Tried to call Diana again today. She quit coming to language lab. I suspect it is because of me, no answer. I embarrassed her at the pool. After class I asked her to come watch me swim. I spat on an asshole crowding into my lane. Diana said she didn’t understand my hostility. I had to laugh.
Lisa calls while I have Diana half-undressed. While I’m on the phone, Diana gets dressed and leaves. Later I find her at the sorority house. She doesn’t want to let me put my arms around her. Goddamn Lisa. Diana says it won’t work out. I ask, can’t we go someplace more private? Diana told me she is dating another guy, but she did not tell me he is black. How does it feel? she wants to know. How does he feel? I ask her back. What do you mean? Aren’t cripples lower than niggers? I say, and I already see tears in her eyes, the kind that used to get my dick hard. I tell her about the orderlies in the hospital. I tell her she doesn’t know anything about them or the hospital.
Dad says Arizona does not have the best MBA program. But the weather is easier here in the winter. In the ice and snow it is easy to fall in the chair. I hate lying there waiting for someone to come over to help me. Time seems frozen while people look at me. I feel all my clothes getting soaked. Finally one of the morons comes over and asks me if I need anything.
All the women in MBA classes are ugly—no—“double uglies” like Rick and Brett and I always called the sows.
The review class is going to be terrible. Boring. Brokerage license, rules and regulations. But I will get rich off this.
Lisa called off our engagement. I try to sound upset. The telephone connection echoed and I couldn’t hear her. I estimate the money I make will more than finance all the costs of the breakthrough technology.
Max skips to the last notebook Trigg had lent Leah.
Breakthroughs in electrochemistry of the human brain. The rewiring of human nerves severed or badly crushed. Money buys anything.
Ike calls from West Germany. Says he’s got a deal over there. They will buy all the blood and bioproducts we can deliver. Blood plasma centers are only the beginning.
I see myself as being superior to the others. I am better than all of them.
Tucson, city of thieves. Third-generation burglars and pimps turned politicians. These alleged human beings, the filth and scum who pass through the plasma donor center, get paid good money for lying with a needle in their arms—an activity they pursue the rest of the day anyway. I could do the world a favor each week and connect a few of the stinking ones up in the back room and drain them dry. They will not be missed.
BOOK TWO
ARIZONA
BIO-MATERIALS, INC.
AS TRIGG BOUGHT MORE AND MORE real estate, he had become paranoid about Mexicans and blacks. He could be rid of his own plasma donor centers anytime he had a hot prospect from the East Coast looking for condominium property in Tucson. But Mexicans and blacks could drift up from the bottom of the cesspool—and it only took a few of those brown floaters to stink up and ruin an entire neighborhood Trigg was “rehabilitating.”
Trigg said he knew right away not to bother bullshitting Leah. Look who her old man was anyway. Rumors went around that Max Blue had never retired.
Trigg wanted to talk about the blood and organ donor business because he had contacts who were developing a whole new market beyond plasma and whole blood. Trigg wanted to use the plasma donor centers to obtain donor organs and other valuable human tissue. Trigg had never known a woman like Leah. He had never found a woman who could listen to descriptions and price quotations for whole blood, human corneas, and human kidneys without turning green. Trigg had seen plenty of big guys faint over an ice-packed carton of cadaver skin for grafts. Trigg liked the way Leah was always thinking. He got ideas off her ideas. Leah was on track about a medical hospital. They could build the facility near the detox-rehab hospital. They would need a regular hospital from time to time for their detox patients. Leah had got the idea for a kidney dialysis machine that would serve the sector of town houses and condominiums that would presumably be bought by kidney patients and their families or by health insurers to house their Arizona dialysis patients.
Trigg had to stop and look in the mirror sometimes to believe his life now, and the new three-piece suit he had just bought. The problem with most of them in wheelchairs was they did not care about their personal appearance. They were ragbags. Many of them smelled ripe. Trigg had always known that to be a success you had to look a success. Money was the measure, and all Trigg had needed was a couple of lucky breaks in a row—a string of winners. Leah was the queen in his ace-high royal flush.
