• Writing
• Nonfiction
• Richard and the clicker girl

(Richard is Richard Pettit. Other names in this story have been changed to minimize potential embarrassment.)  

1.

Huong arrives as Richard and I are finishing our third and final interview. She calls up from the street, then comes down the narrow alley and up the stairs to Richard’s apartment. I have met her once before, when she showed up during my first talk with Richard two weeks prior. On that occasion she walked into the apartment and greeted Rich: ‘Hey bay-bee,’ she called, wrapping her arms around Rich and pinching a big chunk of his ass. She wriggled her little bootie in (mock) excitement, and Rich laughed quietly at her display.

Huong was wearing a matching outfit of teenie-tiny shorts and a halter-top, in dark maroon satin. She had long, thin legs, exaggerated further by a pair of high platform shoes. A lot of young women in Hanoi wear short-shorts and halter tops, but Huong’s ensemble went just a step further, as she was a hooker and made no effort to hide it. Huong was not pretty, although the legs and her incredibly long, luscious brown hair went a long way to hide this fact. Her body had no curves to speak of, and her features were a bit out of whack, as her teeth and jaw were too big for her face. Apparently she had dental problems.

‘I talk to my American friend,’ she said to Rich as they started to make small-talk. ‘He say he pay to fix my teeth.’

Richard nodded in approval. Huong sat down and checked out our snacks; a bottle of dark Cuban rum, a pack of Ritz crackers and some olives. ‘She’s a pimento freak,’ Rich said, as Huong poked around in the jar.

I hung around that time because I was curious to see who this woman was, but the second time Huong shows up, two weeks later, I start to pack up my tape recorder and notebook as soon as she arrives. I mind my own business as Huong and Rich begin to talk in hushed tones. Huong looks down her top and under her bra strap.

‘I lose my medicine,’ she says, gazing up at Rich in disbelief. ‘I lose my medicine,’ she says again, looking down to the floor.

‘Maybe it dropped outside when you got off the xe om,’ Rich suggests, as Huong backs out the door, her eyes still fixed on the floor.

Without commenting on this scene, I pass Huong on the stairs and make my way outside to the sidewalk where my bicycle is parked. I throw my bag over my shoulder and fiddle with the bike lock. Huong comes out and she’s still staring at the ground. She makes her way to the curb and as I ride off, Huong – long, lean legs and huge platform heels – is about to get down on her knees in the middle of the crowded street to search the gutter for her rock of heroin.

2.

Richard Pettit was a good friend of mine in Hanoi. We worked together briefly at the Vietnam News. He had arrived in Hanoi in June 1996 – just a month after I first left – so we didn’t meet until my return in 1998. He would routinely join us for beers on Ly Thuong Kiet Street, where I would try my best not to interrupt his incredible stories. Rich taught English during the day, but he spent a great deal of time getting to know Hanoi on a level beyond almost any other foreigner I met. Whereas most foreigners congregated at restaurants and bars in the city center, Rich preferred to frequent Hanoi’s innumerable tea stalls and beer stands. While I shared his interest in street life, Rich was otherwise very different from me. To start, he was much older, but more importantly, he was a lifelong heroin addict and alcoholic who was most comfortable on the street, late at night, either alone or in the company of a low-rate prostitute.

What made Rich unique was his intellect, which despite the abuses he heaped on his body was tack sharp, and backed up by an impressive education and a life of astounding journeys. In addition to completing a degree in architecture at Boston University in the 1970s, Rich studied anthropology at the University of Hawaii. I learned a lot from Rich precisely because he led a life so unlike my own. What we had in common was an interest in understanding our surroundings, and in Hanoi we both obviously had a lot to learn. Near the end of my days in Hanoi I started working with Rich on a story that in many ways summarized his experience as an expat in Vietnam. I think my interviews with Richard also shed light on just how hard life can be in Hanoi, a city where every street corner has its pimps and its ‘hoes and its junkies.

3.

The culture of drug use in Hanoi is a little different than in Western countries, because the only drug available on any scale is heroin. You can find weed, but the Vietnamese don’t use it. There is no progression in Vietnam from soft to hard drugs. Kids start with heroin straight, and the only progression is from smoking to needlework. (Since this story was written in 2002, a wider range of drugs are available in Hanoi.)

Rich knew someone from the U.N. drug program who said heroin had only been around in Hanoi since the mid-90s, but this was likely not even close to the truth. Huong said she’d been an addict since the late 1980s. I met one American who lived in Saigon in 1992 and he found out just how intensely heroin affects the human body. I don’t know myself, so I’ll have to borrow his description. His name was Tom and he taught English at one of the city colleges for a year, then returned to Vietnam several years later. One day in 1992 another American man living in Saigon asked Tom if he would like to try heroin. Yes, Tom said, as a matter of fact he would. The two of them went down to the city docks and wandered down a suitably dark lane. Tom’s friend had done this before, so he wasn’t nervous. They came across a group of people sitting in front a small barrel full of liquid heroin. Tom said it was the most incredible sight he had ever seen. I asked him to clarify what he meant by ‘barrel.’

