The Reason You're Alive

by Matthew Quick

  When I returned home, after some crazy time in a military loony bin in Kansas, which I’ll talk about later, I used the GI Bill to take the Temple challenge, which meant that I enrolled at Temple University in Philadelphia. Previously, I had been thinking I would be an engineer, but I ended up studying business and economics, which, it turns out, is a lot like war. Like I just said, if you are smarter and tougher and more ruthless than everyone else, you can win the money game and usually do. So I wasn’t getting stoned and drunk back then. I was studying my ass off and working two jobs, one at a bank and another as a carpenter on the weekends.

  Even still, I tried to keep in touch with my Vietnam veteran friends, if only to check up on them and try to encourage them to make something of whatever life they had left, which was a lot harder than it sounds to people who have never been to war in some shithole country.

  The vets of today coming back from Afghanistan and Iraq have it pretty fucking bad, and many who would have been killed in Vietnam come home maimed these days because of advancements in medicine, which means worse rehab and harder handicapped lives. But I’d still say that coming home a veteran in the sixties was much, much worse than coming home a veteran now. We honor the troops everywhere these days with ribbons and patriotic beer commercials and hometown hero announcements at sporting events where they put veterans in uniforms up on the big screens and everyone claps. All good. Better than being spit on. But I don’t mean to say it’s easy coming home from war today, because it fucking isn’t. Not by a long shot.

  Back in the late sixties, whenever I stopped by Roger Dodger’s, there were at least a dozen teenage girls high out of their little minds. Some of these girls were only fourteen or fifteen. A lot of guys got a taste for that in the whorehouses in Vietnam. I knew that wasn’t good stateside. I didn’t want to tell my friends what they could or couldn’t do, but these girls had never left suburbia and therefore had no idea what killers they were partying with. I’m not saying that all Vietnam veterans were dangerous when they came home, but Roger and Brian were definitely taking advantage of these underage girls, impressing them with war stories and then getting them high so that they could get laid on a regular basis, all while taking money off them too. And the girls didn’t know that they were playing with live rounds, sticking loaded guns in their mouths, and other orifices too. I was on a hair trigger myself, but at least I was sober most days. Drugs can be calming, but sometimes they aren’t.

  I’d have a beer with Roger when all these kids were there, and I’d say, “What the fuck are you doing, man?”

  He’d laugh and say, “I’m enjoying the fruits of America!”

  I’d try to talk to him about the GI Bill and maybe having a future, but his setup was too good. All the drugs he wanted, a free place to live, and an inexhaustible supply of teenage poontang gyrating to the Doors or the Stones or whatever the fuck else we were listening to back then.

  I’d been to Roger’s place dozens of times without having to fight anyone, back before I met Jessica, so the following story doesn’t represent a typical day in the civilian life of David Granger.

  It was a Saturday in the dead of winter. Too much snow on the ground for carpentry work. I had the day off, so I went to check up on Roger and try to talk his ass into putting down the weed pipe and taking the Temple challenge, although I can’t remember if they called it the Temple challenge back then. Maybe Bill Cosby started all that later, but before we found out that he was a serial pervert in addition to being Temple’s best-known alumnus. But I remember Roger’s Dodge Charger was covered in several inches of ice and snow. The driveway hadn’t been cleared, or the sidewalk, but there were all of these footprints frozen in the snow. All of them about the size of teenage-girl feet.

  I could hear the music blasting as I approached. I remember it was “Friday on My Mind” by the Easybeats because that was a dumb fucking song to play on a Saturday, or at least that’s what I thought when I was standing there freezing my ass off, waiting for someone to open the door. When no one did, I turned the knob and let myself in.

  The pot smoke was so thick, it looked like the house was on fire.

  “Close the fucking door!” someone yelled. “Keep the smoke in!”

  I saw a few young girls completely naked and passed out on the floor, so I started looking for Roger before I got a contact high myself. I could usually get him to sit with me in the kitchen, where no one else really partied. Everywhere I looked, there were drugs and teenage flesh. I couldn’t find Roger, and no one was responding to any of my questions because of the drugs and also the music was so fucking loud so I went upstairs.

  At the top of the stairs I heard a young woman screaming for help, only it was hard to hear over the music, so no one was helping her. The bedroom door was locked, so I kicked it in.

  Brian was standing there naked, holding a revolver with one hand and stroking his little erect dick with the other, all while saying crude things like he was going to “widen her” and “make her evil” and other perverted ideas I won’t repeat here because they are just too fucked up for the average ear. And if something is too fucked up for me to repeat, you know it is really nasty. He was so high he didn’t even turn to face me.

  I kept my eye on the gun, which was pointed at the floor, but could easily have been pointed at my face within seconds. I don’t take chances with armed men tripping on acid and weed and alcohol and whatever else they had scored. So I simply coldcocked Brian. My right fist hit the right side of his skull, and then his face hit the floor. Only he pulled the trigger as he fell, shooting a bullet through the wood boards below him.

