I have a coworker with some amazing stories ranging from Indiana to Southeast Asia, and he's been kind enough to share them with me. Hopefully there will be handfuls of Johnny stories over the next couple of weeks. To start with, we have prostitutes in Vietnam. Enjoy.
Hookers and Johnny
By Joe Sudar
Everyone
in Vietnam was nice, even the hookers.
I’d been spending time in Thailand
with my girlfriend, Amy, as we toured villages to try the local cuisine. We
were set for recipes if we wanted to open a restaurant in the States, and if we
could find snake.
She joined an anthropology program at Bangkok
University and I had a month to screw around. I called my buddy Ed and found
out he was killing time in India and we started throwing ideas back and forth
of getting together. He himmed and hawed and went nowhere until Pakistan and
India started lobbing missiles at each other. After that it seemed like a good
idea to hang out. So we wound up together in Vietnam.
Between us we had enough cash to
live like kings. We got a room in a guesthouse off the main drag of Ho Chi Minh
City. Ed wasn’t too bad to room with as long as you didn’t mind the noise or
the smells or the manners. Every morning I’d channel Martin Sheen and throw
open the blinds before taking a deep breath and announcing, “Saigon… Shit.” We
laughed about that the way most twenty-seven year old jackasses would. Our
relationship was built on mutual laughter.
Six feet of freckled, insulated
muscle topped with a red beard, Ed was the kind of guy who had no one to blame
but himself. For everything. A confirmed Orientophile, he came to Asia pretty
quickly after graduation and started teaching English in Japan. It was good
enough money to keep him in food and drugs, and it let him hop all over the continent.
By the time I’d met him, he’d been to Nepal, China, Mongolia, Taiwan, and
Thailand before settling in India.
Half of his life was good-natured
adventurism. The other half was the reality that Ed didn’t do well well in his
own culture. Not that he did poorly, but that he was a bit of an outsider like
everyone is at some point. What he realized, subconsciously at least, was that
in a new culture, outsiderness is a defining asset. In a land where you could
fit four locals off the street comfortably into a dresser, a two hundred twenty
pound guy with flowing red curls taking up two seats on the bus and singing
Steely Dan drew attention. That fact kept him in friends and dates whenever he
went to a new place.
He genuinely loved the culture too.
Ed was meant for Buddhism. The idea of achieving the highest state by achieving
nothing resonated. Touring different countries gave him plenty of time to refine
his personal prayer rituals and gave him another in into the culture. Once, in
Mongolia, he hit it off with a monk. The holy man offered to house him as he
worked his way towards enlightenment. That panned out until Ed went to the
Mongolian equivalent of a bar, which I assume was a yurt filled with smoke,
vodka, and shouting, and came home with a young girl. The monk broke some vows
that night.
When we lived in Hi Chi Minh City,
Ed’s vice of choice was the rave scene. He spent his days teaching English then
jigged around on ecstasy, underground in a dark room filled with strobes. Every
time he came home from one of those adventures he’d have a new story about how
he almost died or got his ass kicked by some gangsters. Apparently there are
two kinds of people who go to raves: those who want to cuddle, and those who
don’t.
On nights when we went out in together,
the bar of choice was called Lost in Saigon. It was a time capsule for the
Vietnam era, a little two-story tiki hut filled with smoke and laughter.
Everything was sticky. The jukebox featured hits like Credence Clearwater
Revival and Crosby Stills and Nash. The beer was cheap and stale, the cocktails
were heavy and the house liquor could strip paint. All in all, it wasn’t the
best bar but it was the closest, and nothing makes a cocktail taste better than
knowing you can have another.
There was something to be said for
the history too. Half the patrons were ex-soldiers who’d been there since the
war ended. They’d traded in their fatigues for Tommy Bahama’s shirts but the
regimental tattoos hadn’t faded. Most of them had Vietnamese brides attached at
the hip, either the same ones they’d had since they were soldiers or new ones
with familiar flavor. Buying a former GI a drink was a quarter in the slot that
got you a story. Take a drink for yourself, listen to the story mixing in with
the crooning rock song and you’re back in time thirty years. There aren’t many
places left in the world where the history still has a heartbeat. It was worth
the crappy drinks.
And there were a lot of prostitutes.
That could be said about the city in general, though. There were a lot of
hookers trying to hook. They weren’t as bold as Vegas hookers. Very few
platform pumps and hot pink dresses and shouts of “Hey sailor, wanna date?!”
They dressed like they belonged on a modern college campus: tight jeans,
leather shoes, busty shirt. It drew the eye without causing a lick of the lips.
