The World Played Chess (35)

Cruz and I hopped on the supply chopper and flew back to Da Nang. After picking up supplies for Captain Martinez, Cruz told me we were making a detour. He had a long order to buy weed, and the piastres to back it up. He also knew where to go—a particular mama-san who can be trusted. That sounded to me like a contradiction in terms.

“She’ll haggle like hell and act like she’s insulted, but in the end, she’ll come around.” Cruz was looking to buy party packs, ten rolled joints for about five dollars. This mama-san also had what Cruz calls 100s, joints as long as cigarettes soaked in opium. Those sell for a dollar a joint. Cruz once told me you don’t smoke the 100s unless you’re on base or at the rear. “You can’t function,” he said. “They will literally knock you out.”

We traveled to the Hai Chau District and stopped in a hole-in-the-wall store below three-story apartments. The store had cut flowers for sale on the sidewalk. The inside was as big as my bedroom back home. An oscillating fan, a relic, did little to alleviate the suffocating heat. Maybe that explained why no one else was sitting at the two nicked and scarred tables and chairs.

The mama-san welcomed Cruz like he owned the place. Maybe he did, based on the amount of piastres he carried. The woman was plump and her face ageless. I couldn’t tell if she was fifty or a hundred and fifty. I also didn’t detect a drop of sweat on her, both of which led me to conclude she’d made a deal with the devil. She rarely looked directly at Cruz or at me. She did, however, have cans of Tiger beer, which were brought unopened to the table by a boy old enough to be fighting. I wondered if he could be Viet Cong and whether he was thinking this would be a good way to kill two marines. He delivered the room-temperature beers with a blank stare that only made me more nervous. I drank the beer with one eye on him and the other on the door, my spare hand on my .45.

Cruz’s deal with Mama-san involved haggling in both English and Vietnamese, which Cruz has picked up on his tours. Mama-san yelled and hollered and looked aggrieved, but each time Cruz stood to leave, she waved for him to sit. She wanted the money. She nodded to the boy when the deal was done, and he and Cruz left the room to secure the merchandise while I finished my second beer.

When Cruz returned, I stood, but we weren’t leaving just yet. “Shutter. That was a good day’s work, and a good day’s work deserves its reward. I know you’re strung out waiting to meet Charlie, and Mama-san has something to help.”

I expected him to light a joint, maybe one of the 100s. He took me behind the curtain covering the doorway. Two women were waiting. He explained that he’d haggled us two of Mama-san’s prostitutes. In addition to liquor and weed, Mama-san runs a “boom-boom” house.

I had not yet been with a Vietnamese hooker, or any hooker for that matter, and I still remembered all the negative information fed to us during boot camp about venereal diseases so severe they will rot our peckers. Cruz assured me Mama-san had assured him that these girls had assured her that they are checked regularly by a doctor.

“Well, if she says that they say that a doctor says, then it must be the truth,” I said.

“Bad for business,” Mama-san said.

So is your prostitutes spending money on a doctor, I thought, but didn’t offer. I also didn’t offer that I had never been with a woman. I mean, there were two high school girls I fooled around with, and I reached second base with one, but that’s where they put up the stop sign. The two girls Mama-san had produced for us didn’t look much older than those high school girls, and far less interested. The heat looked to have zapped whatever enthusiasm they once possessed, if ever. I doubt it. They likely hate us as much as the VC, maybe more. The muscles in their faces never moved.

“Just like riding a bike, Shutter,” Cruz said as his woman led him behind one of two curtains.

That comment struck me as wrong—equating sex with these two women to riding a bike. But again, I didn’t say this.

The woman who took me to another bed was attractive, with a nice figure beneath a thin dress that didn’t stay on long. She had small breasts and thin hips and a red scar near her shoulder from a cut badly stitched. I wanted to ask her how she got the cut. I wanted to ask her why she was a prostitute, but I sensed I knew why. She was doing what she had to do, likely to support her family during a war that has disrupted everything. But given her look of bored indifference, I concluded that was not the time for deep discussion. I tried to make small talk, because I was nervous that I was going to mess up, but that, too, went nowhere. She told me to drop my pants and get busy. So I did. I figured this wasn’t going to last long when I heard someone yell, “Switch. Switch.” Cruz came running into my room naked and slapped me on the back like a Saturday morning tag-team wrestler. “Double your pleasure, Shutter.”

I didn’t have much choice. I switched rooms to an equally disinterested woman. It didn’t take long for me to complete my business, even with the sudden interruption, and based on the lack of any sound or facial expressions, I’m sure the moment was as anticlimactic for the woman as it was for me. It didn’t even feel like sex. It felt more like that first cigarette Cruz handed me to calm my nerves.

I had no sooner finished my business when the woman slipped on her thin dress and left the room. I took that as my cue to leave, except Cruz was still going strong in the bed behind the blanket where my clothes lay on the floor. I hoped to hell he wouldn’t yell “Switch” again. I figured I’d just wait in the room, but then the girl reappeared with another GI. She’d no doubt spent the minute in between the two of us getting a quick checkup and nod of approval from that doctor. If I didn’t have the clap by nightfall, it would be a miracle.