Dear Mr. President Page 10

  THE CHIMPANZEES WHO WERE HERE BEFORE US

  Something furry crashed on my head as I crossed the threshold, and a cacophony of screeches erupted, reverberating off the inside of my skull, threatening to split it down the middle. I envisioned the dust that my brain had become spilling out. Dithers fumbled out of my arms, and I felt leather hands pounding and tugging at me. In the commotion I managed to light a flare from my cargo pocket and then I sprang to my feet and shrugged off my attackers, and in the fiery shadows I saw several chimpanzees screeching at me and waving their fists over their heads. Their yellow eyes were filled with hate. Like everyone else I’d seen the psyops pamphlets Iraq had dropped with a picture of King Kong eating the heads of terrified American soldiers, but I never thought there was anything to it. I spotted Dithers motionless on the floor in a heap. His forehead was pale and slick with sweat. His shoulder was a gory red flesh mess, and I realized he could be dead. I said, “Getouttahere,” and waved the flare around in my hand like a sparkler and then frantically chased the chimpanzees into the back of the bunker with it.

  The bunker looked as if it had been abandoned in a hurry. Later, once I’d found the light switch, I also discovered the pinewood cages and figured out that the chimps must have escaped after the Iraqis deserted the bunker. There was a giant metal table against the south wall, which was strewn with papers and booklets that I can’t read, but, judging by the pictures and illustrations, are booklets that describe how to make chemical weapons. And there’s the hand-to-hand combat stuff, and an English dictionary from 1964. In the closet I found a big box of M.R.E.s. There was also a giant cache of weapons, but there’s no ammo. RPGs, AK-47s, M-16s, the works. On the north wall is a little bathroom area complete with toilet and sink. And a couple lightbulbs dangle from the ceiling. And like I said, the wooden cages, eight total, stacked up on one another, pushed up against the east wall.

  HOW I CAME TO BE KNOWN AS G.D.

  This was at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. We were rehearsing hostage rescue. My team crashed through the third-story window, and I hit the deck, laying on cover fire with my 9mm, while Dithers scurried forward with Marty to search the bedrooms and bathroom and laundry room. The Dad came rushing in from the kitchen, crying out, “Help, help, they’ve got my son.” A three-dimensional hologram of a German shepherd appeared on the wall. The dog started barking at me and baring its teeth, threatening to compromise our mission, so I blew its head off with my 9mm, and synthetic blood splattered everywhere. The graphics were amazing. I leapt up and moved swiftly to The Dad, reciting my lines, “We’re here to help, sir. Please lie down on the floor under a table until further instructed. You are safe now.” I was in midspeech, on the word table, when Dithers dove back into the room, squeaking, “Hit the deck, hit the deck.” as he sprayed The Dad with his Koch MP-5 series machine gun, so that the robot’s chest ripped open and a fuse shorted and blazed momentarily, and then the machine’s lights went out. I turned to Dithers, and blurted, “What the hell?” But he was already beside The Dad, and he yanked off The Dad’s face, revealing the grinning, pockmarked mannequin face of the Middle Eastern Terrorist (MET) we’d been instructed to terminate. A baby in diapers waddled out from the kitchen, and I said, “Here’s number one. Got ’im,” and scooped him up, then sprinted into the kitchen, where the baby’s dad was lying, apparently bludgeoned by the MET with a toaster. The Dad gasped, “You took too long, and now I will die because of you. If I were a real person you would now have to live with the burden of my death for the rest of your life, soldier.” Marty came bursting through the kitchen door and I jumped and the baby dropped from my arms, landing on its head. “You moron,” shouted Marty. The baby started howling like a fire engine, and Captain Larthrop’s crackly voice came on over the intercom. “Christ Almighty, son, where the fuck is your head? Good job, Dithers, but it looks like the real terrorist here is you-know-who.” You-know-who was me. “Grab your gear and get in the frigging debriefing room, you knuckleheads.”

  On the way to the debriefing room, Marty turned to me and spat, “Nice job, Mr. Gay Dad. Next time why don’t you just hug the MET to death.” Dithers started laughing, and said, “Yeah, G.D. Why don’t you give him a big kiss next time,” and it was with that laughter that my new name was born.

