Hystopia: A Novel (36 page)
Authors: David Means
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The End
It is sometimes claimed that the second great riots were sparked by the assassination of JFK on September 17, 1970—the Genuine Assassination, as it came to be known. (Even now there is significant confusion over the identity of the real shooter[s]: Identical twins, Utah B. Stanton and Stan B. Stanton, both of Springfield, Illinois, claimed responsibility.) But the third burn of Flint and Detroit, along with the Canada Spillover (in which gasoline cans were hauled across the Freedom Bridge from Port Huron and used to ignite portions of Sarnia, Ontario) and the great Thumb inferno, cannot be definitively linked to Kennedy’s death. Anger had reached a boiling point; factors included the devaluation of the blue-collar worker, the destruction of factory infrastructure, and large numbers of wayward vets and minorities seeking justice. (Howard Harper in his study,
Black Despair, New Slavery, the Burning of Detroit (Again) and the Way Talk Has Talked Itself into Talk
, has pointed to an avoidance of clear analytic approaches in the assessment of the so-called riot sparks in the state of Michigan.)
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[Author’s Note: Accompany the main body of the story with author’s notes, editor’s notes, and interviews. When writing it go ahead and use real names and change them later if necessary. EA]
FURTHER INTERVIEWS
Ned Bycoff
He went over and served and came back and started right to work on his book. When he came out of the house he was wearing his combat fatigues most of the time. He’d just come out and look around the yard and then up at the sky and shake his head and go back in. We knew he was writing something because you could hear his typewriter going day and night. I’d come home from my shift—I was working the night shift as an electrician at Allied Paper—and he’d be up there typing. His desk was in the window and I could see his head bowed.
Molly Stam
Eugene’s sister had a breakdown. I remember that the Allen house got suddenly quiet that summer. You had the sound of his typewriter but otherwise it was silent. The summer before, it was doors banging, shouts, and cars roaring up and down in front of the house. Eugene mentioned something about that. He didn’t like these guys who came in to hang with his sister after Billy was gone. He told me once, I mean we were hanging out and he said: At night these guys come and pick her up, or drop her off, and I watch them out the window. That’s all he said, but it was the way he said it.
John Burns
Perhaps the true history, without enfolding, without JFK miraculously alive and in his highly improbable third term, was simply too painful for Allen. Not that I care. Like I said, I was weirdly happy to see that he offed himself after he got back from Vietnam. He bugged me. I beat the shit out of him one time when he was a kid. His sister was a slut. I mean, she was a slut when she was about fourteen, starting then, and went around asking for it. You know what I mean? Maybe I shouldn’t be saying this. But that’s the truth, man. I can say that. [Prison noise in background.] Biggest mistake I made was not killing him before I landed in here. I mean, what difference did it make to me if it was this guy or that guy; I knew if I got caught I’d be in for life. Go ahead. Put it in your tape machine.
Eugene Allen
Billy Thomas came up to my room to talk. He was back from his first tour and came into my room and sat on my bed. He called me “son” that afternoon. He poked around my room and lifted my mattress and found a magazine and gave it a look, flicked through the pages, held up the centerfold, and then put it back and gave me a smirk and said: Good, son, you’re a normal guy. Then he sat down again on the bed and began to tell me what he wanted from me. “You gotta let the world know if I don’t come back what’s what, man,” he said. He told me once I’d been over there and finished my tour of duty, I’d understand, and then he left.
Buddy Anderson
His sister had been been missing from state hospital after she cracked up, or whatever. That was the summer girls were found all over the state. A girl was found at Gull Lake, battered and dead. Another girl was found in the sludge pond near the paper mill. It’s sick but it’s true. As far as I know, her boyfriend, Billy, went back for his second tour. They spent a lot of time together that summer and then he went back. He was AWOL, is what I heard, but they cut him some slack because he was a long-timer and was good at what he did.
