Profane Men (23 page)

“flash! bulletin! Kennedy slain in motorcade in Dallas. Bustit. Bustit. Correction. Kennedy wounded — ”

Princess strode past some of the most beautiful flowers she had ever seen in her life, as commonplace here as the color green had been in Southeast Asia. God, she thought, what majestic beauty. She was so happy here. Her first week on the air had been a blast. Everybody loved her voice and people were falling all over themselves welcoming her to the station, telling her how great she sounded, and it wasn't going to be so bad after all.

She'd never stay here, of course. Her standard of living had dropped to the basement, as she saw it, but she figured she'd enjoy the beaches and the natural beauty and the climate for a year or so, then make a move back up the ladder to one of the big metros. She could make a real name for herself here, where the competition was all but nonexistent.

She'd found an apartment that was livable, if drab, typical of someone in her income strata, and she'd be able to fix it up. She was going to concentrate on enjoying life for a few months and just not worry about the money. With her American holdings, what she had in the Caymans, the South African Dutch Hartebeest stock, the old AT&T chunk, the low six-figure bundle that she planned to roll over again this year, and what was left in Switzerland, the ridiculous emolument the station paid would stretch.

“Hi!” said the vapid but friendly switchboard girl.

“Good morning.” Princess was not used to lots of employee warmth, and she made a mental note to remember to smile, chat a bit, renew some of the social graces.

“How you like the Islands? Found a place yet?” the girl asked as she walked by the front desk.

“Wonderful. I love it! And, yeah, they found me a cute little place.” Watch it, she thought in Chinese, don't be too enthusiastic about everything. Remember you should act normally today. Don't be too happy. Don't be overly sad later. She had carefully practiced a calculated facade of astonishment with just the right edge of tragedy. Always the prepared pro, she knew it would play easily.

“Hey, Priscilla, what's cookin', good lookin'?” Said without any great malice by a young engineer as she walked down the hall.

“You are, handsome,” she flirted, my God in Heaven, friendly engineers. Can this be a radio station?

Striding purposefully as always, she wheeled into the music room and began pulling the few records she would play during her three-hour board trick. It was an odd, heavy talk, music, and news operation playing “AOR-formatted” popular records. But the all-girl concept, the station calling itself Virgins 7, a spinoff of the frequency numbers, amused her, and she took the gig without any haggling. She liked being a big frog in a little pond, and being free.

She was watching the clock, as always, with a practiced eye, and as the time inched toward the top of the hour, she went into the teletype alcove and ripped a five-foot length of yellow newswire copy off the quietly clacking machine. She'd have to remember to ask how to change the ribbons. She had exactly fourteen seconds left by the time she had her copy stacked and ripped, and popped open the control room door. The heavyset redhead who worked the shift before hers quickly cued a record and jumped out of the way saying, good-naturedly, “Hey, Pris, Jesus Christ, you don't cut it very short or anything!”

“Whatdya mean, Rusty, I had six-and-a-half
seconds
left!”

They both laughed, and the scarred, pockmarked young woman from Vietnam opened her program mike switch with two perfectly manicured, blood-red nails and said, in a voice sexy enough to peel an unripened banana, “You're in tune with Virgins Seven! Seven-ninety on your radio dial, K-Vee Radio for the beautiful Virgin Islands, from sun-splashed St. Thomas!” She touched a mercury switch, and the time jingle played as she segued into the news intro cart, cutting her mike for a moment as she stacked her two news spots. She was trembling slightly, which would appear to be normal new-station control room jitters to any staffer who might see it. She faded up her pot as the intro peaked, saying on cue in her lovely voice:

“Vietnam War headlines: the news this hour on this metropolitan edition of K-Vee radio news . . .” She began reading the first stories on the war, the president, Congress, on down through the copy. Reading the phrases without having any idea what she was reading until she came to her first spot break and her trembling fingers hit the commercial cartridge and she cut her mike for a brief coughing spasm.

Settle down, she gentled herself in Chinese. Be calm. Be at peace. You are safe now. Be careful. Just read the story in the usual way as if the words have no extra meaning, just as you would handle it under ordinary, normal conditions. Take a deep breath. The spot is ending. Open your microphone now.

“Dateline: Cholon. Broadcast pioneer Tobias ‘Toby' Beals, fifty-seven, of Nassau in the Bahamas, called one of the leading exponents of so-called ‘pirate radio' operations, is believed to be among those persons killed in a series of explosions that rocked the Chinese section of Saigon in South Vietnam early Monday.

