This Place is a Dump and You are an Asshole.

---

http://PLANET-OF-DEATH.com


So, I cracked open the day with two cups of coffee and last night’s football snowfest, had a spliff and half a can of frozen Carlsberg for brunch, and stepped out into the street to - well, to get away from the maid, who calls on Sundays for obscure reasons - but mainly to find some bloody place in this dump where I can get any work done.

The house is a typical Vietnamese tower of five identical floors stuck on top of each other, with and office style ceramic fire escape effect staircase connecting them. It’s the kind of building that can be converted into a prison, more or less overnight. The roof is baking most of the time and no work gets done up there really. But a substantial amount of getting stoned instead of getting some work done occurs. I think of that as ‘work’. The gathering, grooming and creation of tales that are both interesting in themselves, and reflect well on you, is an important part of a writer’s work. Three of the other four floors are comprised of identical sun-dried, ceramic and concrete boxes with a bed in them, upon which you can sit, laptop atop your lap, until either your arse or your computer overheats. And you wasted that window of comfort in extra-curricula surfing and yielding to what we will come to know as ‘your animal needs’, so you don’t really get a lot of work done.

The bottom floor is the kitchen and ‘living room’. Almost all meaningful activity takes place on either the top or bottom floors. The ground floor is a windowless box which can be opened almost entirely at the front to emit what lights remains at this depth and other people’s used air. And their used children, dogs, cooking odours and motorcycle fumes. The alley outside is about a metre wide. It’s a different kind of life down there, and you don’t get much work done.

I get my things together in my brain: I need shorts, shirt, sandals, computer, charger, backpack, book, money, keys. This is the kind of thinking that comes from living in two or three discrete boxes with 15 flights of stairs between them. And I haven’t mastered it yet. But I’m trying and I’m getting fitter every day. So anyway, I forgot my credit card. But not before I had left the house and it was three floors up, but it wasn’t up there when I got there and I have no idea where it is now. Logically, I should check the fourth floor before the roof, but I don’t and anyway, it doesn’t matter because the credit card was downstairs in the backpack all along.

Out in the street, I had no previously formulated plan of what to do, but had the basic blocks in place: computer, book, beer, walking. If you like to get a bit stoned and wander around thinking how repulsive everyone is, then sunny Saigon by the sea is just the place to do it. Nothing interesting has ever happened in Saigon after your first afternoon. That’s it. What you just got, is all you are going to get. A ceaseless stream of peddlers of motorbikes, motorbikes rides, wallets and sunglasses, nodding dogs and Avatar; reasonably decent room at a reasonably decent price; some extremely mediocre (but OK) reasonably priced food; a herd of semi-available, semi-attractive semi-whores, and bad warm expensive beers. And about 10,000 totally bored tourists who can’t work out why they came here, dismayed by their recent purchase of the crummiest pirate CDs on the high seas. Every city is unique in its own special way.

Saigion is unique in that it is neither Bangkok, nor is it Hanoi. But that’s about it. It is a second-rate, uninteresting, dreary place, where everything is basically, shit, as the man said, and everyone is a thief.

In many ways, I’m a pretty straight up guy. I don’t have too many expectations of anyone or anywhere, and I am pretty prepared to take people and places as they come. The only thing I can say with any true conviction is about myself is perhaps that “I know my pubs”. In the World Just Being Able To Find A Decent Pub And Have A Drink Championships, I might win. My range - cultural, geographical, financial and classinessal (answers on a postcard please) - is vast. The multidimensional hyperspace of my pub skills is a shimmering, throbbing, iridescent universe unto itself.

Nothing but heat, noise, smell, a dry mouth and the dreary grey edge of the backpackers district had occurred. Fate had taken no choices out of my hands. I would now wander without any destination in mind until my pub finding instincts lead me, to the pub.

