4/17/23

 Monday, April 17, 2023

In bed at 9:30, awake at 4:48, and up at 5:05.  Zapping a cup of yesterday's coffee while watching the seconds tick down to zero, thinking of 'like sands through the hourglass, so are the days of our lives' from DOOL.  31℉, high of 37℉, wind W at 17 mph, 11 to 22 mph during the day, gusts up to 36mph, wind chill is 20℉, will range between 18 and 26℉ today, 0.8" of wintery mix in last 24 hours, 0.2" expected today.  Sunrise at 6:06, sunset at 7:36, 13+30.

Springtime in Milwaukee.  Saturday, i.e., 2 days ago, Milwaukee hit 80℉.  This morning I am looking out at snow flurries and a wind chill of 19℉.

Lila.  I'm a bit surprised that I am enjoying this novel as much as I am though I shouldn't be since I've enjoyed Gilead and Home so much.  John Ames was born in 1880 in Kansas but spent 74 of his 76 years in Gilead.  His second wife, Lila, is probably in her 30s.  The time setting for both novels is 1956.  Ames is old but still rather vigorous.  Boughton is old and increasingly feeble, crippled in more ways than one.  Jack Boughton is 43 and Glory is 38.  After reading both Gilead and Home, I became pretty familiar with John Ames, Robert Boughton, Jack Boughton, and his sister Glory Boughton.  Now I'm becoming familiar with Lila.  John Ames is a thoughtful, humble Congregational minister who struggles, usually unsuccessfully, to love his namesake John Ames Boughton, Jack.  Robert Boughton is a not-so-good Presbyterian minister who wants to love and forgive his prodigal son but can't.  He refuses Jack's handshake as Jack is leaving, turning away and saying "Tired of it."  These were his last words to his son.  A question raised by the 2 novels is to what extent the reader is like Ames, and to what extent like Boughton.  And now Lila enters the mix, striking in almost every way, from her kidnapping by Doll as a very young child, to the hardship of her youth and early adulthood before arriving and squatting near Gilead.  She can read but is uneducated, having spent only one year in some grade of elementary school.  Most of her life was spent as an itinerant farmworker, a migrant laborer, or hustling housework.  I need to think of a notion I have of Jack and Lila as Christ figures, in the sense of taking up their crosses and following him and in the sense of Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani.  I also need to think about the ever-lurking but understated significance of racism in the novels, Jack wondering whether he could find peace and a home in Gilead for his Black wife and mixed-race son (not!), the burned-down Black church, no Blacks in Gilead and insensitivity or indifference or even hostility to what was going on in Montgomery, Birmingham, Selma, etc.

From Lila:  "It used to be when they were with Doane and Marcelle and they had to pass through a town, they’d clean up the best they could first, and then they would walk along together, looking straight ahead, as if there could not be one thing in the whole place that would interest them. Town people thought they were better. They all knew that and hated them for it. Doane or Marcelle might go into a store to buy a few things they needed and a little bag of candy or a jar of molasses, but the rest of them just kept walking till they were out in the country again. . . Walking into Gilead, she felt just the way she had felt in those days, except now she was alone. Doane used to say, We ain’t tramps, we ain’t Gypsies, we ain’t wild Indians, when he wanted the children to behave. She asked Doll one time, What are we, then? and Doll had said, We’re just folks. But Lila could tell that wasn’t true, that there was more to it anyway. Why this shame? No one had ever really explained it to her, and she could never explain it to herself."

Lila has a feral quality.  It comes from her vulnerability.  The only person who loves her is Doll, who also has and teaches a constant need to trust no one, especially men.  Like Jack Boughton, she is a loner but unlike him, her separateness is defensive whereas Jack seems to have gone out of his way to wrong others. Reverend Ames suspects it comes from a meanness in his character.  Reverend Boughton thinks it comes from an essential loneliness in him.  In bot Gilead and Home, she is depicted as kind of a simply good-hearted middle-aged woman.  In Lila we learn there is nothing simple about her.

WaPo: Fiscal crisis nears as McCarthy takes debt ceiling plan to Wall Street: The House speaker is set to outline the party’s new proposal at the New York Stock Exchange, more than a decade after a similar GOP-led standoff hammered U.S. markets

From Blazing Saddles:

[the Johnsons load their guns and point them at Bart. Bart then points his own pistol at his head]

Bart: [low voice] Hold it! Next man makes a move, the nigger gets it!

Olson Johnson: Hold it, men. He's not bluffing.

Dr. Sam Johnson: Listen to him, men. He's just crazy enough to do it!

Bart: [low voice] Drop it! Or I swear I'll blow this nigger's head all over this town!

Bart: [high-pitched voice] Oh, lo'dy, lo'd, he's desp'it! Do what he sayyyy, do what he sayyyy!

[townspeople drop their guns; Bart jams the gun into his neck and drags himself through the crowd towards the station]

Harriet Johnson: Isn't anybody going to help that poor man?

Dr. Sam Johnson: Hush, Harriet! That's a sure way to get him killed!

Bart: [high-pitched voice] Oooh! He'p me, he'p me! Somebody he'p me! He'p me! He'p me! He'p me!

Bart: [low voice] Shut up!

