For Elizabeth Taylor: a memory
New York, 1964. I am working at the World’s Fair in Flushing Meadows and, though I am not terribly fond of the job, I love New York. Slathering mustard and relish on hot dogs, making change, listening to complaints about the expense, hearing hundreds of dialects and languages, I am not impressed with the fair. My feet hurt. My eyes hurt. My sense of smell is incredibly dulled. I go to see Michelangelo’s Pieta: alabaster woman, son lying across her lap-so white, so pale. And yet protected by bulletproof glass, my feet on a moving sidewalk that draws me quickly through the room. Not New York, Disneyland, long before Disney cleaned up Times Square.
I live at the Dixie Hotel, a few blocks off Times Square and I have a girlfriend, Sharon, I met at the Fair. Years later, I wrote a poem for Sharon, an aubade, a morning poem:
There should be flowers, sweet fragrances
the buzzing of bees. When I wake, your bottom
hot against my groin, the sun has got to rise,
golden beautiful in the east, to paint your body.
But we are in the Dixie Hotel, a block or two
off Times Square and the windows are streaked
with grime from back before the war, no,
not that war, I mean the second of the two.
No air conditioning and the ceiling fan doesn’t
work any more if it ever did back when the Dixie
was fairly swank if such times ever were. We’ve
left the window open, can hear the sounds
not of sweet birds and of crickets rubbing their legs
together, but of cabs and buses, the crashing
of garbage trucks. Still, your body touches mine, and even
with this dawn, this heat, the air in the room barely
moving, we can sing the morning in, ignore dark soot,
let our fingers draw lines of damp sweat on naked canvas.
Ah, love, outside noise and hot streets call,
but let’s remain a while, here, in this still morning.
I take long walks any time of the night and day. No one ever mugs me. On the day I arrived, I was insulted, but the old woman was crazy. She heard my voice, assumed I was from Texas, and accused me of killing John F. Kennedy. Crazy, I suppose. But I did kill Kennedy, as much as anyone did, anyone in our society of celebrity. He is avenged a few years later when I am sent to Vietnam.
We are all crazy, beyond the grasp of reality. Have you imagined New York is real? Any more than the London Eliot called “Unreal City?” I find New York as I have so often found New Orleans or Washington, D.C.: a dream world where I can lose myself and become something other.
One day, Sharon and I walk a couple of blocks to the theater district to where Richard Burton is performing Hamlet. The building is, for some reason, unlocked. We walk in and see the dark interior. I flip on a light and climb up on the stage; Sharon sits on the front row. “Oh that this too too solid flesh would melt, thaw, or dissolve itself into a dew,” I whisper to her and to a thousand empty seats. I am young, in love again and enamored of theater, and all the seats are full.
I am Hamlet and am in love with everything, even as Hamlet loved everything. He did, you know, he loved everything and truth most of all. “I have been so great a lover,” Rupert Brooke says to open one of his poems, and so I have. Later, he would write “If I should die, think only this of me / That there is some corner of some foreign land / That is forever England.” I have never been that much of a romantic about war. Perhaps it was just the war that I happened to have. But I have loved the dirty streets of Times Square, a filthy hotel room, the grime of Far Rockaway, a young woman who came onto me one late night in New York and whom I could not afford and would not have afforded could I have.
I see the last acts of a dozen plays. I cannot afford to see the whole play—much too expensive for a young man subsisting in New York on minimum wage. But I find the money to see Burton perform Hamlet a few weeks later and continue, so many years later, to think it was worth it. Late at night, long after I have seen Elizabeth Taylor pick Burton up in a limousine, I open my window in the Dixie Hotel and sit on the fire escape. I whisper the “to be or not to be” speech out across the back alley.
No air conditioning, no rest room (I go to a common bathroom at the end of the corridor when I need to go). The room is a pale green, some of the paint peeling from the walls. It has a burner and a small fridge. Many of the rooms, I am certain, rent by the hour. I rent mine by the week and manage to make ends meet.
One Sunday I go to a matinee of Never on Sunday with Melina Mercouri (I do not mean to imply that Mercouri was my date, she was the star) and I fall in love with her. She is much older than me, but I had also fallen in love with Simone Signouret when I saw her in Room at the Top. I am busy falling in love; it is what I do best when I am in my twenties. I fall in love with my cheap hotel room, with small pizza-by-the-slice places, with winos in the crowd, with the pieta (only a passing flirtation), with street musicians, with Central Park, with everything in the city. But Melina Mercouri is both love and lust. I notice nothing around me in the theater except her and then the man in the seat next to mine gropes me and throws his coat over my lap. I push his hand off and throw his coat back on his own lap, turn to him and say, “No, thank you.” He is about sixty-five, I think, and is embarrassed. I am more interested in Melina Mercouri. After her four curtain calls, I leave the theater.
