The Pied Piper of Hanoi 1 & 2

The Pied Piper of Hanoi

 

            Landing at Noi Boi is eye-opening, the runway pockmarked with bomb craters more than a decade after the war ended. I’m here to see Chuck Searcy, a Vietnam vet returned to assist a generation of children suffering the aftereffects of Agent Orange—spina bifida, cleft palates, limb deformities, heart defects—and the indignities of life in a brutal, war-ravaged place with a per capita income of $70. I I see kids with polio stumble around in braces fashioned of bamboo and leather, hawking ragged copies of “The Sorrow of War.”

 I’ll say.

            Everything is crowded, deafeningly loud, insanely hot, and, of course, Searcy is nowhere to be found. I wander around Hoa Lo, the “Hanoi Hilton,” where John McCain was tortured for six years, then a grim, ghost-filled “Victory Museum” filled with the rusting wreckage of Huey helicopters and Phantom jets, photographs with jeering captions, and dusty exhibits of flight suits and bloody fatigues. I scribble down names, just in case.  On Sunday morning in Ba Dinh Square, I’m buzzed by squadrons of dragonflies as I head for a long line of peasants waiting to visit the mausoleum where Ho Chi Min sleeps, like Snow Whit,  in a refrigerated glass coffin. Registering me, the officer in charge solemnly marches me to the front of the line.

            I march stiffly alongside him.

That afternoon, I come across the wreckage of a B-52 Stratofortress half-submerged where it fell in a lake in December 1972. A terrible sadness grips me as I stare at this forlorn avatar of my world, imagining its death throes, a sky on fire, the men inside. Three days later, still no sign of Searcy and I’m here for a month in a twilight world, not a tourist and no journalist with a government “minder” dogging my every step. I walk around scribbling notes followed by packs of goofy 10-year-old boys hawking soft drinks, rice wine spiked with decomposing baby cobras, knock-off fashions—one kid wears a tee-shirt emblazoned “International Polio Club,” and the ever-present Sorrow of War, the North Vietnamese “All Quiet on the Western Front.”

I never engage with another Westerner. This is long before Vietnam becomes a hot tourist destination (“Ride a motorcycle down the Ho Chi Minh Trail!”).  I meet aged shopkeepers who speak to me in French, discover the phrase for “American” is “Russian with money,” see a poster depicting B-52s dropping long strings of Coca Cola over Hanoi, salute a rail-thin guy waving a dented bicycle pump at passing traffic hoping to sell air. The clerks manning the front desk of my desolate hotel sleep on the lobby floor. Across the alley, and behind a modesty screen, a whole family scrub themselves out of a bucket.

Mornings, peasant women in non la (conical hats) array baskets of fresh vegetables, fish, chicken, on the sidewalk—the same sidewalk I’d seen a man defecating the night before. Pale, beautiful women ride bicycles wearing ao dai and elbow-length gloves to stave off the sun. (Just like Georgia, “If you’re light, you’re all right.”) On another street, uniformed children stand at attention. The times are a-changin’: some are plump, maybe offspring of Communist Party functionaries. Corruption is everywhere.

Vietnamese use Latin letters and Arabic numerals so everything seems just on the edge of comprehension. It’s not. Curbside restaurants feature snake and dog on the menu; cats are delicacies, so owners keep them leashed. On Gam Cau Street gourmet restaurants feature forlorn-looking hawks, monkeys, and tortoises. You haven’t arrived until you’ve eaten an endangered species.  

                                                ***

            One night, searching for a mystical Italian restaurant that seems to float around like the Holy Grail, I find myself behind three outsized guys speaking English. They duck into a bar and I follow into a time warp: Crowded, ‘60s rock music blasts, beer flows. The red-haired, pony-tailed guy behind the bar looks like he escaped from a Zap comic. A benevolent Ho Chi Minh and Jerry Garcia, stares at me from the wall. The guys are New Zealanders, maybe Australians, red poppies pinned to their lapels, commemorating Anzac Day, and the bloody battle of Gallipoli, a story I know from a Mel Gibson movie.

Staying in London’s Earl’s Court, aka “Kangaroo Valley,” I learned “commemorate” means drinking oneself into oblivion, followed by a mad fight. Others are American—English teachers, construction workers refurbishing the U.S. embassy, idealistic NGO types, vets returned to a place where they say they felt “most alive,” aging hippies wandered from California to Kabul to this seeming last place where living is so cheap and women, young and willing.

