Death Valley

Chapter 4-2

Andy flexed his cheekbones.

“So now I am at the Louvre, in front of the Venus de Milo. A guy’s walking around and around Miz Venus, he asks me how I like the torso, do I like the proportions, the angles. He was an older guy, tall, desert boots, brown cords, beard. He invited me for tea – at the Mosque.”

“Did you tell him you’d just been?”

“No way,” she said. “He was too cute.”

“So you knew your way around men, at fifteen years old?” Andy said.

“I knew my way around something. I guess I was looking for its name.”

“So you go for tea with this guy who was how much older than you?”

“Maybe twice as old as me. You know, old. Like thirty-five.” They chuckled together. Her younger self was turning into a shared character in a story.

“When I walked back into the mosque courtyard with him, it all felt different. Even from an hour before. He said, ‘I want to take your picture.’ He posed me for a photograph sitting at one of the blue-and-white tile tables. I was wearing a pink oxford-cloth button-down shirt. That was my thing, then. Button-downs in every pastel. Sleeves rolled up; white jeans; black patent-leather Mary Janes on my feet. When he took my picture it was not the same as anybody ever taking my picture before. I wanted in on that.”

Andy was looking at her with listening eyes. “Tell me,” he said.

“The light went on forever in Paris in the long white nights of spring. The light felt soft in Paris. Maybe it was the Seine. We had more mint tea. He introduced himself. ‘I’m Marty,’ he said, ‘Marty Hirsch.’ So Marty tells me about his grandfather who dealt in silks and textiles, a Jew from the Shanghai Jews who had come to this very mosque café, the textile man in the 1920s. It was a city of Jews and Arabs even then, Marty said. It was Marty who told me that Paris is the city in Europe with the most Jews, and Paris is the city in Europe with the most Arabs. I never forgot that. I did not know Paris was Jewish. I knew nothing. I didn’t know North Africa was full of Jews. Who knew Casablanca was a very Jewish city?”

“Maybe Sam in Casablanca was Sammy,” Andy said.

“You know,” she said, moving her coffee cup to clink it against his, “ojalá, he could be. Maybe the first draft was: ‘Look. Do me a personal favour, Sammila, you should play it again.’” She shook her head. “Nah. You don’t have to play Jewish to be one.”

“I know,” he said. His eyes crinkled, his face was entirely subsumed by the smile.

And so she knew. Jew meets Jew in a desert café.

“So, this Marty character, we’d spent a couple of hours together, he puts his Leica down on the table, and he says, ‘Come to Vietnam with me. I’m leaving for Saigon tomorrow. Carry my equipment.’

“Next thing I know I am flying Paris to Saigon, Vivienne Pink, the photographers’ mascot. Baby Pink they called me. ‘How did you ever get to Vietnam, at that age?’ everybody asks. ‘Easy, honey, I got on a plane. Paris to Saigon, fourteen hours.’ I was not brave, I just took the free ticket.”

She put her elbow on the counter, put her chin in her hand and leaned towards him. “Look, I so knew from nothing, I did not know Saigon from sayonara.”

His nostrils flared, “Oh yeah, been there. Boot camp ain’t Baghdad. It isn’t what you think.”

“So many maps, so little time,” she said, “then you are actually standing in the actual place. How it smells, how low sewer water smells, the rains, the food, meat on the street, smoke and sweet flowers, the wet trees. The sound of rain on a tin roof, how firearms sound. My Auntie Carole said, ‘Vivila, you’ve got moxie. Follow your moxie.’ She used to call me Queen Moxie. My parents? They were old rads, they were happy. I skipped two grades so I had two years in my pocket.”

This stranger Andy got up again, walked around the counter curve, came back behind her again, holding her chair back. “So what happened to Baby Pink in-country?” he whispered into her left ear.

“It was June in Saigon. A Tuesday. What is it with Tuesdays?” She didn’t find the set-up with him odd. How could it be odd, they were in Crazytown, talking about an old Indochina psychosis. “Tuesdays and Elevens. Tuesday, June 11, 1963. I was living with Marty. He gets a call. It was about seven in the morning. ‘Come to the corner of Phan Dình Phùng and Lê Văn Duyệt Streets, there will be an event, in one hour, at eight.’ The caller did not say what it was but all the news photogs got called. You know, everyone says, The Vietnam War, but years before that, the events were going on. The Vietnamese were conducting a war against the Buddhists, the Buddhists were marching pagoda to pagoda in protest. The Roman Catholics running the show were breaking the balls of the Buddhists, but good. Marty told me something I never forgot, ‘Before they come for the Commies, they come for the Buddhists.’ They come for the religion before the politics. So down we go, Marty and me, to the corner of Phan Dình Phùng and Lê Văn Duyệt Streets. There is a crowd of monks and nuns all in white, white is their mourning colour, behind a grey car that had pulled up. It stopped at the corner. Two men exited the car, two monks.