“The remains of eight to ten other persons, allegedly including Saigonese industrialist Vo Phat Chin, and several other unidentified persons believed to be employees of China Production Services, were found in the wreckage of the Cholon offices of the production company owned by Beals Joint Ventures, the Southeast Asian division of the Beals broadcasting empire.

“Toby Beals was acknowledged to be the pioneer of rebroadcast-style or pirate-type radio operations, with highly successful stations in England, Australia, and Europe. Police and military authorities determined the explosives had been planted inside the structure in which the Beals company China Production Services was housed. An unidentified official said the bombing is believed to be the work of Viet Cong terrorists.

“On the lighter side of today's news . . .”

Inside the womb of limitless infinity, a monstrous giant of unfathomable force is spawned from the titanic, cataclysmic afterbirth of colliding, exploding galaxies. Whirling, spinning, surging, radiating, self-replicating, unstoppable, blazing hot, this thing from deepest thermohell eats gravity, gobbles light, plays with time, turns space inside out, negates relativity, inhales matter, redefines mass, curves polarity, refutes direction — is at once blacker than any black hole and brighter than any sun. And she is female.

The bitch goddess of destruction is asleep and her eye is closed so that nothing can be discerned. Inside her womb all is blacker than the darkest absence. A depthless, devastating domain of dimension lessness surrounds and blankets. Although she cannot be seen, she is very beautiful, seductively savage and fickle. She may decide to shelter you or destroy you in a quarter-second, taking you down and leaving you where no human will ever think to look for your remains. She can embrace you or show no mercy.

I feel her tremble and the movement sends a shudder of chill and fear through me. My body is stretched out flat, as close to her as I can get. I will myself to melt into her, for her to take me and hold me from harm. My eyes are fixed on the deep nothingness, but as she trembles, they open and squint ferociously into her absolute inkiness. Form in the formless black reshapes hallucinatory dragons and splendid pagodas and the bright jade eyes of a golden Buddha, imagined silhouettes and details in sickening and fearsome shapelessness, seen and imagined like the conjured figures in a faraway cloud bank. I shudder as she trembles, and my heart pounds to the mighty rhythm of the bitch goddess.

My body aches against her cold, damp skin, and I know that I am far from safety and sanctuary, and this thought wakes me up and at once paralyzes me with fright. I have been asleep in her invisible soaring measureless black towers of night, vulnerable to her thousand million crippling and killing stings and stabs and slashes, inside the womb-temple of omnipotence and doom.

I shake and come awake, terrified, straining to see, and — fingers spread — I awake caressing her slimy skin in the death grip of all-pervasive, absolute horror and shock. I am hurt, dazed, scared shitless, yet I am alive and torn from the womb of the mother.

Coming back is a madness of weeks. Weeks lost to memory. Sleeping during the unbearable days. Traumatized and ravaged by fever. Drinking from leaves, Halazoned stream water, eating whatever didn't eat me first. Following a blue feature that wound and wound, meandering without maps, going with the flow of the blue, moving only at night, giving myself to her. Weeks of hell mercifully lost. Only tattered fragments of the time of returning still remain.

There is a memory of a time out there when all was lost. Out where the third layer of the triple canopy began to give way to sky; tiny slivers of sunlight filtering in amid the huge trees and sun sparkling like silver metal, like the blades of long, thin swords dipped down into her blackness. Like Toledo blades in black.

Moving into more dappled sunlight. Thirty-five-, forty-, fifty-foot giants, then a riot of greens. Improbable, sky-scraping palms anchor themselves down in the muddy water's edge. A woman with eyes downcast carries two tin pails suspended from a bamboo pole. She bends low over the dirty water as the pails fill. Slowly she turns. She carefully steps back up on the slick bank as two of her smallest children play naked in the water nearby. She does not look up at their screams or at the frond-covered sampan and the two men in conical hats who shout something.

They see me and the sampan heads for shore. Noise of their unmistakable gunfire as I force myself to run.

Right behind me. Small and wiry men, hardly more than boys but men, shouting profanities and firing assault rifles, small and determined, profane men running through the double-thick foliage as I blunder weakly ahead across her great body. Footsteps on decaying, dead leaves and twigs and rotten pathway. Massive picture-book ferns and wait-a-minutes as I dodge AK-47 rounds crashing through undergrowth.