‘It was smaller than an oil barrel, but much bigger than a large can.’

‘Like a beer keg?’ I suggested.

‘Exactly, like a beer keg full of liquid heroin. And my friend takes out a needle and passes it to the old man sitting behind the keg, and the guy just dips it into the liquid and pulls the syringe back. We bought a needle full of pure heroin for about one dollar.’

I interrupted the story here for two reasons: 1) I could not believe Tom injected heroin the first time he tried it, and 2) I could not believe the price for a needle full of pure heroin.

‘Well,’ Tom said, ‘I knew I was only going to try this once in my life, and I guess I wanted to go all out.’ (And yes, at the 1992 exchange rate, a needle full of heroin cost about 100 U.S. pennies).

‘My friend said this was enough heroin to fuck us up several times over. We went back to his place to shoot up and he put a small amount into a separate needle for me. He put the needle to my arm, and as soon as it broke the skin I could feel this heat entering my body. As he started to press the syringe my entire arm went numb. It spread to the back of my neck and by the time he had emptied the needle I was gone. It was the most incredible feeling in the world and I’ll never do it again.’

(An edit for accuracy: the drug injected was brown, unrefined liquid opium, not pure heroin).

4.

Richard had stopped using heroin regularly before he came to Vietnam in 1996, but he was never able to fully break his addiction to narcotics. He had been living on the streets of Manoa in the early 1990s, washed out, when he heard about a government program that would pay for him to go back to school. He signed on, and started an undergraduate degree in anthropology. He was interested in fishing communities, and he soon became close with the Vietnamese who ran offshore trawlers out of Hawaii. Rich had worked as an offshore fisherman years before, so he got along well with the Vietnamese crews, especially after taking a course in the language as part of his degree. At school he was a model student, scoring straight A’s and heading towards a graduate degree. Then at the beginning of his last term, he moved in with a girl who said she was a prostitute, and she warned Richard she was a drug addict.

‘There’s only one rule,’ Rich told her, ‘you can do whatever you want, but no drugs in the house.’

The girl was about 18 years old, part Thai, part Hawaiian. Rich told me she was perhaps the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. She was not the first prostitute he had shacked up with.

‘The rule about the drugs lasted about half a day,’ he said. ‘She was addicted to crack, which I had never used before. She was making $500 an hour as a hooker and all of it went to drugs.’

Rich soon started smoking as well, and his life quickly fell apart again.

‘Crack is the worst drug I’ve ever tried. It makes you pathetic, crawling around on the floor to find pieces of rocks you know aren’t there.’

Somehow, at the same time, pre-approved credit cards started arriving in the mail, with Richard’s name on them. I guess he had been living clean long enough to look like a regular citizen. ‘They should have coordinated that with the drug rehab people,’ Rich joked ruefully, ‘because treatment isn’t going to work if you tempt people like that.’

Rich was soon drawing huge sums of money off the cards, all of which went up the pipe. By the time term ended, he had lost control. He scraped through his courses, but never completed his thesis. He had lost his confidence and given up on the idea of doing a PhD. With the debt collectors sure to come calling soon, Rich packed his bags and headed to Vietnam, one of the only places in Asia he had never visited.

5.

Like many Westerners in Asia, Richard’s most likely source of income was teaching English, so during his first few weeks in Hanoi he went around to the bars frequented by foreigners to meet people and make contacts with other teachers. At the R&R bar he met someone who gave him the card of the Vietnam News and said the newspaper was often looking for proofreaders. Richard dropped by the office and was soon hired. There he met Paul O’Connor, who said a room was available at his house near O Cho Dua.

‘You don’t mind living with an old, inveterate drunk?’ Richard asked.

‘Hell no mate, come on over,’ Paul responded.

So Richard moved in with Paul, his Vietnamese wife Molly, and another Australian named Neil. Rich also became good friends with Dave, an American who had lived with Paul until recently.

Life at the house near O Cho Dua was fine, until Paul complained to the landlord that they were paying too much rent. ‘You’ve got to lower the rent, or we’re leaving,’ Paul threatened. This tactic didn’t work, and soon the whole group was looking for a place to live. Dave was already at the Blue Hotel, a small place along Le Duan Street that rented rooms by the month for $200 or less. Rich moved in, along with Paul and Molly. Neil went elsewhere. Richard’s first night at the Blue was memorable.

‘I went to the Roxy and met this girl who wouldn’t take no for an answer, and she actually “blessed the room” so to speak. There was no problem getting her in.’

