I myself was deeply troubled by our little familys image problem, which was complicated when Mother broke her nose 2 days after Father got the black eye. To the outside world it looked as though she had said something to Father about the reason he had a black eye, and his reply had been to slug her. I didnt think he would ever slug her, no matter what.
There is a not quite remote possibility that he really did slug her, of course. Lesser men would have slugged her under similar circumstances. The real truth of the matter became unavailable to historians forever when the falling ceiling of a gift shop on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls killed both participants, as Ive said, some 20 years ago. They were said to have died instantly. They never knew what hit them, which is the best way to go.
There was no argument about that in Vietnam or, I suppose, on any battlefield. One kid I remember stepped on an antipersonnel mine. The mine could have been one of our own. His best friend from Basic Training asked him what he could do for him, and the kid replied: Turn me off like a light bulb, Sam.¨
The dying kid was white. The kid who wanted to help him was black, or a light tan, actually. His features were practically white, you would have to say.
A woman I was making love to a few years ago asked me if my parents were still alive. She wanted to know more about me, now that we had our clothes off.
I told her that they had suffered violent deaths in a foreign country, which was true. Canada is a foreign country.
But then I heard myself spinning this fantastic tale of their being on a safari in Tanganyika, a place about which I know almost nothing. I told that woman, and she believed me, that my parents and their guide were shot by poachers who were killing elephants for their ivory and mistook them for game wardens. I said that the poachers put their bodies on top of anthills, so that their skeletons were soon picked clean. They could be positively identified only by their dental work.
I used to find it easy and even exhilarating to lie that elaborately. I dont anymore. And I wonder now if I didnt develop that unwholesome habit very young, and because my parents were such an embarrassment, and especially my mother, who was fat enough to be a circus freak. I described much more attractive parents than I really had, in order to make people who knew nothing about them think well of me.
And during my final year in Vietnam, when I was in Public Information, I found it as natural as breathing to tell the press and replacements fresh off the boats or planes that we were clearly winning, and that the folks back home should be proud and happy about all the good things we were doing there.
I learned to lie like that in high school.
Another thing I learned in high school that was helpful in Vietnam: Alcohol and marijuana, if used in modera
tion, plus loud, usually low-class music, make stress and boredom infinitely more bearable. It was manna from Heaven that I came into this world with a gift for moderation in my intake of mood-modifying substances. During my last 2 years in high school, I dont think my parents even suspected that I was half in the bag a lot of the time. All they ever complained about was the music, when I played the radio or the phonograph or when The Soul Merchants rehearsed in our basement, which Mom and Dad said was jungle music, and much too loud.
In Vietnam, the music was always much too loud. Practically everybody was half in the bag, including Chaplains. Several of the most gruesome accidents I had to explain to the press during my last year over there were caused by people who had rendered themselves imbecilic or maniacal by ingesting too much of what, if taken in moderation, could be a helpful chemical. I ascribed all such accidents, of course, to human error. The press understood. Who on this Earth hasnt made a mistake or 2?
The assassination of an Austrian archduke led to World War I, and probably to World War II as well. Just as surely, my fathers black eye brought me to the sorry state in which I find myself today. He was looking for some way, almost any way, to recapture the respect of the community, and to attract favorable attention from Barrytrons new owner, Du Pont. Du Pont, of course, has now been taken over by I. G. Farben of Germany, the same company that manufactured and packaged and labeled and addressed the cyanide gas used to kill civilians of all ages, including babes in arms, during the Holocaust.
What a planet.
So Father, his injured eye looking like a slit in a purple and yellow omelet, asked me if I was likely to receive any sort of honors at high school graduation. He didnt say so, but he was frantic for something to brag about at work. He was so desperate that he was trying to get blood out of the turnip of my nonparticipation in high school sports, student government, or school-sponsored extracurricular activities. My grade average was high enough to get me into the University of Michigan, and on the honor roll now and then, but not into the National Honor Society.
It was so pitiful! It made me mad, too, because he was trying to make me partly responsible for the familys image problem, which was all his fault. I was always sorry you didnt go out for football,¨ he said, as though a touchdown would have made everything all right again.
Too late now,¨ I said.
You let those 4 years slip by without doing anything but making jungle music,¨ he said.
It occurs to me now, a mere 43 years later, that I might have said to him that at least I managed my sex life better than he had managed his. I was getting laid all the time, thanks to jungle music, and so were the other Soul Merchants. Certain sorts of not just girls but full-grown women, too, found us glamorous free spirits up on the bandstand, imitating black people and smoking marijuana, and loving ourselves when we made music, and laughing about God knows what just about anytime.
I guess my love life is over now. Even if I could get out of prison, I wouldnt want to give some trusting
woman tuberculosis. She would be scared to death of getting AIDS, and I would give her TB instead. Wouldnt that be nice?
So now I will have to make do with memories. As a prosthesis for my memory, I have begun to list all the women, excluding my wife and prostitutes, with whom I have gone all the way,¨ as we used to say in high school. I find it impossible to remember any conquest I made as a teenager with clarity, to separate fact from fantasy. It was all a dream. So I begin my list with Shirley Kern, to whom I made love when I was 20. Shirley is my datum.
How many names will there be on the list? Too early to tell, but wouldnt that number, whatever it turns out to be, be as good a thing as any to put on my tombstone as an enigmatic epitaph?
I am certainly sorry if I ruined the lives of any of those women who believed me when I said I loved them. I can only hope against hope that Shirley Kern and all the rest of them are still OK.
If it is any consolation to those who may not be OK, my own life was ruined by a Science Fair.
Father asked me if there wasnt some school-sponsored extracurricular activity I could still try out for. This was only 8 weeks before my graduation! So I said, in a spirit of irony, since he knew science did not delight me as it delighted him, that my last opportunity to amount to anything was the County Science Fair. I got Bs in Physics and Chemistry, but you could stuff both those subjects up your fundament as far as I was concerned.
But Father rose from his chair in a state of sick
excitement. Lets go down in the basement,¨ he said. Theres work to do.¨
What kind of work?¨ I said. This was about midnight.
And he said, You are going to enter and win the Science Fair.¨
Which I did. Or, rather, Father entered and won the Science Fair, requiring only that I sign an affidavit swearing that the exhibit was all my own work, and that I memorize his explanation of what it proved. It was about crystals and how they grew and why they grew.