What Would Kinky Do?: How to Unscrew a Screwed-Up World (17 page)

"We call this witchity grub," he said, offering the sickly white, wriggling object to the Four Horsemen.

We looked at the grub and, I suppose, it looked at us. Tom had been a highly decorated flying hero in World War II. McGovern had been a Marine and had ingested many strange things in his life. I'd been in the Peace Corps in Borneo and had once eaten monkey brains. But it was Earl Buckelew, a man who'd never heard of sushi, who was finally brave enough to take the bait, so to speak.

"Care for an after-dinner mint?" I asked him later.

"You know," he said, "it's one of the few things I've eaten in my life that damn sure doesn't taste like chicken."

In the days ahead, we saw many strange animals and people and did many strange things. We survived climbing Ayers Rock, sacred to the Aborigines (thirty-five climbers at this count have died trying). We saw the famous black swans of Perth. McGovern almost got pecked by a poison parakeet near Darwin. Earl entered and won a sheep-shearing contest in New South Wales. I explored the area where the great Breaker Morant and his horse, Cavalier, had once happily wandered before the Boer War. Tom questioned the authenticity of a cannon that Piers Akerman claimed "fired the first shots in anger in both world wars, Australia being sixteen hours ahead of Texas and probably lightyears ahead of Sarajevo where Archduke Ferdinand was assassinated." By the time he'd gotten to how the cannon had started World War II by firing upon a German merchant vessel, the Four Horsemen had cantered off to the nearby town of Robertson, where the movie
Babe
was filmed many years later.

If you go there today and ask for Babe, you'll find that they are tired of fielding questions about their local celebrity. They'll probably tell you, "Sorry, mate. Babe's touring America. He's opening for David Helfgott."

For a country that's roughly the same size as the United States, with only eighteen million people and thirty million kangaroos, both groups of whom happily hop about in the sunshine away from the world's problems, Australia can't be beat. As a vacation paradise, the Four Horsemen give it four stars, one for every star in the Southern Cross.

But as far as questions about whether the water swirls counterclockwise in toilets or whether dogs circle three times counterclockwise before lying down, I'm afraid you'll have to travel down under yourself to find out. I know, of course, but I can't give you the answers. The Four Horsemen of the Antipodes have taken a sacred, eternal, monastic vow to carry them with us into Dreamtime.

HOW TO DELIVER THE PERFECT AIR KISS

The air kiss, long the domain of vapid starlets and anorexic models, has made its way into mainstream America with a loud "muwah!" While the air kiss may seem to be a phenomena of the twenty-first century, the term was actually coined in 1887 in an article from the
Chicago Tribune
that described various forms of kissing: "Nothing is more dainty than the kiss of a well-bred chaperon, who, mindful of the time and trouble spent over the powder box, gently presses her lips on your hair just north of your ear. The minister's wife is another sweet soul who knows where a kiss will do least harm, and her favorite method is an air kiss, with the gentle pressure of her cheek to your cheek."

The air kiss no doubt remained in American culture but the term didn't reappear in print again until
Newsweek,
March 1975: "The uncontested Prince of American Design murmured greetings to the chic crowd, carefully air-kissing their cheeks."

Air kisses are most common in formal social occasions, such as weddings, official ceremonies, or celebrity parties where you have to mingle and pretend to feel care and affection for people you barely know and probably hate. There are a series of important steps you have to make in order to deliver an effective air kiss, and if you follow my guide, in no time you will be an expert at displaying pseudo affection and reassuring people of the sincerity of your pretension.

The Approach:
Greeting people with an actual kiss can spread disease and give the false impression that you're actually happy to see them. If you sense that another person is about to plant one on you, launch a preemptive air kiss attack: spread your arms wide, tilting them slightly at an angle, and announce the person's name loudly. If you don't remember their name, say, "Look at yeww!" If you're in Texas, the "look at yeww!" will be reciprocated and elongated as "Look at ye-wwwww!"

The Ready Position:
Move in and grasp the other person's hands, clutching them to your chest. This makes you look friendly and it also puts up a barrier between you and the other person without making you look like an antisocial ass. Air kissing is all about false impressions so you might as well use it to make yourself look good. Tilt your head slightly and move your right cheek next to their right cheek, but don't actually touch them. If they try to abort the air kiss to turn it into a real kiss, tighten your grip on their hands and don't let them pull away or alter the cheek position. If you allow them to parry the air kiss and turn it into an actual kiss, you will be doomed to greet-kiss this person forever. When you decide to air kiss, you have to be resolute and stay the course.

The Pucker:
Now that your cheek is next to their cheek, pucker your lips firmly. Visualize yourself as a suckerfish clinging to the gills of a great white shark. Your lips must be firm and unforgiving; if you allow any softness at all, your air kiss might be mistaken for a Euro air kiss, which lacks the insincerity of the American air kiss.

The Delivery:
Kiss the air next to the other person's head. A loud, enthusiastic "muwah!" should accompany the kiss. You could also make cutesy kissing sounds but this isn't recommended if there are dogs nearby because
you
don't even want to be there, so why subject an innocent animal to a place that requires air kisses?

The Kiss:
Always air kiss both sides of a person's face. A one-sided air kiss confuses everyone and might set you up for an embarrassing collision when the other person automatically goes for the second kiss and you stay where you are. A rapid succession of four, or even six air kisses should be saved for special occasions, like when a lot of important people are watching. They will think you learned that while vacationing abroad and you'll come across as quaint, even charming.

