I asked Dad what the man meant by Baltonam and Dad explained how it was a cross between the words Baltimore and Vietnam. Just another name for our city.
“You were in Vietnam,” I said, watching someone else load a gun at the counter of the tent. “Baltimore isn’t like Vietnam, is it Dad?”
Dad agreed with me. He said Vietnam was nothing like Baltimore. He said that the two couldn’t be more different. Then he said, “Vietnam was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do.”
“Did you shoot anybody in Vietnam?” I asked.
An old lady with a walker stopped at the game, a little girl at her side. She sited down the rifle and popped three balloons in rapid succession. Panda time.
“I did shoot people,” he said. “I shot a lot of people. When our bullets killed someone we called them killshots.”
“Did they cry?” I asked. “The people you shot?”
“I did a lot of bad things over there, but they were things that needed to be done,” he said. “I did a lot of things that I am not proud of, Jeremy.”
“Were you sorry that you killed those people?” I asked.
“Not at the time,” he said.
“Does it make you sad now?”
“It makes me sad to tell you about it.”
I hugged his leg.
Dad got out his wallet and the man loaded our rifles. Dad instructed me on aiming for the killshot—how to control my breathing, how to inhale and exhale before squeezing the trigger.
BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG!
My shots hit everything except the wall as the kickback from the rifle jammed my shoulder. Dad, however, held the rifle like he’d never been without one. He raised it to his shoulder and stared down the barrel to aim, before popping five balloons in five pellets and winning a panda bear prize.
I wonder sometimes if I remember the details of this memory incorrectly, like maybe I learned some of the more disturbing details of Dad’s time in Vietnam years later and somehow combined them with this memory of us at the state fair as a way to deal with it. Then again, look at who I’m dealing with. Really, anything is possible.
A young man runs across the school parking lot and bangs on the side of the bus as we start to pull away. He yells to the driver to stop and open the door, but the bus keeps on rolling. We ride down the street and through a light before pulling back over to the curb.
Zombies attack the bus on all sides, slapping bloody palms and flesh-eaten fingers across the windows. Fast fuckers with gray skin, pocked with peach-sized craters of missing muscles. Hundreds of them flood the street, filling in around us. They vomit up their insides, growl through jagged teeth, and snap their jaws. The bus rocks side to side and soon will be on its side. Then the feeding will begin. Dinnertime. And there’s no place else that I’d rather be.
24
Dad orders dinner but doesn’t tell me when it arrives.
I can smell it up in my bedroom and my belly growls, so I go downstairs and find him in the living room already halfway through a container of moo shu pork and starting on egg drop soup. Dad loves Chinese food but hates Chinese people. He pinches a ball of rice in his fingers and drops it in his mouth. Dog pushes herself up from her bed in the corner and sniffs the floor, looking for dropped Chinese food. Dad plucks a bamboo shoot out of a container and feeds it to her. She loves him for it.
“Jeremy, cue up the movie when you come in, yeah?” He gulps from a bottle of beer, food still in his mouth. His attention and focus are on the black flat-screen TV with nothing on it, but if I were a fly on the wall and watched him I’d swear he saw something there.
“I didn’t know about dinner,” I say, sitting next to him on the couch. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I called you,” he says.
“No. You asked me to cue up the movie.”
“You were upstairs.” Dad puts down his plastic spoon and container of neon yellow liquid. He cups his hands over his mouth. “JEREMY. DINNER IS READY.” He picks up his spoon and container again.
“You never listen to me,” I say.
“And you lie.”
“Don’t change the topic, okay? I hate it when you do that.”
“You lie. You skip class and don’t say anything about it. I ask you to cue up the movie and you say yeah, yeah Dad but don’t cue up the goddamn movie. Does this look cued up to you?” He points to the blank TV. “Cued … up,” he says, turning on the TV and DVD player with the remote control. “Jeremy, is the movie cued up? Yes, why yes it is, Dad. Good job, son. Thanks, Dad.” He fake smiles to no one sitting next to him. Then looks at me. “Lied. Liar. Lie. You.” Chewing like a cow, he says, “Are we going to watch this goddamn movie, Jeremy, or do you want to hold hands and continue talking about our emotions until our periods sync?”
