The Phantom Blooper (28 page)

The Surf Nazi grins. "There are no spook pencils. There are no spooks. We're not even here."

"Not even here," says the Missing Link. He paws through the shaving gear on my rack. My rack is so squared away that you could bounce a quarter off the blanket. The Missing Link examines my razor blades, then picks up a letter addressed to my mother telling her I'm still alive and coming home in one piece. We don't have a telephone on the farm.

I say, "Put that letter down, dick breath, or you will be wearing a stump sock on your neck."

The Missing Link looks at me, says nothing, takes a puff on his cigarette, then drops the letter onto my pillow.

"Let's eat," says the Surf Nazi. Then to me: "We'll be watching you."

As the spooks turn to go, the Missing Link says, "Yeah, be watching you."

I say, "And
we
will be watching
you
."

The flight on the Freedom Bird from Japan to California inside Fortress America is an eighteen-hour fantasy for two hundred lean and tan Viet Nam veterans. Lots of cold beer and round-eyed stewardesses.

War may be a Cinderella story in which men turn into soldiers, but being discharged at El Toro Marine Corps Air Station south of Los Angeles is a dull and tedious cattle call from big white squad bays to Quonset huts all over the base to the red brick HQ and then back again.

Medical examinations. Lots of miscellaneous spit and polish stateside bullshit. Pay records cleared--I get a year's back pay. We drop our skivvies and draw our pay and it's hero to zero in eight hours flat, out of the Green Mother and back in the World.

We know we're on our way to being civilians when we're sent to an auditorium and the Los Angeles Police Department gives us a recruiting speech.

After the recruiting speech we're ordered to go to the building next door for the next step in our processing.

Inside the building, pogues sit at desks, shuffling papers like battery hens awaiting the laying urge.

A pogue clerk lifer with his eyes on his paperwork shoves a sheet of paper at me without looking up. "That's your DD 214," he says. "Hang on to that."

I wait. The pogue clerk ignores me.

I say, "Okay, pal, so what's the next stop?"

"What?"

"Processing. Where do I go from here?"

The pogue clerk looks up and sighs. He has the fucking pogue lifer's weird blend of arrogance and incompetence, the surly smirk of the punk who is unaccountable and knows it. He's old, and tired, and he doesn't look like anybody. He says, "Jesus." He frowns. His face is fishbelly white and spotted with red acne. "That's it, dummy. You're out." He says, very slowly, in the whining voice of somebody's smart-mouthed kid brother, "Do . . . you . . . under . . . stand?"

I say, "That's it? That's all?" To his sneer I say, "Hey, bro, cut me some slack. This is my first discharge."

The pogue looks down at his paperwork, pouts, ignores me.

I turn and start for the door. When I put my hand on the doorknob the pogue says, "You got to have your papers stamped if you want to get off the base."

I turn around and walk back to the counter. "What?"

The pogue holds up a rubber stamp. "You got to have your papers stamped if you want to get off the base."

"So stamp them. What's wrong, your arm broken?"

The pogue pouts, says nothing.

I say, "Would you
like
to have your arm broken?" But I do not unscrew his head and sbit down his neck. That's not my job. Not anymore.

The pogue is coy. "I can't stamp your papers. Your papers are not in order. "

"What's wrong with them?"

"They're not in order."

I stand at the counter, opposite the pogue, and I do nothing. I wait. I don't protest.

Perhaps the eternal appeal of war is that the pogues are all in the rear. In the field in Viet Nam I would trust a grunt with my life even if I had never met him and didn't know his name. It's pretty to think that there are some pogues out there somewhere who are dittybopping into a crew-served weapon, but that kind of thing never happens, because pogues know how to avoid a fight. Pogues know how to get good men to do their fighting for them. Then, when the going gets rough, the red-tape soldiers sneak away in the night and cozy up to their Swiss bank accounts.

Little Hitlers, Wally Cox Nazis, pogues rule the world not by courage or ability but by sheer weight of numbers, cultivated inertia, flattering myths revered in common, and an undying loyalty to an ignorance as hard as iron. They have killed all of the tigers and the rabbits are in charge.

I wait. I don't argue.

The fucking pogue lifer says, "I'll give you a break. This one time. But next time, I'm warning you, you better have your paperwork in order before you come in here."

Paper rattles under the pogue's fingers. The pogue brings the rubber stamp down hard on my medical discharge with the authority of a thunderbolt from God.

