by Joe Haldeman
No. That was the only good thing he’d gotten out of his hospital stay.
“So you just get off the bus?” the barmaid said.
“Uh huh. What, I sound like a Yankee?”
“Naw. Just most of the dorks come in here are regulars.”
“Regular somethings,” the other voice said.
The bartender clicked a switch and a jukebox lit up. The fluorescent lights over the pool table blinked on. Spider could suddenly see. The other three customers in the bar were wearing dresses, like the bartender.
The bartender had cut her chin shaving.
Spider paid close attention to his egg. He sliced it in two carefully and applied salt, pepper, and Tabasco.
Everybody watched him in silence.
He was carrying the copy of Playboy he had bought in the Jacksonville station. He opened it up and studied the pictures. He ate rapidly.
One of the customers came around and looked over his shoulder. “Oh, my God. She’s so beautiful. Look, Henry.”
The barmaid scrutinized the Playmate of the Month, who was well endowed. “Ah. No tits.”
Spider looked around and made a decision. “Any of you guys shoot pool?”
A man in a paisley frock squeezed Spider for fifteen bucks at a quarter a ball. During the course of play he told Spider that he was not homosexual, but just liked wearing women’s clothing. Two other denizens said the same thing. Spider didn’t believe any of them, but didn’t care one way or the other, so long as nobody made a pass at him. He didn’t really understand why a man would want to have sex with another man, but after his treatment at the hands of Captain My Captain, he had a certain amount of sympathy for them.
Anyhow, the beer was ice-cold and the company was congenial. The paisley guy didn’t hustle him; he was just a better pool-player. It was an enjoyable afternoon, and Spider was feeling no pain as he ambled out of the bar to go get his stuff and start looking for a place to stay.
“Hey, faggot.” Two cliché hard guys lounging on a white ’57 Chevy, nosed and decked, chopped and channelled. The one who spoke was sitting on the trunk, long and skinny, deeply tanned, toothpick balanced on his lower lip and a box of Marlboros rolled up in the left sleeve of his white teeshirt.
Spider looked back at the door to the bar. “You. Faggot.”
“You talkin’ to me?”
The other one stepped forward. He was a head shorter than Spider but solid with weightlifter muscles. Sleeveless teeshirt and cutoffs. Like Robert Mitchum in Night of the Hunter, he had L-O-V-E tattooed on one set of knuckles and H-A-T-E on the other. He hustled his balls. “Want some, fag?”
Spider didn’t know what to say. He just shook his head.
“Let ya blow me for twenty-five bucks.” He was standing right in front of Spider. He unzipped his fly. “Come on. Just get in the back of the car.”
“Look,” Spider managed to croak, “I don’t swing that way.”
“Sure you don’t.” The little man smiled and hit Spider in the solar plexus with stunning force. Spider bent over, retching, and the man pulled down his head by the ears and his knee jerked up to smash Spider’s mouth and nose. He staggered sideways and the man kicked him in the side of the head. He was unconscious before he hit the ground.
When he woke up it was dark. His mouth was full of blood. When he spit it out, it carried a fragment of a front tooth. His nose felt broken.
He was lying behind a line of garbage cans. His wallet was gone and his pockets were turned inside out. He tried to stand up and sat down hard, almost losing it. He waited for the world to stop spinning and stood up again, carefully.
He saw the neon Greyhound sign and oriented himself. He was behind the bar. He staggered around and into the front door.
A couple of dozen people suddenly fell silent. Then the bartender Henry recognized him. “Oh my God. It’s Spider.”
Two men helped him to a chair. Henry came over with a mug of beer and a wet rag. “Hold still.” He dabbed at the blood caked on his face. “God, you’re a mess! What did you get into?”
“Shit. I got jumped. Right outside of the bar.” Spider’s voice sounded strange to him. His tongue was swollen and the new gap where his front tooth was chipped made his sibilants whistle. “Two guys. Called me a faggot and beat the shit out of me.”
“Are you a faggot?” a stranger asked.
“Oh, can it, John,” Henry said. “He just came in for a beer.”
“Gotta call the police,” Spider said. “They got all my money, got my wallet.”