Yet somehow they were obvious as anything. There was no question whether or not
they were hooking. They had a way of draping themselves over whoever they’d
marked. There’s something to be said for sincerity.
I managed to stay away from the
she-devils of delicious temptation, much to Amy’s delight whether she suspected
it or not. But they were drawn to a good time like flies to light, so I got
plenty of propositions. Ed and I would finish a joke, throw our heads back and
laugh, then a strange arm would thread through the crook of mine. Something
warm would press up against me, and there’d be a head bent against my shoulder.
Usually a quick, “Hi,” followed, or if they were really sultry, a “Hello you.” No
need to belabor what else was on the table.
Most times when I said, “Sorry,
taken,” Ed had already sidled up for the rebound. He was always in the mood,
but he wasn’t always in the money.
One afternoon, Lost in Saigon had
three empty booths for every occupied one. We were nursing drinks and breathing
smoke. Lunch had been greasy. Every now and then I’d let out a hacking cough,
the insidious beginning of the pneumonia that would chase me away from the
city. Saigon gets into your lungs. One of the regulars, an Alan Alda lookalike
that we had appropriately nicknamed Hawkeye, was cleaning his fingernails with
a bowie knife in the corner. The running question for him was whether or not he
knew the war was over. No one had asked him yet.
“Uh oh,” Ed spouted with a look over
my shoulder, “here comes The Master.”
The Master was a westerner employed
by the bar to walk around with a pitcher of vodka and Red Bull in an attempt to
keep the constant party going. He wore a button up shirt with the Chinese
script for “Master” on the front, which Ed had glommed onto on our first night.
“Oh, thank you, Master,” I chimed in
as he topped off our tumblers with their third treatment of the day’s potion.
Ed downed half of his drink right
away. I was looking at my watch, having trouble telling which was the long hand
and which the short. Drinking in early afternoon usually didn’t matter until
the late afternoon though. Besides, it was Saturday. On the seventh day, God
rested, and so would I.
“I’ve gotta go take a piss,” Ed shared,
lumbering away.
Without Ed around, the sane part of
my head reminded me that I was not making a productive use of my time. At least drink some water, it nagged. I
was about to ignore it until another coughing fit sprayed The Master’s swill
all over my hand.
I knocked on the bar. It was one of
those big ovals with the drinks at the center, so that the bartenders can run
laps around the place serving drink after drink, getting their cardio workout
in alongside their tip hounding. A bag of sticks with a black bowl cut popped
around the corner. His eyes were too big and too blue to be from his mom’s
side. He was another of the Vietnam War remnants that lived in Ho Chi Minh, for
better or worse.
“What can I get you?” Good English,
bad accent.
“Just some water please,” I rasped.
He was filling my order when a hand
tugged at my shirt. It was a girl, smiling wide and sitting next to me. “Hi,”
she said.
“Hello,” I was ready to give her my
usual “thanks but…” when she went on
“My friend like you.”
“I’m sorry?”
“My friend,” she pointed down the
bar. I caught a glimpse of swishing black hair and a bright smile before they
spun around the racetrack. She was very pretty. Long smooth hair, clear skin,
even if the makeup had been troweled on more than I preferred, and a slim
figure.
I was a little sorry when I said,
“I’m flattered, but I actually have a girlfriend.”
My matchmaker nodded and drifted
down the bar. She headed off the pretty bartender as she passed me in her race.
I pretended to concentrate on my frankly fascinating beer as they whispered and
looked my way. I knew the smile I was getting.
Matchmaker appeared at my side
again. “She say that okay. She like you and want spend time with you.”
“Okay. I’d like to spend time with
her too, I guess. That sounds okay, as long as she understands this isn’t a
date date.” I paused as the pretty girl made another lap, her head cocked to
catch what we were saying. “I’m fine taking her out, but just as friends. Is
that cool?”
Cool. The most colloquial and confusing
word in the English language. Whether or not she actually understood what I
said, she reported that that was fine. The lovely Anh and I were set to go
bowling after she got off work at five. I glanced at the Timex strapped to my
wrist by a sweat-soaked band. Half an hour. Not quite long enough to sober up,
but I was willing to try.
About the time I finished my second
pint of lukewarm water, Ed showed back up. I grunted a hello to him and heard a
squeaky “Heya!” back.
Ed hadn’t been the squeaker. The squeaker
was sitting to his right, mostly obscured by his flaming red beard. She wore
tight, hip cut jeans, leather boots with heels that must sound like a claves
when she walked, and a shirt that did her chest plenty of favors. She had a
soft, rounded face and a mouth that seemed naked without braces. She looked
about ten years old, which meant she may have barely been eighteen. Maybe.
“Johnny, meet Orchid,” he said.