The Closer:
Once you've completed your air kiss, immediately let go of the other person's hands and step-slide backwards. Pretend to see someone you know in the distance and give a little wave in their imaginary direction. Smile at the one you just air kissed and make the "call me" gesture before you move away decisively.

LET SAIGONS BE BYGONES

Another answer to that good question is that Vietnam was a bad war. In the late sixties I'd been in the Peace Corps in Borneo helping people who wore conical hats and worked with water buffalo in rice paddies. When I returned to the good ol' USA, I found myself in the basement thinkin' 'bout the government. They wanted to send me back over to Asia to kill the same people. It was unconscionable, I told them. It wasn't even cost-effective. Neither argument, however, seemed to cut much ice with the draft board. I had to trot out a phalanx of rabbis and shrinks to confirm my insanity and thereby, perhaps quite literally, dodge the bullet.

But that was then and this is now. People in both the East and the West long ago decided to let Saigons be bygones. My own kid sister is currently, in fact, the head of the American Red Cross in Vietnam. Marcie has been based in Hanoi for several years and is in love with the culture and the people. "You won't believe it," she told me. "It's a country of eighty million people with no Christians, no Jews, no Muslims, no Starbucks, no McDonald's, and no Burger Kings. It's paradise!" So a few months ago I went to Vietnam to visit her. And guess what? She wasn't wrong.

Vietnam is halfway around the world from the sign in front of the Kerrville church that used to read "Jesus Is Our Quarterback." If you travel west you can get to the East in roughly twenty-four hours. That gave me a lot of time to think about Marcie, who's sixteen years younger than I, though we've always been close. I've watched with pride as she's developed into what she humorously refers to as a "professional do-gooder." She grew up in Austin, attended Yale and Berkeley, and came within a tadpole of being a Ph.D. in biology before jumping species and deciding to devote her efforts to that most troublesome and needy of all living creatures, the human being.

Soon Marcie was heading up disaster-relief teams in Nicaragua, after torrential flooding; in Kauai, after Hurricane Iniki; and in Turkey, after a series of devastating earthquakes. She has traveled and lived in places like China, Mexico, Australia, and Easter Island. Marcie also spent several years in Washington as a senior program manager at the Red Cross and seven summers directing our family's summer camp, Echo Hill

Ranch, with our father. By the time I visited her in Hanoi, she already had a large, colorful group of friends and colleagues. I didn't have to make new friends; I just borrowed hers.

One friend, Professor Nguyen Trong Nhan, a former Vietnamese minister of health, grew up watching old Hollywood cowboy movies. He said it had broken his heart to know that the American cowboy was fighting on the other side. Another friend, Larry Holtzman, had been a Peace Corps volunteer in Liberia when JFK was assassinated and was now busy dispensing contraceptives throughout Vietnam. I told him it was probably an easier gig than it would be in the States. "One nation under what's-his-name?" he said. Dr. Le Cao Dai had been a legendary Viet Cong hospital commander. His name has many meanings, depending on inflection and tonality; thus it was that a Swedish social worker followed the revered man around for seven years calling him Dr. Urine. Mr. Phan Thanh Hai works for the Danang Red Cross. When Marcie and I saw signs everywhere that read "March 29," we asked Mr. Hai what was up. Merely stating historical fact, he said, "That's the day we defeated the running dogs of American imperialism." Then there was Marcie's friend who owned a sugar factory and named his small boy Ice Cream.

The children of Vietnam are among the most attractive and charming in the world. They are bright, friendly, and inquisitive, and they often call out to American strangers like shy little birds singing, "Hen-no," which, of course, is how they pronounce "hello." Marcie has a special bond with these children: She recently helped procure, through the U.S. Department of Agriculture, an eight-million-dollar soy milk program for the country's schools—the largest American Red Cross package of its kind in Southeast Asia.

Hanoi itself is a magical, ancient city currently inhabited by three million people, three million cell phones, and three million motorbikes. Throw some cars, bicycles, and rickshaws into the soup, and crossing the street becomes a Zen exercise. There are almost no traffic lights, signals, or lanes, so you must walk very slowly and confidently, allowing the motorbikes to zip by from both directions on either side of you. Whatever you do, once you've committed to crossing the street, you mustn't stop. If you freeze in the middle, they can't tell which way you're going to jump.

The Vietnamese people are intelligent, kindhearted, and industrious and, as Marcie says, "the very last people on earth with whom we should have gone to war." The Vietnamese like Americans; we are merely a footnote in their long history. They don't seem to carry grudges, even when perhaps they should— e.g., Agent Orange. I walked with Marcie on China Beach, in Danang, a long, lovely, nearly deserted stretch of sandy, scenic shoreline. It was hard to believe that the three hundred thousand American GIs who had once been garrisoned here had left almost no footprints in the sand. (For a brief time, Marcie thought about putting a message on the answering machine at her office saying, "Welcome to the American Red Cross office in Hanoi. We apologize for our thirty-year disruption in service.")

As I left Vietnam, oddly enough, I thought of the cheerful taxi driver who'd taken me to the Honolulu airport for the flight over. She'd been born in Saigon, and she'd never been to Hanoi. But her father had spent twenty years there in a reeducation camp after the war. As a child she'd drifted with the boat people on a horrifying journey to Malaysia, the Philippines, and finally, Hawaii. Did she like it here? I asked. "I love America," she said.

So it is with all wars: Some will die, some will be heroes, some will be liberated, and some are still not free. The only thing we can be sure of is that nobody ever really wins.