09.28.06
The Hungry Cabbie Eats The Outer Boroughs: Ba Xuyen
In today’s Gothamist post I take a tip from one of YOU, my beloved readers. The outcome is joyous:
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05.26.06
Back In Nam
If you were to ask someone from my parents’ generation to conjure an image of Vietnam, he might well speak of sitting at the dinner table and watching the siege of Khe San on the evening news. He would recall seeing huge US Air Force C-130s landing on the base’s airstrip under heavy fire, then unloading ammunition and medical supplies. Before their propellers fell silent, scores of wounded American soldiers were loaded onto the cargo planes to take off again under more heavy fire.
Nearly 40 years after those nightly newscasts, I visited Vietnam without the company of the US Air Force. I hadn’t considered that I too might have to be medivaced out of the country a broken man. Although the last shot fired in anger at an American by the man in the black pajamas was now more than a quarter century ago, I found Vietnam a harsh and torturous place. My own tour in Nam nearly resulted in yet another American casualty. However, the extent of my injuries reached only to the sensitive area around my upper buttocks and lower back.
Weeks of touring the country exacted a heavy toll on my tender, fleshy backside. Whereas my countrymen had arrived in country lean, mean fighting machines after six weeks on Paris Island, I had prepared myself only with extra shifts seated behind the wheel of my yellow cab. My job gives me the flexibility to travel, but driving 12 hours a day, exercising only my right foot upon my Crown Victoria’s pedals, turns my body to mush. Hard traveling through the Mekong Delta on a wooden boat and across the Central Highlands on a Soviet era motorcycle had tightened my atrophied lower back into excruciating knots.
(The Mekong Delta)
At the end of my journey, already in agony, I traveled to Hanoi by bus. I had not yet learned to become a savvy Vietnam traveler, so, stupidly, I chose a seat above the wheel well, cutting my leg room by more than half. As a result, I spent the entire length of the ride from Hoi An to Hanoi in a one-legged quasi fetal position. It was as though I was performing a jackknife off the high dive with 17 hours of hang time. I had discovered a new definition of pain and suffering.
(Everyone travels rough in Vietnam; Look closely and you’ll see the guy in pink holding one kid on the bike in front of him and two behind)
I was laying flat on a marble bench by Hoan Kiem, one of Hanoi’s many lakes, when I was approached by a young man who wanted to sell me post cards. When I told him that I didn’t want any, he took the rejection as a cue to take a break from hocking his wares. He sat next to me on the park bench and introduced himself as Pham Van Tai in excellent English. We conversed quite freely, and I learned that in addition to selling post cards to tourists he was a college graduate and drove a taxi. We shared a moment that trascended our nations’ stormy past relations when I responded that I too was a college graduate who drove a taxi back in New York.
By this point in the conversation I felt comfortable enough with him to complain, and I regaled him with my harrowing tale of woe on the bus the night before. When Tai heard this he excitedly told me about Hanoi’s famous back remedy in Lang Le Mai, otherwise known throughout Vietnam as “Snake Village.”
Since I had nothing on my agenda for the rest of the day aside from laying flat on my back, I agreed to go with Tai in his taxi. His taxi, it turned out, was a yellow cab similar to my own that he had to borrow from his cousin. He took me across a bridge over the Red River and deep into an outer borough of Hanoi. After reaching a concrete village of sorts on what must have been the outskirts of town, I started to notice paintings of snakes on every other building as we bumped along the wet dirt sideroads.
(Of course I didn’t have my camera when I met Tai, but this is a good shot of my brethren yellow cab in Hanoi)
We arrived at our destination, a three-story bunker of a building with glass, waterless aquariums full of slithering snakes lining either side of the doorway. The proprietor came out to greet us promptly. He immediately got down to business with Tai as his interpreter. Neither of them had explained to me what the back remedy was exactly. He offered me a cobra for $40US or a water snake for $25US. I had gleaned that I would be in some way eating this remedy, and I had not paid more than $2US for a meal in Vietnam yet, so I opted for the less expensive option on the menu. Tai took it upon himself to try to convince me to buy the cobra because, in addition to curing my ailing back, it would give me the stamina to have “boom-boom” 4 or 5 times that night. I told Tai that I had a girlfriend back in New York, to which he replied that this would be only for fun. “I am not trying to make a baby back at home Tai. That is just for fun too.” Silence filled the air, and a perplexed frown washed over his face.
The proprietor sat me down at a small table inside the building, set with 2 jiggers, each half filled with a particularly strong vodka. Before I could ask Tai what I was supposed to do, I was was hissed at by an unsettlingly large water snake being held in front of me. The proprietor then brandished a razor blade on a stick, startling me further. As I watched, slack-jawed, he pierced the underside of the snake’s writhing body, made a 2 inch long incision, and squeezed the thick, oozing blood into one of the jiggers on the table until it was full. He then reached his finger into the wound and pulled out the snake’s still-beating, gnocchi-shaped heart and plopped it into the same jigger, causing blood to spill out over the sides and stain the table cloth red. I looked up at Tai in amazement, and he motioned for me to drink the cup. So, with the water snake still hissing at me, I took the harshest shot of my life and, involuntarily, pounded the empty glass back down on the table.
I smiled proudly at Tai, but my expression quickly shifted to nervous consternation when I remembered the other half-filled jigger. By the time I looked back to the table, the proprietor was digging his finger into the snake’s body closer to its tail. Out came another small organ, this one turning the vodka an unholy neon blue color. The snake was taken away, and I was left there with Tai and my shot, now turning aqua, now teal, now turquoise. Tai had lost the English word for this organ, and for some reason, I refused to drink it until he remembered, as if pancreas was somehow more appetizing than spleen. At the end of my listing of every single organ I could remember from 6th grade biology class, Tai recalled the words “gall bladder.” After a few more moments of hesitation, I took that shot as well. Replacing the heart shot in its short-lived spot at the top of the chart, the gall bladder shot quickly became the harshest shot of my life.
Tai and I then sat down to the best meal I had in all of Vietnam. We drank snake wine until we were drunk, and stuffed ourselves with soup of snake, fried snake, steamed snake, grilled snake, boiled snake, sauteed snake, barbequed snake, and roasted snake with rice. Tai and I talked of life as we munched on our snake spring rolls, and I felt a closer connection with him than I have had with any of my fellow cabbies in Cha Cha’s garage back in New York. I am sure our friendship would have blossomed had I not left for the 20-hour flight to America the next day. My back, however, was good as new.
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