by W. S. Penn
David kept his eye on the mirror as we passed beneath the overpass. Cars in the fast lane accelerated, picking up speed on cue.
“Look again,” he said.
Sure enough, the patrolman had pulled off the exit and paused long enough crossing the overpass to let everyone believe he had given up the hunt. Here he came, back down the entry ramp, accelerating until he was right behind us, timing the cars that had passed us and then swinging out in pursuit of one of the unwary, swinging his red search light up and on.
“At least they play fair out here,” David said, pressing down on the accelerator and beginning to leapfrog cars in the middle lane in order to stay out of the patrolman’s mirror. A mile later, we passed an old clunker pulled over to the shoulder by the patrolman and David relaxed.
“So,” he said. “Tell me that nothing.”
I tried. “Once upon a time,” I began, intending to tell David a funny story about a little Indian boy whose best friend’s name was Bernie Schneider, and how that boy had taken apart his Grandfather’s power saw. I stopped. There weren’t any words. I struggled for them, fought for them, trying to earn my words the Smith Barney way. Giving that up, I closed my eyes, pressing thumb and forefinger into the lids of each of them. At first, nothing except the test pattern sound that Grandfather had abandoned me to. I was determined. I persisted the way even the worst of storytellers must. Finally, the words came through: “Oh Fab, We’re glad, They put new Borax in you.”
“Personification,” I muttered. How the hell did Fab achieve that?
“What?” David said.
“Nothing. I can’t tell you nothing.”
David moved his hands on the leather-covered steering wheel. He glanced over at me, and then back at the highway. “Man, you’re getting pretty weird, you know?”
I knew. “Sorry,” I said, laughing halfheartedly and closing my eyes and feigning sleep. Who the hell was “They”? It’d been Grandfather’s voice, I was certain, even though his voice sounded like someone with throat cancer drunk on whiskey. Was he merely succumbing like everyone else to the jingoism of television, losing himself, his hopes and disappointments in the rising tide of mediocrity or the undertow of senility? Was “They” some anonymous conspiratorial force in the world, the same force that mother in her man-hating letters delineated, seeing her superintendent of schools, her principal, as the They-incarnate, the people who, by putting new Borax into laundry detergent, could make us glad? Or was the “They” friends I was drifting away from like David, in front of whom I lacked words, knowing, as I did, that David’s theory of victims extended beyond Joanne and her ilk to include Black people (“A people that can’t pull itself together makes itself a victim”), Aztecs (“They helped Cortez destroy them”), and Indians (“Look at Joseph, thinking they would let him reach Canada; or the plains Indians counting coup against Henry rifles, dumb, man, dumb”).
Who hasn’t been victimized by “Them”? (“Jews.”) Jews?
“I love you,” I said, blurting it out, surprising David as he drove into Los Angeles.
“We’re good friends. I love you, too,” adding quickly, for safety’s sake, “like I love Sara. I just wish you weren’t so angry with her.”
“Yes,” I said. “So do I. So do I. I love you both, you know, but I still don’t understand.”
“What?”
“Nothing.”
I didn’t. I wasn’t being funny, even though David chuckled. I didn’t understand a fucking thing that had happened from the day that Death stood beside my crib to now. It wouldn’t help when, not many years later, Sara heard that David, who had married a nice Jewish girl like his folks wanted him to do, had put his chin on a table, his tongue between his teeth, his hands clasped on the crown of his head, and bitten his tongue off, bleeding to death.
“On his birthday,” Sara would cry. “His wife coming home from work with a cake for him. There he was. Can you imagine?”
“No,” I lied, thinking ‘So much for underpinnings.’ “I can’t.” Though I could. All too easily. By then, though, I knew something. Maybe I didn’t quite understand it yet, but I knew it.
