Dear Mr. President
Table of Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Praise
The Cure as I Found It
Cross-Dresser
Dear Mr. President
The American Green Machine
General Schwarzkopf Looks Back at His Humble Beginning
Woman in Uniform
Those Were Your Words Not Mine
Notes from a Bunker Along Highway 8
Acknowledgments
MESSAGE TO OUR READERS REGARDING A UNIQUE EDUCATION EXTENSION OPPORTUNITY
PREVIOUS PUBLICATIONS
About the Author
Copyright Page
For my relentless mother and father
Because I could not stop for Death—
—Emily Dickinson
Acclaim for Gabe Hudson’s
Dear Mr. President
“An acutely inventive collection. . . . Hudson’s sensitive, lost narrators may be soldiers, but their sentences come from elsewhere entirely—a hilarious world never glimpsed directly but clearly forged from marketing presentations, government bureaucratese and twice-translated slang. Military life, here, is surreal. . . . [Hudson is] a writer who confronts the preposterousness of war with some preposterousness all his own.” —The New York Times Book Review
“Seductively hallucinatory, comically subversive.” —The Village Voice
“With great comic brio . . . Dear Mr. President manages to be remarkably thrilling and disturbing in its depiction of Americans fighting a war for no clear reason. . . . A distant relative of Heller’s Catch-22 .” —Time Out New York
“Hudson’s take on the Gulf War is at once biting, witty, and unutterably poignant. It’s a message our nation would do well to heed. He’s got the military lingo down just right—a cool patois of acronyms and army slang that lends the stories credibility. These stories are mostly funny—in a laugh uncomfortably way, but funny nonetheless.” —The Capital Times
“Hudson is a major new voice in fiction. . . . Dear Mr. President is a splendid combination of humor and horror, absurdity and abomination, delight and disdain. We’d be a better nation if we listened to Hudson’s . . . gutsy and intelligent look at the America we don’t want to admit we’ve become.” —Houston Chronicle
“Hudson . . . evokes a surreal swirl of high-tech combat and primitive symbols. The result is social satire that is both acutely relevant and darkly hilarious.” —The Philadelphia Inquirer
“Dear Mr. President is a phalanx of ingeniously twisted tales. . . . Equal parts tragedy and travesty, it manages to be both febrile and funny, sad and sardonic. . . . Hudson stands on the shoulders of Kurt Vonnegut and Joseph Heller.” —The Boston Phoenix
“Devour this book. You could probably mine the thesaurus all day in a vain attempt to describe Gabe Hudson’s first book, Dear Mr. President. . . . Unique? Definitely, though that doesn’t cover it. Funny, almost always, in a wonderfully twisted way, but this isn’t humor writing. Profound? Sort of, like a Dave Barry version of the Apocalypse Now script. He’s the kind of writer who will have you giggling profusely and contemplatively staring at the wall—all in the same paragraph.” —Austin American-Statesman
“Ought to be required reading for Congress . . . for it captures with harrowing freshness the madness and stupidity of war. Not unlike the work of another war satirist, Joseph Heller, his heroes survive, if they survive, by retreat into the imagination. . . . A study in the psychological complexities of the life of a soldier.” —St. Petersburg Times
“Powerful and entertaining. . . . Hudson takes us on a hilariously dark tour of the Gulf War experience.” —The Oregonian
“Hudson . . . writes like a grounded, focused combination of Chuck Palahniuk and Kurt Vonnegut. He’s less choppy than either, but occupies a similarly queasy quasi-reality that can be simultaneously entertaining and baffling. His ambiguous stories read as metaphors or case histories, as widely symbolic or unsettlingly literal. That shifting ambiguity, which Hudson’s characters and readers experience in equal measure, makes these stories as compelling as they are disturbing.” —The Onion
“Hudson uses the Gulf War to warn of war, weirdly and hilariously. . . . Hudson uses patriotic speak, song lyrics, psychobabble, and faux product placement (both military and civilian) to bring his characters to life. Hard to believe such a premise can break your heart, but it can.” — The Hartford Courant
“Surreal and funny as hell, funny and hellish in the absurdist tradition of Catch-22 and Dr. Strangelove. Hudson has an amazing and vivid imagination. . . . It’s like listening to the rantings of someone with a high fever: fascinating and scary.” —The Plain Dealer
