Chieu Hoi Saloon

Michael Harris

Description

It’s 1992 and three people’s lives are about to collide against the flaming backdrop of the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles. Vietnam vet Harry Hudson is a journalist fleeing his past: the war, a failed marriage, and a fear-ridden childhood. Rootless, he stutters, wrestles with depression, and is aware he’s passed the point at which victim becomes victimizer. He explores the city’s lowest dives, the only places where he feels at home. He meets Mama Thuy, a Vietnamese woman struggling to run a Navy bar in a tough Long Beach neighborhood, and Kelly Crenshaw, an African-American prostitute whose husband is in prison. They give Harry insight that maybe he can do something to change his fate in a gripping story that is both a character study and thriller.

Sujets

• 1992 Los Angeles riots
• Grit
• Thriller

Informations

• Publié par: PM Press
• Date de parution: 15 novembre 2010
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781604864670
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

“Mike Harris’ novel has all the brave force and arresting power of Celine and Dostoevsky in its descent into the depths of human anguish and that peculiar gallantry of the moral soul that is caught up in irrational self-punishment at its own failings. Yet Harris manages an amazing and transforming affirmation—the novel floats above all its pain on pure delight in the variety of the human condition.” JOHN SHANNON, AUTHOR OF THE TAKING OF THE WATERS AND THE JACK LIFFEY MYSTERIES
“In this powerful and compelling first novel, Harris makes roses bloom in the gray underworld of porno shops, bars, and brothels by compassionately revealing the yearning loneliness beneath the grime…” PAULA HUSTON, AUTHOR OF DAUGHTERS OF SONG AND THE HOLY WAY
“The Chieu Hoi Saloon concerns one Harry Hudson, the literary bastard son of David Goodis and Dorothy Hughes. Hardcore and unsparing, the story takes you on a ride with Harry in his bucket of a car and pulls you into his subterranean existence in bright daylight and gloomy shadow. One sweet read.” GARY PHILLIPS, AUTHOR OF THE JOOK, BANGERS AND THE IVAN MONK MYSTERIES
“Michael Harris is one of those rare beings: a natural writer, with insight, sensitivity and enviable talent.” CHARLOTTE VALE ALLEN, AUTHOR OF DADDY’S GIRL AND MOOD INDIGO
switch•blade (swĭch’ blād’) n. a different slice of hardboiled fiction where the dreamers and the schemers, the dispossessed and the damned, and the hobos and the rebels tango at the edge of society.
THE JOOK
GARY PHILLIPS
I-5: A NOVEL OF CRIME, TRANSPORT, AND SEX
SUMMER BRENNER
PIKE
BENJAMIN WHITMER
THE CHIEU HOI SALOON
MICHAEL HARRIS
THE WRONG THING
BARRY GRAHAM
SEND MY LOVE AND A MOLOTOV COCKTAIL:
STORIES OF CRIME, LOVE AND REBELLION
EDITED BY GARY PHILLIPS AND ANDREA GIBBONS
PRUDENCE COULDN’T SWIM
JAMES KILGORE

The Chieu Hoi Saloon By Michael Harris
Copyright © 2010 Michael Harris This edition copyright © 2010 PM Press All Rights Reserved
Published by: PM Press PO Box 23912 Oakland, CA 94623 www.pmpress.org
Cover designed by Brian Bowes Interior design by Courtney Utt/briandesign
ISBN: 978-1-60486-112-9 Library of Congress Control Number: 2010927778 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed in the USA on recycled paper
To my wife, Takako, and my son, George.
And to Charlotte Vale Allen, Sybil Baker, Joan Campbell, Marguerite Costigan, Ezra Greenhouse, my sister Kathleen Harris, Jim Hayes, Wes Hughes, Paula Huston, Ly Thi Pfannenstiel, Gary Phillips, Myrtle Rucker, John Shannon, Marleen Wong and many others without whose help and encouragement this book couldn’t have been written.
This is a work of fiction, and any resemblance between its characters and real people is coincidental. A few physical details are borrowed from the Long Beach Press-Telegram, where I worked from 1979 to 1987, but my imaginary Clarion is not intended to be a portrait of that estimable newspaper. The quotations from 1940s editorials in the Los Angeles Times, where I worked from 1987 to 1995, were copied from that paper’s files. John Ransom’s Andersonville Diary, reprinted by the Berkley Publishing Group in 1994, is a genuine Civil War narrative; quotations from it are verbatim. The various Southern California “dives” in my story all existed, most under different names. None still exists today.
“… the dark plains of American sexual experience where the bison still roam.”
—John Cheever
PART I

