I joined SP5 James O. Dollins, of Waco, Texas, and SP4 Russel Zoffka, of Spenser, Iowa, both of the 716th MP Battalion: one of the best MP battalions on the Tran Hung-Dao between the Central Market and the Restaurant Dong Khanh. On the south side of the street, anyhow.
SP4 Zoffka was driving. I sat behind, beside the radio, which kept giving me odes like “Mike Gulf Jeep Zero.”
SP5 Dollins told me not to worry about it. All the radio was saying was that their gun-jeep would meet them, in five minutes, in front of the Dai-nam BBQ.
The gun-jeep is a two-man machine-gun truck which follows the lead-jeep to afford it protection from ambush. To give the machine-gunner as great an arc of fire as possible, the gun-jeep is uncovered and has no windshield.
Curfew for soldiers in Saigon is eleven p.m. For civilians, midnight. We wheeled down market streets now shuttered, onto streets lit by old-fashioned French lamp-standards; then back to the darkened docks. The MPs weren’t looking for Charlie yet: it wasn’t yet ten. The hours just before curfew are the likeliest for spotting AWOLs. We swung down Tu-Do.
“Tu-Do Street,” says the guide-book, “is well known for its luxurious façade by day and its dream-like beauty by night. It is the nation’s shop-window anything from liqueurs and perfumes to precision goods and top-quality merchandise from all over the world.”
Actually, Tu-Do is an ugly avenue. The “merchandise from all over the world” consists of cheap watches, outrageously priced, machine-made souvenirs and lacquer wares. Everything has the mark of shoddiness upon it. And this is not entirely a matter of the difficulties that war has imposed. The fact is that the Vietnamese have no art of their own: it is all an imitation of Chinese art. The lack of Vietnamese art objects is due, not to the war, but to the inability of the Vietnamese to do anything original. They are the most unoriginal people on earth.
“Let’s check that one out,” Dollins suggested to Zoffka. Zoffka made a U-turn, the gun-jeep following, and curbed a moon-faced Negro of about twenty in an American Air Force uniform. Dollins examined his papers by the jeep’s headlights. The gun-jeep came up beside us.
“We’ll have to take you in,” Dollins informed the Air Force man.
There were no manacles. The soldier sat beside me, in the back of the jeep, with Dollins half-inclined toward him to make certain he wouldn’t make any funny moves. He didn’t look like he was planning to.
“Where you from?” I asked him. If he heard, he didn’t answer. Dollins and Zoffka turned him over to the Provost Marshal’s office and returned to the jeep.
“He was easier than some,” Zoffka assured me.
“How’d you pick him out?” I asked Dollins.
“Too many ribbons, for one thing.”
“How else do you spot an AWOL?”
“Wearing civilian clothes with army boots. Hair too long. Shoulder patches don’t match. And decorations—the longer they’re AWOL the more ribbons they put on, I’m sure I don’t know why.”
II.
In the earliest break of the big smoky day, when night-patrols are going off-duty and the day-patrols are coming on, then the last hanging flare begins turning to ash. The first steamed-rice jogger trots down Tran Hung-Dao and the yellow dog stirs in his door.
Now the watchful night is done: now the true war can begin.
For by eight a.m. the bike-riders are wheeling up on the walks to beat the lights. And an air of mischief mixed with desperation begins dividing Honda from Harley, Suzuki from Yamaha, pedicab from cyclo and trishaw from taxi. Trying to out-gun and out-ride each other, the cowboys lean their bikes from side to side: in the Vietnamese mind this gains ground.
These riders have caught the spirit of the morning papers: they waken to victories, won every night by somebody else, in The Delta or the DMZ.
SEE ACCEPTANCE BY VANQUISHED VC.
LT. JUMPS ON GRENADE
REDS REPULSED
PRESIDENT RAPS WHISKEY-DRINKING INTELLECTUALS
REDS DECIMATED
NVA WALKS INTO TRAP
The NVA is always walking into a trap. The VC forever being decimated. Heroics go on elsewhere all the time. So ten thousand motorbikes race one another down the Tran Hung-Dao in a kind of mobilized derring-do; and the sirening of an ambulance lends all survivors a sense of achievement.
