The Purple Decades

by Tom Wolfe

  Meanwhile, Dick Brent, in the other F-4B, has seen Dowd and Flint eject. After about fifteen minutes of diving and fishing down through the clouds, Brent spots them on the water below and radios the position. Brent sees a few people on the shore of an island, looking out toward the two men, but the islanders don’t seem to be making any attempt to go out by boat to retrieve Garth and Dowd, which also means capture them. (In fact, the islanders had long since learned to leave well enough alone. American pilots in the water were often followed by screaming rescue aircraft that blew every boat out of the tub.)

  After about another thirty minutes Spads are coming in low over the water. To Garth Flint it appears as if the Spad pilots don’t see him, only Dowd. Over his emergency radio Flint says: “If you see two pilots, rock your wings.” One of the Spads rocks its wings. The Spads call in a helicopter known as a Big Mother. The helicopter, too, heads straight for Dowd. A morose thought crosses Flint’s mind: “He’s a lieutenant, I’m only a lieutenant (].g.)—so they’re picking him up first.”

  Then it dawns on him that they’re going after Dowd because he’s in closer to shore and therefore more vulnerable to gunfire or capture. Hell, it’s going to be okay.

  Back on the Coral Sea Dowd and Flint were debriefed in the ready room. They drank coffee and tried to warm up. The china had a certain dignity. It was white with bands of blue about the rims and blue crests here and there. The silverware—now, that was rather nice. It was ornamental and heavy. The questions came, one after the other, and they went through everything that happened. Yet during this debriefing the two men were waiting for something else. Surely, they would mention something else. But they didn’t. It was a debriefing much like every debriefing. Just the facts! No quarter given! No slack in the line! Then the commander of their squadron said, with a note of accusation: “Why were you flying so low?”

  Now, that was really too much! Why … you bastard! But they said nothing except the usual. What they wanted to say … well, how could they have put it into words? How, within the inner room, does one say: “My God, man, we’ve just been into the Jaws!—about as far into the goddamned Jaws as you can go and still come back again!—and you want to know why we flew so low! We’ve just been there! at the lost end of the equation! where it drops off the end of the known world! Ask us about … the last things, you bastard, and we will enlighten you!” There were no words in the chivalric code for such thoughts, however.

  But all at once the skipper of the Coral Sea, the maximum leader, a former combat pilot himself, appeared—and he smiled! And that smile was like an emission of radio waves.

  “We’re glad to have you back, men.”

  That was all he said. But he smiled again! Such ethereal waves! Invisible but comprehensible, they said, “I know. I’ve been there myself.” Just that!—not a sound!—and yet a doxology for all the unspoken things. How full my heart, O Lord!

  Flint took one day off before going out on his next mission, on New Year’s Eve. Dowd had suffered a back injury in the ejection from the F-4B, and so it was another two days before he climbed back into the metal slingshot, got slung off the skillet, and went flying over North Vietnam again.

  The Lord’s Work

  “ … and his lord answered and said unto the servant who had buried his talent, his piece of gold, in the ground: ‘Thou wicked and slothful servant! Thou knwest that I reap where I sowed not and gather where I have not strewed. Thou oughtest therefore to have put my money to the exchangers, and then at my coming I should have received my own … with interest!’ Now, friends, if you’ve got your money lying around in a passbook savings account down at the bank … you … are like that wicked servant! You … have got your gold … stuck in the ground! Wouldn’t you rather be able to answer, in the Final Hour, when the Last Questions are asked: ‘Oh, yes, Lord! I took my gold … out of the passbook savings account! I put my gold … into the Gospel Money Market Fund! Fourteen-point-five percent per annum as of June 15! Interest compounded daily! Withdrawals in part or in full … at any time! Check-writing privileges … of course! Bank by wire … available! Call me tonight, toll free—the Reverend Bob Lee Boyd. Gospel Money Market Fund, incorporated—and wake up tomorrow … on the side … of the Angels ! This is not an offering, which can be made by formal prospectus only.”

  THE ME DECADE AND THE THIRD GREAT AWAKENING

  n

  1. Me and my hemorrhoids

  The trainer said, “Take your finger off the repress button.” Everybody was supposed to let go, let all the vile stuff come up and gush out. They even provided vomit bags, like the ones on a 747, in case you literally let it gush out! Then the trainer told everybody to think of “the one thing you would most like to eliminate from your life.” And so what does our girl blurt over the microphone?

  “Hemorrhoids!”

  Just so!

