Why Are We in Vietnam?

by Norman Mailer

  Of course, thinks Rusty, I’ll be having to watch. Oh, the ignominy. Just stick my middle-age dick against the screen. Yeah, sighs Rusty, the twentieth century is breaking up the ball game, and Rusty thinks large common thoughts such as these: (1) The women are free. They fuck too many to believe one man can do the job. (2) The Niggers are free, and the dues they got to be paid is no Texas virgin’s delight. (3) The Niggers and the women are fucking each other. (4) The Yellow races are breaking loose. (5) Africa is breaking loose. (6) The adolescents are breaking loose including his own son. (7) The European nations hate America’s guts. (8) The products are no fucking good anymore. (9) Communism is a system guaranteed to collect dues from all losers. (9a) More losers than winners. (9b) and out: Communism is going to defeat capitalism, unless promptly destroyed. (10) a. Fucking is king. b. Jerk-off dances are the royal road to the fuck. c. Rusty no great jerk-off dancer. d. Rusty disqualified from playing King Fuck. (11) The white men are no longer champions in boxing. (12) The great white athlete is being superseded by the great black athlete. (13) The Jews run the Eastern wing of the Democratic party. (14) Karate, a Jap sport, is now prerequisite to good street fighting. (15) The sons of the working class are running around America on motorcycles. (16) Church is out, LSD is in. (17) He, Rusty, is fucked unless he gets that bear, for if he don’t, white men are fucked more and they can take no more. Rusty’s secret is that he sees himself as one of the pillars of the firmament, yeah, man—he reads the world’s doom in his own fuckup. If he is less great than God intended him to be, then America is in Trouble. They don’t breed Texans for nothing. Rusty has a great philosophy, states D.J., it is just you have to be an honest son of a bitch to make it work, for—peer into this—you’re the fulcrum of the universe, right? the good Lord takes his reading off you, right? (Rusty figures—D.J. will tell you—that the Lord despising mass methods does not bother to weigh man in the aggregate or the mass; instead he stays close to a chosen few, and they ain’t Hebes, Rusty hopes to tell you) so Rusty being the cat off whom the reading is read, being that fundament of mind, flesh, and being whose moves are intimate to the Lord, he got to be honest with himself if he want to be on fulcrum point, because if he think he’s doing good, and the good Lord knows he’s not, well, kiss your own sweet ass, Eustachia, Rusty is then no longer up tight with G.O.D.—Grand Old Divinity (biggest corporation of them all? Rusty often thinks not) no, you are one place, God is another, how can you serve? But then an asshole, even a H.G. asshole, cannot be honest by definition, for it would claim to be an organ like any other, it would pretend to have no guilt, and yet it fumes, man. Ho, ho, wait and see.

  Chap Seven

  Big Luke and Kenny Easterly were not running velvet guided tours of America’s last unspoiled wilderness for naught tickle either, so they decided to have the whole group together on the grizzer hunt, five guests, four guides, and Mr. Guide Pilot in Cop-Bird Seat, A1 Bell was his name flying a Bell 47J, three passengers, one pilot—take a bow—Al Bell, no relation to Bell 47J.