I am not certain I can tell you what my summer in New York meant to me—that summer of the World’s Fair, that last summer before I was drafted and sent to Vietnam. That summer in the city, that summer going to the theater, to a few cattle calls, before going back to the southeast corner of Texas to teach high school and then go off to war, that summer living in what I would call poverty had I taken the days in another way of taking something seriously, that summer that comes back to me when I chart where I have been and how I have gotten where I eventually arrived and where I might have arrived had I remained there as something other than a romantic, romanticizing tourist.
You see, I loved the Manhattan of 1964. It was dirty, profane, not yet cleaned up by Disney and Associates. I loved the idea of me there in those years before I ever thought of writing and when theater and love were everything.
It has been too many years for me to remember precisely what New York meant to me when I was a very young twenty-two years old. That is so long ago that I now remember only bright images. But I can remember that young man who walked out of the Dixie Hotel and wandered over to Radio City where he was offered a job as an NBC Junior Executive (that meant “usher” in those days) and preferred just walking through the streets looking at things, staring up at buildings taller than the pine trees in Southeast Texas, and losing himself in crowded streets and falling soot.
Late that summer, I left New York, hitched a ride to Philadelphia where my uncle had taken up residence with his upper class Philly wife thirty years earlier. Tall at 6’ 4” and a certified WWII hero, Purple Heart awardee and member of the renowned “greatest generation,” he went to the Wharton School at Penn on the GI Bill and, ultimately, became a steadfast Republican and ally of Governor Scranton. I am not sure Scranton knew who my uncle was, but my uncle mentioned him frequently. I am, I am afraid, being uncharitable to my uncle whom I loved and who was always kind to me. I don’t mind, though, and he’s no longer with us. Besides, I drop George McGovern’s name probably as often as he dropped Scranton’s.
He really wanted me to find a job and tempt me to settle down in the Philadelphia area. So, it seemed counter-productive to me for him to keep complaining about how awful Philadelphians were. I mean I could never figure out why he wanted to stay in a place he seemed not to like, much less why he thought what he was saying would influence me to move there. But this isn’t about my uncle or even about Philadelphia. It’s about young lust and, even, towards the end, about young love.
To that end and to entice me to stay, he set me up with a few girls, daughters of his friends for the most part. One, I remember, had been his kids’ baby sitter. All were white, protestant and a year or two younger than me. Each one, except the sitter, had a nice car and belonged to a good club. In that year, 1964, the summer before I would be drafted, the beginnings of the sexual revolution, predating the summer of love by a few years, had already started to emerge. The Beatles had exploded into our consciousness only recently and “All ya need is love” might not have been recorded yet but was an ever-present nagging sound in my mind. And love, love, love was all around.
With my uncle shouting about the undesirables in his neighborhood, I closed my ears and went out with a few young women and groped and snuggled and made love along the river, in their parents’ houses when their parents were out for the evening, and almost, once, while the baby sitter was driving across the Walt Whitman Bridge into New Jersey. I am not, really, ashamed of any of that. It was merely the zeitgeist.
Then, with only a week to go, I went with my uncle and his family for a brief stay at their beach house on the Jersey coast. I loved the house, even got along with my aunt’s mother when we visited and putt-putted around with my cousin in his small boat. And there was another girl and, as always, she was enticing. I walked along the beach with Connie whose last name I cannot remember even though I do remember that the water seemed strangely cold for August and not at all like the waters of the Gulf of Mexico. I can remember her touch, the warmth of her skin, even a small dimple, but not her name. Somehow, that seems sad to me now. I suspect she doesn’t remember my name either but does remember some boy from Texas she spent time with one summer in Avalon.
I did not have to hitch a ride back to Texas. My uncle was generous and bought an airline ticket for me, the first time I had ever flown. And I’m pretty sure the plane was a DC-3. In Vietnam a few years later, we would call them C-47s. I suspect my uncle was pleased to get rid of me and had changed his mind about the possibilities of finding me a good job in Philly.
Back in Beaumont, I met Jenny. Jenny was unlike any other woman I had met up until that time. She was ahead of her time and definitely ahead of mine, too. A few decades later, I wrote a poem for her. It’s never been published, probably because it’s pretty bad; so I won’t reproduce it here.
