1655 Hanoi Alley Bell - TLC 56

It takes courage to raise kids with integrity, respect, and authenticity.

Sex is fun.

Responsibility is a duty.

Dave releases streams of anger, bitterness and frustration allowing him to relax, expend and expand the sound. He is startled to hear the sound of his voice ricochet off substandard cold molten gray Hanoi cement block walls. His life is a cold cement wall. Echoes dance through his brain like little sugarplum fairies.

He knows the echo because he made it. He mixed the fine sand and quick dry cement. He slathered it over broken red bricks in a circular abstract desire to create art lasting for eternity which is how he thought of it the day he trow welled the paste.

Life gave him art and he used art to celebrate life.

His voice manifestation expresses human auditory tendencies in a tight space near a gigantic liquid plasma television permanently implanted on a blank cement wall blaring news propaganda and perpetual adolescent reality soap shows about life next door where a hunched over family sits on cold red floral tile slurping from cracked rose bowls and shoveling steaming rice and green stringy vegetables into lost mouths while yelling over each other in tonal decibels competing with their gigantic plasma television featuring dancing bears and pioneer patriots devouring rubber plantations, beaches for golf courses and farmland for glass and brass designer hotels with a double blade axe singing, in a high Greek-like chorus, the national anthem about survival and rampant greed on land, sea, and air as water pianos played by a young wisp, her fingers a delicate blur of fast incantation musical channels dance near a woman garbage collector ringing a bell at 1655 alerting people in Dave’s neighborhood it is time for them to bring out their daily garbage.

Remove the evidence. Bag it and tag it. Autopsy material.

Mrs. Pho hears the bell. She’s ready. She’s willing. She’s able. She’s arranged her family’s daily consumptive waste into two plastic bags. One pink. One white. Orange and yellow fruit rinds went white, shreds of fat pink. She didn’t waste a thing. No one did. 

Life is a nasty, brutal short struggle she reflected bowing in front of her parent’s faces, dead, gone remembered forever with their stoic black and white ghost images living above eternal electric Buddha bulbs pulsating red, green, blue, and white on the family altar.

Plastic flowers, daily fruit offerings, burning incense - spirit food.

Let’s eat.

She thought of her father whispering as he carried her away from their burning village during the war, “Remember where you came from.”

She never physically returned. Memories saved her.

It didn’t really matter what went where because after she’d carried her garbage down the high walled alley blocking sincere fading daylight she tossed plastic bags into a rusty gray rolling cart with plywood boards reinforcing the height because the massive accumulation of neighborhood garbage was tremendous.

Growing day by day it evolved as a collective socialistic mess and community consciousness. Garbage in-garbage out was everyone’s mantra.

She felt content knowing her contribution was not extensive. Just enough. Enough to get her away from homeland security prison walls to gossip with neighbors waiting to die as twilight filtered past musical hammers, creaking broken carts pulled by skinny boys, incessant motorcycle horns echoing through tight alley chambers with floating dust particles breaking light into a magical sense of mystery for her tired eyes marveling at a visual epiphany as exactly 21 shovels of earth were manipulated this way and that by young desperate hungry boys and girls from poor villages with zero educational opportunities laboring wheelbarrows filled with sand, gravel, bricks, mud, sludge, wood, their bodies caving in from exhaustion, heat, H1N1 virus, mortar attacks and suicidal dreams.

Laborers were light years away from young H’mong Sapa mountain sellers and trek leaders speaking fluent English with no further hope of a formal education after ninth grade surviving with indigo blue stained fingers hands and hearts living through long dark cold mountain winters as storms howled, “I feel free.”

They cheerfully offered their bright beaded bags, embroidery and natural world experiences to strangers.

Cynical war weary logic infested objectivists burning inside towering twin infernos of their psychosis ate self-pity with no exit for dessert inside Fibonacci’s eternal spiral.

A shattered mirror reflected Pho’s fragmented identity.

Inside his cement cell Dave’s angry voice danced with stranded rusty brown bard wire encircling his social network domain avatar easing over shards of fractured green glass embedded in shrapnel’s perimeter.

Chinese introduced barbwire when they occupied the neighborhood for 1,000 years. 

Vietnam massacred them back to Manchuria.

The French introduced excellent wines and installed intricate glass mosaics in Dalat garden walls to prevent strangers and invaders from getting in, getting on, getting the better of them as fragments of glittering glass composed minuscule myopic minimal musical microcosms and colonial ideology.  

At Dien Bien Phu in 1954 Vietnam slaughtered the Frogs back to De’ Arc of Triumph.

They kept the language and baguettes. Yellow colonial buildings aged along Rue This and Rue the Day. 

Then the Yankees with their megaton Catholic missals of mass destruction, death, suffering and chaos unleashed their blind idiotic military-industrial ambition on peasants gathered in Chu Chi’s tunnels below the surface of appearances.