And after about 30 metres and 6 bars I found this wasn’t going to be so easy. It’s Sunday lunchtime, and what I want to do, is find a pub. I want a cold beer. I want to feel reasonably happy about getting my laptop out. Ideally, I’d like a power supply, but I don’t mind. At least, I want to find a place where I can read my book. Cold beer. CHEAP cold beer. Reasonably pleasant atmosphere. This town is a dump. Yeah, I know you go to places for different things, but they don’t have any of them here either.

Saigon is a bland strip, greatly expanded in the last five years, of absolutely nothing of any interest. Nothing to see, nothing to do. There used to be a reason to come here, and that reason was that very few people came here and you could make yourself special. People like to feel special. When I were a lad, the food was better and the beer was colder and there certainly weren’t 130 tiny bars spilling out into the streets, over-brimming with late middle aged European males and apparently much younger and substantially less innocent collections of pleasant young ladies from the dark interior (New arrivals Mondays).

No one can get any work done here. Except women. In Vietnam, men work like dogs until such times as they marry, then they sit. They play cards while they sit. They drink coffee. They say, “motorbike, motorbike” and make a ‘vroom, vroom’ gesture, indicative of their power to sweep you off to your dreams. Women work. Almost incredibly, there are two groups of women in Vietnam who have reached almost equal status of lazy unworkingness as the male. Generally, they drink tea. They are the market women and the whores.

Much as it is every Vietnamese man’s dream to sit around drinking coffee, playing cards, smoking and have near-adult Scandinavian women cling to him as he speeds them around town on his moped, it is every Vietnamese woman’s dream to sit around all day, drinking tea, gossiping with her mates, bitching, knitting, smoking and exchanging ‘massages’ or rucksacks, shoes and silks for unreasonable amounts of the Dong of the Scandinavians their husbands, pimps and bosses bring to their door. Working in the market is probably less desirable than whoring, on the basis that the whores do get to watch an awful lot more daytime TV; the ultimate dream of the girls in the market. At the end of the day, the guy on the moped will have almost all the cash anyway. And in many ways, he deserves it. Sweating away in the sun all day, the traffic. Cows on his bike.

It’s occurs to me that I might never have been in a place where there was such an intensity of ‘bars’, or at least places where I could just sit down and order a cold (sic) beer, all of which were ‘crap’. Leeds probably.

My foolish instincts tell me that I am still in the ‘new’ part of this hell. When they were building Hell, do you think they started with one big circle and built smaller and smaller circles inside to categorise various levels and kinds of the damned, or did they start with a small circle and expanded outwards through overpopulation and that the categorization of the damned was an epiphenomenon or side-effect of such growth? Is the new bit of hell, the best bit or the worst bit? Is it the Yin or the Yang? And in the heart of the beast it is EVEN WORSE.

De Tham was never one of the world’s great streets, but it was OK.

It was always like Blackpool, Or maybe more like Southend. A street of crappy little shops, bad hotels, not very nice restaurants, hustlers, etc. Nothing special about it. Intensely fake, but old and battered fake. The bar where I hung out is still there, of course, but what does it mean for a bar to still be there? It occupies the same space, it is owned by the same owners, and one (or two) of the girls (Mung, Bung, Hung, Thong, Van, Tit, Shit, Ding, Dang, Dong, Ning, Nang, Nong, Cat, Mat, Rat) still work there: the boring stupid one I didn’t remember, and a shadowy figure, always thin and bossy, who is now much more prominently displayed. A fat little friend has been replaced by an identical clone of herself, but about seven years younger. She is a bit ‘nicer’, but the identical cloniness is deeply disturbing. The pool table is gone, and the name changed. There are three or four hundred customers a day, against the 10 or 12 of yore. I don’t like it very much. I had a conversation with boring forgotten girl: she said, “You have come back” and I said, “Yes.” But, two doors down, there is another story. I didn’t come here for a reason - nothing happens for a reason - but I would like to know what happened to Van, Van of Van Café. I quite fancied Van, and I think she quite fancied me. Westerners and Asian women do not, traditionally, ‘fancy’ each other. They ‘choose’ one another. But when I say, “I think she quite fancied me,” what I really mean is that she thought I was weird. And it’s true. But not very true.

