Dope Deals

Smoke and a pee at 4:30 AM; my legs dangling off the side of the bed.  Outside my open door to the patio, rain continues unabated.  The bedclothes are a merry jumble.  All three cats have joined me back here in the bedroom; three dogs are burrowed under the sheets.

Winston, my 18 lb. long-haired orange tabby lies at my side.  His luxuriant fur is almost completely grown back from the springtime shave, a necessity for him over the hot summer days.  With his booty leggings and his head unshorn, the neighborhood kids call him The Lion King.

He lays there while I quietly smoke, getting his large head vigorously rubbed; punctuated by raking his back to the base of his long swishy tail.  As a kitten, he contracted a respiratory infection that scarred his lungs.  Now, his purring sounds like Cystic Fibrosis: unnerving, but quite healthy and robust otherwise. 

Fearless of dogs, he frequently flops languidly down on the tile, to openly taunt Clancy and Scooter.  They just cannot understand why he doesn’t split and run like the other cats.  Poor dummies, they never get it.  I try to tell them, but they just won’t listen.  From anywhere in the house, I can hear their fretful squeaky barking and know in an instant that Winston is screwing with their heads.

Jypsi, the little dapple Daschund, is pressed against the small of my back as I tend to Winston.  I love her as I do all my animals, but she is a gawdawful pain in the ass.  Barely house-broken anyway, rainy days she just goes…wherever. 

Getting up to start the pot ahead of schedule, my bare foot lands on a damp spot in the carpet.

Shit.  Carpet cleaning detail today.  Again.

While the pot percolates, I return to my bed (MY bed! Ha!) for ten more minutes of shuteye. My head lays perilously close to Goofy’s backside. Once he is relaxed and asleep, he becomes the immovable object. Oh God.  Deliver me from one of his nocturnal SBD’s.  On the battlefields of France during the Great War, you were dead if you smelled the mustard gas, too late to don a mask.  Same-same here with the big dog’s farts.  The only chance for survival is to run at least twenty feet away, holding your breath all the while.

Kali is bothered with all the undercover traffic, so she is sprawled on the hope chest at the foot of the bed.  Miss Tree, similarly bothered, crawls beneath to await the morning reveille, to resume her rightful position on top where her pad is spread out; warm, clean and quilted.

Stick is curled up somewhere in the center, a small lump barely discernible in the toss and chaos of the comforter and sheets.  The Chihuahua’s full name is Drumstick because her rear atrophied leg resembles a tiny Buffalo Wing.  At six and a half pounds, she is the alpha dog and leader of the pack, three legs being no bar to her authority.  Even Goofy kowtows to her.

She has the quaint and dainty affection of gathering up three or five Kibbles from a food bowl (a veritable cafeteria of bowls at my house), retiring to the couch, depositing her food in front of her, and eating her breakfast at leisure far from the madding crowd.  No dog dares approach while she feeds.  You cannot imagine with what rapidity this itty bitty doggy can go from a pop-eyed little lovey-dovey to a snarling Cubacabra.

There were dogs in Viet Nam, at least around the Americans.  I saw scant few pooches playing in traffic or with a gaggle of little kids.  I guess the gooks didn’t like them very much; or perhaps they liked them too much…

Pets are a luxury in this country.  Many lands do not have the luxuries that we take for granted.  Don’ warry, to mimic mamasan, I’m not going to launch into some twaddle about starving children in China.  This is going to be more or less about my chemical excesses during the War.

The night watch over, cleaning up the barracks around the slumbering night crews was a relatively simple task.  Slosh out the latrine and wet mop the floor, wax and buff to a mirrored perfection.  The sweat still came, but the drenching perspiration of first arrival had dissipated…somewhat.  I think the heat stopped aggravating me as much as it once did.  Like the air itself, it was just always…there.

The mamasans took to the outside grounds, swishing their little witch brooms to maneuver the dust from this spot to that.  This was primary to the First Lieutenant’s Division; that everything to be kept ship-shape, including the dirt.

Frequently the mamasan assigned to my barrack would squat down against the wall (gooks were either walking or squatting, no stand-up loitering around like their American bosses).  With a nut-brown withered face attached to a thin emaciated frame, her gook-squat so compacted, it seemed as if she had no cartilage in her knees.  She would stoke up one of her conical hand-rolled cigarettes and the overpoweringly noxious odor of it would permeate the atmosphere in a cloud of bluish smoke.

Unlike the heat, I never totally acclimatized to the smell of Viet Nam.  It remained, and remains in my memory as inscrutable as the gooks who produced it.

(‘Nother commercial break:  I use the derogatory term gook herein, because at the time, this was the way all of us dehumanized the Vietnamese: Americans, Koreans, and expatriate French alike.  It galls me to be compelled to use the term now, but this is a work of reality dredged from my memory, not some fanciful work of fiction.  And we are back…in three, two…one)

The morning break was our time to exchange gifts and negotiate the next round of gift giving.  I would produce carton(s) of Salem Cigarettes; she would extract dope, laundered fatigues and skivvies, or shirts embroidered with my name over the pocket.  They emerged from either her clothing—a white floor-length form-fitting tunic, split to the hip over black pajamas—or from one of the two counter-weighted baskets that were carried on a flexing bamboo pole across the shoulders.

Every Vet reading this can see them once again, trundling along the roads and rice paddies: men, women and children with their ubiquitous cargo.  The baskets would gently sway and bounce to the steady cadence of their bow-legged trot.

The clothes you can envision on your own.  The notorious weed was delivered in transparent plastic packs of ten perfectly shaped pre-rolled Pall Mall-sized doogies, ready for the discerning consumer, just the way they liked ‘em.

