Thrown-away Child

she took it. “I need your help, girl.“
    “Doing what?”
    “Waking people up to things been wrong for a long, long time.”
    “You talking dangerous.”
    “I surely am. I’m saying no way folks should keep on forgiving those who trespass against them. I’m saying people got to pay what they owe. And Sister, I’m saying the debt is high.”
     

TWENTY-ONE

     
    Back when we were getting our asses whipped in Vietnam by a short old man with a stringy wisp of chin hairs who understood the contradictions of America—he venerated the Declaration of Independence, and was refused a haircut by a Boston barber— I mostly spent my R and R leave time in Bangkok. Which is the city where fleshpots were invented, not that I myself ever knew of such things.
    There was I, halfway around the world in Indochina, a teenage harp from Holy Cross parish struggling mightily to obey the sexual code of the Church. It would be some years yet before I figured out that nobody should take sexual advice from nuns or priests—nor even His Holiness the Bishop of Rome, Vicar of Christ—for the simple reason that if these people knew anything about it, they shouldn’t. Nonetheless, my indoctrination had been fierce. To this day my ears ring with Sister Bertice’s earliest warning to us frisky boys of Holy Cross: Touch yourself and the saints weep! Hotly remembering this and other warnings, I was spared wicked congress with sloe-eyed femininity.
    Luckily, Bangkok held other sensual attractions. the tattoo parlors I did not care about. But I did smoke a stunning amount of excellent hashish in the city’s dope dens. And I may well have drunk enough booze to fill up the Gulf of Siam. Also in those days I became a gourmand, even something of an epicure. Both these qualities were impossible back home in Hell’s Kitchen, a neighborhood of cabbage spiced with Colman’s dry mustard, some thirty different ways of eating potatoes, bread and butter, and earnestly boiled beef. All that and Irish soda bread besides, prized for its throat-scorching dryness.
    But, oh—Bangkok! Here was the city to cure my stunted Irish tongue. Noodles baked in the shape of birds’ nests, doves’ eggs spun into crisp confections, the spices of two millennia.
    Once, a delegation of us Yanks found a back alley bistro specializing in what I had thought was the most exotic entrée there could ever be. A waiter brought to our tableside a contraption that appeared to be a four-foot-high oak stand upon which a fern plant might usually be perched. But instead of a leafy fern, the top of the stand held a device of circular wood blocks and leather straps. These blocks and straps held in place the head of a small monkey, dazed from a fresh clouting back in the kitchen. Clamped at the head, the monkey’s hairy, quivering body hung suspended inside the stand. The waiter then produced a small saw, cut open the monkey’s head, and ladled warm, bloody, living brains over the watercress on our plates.
    I could not help but remember about Thai cuisine as I learned the meaning of “mess” in Mama Violet’s New Orleans kitchen. For here was where a twenty-five-pound heap of crawfish had recently met their end in a vat of Zatarain’s crab boil.
    And now here was I, surrounded by the first wave of newly met in-laws and doing my part to devour the mound of steaming hot crawfish dumped into the middle of the newspapers spread all over the tabletop. Twelve grabby hands—two of them pale white, ten others various shades of brown—snapped up red boiled creatures that looked like miniature lobsters.
    We ate, all of us, in greedy communion. The law of the swiftest was at work in this meal. Also I had to learn the art of cracking open brittle shells for the sweet specks of meat inside.
    It was halfway into the mess when I thought about the unfortunate Bangkok monkey. This memory was interrupted by the bustling entrance of a woman wearing expensive sunglasses despite its being an hour into evening. She made it clear that she knew perfectly well what the man sitting on my left was about to do with the crawfish skull poised in front of his mouth, the man being Cousin Teddy the Torch.
    Teddy slipped the beady-eyed delicacy between his lips, glistening red from salty crab boil, and inhaled. The woman in the shades pointed an accusing finger at him, and said, “Oh, ish!”
    “What you... ?” This was all Teddy was capable of saying, since his mouth was full of something mushy as the