Night Train

by Thom Jones

  I cut and ran from that field in Southeast Asia. I’ve read that Davy Crockett, hero of the American frontier, was cowering under a bed when Santa Anna and his soldiers stormed into the Alamo. What is the truth? Jack Dempsey used to get so scared before his fights that he sometimes wet his pants. But look what he did to Willard and to Luis Firpo, the Wild Bull of the Pampas! It was something close to homicide. What is courage? What is cowardice? The magnificent Roberto Duran gave us “No más,” but who had a greater fighting heart than Duran?

  I got over that first scare and saw that I was something quite other than that which I had known myself to be. Hey Baby proved only my warm-up act. There was a reservoir of malice, poison, and vicious sadism in my soul, and it poured forth freely in the jungles and rice paddies of Vietnam. I pulled three tours. I wanted some payback for Jorgeson. I grieved for Lance Corporal Hanes. I grieved for myself and what I had lost. I committed unspeakable crimes and got medals for it.

  It was only fair that I got a head injury myself. I never got a scratch in Vietnam, but I got tagged in a boxing smoker at Pendleton. Fought a bad-ass light-heavyweight from artillery. Nobody would fight this guy. He could box. He had all the moves. But mainly he was a puncher—it was said that he could punch with either hand. It was said that his hand speed was superb. I had finished off at least a half rack of Hamm’s before I went in with him and started getting hit with head shots I didn’t even see coming. They were right. His hand speed was superb.

  I was twenty-seven years old, smoked two packs a day, was a borderline alcoholic. I shouldn’t have fought him—I knew that—but he had been making noise. A very long time before, I had been the middleweight champion of the 1st Marine Division. I had been a so-called war hero. I had been a recon Marine. But now I was a garrison Marine and in no kind of shape.

  He put me down almost immediately, and when I got up I was terribly afraid. I was tight and I could not breathe. It felt like he was hitting me in the face with a ball-peen hammer. It felt like he was busting light bulbs in my face. Rather than one opponent, I saw three. I was convinced his gloves were loaded, and a wave of self-pity ran through me.

  I began to move. He made a mistake by expending a lot of energy trying to put me away quickly. I had no intention of going down again, and I knew I wouldn’t. My buddies were watching, and I had to give them a good show. While I was afraid, I was also exhilarated; I had not felt this alive since Vietnam. I began to score with my left jab, and because of this I was able to withstand his bull charges and divert them. I thought he would throw his bolt, but in the beginning he was tireless. I must have hit him with four hundred left jabs. It got so that I could score at will, with either hand, but he would counter, trap me on the ropes, and pound. He was the better puncher and was truly hurting me, but I was scoring, and as the fight went on the momentum shifted and I took over. I staggered him again and again. The Marines at ringside were screaming for me to put him away, but however much I tried, I could not. Although I could barely stand by the end, I was sorry that the fight was over. Who had won? The referee raised my arm in victory, but I think it was pretty much a draw. Judging a prizefight is a very subjective thing.

  About an hour after the bout, when the adrenaline had subsided, I realized I had a terrible headache. It kept getting worse, and I rushed out of the NCO Club, where I had gone with my buddies to get loaded.

  I stumbled outside, struggling to breathe, and I headed away from the company area toward Sheepshit Hill, one of the many low brown foothills in the vicinity. Like a dog who wants to die alone, so it was with me. Everything got swirly, and I dropped in the bushes.

  I was unconscious for nearly an hour, and for the next two weeks I walked around like I was drunk, with double vision. I had constant headaches and seemed to have grown old overnight. My health was gone.

  I became a very timid individual. I became introspective. I wondered what had made me act the way I had acted. Why had I killed my fellowmen in war, without any feeling, remorse, or regret? And when the war was over, why did I continue to drink and swagger around and get into fistfights? Why did I like to dish out pain, and why did I take positive delight in the suffering of others? Was I insane? Was it too much testosterone? Women don’t do things like that. The rapacious Will to Power lost its hold on me. Suddenly I began to feel sympathetic to the cares and sufferings of all living creatures. You lose your health and you start thinking this way.

