The ballad of Apo, B. and Clair de Lune
A tale I have told in person more than once over the years. Now committed to digital ink for the first time. A text premiere, no less.
“Your soul is a chosen landscape, bewitched by masquers and bergamaskers, playing the lute and dancing and almost sad beneath their fanciful disguises.” ~ From ‘Clair de Lune’ by yer man Verlaine.
IT WAS CLOSE TO MIDNIGHT. I was on the beers with a) some of my tried and trusted drinking buds or b) whatever randoms happened to be gathered in Le Maquis, a tiny but lively watering hole in the Old Quarter. In the unforgiving heat of a Hanoi summer, the bottles of Halida were no doubt going down easily and I probably had no plans to be going anywhere else until my English pal T. – a camp straight guy with a flair for dramatic entrances (and flamboyant dance moves1) – burst in the door and told me, with great urgency, that we had to go to Apo to find Clair de Lune.
A quick two-item glossary:
Apo (short for Apocalypse Now) – billed as a night club but basically, circa 2000AD, this was the dive bar of all dive bars; mostly bereft of customers till 11pm, Apo burst into life at midnight on weekends because basically there was no other ‘club’ in the whole city. Every expatriate – no matter who they were, or what they did (NGO workers, conservationists, diplomats, UN reps, US marines, American vets, artists, fashion designers, teachers, deviants, miscreants and wastrels) – would, if they were any kind of nocturnal creature with a thirst, regularly end up at Apo. Most of my mob went with relatively innocent intentions. We sank beers, necked shots; we played pool (on a table with the most forgiving of wide pockets) and took turns bugging the DJ (perched in a booth shaped like the nose of a fighter jet) to play a half decent tune. If that sounds innocent enough, well, Apo was also populated by hookers, pimps and, it was always assumed, gangsters. Fights were common enough (though, for record, I only ever saw expats scrap each other). But as I said, there was nowhere else to go, and honestly, as shit as the place was, me and pals, when we were suitably drunk enough, loved hooning down Ba Trieu in the dead of the night and screaming: “Ah-pock-o-LYPSE.” [A friend recently described the feeling of entering Apo, back in the day, as the closest thing we would ever get to pushing through the swinging doors of a saloon in a dusty Wild West town).
Clair de Lune (Moonlight) – a prostitute, whose real name might have been Nguyệt or Hằng, which both mean moon in Vietnamese. As far as I know, she did not know she was known as Clair de Lune. Or perhaps she called herself Moonlight and in turn became known to a certain clique of expats as Clair de Lune.
“It's not something I would recommend. But it is one way to live.
'Cause what is simple in the moonlight, by the morning never is…” ~ Lua by Bright Eyes
So, anyway, why did T. so urgently need us to ride down to Apo and find Clair de Lune?
Well, the two of us knew an expat, B. – a young, sturdy but slim French fellow, who wore Dr. Marten boots and sported round glasses with thick lenses. Like so many folk did in those days, B. had drifted into town and decided to stick around (no judgment there). For a while he was one of the staff at Le Maquis. But he was better known, at least to me and my mob, for his misadventures around town. A gentlemanly English expat, whose name I can’t recall, once described B. as the last great debauchee. We’d all heard stories of his escapades as he had no shame and spoke of them openly. Let’s just say he regularly availed of sex workers’ services across the city. He was also fond of hard narcotics. Opium, probably. Smack, definitely. Amphetamine-packed weight loss pills, very possibly (should go without saying, on top of all that, he drank with gusto). Physically speaking, he seemed to have a steady enough grip on his vices. I remember him telling me that it’s more typical to first smoke gear and then graduate to injecting it. But he seemed proud to have gone the other way (he’d used needles in France) and unfazed by the fact that he had slipped back into old habits in Hanoi, as if chasing the dragon wasn’t much to worry about. One evening, in someone’s flat, he pulled out a piece of tin foil in front of me and friends and got high with the nonchalance of someone smoking a joint. Everyone else had come over for a mug of Lipton’s finest and a game of gin rummy.
What can I say? They were different times, and I am not sure if we – the onlookers, all of whom had quirks, but no demons – were all that shocked, even if we weren’t comfortable. I certainly don’t remember anyone saying anything. That was the thing about those days. Interventions hadn’t been invented. Most of us just accepted B. for who he was – a tearaway tearing away. The last great debauchee doing his thing. Someone shuffled the cards and dealt everyone a hand, well, everyone except B., who, I’m guessing, zoned out then shuffled down the stairs and into the night.
