Bart Platenga
Ocean Groove, Ocean GraveNovel excerpt: H., is an ex-military vet (of no verifiable war), K., is a lanky Lolita-type poetess, and P., a mysterious “I” character, not so much a community member as a virus, a grey bedouin defined by his migrations and the conjectures and prejudices of the locals.
Ocean Grove, NJ, is a picturesque but conservative Methodist town of 5000 inhabitants along the New Jersey shore, just south of Asbury Park and 40 miles south of New York. During the summer tourist season, the town bloats to nearly twice its off-season population.
Disclaimer: Author does not dispute the diagnosis of PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) — in soldiers who have actually seen combat duty.---------------------------
August 6, mid-afternoon
I saw the flat black SS 396 of H. parked diagonally in front of Gifts by Tina. I decided to ignore my over-compensating survival instinct and walk by as nonchalantly as my imagination would allow. I had to quit letting my mind get the best of me.And there they sat, H. and K. Presumably she had just gone to the bank to drain more spending loot from her account. This was the insinuation made by G. who I spoke to briefly on the street. G. said she was worried about this. “With her mom and H. she’ll prob’ly end up in Monmouth County Community.”
Through the scratched and peeling effects of self-stick applied smoked glass I caught a sliver of the ghost which seemed to represent H. smiling right into me. The smile was no more perceptible however than a piece of sunlight highlighting the hairline fracture in a grimy wine glass.
It was like a peep show that lasted as long as the snap of a finger. A peep show where the attraction was not nudity so much as the dramatic collapse of the individual.
It was as if I were in a late night video arcade and his windshield was the monitor of that game Terror Trucker. And as I stood and stared I noticed that my stare had been reversed. And now it was I who was being stared at; it was I who was being manipulated like some pixeled blip on a screen. It was I who had become the victim pedestrian. And I could see on the screen that every thought he had ever forgotten was a landmine, the maze through which I had to negotiate.
K. meanwhile, sat stockstill, like a hostage, eyes like dull buttons on an old coat. She didn’t dare wave or didn’t dare want to wave. It was as if I was not there. I looked down quickly and saw my feet attached to my legs. This reassured me. I imagined (but shouldn’t have) him poking a gun into the most delirious, if minimal, fatty folds (whatever fat had not been eaten away by nerves) that gathered at her feminine waist.
H. backed out into traffic without looking. This was admirable. Life was, for H., all a matter of trust, confidence, daring-do. Fear is stored in the spongy matter in the limbic system, 10,000 years of it, just enough to make us stupid and fascinating. Being able to inject fear into a control situation is a way of projecting prowess (H.’s reported erectile impotence could have been caused by the very fear of impotence or the suspicion that perhaps these glam acts of prowess weren’t really compensatory enough. Anyway, there were indications that K. might have been making up some of his dysfunctions, telling others, in an attempt to get back at him.)
He revved and revved the engine, then slammed it into first and burned rubber. The screech careened eerily along the somnolent walks, unearthly and full of commotion. People stood still as figures in a museum diorama for a few seconds, then went along their ways, finishing afternoon errands and passing by the film crews with the hopes that they might be chosen as walk-ons.
This too seemed admirable, H.’s ability to remind people of his existence, a gesture that sat somewhere between desperate and noble, art and harassment.
As the pungent blue smoke cleared I saw them heading west on Ocean Ave., out the gates of Ocean Grove; I think my eye was trying to convince the fragile state of my mind that I could see her long slender neck arise just above the fake leopard-covered seat and see the slight twitch of her sternocleidomastoid muscle, that nice cord of muscle in the nape of the neck. If you look you’ll see the soft downy hairs pricked up by shivers — I do — and if you inhale, you smell the warm display in the confectioner’s window, behind the ear that keeps the head on straight, that allows it to say YES without thought and misgiving.
Can someone victimize so effectively with the status earned as a victim? Can a victim victimize an entire community with his renovations of character? An unqualified YES is in order here.
At some instant in time (where is that dusky moment when dark goes light, when doubt becomes faith?) the Grovers just began believing him. True to the notion of Christians of Convenience, practicing, honing their own form of cognitive dissonance, it was easier (if you believe, you just have to believe — no messy logic, analysis or philosophical quandaries — no fuss no muss). Also more entertaining.
During the summer, the body of H. became a testament to his trial and tribulations. The wounds were there for all to see, like a muscle-bound savior up on a cross in a 14th-century painting. The cut-off camouflage Army pants, Army boots, camouflage tee shirt shorn strategically of its bottom third to reveal a bare midriff riddled with the bulletholes (that K. suspects may be tattoos! Or wait, is it me who planted the doubt in K.’s brain in the first place? Which she then ran with to prop up as her own astute observations? Isn’t this how she hoped to become more sophisticated?)
