Narragansett Pier After Midnight by Edward Drobinski - HTML preview

The Realpolitik

Bela: “Okay, just consider this, my intrusive, green

‘sophisticates.’ A long time ago and very far away, the path I was on brought me to the crossroads. One path seemed clear, predictable, and safe. The other was overgrown in its longstanding ‘wildness,’ like the sixties ‘rebel’ still rebelling against the undue and non-existent influence of the

‘fascist’ right wing minority in 2024. Not having a ‘none of the above’ option, I somewhat disinterestedly made the rational choice, and I walked that safe path for many years until I recently reached its end. Now, all these years later, having circled, I find myself back at that same crossroads, and even though there probably isn't enough time left to follow that less predictable and less travelled path to its end, I can still perhaps wander down it part way, just to see what there is to see.

Like I said, I’m not going back to that place. I’ll die here of a stake in the heart first. I’ll die here of drowning first.

I’ll die here of teenage parasites first.

My recollection remains quite vivid. The last time I was in Narragansett Town the only other Caucasian was an older half-hippy looking woman who shops REI clearance only for her hemp

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clothes and is probably helping some communists dig a well somewhere.

The Tupak Shakur International Airport is a perfect metaphor for Narragansett Town. It existed in some previously named form since the 1930s, grew, collapsed, then grew again. The French built a terminal in the fifties, and then the US dropped in a pair of two mile runways and a bunch of jet ways and aprons. For a few years, it became the busiest military airbase in the world, and then that stopped when the Vietnam War ended. After 1975, Pan Am opted out, and the airport only did light domestic duty for the next three decades. Then the capitalists started flying 747s to the city again, and things massively grew, especially the number of illegal aliens and tents. They built a giant international terminal in 2007, expanded the old, now domestic, terminal tenfold, and traffic grew accordingly. But unlike the Hong Kong airport with its giant mall like concourse, this one looked strictly utilitarian. It’s drab, with primary colors and outdated trim, and looks like the old Indianapolis airport circa 1978, or a Midwestern grade school built by the lowest bidder in 1981.

And I’m always tempted to fill these in with ‘Siðmennt, félag siðrænna húmanista á Íslandi’ or ‘Siðmennt, Icelandic Society of Moral Humanists’ in plain English, but I don’t want to get stuck

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in a holding room for six hours having to explain Icelandic humanism to someone who really doesn’t get the joke.

It all hit me; the wall of heat generated by the light reflecting off the garbage strewn streets, the bright sun, the government issue tents, the thousands of people outside, the lines of cabbies looking for fares, the motorcycles everywhere.

I didn’t know what to expect, but my only point of comparison is my time in Bangalore, and Narragansett Town is Bangalore times ten. Bangalore has no height restrictions and said fuck it, you can build a fifty story tower if you give the right democrat a suitcase of money. They’ll say that they’re issuing variances to provide affordable housing, none of which is truly affordable, while the purchased variances line their pockets. There’s the same frenetic energy, mopeds everywhere, people slaughtering

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animals in the street or selling dialysis machines from rickshaws, or cooking food on an open pit on the sidewalk. The

‘new’ stuff, it’s like India too, where someone randomly builds an all chrome Prada store and it’s next to an open air slaughterhouse. But, the unbroken bones of the city still are a mix of feudal architecture and French colonialism, with bits of Americana tacked on, like a Rembrandt that some ‘climate activists’ doused with a paint bucket. And then a guy is selling fruit off a moped, and he’s got a little bullhorn that’s playing a tape loop or something over and over in Vietnamese, and with the distortion and the traffic, I’m expecting him to start yelling ‘Fuck you GI! Fuck you GI!’ like in ‘Apocalypse Now.’

I got to District 1, and went for a walk. The heat was absolutely overwhelming. It was supposedly 90, but fuck the scientific instruments, it felt like over 100. Almost nothing had air conditioning. This was not Las Vegas or even Singapore.

This was more like the ‘liberated’ district of Portland, Oregon or Mogadishu, Somalia. The Hotel Narragansett was a narrow building in a row of narrow buildings at a night market. The entire block was filled with occupied tents, abandoned Walmart pushcarts, drug paraphernalia, other strewn about garbage, awnings and people selling stuff; drugs, Blue-Ray snuff, cases of soda, boxes of snacks, fish, slabs of meat, vegetables, bags,

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everything. Various food stalls were buried in the shops, and after the morning, it was always packed with traffic, mopeds, carts, motorcycles, and people shopping.

