Where Chaos Goes to Party

left: Saigon at dusk. Check out the cop--loungin'

Saigon is where chaos goes to party. The city is a pressure cooker roasting three million buzzing motorbikes that ricochet between stop lights like dull metallic comets, old shortened hunch-backed women in conical hats selling fruit and bouncing as they walk under the pain and weight of their ripping baskets of mango and banana and pineapple, motorbike repair shops on every corner spilling their oil and greased tools and sweaty mechanics onto the sidewalk like gray urban cornucopias, little blue and red plastic stools surrounding noodle vendors like toadstools, pot-bellied white men with recent hair cuts and tucked in pastel polo shirts ordering bottles of gin for the table that cost more than their waiter makes in three days. It all meshes together in the cauldron that is Saigon and at night, the mess bubbles.

If we could bottle Saigon and ship it all over the world, TVs and movie theaters would be run out of town. You can sit at an outdoor table at any cheap Saigon bar or restaurant and, before your very eyes, under your nose, through the fuzz on the backs of your hands, you can see and smell and feel a show that TVs and theaters try but fail to catch. It’s all too grimy and too loud to package for an audience. It’s a place you end up in and can’t leave because leaving requires an emergence from hypnosis, a sitting up when the world is heavy on your chest taking a shit and honking its horn. To sit at an outdoor table and watch it all go buy is to touch the electric fence of life and wriggle out in spastic frenzy from the point where your finger makes contact with the wire, unable to pull away or close your eyes.

left: Not the safest powerline set-up

And right now, I’m wriggling and loaded with current. The undersides of my forearms are sticking to the plastic tablecloth as I write. Afraid I’ll miss a 25-bike-pile-up or kid peeing on a dead bird or a whore giving a blowjob to a backpacker in broad daylight, I lower my eyes to the pages of my notebook in quick little glances. It’s late afternoon and the whole city is sweating and leaking.

Large bottles of beer are a dollar at this place and they taste better the hotter it gets and the more I drink. I call the waitress over and ask her to take away the two empty bottles next to a half-full cold one—a couple just sat two tables away and I don’t want them pitying me. Not for my sake really—for theirs. Their clothes are crisp and clean and I can tell they’re on a short vacation. There’s no time for pity on short vacations.

Rich, I feel so bad for that guy. He’s all alone and drinking his sorrows away. Maybe we should invite him to sit with us? Or send over an order of ice cream or something?

I know, babe, it’s so sad that people come on vacation and can’t leave their devils back home. Let’s leave him be though—I’m really hungry and we said we would just eat-and-run, remember? The bus is picking us up at five.

left: View from my table as I wrote this piece.

Plus there’s no need to pity me. None at all. I am happier than a pig in a sea of shit just sitting here taking in the honking horns and the shoe shine boys and the café owners flinging dishwater into the street like fishermen casting nets. A man alone at a restaurant table is assumed to be a man desperate for something, for everything. Just a sad, lonely man. I used to wait tables and all the waiters hated waiting on lone diners. It was too depressing. They would tip just like any other customers, but there’s something saddening and crushing about unscrewing a mini bottle of wine for an old man on a Saturday afternoon before the dinner rush. How could such a man be happy? Waiters want no part of it.

Now I am the old man at the table. And I like it. I think what I want, stay as long as I want, and have delicate, paced, well-preserved conversations with my notebook that never last longer than I want them to.

There is a boulder of silence squashing the couple a few tables away. The man looks up at the restaurant awning and for a second, I swear he’s begging God to speed up his food order. The woman has her elbow on the table and is turned half-way around to look at the play with no end and no beginning that is ever-spinning out in every Saigon street. Their silence swells and envelops tables on either side of it. I can feel it start to nudge the pinkie toe on my right foot, the foot closest to the couple, and I take a swig of beer. I look out to the street and the tension recedes to look for some other victim.

The alcohol is pulsing through my system now to the beat of my heart and wants nothing more than to run its course. I feel sewn into the scene around me and am at home and calm. Feeling so at home in such a foreign place knocks my socks off and I smile. I suddenly feel as if I’ve never been more comfortable in any other place on earth, a type of Christmas-morning-comfort.

I’ve still got my wits about me and am far from drunk, but I’m aware of my breathing and aware of the miracle of man whirling around in front of me. I see: All of these people need each other. They have established routines and lives that depend on the routines and lives of others around them. The ice vendor needs the restaurants. The tourists need the restaurants. The restaurants need the tourists. The landlords need to collect rent from the shop owners. The shop owners can’t afford to buy shop space and must rent from the landlords. Everyone needs everyone, and although this is true for any group of people sustained by commerce, although it applies to every place I have ever lived, I notice it more here. The connections between people are more direct, almost tangible, like red yarn stringing together a necklace of people dependent on one another.

left: Fruits and flowers

I feel like I’m a part of this strange web of connection and it makes the world seem smaller somehow. This is our ant farm. Our bee hive. We accept anyone anywhere as long as they can move dirt, buy honey, or both. Sure, busy bees keep the queen fat and warm, but the queen seems so far removed from this moment. I know all this commerce brings in taxes and keeps powerful people powerful, but they’re not here with sweaty forearms stuck to the tablecloths. They don’t walk among the men and women in the conical hats pushing and pulling and lifting and dragging all day to make a buck. This scene is far too genuine and devoid of superficiality to attract a puppet master or a stage director. I forget we’re actors and puppets and worker bees here—it all seems real and driven by necessity and honest. Everyone is sweating here. Everyone.