in the distance saying, “Farang khii mao mahk mahk” (“foreigner very, very shit-faced”). Brian Golson, “the Reverend,” our leader who never worried about anything, looked worried. “Where you been?” he asked.
“Nowhere. Just a little Spectre farewell party.”
“Where’s Mali?” I asked.
“Sent her home,” Harley replied.
“You look like hell,” I said, giving up my comfy bar stool and walking over. “What’s wrong?”
“Mai pen rai,” answered Harley, plugging in his Les Paul but having a hard time tuning it. “There’s nothing wrong with me that a large bottle of Singha won’t cure.” He grabbed a beer off the tray of a passing waitress and took a swig, setting it down precariously on his amplifier. “Mai pen fuckin’ rai,” said Harley a little too loudly. “The show’s gotta go on.”
I would have liked to take him off stage, but he was right—it was show time. Despite being the first time the band had played in public in over a week and despite having only had an hour of rehearsal in between, we sounded pretty good—except for Harley, who missed a couple of cues and was still out of tune. “Sugar, Sugar” was an in-joke for the Thai waitresses and bartenders who knew Oi and got us a round of laughter and applause that went over the heads of the GIs in the audience. We were in the middle of the Otis Redding version of “Satisfaction” when Tom Wheeler and Lek came in with Larry Zelinsky and Pueng. Dave Murray trailed behind them, accompanied by a girl I didn’t recognize in the smoky haze. When they danced up close to the bandstand, though, Murray’s mystery girl looked vaguely familiar in the swaths of reflected spotlight that occasionally hit the dance floor. She reminded me of the girl I took pictures of my first weekend in Ubon, but she kept disappearing into the crowd of dancers before I could be sure. It didn’t help that the night was extremely hot and this girl was wearing a vermilion tank top instead of a navy work shirt and her hair was pulled up in a twist.
I gave my full attention to the cymbal crashes that I matched to the three loud opening chords on “That’s How Strong My Love Is,” but once we settled in for a fairly conventional ballad, my mind started drifting, wondering at first whether I liked the Otis Redding or Mick Jagger version better and then smiling to myself, realizing that I liked our version best of all. Nobody sang soul better than the Reverend, his North Carolina voice both clear and resonant as it wrapped itself around notes in a way that nobody with a recording contract back in the World was doing any better, a quality equal to Joe Tex at his best on a song like “Hold On to What You’ve Got.” Even though the drumming demands on “That’s How Strong My Love Is” were simple, I tried to make every beat count, timing my fills on the tom-toms to dig deep into a listener’s heart. As if by mental telepathy, Brian called for the Joe Tex song next. It had a similar gospel-ballad feel and it sounded so good that I wasn’t surprised at all when I caught Dave Murray’s mystery lady staring up at me and smiling a couple of times, even while she was dancing with her body pressed close to his. I tried to smile back but she kept disappearing into the darkness. Now that I had gotten a couple of good looks at her, though, I had no doubt that she was the girl I had seen that first weekend in Ubon at the market down by the River Mun.
I didn’t know much about Murray’s personal life other than that he shared a place off base with a strange dude named Mole and that they were serious potheads. If she was Murray’s tii-rahk, he was a lucky guy. If he was only with her for the night, I figured he was still a lucky guy. It was right about then that I was snapped out of my reverie by the neck of Baker’s guitar crashing into my big ride cymbal.
Golson quickly wrapped up the song and stepped up to the mike. “It’s break time, folks. Don’t forget to tip your waitress.” Baker had already picked up his beer and was about to head for the bar when Golson caught his arm and guided him backstage. The Reverend was calm, but he wasn’t happy. “What’s with you tonight?”
“I’ll be fine,” said Harley. “I just need a little fresh air.” He lurched toward the stage door and put his shoulder to it, forcing it open with an ugly thud. He stepped outside, not having spilled a drop from his bottle of Singha.
The Reverend looked at me regretfully. “We gotta send him home.”
“I’ll take care of it,” I said, packing up the Les Paul.
“You might need some help,” said Sugie Bear as he and Ackerman followed me outside. We surrounded Baker, grabbed him by the elbows, and guided him around the corner to a waiting three-wheeled, bicycle-powered rickshaw called a sahmlaw. I overpaid the driver and asked him to take Harley back to his bungalow, but Baker wasn’t in a cooperative mood and broke away from us. “Fuck you, Leary. Fuck all of you.”
He was too wobbly to walk, however. We took hold of him again, forcefully this time, and maneuvered him into the back seat, where I handed him his guitar case. “Go,” I told the driver.
“I oughta come back and shoot you bastards!” Harley screamed as they drove away. “Watch your back, Leary—you’re gonna be first!”
By the time we got onstage for our next set, Wheeler’s group was gone. The mystery girl would remain a mystery. A bigger concern was how capable Harley was of actually carrying out his threat. Pissed-off troops over in Nam were fragging second lieutenants, but this would have been ridiculous. We slogged on through the night’s performance, grinding it out. Harley didn’t need to kill anybody for his tirade to have put a damper on Sugie Bear’s birthday celebration. When the last set was finished, everybody threw their equipment into their cases and skedaddled, leaving me to pack up the drums alone. By the time I was finished, the manager had emptied out the cash registers and turned out all the lights except one. It was creepy stepping outside and finding the streets deserted, not a cab in sight. Turning my bass drum case on its side, I sat down and waited. A trash can fell over in the alley behind me, making a sharp crack that I mistook for a gunshot. I dived behind my drum cases, my heart racing, and I hoped like hell it had been a hungry cat raising the ruckus and not Harley with his Ruger Blackhawk.
When I got back to the hootch, my bunkmates were already sound asleep. Leaving the lights off and walking on tip toes, I wearily peeled off my clothes. Reaching into the shadows to pull back my covers, I put my hand on a body! “Jesus Christ!” I shouted, instinctively jumping back from the bed.
“Shaddup, Leary!” one of my unsympathetic hootchmates grumbled.
I flipped on the light and what did I see but Harley Baker passed out on my bunk holding his guitar case in his arms like a long-lost teddy bear. “Baker,” I said warily, trying to shake him awake, “I thought you wanted to kill me.”
“I love you, man.” Opening his eyes, he rolled out of the bed unsteadily and put his arm on my shoulder. “Let’sh go to th’NCO Club. We need a drink.”
“Sure that’s a good idea? You’re a scarier drunk than my kid brother.”
“I’m shupposed to be scarier, ashshole.” He started pushing me toward the door. “We Scotch Irish’re way scarier’n you Irish Irish. Le’sh go—or I really will have to kill you.” Harley could be a hard guy to say no to.
“Would you bastards turn out the light and let us get some sleep!” came another groan.
We slowly made our way over to the NCO Club, which was kept open twenty-four hours a day on account of the several secret and not-so-secret wars and non-wars in the area that were flaring up twenty-four hours a day. “You sure it’s okay bringing a two-stripe airman
