He wasn’t kidding about the golf. The next Monday morning, forty of us reported, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, to Burning Bush Country Club and were each issued a set of Wally Hammar golf clubs and an electric cart and sent out to play. We were assigned to foursomes. Randy Qualey, Keith Quintan, and Dennis Quintz were in mine, and in the next couple of months we got to know each other like real buddies. We went out drinking together and everything. We shot eighteen holes every morning—sunny or cloudy, warm or cool, it made no difference.
Two months later, I was utterly fed up. I’d been promoted to corporal, but why wasn’t I doing the job I’d joined the Guard to do: inform the public? Was it because of poor grades in college and a low score on the Guard entrance exam? Was it because of my inability to type? If the Guard didn’t have confidence in me, why hadn’t they let me go to Vietnam?
I talked it over with my dad, and he promised to look into the matter. Meanwhile, I met my wife at a dance. It was love at first sight. The next three months were the happiest of my life. Then one day I was called into Colonel Mills’ office at ComInNatGu—the secret Guard command center housed in a complex of deep bunkers around the ninth hole. You entered through a tiny tunnel via a door marked “HIGH VOLTAGE: EXTREMELY DARNED DANGEROUS!” The door was in the janitor’s closet of the men’s room off the Bee Bee Lounge, in the clubhouse basement. Before I reached the men’s room, though, I heard a big, booming voice say, “Sit down, trooper.” It was the Colonel, looming up behind the bar in a green-and-yellow Hawaiian shirt with a bolo tie made from bullets, shaking up a batch of Bombardiers, his face hidden by a broad straw hat with long fronds. “Understand you got some questions, son,” he said. “Let’s talk.”
I climbed up on a stool and leaned forward and started to tell him that I was trying to figure out why the heck I was in the Guard and what I was supposed to accomplish. “Mmmmmm,” he said. “Uh-huh, uh-huh.” And then, in a split second, before I could move a muscle, he grabbed me by the neck and hauled me across the bar and had me flat on my back on the ice chest and was holding a blender to the side of my head. I’ll never forget the cold animal anger in his green eyes as he stared down at me, unblinking, for the three longest seconds of my life. Then he helped me to my feet and offered me a drink.
“Sorry about losing control like that,” he said. “I guess I got angry because I see in you so much of myself. I get fed up with waiting around, too. It’s the hardest part of being in the Guard. And it’s twice as hard in the I.N.G. You want to know why?”
I did.
“Because we’re not even supposed to exist.”
He put a big ice cube in his mouth and ate it like a cherry. “You see, Soviet spy satellites in low orbit are reading Indiana right now like a children’s book, and we have to make sure they see us as a bunch of civilians in one-bedroom apartments who happen to like golf a lot. You see, at peak strength, mobilized, the Indiana National Guard numbers fourteen million men. It’s the biggest secret army in the free world. And one of the best equipped. We’re one ace the President’s got that they don’t know about—maybe the only one. Get in my car, Dan.”
THE Colonel’s beige Buick Electra was moored in a secret parking space under an aluminum roof beside the kitchen. Aluminum confuses the heck out of radar, he explained, and beige is the hardest color to remember afterward. The car shone. A good wax job, he pointed out, prevents a person or persons from leaving messages in the dust. When he turned the ignition key, the car sprang alive, antennas rose, the radio came on, the seats themselves hummed with power, ready to go forward or back at a finger’s touch. “Always fasten your seat belt,” he said. “It’s one thing they’d never expect us to do.” We cruised west into the warehouse district, and he pointed out long, low aluminum I.N.G. buildings where the hardware was kept. “We have more than four thousand forklifts, fifty-two hundred portable biffies, eighteen bulk-milk trucks, and four thousand rider mowers,” he said. Those were the figures I wrote down. There were also more than six hundred infrared cluster-type thrusters with uplink/downlink/intercept capability. “Only two thousand fifty of those puppies in the whole U.S.,” he said. “So, you see, we’re sitting on top of one of the larger secrets in the defense community. Our job: keep it that way. It’s tough to sit tight, no buts about it, but when we get the word to go I want the other side to find out about us all of a sudden. Bang, we’re there. I don’t want the enemy to be studying us for three years and getting a Ph.D. The big secret of the I.N.G. is that we could take ninety per cent casualties with no effect on our capability. I don’t want the enemy to know why. When the time comes, I want to be able to get in there, search, destroy, interdict, capture the flag, and bring the boys home for Christmas.”