A year later, when it was Harry Hudson’s blood on the floor of the Chieu Hoi Saloon, Mama Thuy remembered the first time she’d seen him—a big guy in a tweed jacket, helping Rita and Navy Swede mop somebody else’s blood from around the legs of the pool table.
Rita, a barmaid who just before the fight had ducked into the ladies’ room and done a line, gazed at Mama Thuy dreamily, thinking of the second after one Marine’s cue had hit the other Marine on the left temple. Where the sunburned white skin was so thin you could see the veins through it. Little-boy skin. And the bones underneath were thin, too, Rita had read somewhere. Like tissue paper. The cue had made a hollow sound—though wasn’t a head stuffed with brains and water and shit, without any empty space inside? But what really blew Rita’s mind was that single second, when she stared at the skin where the cue had hit and saw nothing. Not a mark. Just skin. Glowing, perfectly white. Then, when the blood poured out, it seemed to spill from nowhere. Far out, Rita thought. She wanted to tell Mama Thuy about that, but Mama Thuy, coming in at midnight to close the place, wouldn’t have the patience for it, Rita knew. Seen enough bar fights in her time.
So all she said, after the mess had been cleaned up, was “Him.” Rita pointed her chin at the new guy. “Keep an eye on him. He come in here all happy, got himself a new job or somethin’. He was buyin’ drinks for everybody. Then, whoa, all of a sudden he’s cryin’ and shit. Like he’s a whole other person, man. Or crazy.”
Or he’s on something too, Rita thought.

At first, Mama Thuy hardly noticed the new guy. Just the blood—threads and drops of it, and in one place a big red smear on the linoleum, mixed with suds and dirty water. She set her purse down on the bar. “What happen?”
“Couple Marines,” Charlene said at the cash register. “One of ‘em called the other one a faggot.”
“Where they go? Take a taxi? Jesus, turn it down.”
The thump of the jukebox made the base of her skull ache. She worked the remote switch herself, automatically, as she had seven nights a week for the last eight years. Hank Williams Jr., “There’s a Tear in My Beer.” Mama Thuy hated country music, but there was no way to get rid of it, not with her clientele. This song was one of Randy’s favorites, and she checked for him down at the far end. Randy was asleep. Twenty-two years old, mental age about fifteen, sitting on his stool with one pimply cheek flat on the counter, still clutching a half-full glass.
“Wake up! Last call!” she yelled.
“Ron took ‘em to St. Mary’s, Mom,” Rita was saying.
“Hurt bad?”
“Head wound,” Navy Swede said, calm as usual. “Bled all over the place, but he’ll be OK. Figured he’d better go to the emergency room, though, before he heads back to base.”
“Ron was bein’ an asshole again,” Rita said.
“Too much water,” Mama Thuy told the moppers. “You make too much work for yourself.” Six years ago, in between marriages, she had lived with Ron for a month, and that mistake seemed destined to follow her forever. He hung around, looked sad, got drunk and mean, made trouble. “What they do, break another pool cue?” She sighed. “Why me?”
“B.J. was an asshole too,” Charlene said.
“Tell me something new,” Mama Thuy said. “Wake up!” she yelled again at Randy. He groaned and lifted his head, one end of his thin new mustache bent up like a spike. “Rita, you let Randy go to sleep? And Pop, too.” For nobody seemed to have noticed the grey-bearded man in the tattered black pea coat who was snoring at his table in a corner next to the shrine to the Buddha, his head tilted back against the wall. His breath through the tangled hole in his whiskers was poisonous.
Mama Thuy lit two sticks of incense. She thrust them into the forest of burned sticks on the altar, before the little fat golden statue. “Cops come in, we get another ticket,” she told Rita. “All your fault.”
Rita pouted. “Shit, Mom, this fight was goin’ on, how’m I supposed to notice? Randy drinks too much.”
“Pop, I call you a taxi, OK?” Mama Thuy said.
The old man blinked awake, coughed up phlegm, groped for the aluminum crutch beside his chair.
“Then stop serving Randy drinks, if he drinks too much,” she said to Rita. “Where’s your brain?”
Filipinas, she thought, not for the first time. Her friend Kim Lee, who owned a bar in San Diego, had caught a couple of her girls giving customers blow jobs in the back booths. Crazy! Like Rita. She was thirty-seven already—the kind of girl who grew old but never grew up.
Lights on but nobody home.
“It’s not my fault, Mom,” Rita said.
“Then whose fault is it? They give me a ticket, they say my fault and I’m the one has to pay. You not the owner, you not the one responsible. I am.”
She wondered if maybe it was time to fire Rita again. Was she back on cocaine, with her husband Walt’s ship due in next month? Heavy duty. The trouble was, Rita brought in business. Flashed her tits a lot. Little tits, but it didn’t matter. Guys liked her. Not like Charlene, who drove customers away with all her bitching.
Mama Thuy worked swiftly, automatically. She closed the Long Beach Boulevard door first, locking the folding metal screen outside and barring the door itself with a two-by-four. She wiped down the counter with a rag. She collected dirty glasses and ashtrays, filled a sink with hot water and detergent, plunged them in, washed them, set them clinking on the shelves behind the bar.
“Swede,” she said. “Get me three cases of Bud, two cases of Miller, one case of Bud Light. OK, hon?”
Navy Swede, six-four and all muscle, went back into the storeroom. The new guy drifted after him.
“Pop,” Mama Thuy said again. “You want a taxi?”
“Naw, I can make it,” the old man said.
“You sure? I call you one.”
Pop heaved himself slowly up, steadied himself on the edge of the table. He mumbled: “Sure as hell ain’t gonna put it on my tab.”
“I pay if I have to. Don’t want you to get killed, Pop.”
“Only three blocks,” he said.
“Too many crazy people out there.”
The old man hesitated. Wants his hug, Mama Thuy thought. She came out from behind the bar and put her arm gingerly around his waist. Pop stumbled into her—on purpose, she knew