Many hours later, I stagger outside. Drunk, giggling, no clue where I am, and no cyclo (three-wheeled taxis with a passenger seat in front and driver peddling madly in back) in sight. In the bar, I’d met a much-traveled Dutch blonde who mentioned this club, this wild, post-war, “you must-visit” scene that makes Berlin’s Kit Kat Klub sound like a Canarsie nursing home. When she says the club’s name and I’m transfixed, my original story idea disappeared:

Apocalypse Now.

Grinning, I pull the crinkled, hotel map from my jeans and start walking. And walking. It’s pitch dark, dead quiet, and suddenly unsettling. I squint at the few grimy street signs. The lettering that looked so familiar in daylight is totally unintelligible. Of course it is. It’s fucking Vietnamese! I have no idea where I am, and sobering quickly. Up ahead, I see a park bordering a small lake—my tourist map shows many greenspaces, but I can’t tell one from another. I’ve seen elderly folk going through early morning Tai Chi movements, martial music blaring through tinny speakers in the trees. I’m close to my hotel. I’ll just curl up on a bench and wait for rosy-fingered dawn. So writerly.

I’m cutting through clumps of scraggly bushes making for a waterside bench when the ground at my feet suddenly moves. What the fuck! Rice wine can’t do this to me, even with decaying cobra chaser. I blink, look down at a long undulating wave of movement at my feet. It’s like the Red Sea parting, only this sea is made of rats, dozens, maybe hundreds, of brown rats! Not aggressive, but lazy buggers who start and stop with each step I take, joined by myriad others. I don’t dare look back.

I stagger to the bench, sit sideways, knees up under my chin, eyes closed tightly. When dawn breaks, I’m alone. Thirteen thousand miles from home.

CONTINUED

 

Election Day Wipeout

 It wasn't about diesel, it was about decency.

The Beast In The Basement

 

How a Franciscan sexually abused dozens of altar boys and got away with it for half-a-century

God bless and keep the Our Lady of Peace altar boys who were molested by the Beast, Brother Masseo Butteri, a half-century ago, and lived in shame and silence. They are part of an upcoming settlement by the Diocese of Brooklyn estimated at hundreds of millions of dollars. The story is told in my Gowanus Crossing memoir published June 2026

The Pied Piper of Hanoi Part I

 

Landing at Noi Boi airport is eye-opening—the runway is still pockmarked with bomb craters a decade after the war ended. I’m here to see Chuck Searcy, a Vietnam vet returned to assist a generation of children suffering the aftereffects of Agent Orange—spina bifida, cleft palates, limb deformities, heart defects—and the indignities of life in a brutal, war-ravaged place with a per capita income of $70. I see kids with polio stumbling around in braces fashioned of bamboo and leather, hawking ragged copies of “The Sorrow of War.”

I’ll say.

Everything is crowded, deafeningly loud, insanely hot, and of course, Searcy is nowhere to be found. I wander around Hoa Lo, the “Hanoi Hilton,” where John McCain was tortured for six years, then visit a haunted, empty “Victory Museum” filled with the rusting wreckage of Huey helicopters and Phantom jets, photographs with jeering captions, and grimy exhibits of flight suits and bloody fatigues. I scribble down names, just in case.

Sunday morning in Ba Dinh Square: I’m buzzed by squadrons of dragonflies as I stand in a long line of peasants waiting to visit the mausoleum where Ho Chi Minh sleeps like Snow White in a refrigerated glass coffin. Registering my skin, the officer in charge solemnly marches me to the front of the line.

I march stiffly alongside him.

I come across the wreckage of a B-52 Stratofortress half-submerged where it fell in a lake in December 1972. A terrible sadness grips me, staring at this forlorn relic of my world.

No sign of Searcy and I’m here for a month, existing in a twilight world, not a tourist and no journalist with a government “minder” dogging my every step. I walk around scribbling notes, followed by packs of goofy 10-year-old boys hawking soft drinks, rice wine spiked with decomposing baby cobras, knock-off fashions—one kid wears a tee-shirt emblazoned “International Polio Club,” and the ever-present Sorrow of War, apparently the North Vietnamese “All Quiet on the Western Front.”

I never engage with another Westerner. This is decades before Vietnam becomes a hot tourist destination. I meet aged shopkeepers who speak to me in French. I discover the phrase for “American” is “Russian with money.” Vietnamese use the Latin alphabet and Arabic numerals, so everything seems just on the edge of comprehension.