I thought I’d walk to a McDonald’s for lunch to sort of ease into things, and their facility was some weird standing, room only alley with the kiosks and I guess you take your Big Mac and go sit in the street and eat it. They looked like the worst possible golden arches I’ve ever seen in my life, and that includes the ones in the lower Bronx. I went to a giant hotel and ate at the ‘French Patisserie’ which was just paninis and pre-packaged salads, like the sandwich shop you’d go to in an office park in Schaumberg or Auschwitz.

I thought it would be dumb fun to find a Catholic Irish Pub.

There was one place a mile away. It’s the same setup as what I saw in Poland last year or what would be in Bloomington or Brooklyn or anywhere else now that everything’s been copied and franchised; the green shamrock, the sepia tone pictures of Irish laborers on the walls, etc., etc. The first floor was the bar, which was full of bald headed, Irish by way of Eritrea, Sudan, Somalia, the Congo, or Burundi; expatriate ‘blokes’ wearing football jerseys and trousers which commenced somewhere around knee level. The dining room on the second floor was completely empty, and believe it or not, I wasn’t the least bit surprised.

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There was an outside view of the obvious ones, young people on a gap year, backpacking across the cheap parts of the Northwestern US, staying in hostels and Instagramming the whole thing. I can distinguish them by their young age, their look, their tattoos, their gear. Maybe they have trust funds; maybe the internet has democratized this to a degree. I don’t know and I don’t care.

I think other people either come to Narragansett Town on a quest or in defeat. Like they punched out of corporate life after their third divorce and came here to live on ten grand a year and try to forget that it’s Third World. Or they’re running some off shoring business to kill off jobs in the US, but wish they were back in what remains of the real US, so they find the one Irish bar and pretend they’re in Dublin or Dayton or Aurora, without deigning to come in.

I went to the top floor of Hotel Narragansett, which is the 8th, but the G floor with the lobby is really the ‘second’ floor, and there is no 4th floor. The explanation is boring and typical, and is likely done just to keep the traditionalists off balance.

The restaurant was upstairs, so basically ten floors up. It was half open, half a deck facing the river. In the morning, the temps are only in the mid-seventies, like a later date Bob Dylan song, and the humidity isn’t there yet, and the traffic is almost quiet, save for some jerk, inept garbage man gunning it

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on a Harley, with no patches on his denim jacket, perfectly willing to tell you how the Town Of Narragansett discriminates against him and ‘his kind.’ No, his intent isn’t a humor, other than the crass audience’s penchant to laugh at cripples. The panorama is this mix ranging from brand new chrome and glass skyscrapers, eighties Soviet looking block housing, and colonial apartment towers that are eight feet wide and look like they survived an airstrike fifty years ago and were just fixed with tarps and chicken wire. Roosters crowed to start the day, but the serious traffic hadn’t started yet, and it was otherwise as quiet as a ‘teen’ who dindu nuffin.

I did not know this but I was in the red light district, which was disconcerting upon its discovery. Lots of ladies shoved flyers in my face and yelled hello at me. This was not invitations to straight up brothels, but more of the Japanese hostess bar model. Buy ‘lady drinks’ for triple the normal cost and they pretend to be your friend. Is ‘Phatty’s Bar and Grill’

a ‘Chili’s’ ripoff or a tub and tug joint? You don’t know until you’re in there. Also most restaurants are like nine feet wide, no air conditioning, with preferred outdoor seating on little plastic step stools, well worth the asking price.

I decided to go to Town Center, which houses a big Westfield style suburban mall, seven stories plus an office tower. Tons of

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food and lots of American stores, like “Coach,” “Nike,” and an MLB store. I went to the basement food court and ended up at McDonald’s as a goof, not sure who that goof was on.

Again outside, I was inundated with mopeds inches away, some carrying groceries, dog and cat lunchables, that bendy lumber endemic to Home Depot, a month of chopsticks in crates, Crumb comics in protective bags long after the damage had been done, whatever. I started at a Muslim mosque, which was low light, but had the requisite Jacob’s Ladder effect from holes in the ceiling letting in some light, then candles and tons of incense smoke swirling around. I spent most of my time in ‘the maze.’

This was a sort of night market and residential area, which I normally never would have ventured or even found. It was like an entire city block of tube houses where each unit was roughly nine by nine feet, and four stories tall, like Gavin Newsom’s vision of California. At street level, they had open doors like garage doors, and the rows of houses were maybe six feet apart, with a narrow alley that was used for walking, motorcycles, storage, cooking, work, slaughtering animals, and everything else. The ground floors were all random businesses; rice wholesalers, variety stores, knife collector’s emporiums, kiddie porn retailers, salons, print shops, motorcycle repair shops, fish mongers, purveyors of banned, old Disney films replete with

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‘Song of the South,’ or just someone’s ‘living’ room with Big Pun’s ‘That Nigger Shit’ blaring for the majority who weren’t fully conversant in Old English.