  I quickly kicked the gun out of his hand, made sure he was out cold, and then ran downstairs to see if anyone had been shot. Miraculously, the bullet passed through without hitting any of the dozen people partying on the first floor. The music was so loud and everyone was so wasted that no one even knew that a gun had been fired. That’s how fucked up these people were. With everyone out of harm’s way, I went back upstairs to check on the young girl Brian had sexually assaulted.

  She was crumpled up in the corner, shaking and crying. When I touched her shoulder, she jumped and then screamed, but then she threw herself at me, so I put my arms around her in an attempt to calm her down.

  After a minute or so, she looked at me and said, “Who are you?”

  I told her my name and asked for hers.

  “Jessica,” she said, and then went on to explain that she was Roger Dodger’s kid sister. I’d later learn that she had been coming around the house to try and help get her brother out of his drug haze, but instead had ended up getting sucked into the scene and participating. If you were in that house, you had pot smoke in your lungs whether you wanted it there or not.

  To make a long, awful, fucked-up story short, Jessica didn’t manage to get Roger to stop using drugs to escape his Vietnam memories. It was the other way around: Roger got Jessica to start smoking pot and tripping, because he believed it would help cure her depression, which, to be fair, was severe. People thought LSD cured everything back then. I never took the stuff myself; I had enough wild images in my head already. Since Roger was a consummate drug user and constantly having sex with teenagers—he loved the Catholic schoolgirl uniform—he often lost track of what his sister was doing in his house, which is how Brian got to Jessica. Put a lamb in a cage with a tiger, and there will be blood.

  What I didn’t know at the time was that Brian was dead. Someone finally found him, naked and ice cold, hours later. He had so many drugs in his system, it was assumed that he overdosed or simply fell down and hit his head too intensely on the hardwood floor. Brian had a wild bush of hair on his skull back then, so maybe no one saw the bruise on his temple, I don’t know. Or maybe he really did overdose on drugs, and I’m just taking credit for a punch that really wasn’t all that impressive. I mean, you don’t exactly have to be Smokin’ Joe Frazier to knock out a man who is tripping off a veritable cornucopia of drugs.

&n
bsp; The point of this tale is that up until right now, only two people in the world knew that I had coldcocked Brian before he died: Jessica and me. The cops never questioned me about Brian’s death. I’m not sure that anyone else even remembers my being in the party house that day—they were all so fucking high. And Jessica never said anything to anyone else about my dropping Brian like the sack of shit he was.

  That’s all I know. Brian died. No one connected me to his death. I wasn’t about to give myself up, either. I’d killed a lot of gooks in my day, and if I thought about it—which I don’t—I’d probably get to feeling sadder about the little yellow bastards I offed than I would about Brian. Honestly, the local police probably also celebrated a deadbeat Vietnam veteran’s death. Drugs were a great patsy scapegoat too. America hates drugs. And Brian became a poster child for just saying no in that community. Everyone was happy with that narrative. End of story.

  Before you get to feeling too bad about Brian’s untimely demise, allow me to prove to you that he absolutely deserved to die. You’re probably already feeling squeamish about two Vietnam veterans partying with and screwing a bunch of girls in high school, right? Well, if you think that’s bad, it gets even worse. Brian’s fucking wasn’t always consensual. That’s right. Brian was a piece-of-shit rapist. A true misogynist, to use one of my son’s favorite insults.

  But Jessica and I didn’t know Brian was dead when we left the house that day. We just thought he was knocked out, sleeping it off on the bedroom floor. Jessica asked me to get her out of that crazy place, so I put her in my 1964 GTO, and we drove around on the snowy roads, smoking cigarettes and listening to the radio.

  I had been around enough fucked-up people to know that Jessica needed time to process whatever the fuck hellish ordeal happened to her in that house, and I didn’t have anything else to do that day. Several times I asked her if there was anywhere she wanted to go, and she kept asking if we could just drive. Gas wasn’t free, but neither was love, and some part of me knew right there and then that I had fallen hard and irreversibly. I didn’t want to fuck this young girl, I wanted to help her—but I also wanted her to like me, even love me. Mostly, I wanted her to think of me as the opposite of that rapist disgrace to his country, Brian.

  After hours of driving in a huge circle around Philadelphia, which took us into Delaware, Pennsylvania, and even up to Trenton, Jessica asked how I’d been able to come home from the war and do better than her brother Roger. “Do you have a secret?” she asked.

  I didn’t know how to answer that one. To be honest, I have often wondered why so many of my combat brothers were unable to rejoin civilian life. Some never really left the jungle. Many others never could keep a job, let alone make the sort of money I made. I wish there were a formula or a set of instructions I could give to other veterans, but the truth is, I don’t really know why I didn’t end up dead or burned out on drugs and alcohol. Something inside my brain switched when I was eating fucking snakes and sleeping in trees and killing gooks. Fuck this shit, it said. I’m going home to the greatest country in the world, and I’m going to make something of myself. Never again will anyone make me live the way I was forced to live in the jungle. I’m going to use my freedom.