[Bart places his hand over his own mouth, then drags himself through the door into his office]

My Detachment by Tracy Kidder.  One of the chapters in this Vietnam-centered memoir is "R&R" in which Kidder describes his time in Singapore, his sexual experiences with Malaysian prostitutes, and which reminds me of course of my R&R week in Bangkok, Thailand which I wrote about in my own memoir.  I don't know quite what to think of Kidder's narrative.  It was written decades after he served in Vietnam but he reports verbatim conversations so how much is based on real memories and how much is constructed long after the fact can't be known.  Moreover, I'm struck by the ease and the cador with which Kidder reports his use of prostitutes.  My Catholic fear of all things sexual stayed with me in Vietnam and it was shored up by fear of STDs, or as it was known then, VD, 'the black syph," as I wrote in my memoir:

"My other trip out of the country was a Rest and Recreation trip to Bangkok.  R&R trips did not begin until some months after I arrived in Vietnam after President Johnson decided that we were in the conflict for the long haul.  R&R destinations were added a few at a time:  Hong Kong and Manila at first, then Bangkok, Penang, and eventually Taipei, Japan, and Australia.  When I became eligible for R&R, after 6 or 7 months “in country,” I had a choice of Hong Kong, the Philippines, or Bangkok, my destination of choice.  R&R leaves were for 5 days, but that could be extended day-by-day if there were no space available for the return trip to Vietnam.  Therein lies the unusual story of my guided tour of Bangkok brothels.

In January or February of 1966, I flew from DaNang to Bangkok on an Air Force transport plane with a planeload of Marines, airmen, and a few soldiers and sailors.  There was a gaggle of taxi drivers who met our incoming plane with offers of exclusive taxi service for the entire 5 days of our R&R.  The drivers were as much personal tour guides as chauffeurs.   Most of us servicemen had money to burn since there was little to spend our pay on in Vietnam and goods (booze) and services (haircuts and mamasans who did laundry and swept our tents) were inexpensive in any event.  I hired my driver/tour guide who took me to the small hotel I was staying in where I started my R&R by taking a nap.  It was great to be in a real room with a real private bathroom and a real mattress on the bed and no need for mosquito netting.  I slept until my driver returned at the time we had agreed.  He told me that his last client, whom he had deposited at the airport before picking me up, had been unable to obtain a flight back to Vietnam.  Would I mind sharing the taxi with his previous client for a night?  I said that would be fine.  I of course did not know a soul in Bangkok and was happy to have someone to talk to on that first night.

The previous client turned out to be an Army doctor stationed at the big base in Nha Trang, between DaNang and Saigon.  We had dinner together and drank and schmoozed and got along well.  He told me about the medical facility at Nha Trang and I told him something about I Corps.  In the course of the evening, I have no recollection of how the subject arose, he told me that he was a virgin.  He was 27 years old and unmarried.  He had come to Bangkok intending to have his first experience of sexual intimacy (in a manner of speaking) but had not succeeded.  He wanted to try again that evening.  I think the fact that he had someone with him – me – stiffened his resolve (no pun intended.)  I wasn’t in the market for the services he desired (oh, those impure thoughts and impure deeds!)  but accompanied him as the driver/tour guide took us from brothel to brothel in the red-light districts of Bangkok.  As with my arrival at Chu Lai and my encounter with the killer barber and Chinese assassin in DaNang, I failed the dauntless test.  The driver took us down dark streets and alleys and into dimly lit bordellos where he spoke Thai to the Madame.  It was creepy and a little scary.  I was no more experienced in this kind of adventure than the virginal doctor.   The doctor was clearly not eager to engage any of the women who came forward for his inspection, but after a number of stops, he finally took a young woman back to the hotel where we were staying.  I bid him adieu at the hotel and went to another bar or nightclub with the taxi driver.  I knocked on the doctor’s door when I got back to the hotel.  He said he had company and would see me in the morning.  The next morning, he came down to breakfast while I was in the dining room, and sat with me.  “Well?”  I said.  “No go,” he said, “we talked all night.  She is very nice.”  The driver took him back to the airport after breakfast where he caught a plane back to Nha Trang, his virtue intact.

I cannot place too much emphasis on notions of virtue or moral purity in describing this strange night.  Bangkok was a commercial sex center even in early 1966.  Every R&R port was, or became, a sex center.  All those American servicemen with all that money and pent-up hormones and greater or lesser fears of dying sure can disrupt a local economy and corrupt a culture.  Prostitution thrived in all the R&R ports as did the drug trade and trafficking in crude pornography.  There was, however, a rumor afoot that servicemen were being infected with a strain of venereal disease that was highly resistant to antibiotics and highly destructive of the structural integrity of the male organ.  The not-so-funny jokes were that if you caught ‘the black syph,’ “you and your _____ [insert any of hundreds of slang terms ‘the black syph,’ “you and your _____ [insert any of hundreds of slang terms for penis] will rotate back to the states in separate aircraft” or “You’ll be able to take your [whatever] back in its own box.”  Not that there were lots of opportunities for sexual adventures in Vietnam, but I didn’t know any officers, almost all of whom were married and older than the enlisted troops,  who indulged in that kind of activity before DaNang was placed off-limits for American servicemen.  Religious sensibilities and marital vows played some roles, but so did fear of the notorious “black syph.”