Fragments Imperfectly Remembered As Related By Unreliable or Dishonest Narrators For Inattentive, Drugged or Dumbed Down Readers Plugged to Drill Rap While Perched on Cans
[Uncle Ho Lives Forever in Vung Tau, 8/26/24]
Troy Skaggs, “I recently left my section 8 apartment in a majority black neighborhood in an economically depressed city that is over a quarter black. It wasn’t a pretty picture and sounded worse. There are beautiful moments and people in any place, but after an intense police standoff in front of the place on Memorial Day, the inability to walk peacefully in the neighborhood, screaming neighbors, constant window rattling bass and various other urban concerns I decided that anywhere outside of South Bend city limits would be better than the current situation. I was right.
“It’s been a month on the road, stoned as usual, but trying to make it work in the ‘big corn’ of central Indiana. Motels, campgrounds and a few nights ‘roughing it.’ Last night was spent in a baseball dugout in Peru, Indiana next to the Nickel Plate rail trail. Miles of walkable, bikeable asphalt passing through sparsely populated cornfields and small towns. Tonight is a tent night at lake Mississinewa reservoir. Insects, frogs and white people doing peaceful white people stuff. I’m no white nationalist, but this is nice.”
I can read such sketches all day. Ordinary life at ground level has always been grossly underreported. Literature is mostly practiced by bookish nerds with few interactions with car mechanics, dishwashers, cardboard scavengers, nannies, bathroom attendants, soccer moms and fulfillment center associates. To Troy, I suggested:
Introduce us to the people you meet! Let’s hear their voices. It’s not a bad idea to use your phone to record them to get their speech more exact. When we write down what people said, we tend to translate their idioms and cadence into our own, so an actual voice recording can help to correct these distortions.
Emailing an excellent young poet last night, I said I would love to see more language from actual encounters, of people talking and their idioms, “Your facility with languages is book learned, so get into the alleys more and enjoy lowlife motherfuckers!” Hold on, you huff! Didn’t Yeats say:
Dear fellow-artist, why so free With every sort of company, With every Jack and Jill? Choose your companions from the best; Who draws a bucket with the rest Soon topples down the hill.
Since most Jacks and Jills are at bottoms of hills, any depiction of humanity is flawed without sober accounts of them, as earned from thousands of hours in their company. Orwell’s nonfiction is no less valuable than his political parables.
This is not really about writing or reading, but how to be grounded, so relevant to illiterates even. To be attentive to your immediate neighbors is to reclaim your environment, so eroded and violated after a century of molestation from distant assholes.
The above took me two hours. At 5:30AM, I’m at the café on General Uprising. Big news this morning is a trucker who hit a motorcyclist at a gas station. After pausing for five seconds, he decided to drive on, so squashing that young woman, lying beneath. Raging, Tank Top says the driver had “a cow’s head with a dog’s brain.” Colorful but inaccurate. As usual, his fat son is shooting away. Though constantly told to keep his rat tat tat down, kid must sate his sadism, rage and sadness with a constant stream of loud bangs.
Nearsighted, fat and oblivious to everything outside his tiny screen, kid won’t make it as a soldier 13 years from now, unless he declares himself a woman and moves to the USA. There, he can join the Secret Service to not protect the AI robot who’s pretending to rule over what’s left of a smoldering United States of America. Shivering in husks of office buildings and parking garages, several dozens Americans who can still read will murder each other to get their mutilated hands on the rarest copies, with half their pages missing, of Troy Skaggs’ Last Days of Big Corn, self-published in 2025. Reading “Last night was spent in a baseball dugout,” they’ll curse, “Fuck you, Troy! You had a clean baseball dugout all to yourself!” The ones not blown up quickly became toilets.
Yesterday, I overheard tidbits from an ex Viet Cong or maybe just a VC suspect, “Now, they piss their pants when you bang on the table! They forced me to drink soapy water. They’d hit so hard, they’d break bones, even your spine. They put leeches into vaginas.” Unlike Tank Top, he didn’t say cunt but body’s opening, cửa mình, the most polite term. War unleashes sadism, requires it even. Once you’ve crossed that line, you’ll keep going. That’s why stabbing victims are often punctured dozens of times. You’d think no one could have so much energy, but humpers don’t count how many thrusts.
Leaving the café yesterday, I ran into a neighbor from Minh Thư Hotel, where I stayed for six months two years ago. This Vung Tau native escaped by boat in 1981 at age 19. Lucky enough to make it to Galang, he stayed there three years before being accepted into the US as a refugee. After a series of near minimum wage job, he was hired as maintenance technician by Continental Airlines “Going from $6 to $10, I was thrilled!”
After Continental and United merged, he moved from Denver to Houston. Making $47 an hour by 2022, he retired early with a 75% pension. With that kind of cash, he can be more decadent than Hunter Biden, but his main recreation here is billiards. He also knows where to get amazing food for cheap. On his recommendation, I had the best smoked veal in my life yesterday. Sprinkling the tenderest meat with powdered grilled rice, thính, is a culinary Everest.
In the US, he made such mind blowing dishes at home, his son’s white girlfriend moved into his house. Of course, he charged her nothing. When the couple moved out, he was annoyed she had to pay half their rent, “A psychology major, she didn’t make very much working in a café, so I told my son, ‘Have her pay 40% at most,’ but he said no. It’s 50-50.” Shaking his head, he laughed. “That’s how they do it in America.”
Then, “After I cosigned my daughter’s car, she asked for gas money the first time I asked her for a ride!”
“Has she been to Vietnam?”
“No.”
“But she can fly for free with United Airlines,” same as this man.
“She went to Germany on her last vacation.”