"Okay," I say, "we're done. You can slip back into your coma now."

As I leave the Quonset hut, trying to figure out the meanings of the papers in my hand, I hear the fucking pogue lifer reply to a comment from someone in the rear of the office. He says, "Yeah. It was a dumb grunt. Just another dumb grunt."

Far in the rear of the office, someone laughs.

Outside, in the cold light of a counterfeit sun, I laugh too. I don't say to myself, "Well done, Marine." But I do say, "There it is."

Pulling a tour of duty in the military service of your country is like being put onto a chain gang for the crime of patriotism, except that on a chain gang you get shot if you run away and in the military you get shot if you stay.

Walking to the bus station, I contemplate my bleak and hopeless future, a future populated by surly file clerks, loyal company men, hall monitors who grow up to be cops, brainless civil servants, sexless schoolmarms and stern librarians and Hitler Youth meter maids, and a whole catalog of pasty-faced bureaucrats bloated up fat and sassy with money extorted from taxpayers by force, sopping up gravy they didn't cook. The whole damned world is ruled by fucking pogue liters and Viet Nam has taught me that my religion is that I hate pogues.

Still in uniform, I take a bus from El Toro to Santa Monica, California, via Los Angeles.

Sleeping on the bus, I have a dream in which Charlie Chaplin turns into a werewolf and vomits up the arm of a child. Part of me is bleeding in the dream.

Los Angeles is a big concrete refugee camp lost inside a Gordion Knot of freeways, a place where stores have iron bars over their doors and where bag ladies patrol the street picking up scraps.

Santa Monica is by the sea.

In Viet Nam, Bob Donlon never stopped talking about the glories of the Oar House bar. He made it into a legend.

On the wall outside hang two huge boat oars.

Inside, the Oar House is a dismantled carnival that has been glued onto the walls of a long narrow cave, a junkyard of the past and a museum of the bizarre. On the walls and ceilings hang branding irons, old movie posters, a brass diver's mask, a stuffed shark, a wooden wagon with a World War I German Iron Cross painted on the side, an old motorcycle, a canoe, a stuffed wolverine, a stuffed muskrat, a stuffed baby elephant, life-size clown dolls, and a painting of a guy picking his nose and coming out with a miniature cheeseburger. There's a lot of other stuff, but it's getting blurry.

The floor is an inch deep with sawdust and peanut shells.

Between chugging pitchers of beer I'm telling Katrina, a sexy German barmaid with hypnotic legs, who is as pretty as a silver dollar, the story of my life: "Like the Indians, we fight to stay on the land. On the land we are men. We are free. We don't need anybody. In the cities we are refugees. Katrina, the Indian agents gave government cattle to the Indians. Beef on the hoof. The proud Sioux warriors didn't know what to do with cattle. They didn't know how to kill them so they could eat them. When they got desperate, they stampeded the cattle and pretended they were buffalo, then rode them down and shot them with flint-tipped arrows. In refugee camps we have no dignity. We'll be forced to beg from the fucking pogue lifers and live on their handouts. The pogues want us in the cities. They own the cities."

Katrina does not speak English well, so she makes a good listener. At some point in my babbling I ask Katrina to call Donlon on the phone for me. I give her the number. "Tell him the Joker says to polish his brass and present his ass, most ricky-tick."

Katrina calls, gives Donlon my Papa Lima, my present location.

By the time Donlon comes in with a hippie girl I'm a hammered Marine hanging on to the bar, throwing marriage proposals at Katrina like darts, and mumbling about Song and the Woodcutter and Hoa Binh and Johnny Be Cool.

Donlon and the hippie girl take me home with them and put me into bed.

At breakfast there is little time for a reunion.

"Welcome home, bro," says Donlon. He hugs me. He has grown paler and fatter. "Joker, this is my wife, Murphy."

"Hi, Murphy," I say. Murphy is wearing blue jeans and a leather vest with nothing on underneath. On the front of the vest are two yellow suns and jagged yellow lines. Murphy has very big breasts and sometimes you can see a brown half-moon of nipple. Murphy is not a pretty woman, but she is very earthy, very attractive. She doesn't say anything. She doesn't smile. She walks over, hugs me, kisses me on the cheek.

"Let's go, Murphy," says Donlon. "We're late."