I don’t know if it was rude to laugh
as much as I did, but Orchid took it well. “Very classy, dude,” I said.
“Psh, whatever.” Orchid wrapped
around his arm like a boa constrictor, oblivious to our conversation. “It’s
legal.”
“If that’s your best justification
maybe that’s a sign.”
“Not hearing that. Anyway she
doesn’t want to stick around at the bar much longer. Anything you feel like
doing?”
“I got asked out by Anh, the
bartender.” On cue she appeared, pulling ahead in her race. For the third time
her eyes turned in my direction. But it was our direction now, and they latched
onto the pretty young thing doing a lamprey impression on my friend. “We were
gonna go bowling at five.”
“Sweet. Mind if we come?”
I probably should have. “No, that
seems cool. Make sure your little Lolita brings her ID though.”
“Ooo, Lolita,” he freed his arm and wrapped
it around her shoulders. “I like that name. Lolita.”
“Lorita!” Orchid announced with a
big smile. I wished I could take it back, but Pandora probably did too.
Anh had taken a pit stop at the far
end of the bar, filling a pint. I looked her way and saw that she was looking
back. The smile wasn’t there this time, though. She was looking at Orchid, who
smiled and kicked her leg into the air and generally drenched herself all over
Ed. I recognized the look on her face from my memory of every girlfriend I’d
had before Amy. It usually happened right before ‘we had to talk.’
Five o’clock came around quicker
than sobriety did. By now there were a couple empty glasses in front of Orchid
as she shouted “Lorita! Lorita!” and climbed Mt. Edward. Anh kept glancing as
she did her victory laps. Her replacement came in, identical looking but
taller. They threw some sentences in hushed whispers back and forth at each
other and then Anh stomped her way over to us.
“Heeeeeey,” I opened with, “So Anh,
this is Ed. And this is Orchid.” I waited for the laugh track.
“Hiya!” Orchid opened, jabbing a
hand towards my date. It shook with the air.
“Hey, sweetie,” Ed said, “so what’s
it like working for The Master?”
“De… de master?” Anh mouthed as
though the words had a spiky foreign feel to them. It hit me then why Anh’s
friend had made all the introductions: she probably didn’t speak a word of
English beyond “Hello” and “Thank you.” Luckily she wouldn’t know what Lolita
meant.
“Why don’t we just get going? The
pins aren’t going to knock themselves down.” I found Anh’s hand, a tumble of
limp fingers, and pulled us towards the exit.
The bowling alley was down a crowded
street, a few blocks away. Most of the city blocks in Ho Chi Minh are packed
like a freeway. People wander in every direction, cutting off your path even as
it opens. Walking was stop and go traffic.
Anh’s hand turned into a vice around
mine as soon as we got into the street. I was relieved until she pressed up against
me from behind. Too datey, too close. I was about to remind her that it was a
platonic date when I realized she was hiding in my shoulder. A squeal two
octaves above middle C sounded behind us. Ed galloped through the crowd, Lolita
on his back. I gave him a courtesy laugh but even I felt the eyes that turned
out way as my buddy sang the tune to Bonanza.
“Giddyup!” Ed whooped.
The eyes were uncomfortable for me,
but I’d be gone in a month or so. For Anh, they were the community.
The arcade was a long open air
building like a giant speaker producing the sound of bells, electronic buzzers,
clattering bowling pins and laughter. The Lone Ranger charged in with his rider
on his back, giggling away. We shuffled after them. The crowd opened and closed
before the red oddity, every head sparing quick glances.
“What’ll it be, princess?” Ed asked
over his shoulder.
“Ovah there!” Lolita pointed, her
elbow inverting just a little, the way only girls’ arms seem able to. There was
an ice cream machine. I snorted a laugh, wondering what jailbait card she’d pull
out of the deck next.
“Hey Anh,” I asked behind me, “you
want an ice cream?”
“Whu?” She looked up, eyes puffier
than I’d like them to be.
“Ice cream,” I mimed a cone in my
hand, licking away. Then I realized the gesture I was making. “No, no, no! Over
there.” I pointed at the machine where Orchid waited, almost two heads shorter
than her beau as the soft serve coiled onto a sugar cone.
“Hokay,” she nodded.
Four
cones were embarrassingly cheap. “Well, this is nice,” I pulled the comment out
of my ‘talking with in-laws’ library. Lolita gobbled her cone down, smiling and
mmmming as the cream dribbled down the side of her mouth. I expected her to
pull out a badge any moment.
Anh let her ice cream melt. Little
vanilla specks splattered on the floor. When I looked over she’d take a lick
but then rub her stomach and shake her head, the hunter-gatherer way of saying
‘I’m not really hungry.’