“They took a can of gas out of the hood. Three other monks get out. Marty has his Leica in his hand, you know holding it like a baby, and a bunch of cameras around his neck as backup. One of the monks places a cushion on the street, and a different monk sits on the cushion, quiet. Marty hands me a camera, saying nothing. He nods to me. I look through the lens –

“One of the monks takes a can of gas and he pours it on the monk sitting on the cushion in the middle of the street in a lotus position in his robe, soaking his robes and his head. I took a picture just as the one monk poured gasoline on the head of the sitting monk. I did not know it was going to go that way, but I was ready. I had never felt anything like that in my life. The lotus monk was sitting in a pool of gas.

“The street filled up with more Buddhist monks who had come in their white mourning robes. I could see ahead of myself, I was elevated, focused. I thought, I want to be in the world, right now. I want to see history. I want to tell the story. I have found my life. The lens was my teacher.

“I could see there was going to be a picture of his body, that I had to be ready for that. I had been called to this. I had walked in the door of the Paris Mosque and that was why I was in Vietnam. I walked in and I did not walk by, and now a camera owned me. I was picturing where his body would fall so the camera could be there; I stepped forward. I still have the image in my head of Marty watching me move away from him, to the picture.

“The lotus monk was not yet on fire and I could see his dead body’s position. I felt the immediate future in my fingertips, my forearms were on fire. It was the monk himself, soaked in gasoline, who lit the match to his own robes. It was a sunny day. It was self-immolation.”

Still standing behind her chair, Andy reached over to the counter, took the bright Pink smokes pack, lit one, gave it to her, lit another. “Tell me about the monk,” he said, close to her ear. She sucked in a long drag of the cigarette, and went on.

“The monk’s name was Thích Quảng Dức. He lives on in the photographs of his death. One of the photogs there, Malcolm Browne of AP, took the picture that they say President John Kennedy saw the next morning in the newspaper on his desk, and that he was deeply affected by it. I had walked into one of the most famous photographs in history, sweet Jesus how small the steps, and then boom, you cannot step away from your kismet. It was like love, taking pictures. No second thoughts. What a time. It was early Vietnam days yet, for the Americans. All these handsome stateside boys just spooking around, setting things up in Southeast Asia. Guys going into Operation Rolling Thunder, guys going up the la Drang Valley, guys in their B-52s, all that was later. I was Baby Pink, pitzel photographer. I was like a ferret in the wet Asian alleys. I could smell pictures coming as dusk set in. My eyeballs were soaking up the chemistry of the complicated East. I smelled them, then I heard them: the sound of a pic coming. A wing, a clatter, a g*n, a motorcycle backfiring. I was jumping out of my skin every day.

“You know what the funniest part is?” Vivienne asked, swirling around. “These new spooks came in, they’re asking around, ‘Who do we get the gen from, who knows the story on the ground?’ And my pals, my mentors, Marty and Co., they would say, ‘Ask for Baby Pink. Baby Pink can tell you.’ So these tall fit men would come knocking on Marty’s and my door – we lived behind a red door, Marty taught me, ‘Always have a red door on your house’ – and he would answer, ‘Yeah? Help you?’ in his red bandana and baggy shorts, and they would say to Marty, ‘You Baby Pink? Hear you have the word.’ ‘No, not me, hang on,’ he’d say. ‘V! Baby Pink, get your sweet a*s out here, these handsome lads here want a word.’ And out from the darkroom comes me: sweet sixteen in loose thin cotton pants and an undershirt and suspenders. ‘Your Mom around, little girl?’ ‘Listen fartface, you want info or did you come into my home to insult me?’ An hour later, we were new best friends, and they were posing for pictures, two photog guys hamming it up on my pink silk bedspread. I was as young as a Viet Cong guerrilla. Everybody knew me, I was that crazy Canadian coyote with a camera.”

“Tell me more about the monk,” Andy said, taking his seat again.

“When the fire had burned him and his robe, he fell back in rigor mortis, charred, his arms stiff. They went up like rigor claws, his legs went up like rigor claws, the crowd leaned in. I took that picture, it came out in Time. By some magic, I had entered my own life. I set out unknowing. If I had known, I probably would never have gone.”

“Amen,” he said.

“I have film from that day I have never developed. I have contact sheets I have never made prints from. They talk about Vietnam protestors, they use the word hippies. Did you know the first protest against the American presence in Vietnam was organized in 1946 by merchant marines? American merchant marines in 1946? These sailors were waiting to be shipped back to the States right after World War Two, and they saw American ships being taken from the job of bringing the boys home, their US ships meant to take them – the war vets – back to the States, being used instead to help bring in arms for the French in Vietnam. Like you said, honey, it is never what you think. It is never when you thought. Come on up, let me take your picture.”