  Big Luke had a military decision. Whether due to the atom bomb or to Al Bell and his 47J and numerous other yclepts helicopts from Sam Sting Safari, and other Safari Counters with their respective airplanes, Cop Turds, and general fission of the psychomagnetic field (new concept, Suck-Mouth) of the wild life in the Brooks Range, the fact is that the grizzers had gone ape. Big Luke had known grizzers all his life—there was a time when he knew them so well he could walk up to a peaceful one and pat him on the shoulder, the bear ain’t an undivided heavy, a stone sadist, no, grizzer can be patted on the back, at least was a time but now the psychomagnetic field was a mosaic, a fragmented vase as Horace said to Ovid, and Big Luke couldn’t be sure if he was still in contact with his monumental cool, too many grizzers were charging the hunter before the first shot. So Big Luke took a military fix. He had two adolescents who could shoot maybe, and one high-grade asshole who could shoot some of the time, and two M.A.s who had a fifty-fifty even locating a moving target in their scope. He had the guides of course, he could count on his guides, they would hold, they would keep shooting until the bear’s breath was up their nose, but the clients had to get the first shot (with any pretense of class, the second as well) so look, here’s a grizzer, wounded twice, a mind now halfway between dragon and dinosaur, fire in his gut, lightning in his shoulder, and zero in his life but heart, teeth, fangs, get those long claws in, and Luke’s guide waiting for client to get two shots off now has the Grizzly Express running straight on them, not forty yards away, hop, lurch, leap, heave. For those forty yards the grizzer could be fast as a mustang. Even if guide hits him three times more, maybe grizzer doesn’t stop until he takes a human trophy out with him into the twilight beyond the painted waters. “Ah swan,” says Big Luke, “my client died in the old bear’s arms.” Shit! That cannot be. Big Luke has never lost a client, but there are averages, laws, and retribution. Cop Turds are exploding psychic ecology all over the place, and this is above the Circle, man, every mind, human, animal, even vegetable, certainly mineral (crystal mineral) is tuned in to the same place, wait and see, better believe, Big Luke knows he’s getting away with too much, he’s violating the divine economy which presides over hunters, and so he could lose a client, he would mar the record of a life, this is Yukon, man, heroes fall, listen to Big Luke folklore, Big Ruby Lil, the great whore of Saskatchewan, never failed to please a client, giants and pygmies they all came—Luke could tell the tale—until the day she pressed her luck, took Yukon hashish—what?—to speed the passing of the hours, and behold an auditor from Manitoba rolled in her comfortable soft brown slightly charred (from thirty years of peter burn) sweet whore’s old Cadillac of a cunt, it was thus big and roomy (the secret was that her clients used to let the fatigue of a lifetime shoot, fire or seep out into those homey cunt walls—she was medicine, man) well, the audit got it up but he could not let it go, there was a knot of congested fatigue in his heart, he was afraid he would blast himself if he ever blew it into her, so Ruby Lil tried everything, she even, after four hours, sucked his dick, and Ruby Lil had not done that for twenty years, she was a Mexico-Eskimo Queen, man, she put down the taste of semen, but she even did the rim on that auditor with the eyeglasses from Manitoba, yet she failed, he never got the first drop to say sayonara to his dick, no floods of seed left the comptometer of his nuts, and Ruby Lil declined and was diminished to a dyke.

  This Big Luke’s thought? No, it’s D.J. on the edge of masturbating in the Alaska night, with the excitement of going for griz in the morning, and holding off, holding off, cause a handful of spit on a sixteen-year-old dick puts a worm on the trigger and you slip off your shot.

  This is defalcation from the point. Big Luke is also lying awake, and the knot of fatigue in the auditor from Manitoba’s heart which D.J. is cooking via his fantasy is the actual knot of tired Herr Dread in Big Luke’s heart (how’s that for symbology, syph-head?). Yeah, now. So Big Luke General Fellinka makes his military disposition. They must be in position to bomb and superblast any grizzer who attacks. Therefore they will all make it together—five clients, five guides, Luke knows the spot, there’s the bank of a mud-lick where berries grow—but the nightmare persists. Military solutions proliferate new problems, Pierrot. If General Luke has his double line of infantry, five clients in a straight row with five guides behind, just let one grizzer break through the line, and clients will be shooting at each other and at guides, what embroilment! no, the bank of the mud-lick is out, he’ll have to form a circle around a knoll, and pictures of terrain circulate his head, revolve, come to a stop, start up again.

  Big Luke finally picked the patch. It was a chimney of vertical rock round about one hundred feet in diameter, and bushes at its base where hunters could fire from cover. It stood in the middle of one emerald alpine meadow far enough beneath timber to hope and expect for more than one or two bear, and patches of buffalo berry and blueberry showed at the edge of the trees. Luke disposed his Hot-Shot Special as follows: ten men
including himself set out in an arc one-third of the way around the chimney on the side facing those berry bushes (upwind side) and he pinned the line with two guides at each end. Five hunters and himself in the middle. By that method, the fire of two guides would impact on any bear circling around the flank from the blind side of the chimney, and the cross fire of all four guides ready to concentrate on any one bear attacking anywhere up the middle. If the bear ever reached the center, Luke knew he there to be the man to stop it. Thus disposition is done. General Luke Fellinka now trundled the Pure Pores boys and Moe Henry guides in by copter to a knoll one mile away and then walked them over open country, high on the ridgeline, so no bear could pop in on them in the brushwood.

  All set up, Big Luke made a speech. “Don’t hold fire too much! Any bear you see belongs to all of you. You can all shoot. That’s the way to take him out.” Shadow of Ruby Lil passes all unseen over Big Luke’s brainpan.

  “Who does the bear belong to?” asks Rusty.

  “I’ll know,” said Big Luke. “I can tell if the first shot should get the credit, or if it belongs to a later shot when that’s the one does the work.”

