“UNDER the wide
and starry sky
Dig the grave and
let me lie
Glad did I live
and gladly die
And I laid me down
with a will
This be the verse
you ‘grave for me:
Here he lies where he long’d to be;
Home is the sailor, home from the sea,
And the hunter home from the hill”
-Robert Louis Stevenson-
Like most of my generation, I clutched at the ideas
embedded in literature. My parent’s
generation imparted their values upon us, but failed to impose their notion of
culture, of civilization. I needed
something else. I didn’t want the suburban bungalow and the 2.5 kids; I didn’t
have a clue as to what I really wanted, but I knew I didn’t want that.
Literature gave me a window. I could lean on the imaginary sill and gaze
out into that fictional place without climbing through to join the author; safe
in my bedroom, taking in the excitement, risk free. Or so I thought.
The kicker came from impressing my young mind with
possibilities. Now, I had unfulfilled
longings, but lacked the confidence (to speak nothing of courage) to take the
leap of faith and travel my own path into the world.
I was particularly fascinated by Richard Farina’s
protagonist Gnossos Pappadopoulis in I’ve Been Down So Long, It Looks Like
Up To Me. Gnossos was a madcap
college student who tore off the chains of conventionality and careened across
the pages of the novel from Upstate New York to California to Cuba, in the grip
of Revolution.
For the latter half of the sixties, this hilarious
escapade gave me hope that I too could live the Great Adventure. Not to be; the world had other plans. What loomed like a black menacing cloud over
us young folks was the Viet Nam War. It
colored everything, from our political/cultural views, to the overpowering fear
of being sent there. This was certainly
not the Great Adventure I had in mind.
When I was permanently scholastically withdrawn from my
college, after eight straight semesters on probation (I believe it still stands
as the school record) I was sucked up by my Navy Reserve obligation and
summarily ordered to the worst place on the planet. I was actually going to
Viet Nam. How could this have happened
to me?
The Navy, as due process, offered me a thirty day
furlough before deployment. I took
it. Of course, I took it. It went by with the speed of a death sentence
with all appeals exhausted.
As I traveled from my Washington DC home to San Diego, I
stopped off at my college to attend an anti-war rally with a girl--I think her
name was Maggie. To add to the sense of
irony of this meaningless final gesture of resistance before the Abyss, the
school R.O.T.C. provided the dais and the bleachers for the gathering. We were so loving and helpful back then.
After the rally, my flight to Hell pending, I professed
my undying passion (you had to use the word love
with girls), and made that pathetic plea of all such doomed young men--to get
lucky and get laid for possibly the very last time. She gently rejected all advances (there were
more than one) and I departed for my destiny with fate unsated and unloved. I vaguely remember writing her once. In no
time at all she slipped from my consciousness, to be replaced by a reality
which stifled my libido for at least three weeks.
My tour dragged through its compulsory time, punctuated
by momentary excitement (a monsoon or a rocket attack--those were exciting) to
a deadly dull quagmire that the books I voraciously read could not dispel. I was looking out from the window of literary
distraction, but the monster under my bed—death, horrible disfigurement,
disease and loneliness—caused me to lose my focus. The reality of this awful place could not be
daunted.
When it was over, when my body came back to the world,
the War followed me home. Memories,
whether the derisively spewed venom from my fellow Americans righteously
denouncing my participation, or the indelible scenes of war: thoughts that haven’t
left me to this very day.
I kept a single souvenir of Viet Nam until it was
misplaced during one of my many moves made in the disquieting days afterward:
an oversized Zippo, about the size of an iPhone, mailed to me by my best bud in
the ‘Nam, a freckle faced kid from Detroit named Frosty McCleod.
On it, Frosty had engraved a quote from Farina’s book, a
phrase that I apparently repeated sufficiently for it to impress at least him:
Oh home is the
Madman
Home from his
Dreams;
And the Satyr,
Home to make Hay
And here I remain, to ponder my existence; and the next
step in the Divine Plan.
No comments:
Post a Comment