Dave knew this because his grandfather’s father and his father’s family through dynasties encroaching on walls and shrines inside meditative brown temples celebrated silent stories.

During the day they worked paddies before evolving underground when nightingales brought carpet-bombing and napalm.

Agent Orange extended misery for generations. 

“Horror has a face and you must make a friend of horror. Horror and moral terror are your friends. If they are not, then they are enemies to be feared. They are truly enemies.”

- Colonel Kurtz, Apocalypse Now

“Quick into the tunnels. Run.”

Sitting, crying and praying they heard the dull roaring threaded whoosh as steel canisters thudded tremors shredding forests, jungles, paddies and lives. Bamboo homes danced in flames. Heat soared over tunnels bathing them in sweat.

They traveled deeper following interior earth trails until their unconscious became conscious. Earth swallowed breath. Their bones fertilized soil. Ancestor bones cried in their sleep.

Sweet silence comforted the crying and wounded after foreign devils fled in terror, guilt, shame and loss.

Survivors streamed down mountains, emerged from caves and tunnels, poling rivers, walking on water, drinking oceans in creation myths, forcing devils into the sea. Blue green seas ran red.

Vietnam forced Americans back to Guam in 1975.

Voices in Hanoi flowed between crumbling sand and haphazard red bricks. Cement walls blocked wailing anger. Frustration's repressed bitterness adapted survival instincts in the reality of life’s twisted fateful truth.

Their memory was fiction.

Fiction created their memory. 

Lucky sat on a Hanoi garden balcony cleaning The Dream Sweeper Machine.

There’s an invisible guy next door with an infant. He raises his voice. People yell here. It’s normal like breathing. They get yelled at when they are kids like the man tormenting his child until the kid balls. Tears stream. Mother rescues her darling from endless emotional abuse stunting the child’s development.

Children learn how to reject this yeller. They learn to raise their voice in a whining, demanding yelling overture. They are passive-aggressive. As they age they turn off their brains. Genetic engineering. Essential healthy neural paths lie dormant. They turn off their ears. Blend in. This attention deficit disorder is deader than an ancestor eating incense. Ears are assaulted nonstop 24/7. The volume control is broken. They grow up to be non-listeners. Never engaged unless marriage and procreation reactionary recreation speaks.

The adult savors this POWER. It’s a throwback to generations raised with fear, intimidation, suspicion, insecurity, starvation, poverty, informers, paranoia, empty promises, false hope and loud voices. Some voices are real others are pure nightmares.

Hope is the last evil thing that dies, yells his wife. Take out the garbage fat man. Lose face idiot. Hide your shame. Put on your social identity mask and hit the bricks. Raise your voice like a flag of authority. Signal your displeasure with your children. Get them in line. Shape them up because you can’t ship them out. You will raise them to yell with the best of them.

They will bellow like stuck pigs, bleating sheep and cackling crows breaking heart-minds and transmit shivers down your spineless self with regret and anger and fear manifesting in narrow tight lives under long florescent lights, this shattering glare. They grow up to be passive-aggressive yellers.

Time is a circle.

They bury you and take your photo to the artist who memorizes your face with graphite on parchment. Generations and friends stare at your black/white frozen face. Kneeling in supplication they offer you fruit and water. They burn incense so your spirit has something to consume, so it will not be angry and return yelling, demanding and pleading. Survivors live in fear of ghosts. How we live and how we remember. Let’s eat.

One day in the not-too-distant future of this long now your dead ancestors will learn to make sounds, words, phrases, sentences called speech, then louder until they achieve the decibels required to re-join the family so to speak. They will compete in yelling contests with talking monkeys.

We work. We breed. We get slaughtered.

Someone - a parent, teacher, sibling, boss, lover, or stranger - yells at them and they ignore old yeller. Doesn’t matter who it is. Ignore the humans, beasts and gods. Old yeller yells a little louder. No answer. 

The child plays the game waiting for them to get their yell going strong. Louder says listener hiding inside silence. After they’ve made them yell three times child answers with a whisper. They can’t hear the child. They yell again and again. The child has conditioned them to their catatonic neurotic auditory nightmare. 

A kid whispers to teach them a lesson. A-dolts can’t hear them. They raise their voice competing with other yellers. Kid rejects them for yelling at him/her. He/she is easily distracted. He/she nurtures chaos, confusion and distractions. He/she loves the fragments. Ah, the glare of artificial ancestor passion for tongue-lashings. 

Two ghosts whisper, “Give them 1,001 lashes with your tongue. I have 1,001 arms and 1,001 eyes. I am infinite on the ocean of wisdom.” 

Ha Noise people grow up in small tight spaces where people yell, talk over each other, don’t listen, yelling louder trying to be heard as others block them out or ignore them and the yelling gets vicious like the starving dog downstairs howling, Feed Me.