There it was a constellation of wounds turning a stigma into stigmata, (self-inflicted) wound into heroism. And there he’d be swaggering his limp down Ocean Ave., a one-man cathartic show. As I have remarked earlier, the cane was an admirably dapper touch. Method acting that converted the thing into the person, the injury into personality, the limp into myth, as the jingly medals and a fat cluster of keys and tools jangled menacingly and testicularly from his grommeted belt. One could almost be reminded of a desperado’s spurs. And in this swagger the conflagrations of an entire world seemed to be worked out in the high resolution of his own apocalypses on the backs of his eyelids.
Why would anyone doubt him if they did not intend to sacrifice him on his way to defaming their “way of life in Ocean Grove, the freedoms we Americans have fought so hard to preserve?” This is what the letters-to-the-editor section of the Ocean Grove Times wanted to know week after week. “Let’s put the gates back up and learn the lessons of our heroic forefathers — Remember the Alamo!”
Only the liberal, “pro-Marxist,” “pro-union,” “anti-American,” press would stoop so low as to use H. to destabilize the very lifestyles held so dear by all “real” Americans. The Asbury Park Press ran an article which rehashed old issues surrounding H. H. had not long ago been arrested for public drunkenness, (“it’s understandable after what he’s been through defending this nation’s freedoms,” retorted one editorial in theTimes reacting to the Press), disorderly conduct, public lewdness, a danger to himself (who isn’t, I thought) wielding a huge Ginsu knife and one of his vintage sabers (eventually traced to a museum in Wilmington, Delaware) down by the Trailways Bus “Terminal” (a greasy corner on Kingsley, a sign emblazoned with a fading Trailways symbol on a bent pole) to “spook the spooks” as he was quoted as saying. Chanting all sorts of wild things: “my shiny saber thrusteth for sure cuz my strength is as strong as 10 cuz my heart is hard and pure ...” He’d said it all before. The journalist was not only “insensitive” to H.’s war record by questioning the honor of his past but also for delving into it and discovering his dishonorable discharge right there in a back issue of the same newspaper. He had just reiterated the facts — there had been no battles, no wars, no peacekeeping ventures during his time. All that had already been established for the public record in some forgotten past, never mind his being caught in a Memorial Day Parade “by a colonel of Hispanic descent” wearing the medals he’d never earned and had probably swiped from deceased soldiers. I read it’s called borrowed virtue: the action of a man who feels weak or inadequate by himself who gains feelings of strength and superiority by attaching himself to a stronger man or organization or icon. In this way a man can feel that he can vanquish foes, avenge wrongs, protect a way of life.
The Grovers, young and old alike, were angry, everyone was angry, angry with how disappointed they all were with everything and everyone. The letters poured in for months; each week another letter or 2 appeared in the Times. The Grovers had huddled around the Beersheba Well and out of the grumbling outrage regarding Communist, Unamerican outsiders came the “decision” to rally around H. The town gave him the very status he had for so long desired — hero. He was a hero because the besieged Grovers could themselves be ennobled if they could effectively rally around this victim, if they could get behind the whole thing, they could embody the victimhood and then nobly resist it — Remember the Alamo!
No amount of truth, fact, dossiers of cited evidence, declassified documents could now undermine their victimhood, their special resolve to hoist him, into his proper ascendancy, forged in faith, nourished by need all because they had discovered the proper degree of plausible denial. His “suffering” was hijacked to appeal to the Grovers as emotion and that emotion would justify the moral sentiment aroused, which would egg them on to political actions taken.The townspeople were brutally portrayed (“eviscerated” their Congressman would protest) in a New Yorker article in the heat of the calamity. It seemed to have little effect other than to further cement their resolve:
“... so flattened by their various consumptions, surviving by moderation, clipping their highs and lows like spiritual Dolby. No deep, calm lines of purpose, eyes like shallow washtubs filled with stagnant water — not the eyes of deep meditation — they’re proud of their benign surfaceness! Among tourists and journalists, they are pictures of hospitality and restrained conviviality, ‘a soft and anxious compliance’ as C. Wright Mills put it. High conformers who know that the Pledge of Allegiance, hand over heart, guarantees them freedoms that they’ve long ago stopped implementing. They are conventional, authoritarian and obedient (demanding the police enforce unenforceable laws) and less capable of tolerating uncertainty and ambiguity and thus, they invent traditions everywhere — you see many signs that say ‘1st annual tradition.’
