My goals were set when I left for                              Vietnam in September 1966: 1) Do a 13-month tour; 2) save money; 3) return to                          NJ; 4) resume street-racing Chevys; 5) come what may. After four months at Danang,                     the F4 squadron I was with rotated to a Japan airbase to patch its Phantoms. I ain't been                   the same since. My first three-month deployment to Japan was against my will. I tried to                change squadrons in hopes of staying in Nam to save rather than waste my pay at raucous                bars. How dumb I was. Another six trips to Japan during what turned out to be a 33-month                                               war tour resulted from a zeal for what a black marine pal called, "Schemin'                                  on 'dem hamlets." I was discharged on 24 June 1969, Mom's birthday, appearing        unannounced on her doorstep that night. I began college in September, worked as a janitor,      took Japanese lessons at night school, and bunked on Mom's sofa. Despite threadbare pockets, I          announced: "I'm goin' back to Japan next summer." Mom sniffed: "Yeah, right." I arrived in Tokyo         the following June, trained southwest to Iwakuni, and stayed the summer with a certain woman.           That's when it happened. A week after arriving, I was watching local TV one sultry afternoon with she           and a neighbor. It was a how-to program for housewives, showing viewers how to give cardio-       pulmonary resuscitation (CPR). A guy lay on the stage floor so several women from the audience could try mouth-to-mouth techniques on him. The show's host selected a college-age male as the "victim." The CPR teacher diagrammed the technique on a blackboard, then monitored each woman as she tried it on the prone buckaroo. Some of the women weren't much older than the victim; I recall thinking he must be enjoying his end of CPR. I couldn't follow the rapid-fire dialogue, so I didn't know why my friend and her neighbor were laughing. Then I saw the show's housewives also were laughing as the camera panned from them to their victim's beet-red face. CPR "kisses" from women leaning over him had caused a normal response—an erection. Whereas in the U.S. such a scene would've been edited out (to say the least), the Japanese find no sin in nature. Incredibly, the TV camera panned slowly from the lad's closed-eyed, blushing mug to the bulge in his chinos. The housewives, CPR instructor, my friend and her neighbor were howling. Only I was agog: 12 years of catechism hadn't prepared me for this. "Jeez" I hissed while making the sign of the cross, "Don't you realize that's a sin?" My host, an unlicensed psychiatrist, derailed my dogma with a deft nudge:

                                   "Welcome to Asia, Frankie Boy. . ."

Pagan Ways

— An altar boy's fall from grace —