The man working the hotel desk at the time was named Luoi.

‘Whatever transpired was between him and her on the way out. He actually called up to say “She’s leaving is it okay?” to make sure you’re not passed out and she’s pocketed your money. I never had to pay something in addition to get girls into the hotel, so that was nice.’

But the hotel soon changed management, and they started to tighten up on their regulations. Even this was okay, as Richard lived only one floor up from the lobby.

‘The first girl I carted through the window was when I was living (on the first floor). Her boyfriend gave her a leg up and she hoisted herself into the first floor hallway. But I was worried about that because that’s the kind of thing you could actually get into trouble for.’

Rich talked to Dave and mentioned the idea of getting a small bamboo ladder and storing it under his bed, then passing it out the window for girls to come up without passing through the lobby.

‘That’s not a good idea,’ Dave said.

Rich eventually agreed, and in any case he had several straight girlfriends the new hotel management didn’t mind, including a woman who sold roast duck out of the far corner of the lobby – which faced a busy intersection. The hotel maid would also send her friends around to Richard’s room on occasion. Richard normally paid 50,000 dong for all these trysts (just over $4 at the time), although none of the women were ‘professional’ prostitutes.

In early 1998, after he had been in the country almost two years, Rich went down to Nha Trang to see if he could get work there. He loved the ocean and liked the idea of living on the coast again.

‘The airport is about a half mile from the beach and I was like “Whoo! Here I am!” Water, palm trees, cold beer. I went straight from the airplane to the bar on the beach and didn’t even check into a hotel until I’d had about ten beers.’

‘I was on this euphoric vacation thing that I had forgotten about for about ten years. I had money, I had a visa, there were no problems. The second night I was there I went back to the same bar to duplicate the first night and it was one of those scenarios where I woke up, completely alone in the bar, with all the lights off, no staff, no security, and nobody had bothered to wake me up and kick me out. I was passed out at the bar. It must have been 4:30 am or so. I thought “This is my kinda place! They don’t even kick drunks out at this place!” I think they figured I was harmless. There were no doors, I just hopped a railing. So that was nice.’

Unfortunately, work did not come through in Nha Trang, and after partying away all his money, Rich had to leave his passport at the hotel – he had no money for the bill – and make his way back to Hanoi. The Blue Hotel was full, but Rich had no luck finding another hotel: ‘I had no money and no passport and I’d been up drinking for a couple of days, so nobody would check me in.’ He went back to Luoi to beg for a room.

‘Luoi said “move into the kitchen upstairs” – which was a big room on the fourth floor that was not being used. It had a good-sized bed for $3 a day, and I had the whole floor except the girls did their ironing and hung clothes there. I had a phone… two sinks and a stove with an oven. But no fridge.’

Rich had to borrow money from Dave and Steve (from the newspaper) to get going again, but he eventually found teaching work and was able to pay them back. When his old room opened up downstairs, he was able to convince the new manager to give it to him for $160 a month. Luoi was no longer there, and the new manager was Mai, an attractive woman in her early 40s. Rich was no longer carting women in through windows, because as he said, ‘I never brought many women back – it was in the street, even then.’

‘I was satisfied with that place, with the set up, the management.’

Things went well for Rich over the next year, with teaching jobs opening up and the newspaper eventually taking him back at his proofreading position. Rich and I worked together briefly in the fall of 1998, when I was living with Julian Wainwright in a house along Bach Dang Street. Jules and I had both stayed briefly at the Blue Hotel, where Jules first met Rich and loaned him a sleeping bag so he could deal with the cold nights. (Despite Rich’s lifestyle, he was never once late for work, he was always sober on the job, and he was more than competent as a proofreader.)

‘I stayed at the Blue for another year, then I’d been in the country for over three years without leaving, so when I tried to get another extension they told me I would have to leave. The guy actually came over to the hotel and he was on his mobile and I was on my phone to get tickets and stuff.’

Rich decided to go to Thailand to relax for a while and wait for his new visa. He didn’t want to bother moving his stuff into Dave’s room at the hotel, so he paid for the month he would be gone.

‘Before I left… I composed a note, using a dictionary, and I said, “While I’m gone would you mind repainting my room. I have at least two families of rats living under my bed. One of the closet doors has popped off” – there were about four or five things listed…. And when I came back they had done everything. The room was cherried out, it was fucking plush. They spent some time… they didn’t just paint – they painted well. They even cleaned the inside of the light fixtures.’

But there was one minor change that soon ballooned into a catastrophe.