It’s not. Curbside restaurants feature dog on the menu; felines are in such gustatory demand cat owners keep them leashed. On Gam Cau Street the delicacies are forlorn-looking, hawks, monkeys, tortoises. You haven’t arrived until you’ve eaten an endangered species. It will get worse.

Continued

The Texan Part I

 

She chose me, this blonde Texan who slips away from her raucous posse, chaperones disappeared like tumbleweed in the perfumed air. She chose me— I stood on the beach trying to come up with something, anything, to keep her from leaving. Light from the Hotel Carlton shimmers in still water.

She stays.

A week before, I’d never flown, never been west of Jersey, certainly never lay under a striped canopy on a chaise lounge in Cannes with a woman so firm and sinuous she feels like a replicant. She studies classical piano in a “cow town. She’s applying to The Julliard School. I nod but can't appreciate the audacity of her ambition. (Two percent of the pianists who apply are accepted.) I sense steel underpinning her softness, a furious determination to escape whatever stingy destiny awaits in Texas.

At 22, I have no dreams, no goals, only an amorphous need to live a different life. I don’t even know Columbia’s J-School, my future alma mater, exists. When I describe Gowanus, she doesn’t judge my Brooklyn accent. A 20-year-old who literally grew up on Fort Worth’s “Fortune Road” finds Italian men charming, romantic, exotic—Vivaldi...Verdi...Vinny? This happy misappropriation repeats when I move to Georgia.

Years later, at bar, party, or press conference, I realize that the stranger staring at me “across a crowded room,” and the blinding heat that gaze triggers, has happened before: to both of us. By then, I’ve spent years mourning what might have been.

We promise to write.

I’ve not written a word since Sister Mary Malachy pummeled me for plagiarism—in front of Jean W— a sin I neither understood, nor committed. Now, energized by some potent alchemy, I write. I know nothing of the world. I live in a snow globe on a poisoned canal in a forgotten corner of Brooklyn. Nothing of books, music, poetry, art. I do know cars. Particularly one old car:

“At night, the battleship grey Ford looms atop the gas station’s outdoor lift like a leviathan..."

Ignoring my father’s warnings, I buy it from a leering, gap-tooth punk in the Sunoco station on 4th Ave. and Prospect, squandering my scholarship money, taking two jobs, one a night gig in a liquor store on Williamsburg’s riotous Roebling Street, stoking Joe’s lightning-quick fury.

***

The monster engine roars, rattling houses on Carroll Street. I grin idiotically. A minute later, it spews oil, antifreeze, sizzling bits of shrapnel, like vomit in The Exorcist. By midnight, my father is chasing me down the steps of the Union Street subway station, garrison belt whirling. A few days later, I’m tearing the Chrysler hemi engine apart, using borrowed tools from Honey Christiano in a weedy lot on Nevins Street. I bag and tag each bit like a medical specimen. Its beating heart, an “Iskenderian” racing camshaft, is beyond repair. Replacing it will cost more than the $400 I paid for the car.

I write Ed Iskenderian, a legendary West Coast hot-rodder whose name I know from drag racing magazines, imagining an Armenian Santa in coveralls surrounded by wrench-wielding elves as the Beach Boys harmonize in the background. I tell “Ed” my story, but like the Ancient Mariner I can’t stop, page after page in longhand slowly makes its way from Brooklyn to Gardena, California. Someone reads it and is moved. A month later, a new camshaft arrives—free of charge.

Such manly men, these Californians.

Years later, I apply to Columbia. I have no journalism experience, no elite college diploma; neither academic honors, nor high-powered recommendations. I teach English to aspiring auto mechanics in the school that expelled my father. The final section is a 500-word personal essay. I write 5,000 words, my life story. Someone—I imagine a desk piled with clamoring applications—takes the time to read mine.

I’m accepted.

***

I write on legal pads, crumpled pages carpeting the floor like daffodils. She never writes back. I discover a poet, Jimmy Santiago Baca, Chicano/Apache teaching himself to read in prison, surviving by crafting love letters for murderous men. Baca holds the Yale chair once filled by Allen Ginsberg. His desolate life in Albuquerque’s South Valley is vastly different from Gowanus, and yet familiar:

“Each day my hands hurt for something to have,

and a voice in me yearned to sing...

I wished I had had a chance to be a little boy,

and wished a girl had loved me,

and wished I had a family-but these

were silver inlaid pieces of another man's life...”