  Well, they didn’t have too much to wait. Ninety minutes later, about eleven in the morning, two bears wandered into the meadow, husband and wife but for the lack of a J.P., and the wind came across the meadow from them sailing with such connubial grizzly funky strength that Tex swore afterward he could smell the bear on the breeze, and that was why he saw them first. Tex got off his shot first—it was his hunt this year—the male was dead with a .270 through the brain, and Rusty and Pete fired off two shots each at the other bear who let loose a roar like the explosion in the foghorn of a small-town firehouse when the noon alarm goes off. And then she turned and smashed off into the woods, blood all over her back and flank, and was hit eight more times by the guides, and dropped not ten yards back into the trees.

  Big Luke gave the award to M.A. Pete. The second bear was Pete’s bear, decided Luke. Pete was ready to give it all to Rusty, and his cannon too, but Luke after leading Rusty, Pete, Tex, and a couple of guides up to Tex’s bear (proved to be stone dead on approach by failing any quiver when stones were tossed at him) now walked on, rifle at the hip, following the trail of the female whose blood was red on the alders and the dwarf birch trees, blood looking to expire into brown gum on the pine needles still bright as electric red on the cedar leaves, that red vibrating up D.J.’s nose in the cool gray blue ass sky green gray ground of Northland, up above the Circle, red above the Circle, red in the cool September Arctic air. Some giant wolf in D.J.’s heart, some prehistoric wolf all eight feet big began to stir new boils and springs and pools in the river of D.J., in his blood, beasty audience, in his blood, and he had to get him a wolf in the form of a bear like the grizzly bear plugged with twelve shots which lay there still shaking and broken and dead but still twitching, that female bear her belly half demolished by the Nitro Express of Medium Asshole Assistant to Procurement Manager Pure Pores Pete. Yeah. Rusty’s shot had broken the shoulder and probably carried near the heart, but Pete got the duke. “I think this bear went from massive shock,” said Big Luke, hardly able to hold back a massive shocker of a shit-eating grin. “Yours was nice shooting, Rusty—” dig—first time Luke calls Sir Jet-Throne, Rusty “—but Pete did the real job, so I’d call it.”

  Pete began to think of moving to Kansas City. That corporation land is mother, father, children, wife, hot weekend fuck, and romantic sorrow all in one. There are corporation execs who have sensibility fine as Anna K.’s (Anna Karenina, hunk-head!) for one thing: their boss. They know when their boss has ceased to love them. M.A.s in corporation land are vacuum tubes, man, ideal diodes, they are there to damp the waves in one direction, send them out the other, yes, yes, and cut out all the no no no. How else a boss to build up potential to transmit his communications without a M.A. vacuum tube or two in his network, Fergus? Well, the filament just burned out on Pete’s tube. Ideal diode is no more.

  “Where are you going to get that bear stuffed, Pete?” said Rusty.

  “What do you recommend, Rusty?”

  “Shoot another bear so you can patch the holes in this one.”

  What a cunt of a remark! But Rusty’s got cunt in him. Vicious little streak he passed right on intact to D.J. Rusty don’t look like Henry Cabot Lodge for nothing, he’s already up and about and looking forward. Cause if he don’t get a bear now, he can transfer to Japan.

  Well, so there they go, right back to the chimney. And they wait for more bear. And more bear ain’t coming. Bear may have gone ape shit in the Brooks Range, but they are not kamikaze, they can smell their own bear gum blood on the evergreen needles, and smell the insects strumming out all kinds of electronic ax music while insect pissing and shitting and orgy blood fucking with the flies in the wet red on the meadow and the woods, yeah, and those bears can smell the last shit blasted out of dead female grizzer with twelve slugs in her, and the shit that is ejected after death has passed through the vale and got an odor of the other, of the tomb, like the odor of cigarette breath on the mouth of a bitch who smokes forty cigs a day, you know the smell that goes back to Egypt. No bear comes. Not all the rest of that day, and back again in the morning, not all the rest of the next day. Next day Tex and M.A. Pete go off with guides to look for moose, Cop Turd is carrying them to a good shallow moose lake, and Rusty and D.J. are left with M.A. Bill and his Boom Boom Boomerang .311 Genius Special. It’s amazing what waiting can do to a man’s guts. M.A. Bill gets dreamy. He ceases to desire bear. Rusty scurries about in his gut and reamasses his cool. He is getting to feel taut and not without his ready—D.J. is more so than a young assassin with a knife. He too has got to get grizzer. The wolf is burning fever in him now, best future of his blood is going to boil off if he can’t get on a bear (for he was the only one not to shoot at the female grizzer)—he had (tell it not even to thine own armpit)—he had blown up in bull buck bear fever. Or maybe it was all that jack-off tension over Ruby Lil, yeah. The scope had done a wiggle, finger did the trigger in a jig and never pulled at all. So he is in the heart of horror, he and Rusty can sit no longer in the brush at the foot of the chimney looking at a lazy meadow where no bear comes to feed on berries, and the only sight in an hour is a loon winging on south from high overhead. They could be as well out in Texas desert as in this gray ass Arctic Circle with its emerald green lawns and the itch-dick memory of electric red on the leaves. So they push on Luke to go out tracking for bear, to push any direction into the wind down trails through woods, fuck the cautions, Rusty is indicating to Luke, let them be hunters at last and take a trek for game. And Luke resists, just as long as he can, he resists, for the word is out to the grizzers on the Brooks Range, this piece of patch anyway—and there’s sullen babies inside those bear hides now, they could make an Ace Delinquent on a bad Spade drunk seem like Angel Enlightenment next to the look building in those itty-bitty mean grizzer eyes. “Shit, man,” said Rusty finally, “I’m taking D.J. here and we are going to walk all fifteen miles back to Ding Bat and see if we can’t encounter what we came to find.” And Luke is wishing he had given the hide to Rusty.

