Born on the Fourth of July Page 12
I called her up as soon as I got back. It was really nice to have someone love me, I said, and I listened to her tell it to me again. I went over to her house that night and slept with her in her bed. She had this little room that was near the kitchen and she had a photograph in it, a wedding photograph of herself and her ex–old man all dressed up in the finest things. She said he was a drifter but she still cared about him. He just wasn’t responsible enough to take care of her and the two kids. I remember she played soft music on the radio. The whole thing gave me a funny empty feeling. I slept with her the second time just before I went back to New York. I told her I was leaving and that I would see her in a month or two. I didn’t tell her it bothered me that she was calling me all the time now telling me she loved me. I said I’d had enough of California.
I remember freaking out a couple of times when I got home, crying in front of my mother, telling her about the babies I had killed. I thought I was losing my mind. The dead corporal from Georgia was finally catching up with me and hanging me in almost all my dreams. Every day I woke up with a pain in my chest. I felt scared and shaky. I broke down one night and called Helen. “I think I want to marry you,” I remember saying.
“Are you sure?” I heard her say over and over on the phone. “Are you sure you want to marry me?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I love you baby and I want to marry you.”
Next thing I knew she was flying across the country with two screaming kids to meet my family.
I met her at the airport. She was wearing red tights and I remember she had cut her hair. I’d really liked her hair long but when I went to the airport her hair was short and the kids looked terrible too. I didn’t know how to tell her about her hair.
I remember she wanted to go to church that day to say a few prayers for something or other. I drove her over there but I wouldn’t go in. I sat in the car and turned up the radio. A song was playing called “Bye-Bye Miss American Pie” and I remember listening to it and feeling real sad inside, real low like I wanted to cry or kill someone.
She came back into the car and we drove all over the neighborhood. I kept stopping and introducing her to people I knew. “Helen and I are getting married,” I said. I even introduced her to Castiglia, who was visiting his folks that weekend, pushing away from him in the wheelchair after I told him I was going to marry her.
By the time we left Massapequa we were fighting about everything all the time and I was getting sick of the whole thing. She was always talking to me about going back to church and meeting married couples and building a strong family for the future. We hadn’t even been able to sleep together much. I’d had to stay on the couch on the porch and she was down in Sue’s room with the kids. My mother and dad never wanted a man and woman that weren’t married sleeping together even if the woman was divorced and had two kids.
We tried living together for a while when we got back to California, first at my house and then at hers. I don’t know why I ever did it or why I ever asked her to marry me, but back then it seemed really important to have someone like Helen to hold on to. I even ended up going down to the V.A. hospital in Long Beach and seeing a marriage counselor for paralyzed men. The counselor and I sat out in the sun a lot and fed birds and shouted at each other but it never worked. Every time I came home from the sessions I threw up and finally I couldn’t even sleep near Helen anymore. I knew I had to be alone for a while. I found a small house on Hurricane Street in Santa Monica and moved into it.
WHEN I FIRST MOVED to Hurricane Street it was quiet. I wanted to get away not only from Helen but from everything that reminded me of the war. I was going to grow plants and cook my own food. I had a lot of dreams about how it was going to be. I even wanted to write a book. I bought an old rolltop desk and spent an afternoon with a couple of friends going to pick it up and moving it into the house.
It was a beautiful little house a block from the ocean—more a small neat shack tucked into an alleyway. The windows were wooden hurricane slats, which gave the place the appearance of always being ready for a hurricane or a big storm. There was a shower that had been adjusted for me so I could fit the wheelchair in comfortably, and I loved being so close to the ocean. I went out one afternoon and bought a big waterbed, the first one I’d ever had.
I never talked too much to my neighbors, except when I was emptying garbage or something. I used to sit at the window and stare at a dog that was always on the roof of the house in front of me. After the first couple of days I gave up cooking and started eating out at the Jack-in-the-Box hamburger stands. The food was awful, but it was better to be out in the car than stuck alone in the house all the time.
Sometimes I’d have terrible nightmares about the war. I’d wake up scared in my room in the middle of the night. There was no one to hold on to, just myself there inside my frozen body. I remember watching flowers bloom outside my window and feeling good when the ants would come into the house. Well, at least I’ve got some company, I thought.
I wrote a poem once at my rolltop desk. It was called “Hurricanes/in the eye of the hurricane.” I wrote about the loneliness and the silence of my house, how being there was like a sudden pause in the middle of a wild swirling storm. A lot of times I couldn’t take it. I’d get into my car and drive as far and fast as I could. But after a while I learned to stay by myself for a long time.
The time since the war was passing so fast now and he wasn’t in the hospital anymore and they weren’t smiling down by his bedside and the priests weren’t there and he wasn’t in the streets speaking out against the men who had made all the terrible things that happened to him possible. They weren’t cheering and clapping or even putting the handcuffs on him anymore. He wasn’t in jail and in jail at least he knew there were other people around to talk to but now there was no one and all the cheering and all the clapping had stopped and now he was more alone than he had ever been in his life.
