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Snail Flavored Pop Cyclos (or Operation Escargot)
In early autumn of 1994, if you can say that Saigon even has an autumn, I was with my Froggy friend Stéphane Bulckaen and his steady sidekick Mr. Long, the dragon as I called him because his name in Vietnamese meant “dragon”. We were imbibing at Saigon’s fashionable Q Bar. In those earlier days there were very few expatriate bars so the Q Bar was pretty well the mainstay of the expatriate community, at least those who had jobs. Lots of the local Saigon expat community also hung out at the Liberty Hotel which was not too far away downtown on Dong Khoi Street. Lots of those Liberty Hotel patrons were the Vietnam War vets who spilled their hearts and guts with stories of their bygone general issue days and filled the empty space with warm beer on ice. They often found themselves accompanied by an audience of long-time Asia hand wannabes who were basically human gnats attracted to the dim glow the place radiated. The Q Bar had a fairly enclosed section in the back all the way to the right when you came in the entrance and it was that section where I preferred to go. It seemed that the people who went to this part of the bar actually had something to say but it was also the place where you could meet everyone because the pissers were located in that part of the bar. Oh, and the other benefit of being in that section was that if you needed to go to the pisser, well, it was kind of right there. And if the men’s room was full we just used the ladies’ room. Easy weezie!
Anyway, I deviate from the story…!
As I mentioned before, Stéphane was (and is) a Frog. If I am not mistaken he was from Lille, (which I used to dub the “Lille-e-pad”), so he just loved to eat escargot. To common folks that means that he ate snails. God knows why but Stéphane was nuts over the damned things and had long since discovered a place outdoors on the street where they steamed up the slimy creatures each and every night and served up more food poisoning each week than the local hospitals could take care of. Yet for some insane reason Stéphane couldn’t be rested in his psyche if he didn’t eat some nasty snail meat at least once a week. Doing without would simply ruin his weekend. Quite often the poor boy would spend a day or two incapacitated, vomiting wildly and uncontrollably from food poisoning he’d get from eating these nasty gastropods. But later though and to my unfathomed astonishment he’d go right back to eating the mollusks again! When it came to eating snails Stéphane was like a goldfish that swam in circles in his bowl: It was a new experience every time!
Actually, watching Stéphane’s inability to eat for three days after these episodes at one time had me conjuring up the perfect non-fail dieting plan which comprised of eating snails until you puke and starting over with the snails again once the pink color returned to your face. In the end I chucked that idea because I was afraid that I might get hit with a thousand lawsuits from disgruntled dieters who developed bulimia through a psychological aversion to eating any kind of food thereafter. (By the way, didn’t anyone ever tell the French and Vietnamese that the closest relative to a snail is a damned slug? For heaven’s sake, stew on that one that for a while, wontcha?)
To get to the snail gettin’ place we “three musky tiers” would often take whatever was the most readily available transport, whether it be a taxi, motorcycle or cyclo, in order to go to Le Lai street in Saigon’s District One near to the New World Hotel. There were lots a snail eating places in the mid-section on this street, on the right if you are heading toward the river. Most of the time Stéphane and Long would go by themselves to eat snails but sometimes if they thought I needed something to do other than drink beer I would join them in order to witness them suck in those bacteria infested slime things – and to also drink beer during my witness duty. Anyway, the snail hawkers did have cheap beer to drink and young Vietnamese women customers to gawk at, who, like Stéphane, also were crazy about getting their regular self-imposed dose of food poisoning. As such I could be entertained enough at the snail eatin’ place until the time had passed and we three musky tiers were on to other misadventures.