At the intersection of Hung-Dao and Nguyen Cann Chan a Vespa is upended, its wheels still spinning slowly. A white-holstered policeman is looking languidly down at the rider whose face is now part of the pavement. It’s all part of the fight against Communism.
The hostility of rider toward rider, driver toward driver, of all toward the “White Mice”—the National Police—and of police toward foreigners; of civilians toward soldiers and of all toward the police intensifies as the morning wears on.
While escorting about ten call-girls to headquarters for questioning, a posse of police Monday night ran into a group of military men on Cah Mang Road. Six girls were promptly freed by the latter. The rest proceeded to the cooler. —Saigon Post
Racing down the Tran Hung-Dao from Cho-lon to Tu-Do, competing all the way yet coming back alive, lends a sense of participation to the defense of the Free World. The consequent uproar sounds like a lawnmower, with one blade missing, amplified a thousand times.
An American tank, trapped in a herd of Peugeots, Datsuns, Citroëns, Porsches and Toyotas, thrusts its gun-turret forward like a single dark tusk and moves on its tracks with enormous deliberation; as if deciding which, of the lesser brutes surrounding it, it will turn upon first. While whistles are shrilling, sirens are warning, horns are squawking, brakes are grinding, bumpers clashing and tires complaining; and human voices yet converse.
Now come copper-gong-beaters and old betel-chewers carrying umbrellas over their heads and spitting as they come. Now the shaved-head bonzes, in grey or orange robes, and the children hauling between the shafts, come crowding off bridges, buses and barges: they are coming in now from the outskirts of town. From Gia Dinh, Binh Hung, Khai Tri and Pham Thang.
From barrack, paddy and slum-canal.
Now the forenoon heat is beginning and the day’s black-market charts are on the street: green is up, MPC is down. The moneychangers are at their corners and the whores are back in their beds.
Beneath the Central Market’s morning commotion, a whisper follows, decibels deep, in and out of the noodle cafes: now here now there. Asking from alley and areaway: “MPC? MPC?”
MPC is what the National Police are looking for when they arrest a Vietnamese woman for walking hand in hand with an American. MPC is what the Security Police are shaking the PX girls down for. MPC is what the Vietnamese woman is sitting close to the American in the taxi for. And MPC is what the Daily News, like every other, is in pursuit of the GI for.
ON KREATIV RIGHTING
“The mere fact that the younger American literary generation has come to the schools, instead of running away from them,” Professor Wallace Stegner, of Stanford, assures us about Creative Writing Workshops, “is an indication of a soberer and less coltish spirit.”
“Writers in groups are with few exceptions the most impotent and pernicious tribe to infest the planet,” playwright Ed Bullins says, flatly refuting Professor Stegner. “It would be healthier for a writer to socialize with drug addicts than with a claque of hacks.”
If the act of writing, like that of ministering to the sick, defending justice, or constructing decent housing, is performed to sustain society’s confidence in the rightness of its own rules, Professor Stegner is right. Mr. Bullins is wrong. If the act of writing is performed to sustain the reader’s conviction that his own society is the best of all possible societies, Mr. Stegner is right again. Mr. Bullins still wrong.
Yet strangely, from The Scarlet Letter, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and Maggie, through An American Tragedy, The Grapes of Wrath, and Native Son, the American novel has consistently challenged our society’s confidence in its sense of justice. Of those books written in the conforming attitude of a
“soberer and less coltish spirit,” not one has lasted. While not a single enduring work, from Moby Dick to Catch-22, but has been written in alienation from society; and in denial of the justice of society’s rules.
It is true that, as Professor Stegner says, Creative Writers’ Workshops offer sanctuary: a sanctuary which is precisely the means of cutting off the writer from the real world. Can one imagine Life on the Mississippi being conceived in a literary workshop? Could anyone have developed The Open Boat from a field trip through a classics library?