Eugene Allen
This car drove up and this officer got out. He had that anxious look of a bearer of bad news. He stopped for a second, wiped his brow, looked up and down the street at the sun coming through the trees. He was wearing white gloves. He had some paper in his hands. I heard him knock on the Thompsons’ door across the street and then I heard the screams. Like steel on steel, maybe, or glass on slate, as keen and horrible as anything I’d ever heard—maybe like something being pried apart from something else—and then this new kind of silence that let the wind in, the sound of the leaves, the midsummer afternoon hush and then the abatement of hush and then an even deeper silence through which, far off down the street, you could hear kids playing ball, and then an even deeper silence that I can’t describe here but hope to get in at the end of the next revision.
Randall C. Jones
We were treating her with EST and I was the only male nurse on the ward, which seemed to mean something. Just this sweet little girl who’d been into all kinds of shit. We had a lot of those, and this was around the first riots, and there were a lot coming in, most of them lost causes, just wrap and let them rock away the afternoons. We used convulsions as an excuse to pump them full of Nembutal. I remember some of the weird nicknames. We had the Attorney in there. We had the Butler. He was a famous case because Dr. Morris was working him and he thought he was Lord Byron one minute and then went back to his usual state as a tool-and-die man out of Detroit. I remember that. But Meg stuck in my head—and I guess that’s why we’re having this interview. [The sound of a cigarette being lit. Coughing. A phone ringing in the background.] I remember Meg Allen because she was one of those rare breakouts. She took off one afternoon, slipped away from the back of the hospital, near the loading dock. She must’ve gone under the fence, worked her way down the hill behind the facility. It was tough going down there, but she had some skills. From that point it’s all conjecture. She was found upstate, from what I heard.
Lee Wolf
The thing was Allen hated it because these guys called his sister a slut. They didn’t just say she’s a slut. They’d say: There goes the Slut. She was slim, beautiful, unstable. I think we all felt that, as if her fate, if you know what I mean, was in her instability. For a long time Allen was just this quiet little geeky kid brother, and then he was a young man. I don’t remember that much. He was in my class in school, and we knew he was smart, and we knew that the older kids gave him a hard time. I don’t recall the incident you allude to. I mean I knew that he got picked on. That was the natural order of things back then. You had the bullies, and the tough kids from down the hill, and they just existed and you worked your life around the fear and found ways, if you could, to avoid contact. If they kicked your ass, you simply saw it as part of the way your world worked.
Buddy Anderson
I don’t believe the report would’ve used the phrase “friendly fire.” I’m not sure if they were using that phrase during the second phase of Nam, although I might be wrong. Whatever the report said, it alluded to the idea that Billy Thompson was somehow involved with his own death. There must’ve been something about the coordinates. I don’t believe Eugene made that up. That’s what he might’ve said to me when we talked about Billy coming into his room that afternoon and poking around and then saying something along the lines of: If I don’t come back it’s gonna be up to you, the writer, to tell my story. Have a vision of it, he might’ve said. Eugene was always talking about having visions. He’d say: I have a vision of myself at the very end, and I’d say, What the fuck are you talking about? and he’d say, Don’t you ever think about how it would be, right before you die? Don’t you think you’d have some kind of vision as the time compresses in on itself; I mean, you start splitting the seconds until you find eternity, man, he said. We were driving up north looking for a fishing spot, smoking a joint—I mean, I don’t really remember, but I kind of assume we were smoking. It was the summer after they found his sister, and he told me he was taking a break from writing his novel until he could figure out how to end the thing.
Dr. Brent Walk
We all know his sister wasn’t found up there the way Eugene described it, which for me is just a bunch of bullshit. Yeah, she was killed, most likely. But maybe not. Maybe she got lost or something. Or maybe she overdosed. But it’s just as possible that the cop killed her and then tossed her body into the weeds. I’ve been to that spot, not far from St. Ignace, just over the bridge. There’s one of those dunes on the other side of the road, across the beach. Pine needles and all that. Thing is her body was so far gone with decay that it’s just speculation, but he had to pin it, I think, on some gang of bikers. That’s what he went around telling us. He went around saying she was killed by some Nam vets. Least that’s the way I remember it.
