“None taken,” I said, mildly offended.
“How come we gotta go and they don’t?”
We looked at one other and nodded. Doug was making perfect sense. We hoisted our glasses and said goddamn right it wasn’t fair.
Doug shook his head. “Now we gotta go and protect them against communism. The motherfuckers, they graduate and get management trainee jobs that pay upwards of four hundred dollars a month and marry the best-looking girls. We’re out there digging foxholes. Know the money we’ll be making? A buck private draws seventy-eight clams a month.”
“We oughta fucking go and fucking tell those fucking draft-dodgers what we fucking think of their fucking candy asses,” somebody yelled.
That was a mistake. A big mistake. It qualified as a dare. I’d witnessed Doug’s dares. Somehow he’d lived through them. Jumping off bridges into cold water, lighting firecrackers in unusual places, and such.
It got Doug to thinking, like he’d been thinking when he swiped his mother’s pink silk panties. From the way he fidgeted, I knew he still had them on.
“On to the University District,” he responded. “We’ll tell ’em a thing or two! You guys with me?”
Of course we were with him. This was no time to be a pussy. These were the days when everyone smoked (me the only weirdo in the group who didn’t) and nobody got too excited if you drank a brew in your car. We stocked up on weeds and six-packs of cold Olympia stubbies, piled into Doug’s ’51 Chevy Bel Air, and off we went.
He’d had that red-and-white Bel Air hardtop since he was a junior in high school bagging groceries at the A&P. He’d customized it in small ways--like spinner hubcaps and a necker knob. He Simonized it monthly. He’d never bitten on a dare involving that Chevy, playing chicken or anything. A big reason Doug didn’t want to go into the service was that he couldn’t bring his beloved five-one with him.
This was pre-skyscraper, pre-freeway Seattle, though construction on some interstates had begun. The burbs were still separate towns, not part of an amorphous sprawl. Seattle’s tallest structure was the Space Needle, an eyesore (in my opinion) erected for the 1962 World’s Fair. On top of the Needle was a flying saucer of a restaurant the Jetsons would feel at home in. Seattle had no major-league professional teams. The Rainiers of the AAA Pacific Coast League was as close as it got, and they were overshadowed by Seattle University basketball and University of Washington football.
It was to the UW we went. We cruised Greek Row. Many of the fraternities and sororities looked like old gingerbread mansions. I hadn’t been inside one and never would be, but they couldn’t’ve been too swell with fifty or more guys or gals jammed in, or so my sour grapes informed me.
Doug said we had to find the ideal frat-rat house, the ritziest, with the most brick and ivy.
“Those pussies, we’ll rattle their cages,” he said. “Their mommies and daddies got the dough to keep them in school forever.”
He found precisely what he was looking for, three stories of shutters and porches and tradition. Doug nosed the Bel Air over the curb onto the sidewalk and climbed out none too steadily. A squirrel on the lawn ran up a tree that looked older than the house.
We were with him, kind of, standing to his rear, shivering. An icy drizzle had begun, soaking through our clothes. I had to wonder what the hell we were doing there. The weather was sobering everyone up except Doug, who lobbed his empty Oly. It smashed on the front door of the fraternity.
“Hey, you fucking lily-livered, draft-dodging, turdbird, dick-licking, fucking faggot cocksucker pansies!” he hollered, cigarette dangling from a corner of his mouth.
There was no response. Doug went to the trunk and pulled out a gun. I’d seen it before. It was his dad’s Colt .45 pistol that he’d forgotten to turn in to the Navy when he’d retired. I didn’t know the dumb shit snuck it out and carried it around in his car.
“What the hell are you doing?” I asked.
Doug whipped his best Howdy Doody grin on me. “Gonna put a little fear in them is all.”
“You’re going too far, man,” I told him. “Put it away before they call the cops.”
He pointed the gun in the air and cocked the hammer. “Quit worrying. It’s not loaded. I’ll show ’em cold steel, make ’em shit their knickers. We’ll haul ass before they get our license number.”
“Doug, how do they know it isn’t loaded? Could be one of them is in there, us in his sights. His gun is loaded.”
