When I finished, the chapter was thirty pages long. Patience read it and marked it up, saying I should give more details here, clarify this, expand that, shorten this, and so on. Patience is a very talented editor and a real pain in the ass about it. I rewrote it, the first time in my life I ever rewrote anything. When I finished, I had seventy pages. Much better, Patience said, and marked it all up again. I rewrote it again. Good, she said. I sent it off to Knox.
Knox wrote back saying it was powerful stuff, and I ought to keep at it. He said that if I got two hundred pages together, he’d take it around to see if he could sell it. I spent a day experiencing uncontrollable elation. With the exception of flying helicopters, I hadn’t done anything that gave me such satisfaction.
Knox had also said, “Have you read any Vietnam books?”
“No. I’m afraid they’d influence me.”
“Amateur. Get some. Read them. See how they handled it.”
I read A Rumor of War, by Philip Caputo. Caputo was a grunt Marine officer in Vietnam the same time I was there. He’d been tried for murder; had a lot of terrible things happen to him that I hadn’t experienced. Caputo’s book was also intimidating to me because the man wrote so damn well. I wondered if I was up to the task.
I read The Killing Zone, by Frederick Downs. Downs’s description of himself being blown to shreds at the end of book was electrifying.
I read If I Die in a Combat Zone, by Tim O’Brien. O’Brien’s book was about his tour as an Army grunt. It was a tough and moving narrative, but I thought I could match his writing skill. Going After Cacciato, his Vietnam novel, knocked my socks off when I read it later. He opened my eyes to kinds of writing I’d never thought of.
I read a short story in Harper’s called “Good Morning to You, Lieutenant,” by Larry Heinemann. A Vietnamese girl gets raped and murdered in the story and it felt like it. That story pissed me off for days. When I calmed down, I realized that the events were fictional, but the feelings weren’t. Heinemann was communicating emotion to me. I wanted to affect people like that. I had to tell people what it felt like to be a helicopter pilot in Vietnam.
When I read Dispatches, by Michael Herr, I decided that if a journalist could make his Vietnam experiences interesting reading, so could I.
It took me until February 1980 to put together a two-hundred-page manuscript with a thirty-page outline of the rest of the book. I couldn’t think what to call it, so I sent if off to Knox untitled. A week later, Knox wrote back and said he really was moved by it and would take it around. He warned me not to get my hopes up. The material was good, but it was going to be tough going. In 1980, nobody wanted to publish books about the Vietnam War.
That last bit just went by me. The fact that Knox liked what I’d written was exhilarating in itself. That he was going to try to sell it was a triumph. Just before we left New York, Knox had sold Bill’s vampire bat book, Nightwing, and the film rights for hundreds of thousands of dollars. It changed Bill’s life. He was on the Today Show, for chrissakes! He’d even gone to the publisher who was giving him crap about not sticking to the outline of his Russian novel and bought the thing back so he could do it his way. Wow!
Yes, indeed, I figured it might take a couple of months, but I was definitely on the road to success now. And I was happy.
CHAPTER 10
March 1980—I figured it might take a few weeks to sell a book, so I waited a month to call Knox.
“Knox, I don’t mean to bother you, but—”
“Yes, you do.”
“I do what?”
“You mean to bother me. Look, Bob, this is a tough sale. Don’t hang around waiting on pins and needles. This could take a long time. Why don’t you get a job?”
Good advice. The money from my severance was almost gone. I’d decided that I’d finish the Vietnam book if somebody bought it; otherwise, it was just too damn painful to do. Instead of looking for work, I started a book about something fun, something I was fascinated with: robots. Back in 1970 I’d read an article by Marvin Minsky of MIT. He described a little robot they’d built that just wandered around the lab on its own. When its batteries got weak, it’d find its way to a receptacle, plug in, and recharge itself. I thought that was amazing. Minsky also said that the thing, which had a TV camera for an eye, would just loiter around the place, staring at people. One woman in particular, a secretary at the lab, often found herself the object of this mechanical scrutiny and said it was unnerving. Minsky claimed not to know why the little pile of parts did that. I was drawn to artificial intelligence by that article and was reading everything I could find on the subject.
When I decided to write a novel, I figured I’d make the hero a machine.
Eventually I realized it would take more time to write a novel than I had. My Vietnam book was somewhere in limbo. I was not getting rich like I’d imagined. I applied at the local plastic pipe factory as a plastic-pipe-extrusion specialist and was turned down. I read the classifieds every day. I wasn’t getting anywhere. Luckily, Elliott called and said he wanted to come down. He wanted to go on a big canoe trip down the Suwannee River.
I’m usually not one to point out personal abnormalities, but I have to say here that Elliott is rich, always was. He’d inherited a comfortable fortune when his dad died and had a steady income from a portfolio of stocks and bonds. On our trip to see Willis, he’d advised me that a good investment to make was in railroad cars. Buy ’em—thirty thou or so—and lease ’em. This was gibberish to me—at any moment, without too much trouble, Patience and I could put our hands on maybe twenty bucks.
So Elliott showed up in a rented car and we all decided to go to our hometown, Delray Beach, and visit my father on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday before we went on our big river adventure. Patience and I stayed with my parents in Deerfield Beach. Elliott stayed with his mother in Delray. It was spooky visiting Delray Beach again. Lots of changes. South Florida had become overgrown with condos built on land that had been covered with sea-grape trees and sand dunes when I was a kid.
When we came back up to High Springs, Elliott and I began to get our gear together for our trip down the Suwannee River.
This would’ve been a fun trip under normal conditions, but Elliott and I had differences that began to surface and produce tensions. Little things cropped up while we were getting ready to go: Elliott would say let’s go out tonight for dinner. We’d think he meant he was buying (he’s wealthy and he asked), but he didn’t. So we almost get stuck for a check at a restaurant we never would have gone to had we not been invited. We’d have to point this out to Elliott. He wasn’t trying to be unthinking or uncaring; it just turned out that way because he didn’t, couldn’t, understand what it was like to be actually, honest-to-God, poor.
I’d prepared for the river trip by inventing a new way to do it. (My instincts have always been to invent things that can’t be patented when I need money.) I invented a way to connect two canoes together with a platform upon which a tent could be pitched. I made the platform of thin strips of cypress held together with cord woven through the slats. I made it in two sections, each four by eight feet, so they could be rolled up and carried when we had to portage around the shoals at White Springs. Unrolled, tied together, and clamped to the canoe gunwales, we had an eight-foot-square platform sitting across two canoes—something like a catamaran—that allowed us to make the trip comfortably. One of the big problems of long trips down the Suwannee, or any river, is that you’re never sure when to stop and pitch a camp unless you know the river. At sunset, you might be next to private property or a swamp; so you start looking for a place early in the day to be sure you have a campsite before dark. With Mason’s Unpatented Canoe Raft, that was a worry of the past. Sunset? Not to worry, just keep drifting. We lighted the fire in our hibachi and cooked dinner at sunset. When we got sleepy, and when we fucking well wanted to, we’d just snatch a low branch and tie up for the night. Sometimes beavers would slap water on our tent, letting us know we were trespassers, but most of the time things worked out fine.