Death of a Pimple

left: We rock the bicycle helmets.

Huy has this way of knowing when I’ve had enough on the motorbike. Just as I am feeling like my ass couldn’t take another stone or pothole, he veers off the dirt road into a gas station. We hop off the bike and, as he tells the attendant to fill up our tank, Huy reaches for a bamboo water pipe leaning up against one of the pumps. He packs a wad of dry, stringy Vietnamese tobacco into the chamber, lights a match, and waits for it to catch good and well before gingerly letting the flame kiss the tobacco. He pulls; the pipe bubbles to life.

“You can sit there,” he says between tokes and motions to a cluster of plastic chairs and tables at the roadside café across the street. I waddle over as he pays the gas attendant and take a seat.

The dusty bandanna around my neck makes me look tougher than I feel. My ass is so sore I sit forward in my seat to put some weight on my legs. I have blisters on the same spots on both hands from gripping the back handlebar on the motorbike. My back aches and makes me think of my father. My eyes are pink and itchy from the ever present cloud of dust that hangs lazily above all rural roads in Vietnam. The insects drone on hypnotically and, despite my damaged posterior, I become comfortable the second I sit down. Fatigue catches me, finally. I stare at a stain on the plastic tablecloth to give my eyes a rest.

left: The monster. 100 cc's. Purrs like a kitten. Our backpacks are resting on the center console and Huy had to straddle them with his legs whenever we rode.

Huy strolls up to the table with that bounce of his. He never seems to tire. I’m amazed that he’s done the 900 km. roundtrip from Hanoi to Sapa over 50 times. The ride is 11 hours one way and is filled with hundreds of hair pin turns on bumpy, dirt roads through the mountains. How he manages to stay energized and unaffected by such an endurance test is beyond me. Well, he’s not totally unaffected: the whites of his eyes are blood red from dust and flies and small pieces of tree bark and leaves kicked up by the trucks. He’s used to it, he explains, and knows it always goes away after a day or two back home in the city.

“You thirsty? Maybe you thirsty.” He plops into a chair, throwing his arms up a bit as he sits.

“Nah, I’m OK,” I say. He’s always looking after me and it’s comforting during times like this, when I’m too tired to try to communicate with the café owner staring at me from the corner.

“Shit it’s hot today!” Every time Huy says ‘shit’ he looks at me to see my reaction, see if the curse words tourists have taught him actually work in his sentences. I laugh.

“Yeah it is. Hottest day so far in the four days we’ve been riding,” I say. Pause. “Actually, I don’t want a drink but I would like a watermelon,” I motion to the stack of bubbly football shaped watermelons on a table in the shade by the road.

“No problem.” Huy orders a watermelon for me and a Number 1 energy drink for himself.

A slight spindly women slinks from the corner and smiles at me as she passes. Her shirt is stained on the sides where she dries her hands and her thin forearms are strong with all the tendons visible. She inspects the watermelons and acts like she’s trying to pick the best one for me. She tries to cut the melon into eight pieces at our table and I stop her; four is fine.

I hear the bubble of another water pipe. Huy draws in on the two foot long bamboo pipe and then slaps the top of it. A small, damp lump of tobacco shoots from the chamber of the pipe like a tiny brown cannon ball and lands on the floor a few feet away. He leans in and clears the tube of its smoke. He cracks open his drink.

“I love Number 1. Many times, I drink Number 1 when I drive. It makes me awake. Like a Redbull but stronger. And cheaper!” he laughs and takes a swig.

“I don’t like caffeine, but I can understand why you need it on a ride like this. You want a piece?”

“No thank you, too sweet for me.”

“Where should I spit the seeds?”

Huy laughs. “On the ground! Always on the ground in Vietnam!”

I look around. There are yellow, pink, and light blue plastic bags scattered around and weighted to the ground with the small pools of liquid they hold. Cigarette butts and bottle caps circle a sleeping mutt with her tongue unrolled onto the pavement. Her nipples are swollen and look like brown thimbles extended from deflated, stretched breasts. I spit a few seeds at my feet.

Huy sparks a cigarette and I get the impression he doesn’t even know he’s just done it. He smokes two packs a day most days, but yesterday he admitted smoking three. His justification: my job is boring sometimes. By that logic, there should be a thick stale cloud above most of the planet.

I look up and he’s patting the back of his hand against a pimple on his chin that’s been swelling and gaining strength for days like a summer hurricane. He’s just noticed it. He catches me looking at him.