“And you can't help me, not you guys, or all you sweet girls with all your sweet talk
You can all go take a walk. And I guess I just don't know …” ~ Heroin by Velvet Underground
IF YOU SPENT ENOUGH TIME IN APO, circa 2000AD, or any of the late-night expat drinking dens, you could easily cross paths with some reptilian wretches and loony drunks. It should be stressed B. was sound. Sure, I saw him throw a few strops (but who didn’t throw one?) when he thought he was being ripped off (for a pittance) and I only ever heard of him getting into one scrap, at Apo of course. He’d stepped on the toes (figuratively speaking) of a guy called Khan, a genuinely sinister and creepy Eurasian pimp, who looked like he slept in a crypt and had very possibly sold his soul. After a bout of grappling on the floor, B. and Khan dusted themselves down and started buying rounds of whisky-cokes. Hooch, heroin and hookers. They had at least three things in common, although I guess one stood to profit more than the other from the relationship that ensued…
Anyway, as much fun as B. might have had riding around on his motorbike every day, going to Apo to shoot pool, score (drugs), and fulfil all his sexual fantasies, one day, he abruptly called time on Hanoi. I couldn’t possibly tell you exactly why. Maybe the lifestyle had caught up with him. Maybe he recognised he was well past halfway down a slippery slope. Maybe he’d incurred ‘The Wrath of Khan’ and/or realised that by keeping such company he might soon end up living in a Vietnamese jail when he could be sipping Ricard on ice, sur la terrasse, in the soft Parisian sunshine…
Of course it wasn’t B.’s style to go gently into that good night, and at some stage before he departed, he (fatefully) met Clair De Lune at Apo and availed of her services. Was it because he knew he was leaving town that he fell for her so hard? So many people who have lived in Hanoi know the feeling that the place has somehow become part of you and will forever be a part of you. Maybe B. couldn’t stand the thought of quitting the city – and going cold turkey alone back home – and needed to feel like he was taking something in return. Maybe he’d just lost the run of himself but what I do know for sure was B. was hooked. He couldn’t get enough of Clair de Lune and continually went to Apo just to find her. No other working girl would do. Just like that, he was a one hooker-man.
“Of everything I have seen, it's you I want to go on seeing: of everything I've touched, it's your flesh I want to go on touching.” ~ Amor by Pablo Neruda,
Did B. and Clair de Lune also spend time together in the less forgiving light of the day? Did they eat deep fried eel on glass noodles to cool off on a hot day, ride around the city’s drowsy lakes in the late afternoon, or sip on cà phê sữa đá by the tangled roots of a Bodhi tree as the setting sun stretched across the skyline in a thick orange haze? Probably not. They were creatures of the night and druggies, if they did linger in each other’s company by day, it’s more likely they smoked heroin and slept until the sun had already gone, and there was nothing but the night to creep back into…
Does this all sound sad, depraved and desperate to you? Well, to pinch another smidge of poesy from Señor Neruda, we don't know how others love, or how people loved in the past. At that moment in time, B. was free to believe that he and Clair de Lune could have a future, however ill-advised this mésalliance seemed to others. So, as far as I recall, B. left for France as planned. But before departing he had proposed to Clair de Lune that she would follow him and she, I believe, had agreed (even if she never intended to go – she most probably didn’t even have a passport).
B. bought her a ticket and left believing she would follow. But as the date of Clair de Lune’s departure loomed, he must have had concerns. I guess he must have sent T. an email, desperately asking him to find her and urge her to collect the ticket and go. Or maybe he had, even more naively, sent her money? Either way that takes us back to the night when T. burst into Le Maquis and told me we had to go to Apo. For love! Well, for the love of something…
T. never had a motorbike2, so we must have rode there on my shitty red Minsk, through the sticky midnight air, when the woozy Hanoi streets (in those rare auld times) were mostly empty, and when it was easy to think, just ‘cos you had some wheels, and no one was around, you had the run of the place, and always would.
“O never fear, lads, naught’s to dread,
Look not left nor right:
In all the endless road you tread
There’s nothing but the night.”