  That was how she ended up in her present state … stretched out on the wall-to-wall carpet of a banquet hall in the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles with her eyes closed and her face pressed into the stubble of the carpet, which is a thick commercial weave and feels like clothesbrush bristles against her face and smells a bit high from cleaning solvent. That was how she ended up lying here concentrating on her hemorrhoids.

  Eyes shut! deep in her own space! her hemorrhoids! the grisly peanut—

  Many others are stretched out on the carpet all around her; some 249 other souls, in fact. They’re all strewn across the floor of the banquet hall with their eyes closed, just as she is. But, Christ, the others are concentrating on things that sound serious and deep when you talk about them. And how they had talked about them! They had all marched right up to the microphone and “shared,” as the trainer called it. What did they want to eliminate from their lives? Why, they took their fingers right off the old repress button and told the whole room. My husband! my wife! my homosexuality! my inability to communicate, my self-hatred, self-destructiveness, craven fears, puling weaknesses, primordial horrors, premature ejaculation, impotence, frigidity, rigidity, subservience, laziness, alcoholism, major vices, minor vices, grim habits, twisted psyches, tortured souls—and then it had been her turn, and she had said, “Hemorrhoids.”

  You can imagine what that sounded like. That broke the place up. The trainer looked like a cocky little bastard up there on the podium, with his deep tan, white tennis shirt, and peach-colored sweater, a dynamite color combination, all very casual and spontaneous—after about two hours of trying on different outfits in front of a mirror, that kind of casual and spontaneous, if her guess was right. And yet she found him attractive. Commanding was the word. He probably wondered if she was playing the wiseacre, with her “hemorrhoids,” but he rolled with it. Maybe she was being playful. Just looking at him made her feel mischievous. In any event, hemorrhoids was what had bubbled up into her brain.

  Then the trainer had told them to stack their folding chairs in the back of the banquet hall and lie down on the floor and close their eyes and get deep into their own spaces and concentrate on that one item they wanted to get rid of most—and really feel it and let the feeling gush out.

  So now she’s lying here concentrating on her hemorrhoids. The strange thing is … it’s no joke after all! She begins to feel her hemorrhoids in all their morbid presence. She can actually feel them. The sieges always began with her having the sensation that a peanut was caught in her anal sphincter. That meant a section of swollen varicose vein had pushed its way out of her intestines and was actually coming out of her bottom. It was as hard as a peanut and felt bigger and grislier than a peanut. Well—for God’s sake!—in her daily life, even at work, especially at work, and she works for a movie distributor, her whole picture of herself was of her … seductive physical presence. She was not the most successful businesswoman in Los Angeles, but she was certainly successful enough, and quite in addition to that, she was … the main sexual presence in the office. When she walked into the office each morning, everyone, women as well as men, checked her
out. She knew that. She could feel her sexual presence go through the place like an invisible chemical, like a hormone, a scent, a universal solvent.

  The most beautiful moments came when she was in her office or in a conference room or at Mr. Chow’s taking a meeting—nobody “had” meetings any more, they “took” them—with two or three men, men she had never met before or barely knew. The overt subject was, inevitably, eternally, “the deal.” She always said there should be only one credit line up on the screen for any movie: “Deal by …” But the meeting would also have a subplot. The overt plot would be “The Deal.” The subplot would be “The Men Get Turned On by Me.” Pretty soon, even though the conversation had not strayed overtly from “the deal,” the men would be swaying in unison like dune grass at the beach. And she was the wind, of course. And then one of the men would say something and smile and at the same time reach over and touch her … on top of the hand or on the side of the arm … as if it meant nothing … as if it were just a gesture for emphasis … but, in fact, a man is usually deathly afraid of reaching out and touching a woman he doesn’t know … and she knew it meant she had hypnotized him sexually …

  Well—for God’s sake!—at just that sublime moment, likely as not, the goddamn peanut would be popping out of her tail! As she smiled sublimely at her conquest, she also had to sit in her chair lopsided, with one cheek of her buttocks higher than the other, as if she were about to crepitate, because it hurt to sit squarely on the peanut. If for any reason she had to stand up at that point and walk, she would have to walk as if her hip joints were rusted out, as if she were sixty-five years old, because a normal stride pressed the peanut, and the pain would start up, and the bleeding, too, very likely. Or if she couldn’t get up and had to sit there for a while and keep her smile and her hot hormonal squinted eyes pinned on the men before her, the peanut would start itching or burning, and she would start double-tracking, as if her mind were a tape deck with two channels going at once. In one she’s the sexual princess, the Circe, taking a meeting and clouding men’s minds … and in the other she’s a poor bitch who wants nothing more in this world than to go down the corridor to the ladies’ room and get some Kleenex and some Vaseline and push the peanut back up into her intestines with her finger.