“I am asking a simple thing,” I say.
“You think I don’t know?”
“I know you hear me,” I say.
“You really are your mother’s son.”
“How hard is it to come up and get me when dinner is ready?”
“Fine. I will. Okay? Are we done here? Can we get on with it?”
“I love you, Dad.”
“I love you too,” he says, holding out his fist for me to pound. “I’ll be better about it. Promise.”
“We both know you won’t,” I say. I make a fist, tiny in comparison, and tap it against his, but his tap feels more like a jab. I grab the DVD from the table and cue the fucker up.
“I said I promise and when I promise, I promise,” he says. He finishes a bottle of beer, but has another one ready to open. He drinks half before setting it down. “In the Marines,” Dad says as the FBI warning fades up on the screen, “they teach you a lot of everyday skills. They teach you important qualities that every man should own, like loyalty, honor, respect. The Marines,” he says, aiming his fork at me, instead of having to look at me. “The Marines taught me the value and importance of consequence. They taught me a lot of things. A lot,” he says, looking at me now. “I was the one they trusted and so they taught me how to extract the tongue from a prisoner’s mouth, surgically, as a consequence for not cooperating with our interrogator.” He takes a small bite of his mu shu pork and then another bigger bite. “They taught me to do this thing as a consequence. If a valuable prisoner refused to speak, then the interrogator would say it was time to send in the doctor. That’s what they called me, the doctor. That poor bastard would see me walk in with a little black kit filled with the nastiest little blades and clamps, and immediately he’d sing the most beautiful song. Everything we needed to know, right there.” Dad scoops up more food, but doesn’t eat it. “And when he didn’t sing, I did what I had been trained to do. They took the kit away from me when I returned home. Said I had no civilian use for it.” He laughs. “So don’t ever lie to me.” He taps his temple. “I’ll know, or I’ll know how to get to the truth.”
Dad is known for his stories. He lectures and rants and keeps strong opinions that are mostly and largely not fit for radio or cable. But this story, this was different. This was new. This was about what he had done. Who he had been at one time. Extracting tongues.
“Once a long time ago,” he says, “way back at the beginning of everything, there was a man and he was alone with only one purpose—survival. He didn’t have a choice—he was a survivalist—and that one man learned the most valuable lesson of all. He learned that there are only two types of people in the world—the hunters and the hunters being hunted.”
I am goddamn thankful that Planet Terror, a true Zombie Apocalypse, a terrifically bad zombedy, begins.
The writer and director Robert Rodriguez has created one of my favorite heroines in zombie cinema: Cherry Darling—a go-go dancer, not a stripper as she argues throughout the movie. I love her mainly for clarifying this very issue of stripper v. go-go dancer throughout the movie. This zombedy has a phenomenal opening sequence wherein Cherry dances on a stage, shaking it out, until the very end where Rodriguez’s br
illiance truly shines through, revealing Cherry in all of her emotional glory as she collapses into a puddle of furious and hysterical tears, crumpled in the corner, crying on stage as all of her deep-seated emotional pain comes crashing down all around her.
If you ask me, though, she is a stripper, not that I’ve ever really seen a stripper. Dad thinks she’s one too and I’m fairly sure he has seen a stripper. In the 1970s a chick that danced and stripped on stage was a go-go dancer. In the 1980s, this same thing was called a stripper. Either way, the girl is usually showing tit, at least.
Planet Terror is the kind of movie where it’s part zombie film, part schlock, part low-budget gore fest, part skin flick. It’s the complex, complicated layers that make it great and more than some dumbass zombie movie. Regardless, one thing remains true—zombies are dead inside without any stake in humanity. They generally have no emotion and carry only the need for destruction and cannibalism. The zombie movie is a morality tale. Catholics call these parables. Recently, Hollywood calls them box office blockbusters.
Dad and I’ve seen Planet Terror a trillion times. Shit, we’ve seen every zombie movie a trillion times, but everyone has his or her comforts.