This whole little series of stories is for Elizabeth Taylor. I never met her, but she is, somehow, like the girl in the white convertible in American Graffiti. I turn a corner...and she is there. I see a new production of Hamlet and her limo sweeps into the alley and picks up Richard Burton. Beautiful, beautiful Elizabeth Taylor, violet eyes luminescent in dark alleys, lighting the sky for all of us.
Wednesday, March 23, 2011
Monday, March 21, 2011
Just a Few Notes About Vietnam #38
Making love and peace and listening to music
Ho Chi Minh died on September 2, 1969. Woodstock happened from August 15 – August 18, 1969. The two events have been linked in my mind for a long time. We knew, at NSA, some weeks prior to the death of the man who presented himself to the world as “Uncle Ho,” that he was dying; we were just waiting for it to happen. I was waiting, as were a number of other people, at the National Security Agency.
By the week prior to Woodstock, we thought the old man could not hang on a minute longer, but his death was somewhat like that of Francisco Franco: he lingered and lingered. I hate to admit to this, but we started making jokes about it and for a month or more afterward kept asking ourselves if Uncle Ho were still alive. Part of that was because North Vietnam did not want the people of the North to hear about it on the days of celebration of the anniversary of the founding of the DRVN. We knew about it at NSA.
Flashback a bit to August 14, 1969. My friend, Allen Hallmark, made one of his trips to Washington and, in his hand, held a cluster of tickets to a music festival being held in Upstate New York. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s go!” But I was on the Death Watch. NSA would not give me the time off while we were waiting for Uncle Ho to die. So, I had a ticket to Woodstock, held it in my hand, and then watched a few friends head off to New York while I stayed behind to translate inane messages about the illness of Uncle Ho.
Not too long after that, I could hardly make my way through the streets of D.C. without hearing people shout “WERE YOU THERE???!!!!!!!!!!!” and having to admit that, "No, I was not there." There was some consolation, though:
Linda and I managed to go to the Corcoran Gallery and were out of the car and sitting on the floor, beneath my legs glass brick and green light shining through, and a band at the front, a band that no longer exists, a band called Love Cry Want played sitar music accompanied by a panoply of instruments from Thailand and Burma. A big man in dreadlocks moaned into a microphone as the walls moved in and out and the green light hit my face. The light show was designed by the lights people from Woodstock. Someone passed around a small cup with sugary liquid stuff and I tasted just a little—I never really did that kind of thing, but that time. . .—and passed the cup to a guy sitting to my left. Then I watched the walls come to life, breathing in and out to the rhythm of the music.
So? That was my Woodstock and my life, then, was accompanied by that same band when we drove out to Rock Creek Park to sit among a few thousand other people and listen to Love Cry Want front for a group called The Who and watched and listened to them perform Tommy. Good times, really. I have always had very little patience with people who claimed we had to be serious and solemn when participating in peace demonstrations. To me, those were always joyous events.
I spent the night Ho Chi Minh died in The Building, the large gray edifice that housed the National Security Agency. I translated message after message coming from all over both South and North Vietnam, expressions of loss from various official and non-official groups, the PRG governments in the South, and from the official government in the north. We may have hated Uncle Ho, but he was much revered throughout the North. His loss was felt all over the country. After that, North Vietnam was pretty much governed by the committee that made up the Vietnamese Communist Party. The night of September 2nd. . . no sleep, just endless messages, all saying about the same thing.
The next month, Linda and I would march in the almost silent October march where we deposited candles on the wrought iron fences of the Treasury Building and the next month, the November march that was the largest march in the history of the protest movement. On November 19th, my name appeared in a New York Times petition against the war signed by 1,000+ active duty troops from all over the country. The next morning, I was denied entry to The Building though my security clearance was not pulled.
My time in the Army was drawing to a close anyway. By January, I was headed back to Texas and graduate school and more marching. More about the big peace demonstrations and Austin in a later blog entry.
Ho Chi Minh died on September 2, 1969. Woodstock happened from August 15 – August 18, 1969. The two events have been linked in my mind for a long time. We knew, at NSA, some weeks prior to the death of the man who presented himself to the world as “Uncle Ho,” that he was dying; we were just waiting for it to happen. I was waiting, as were a number of other people, at the National Security Agency.
By the week prior to Woodstock, we thought the old man could not hang on a minute longer, but his death was somewhat like that of Francisco Franco: he lingered and lingered. I hate to admit to this, but we started making jokes about it and for a month or more afterward kept asking ourselves if Uncle Ho were still alive. Part of that was because North Vietnam did not want the people of the North to hear about it on the days of celebration of the anniversary of the founding of the DRVN. We knew about it at NSA.