Doug was mulling that over when the .45 went off, sounding like a cannon.
“Holy fuck!” he cried, looking at the smoking barrel. “I’ve seen the old man clean it a million times.”
We did have their attention inside the frat house. If you thought we’d be greeted by pipe-smoking, four-eyed weenies in cardigan sweaters, you are sadly mistaken. A dozen ROTC uniforms marched out. The cadet in the lead had a neck wider than his head.
“What’s your problem, turkey?” he demanded. “What are you doing with that weapon?”
Doug turned, gun at his side, and gave me a what-the-hell-are-we-doing-here look. I shrugged. I sure didn’t know.
Doug was listing a bit to starboard. “You’re the fucking problem, Rot-see shithead.”
The cadet held out a large paw. “Fork over that weapon, Dilbert.”
Doug told a short tale that concerned the cadet’s mother and a German shepherd. Maybe his reply should’ve been less disgusting, but I guess he realized his face was gonna be busted anyway, so he decided to try to save some. The cadet decked Doug with one punch and yanked the pistol out of his hand on his way down.
He asked if I had a problem too. Well, you know me and how my fists engage before my brain does. But our new friends had vamoosed, nowhere to be seen. It was Doug and I by our lonesome, the former on the ground. I was just sober enough to dislike the odds, to do the smart thing. I said no thank you sir. The cadet told me to get my stupid drunken friend the hell out of here.
“I’m unloading this weapon before somebody gets hurt,” he added.
He was handling the pistol as if he knew what he was doing, but it went off again.
The cadet fell on his back, feet flailing in the air, howling like a banshee. He’d shot himself in a calf, a flesh wound by the looks of it, as there wasn’t much bleeding. His pals helped him stagger into the frat house. I heard one say that they weren’t due for .45 training until spring quarter.
I would’ve been more sympathetic if I’d known what I know now of that cadet in The Great Beyond. He did recover from the injury, and his military career was not blemished by the incident. Nothing ever came of the shooting. Because of what it could have done to their illustrious scholarly and military careers, the cadets closed ranks and patched up their leader on their own, mum’s the word.
I learned his name was Ron Gibbs. Two years later, First Lieutenant Ronald Gibbs was leading his men on patrol in the Delta, near Can Tho. He triggered a mine on a jungle pathway.
This was not the generic kind of land mine that got Father at Inchon. It was an especially nasty gizmo named a Bouncing Betty. Designed by the Nazis, Bouncing Betties spring up to waist level and detonate at the victim’s midsection and family jewels. It definitely qualified as a weapon of terror. It had to be an excruciating way to go.
Doug was sitting in a mud puddle, slimy water seeping into his mother’s pink silk panties. He spit blood and an incisor and said, “This wasn’t the way it was meant to go.”
“Gimme your hand, dummy.”
I poured Doug into his Chevy and somehow got us home. First thing in the morning, we volunteered at our friendly, local neighborhood draft board for the next call-up. The army would be a good place to hide. It was better than waiting for the inevitable, not to mention the cops.
Our “Greetings from the President of the United States of America” letters came within a week. By early February we were at Fort Ord for basic training. Marching and shining our boots and pulling KP and being screamed at. The more intense their
pressure on me to conform, the fewer my inhibitions to do so.
After Basic, as you know, the army kept me at Ord and trained me to be their macabre version of a chef. Doug went to Fort Rucker, Alabama to aircraft mechanic school, where he received orders to Vietnam. Doug and I lost touch. Nothing happened, we simply drifted apart. In the last letter he ever wrote me, he said nine out of ten Rucker trainees had orders to Vietnam and that every map of the country had been torn out of every atlas in the post library. He’d had no idea where he was going.
I’d heard that Doug got into a disagreement with the Vietcong. While he was on night guard duty at his Bien Hoa airbase, they tried to blow up the place. They did so to a degree, but Doug went after them, expending his clips, making them pay, killing three of them. He went home with a Silver Star and a Purple Heart.
In Basic, I’d taken the cowardly route of ignoring Judy. After ten unanswered letters, she reciprocated. My immaturity was one of the luckier events in her life. While on leave from Vietnam, Judy and Doug eloped in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. Doug re-upped and became a lifer. Judy became an army wife and Doug retired after twenty years as a master sergeant.