25
There’s a chemical explosion in Planet Terror (isn’t there always?) that causes human skin to melt and liquefy into horrendous walking rotting corpses of goo. Dad calls these Goo Babies. They are the grossest kind of zombie you can encounter. Like melted gum on the bottom of your shoe.
“Dad, there are two things I want to say to you. I don’t like the fact that you disappear every night and I don’t think that Liza really exists.” I’ve broken two of the Zombie Survival Codes. I made eye contact with him and opened my damn mouth. I sit back and wait for him to respond—shout or explode, I’m not sure which yet.
“Let’s play Zombie. Okay? Situation—you’re alone in this house.”
“Is Liza here?” I ask.
“You’re in the basement. By yourself. It’s our basement.”
“Is it day or night?” I ask.
Dad rips off the end of an egg roll. “Night,” he says.
“What kind of dark?” I ask.
“Good question,” he says. I love it when he says that. Makes me feel like I’m his only son. “Early morning dark—the darkest before dawn.”
“Like the time of day you usually come home?” I ask. “That kind of dark dawn?”
“It’s early morning,” Dad says, pushing his plate away from him. “Very dark. Stop fucking around. I’m doing our thing here. This is our thing. Zombie is our thing. Come on.”
“Where are you in this scenario?”
“I’m dead. Throat ripped out. In my office.”
“What kind of zombies? Are we talking Night of the Living Dead zombies? Planet Terror, Goo Baby zombies? White Zombie zombies?” I ask, laughing.
White Zombie is technically the first zombie film ever made in 1932 and the zombies in it act more like people who smoked too much weed. Not scary at all. They look like they’re sleepwalking because they’re hypnotized.
“Not White Zombie zombies,” he says. “28 Days Later. Fast fuckers. Infected. Now. What do you use as your weapon and what is your escape route?” Dad gulps his beer, like he can’t drink fast enough.
I can’t wait for my favorite scene where Cherry Darling has her leg amputated and replaced with a Minigun prosthetic leg to fight off the zombies, but we are nowhere near it. While I’m talking about it, the name Minigun is a misnomer. A Minigun is a 7.62millimeter, multi-barrel machine gun that fires 6,000 rounds per minute with rotating barrels. It’s badass. Ain’t nothing mini about it. It’s gigantic as fuck. A megagun, more like it.
“And you can’t say Minigun,” Dad says. “You always say Minigun. Not this time. The zombies are descending the stairs. Go.”
“Baseball bat,” I say.
“Aluminum or wood?”
“Aluminum.”
“Why?”
“A hatchet or handsaw or claw hammer would cause more damage, but I would have to get right up in there to cause damage. Plus, far too messy with all that hacking.” Dad’s tongue comment comes rushing back, but I shake it away. “Wouldn’t want to risk getting that residual blood splatter in my eyes or mouth. If I had time, I’d wear a full body rain slicker too, but does anybody ever really have time to grab the things they need? So I’d use an aluminum baseball bat. This would cause severe disorientation with multiple headshots and I would be using strength, velocity, and distance, rather than just strength. Added bonus—that ping sound. Metal meeting undead body—awesome.”
“Wouldn’t a bat slow you down and wear you out after a while? Think about it. After every swing, you’d have to pull back and wind up. That’s a lot of energy exerted over very minimal aerial coverage.”
“You want to know why a baseball bat is the best weapon out of all non-firearm weaponry? Two words—choke up.” I slide my hands together. “Higher up on the bat you go gives you more speed and power at less exerted force. It’s physics or some shit.”
“But it’s only true to a point. You can choke up some, but at a certain point it’s less power and less force. You understand? And if you go up too far, guess what? It’s less speed, too.” Dad finishes his beer. “Next—your escape route?”
“I’d fight off the first wave and pile their bodies up at the base of the stairs so that the second wave would be met by a barricade of their own undead family. Suck on that.” I pantomime swinging a bat and make a clucking sound with my tongue on contact with the imaginary zombie. I go on for a while about where else I’d go, and what I’d do. I end up talking about it on and off through the rest of the movie. When the credits roll, I ask him where he’d go, what his weapon would be.
