This is a work of fiction. Names of characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination and are used fictitiously; any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locations is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2015 by Dennis Milholland – All rights reserved. Other than for private, not-for-profit use, no part of this work may be reproduced, transmitted or stored in any form or by any means, other than that intended by the author, without written permission from the copyright holder.

Careful! This is a work of fiction containing graphic descriptions of sex between males and critiques of religion and governments. And last but not least, Nifty would like your donations.

Farewell, Uncle Ho

by Dennis Milholland

questions and comments are welcome. www.milholland.eu / dennis@milholland.eu

Chapter 3

"Are you feeling calm enough to go for a walk?" I nod, and Jules kisses me on the cheek, takes me by the hand and leads me out the security door, through the courtyard that we share with the shipping company and wholesaler who supplies our wines and brandies, passing by Jules' glossy, black, 1955 Citroën Traction Avant, with front-wheel drive, which always reminds me of a gangster's sedan, and out the service entrance onto the side street.

We turn left, across from the side of the domed, turn-of-the-century Saigon Palace Hotel, which hasn't been used as a hotel in years and is in need of a coat of paint. But it was the original Grand Hotel in Saigon.

At first, when coming onto Tu-Do Street, I can't make out any signs of damage to the redone, toned-down, now bombed, Riviera-style Majestic Hotel, aside from debris on the pavement and the stench. But walking almost a block down toward the river, I look up to the top of the five-storey building. I now spot it at once; part of the roof garden and restaurant plus most of the ballroom-conference facility are missing, and the smell still emanates from the burned building as a result of the rocket attack the day before yesterday, even though we've had torrential rains in the meantime. Appropriately, the monsoons have arrived early, this year.

Ice-cold irony runs through my veins, making me shiver, despite the heat. The vast Parisian Majestic Hotel, in which the German High Command had their headquarters during the Second World War, had also been the site of Henry Kissinger's Paris Peace Talks. That hotel's namesake in Saigon, however, had been rocketed because of similar peace talks. Negotiations about Vietnam are definitively over, no longer an option. Surrender is the only thing left.

Due to the tip-off from our faithful Wade Chung about the National Liberation Front's wanting to bomb the site of these peace negotiations, to set the tone, so to speak, we took the twins to Yvette's and have been keeping all the shutters, facing the once well-visited hotel shut and the windows open, so the glass would not be blown out by the blast. As you can imagine, we were jolted out of our sleep at around four in the morning. Some dishes and glasses fell off the draining board in the kitchen downstairs, caused by the jolt directly across the street; we had to have wild, frantic sex to return to any semblance of sleep. But we knew we were safe because Monsieur P.B. de Montreuil, from 214, Boulevard Paul Bert, Saïgon, made good on his promise. He and his armored shutters will always have a special place in my heart.

Now, looking down, I notice the damage to the asphalt street the tank treads have caused. Focusing on the street, I spot two soggy business cards in the paving-stone gutter outside the entrance to Jules' tobacco shop. I pick them up, since the blast of the attack must have blown them outside. Uneasiness grips me as I read: Henri Landry et fils, Importateurs de tabac brut et de tabacs manufacturés, 2, rue Catinat, Saïgon. Jules never had other business cards printed. I still don't know, after all these years, whether it's because he still thinks of himself as '& Son', or whether it's because he refuses to call rue Catinat, Tu-Do Street.

My throat tightens as I finally notice panicked people trying to fill a ship beyond capacity, which is berthed on the quay in front of our home. I hadn't noticed them before because they are so quiet, literally trying to stowaway on an already overly full ship. My heart goes out to them because the boat's engine has been broken for over a month, and it's docked for repairs, which now may never happen.

Another surge of emotion threatens to augment my uneasiness, induced by dope and sleep deprivation, as I quickly glance a couple of blocks down the Saigon River to the spot where the now darkened floating restaurant, My Canh, anchors. There was yet another bomb blast and a claymore mine set off in this senseless war that shook Jules' life, leaving him orphaned and an only child at the age of 19.

Because the place had the best ice cream and cake in town, aside from Givral, his parents had taken his little sister to the floating restaurant to celebrate her 8th birthday, while Jules tended shop. It was at 8:15 in the evening of June 25th, 1965, the point in time from which they would never return, just two blocks from where Jules was locking up for the night and two years and almost a month before we met. I feel guilty because I wasn't there for him then, when he had to go to the city morgue to identify their mutilated bodies.

I'm fighting back yet another surge of vengeful sadness but manage to keep control as I approach my man who is now standing in front of number 16, part of the Saigon Palace Building, which is the airline's office, giving me a concerned look from under the TWA sign, hanging from the concrete awning.