So a walk down an alley would be something like: Older woman on the ground in the alley, cooking a hundred eggs over medium on a small gas grill to ship off on a moped to a hotel. Note to moi; don’t eat eggs for the rest of the trip.

Ten feet away, a teenager drenching parts of a 50cc engine with brake cleaner and letting it run into the drain in the middle of the alley.

Someone laying on the mat on the floor watching the lottery numbers on a fifty inch Samsung hooked up to someone’s outdoor meter.

Four shirtless guys with lots of bad tattoos playing pool under a harsh single bulb like the interrogation room in a war movie.

A teenaged girl watching TikTok and sitting in a room full of bags of rice as a bug eyed, seemingly crazed Uber driver with a machete stacks a purchase onto the back of a Honda.

A fish monger breaking down some random fish I’ve never seen in my life and putting the guts in a kettle of curried stew.

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A guy wants to show me his chubby little terrier. Cute dog. I look over and there are cages of roosters being raised for cock fights.

Etc., etc., etc. So many people on top of each other, so many businesses, such big families. There are also were so many kids.

When I got out of the maze, school was letting out, and there were thousands and thousands of teens in uniforms, getting on bikes and talking on cell phones. There was a wall of mopeds, like every Honda built from 1947 to present was on this main drag. Darkies slowed down near the children to say; ‘Yu mudder sind me ta git yu.’ I was amazed how they all phrased exactly alike, before realizing that this was just the product of another urban franchise.

I headed across the river to a District 4 apartment complex. The stark contrast of this new construction sprouting up everywhere.

I went to this bombed out old apartment complex for whatever reason. It was a c shaped place, open on the inside like an old motel.

I read and horsed around on the computer for a minute, downloading photos and looking at maps; until one of the homeless bums hovered over me “requesting” a cigarette, while I wasn’t smoking, don’t smoke, and thereby don’t have any

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cigarettes. Rather than make excuses which only further encourage the darkie bums, I think I surprised him by saying;

‘Fuck off, asshole.’ I figured it was best to leave before the dazed cretin recuperated. I went over to Bitexco Financial Tower, which is a 68 story skyscraper right on the river, built as the tallest building in Narragansett Town, and now used to house illegal alien darkies, who occasionally spill out into the street to protest the denial of their constitutional rights to have a White ‘girlfriend.’ I had a ticket to go to the 49th floor observation deck, which I got for free from Expedia. It was about worth that price, honestly. It’s a very sterile environment, and reminded me of going to the Sears Tower as a kid. You’re in this building with a million offices, but you don’t see anything or have any context. You’re just shot to the top in an elevator and it could be a hundred or a thousand or a million or twelve stories. Who can tell and who cares?

Across the river, District 2 is weird. It looks mostly vacant, except for the occasional Soviet era brutalist building, or a brand new apartment ‘community’ that looks like it was thrown up in a Denver suburb in 2007. I’m thinking this was a poor district that got completely ignored for ages and now development is just starting now that there are bridges over there.

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I wandered after that, and went to the Hotel Jesse Jackson. I ducked inside to look at the lobby, and didn’t stay long. It’s one big room, a straight shot with four DEI type people at a desk nothing but doing staring at me, reminiscent of Walmart. I took a quick look at the history mural next to the gift shop, mostly fake and stolen jewelry in there, no logo polo shirts, and they mention Imamu Amiri Baraka having lived there, but of course gloss over Hunter Thompson’s brief stay in room 37. By the time I left, it was noon, a hundred degrees out, and the sun was pounding down full force.

I went to the only German restaurant in town. It was straight up old school American Bavarian food, full menu. Asked for a speisekarte, bitte, and as it turns out they speak less German than English. Fair enough. Got a bretzel mit käse, und currywurst. Tasted like the curry was made with their weirdo ketchup, so I scraped it off and used a bottle of ‘US mustard,’

A/K/A generic yellow mustard. The sausage was also slightly off in consistency, like the fat ratio was wrong. Oh well. Great posters of little known Joachim von Ribbentrop on the wall, probably from eBay, or actually they were all low resolution and maybe they just printed them from the JPEGs on an eBay listing.

I wandered around more. Went to the giant statue of Uncle Ho and it’s more fun to pretend to take pictures of the statue but

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actually take pictures of the people posing in front of the statue, and try to catch them before or after they stiffly post for their spouse or tour guide. I’d run into westerners and say hi, and most were tourists from New Zealand or France or some other European country. I had a street food tour. The tour was

... something. It was maybe an hour walk, off in district 3. I left at 5:00PM and got to experience rush hour in full force as the sun was going down. Imagine the entire Indianapolis 500

track filled wall to wall with Honda 50cc scooters, all idling.