“Maybe you don’t want to call ’em.” Spider recognized the voice but not the man. It was the one who had looked at his Playboy, but he’d traded in the dress for Esso coveralls. “You might get beat up again, they find out where you were.”
“That’s right,” Henry said. “Use the phone over at the bus station.”
Spider slapped his pockets. “Shit. I don’t even have a dime.”
Henry pulled a bunch of change out of his pocket and put it in Spider’s hand. “Look, how much did Taylor take you for this afternoon?”
“Fifteen bucks. But that was fair and square.”
“Yeah, I’ll fair-and-square him tomorrow.” He selected a ten and five from his wallet and stuffed them into Spider’s shirt pocket.
“Coop, you go with him. Don’t let anybody fuck with him.”
“Right.” The Esso coverall had COOPER sewn into the breast. Coop looked pretty tough when he wasn’t wearing a dress. “You want to drink that beer first?”
“Yeah. ’Scuse me.” Spider went to the men’s room and rinsed the blood out of his mouth. He looked bad in the mirror, black eye as well as everything else. Big purple bruise over his solar plexus. He stood over the toilet for a minute but didn’t puke, thank God for small favors.
He went back out and drank the beer. Henry offered him a shot to go with it, but he declined, thinking about facing the police with whiskey on his breath.
“You were in the Nam,” Coop said, pointing at his bracelet.
“Yeah.” Spider laughed, a grunt. “I know all about ambushes. Just didn’t expect one here, in broad daylight.”
“What these guys look like?” Coop asked.
“Coupla JDs. Mutt and Jeff. One guy over six feet, skinny; the other, I don’t know, five-four. Little guy’s the one who got me; looked like a goddamn prizefighter.”
“Tattoos on his knuckles?”
“That’s right. You know him.”
“Shit,” Henry said. “Everybody knows him. Name’s Sonny. You don’t fuck with him.”
“Speak for yourself,” someone said.
“Yeah, you fuck with him. You just don’t fuck with him.”
“I’m gettin’ lost,” Spider said. “You mean he’s a fa—he’s a homosexual?”
“Ah, he ain’t homo or hetero,” a black man said. “He just fuck anything don’t move fast enough. He stick you with a knife and fuck the fuckin’ wound.”
“Jesus.”
“And can’t nobody fuck with him because he’s fuckin’ Family.”
“That’s what he says,” Henry said. “I think he just has an overactive imagination.”
“And a gun, man. I seen his fuckin’ gun.”
“What, nobody here has a gun?” Henry pulled up enough skirt to show the derringer strapped to his calf.
“Hold it,” Spider said, rubbing his face. “Is all of Tampa like this? Might as well go back to Vietnam.”
“This the nice part of town,” the black man said.
“Oh, bullshit,” Coop said. “This is the same kinda part of town you always find the bus station. Drink the beer and let’s go over there.”
“Good idea,” Spider said. He finished the mug and stood up.
Crossing the street, Cooper told Spider he had done a tour in Vietnam. “That was ’65, though,” he said. “Not much goin’ on. Just teach the gooks about M14s and such.”
“You were an advisor?”
“Green Beret, all the way
. Fuckin’ crock ’a crap. Shouldn’t of been there then and double shouldn’t now.”
“Damn straight.” They went into the bus station. “Oh, shit.” Spider crossed over to where his locker was standing wide open.
Coop came up behind him. “Least they left your guitar.”
“Yeah. Knew how much they could get for it.” His suitcase was unzipped and the money was gone. They had taken The War With the Rull. Otherwise everything seemed to still be there.
Spider sat down on the suitcase. “Shit. I had over three hundred dollars.”
“So you gonna call the cops?”
“Yeah. Maybe get the wallet back.”
“Maybe. I wouldn’t finger Sonny, though, the knuckles. That Mafia stuff is probably bullshit, but he’s one hard case. Be back on the street in a week and lookin’ for you.”
“Yeah. I’ll tell ’em I didn’t get a good look at him.” He stood up and stretched. “Big black guy. Jumped me in the men’s room here.”
“Okay. Then what? You call the cops and then? You got a place to stay, know anybody?”