Flashback a bit to August 14, 1969. My friend, Allen Hallmark, made one of his trips to Washington and, in his hand, held a cluster of tickets to a music festival being held in Upstate New York. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s go!” But I was on the Death Watch. NSA would not give me the time off while we were waiting for Uncle Ho to die. So, I had a ticket to Woodstock, held it in my hand, and then watched a few friends head off to New York while I stayed behind to translate inane messages about the illness of Uncle Ho.
Not too long after that, I could hardly make my way through the streets of D.C. without hearing people shout “WERE YOU THERE???!!!!!!!!!!!” and having to admit that, "No, I was not there." There was some consolation, though:
Linda and I managed to go to the Corcoran Gallery and were out of the car and sitting on the floor, beneath my legs glass brick and green light shining through, and a band at the front, a band that no longer exists, a band called Love Cry Want played sitar music accompanied by a panoply of instruments from Thailand and Burma. A big man in dreadlocks moaned into a microphone as the walls moved in and out and the green light hit my face. The light show was designed by the lights people from Woodstock. Someone passed around a small cup with sugary liquid stuff and I tasted just a little—I never really did that kind of thing, but that time. . .—and passed the cup to a guy sitting to my left. Then I watched the walls come to life, breathing in and out to the rhythm of the music.
So? That was my Woodstock and my life, then, was accompanied by that same band when we drove out to Rock Creek Park to sit among a few thousand other people and listen to Love Cry Want front for a group called The Who and watched and listened to them perform Tommy. Good times, really. I have always had very little patience with people who claimed we had to be serious and solemn when participating in peace demonstrations. To me, those were always joyous events.
I spent the night Ho Chi Minh died in The Building, the large gray edifice that housed the National Security Agency. I translated message after message coming from all over both South and North Vietnam, expressions of loss from various official and non-official groups, the PRG governments in the South, and from the official government in the north. We may have hated Uncle Ho, but he was much revered throughout the North. His loss was felt all over the country. After that, North Vietnam was pretty much governed by the committee that made up the Vietnamese Communist Party. The night of September 2nd. . . no sleep, just endless messages, all saying about the same thing.
The next month, Linda and I would march in the almost silent October march where we deposited candles on the wrought iron fences of the Treasury Building and the next month, the November march that was the largest march in the history of the protest movement. On November 19th, my name appeared in a New York Times petition against the war signed by 1,000+ active duty troops from all over the country. The next morning, I was denied entry to The Building though my security clearance was not pulled.
My time in the Army was drawing to a close anyway. By January, I was headed back to Texas and graduate school and more marching. More about the big peace demonstrations and Austin in a later blog entry.
Friday, March 18, 2011
Washington, D.C.: Unreal City (Vietnam Notes 37)
Washington, D.C.: Unreal City
D.C. D.C. was wonderful…even in those days of assassinations and marches in the streets and people dying in Vietnam and going to jail for what they believed in or going to Canada or Sweden. Other people, most of whom also believed in what they were doing, were on patrol in Vietnam, pursuing elusive enemies, trying to win in a cause I believed was already doomed.
D.C. Washington: a beautiful city with a grimy, dirty underbelly that those of us who did not truly live there, who were involved with love and peace and national and international events, but were not involved with in its day-to-day life, could not or would not see. Janet Cook wrote about it; but she, too, did not take the time to truly discover what she thought she had found. Instead, she developed a composite of all the suffering children of Washington she could think of and, yes, this was some time after I spent my time in D.C., and publish it to the world. What Cook did was write truth while ignoring fact. Facts can sometime get in the way of truth. She’s been a bad example of ethical misbehavior in journalism classes since then, yet still, she wrote a truth bigger than her lies.
I’ve been a member of a Vietnam discussion group on the internet for almost twenty years and from time to time the discussion veers to the problem of spat upon Vietnam vets. You know the story: those hundreds of spitters just waiting for vets to return from Vietnam. There is no evidence that this ever happened though it may have happened, probably did happen, a very few times. But, fact that it happened often? No. Very few if any Vietnam veterans were spat upon when they returned to the United States from overseas duty. But, truth: for many of them it felt as if people had spat upon them even if they had not done in fact. I have no problem with that: The metaphor is important even if it is based upon something less factual than those vets believe.