“They lionize gut reactions, action, can-doers, generals, captains-of-industry — ‘Less talk, more action’ — imbue events with significance if they arouse emotion. The emotional arousal then justifies the belief in whatever aroused it — this defines their personal relationship with god.
“In the summer of 1986, area beaches from Point Pleasant to north of Long Branch were closed because raw sewage, garbage and sludge had been washing ashore — I found syringes on the beach. But Ocean Grove was spared; it was the only area beach declared safe for swimming and many around town could be seen openly gloating; smirking up toward heaven because they “heard” something no one else heard — God’s message of gratitude to the devout, the upright entrepreneur, those who had spent the time to establish a personal relationship with Him while fate had punished those who’d gone astray. Special reprieve? Mere chance? Re-election maneuver — safe beach = tourism = reelection? No and double NO!!
“They await hurricanes, tragedy, scandal, the next gay urban professional invasion to threaten their simple ways. They are vaguely harassed, easily put upon; a skateboard or punk haircut can send them over the edge. They want to get their dander up, get pissed, solemn or weepy, in front of the next charred remains of the next torched home, the next cataclysm, the next unsolved teen murder, the next charismatic guru of calamity; Charles Manson in a cheap suit, a Rambo Rector, reconstructed and welcomed into their desperate fold, paid well to speak in the ‘Big Aud’, to spark their dead fireplace hearts, reinvigorate them, bring them back from the malls with the high drama of death. In turn, they enforce this behavior to assure that their proofs are borne out revealing them to be somewhat good judges of character.
“But this unquestioning sympathy often gets tested, and perversely at that, by the very anointed one who cannot believe how far they will go for him which prods him to see just how far that far is ... One must admire their ability to so painlessly time and time again return to belief. Like robbers returning to their hideout. Their beliefs supersede justice, clarity, truth, culminating in a cultish state of “not thinking,” thinking being the enemy, the “barrier to experience.” EST-Guru, Werner Erhard once said that thinking is just old endless cassettes going round interfering with the essence of pure experience ...”
K. showed me an article, said H. said it was about him: “ ... not truly of [his] native place or region ... always angry ... dodging the dutiful truant officers of those lost days, already a fanatacizing loner ... whose chance of fame would always be proportional to his willingness to self-destruct.” That these words did not paint a very pretty picture seemed to escape H. or be besides the point in the schemes of his ascendancy. There were some indications that he just did not care. It was at least something.
Years later I would discover quite by chance, the article he had given K., as if it had been a resume, to actually be a review by Robert Stone of a book by Norman Mailer about the life of Lee Harvey Oswald!
The happiest man in “our” town meanwhile, was a WWII shellshock victim, an oldtimer who rode a rickety bicycle around the shady streets, oblivious to all, attuned to another bell somewhere tolling. Everyone and no one was his friend. “Howdy!” He’d call out to one and all, one arm chopping woodenly through the morning air. He’d say the same thing everyday, “Nice day for a fair ain’t it?!” But after analyzing his speech pattern over the months, it began to seem more and more evident that what he was really saying was, “Nice day for an air raid.”
Is this the H. we can expect in 10 years? Will there be entire communities of casualties, modeled after the leisure communities, Stepford Chateaus West, Beirut Estates, Granada Shoreview, ambient dysfunctionals who live in controlled communities in the Pine Barrens, well-lit ramps, social activities, wheelchair basketball, their bitter urine seeping in through the sandy soil to contaminate the largest fresh water aquifer on the East Coast?…
Another old coot (well, it could be anyone) put up fliers declaring who was and wasn’t welcome inside the gates of Eden:
This is Ocean Grove NJ — We Protect Our Own [presumably meaning H.]
We say YES to:
1. Patriotism
2. Good workers
3. Honest Businessmen
4. Helpfulness and Politeness to others
5. Property OWNERSHIP and IMPROVEMENTWe say NO to:
1. Criminals and Vandals
2. Prostitutes
3. Legacy Hunters
4. Panhandlers
5. “Lawsuit” Abuser Bums
6. Drug and Alcohol Abusers
7. Marxist FanaticsKEEP OCEAN GROVE BEAUTIFUL BOTH PHYSICALLY AND MORALLY
Oh yea H., I’ve been thinking about this bragging you do about killing people you never killed in battles you never fought. Apparently you claim to have killed some 100 enemy soldiers in close, sometimes hand-to-hand combat — what enemy, where!? I guess we make the most of what we don’t have.
