because he had brown eyes instead of blue to go with his long, straight blond hair, but his mellow good cheer and his endless supply of grass seemed to attract a steady stream of women. “What do you mean ‘unenlightened’?” he used to ask with a bemused smile.
Zelinsky and Pueng, the unabashedly plump Thai girl he had returned to marry, never let food sit around uneaten for long and soon came out of their room to join us. Pueng’s round face and sparkling eyes radiated warmth and naughtiness and gave her the kind of beauty that would age well into a Thai version of Mrs. Santa Claus. It was the kind of beauty that a guy like Zelinsky, who had been too shy to find a date for his senior prom, could feel secure with. No high rollers would be hitting on her back in the World. The two of them would keep it to themselves how great she was in bed. “Did we hear something about Happy Hour?” Zelinsky asked.
“Count us in,” said Groendyke, who came out of the third bedroom followed by a smiling, somewhat embarrassed young bar girl who looked from her disheveled hair and squinting eyes like she had just woken up. He was apparently on hiatus from his engagement to his high-school sweetheart back home.
The elevated porch began to rumble pleasantly. Tom looked off in the general direction of the base. “Here they come,” he said.
Silhouetted by the copper sky, a Spectre AC-130 gunship, an ominous black version of a Klong Airlines troop transport, took off over the south end of the base, droning as it floated past us, climbing out slowly for the hills of Laos. A few seconds later another appeared. “Ghost Riders in the Sky” wafted down the alley on somebody’s portable cassette player. It grew louder as footsteps began banging their way up the wooden stairway.
A third Spectre bird floated past as the song filled up the porch with twangy guitar, paused, and then disintegrated into the kind of acid country that Jimi Hendrix might have played had he transferred from the 101st Airborne into the Air Commandos instead of running off to England. “What the hell is that?” I asked, taking a long toke and finally looking up to see Harley Baker and his girlfriend, Mali.
“My brother got it from a bar band called the Outlaws that was playing around the Florida panhandle. He thought I might dig their arrangement of the Spectre theme song and sent it along.” Baker’s chalky white complexion and pink-rimmed eyes gave him the appearance of someone who’d spent some time in Transylvania. Between night operations with the 16th Special Operations Squadron and his off-nights spent in bars, he saw less daylight than the Thai kickboxer across the alley. Baker was the kind of walking bundle of contradictions who had no trouble blowing up trucks on the Ho Chi Minh Trail one night and playing soulful blues guitar the next. I admired his guitar playing and his fearless approach to life. At the same time he scared me, constantly walking a fine line between fearlessness and recklessness. We figured out early on to not talk politics.
Mali’s skin was as golden brown as Harley’s was pallid. Her face was as soft and sensuous as his was hard and angular. Her coal-black hair was as long and soft and wavy as the patch of straw that covered Harley’s head was greasy and straight. While Harley carried himself as aggressively as his gold prospector grandfather had swung a pickaxe, Mali carried herself with the grace of a village girl, even though her father was in fact a petty official in the provincial capital at Roi Et. I liked Harley’s music, but the Air Commando part made me uneasy, both the hawkish politics and the macho attitude. If he’d been a Thai guitar player and wasn’t earning flight pay and combat pay, I wondered if Mali would have given him the time of day.
“Let’s crank it up,” said Tom, opening up the chintzy leatherette case of Baker’s Norelco portable and taking the cassette inside to the music room. He pushed his system, the finest mixture of Sansui, Teac, Pioneer and Dual components the BX had to offer, to the limits of semi-fidelity, shaking the entire alleyway with nair nair nair nair’s shrieking out of the lead guitar and duga duga duga duga’s cascading down from the bass into explosions of cymbal crashes. Satisfied with the ear-splitting volume, Tom came out and sat back down, smiling blissfully as Lek rested her hands on his shoulder and nuzzled him from behind and they watched gunship after gunship take off that night. Zelinsky and Groendyke and their companions had settled in to watch the show from the chairs and pillows they had brought out with them. When I offered my seat to Harley and Mali, she slid into his lap and they leaned back comfortably in the high-backed chair. I drifted over to the porch railing and rested my hand high up on the wooden support post, soaking in the pleasant blend of music, Mekong whiskey, juicy pineapple and weed while watching a few more slow-moving Spectre birds pass us by. When “Ghost Riders” ended I went inside to turn down the stereo and came back out. I was by myself, but I wasn’t alone and I didn’t mind.
Finally, the last of the sixteen Spectre gunships taking off that evening turned right over downtown Ubon and lumbered off to the secret war in Laos that no one back in the World was seeing televised on the evening news. The sky had quickly turned indigo. Six forty-three p.m.—twenty minutes after sunset. Right on time in the tropics.
Tom finally broke the spell. “Hey, Baker, why aren’t you flying tonight? Isn’t that a lot of planes going out?”
“I had to rearrange my schedule. Didn’t Brendan tell you we’ve got a gig at the Soul Sister?”
“It’s the bass player’s birthday,” I explained. “You oughta catch it.”
“Tommm,” purred Lek, “can we go?”
“Should be a good show,” Harley said as he and Mali got up to go. “See you later.”
“See you there,” I replied.
“Later,” said Tom and Lek.
14 May 1971 (later)
“Mai Pen Rai,” OR: The Show Must Go On
At quarter of nine down at the Soul Sister, the band had almost finished setting up. I had already put my cases backstage and checked that the stands and other hardware on my kit were ready to take a pounding. I gave the bass drum, tom-toms and snare drum one last thunk, decided the tuning sounded good, and made my way over to the bar to relax a few minutes before the show began. Ackerman, the sax man from New Orleans, was warming up, running through some staccato arpeggios and scales. Angel, the Thai-Filipino trumpet player on loan from Jay and the Ugly Americans, had been smoking grass with Ackerman all afternoon, looking for inspiration. He was still looking, unable to play more than a series of soft, long tones on his horn while he stared blankly at the wall, the faint smile on his face alternating between perplexed and mellow.
Sugie Bear, the birthday boy, was sitting in a corner booth with Oi, who had just moved in with him and officially become his tii-rahk. It had taken me two months in-country to learn that tii-rahk literally meant “loved one.” I had been surprised because I had heard it used so much in other contexts that it never occurred to me that it meant anything other than “shack up” as either a verb or noun. Sugie Bear was a gangly, homely eighteen-going-on-nineteen-year-old from the streets of Brooklyn. Oi, a frequently zonked twenty-seven-year-old, sported a bright orange Afro that was hard to miss even when the lights were dim and the place was crowded. They were deeply in love, Sugie because he didn’t know any better and Oi because she was close to retirement and realized that Sugar Bear might be her last chance to find a Sugar Daddy who could whisk her off to America and a life of ease. He was especially looking forward to tonight’s performance because her name meant Sugar Cane in English and he’d be singing lead on a soul version of “Sugar, Sugar” that the band had worked up as a little surprise serenade. While Sugie Bear and Oi waited for the show to begin, they slid a little closer together and continued sweet-talking.
Harley