“Count me in,” I said softly as the big car nosed homeward. “I want a piece of it.”
“Just don’t forget who you are,” the Colonel said. “Look relaxed, but don’t be relaxed. Smile, but don’t make a point of it. Drink vodka. Lots of ice. Lemon, not lime. Not too many peanuts. Always turn the conversation to the other person. Pace yourself. Always take the end urinal in the men’s room. Sunday morning, take a side pew. Don’t wash dishes; always dry. Remember: you’re a killer, a professional killer. Your stereo has a sharp needle you could poke a man in the eye with. You know how to take an ordinary putter and beat somebody senseless. With your skill, even an ordinary golf ball is lethal. Killers are what we are. And, by the way, always choose Thousand Island.”
He pulled up in front of the Alhambra. Music drifted out from behind the closed windows, shadowy figures moved behind the drawn shades. “So for now, trooper, your orders are to stay low: play good golf, drink cold beer, and make love to beautiful women. And let’s just hope the Russians aren’t doing the same.”
He came around to open the door for me, but I was ready for him, and when he tried to kick me I got him by the ankle and flipped him up on the roof of the Buick and pounded him twice, hard, in the pancreas. “Good,” he said. “Darned good.”
HIS lecture changed my way of thinking, and for the remaining two months of Guard training I tried to act as normal as humanly possible. It wasn’t easy. A guy looks down at his typewriter knowing it can be switched over instantly to invisible ink simply by typing “Hoosier” (a word that even Russians fluent in English would not be familiar with), and he finds it hard to relax and have a cool time. (I kept my typewriter set on invisible most of the time, in case I forgot the password.) We had to remember to always use electric golf carts on the course, for fast response in case of a Code Green alert. The radio signal would be two longs and a short, on either a horn or a saxophone, on “The Don Davis Show,” on K-WAYNE, or on my own “Dan the Man Show,” on the Gentle Giant 101 (2:00–6:00 P.M.).
Being an information officer meant that I knew a great deal, and having a popular radio show meant that I was in a position to sway minds, and so, in the event of enemy capture, I was prepared to take cyanide. On the golf course, I kept it hidden in a fake ball (I always used my dad’s Top-Flites, but one ball, which could be pried open to reveal the deadly white pill wound with string in the core, was marked “Top Flight”—a discrepancy a Russian would never notice), and in the radio studio I kept the cyanide in a tiny slit cut in the foam rubber around the microphone. All I had to do was lean forward and bite. It wasn’t easy playing music knowing that death was always two inches from my lips, but I did it. And then one day the war was over.
All of us knew that if the President had pursued an all-out strategy to win the war and had unleashed the I.N.G. against the Vietcong the outcome would have been very different, but we were never allowed to go. We never blamed the President for it—his hands were tied by the press and the protesters—but the tragedy is that we never got the chance to get over there and get the job done.
Twenty years later, millions of Indiana National Guardsmen suffer from postwar regret, waking up in the middle of the night with an urge to go out in the rain and hunker down in the mud, to hold a gun and use
a walkie-talkie and for a while I felt bad like that, too, and made a point of playing golf in extremely hot weather and not drinking enough liquids, deliberately pushing myself toward the edge. It was on a real scorcher of a day, playing the Gary Country Club, that I met Colonel Mills for the last time. He was dressed in regulation green and yellow, blasting out of a sand trap. He made a perfect shot and turned and saw me and we exchanged the traditional National Guard wink. (Russians do not wink, and therefore would fail to comprehend this signal.)