WHEN T. AND I CLAMBERED off my steel horse, I probably did what I always did on arriving at Apo – I would have high-fived the bảo vệ (parking guy), kicked in the saloon doors (just imagining those), tread across the sawdust covered floor (actually, I think there was sawdust?), hollered for a beer from one of the stoney faced barmen (the saddest looking men in history to ever wear Hawaiian shirts), put my name on the board for a game of a pool, then requested the DJ to play ‘KISS’ (the song) and proceeded to talk crap to whatever randoms were around.
But T. hadn’t forsaken his mission. He hovered around the bar, sipping a vodka tonic, and keeping an eye out for Clair de Lune. Right on schedule, arriving at midnight, through a miasma of smoke, sweat, red bull and hormones, Clair de Lune appeared to take her place at the bar, where she could scan the crowd and make eyes with punters. And the way I remember the story being told, T. tried to attract her attention with a friendly wave and at first he thought Clair de Lune was waving back, recognising him as a friend of B.. But then T. realised she was gesturing to some expatpotamus3 or expatosaurus4 standing beside him, and suggesting he (the expatpotamus or expatosaurus) might wish to avail of her services, which he probably did, and at that moment T. must have realised the absolute folly of being asked to play cupid in this scenario...
But wait… did T. attempt to talk to her and tell her B. had been emailing him? "Em oi! B. really loves you! He’s in Paris! He’s waiting for you! All you have to do is pick up the ticket darling!” My flickering memory wants to say that he did, but I also have a faint recollection Clair de Lune’s response was, quite simply, she just didn’t want to go.
I was probably teetering on the edge of the dance floor when T. tapped me on the shoulder and broke the (unsurprising to me) news that Clair de Lune would not be travelling to France. He then asked me what he should tell B., who would surely be expecting T. to reply by email. But before I could answer a question that I didn’t want to answer, and wouldn't know how to answer, I heard the jangling guitar intro I’d been waiting for and Prince’s sultry voice grunting: “Uh”
And as T. and I moved to the centre of the dance floor to throw some shapes, and wail, ‘You don't have to be beautiful to turn me on. I just need your body, baby, from dusk 'til dawn’, with the other sweaty, sloppy drunkards, all happily lost in the moment, no doubt, somewhere behind our backs, Clair de Lune, having found a client for the night, would have slipped away into the calm moonlight, the same moonlight that Verlaine called sad and lovely, and that makes the birds dream in the trees, and the plumes of the fountains weep in ecstasy. But also a moonlight that, in a few short hours, would have left no trace.
Unfortunately when his big moment came, challenged to a dance off by a Vietnamese fellow with some nifty hip-hop moves, and everyone on the dance floor at Apo formed a circle, T. came a’cropper after trying to pull off an audacious ‘cossack squat’. Still 10 out of 10 for effort.
On another night in the midst of stormy season, when a deluge had just been and gone, I was with T. in Le Maquis. I had just bought my Minsk, which turned out to be an absolute lemon but I was very proud of it that night. After multiple drinks, we set off for Apo with T. riding pillion, and somewhere around-about where Tran Quoc Toan cuts through Ba Trieu, I saw the streets had flooded up ahead, and timidly started to slow down but T. goaded me on: “Come on Connla! You have a fucking Minsk!” So, I accelerated into the thigh-deep sewage-y waters, determined to get us to Apo (relatively dry). I was pretty pleased my Minsk was somewhat amphibian, as in it didn’t cut out, but when I turned to say something to T. I realised he’d fallen off, 30 or 40 metres back. Only his head and shoulders were visible to me when I u-turned to fetch him. When I saw he had a cut on one of his elbows, I suggested dropping him home. But no, no, no: “I need an antiseptic, so we’re going to fucking Apo!” And so we did, and when we arrived, T. stormed straight to the bar and shouted at the most senior of the stony-faced barmen: “Anh oi! Give me a shot of vodka! I’m bleeding!” He then doused his wound with the vodka and, without paying, wheeled on his heels and bee-lined for the dance floor, dripping wet, soaked to the bone and electrified by the madness of our ridiculous existence.
Expatopotamus (noun) /ĕks′pətˈo'pä-tə-məs/ A very large beer-bellied expat male capable of running at 30kmph over short distances in bars.
Expatosaurus (noun) /ĕks′pə'sȯr-əs/ Literally "expat lizard" (from the Greek: expat = expat + sauros = lizard. A genus of sauropod expatosaurs