‘When they repainted the room and cleaned out the rats – they were shitting and building nests right underneath my bed – the staff unplugged the refrigerator and then never plugged it back in. So I think just that little thing upsets the way a fridge works, when it sits unplugged for a month or whatever it was. When I plugged it in the light went on, but it never got cold. I waited about two or three days for that thing to get cold and it never did, so I mentioned it, first to the kids (at the desk) and later to Mai. I said “tu lanh chet roi” (the fridge is dead) and they understood, but it wasn’t anything that got an immediate response.’

Rich and I laughed over this, because even at the time he had told me, ‘I have the beginnings of a bad feeling about this…’.

‘I plugged it in and fiddled with it and unplugged it and fiddled with it, then shook it around a bit.’

Then one day the hotel sent two repair guys to Rich’s room to look at the refrigerator.

‘When they were in there I said to them “chet roi” and they said “yes, chet roi.” There was actually a fridge repair shop within sight of the hotel, although it’s maybe not the shop the hotel used.’

Four days went by with no further work done on the fridge. The next stage was for the fridge to be moved into the hallway outside Rich’s room, where it sat for about two weeks.

‘Every day I thought “surely something is going to transpire before this day is over.” Finally I said “what’s the story?” and Mai said, “It’s going to cost a lot of money to fix it,” as if it was somehow my problem.’

Rich also came home one day to find that his bed had been moved out of the room and replaced with an inferior model, one that did not have a headboard where he could store his books and personal items. All his things were piled in the middle of the room. The staff told him the old bed was gone, in the garbage, but not to worry because the new bed was better. Rich thought this was bullshit, as his beautiful bed was probably spotted by another guest who then asked for it to be put in their room. Rich told the staff that he had something ‘very valuable’ stored in the bed, and they would have to return it. He got a girl at the Vietnam News office to compose a letter in Vietnamese which read something like: 1) Don’t ever take anything from my room, 2) Do not touch my personal belongings without asking me first, and 3) Don’t assume you know what I like better than I do (like which bed is better). Finally, Rich asked for his bed back.

The letter worked, and Rich’s bed was returned. ‘They lied like rugs, because they said it had been thrown out.’ There was still the matter of the fridge, however. One guest at the hotel was an American Viet kieu who seemed to spend a lot of time with Mai. One night Rich came home after having a few drinks and the American and Mai were in the lobby. Rich approached the man. ‘Maybe you can ask this lady why I’ve been without a fridge for five weeks.’

‘The guy said “What?!?” and then I started to get pissed off. He told me not to swear so much and I said, “Do you have a fridge in your room? Well I don’t. So you’re okay and I’m not”.’

The American calmed the situation by telling Rich that he was leaving the hotel the next day, and his fridge would be in Rich’s room by the next evening. This took place, and Rich’s fridge went to the shop. ‘The transfer occurred, and his fridge – which was the same make and model – was in my room the next day. Everything was alright, it was like “Okay, that’s over, thank you very much”.’

The fridge came back in a couple of days. The manager Mai said ‘everything okay!’ Rich knew it was his old fridge because it had burnt and discolored plastic from where someone had once used a soldering gun.

‘It only lasted three or four days, not even a week, before it went off again. I just went “Chet nua. Tu lanh chet nua.” It was such a ridiculous situation that I wasn’t even uptight.’

But at the same time, the Blue Hotel did a fairly extensive renovation of the lobby that involved a lot of marble and nice track lighting. Rich told Mai: ‘This is beautiful stuff. What about my refrigerator?’

The weather was warming up and after another couple of weeks Rich was not happy about life without a fridge. ‘I woke up every morning and it was the first thing that crossed my mind: I wake up and I go “fuck, there’s no fridge”.’

Rich’s standard fridge at the time was a jar of mayo, pickles, cheese, ham, water, peanut butter, jelly, bread (to make it last, they don’t use preservatives in Vietnam), and ketchup. As Rich told me, ‘I’d bring home a banh my trung. You dust that up with a little fuckin’ spicy mustard and ketchup and it’s a whoooooole different piece of… it’s good, you know?’

He expounded on this point: ‘It’s not just the idea of the thing. It is convenient to be able to keep stuff to snack on.’

Rich approached Mai and said he would deduct money from his rent, a portion suitable to the value of having a fridge in the room. ‘No you won’t,’ Mai responded. He also talked to a couple of lawyers in town, who, as he said, ‘talked like lawyers’ and told him to get a proper contract for the room.

‘I don’t want a fucking contract I want a fridge,’ Rich explained.

Finally, Richard came down from his room one evening before going to work and he told the staff behind the desk that he was going to call the police.

‘I will call the tourist police and report this,’ he said.

Now, there are no ‘tourist police’ in Vietnam, but this final tactic was successful, and later that night there was a brand new Daewoo fridge in his room. Unfortunately, Richard’s problems with the hotel were just beginning.

6.