I would call it the Big Bang Theory of Meaning. As the cosmos expanded, what people took to be meaningful shrank. Where, once upon a time, feeding your family was Important, or leaving something behind was Meaningful, everything was shrinking into the Nut of Now—Nikes now, a Mercedes now, a condo on the beach now, cocaine now. Just when the need for meaning was greatest, people were choosing to settle for the Nut of Now—a nut which disintegrated into nothing more than dust under the pressure of their own ignored mortality. Living for now, given my friend Death, was meaningless and the contemplation of suicide was only a winnowing fan that could sort out the wheat from the chaff and leave people in awe of being alive.
“Don’t you ever think about doing that to me,” Sara said, hysterical with the suddenness of David’s death and the idea that if we hadn’t drifted away from him, he might still be alive.
“I won’t,” I said, holding her, beginning to rock back and forth with the slow, even comfort of a low tide. Suicide, as an expensive callgirl of Death, might seem attractive at moments to other people. But the option of killing myself had been stolen from me when, after the doctors had decided I was not going to live, Grandfather took Death by the hand, drove Him away from my cribside, and chained Him outside the mission’s door. Having heard over and over how I was never supposed to have lived, every moment was a gift, a luxury that I did not earn or deserve any more than the man who inherits his father’s wealth. For me to complain about living was as silly and self-serving as the heiress complaining about taxes or poor people on welfare.
Besides, Death was so boring.
I had David drop me in North Hollywood. I’d get a bus back out to Clearmont. There were things I had to think about.
The school was still there, across the street from one of the many houses I had occupied as a child. The asphalt was cracked and grayed by the sneakered feet of children, but the stucco walls of the school’s buildings were still salmon pink, as uninviting in color as the buildings were in their flat, prison-like design.
Walking down towards the wash, I came to the alley where Bernie Schneider had pushed me into the cement block wall, and I walked the alley, trying to find the back gate which had been Bernie’s. Two Vietnamese children darted, one behind the other, from the gate that had led to the Schneider house. When one caught the other and began to hit him, I interfered. Whether they understood me or not, I didn’t know. They stopped, backing away from my disproportionate size like mountain sheep before the monster Ilpswetsichs. Was I a “they” to them, or an “us”? Where did my impulse to explain to these strange children that I was an Indian come from? At the end of the alley I looked back to see the two children beginning once again to stalk each other, ready to lock into Greco-Roman combat, as if they sensed the endless repetition of history and their part in that repetition.
Sooner or later, those two boys, Americanized, will become uneasy allies seeking to understand the diplomacies of little girls and, failing to understand, they will seek to influence the world of girls covertly, finally to dominate it if they can. Their fragile alliance will look strong, at times. When they are playing softball and the one fails to charge the grounder coming at him at third base, hurries his throw, and slings the ball high and wide of the first baseman, the other will chant, “It’s okay. Settle down. We’ll get the next batter,” as the girls twitter like a flock of starlings over his clumsiness. But when the teacher tells him to go to the blackboard and the one pleads that he can’t, his little masculinity prodding at the pleats in his pants, the other boy will betray him and twitter right along with the girls who are covering their mouths but not their laughing eyes. The one will secretly hate the other for this and determine to pay the other back for the betrayal—and, if he is able, to make the girls pay, too. Even with this determination, which makes his eyes sparkle like a sniper’s, he will live with t
he fear of being twittered at from that moment on.
Bemused, I headed down the boulevard along the wash I had played in as a boy, the dried-up riverbed fronted by houses. There was Tommy A., himself, polishing a pink Thunderbird pulled up on the Bermuda grass beside the house. There was no mistake: It was Tommy all right, with the same round, innocent, and hairless face attached to a body that had grown taller, into the shoulderless shape of a barber’s pole. I stood, watching him buff off the Blue Coral, and when he looked up and smiled, I said, “Nice car.”
“Thank you,” he said. It was a ’56 Thunderbird, a two-seater with porthole windows and a V-8 under the long low hood. Did he recognize me?
“A classic,” I said. “Those were great cars.”
“If you like, I’ll give you a ride in it when I’m finished.”
“Thanks,” I said. “I don’t have time.”
“Maybe another time,” he said. He was so upbeat, so filled with the potential of promise. “My name’s Thomas.” He wiped his hands on a cloth and circled the front of the car to shake my hand.