A month following my MRI, Sally and I attended my high school class reunion. Thanks to Sally’s TLC and my medication, I was still in pretty decent shape, able to stay on my feet and converse normally, in good enough condition to say I was in the pink and get away with it.
Doug and Judy were there, too. She looked okay, matronly and pleasant, but I couldn’t conjure the Judy I’d known from that Judy.
I’d know Doug anywhere. He was a little heavier, and what remained of that carrot top was silver. He still had his goofy Howdy Doody smirk.
I believe he would have taken me up on a dare, but I couldn’t think of one.
8.
I AM awakened one morning in The Great Beyond by noise that sounds close, noise like a door slamming, noise that drowns out the soft piano tinkling of “Tiny Bubbles,” courtesy of those responsible for our multi-ultra-quadraphonic elevator music. A door slams again. This cannot be.
I rush to the living room and peek through drapes. A dark-complected young man is sitting on the front steps of the home to my left. He has shaggy black hair and Bambi eyes. He’s Middle Eastern, from somewhere in that part of The Land of the Living. His chin is cupped in his hands. He is not a happy camper.
Another cruel joke on me, I think. It’s one thing to people a strip mall with humanoid holograms, but to install one as a next door neighbor--. It isn’t much classier than whoopee cushions and exploding cigars.
I take the bait, though. I dress, walk outside and up to him. He looks up at me in surprise. I extend a hand. He extends his. In frustration, I squeeze air hard, expecting fingernails in my palm.
But it’s not air, it’s flesh and bone.
“Ow!” he cries, pulling his small, soft hand back.
I damn near jump out of my shoes. “Who the hell are you?”
“Who are you and where am I?”
“I’m Joe. The second part of the question is a bunch more complicated.”
He introduces himself. I catch only parts, syllables like “smi” and “eth’.
“Okay, Smitty.” I say.
“Smitty?” he says, gaining his feet.
Smitty is five-foot-five tops. “Smitty’sa fine, upstanding name.”
“If you say so.”
He’s still a sourpuss, so I say, “It’s not perfect, but it’s okay here in The Great Beyond. It could be a hell of a lot worse, pardon the pun. Nobody’s mistreated me. Not physically.”
“Tell me then, Joe, where are my virgins?”
I’d lay money he was one himself. “Well, Smitty, that’s a tough one to get your hands on, as is sex in general hereabouts.”
“But I was promised seventy virgins,” he wails.
Seventy. Holy shit! Smitty’s in The Great Beyond thanks to a dynamite undershirt he detonated. I yearned and yearned for human companionship and this is what I get. Wherever you are, dead or alive, kind reader, be careful what you wish for.
“Where did you blow yourself to smithereens, Smitty?”
He replies as blithely as if I’d asked him for directions to the public library. “In a market.”
“What market?”
“A crowded one.”
My neck is burning. “I think your bosses fibbed to you, Smitty.”
“No, cannot be! They promise seventy virgins if I do it.”
I’d like to stomp the homicidal little son of a bitch into a grease spot, but I force a smile and say, “Really and truly, they made that promise with their fingers crossed. And trust me, virgins are overrated. When I was your age and younger, I dated some. I’ll tell you, they were projects. When I dropped them off and we had our good-night kiss, after all that sweating and heavy breathing and ear-licking and kissing and lies at the drive-in movie or lover’s lane, they were still virgins, their panty girdles in place. Man, those things, they were like a suit of armor. No fun at all.”
He doesn’t reply.
“You were bullshitted by cowards who didn’t have the balls to do it themselves, pal.”
I had blasphemed. Smitty gives me a hateful glare before I head back home.
Which makes my day.
Forty-five-plus years earlier, in 1965 Saigon, I awakened one morning by noise, too, to an earthquake, not a biggie like Prince William Sound, Alaska’s 9.2 last year, but no minor tremor either. It was a ground-rumbling, lampshade-quivering sensation that I, a Seattleite, knew too well.