“How’s civilian life treating you?” he asked. I told him how I felt and he stood there and said, “You should be proud, soldier. You didn’t burn the flag, you didn’t go to Canada. You did your job. Accept the rewards of a grateful nation.” Then he turned on his heel and went straight up and over a steep hill in front of the green, and I never saw him again.
About three years after that, I actually did go to Canada for a weekend. It was O.K., but, based on what I saw, I was glad that I hadn’t gone there before.
1988
VERONICA GENG
POST-EUPHORIA
Frankfurt Stock Exchange
Frankfurt, Germany
DEAR SIRS:
Specifically speaking, how does a stock exchange work? One would require approximately how many tables and chairs? And then what?
As fledglings, we are excited to be initiating such a body! Having in readiness for our members a fifty-litre samovar, we now await merely your input on final refinements of procedure.
Gratefully,
FREE MARKET PLANNINGCOMMISSARIAT
British Humane Society
London, England
LADIES AND GENTLEMEN:
Begging your advisory as per the ensuing hypothetical. Someone on my street, not me, keeps surrealist parasites in his basement as a hobby. Supposing he decided to release them from the holding pen—what would be the safest way? Should he just smash the pen open with a hammer and then run? I heard there is a danger that uninhibited specimens have a difficult transition phase and might form roving packs of killer strays. Is this true, or would they reenter the natural population?
Very truly yours,
CONCERNED SIBERIAN CITIZEN(RET.)
Editor-in-Chief
Le Monde
Paris, France
ESTEEMED COLLEAGUE:
Our best regards to you and your enchanting wife.
By the way, how do you decide which are the news stories and which are the editorials? Is it by word count or, rather, a collective decision reached by secret ballot? Or perchance you leave this matter in the capable hands of your delightful spouse. In that case, might we consult with her now and then, purely on a professional basis?
With felicitations,
IZVESTIA EDITORIAL BOARD
P.S.: Please forgive the ironic idiocy of the above query if yours is one of the Western press organs which have been taking their instructions from us. Someone told us to forget about all that, so we had to.
Supervisor
Cook County Board of Elections
Cook County, Illinois, U.S.A.
DEAR SIR OR MADAM:
Knowing your reputation far and wide, we were just wondering. What if there occurred some voting machines of a highly democratic technology—for example, allowing multiple choice by means of extra slots and levers? Is there some method, in its sophistication a mystery to us, for insuring that a candidate with more votes does not obtain an unfair advantage over a candidate with not so many votes? There could be a situation where the latter is more deserving, due to family needs or health problems, etc., yet is passed aside by a hasty or whimsical electorate for a candidate they think they “want.” Then idealism would cry out on its hands and knees to serve a higher justice. Is there a special device for this?
Also, do you happen to know how to get the ballots out of the machine—smash the whole thing open like a piggy bank, or what?
Sincerely,
SUPREME ELECTION REFORMCENTRAL COMMITTEE
Mr. Akio Morita, Chairman
Sony Corporation
Tokyo, Japan
DEAR MR. MORITA:
This is not your problem, but in our admiration for your fantastic acumen we hope to presume upon your farseeing wisdom and topnotch business sense.
A woman named Yoko Ono has made us a firm offer of $30,000 in hard currency for eight hundred thousand hectares of state-owned pasture in the northeastern Urals. She asserts managerial skills such that over a five-year period she can transform the area into a profit-making dairy farm equipped with automated milking system, carriage barn, historically restored rustic stone walls, manor house with large deck, hardwood floors, antique lighting, Tulikivi radiant fireplace, all-electric kitchen, aluminum siding, up-to-the-minute recording studio, and much more, and will then rent it back to us on terms to be mutually deferred.
Naturally we are tempted to gobble this while her enthusiasm is still at fever pitch. But the wife of our deputy agro-industrial minister suggests we ask if you know a hard-nosed tactic to sweeten our end of the deal.
Most respectfully,
LAND DEVELOPMENTINSPECTORATE
Hughes Tool Company
U.S.A.