It may be the hotel always wanted Richard to move out, as part of their general upscaling to a new level of clientele. Rich told me as much himself. But in any case things took a turn for the worse late one weekend evening when he was having a bowl of noodles at the all-night stall next to the hotel. It was after 3:00 am, he had been drinking, as usual, and was making a conscience effort to have some food before retiring to bed. Suddenly, Dave pulled up on his motorbike with Ted in tow. This was another American, younger than Dave, who had been living in Hanoi for several years and knew both Dave and Richard fairly well. Ted was known to be a decent sort of guy, but very unruly as a drunk – loud and aggressive, to the point of being dangerous.

But Rich was not concerned and when Dave and Ted pulled up he thought ‘Alright, maybe this party isn’t over!’

The pair joined Richard and they ordered some more beers. Rich also had beers in his fridge – this must have been just after it was fixed – and so he invited the pair up to his room. ‘They were pretty fuckin’ drunk,’ Rich notes, ‘but maintaining, you know, nothing untoward.’

Up in Rich’s room, Dave started things off by getting in a wrestling match with Ted. The pair fell over and broke the bed, and as Rich remembers, ‘beers were spilled immediately.’

‘Ted was sloppy, spilling beers over his feet. This set the tone – although we did get a laugh out of the bed going down – and when I commented to Ted about the beers he said something like “Do you know how many drinks I’ve bought you?”.’

Rich admitted that, yes, Ted had bought him many drinks over the years, but he was growing concerned about the ‘animal house’ nature the proceedings were taking.

‘My fan may have had a click in it or something… some noise as it rotated. But Ted just lurched off the bed, probably knocked over another beer, and just crashed it on the floor and started jumping up and down. It went into several hundred pieces of plastic and wire grill.’

Rich said even this didn’t bother him too much: ‘I got behind even that. I just figured, well fuck, he’s gonna buy me a new fan.’ Dave however was looking funny at Ted’s behavior.

‘Ted made more comments, more beers were spilled, then the next thing was the reading lamp.’ Ted grabbed Rich’s lamp and smashed it on the floor. ‘I was starting to get the impression this guy thought my abode was a piece of shit.’

‘Now we’ve got the bed, the fan, the lamp. My perception began to change…. By now we’re not swimming in beer, but there might have been some glass as well. The next thing was Ted walking up to the head of my bed and sweeping all my books off the headboard, onto the floor, into the beer.’

‘I snapped. I’m sure he didn’t expect this – I just swung on him. I hit him too high, I should have aimed for his nose or something. Or maybe I did and missed. But it actually worked…. I jumped right on his shit and that popped the rest of the bed. I had him – I was scared though – I actually had my thumbs in his mouth, which I did real quick and I got outside his teeth, and I was telling Dave, “Get this motherfucker out of my room”.’

Dave sat there for a moment but then snapped to attention and man-handled Ted out of the room. Ted was bleeding over the eye, and Dave took him down to the hotel lobby bathroom to get cleaned up.

‘Then I start hearing this “I’ll kill him” stuff. And I’m like, “This fucker still doesn’t realize?” So I went downstairs, I was gonna throw him through the window or something. Ted saw this and he said okay it’s over, and Dave threw him in a cab and slammed the door.’

‘My room was completely fucked…. Dave came up and righteously helped me clean up. We spent about an hour putting my room back together. We couldn’t fix the bed, it needed hammers, nails, drills, screwdrivers and shit – but Dave went upstairs and came down with a couple of bungee cords, and we bungeed the two sideboards so they would clamp in on the tail so it would actually stand. And I had those bungee cords on that bed until the day I left. We found a bodybag for the fan, we got down to everything except the floor.’

Dave eventually went upstairs to his room, only to come down a few minutes later. Their adventure was not over yet:

‘Ted just called me and said the cops are on their way over.’

They were incredulous, but Dave suggested leaving. ‘It’s going to be a bad scene.’ He asked Rich to come with him and get breakfast, as the sun was already coming up. ‘No way,’ Rich said. ‘The only thing I can do is get another beer. I’m too drunk to be sitting with sober people at a noodle stand.’

So Rich went off to get a beer, and Dave headed for breakfast. Dave was the first to return to the hotel, at around 10:00 am. There were two plain-clothed police officers waiting in the lobby. These two goons started by asking Dave, ‘Where is Mr. Ted?’ Apparently, Ted’s story was that Dave and Rich had kidnapped him and abused him in Rich’s room. Dave – who was having his own visa problems at the time – managed to defuse the situation by saying it was an argument over a football game. In fact there had been a major football game the previous evening, so the cops eventually bought that excuse and left.

When Rich came crawling back several hours later, Mai was at the desk, grinning at him as he walked in the door. Rich knew this didn’t look good, although as he said, ‘On the other hand, it wasn’t all that bad in terms of the shit that happens in hotel rooms. It was just a brief fight.’ Rich was still worried, and he asked Dave to get Ted to call the police and explain himself. ‘Get this guy to cop to what happened and get us off the shit list,’ as he put it. Ted did contact the police, explaining that he was just upset because of girl problems that had nothing to do with Rich or Dave.

