The Greatest Story Ever Told (about Uzbeki Fred in Hanoi)

This well-spun yarn about a wild-eyed expat in turn of the century Hanoi was first published by Eastlit in 2014. It has been brushed up a bit. Hopefully for the better.

Hanoi by night - Chu van

FIRST THINGS FIRST, let’s get you up to speed.

Uzbeki Fred was a man named Fred from Uzbekistan. He was a short, balding man. He might have looked a bit like Rocky’s pal Paulie in the Rocky movies. But after so many years, all I can really say, for sure, is that Uzbeki Fred was not a beautiful man. Or even handsome. That’s to say, he had a head only a mother could love.

But in spite of his looks, Uzbeki Fred had a smoking hot Chinese girlfriend – an inscrutable beauty with a skinnymalink body, who wore super-tight jeans and high-heel shoes. She would click-clack in and out of Uzbeki Fred’s hard-drinking circles, not for conversation. Just to sip on her whisky and light cigarettes (his and hers). I remember she liked to play pool and she even had her own glove. Some people said she was a very good pool player, as if to suggest she must have spent a lot of time in bars and, therefore, she must be a ‘woman with a past’. They were probably just jealous of her ability to nail clutch shots with a cigarette (sometimes lit, sometimes unlit) dangling from her pursed, carmine lips.

To me and my buddies, who knew much less of the world than we realised, Uzbeki’s smoking hot Chinese girlfriend seemed like an odd fit for Uzbeki Fred, not just because of her appearance (and his). But also because of what Fred did – he described himself as a ‘rice farmer’ as he was involved in some kind of State-run agricultural project in another province, where he rode several times a week on his 250CC two-stroke. He was not a suave man. In fact, Uzbeki Fred was the sort of guy who’d walk into a bar and immediately order a bottle of whisky, flagging his intentions for the night from the get-go. Another important detail for this story: Uzbeki Fred had once, we were told, served in the French Foreign Legion.

Anyhow, me and my pals used to cross paths with Uzbeki Fred in the Maquis Bar on Ta Hien Street or else Apocalypse Now (‘the dive bar of all dive bars’¹). Now everyone who went to Apo would be there in ‘high spirits’ (it was no place for timid, sober souls) but as Uzbeki Fred would have guzzled umpteen whiskies (before riding there on his 250CC two-stroke), let’s just say he would have been closer to a demonic state of drunkenness than many others. I certainly found it hard to catch quite what he was saying when he had his arm wrapped around my head so he could growl conspiracy theories in my ear. My buddy Al advised me more than once to consider giving Uzbeki Fred a wider berth when we were in his vicinity at the bar in Apo. The logic being, well, you know, he was an ex-soldier in the Foreign Legion ergo he was probably a man with a past and, um, may have killed a man. Or many men.

In a more convivial, early-evening setting, sitting on plastic stools at Minh’s Bia Hoi on Ta Hien, easing our livers into another evening with beers, smoking fake Marlboro Lights, or nibbling on nem chua (fermented sausage), me and some of my pals wondered what Uzbeki Fred might have witnessed as a legionnaire, or what depths he might have succumbed to before he even signed up (in exchange for his soul). “Don’t they offer new identities to recruits?” somebody wondered aloud.

Now, we knew nothing about the Foreign Legion. For all we knew Uzbeki Fred might have been valiantly helping French emigres evacuate a war zone in Zaire, or just been shovelling nuclear waste in Algeria, rather than, say, hacking limbs off rebels in a secret war in [insert the name of a country, that you know nothing about, of your choice here], but still, we assumed going toe-to-toe with Uzbeki Fred would surely end badly for whomever took him on. As we were only human, naturally we couldn’t help but wish to see what might happen if someone ever did get on the wrong side of Uzbeki Fred…

And then one night, somewhere between the pool tables and the bar at Apo – a notorious combat zone where drunken brawls frequently erupted – it happened in front of our eyes. A large Russian and Uzbeki Fred stepped on each other’s toes, figuratively at first. A heated argument began. Fingers were pointed. Teeth were clenched. Insults travelled in both directions. Had they been discussing Soviet-era politics and the socio-economic imbalances caused by the Era of Stagnation in Uzbekistan? Perhaps Uzbeki Fred brought up Leonid Brezhnev and his corrupt commie cronies’ for fucking over Uzbekistan in the great cotton scandal of 1989? Or… maybe they were just arguing over who was next up on the pool table. Whatever they said to one another, the Russian pushed Uzbeki back into a table stacked with drinks that all tipped over. We all heard the crash and when we turned to look, there it was… lo and behold, the red mist descending on Uzbeki Fred. So picture him now, throwing his glass of whisky to the floor, and – with Technotronic’s Pump up the Jam playing in the background – gunning for the Russian with his two fists clenched, and now picture Uzbeki Fred swinging with his right, and missing, and then swinging with his left, and missing, and then picture the Russian, after steadying himself, cleanly clipping the temple of Uzbeki Fred who crumples to a heap on the floor, and if the story ended there, why yes, it’d be one very anti-climatic tale, but don’t worry, I didn’t lie when I told you this is ‘the Greatest Story Ever Told (about Uzbeki Fred in Hanoi)’, because while Uzbeki Fred is out for the count, you must now picture his smoking hot Chinese girlfriend dropping her pool cue, click-clacking over in her skin-tight pants and high-heel shoes, squaring up with the Russian and then swiftly high-kicking him right on the chin and knocking him out cold. And what happened next? With the two men stretched out on the ground, many witnesses claim to have noted an unlit cigarette dangling from Uzbeki Fred’s smoking hot girlfriend’s pursed, carmine lips before a diminutive member of Apo’s bar staff (clad in a hi-vis Hawaiian shirt) dutifully stepped forward to light her cigarette. If that sounds like a classic tall tale embellishment, we must remember the most important rule for such biographies: ‘When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.’

From there, well, dumbstruck bystanders simply watched in stunned silence as Uzbeki Fred’s smoking hot Chinese girlfriend hoisted Uzbeki Fred to his feet, dusted him down and led him to the exit. Almost as if spellbound, some spectators followed them to the street where they claim to have seen a still dazed Uzbeki Fred standing on the steps, checking to see if he had lost any teeth, while his girlfriend located his 250CC two-stroke. She then started it up (with her high-heel shoes, first time) and a bao ve (parking attendant) helped Uzbeki Fred clamber onto the backseat. After making sure Uzbeki Fred had secured himself by wrapping his arms around her skinnymalink waist, his smoking hot Chinese girlfriend let the clutch go, pulled on the throttle, and they soon disappeared into the stillness of a Hanoi summer night…

And from that moment, Uzbeki Fred’s smoking hot Chinese girlfriend took on legendary, if not mythical status. She’s the reason this story gets told over and over again. As for Uzbeki Fred? Frankly, some of us were a little disappointed to realise he was just the wingman, a not-so-trusty sidekick who couldn’t hold his liquor let alone throw or duck a punch. It’s probably not a surprising detail to add that soon after this incident he left town never to be seen again. I wouldn’t be shocked if someone told me he returned to Tashkent, alone, and moved in with his mother.

1. 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).