Years after the war, many years, back when troops were returning from the first Persian Gulf War, there was some kind of effort made to reverse the lack of respect given to vets of the Vietnam War. We were, in many cases, invited to participate in the parades for the Iraq veterans. I found that extremely patronizing.
Some truths are simply more powerful than facts. Janet Cook had her Pulitzer stripped from her even though her stories in the Washington Post struck at a truth so powerful no one could deny them. The little boy she made up became a powerful metaphor for almost everything that was wrong in that grimy underbelly that was in the substructure of Washington, D.C. And, damn, the writing was good and the writing was true. It just wasn’t factual. That is also true of the stories of returning veterans from our war.
I am wandering here and I have wanted to write about Washington, D.C., as I experienced is in 1968 and 1969. But that Washington, D.C., was an unreal city. Those of us who lived there temporarily were our own city, separate from, co-existing with, something so real that we could not approach it without killing off what we had brought with us: that sense of idealism that managed to survive knowing, however superficially, where we were, the war we had fought in, those assassinations that had rocked the country. That’s why, many years ago, when some of this was starting to sink in, I wrote this:
Our Lady of the Metro
(originally published in Briar Cliff Review)
At the Metro Station in Dupont Circle
I ascend a steep escalator into a too bright
day, see a slender silhouette with hair flung
wild descend. It could, of course, be you, but
I cannot tell, only the form of an image dropping
downward into dark. A moving step ladder
carries me up, you down, until you develop
like those white sheets of paper in a darkroom,
like an x-ray reverting: meat firming,
packing onto bare bone, body budding
under sheer cloth, legs, waist, face, breasts
growing from dark outline to fleshy fullness
until I can know it is not you, not those lips,
long legs, careless hair. But for a moment
in a mandala of light, her body shaped
against the curve of sky, I longed for faith.
You see, for me, Washington was relief from daily work life at NSA where I continued the work I had been doing in Pleiku, Vietnam. The same old stuff kept happening, day after day, month after month, and, seemingly, year after year. But at 5 p.m. each day, I took off the war with my uniform when I went home to Chillum Heights. I would drive over to Linda’s home in my VW convertible and we would simply forget about the war or I would go into College Park and encase myself in Melville or some minor poet of Renaissance England.
But, some days, Linda and I would hold hands and march with tens of thousands of other people or, at night, we would light candles and walk slowly through the streets of that beautifully unreal yet somehow truthful city.
D.C. D.C. was wonderful…even in those days of assassinations and marches in the streets and people dying in Vietnam and going to jail for what they believed in or going to Canada or Sweden. Other people, most of whom also believed in what they were doing, were on patrol in Vietnam, pursuing elusive enemies, trying to win in a cause I believed was already doomed.
D.C. Washington: a beautiful city with a grimy, dirty underbelly that those of us who did not truly live there, who were involved with love and peace and national and international events, but were not involved with in its day-to-day life, could not or would not see. Janet Cook wrote about it; but she, too, did not take the time to truly discover what she thought she had found. Instead, she developed a composite of all the suffering children of Washington she could think of and, yes, this was some time after I spent my time in D.C., and publish it to the world. What Cook did was write truth while ignoring fact. Facts can sometime get in the way of truth. She’s been a bad example of ethical misbehavior in journalism classes since then, yet still, she wrote a truth bigger than her lies.
I’ve been a member of a Vietnam discussion group on the internet for almost twenty years and from time to time the discussion veers to the problem of spat upon Vietnam vets. You know the story: those hundreds of spitters just waiting for vets to return from Vietnam. There is no evidence that this ever happened though it may have happened, probably did happen, a very few times. But, fact that it happened often? No. Very few if any Vietnam veterans were spat upon when they returned to the United States from overseas duty. But, truth: for many of them it felt as if people had spat upon them even if they had not done in fact. I have no problem with that: The metaphor is important even if it is based upon something less factual than those vets believe.
Years after the war, many years, back when troops were returning from the first Persian Gulf War, there was some kind of effort made to reverse the lack of respect given to vets of the Vietnam War. We were, in many cases, invited to participate in the parades for the Iraq veterans. I found that extremely patronizing.
Some truths are simply more powerful than facts. Janet Cook had her Pulitzer stripped from her even though her stories in the Washington Post struck at a truth so powerful no one could deny them. The little boy she made up became a powerful metaphor for almost everything that was wrong in that grimy underbelly that was in the substructure of Washington, D.C. And, damn, the writing was good and the writing was true. It just wasn’t factual. That is also true of the stories of returning veterans from our war.