“These twisted tales about soldiers’ lives manage to be at once hilarious and sobering.” —GQ
“Powerful and bold. . . . The stories in Dear Mr. President depict the war against Iraq as chaotic and amoral, and soul destroying. And the surreal images and epistemological twists elevate the gory details to genuine significance.” —Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
“One of the year’s most provocative story collections.” —Interview
“Phantasmagorical. . . . A floridly violent and hallucinatory collection.” — Salon
“Hudson displays a brilliantly macabre sense of humor, a fine ear for military and bureaucratic clichés, and abundant compassion for his quirky, bruised characters.” —Publishers Weekly (starred)
“Surreal, disturbingly funny. . . . Beneath the absurd scenarios is real compassion.” —Details
“Hudson is . . . one of the best comic writers of his generation. In the tradition of dark war narratives such as Slaughterhouse-Five, all of the stories blend humor with the horrors of war.” —Contra Costa Times
The Cure as I Found It
This is the story of my recovery, and I should probably start at the point where Fear Me crashed into my life. It was a Friday night and I was lying on the floor goofing around with Whiskers, waiting for Gloria to stop by after work. Whiskers and I were playing the shoelace game, which means I was jerking a shoelace around the floor and Whiskers was chasing the shoelace around the floor, trying to pin it down with his paws. Whiskers is an orange tabby I found in the trash can shortly after moving to Brooklyn. I lifted the lid and there he was, lying on a pile of pizza boxes and empty milk cartons and fashion magazines and old computer cords, with his tongue lolling out of his mouth and a halo of flies buzzing around his head. And then at some point Whiskers stopped chasing after the shoelace, feigning boredom, and turned and looked at me with his one good green eye. “Meooow.” I tussled his head. I said, “Hey, partner. Okay. Okay. Hold your horses.” I popped open a can of tuna while he did cartwheels and pirouettes around his dish, shedding a small tornado of fur in the air. And it was then, as I was spooning the tuna into his dish, it was then that the sound of breaking glass exploded in my apartment.
I flew back to the bedroom where the noise had come from, and there on the floor, atop a salad of broken glass shards, was an old basketball. I figured someone just must have missed the basket, and in my head I was already trying to figure out if I should make them pay for the window and deciding that I should not, because accidents happen, and because of how much I love to play hoops myself, but then I realized the courts were a good hundred yards away, at least, and besides, my place was on the third floor. What the hell?
I felt my heart break into a jog.
I held the ball up to the light and noticed there was something written on it in red ink. YOU WANT TO PLAY HOLMES? I read it again. YOU WANT TO PLAY HOLMES? Suddenly a yellow bolt of realization flashed across my mind, and I dropped the ball and flung my head out the smashed window and peered down into the darkness. “Hey,” I said. “Lea
ve me alone.” Someone in the street below started cracking up, and I jerked my head in the direction of the laughter, trying to make the scariest face I could.
But I could not see a thing.
Everybody’s Gulf War Syndrome is a little bit different, and in my case I knew something wasn’t right when, two months after rotating back to the world from Desert Storm, all the hair on my head suddenly turned completely white. Still, for the next couple weeks afterward, I went around trying to pretend nothing was wrong with me, tried to tell myself that this was just a temporary setback and that my old brown hair would return in no time. How could it not? I mean I was what, twenty-four, just about to turn twenty-five, still a kid in every sense of the word.
Then all my hair fell out. I was suddenly bald. This was more than a blow, this was something like having my hands chopped off and stuffed in my mouth, to be bald. I do not care what people say: to lose your hair is the highest sort of tragedy, and as a result I felt myself slipping under fast, felt myself being sucked down irretrievably into the torturous pit of darkness and despair that every bald man must secretly endure.