***

Months later, her letter arrives, a torrent of words bursting outside the pale blue envelope. Her promises gush like wildcat wells. She’s visiting an aunt in Virginia. I’ve never been to Washington, D.C. I drive straight through in a blue Alfa Romeo with a whining transmission.

We collide, clawing at each other in a pine-paneled motel room.

When we talk, the prize is still out of reach. She’s waiting to hear from Julliard, giving recitals, working menial jobs, volunteering. At graduation, she’s not voted “Most Likely to Succeed,” but “Most Promising Secretary.”

I’m teaching junior high in Bensonhurst. Giggling 7th graders slip me notes on ice cream soda stationery, and the bald principal, hating my mustache and longish hair, plots my exit.

    ***

She arrives for the Julliard audition. Afterward, she’s subdued. The big city can overwhelm dreams. We cross the Brooklyn Bridge, stroll the Promenade. Someone is playing rapid-fire piano in one of the mansions along Columbia Heights.

“Chopin...” she says.

We retreat to Bruno Rubeo’s Brooklyn Heights studio, leaving only for meals at Capulet’s on Montague, and briefly. Eager, inexperienced, kids. I’m overwhelmed A half-century later, I remember her fragrance in the sheets, the fineness of her hair, the heat, and her wildness. How Bruno's paintings rattled on the walls.

And then darkness. Weeks later, the letter arrives, oddly formal. She’s turning Julliard down, staying in Texas. Later, she’ll earn an MBA in Austin and meet the man she marries, an Arkansan?

***

An older sister, pale, lissome, languorous, spun-gold hair in a bun arrives in New York with her dwarfish lover, Cynthia. Suzanne is an actor. Her Texas friends all seem to have last names for first names—Sloan, Patterson, Mason—and trust funds. They orbit a Dallas-Paris-Manhattan universe; some, lost boys and girls, costumed in thrift-store clothes and ragged motorcycle jackets. Later I’ll see them wandering thin with addiction on Christopher Street, at CBGBs, in Times Square, in the trailers of trucks parked under the West Side Highway.

A year passes. I’m living in a tiny walk-up on Hicks and Pineapple behind the Saint George Hotel, taking Chaucer courses, barely making expenses with the $25 a day I earn substitute teaching. My blue Alfa is destroyed when a hitter in a Chevelle runs a stop sign on State Street and broadsides me. The passenger door handle brands a bloody “L” on my forehead.

Branded, I imagine, like a Texas steer.

On a Sunday, my doorbell rings, likely a Jehovah’s Witness. Hundreds live nearby and work on The Watchtower newspaper. Mornings, they walk single file carrying identical brown paper lunch sacks; evenings, they return, no laughter, no teasing, no flirting, an Orwellian vision. The bell buzzes again...again. I stumble downstairs, pull open the vestibule door ready to confront another midwestern drone with black bible and bad haircut. I’m in my boxer shorts. It’s the only way to drive them off.

A blonde pushes a bouquet at me.

Lilies? The scent pungent and overpowering.

“Vincent...we we're in the neighborhood,” the blonde drawls. “Thought to stop by.”

I recognize that lilt. It’s Suzanne and Cynthia, Batgirl and Robin, only in poodle skirts and shredded fishnet stockings.

“It's 6:00 A.M.”

Cynthia shrugs, bored.

“Would you like coffee?” It's what my mother would do.

“Sure thing!” chirps Suzanne.

Only it’s not coffee. It’s ham and eggs, toast, fruit, cheese, whatever else is in my fridge. An hour later they’re asleep on my couch.

The lilies? Wilted, plucked out of Raccuglia funeral parlor’s trash bin on Court Street. Another wild night dodging unwanted advances—Suzanne’s version of events—of the bull dyke manager of an Upper Westside art house, a story I'll hear repeatedly. Always in the clutches of dirty, rich old men, drag queens with long nails, shady producers, crooked agents, perverse casting directors. Life as silent film melodrama.

Days later, they’re still crashing on my couch, perfumed vampires who sleep all day and disappear at night. I think this is cool, living with two avantgarde women, though nothing sexual happens. They take over the bathroom, and I cede them the mattress in the bedroom. Some nights when I’ve got to study, I ignore the doorbell, hoping they’ll disappear. Suzanne, clever girl, wedges a matchstick in the buzzer.