Her gaze kept drifting to one spot
to our left. I followed it and saw a neon sign and a man mixing drinks. “Want
one?” She was up and over there before I’d finished the gesture. She had no
problem guzzling all three of them before the ice melted.
The bowling began. Ed got up on his
toes and did a Fred Flintstone style long toss, sending it spiraling down the
lane to get strike after strike. He finished each pitch with a “Yaba daba doo!”
For Orchid, it got funnier every time.
She clapped and laughed and gave Anh a little push and said “he so big and
strong!” Anh smiled back and nodded, then look at me. It wasn’t the same look she’d
flashed on her way around the bar, or even an angry look. It just made me want
to quickly empty three drinks in myself.
*
I was
Lost in Saigon the next night, but on the first floor. The centerpiece was a
polished teak dance floor, filled with bodies doing their lava lamp
impressions. The Master was serving me his potion but I wasn’t about to go
upstairs and ask for something I actually wanted. Anh would have given it to me
and my guilt would have tripled.
Ed was off with Lolita. It was
turning into a lonely night. I wondered what Amy was doing and if her anthro
course covered attitudes towards prostitution. Maybe she’d met a nice guy up
north and he’d brought a call girl and they’d played lawn darts. We’d have
something to talk about.
The once daily ritual of feeling an
arm thread into mine pulled me out of my rumination. I turned around to see a
girl. No, a woman. Maybe ten years older than me, not that she was bad looking.
Actually she looked great, and had put a lot of effort into doing so.
“Hi you,” she lilted, “you want
company?”
“Yes I do.” It was an honest answer,
but the subtext didn’t land until after she’d sat down. “So,” I was committed
to a conversation at least, “what’s your name?”
“Orchid,” she said.
“Oh god dammit.”
“I change.”
“No, no it’s fine. Pleased to meet
you, Orchid. My name is John.”
“Good America name. You America?”
“Yeah, I America.”
“So, America John, what you want
do?”
I was too crabby for wit. “I want to
get the hell out of this bar and go see the side of Ho Chi Minh City that no
one else sees. I want to go past all the tourist bullshit and see how people
actually live. Once I do that, I want something to eat that I would never be
able to get in America, then I want to sleep like a log for eight or more
hours.”
“Okay.”
“Okay?”
“Tour guide very easy, I show you
all of Ho Chi Minh.” The way she said the city’s name was drop dead gorgeous.
It spoke to exactly how much she could show me. “You pay stay over cost.”
“How much is that?” When she told me
I was glad I had The Master’s drink to hide my smile. Fifty bucks, roughly.
Worth it for a tour guide that knew the streets. “Alright, let’s go.”
First she flagged down The Master,
poured a pint glass of his sugar and spice and downed it in a gulp. Good start.
From the moment we stepped onto the
streets it had a different feel. It was nice to be the one being led for a
change. The crowd was still there, but the mystery behind it was gone. No more
rushing headlong with two steps forward one step back. We became part of the
crowd, part of a stream that bubbled away from the bright streetlights and into
the low paper lamps of the residential city.
Fleets of motor scooters burbled
along the streets. Some carried a single passenger, some carried three or more,
some almost toppled with boxes stacked one on top of another. The farther away
we went from the main thoroughfare where my guesthouse was the louder things
became. The lights faded but the people grew. So much shouting, some of it
angry, some of it happy, all of it with more energy than I got from three cups
of coffee.
There was no grid to the streets.
They were diagonals and corners and roundabouts and huge squares. People moved
through everything like blood through veins. The buildings were beige and teal
and red and green and strung up with clotheslines and there were open windows
that sitar music or old school rock leaked out of. I was led like a kid
visiting a new city for the first time, taking in a slice of the life that had existed
for my whole life without my knowing.
“Okay,” Orchid the Elder said, “we
eat.”
“What are we having?”
She was already talking to a vendor.
He was whipping a wok up and down over a portable gas plate covered in grease-spattered
tin foil. It looked like there were little brussel sprouts in his pan, but they
were somewhere between tan and yellow.
“He want you pay him” she said when
the man smiled with a mouth half full of teeth and an open hand. My second date
to pay for in two days and neither one was getting me laid.
“So what is this?” I held the little
lump in my hand. It had a firm feel, and seemed like I could unwrap it, or uncurl
it in some way.
“It Hot Vit Lon,” she said, popping
one in her mouth, “cooked with curry and chili and green onion. You like.”
I popped one in whole. I did like.
It had strong eastern flavor and the meat tasted like chicken. Then it
crunched. Then I hit something that I couldn’t crunch, it just sort of flexed
in my mouth. I pulled it out and saw what looked like little nostrils. It looked
like a duck beak.
