A Cook's Tour (9 page)

     Matthew thought about that. ‘I’ll be right over.’

     He showed up a few moments later – with his camera running. He stood over my bed, getting a ‘white balance’ off my bloodless face. He filmed and filmed, while the room tilted and whirled around me, panning back and forth between me, moaning in my sodden sheets, and Jerry, in
Cinderfella
. He shot close-ups as I heaved and pleaded. Cutaways of the out-of-reach remote control, slow pullbacks to reveal the source of my torment, the distance between me and the remote as I groaned, promised, threatened. Just before he finally reached down and tossed me the remote, allowing me to put a merciful end to a scene from Jerry’s masterpiece,
The Nutty Professor
, I heard Matt say, ‘This is gold, baby! Comedy gold!’

     Don’t make television. Ever.

The Burn

Back to New York, Christmas dinner, wake up, exchange a few presents, and it’s back on the infernal machine: New York to Frankfurt, Frankfurt to Singapore, Singapore to Ho Chi Minh City, another marathon of smoke-free flights, my personal circle of hell, sitting next to the smelliest man on earth, the engines droning on and on without variation, making me yearn for turbulence – anything to break the boredom, the gnawing, terrible sense that I’m in some gruesome state of suspended animation. Is there anything so expensive and yet so demeaning as tourist class on a long flight? Look at us! Stacked ten across, staring bleary-eyed straight ahead, legs and knees contorted, necks at unnatural angles, eagerly – yes, eagerly – waiting for the slop gurney finally to make its way down to us. That all-too-familiar brackish waft of burned coffee, the little plastic trays of steamed food, which would cause a riot in a federal penitentiary. Oh God, another Sandra Bullock film, another Willis. If I see Helen Hunt squinting at me from a hazy airline screen one more time, I’m opening the emergency door. Being sucked into thin air has got to be preferable to that. I find myself looking for any diversion, anything to take my mind off the nicotine yen: Focus on the snoring human compost heap across the narrow aisle, pretend that if I stare hard enough, he’ll explode.

     By now, I’ve come to know the smoking areas of airports all over the world. I find similarly afflicted passengers speed-smoking about twenty feet from the gate in Frankfurt. In Singapore, you have a choice of two – count ’em,
two
– smoking lounges: a foul-smelling glass fishtank inside the mammoth shopping arcade, and an al fresco area where there’s always an interesting bunch of Asian adventurers. They sit on benches in the roaring heat and humidity, nursing Tiger beers, happily sucking up cigarettes and jet fumes in the blinding dawn light. The accents of those talking are Aussie, Kiwi, Brit, French, Dutch – all drunk and red-faced, exhausted. Each carry-on bag tells a story of a long time away from home.

     Tan Son Nhut airport. Ho Chi Minh City. Everybody still calls it Saigon. You can light up a smoke the second you’re off the plane. The customs inspector has a butt in his mouth. I like Vietnam already. The last pitched battle of the Vietnam War (what they call the American War here) was fought on these tarmac strips, in these lounges. Crumbling American-built Quonset huts still line the runways. You’ve seen the movies. You’ve read the books. Do I have to tell you about the blast of heat that hits you in the stomach when you make it past the baggage claim and through the glass doors? The wall of humanity waiting outside? Saigon. A place I never thought I’d live to see.

I wake up at 3:00 a.m., chest pounding in the cold, damp room. I’m on the tenth floor of the New World Hotel. I’ve sweated through the blankets after yet another violent and very disturbing dream. It must be the antimalarial pills. There’s no other explanation for the vivid, full-color nightmares I’ve been having since I arrived. I can smell blood and motor oil still – the dreams seem to be in Sensurround, fully textured affairs, where I can actually feel vibrations, physical exertion. This time, I was rolling and rolling in an out-of-control car, spinning off the asphalt of a dream highway and down a steep decline. I could feel myself bouncing off the door frames, the seats, the crumpling dash. I could hear the glass on the instrument panel shattering, the windshield safety glass cracking in starburst patterns.

     I wake up, my arms sore from bracing myself against the collision. Absentmindedly, I run a hand through my hair to brush away nonexistent shards of safety glass.