Into tall, screaming, razor-edged saw-grass. Nightmare green of slicing terror and noise, green of river willows, emeralds on velvet, gators and crocs, fire-breathing salamanders. Tricking the eye like a patchwork quilt of multihued earth tones — green and rust. She takes me and decides she will not kill me this time.

I thought I was in green hell, but not yet. And I cannot write about that part of it. Some hells are too private to recount, much less to share. Nor will I write about the canvas snakes. Only that the other day I watched a harmless two-foot blacksnake climbing high up in an ash. (For what? There were no bird's nests there.) Twenty-five, maybe thirty feet above the ground. I watched him coiling around the symmetrical perfection of the ash and turn himself slightly, almost disappearing in an awesome trick of camouflage.

The blacksnake's gray-black belly so closely matched the coloration of the ash's bark that he disappeared, ninja-like, before my eves, yet without more than a suggestion of movement. Then he suddenly reappeared and dropped about two feet down into a mass of leaves, wrapping himself around a fragile limb that sagged with his weight, and for just that second or two when I thought the limb wasn't going to hold and the snake was going to drop out of the tree on me, I flashed on the little bamboo vipers dropping. It was like a vehicle backfire after thirteen months of mortars and arty and you yell “Incoming!” and hit the deck in the middle of the shopping mall with all the people looking at you and snickering.

Nor will I detail my eventual parting from Chi. Except to say that ultimately I crossed the river into Saigon's Chinese section, where I lived in hiding for a long time. Most of that time was spent with Chi, and the conditions were far from conducive to providing a foundation for a solid, lasting relationship. It neither ended badly nor well; it simply ended after a time, in a tiresome series of arguments over nothing, made more distasteful by the unpleasantness of the circumstances.

I had a lot of time on my hands to design an escape avenue, and plot my own revenges. I recall one of my first plans involved putting a lot of this shit down on paper and arranging it so that the three major networks and the anti-war papers would have photocopies if I wasn't back in the world, contract payout in hand, healthy and wealthy, by
X
date. I had figured certain precautions so that torturing me for contacts and so on would be mutually destructive. I thought I'd fabricated a plan that would put Ellsberg's shit back on the op-ed pages. Can you imagine what some politicians would have done with knowledge of the U.S. military coopting a mission involving convicted murderers? That was one of the first plans that came off the drawing board and went sailing straight into the big round file. We'd already seen that movie.

When I got out, toward the end of it all, I came out like a blurred simulacrum of a ghost, a shadow of an eidolon, all insubstantial form and phantasmic image, the illusion of a figment of a dream. Incorporeal. A trompe l'oeil collage. An apparition. Now you see me, now you don't. Abracadabra.

And then I dreamed that I had dreamed myself out. And this was the worst nightmare of all, coming only at night, stalking the shadows of bedrooms and motel rooms all made palatable by the decorating firm of I.W. Harper, lighting up the dark corners of my subconscious with scenes of frightening clarity and minute attention to detail. I would wake up just on the edge of the nightmare each time, seconds from putting my painstakingly contrived escape plans into motion, choking on the smell of Southeast Asian jungle and canvas snakes, drenched in fear-soaked sheets of sweat, paying for remembered sins for the five hundredth time, dreaming that I was awake and not knowing yet that my mind's eye was still imprisoned within the bamboo cages of my captors, still caught inside my cruel dream.

Once, I recall vividly, the damn thing was so real and so powerfully strong that I could see myself swinging my legs off the side of the bed in some Ramada or Best Western and coming down not on the floor but in a sea of tall, undulating elephant grass, walking away from the bed with that funny, twisting, grass-mashing walk we used in the tall grass to beat a pathway for the men behind. And just as I dreamed I awoke in the microsecond of startling insight, something opened that showed me what it was all about. I wish I could explain it for you too.

Let it suffice that I caught a glimpse of the parallel stage of waking as it slid by the sleep stage in a receding blur, and a secret revealed itself to me as I got a quick peek up the skirts of lady truth. I learned that Heaven and Hell do exist. Everlasting punishment or life eternal — it's all there. The infinite lives we will relive again and again down through the endless tunnel of perpetual timelessness.

But on the other hand, perhaps I did too many drugs in the sixties, and this is payback. Whatever the case, I found another born-again dreamer in 1974, in Canada. Just another of those strange quirks of fate that like to elbow me in the ribs once in a while to see if they can get my attention.