Dave pisses in his underwear and his wife lives in her pajamas. They are a cheap red pastel flowering cotton brand decorated with brown pandas. He yells at her and the kid because he had little choice in the matter when his father and mother ordered him to marry the slob who learned to yell while ignoring her parents which is how they evolved into this intelligent higher life form.

Every morning Lucky walked past homes guarded by rusty sliding gates. Narrow alleys and sardine dwellings. SHOCK was spray painted on a wall near a discarded sofa among residents cooking with round perforated coal, workers hauling cement, bricks, wires, and stones creating magnificent futures with Marxist production tools: knife, hoe, scythe, axe, hammer, control stick elephant.

All fine well good ends to a means.

In a narrow street packed with screaming, beeping careening cycles, garbage carts, kids playing fast and loose and women selling produce from broken bamboo baskets was a dead chilled out sausage dog with splayed legs and glassy brown eyes. Inert.

This spectacular spectacle attracted people pouring from shops/homes. Sewing ladies held a thread in air, a woman chopping greens fondled a veined leaf, a man oiling a bike gestured a can, a woman working meat caressed a knife dripping blood, a girl held her red balloon, a retired man gripped his glass of urine beer, a grandmother hugged her young future yeller - all staring at the dead dog as rush hour motorcycles beep-beeped impatient music twisting through the crowd to get home to families, lovers, food, television, sex, dramas about heroes and heroines, their beloved pet and hungry dead ancestors.

A thin old man emerged from his small dark narrow utilitarian space where millions living in the dark hid from strangers. He grabbed the dog’s two rear legs, picked it up, lifting it into the air. It hung down. He resembled aristocracy holding a wild hare after dogs flushed it running wild filled with freedom’s fear.

He was in shock holding the dripping dead dog as blood formed a small pool surrounded by confused voices of friends, neighbors and strangers pealing like bells in his brain muttering something, offering suggestions, advice, warnings, predictions, songs, rituals, chants, musical operas, significant silences, stares, or no appropriate words inside or outside the mystery of death standing alone holding the legs before laying the dog near the gutter as the animal’s body eased itself into itself and he turned away from people, noise, confusion, meaning and returned to his dark interior unconscious space.

Buried inside his family’s deep dark home was an altar for candles, fruit, dead relative images and burning incense.

The black and white imitations resembled the Chinese artist's work. He drew the dead. A relative gave him a common small black and white photo from 1949 when the country declared itself free and independent and benevolent Chairman Mao dear grandfather leader bless his heart smiling at the masses ordered peasants, “Eat Grass.”

45 million died of starvation.

Their small iconic image was used in documents for residence, work and party politics. People had the three iron rice bowls. Guaranteed living space. Guaranteed work unit. Guaranteed rice rations. It was a great deal.

Everyone was treated the same, wore the same grey clothing, ate the same gruel, saying the same thing following the leader like condemned criminals playing a game. No one got out of line. Comrade. 

The bent nail gets hammered down, yelled an undersexed Chinese teacher in a university class tomb pounding her point home with a Marxist control stick.

The Maija artist accepted a photo from a grieving relative set up his easel and studied a face with a magnifying glass. His pencil sketched an 8x10. On chipped plaster walls were images of peasants, farmers, aunts, uncles, husbands, wives, young and old Pioneer Communist members with tight red party issued scarves knotting necks suffocating passion. 

This day he sketched an old stoic sad resigned peasant woman. She’d suffered at the hands of the Nationalists then Communists then corrupt greedy economic free market revolutionaries before facing the indignities of old age.

Old age is a killer.

A battered three-string wooden musical instrument hung near red streaks of paint in his fine art museum. A black fly on the artist’s left shoulder rubbed feelers together. Tasty. 

An emaciated friend of the artist wearing a skeleton face with paper-thin arms opened a bag of Fujian tea. He poured tight compressed leaves into his bony right hand dispersing it into an old chipped blue pot. He added water from a battered red thermos. They shared tea watching the artist. The likeness was perfect. The tea tasted ascetic.

Images decorated Asian family altars and collected dust in temples. Ancestor worship and the fear of ghosts was a big deal.

Do all the ancestors hear, understand and acknowledge the yelling? Yes. Do they open their mouths requesting a little peace and quiet? Yes.

On anniversary death days they met ghost ancestors in cement alley mazes where piss, drain water, used cooking oil, daily slop and vicarious liquids flowed into small holes. 

The dead formed a rubber stamp committee addressing Hanoi family noise. “It’s come to our attention dear comrades, beloved family and friends...we have a communication volume problem in the neighborhood. Silence. We are trying to enjoy a long peaceful restful sleep. Leave us be or we will return to haunt you. Forever.”