And so on: Hermann Goring’s wet dream.
Round and round the tight circle of booths they went, mostly suburban types, engineers, CPAs, ad-men, no different from farmers at a county fair examining produce and flowers, except that these guys were looking at hard-core weapons of death.
The tenor of the whole event was set by the huge poster that hung above the stage showing Sylvester Stallone in Rambo drag. In his headband and his shoulder-strap ammo belt and his carefully mussed hair, he looked like the Liberace of survivalists.
My part was pretty simple, actually. I’d been hired to don camouflage gear and grease my face and stand on the stage reading a lot of hokey copy provided me by Lynott, the guy who’d just asked if I’d ever wanted to own a tank.
“In this era, brave warriors must match their courage with the proper weaponry if freedom is to be preserved.” Shit like that. In the old barn of a colosseum my voice bounced off the high ceilings and reverberated throughout the booths. Not that anybody paid attention. They were too orgasmically involved with guns.
“Part of learning your craft,” as my agent always said. “An actor’s got to take work where he can find it.” Actually I was getting union scale, which worked out to be three times as much as my job for Federated Security paid.
“The hell of it is,” Morg Lynott was explaining, “you can get the tank all right. It’s getting the goddamn ammo that’s the hard part. Leave it to the limp dicks in Washington to come up with a deal like that. They’ll let you go out and buy your tank, but just try and buy ammo for the sucker and the firearms boys will be all over your ass like a rash.”
Now you’ve already got him pictured as some good-old-boy slob who wants nothing more than to torture Democrats and homosexuals with bamboo shoots and electric prods, right? Wrong. And that’s the hell of it. Morg Lynott is this big sheep dog of a man who runs a John Hancock insurance agency and is actually a generous, warm and intelligent man. He just happens to be right wing and crazy as shit.
But that’s a contradiction I’ve always found. Many of the neo-Nazi types I know are actually more decent human beings than many of the snotty liberals who polish their Volvos and give you big speeches about Civil Rights and The Bomb. When I’m around the do-gooders long enough, I almost hate my humanitarian impulses.
“Yeah, that’s a bitch, Morg,” I said, “not being able to get ammo for your tank.”
He laughed. “You’re being a liberal again, Dwyer.” He rubbed hands on his khaki jacket.
“I suppose I am.”
“Nothing wrong with a guy having a tank. The Constitution gives us the right to bear arms.”
“I suppose you’re right. I’ve always wanted an aircraft carrier myself. You know, put it up there in my efficiency apartment, and I’d sleep a lot safer at night.”
Then it was time to go back to the stage and read some more war stuff. Morg handed me the copy and said, “My wife wrote this stuff. We’re damn proud of it.”
I made the mistake of not reading it to myself first. Because when I got up there and actually started reading, I almost started laughing. The copy she wrote was about what would happen when the Russians invaded and saw all the beautiful American women. “If we aren’t armed with our own auto pistols, with our own Enfield assault rifles, with our own mini-Uzi submachine guns, then these Russian bears are going to spread wide the unity of American virtue and drive deep into our very souls the thrusting rod of Communism.”
Apparently, Mrs. Lynott read a lot of costume romances.
10
When I called Mike Perry’s place, I was told by an answering machine that he could be found, if it was any kind of emergency, at the Windsor Park softball field.
The next place I checked was Federated Security to see if they wanted me to work tonight. Bobby Lee answered. “He told me to tell you were put on suspension.”
“Bullshit.”
“Don’t talk to me like that. I’m a lady.”
“Right. And I’m an astronaut. Now let me talk to him.”
There was a pause and then a shocking sound. She was crying. Bobby Lee with the beehive hairdo and the spandex pants was crying. In a soft voice — hell, her pain was pain even if I didn’t like her — I said, “What’s wrong, Bobby Lee?”
“He’s taking her on vacation.”
“Who?”
“His wife. That bitch.”
So much for her being-a-lady theory.
“What’s wrong with that?”
“He never takes me on vacation,” she said.
“I see.”
“You see what?”
“You’re jealous.”
“Well that’s a goddamn nice thing to say.”
“It’s perfectly understandable, Bobby Lee. I’d be jealous, too.”
“You can just piss up a rope as far as I’m concerned.”
Then she slammed the phone down.
There were a few dozen kids in wheelchairs lining a softball diamond. They were muscular dystrophy kids. They had twisted limbs and suffering eyes, and when they talked you could barely understand them. They just sat there and broke your fucking heart.
Next to the field knelt video-tape crews from two different TV stations recording the game itself.
On the mound was Mike Perry. He threw under hand the way Sonny Liston used to throw uppercuts. As if he were trying to penetrate a steel wall.
On first base was Bill Hanratty. While Perry did his pitcher routine — chomping Red Man, letting his fingers find just the right purchase on the rawhide, scratching his balls — Hanratty faced the bleachers and did what he did best: sang. He did “My Way” in his bad booming Irish voice, and all the housewives watching him loved it, clapping and pointing.
Now it would be easy to be cynical and say that Channel 3 and this CBS affiliate put on this softball game for MD kids just to get some self-serving footage on the six-o’clock news. And certainly that crossed their minds, I’m sure. But the charge of cynicism fell away when you looked at the kids themselves — their smiles and the way they moved excitedly in their wheelchairs. Nothing’s pure: the stations were helping themselves, but you sure couldn’t have proved it by the kids.
I sat in the stands for twenty minutes and enjoyed listening to the ball meet the bat and watching an overweight news director make some spectacular catches out in right field. There were apple blossoms nearby, and an old guy with a battered tin box strapped around his shoulder sold hot dogs, and I said fuck it about nitrites and had me two of them, with as much mustard and onions as he could put on them.
After the game all the station personalities went up and spent time with the kids, and it was damn nice of them. The kids got even more excited. Dusk was coming, and the air was sweet with apple blossoms, and not too far away you could hear the river rushing, and close up there was the fragile laughter of these children, and at that moment the world seemed to be in pretty good shape.
Vans came up then, and the kids were put inside by a group of volunteer women. You had to marvel at these women — at their patience and love, in seemingly inexhaustible supply. Mike Perry and Bill Hanratty stood next to one of the vans and handed out autographed softballs. They kissed the little girls and patted the little boys on the backs. The vans left, headed down a winding asphalt road into a salmon-pink dusk.
From the trunks of cars came several cases of beer. The laughter on the air now was different, harsher, masculine. You could imagine that it would have sounded this way centuries earlier in the camps of Attila or Tiberius, just at dusk.