I was resented by most of the Chinese men in the bars; they accused me, in the oblique way Hing had, of spoiling the girls. The occupation of a prostitute they saw as a customary traditional role, an essential skill. But pairing up with red-haired devils made the girls vicious — it was an abnormality, something perverse, and the Chinese men considered these girls of mine as little better than the demon-women in folk stories who coupled with dogs and bore hairy babies. And that was not all. The men also had that little-country grievance, a point of view Yardley and the old-timers shared, about rich foreigners butting in and sending the prices up. Neither accusation was justified: the girls (who nearly always hated the men they slept with) were improved by their contact with Europeans, quiet undemanding men, unlike their sadistic woman-hating counterparts in the States. The men were instructive, curious, and kind, and wanted little more than to sail home and boast that they had spent the night with a Chinese whore in Singapore. And as for the prices going up — after a decade of inflation, when the price of a haircut doubled, cigarettes increased five times, and some house rents — my own, for example — went up by 200 per cent, the price of a short time with massage stayed the same, and an all-nighter cost only an extra three-fifty. Until Japanese cameras flooded the market, a night in bed with one of my girls was the only bargain a feller could find in Singapore.
The Chinese men would not listen to reason. “Boochakong just now cost twenty-over dollar-lah” they complained. I felt loathed and large. Some simply didn’t like my face or the fact that I was so pally with Chinese girls. I have already mentioned the secret-society member, the Three Dot in the Tai-Hwa who asked me threateningly, “Where you does wuck?” Another brute, late one night, took a swing at me in the parking lot of the Prince’s Hotel. He came at me from behind as I was unlocking my car — Providence made him stumble; and later the Prince’s manager, who to a Chinese eye might have looked like me — they can’t tell ang mohs apart, they say, and don’t find it funny — was found in a back alley with his throat cut and his flowered shirt smeared with blood. Karim, the barman, said his eyes had been ritually gouged. I had to choose my bars carefully, and I made sure my trishaw driver was a big feller.
Still, I was making money, and it delighted me on sunny afternoons to have a cold shower, then make my rounds in a well-upholstered trishaw, chirping into dark interiors, “Hi girls!” and to say to a stranger in a confident whisper, “If there’s anything you want—anything at all—” and be perfectly certain I could supply whatever he named.
Being American was part of my uniqueness. There were few Americans in Singapore, and though it was the last thing I wanted to be — after all, I had left the place for a good reason — the glad-hander, the ham with the loud jokes and big feet and flashy shirts, saying “It figures” and “Come off it” and “Who’s your friend?” and “This I gotta see,” it was the only role open to me because it was the only one the people I dealt with accepted. It alerted them when I behaved untypically; it looked as though I was concealing something and intended to defraud them by playing down the Yankee. In such a small place, an island with no natives, everyone a visitor, the foreigner made himself a resident by emphasizing his foreignness. Yardley, who was from Leeds, but had been in Singapore since the war — he married one of these sleek Chinese girls who turned into a suburban dragon named Mildred — had softened his Leeds accent by listening to the BBC Overseas Service. He put burnt matches back into the box (muttering, “These are threppence in U.K.”) and cigarette ash in his trouser cuffs and poured milk in his cup before the tea. The one time I made a reference to the photograph in the Bandung of the Queen and Duke (“Liz and Phil, I know them well — nice to see them around, broo-rehah!”), Yardley called Eisenhower — President at the time—“A bald fucker, a stupid general, and half the time he doesn’t know whether he wants a shit or a haircut.” Consequently, but against my will, I was made an American, or rather “The Yank.” When America was mentioned, fellers said, “Ask Jack.” I exaggerated my accent and dropped my Allegro pretense of being Italian. I tried to give the impression of a cheerful rascal, someone gently ignorant; I claimed I had no education and said, “If you say so” or “That’s really interesting” to anything remotely intelligent.
It was awfully hard for me to be an American, but the hardest part was playing the dumb cluck for a feller whose intelligence was inferior to mine. The fellers at the Bandung reckoned they had great natural gifts; Yates, in his own phrase “an avaricious reader,” would say, “I’m reading Conrad” when he was stuck in the first chapter of a book he’d never finish; Yardley pointed to me one night and said, “I wouldn’t touch an American book with a barge pole,” and Smale ended every argument with, “It all comes down to the same thing, then, don’t it?” to which someone would add, “Right. Six of one and half a dozen of the other.” They were always arguing, each argument illustrated by anecdotes from personal experience. That was the problem: they saved up stories to tell people back home; then, realizing with alarm that they probably weren’t going home, wondered who to tell. They told each other. Stories were endlessly repeated, and not even the emphasis or phrases varied. The silent fellers in the Bandung were not listening; they were waiting for a chance to talk.
I was the only genuine listener — the inexperienced American, there to be instructed. But the funny thing was, I had a college education and almost a degree. It was no help in the Bandung to say a bright truth, for even if someone heard it he was incapable of verifying it. And on the job it created misunderstandings. I recall meeting an Irish seaman on one of my “meat runs,” as my ferrying of girls into the harbor was called. Hearing his brogue I said, “I’m crazy about Joyce,” and he replied, “That skinny one in the yellow dress?”
I said, “You guessed it!” and he went over and pinched her sorry bottom through a fold in her frock. Later he thanked me for the tip-off. He was right and I was wrong: education is inappropriate to most jobs, and it was practically an impertinence to the enterprises of the feller whom an Indian ship chandler on Market Street described as “having a finger in every tart.”
It was on the GI Bill; I was thirty-five, a freshman. I always seemed to be the wrong age for whatever I was doing, and because of that, paying dearly for it. But I was not alone. Older students were a common sight in every university in the late forties and fifties, army veterans from the Second World War and then Korea, wearing faded khaki jackets with the chevrons torn off, the stitch marks showing, and shoes with highly polished toes. My inglorious war — a punctured eardrum put me behind a desk in Oklahoma — ended in 1945. I came home expecting a miracle letter (Dear Jack, It’s good to hear you’re home and I have some fabulous news for you…), but nothing happened. I helped my father in the tailor shop, blocking hats and putting tickets on the dry cleaning, and sometimes doing deliveries. My uncle said, “There’s good money in printing,” so I joined a linotype school, which I quit soon after. “They’re crying out for draftsmen” and “A good short-order cook can name his salary” sent me in other directions.