rate, it will soon be a purplish blob plopped on some ratty pillow looking stunned or disgusted, but hey, I got myself together enough to self-publish 11 books, and they are moving, so thank you.

Last month, I woke at 4PM but thought it was 4AM. Seeing my morose neighbor Dzuy with his can of Saigon Beer, I shouted, “Why are you drinking before five?!” Wandering downtown an hour later, I noticed the streets so festive, but didn’t think too much of it. At 6:15, it was still dark, so I half suspected something was weird. When no sun had risen by 8:30, I finally realized it was night and not morning!

At least I caught my wrong itinerary in time. Since so much can go wrong on the road, most people just stay put, until they’re menaced by bombs, bullets, starvation or Satanic laws. The indecisive are trapped, burnt or blown up.

In Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” six people lose their lives due to a cheery grandma’s faulty memory. This would have been harmless had it not been compounded by one bad decision, itself innocuous when made.

On a family trip from Georgia to Florida, grandma hides her cat in a basket. On the way, she persuades her son to visit an old plantation. To build her case, grandma lies:

“There was a secret panel in this house,” she said craftily, not telling the truth but wishing that she were, “and the story went that all the family silver was hidden in it when Sherman came through but it was never found…”

With his two kids screaming to see this mythical place, her son reluctantly turns onto a winding dirt road. Suddenly, grandma realizes it’s in Tennessee and not Georgia:

The thought was so embarrassing that she turned red in the face and her eyes dilated and her feet jumped up, upsetting her valise in the corner. The instant the valise moved, the newspaper top she had over the basket under it rose with a snarl and Pitty Sing, the cat, sprang onto Bailey’s shoulder.

Startled, her son loses control, so the car flips before landing, right side up, in a “red-gutted ditch.” Though her daughter-in-law and baby granddaughter are thrown from the car, they somehow survive, as does everybody else, but their trouble has just begun. Only Pitty Sing would live.

Grandma’s epitaph, so to speak, is among O’Connor most inspired passages:

“She would of been a good woman,” The Misfit said, “if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.”

As a starting point for hundreds of thousands of boat people, Vung Tau launched so many horrific journeys. Only a fraction has been recorded. Most of these accounts have been ignored or forgotten.

Visiting Vung Tau in the 70’s, I was charmed by a hulking ship stranded near Back Beach. Since the country was awash with tragedies, this hardly counted. Built in Baltimore, it was a Liberty vessel in WWII. By 1968, it was Greek owned and named Ioannis. After unloading powdered milk and cooking oil in Saigon, it hit undersea rocks due to a navigation error, so the captain slit his wrist after half a day of useless maneuvering. In scarce Vietnamese accounts, he’s known only as “Klaus.”

Bigger and braver boys sometimes climbed up its anchor line. Men ransacked it for anything to sell. For 20 years, this inadvertent memorial to a self-accusing German lingered. Mistake prone, we will all be forgotten, in the ultimate act of mercy. Heroes, fools and wronged ghosts alike dissolve.

In 1992, 68,000 Qing Dynasty objects were recovered from a 300-year-old shipwreck just off Vung Tau. Porcelain vases, jade buddhas or just a sailors’ kettle, all are gorgeous. That, too, was a fatal trip, but its reverent and loving cargo also shows we’re not just beasts.

[Vung Tau, 2/28/24]

[Vung Tau, 3/20/24]

[Vung Tau, 3/20/24]

[Vung Tau, 1/18/24]