First there’s the soldier who has killed and is proud of it. It shows him to be brave and loyal. That’s pathetic enough. But you, you who have never killed, been shot at (unless it was your fellow soldiers), never seen combat, who then makes a career out of these lies, constructing an entire foundation upon which to display your manhood, a chest to pin medals on, in effect; I mean that really gets me. Your soul up for sale. All funneled into the transformation of wish into lie into career into martyrdom. Ingenious. But nothing I say can matter to you or them because all of you have dug in for the long haul.
I can’t even get it up to get pissed at you any more. It’s like getting pissed at a dog that’s been hit by a car that in turn holds up traffic, creating a traffic jam that ultimately causes me to be late for work. How can I get mad anymore when I now fully comprehend your madness as a sort of method?
August 17
When I read the photocopy of an article in the Ocean Grove Times taped to the window of the Pathway Market I went in anyway to do my shopping ... auto ... But never before had I had such trouble negotiating my ... accident ... way from one aisle to another. It’s small here, cramped but negotiable if you arrive with a list and have internalized a mental map of the store’s layout. They keep everything pretty much the same, the small tins of tuna ... intercranial hematoma, massive skull fracture ... have always been down aisle 2, second shelf, so the oldsters don’t have fits. Habit had also made the connect the dots — peanut butter, coffee ... severely ... cheddar cheese, yogurt ... injured ... even easier ... K. in a coma ... I could actually do it all in less than 10 minutes ... ...But today I just stared ... out of which she has emerged ... at every item ... only several times ... as if the label were in Japanese or Cyrillic, as if the items weighed less or more ... and then for only a few minutes ... as if every label had been printed backwards ... blood vessel ruptures between skull and brain ... glued to the wrong containers, as if prices had come down or gone up ... weak wan smile ... the frozen pizza felt warm. I shook the can of peas ... blood leaks between brain and skull forms blood clots which compresses brain tissue ... was overwhelmed to tears by all the cereals ... needed more surgery ... each box a happier one than the next ... evidence of lingering neurological integration ... Tried to peek inside the Brillo Box ... still displays steady minimum necessary qualities for personhood ... Were the pads still pink? … H. sustained only superficial injuries They were! To celebrate I twisted the cap off a bottle of warm Pepsi. It spritzed all over the shelves, floor and my shorts… The police refused to respond to reports that a suicide note detailing their pact… The stockboy came over asked, “Can I HELP you?” As in get the hell out of the store… Sources close to H.’s family claim that H. insists he has the suicide note but no one has thus far been unable to locate it…
August 21
It was ironic, I thought, that they — H. and K. — were both in the same hospital. And that, like her mind floating on the uncharted sea of her coma, her body was nowhere to be found by me. The room was kept totally secret while the criminal investigation continued. I prowled the corridors, paced the floors, nose up in the air, flared tuberculum septi ready to suck up the an-alpha pheromonal effluvia that fermented between her thighs and could set into motion a set of complex and irrevocable arousal responses. I could hear marching band music, like a high school band practicing just over the horizon — “Strike Up The Band,” “The Liberation of Grenada March” — I seemed to be getting further and further away, harsh fluorescent light bouncing off hard ceramic tile and waxed linoleum; the orderlies pointing this way and that, down deep long hallways until I was facing a huge swinging door: Dept. of Waste Disposal — No unauthorized Personnel. Down another corridor and another dead end — Unauthorized Entry Forbidden. Hints of tear clung to my pupils to make a shambles of a clear view. The harder you search the less you find — is this a law of the universe meant to keep the likes of me humble or what? “7666 Trombones” ...
H. was lying there when I entered. A room all to himself — ah, the luxuries that notoriety affords. The hospital bed seemed to absorb him, yet oddly, also seemed to prop him up, to make something out of him, giving his body substance despite the feeble, rapid pulse. Like a small king on a big throne immersed in a coloring book, first outlining the section of the head he is about to color in.
It was not a total mistake, not total happenstance that led me into this room. I thought, what the hell, maybe I could weasel something out of him. Shake something loose. Look into his eyes and find something stuck in his gaze. Even entertained the thought of making a mask of K.’s face and then putting it on here to torture him — the old nagging memory torture, eh, ole Gutless Wonder.
The stitches made his face look like a smiling pigskin. “You are a fuckin’ mess that even Mother Teresa would turn away from.” I whisper.
Each slash, slit and wrinkle a potential escape route. Any emergent triumph his image of self might secure, welcome home fanfare, for instance, was inversely proportional to how broken up his body was perceived to be. If his entire skeleton were to get pulverized, the dust would certainly end up blowing into the faces of the Grovers because they were ready to make him a noble thing, a collective project, because the more he could be perceived as teetering on the edge of death, the more life would be pumped into his body. Life — if he walked away without a scratch he might walk right into the obscurity caused by forgetfulness. Death, or near-death, would make him bigger than James Dean, bigger than life.
