A night in Saigon

Joe had been telling me I was missing something memorable by not taking a nightime ride on a xe om. He had done it the night I was out of commission. Xe oms---aptly pronounced "zooms," I think---are motorbikes whose drivers cruise the city looking for fares. They are far more common than the metered taxis, and cheaper.

So last night, needing to go to a distant part of the city, Joe found the moto guy who had driven him several times and hangs out at a particular corner. That driver located a buddy moto guy, and off the four of us went.

I was Audrey Hepburn behind Gregory Peck in Roman Holiday all over again, but this time with elements of The French Connection, Bullitt, GWTW (the flight from Atlanta as Sherman approached) and maybe Potemkin (now I know how the baby felt). Plus, of course, Bugs Bunny and the Roadrunner.

It was terrific. The motobike traffic's movements are fluid, and you feel like you're part of great series of rivers rushing up and down the landscape, somehow crisscrossing and intermingling and constantly reforming anew. It has the same fluid intricacy of a hydraulic system, or of Disney at his best, in Fantasia. You know you could fly off and land on your unhelmeted head, and it'd be curtains, but some Buddhist living-in-the-moment feeling takes over and you are at peace in the steamy chaotic Saigon night under a full moon. We did see one minor crash; a truck hit a motorbike, then maneuvered and hit it a second time. The moto guy was unhurt but irked. My driver said of the truck driver, "Oh, beya, beya!"---he'd been drinking. But I knew that wasn't going to happen to us. (Joe said later he wasn't as confident as I was.) Bill T. Jones choreographed for his troup a thrilling dance I've seen twice, about dancers moving at high speed underwater trying to find the surface. It's done to Mendelssohn's bubbling and soaring octet, and last night I thought I had just a taste of what it must feel like to be part of that dance.