“Huh uh. Sleep in a chair here, I guess. Go look for a job tomorrow.”
“Spend a night here, you probably will get mugged. You come on to the Esso station with me, you can sleep in my truck. Tomorrow … you got a tent and a bedroll, I know a place you can stay for free, pretty safe.”
“That’d be okay. I wanted to camp out some anyhow.”
“Yeah.” He laughed. “This place is some kinda campin’ out.”
WINTER
The end of something
Beverly kept running the ad for Spider until November, when she missed a period and decided it would be prudent to save the money. Lee was resignedly happy about the prospect of becoming a father. He took another part-time job, teaching guitar in Montgomery Mall. The manager wanted him to cut his hair, but he charmed her out of it.
School went well for Beverly. She decided she would take a full load next semester, then leave for a year after the baby was born, then continue part-time at least to the B.A. level.
On one wall of their converted whorehouse there were large pictures of Kennedy and King, of Chicago in riot and Washington in flames, of black athletes with their fists raised high in Mexico: a kind of 1968 in review. But when the ROTC building burned, they were not in attendance. Beverly walked through tear gas to get to class, but she wasn’t among those who threw the gas grenades back at the cops and wore football helmets against their clubs. When a news program came on television, she would turn it off or leave the room.
Sometimes she would sit alone and cry for no reason, or for reasons beyond counting.
John in the box
Hooch City was a vacant lot near the railroad tracks where a floating population of forty or fifty men hung out: mostly young, mostly Vietnam vets, mostly not working. All of them fucked up one way or another. Spider fit right in.
The police didn’t bother them, probably because it was convenient to have them all in one place. They kept the area pretty neat and didn’t flagrantly break laws other than the obvious one of vagrancy.
Those who, like Spider, got disability checks or occasional money from home went in together on a post office box. Dinners were communal, fixed by two guys who lived together in a packing crate, Red-eye and Deros. Their home was everyone’s pantry, stocked with big sacks of rice and dry beans, which were the basic staple, along with odds and ends that people scavenged or shoplifted or sometimes bought. When the VA checks came in, those fortunate enough to be disabled put together a monthly party of beer, wine, and whiskey. There was not much regularity to their lives other than 7:00 dinner and the first-of-the-month party. Some of them worked odd jobs or begged, and others just sat around, waiting. Every now and then someone would tire of waiting and play a round of “Kiss the Train.”
Spider lived in his tent for two weeks, and then inherited an eight-by-eight-foot packing crate when its owner, Radio Jon, got bitten by a scorpion and had such a severe reaction he had to be taken to the hospital. Spider paid the cab fare, so Radio Jon said he could have the hooch if he didn’t come back. He did come back, two days later, but just to pick up the big Japanese radio on his way to Georgia, where he figured there wouldn’t be any scorpions. Spider missed the radio but was glad to have a dry place to sleep.
The University of South Florida wasn’t too far from Hooch City, so Spider went up there and got a set of catalogs and registration materials. He really ought to get back into school and start collecting the GI Bill money, but he had plenty of time before classes began in January. He could use the P.O. box as an address; it would be funny to be living like a hobo and going to school at the same time.
He was actually in a kind of twilight zone between respectability and bumhood. When he got his first disability check, he opened a bank account, mainly because he was afraid to carry a large amount of money. That put him so close to the economic mainstream that American Express sent him an application, which he thumbtacked up on the wall of his crate for everybody’s amusement.
He did have a sort of a regular job, playing guitar on the street. He usually wore his fatigues from Basic Training and a boonie cap from Vietnam that a guy traded him in exchange for a sixpack. Every now and then someone would give him a hard time about Vietnam, but he’d just smile and nod until he or she got nervous and left. Twice he was spat on, but he let that go by, too. After his experiences in Walter Reed and outside the gay bar, the last thing he wanted to do was get into a fight.
He went out every day it wasn’t raining, at least for a couple of hours. He had a regular route, mostly bus stops, and even wound up with some regular customers, who would say hello and give him a dime or a quarter every time, and sometimes ask for specific songs.