One particular night Stéphane, Long and I decided to take some cyclos from the Q Bar to Le Lai Street so Stéphane and Long could gobble gastropods. Since I haven’t explained before for those who do not know what cyclos are, well, they are slow moving tri-wheeled vehicular death trap contraptions that are like a cross between push bikes, rickshaws and wheel barrows, which are often used to transport people, goods and broken down motorcycles. To drive a cyclo you must have a certificate from the government proving that you are a verifiable idiot, that nobody loves you (including your mother) and that you know how to annoy people and stuff up traffic on busy streets. I was outvoted on the decision to take the cyclos so I decided to get in mine and pretend that I was actually a fourteen year old kid pretending to be an international playboy in a cherry red Lamborghini. (Somehow I could never convince myself subconscious to really by that one…)
After the cyclo drivers had pumped down the road us about halfway to the intended destination I got the idea to do something out of drunkenness and / or pure idiocy: Persuade the cyclo drivers to let us drive the cyclos the rest of the way to the destination. (I must add that since then I have on several occasions seen tourists do the same thing. Whenever I would see this I would say out loud ‘What a cad!’ and stare in disbelief at how anyone with enough money to buy his next meal would want to side on a cyclo and pump it down the road. I somehow have the same reaction in Thai go-go bars when I seen drunken idiot tourists get up on stage and pole dance for a laugh.) To this day I don’t know why I did it. Although we couldn’t see ourselves in my mind’s eye we certainly looked damned stupid.
I have to tell you, no matter the similarity of operation in theory, in reality driving a cyclo was not like simply pumping bicycles around the neighborhood either. First of all, they are damned hard to steer because you steer with handle bars shaped like those of a huge grocery cart. It was worse than steering a battleship on a sheet of ice. You also couldn’t put the pedal to the medal so to speak. It was incredibly hard to get these contraptions to go at a decent clip and if you tried to force the vehicle to go too fast the chain would slip. Anyway, we eventually made it to a spot near enough the snail chomping spot when we finally stopped the cyclos to disembark. At that point some fool hit the idiot button and the cyclos drivers went into action and set to giving us what is known as “the old cyclo shuffle”: The agreed upon price of 15,000 dong had gone up to 50,000 dong.
The locals changing agreed upon prices unilaterally is something every foreigner living in Asia or Africa will have to go through on almost a daily basis. It’s like breathing air. Personally, I’d rather dunk my head in a tub of boiling ox shit than to pay those cheating assed cyclo drivers their revised rates. And of course the cyclo drivers were only trying to hit the two foreigners up for the dough, letting Mr. Long alone. I decided not to fiddle with the harp player for any longer, there was beer to be guzzled, so I laid the prior agreed upon amount for the “ride” we got (15,000 dong) in the seat of my cyclo and started to walk away. And that was enough to set ignorance into vigorous action. The muck brain cyclo driver who owned the cyclo I was in, who incidentally wasn’t quite a third of my size, bolted at me to seize me by the arm and tried to stop me from leaving. At that point, like we say in Arkansas, I hit black ice and went strait up. So my muck brain cyclo driver decided to threaten me with a bit of dazzling homegrown martial arts by striking a pose in the jackass position. Now twice physically threatened by this moron I was forced to “slug” him. And of course, he went down faster than a Mexican submarine.
The next thing any of us knew there were cyclo drivers everywhere and they had we three musky tiers surrounded tighter than a pack of hounds in squirrel season. These cyclo drivers were suddenly brandishing all of the homemade weapons they could find. Out of nowhere came homemade knives, metal bars, ice picks, wooden axe handle clubs and tire tools. Stéphane, though a Frog, didn’t hot foot it but rather assumed a commando defense position and although he had served in the French army I still believe he would have fought – I mean, you need to understand that Stéphane’s day job in those days was flying micro light and ultra light aircraft for tourists in the Vietnamese Central Highlands, which either requires a balance between bravery and lunacy. At the same time I could see from the corner of my eye that Long had also found a metal pipe to swing and was positioned directly behind one of our prime antagonists, ready to knock him into next week. But before another punch could be thrown the Viets, like jackrabbits on the prairie, all went into freeze position. Up the streets came roaring three army jeeps with uniformed commandos, or so I thought, who were carrying AK-47’s. How they were alerted so quickly I have never been able to figure out but nonetheless they broke up the one ring circus going on. They instructed me that they were police, even though they were dressed in greens like soldiers. The police head honcho, a chihuahua looking dasher, dismounted from the lead jeep.
