"& Thongs of the average peasant were floating in the River, Commander. I remember that much, except the exact geographical location or map quadrant escapes me. It could be any body of water now. River of all rivers & Time. Our cultures have tragically and irremediably intersected, of course. Will we ever be the same? Perhaps that's why I came back. I can never really return to Hanoi Hilton -- it will not grace me ... But here, at the Motel, where we once came for R & R at times -- well before the Tet Offensive, & even after it -- can I not seek and perhaps achieve a rebirth of sorts? Seeing how wonderful the bustling city's become since those days!
"Hang the motorbikes, the traffic congestion ... Yet you ask me why I don't think of the River anymore, why I prefer to be in the City with all of you. It's simple, isn't it? The River, the highlands were all war, that's why. Water was a dark liquid the gods threatened to turn into the blood of eternal life. We could not become one with you, the Vietnamese people, & ease our suffering. Killing you wasn't enough. We wanted each to become the other, didn't we, since we couldn't remain ourselves? To subvert and pervert the ugly rules of War. To be both enemy & friend, as if such a union was possible. So attempting to dispel that impossibility drove us forward, Commander Ho, far across the embattled river with its villages we ravaged, with its women we raped. How my attempt to achieve apotheosis was dashed each time! For in doing the inhuman, we festered further in our being the most lowly of humans. It was impossible to be anything, Commander Ho, & embrace that transcendence from our bestial condition we so desired.
"How did you do it, Commander? How did you remain so serene in the visage of such destruction? Those times along the river, I envied whatever still flew above us. As if a simple bird could outlive us? Finally I believed what I observed in your terrain was a living mysticism of geographical elements. Recalling some lines from Sebald's After Nature:
" 'For it is hard to discover
the winged vertebrates of prehistory
embedded in tablets of slate.
But if I see before me
the nervature of past life
in one image, I always think
that this has something to do
with truth ... ' "
When did I really DIE, Home? It seems I've been at the Motel forever -- before the war, & forever after it. Beneath your gown, lost gender is a void-whistling wind.
Of all things: Arriving at the Ho Chi Minh Motel in an old U.S. Army jeep (an archaic relic, really, my driver rescued from a mysterious "motor pool" years before, to use thereafter as his taxi), out of it on drugs, of course, the legally prescribed pain-dousers. The illegally obtained darvons crossed with stelazine as well, like mixing hard liquor & draft beer to chase things down. Not recognizing the place at all, this new Saigon resembling a Hanoi prisoner of war camp in my hardly pellucid mind... So what to do? Like so much else in my mistake-prone life, I was brought to a place where the Commander assured me it would be like old times. In a protected environment, much like the Camp had been years before, and we could proceed where I had left off trying to forge reconnection with a terrible enlightenment that suffering through a civil war can only bring.
"Giambi, you will marvel at the room service here," Ho said. "Remember, there are more Ho Chi Minh hotels than motels. We are an experiment, we are one of the city's few experimental motels. Here you can be anything or anyone you want to be, you've paid for it all in perpetuity & can spend the rest of your disease-ridden years here if you wish. Maybe you can begin to re-learn all the Vietnamese words you say you once knew, but have eluded memory, skirted over it with wings of exotic butterflies, or the swirling fins of the delta Devil Fish you believe exists. You can begin to envision your rebirth, Lt. Giambi."
Dear Homey, you're probably thinking what a schizoid, delusional fuck I am, & always have been. To be unable to tell the North from the South, Hanoi from Saigon, my left foot from my right; but what difference does it make, now OR then. What difference did such distinctions ever make --?