I stood over his body. His eyes shut — like an infant or a grandfather. Throat greedily sucked in air like a carburetor with the air filter removed, finger down its metal maw, jamming open its epiglottis to allow even more air in — sucking, sucking. I could not help but notice that I could have easily pulled the clear tubes from his limbs and guts, smothered him with the extra pillow. I watched the fluid flowing from the intravenous bottle through the clear ICU. I contemplated pissing in the bottle, having him process that. I could have, would have — 2 weeks ago but now I just stared at him. The bruises on the exposed portions of his body — his face, neck, and hands — lent him a kind of battered elegance. The configuration of blue blossoms on white flesh created a certain pugilist or maritime mythology — a geography of tattoos that might effectively gather sympathy at its source.
“Gotta hand it to you, H., you made the Grove your lil Cape Fear.”
The eye that is the wound in the face that gathers the data of encroaching ugliness began to twitter. “Robert Mmm ...”
“Mitchum.” A symmetry emerged between my upright body and his supine wooden corpus, my face in reference to his. Like sail to deck, sextant to sky. There was nowhere for either of us to be since the “accident” (the investigation will, for all intents and purposes, conclude accident) except right here. No schedules. Schedules had never kept us anyway. Death, or some vague sniff of it, had opened up the world, wide and vast. He pointed to the pen in my breast pocket. I handed it to him. He wrote on the backside of a magazine: “a symetric warfair tha’s armys word for big fucken surprise weapon. (sic)”
My face dangled over his. Day after day I found myself there, hovering like a satellite around something with gravity. I returned day after day without food, without flowers, without hunger, thirst or any of the usual needs I had experienced before. Our bodies — I watched the in- and exhalations, as all attention hovered over this sucking organ — not occupying space so much as preoccupied with the attitude that would insure our respective terrains. Trench warfare, the big staredown, a standoff, a bile-full, combustible acid in solution, a détente of volatile hormones, hormones begging to tag atmosphere as territory and terror as space, a relationship between a matrix of chakras.
“You might die, I hear ...”
“No, they say ...”
“That’s my prognosis.” The edges of his smile were quickly absorbed by the globules of flesh that clung to his cheekbones. His eyes, now open, open and strange and dark like 2 whistling bulletholes in an abandoned warehouse window.
“Fatigue is a fifth-column enemy that is always ready to infiltrate and attack.”
“Wha’z’at from yer Army Manual?”
“It’s from my excell ... brain. You here to see to tha ...”
“That you die? Yea, I wish I could ...”
“You don’t mea ...”
“Mean that? Oh yea, ever since I thought you were fucking with K., afflictions sucking up compassion ...”
“Tha’s poe’ry, byOOful bu’ wron’.” His face swollen, puffed out yet sucked into itself at the same time. His sharp, splintery features floating in the chemical soup of the various local and general anesthetics.
“Don’t think so, and then you deprived her of college and whatever else, like you were keeping her for yourself, like kids in a playground that’d rather break their toys than share’m ...” His emotions looking for some pain to fish out of this anesthesia that he might be able to retool for his own purposes. But there was none to be found.
“Death’s our best PR, man ...” The more pitiful he appeared the more like a king he became. His every triumph hinging on the dramatic nature of his post-convalescent limp — the Grove’s king of kings. His severe dyskinesia, is what he’s got, is an abnormality in performing voluntary muscular movements that will offer him great accumulations of power around his afflictions and justify further complaints that begin to act more and more like brags. He will use his lacquered and carved cane as magic wand and his new limp will make him irresistible to girls, war vets, and mothers alike. [G. will insist I surreptitiously watch H. as the limp all but miraculously disappears when no one seems to be looking.] He will manage, through no real volition of his own, the ever more ecstatic relations with the projected tragic image of himself.
“Least still got me set o’ wheels ...” Something like a smile or an old book’s cracked spine. His weak arm made a gallant effort to dramatize the joke by pointing down, down under his bed toward the gurney’s wheels. “Zero 60 in ...”
“... no time.”