Dad sits on the edge of the couch, resting his elbows on his knees. He runs his hands through his thick wavy hair, eyes closed. “I’m too old to run anymore. I’d welcome that kind of change of pace.”
26
I wake up on the couch with Dog licking my face and the TV stuck on a bright blue menu screen. Dad is gone again. I know what needs to be done.
In Dad’s office—James Dean, Purple Heart, Jane Mansfield, box of war.
I shuffle through the boxes in Dad’s closet until I find the business of the night. The box of war slides out easy like before. I unflap the top and dig around for the book and plastic case, but nothing new has been added. It’s possible Dad didn’t have time to sneak them into the house and left them in his car, maybe the glove box or under his seat.
Back at his desk, I survey the scene. Everything that had been there yesterday—the sick drawings of body parts wearing neckties, the Christopher’s surgery textbook, and the notes with the names and numbers and dates—had all been removed, disappeared. I opened the desk drawers and knocked my hand around inside. Nothing.
I lift the box of war back onto the shelf and slide it against the wall. I run my hand along the back of the shelving unit, but there isn’t enough space to hide anything back there. I step up onto my toes and feel around on top of the boxes, but also don’t feel anything. Then, there, stacked neatly in the corner on the floor is everything I had hoped to find. Christopher’s textbook of surgery, the notes of information, sickass drawings, and Rembrandt gifts—all out in the open as if to say fuck you.
The book—Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky.
The disc—Sublimation.
I read the back of the book and am not entirely sure what it’s all about, but the one piece of information that I retain is that the main character attempts to save a young prostitute named Liza. Dad’s new fake girlfriend. I put the book back on the floor and retrieve the plastic case instead.
I place Sublimation in the tray of the living room DVD player. I have no idea how the guts of electronics work but hear our machine working overtime, churning the disc around, searching for a reading or data lines or whatever is imprinted on the burned DVD copy. My insides burn while I wait—my heart, my lungs, my muscles.
Now my skin burns too. The DVD player whips the stubborn disc in circles, searching, and then there is a change. The timer on the player begins to roll, measuring time by the second, a bomb in reverse. An electric charge sparks through my organs. What the fuck does Sublimation mean? I hold one finger on the pause button and one finger on the fast-forward button, ready to press either one at any moment. I’ve seen enough of Jackson naked over the years. The thought of seeing Dad’s dong or even seeing Dad banging this imaginary whore, Liza—or the thought of Mr. Rembrandt naked—it makes me sick.
The screen flickers. Thin, white lines streak and scroll up from the bottom, horizontally, thin at first, but widening as they reach the top. The lines grow and widen, before cutting back to a soundless black—disappearing. A screen of nothing. The black continues. Then, a buzz breaks into the background, faint, but constant and steady. The buzz, too, fades away and disappears and reveals for the first time actual sound—movement. General movement without words. Like when Dad returned from his walk with Dog—coughing, grunting, walking, moving, breathing, whatever-the-fucking. I punch up the volume and lean in close. The screen still black, a muffled voice speaks in short, clipped phrases. A calm voice. A male voice. A direct voice directing others. The whatever-the-fuck noise in the audio scrambles like tuning in an AM radio station, finally correcting itself, clearing away the cobwebs. Then the voice.
“Some call it God’s Will. Others—Devil’s work. Some call it Fate. Others—self-directed destruction. Maybe you prefer Destiny. The semblance of it amounts to utter garbage. We live a predetermined life, an inevitable existence. A name matters nothing. What we seek is absolution. What we seek is beyond a higher power. What we seek is reckoning. What we seek is an uncommon valor. A code—this is it and it is all we have—a code. Wholeness. Transgressing without the slowed process of phases. Skip the burn and get right to the healing. Fractured, bitter, endless pieces familiarized into a singular oneness. You. A man. Adam. God’s creation. The first. Fuck Eve. It’s about commitment. Sublimation of spirit. Will. Fate. Destiny. Bullshit. One code. Without it, we are merely base animals. Do we agree?”
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