Trigg did not trust employees. Trigg handled all the bookkeeping and banking himself to ensure privacy. Trigg shipped out fresh-frozen plasma and whole blood and took pride in delivering the shipments himself. The Bio-Materials company van had a rear lift system that allowed Trigg to remain in the wheelchair while he was driving. A new Mercedes would not be so convenient. Trigg would have to pull himself in and out of the wheelchair into the driver’s seat and still stow the wheelchair. But the extra trouble would be worth it because the Mercedes he had bought was a beauty—a custom convertible for Tucson’s lovely weather. Trigg imagined speeding along the beaches heading for mother’s place in Palm Beach. He would buy a white three-piece suit for the occasion. All it would take was enough money and his mother would be telephoning to invite him for tea.
Trigg took pride in the strength of his shoulders and arms. He was always pleased when women asked him if he worked out. A stupid question when he was wheeling his body weight and that of the chair around campus eight hours every day before the wheelchair ramps became the law. The worst had been the dumb broad who had said, “Oooh! You really do have a great upper body!” Trigg hated the sorority-house piggies, pink and sweating in their bikinis. If they encountered him around the university pool, they invariably shrank back from him as if he were the Boston Strangler.
But when Trigg had finished his laps, if the mood struck, he could always buy himself a quickie with a piggie. All he had to do was offer a coed a joint in the back of the van, and then he’d tell them about his land development corporation and the Mercedes, and the little piggies would shed their tops and bottoms in a flash. Trigg was happy that Leah was a married woman. She could keep her gangster husband and Trigg could keep his panhellenic piggies.
Trigg made it his policy to check the daily ledgers and receipts as well as the contents of the freezer units at each of the plasma donor centers. Luckily Tucson employees were ignorant of the value of blood and other “bioproducts.” Nurses and medical technicians would steal any drug they could get their hands on. Except for pints of blood or frozen cadaver skin, there wasn’t much to pilfer from a plasma donor center except needles and syringes and the usual thefts of toilet paper and garbage bags by employees.
Trigg had had an idea buzzing in the back of his head for weeks, maybe months; he had not been able to forget the price quotes for fresh whole blood, human corneas, and cadaver skin. Trigg was becoming acquainted with human organ transplant research teams at the university hospital. Someday Trigg would walk again with the aid of their electronic-impulse hookups to his legs and skull. He wanted to help research teams obtain the fresh biomaterials they needed.
GREEN BERET
TRIGG DIDN’T LIKE THE RECEIPTS for the week from the two new locations. Volume was the name of the game, and no way were the two northwest plasma donor centers pulling in enough donors. The northwest locations had been intended to exploit areas where copper strikers were unemployed. Trigg had placed help-wanted signs in the donor centers because he wanted to find “one of them” to hit the streets and start recruiting plasma donors for him. Trigg could not implement his plan without substantially increasing the number of “resident” donors and donors who could be counted on to return month after month.
Trigg interviewed the job applicants himself. Trigg had noticed the big guy before. The staff members said street people called him Rambo. Trigg had looked him over wi
thout looking him in the eyes. The combat boots and the camouflage T-shirt made the guy “Rambo.” Trigg had to laugh to himself at the moron standing in front of him. But when Trigg finally looked into Rambo’s eyes, he saw something that had chilled him; after that, Trigg believed Rambo had been to Vietnam. Trigg had enjoyed Rambo’s military posture and the way Rambo would almost salute before he left the room.