  And even if she’s able to get away and do that, she will spend the rest of that day and the next, and the next, with a deep worry in the back of her brain, the sort of worry that always stays on the edge of your consciousness, no matter how hard you think of something else. She will be wondering at all times what the next bowel movement will be like, how solid and compact the bolus will be, trying to think back and remember if she’s had any milk, cream, chocolate, or any other binding substance in the last twenty-four hours, or any nuts or fibrous vegetables like broccoli. Is she really in for it this time—

  The Sexual Princess! On the outside she has on her fireproof grin and her Fiorio scarf, as if to say she lives in a world of Sevilles and 45OSL’s and dinner last night at Dominick’s, a movie business restaurant on Beverly Boulevard that’s so exclusive, Dominick keeps his neon sign (Dominick’s) turned off at night to make the wimps think it’s closed, but she (Hi, Dominick!) can get a table—while inside her it’s all the battle between the bolus and the peanut—

  —and is it too late to leave the office and go get some mineral oil and let some of that vile glop roll down her gullet or get a refill on the softener tablets or eat some prunes or drink some coffee or do something else to avoid one of those horrible hard-clay boluses that will come grinding out of her, crushing the peanut and starting not only the bleeding but … the pain! … a horrible humiliating pain that feels like she’s getting a paper cut in her anus, like the pain you feel when the edge of a piece of bond paper slices your finger, plus a horrible hellish purple bloody varicose pressure, but lasting not for an instant, like a paper cut, but for an eternity, prolonged until the tears are rolling down her face as she sits in the cubicle, and she wants to cry out, to scream until it’s over, to make the screams of fear, fury, and humiliation obliterate the pain. But someone would hear! No doubt they’d come bursting right into the ladies’ room to save her! and feed and water their morbid curiosities! And what could she possibly say? And so she had simply held that feeling in all these years, with her eyes on fire and her entire pelvic saddle a great purple tub of pain. She had repressed the whole squalid horror of it—the searing peanut—until now. The trainer had said, “Take your finger off the repress button!” Let it gush up and pour out!

  And now, as she lies here on the floor of the banquet hall of the Ambassador Hotel with 249 other souls, she knows exactly what he meant. She can feel it all, all of the pain, and on top of the pain all the humiliation, and for the first time in her life she has permission from the Management, from herself and everyone around her, to let the feeling gush forth. So she starts moaning.

  “Oooooooooooooooooooooooohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!”

  And when she starts moaning, the most incredible and exhilarating thing begins to happen. A wave of moans spreads through the people lying around her, as if her energy were radiating out like a radar pulse.

  “Ooooooooooooooooooooooohhhhhhhhh!”

  So she lets her moan rise into a keening sound.

  “Oooooooooooooooooooohhhhhhhhhhheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!”

  And when she begins to keen, the souls near her begin keening, even while the moans are still spreading to the prostrate folks farther from her, on the edges of the room.

  “Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeooooooohhhhhhhhhheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeooooooooh!”

  So she lets her keening sound rise up into a real scream.

  “Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiai!”

  And this rolls out in a wave, too, first through those near her, and then toward the far edges.

  “Aiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaieeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeohhhhhhhhheeeeeaiaiai!”

  And so she turns it all the way up, into a scream such as she has never allowed herself in her entire life.

  “AiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaaaAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRGGGGGG-HHHHHH!”

  And her full scream spreads from soul to soul, over the top of the keens and fading moans—

  “AAAAAAARRRRRGGGGHHHaiaiaiaiaieeeeeeeeeeoooooohhheeeeeeaiaiaiaiaaaaAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRGGGGGHHHHHHHHHH!”

  —until at last the entire room is consumed in her scream, as if there are no longer 250 separate souls but one noösphere of souls united in some incorporeal way by her scream—

  “AAAAAAAAARRRRRRRGGGGGGGHHHHHHH!”

  —which is not simply her scream any longer … but the world’s! Each soul is concentrated on its own burning item—my husband! my wife! my homosexuality! my inability to communicate, my self-hatred, self-destruction, craven fears, puling weaknesses, primordial horrors, premature ejaculation, impotence, frigidity, rigidity, subservience, laziness, alcoholism, major vices, minor vices, grim habits, twisted psyches, tortured souls—and yet each unique item has been raised to a cosmic level and united with every other until there is but one piercing moment of release and liberation at last!—a whole world of anguish set free by—