Sudetenland Tales by Edward Drobinski - HTML preview

Sudetenland Tales

Page 166

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 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