Trigg had never regretted the money he had paid Rambo—fifty cents a head for a donor who returned at least twice. Rambo didn’t get paid until the donor had returned the second time. Trigg couldn’t lose. Rambo had showed up riding a really nice ten-speed bicycle one day, and after that Rambo had pulled in plasma donors he found in the unemployment-office parking lots and in the food stamp lines and at the government free-cheese lines. At first Rambo had not enjoyed riding the bicycle because he had been afraid of the cars. He had not been afraid the cars were going to hit or kill him; he had been afraid of the people inside the cars and what they might be thinking about him. He had vowed to always wear some article of clothing—combat boots or jacket and of course the green beret—to remind all of them of Vietnam and where he and a million others had been. He had to laugh. Americans got paralyzed with fear every time they saw a Vietnam veteran still wearing combat clothes; Rambo enjoyed the advantage this gave him. Army surplus stores had resupplied him when his last pair of combat boots wore out. On the road or living on the street, Rambo had found the green beret and combat boots did the trick; even cops and railyard bulls had been strangely transfixed by the green beret. They could not stop staring at the Silver Star and Purple Hearts pinned on the beret. But Rambo refused to discuss his medals or what he had done in the war. If people still pressed, Rambo simply told them the past was history and no longer mattered, and even the strangers had always walked away more relaxed. Rambo did not spend money on much, but he was careful to always have the beret dry-cleaned, and not at one of those dinky one-hour places either.
Rambo had tried going without wearing the green beret; the wool in the green beret did not make the top of his head any hotter in Tucson than it had in Thailand. A little sweat, a little discomfort, was necessary to give men the fighting edge. That had been one of the primary lessons at the Special Forces training school in Florida. The wool acted as an insulator against the heat as well as the cold. He had been sent home before the others in the Special Forces unit. When Rambo had awakened in the hospital, he had thought he was wearing his beret; he could feel the beret on his head, though somehow in his sleep the pillow had pulled the beret far down over his ears. But when Rambo had tried to reach up, he had not been able to get his arms loose from the mass of bandages that were somehow tangled with the bed sheet. He had bellowed and grunted a long time before one of the other patients in the ward had repeatedly hit the nurse-station button. Rambo had asked them what day it was, and where he was. Wednesday, and somehow he had ended up in Manila. He had demanded to know where the rest of his unit was, and they had told him that all the rest of his unit had gone home. They had already gone? They had left him? When was this? The nurse had been apologetic. He would have to wait until the following day and ask the doctor. The nurse said she was new; she had been rotated up from Australia and was headed back home herself.
“Don’t worry. You’ll get home too. If you want something, you can have a pill to help you sleep.” He had asked her about his beret. She had repeated the word, dumbstruck. “Beret?”
“Beret! Beret! Green beret! You know, you fucking cunt! My goddamn green beret!”
The following day the doctors had come. Rambo noticed immediately they were afraid of him because they had all approached his bed in a tight group, pretending they were merely crowding around to look at his medical chart. Rambo could see immediately the young doctors in their starched and pressed khakis were not real military because they did not wear their caps with the scrambled eggs—the gold braid army doctors got with rank. The war was over so they thought the men would not detect civilians in uniforms. He did not see why the military had tried to deceive wounded veterans.
Roy was a special name because it meant “king” in French. His mother had always loved the romantic sound of French, and she had never let him forget his name was special. After Vietnam, they had not got along. She had not liked the “vulgarity” of Roy’s vocabulary and the repetition of four-letter words; she had objected to the loud klomp! of his combat boots on her hardwood floors.
The young doctor had explained slowly and carefully that what Roy felt around his head were bandages, not a hat.
“Beret!” Roy bellowed. “My green beret!”
“Yes, of course,” the young doctor had said, smiling apologetically. It was not a hat on his head that he felt. The doctors had even showed him, pointing in a shaving mirror. That was him with a cone of bandages on his head. Of course then he had been called Roy, not the nickname Rambo. He had not even liked the movie because none of it was real or true. But the nickname Rambo had stuck with the younger men in the homeless camp. They had seen all the Vietnam War movies.
For a long time the doctors had not understood where Roy’s injury had been. He had not minded the bandages around his head, but he certainly had no wound on his head. That had been the most absurd notion the doctors had; Roy had screamed at them.
