Linda and Washington. Peace marches, protests. Rock concerts and art museums. My VW convertible, my 250CC Suzuki, my MX-5. So much time. A bicycle in South Vietnam. A hitched ride in a deuce and a half. It all becomes mixed up somehow—time out of sequence. There is an old saying that life is motion, that when you stop moving, you finish dying. In my dissertation, written on the Vietnam War novels back in 1984, I wrote, and again this was many years ago, about the helicopters in Vietnam:
Helicopters were used for almost as many purposes as there were missions in the war. They were observers, searching for the Viet Cong; destroyers, raining bullets from the sky; saviors, transporting the wounded to hospitals; hearses, carrying the dead to military morgues; status symbols, cadillacing for every field grade office in the American Army.
I used them to travel from place to place, most notably to and from Dak To in 1967. And, God help me, I loved them. I loved half standing and leaning out the side of the olive drab bird, hanging onto the strap a door gunner used, looking down on a green land that we were destroying, loved the almost vertical take-off and the slow, sometimes spiraling landings. Motion, movement! Hardly anything else matters, it’s reality and it’s a metaphor…if you think about it in grand enough terms. This is why Emily Dickinson has death come as a coachman to give us a ride across the fields and across a lifetime.
In another essay, published years later in Tattoo Highway, I wrote about a dream trip through Milwaukee, a city I have still never been in:
The bumper sticker on the car ahead says MY KID CAN BEAT UP YOUR HONOR STUDENT and vanishes with its car heading down an off ramp to somewhere...or not. I am almost always happy when I’m driving even when I have no destination in mind, just wheeling off down a road that, with luck, I’ve never driven before. Like driving through Milwaukee on this particular afternoon when nothing happens except a few old friends appear, vanish, reappear. I am in the house on Nueces Street and I am in Milwaukee and I am sitting in an old chair. Laura, who never lived there, is on the floor, her cheek against my knee, her long dark hair flows down my leg as I drive past an exit sign that says Khe Sanh—20Km. We were never lovers, Laura and I, for some reason neither of us has ever figured out, but it’s right somehow that she is here in Milwaukee as the world is coming to an end.
I begin to relive a drive I took almost 40 years ago, nonstop from Austin, Texas, to Washington, D.C. I was engaged to Linda and with the passing days and weeks had become more and more convinced that I had made a mistake, that I simply did not want to be married, not to anyone, not at this stage in my life. Austin had been nirvana for me in the few short months I had lived there.
When I was discharged from the Army back in December, 1969, I drove straight through, barely sleeping. The first two nights in Austin I rejoined Don and Allen and we crashed with Ann and her two room-mates. For a while the three of us would share a house near the University, and in those first months had a great time repainting the interior in black with day-glo highlights. As I said, a long time ago, almost alien to the way we all live now.
That day I realized I didn't want to marry Linda, I agonized over how to tell her and was tempted to just call and break it off. But that seemed too easy, much too easy, for me after a relationship that had lasted two years, had seen us marching together against the war in the streets of Washington, making love almost every night, taking her twins out to the parks on the weekends, getting high together on life instead of on various chemical substances. Linda deserved better than a brief phone call and that time in my life, that time, deserved something more monumental to mark its passing. So, I decided to return to Washington.
At 9 a.m. the morning after I made that decision, I threw some clothes into a bag and filled my cooler with beer and cokes, left a note for Don and Allen and headed northeast from Austin to Washington in my 1966 VW convertible. The trip took 27 hours one-way, non-stop except for fueling the car every 250 miles or so. The first eight or nine hours were all in Texas: Austin to Dallas on I-35, Dallas to Texarkana on I-30. One problem with living in the heart of Texas is that you have to drive so far to really feel you've made progress. When I lived in Washington, I could drive through four to five states in the same time it took me to reach the Arkansas border. But the highways were good and the miles rolled under me.
Late that night, 2 or 3 a.m., I drove along the Blue Ridge in Virginia, top down, a million fireflies made the Shenandoah Valley glow out the driver's side window. The Milky Way was above and seemed, also, to be below me as I took steep turns, barely awake, zoning out, nodding off from time to time, jerking awake. But finally, I began to fall asleep, and my car drifted out of my lane towards the cliffs on the left side of the road. I suspect I would be dead now except for a truck driver who raced up on my tail and blinked his lights, blowing his air horn loudly, jolting me back to life. I was able to swing the car back into my lane, then stopped and got out, just standing there, almost drunk from exhaustion, watched the fireflies below me, winking in and out, and sat down under a tree for what seemed like hours. After a few minutes,I drove on down the highway and stopped at the first diner I came to.
This was the first real stop I had made and at the diner I drank cup after cup of coffee and I do not normally drink coffee, got strung out, tense, jittery, and headed back east and north, anxious to have the trip over, the trip almost becoming the meaning, the form pushing the substance, my split with Linda, back into the recesses of my mind. As I drove on, I began to see things along the road that were not really there, bushes became animals leaping onto the road in front of me, the shadows were alive, and slowly, slowly, the fireflies began to disappear.
As the sun rose that morning, I continued to fight sleep, continued to make the VW move as quickly as possible, the drive almost becoming the thing itself, punishment for what I was going to do, pushing guilt back and back. I irrationally began to get mad at Linda, blamed her for the whole thing, for my near accident on the Blue Ridge Skyline, for my driving to Washington, though I knew she was not to blame.
I took the beltway around Washington, exited at one of the Silver Spring exits, and pulled the VW into her parking space. It was 2 p.m. and Linda was still at work. I opened her door with my key and walked into the apartment, so familiar, like I still belonged there. I walked back to our bedroom, took my clothes off and fell asleep almost instantly.
Not until nine that evening did Linda wake me up. The whole thing would have been much easier if she had gotten mad at me, had kicked me out of her house when I told her, after we got up, after we went into the kitchen and had a beer, that I did not want to get married, that no, there was no one else, and there was not, that I simply was not ready for marriage, but she didn't. She was the very soul of reason, very controlled, very cool. She didn't cry, didn't scream at me, didn't try to get me to change my mind. When I told her I needed to leave right away, to get back to Austin for classes, she told me to spend the night, to rest. The next morning, she made breakfast for me after the kids had gone to school. And then she kissed me goodbye. I have not seen her again.
I'm glad I made the trip. It would not have been right to end things with a simple phone call. But I wish, somehow, she had been nasty. But if she had, it would have been just for me. I hope now that when I left she closed the door and laughed, howled, shook with joy that she had gotten out of a situation that she did not want. But I don't really believe that.
Just out of Washington, I picked up two hitchhikers headed for Memphis, Tennessee, and we smoked and talked. When I got tired, I turned the driving over to them and slept until we got to their place. Then, I drove back to Austin.
This was all part of the zeitgeist, part of the spirit of the age. Today, some people break up by texting; in those days, I felt I had to do the honorable thing and break up face to face. It’s not part of Vietnam, but it is part of what led me to do certain things: a sense, almost like Hemingway’s sense of “grace under pressure,” that here are things we must do to continue to be honorable people, to be able to continue living with ourselves.
The next blog entry will be about the great peace march of November 15, 1969, and we’ll be back in motion again.
No comments:
Post a Comment