Today’s bartering was a repeat of several failed attempts to procure...hashish.

While attending Counterinsurgency School at Coronado Island, I would boost a ride up the coast to Los Angeles, to spend the weekends with Laura and Craig, my friends from back home.  A former lover, Laura had met and married Craig at UT Austin.  Now, Craig was a Navy Corpsman in training, soon to ship out to Yokosuka Naval Hospital, where he would finish out his military service.

Laura was beautiful, fiercely intelligent and as hard-headed as any female in my memory.  She parlayed her savings from work at the Farmer’s Market into a one-way air ticket to Japan.  Without the support or the permission of the Navy, she joined her husband and began modeling to keep up their tiny off-base apartment.

In short order, with her diminutive frame, angelic countenance and lush little curves, she came in high demand as that ideal western woman that all  Japanese men and women coveted.  For a while, she was sort of the Lauren Hutton of Japan; she smiled radiant happiness for the—whatever she was modeling--from the huge lighted billboards in every major city.

There were photo shoots in Siberia and the Aleutians.  She always did have a knack for the celebrity spotlight.  She was even the foldout one month in the Japanese equivalent of Playboy.

When Craig completed his service, he mustered out over there.  Laura, with her gift for inhaling languages like smoke, became fluent in Japanese (she was already fluent in Thai from years in Bangkok with her Air Force Colonel father). 

She somehow managed to wheedle an apprenticeship with one of the Japanese National Treasures, a ceramist; and the two madcap adventurers spent the next seven years perfecting their chosen art before returning to the United States.

Whew!  An interminably long digression, but I haven’t thought of those two dear friends in quite a while, or of those weekends in their crib just off Wilshire Boulevard; a time and place when I acquired a taste for uppers…and hashish.

I’m back again, haggling with mamasan in the glare of mid-morning, on another sweltering ‘summer’ day, out to the rear of our appointed barrack.  “Hash…HISH, Mamasan, same-same this!” 

I would pick up a lump of dried dirt and roll it between thumb and forefinger, displaying it for her inspection.  She looked at it, her craggy face brightening into one of those black maw smiles, exclaimed, “Shoe-ahh, Gee Eye, tooo caht Saylaams!”

“One carton, Mamasan, no more.”.

“Tooo! Velly cheep! Have beaucoup.  Yooo bee velly hoppy!  Yooo see! Too caht Saylaams!”

Caving to the perfunctory niggling back and forth demanded by the gooks for each and every thing, the bargain was struck.

Next day I found her, same time same place, the two demanded cartons in hand.  It was serendipity that she was unaware I would have paid ten cartons for what I sought; but, oh well, her loss my gain.  Rules of the game apply when the house controls the deck.

Out from her tunic came a small paper wrapped package.  I peered around, to check if anyone was watching us, as if nobody at Camp Tien Sha had ever seen a drug deal going down.  My paranoia assuaged, tearing off the tissue, what I had in my hand was a hard lump of Opium, about the size of Silly Putty enclosed in a single plastic egg.  Silly indeed.

I didn’t smoke the opium; I gave it to Larry, who apparently had no fence around his corral.  Larry was addicted to, “Try some of THIS, sonbitch!”

I somehow held to the peculiar idea that my quixotic rushes at marijuana, guzzling oceans of beer and injudiciously plying my body with Obeisatol were pretty much OK.  Some vague suspicion that the black sticky stuff was bad for me and would lead to Eternal Damnation kept me from getting into it. I did try it later, just once at Service Craft.

I had strange hallucinations of serpents gliding along the wainscoted panels of my hooch, looking every bit as if they were miniatures of the snaking Dragons seen in Chinese New Year parades. 

That was at the outer edge of my weird.  Turning my space into a shoebox Opium Den was not a good idea after all.

One more drug score story and we’ll put this to rest for today.

I mailed Delaney (a bud returned to the World) a shipment of ten-packs.  Not very prudent of me, but he was my Buddy, and had begged me to do it. 

By return mail, folded in blank sheets of paper and no return address on the envelope came two enclosures…well, three.  Tucked in a miniscule corner of sponge, Delaney had sent me a purple pill the size of a low-dose aspirin.  It was a tab of the legendary Purple Haze LSD of Hendrix fame.  I put it away and will jaw down on that another time

The other enclosures were two $20 greenbacks, absolutely prohibited currency in-country.  How Earl and I used the money is demonstration a-plenty for the prohibition.

Earl had a contact out on the lonely part of Marble Mountain road.  He placed an order for 400 joints (we were later to always recall this batch as the ‘Fab 400’), to be delivered to the usual rendezvous.

When we arrived, there was another gook standing behind Earl’s dealer, older than the skinny little entrepreneur.  He was dressed somewhat better than the kid and never spoke in our presence. 

As we transferred the 40 ten-packs to the inside of our fatigues and pulled out the greenbacks in agreed payment, this gook reached over the shoulder of the kid and gently snatched them out of my extended hand.

The deal concluded, Earl and I scurried back to Service Craft with all due dispatch, considering that for once, we were holding enough dope to be skinned alive, if the Shore Patrol collared us.

As we traveled along, we looked across at each other.  Neither of us ventured a peep.  We just knew that gook back there on the road wasn’t some kind of senior drug pimp overseeing a deal greatly sweetened by the lure of American currency that was not the standard script permitted in-country.

We never did mention the incident, not to each other, certainly not to anyone else, of our transgression.  How many AK-47’s could $40 buy?  How many rounds of 7.6mm ammo?  How many mortar shells?

There are some questions which should never be asked…or answered.