The sign, above Jules' head, triggers hallucinatory horrors, remembering the air disaster, just before Christmas of 1960, in which a cousin of mine perished, where a TWA super constellation, Star of Sicily, collided with another plane to crash onto Staten Island, leaving bodies of passengers, along with my cousin’s, hanging from trees in New Dorp not far from Gordon's house, my last home of record, just like the ones once hanging in the jungles here. I shudder with a cold chill, when I imagine to see them hanging from the trees on Tu-Do Street. Their tongues thick, eyes bulging, as if they had been hanged in execution.

Jules shakes me hard, slapping my shoulder. Snapping me back to now, I absentmindedly hand him the soppy business cards, feeling as if I had to apologize. "The blast must have blown these out of the shop through the vents." Without looking, he wads them up and pitches them onto the street next to the fresh, open wounds caused by tank tracks. His look of concern is stern, my feeling of embarrassment is overwhelming.

"I'm sorry, Jules; I'm feeling fuzzy again." He nods, squeezes my shoulder and motions up the street.

The canopy of tamarind trees, arching high-above Tu-Do a bit further up from where we now are, past the empty, evacuated Eden Roc hotel, which used to be teaming with what were known as rear echelon mother fuckers, envelope the street in shrouded darkness, starting at the ominously deserted, park-like, kindergarten playground. The trees add more gloom to the fact that there are no lights on in the once glamorous shopping street, where the fashion of Coco Chanel was the norm, in what was the Pearl of the Orient, the original capital of French Indochina. A noble title, which it lost when the French moved the capital to Hanoi. Apparently, history does repeat itself. And now all that is left of the Pearl, is an illusion, a tarnished trinket, a crumbling bauble.

In the more than seven years that I've lived with Jules above his still glamorous shops in our three-storey, pati-ochre-colored, early-colonial home at the lower end of Tu-Do Street, I've watched the remaining French slowly winding down their businesses, possibly taking them elsewhere, possibly just giving up. The ever increasing amount of empty, elegant French property was then occupied by garish night clubs, less expensive restaurants, and American entrepreneurs and entertainers out for fun, travel, and adventure, changing the lingua franca from Metropolitan French to American English, the ambiance from that of sweet, expensive perfumes to that of bitter, stale beer and acrid vomit lingering in the gutters, and the once sedate, narrow street into a mini Las-Vegas strip, alight with neon signs in the predominant color of red.

Today, Wednesday, April 30th, however, they'll get their ultimate rush. That is, of course, if they're still here and/or still watching or even still alive. For endless hours now, the onetime American Forces Vietnam Radio, presently calling itself American Radio Service, given that the troops have officially been gone since '73, has been broadcasting the first eight bars of White Christmas, which get you to hearing 'sleigh bells in the snow' on a continuous loop since 11:00 in the morning of the 29th, with someone who is not Bing Crosby driving everyone nuts. We've just had a major overdose of every fucking thing white. And the Americans complained about the Viet Cong's having used psychological warfare.

Although, I'm now quite sure that the naïve, or possibly even cynical white guys in charge of evacuation didn't intend this choice of song to be psychological warfare, but for many people of South Vietnam, it certainly is. It's the last really brutal kick in the face for these people. They are being abandoned by a predominantly white country, all the lily-white politicians of which promised never to leave them, to never turn them over to the 'communists from the North. Just ask the Montagnards of the Central Highlands how their American friends hung them out to dry. Nonetheless, yesterday and on into today, White Christmas is the signal for the final evacuation of all, again predominantly white, Americans, along with their favorite Vietnamese bar girls and some diplomats of friendly countries.

Even at this last moment, they're lying. Graham Martin, the American ambassador appeared on Saigon television, swearing to stay, not to abandon the Vietnamese people, inviting anyone to go by his residence to see that his bags are not packed. Everybody knows he's lying; everybody knows what it means. It means that white guys will be your friends until they can no longer twist things to their own advantage. And after that, you're on your own.

How do I know this? I grew up in precisely that predominantly white society. However, I did wonder briefly this morning about how many, other than me, deliberately missed the last chopper out.

Obviously, still staying very much alert and more than just somewhat anxious, we continue up the street in direction of the Opera House, where there was massive fighting, to judge by the noise yesterday from that direction, after the one-week-wonder, President Huong, had resigned. Up until sometime today, the Opera had served as the South-Vietnamese National Assembly.

After this afternoon, I suppose that there might well be legitimate theatrical productions and concerts once again in the house, which vaguely resembles the Petit Palais in Paris and was built about the same time. The resemblance, of course, would be considerably stronger had the Japanese troops not made off with parts of the façade and the copper roof during their Second-World-War occupational extravaganza. Come to think of it, though, and considering that it can now be used as a theater once again and taking the general atmosphere here at the moment into consideration, a performance of something slightly suicidal from Gustav Mahler might be appropriate.