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Published: March 9th 2008
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I love the Smell of Moto Taxi's in the Morning* 03/02/08 - 05/02/08
Hanoi. Shit. I'm still only in Hanoi. I step out the shower and think I'm going to open my eyes and end up back in the desert. The first night in the hotel, it was worse. I'd wake up in the dead of night, and they'd be no dogs barking, no sounds of Indian men snoring....they'd be nothing. I hardly said a word to my room mate until I said "yes" to a beer.
When I was in Goa I just wanted to be back there. When I was in Rajasthan, I just wanted to get back into the bushes and take another shit. I've only been here two days now, waiting for an excursion, hoping for a glimpse of a temple. Every minute I'm getting softer, weaker. And every minute Trung is out there, waiting for me in the old quarter, he gets more numbers. I look around, and walls of the Twin Room in the Youth Hotel close in a little tighter.
In the End, everyone gets everything he wants. I wanted an excursion, and for my sins, they brought me one.
Brought it up to me on a plate like it was fresh towels.
The puppets..........
The puppets...........
They bring me down the stairs into the hotel lobby, and I'm sat down at a table with Trung, Ly and Tick. I can tell Tick is the one in charge. He's from Thailand, and he's wearing an NFL jacket. His favourite team is the 49ers. His type sees a lot of action, and there's no doubt he's a born killer. Trung is the coordinator. I know him by reputation. He coordinated the shit out of a group of rookies back in Saigon, and now he's going to do the same to all of us. Ly is different. Green, like. I don't trust an officer that hasn't seen their share of combat, so I'll be watching her close. She stays by the horn, waiting for the call.
I meet my team. The Scott, the one they call Craig, is from Aberdeen. He boom-boomed too much in Thailand, maybe he'll boom-boom too much in Vietnam. Gregg is from Coventry, a famous team in 'Nam. You look at him and you would never believe he ever downed a B52 in his whole life. Kat, Mrs. Kat, was from some South Scotland shithole**. Marianne was a strange one. Light and space of Vietnam must have really put the zap on her head. Every time she opened her mouth, in was like a wormhole into bi-lingual insanity. Then there was Firmin, the Teacher. It may have been my excursion, but it was sure as shit Teacher's trip.
I was going to the worst place in the old quarter, and I didn't even know it. Trung gave us the dossier on the Canadian. Told us all about the water puppets, how it was some old Vietnamese tradition. Ly got real excited at this point. Eyes near popped out her head. We walked up hundreds of yards of pavement and up the main street like it was a main circuit cable that plugged straight into the Canadian. It was no accident that we were going to bump into each other that night, anymore than being in Hanoi was an accident. There is no way to tell the Canadian's story without telling my own. And if his sick, twisted story is really the confession, then maybe, so is mine...
"We must wet them. We must splash them all. Puppet after puppet, string after string, beady eye after beady eye, tiny fragile features, arm after arm. And they call me a sex fiend. A dangerous paedophile. They lie...I just enjoy a good puppet show. Sweet, innocent fun. I just love to watch as they splash and frolic. Those British. I hate them. They try to sell me tickets with bad seats. How I hate them. Splash me....Splaaash meeeeeeee!"
At first, I thought they'd made a mistake. When I saw him, standing there in the shadows, he just looked like a normal guy, minding his own business. Then, when Craig was going crazy in the night air, running around shooting off his mouth, trying speak fucking Thai, when he could have been in Laos, and waving that spare ticket around like a loon, I knew something was up. He stepped forward out of those shadows, and I looked into his eyes and I knew. He approached slowly, like a cat padding through the jungle. He never took his eyes off Craig, off that goddamn ticket. Sick, fucking Canadian. He pretended as though he wasn't interested, but I knew. He wasn't gonna pay, that was for certain, but he was watching the show tonight, no doubt. Said the seats were bad. The fucking seats. He'd seen this show before, knew every move those puppets made, every splash. Just a few skits about Vietnamese life. Just a few skits, he said.
Inside, the air was thick with French-Canadian sweat. They were going crazy, as the puppets danced and splashed, cheering, laughing, maybe even crying. The Canadian was different. He just sat and stared. Stared straight at the puppets. Watched their every move. Like a hawk. His eyes, hooded, sunken, zombie, black from too many hours staring at the sun, staring up at the ceiling, trying to figure out how to fix that harness that would unlock his ultimate fantasy and turn him into one giant puppet, dooming all of us, sending us to hell.
Someday this show's gonna end. That would be fine with the guys in the group. They weren't looking for anything other than a few temples, maybe a couple of nights in Funky Monkey. Trouble is, I'd already been to the temple on the lake, and I knew it just wasn't worth 3000 dong entrance few. I began to wonder what they really had against the Canadian. It was his fucked up culture, he just needed an encore. Insanity and a weird puppet fetish. There was enough of that shit to go around for everyone.
"You smell that? Do you fucking smell that? Opium, son. Nothing else smells like that. I love the smell of opium first thing in the morning. This one time, we were staying up a hill with minorities. Drank for twelve hours. Smoked shit out of a thuc la. When it was all over, I walked up the stairs. Didn't find a single one of them, not one. The smell, you know that sweet, sickly smell, the whole hut. Smelled like - the Magic Man."
*This blog is dedicated to all the brave souls who laid down their sobriety for the greater good. God bless them, and may they sober up in peace.
**Sorry Kat, don't mean it.
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