Just as soon as I turned away, trying to avoid an awkward and potentially dangerous situation—trying to “de-escalate,” as my VA shrink says—Timmy calls my name and says he wants to introduce me to his “good friend.”
I was in a tough fucking situation there. The scent of nuoc mam in my nose is like pressing the button that launches a nuclear warhead, and I knew it. But I also really loved this spin class, and gays can be super touchy when it comes to social etiquette. If I walked away, I couldn’t exactly call Timmy later and say “I was afraid I’d kill your gook friend who smelled like nuoc mam.” No one is going to understand and condone that sentence unless they were in the Vietnam jungle back in the sixties. And certainly not Timmy, who has thrown people out of his class permanently for walking in thirty seconds late. You do not fuck with Timmy once you “make the commitment” to be in his “spinning family.” That room full of spin bikes is his domain. Where he gets to be God, and I respect that. I had made the commitment.
The last time I stopped going to spin class, I gained twenty pounds and had a heart attack, which forced me to give the thieving doctors big-time money, so I couldn’t afford to even accidentally insult Timmy, who was literally keeping me alive at that point in my life.
All of this led to me trying to hold my breath as I walked back into the spinning room, but of course, eventually I needed more air.
I could still smell traces of nuoc mam, but the scent was much fainter, which sort of disproved my theory about it being the gook whose pores were venting that vile fish sauce.
“David,” Timmy said, “I’d like you to meet my good friend Sue Wilkerson. Sue, this is David Granger.”
Sue stuck out her little yellow hand, and because of my respect for Gay Timmy I shook it. As our hands went up and down in between us, I got a whiff of her. I braced myself for a violent outburst, but there was no nuoc mam in the air. Instead, I got a nose full of vanilla with maybe a hint of lavender.
“You smell surprisingly nice,” I said.
“Surprisingly?” Timmy said, in a way that let me know I had violated one of his many secret homo rules. An agitated gay is a lot like a king cobra rising up, flaring its hood, and hissing at you. Yes, the cobra can kill you. But the dramatic reaction is just a warning, and there is never a problem if you back down. Gays are peaceful by nature, and I had learned this long ago.
So I said to Timmy, “After an intense workout, I always stink like shit.” And then to Sue I said, “I can see you’re Vietnamese.”
“I am,” she said. “And I’m impressed. Most Americans think every Asian person is Chinese.”
“Yeah, well, I’m not a fucking racist,” I told her, “and I spent some time in Vietnam. A few decades back. Before you were born. And today’s average American civilian is a moron anyway.”
Sue laughed in this confident and easy way that I immediately liked, and then she told me that her father was a Vietnam vet.
So I said, “I hope he wasn’t Vietcong.”
But it turns out her father was US Army and white. She had been adopted. So I immediately told her to thank her father for his service, on my behalf.
“I’m sure he’ll thank you for yours too,” she said. Letting me know Timmy had already told her I was a veteran, just like her father.
Timmy chimed in here and said, “David, you should meet Sue’s dad. We’ll have you all over for dinner. How does that sound?”
I don’t know if you have ever gone to a gay dinner party, but let me tell you something—they are intense and last for fucking ever. I always end up taking too many cigarette breaks outside alone, and I often have to leave early because trying to keep up with lively gay dinner-party conversation makes me so fucking tired. On the plus side, I always enjoy speaking with my fellow Vietnam veterans, and this Sue Wilkerson had me curious.
This next statement will piss off the liberals for sure, but there is a big difference between a gook and a genetically Vietnamese woman raised here in the United States of America by a US Army veteran. Sue is as American as can be. Just like I’m not Irish or German or English, even though my Irish, German, and English ancestors passed down their genes to me. When you are raised in the USA and act like it, you are American, which makes you the best type of person in the entire world.
I’ve often wondered exactly what spin class attendee had eaten nuoc mam on the day that I met Sue Wilkerson. The rest of the people in that class were white, which probably meant that the nuoc mam eater had dined at a trendy Vietnamese restaurant prior to entering Gay Timmy’s domain.
I wondered if a Caucasian could actually enjoy nuoc mam. Was that even fucking possible? I was betting no, because of the genes gooks have, which make their tongues different than ours. But I never did find out the answer to that little mystery, because I wasn’t about to conduct a fucking survey. There was no good way to explain to the entire spin class why I wanted to know who was eating nuoc mam without getting into everything I’m telling you here, which is not exactly for the ears of the general public, to say the fucking least.
Anyway, Timmy and Johnny had that dinner party. Alan and I hit it off big-time, as you might imagine we would. He was a smoker too. Had downgraded to Marlboro Lights, just like me, but unlike me, he still had his lucky Zippo from the war, which was inscribed with the same exact words that were on my lucky lighter, which I lost somehow when I went rogue with Tao. It was a pretty common saying back in Vietnam, so the odds of us having the same Zippo weren’t that amazing, but even still, the match was good enough for me. Here’s the little Zippo-size poem:
WE ARE THE
UNWILLING
LED BY THE
UNQUALIFIED
DOING THE
UNECESSARY
FOR THE
UNGRATEFUL
Once I saw that lighter, I knew Alan was a true brother. He understood. And he became one of my closest friends. All because two homos were thoughtful enough to throw a dinner party for veterans.
And the more I saw of Alan, the more I saw of Sue, because she and her father were close. She started arranging outings for their family and me—fishing trips, weekend getaways, target practice at the gun range, stuff like that—and it all seemed completely normal. We also started eating a lot of meals together—Sue, Alan, his wife, and me. I didn’t think too much about any of this until one night when I was smoking my last cigarette of the day on an Ocean City front porch, under a green awning attached to the house we had rented a few blocks away from the beach. Sue came outside and just started talking about how I made her father feel comfortable, and how she had never seen him so at ease in her entire life.
I told her combat veterans can only ever really trust other combat veterans.