“I hate this man. I really really hate this thing. I always have a problem like this.”

He reaches to the table and picks up a square of ripped napkin. Like a kid picking up a bug in the bathroom with a piece of toilet paper, he covers the pimple. I think at first he’s going to clean his face with the napkin somehow. All of the sudden, he squeezes his thumb and forefinger together and his eyes squint with a flash of pain. I flinch and hope he doesn’t see me. He pulls the napkin away and looks at its contents. I stop chewing the watermelon in my mouth.

“Why is our skin different?”

At first his question seems heavier than it actually is because I forget he’s talking about his pimple. I start thinking, Yeah, why is our skin different?
“Why don’t you ever get these on your face? Why me?”

“I get those too sometimes,” I say. “If I’m really sweaty for a while or my face is dirty I’ll get those too. In English we call them ‘pimples’. It’s not just you. Everyone hates them!”

Huy blots his face and gives the napkin red polka dots. The pimple, quite angry now, is generous with its blood and drips like a pricked fingertip.

“Yes, but you don’t have them like me. I have them on my face always. And my back too. I hate them. I went to doctor to fix them, but he said he can’t fix. He said my skin is bad.”

I really feel sorry for him. He pushes the napkin hard up against his face while talking like he’s done it a few times before. He takes a drag from his cigarette.

“Hey, how tall are you?”

“One hundred eighty five centimeters,” I say clearly so he can pick up the big number. It takes a second or two to register.

“Wow! You’re big! Wow. No one in Vietnam is 185. You are 20 more than me. I’m 165. Too short I think.”

“Why do you think so?”

“I want to be 170, I want five more. Then I will be happy. 165 is not enough. In Vietnam, many men are 170 or more. 170 is good. But no one is 185!” he laughs.

Huy takes a drag on his cigarette and it triggers a coughing fit. I put a watermelon peel on the plate and take another piece, trying not to look at him because, for some reason, I feel embarrassed. After about thirty seconds, he stops coughing and regains his composure.

“Wooh! Crazy man, I need to stop cigarettes. Only smoke the water pipe! I’m killing myself!”

I think about this for a moment.

“Why don’t you? Why not just smoke the water pipe? It has to be better than cigarettes because the smoke passes through the water before it goes into your body.”

“Ehhh, water pipes are not everywhere. Cigarettes are everywhere because I always have them.” I look across the street at the pipe leaning up against the pumps. Next to the gas station, I spot the familiar bamboo pipe leaning up against the leg of a table at an outdoor rest area. Squinting, I see another pipe at the next restaurant.

“Everywhere we go you find a pipe to use! They’re everywhere! I think that if you wanted, you could easily find enough water pipes to get you through a day of driving.”

All this talk of pipes starts him craving and he puts his cigarette down and loads up a wad of tobacco into the pipe at his feet.

“You know,” he exhales, “I was in hospital for three months once. A doctor said I almost died. Lung problems. It was like cancer but not the real cancer.”

“And you didn’t stop after that?”

“I tried but I couldn’t. I will die young, I know it. Hey, you know I once lost $500 US because I couldn’t quit?”

My jaw hits the ground as I raise my eyebrows—that’s two to three months of pay for Huy.

“Are you serious? How?”

“My girlfriend from Holland, she bet me that I couldn’t quit. I only said OK because if I quit, she pay me $800. After one month, I lost. I didn’t pay her $500, but for a long time I took her out to dinner and I took her on a motorbike trip to Saigon for a few weeks. So maybe I pay almost $500, but I don’t know. It was a lot. I should have quit.”

The dog wakes and tries desperately to eat a fly circling its head. His jaws keep clapping shut with such force I’m sure he’s piercing his gums with his teeth.

“Crazy dog,” Huy says. “A dog can’t catch a fly.” He says this like it’s a known fact or some mystical Vietnamese proverb. I believe him.

Clap…clap clap…clap……clap clap clap.

Black seed constellations are clustered at my feet and attracting fly astronauts.

“Well, maybe we go now?” He rises before waiting for an answer and flicks his butt towards the dog.

“Maybe,” I say smiling.

I leave bills on the table and push myself up out of my chair with my arms. My ass sends pain to my brain and begs me to stay off the motorbike. I walk back across the street with legs spread and ease myself onto the back of the bike. A soft landing. I put my shades on, buckle my helmet, and pull my bandana up over my nose. The bike whines to life and pulls us out into the dust and sun.