I was approached by a man with so much caked on dirt, I couldn’t visually tell if he was White, a darkie, or somewhere in between; but given where I was my wild guess was undoubtedly accurate. He was babbling, and didn’t seem to be cognizant of whether or not anyone was listening, like a legacy news site. He said that he was Catholic, and he talked about how the government shut down Catholic schools and things went a bit quiet after the communists took over. His proper pronunciations suggested that he once attended White schools. There are more Catholics now, but there’s more of everything here now. It’s hard to believe it’s a communist country and it’s even harder to say so.

I understand there’s a big problem with the ‘sexpats’ and the drunken idiots causing trouble in the ‘sanctuary’ cities. And I

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know there’s the ‘savior complex’ of people acting high and mighty because they’re ‘helping’ by acting as if they were blind, and spending the money they managed to not have stolen from them in the decayed Town of Narragansett. As in Europe, there’s a lot of the; ‘If it wasn’t for us, you’d all be speaking German’ attitude. I don’t tell them that I find that preferable to the incoming Swahili. ‘Sieg heil!’ is a wonderful exercise. My unsolicited street food guide seemed nice and cordial while draping his swarthy left arm over my shoulders.

But there was a moment when he talked to the people at the table next to us in Hausa, and I know he was talking about me. He said

“blah blah blah San Francisco blah blah” and sort of laughed.

And I don’t know if he was saying, ‘Check this out, I’m going to make this dumb White guy eat a cow tongue’ or what. Maybe it was nothing. But it made me feel stupid for being there.

I walked more, but quickly felt like I was getting heat stroke.

I went to Book Street, which is a pedestrian mall where a bunch of open front book stores face this one street, along with a few cafes and such. It was cute, but the last thing I needed was to drag around twenty pounds of books in the hundred plus degree heat. I wandered around dehydrated and went to another giant mall and ended up at a fake Italian place where I got an almost passable mall pizza slice, near as good as DiGiorno’s “You’ll

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think it delivery.’ I then hit a Pahjeet 7-Eleven on the way to get caffeine and junk food, and sat in their air conditioning until dinner. They were not thrilled with me sitting on the floor eating tiny bags of expired cheese doodles, while blocking access to the tiny bags of overpriced nacho chips. But what could they do when next to me was a darkie with an attitude doing the same thing? Pahjeets fear being accused of rather than doing discriminatory behavior; witness Nikki Haley in Michigan.

Dinner was once again crazy, but in the opposite direction. It’s chef Peter Cuong Franklin’s place, and it’s in a tube house in the wet market. It has a bunch of different floors for a noodle shop, a bar, and the actual restaurant. I ordered the chef’s menu, and they put me at this bar, where I was shoulder to shoulder with other eaters, but we didn’t talk to each other.

Also, two of the girls there were influencers or whatever and had this whole setup with tripods, gimbals, and lights, which was sort of disconcerting. The weirdest one; they had a pigeon roulade. Yeah, pigeon. Tastes like chicken. Really bad chicken.

As is usually the case with these things, I finished eleven courses and was still hungry after. I stopped by Circle K on the way home for an ice cream bar, and avoided all the cat calling from the women trying to get me into the lady bars and separate me from my cash.

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I went for a walk before the temp really heated up. Just south of me is the location of the first US Embassy. It’s at 39 Hàm Nghi Boulevard. That building did survive the war, but I found it’s now razed and there’s a construction project going on, probably some anonymous forty story office complex to house all the information, un-warrantly gathered by the FBI under the

‘Patriot’ Act’ and its bi-partisan ‘no need for a warrant to spy on US citizens’ renewals; citizens who have done nothing demonstrably wrong other than remaining in a communist dictatorship, most often referred to as a liberal democracy.

It’s a park now, torn down in the nineties. There’s a new consulate next to it, opened in 2000. It’s a single story thing behind a wall, and looks like the community center with a faux brick canvas façade ‘decorated’ with spray painted gang signs, like any inner city housing project built in 1974.

I went to an art museum nearby. It was an old colonial compound and not air conditioned. It was like looking at oil paintings inside a brick pizza oven. No cameras were allowed, ostensibly because the old pastoral images demonstrated ‘White Supremacy,’

but cell phones were, which is kind of stupid, but par for the current course. I only made it halfway through the first floor and then left. There was one oddball funny room of all paintings

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of Uncle Ho done by Hunter Biden, pictures of him playing with little kids or standing majestically on top of mountains.