TO THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS:
No doubt it is something out of the blue, receiving a letter from an unknown woman in Russia. I have selected your company because my husband is a fan of your unique oil-drilling equipment, which he appreciates only by remote lore and word of mouth but aspires someday to purchase for his business here. Having started from a single informal kerosene drum in a shed behind our dacha on the Black Sea, he has created over the years quite a formidable oil-and-gas-pumping endeavor, and now stands in position to operate on a mammoth regional scale.
However, I am concerned that he is the victim of a fairy tale about capitalist management principles. A small cohort of men visiting from your state Utah have attained influence over him. They are causing him to discharge fond employees of loyal longevity, and to sign many papers, and now they have him in a reclusion, lying in bed with long fingernails, watching a videotape of a film, “Ocean’s Eleven.” Recently he sent out to me an elaborate pencil memorandum explaining how I should open herring jars in a certain way so germs from my hair cannot tumble in. He said that titans of capital have to protect themselves from poison elements, but I believe this to be a propaganda romance, indoctrinated by the Utah men. Finally, would it be a fact that executive decision-making power is enhanced by hourly injections of the substance “codeine”? This is what they proclaim, although they themselves are fanatically abstemious when it comes to even vodka or tea.
As I am too typical of our national unfamiliarity with these parts of the free-enterprise system, I pray that you can inform my perspective before it is already too late and I smash open the attic with a hammer.
Desperate
TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN:
I am free. What should I do?
1991
NOAH BAUMBACH
KEITH RICHARDS’ DESERT-ISLAND DISKS
Each month, the editors of Pulse magazine ask a rock-and-roll star to list which ten CDs he or she would bring to a desert island. Keith Richards selected the following:
Little Richard: “Lucille” or “Tutti Frutti”
Beethoven’s Third Symphony
Anything early by the Nat King Cole Trio
Everly Brothers: “That’s Just Too Much”
Robert Johnson: “32-20 Blues”
Big Bill Broonzy
Louis Armstrong: “Pratt City Blues”
Blind Willie McTell
Carla Thomas
Otis Redding
Brenda & the Tabulations: “Who’s Lovin’ You”
• DAY ONE
Rigged a distress flag with me gypsy scarf, but it droops like Mick’s jowls. While waiting for it to fly, played all ten disks. Ate a peanut-butter-and-Fluff sandwich the missus packed for me dinner and washed it down with me new poison of choice: Stoli and Sunkist. Smoked a Marl
boro Red and watched the sun go down. Was lulled into me forty winks by the island’s own music, the flop flop of the waves and the caw caw of the parrots.
• DAY TWO
Went combing for shells for me bungalow back home. In the uninhabited spots, one gets first pick, so to speak. Dragged back a whopping conch! Chilled out with me CDs. The sign of good music: if it’s got some soul, ya know, you can listen to it over and over. That cat Little Richard must’ve had a desert island in mind when he wrote “Tutti Frutti.” Scanned horizon.
• DAY THREE
Do I really need both Big Bill Broonzy and Blind Willie McTell? Thinkin’ I should’ve put some Buddy Holly on that list, or maybe some Four Tops. Had a real craving for “That’ll Be the Day.” Spent the afternoon scouting for other signs of life and listening to “Tutti Frutti” on repeat.
• DAY FIVE
Can’t get “Tutti Frutti” out of me head. Perhaps “Lucille” would’ve been a better pick. Opened me Big Bill Broonzy CD to discover me little one, Theodora, had switched it with the soundtrack to “Elmo in Grouchland.” Cheeky critter. I must’ve missed it before when I was wrestling that monkey for coconuts. Been using the Shuffle option Patti showed me on the disk player to give those ten disks a new life they badly needed. The local birds and monkeys bop along to the tunes; one parrot in particular seems a bit more on key than Don Everly. It’s me own Voodoo Lounge. Me Zippo ran out of fluid, so I’m reduced to lighting me Marlboros with two stones.
Fierce Pajamas: An Anthology of Humor Writing from The New Yorker Page 39