“How mushdju believe ...?” His voice continued to trail off and yet somehow I managed to finish each of his sentences. Like I could read his mind. But then, I had already spent so much time nosing around there in the dusty stacks of his cerebral folds. The “H. case history dossier” contained the collected observations, handwriting samples, snapshots of his car, the quotes gleaned from reporters, the clippings ... Newark Star Ledger: “Nice guy ... Nice enough ... mother doted ... they had a crazy way of always being together ... neighbors say he slept in her bed until he was 16 ... others say longer ... jobless ... camouflage ... strange, oddball but no psycho ... gun collection extensive ... sword and knife collection ought to be sold to a museum ... father disappeared ... after a scandal that involved the abuse of his position ...”
H. case history dossier: “The military psychiatrists and civilian therapists have yet to take into account the possibility of a complex intermingling of fantasy and memory. The way his mind creatively reconstructed rather than passively accumulated memories and perceptions ... an act of deep collusional self-deception ... Stress induced by humiliation during showers and drills, slapped by an officer ... a gloved violation of his anal cavity ... 3 weeks in the hole for wrongful conduct — C-rations (dog food), roaches, lice, slept in own fecal matter ... tortured into expectorating, defecating on U.S. flag and forced to masturbate before laughing guards ... further evidence of humiliation based on perceived diminutive nature of genital area ... left testicle possibly undescended ... potential suggestibility of H. left his identity organized around a sense of self as victim. His mother often made the sign of snipping scissors with her forefinger and middle finger — SnipSnip — to bring him back in line ... military psychiatrists applied coercive techniques, left scissors strategically out on the desk, bit into hot dogs during sessions, all of which further abused patient ... in an attempt to extricate a recruiting mistake without admitting to their diagnostic errors ...
But there are indications that he was totally aware that disordered brain function is easily reproduced managing conversions of affliction into personality, injuries into positive traits “the way horseflies lay eggs in warm cow dung” ...
His memories were altered, “nervous depression” tweaked, anguish amplified, self-inflicted gunshot wound, and ailments tailored to the expectations of the Grovers who gladly consumed the dramatic plight ... has created complex sycophantic relationships with this small community ... His partially remasticated falsely-recovered memories enhance fictive engagements with imaginary traumas aiding in the construction of “selves.” These casually manufactured false memories are further enhanced into biographical fact by the suggestive questioning of therapists encouraging pornographic confessions — “and then what’d you do to her?” ... forced to unearth traumatic experiences utilizing recovered-memory hypnosis, sodium pentathol, coerced body mnemonics, and therapeutically-generated memories to produce otherwise unknown and biographically anomalous events ... offered rewards when confessor is congratulated for creative memories ... too often concluded that symptoms are indicators of repressed sexual abuse ... and then shoved into the arrogant tautology offered by psychoanalysts: any repression is an indication that the lack of memory of a particular trauma is itself evidence of the trauma ... Rumors of incestuous activity between mother and son ... genital stimulation sensual kissing and flagrant caressing ... mother taunted lovers by caressing son “lovingly” ... vulnerable patient’s identity (described as a tender, unexceptional child) fully organized around a sense of self as victim ... too predisposed to regard symptoms as consistent with abuse and seldom questioned the culpability of a proud and conniving mind.”
Asbury Park Press: “He studied books — war, the history of “his” war(s), the psychology, films, dying scenes, John Wayne, Audie Murphy, Lee Marvin, Robert DeNiro, Christopher Walken — their walks and grimaces, the torture scenes from The Deer Hunter, the insanity of Robert Duvall in Apocalypse Now, Willem Dafoe, Chuck Norris, Stallone, Travis Bickle. The neighbor teens tell of how they’d see him in front of his mirror reciting, ‘Are you talkin’ to me, well, who the hell else are you talkin’ to? ...’”
“Some people got talent, others got charm but you got third-hand ‘awarenesses’ of illnesses that you put to use like emotional levers to get you what you don’t even care about getting anymore.”
“Brill’nt. Lahk’t ...You know I had me enough life to kill me 10 time over. I got scars roun’ mah ass ho’ make you puke all day. I had me so many women it make me into a fag ...” As his voice emerged from the painkillers it grew sharper and twangier. It was the drift of an accent that Northerners acquire in the Army that is best described as a “boot camp drawl.” It seemed overly manufactured, this illusion that there was a nonchalant self-assured individual inside that drawling body. But why do Northerners all acquire this? Why don’t Southerners end up with a Yankee accent? I would ask him next time.
“I don’t see ... I have fucked my share ...”
“Yea, butchu be doin’ it in the employ o’ gatherin’ info-mation fer yer books. I just fuck women to fuck’m ...”
“Not no more ...”