When she shows up with Bart, a haggard, curly-haired male prostitute who cruises the Meatpacking District, it’s too much. We never fall out—she’s too lively, and my only connection to her vanished sister.

***

1980. I’m a reporter in Atlanta. Not a word from Texas in 15 years. At a newsstand in Peachtree Center, I’m glancing at Fortune or Money, when an attractive, impeccably dressed blonde on the cover jumps out at me. “Adrian Brown” is a financial planner for heiresses, dowagers, divorcees, widows—a rousing success in a male-dominated field. Assured, cocky, confident. Living In Little Rock, she’s married into a prominent family, and connected to Hillary Clinton’s Rose Law Firm. A thing, long-buried, rips at my heart. I’m successful too but haven’t the heart to contact her. My fantasy is still wrapped ‘round me like a cloak.

***

On June 14, 1985, TWA Flight 847 enroute to Rome is hijacked by Arab terrorists, diverted to Algiers and then Beirut, one hundred thirty-nine passengers aboard. In Beirut, a 23-year-old U.S Navy diver named Robert Stethem is executed, his body dumped on the tarmac. For 17 days, passengers and crew are beaten and threatened, those with Jewish-sounding names singled out; some 40 hostages disappear into the war-ravaged city.

At Newsweek, it’s a “scramble the jets” moment, everyone running everywhere at once. One hostage, Jimmy Palmer, is from Little Rock. I’m assigned with a photographer from Chicago to interview Palmer’s family, stay until the crisis resolves one way or another

Days later, I call Adrian Brown. She’s taken aback, then pleasant, polite, curious about what I do and why. When we meet, she looks at me thoughtfully. She's elegant, very wealthy, and successful, and doesn’t remember the person she was. Her husband runs the family’s steel fabricating company. Her mother-in-law is a Junior League doyenne. Adrian lives in the very best neighborhood, looks as taut and trim as she did at 18. The thought of her moving in the same circles as Bill Clinton sickens me. There’s no “strangers across a crowded room” moment. We talk, but not about the past.

As I’m leaving, I pull out the packet of her letters I’ve saved for 20 years and hand them to her. On the outside of one envelope, she’d scrawled in girlish hand,

"De-Liver, de-letter

De-Sooner de better!"

She grins. Her composure cracks, but only for an instant. She hugs me so hard.

Dawn is breaking in Beirut.

***

More years later, I encounter Suzanne in Los Angeles. I’m trying to peddle a screenplay without success. She’s a masseuse, a cottage industry for failed actors. She’s been diagnosed with uterine cancer and has no health insurance. We visit a half-dozen doctors, none willing to help. She tells me Adrian fled her Arkansan marriage and moved to California with “a bodybuilder.” When I check, Adrian has three more names. In 2025 she’s living in London with an Iranian businessman.

I lose track of them.

 

REVIEW JULY 2026

 

livingmybookishlife

 Edited•4w

🏢🏢 ARC REVIEW 🏢🏢

GOWANUS CROSSING: A BROOKLYN BOYHOOD by Vincent Coppola
Publication date: June 9, 2026

When Henry Holt Books offered to send me a finished copy of GOWANUS CROSSING: A BROOKLYN BOYHOOD by Vincent Coppola, I jumped at the chance. My own memoir could be called Bensonhurst: A Brooklyn Girlhood, so it’s understandable that I would find connection with Coppola’s experiences.

Coppola tells his story through short vignettes heavy on fantastical characters that seem almost too contrived and stereotyped to be real. But, if you grew up in the Brooklyn of the 60s and 70s like I did, you would recognize them as the friends and family that populated your youth. Big personalities, creative monikers, and close proximity are the hallmarks of the large, close knit immigrant communities that made up Brooklyn at that time.

Coppola is a product of both his family and his neighborhood. A child of blue collar parents, he dreams of escaping and education is his ticket out. He reflects on the influence of the Catholic Church, parochial schools, the Mob, and the drug culture that was prevalent during that time. All of this felt very familiar to me.

The majority of this book felt like a walk down memory lane, yet it was the ending that revealed the underlying message of this memoir. GOWANUS CROSSING is a love letter and tribute to the place and people that formed the foundation upon which his life was built. You can take a person out of Brooklyn, but you can never take Brooklyn out of a person.

This will either be infinitely fascinating to those who enjoy The Godfather, The Lords of Flatbush, and Saturday Night Fever vibes or feel incredibly niche. I am obviously in the former category.

Life on the Gowanus Canal circa 1965