Paul Theroux - Saint Jack

One group of GIs bought me a pair of binoculars, expensive ones with my initials lettered in gold on the leather case, and a little greeting card saying To a swell guy.

“Now I can see what goes on in your rooms,” I said.

They laughed. What went on in those rooms, anyway? Aw honey , the purest cuddlings of romance, pillow fights; they tickled the girls, and they never broke or pilfered a thing.

“You won’t see much in Buster’s,” one said.

I turned to Buster. “That right? Not interested in poontang?”

“I can’t use it,” Buster said, with a lubberly movement of his jaw.

“Buster’s married.” The feller looked at me. “You married, Jack?”

“Naw, never got the bug — ruins your sense of humor,” I said. “Marriage — I’ve got nothing against it, but personally speaking I’d feel a bit overexposed.”

“Where’s your old lady, Buster?” the feller asked.

“Denver,” said Buster, shyly, “goin’ ape-shit. How about a hand of cards?”

“Later,” a tall feller said. “My girl wants a camera.”

My girl. That was Mei-lin. They all wanted cameras; they knew the brands, they picked out the fanciest ones. When the fellers boarded the bus for the ride back to the war the girls rushed to Sung’s Photo in the arcade and sold them for half price.

“Used camera,” said Jimmy Sung, when I challenged him.

“Cut the crap,” I said. It was a shakedown. From a two-hundred-dollar camera Sung made a hundred and the girl made a hundred; the soldier paid. But Sung ended up with the camera, to sell again.

“Full prices for the cameras,” I said to Sung, “or I’ll toss you out on your ear.”

In the kitchen Hing made up huge deceitful grocery lists which he passed to Shuck without letting me see, and he got checks for items he never bought. The arcade prices were exortionary, the girls were grasping. No one complained. On the contrary: the fellers often said they wanted to marry my girls and take them back to the States, “the world,” as they called it.

I did what I could to reduce the swindling. The arcade shopkeepers saw it my way and “Sure, sure,” they’d say, and claw at their stiff hair-bristles with their fingers when I threatened.

In Sung’s, on the counter, there was an album of photographs, a record of Paradise Gardens which thickened by the week. Many were posed shots Sung had snapped, tall fellers embracing short dark girls, fellers around a table drinking beer, muscle-flexers by the pool, group shots on the verandah, candid shots — fellers fooling with girls in the garden. There were many of me, but the one I liked showed me in my linen suit, having my late-afternoon gin, alone in a wicker chair under a traveler’s palm, with a cigar in my mouth; I was haloed in gold and green, and dusty beams of sunlight slanted through the hedge.

Shuck was right: the news was good, almost the glory I imagined. I was surprised to reflect that what I wanted had taken a war to provide. But I didn’t make the war, and I would have been happier without the catastrophe. In every picture in Sung’s album the war existed in a detail as tiny and momentous as a famous signature or a brace of well-known initials at the corner of a painting: the dog tag, the socks, the military haircut, the inappropriate black shoes the fellers wore with their tropical clothes, a bandage or scar, a particular kind of sunglasses, or just the fact of a farm boy’s jowl by the pouting rabbit’s cheek of a Chinese girl. In the lobby it was a smell, leather and starch and after-shave lotion, and a nameless apprehension like the memory of panic in a room with a crack on the ceiling that grows significant to the insomniac toward morning. “Saigon, Saigon,” the girls said; we didn’t talk about it, but the fellers left whispers and faces behind we could never shoo away.

And Sung’s photograph album, the size of a family Bible and bound with a steel coil, was our history.

A sky of dazzling asterisks: the Fourth of July. The fellers set off rockets and Roman candles in the garden with chilly expertness, a sequence of rippling blasts that had Dr. B. K. Lim screaming over the hedge and all the guard dogs in the neighborhood howling. The fellers ate wieners and sauerkraut, had a rough touch football game; that night everyone jumped into the pool with his clothes on.

Mr. Loy Hock Yin holding a huge Thanksgiving turkey on a platter. Fellers with napkins tucked in at the throats of their shirts. I was at the head of the table, and the feller next to me said, “How’d you get all those tattoos, Jack?” The fans were going, the table was covered with food, I had a bottle of gin and a bucket of ice beside my glass. “What I’m going to tell you is the absolute truth,” I said, and held them spellbound for an hour. At the end I showed my arm to Betty.

“What’s underneath that flower?” I asked.

She squinted: “ Whore’s Boy. ”

Me as Santa Claus, with a sack. Late Christmas afternoon we ran out of ice. I drove downtown in Shuck’s Toyota with four uproarious soldiers and some squealing girls. I was still wearing my red suit, perspiring in my cotton beard, as we went from shop to shop saying, “Ice for Santy!” On the way back, in traffic, we sang Christmas carols.

Gopi with an armful of mail. He said, “Nice post for you.” Postcards of Saigon I taped to my office wall. Messages: “It’s pretty rough here all around—” “When I get back to the world—” “Tell Florence my folks don’t care, and I’ll be down in September—” “We could use a guy like you, Jack, for a few laughs. This is a really shitty platoon—” “The VC were shelling us for two days but we couldn’t even see them—” “Richards got it in Danang, but better not tell his girl—” “What’s the name of that meat on sticks Mr. Loy made—?” “I had a real neat time at Paradise Gardens — How’s Jenny?” “It’s fucken gastly or however you write it — I know my spelling is beyond the pail—”

A Malay orderly in a white smock tipping a sheeted stretcher into the back of an ambulance.

“Fella in de barfroom no come out.”

I knocked. No answer. We got a crowbar and prized the lock apart. The feller had hanged himself on the shower spout with a cord from the Venetian blind. A whiskey bottle, half-full, stood on the floor. He was nineteen years old, not a wrinkle on his face.

“It was bound to happen,” said Shuck. What certainty! “But if it happens again we’ll have to close this joint.”

No one would use the room after that, and later the door grew dusty. All the girls played that room number in the National Lottery.

Flood. When a strong rain coincided with high tide the canal swelled and Bukit Timah Road flooded; muddy water lapped against the verandah. The photograph was of three girls wading to Paradise Gardens with their shoes in one hand and an umbrella in the other, and the fellers whistling and cheering in the driveway.

The theaterette. Audie Murphy in a cowboy movie. “He’s a game little guy,” I said. “He won the Medal of Honor.” A feller to my right: “Fuck that.”

A group photograph: Roger Lefever, second from the left, top row.

“What’s the big idea, Roger?”

“I didn’t mean it.”

“She came down crying and said you slugged her.”

“It wasn’t hard. Anyway, she pissed me off.”

“I got no time for bullies. I think I could bust you in the mouth for that, Roger. And I’ve got a good mind to write to your C.O. You wouldn’t do that back home, would you?”

“How do you know?”

I slapped his face.

“Smarten up. You’re on my shit list until you apologize.”