Courses in photojournalism, in juveniles, whodunits, science fiction, or in how to train your chihuahua to be an attack dog may not only prove worthwhile commercially, but may be fun to attend as well. But what have such courses to do with “creative” writing?
Creativity, by its own essence, is a solitary enterprise: one in which the individual confronts actuality alone; takes his own chances and wins or loses off by himself.
The attraction of the Creative Writers’ Schools is that they offer the opportunity of becoming a “creative writer” while taking no risks at all. Anyone with the tuition can now register himself as a “creative writer,” gain the respect of other “creative writers” and go from there to a safe university post teaching “Creative Writing.”
And never once come in contact with the way in which Americans actually live their lives. For the only records we have, of the way in which we live, are those which men like Theodore Dreiser and Jack London had the unkillable gall to face up to and write down firsthand.
Creative Writers’ Workshops do not derive from the tradition of challenge. They derive, rather, from the tradition of smiling optimism which William James once summarized as “the smiling side of American life.” It was the writer’s duty, Professor James decided, to avoid writing “anything that might bring a blush to a maiden’s cheeks.” This reduction of American writing, to what might lie within the grasp of a retarded teenager, was violently blasted when Stephen Crane published Maggie: A Girl of the Streets.
The conformist tradition, however, persisted among those who found sanctuary in “a soberer and less coltish spirit.” Sanctuary, that is, from the dark, unsmiling side of American life.
“Are you one of the quiet ones who should be a writer?” the Famous Writers School used to ask in all the magazines just as if no one had pointed out that the loudest mouth and the most belligerent bore, in any group, was inevitably the writer. “If you are reserved in a crowd you may be bottling up a talent that could change your life. If you’ve been keeping quiet about your talent, here’s a wonderful chance to do something about it. The first step is to mail the coupon below for the Free Writing Aptitude Test.”
The minute you’ve unbottled your money you’ve passed the test. The Creative Writers’ Workshops are the campus extension of the Famous Writers’ philosophy.
“Whether Dreyfus is guilty or innocent,” Chekhov wrote at the time of the Dreyfus trial, “Zola is still right.” Meaning that, in defending Dreyfus, Zola was right simply in defending the accused, guilty or innocent. Zola, to Chekhov, was right simply because he stood in opposition to the Establishment.
Creative Writers’ Workshops, by and large, are conducted by people in the service of the court. Having long ago compromised their own integrity, in return for security, their business has now become that of inducting the young into the necessity for compromise.
But if the proper study of mankind is man, it follows that, in order to report man, one must first become one. How is one to create something unique without first having, himself, become a unique being?
The style is the man: the unformed personality cannot create form beyond itself.
I am all in favor of Creative Writers’ Workshops. They pay me more, for talking about writing, than I get paid for actually writing it. But the young people to whom I talk are not the ones who are going to do any serious writing themselves. If they were they wouldn’t be listening to how someone else does it: they’d be doing it their own way, by themselves; without literary field trips through the dead past.
TOPLESS IN GAZA
While I was wandering idly around Times Square recently, nothing in particular to do and nothing particular in mind, someone shoved a handbill in my hand. I put it in my pocket and didn’t read it until, staring above a martini at the wall behind the bar in Sardi’s, I pulled it out simply to look at something besides the wall. “Free Admission,” it said. “No Cover” and “No Minimum Charge,” it said. There was also something about nude girls and topless dancers. Martinis are expensive at Sardi’s, so I wandered down Eighth Avenue.
“Six French models direct from Paris,” a skinny Puerto Rican was ballyhooing in front of the joint—“They’re takin’ ’em off in here, men, six beautiful French models in the extreem nood!”
They weren’t French and they weren’t models. A naked black girl, so emaciated she appeared to have been rescued from Buchenwald earlier in the day, jiggled herself about on top of the bar near the entrance. At the bar’s farther end, a naked white girl, with shoulders so narrow and thighs so heavy that she looked like a flatiron turned upside down, also jiggled herself. I ordered a beer. The barmaid looked stupid.
“Three seventy-five,” Miss Stupidity told me. Wow. I handed her a ten-dollar bill.