  I think that many Vietnam vets believed that no matter what they did, they would never have any control over their lives. Powerful, faceless men would always pull the strings, so why should the powerless non-string-pullers give a fuck? Playing the puppet while high became easier than cleaning up enough to cut strings and kill puppet masters. I understood their logic, and believe me when I say I still haven’t killed all of the puppet masters, not even by a long shot. But I decided that I wanted to pull at least some of my own strings, even if I could never pull them all.

  I couldn’t have said as much back in the GTO, cruising around with Jessica. I might have been to Vietnam and back. I might have killed hundreds of gooks. But I was still just a kid.

  I remember we were on the New Jersey Turnpike when Jessica told me she was pregnant. I’ve never told this story to anyone, and obviously Hank didn’t know shit about this for most of his life. I wouldn’t be spilling all of this now if I didn’t have a good reason to do so, and if I didn’t have your word that all of this will remain classified until I die. That being said, if you tell anyone about this little secret of mine before I’m in the ground, I will break into your house in the middle of the night, slit your throat while you are sleeping, and annihilate your entire family. I have your name and title—it wouldn’t be all that hard to track down your home address. Believe me. Nothing personal here. Of course I trust you, or I wouldn’t be telling you all of this in the first place. But it makes me feel better to let you know that there will be big-time fucking consequences if any of this shit becomes public. If you break our little agreement, you will be sorry. And dead.

  Brian was the father, Jessica went on to tell me. He had raped her a month before. The day I showed up she had gone back to the house to speak with Brian about her options, but like I said before, he was high out of his mind, so all he could do in response to Jessica’s pleas was jerk off. Nice guy, right? I have no regret killing that motherfucker, if it was indeed my fist that took his life. They say killing a man with one punch is one hell of a hard thing to do, so maybe it was divine intervention. If you believe in God, we may be able to agree on that.

  Back in the GTO, I glanced over at Jessica. It was nighttime by then, and I could only see her face when we passed under lights, or when cars going in the opposite direction illuminated her with their headlights for a second or two, creating an eerie sort of strobe effect. I could clearly see that she was contemplating buying the bullet. She was a senior in high school. Beautiful. Radiant. And I would later learn that she was an extremely talented painter. But that night, as we drove around, she was contemplating death. I could smell the Grim Reaper there with us. Like I said before, I know that motherfucker Death better than you know yourself.

  Scary fucking words started coming fast and furious out of her pretty little mouth. I knew she was closer than ever to buying the bullet, because she didn’t care what I might think about her. She told me all about how Brian had coerced her into smoking too much weed, and then he used his tongue to transfer a few LSD tabs when he forced her to kiss him. I don’t know too much about drugs—I’m a beer guy—but this asshole used weed and acid to make a young girl vulnerable, and then he raped her several times over the course of an afternoon. Yes, rape, because she didn’t want it to happen. Period. That’s rape. She was a virgin before that. And all this happened because she was genuinely concerned about her brother Roger’s well-being. No good deed goes unpunished, right?

  Jessica didn’t want to have an abortion because she didn’t think she could live with herself afterward, murdering an unborn child. She wasn’t religious and was all in for women’s rights. My dead wife might even have been described as a bleeding-heart liberal, if we’re really being honest, but for whatever reason, she just couldn’t wrap her head around killing the baby inside her—which, of course, would end up becoming Hank.

  What she could wrap her mind around, and was working her way up to telling me about, was killing herself. That way she wouldn’t have to live with the guilt of aborting her unborn child, and as an extra bonus, she wouldn’t have to deal with her depression any longer either. The fact that she had been raped would go away too.

  I picked up on the self-slaughter vibe way before Jessica got around to admitting that she was suicidal and so I interrupted her and told her that I had a plan that might work.

  My plan was this: she and I would get to know each other over the next few weeks, and if we liked each other, we’d begin to tell everyone that I’d knocked her up, and then we’d get married. If we didn’t like each other, well then, nothing was lost, and she could go ahead with her original plan.

  “What original plan?” she asked me, because she hadn’t yet actually admitted to being suicidal.

  I told her the common Vietn
am veteran theory about buying the bullet, which she hadn’t heard before because her brother was too busy getting high to educate her. “If you think you’re going to die, it will definitely happen. So be careful with your thoughts.”

  Then I told her I knew what she meant when she said she was going to just disappear, but she kept pushing me to say it. So I finally did.

  “Why would you want to marry a suicidal girl?” she asked. It was a fair question. I didn’t want to marry her just yet, I told her, but I liked driving around with her and thought she was pretty.

  “You’re attracted to the pregnant raped girl?” she said, which made me want to kill that scumbag Brian because I didn’t yet know that I already had.

  I told her that while she was undoubtedly feeling bad, and understandably so, she had no idea how low you can really go when it comes to feeling shitty about what you have done and what has been done to you.

  “You mean about the war?” she said.