Drunken Love, Que Son [jenna bush book club TXT] 📗

artful, and he especially loved to listen to music when he was high on marijuana.

 

Writing was another of Adam's passions. He wrote like a maniac. Notebook after notebook. He wrote about the pain of becoming an adult. He stayed up all night to write. Then he threw them all out to start over again. One night he threw all of his notebooks into the river and had no regret.

 

For a time, Adam walked every night through the streets of the city wanting to commit suicide. And he actually did it. He was insane. He was crazy. One night, he took a dose of mercury on the advise of a friend then went to bed and waited for death. He waited and waited then fell asleep and the next morning when the sun hit him in the face he opened his eyes to find that he was still alive. He was disappointed and wondered what had gone wrong. One beautiful morning a few months later, he tried to hang himself. But as his neck went into the loop and as he tightened the noose, it was painful, so he stopped. Then he went out and drank until he became a raving lunatic. And he was seventeen years old.

 

Alcohol was easily available and he drank all the booze there was to drink. But still he couldn't get rid of the pain of being alive. His parents were concerned about him. His father once suggested that he be committed to a mental hospital. But he objected, terrified at the idea of being seen as mentally ill. His father later dropped the idea.

 

Adam remembered that the country lied at the foot of a range called "Long Mountains," and the mountains extended into the sea. The country was in the tropical region, the climate was hot all year round; and in the central part of the country where Da Nang was, it rained in October and November and sometimes it got cold. But Adam loved the dry season because he liked hot weather. During the summers, every night he went to bed and the next morning he woke up sweating. Sometimes he had coma sleep if he slept during the day. When the coma took over him, Adam felt like the weight of the whole earth was coming down on him and he screamed in terror but made no sound and he used all his strength to shake himself out of the nightmare but couldn’t move a muscle. He thought he was going to die. Then all of a sudden he woke up, stunned, and dared not sleep again.

 

The region's climate was not monotonous because even when the weather was the most dry, the rain would fall after a long drought and things would become alive again. In the rainy seasons, the sky was always dark and the rain was relentless. The noise that the rain made on the tin roofs was thunderous. The river that ran through the city swelled and big waves bounced up and down, crashing against the banks. During those times Adam would put on his raincoat and walk to the river and sit on the bench and watch the dark and violent river. It was like the end of the world…given the dark mood he was in at that time. On occasions he would walk to the sea and look out into the distance and at the powerful walls of water that slammed furiously onto the shore. This image often appeared in his dreams after he settled in America. Sometimes he dreamed whole towns and villages being washed away by these giant waves.

 

Adam often disappeared from home for days at a time. When restlessness hit, he would get up early to get ready for the trip. He might have done all the preparation the night before: his backpack was packed, nice and ready. But then, he could not sleep very well. He closed his eyes and drifted in and out of dreams. When dawn finally arrived, he got up and washed himself, put his clothes on and sat waiting for the sky to brighten up. All the while, his heart was beating hard, full of expectation of what he might encounter on the road. Then he walked to the bus station on the edge of the city, bought his ticket, and sat in a small café and had a black coffee and waited for the time to depart. Life looked very interesting during those moments. For Adam, it was a time of adventures, of aimless wandering to strange corners of the land, sometimes alone, sometimes with friends. And while he was running away, Adam's father and mother sat home and worried about him. On one of those wanderings he was arrested together with a friend by the police while they were walking on the road late at night. He had no travel permit--a serious violation of law. The whole of Viet Nam, just after liberation, then was in a state of siege and everyone was paranoia, especially the police who saw enemies everywhere they looked. That night Adam was thrown in jail. He was kept in a container for two days without food in a village before being transferred to a nearby town's prison.

 

It was while in prison for the first time that he knew what masturbation was. Guys sleeping near him would wake up in the middle of the night and jerk off and he watched them out of the corners of his eyes and understood what they were doing. They moaned with pleasure while they were doing that.