“Give me fifty cents,” she told me before giving me my change.
I gave her fifty cents.
A rather pretty young black girl, wearing a leotard, came up to me and asked me to buy her a drink.
“Only one,” I told her, thinking of the six and a quarter I had coming.
Miss Stupidity poured something which looked like white wine from a bottle into a cocktail glass.
“That will be thirty dollars,” she told me.
I glanced about to see whom she might be talking to. She appeared to be talking to me. In fact, she was looking right at me.
“Pardon me?” I inquired politely.
“That will be thirty dollars,” she repeated.
I looked at her. She meant it. She really meant it.
“No way,” I assured her. “No way.”
“You ordered a drink for the lady.”
“I didn’t order that.”
She called to someone up front and here he comes: the Animal.
Race: white. Height: six feet four and one half inches. Weight: 240–245. Hair: brown, worn shoulder length. Eyes: gray. Identifying marks: Pancho Villa mustache; silver earring in lobe of left ear; tattoo on right forearm, in red, bearing inscription, not decipherable, in blue.
Every midtown-Manhattan bar employs one Animal. He is employed because he is big. Very big. So big that barflies trapped between paying an extortionate price and fighting him almost invariably choose to pay.
Animal isn’t necessarily dangerous: Animal is not a fighting man. If he were, he’d be working in a gym instead of a bar. When you’re over six feet high and weigh 200 pounds when you’re only thirteen years old, you don’t have to fight. Your size suffices. Lacking, thereafter, an ability to earn a living by any other means, Animal comes to depend on his size for his livelihood. His proportions become his trade. He can’t fight, he can’t wrestle, he can’t make the police force. He’s too big to be a sanitation engineer and not quite big enough to travel with a circus. He becomes a barroom conqueror who has never fought a battle.
Animals are taught to do two things: first, to loom; second, to make ominous-sounding noises, like: “You ordered the lady a drink: pay!”
Before he did either of these things, Animal handed me a dirt-stained price list: beer, $3.75; bottle, $30; cocktail, $10.
Beneath, this gained legal support: “These prices are registered and approved by the State of New York Department of Consumer Affairs.”
Some department. I’d like to see one of its members put out thirty dollars for a cocktail glass of cheap white wine. If he did, he is unfit for public office.
“You ordered a drink for the young lady and now you refuse to pay—is t
hat it?” Animal demanded to know. Then he loomed.
“I never offered to pay the young lady’s rent and buy her a new pair of shoes. I never read the price list.”
“That shows you’re not a gentleman,” Animal informed me. “If you were a gentleman, you would have read the price list. Gentlemen always read the price list.”
Well, what do you know. That was what those men were doing studying a menu pasted into a restaurant window. And I’d always thought they were just studying prices.
Animal went into his ominous-sounds routine. “Call the cops!” he shouted to someone up front. “Man refuses to pay bill! Call the squad car! Take him away! Lock him up!”
“They’ll be here in a couple minutes, sir.” The little black girl in the leotard tried to support the house.
“It’s all right, honey,” I assured her, “I don’t mind getting locked up.”
“Oh, don’t think you’re going to get out tomorrow, Pops,” Animal warned me. “Tomorrow’s a holiday. You won’t go to court till Friday.”
“Friday is all right with me,” I told him. “I’m not doing anything in particular over the weekend anyhow. Being locked up ain’t too bad. I been locked up before.”
“I don’t doubt that,” Animal attempted to be cutting. “I’m sure you have.”
“The cops are on their way,” Miss Stupidity warned me.
“I’m waiting,” I told her.
“Don’t worry,” Animal reassured me, trying to sound as if he weren’t weakening, “they’ll be here all right.”
“You’ll be better off to pay up.” The little black girl tried to help her boss. “It’s their policy.”
“Their policy,” I pointed out, “not mine.”
Animal sat down beside me.
“What they’re going to do to you, Pops, is send you to Bellevue!”
“Bellevue?” I looked at him in astonishment. “Hell, Bellevue is where I come from! I’m out on a liberty pass. I ain’t due back till Monday!”