“Jack,” I said, looking him square in the eyes. His face was so youthful. How had he managed to avoid aging? ‘A mere boy,’ I thought, wondering what Crane or Dreiser would have done with a character like Thomas. Crane would make it the Courage of Queers; Dreiser, the Fate of Faggots. Neither would fit. A Pride of Lionesses? No, Tommy in his own way had always been a homosexual and he had never belonged to any of those subgroups. He was the sort of homosexual who could massage another man’s back without that other man needing to feel threatened by attitudes, and if he belonged to a classifiable group then it was to a Humility of Homosexuals.
“Well anytime, Jack,” Tommy said as I began to walk away. “You know where I live. You’re welcome to tea. After six, though, it’s happy hour.”
I waved without turning around.
“Have a pleasant day,” he called after me and, with something in my eye, I could hardly hear him.
“You, too,” I said to myself. “You mere boy you.” I dug a dexamil from my watch pocket. Through the teeth and over the gums, I thought, following the lumpish capsule as it worked its way down my esophagus, the gelatin dissolving slowly in the p.H. of saliva.
43.
Strangely, where amphetamines helped me to think properly for class work, they did the opposite when it came to the Army. I loved the Reserve Officers Training Corps, at first because anyone could belong, but eventually just because it was easy. The routine of polishing brass, spit shining shoes, pressing pants helped me forget. Any idiot could do well in Rotsy as long as he was willing to follow the rules and memorize a few children’s rhymes about rifles. Rhymes and rules were what the Army’s indoctrination was all about and it made perfect sense. After all, if you were going to kill another human being in the jungles of Vietnam, you had better imagine him as a human unit and in this case a Gook—not only alien but inhuman, stereotyped by catch phrases. The purpose of the bayonet was to kill; the purpose of a Gook was to be killed. If he was a friendly Gook, then he was called a Vietnamese and his leader a president. Unfriendly, he was a Gook and his leader was a commie dictator—a Manichean division that came readily and easily to Rotsy cadets and which I understood better than sawdust, although I wanted to know the distinguishing marks that would make you certain that one soldier was a Vietnamese and the other a Gook. I didn’t, after all, want to make mistakes, even in the dark foliage of Vietnam.
“Don’t worry about it. Shoot ’em first. Then ask questions,” the officers told us.
Father had never let me play Little League baseball and the Boy Scouts had rejected me a priori with a premonition of my unpreparedness. But the Army welcomed me, and playing with the boys on the marching field, drilling through the manual of arms, was great fun. I laughed with heterosexual heartiness when another cadet slammed his thumb in the chamber of his M-1 during inspection, releasing the bolt from the heel of his hand and failing to clear his thumb in time. I loved the cold sweat of parade arms on hot days and disdained the cadets who locked their knees back on purpose until they fainted and were dragged to the shade of the armory. Willingly, I was consumed by something larger than myself, a something that seemed to hold the power over life and death.
If one had a knack for shouting orders from deep down in his chest without using his tongue to form consonants, he quickly became a squad leader, able to stand apart from the rest of the fodder and bask in the silvered gaze of inspecting officers on the parade review stand.
If one managed to steal the answers to the entire semester’s examinations, he was issued a white glazed helmet and spats and placed in the Honor Platoon.
It was after one of the first Rotsy lectures. Sergeant Potter had talked at us for ten or fifteen minutes before switching off the lights and showing us training films. Made by the same propagandist who directed Driver Training films for high school students, the films emphasized slogans that Potter introduced to us. Action-packed and full of special effects, each of the short clips was direct and easily understood: “You take care of your rifle, it will take care of you.” After the films, I had the same secure sense that I’d had as a child when I was being toilet-trained. There was a right way (and time and place) and a wrong way (and place and time), and in case you could have missed the point, the director had added a heavy twist to the endings.
