| For Better or Worse |
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The click of the dead bolt from outside the small room in the karaoke bar was a good sign that things were about to go very bad. My childhood friend B.D. (Big Doug)—six-three, 240—sized up the four sinewy Vietnamese men who’d squeezed into the room just before it was locked, simultaneous to the four slender female karaoke singers slipping out. As he moved to the balls of his feet, I knew he was considering a punch-out rather than paying the outrageous $700 bill we’d been presented with for the pile of “chips and Cokes” the girls had nipped through in little more than an hour. But he rocked back onto his heels when the leader of the foursome subtly lifted his shirt to show off the hilt of a sizable knife.  If this had been the great American West, where B.D. has made his home the past three decades, I think he would have gone for the brawl. But since we were in the heart of Hanoi—far from the comfort zone of his America (upscale strip malls, Scotch-and-steak joints, TV sports, and the drumbeat of Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity shaping his political worldview)—the only real choice was to fork over a credit card and immediately start synthesizing the near bloodfest into an anecdote to enliven future cocktail parties.Why does this kind of thing always seem to happen only when I hook up with my oldest friends? If I get into trouble, even today, at 54, it is usually in the company of the small handful of running mates I met on a schoolyard when we were 11 and 12. Since then, I’ve adventured and traveled far from that schoolyard, with dozens of guys from dozens of nations. Yet it seems only when I’ve arranged to meet up with my boyhood pals in some exotic locale do things get…screwy. In recent years, whenever I would finish a sizable foreign trip, B.D. and I would arrange to meet up for a little R&R. Though a softie on many fronts, he?is classically all-American—high school jock turned political conservative despite an early drug-dabbling decade—and has long been a conflict magnet. He seems always to be squabbling, with one of his four kids, one or another ex-wife, neighbors, drivers who move too slowly. His logic for our travels together boils down to: “You’re already there, most likely have the logistics wired, and I would never go to a hellhole like, say, Vietnam, on my own.” Which is how I ended up sending a car to the airport in Da Nang to pick him up. With four others, I was just finishing a two-month exploration of the North Vietnam coast by sea kayak. It had been physically arduous but mentally more so, since the still-Communist government in Hanoi had insisted that a 24/7 monitor accompany us. Having B.D. join us at the end of the trip sounded like a good idea in the months leading up to the adventure. Though these days we share so little politically, culturally, philosophically, we’ve known each other so long that we tend to overlook most differences. The beauty of old friends is that they rarely judge you and certainly don’t give a shit about what you’ve done lately. When they see you, they see the skinny, snot-nosed prat you were when you met. They know your siblings by name, remember your first girlfriend, and are ultimately forgiving of most of your sins, providing a built-in comfort zone not possible with new friends. Unfortunately, it’s that very comfort that often leads to taking the wrong fork. On the last day of the kayak adventure, in Hoi An, I wanted nothing more than a two-week-long sleep in an air-conditioned room. Instead, I found myself pinning a note to the hotel room where B.D. was sleeping after his long flight from the States, explaining that we were headed out onto the water for a last day of paddling and filming. Several hours later, off the water for the final time, we were snugged up in a riverside bar for lunch when our fixer came around to tell us that a “very large Australian” was looking for us. B.D. (Australian, American, German—they all look the same.) Within minutes, a noticeably large, very white man came strolling up the narrow street, trailed pied-piper-like by a crowd of locals. “It’s just like Mexico here” was B.D.’s first review of Vietnam. My travel partners—a world-weary socialist filmmaker, a South Vietnamese refugee who’d escaped on the last day of fighting in 1975, and a Buddhist photographer—rolled their eyes. As I introduced him around, their looks begged the same question: Who is this guy? B.D. and the one-armed boat driver he’d hired to go search for us were carrying a few beers, the remnants of a full case they’d intended to deliver to us. When they couldn’t find us, they’d begun drinking. “Why do they keep rubbing my belly?” he asked. It was true; a swarm of giggling women insisted on touching his ample belly. “I think they have you confused with Buddha” was all I could guess. Taking a chair and ordering a Tiger beer, he motioned to a woman in the back of the bar who brought forward a tall pile of cardboard boxes, each carrying a silk shirt he’d had made for himself first thing that morning. “The beauty?” pronounced B.D. “They’re, like, two bucks apiece. I love this country!” Back in Hanoi a few days later, while I ran around the city trying to get the necessary permits to allow me to take 52 hours of video out of the country, I tried to steer B.D. toward some local history. I arranged a driver to take him to the hill country for the day; he backed out, choosing instead a lunch date with the Dallas-based flight attendant he’d met on the trip over. Later that night, we found ourselves in the five-story karaoke bar getting scammed by potato-chip-gobbling bar girls. I take 50 percent of the blame; to this day, B.D. wishes he’d chosen to fight. A year later, in French Polynesia, it was the end of another long adventure. I borrowed a house on a hill overlooking Cook’s Bay on Moorea, and one paradisiacal day, B.D. took a turn around the island inviting everyone he met to a party—chez Bowermaster. When I walked up the hill to pulsing disco blaring out the windows, B.D. was there to greet me in full Polynesian regalia, a loud, flowered skirt wrapped around his Buddha belly, a flower behind each ear, and a 20-ounce rum punch in his paw. “Welcome to paradise, my friend,” he shouted. “You know, I was thinking today, This place is a lot like Mexico!” |
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