So the situation evaporated, but it seems that Mai had grown weary of having Richard stay long-term in the hotel. After the fridge was finally repaired, Rich noticed that the cleaning staff more or less ignored his room, and he would have to walk down to the lobby and ask every time he wanted a clean towel or some toilet paper. Until then, Rich had liked living at the hotel, where he didn’t have to worry about housekeeping, losing his keys, or security. But sometime after the fight with Ted, Rich tried to bring another foreign friend up to his room and the desk staff refused, saying no guests were allowed. This was the final straw, and Rich started to look for alternate living arrangements.

7.

At this point in the story, a new character enters. His name is Tony, a big Puerto Rican from Miami who was about the same age as Rich, and had also seen more than his share of adventures in life. Before coming to Hanoi and taking up life as an English teacher, Tony had worked as a musician, a cab driver and a drug dealer, and had lived in India and Italy, and probably a few places in between.

As Rich began to discuss Tony, he leaned into the microphone to say, ‘Tony’s got no shame… You hear that?’

Rich continued: ‘I mean, Tony doesn’t tell everybody everything, but myself if I brought home a ‘hoe and then passed out and she swiped my TV, I might not tell anybody. Tony told me. I guess it helps him get it off his chest.’

Tony lived in a small two-room apartment near Lenin Park. He drank and went with prostitutes more often than not. His landlord, Cuong, did not seem to mind his lifestyle. But after one late night of drinking and whoring Tony awoke to see his landlord standing over him. ‘I found your keys in the gate,’ Cuong said. Tony bolted out of bed (Richard: ‘Probably stinkin’ like a goat’) and the two of them walked into the living room. They immediately noticed the TV was missing. In Tony’s version of the story, he looked at the landlord and said, ‘I should probably just get married, it would be cheaper.’ Tony asked how much the TV was worth, and when the landlord said $300, Tony went into his room, found his stash and peeled off three bills.

Rich was impressed by how loose Tony was about the situation, although as I pointed out, you need to have that much money lying around to be that righteous about it. In any case, it wasn’t the only discussion Tony and Rich had about ‘thieving whores.’ (Richard: ‘I’ve passed out on whores quite a bit, and my philosophy is, you’re fair game. You’ve got no business taking a whore home if you’re on the verge of passing out, so I don’t take it personal.’)

Tony was bemused one night by a prostitute who stole the remote control clicker for his air conditioner. Rich didn’t pay this much attention except to note whom Tony was talking about and then avoid her. This changed, however, when Rich moved into Tony’s old apartment. Things at the hotel had continued to deteriorate, and when Tony said he was moving and his landlord would come down to $200 a month for the next tenant, Rich agreed to take the place. It had been years since Rich had his own apartment, and he reveled in the freedom. He had saved a bit of money by then and work was stable, so he felt free to increase his budget for wine, women and drugs.

The only problem with the new apartment was that it lacked a clicker for the Mitsubishi air conditioner. Rich asked the landlord about this and the man simply replied, ‘Tony.’ So Rich knew he would have to solve this problem himself. He started by sitting down with Tony and getting the full story – Tony’s side of the story. This was simple enough: Tony took this one girl home, she acted a bit suspicious and when she left, for some reason she said, ‘Do you want to search me?’ Tony didn’t clue in to any problem until the next day he noticed the clicker was gone.

In an unrelated discussion, Tony starting going on about one girl at Apocalypse Now who gave extremely good blowjobs. (Tony: ‘She could lift you off the bed with just her mouth’). Rich inquired as to who this was, and as it turns out it was the girl who stole the clicker.

Richard and Tony were standing in Apocalypse Now when this conversation about the blowjob past master took place.

Rich: ‘What? This is the one who swiped your clicker? I don’t think you mentioned that before. That puts a whole different slant on the situation.’

Richard approached her and asked if he could buy her a drink.

‘You can’t afford to buy me a drink,’ she replied. ‘I’ve seen you in here a lot and you don’t have it.’

Rich loved this girl’s attitude, and he bought her a drink. Her name was Huong. I asked Rich if his motivation for approaching her was strictly blowjob-oriented:

‘Ya, plus I had a fantasy about getting my clicker back. The motivation was two-fold, or two-pronged… Get my clicker back, and getting… Well, I also wanted her version of the story. I brought it up right away, so I think the motivation might have been the clicker.’

As soon as they were talking, Rich asked Huong for her version of events. ‘By the way,’ Rich started. ‘I just moved into this apartment. Tony used to live there. I don’t have a clicker. Tony says you stole it.’