What kind of miserable life was this, no friends, no legs, people staring at him wherever he went. The depression sometimes was awesome, like he was drowning in it, and no matter how hard he tried he wasn’t ever getting out. He had tried so hard for years to hold on. He had even sometimes invented things that weren’t true, made believe so the feelings would go away. But now he wasn’t making things up anymore, he was too tired to do that, in too much pain. Where were his legs that used to run? he thought.
He wanted people around him. He wanted someone to call him on the phone. He wanted just one friend he could talk to about the real things, the painful truths about his miserable existence that would make most people walk away from him—“Sorry I gotta run now. I’m late already.” Other people always seemed able to laugh and joke about the whole thing, but they weren’t the one who was living in this angry numb corpse, they didn’t have to wake up each morning and feel the dead weight of these legs and strain the yellow urine into the ugly rubber bag, they didn’t have to put on the rubber gloves each morning over the bathroom bowl and dig into his rear end to clean the brown chunks of shit out. They lived very easy lives, why their lives were disgustingly easy compared to his and they acted sometimes like everything was equal and he was the same as them, but he knew they were lying and especially the women, when they lay with him and told him how much they loved his body, how it wasn’t any different than any other man’s, that they didn’t care if his dick was numb and dead and he couldn’t feel warm and good inside a woman ever again. He was a half-dead corpse and no one could tell him any different. They could use the fancy medical words like they had in the hospital but he knew who they had brought back with all their new helicopters and wonderful new ways of killing people, all that incredible advancement in technology. He would never have come back from any other war. But now here he was. He was back and dead and breathing. Oh Mom, oh Dad, somebody, Jesus, somebody please help me. No one to love him, no one to touch him the way he had been touched before the war. He was a little speck now, he was a tiny little dot and he had to do som
ething fast because he felt himself getting smaller and smaller. He had to live again, feel again.
He had been born on the Fourth of July, he had been their Yankee Doodle Dandy, their all-American boy. He had given them almost his whole being in the war and now, after all that, they weren’t satisfied with three-quarters being gone, they wanted to take the rest of him. It was crazy but he knew that’s what they wanted. They wanted his head and his mind, the numb legs and the wheelchair, they wanted everything. It had all been one big dirty trick and he didn’t know what to think anymore. All he had tried to do was tell the truth about the war. But now he just wanted it to be quiet, to be where they weren’t cursing at him and beating him and jailing him, lying and calling him a traitor. He had never been anything but a thing to them, a thing to put a uniform on and train to kill, a young thing to run through the meatgrinder, a cheap small nothing thing to make mincemeat out of.
And somewhere along the way he had forgotten to be polite anymore, and how to be a nice person. Somewhere through it all they had taken even that and he wanted it back so much, so very desperately, he would give almost anything to be able to be kind to people again, but the big machine, the one that had given him the number and the rifle, had sucked it out of him forever. They had made him confused and uncertain and blind with hate. They wanted to make him hide like he was hiding now. How many more, he thought, how many more like him were out there hiding on a thousand other Hurricane Streets? He was a living reminder of something terrible and awful. No matter what they said to him, no matter how much they tried to twist and bend things, he held on to what he knew and all the terrible things he had seen and done for them. They had buried the corporal and the children he had killed in the ground, but he was still sitting and breathing in his wheelchair, and now the last thing he could do for them if he wasn’t going to die was to disappear.
He knew too much about them. He knew, goddamn it, like no one else would ever know. They were small men with small ideas, gamblers and hustlers who had gambled with his life and hustled him off to the war. They were smooth talkers, men who wore suits and smiled and were polite, men who wore watches and sat behind big desks sticking pins in maps in rooms he had never seen, men who had long-winded telephone conversations and went home to their wives and children. They were like the guy on television who hid the little pea under the three cups, moving them back and forth, back and forth, until you got real confused and didn’t know where the hell anything was. They had never seen blood and guts and heads and arms. They had never picked up the shattered legs of children and watched the blood drip into the sand below their feet. It was they who were the little dots, the small cheap things, not him and the others they had sent to do their killing.
He had to rise up out of this deep dark prison. He had to come back. He knew the power he had. Maybe he had forgotten it for a while but it was still there and he could feel it growing in his mind, bigger and bigger—the power to make people remember, to make them as angry as he was every day of his life, every moment of his existence. He would come back very soon and he would make it like all the stories of the baseball players he had read when he was a kid. “He’s picking up the ball. He’s running across the field. Kovic is making a terrific comeback, folks! A terrific comeback.…”
6
EVERY ONCE in a while as I drive the Oldsmobile down the long, hot Texas highway, I look into the dust-covered rearview mirror and see the convoy behind me, stretching back like a gigantic snake so far I cannot even tell where it ends—cars and buses, trucks and jeeps, painted with flowers and peace signs, a strange caravan of young men wearing war ribbons on torn utility jackets and carrying plastic guns. It is August of 1972 and we have come nearly two thousand miles with another thousand still ahead of us before we reach Miami. We have shared food and cans of Coke. We have driven like madmen across the desert and lain down in the sand in our sleeping bags. We have played and laughed around campfires. It is our last patrol together, and I know I will remember it as long as I live. It is a historic event like the Bonus March of thousands of veterans upon the Capitol in the thirties. And now it is we who are marching, the boys of the fifties. We are going to the Republican National Convention to reclaim America and a bit of ourselves. It is war and we are soldiers again, as tight as we have ever been, a whole lost generation of dope-smoking kids in worn jungle boots coming from all over the country to tell Nixon a thing or two. We know we are fighting the real enemies this time—the ones who have made profit off our very lives. We have lain all night in the rain in ambush together. We have burned anthills with kerosene and stalked through Sally’s Woods with plastic machine guns, shooting people out of trees. We have been a generation of violence and madness, of dead Indians and drunken cowboys, of iron pipes full of matchheads.
