Obeisatol

I have heard of artists who visit their works hanging in museums, standing or sitting on a stool in front of them with oils and pallet, adding touches to the canvas.  I had always thought that such lunatic behavior was only fitting of the deranged.

Well, wake up and smell the coffee asshole!  Of course, artists are deranged; it is the preparatory condition for the process of transferring one’s imagination to another medium.  Regardless of the form; canvas, paper, film, photos, dance, music, land sculptures—the urge to display one’s thoughts is the heart of art.

Like the painter in the museum, I ponder these writings and edit them many times before clicking the post button.   Always, the thought nags me to death: am I done here?  Is this finished? 

Even so, the work indelible on FB, I revisit the bit, wondering if anyone out there in Ether Ether Land is moved or even mildly interested.  If I myself continue to be moved, if I get another laugh out of my own musings, the work has done its job.  I am at piece (sp).

Unfortunately, these scrutinies reveal flaws that only hindsight can discern.  The flies in my personal vial of ointment are typos.  I hate typos.  In my working life (writing is NOT work!), I would rail at colleagues and subordinates alike.  I had a hawkeyed glint for the flyspecks of error and was swift, nay, merciless in pointing them out to the offender.

The problem, of course, is the time-honored axiom that one should never proofread one’s own stuff.  In the sanctum sanctorum of my office, I have only my animals as witness.  The dogs come and go, seeking reassurance or treats or their morning walk.  Kali, my big calico cat, is only interested in what cats enigmatically seek: my lap, the chance to pad onto the desk and lay on the warm laptop, demanding more massage, affectionately biting the fleshy part of my hand.  None of them will take a single second out of their busy routines to proof my work.

Ingrates.

So (sigh) there are typos afoot.  Sincere regrets.  Ever so ‘umble, I am, in conceding to myself that I am a fat-fingered denizen of the proletariat, lockstep in the way of human commonality.  I will have to live with this; so will you.

Which brings me to the topic of publishing, as some of you have encouraged me to do.  Ain’t gonna happen.  Nosireee buddy.

I will not permit some pimple-faced editor forty years my junior to take a blue pencil to my stuff.  This ‘stuff’ comes to you with my own blue pencil sharply applied, and is not to be tampered with, pawed over or manipulated by another’s ideas of what is acceptable to the reading public.  No righteous prig of a publisher would ever allow all my hanging prepositions to remain. Alliterations are another anathema.

I am making a statement herein to every English teacher who verbally chastised me back when for those unseemly blots on the Cannons of Grammar. Screw you, Mr. Perkins, Mrs. Hersuit.  End of topic.

(And now, back to the next episode in our young Hero’s tour of duty).

Turned out I was assigned to the very edifice I walked into on first arriving at Camp Tien Sha.  This French-built structure, already a doddering fifty years old, was constructed of cinder block, finished (ha!) with a corrugated tin roof and green painted concrete floors.  Windowless, the big doors on each side were the sole egress.

100 feet long and 30 feet wide, it held about fifty double bunks, 100 lockers and toilette facilities to accommodate the damned.  With high ceilings and the large doors kept open on all four sides, it had all the charm of a dog run.

My job was to mop, clean, wax and buff the floor; attend to the latrine and mount the watch every other night.  The watch duty played havoc with my sleep routine.  In addition to the disrupted slumber, there was the heat; the gawdawful heat, peaking at 103 in the daylight and cooling to 90 at predawn.  That might have been eventually tolerable except for the constant 97% humidity.

Before climbing up to my bunk after coming off watch, I would drag one of the huge floor fans over and train its roaring blast of air inches away from my body.  It didn’t ease my discomfort; it never stopped the profuse perspiration rolling off onto the sheets as I tossed and turned.

“Don’ warry”, warbled Mamasan, smiling up at me with her teeth completely blackened by the incessant chewing of beitel nut, “It gat coolah when Monsoon come.”

How reassuring.  The seasonal monsoons weren’t due until September. This was June.  I did the math and rolled my eyes.  How to survive in the interim?  Having no idea what the monsoons entailed (another surprise yet to come for the white boy from Texas), I surrendered to despair and bleakly peered up at the mountain of time remaining in-country.

We always referred to our tours as ‘in-country’, in the vain hope that such a euphemism would grant no power to the onus of time remaining.  It was like the prisoner’s agony of scratching hash marks on his cell walls.

Two nights later, one of my new buddies came in with a solution of sorts.  The marijuana was a constant by now.  You could stand anywhere in the compound and catch the wafting sweet scent of smoke; suspended only by the periodic passing of the DDT wagon, trailing its fog of toxic stink;  killing the mosquitos and improving our health.

Ray came in and squatted down next to me with another newcomer, Larry.  Larry and Ray were to become two of my closest companions in the months ahead.  Larry slid down the wall in a slump, his eyes already glassy, his olive skin a glistening pallor in the artificial light.  He reached in his jacket (we were by now wearing the green fatigues issued to us with our surnames embossed over the pocket), extracted a bottle that looked like it came from a drugstore, poured himself a Dixie cup of a brown treacley liquid and downed it in a single gulp.

It was Obeisatol, an over-the-counter diet aid, on the shelves of every pharmacy in Viet Nam.  It cost practically nothing--a carton of Salems at $1.50 a carton (no shit Sherlock!).  Salems were the preferred coin of the realm.  Paltry pennies to us sailors, they were worth their weight in gold to the gooks.

Obeisatol was Benzedrine suspended in brown sugar water.  If we could have read the labels printed in Vietnamese, we would have been directed to take half a teaspoonful before meals.  A Dixie cup was about 20 half teaspoons.  That was our recommended dosage.  Larry offered it all around.  We shared the paper cup and followed his example.

By trial and error, we eventually arrived at each supplicant’s correct dose by the dictum, ‘Sheeuht! You ain’t got off yet?  Take another hit, motherfucker!  THERE ya go!!’

That sickly sweet infusion kept me wired and wide awake for about the next 18 hours.  Back then, I smoked Pall Mall Reds unfiltered; and the very strongest tobacco brand on the rack.  Smoking them was akin to sex without a condom.  You knew you were going to pay a consequence someday, but what the Hell?

The first wife persuaded me to at least scale down to Marlboro Reds, but that was a future event.  Now, jitter-bugged out of my skull, I chain smoked through four packs over the course of the high.  Life was good again.  The night watches became delicious interludes of solitude, stirred only by the snores of the day crews.

As I shook and smoked into the long night, I would write volumes to anyone I could think of back in the world.  I cannot imagine what my parents must have made of the gibberish coming from their Dear Boy Overseas, enclosed in those blue, tissue--thin envelopes provided to the troops.

When I returned home, the letters were never mentioned.  Unlike the letters Dad kept in his nightstand, wrapped in a rubber band, from my Tom Brown Days at Salesian College, the Viet Nam letters had disappeared.

Probably just as well.  I have no recollection of a single phrase.  My state of mind at their writing was criminal inference enough.