‘Yes,’ Huong replied, ‘I stole it.’

Huong said Tony approached her one night and they reached an agreement and went back to his place. They had sex once, and when Huong got up to leave, Tony said he wanted to have sex again. Huong said this would cost more money, and Tony grunted something in response. ‘The second time take a long time,’ Huong said, ‘and then he refuse to give me more money.’ So, she took the clicker on the way out.

Rich felt this version of events was probably more accurate than Tony’s. He later told Tony what Huong as said, making sure to embellish Tony’s sexual prowess in the process. ‘That sounds about right,’ Tony admitted. ‘But who are you going to believe, her or me?’

Rich noted that Tony was now getting a bit pissed off, whereas Rich just wanted his clicker back. ‘Tony somehow had a blindspot there for the longest time,’ Rich told me, ‘Like it wasn’t his responsibility. Somehow the TV was, but the clicker wasn’t.’

In the face of Tony’s intransigence, Rich began his own campaign to get the clicker back. In fact, he had already started the process. He took Huong home that first night, paying her 300,000 dong for sex, ‘and a clicker.’ This started a relationship that lasted many weeks, where in addition to hooking up some nights at Apocalypse, Huong would come over to Rich’s apartment early on Saturday evenings to spend time together – having sex and getting stoned.

‘The first time was 300,000, then it dropped to 220,000, which is exactly the price for a phan of heroin, which is six to nine goi.’

Huong was addicted to smack, and in one of only a few lucid moments she told Richard, ‘I have a big problem.’ Huong’s father and brother/s were also addicts, and Huong probably supported the whole family. She said she went through $50 of heroin every day, an amount that Richard could not believe. Given Hanoi street prices, $50 of heroin was enough to kill any addict Rich had met. She was either lying, or as we suspected she was providing this amount of heroin for her whole family. Unlike many addicts, Huong only smoked the drug, she didn’t inject. Richard knew a French expat named Leon who was a researcher for the U.N. Drug Control Program, and this man had been doing a study of injectors and HIV. The average addict, he said, smokes for two years before starting to inject. Huong said she started using over ten years ago, in the late 1980s. She was about 30 years old, and just hanging on.

8.

Richard’s interest in drug use extended past the obvious history of his own addiction to an almost scholarly attention to detail. His degree in anthropology may have played a part in this. Leon, who worked for the UNDCP – an organization Richard did not have much respect for – was an unlikely acquaintance. But Rich was always open-minded, and had no problem sharing his experiences. During our last interview we discussed Leon’s research, and I innocently asked Rich, ‘You don’t have any tracks, do you?’ He laughed and turned his arm towards me, so I could see the range of scars running down his veins. The largest was right in the crook of his left elbow. ‘That was after I didn’t care about my public image anymore,’ he said. Rich explained that he had started high on his arm, so he could cover the needle marks with a t-shirt.

‘When you’re shooting drugs, it’s the kind of thing where you don’t want to miss, and what eventually happens for almost every serious user I’ve seen is that you end up hitting the spot where you’re sure you won’t miss, so you get these little tracks that get progressively wider, then you end up with what borders on an abscess.’

Rich told me he was in Munchies one night – an all-night burger joint next to Apocalypse Now – when a girl sat next to him and started talking him up. They went home together and, as Rich put it, ‘I was going down on her when I noticed she had these lines just above her pubic hair… they looked like a tattoo, very symmetrical.’ Rich was amazed by these track lines, and he asked the girl to meet him next week at the same time. He wanted to photograph her tracks, although presumably he didn’t mention this directly. Later that week he told Leon about the girl with symmetrical track lines along the veins above her pubic hair, and Leon was also intrigued. ‘I’ve heard about that, but I’ve never seen it.’ Leon met Rich the next weekend and they waited for the girl outside Apocalypse, but she never showed.

9.

Huong was a thief and she didn’t hide it. It wasn’t just clickers. One day she told Richard that a rich European businessman had taken her home a few nights back. This man was staying in one of the fanciest hotels in town. He paid her $200 dollars up front, an astounding amount in Hanoi, where a woman like Huong might normally charge somewhere between $20 and $50 a trick. While in this man’s room, Huong said she stole another $400, and then was surprised when he tipped her another $200 at the end of the night. She walked away from his room with $800, which happens to be the average annual per capita income in Hanoi.

‘What happened to the money?’ Richard asked.

‘I spend already,’ Huong replied. ‘Medicine.’

10.

The price for an air conditioner remote control was about 150,000 dong, or just about $10. They can probably be re-sold on the street by someone like Huong for 50,000 or so, although admittedly this is just a guess. In any case they are not valuable items. But a few dollars is all it takes to get stoned and drop away from reality for a little while, and for some people that’s good enough.