I am wandering here and I have wanted to write about Washington, D.C., as I experienced is in 1968 and 1969. But that Washington, D.C., was an unreal city. Those of us who lived there temporarily were our own city, separate from, co-existing with, something so real that we could not approach it without killing off what we had brought with us: that sense of idealism that managed to survive knowing, however superficially, where we were, the war we had fought in, those assassinations that had rocked the country. That’s why, many years ago, when some of this was starting to sink in, I wrote this:
Our Lady of the Metro
(originally published in Briar Cliff Review)
At the Metro Station in Dupont Circle
I ascend a steep escalator into a too bright
day, see a slender silhouette with hair flung
wild descend. It could, of course, be you, but
I cannot tell, only the form of an image dropping
downward into dark. A moving step ladder
carries me up, you down, until you develop
like those white sheets of paper in a darkroom,
like an x-ray reverting: meat firming,
packing onto bare bone, body budding
under sheer cloth, legs, waist, face, breasts
growing from dark outline to fleshy fullness
until I can know it is not you, not those lips,
long legs, careless hair. But for a moment
in a mandala of light, her body shaped
against the curve of sky, I longed for faith.
You see, for me, Washington was relief from daily work life at NSA where I continued the work I had been doing in Pleiku, Vietnam. The same old stuff kept happening, day after day, month after month, and, seemingly, year after year. But at 5 p.m. each day, I took off the war with my uniform when I went home to Chillum Heights. I would drive over to Linda’s home in my VW convertible and we would simply forget about the war or I would go into College Park and encase myself in Melville or some minor poet of Renaissance England.
But, some days, Linda and I would hold hands and march with tens of thousands of other people or, at night, we would light candles and walk slowly through the streets of that beautifully unreal yet somehow truthful city.
Tuesday, March 15, 2011
Part 36: Return to Normalcy, sort of
Who Killed Cock Robin?
That period between Vietnam and the peace marches, between Pleiku and D.C. and Austin? Basically, they were fairly ordinary for someone still wearing a uniform, commuting to work each morning, carpooling with my friend Don Mohr in his MGB (or was it an MGA?), top down when the weather permitted and both mags were firing. I eventually bought my own car, a not new, blue and shiny, Volkswagen convertible. I re-entered a world that included Vietnam only from 8 - 5, Monday through Friday.
Among the first things both Don and I did was enroll at the University of Maryland in College Park, Maryland. Not only was I planning to do what I had set out to do three years earlier (go to graduate school at UT-Austin) but I wanted to meet young, well-educated women. I know that sounds snotty but I did not want to hear again, not ever, “I love you so much, GI” and I did not want to "date" (quaint word these days) any of the mostly conservative women I met at the National Security Agency. Those were mostly women with a professional mission or clerk/typists with security clearances. I wanted to forget what we always called The Building (upper case letters implicit in the pronunciation) and immerse myself in being a college student again.
I took two classes at the University of Maryland: Renaissance literature and a course in Melville and Hawthorne. Damn that was wonderful. I decompressed, became totally human once again. I can hear combat vets now: “Puh-leeze!!!!!!! You were safe. No one pointed an AK at you. You got to talk with young women.” Yes, that’s all true. And I will repeat something I have said many times before: I mostly enjoyed my tour in Vietnam…from the ship ride over, to internment at Subic Bay with huge quantities of San Miguel beer, to the LSTs rocking down the coast of what was then South Vietnam while we sang Country Joe’s “Vietnam Rag,” to my strange last night in Nha Trang and the Pan American “Freedom Bird” home. But I wasn’t happy with myself for having, if not enjoyed it all, been separate from it while being in the middle of it and standing on the periphery while helping locate people who were going to be killed.
My first little book, about the war mostly, was called From the Periphery: poems and essays and that’s mostly how I felt: on the periphery of the war, not truly involved, marking time, doing something I had never questioned but had begun questioning while in the middle of it all. Dak To was a part of that questioning, the young P.O.W., an increasing feeling, after Tet, that the waste of life on both sides was futile. Those who did believe were correct in that we did not fight to win. Those who were opposed to the war were correct in that we should not have been there in the first place. I was, by the time I left, irrevocably on the side of those who felt we should never had been there in the first place.