     Maybe it was the snake wine.

     Earlier in the evening, I’d gone to see Madame Dai in her tiny law office-turned-café/salon, and after the spring rolls and the rice-noodle cakes and the beef wrapped in mint leaves dipped in
nuoc mam
, she’d asked in her perfect, elegantly inflected French if I’d care for a ‘
digestif
.’ I’d said yes, of course, utterly charmed by the diminutive but stately Vietnamese woman in her black dress – a former man-killer if there ever was one. She’d disappeared for a moment into the kitchen while I’d looked idly at the photographs of old friends on the wall: Pierre Trudeau, the Pope, the head of the Central Committee, François Mitterand, various war correspondents, former lovers, a portrait of herself as a young woman in the 1940s, looking absolutely Dragon Lady in a slinky
ao dai
. When Madame Dai returned, she held a large glass jar filled with snakes – a single full-beaked bird still in plumage, entangled by serpents deep in the clear rice wine.

     I can still taste it.

     When am I awake? When am I asleep? All Saigon has a dreamlike quality for me. Wandering down Dong Khoi Street, the former rue Catinat, headed away from the river, past the Majestic, I turn the corner and there’s the Continental Hotel, the Caravelle, the gaudy Rex; I wade through a sea of scooters and cyclos and motorbikes to a narrow side street where, among the dusty pillboxes, broken timepieces, foreign coins, used shoes, cigarette holders, and dented dog tags, there peek out stained Zippos (both real and fake) inscribed with the poignant personal mottoes of their original owners:

vietnam

Chu Lai 69–70

Always ripped or always stoned

I made a year. I’m going Home.

     I find one by the compasses, feeling absolutely ghoulish as I read another plaintive commemoration of one young man’s long-ago year abroad:

hue

DA NANG

QUI NHON

BIEN HOA

SAIGON

     On the other side of the lighter, the sentiment:

                                   When I die, bury me face down

                                   So the whole world can kiss my ass.

     This is a city named after a cook. Maybe you didn’t know that. Ho Chi Minh was a very fine, classically trained culinarian. Prior to helping found the Vietnamese Communist party, he worked at the Carlton Hotel in Paris, for no less a chef than the great man himself, Auguste Escoffier. It is said he was a favorite of the old man. He worked as a saucier there, later as a cook on a transatlantic liner, then as a pâtissier at the Parker House in Boston. He was – the Commie thing aside – one of us, like it or not: a guy who spent a lot of hours standing on his feet in busy hotel and restaurant kitchens, a guy who came up through the ranks the old-school way – a professional. And yet he still found time to travel under about a zillion aliases, write manifestos, play footsie with the Chinese and the Russians, dodge the French, fight the Japanese (with U.S. help, by the way), beat the French, help create a nation, lose that nation, and organize an ultimately successful guerilla war against America. Communism may suck, but old Uncle Ho was one interesting guy.

     And this is where his dream ends: on the tenth floor of the New World Hotel, an overchilled high-rise mausoleum in the city center; with a swimming pool elevated from the noise and exhaust of the city’s streets, where one can look up from one’s blender drink at poolside (though the developers have done their best to mask the view with foliage) through trellised flowers and see the ramshackle apartment blocks of the Workers’ Paradise, where barefoot old women live on less than a dollar a day.

     At the New World, one can walk directly from the maddening heat of the streets into the gigantic, sweeping lobby, past the gingerbread house display for the holidays (‘Festive Table!’), past the cocktail lounge, where a Vietnamese cover band, the Outrageous Three, are playing note-perfect Barry Manilow tunes, ride the silent elevators up to the Executive Floor, or to the health club, the driving range, or tennis court. One can sit on the enclosed tenth-floor terrace, sipping 333 beer (pronounced
bababa
), or enjoying a little port wine and Stilton from the complimentary buffet while rubbing one’s fingers over a dead soldier’s Zippo.