  DITHERS’S NEAR-DEATH EXPERIENCE, AND MY SPIRITUAL CONVERSION TO THE ART OF HEALING, NOT HURTING

  It was touch and go for a week or so there, but then I finally got Dithers to regain consciousness. Snatched him right out of the jaws of death is how I like to think of it. Those first couple days I tended to him around the clock. He was shaking and his teeth were chattering and not once did he open his eyes. I gingerly pulled back his eyelids with my thumbs and saw nothing but white. I thought maybe hypothermia and shock. I squeezed perfect droplets of water into his mouth with a wet rag. Endlessly wiped his damp forehead with leaves. Changed his soiled skivvies. He’d lost a ton of blood. I patched up his shoulder with gauze dressing from my medical kit. When the gauze was saturated red I would change it out. I changed and I changed and I changed. On the third day the bleeding stopped. Just like that. And throughout all this I would talk to Dithers in his fevered state, words of consolation.

  “Hang in there, Dithers,” I’d whisper into his ear. “You’re in for a little shock, buddy. You’ve lost your right arm. But you shouldn’t worry about it, even though some people are going to think you’re a one-armed freak, screw them. Do you know why, my friend? Because that missing arm is a symbol. It’s a symbol of the sickness you left behind when you quit the war.” Then I would pause to let all this sink in, before going on. “You don’t know yet that you have quit the war. But Dithers, let me tell you something. You can rest easy now, buddy. Because all that stuff is behind us now. We’ve got our whole lives ahead of us.”

  When Dithers finally came to, his eyes fluttered, and then they opened very wide as if for good. He smiled. “Hey,” he said. “It’s good to see you.” He reached for my hand and squeezed it. “God, it’s good to see you, G.D.” Then he asked me where the rest of the team was. “Where is everybody?” he said, looking around. “Where are we? Hey,” he said, “you’re not going to try and make a move on me now, are you, G.D.? G.D.? Hey, what’s wrong?” he said with a cocksure grin.

  MY DAD’S PROPAGANDA CAMPAIGN, IN THE FORM OF LETTERS SENT TO ME SINCE I’VE BEEN IN THE MIDDLE EAST

  Dear Son,

  You amuse me. When you say I have dishonored my country, and the uniform I served in, and the proud tradition of American Warfare, just because I prefer to make love to men rather than women, you drive home my point even further, that the biggest mistake I ever made was putting my dick inside your mother. That was truly a “dishonorable discharge.” You are emblematic of everything that is wrong with your pansy, self-conscious, haven’t-worked-for-anything-and-have-no-sense-of-history generation. Let me tell you something about honor. I fought the mighty Vietcong, and here you are in the Persian Gulf war, sitting in the desert, making sand castles. I piss on your war, and it has no more bearing on history than an ant’s testicle. I can’t wait to see the great stories your generation writes about their war. Oh boy. That’s going to be fascinating. What do you know of honor, of sacrifice, of death anyway? And what are you fighting for? Oil. How dignified, how noble, how principled. What is the battle cry over there, “Fill ’er up?”

  So I could care less if your team is making fun of you for having a gay dad. I broke dink necks with my bare hands because I could, danced with a dead gook in my arms for an entire night while smashed out on opium. I saw a boy from Georgia keep himself alive by holding his guts in his hands. You tell Marty or Dithers or anyone else from your team that if they were here with me right now, I would bend them over and “break them off something.”

  Now listen, son, let me give you a piece of advice. It sounds like you are all wound up over there, and that you are focused on all the wrong things. What I recommend is the next time you find yourself in a foxhole with Dithers, y
ou get him to give you a blow job. I cannot recommend this highly enough, and I think you will instantly recognize the sagacity of my advice. Who else would know best how to give a blow job but a man? That is my one real regret. When I think back to The Nam, and consider how many lonely nights I spent, I feel the bitter taste in my mouth of lost opportunity. Of dark regret.