My first semester at the University of Maryland, I was besotted with being a student, fell in love a few times with young women not much younger than I was, met Linda and fell in love with her. When I got back from Vietnam, I started falling in love with everyone. I met Linda in that Renaissance lit. class that was a reintroduction to college classes. Dr. Spurgeon had assigned a poem by George Gascoigne called, quite ironically, “Lullaby.” Here’s the whole poem and it’s quite long for this medium:
Gascoigne's Lullaby
Sing lullaby, as women do,
Wherewith they bring their babes to rest;
And lullaby can I sing too,
As womanly as can the best.
With lullaby they still the child,
And if I be not much beguiled,
Full many wanton babes have I
Which must be stilled with lullaby.
First, lullaby my youthful years,
It is now time to go to bed;
For crooked age and hoary hairs
Have won the haven within my head.
With lullaby, then, youth, be still,
With lullaby content thy will,
Since courage quails and comes behind,
Go sleep, and so beguile thy mind.
Next, lullaby my gazing eyes
Which wonted were to glance apace.
For every glass may now suffice
To show the furrows in my face.
With lullaby, then, wink awhile,
With lullaby your looks beguile.
Let no fair face, nor beauty bright
Entice you eft with vain delight.
And lullaby, my wanton will:
Let reason's rule now reign thy thought,
Since all too late I find by skill
How dear I have thy fancies bought.
With lullaby now take thine ease,
With lullaby thy doubts appease
For trust to this, if thou be still,
My body shall obey thy will.
Eke lullaby my loving boy,
My little Robin, take thy rest.
Since age is cold and nothing coy,
Keep close thy coin, for so is best.
With lullaby be thou content,
With lullaby thy lusts relent.
Let others pay which hath mo pence;
Thou art too poor for such expense.
Thus, lullaby my youth, mine eyes,
My will, my ware and all that was.
I can no mo delays devise,
But welcome pain, let pleasure pass.
With lullaby now take your leave,
With lullaby your dreams deceive,
And when you rise with waking eye,
Remember Gascoigne's lullaby.
That is not a difficult poem but the class was mixed: juniors and seniors mostly, a few older people. Some of them did see that the poem was all about sex; some did not. And, when we got to the “little Robin” stanza, no one was wiling to offer their reading on what Gascoigne was talking about. Spurgeon grew somewhat exercised over this and, finally, I raised my hand. “At last,” he said,” Mr. Hall, will you explain the stanza. I did. The whole poem is rather like Shakespeare’s “All the world’s a stage” speech, about how raunchy we are when young, how we may sprinkle pollen and babies around the landscape in lust run amok…okay, okay, we don’t do that sort of thing anymore, but…
The stanza in question has got to remind us of the “Cock Robin” lullaby and that old reprobate and deflowerer of virgins, George Gascoigne, is saying goodbye to an active penis in an age when we had not yet invented Viagra. It was not that I knew more or was smarter than the other students but that they were unwilling to say out loud what needed to be said out loud (and there was no Viagra or Cialis in those days).
So, why am I telling you all this? Well, Spurgeon applauded. I figured I’d still be able to cut it in grad. school, and Linda asked me out for a drink after class. MORAL: When you’re amongst English majors, it always helps to read poetry well: you get the grade, the girl and everything.
Later, she was my constant companion at rock concerts in the parks and at the Corcoran and, more importantly, on peace marches. Her twin children often went with us. The way I left her is among the more shameful things I’ve done, but that’s a few blogs away still.
That period between Vietnam and the peace marches, between Pleiku and D.C. and Austin? Basically, they were fairly ordinary for someone still wearing a uniform, commuting to work each morning, carpooling with my friend Don Mohr in his MGB (or was it an MGA?), top down when the weather permitted and both mags were firing. I eventually bought my own car, a not new, blue and shiny, Volkswagen convertible. I re-entered a world that included Vietnam only from 8 - 5, Monday through Friday.
Among the first things both Don and I did was enroll at the University of Maryland in College Park, Maryland. Not only was I planning to do what I had set out to do three years earlier (go to graduate school at UT-Austin) but I wanted to meet young, well-educated women. I know that sounds snotty but I did not want to hear again, not ever, “I love you so much, GI” and I did not want to "date" (quaint word these days) any of the mostly conservative women I met at the National Security Agency. Those were mostly women with a professional mission or clerk/typists with security clearances. I wanted to forget what we always called The Building (upper case letters implicit in the pronunciation) and immerse myself in being a college student again.
