Enter the Rave

waiting in this room
as content as i can be
in my safe familiar womb

yet tomorrow slips past me

spinning on a loom
one day this will surely be
my safe familiar tomb

one comfortably uneventful saturday evening in the middle of october, i was, where else, at the cave playing pool with my housemates. sensing someone behind me i turn around, and there's some vietnamese dude looking at me speaking perfect english. that's extraordinary enough for me to straight drop my pool stick, but then he started being like "what's up?" and "remember me?" and acting like he knew me, like we were friends or something. said his name was dave.

now i'll be honest with you here. they all fucking look the same. yeah about half of'em have what appear to be a pair of mammary glands sticking out of their chest but aside from that, i can't tell a single one of them from the other. they all have squished black eyes, straight black hair, no facial or body hair, yellow skin, and they squat and talk like monkeys. and the english name? no help. everyone here's got one. i just met a guy named diamond last night, i shit you not.

but over a few beers this guy reminded me of how we used to go out almost every weekend when he was last in saigon, complete with crazy stories of illicit drug use, courting girls from the back of his motorbike, him getting paid a thousand bucks a month to do nothing, dying his hair orange, and paying prostitutes just to check for so-called "stubs." nothing. he said he used to live in the room right across from mine until he was kicked out for partying too hard (all in perfect english lest i remind you). who? and he said he had even come to my house back in new york a couple times over the summer, and met my parents (who, like me, were amazed at how well he spoke english). so what, my parents are amazed at a lot of things. whatever, he said he liked to party, so after he pinky swore that he wasn't a communist spy, we tentatively became friends again. but it wasn't until a week or two later when someone forced "his medicine" on him that i realized who he actually was: dave the rave.

in the weeks that followed, we reestablished our mutually beneficial collaboration in which he makes the plans for the night and does most of the talking, while i just be american and spend most of the money. (heh... what a sucker.) considering we were a man down without the almighty patty o'nguyen and the city is still on a strictly enforced midnight curfew, the level of rocking-out-with-our-cocks-out (not at the same time) we have attained is totally acceptable. and with a couple more weeks to go, who knows what'll happen.

i'm done working for money, though i promise to work hard recollecting and reflecting on my many untold experiences in saigon, including those in the past 6 weeks. expect plenty of updates from now until i come home.