So I changed my line of reasoning quick, acknowledging that my hair was not coming back, not my old brown hair or my new white hair, and tried to tell myself that my new bald head was cool, different, sexy even (besides, I still had my youth), at least that is what my girlfriend, Gloria, said. “My beautiful old man,” she would coo. I even told myself that I wouldn’t accept my old hair if it tried to grow back in, that I would shave it all off. Hair was stupid, anyway. Any old schmuck could have hair, but not anybody could be bald, I thought.
But then in late February, a couple weeks after my twentyfifth birthday, I mysteriously sprained my wrist while shooting a lazy jump shot in the playground. The second I released the ball it felt like someone had smashed my wrist with a hammer, and that’s when I went to see Dr. Himmons. He immediately ran a bunch of tests and X rays, and a week later I was back in his office for the results. Dr. Himmons told me to sit down, but before I could sit down he held up the X rays and I fainted. My skeleton was riddled with holes. It looked like a worm had been eating and tunneling through my bones. When I came to, Dr. Himmons was weeping and holding my head in his hands, and muttering, “I’m sorry, Larry. Oh my gosh, I’m so sorry.” Then he explained to me that I had Gulf War Syndrome, and my particular strain of Gulf War Syndrome was disintegrating my bones at a massive rate and if things kept up this way every bone in my body would be gone within the year and there was nothing he could do. I was going to be the human blob.
About a half hour after the ball came crashing through my window, I called Gloria at work and told her what had just happened, and suggested, given the circumstances, that maybe us getting together that night was not such a good idea. She whispered, “I’ll be right there.” Ten minutes later there was a knock at the door, and when I opened it Gloria barreled past me and said, “Show me the window. I can’t believe this. That son of a bitch. His ass is grass. Show me the goddamn window.” Later that night, after we had swept up the broken glass and coaxed Whiskers out from under the couch, she started rubbing me down with lotion, trying to ease the pain in my bones, which had left me feeling, well, rusty. I was draped in bed on my stomach, with my arms spread wide, like Jesus. Gloria ran the heel of her palm up my spine.
“Mmmm. That feels good. Keep doing what you’re doing.”
When I got back from Saudi, this was about a year and a half ago now, I got my discharge from the army, packed my stuff, and moved from San Francisco out here to Brooklyn. I was living off my V.A. checks, and I was going to start college in the fall, where I would be a Religious Studies major. In high school I was a National Merit Scholar, but then at the last second, because of an overrated epiphany arrived at after reading way too much Hemingway, I elected not to go to college, eschewing the sterile classroom for life: which translated into six long years as a rifleman in the army. But now I was ready to pick up where I’d left off, so when people asked me what I wanted to be, I’d say, “A shepherd.” I pictured myself, down the road, as an old man sitting on top of a mountain, alongside my devoted herd of billy goats, with a blue-gray beard that fell to my bare toes.
While we’d been sweeping up the glass, Gloria had been needling me, trying to get me to do something in retaliation to Fear Me and his crew for the thing with the basketball. And now, as she rubbed me down, she started in again.
She said, “Come on. Think about it. Fucking take them out. Put this thing to rest.”
Gloria was my Super Good Thing. I met Gloria the first day I moved into the neighborhood, I went down to the Deli Grocery, and she saw my high and tight haircut and instantly started flirting with me from behind the register, asking me about the army. “Nice butt,” she’d said. And sure, Gloria was a little cheeky, but her life has not been easy and deep down she is an angel with a heart of pure gold, and she makes all this other crap worth it. Gloria was a ballet prodigy until she was ten, and her instructor, Jacques, was always telling her that she was going to show the world, but then one time, during a performance of The Wizard’s Pond, Gloria leapt, and when she landed on the “magic lily pad” her head jerked back as if someone had yanked it with a rope and she fell down. She had given herself whiplash. It turned out that her right leg had grown an inch longer than her left leg, and in the next year her right leg would grow another two inches, and in that same year Gloria would be kicked out of the ballet studio and botch her first of many suicide attempts. Today, though, you would never know any of this, unless you looked closely and noticed that her right boot heel is three inches taller than the left.
I turned my head to the side. “Give it a rest, okay? Just forget about it. Kids get drunk and do things. Stop trying to make it into a big deal.”