“Yea, well, I jus’ grew tired of their dee-mands. They’s all like the eyes of a hurricane. You can think of the pussy as the eye of a hurricane like a black hole in space like a big stinky drain that suck up all the sperm, blood and life you got. It’s Asian women man, that suck me dry — hehehe — especially Thai women, they are the best or the worst dependin’ whether yer on top or bottom. I mean, why fohck they call’m ‘Thighs’ and why’s their big city call’ ‘Bang-Cock’!”
“At this point I don’ believe you ...” He also may have been bi-polar which is a technical term for manaic depressive). But somehow I couldn’t allow diagnosis to give him the benefitt of the doubt.
“Wha’s the point of a story if it ain’t entertainin’?”
“... And I don’t fear you no more; I just laugh.”
“Awh, gosh. Gimme the smell of burnin’ bodies ’s like smellin’ salts to me. I still’s got the smell of fires up my fohckin’ nose. It’s like fohckin’ Dachau. It turns me on ...”
“I don’t fuckin’ believe you. The more I read up on you — the purported ‘torture survival and intelligence evasion’ courses, kept in an 8-foot box 24 hours — the less substantial you become, the less there is to laugh at — ‘hung by the thumbs, lowered testicle into jeweler’s vise’ — I mean the Army denies this course ever existed.”
“Cam’ Pearey, look’t up ...” And suddenly, as if on cue, he regressed back to a state of a lower animal. As if he had suddenly realized he was out of character and much too chatty for what he claimed to be his ailments.
“Campari?”
“CamP EErie!”
“PA?”
“Camp P-e-a-r-e-y ...”
“If I remember correctly, tha’s where they trained anti-Castro forces like Alpha ...”
“So ...”
“Tha’s like 30 years ago ...”
“Castro still alive ...”
“This don’t pan out ... This makes me laugh. Wha’s that smell? Like perfume or like some ...”
“Tha’s mom ...”
“It smells like the ladiesroom in a ballroom.”
“It’s FE ...”
“FEmale?”
“FE ...”
“FEeble?”
“FEER ...”
“FEar?”
“FEral ...”
“Feral?”
“Uh huh. This stretching out of words makes me laugh too, but in a different way as I watch your aches and pains migrate, take up positions, assume roles as 2nd-string pieces of personality. I know the split between sane and insane, normal and abnormal is slippery. After all you were very nice to drive her out to college, set her up in her dorm ...”
“The sun on wind ...”
Everybody was all hearts and ears — the blinding glare, how he swerved to protect her — crawling ever further up the asshole of his own fabrications where lies substitute themselves for actions.
“You killed her depthless eyes. You gave her strange rashes and bruises and a complex about her tits tryin’ to force K. to get breast implants.”
“I’m intuh Tuppahware, wha’ can I say?”
“for your info, they’re perky, full of life and very, very arousable. In effect they work.”
“But kinyuh burp’m?”
“I mean it ain’t worth tryin’ to get her to look like your mom because, fuck man, your mom’s busy tryin’ to look like K.”
“They’s check m’organs ev’ry fuggin day ...”
“Checkin’ for soul.”
“Naa, aint wor’ a nickel. They wan’ salvage. Like I’m a car up on block ... they migh’ lemme die ... duh gangrene I hear’t look blue ...”
“There was no war was there? Just hormones and a big lacka self-esteem. Full of shit.”
“Peacekee’n’ ... in Gra ...”
“Granada? No way, I checked. ‘Rejected for Urgent Fury mission to recapture Grenada military airstrip.’”
“P-P-Pa ...”
“Panama? No.”
“B-B-Bay ...”
“Bay of Pigs? You were like 1-year old or somethin’.”
“Bay ...”
“Beirut?”
“252 of buddie’ ... I seen ...”
“They were Marines. You were in the Army, actually the National Guard, Latrine Patrol, dishonorable discharge.”
“Bol ...”
“Bolivia? Before your time, H. Plus arrested for impersonating an officer ...”
“Bol ... shit ...”
“What room’s she in?” I kept whispering through sharp seething breaths.
“Hehehe (cough) Fee ...”
“Feeble?”
“Fee ...”
“Fearsome?”
“Phe-no ...”
“Fee-cal ... Fetal, futile, yea, I’m gonna come visit everyday, hover over your bed, play with the tubes, play with your mind I won’t let you die. Or will I? I’m gonna throwaway all your tranx, your diazepan, valium and ...”
“Phenobarb’t ...”
“All’m too. Each new diagnosed tic replacing a missing piece of your personality.”
“Be ...”
“Belabor? Be-elzebub? Be-bop?”
“Beer, I will buy ... you ...”