I flew out of bed and flung open the shutters. It wasn’t tectonic plates shifting. It was tanks in the streets, a line of them rumbling along ours. We had us yet another coup, the latest chapter of Götterdämmerung, South Vietnam style. The generals were playing musical chairs for the second or third or fourth time this year, one kleptocracy replacing another.
Nervous ARVN troops flanked and trailed the tanks, carrying rifles and carbines, patrolling for nothing in particular. The ones who appeared the most scared were the scariest. They were young and didn’t know who they were working for today. There were few civilians or civilian vehicles out and about.
My first instinct was to crawl under something, like we‘d done in grade school air raid drills in the 1950s. A siren would sound, as if it was the real warning for Uncle Joe Stalin lobbing in ICBMs. We’d quickly hunch under our desks. I never understood. If it was the real deal, where they’d drawn an X on the principal’s office for the target, we’d be vaporized while curled on the floor, rather than seated, struggling with long division.
Ziggy and I dressed, to do our duty. On the way to the 803rd, we whistled and forced smiles. We did not look anybody in the face.
There’d been rumors of a coup, but there were constant rumors of coups, so as far as I was concerned, the coup rumors didn’t qualify as rumors. A coup was not a surprise. Only the timing was.
What of Mai, my Dragon Lady? Had she watered my flowers and gently arranged them in a vase? Had she been in bed with an ARVN officer when I had come calling? In retrospect, her expression had been dreamy. I conceded that she surely knew senior brass, knew them carnally. A woman of her beauty and presumed charms, she wouldn’t settle for a paramour below the rank of colonel. My Dragon Lady in the funny papers was always in the thick of the intrigue, her sexuality easily read between the lines.
What side of the coup were her partners on? Was she privy to the coup planning? Was the lover I’d concocted an important player on today’s winning team, Mai escorting him in his triumph, she the next Madame Nhu? If not, would they be dragged out of bed and taken for a ride, her along as a collaborator?
I paused and breathed deeply. I had to cease this madness before I upchucked the breakfast I hadn’t eaten.
Captain Papersmith wasn’t in, not a huge stunner. He must have blundered out of the sack with a head-splitter, then crawled back under the covers. There’d be no special assignments for us today.
Company clerk PFC
A. Bierce was in, at his typewriter.
“Colonel Lanyard wants to see you ASAP, Joe,” he said.
“Just me?”
“Just you.”
“Whoever calls us on the carpet usually asks for both of us.”
I looked at Ziggy, who shrugged.
Bierce typed on. “I am only following orders.”
“Let me ask you a question, Herr Eichmann. Captain Papersmith said we were to assist you on your clerical duties as he sees fit, as you work like a dog, quote-unquote. What’ll that entail?”
“Don’t worry about it. I’m caught up.”
“Another question, PFC A. Bierce.”
He nodded and continued working.
“Is your first name Ambrose?”
The hunt-and-peck stopped.
He changed the subject. “That tattoo on your arm, are you from Montana?”
“No. How about yourself?”
“Nogales, Arizona.”
I’d suspected that he was versed on many topics, fine art included. “Believe it or not, Bierce, it was supposed to be a Mondrian. Long story.”
“Color fields. Ho-hum. I prefer the surrealists.”
“Dalí?”
“René Magritte is my favorite. That apple floating in midair, you can pluck it off the canvas and eat it.”
Before we drifted too far afield, I said, “I took a course on American humorists and satirists. Ambrose Bierce was prominent. He was a misanthrope. He was a sick puppy and he was hilarious. Kept me rolling on the floor.
“I especially enjoyed The Devil’s Dictionary. His definitions had me in stitches. His short story, Oil of Dog, too, where the protagonist perfected a concoction with his wife’s aborted fetuses, it was the sickest thing I have ever read. I loved it.
“I love his quotes, too. The one about war is a classic. War―a byproduct of the arts of peace.”
Bierce glared at me and said bitterly, “You know, Joe, the one reason I welcomed the draft is that I knew that nobody in this man’s army had ever heard of Ambrose Bierce.”
“I’m an exception to a lot of rules. I’ve had more college majors than Carter has pills. Like Ziggy, I possess a ton of trivial and absolutely useless information. My name is a bad family joke. Yours too?”
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