More Selling Trinkets or Body

[Vung Tau, 10/13/24]

Still thinking about Whitman, I hear Pale Face mumbling, “Barking, that’s Germans. Us Vietnamese sound like birds chirping. Chinese are like frogs, they croak. As for speaking softly, melodiously, that’s the Russians and the French.” As usual, he’s mostly talking to himself. You can barely hear this know-it-all.

Meanwhile, Tank Top is ranting away. One outburst, “I’m cooking, my crotch is sweating. Suddenly, there’s a call. Some guy tells me about investment and real estate, so I shout into the phone, ‘Listen, you send me ten kilograms of rice. When I’m full, we can talk about investment and real estate!’ I’m starving to death [đói gần chết] yet this crippled cunt wants to talk about investment!” That last bit he has no doubt improvised.

Yesterday he talked about being arrested years ago. Tank Top had transported a thief to his destination.

“The cop said, ‘Fuck your mother, you’re complicit, so confess.’ I said, ‘I’m just a motorbike taxi guy. How could I know what my passenger was up to?’ ‘Fuck your mother,’ he said. ‘Stop lying!’ Then he left me there from early morning until about 3. I was more or less arrested. Returning, the cop said, “We just caught the guy. If you keep lying, you’ll get in worse trouble.” Still, I wouldn’t admit to anything. The cop was lying! At 4, he said, ‘We don’t have enough to charge you, so we must let you go, but we’ll keep your motorbike as evidence.’”

Still chuckling, Tank Top lowered his voice, “There are times you must back down, so I pleaded, ‘If you keep my motorbike, how can I help you catch the guy? I won’t be able to run after him if I see him riding around.’ The cop saw my logic. I kept my motorbike. Once outside the police station, I turned around and shouted, ‘I’ll help you catch your mother’s cunt!’ Ha, ha!” Again, Tank Top got creative.

However distorted, Tank Top’s account is revealing, and so is my retelling, I must say, though further distorted. Tank Top’s bravado also says much, and not just about him.

Three months ago, Tank Top shared what he had advised any girl coming from a distant village, “Get a job at a massage parlor. That way, you’ll have instant noodles,” his term for instant cash. “After you get the hang of it, try to work in a hostess bar. If you hook up with a foreigner, he may give you a motorbike or even a house!”

Yesterday, Tank Top revisited this topic, “Don’t think foreigners don’t cheat! There was this Korean guy. The first time, he tipped this girl really well, a real big shot! He did this a few more times, then he stopped paying. She didn’t say anything. Here’s this foreigner, so generous, she’s not going to nag. This went on for a while then, suddenly, he disappeared! Ha, ha! This Korean had gone home!”

This Korean’s boldness clearly impressed Tank Top, “We found out later he was a Mafia type back home. How he smoked a joint was amazing! We marveled at how he held his joints. Koreans don’t waste. Just look at how they finish a bowl of soup. In public, us Vietnamese would never bring a bowl to our mouth, but Koreans just do it! They’d slurp it like a dog!”

Since our mouths aren’t snouts, that’s impossible, but story telling has its own momentum and logic. Again, Tank Top got carried away.

Through his comments at SubStack, I’ve been following Troy Skaggs’ recent movements with interest. Two months ago, this weed smoking and self-educated war veteran had enough of booming music, sirens and tense walks, so fled his South Bend ghetto, to move into a Kokomo shelter. On 10/9/24, Skaggs reported, “Out of the shelter and back in the tomato fields, I’m staying in a camper trailer on the old ‘home place’ where I grew up. No running water at the moment, so paper plates and pages of Indiana Auto & RV serve the purpose of ready made latrine. Some mornings I can’t help but ask myself, ‘Could this shit be art?’” This morning, Skaggs messaged me, “Got done with a tomato season. The tractor crew consisted of South African white boys over here for the season. Some of the hardest working dudes I’ve encountered Linh.”

Who wouldn’t want to hear more? I emailed Troy, “You must jot down these observations, reflections, meetings and conversations. Just do it, man!” Tell us more about your alcoholism, boredom, loneliness, girlfriends, army buddies, Afghanistan at war, South Bend at war, Indiana dives and your anxieties, if any, about growing old. Get the South Africans to be candid about race. Ask if they think the USA will become South Africa.

Whitman is a beacon, Troy. Repeatedly, he stresses that shunned or obscured lives must be shown:

Through me many long dumb voices, 
Voices of the interminable generations of prisoners and slaves, 
Voices of the diseas’d and despairing and of thieves and dwarfs, 

[...]

Through me forbidden voices,
Voices of sexes and lusts, voices veil’d and I remove the veil, 
Voices indecent by me clarified and transfigur’d. 

Small truths are ignored. Most great truths are lies. Whitman:

We talk of “facts” in history. What are facts? A good deal that gets written once is repeated and repeated, until the future comes to swear by it as a gospel.

*

We get into such grooves—that’s the trouble—passing traditions and exaggerations down from one generation to another unquestioned. After awhile we begin to think even the lies must be true.

*

Now, there’s Abraham Lincoln: people get to know his traits, his habits of life, some of his characteristics set off in the most positive relief: soon all sorts of stories are fathered on him—some of them true, some of them apocryphal—volumes of stories (stories decent and indecent) fathered on him: legitimate stories, illegitimate: and so Lincoln comes to us more or less falsified.

At the start of this article, I looked up so see a sexily dressed young woman, standing in the half dark across the street. Her phone lit her white masked face. Everyone knows Covid is especially active around 4AM.

Her bare legs were a compass spread 30 degree. Behind her was a forbidden alley so thin, it was almost entirely blocked by her flesh and bones.

Even with my boogie days long gone, I knew there were nightclubs on Back Beach two miles away. This couple, though, showed no sign of having been partying.

Without exchanging one word, they disappeared, very business like, into that darkness.

The signs are there. I now see even very young kids wandering around to sell lottery tickets. Some peddle toothpicks, cotton swabs, keychains or the cheapest plastic toys. Beggars, too, have returned.

Thirty years ago, many Vietnamese babies were fed rice water instead of milk. Destitution excites vultures. With more whores everywhere, prices will go down.

[Vung Tau, 10/11/24]

[Vung Tau, 10/12/24]

[Vung Tau, 10/13/24]

[Vung Tau, 10/12/24]