 

One month after being thrown in jail his father found out where he was and got him out after bribing the jailers. He was glad to be home again, feeling kind of special when his mother and father treated him with more care and attention than before and pleaded to him not to run away again. "Your mother prayed everyday for your safe return, son," his father said, "and I had to run all over from town to town looking for you." That was Adam in his late teen years. And when he was not traveling, he would lock himself in his room and read all the philosophies and fictions and poetry he could find. And he wrote his journals, all of which were now food for the fish in the river.

 

Adam remembered those miserable long train rides that he made frequently back then. At that time the country was in a deep economic pit. Everyone was dirt poor. There were no jobs. So people took to the railroad to buy and sell whatever that might make a profit. Adam was along for the ride but his situation was different: he was running away from home, trying to escape the desperation of his spirit, the hopelessness he felt, the dead end of his life. He was a teenager in crisis, in growing pain. So often he was on one of those trains where human miseries concentrated. The train was always packed to the max with people and merchandise. Some people could sit, if they were lucky to find a seat, but most had to stand and everyone was on top of one another. The stench was powerful, mixed with the screaming and yelling every time the train pulled into a station and people tried to get on and get off. All took place in the heat of the summer or in the drenching rain of the monsoon. He usually rode on the roof of the train with hundreds of other people. It felt better up there. And except for the danger of being shaken and thrown off by the violent movements of the train and of being smashed against the overhead steel bars of a bridge, riding on the roof was very enjoyable because he had the winds, the sky and the spectacular scenery in full view.

 

One night on one of those runaways he was lying on the roof of the train next to a strange girl. As it got colder late in the night Adam used his raincoat to cover himself--and the girl. It was dark and he could not see clearly the girl's face but it did not matter because it was the first time he was body to body with a girl in a horizontal position and he was excited. They never said a word. And under the cover of the raincoat and darkness, he explored her body. And she let him…or rather she had no reactions. Adam’s hands nervously went up and down over her breasts, her belly, her thighs but he was too afraid to touch her between the legs, all in silence and in the steady rhythm of the train. Then he fell asleep. When the morning came he looked at the girl and she was pretty and had dark skin and looked like a peasant girl. Adam did not feel embarrassed. The girl glanced at him once or twice then sat looking into the distance but never said a word. He did not say anything either.

 

One evening a friend asked if he had ever fucked. He said no. The friend said he himself had never fucked either but dared not and asked Adam if he dare to fuck, and if he dared, the friend would pay for the fuck if Adam would just let him watch. Adam agreed, and they went looking for a prostitute. He was greatly excited, and his heart beat faster and faster as they approached the corner where they knew streetwalkers liked to hang out. And under a street lamp that was too weak to dispel the darkness, they saw a female figure walking slowly in front of them, and every minute or so the figure turned her head and looked quickly at them. They knew they had spotted a prostitute. She was tall, slim, her hairs flew down her shoulders and she wore a pair of blue silk pajama. After letting them trail her for about five minutes, she suddenly stopped under a tree where it was dark, then she turned around to face him and his friend. He came close to her and asked how much, his voice trembled, and his heart beat even harder. She had a beautiful but sad face, and the sadness was distinctively clear in her eyes. The woman said her price, and also said the place to fuck would be a room she rented for things like this not far from here, near the river.

 

Then the three of them walked. He strolled close to the woman and the scent of her perfume fascinated him. It was almost midnight and the streets were deserted. Before reaching the riverbank, they turned into a small street, more like a lane than a street; and at the middle of the lane, the woman stopped in front of a two-story building that looked like a warehouse and in a small voice called out someone's name. She called three or four times, and moments later, the door silently opened by someone behind and the three of them walked quietly in. Adam was going to see a naked female body, and he was really going to fuck for real, not masturbate. The person who opened the door for them was a young man, not much older than him, who disappeared after closing the door after them. It was dark and hot inside the house, and the air stood still. The woman led the way, walking up a wooden staircase that cracked and groaned under their steps. Then she entered a room and he followed her in. She closed the door, but not completely, because Adam had told her that his friend would be allowed to watch. She took off her pajama, and totally naked, lied down on the bed and asked him to do the same. He stripped and sat down on the edge of the bed and looked intensely at body of the prostitute that was spreading silently under