Stan White
Here’s the thing, man. It’s not enough, the way I see it, to change the name Billy Thompson to Billy-T and leave it at that. Billy was more messed up than Allen lets on, and his fuckedupness was combined with Meg’s fuckedupness. But one thing Eugene had right about Billy was that he loved Iggy Pop. He said Iggy was Christ, or maybe Christ was Iggy. That’s what he said. But even before he went to Nam, is what I’m saying, he was messed up. He was one of those gentle screwups. He had this kind of slippery, lazy way of dealing with reality, and he admitted it. He’d say, Man, reality is too real for me. I’m gonna just take it slow and easy. We’ve got all the time in the world. He said that again and again until he didn’t have all the time in the world.
Capt. Willard Starks
I’m only speculating that Thompson told him about some of the fighting he’d done and Eugene combined that with his own war experience. His old man was in Korea, so he got some of that material from him. But Allen wasn’t in intense combat as far as I know. He seems to have had a desk job in a recon outfit in Saigon, although I have to admit that his files mysteriously disappeared.
Buddy Anderson
He wasn’t happy with the ending of the thing and said it fooled him. He said he let it play out but was shocked because he wanted the end to have a big shootout. He said his desire to have revenge in the end just didn’t work out. I never believed him when he said that.
Gerald McCarthy
You ever hear about Project 100,000? You know, man, the thing was these were all working-class guys and would’ve been rejected anyhow, at least I’m talking Billy would’ve been because he wasn’t such a bright bulb, not stupid but not exactly educated, if you know what I mean. If you haven’t heard about Project 100,000, you’d better look it up.
John Burns
The thing was Billy and Eugene were draft bait and couldn’t land a decent job because they were draft bait and they, meaning the managers hiring at the mill, or at the pharmaceutical plant, always asked if you’d fulfilled your service. Why would they train you on the line at Upjack, or in the mill, if you were going to be yanked out? They joined up because they felt it coming, if you know what I mean. Billy’s old man could’ve landed him a job. His old man worked at Ford and could’ve gotten him something down there, for sure. Eugene’s old man was a manager, but he started out on the line, I think, and worked his way up. He hauled a lunch bucket like the rest, though.
Buddy Anderson
I’m thinking his draft notice came right around the time he was just starting to write the first draft, which no one ever really got to see because he burned it and rewrote it when he got back. At least that’s what I remember him talking about. He was saying he was closing in on the end. His grandfather had been on the board years back, but from what I know that didn’t do no good with pulling strings and his number came up anyway.
Gerald McCarthy
You remember that recruitment ad the Army ran? You’d see it at the post office, or in school. It said, “Make the choice now—join, or we’ll make the choice for you.” That’s the way it was for us kids. I mean, it’s not like we had much of an option, not like the rich kids on the other side of the river who could get a doctor to write up some bullshit crook knee, or someone heading to school full-time. Billy Thompson was part-time in school for a while, but that didn’t do the job with the board because you had to be full-time. His old man just couldn’t afford it, and he knew he’d be drafted so he figured he’d sign up and make the choice like most of the other guys did.
John Frank
Operation plans during Nam were often written after initial contact. In other words, you’d go in and draw fire and fight and then they’d name an operation after the mess and the mission statement would be backdated to the start of the fight and written after the fact. Singleton and Rake were in Operation George Washington, I think. Singleton must’ve known at the end, tracking Rake, he was in Operation Duel. The way I read it, the guy knew the entire thing would be rewritten after the fact, after he caught Rake, to look retrospectively like it all fit together. Then it would seem as if there were intuitive—some might say conspiratorial—factors involved. I look at it as that kind of deal. That’s what led them into contact—that kind of delusion that was in the air, the delusion you get when what you’re going through, maybe you know it, maybe not, is going to be written up to make some kind of sense from an operational standpoint when presented to the bigwigs in Washington as a report. That shit was in the air when Eugene wrote this thing. There was still that shit in the air.
