The Reason You're Alive Read online

  And then, finally, my pitiful trip to the rob-you-while-you-are-sick hospital was over, and Hank and I were driving back to his home. I asked to stop at my own house, thinking I’d like to pick up some more weapons, but my request was denied.

  “Thought we were going to lose you there,” Hank said as he drove his tree-saving plug-in car made by little rice-eating men in some godforsaken faraway land.

  “Only the good die young,” I told him. “Can’t get rid of me that easily.”

  I said I was sorry to have ruined his second date, which made him laugh for some reason.

  Then Hank said, “Did you check your ankle holster lately?”

  I had completely forgotten that I was packing heat at the art museum. I reached down for my ankle and felt nothing. “Where the fuck’s my Glock?”

  He told me that Sue had taken it home for me, and I wouldn’t be needing it anymore. And then he went on and on about how he didn’t want any guns in his house. Not around Ella. “None!” he kept saying. My son was apparently letting the first offense slide “on account of” and “only because of” my brain surgery. However, I would get “no more strikes.” Then he said, “Are we on the same page here?”

  “Sue took my gun?” I said, because at least she was trained by her father on how to handle firearms. I had tried to train Hank, but he flat-out refused to fire a weapon, even when he was a boy.

  A month before Jessica died, she dumped all of my guns and ammo into a bathtub full of water in an attempt to destroy my entire collection. I wish to God I could take back the things I said when I found out what she had done. I don’t know why I’m thinking about this right now, but my screaming at Jessica in the bathroom is one of the worst memories I have, including the horror show year I spent in Vietnam. I was a fucking monster that night. I didn’t hit her, but I smashed the mirror with my bare fists, bloodying my knuckles, which upset my wife even more. Jessica shouldn’t have done what she did, but she wasn’t in her right mind, and I loved her too much to face that truth. I didn’t want the doctors to lock her away in some insane asylum, and so I tried to do my best, which wasn’t good enough, obviously.

  While he drove us home from the hospital, Hank kept saying, “No guns in my home. Are we clear on this issue?”

  When I didn’t answer, he went on and on about all sorts of bullshit handgun statistics made up by liberals who had never even touched a gun, let alone taken care of one. Then my boy actually made a legitimate point about how someone could have taken my gun off me while I was having a seizure, before Sue got to it first. Sue knew that I always carried, so she was able to discreetly remove the Glock from my ankle holster before the Puerto Rican EMT took me away. There were many people at the art museum that day, and on any other different day bad luck could have definitely sent a more violent type as an EMT, someone who needed a gun to do some base awful thing, and then what would have happened when impulse met opportunity? It was true that any old bad guy could have used my gun against me when I was convulsing, or worse yet they could have used it on Ella. The thought made me shiver.

  I am more reliable than anyone out there when it comes to gun safety, but the fucking asshole skiers I had for doctors could not be trusted when it comes to my medication, which, at the end of the day, meant that I really couldn’t trust myself. I decided that I would get Sue to carry for me when we were hanging out together in the city and would talk to her about that plan just as soon as I could.

  To Hank I apologized, not for carrying the Glock without his permission, because he is not the fucking boss of me, but for putting his daughter in harm’s way by having the seizure while armed. Obviously it was the fault of the dumbass doctors, who didn’t know goddamn anything about medicine, or at least not enough to give me the proper dosages, but I could understand Hank’s not giving a shit about that. His first priority was to protect Ella, and I had to agree with that logic.

  And so I told him I would not carry a firearm again until I went seizure-free for four weeks, which seemed to satisfy him, because he said, “I can’t believe we are actually in agreement. Pinch me.”

  I told him that I wasn’t going to pinch him then or ever, but we were in agreement about Ella’s safety coming first. Then I added, “Don’t get cocky, son. I’m not dead yet. You ain’t never gonna ever eclipse me, because I’m gonna live forever. And there ain’t no man better than your father when it comes to completing missions and taking care of business. I’m a real man. You hear me?”