  Well, naught tickle to fare, Big Luke radios Cop Turd and tells him they’re coming in on foot, and he’ll give him another toodle-oo in two hours forty, and they string out now, Ed Smith the guide at point, Rusty, D.J., M.A. Bill and Big Luke. D.J. is finally walking with a gun across some miles of terrain in the Endicott Mountains of the untapped last wilderness Brooks Range.

  And it’s not that wild, man, it’s not jungle, icicles, glaciers, mountain peaks, abysses, no, man, this patch right by to them here is nearly like Switzerland, but stretched out, baby, hint of big stuff, frozen ass snow peaks to the north, howlers of wind in the big cavities of the big mountains, but here it’s just as clear and clean as a tasty blond fuck, I mean D.J. could say you might just as well be in Yosemite, Evan, you can’t beat this land for long big clean cool, evergreens, man, the odor of evergreens pe
rvadeth.

  But Rusty is half-insane by now. That odor of evergreen might just as well be poppers for his inflamed brain. He ain’t trundling his ass for two hours forty in order for Big Luke to radio the Cop Turd and taxi them in, he’s not there to have his lust blooded and placated, he is up, his guts are there. So he turns to D.J. and says, “Son, let’s split from Luke the Fink cause he ain’t going to get your ass or mine near a grizzer.” And D.J. who has been feeling the high hairy cool of a terrible turn where your short will hold or not hold old bitch road, it’s endless, yes, that moment has been riding the next moment every step of their walk, he don’t know if he’s going to be a hero or dead, but he loves his daddy this instant, what a fuck of a stud, they will take off together, they will make their own way back to Camp, and Big Luke will sweat a huge drop. So in a turn around a ledge in the woods, they bear off sharp right, climb the ledge, let the others pass beneath, and work fast in the other direction, running when they are out of sight. Maybe they have run up a distance of a half mile in the woods before Big Luke will be aware they are gone, and Big Luke will work a quarter-mile circle for an hour at least before he decides they have dumped him. At which point they will be two miles away, and Rusty thereupon sprints off with D.J., making real rough woodsman time through these woods, easy going, lots of carpet, very still, little animals scattering, Northern cool slowly settling. They are off on a free, father and son.

  Intro Beep 8

  The pure moment of salt forming the crystal of this narrative going through D.J.’s super-accelerated consciousness at eighteen right here and now when he sitting at the dinner table in the Dallas ass manse with Mr. Rusty Smoking Jacket, Halleloo all beautiful perfumed tits popping big tasty hostess heaves and Tex across from him, D.J.’s mother humping up secret heart of pussy welter wallow and slide tug suck fuck for Tex’s nineteen-year-old dick, Tex, D.J.’s best friend, blood brother, incest is electric man, never forget, and eighteen between D.J. and Rusty it is all torn, all ties of properly sublimated parental-filial libido have been X-ed out man, die, love, die in a diode, cause love is dialectic, man, back and forth, hate and sweet, leer-love, spit-tickle, bite-lick, love is dialectic, and corporation is DC, direct current, diehard charge, no dialectic man, just one-way street, they don’t call it Washington D.C. for nothing, eighteen, it’s all torn, torn by the inexorable hunt logic of the Brooks Range when D.J. was sixteen, wait and see. Here they go. Here is the result of Rusty losing female grizzer with twelve male plugs from I don’t know how many shooting tubes, think of fighting over a trophy which is as unknowing of its killer as the poor town fuck must be unknowing of the parental origins of her latest feet-ass (and head) now in embryo in her womb, forgive D.J. for acting like Dr. James Joyce, all junkies are the same, you know. Follow the hunt.