  Has man become any better since the times of Theogenes? The world is replete with badness. I’m not talking about that old routine where you drag out the Spanish Inquisition, the Holocaust, Joseph Stalin, the Khmer Rouge, etc. It happens in our own backyard. Twentieth-century America is one of the most materially prosperous nations in history. But take a walk through an American prison, a nursing home, the slums where the homeless live in cardboard boxes, a cancer ward. Go to a Vietnam vets’ meeting, or an A.A. meeting, or an Overeaters Anonymous meeting. How hollow and unreal a thing is life, how deceitful are its pleasures, what horrible aspects it possesses. Is the world not rather like a hell, as Schopenhauer, that clearheaded seer—who has helped me transform my suffering into an object of understanding—was so quick to point out? They called him a pessimist and dismissed him with a word, but it is peace and self-renewal that I have found in his pages.

  About a year after my fight with the guy from artillery I started having seizures. I suffered from a form of left-temporal-lobe seizure which is sometimes called Dostoyevsky’s epilepsy. It’s so rare as to be almost unknown. Freud, himself a neurologist, speculated that Dostoyevsky was a hysterical epileptic, and that his fits were unrelated to brain damage—psychogenic in origin. Dostoyevsky did not have his first attack until the age of twenty-five, when he was imprisoned in Siberia and received fifty lashes after complaining about the food. Freud figured that after Dostoyevsky’s mock execution, the four years’ imprisonment in Siberia, the tormented childhood, the murder of his tyrannical father, etc. & etc.—he had all the earmarks of hysteria, of grave psychological trauma. And Dostoyevsky had displayed the trademark features of the psychomotor epileptic long before his first attack. These days physicians insist there is no such thing as the “epileptic personality.” I think they say this because they do not want to add to the burden of the epileptic’s suffering with an extra stigma. Privately they do believe in these traits. Dostoyevsky was nervous and depressed, a tormented hypochondriac, a compulsive writer obsessed with religious and philosophic themes. He was hyperloquacious, raving, etc. & etc. His gambling addiction is well known. By most accounts he was a sick soul.

  The peculiar and most distinctive thing about his epilepsy was that in the split second before his fit—in the aura, which is in fact officially a part of the attack—Dostoyevsky experienced a sense of felicity, of ecstatic well-being unlike anything an ordinary mortal could hope to imagine. It was the experience of satori. Not the nickel-and-dime satori of Abraham Maslow, but the Supreme. He said that he wouldn’t trade ten years of life for this feeling, and I, who have had it, too, would have to agree. I can’t explain it, I don’t understand it—it becomes slippery and elusive when it gets any distance on you—but I have felt this down to the core of my being. Yes, God exists! But then it slides away and I lose it. I become a doubter. Even Dostoyevsky, the fervent Christian, makes an almost airtight case against the possibility of the existence of God in the Grand Inquisitor digression in The Brothers Karamazov. It is probably the greatest passage in all of world literature, and it tilts you to the court of the atheist. This is what happens when you approach Him with the intellect.

  It is thought that St. Paul had a temporal-lobe fit on the road to Damascus. Paul warns us in First Corinthians that God will confound the intellectuals. It is known that Muhammad composed the Koran after attacks of epilepsy. Black Elk experienced fits before his grand “buffalo” vision. Joan of Arc is thought to have been a left-temporal-lobe epileptic. Each of these in a terrible flash of brain lightning was able to pierce the murky
veil of illusion which is spread over all things. Just so did the scales fall from my eyes. It is called the “sacred disease.”

  But what a price. I rarely leave the house anymore. To avoid falling injuries, I always wear my old boxer’s headgear, and I always carry my mouthpiece. Rather more often than the aura where “every common bush is afire with God,” I have the typical epileptic aura, which is that of terror and impending doom. If I can keep my head and think of it, and if there is time, I slip the mouthpiece in and thus avoid biting my tongue. I bit it in half once, and when they sewed it back together it swelled enormously, like a huge red-and-black sausage. I was unable to close my mouth for more than two weeks.

