The sun was starting to set. I had no idea how much of Saigon the VC had overrun. I didn’t think I could make it that far.
I started crawling along the wall, away from the palace. I came upon a door and reached up and tried it; it was locked tight. Same thing with the next building. I made it to the corner and slid around, and there in front of me was the wide-open door to a regular apartment building. I stepped in, and the lobby was empty. I tried to lock the front door behind me, but the lock was broken. I got inside an interior door and was able to lock that.
I was inside a hallway. I couldn’t find a light, and it was pitch black in there. I sat under the stairs and waited in the dark. And waited. Nobody came in or out the whole night. Everyone had probably fled the building. As much as I could sense, nothing moved past the front of it: not a car, not a truck, not a person. I still had the .45 and seven bullets, and if somebody would have walked through that door, I think I would have shot him.
You know, back in New York, people will tell you, “Chickie knows everybody.” They’re not necessarily all friends, and, thank God, I do have a lot of friends, but I kinda know everybody. I’m a communicative guy.
But here I was, after watching people being killed, and I didn’t know a soul. Worse, nobody knew me. Our servicemen couldn’t help me; they had their own problems. I was invisible. They had no time for me, and I don’t blame them. I would have been doing the same thing. It wasn’t like the Vietnamese cops could help me, either—they were trying to help their own country. There was no one to talk to. For the first time in my life, I was alone. I’d never known that feeling before, and it didn’t feel good.
I don’t know if I was drifting in and out of sleep or was woozy from hunger or if I went temporarily crazy, but after hours alone and on alert in the darkness, I started to see and hear things.
“Chickie, c’mon, gimme two more eggs!”
“No, man, Chuckles, you missed last time—how can you miss the Circle Line boat? Anyway, I only have four left.”
“C’mon, just one, then!”
Chuckles and I were up inside the blue trestle of the Henry Hudson Bridge, egg bombing the day liners sliding through Spuyten Duyvil Creek. It was a little cooler up on the bridge on this scorcher of a July day, but not much, so as soon as Chuckles hit a guy in a hat—and you could see from his body language how miffed he was about that—it was time to celebrate. We scrambled across to the cliffs on the Bronx side of the bridge. It would be a while before the current shifted back toward Inwood and we could ride it, praying that the time wouldn’t coincide with sewage being blasted into the creek—which would send us diving like mad under it.
“I’m gonna jump off Big C!” yelled Ricky Duggan. A giant blue C, for Columbia University, was painted on the highest cliff, which towered ninety feet above the water. “Me, too!” chimed in Tommy Collins.
“No way!” I shouted. “If you get killed on my watch, then your mother and my mother will kill me—twice.”
I made my way up Big Boy, as we called it. I took one long look at the Palisades across in New Jersey, where my father was selling hot dogs under the roller coaster in Palisades Park. He would do that all day, then work as a janitor in the Faber pen factory in Englewood, New Jersey, at night. I also gazed at Manhattan, at our beloved Inwood Park, still lush with the same virgin forest that shaded the Lenape Indians before they “sold” their island to Peter Minuit, the Dutch director general of the colony of New Netherlands, under their sacred tulip tree there, in 1626. The blue expanse below was clear of boats. Tarzan pose, push off, jump, and then I was falling, falling, falling, and splash! Blackness.
I snapped to.
I wasn’t in the cool waters of the Spuyten Duyvil. I was still in a godforsaken hallway in the middle of Saigon that was as hot as a Russian steam bath on the Lower East Side. I went to the door, and I still could hear shots from a couple of blocks away. I started pacing.
“Hey, kid! You skylarkin’ over there? I called you!”
I stopped sweeping the floor of the Dyckman Democratic Club that my aunt Florence ran. I dashed over to where the judge was playing poker with some political operatives who were regulars at the club.
“Chickie, run up to Bennie’s and get me a cigar, will ya? No, two. I have a feeling this is going to be a l-o-n-g game.” All the men laughed knowingly.
I knew he wasn’t talking about a straight flush beating a full house. The game they were really playing was getting their preferred candidates elected, or rewarding local lawyers with judgeships because they’d done them a lot of favors, such as getting their relatives out of jams.
“Yeah, pick up a new pack of cards, too, Chickie.”
“And a cream soda.”
“And a Clark bar, kid.”
“Pepsi.”
“Too bad he can’t buy beer!” More laughter.
“Well, if we get O’Connell elected, let’s make him introduce a bill that says kids can buy beer with a note from their parents.” Even louder laughter.
“Maybe he should run on that platform! That’d get the votes!” Raucous laughter now.
They all gave me different wads of bills, but they knew I would keep it all straight. The judge slipped me a ten, and I was glad—he was a big tipper.
I opened the door, the Saturday sunlight flooded into the dark club, and off I ran to Bennie’s on the corner. I picked up Macanudo cigars, and a deck of blue-backed Bicycle cards. I ran back into the darkness of the club, handed out the spoils and the change, and when I reached the judge, I heard the magic words: “Keep it, Chickie.”
“Thanks a lot, Your Honor!” I said in earnest, and the guys got a big belly laugh out of that. Their laughter echoed in the darkness, and I heard my aunt call out over it:
“Time to go home, Chickie! Your mother wants you to come home. Go on home, now. Go on home.”
I woke up either from a dream or a hallucination and I thought, Hey, you can’t drift off, man! If the Vietcong are inside my embassy grounds, pissing on the plants, then they’re everywhere. Keep it together!
I was sitting against the wall in the gloom. There was nothing to see or hear.
It was then that I thought . . . I actually might have died.
I thought I might have been shot in front of the embassy like the others there; that I had died instantly behind that tree, because I didn’t remember being wounded. I thought I might be dead, and I wondered how my family would take it. I fell deep in thought, and I went back to my Catholicism, my religious training, and I believed then that I must be in purgatory.
In Catholic school, they told elaborate stories about hell and about heaven. They even talked about limbo, where they said unbaptized infants and upstanding non-Catholics went, so I always pictured Abraham Lincoln floating around with babies in limbo. But they never really described purgatory to a tee.
What if this solitude were my purgatory? A place where I never talked to anybody and nobody talked to me. Where I grew up, everybody knew everybody, and I knew everybody. I couldn’t go a block without seeing or talking to somebody I knew. Even here, in a war zone, I had run into people I knew. But now, maybe for the first time I could remember, I was completely alone for a sustained period. It felt like . . . death.
It was that, and the fear of the unknown. The fear of what was outside the door. What was going on? Maybe the VC would come through that door. I was preparing for that eventuality.
Still, you don’t have time for fear in a situation like that. You’d better have your wits about you. What do I mean by that? Don’t do something stupid. Don’t walk out in the middle of the street, look around, and say, “Hey! Is there anybody around?!” Because there is, and they might not like you.