I took two classes at the University of Maryland: Renaissance literature and a course in Melville and Hawthorne. Damn that was wonderful. I decompressed, became totally human once again. I can hear combat vets now: “Puh-leeze!!!!!!! You were safe. No one pointed an AK at you. You got to talk with young women.” Yes, that’s all true. And I will repeat something I have said many times before: I mostly enjoyed my tour in Vietnam…from the ship ride over, to internment at Subic Bay with huge quantities of San Miguel beer, to the LSTs rocking down the coast of what was then South Vietnam while we sang Country Joe’s “Vietnam Rag,” to my strange last night in Nha Trang and the Pan American “Freedom Bird” home. But I wasn’t happy with myself for having, if not enjoyed it all, been separate from it while being in the middle of it and standing on the periphery while helping locate people who were going to be killed.
My first little book, about the war mostly, was called From the Periphery: poems and essays and that’s mostly how I felt: on the periphery of the war, not truly involved, marking time, doing something I had never questioned but had begun questioning while in the middle of it all. Dak To was a part of that questioning, the young P.O.W., an increasing feeling, after Tet, that the waste of life on both sides was futile. Those who did believe were correct in that we did not fight to win. Those who were opposed to the war were correct in that we should not have been there in the first place. I was, by the time I left, irrevocably on the side of those who felt we should never had been there in the first place.
My first semester at the University of Maryland, I was besotted with being a student, fell in love a few times with young women not much younger than I was, met Linda and fell in love with her. When I got back from Vietnam, I started falling in love with everyone. I met Linda in that Renaissance lit. class that was a reintroduction to college classes. Dr. Spurgeon had assigned a poem by George Gascoigne called, quite ironically, “Lullaby.” Here’s the whole poem and it’s quite long for this medium:
Gascoigne's Lullaby
Sing lullaby, as women do,
Wherewith they bring their babes to rest;
And lullaby can I sing too,
As womanly as can the best.
With lullaby they still the child,
And if I be not much beguiled,
Full many wanton babes have I
Which must be stilled with lullaby.
First, lullaby my youthful years,
It is now time to go to bed;
For crooked age and hoary hairs
Have won the haven within my head.
With lullaby, then, youth, be still,
With lullaby content thy will,
Since courage quails and comes behind,
Go sleep, and so beguile thy mind.
Next, lullaby my gazing eyes
Which wonted were to glance apace.
For every glass may now suffice
To show the furrows in my face.
With lullaby, then, wink awhile,
With lullaby your looks beguile.
Let no fair face, nor beauty bright
Entice you eft with vain delight.
And lullaby, my wanton will:
Let reason's rule now reign thy thought,
Since all too late I find by skill
How dear I have thy fancies bought.
With lullaby now take thine ease,
With lullaby thy doubts appease
For trust to this, if thou be still,
My body shall obey thy will.
Eke lullaby my loving boy,
My little Robin, take thy rest.
Since age is cold and nothing coy,
Keep close thy coin, for so is best.
With lullaby be thou content,
With lullaby thy lusts relent.
Let others pay which hath mo pence;
Thou art too poor for such expense.
Thus, lullaby my youth, mine eyes,
My will, my ware and all that was.
I can no mo delays devise,
But welcome pain, let pleasure pass.
With lullaby now take your leave,
With lullaby your dreams deceive,
And when you rise with waking eye,
Remember Gascoigne's lullaby.
That is not a difficult poem but the class was mixed: juniors and seniors mostly, a few older people. Some of them did see that the poem was all about sex; some did not. And, when we got to the “little Robin” stanza, no one was wiling to offer their reading on what Gascoigne was talking about. Spurgeon grew somewhat exercised over this and, finally, I raised my hand. “At last,” he said,” Mr. Hall, will you explain the stanza. I did. The whole poem is rather like Shakespeare’s “All the world’s a stage” speech, about how raunchy we are when young, how we may sprinkle pollen and babies around the landscape in lust run amok…okay, okay, we don’t do that sort of thing anymore, but…
The stanza in question has got to remind us of the “Cock Robin” lullaby and that old reprobate and deflowerer of virgins, George Gascoigne, is saying goodbye to an active penis in an age when we had not yet invented Viagra. It was not that I knew more or was smarter than the other students but that they were unwilling to say out loud what needed to be said out loud (and there was no Viagra or Cialis in those days).
So, why am I telling you all this? Well, Spurgeon applauded. I figured I’d still be able to cut it in grad. school, and Linda asked me out for a drink after class. MORAL: When you’re amongst English majors, it always helps to read poetry well: you get the grade, the girl and everything.
Later, she was my constant companion at rock concerts in the parks and at the Corcoran and, more importantly, on peace marches. Her twin children often went with us. The way I left her is among the more shameful things I’ve done, but that’s a few blogs away still.
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