Is it the antimalarials I’ve been taking in preparation for the Mekong Delta and Cambodia that are curdling my dreams? Was it the snake wine? Or is it the fact that I’m in the Vietnam of my dreams – all of our dreams. Was it Tricky Dick, all those years ago, who called everything we did here – all the waste, death, folly, the legacy of still-permeating cynicism we inflicted on ourselves – ‘our long national nightmare’? In Saigon, walking the streets, it’s hard to separate the real from the fantasy, the nightmare from the wish, a collection of film and video images that have long ago been burned into so many of our cortices. The ceiling fan in
Apocalypse Now
, the choppers coming in slow with a
Whuppwhupppwhupppwhuppp
. . . the running girl, flesh hanging off her arms from a napalm strike . . . burning bonzes toppling over . . . the point-blank bullet to the head . . . that lush longed-for green that drove generations of mystics, madmen, technocrats, and strategists insane. The French, the Americans, ruined for decades by tiny little farmers in black pajamas, slogging through those beautiful rice paddies behind water buffalo. Yet it always looked so beautiful, so . . . unknowable.

     I wake from yet another nightmare. This one was even worse. I was a witness at an execution. I can almost still smell the smoke and cordite from the guns. Feeling nauseated and guilty, I read for a while, afraid to go back to sleep. I’m rereading Graham Greene’s
The Quiet American
for about the fifth time. It’s his Vietnam novel, set in the early days of the French adventure here. He wrote much of it – it is said – at the Continental Hotel, just down the street. It’s a beautiful, heartbreakingly sad book. But it’s not helping my state of mind, which is becoming increasingly deranged. I’ve got to get out of this room. Even with the air conditioner on, everything’s wet. Condensation has built up on the windows. The carpet feels moist and smells stale. My sheets have been sweat through. My clothes are soggy. Even the currency is wet; a pile of near-worthless dong sits limp and moist on the nightstand. I head out for the Ben Thanh market, about twelve blocks away.

     I stroll past quaking rabbits, squawking chickens, trembling deer mice, past meat counters where vendors squat barefoot on their cutting boards, calmly eating from chipped bowls. The smell is heavy, narcotic: durian, jackfruit, seafood,
nuoc mam
– the ubiquitous fish sauce condiment of choice all over Southeast Asia. At the center of the enclosed market, past the vegetables, meat, fish, live poultry, nostrums, jewelry, and groceries for sale, is a large area of food stalls selling a psychedelic rainbow of good-looking, good-smelling, unbelievably fresh stuff. My mood begins to improve immediately. Everything is brightly colored, crunchy, exotic, unrecognizable, and attractive. I suddenly want everything. Without warning, I’m happy, exhilarated, delirious with hunger and curiosity. A manic-depressive on a happy jag, I’m on top of the world.

     I sit down at a clean white counter with a crowd of Vietnamese and order a bowl of
pho
, a spicy noodle soup that comes with a variety of ingredients. I’m not sure exactly which
pho
I’m ordering, but it all looks good, so I simply point at what the lady next to me is eating. Is there anything better to eat on this planet than a properly made bowl of
pho
? I don’t know. Precious few things can approach it. It’s got it all. A bowl of clear hot liquid, loaded with shreds of fresh, white and pink crabmeat, and noodles is handed to me, garnished with bean sprouts and chopped fresh cilantro. A little plate of condiments comes next: a few wedges of lime, some ground black pepper – which, judging from my neighbors at the counter, one makes into a paste, adding lime juice to pepper and stirring with chopsticks – a dish of
nuoc mam
, a dish of chili fish oil, some chopped red chili peppers. The proprietor hands me a cold plastic-wrapped towel, which, once again emulating my neighbors, I squeeze – until the air is forced to one end – and then pop loudly between my hands. Everyone claps encouragingly. This sound, the
pop pop pop
of plastic-wrapped hand towels exploding, is the backbeat to Saigon. You hear it everywhere. Inside the wrapper is a cold, fresh, clean towel to wash and refresh with. The
pho
is fantastic – spicy, hot, complex, refined, yet unbelievably simple. The astounding freshness of the ingredients, the brightly contrasting textures and colors, the surprising sophistication of the presentation – the whole experience is overwhelmingly perfect. The proprietor beams at me before I even take a mouthful. He knows it’s good. I wipe my bowl out, wash it down with a little clear plastic sandwich bag of lychee juice, and hand over a few moist dong.