The one about keeping your rifle clean, for example, focused on Christopher and Sammy. Christopher (who insists on using his full and not a nick name) always cares for his equipment, breaking down his rifle every night, cleaning and oiling it, lifting it high above his head when fording streams or rivers, falling on his face in the muck and ooze rather than let his rifle be sullied. His buddy Sammy thinks he’s silly, preferring to relax and catch some shut-eye rather than continually clean his equipment. Sammy is lazy, cleaning his rifle only when an officer makes him. Where Christopher looks—even on patrol—like he’s just been returned from a Chinese laundry, Sammy is wrinkled and untucked, his brass embarrassing. Yet the pair love each other like brothers (we are told this since there is little time in a short film to convince us of it). Sammy’s admiration for Christopher causes him to make an effort at cleanliness; he wants to be like Christopher, but his wanting is frustrated by his inherent tomorrow attitude.
“What’s the use of polishing my brass?” Sammy asks. “It will only be tarnished tomorrow.” (This elicits grunts of agreement from the cadets watching the film—it is true, after all—and out of the corner of my eyes, I see Potter grin in the light from the projector; Potter knows his cadets have been sucked in, set up for the higher truth to come; Potter has the film memorized, having shown it with the regularity of communion.)
The brass, Christopher kindly explains, is U.S. Government Issue and the government’s property. It must be taken care of. Sammy and he are representatives of their country, their government, and more, the United States Army, and as such they ought to look their most presentable (Sammy’s protests that this is war are cleared up by Christopher’s telling him that in war or peace, it’s the same). Finally, Christopher wows the film audience with a powerful syllogism: All soldiers who care for their equipment are good soldiers, he cares for his equipment, therefore he is a good soldier. Even Sammy is rocked back on his heels by the obviousness of this, though he still has trouble changing his habits (therefore, Sammy is not a good soldier).
Sammy and Christopher get caught in a fire fight. Like the good soldier he wants to be, Sammy charges the enemy emplacement. His rifle jams and he is pinned down by semi-automatic fire. Christopher, trying to save him, exposes himself needlessly and is cut into human confetti; using Christopher’s rifle, Sammy manages to save himself. The end of the film is a shot of Sammy weeping over the body of his buddy, who has forgiven him his slovenliness with his final breath as Sammy swears he will change.
When the room lights clicked on, Potter was front and center, obviously moved by the film. “That, gentlemen,” he said, “is why
you will polish your brass every day. In one week, you will be issued M-1’s. In two weeks, you will be able to break your rifle down, oil it, and reassemble it in less than ten minutes, blindfolded.” He smirked. “It can get real dark in the jungles of Vietnam.” Potter did a left face, snapped his heels, and out he marched, slamming the door like an exclamation mark.
Most of the cadets were shaken, leaving the hall quietly like Baptists after a sermon on hellfire and damnation. I loved the simplicity of the film’s message and the way the director had accomplished his task almost without my fellow cadets knowing it. Still, there was a vague feeling of dis-ease which I couldn’t place until Woody sneaked up behind me and slugged me in manly fashion on the shoulder.
“Don’t worry about it,” Woody said, beaming like Ken at Barbie. “Most of us are gonna get desk jobs and ride out the war on swivel chairs. Only niggers and beaners get put on the front lines.”
And Indians, I thought. “Hey Woody?” I called as he left.
“Yeah?”
“Fuck you.”
Woody’s smile hung in the room like a bad fart, and I gathered my notebooks and pencils together slowly.
On Potter’s desk—one of those old office desks in which you can find pencil nubs, the odd paper clip, a scrap of paper with an unimportant note scribbled on it by an untrained hand, even crayons from the time the room was used for day care—was a manila folder. Finding nothing of interest in the desk, I opened the folder expecting to find Potter’s cuneiform cues for his slogans.
Eureka. It took time—everything does—but no more than the 10 to the minus forty-third power it took to begin the universe for me to realize that here were the answer sheets to the entire semester’s exams. It took a little more time—fifteen minutes or less (though my experience of the time was much longer)—for me to dash to the library and photocopy the set and return the folder to the desk.
As I descended the wide stairs outside the building, the sun was out and the sky seemed free of smog. I wore a smile as big as a banana, and I imagined I could hear my uncle in the distance singing what sounded like “Save the last dance for me.”