Donlon safety-pins a white band of cloth bearing a blue and red peace symbol around his bicep. Murphy puts on an armband that says MEDICAL AID.

"Make yourself at home, Joker," says Donlon. "We'll be back tonight, maybe late."

"Where you going?"

"Federal Building in Westwood. Protest by the VVAW."

"The what?"

"The VVAW. The Vietnam Veterans Against the War."

"I'll go with you."

Donlon says, "It might get violent."

I laugh. "If you're going, I'll go with you."

Murphy goes into the bedroom and comes out with a logger's shirt and some faded blue jeans. "You can wear these."

I say, "No. But thanks, Murphy. I'll wear my uniform. I'm proud to be a Marine."

Donlon laughs. "Lifer!"

I shrug. I say, "Once a Marine, always a Marine."

During the drive to Westwood in Donlon's orange Volkswagen bug, Donlon says, "We sort of been expecting you to visit. We saw your picture in the
L.A. Times.
It said the Crotch souvenired you one Silver Star for being an outstanding and squared-away POW. All of the guys were glad to hear that you were a POW. The Green Machine had you down as MIA, but we all know what that means. We figured the gooks had planted you in a tunnel wall somewhere north of the Z."

I say, "What a pretty picture."

Murphy says, "It must have been bad over there, as a prisoner. "

I say, "No, it wasn't so bad.

Donlon says, grinning, "So did you ever meet the Phantom Blooper face to face?"

I say, "Does a teddy bear have cotton balls? Does Superman fly in his underwear?"

Donlon says, "Bullshit."

I say, "No, that's straight skinny. The Phantom Blooper and I were tight. We used to hang out together down at the Viet Cong E.M. club."

Donlon laughs. "There it is."

Before we get to the Federal Building, Donlon brings me up to date. Donlon is studying poly-sci at UCLA. Animal Mother is alive; he escaped from a Viet Cong prison camp in Laos. He's still in the Crotch, a lifer, stationed at Camp Pendleton.

Stutten lives in New Jersey and has a kid with a harelip.

Thunder is a cop with the LAPD and is a star sniper on a SWAT team.

Hand Job died of colon cancer at age twenty-two.

Daddy D.A. is an alcoholic working as a mercenary with the Selous Scouts somewhere in Africa.

Bob Dunlop joined the cancer-of-the-month club and is dying of cancer of the mouth.

Harris, the hillbilly, shot himself in the head, but didn't die. When people ask him if he served in Viet Nam, he denies that he is a Viet Nam veteran.

The Federal Building is so big that it dominates Westwood, the chic cluster of boutiques nestled against the campus of UCLA. Overlooking a vast veterans' cemetery that extends as far as the eye can see, the Federal Building looks like the Tomb of the Unknown Veteran.

On the front lawn along Wilshire Boulevard, thousands of people are massed in the sun. There are banners and placards everywhere. A pretty teenaged girl's T-shirt reads: TO HELL WITH NATIONAL HONOR--WE WON'T BE USED AGAIN. And I see a middle-aged woman carrying a hand-lettered sign that says: MY SON DIED FOR NIXON'S PRIDE.

Donlon parks the car ten blocks away and we walk back and join the crowd. We listen to a lot of fiery speeches. One vet says, "Viet Nam means never having to say you're sorry." Another says, "Viet Nam is like a piece of shrapnel embedded in my brain."

Donlon steps up to the microphone and says, "I want all of the FBI informers in the audience to raise their hands."

Nobody raises a hand, but everybody looks around at everybody else.

One of the guys behind Donlon raises his hand. The guy has a red bandanna tied around his head. He says, "I confess!"

Everybody laughs.

Donlon says, "That's just the King, people." To the King he says, "Your Highness, sit your silly royal ass down." The King makes a courtly flourish with his hand and steps back.

Donlon continues: "Okay, now I want everybody who thinks that one of the individuals on either side of you is an FBI informer to raise your hands."

Everybody looks around and laughs as all hands go up.

Donlon does an about-face and addresses the Federal Building. "Yo, J. Edgar. How's it hanging?" Then, to the audience: "The FBI is the highest achievement of the federal civil service. It's the phone company with guns."

The audience laughs and applauds.

Most of the men in the audience have ragged beards and are wearing hippie beads, peace symbols, and military gear--mildewed boonie hats, faded utility jackets studded with unit patches and badges, representing all branches of the military.