My father died on the day of my last mission, to spook it further. The navy let me out and paid me handsomely to quit its service.
Now I come to Oxford and I am war. I’ve found the six other vets and am now a lay minister. My wife Brazile left me but might come back. What else did you expect? I cannot tell whether I’ve got the guts to minister to the other vets because of confusion among love, war, peace, and former nefarious behavior on my own part. I bought a church near the casino in Vicksburg right on a bayou. I knew the law and the law left me alone. My congregants were rough and smooth but all wanted to talk about God and each was allowed to give his own sermon until it became Babel and I made the rule that we could only talk about Christ. Several cursed me and left in their leather and denim all Prussian with medals and pins all over, out to the motorcycles and gone. The sergeant at arms of the church was a close friend. We did not truly need a sergeant at arms but the office made him feel good. He carried a baseball bat with barbed wire wrapped tightly around the sweet spot, a fine piece of craftsmanship, and he came through and brought the others back into the fold with him. After all, the bikers were just oily Prussian children with no place to go. Three of them lived with my pal Dan, of the barbed wire bat, in a cabin near a colossal junkyard. They were on heavy metal, they listened to heavy metal music, and they breathed oily heavy metal on a good wind off the yard.
After church the gambling would begin. The church was a casino and a pawnshop. Folks not even remotely connected to God, and happy Vietnamese and Chinamen, Haitians, Black Muslims, and Mexicans with the smell of road tar, all gathered to gamble and pawn.
My wife was an inattentive Roman Catholic from Morgan City, Louisiana, who flew helicopters out to the oil rigs in the Gulf when I met her. She was from the upper middle class and wanted to prove something and she did. I could never figure what delight anybody could have piloting a copter but her moxie brought me over. That and she was a rare gem of a fuck, with long legs, bouncing bosoms, and the only hair I’ve ever seen that was naturally black and gold.
She was as tall as I was, five feet eleven.
I’m not going to say a damned thing about 9/11, by the way. I think the innocent dead will appreciate that. When will “poets” ever realize they’ve long since been irrelevant after Bruce Springsteen’s The Rising? And in all other matters by Dylan, et al.
Maybe all books must die before we form the peace.
I am war for Christ and my Brazile fled what she called outright insanity. She played the violin very well, I mean tempestuously while I entered her naked entrances from every angle possible. I wish her ears could suck. Get in there deep to her unarguable perfect pitch. I was a lucky man but I thought I had to prove something every day. I was thrown out of my war but am not comfortable with peace. Something always seemed left out of it. Like when we were kids and rigged a cannon that fired a two-inch shell of mule shit tightly wrapped in aluminum foil at the most beautiful white mansion in Natchez.
Too many books will deny their slaves the race to die in battle with the shout of victory in their ears. Otherwise you only get a cool nap in the shade and kick off with a little ah sound so they know to get you in the ground haste-wise before the public stink.
You dream maybe of Sam Houston whose own army ignored him and struck out to attack Santa Anna at San Jacinto. Old Sam yelled, “Gentlemen, I applaud your bravery but damn your manners,” as he watched the slaughter and rode his white horse five times around the battle, getting his own licks in with no choice left.
Two regiments clash by afternoon. Gluttonous killings. Mexican drummer boys stuck in the bayou mud, half-beheaded by musket butts. Thus the birth of Texas, the birth of all states by mob slaughter.
For me, my own scribblings in my Life Book must end. Burn your books or hand them to other slaves who’ve lost their voices, their silence, their souls to literature, a feeble sucking religion.
What dream was I in January and February, 1991, when I made my last flyover of Baghdad? All F-18 Hornet, hardly a human creature at all. No balls, no soul, just fire, lift, drift, roll over, bang. The gorgeous missile tracks oranger than orange, or your hand-rolled bomb for any occasion. What a heavy leap of fire down there. You never imagine the hunched-down earthling in the streets or sand. Sheet, burnoose, and sandals, a helmet held to his dick. Look out above!
In the cockpit I was nothing but quiet screaming head, watching the immolations with small concern. I may have burned up this self and soul when I accidentally saw the burning man on the ground. My handiwork.
But somebody down there owned a vector on me. When I blew out with my already dead copilot just behind me somewhere in the air and never found, I believe I went from a mild scream to nothing, not a long trip.
Now I have the soul of an abandoned hospital. The six other Desert Storm vets, I want to invite them into it. Fill me up. But I’m a coward and a bad host in my ministry, astride this yellow Triumph Tiger, 1970 and mint, given to me by good Dan Williams.
In my journey from needy ones to other needy ones, I smile and think of Dan, who taught me how to hide things, my airplane and my last hundred thou. He knew the IRS as the gestapo and planned to attack three of the jackals who stalked him, still after money rightly devoted to Jesus.
Lt. Cmdr. to grievous joystick gambler, money changer in the temple of God, to Idiot of Christ, then lay minister, then simply four diseases all at once. Two cancers and chemo with its attendant friends neuropathy, boiling claws inside my legs, and a maddening ring ever constant in my head, half a heart and lungs blown away, three invasive surgeries, the horror of waiting waiting waiting for doctors who don’t want to see you and cannot abide the idea of pain. How do I count the ways, fair pain, among the criminals and loafers of the drug, med, hospital, insurance white-collar-larceny colossus?
But will you believe this?
I am happy to just get down the road when I can, giving even unluckier muckers a ride if I can. Near death by pneumonia I had dreamed of all my pals and gals, foremost Brazile Varas Burden, the woman who will surely come back to me because she’ll understand I’m no longer insane. Rather, to the contrary, serene and filled with peace that passeth understanding.
May I say this. Mark this: I do not feel saved but only born again into a parallel world where all my animals, all the girlfriends and powerful pals, the handsome infants, all of us children of a quiet green meadow with the ocean over there just beyond the trees, where we live when misery that passes understanding knocks down our last doors to come and claw us. It will always be there when no pills, no help, no release are left, only the hard wall of stupid random torture and malicious indifference. Then Christ comes if you give this kind stranger a chance. Simplicity. Ecstasy, all speech and acts converted to a fundament of rest.
Plus I’m still a handsome dude, hung like a small bear. I am faithful to my wife in our separation and she is faithful to me. Time is all, a hard matter, time and its exasperations like minutes stretched to no horizon.
Now in Oxford, drawn by the church, mosque, and tabernacle burnings from northwest Mississippi to St. Louis along the river through Memphis, I admit again I am a worm. I am organizing walking tours from blackened ruin to blackened ruin. Some of the churches were not just burned. They were bombed expertly as well. They exploded as only the hand of a specialist could bring about.
This does not harken back to the Klan burnings of the sixties, which were done by imbecilic cowards cheered on by silence from miserable governors. This is new history. You think Iraq. Vets of Iraq. I know six of them but have not a clue if the crimes are connected to any, none, or all of them.