I wasn't sure if Rabbit meant Jerry Garcia or David Walker, but I guess both were pretty tough blows.
Hot season, 1973, and Randy Cooper, whose father worked at the American embassy in Chiang Mai doing something that involved water buffalo, could not believe that David was such a dickwad that he had never ever seen a real movie in a real movie theater, indeed, had never seen a movie in his entire life.
"I told you," David said. He was twelve years old. "We used to live in the jungle. I mean, really in the jungle, where there wasn't even electricity and stuff. I had a pet tiger. I told you."
"Still a dickwad, Tarzan."
With Randy Cooper's explosive "dickwad," David realized that everything had changed. Since the family's arrival in Chiang Mai a little over two years earlier, David had been trading on the story of his adventures in the jungle, his account of the family's lonely homestead in the farthest reaches of northern Burma reaching a stirring crescendo with his account of his pet tiger. The story had produced big eyes in its first-grade recitals, and contemptuous "No ways" in the more skeptical sixth grade, until David produced for his classmates a photograph of himself with Elijah Cat in his lap. Aunt Helena showed me the photo: a bare-chested boy with a sweet goofy smile and an awful homemade haircut, sitting cross-legged on a bamboo floor with an honest-to-God tiger cub bent backward over his thigh. All four of the tiger's paws were in the air, and David was rubbing its belly. So it was all true after all. David had been enrolled in the fifth grade (at age level, to his grandmother's pride), when they came over from Eden Valley, and through the end of sixth grade, that photograph, explaining David's oddness and proving his extraordinary pedigree, had been the difference between dorkhood and grudging popularity.
But even the most wonderful story, told too often, loses the power to compel; and David's, which was his little part of the story the Walkers told of themselves, now provoked only withering glances of indifference from the other kids at school, who had heard the jungle stories when David didn't know how to play dodgeball; when he admitted that he had never heard of the Rolling Stones; when he couldn't ride a bicycle; and when he wasn't sure just who the president of the United States was— although David could have easily identified a dozen varieties of snake and pronounced them poisonous or benign, ably assisted in the construction of a thatch-and-bamboo home, identified all of the signs of the Rapture, or recited more lines of Scripture than anyone in school cared to hear, in both Dyalo and English. Indeed, by seventh grade David was no longer even the possessor of the most exotic story in class: Sarabeth Morgan's parents had been aid workers in Laos, and Sarabeth had grown up in a Hmong village, until the family was driven out by the war. She had seen a massacre, and had lost an adopted brother. She had arrived in Chiang Mai just this year, and her fresh stories made David's tales seem wilted and antique. David felt that it was time to put the photo of Elijah Cat back in the album and begin to accept that Eden Valley was gone forever, and that he lived now in Chiang Mai, where people went to the movies if they didn't want to be dickwads.
Not very long after his encounter with Randy Cooper, David decided to defy his father's unspoken but omnipresent code of personal conduct and go see the English-language movie of the week at the Kamtoey Theater, where was showing an entirely forgettable and now almost entirely forgotten blaxploitation film called Blacula, which the very same Randy Cooper, who brooded over the seventh grade like an incubus, the week before had said was so funny it almost made him piss himself.
Thomas had never specifically told his eldest son that he was not allowed to visit the Kamtoey Theater, but David knew his father was far too subtle a psychological tactician to prohibit outright a forbidden pleasure. Not long after the Walkers arrived in Chiang Mai, Linda-Lee had begun reading Cosmopolitan magazine, which she borrowed monthly from a classmate at school. Thomas didn't tell Linda-Lee that if she looked at that magazine one more time she'd be headed straight to the burning pits of Hell, which in Thomas's mind was not very far from the truth; but when he happened to notice a copy of Cosmo in Linda-Lee's book bag, the fifty-one-year-old Thomas began very publicly to read the magazine himself. Linda-Lee came home from school one day to find her father on the couch absorbed in an article about trimming the pubic regions, and at dinner with the whole family Thomas asked Linda-Lee if she had read that same fascinating article about how to seduce a man in six minutes or less? The funny thing was, Thomas continued, that was precisely how Mom had won his attention all those years ago, and was it working well for Linda-Lee? Linda-Lee went quiet as a puddle of water at the table. The very last thing the fifteen-year-old girl wanted to do was publicly compare her mother's quondam abilities as a seductress with her own. Can you imagine, Thomas went on, that people actually paid attention to this silliness when other people on this planet still lived as slaves? Norma went tsk-tsk wearily, and Grandpa Raymond shook his patriarchal gray head from side to side. You could almost hear the bags under his eyes go swish-swish in disapproval. Linda-Lee wished that the ever-present gaping maw of Hell would swallow her up right then and there.
So to go the Kamtoey Theater, which if discovered would have subjected him to his father's mockery, David was forced to lie to his father, which if discovered would have subjected him to his wrath. In preparation for his first visit to the cinema, David announced to his mother that he had joined the swim club, which met from four to six on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons. (Except at the height of the rainy season, when the pool, for reasons no one could explain, turned a violent cucumber green and widespread student opinion held that to dip so much as a toe in the water would lead to an agonizing death by slow-creeping gangrenous rot, which would pass upward from the feet, if you catch my horrifying drift, a terrible thing which really happened to some poor kid in the tenth grade. In the rainy season, David thought it prudent to play volleyball.) But attendance at athletic clubs was optional, and David explained to the swim teacher that he was expected that evening at a church youth group meeting.
Thus having fashioned himself a solitary afternoon in the hot season, David went to the Kamtoey Theater, by bicycle, directly and absolutely alone, first dodging traffic on the Charoen Muang Road, then over the Nawarat Bridge, crowded with bicycles, motorcycles, trishaws, tuk-tuks, and handcarts piled high with bags of rice and cement, past the aromatic flower market with its mountains of roses, orchids, jasmine, and lilies, then into the old city itself through the Tha Pae Gate. The whole way there, David swore to himself that he would never forget the Dyalo again, not even one time, not when the hills which ringed Chiang Mai were throbbing with demon-besotted Dyalo who needed his personal assistance, whose souls were crying out for liberation — although David did wonder just how two hours of swimming or volleyball, activities which no one disapproved of, would have helped the Dyalo. The question had bothered him enough that he'd asked his grandfather what he should be doing to help the Dyalo if he wasn't going out into the hills and preaching as his dad had done at his age. Grandpa Raymond had nodded in that slow, thoughtful way he had, and said that at the very least, David could pray for the Dyalo. "I take prayer extremely seriously, David. Prayer is often our most effective tool in the Fight." David was impressed by the serious, manly way his grandfather spoke to him, and decided that he could just as well pray for the Dyalo in a movie theater as in a swimming pool.