I'd been in Providence. I forget why. And I was driving up the Atlantic seaboard, more or less aimlessly, the way I did everything, following the blue feature that wound and wound, heading more or less north, meandering without maps, going with the flow of the blue, moving only at night, totally giving myself to it — sound familiar? — freezing in the chill salt spray of the nearby ocean breezes, going with the curves and twists of the coastline that will eventually take you up through Maine and into Canada if you don't give a shit how many days it takes. It's funny what stays in your mind. I remember crying alone in the darkness at the sweet smell of the ocean night — someplace called Rye Beach.

I had become a victim of my own expertise. Like a confused chameleon, I had so mastered the art of the delusive appearance that somewhere along the line I had lost my own identity. I suppose I was either running from myself, from my own reality, or running to find it. Whichever. Gasoline was no more costly than psychoanalysis. Finally, after days of aimlessness I managed to hit customs.

I had stopped for gas in a pretty little village just across the line called Sault Saint Marie, and was driving in the daylight for a change when the beauty of a view got me. Always the American tourist, I pulled out a Polaroid to preserve the scene. It stayed in my mind because of maybe three thousand photographs I've taken over the years, using twenty-eight different cameras, each more expensive and worthless than the last, it was the only picture that was perfect. I shot the clouds and a church spire reflected in the blues and whites of the local riverway, and the beauty of the mirrored scene just blew me away.

So I'm at this little gas station, listening to French-Canadian radio and trying to get my head together when some kids come running up to the car next to mine, pointing at a beautiful German shepherd in the back seat. Big mother, just gorgeous. A fabulous animal with a white-masked face that gave it the look of part coyote or part wolf. The kids were excited when they saw the dog and had run across the street for a closer look at it, jabbering, “Ooh la la! Poochee! Ooh la la! Poochee!”

The dog was a knockout. I got out of the car to get a better look at the animal myself, and a familiar voice said in a thin whisper, “Man, this better be a fuckin' coincidence.” The man sitting in the front seat was Shooter Price, cocaine eyes asparkle.

“Shit me not, man. I thought you were dead.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I didn't know anybody else walked away from that mess.”

“No problem. Listen, what I need you to do, just be real cool, man, like when these kids move on, what I want is you to walk up ahead about twenty feet. I'm going to pull up to where you are real slow, just keep your hands where I can see them, OK?”

“Uh. Yeah. Sure.” I walked. The kids were moving off. The dog barked once.

“Fine. Real good. Just stay there now.” The car started and Shooter moved up out of the service area. When he was even with me, he motioned me over and opened the door on his side.

“Real easy now, just lean in here like we are talking, please,” he said, putting a hand along my back as I leaned in and beginning an expert pat-down, “so — uh, how you been and like that.” The dog growled slightly. “No, Prince,” he said.

“Prince, huh?”

“Good boy.” I don't know if he meant me or the dog. He was busy running his left hand up my leg, and I don't think he was measuring my inseam or that glad to see me.

“I'm not carrying, babe.”

“Sure, I can be OK with that.” He kept his right hand inside a paper sack on his lap. My back was getting a nice cramp.

“Walk around and get in the front seat, please.” I walked. I got in the car. Prince was about three inches behind my head. I didn't turn around.

“He gonna bite?”

“Naw. He's cool. Just relax.” Shooter reached over and did a frisk job on my ankles, one more time around the fly (I was starting to like it), and a few more professional pats and squeezes. He tossed the sack in the backseat next to Prince and tucked a leg up under him.

“What did you have in the sack?”

“Can of Alpo.”

“So.”

“Yeah. Sorry, mano, but I hadda check, you know how it is.”

“Oh, not really. No. How is it?”

“Well. You could have found me up here, right.”

“Why would I want to do that — old time's sake?”

“Somebody blew our shit away that day, my man. That was fuckin'
friendly
fire; that goddamn arty was comin' from in back of us.”

“Yeah, pard, but remember me? I was on that bird right there witcha, remember?”

“That don't mean shit and you know it. How the fuck I know what you been up to since the mid-sixties, man. I don't know who you work for, now or then, and don't rightly give a fuck.”

“How come you let me in the car, then? I mean you coulda blowed my ass away right then and there, man. How do you know I don't have a curare dart in my belt buckle or some of that Ian Fleming jive shit? I could have a bomb in my asshole for all you know.”