Thang Nguyen 555

There is nothing for you here but headache and heartache.

It’s a dream, with purgatory, hellish fire and people hurting people (to hit back is to hurt yourself).

Run Be Run.

One pharmacist student – a Duc – took notice. He said, “hop in”. We then rode to the ping pong hall for a quick set. That’s Cinema Paradiso and House of D mixing together. Coming of age, growing old and growing pain.

Robin Williams my neighbor Duc was not. But stocky, handsome and empathic, they both were.

Without that apprenticeship with more mature male outside the family, Duc the pharmacist or Duc the priest, I wouldn’t know how to reciprocate and return the favor, kindness for kindness an unbroken chain e.g. stepdaughter or that unaccompanied shirtless refugee boy in Jubilee camp.

In my neighborhood, childhood was pre-ordained. After all, there were only 7 playgrounds for a city of 3 million in 67. Sweaty and shirtless crowd played audience to the burning monk and burning torches through and through Autumn festival. One drama after the next. Animal factory entertainment menu without the remote control or parental control in pre-TV and pre- TikTok times.

Then at my first dance when it’s my turn to be up on stage for “Love me with all your heart”, a slow song I was about to dedicate to my date, only to see her dance with her x-boyfriend. Only headache and headache. To self-assure and to finish out the song, I assumed she’d done it out of politeness.

Run Be run. There is nothing for you here, not even a date at a dance of which you yourselves were organizing committee chair and slow-song soloist (after Black Sabbath’s Paranoid).

There wasn’t a supper on time, a school picnic cookout without sand in dessert, like a character in Hanoi Hilton. Fun? yes. But plenty of grief. Broken bike broken arm. Broken home and disappearing country, the like of East Germany. Run Be run.

Then come back a man. Let Theme from Cinema Paradiso fade in to evoke a sense of nostalgia. No now-blind mentor (Cinema Paradiso), nor your mentally challenged neighbor (House of D) nor your alley bully (dead from OD).

The old tomb at my outdoor Cinema Purgatory, unlike drive–in theatre in California, often filled with parked cars and kids making out – all bulldozed.

The past, once seemed insurmountable, now shrinks and contracts. Its fear obviously overinflated. Of course you survive, by trial and error, on course for collapse or compromise. Wrecking ball and course correction like “Rabbit at rest”, final installment of Updike’s trilogy.

Your story is contained in and a subset of humanity story at large. So personal, yet so universal. See, you live in a world that is not set up or prepared for perfection. That’s why they are constantly busy quantifying and measuring at scale e.g. marginal cost and median income. You of course knew that all along.

Don’t look back, or else, like Lot’s wife (of Sodom), you may turn salt pillar.

Regret not what you cannot keep even when they kept the monk’s char for further protest impact via display case at Xa Loi pagoda the day after Malcom Browne took that photo that was seen around the world. You yourself did not miss the live matinee show along with that same Saigon throng who moved on to another exhibition some years later at the VUS when the US got more deeply involved in the quagmire. Moon rock was for diplomatic soft power on top of tons of bomb and defoliate agent.

No wonder, in a menu of drama, the Logos book exhibition was a rare thing. So impressed with the global brotherhood (the international makeup of the crew), you went on a summer of volunteer in W Africa on the Doulos, its successor, which subsequently saw terrorist grenade tossed on board in the Philippines.

So, run Be run. Come back after seeing from all sides with Waymo-360-degrees turn. There isn’t perfection here, nor anywhere. Just time and geography, blood and illusion without a mentor nor a ping pong game. No one is there to save those balled-up pages torn from the Bible you once tossed out – as in House of D. or a gag reel as gift (Cinema Paradiso).

Those older mentors/neighbors shouldered all the pedaling on three or two wheelers, with younger kids like yourself in tow. Lonely unsupervised kids in a neighborhood, where millions of ways could have gone wrong: suicide, mass shooting and overdose.

On a dare, I would have done anything e.g. jump, kick and miss the punching board. The summer of my quarantine from a broken Hapkido arm saw no one learn English or ponder about war-preset path much less recollection and reflection.

Childhood and youth pass mercilessly at scooter speed. You can’t go home again.

Run Be run. There is nothing for you here. Then if you do come back, come back as Bo – a more mature Be – the laughing cow – “la vache qui rit” – Pho mai dau bo.- Frenchy spread on crunchy toast.

P.S. in Vietnamese, “be” is a baby cow and “bo”, a grown up one. Like “bonheur” and “boner”, a double entendre, since “bebe” means “baby”, not young cow which runs away at birth only to return all beefed-up in ready-served hamburger.

There is nothing for you here but headache and heartache.