I looked back at the vendor and saw
him cracking eggs and dropping more half-formed ducks into the pan. “Is, uh,” I
said, “is this fetal duck?”
“What fetal? It duck don’t hatch.”
“Okay,” but I was pretty hungry,
“well, now I know.” They weren’t that bad. Once the guesswork was taken out of
them I didn’t have much trouble digging into the whole batch she’d bought.
We kept walking afterwards. The city
noises kept up, I tried not to imagine quacking coming from my stomach, and
eventually we made our way to a small park. It was just as busy as the rest of
the city, but there wasn’t as much noise. People walked in silence, mostly in
pairs. Heads met at shoulders, and hands locked together like zippers. Orchid
led me over to where a decommissioned tank sat on a concrete pedestal. Its
barrel was plugged with cement, but she sat us right below the huge
interlinking track.
“What you think, Ho Chi Minh City?”
She asked me.
“It’s beautiful. It’s very alive. I
wish I spoke the language.”
“I teach you.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Yes. Vietnamese very easy.”
“I heard it was kind of hard.”
“It like swimming. Swimming hard
too, but you have to keep paddle.”
And with that she was off. I tried
to swim along with her, but the best I could do was doggy paddle. The metaphor
made sense though. It was a tonal language, you changed your voice and you
changed your stroke and you changed your message. Crawl stroke for a daily
conversation. Butterfly for all the things I’m sure Anh wanted to say to me.
Diving down for sweet nothings.
Then someone burst into our lesson
with something like water skiing. She had a black page boy haircut, so shiny it
picked up light like a disco ball. She rushed towards us, or rather, towards
Orchid. She had the same type of clothes and more importantly the same high
heel boots that gave a clear message about how they knew each other.
“Hi honey,” she said, “this your
man?”
“This my Johnny. Johnny, this Rose.”
“Nice to meet you, Rose.”
“You treat my Orchid flower nice?”
“Yeah, I think we’re doing okay.
Dining on the finest duck and cheap drinks.”
“You buy her a pair of shoes.”
“Pardon?”
“You should buy her shoes.”
“Uh, okay. How much are a pair of
shoes?”
This one wasn’t worth laughing at.
It was less than I spent on my average bar run. I said yes and we were off to a
tailor.
There was no shortage of clothes
makers in Vietnam. Every street had a little den you could step into for measurements.
The most touristy featured hanging jackets and pants made of silk, destined to a
life of being re-hemmed into larger and larger pajamas. The locals shopped at
corner stands where a man shouted his prices over boxes of surplus tee shirts.
We stopped off in a store with varnished lattice doors that leaked wispy trails
of incense.
Our tailor had the requisite scoliosis and
careful way with the measuring tape to show us that he’d been in the job for
longer than he should have. He carefully looked at Orchid’s feet, belting commands
to the younger workers who stood in rapt attention next to him. One by one they
took off to fetch tools or supplies.
Before I knew it, he’d turned on me.
He measured my arms, chest, and had a silk jacket drafted before I could
imagine how foolish I’d look. Thirty minutes later, Orchid’s new brown leather
shoes clacked down the street next to me, clad in a jacket that made me look
like a local, or maybe a yokel.
Two AM rolled around and I was more
worn out than I was ready to admit. She insisted on walking me back to the
guesthouse. I put myself clearly between her and the door as I dug out my
wallet.
“Now this means you don’t work any
more tonight, okay?” I demanded.
“If you say so, Johnny.”
“Alright. Thank you for a great
time, Orchid.”
“Thank you, America John.” She
planted a kiss on my cheek and clacked her way back into the crowd. It hadn’t
dissipated at all, the steam kept moving.
*
Within
another week I was ready to leave Ho Chi Minh City. My pneumonia had become a
hospital-level thing. I met with a doctor who was a dead ringer for my tailor
and he said that I’d been running too hard in air too dirty.
Ed continued to see Orchid the
Younger. She continued to get drunker and drunker, draping herself around him a
little more each time. Every time they appeared in public there was some new
piece of jewelry or clothing or otherwise pretty thing on her person, courtesy
of him.
Anh either forgave me or remembered
her professional courtesy. Either way, she served me my last drink at Lost in
Saigon, and smiled politely as I doggy paddle thanked her in Vietnamese.
I saw Orchid the Elder one more
time. She was busy looking for her new mark, but she gave me a wink and a pat
on the arm. Beyond that I have the taste of half-formed duck and a few Vietnamese
words that leak out of my head every day to remember her by. And she has a damn
pretty pair of shoes for me.