There is a tremendous downpour just outside of Houston that almost tears the windshield wipers off the car. And after the rain there is one of the most beautiful rainbows I have ever seen, and then a second rainbow appears—a magnificent double rainbow above our heads. I am certain I want to be alive forever. I know that no matter what has happened the world is a beautiful place, and I am here with my brothers.
We drive into Louisiana through the little towns, past waving schoolchildren and smiling gas-station attendants flashing the peace sign and faces looking curiously at us from windows, not angry just curious and friendly, surprisingly friendly—the ordinary working people who want the war to end too, the glory John Wayne war. But I am scared in Louisiana. Like a lot of the other guys I think the KKK is all over the place and someone says there is no difference between the Klan and the cops, they are both the same thing.
He probably hated niggers, the corporal from Georgia. All through the South, these roads, the memories are talking.
He probably hated niggers. Pushing shoving, moving grooving, sliding diving into the coffin, into the soft earth of Georgia. Brought him back in and some guys sent him down the river where all of the dead went to, all the nineteen-year-old corpses who had to be fixed up, shot full of stuff and preserved real good so they could be packaged like meat in the deli to be sent back home where their mothers and their sisters and their fathers and their wives could stand and pray and talk about what they were like when they were alive. She’d probably remember better than most of them what it was like to hold his hand, walk with him, kiss him on his soft lips that were now cold and dead, planted six feet in the Georgia mud. Nothing will bring him back, nothing on earth will bring him back. The corporal’s dead and he’s dead because of me. Oh god, oh Jesus, I want to cry, I want to scream, I want him to be alive again, I want him to be alive again I want him to be alive again oh god oh Jesus oh god o god ogod help me, make him feel, bring him back, bring him back wailing and talking, breathing and laughing again. Who who who who who is he? Now he’s finished in the earth, in the ground. Try not to think about it, the thought, the dead thought. Goddamn, goddamn, goddamn fuckin’ southern bigot. They were all that way in boot camp. Yes yes I remember. I want school and sitting on the fence and where’s Mom and the heater, Richie and me stringing high-tension stickballs, eggballs, baseballs, r r r r r r r run the bases to Castiglia’s basement. I want out, I want out, I want out mom mom mom mom mom mom. Take a drag of the cigarette Yes thank you. Can’t move, can’t you see Richie, can’t move, no more posters, teacher’s dirty looks, no more warm good red checkered table … let me out let me out.
And the last Patrol moved into the silence and darkness of Louisiana, the long snake, long line of us packed together, moving slower and slower, following the cops under the swaying beautiful trees, the warm muggy night, so warm and muggy and nice and getting ready to rain. Okay okay everybody! Someone screaming into a bullhorn and we are easing into the campsite, circling around like Gabby Hayes and the wagon trains, like a big 360 in the Nam. People crawling into their sleeping bags all over the tall swampy grass, crawling in and pulling them up over their heads dreaming of illumination canisters, or popping red flares i
n the DMZ, they make love like morphine, rolling and driving together like tomorrow will never come. What gave them the right to beat me, the war, the scar, the scar in the chair, in the road, for whose trophy case this time Mr. President?
There is a bridge that goes into Miami and we moved over it like a returning army, like a returning army we moved together slowly across the bridge, our horns blasting, our flags waving, shouting into the wind that blew from the ocean. Once we crossed the bridge we headed through the city, headlights burning on all the cars and trucks. A quick decision was made and we went through every red light and stop sign in the town. I remember hanging out of the Oldsmobile with the big upside-down flag flapping, screaming and shouting as we came nearer and nearer to Flamingo Park. This was the end of the journey and as we approached the park we were beseiged by hundreds and hundreds of well-wishers yelling and cheering and clapping the arrival of the veterans. People were dancing in the streets, playing flutes, running up to us, Yippies and Zippies shoving handfuls of joints into our laps and all the brothers were climbing out of their cars hugging and jumping on top of each other, singing and screaming and carrying on like we had just won the war.
A couple of vets from New York who knew me ran up and hugged me, welcoming me to the enormous tent city. “Yeah man,” one of them said, “I read about you in New York when they beat you up. Good to see you down here, good to have you down.” I found a place to put my rubber mattress and plant my upside-down American flag. I sat down and looked at all the wild activity around me. Later in the afternoon one of the first reporters came by. “I’ve got a few things to say,” I told her, and we talked for about two hours until she had to go. It got dark and all of us went to sleep. The Yippies and the Zippies were still smoking dope and carrying on in a wild pot party but the Last Patrol was tired. It had been a long journey across America.