When the chihuahua started barking questions our friends the cyclo drivers couldn’t dare explain the truth that the scuffle started because they had overcharged us for the cyclo ride. Nope. They reached deep into their collective imagination and collectively claimed that we three musky tiers had stolen the rides and one of them was wrecked now and couldn’t be driven anymore. The main complainant was my driver who’d gotten his jaw busted. Muck brain demanded to the police that I pay him a hearty sum of US$ 400 in reparations. “This guy knows what he’s doing,” I thought to myself, “He’s obviously been in this position before.”
See, the police knew that they would be on the receiving end of money if any was going to be changing hands from the foreigner guy to the local new found comrade. So stalling for time I told the cyclo driver to show me where the cyclo was busted. The cyclo driver hunkered down, pointed under the cyclo at the axle in general. I told him to pin point to me exactly where there was any damage that could be seen and he couldn’t. I went through a few more of the cyclo maniacs but none of them could agree where any damage was done. I then had an underling policeman get down to show me where the cyclo was busted. He couldn’t do it either. Having not seen the location where the very first cyclo driver was pointing out the policeman fingered an entirely different spot, the hub on the front right wheel. But because our policeman had found an imaginary spot himself I could immediately and clearly see that the police, no matter what, were going to cooperate with the cyclo hoodlums on this problem. They could smell cash in the sad situation. So I changed my tactics. I had to force the chihuahua’s hand.
I told the chihuahua that I agreed to pay the “ransom” money, er, reparations money…
Smiles went all over all of the cyclo driver’s and police faces. They’d won!
But not so fast…
I agreed to pay the entire US$ 400 not to the cyclo driver but rather directly to the chihuahua on behalf of the cyclo’s owner under the corollary that the cyclo driver could produce the ownership papers immediately and on site to prove that this was indeed his own cyclo! I knew from a neighbor that cyclo drivers had to have these papers on them the same like all Viets were required to have their personal identification on them. The neighbor also told me that most cyclo drivers had their identifications taken by organized criminals who made them pay regular “tithes” and “protection fees” in order to not be put out of business with a broken leg or a bashed up cyclo. I gambled that this screwball didn’t have his paperwork. And the gamble was a winner – the driver couldn’t present any documentation to show that this cyclo even belonged to him.
At that chihuahua barked to his troops and they did what any good Vietnamese policeman would do. They confiscated the cyclo! The chihuahua wasn’t going to leave without someone having to pay him something, and he now had a cyclo for collateral. And although he’d probably rather have hit the big time payday with a foreigner if the chihuahua could take the man’s cyclo it was a sure thing – money in the pocket. The police have to have some dosh to buy their gold watches, you know.
So Stéphane, Long and I got the Hades out of there but this time by taxi, and although I am notorious for troubles with taxi drivers, tonight the taxis were a welcome site.
We went back to the Q Bar and in the back section where I normally went was sitting the Bangkok based noted Canadian author, Christopher G. Moore. I had met him before a few times by chance in the Q Bar in those days. He asked what I was so exited about and so over the course of a few beers I told him the entire cyclo story. In fact I probably told him seven times, each time with greater force and detail.
Fast forward a few years…
I had since moved to Hanoi and an old friend of mine from Texas who I had met when I lived in Seoul, Korea, was visiting and staying at my house. My friend was Don Boring who had worked before for the Atlanta Journal Constitution, UNICEF and a university in Korea. Don was affectionately known to Seoul hashers as “Big Buoy” since he stood 6’7” and weighed like a bloated pony. “Why didn’t you tell me you are in a book?” asked Don. I hadn’t the foggiest idea of what he was talking about. His comment took me aback and made about as much sense a monkey speaking Greek. Then Don handed me a copy of Christopher Moore’s book Comfort Zone and sure enough, my cyclo story was in there, albeit paraphrased a bit by a fictional character. And the character Christopher chose to tell it was a minor player in the book, Charlie from South Carolina who spoke with an accent from another century…
So the moral to all this is, if you want to be in someone else’s book, you need to find someone sick enough to eat slimy snails off the street all the time.
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