“Look, that’s the dumbest thing I ever heard,” she said. “You think Fear Me’s going to forget about it? You embarrassed him in front of his crew. This is his hood.”
Fear Me was the neighborhood thug. Fear Me had the words Fear Me tattooed across his chest in big gothic letters. He had fierce blue eyes and a shaved head, and one of those wallets that has a big chain dangling from it, and once in broad daylight I’d seen him take a crap on the hood of a blue car stopped at a red light. Gloria had gone to elementary school with Fear Me and she said his real name was Donald.
“Hey,” she said. “You were the one who had to dunk it. So now you’ve got to handle this.”
I had gotten in a scuffle with Fear Me and his crew on the court the other day. We had been playing a pretty beasty game of full court, and the score was tied and it was game point. Everyone was sweating and yelling and playing extra-tight D, and then at some point, Fear Me dribbled through my team kamikaze-style and went up for what looked to be an easy two. But he did not see me. I came out of nowhere. I ran and leapt up behind him.
I stuffed Fear Me’s shot and then scooted down the court and scored the game winner, and I guess I could have just laid it up, but instead I showboated a little bit and dunked it. I did a three-sixty dunk. I hung on the rim, and said, “Yeah.” He came galloping up behind me and shoved me the second my feet touched the ground. He said, “You fouled me, bitch. You got a problem, soldier boy? Huh?” Finally, I had to say, “Hey. I’m sorry, man. I didn’t mean to foul you. I don’t want any trouble.”
And now Gloria was rubbing my shoulder blades, digging in with her thumbs. I rolled over onto my back and looked at her. “There’s some things you just don’t understand, Gloria. Trust me. I’ve dealt with—”
“You were a rifleman in the army for fuck’s sake. You blasted those Iraqis at Al Mutlaa Ridge. Don’t pretend like you didn’t wax those guys. You want to know what you should do. Go hunt down these punks and cut all their tongues out and make a necklace with their tongues. Then we’ll see who gets the last word.”
I sighed. I was starting to regret that I ever told Gloria about the day my battalion took Mutlaa Ridge, how we clashed with the Iraqis fleeing back to
Baghdad, how the Iraqis turned and took a stand on the ridge’s high ground. Our objective was to pinch them off, lock them in—this was Schwarzkopf’s famous Left Hook Maneuver, which would cinch the victory for the Allied Forces. This all happened along the highway in Kuwait that would come to be known as the Highway of Death. What can I say? I went over to Saudi crazy and thirsty for blood. I thought I could justify my life by taking someone else’s, that I would be entering The Great Dialogue of War that man has been having ever since the beginning of time, that war was, in a sense, the ultimate form of divinity. So two days after G-day, when it became official that the Marines had secured Kuwait, my platoon of mech riflemen and three others charged over the desert in Bradley Fighting Vehicles.
Down there in the hull of the Bradley, we were getting jostled around on the benches and I remember I closed my eyes and for a split second I felt as if I was eight years old again, crammed in the back of Danny Gordon’s mom’s minivan, heading to our Saturday soccer game, only this was no minivan and Danny Gordon’s mom was nowhere near this madness: this was an LAV powered by a 275 horsepower engine, and above us our gunner, Haden Fark, manned the 25mm Bushmaster cannon, ripping giant gashes in the Iraqi T-55s and T-62s that tried to stop our onslaught. I could hear Fark saying, “That’s right, Dr. Fark is in the house. The roof is on fire. That’s right, we don’t need no water, let the motherfucker burn.” Fark was also using his AN/TPQ-36 Firefinder radars, and each time an Iraqi shell exploded in our vicinity his computer would instantly map out its virtual arc on the screen and track back the coordinates of the shell’s origin, and then he would rocket off an M-1093A3 self-propelled howitzer, blasting the Iraqi fool who was lobbing shells from a distance. The explosion of the howitzer erupting from our Bradley threatened to knock my ears off my head, and through my periscope I caught a glimpse of the red leering sun, obscured by the black haze billowing from the burning wells, as we crashed through Al Manaquish oil fields.