  As ever, Dad

  ESTABLISHING ALLIANCES, THE FIRST STEP TOWARD THE PROJECTED COALITION

  It hasn’t been easy getting used to these chimpanzees. What kind of disgusting creature has a carpet of pubic hair all over its body? A chimpanzee. They are dirty and they stink. I can smell them right now, which is why I tend to stay on this side of the bunker. But they’re my friends, or at least they will be soon. I’m training them to be my friends.

  After setting up shop here, I went ahead and named the chimpanzees, respectively: Ingrid, Ronald, Beverly, Lorraine, and Dennis. Ingrid is gentle, and the first thing she tried to do after that first bit of unpleasantness was pet my cheek. Her favorite song is “Happy Birthday.” When you sing “Happy Birthday” she tries to bounce up and down on her head. Ronald likes to make kissing noises and then look around as if he didn’t know where they were coming from. Beverly is deaf. It took me a while to figure out she was deaf until finally I snuck up behind her and clapped my hands. Lorraine. Well, Lorraine is the brooding-poet type—she just sits around and stares with a superior look on her face. And Dennis is a gigantic male with big biceps. I’ve seen Dennis amble up and mount each of the other chimps at will, girls and boys. I keep a close eye on Dennis. So you might wonder how I could be sure which are the girl chimps and which are the boy chimps. Well, this would tell me that you’ve never seen a chimpanzee in person before, because a chimp’s penis is something that can’t be ignored.

  It wasn’t until later that I put them back in their cages. Of course there wasn’t any way for me to know if I was putting them back in their original cages, but I didn’t care. A cage is a cage is a cage. At first they didn’t take to the idea, and Dennis and Lorraine tried to gallop down the hall to the bunker hatch, but I’ve always had a quick first step and even with this bum knee I was able to get the jump on them. In fact, and I don’t want to step on anyone’s toes here and presume to speak on behalf of the chimps, but I’d be willing to bet that if these chimps could speak English they’d say they prefer this arrangement to the one that they had before. If for no other reason at least they’re safe from Dennis now.

  I MAKE MY CASE TO DITHERS, WHO HAS SOME TROUBLE SEEING THE LIGHT, BUT EVENTUALLY COMES AROUND

  The penalty for desertion is the brig. Pure and simple. The brig’s where they can, because it’s Military Law, strip you naked and throw you in solitary “think tanks” all in the name of Justice. If you make too much noise they’ll break your jaw and then wire it shut. Standard cuisine is bread and water. I met a blind Marine once at the V.A. hospital, a young private who’d spent three months in the brig; he had a white bandage over the top of his head, and apparently a guard had conked him in the nose with a club and those things that hold your eyeballs in place had come detached. “They float every which way now,” he said. “Every which way but loose,” and then started cracking up. “Because check it out. They’re sending me home with a medical discharge as long as I don’t make a stink about it. Full benefits.”

  And so, because my heart tells me that I do not deserve to spend the rest of my life in the brig, I have now, metaphorically speaking, changed my identity, and so I’ve renamed myself Help People. Help People’s my name because help people is what I do. Every night. Right after a long yoga session, after getting my mind up into the void, running through the routine of Peaceful Rainbow, Fierce Cricket, Sun Salutation, and then finishing off with Wide Galaxy, I slip out into the night with my medical kit and tend to the wounded Iraqi pilgrims littered along the sides of the highway.

  And I am a quick study. And I’ve learned the Ways of the Desert, so fueled on by the victorious breathing that I feel all the way down to the soles of my feet, when I go out on my nightly forays for the Good of Mankind I’m basically an untouchable phantom. The secret is to move with the land, not against it. One night I might filter myself out among the stars, and on another I might blend into the billions of grains of sand that line the desert floor. I become and do whatever’s needed because I let my heart steer me through the madness now. I always wear my NVGs, night-vision goggles. I’ve still got all my gear: rifle, rucksack, e-tool, flak jacket, Gore-Tex, helmet, gas mask, poncho, poncho liner, maps, and of course the most important item of all, my medical kit.

  So, when Dithers came out of his coma, lying there holding my hand, and started hammering me with all those questions: I told him the truth. “G.D. is dead,” I said. “My name’s Help People now, Dithers.”