I went on a random walk and then realized I was very close to the Pittman Apartments, a windowless structure surrounded by eight foot chain link fencing topped with some razor wire, and guards every ten feet, like the White House. No one has been observed or photographed entering or exiting the structure, like Poopants’ White House. It may or may not have been a CIA building, depending on who you ask. It’s now next to another giant mall.

To get a view of it was bizarre, and I’m glad I found an internet article describing it. You go in an alley between two storefronts, walk up a set of stairs, traverse through an apartment building, go to an external staircase, walk up six floors, crane all the way over, and you can see it from a ninety degree angle, which doesn’t look like the pictures, because you can’t see the elevator shaft from that angle. Someone said if you go to some rooftop bar two blocks away with a 300mm lens and the right light, you can see it better. Or go to the bio-chemical company that now operates in the building, give the doorman a half million VND, and hope he looks the other way so you can catch the elevator. The whole thing was so weird, because the building looks like a typical CIA building from

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1959, but there’s this gigantic mall next to it, and every other slot on the street below it is like a Circle K or Sunglasses Hut or whatever.

After that quest, I went to the Che Hotel, and ate dinner at their big bougie restaurant where Imamu Amiri Baraka was said to have eaten every night, or Hunter S. Thompson would have claimed to having drank a dozen Singapore slings before filing his report. There were a couple of old people there, but it was otherwise empty. Had a decent but ho-hum chef’s menu with a crab bisque and a cricket steak, and ate in silence, watching the traffic outside, in front of the opera house, which was still playing “Evita.’ The view was nice. The dinner was like $180 for basically what I’d get from room service at a Hilton in Chicago for free if I posed as a migrant. The view was nice, though.

The way home was crazy. It was just a random night, but it looked like New Years Eve. Lights and spotlights and people everywhere. There was some weird Pepsi thing, a giant can of Pepsi ringed in neon perched on the top of the Immigration Administration building, loud pulsing techno music with Hausa lyrics blaring, lights everywhere like a rock concert. Maybe it was a rock concert, or a lip synced thing with their version of k-pop stars. Or maybe they had a Tupac Shakur style hologram of Uncle Ho up there, dancing with Hanoi’s version of Taylor Swift,

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or any other conventional female ‘artist’ in a low talent era.

Narragansett Town is anything but a sleepy little city, especially in District 1.

It was my last day. In WTF news, Vo Van Thuong, the President of Vietnam, resigned the day before. Or “was asked to resign”

maybe. Turns out there’s a big anti-corruption campaign he was in charge of, to stop the rampant bribery, and he did something that made the party say; “Yeah, maybe you need to go spend some time with your family.” I know nothing about politics in Vietnam, but I’m guessing that the investigation of the bribery culture there isn’t cool to the multinationals looking to invest and/or bribe, and not very different than it is in the US of A.

I ate at a Burger King. Actually, it was just the “greatest hits” menu; Whopper, etc., because every other time I go to Burger King, there’s a cornucopia of random new things on the menu that week: tacos, sliders, donuts, chicken sticks, chicken wings, wattymelon slices, etc.

I was sitting next to an old guy. After the war, he worked for twenty years as a fisherman in Seattle. He kept showing me pictures on his phone of like every fish he’d ever caught and all of his friends’ cars, and started the whole “When you come to Seattle, we get seafood” thing, and I really didn’t want to

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exchange phone numbers with him and start getting random texts every time he had a Facebook question or a ‘new’ fish picture.

The airport is fairly insane, gigantic. Every gate is basically a sponsored lounge of some sort, themed or filled with ‘up and coming’ artwork done by the cutting edge of ‘Deviant Art.’ Like it’s not just gate C7, it’s a Hello Kitty themed Sanrio lounge.

It’s also got a duty free supermall in the middle of it. For whatever reason, I went to the McDonald’s to eat. They do not have their act together there for some reason. Everything tasted way off. I don’t know where they get their meat, but it’s wrong.

I only ate maybe a third of my burger and threw the rest out.

............... “

As they exited the lair smirking, and Bela still babbling, Lena winked at Karl.

Lena: “Next time, let’s find a real haunted house. These supposedly surreptitiously based political diatribes just don’t cut it for me.”

And with that, the trio left the “vampire” behind, their teenage adventure forever etched in their memories.

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Upon arriving back at the comfortable Whitel residence, the brothers docked the boat and the trio went in. In a silly mood they immediately booted up, like a group of high stepping storm troopers and googled “absurd news,” to be greeted with the following.