Viva Las Vegas. Can you dig it?
Johnny certainly could. He and the blond had left the Casbah Hotel amp; Casino just past six in the a.m. Johnny’s band had a gig there playing soul sounds from the sixties and seventies, which in Johnny Da Nang’s opinion just happened to be the finest sounds on the planet. Well, if you excluded The Fifth Dimension. There was way too much vanilla in that band’s sound for Johnny’s taste, thank you very much.
Johnny was the lead singer and hence the busiest fuck in the group. Damn but the women seemed to go for a Vietnamese boy who could sound like Al Green one minute and Smokey Robinson the next.
Even if he was five foot flat.
In dollars it wasn’t the greatest gig. No cakewalk either- one set after a fuckin’ ’nother, maybe a ten-minute break in between if he was lucky, just time enough for a thimble-sized Stoli over ice at the bar, then back at it, singin’ “ABC” and moonwalkin’ like Michael when he used to be black. Sure it was a tough gig. But a band had to start somewhere, didn’t it?
Johnny Da Nang and the Napalms were starting in the land of the five-dollar slot. The Napalms were Johnny’s brothers and there were four of them, all older than Johnny. Together they worked a small room with a two-drink minimum, and they put the butts in the buckets. Hired ostensibly to lubricate the plentiful but notoriously penny-ante Asian gamblers from LA, Johnny and his boys also drew a sizable crowd of brothers who’d survived the bottomside of the ’Nam experience and wanted to get all nostalgic about their last R amp;R in Saigon. Wow, they’d get drunk and collar Johnny at the bar while he was sucking down a Stoli, buy him drinks he could have gotten for free and tell him how much they missed that mama-san who gave them their very first case of the clap.
Roger that. Show business surely had its downside. Johnny had heard it all before, but he always listened because. . wow, you never knew, you know? Maybe one of the brothers would turn out to be Quincy Jones’s cousin or something, and Johnny and his boys would put the move to the groove, end up with Quincy as their producer, tunes in heavy rotation on MTV, the whole enchilada.
Hey, it could happen, couldn’t it?
Still, it took some serious patience to listen to the brothers go on about the ’Nam. Hey, Johnny had been born in Saigon. And he had to admit that the brothers weren’t really his favorite people, because he’d spent most of his youth in South Central LA, and a good bit of that time he’d been the designated neighborhood punching bag. Johnny much preferred spending time with blonds. The big ones. The ones with two-seat buckets and mouths that put the baddest Dirt Devil to shame.
Hey, it wasn’t that he was racist or sexist. It was just his own personal voice of experience talking. And that voice said, Johnny, not one blond-no matter how big-has ever beat you up.
Can you dig it?
Johnny could and currently was. He and the blond had been heading for his condo, but she just couldn’t seem to wait and neither could he. Wow, it happened every time he closed the show with “Ain’t Too Proud to Beg.” The way Johnny dug down into that one, the ladies just ate it up. Nail it, not a dry pair of panties in the house. Outta sight and all right.
He’d sure ’nough come a long, long way from South Central. Wow, he could remember his first days in America, six years old in a schoolhouse full of black faces, trying to string those damn vowels and consonants together in the right way so he’d sound like everyone else. No one at home to help him because his old man, an ARVN colonel, was trying to put the muscle to the hustle on the streets of LA and didn’t give a damn how anyone talked.
When it came to conversation, the colonel was concerned with only two things-volume and intensity.
Johnny had to hand it to the old man. The colonel had left Saigon with his family and an entire division’s monthly payroll. He’d used the money to buy several neighborhood markets in South Central and put a kickass corps of transplanted Montagnard scouts in charge.
He made a half-assed living doing that. With the invention of the VCR the colonel moved into the electronics business, renting players and TV sets by the month. By that time he’d done some recruiting of his own “in country,” appreciating the fact that he was drawing on the native population of South Central the same way the Americans had drawn on the South Vietnamese. Most of the guys he hired were at loose ends since coming home to the ’hood-they needed that military discipline in their lives, and the colonel gave it to them.
The colonel forged an elite corps of repo men from former badasses who’d done tours as LURPs and worse in ’Nam. Get behind on your payments to the colonel, those bastards showed no mercy. They’d repossess the TV, the VCR, and take any damn thing that wasn’t nailed down to sweeten the pot. You complain, suddenly your dog’s dead and the repo men are out back cookin’ it up on the barbecue. You call your brother in the Crips, your cousin in the Bloods, suddenly you’ve got a telephone cord wrapped around your neck and that percussive sound you hear is fists rat-tat-tatting on your face while your white and pearlies rain down on the floor.
Yeah. Colonel Da Nang was one bad-mother-shut-your-mouth. Isaac Hayes would have said so himself.
It was funny how the whole music thing happened. One day Alonzo the LURP-a big bald Earnie Shavers lookin’ bro who’d lost an ear to some honkies at Fort Bragg but hadn’t received one scratch in ’Nam-anyway, Alonzo goes after a cokehead musician who’s three months behind on a big-screen TV. Turns out that the cokehead had shot out the TV, which didn’t make Alonzo very happy. So to smooth things out the cokehead offers Alonzo his guitar. Pretty good for openers, but Alonzo, he’s a born negotiator.
That night Alonzo shows up on the colonel’s doorstep with a truckload of amps and guitars and drums. The colonel says. We sell this stuff easy. But Johnny’s mama, she says. We keep it. Why the fuck we do that? the Colonel wants to know. You got five sons, his wife says. Jackson Five make big money.
So, in the tradition of Joe Jackson (the psycho paterfamilias of the Jackson clan). Colonel Da Nang locked his boys in the garage until they could play. Well, that wasn’t exactly right. He did let them out to eat and piss and shit, but that was about it. And while they hadn’t gotten anywhere close to that Jackson Five money in the seven years they’d been playing professionally, they were doing all right for a pack of twenty-somethings. Living in Vegas. . making good money. . gauging what exactly was what on life’s experience-o-meter, if you wanted to get philosophical about it.
And they were making music, too. You could bet your last money it’d be a stone gas honey, and it was. The music was the heart of it as far as Johnny was concerned. Because when push came to shove Johnny didn’t really care about the money. Only the colonel cared about that. Johnny cared about The Temptations and The Four Tops and Otis Redding and Little Milton. He didn’t want to end up like the old man, owning a repo man empire and telling stories about how his troops had busted the kneecaps of half the Lakers’ retired players and shit like that. Who needed it?
All Johnny needed was his music and a big blond now and then.
And friends. Friends were good. You helped them and they helped you and you never had to beat anyone up or break any arms to get what you wanted. Hell, the more people you knew, the more people who’d buy your CD when you finally got a recording contract. And Johnny Da Nang knew a hell of a lot of people. He had made good friends in Vegas. He knew most of the tenants in the condo complex where he lived. Some of them were crooks, sure, but what the hell. Johnny’s old man was a crook. And there wasn’t any law against crooks buying CDs or concert tickets. Johnny didn’t walk around with his nose in the air. He was a people person. Wow, what was the use of being alone?