His son has been here several times and speaks Vietnamese well. Last time, he spent just a day with his dad. Americans need more mental space also.
“When was the last time you went back?”
“Just over a month ago.”
“For low long?”
“Fifteen days,” he chuckled. “It was enough.”
I have an American friend, Dan, who’s married to a Brit. Living in Brighton, he dreads each trip home. Last week, Dan emailed me, “Going to Denver then Chicago in three weeks, parents paying for tickets. Wish me luck and the boys not to get shot or knockout punched, etc.” In Barcelona recently, Dan and his kids could roam all over without fear. “It was heavenly. But no American city, no thanks. Just get me the fuck outta there as fast as possible!” Dan spent years in Philly so know all about the infinite charms of urban America.
His blood pressure rising, Dan just sent me this, “Dodging bullets and keeping a sharp eye out for white-hate-filled psychos in Chicago and Venezuelan gangs in Denver/Aurora time is almost here. Must start mentally preparing, and trying to do ten creaky pushups and lift a ten pound dumbbell for ten reps. Should be in fighting shape in three weeks!”
Writing or just speaking is often playful. To joke or jest without malice shows you’re still sane. Unheard and unseen, they seethe.
Raising a son alone, Tank Top sometimes snaps, but his daily rants at the café before dawn prevents much worse. At Philly’s Friendly Lounge, cranky Johnny the Hat rarely talked, but just seeing Dom, Felix, Terrance, Johnny AC and me more or less daily calmed and cheered him, I’m sure.
Tank Top, “Why would anyone want to visit a foreign country?! You can’t talk, so you’re like a mute, and you don’t know what to eat. There’s so much to see inside Vietnam. At 52, I haven’t even been to Da Lat!”
The inattentive or self-absorbed can travel the world yet see and feel much less than those confined daily to a neighborhood café or pub. Yesterday, I had to pause to admire that dark and bone thin seller of lottery tickets. Bogart or James Dean couldn’t have smoked more beautifully. Always serene, she cheers me. Her toothless laughs are wordless haikus.
[Vung Tau, 8/12/24]
[Soviet Donuts in Vung Tau on 8/28/24]
[Vung Tau sneaker store on 8/28/24]
[Vung Tau, 8/28/24]
Hi everyone,
After lunch and a brief nap, I stumbled upon news about Tren de Aragua taking over several Aurora apartment complexes. There’s a video of six gangsters casually converging on a door. Four carry handguns. One has a military assault rifle with a smart scope. All but one are slim young men in casual Gap or Old Navy sort of clothing. Wearing a black baseball cap, one coolly smokes a cigarette. A second clip shows two men forcing a door open with a prybar. One door over, there’s a sign, “WORKING FROM HOME—PLEASE DO NOT DISTURB.” At his desk, occupant may have wet his pants.
Venezuela became so lawless after decades of economic war waged by the US. With much oil, it was once rich and stable. As head of Homeland Security, Jewish Alejandro Mayorkas welcomed hordes of violent Venezuelans. Open border has long been a Jewish weapon. With a Jewish husband, blathering Kamala Harris is the AWOL border czar. If it suits Jews, she’ll be the next president. Half a country of suicidal idiots will scream ecstatically. The other half will wait four years, or maybe it’s their turn to feel vindicated, if only for a few blinks. It’s better than no orgasm. Though Trump implemented genocidal Jewjabs with his Operation Warp Speed, he’s endorsed by “anti-vaxxer” Robert F. Kennedy Jr! Bob knows better than to mess with those who murdered his dad and uncle in full view. If he sucks hard enough, they may let him become Puppet in Chief in 2028 or 2032.
Meanwhile in Aurora, city councilmember Danielle Jurinsky can only lament, “The city nonprofits have lined up to help the migrants that have come here but nobody is helping the Americans that are trapped in these apartment complexes.” By calling them migrants and not illegal immigrants, Jurinsky has already lost, but in today’s America, one wrong word can mess you up.
Careful, Danielle, in making a distinction between “Americans” and “migrants.” Since they’re here to stay, they’re as baseball, Chevrolet and huevos rancheros as you. My bad, I mean caraotas negras! It’s impossible to keep up with progress.
Linh
Troy is in a much better place in small-town Indiana. I had my own taste of it back in the '70s, when I spent a couple of years at Indiana University. Bloomington wasn't exactly small, but the entire state was sprinkled with small cities and towns. Many if not most of my fellow students were from those places, and looking back on it, it seems a much less complicated existence.
I lived in the dormitory, and there was an old woman who had the job of changing the bedding in each room once a week. She had to blast half of us out of bed to do it, since we were staying up late every night and sleeping until the morning was half over. She was feisty, but everyone liked her. One time about 20 of us went down to her house in a town about 20 miles away and gave her a surprise birthday party. Her house was no palace, but a simple place. Back then I did not pay close attention to such things, but she was probably living simply.
I had a girlfriend for about a year who was from a small northeastern Indiana town of maybe 1000 people, and visited her one summer. The family was very nice and welcoming, even though I'm sure I was a bit clueless. One of her brothers even insisted I try out his new motorcycle, although I had never ridden one before--I was so afraid I would bash it up. The town was so small that to call her up from my home I could not direct dial. It required operator assistance because they had what was called a "ring down." Everyone in town had a two digit phone number. When we talked on those calls, she warned me never to get too personal. She had a job at the local phone exchange in the summer, and she knew that the operators there frequently listened in on calls. And because it was such a small place, they would gossip about it, of course.
Rural Indiana was beautiful, especially in autumn. Once you are south of Indianapolis, the "cornfield" Indiana starts to morph into something more like Kentucky hill country. I wonder how people in those small, formerly bucolic towns are getting by nowadays.