“I hear you signed my name to some letters-to-the-editor at the Times. Clever. Makin’ me look like I’m fuckin’ mastermindin’ yer ... like writin’ me into yer story ... You know, I gotta girl friend o’ mine, she’s callin’ the cops anonymously to say that you have child porn and torture equipment in your place ...”
“Ahr place ...”
“Not my place ... and she’s sayin’ she was one of the women coerced by you. The raid on yer place’ll happen before you’ve fully recovered from your ‘injuries.’”
“Beer ...”
“You piece of fossilized fecal matter!” I whispered through the seething that arose from some moral outpost in my cortex. I tugged playfully on the clear tubes that carried amber liquids into his body. “You killed her, you greedy cum wad. I hope you recuperate so I can send you back here. Not kill you, but keep giving you injuries, that just keep throbbing and throbbing ...”
“S’like m’mind’s a barrel o’scorpions. But my fuckin’ doc’or, Mcbeth, he don’t buy’t ... He’ gonna discha’ge me anyho’. Ever anybody tell yuh look like that g’tarist, nobody never tol’ you you look like ... nobody ... like ...”
“... I know you LUUve yer car’n all. Well, that SS-396 is byebye. You wanna see photos? Tragic. Hehehe. But I know you got a Pontiac GTO too. Vintage. Flake metallic candy apple red. I know the garage you keep it in. I seen it. Take a look at it when you get out. Pathetic. How much are wide oval tires anyhow? And uh, can yuh still get replacement fenders?”
“Every cop’s a ...”
“... criminal and all the sinners saints ... blablabla” Suddenly I found myself shaking my head yes to his stabs at perception as if I was beginning to sympathize (well, not quite), or at least understand what there was of him to understand. I had a strong urge to bang my forehead against his in an affectionate manner.
“Every ounce, every twitch, every motion of a soldier’s energy should be concentrated on the defeat of the enemy. Whenever he wastes his strength on any sort of activity that does not contribute to that one end, it is, in effect, a casualty...
“Zest, vigor of spirit, love of life linked to an eagerness to risk life itself for a worthy undertaking. A spirit of high adventure that turns a difficult mission into a rare chance to show the stuff of which men are made. This is the weapon that makes the military unit unbeatable. Without it the best trained army would be a lifeless automaton incapable of splendor unable to put forth that last full measure of devotion that brings victory.”
I could not read any more of the highlighted passages in his old Army Manual with its one corner charred, flaking, flakes falling to the crisp bedding.
As he drifted back off to a jittery sleep I tried on my best hypnotic voice as I asked for the room number of H. — nothing. A strange gurgling drool oozed from the corner of his mouth. His eyes fluttered with sparks of nitro-glycerine leaping from his eye sockets. America’s entire drama of emotion wedged between dream and frustration, identity and nonaligned drift, pride and self-pity had been looped into, transferred from the hard drive of history to the expansive net of bio-electrical circuitry — if you squeezed his body like a squeezebox it’d play Sousa’s pomp, Woody Guthrie’s woesomeness, Billy Holiday’s rendition of the drowning songbird, the nihilistic sawbuzz whine of a metal guitarist strumming right through his guitar body or whittling his fingers down to stubs; the pyrotechnics of so many clandestine battles so that when he declared from his hypnagogic stupor, “Everything plays on my fohckin’ heartstrings. Ain’t no fohckin’ harp, it’s a fuckin’ ax,” I knew exactly what ax he was talking about.
I grabbed the headphones from around his neck, unclasped his rigor mortis grip from the Walkman. And as I stepped outside I pressed PLAY. There was noise on the headphones like the inside of an explosion. I could picture him the way some of the young boys described, blissed out, stoned; speakers on floor, beer through a long straw, just lying there, listening not to music but noise, not just noise, but the acoustic characteristics of battle, famous battles, clipped and sampled, soundeffects records, the rattle of a Tommy Gun, the powpowpow of a semi-automatic pistol, and bits culled from war documentaries — The World At War — war movies, reality shows. The noise not unlike the way a mother holds her belly, sings to her unborn child. Side 2, he had taped the soundtrack of Killing Fields. Not the Mike Oldfield music but the actual film, not the conversations or the drama but the agony of human voices, moans, groans, bombs, explosions, terror, pain, turmoil, machine guns the fwopfwopfwop pulse of the chopper blades.
I walked hypnagogically along the beach neither this way nor that, neither here nor there, with his headphones on, his “music” playing. It was like I was walking through a video game or climbing on the stage that hung behind the inside of his eyes. On the beach, it was Juno Beach, Iwo Jima, D-Day every day and every hole dug by children with bright shovels became a bomb crater. The dreams followed me home and I dreamed the dreams he dreamed.