  One of his eyebrows arched.

  “Help People?” he said with a half grin, his voice raised.

  I tried to figure out what else he needed to know. Then I spoke. “Yes. Help People. And I move with the Ways of the Desert.”

  His smile grew wider. “Come on, man. What are you up to? We’ve got to get back and blast those SCUDs, right? What about the nuclear war?” he said, grinning.

  I told him about seeing George Washington. I told him how America had no real culture of its own and how that burrito was a symbol for what we’d done to our downtrodden neighbor, Mexico, how America raped other countries of their cultural artifacts and then filtered them through its sadistic and glamorous lens of ultra-consumerism. “We put everything in neon letters,” I said. I told him how America was the home of the gun-toting white supremacists, and that Charlton Heston was really the Grand Wizard of the KKK. I told him that the Native Americans were living works of art and we’d murdered them. That even the term Native American was an oxymoron. I said, how can we fight for a country where only forty years ago it was no big deal to lynch an African American. My mouth ran on and on. I redressed his shoulder with gauze bandages as I talked, and I watched as the smile slid right off Dithers’s face. I could see the wheels churning in his head as I talked. Finally, breathless, I stopped. And the second I stopped talking he spoke right up. What he said popped right out of his mouth as if it had been on the tip of his tongue the entire time.

  “So when do we leave here, G.D., and get back to the guys?”

  “We’re not leaving,” I said. “That’s the whole point. Haven’t you been listening to a word I’ve said?”

  “I could be ready in a couple days,” he said, and tentatively stretched one of his legs out. “Of course it’s gonna be difficult with this,” he said, and nodded to his bandaged shoulder. “But I’m willing to give it a shot.” And as he said this his head slowly turned and his eyes met mine and held them.

  I think the look on my face said it all. My eyes were stone that burned fire in the middle. I waited for the idiocy of what he’d just said to sink into his head. Finally he turned away and stared at the table with all the papers and books spread over it. I watched his brow furrow. His brain appeared to be chewing something over.

  Then his face broke into a smile and he turned to me and said, “Well, it seems like you’ve been doing a lot of thinking. And I’m glad you’re doing what you’re doing. Help People, huh? I like that.” He glanced at his armless shoulder. “Because let’s face it. If it weren’t for you, I probably wouldn’t be alive right now.” Then he looked back up at me, the smile widening. “So how about that, Help People? Say. You got any chow around here? What do we eat anyway? I’m starving.”

  PROPAGANDA LETTER #2

  Dear Son,

  Everyone’s saying Desert Storm looks like a video game on the TV, but from where I’m sitting you couldn’t get me to pay a quarter to play it. Hell, I’d rather play Pong—remember how I used to kick your butt at Pong?—or pinball. I have one question for you. Is that war as boring to fight as it is to watch on TV? I sure hope not, for your sake. Because too bad for you, you can’t just click the remote and flip to anoth
er channel. Rob said he wondered if the ratings sink low enough on Desert Storm, they’ll yank your prime-time spot and put it on late night with all the infomercials. Have you even got to fire your weapon yet? I heard on NPR where American soldiers in Saudi Arabia had to conserve ammunition over there, so when they practiced drills they had to make sounds that approximated the sounds of rounds being fired. I heard one grunt going, “Batatat-tat-tat.” What kind of war is that, where you have to pretend to fire your weapon? Shit. There’s more killing in the American inner cities every day then there is in your entire Desert Storm so far. Compton, California, is more dangerous than Kuwait. Maybe if you want to prove your manhood by shooting people, Mr. Bigshot, you should start dealing crack over there, then you might see some action.

  Get your head out of your ass and come home, son. Have you ever thought about why you’re over there in the first place? Did you know that the American government used to consider Saddam an ally in the fight against the Russians and Iran, and that we funded him and gave him weapons? That we supported him when he pulled a Hitler and gassed the Kurdish town of Halabja in 1988? America beds down with any Middle Eastern country that will do its dirty work for it. American foreign policy amounts to being a slut. Can’t you see how the government is playing you for a fool? They’re setting you up, son, you’ve inherited that myth. So don’t believe it for a second.