Van’s Café was swept away in the flood. Nothing remains. No waitress clings to the hulk. It is a hell hole of pointless Westerner shafting, a Saigon penny arcade, with more accommodating slots. But life being life, as I wrote the previous paragraph, Van cycled by. On a bike. “Ciao, Jon,” she said, and cycled on, raising her eyebrows without breaking whatever a cyclist has instead of a stride. She definitely thinks I am weird.

So clearly I found somewhere to work, if you call this working. I am officially working from a shiny metal table and plastic chair, in a lane. The whole coming-up-ness of this part of town has taken a couple of lanes, once mere motorcycle parks lined with blue plastic stools and Pho sellers, and rendered them gentrified. They are now motorcycle parks lined with backpacker eateries selling eclectic mixes of shit, and concrete hotels with ceramic interiors. It’s the last place that looks remotely tatty, and remotely tasteful in the street. Saigon Green, very cheap. Smiling waitress, who is only a semi-demi-whore. Find it if you can: two old white men, escaping from young yellow women, and a dashing Indiana Jones type with a lap-top, sweltering Sunday away.

Until the battery ran out, which gave me an excuse to stop writing, get a bit more pissed and career around town being disgusted. It seems I don’t even take Sunday’s off.

If you want electricity, you have to move up a couple of levels of classiness, price, bad taste, bad food and bad service. No matter what you buy here in HCMC, the more you pay, the worse it gets. From my new upmarket power table, there is nothing to do but observe the sewerage as it flows along the streets, or ‘tourists’ as they would call themselves. The backpackers are bored out of their minds. They have no reason to be here, not even the fake reasons they can concoct for being at Angor Wat or Uulaan Baatorr. They are dazed and bemused. They don’t want any more sunglasses. They fear the whores. And they fear the gangs of middle-aged men, perhaps their own fathers amongst them, who populate the whore bars. They don’t want another Lonely Planet, the one they have already is shit. There are some tunnels here. You can visit them and pretend you are a soldier. The real soldiers here are the fathers in the bars. I can’t tell whether this place is a burgeoning centre of a new sex-tourism industry - it certainly wasn’t like this five years ago - or a pathetic backwater. These fathers look more like guys who are trying to save money than the crew of the Starship Enterprise.

There are no depths of moral, physical, social, or olfactory decrepitude to which a man can sink that would leave him unable to get a girlfriend in Saigon. And if he retains even a partial grip on his self-respect, she will look about 14. Maybe even pass for a boy from behind, And who can blame him? We are all adults here. We have been on the internet. We know all too well the horror of the middle-aged, middle-class, middle-european frau which is the alternative back home in Kracow or Nuremberg. They look pretty smug, these guys, and it’s not their most appealing feature.

For fifteen years at the beginning of his life, and about another fifteen in the middle usually, men are totally controlled, manipulated, used, castrated and put to work by women. For the fifteen years in between these periods, and the whole life afterwards, he is, if he wishes to be, completely free of them. The backpackers are still dumb enough to think that they can get sex without being made to pay for it, and the fathers have discovered that by far the cheapest and most satisfactory way of getting sex is this way. This is why it is mainly women who oppose the legalization of prostitution - nothing to do with morality or the welfare of the women concerned - but simply that prostitutes undercut wives to such a degree that uxory becomes unmarketable. Miraculously, groups of these castrati-temporati are here too, accompanied by their female owners and trainers - or ‘families’ are they are sometimes known. These groups consist of all the fears of the backpackers, hatred and/or jealousy for the fathers in the bars, and wonderful eclectic mix of family angst.

How can I explain it to you, dear parents? Adolescent kids do not want to bond with you. You are embarrassing scum. Save your money. The kids are right: this place is a dump and you are an asshole.


http://PLANET-OF-DEATH.com

---