Neil, an old friend who once lived with Richard, told us a story about visiting a house that was for rent, a few months back when he was looking for a place to live. Rich and I had just told Neil that we were working on a story about a missing clicker.

Neil went to see this house, a very modern two-story affair that was priced just a bit over what Neil wanted to pay. He counted three air conditioning units, in both bedrooms and the living room, but he noticed there were no clickers.

‘Where are the remotes?’ Neil asked the landlord.

‘I keep them in my other house now,’ the landlord explained. ‘You see, last week I showed this house to two well-dressed young women who said they could find me a foreigner to rent the place. They walked around and looked at everything closely, and after they left I noticed all three remotes were gone.’

11.

‘The only time she straight ripped me off was one night for 170,000 dong. She was going to go score and meet me back here (at the apartment). I sat outside and smoked about three cigarettes.’

Richard found out later that at the last moment before leaving Apocalypse, Huong was picked up by a senior U.N. official who probably paid a lot of money to cart her off in his big white Landcruiser.

‘That was going to be the third time we went together. I phoned her later but she wasn’t home, then she saw me the next night and said “why you call and wake up my father at 5:00 am?” I said “you were supposed to come, I gave you some money”.’

This conversation, which took place at Apocalypse, degenerated into name-calling.

‘Don’t disturb my father,’ Huong ended up saying, ‘He’s sick.’

Rich apologized and asked what happened to her mobile phone. She had hawked it for cash, and they both got a bit of a laugh out of that.

‘She picked up on my logic and since then we’ve gotten along a little better, no harsh words. She actually tries to figure stuff out, and so do I.’

Rich never forgot the clicker, however, and he brought the subject up again after the phone situation was clear.

‘You owe me 170,000, and I want a clicker.’

Huong said she would steal one, next chance she got. ‘I haven’t been with someone who’s got one,’ she said.

(Whether her father was really sick or not, Rich was not sure. The first time I met Huong, during my initial interview for this story, she told us her father was constantly spitting up blood, and the somewhat absurd medical diagnosis provided by a Vietnamese doctor was that low blood pressure was the problem. Huong said that in the past her father ‘sold too much blood,’ which I took to mean he used to give blood frequently to earn a bit of cash. Why this would relate to him now spitting up blood, I have no idea. But even without her sick father, Rich pointed out that Huong hawking her mobile phone was clear evidence that she was getting increasingly desperate for cash.)

That night they went home together and Rich was worried because he was nodding off. ‘Can I take a piss without losing something?’ he asked. Huong got angry at this comment because she had already promised she wouldn’t steal from him anymore. The next time they were together, however, Rich gave her a 100 yuan note, worth about $8, to score some medicine. This never materialized. A few more days passed, and then near the end of a night Huong called Rich from a payphone. Already in the company of another prostitute, Rich nonetheless said, ‘Come on up if you want. No money, no sex.’

‘Why would I come up for no money?’ Huong laughed.

‘I dunno, watch a film, chat.’

Huong laughed again and hung up. Rich found this response hilarious, but as he pointed out to me, ‘She might eventually… hey, I’m a pretty righteous guy.’

But righteous or not, Rich soon realized that Huong was too far-gone to reason with. The quest for a clicker was fun for a while, and it made a good story, but getting played by an addict was tiring. A few more weeks went by, and one night Rich gave Huong a 50,000 dong note in return for three small lines of heroin not worth half the amount. Huong then asked for all Rich’s money, and when he refused she said, ‘Don’t call me anymore if you don’t have cash.’

Rich walked off, but a short time later he went back to her and said, ‘I don’t have a problem with you, but someone is going to hurt you if you keep stealing.’

Huong looked at him blankly. ‘I die soon no problem,’ she said.

Rich by that time had hooked up with a couple of bicycle whores who patrolled the streets hear his apartment, and he had already moved on to these ladies. There was no need to continue with Huong.

Tony showed up one day at Richard’s apartment with three Mitsubishi air conditioner remote control units in his hand. He must have felt guilty, or realized he would end up looking bad in this story. They tried all three of them out, but none worked with Rich’s machine. I guess air conditioners don’t have universal remotes like TVs do. Rich and Tony had a good laugh at this, and Rich decided to buy a new fan.

Sadly, Richard Pettit died in Hanoi in October, 2002. He was 57. He passed away quietly one Sunday afternoon in his beloved apartment. Rich had no living family members. He will be greatly missed.

Richard’s most cherished possession was a copy of the New Yorker magazine that featured a cover painting by Carter Goodrich called ‘Heavenly Blues’ (below). In this painting, bar patrons and a group of jazz musicians all nod off under the spell of drugs, alcohol and the voice of an angelic singer whose wings protrude from the back of her dress. ‘No one has looked at this painting as long as I have,’ Rich said.

I guess he never found his angel.