“Head! My head? You stupid cocksuckers! I never got hit in the head!” He got control of himself again after that outburst because he wanted the doctors to think he respected their military rank, when, in fact, he had guessed their charade. One of the other doctors had tried to trick him by saying that it was shrapnel, not a bullet. Of course he knew it was shrapnel! he screamed at them. But why did they have his head wrapped up? The army was always making mistakes. Here was another one. His head and arms all wrapped up and both legs bare. Roy had told him he did not understand it. They could see the scars on the leg where the wound had already healed. Why had they flown him to the Philippines with bandages around his head?
Roy had been happy when he had got the nickname Rambo because that meant the homeless men along the river had decided to let him in. Because at first they had all been certain Roy was an undercover cop in jungle fatigues and green beret. They had lost his green beret in the hospital in Manila. Because Rambo knew the pictures his parents had taken of him walking off the transport plane by himself showed him without his green beret. He had been wearing the bandages on his head, which they had finally forced him to admit were necessary. Bandages on his head were necessary. That was all he allowed to be said about the bandages. He had no head wounds. The beret had been stolen by custodians who scrubbed the floors of the wards. At the time Rambo had felt a great deal of hatred in his heart for the filthy gook who stole his green beret. The green beret had protected him from harm. Roy had never let on to the others, but he thought the Rambo movies were full of shit because Sylvester Stallone would have been blown to bits eight million times in his first week in combat in Vietnam.
Roy had worked the longest with the doctor who wanted to find out more about the killing of Sylvester Stallone. Finally Roy had had to tell the doctor it was no use. If the shrink did not know why Stallone had to die, then the doctor ought to give up psychiatry. Right after that, Roy had been wandering near the train station in Albuquerque and had seen the green berets in the front window of the army surplus store. The new combat boots had cost a lot too, so Roy had to cash in the remainder of his bus ticket. Wearing the green beret again all the time greatly changed the sort of thoughts Roy had. If he had still been talking to that shrink, he would have been happy to inform the doctor that he never gave Sylvester Stallone a second thought these days. He would have said, “Doc, unbelievable, but I never even think of him when the guys call me Rambo. Stallone the actor, who is he anyway? In a way I am more Rambo than Stallone is because I have a Silver Star and three Purple Hearts, and where was Stallone in the war years? Prancing naked in porno movies.”
No, Roy knew who he was. With the beret on his head, Roy’s t
houghts had been crystal clear; it had been as if steam or condensation had been wiped off a window inside his head, behind his eyes. Too many of them had made money off the Vietnam War. Not just the actors, the Holly-weirdos, but all the giant corporations—Dow and Du Pont, Remington and Colt, General Motors and General Dynamics—the fat cats glutted with blood. Someday his army would arrive at their doorsteps; Rambo would lead his ragged army against the government. When he wore the green beret, all of the future became clear to him.
Rambo ate only peanut butter and the macaroni and cheese the homeless shelters fed the men year-round in Tucson. He had not been able to eat meat or fish or anything that had once wiggled or had blood. Someday he would show the fat cats blood, but the blood would be theirs. The fat cats had helped Roy’s thinking clear. He now thought of himself as Roy who was also known as Rambo. Communism had killed itself. Now the United States faced a far greater threat—the danger from within—government and police owned by the fat cats. Roy had seen for himself women and children hungry, and sleeping on the streets. This was not democracy. Police beating homeless old men was not the United States of America. Something had to be done, and Rambo and his army would do it.
The green beret made anyone—a man or a woman—look strong and clean. Roy’s beret had kept him alive on the helicopter ride to the hospital.
PLASMA DONORS
ROY SAID IT WAS HIS LUCK; he had spent two blistering years in Thailand crossing borders back and forth fighting the secret war. Television news had never mentioned it. Roy thought it was funny; his parents had not believed their own son when he told them he had been fighting in Thailand. His parents had believed what they had been told by television. What do you think of that? Your own folks don’t even believe you. They believe the TV.”
The Almanac of the Dead Page 46