  The fits are coming more and more. I’m loaded on Depakene, phenobarbital, Tegretol, Dilantin—the whole shitload. A nurse from the V.A. bought a pair of Staffordshire terriers for me and trained them to watch me as I sleep, in case I have a fit and smother facedown in my bedding. What delightful companions these dogs are! One of them, Gloria, is especially intrepid and clever. Inevitably, when I come to I find that the dogs have dragged me into the kitchen, away from blankets and pillows, rugs, and objects that might suffocate me; and that they have turned me on my back. There’s Gloria, barking in my face. Isn’t this incredible?

  My sister brought a neurosurgeon over to my place around Christmas—not some V.A. butcher but a guy from the university hospital. He was a slick dude in a nine-hundred-dollar suit. He came down on me hard, like a used-car salesman. He wants to cauterize a small spot in a nerve bundle in my brain. “It’s not a lobotomy, it’s a cingulotomy,” he said.

  Reckless, desperate, last-ditch psychosurgery is still pretty much unthinkable in the conservative medical establishment. That’s why he made a personal visit to my place. A house call. Drumming up some action to make himself a name. “See that bottle of Thorazine?” he said. “You can throw that poison away,” he said. “All that amitriptyline. That’s garbage, you can toss that, too.” He said, “Tell me something. How can you take all of that shit and still walk?” He said, “You take enough drugs to drop an elephant.”

  He wants to cut me. He said that the feelings of guilt and worthlessness, and the heaviness of a heart blackened by sin, will go away. “It is not a lobotomy,” he said.

  I don’t like the guy. I don’t trust him. I’m not convinced, but I can’t go on like this. If I am not having a panic attack I am engulfed in tedious, unrelenting depression. I am overcome with a deadening sense of languor; I can’t do anything. I wanted to give my buddies a good show! What a goddamn fool. I am a goddamn fool!

  It has taken me six months to put my thoughts in order, but I wanted to do it in case I am a vegetable after the operation. I know that my buddy Jorgeson was a real American hero. I wish that he had lived to be something else, if not a painter of pictures then even some kind of fuckup with a factory job and four divorces, bankruptcy petitions, in and out of jail. I wish he had been that. I wish he had been anything rather than a real American hero. So, then, if I am to feel somewhat indifferent to life after the operation, all the better. If not, not.

  If I had a more conventional sense of morality I would shit-can those dress blues, and I’d send that Navy Cross to Jorgeson’s brother. Jorgeson was the one who won it, who pulled the John Wayne number up there near Khe Sanh and saved my life, although I lied and took the credit for all of those dead NVA. He had created a stunning body count—nothing like Theogenes, but Jorgeson only had something like twelve minutes total in the theater of war.

  The high command almost awarded me the Medal of Honor, but of course there were no witnesses to what I claimed I had done, and I had saved no one’s life. When I think back on it, my tale probably did not sound as credible as I thought it had at the time. I was only nineteen years old and not all that practiced a liar. I figure if they had given me the Medal of Honor, I would have stood in the ring up at Camp Las Pulgas in Pendleton and let that light-heavyweight from artillery fucking kill me.

  Now I’m thinking I might call Hey Baby and ask how he’s doing. No shit, a couple of neuropsychs—we probably have a lot in common. I could apologize to him. But I learned from my fits that you don’t have to do that. Good and evil are only illusions. Still, I cannot help but wonder sometimes if my vision of the Supreme Reality was any more real than the demons visited upon schizophrenics and madmen. Has it all been just a stupid neurochemical event? Is there no God at all? The human heart rebels against this.

  If they fuck up the operation, I hope I get to keep my dogs somehow—maybe stay at my sister’s place. If they send me to the nuthouse I lose the dogs for sure.