He also made a little money as a small-scale purveyor of Pharmaceuticals. He picked up his Valium every fourth Friday at the VA hospital dispensary, and it was twice as much as he needed, so he sold half of it on the street through a hippy who came through Hooch City now and then.
He wasn’t bothered by dreams as long as he could wash his evening pill down with whiskey. Beer if it was cold. Warm beer tasted like Vietnam; he couldn’t swallow it.
He knew it was no health pill, whiskey plus Valium, but figured it was temporary. He was saving a few bucks here and there. When he started school in January, he might have enough to rent a room for the semester. Get off the street.
And this is how he ended the year, 1968:
On December 31st he was kind of broke but not unhappy. He had made good tips the couple of weeks before Christmas, having learned a few carols on the guitar, but had spent most of it. He’d spruced up his packing crate with a carpet remnant, an aluminum folding cot, and a wool blanket, and had bought a smoked turkey for everybody, Christmas Eve. He had eight dollars in his pocket earmarked for a couple of bottles of cheap champagne to take back to the hooches tonight. Bring in the New Year like real people.
It was cool that day but not too cold for playing guitar. He had some woolen army gloves modified by snipping off the fingertips. He couldn’t do anything fancy, like barre chords, with them on, but eight plain chords sufficed for most of his repertoire.
One of his most lucrative spots was a bus stop in a poor section downtown; he went there just before five and played while people came home from work. On this last day of the year, he was almost to the bus stop when a carload of laughing teenagers went by him and threw out a holiday firecracker. Spider didn’t see it bounce off a parked car and roll between his feet.
The Valium, and maybe the whiskey, helped Spider with anxiety in general, but they didn’t do much about his hyperreactivity; his startle reflex.
The firecracker was a red two-incher Salute. It was about as loud as a single shot from an AK-47. When it went off, Spider hit the dirt, hard. He landed on his guitar, which made a bad “crunch” sound.
Spider turned the guitar over and looked at it. The back was pretty much caved in, the wood split lengthw
ise in two places.
He tried to play it but it just kind of buzzed. He tried various ways. If he held it really tightly against his chest and plucked the strings down by the nut, he could pick out a recognizable melody, but chords still sounded like shit. He held his face tightly, too, holding in words more than tears.
One of his regulars, a tall skinny Rastafarian with tight greasy braids, got off the bus and walked up to where Spider was sitting on the sidewalk.
“Spidah? You gonna catch cold down there.” He reached down to help him up but Spider shook off his hand. “What the fuck, man?”
Spider tried to speak but all he could do was shake his head. He turned the guitar around and showed the man its busted back.
“Somebody stove it in? Be some tough shit, man.” This time Spider did let himself be helped up, and then led to the bench by the bus stop. “Ah, shit.” The man looked around. “You wait here.”
He ran across the street, dodging traffic, and went into a pawn shop. A few minutes later, he came out with a guitar similar to Spider’s old F-hole. He pried the old one away from Spider and gave him the new one.
Spider strummed a couple of chords. It was in tune and sounded crisp and beautiful. He found his voice. “I can’t let you do this, Royce. I can’t take this.”
“Ah. What you can’t do is you can’t tell me what to do, white boy.” He held out the broken guitar and admired it. “Some day you be a famous music dude and I sell this mother for a million bucks.” He walked away laughing, the old guitar jaunty over his shoulder.
For a long time Spider played the same chord over and over, staring at a spot on the sidewalk. Then he snapped out of it and put his hat down at his feet. He salted it with three quarters and began to sing a song about a man in trouble.
Life is but a dream
The tall, older man who had been given the job of making sure the dead were dead, and killing the wounded, was being punished. Punished for being Chinese, punished for being a scholar, punished for hating war and showing compassion.
Shi-Jung Han was born in the Cholon district of Saigon in 1941 to Chinese parents who had emigrated from San Francisco in the thirties. They spoke a little English around the house, and he studied it in school. At university he studied Chinese literature and took a few courses in English, and was delighted with his graduation present: His parents sent him to San Francisco in the summer of 1961. He stayed with relatives in Chinatown and wandered through the city, reveling in its strangeness.