And you probably believe Ho's impersonator is another one of my illiterate embellishments, that I'm sitting here really in Los Angeles jacked into a computer winging my way through a cyberspaced gigabye game called Return to the Namster, that all lost time is a deceit, that the missing neurons in my soul-bodhy were never cut loose like so many kite strings from the directionless, karmic being each person calls a Self. "And what is that 'self'?"... Commander Ho tells me (laughingly, scratching his wispy, ganglia-like beard strands) The self is one big fucking illusion, an evil ego device perpetuated by a blind and arrogant Western civilization, one bent on enforcing a monotheistic deity on the far eastern world. The real gods are outside our puny skin, Commander Ho winks, preparing my lunch-time water pipe. With inimitable flair, let's add, since I've pre-paid for the ultimate treatment. The "real gods" are not just within our consciousness, Home Boy, but are out there circling us like so many buzzards waiting to pick a winner from our bleached bone-brains --
Ho attaches the 'trodes to my forehead. Lovingly almost jacking me in while I suck in the sweet smoke of eternal cannabis, incense of the little warriors perhaps. Smoke of the smoggy mind. For why think about it, all the delicious tortures of the flesh & spirit bedeviling humanity since The Beginning.
Why give it a second thought? Buddha's Eve is nearly naked now before me, her skin resinous & exuding piquant odors of an eternal plant life we delight in feeding on, & despoiling as well. A simple village girl in a wraparound black dress so frayed with diaphanous sweat & sexual activity, I wondered if I deserved such a "hostess" after becoming so ignominiously separated from Delta Company. (The C.O. would shoot me himself and label it suicide for Graves Registration, should I ever go back --) The seed of sex was a blood spilling between us. The surrounding jungle was paganly biblical to me, the garden of Adam & Eve, & together we feasted on its teeming, multitudinous fruit. Laughing, singing, hugging & fondling one another in the sultry midday heat, Eve worked my member like it was her magical snake,
& the knowledge was good between us, despite where she was leading me. Perhaps the war was over, it was nearly 1975, if we were about to hightail it to Saigon for the great hegira, so be it... But fortune kept enthralling me to the contrary, Home Boy, don't you see. Really I was led back to The Camp (wherever it really existed) for further interrogation, crossed & humiliated by yet another exotically splendid Vietnamese woman, a gift from the North, no doubt from the stone regions of the Viet Cong who loved & hated my perpetually defecting corpus.
So once I was inducted (originally) into The Camp, my Vietnamese seductress evaporated as radar screen blips do after a plane disappears -- & defense mechanisms begin to erode the province of memories, turning it into an antiquated museum for your lost consciousness.
(BUDDHA'S EVE dances each time I'm able to
escape The Camp, for whatever unknown duration
she's always by
blue
or green
river water,
her flesh floating
thru orgasmic electricity
the earth harbors
as magnetic poles
children skip around
to,
singing:)
That magnetic pole sprouts a bodhi-tree from which all good life comes, the villagers tell me, almost in sign language
& that good Life is what Uncle Sam
came to kill...
Home Boy,
Don't think of me missing-in-action, my flesh remains somewhere hidden as a fool's gold treasure in the Nam's steaming jungle ...
I'm everywhere the Spirit takes me now, in the bark of those humid trees sweating with seaweed-like grass, either damp with rank smells or more piquantly sweet in any valley of sun: all that bullshit-corny stuff, you're saying. I hear your patrol coming -- the soft footfall of boots crushing brush, disturbing insects and tiny dirt animals burrowed into their terrestrial clusters. A lot like Charlie, you'd say, in his elusive hideaways no one suspected was a networking of shadowy caves. How the earth hides its most common surprises of an unkind fate, Home... You'll come close to the Motel now more than ever, linking the political phraseology of our leaders' rhetorical thoughts, bursting the deep wire perimeter with a brunt of entrenching tools & the barbed caress of your crooked teeth, before realizing it's better staying away, perhaps, from where the POWS are. All the captured U.S. Army grunts, to wit, quartered like a bevy of trainees temporarily vacationing at the Ho Chi Hilton. Wherever THAT dissipating place exists in a land so creepily vast, from the South beaches to the North hamlets where Sister Girl waits in full combat regalia, waiting to blow you more fully away than victor charles himself, that wimpy slit-eyed gook you despise with your Christian Baptist righteousness, who I hope to show you in a different light someday, before "spirit" starts roaming in you
like the dark water buffalo in-country
you thirst for
Peter says, "In all honesty I'm still wondering who the heck 'Peter Magliocco' is & what he did." His latest chapbook, This Junkyard Heaven, is available from Pudding House Publications, and reviewed by Charles P. Ries.