  The Black Lights

  COMMANDER ANDY HAWKINS​, chief psychiatrist of the neuropsych ward at Camp Pendleton, received the inevitable nickname Eaglebeak, or Eagle, early in his first tour in Vietnam when a crazy Marine attacked him out of the clear blue and bit off his nose. It became a serious medical event when Commander Hawkins developed a resistant staph infection in his sinuses, which quickly spread to his brain—a danger that is always present with face wounds. To complicate matters, Hawkins was allergic to the first antibiotics administered to him and went into anaphylactic shock. When that was finally controlled, his kidneys shut down, and he had to be placed on dialysis, as the infection continued to run rampant through his system. Hawkins developed a raging fever and had to be wrapped in ice blankets for two days, and weeks later, after his kidneys and immune system kicked in again, he came down with hepatitis B and nearly died from that. He resigned his commission, quit doctoring altogether for a time, and went to the Menninger Foundation in Kansas, where he did some work—work on himself. He wanted to regain some compassion for his fellowman before trying to go back into private practice, but his dreams of a successful civilian career were destroyed by the fact that he had no nose. He wore a tin nose, complete with a head strap, crafted by a Vietnamese peasant, and it made him an object of ridicule, led to a divorce from his wife, and prompted him to rejoin the Navy, where it didn’t really matter that much what you looked like if you had enough rank. It mattered socially—at the Officers’ Club and so on—but not on the job.

  Commander Hawkins started out with a plastic prosthetic nose, but it was easily detectable, so he decided to make the best of a bad situation by wearing the tin nose and being up front about it. He was always quick to point out that he, more than anyone, realized how absurd his condition was, and in doing so he attenuated in part the sniggering he was subjected to for wearing a tin nose. What bothered him more was what he imagined people said about it in private. He became a virtual paranoid in this regard.

  I was sent to Pendleton’s neuropsych facility—that bleak, austere nuthouse—some weeks after defending my title as the 1st Marine Division Middleweight Champ in a boxing smoker at Camp Las Pulgas. I lost on a K.O. My injuries resulted in a shocking loss of weight, headaches, double vision, and strange, otherworldly spells. EEG readings taken at the hospital indicated that I had a lesion on my left temporal lobe from a punch to the temple that had put me out cold for over an hour. I was a boxer with over a hundred and fifty fights, and I had taken a lot of shots, but this last punch was the hardest I had ever received and the first punch ever to put me down. I had seen stars before from big punches; I had seen pinwheels; but after that shot to the temple I saw the worst thing you ever see in boxing—I saw the black lights.

  There I sat in a corner of the dayroom on the kelly-green floor tiles, dressed in a uniform of pajamas and bathrobe, next to a small, tightly coiled catatonic named Joe, who wore a towel on his shoulder. Here in this corner—the most out-of-the-way place in the ward—was one of the few windows. Occasionally a Marine would freak out and bolt for the window, jump up on the sill, shake the security screen, and scream “I want to die!” or “I can’t take it anymore, let me out of this motherfucker!” At these times Joe would actually move a little. By that I mean he would tilt to the left to give the screamer a little space. Except for me and one of the corpsmen, Joe would not
let anyone touch him or feed him or change him.

  As I said, Joe wore a towel on his shoulder. He drooled constantly, and he would grunt in gratitude when I dabbed his mouth dry. Joe gave off a smell. Schizophrenics give off a smell, and you get used to it. Sometimes, however, it would get so bad that I could swear I saw colors coming off Joe—shades of blue, red, and violet—and to get away from it I would get up and walk over to the wall-mounted cigarette lighter, a spiral electrical device much like the cigarette lighters in cars. The staff didn’t trust us with open flames or razor blades.

  Sitting next to Joe, I would chain-smoke Camels until the Thorazine and phenobarbital that Eagle had prescribed to contain my agitated restlessness got to be too much and I fell into heavy, unpleasant dreams, or I had a fit and woke up on the tile with piss and shit in my pants—alone, neglected, a pariah. The same corpsman who changed Joe would change me. The others would let you lie in your filth until the occasional doctor or nurse came in and demanded that they take action.

  I was having ten to twenty spells a day during my first month, and I was so depressed that I refused to talk to anyone, especially when some of the fits marched into full-blown grand mal seizures, which caused me much shame and confusion. I refused to see the buddies from my outfit who came by to visit me, and I did not answer my mail or take calls from my family. But as I got used to the Thorazine I began to snap out of my fits quicker. I began to shave and brush my teeth, and mingle with the rest of the neuropsych population. With Eagle as my living example, I had decided I would make the best of a bad situation; I would adjust to it and get on with my life.