  Hank stared through the windshield for a few minutes as we crossed the Ben Franklin Bridge. Then, as we were driving past Camden, he said, “You were telling Ella about Mom. At the art museum. She told me last night when I was tucking her in.”

  “Hope that’s not illegal too,” I said.

  But Hank actually approved. I knew because he said, “Would you mind telling me about Mom’s artwork again? It’s the closest I’ll ever get to seeing one of her finished paintings.”

  So I told Hank what I remembered, which was a lot actually. Jessica painted for a decade, so she managed to finish hundreds of works. I was the only one who ever saw any of them—or so I thought. She kept them hidden in her garage studio, which was always locked. At the end, she wouldn’t even let me into her work space, because she felt that her paintings were visual representations of all that was going on in her mind. Since her mind was so fucked up with depression, she was worried about infecting others with her art, especially me, because of all that had happened to me during the war. Jessica had actually started to believe that others might become mentally ill simply by looking at her artworks.

  But I didn’t tell Hank about those later years; I told him about the beginning, when Jessica was still a teenager, painting more hopeful pieces at the start of our marriage. The boy spent many days and nights in a basket next to her easel. Sometimes I’d come home from work and find different-colored blobs of paint on his clothes, arms, legs, and face. My son loved when I talked about that. Without interrupting, adult Hank listened to me go on and on about his mother, and when we pulled into his driveway, I caught him wiping a tear off his cheek. I didn’t call him on that girly-man behavior because sometimes I also feel like shedding a tear or two when I think about a nineteen-year-old Jessica looking up from a canvas big as her, smiling at me with paint smudges all over her face, like camouflage. Her long, brown hair is always braided into pigtails, and she is perpetually in overalls, as if she were a farmer riding on a tractor. All she needed was a piece of hay hanging out of her mouth. You could see the light in her eyes back then. It was bright as goddamn June moonbeams shimmering off ocean waves still warm from the day’s sun.

  11.

  By now you probably have pieced together why I might be so immediately sympathetic toward a rape survivor like my dead wife Jessica. You have access to my secret military records, and I know you’ve already been through all of those, so don’t even try to bullshit me about that. But since I don’t have access to those files at this point in time and therefore have no idea just what the fuck they say, I figure I better set the record straight about my being sexually assaulted myself.

  When they shipped me home from Vietnam, they allowed me to see my parents for a weekend before I had to go to Kansas, where I was supposed to undergo a psychiatric evaluation. Like I said before, after so many days in combat, everyone becomes legally insane, regardless of his—or unfortunately her, these days—mental fortitude going into war. This is a well-known fact that even the liars in Washington would never publicly dispute, even if they will never send their own sons and daughters to fight wars. So fuck them. And yes, I was definitely pretty fucked in the head when I came home, but I managed to keep it together for the forty-eight hours I spent with my mother and father, eating my mother’s food and smoking my father’s cigarettes. Because my father had been to war, he knew I was acting, but he played along for the sake of my mother. I tried to protect her from that the best I could. If she were still alive, I wouldn’t be telling you h
alf of what I am here, but my mother died years ago without knowing these things. Mission accomplished there.

  I started to really lose it on the bus ride to Kansas. I kept seeing gooks in the trees we passed and in the backseats of vehicles next to us on the highway and peeking out of gas station windows. The pajama wearers were everywhere. There was part of my mind that knew I was hallucinating, but a larger part of my mind kept saying, Just because you are in America doesn’t mean you’re safe. Your government fucked you so many times overseas, what makes you think they’ll stop now that you’re home and within arm’s reach? Part of me—the part that was seeing little yellow bastards in American trees—was completely paranoid, I admit, but another part of me was right about a lot of things too.

  I was also afraid of seeing my nemesis, that Indian, Clayton Fire Bear, on the base. He and I had arrived in Vietnam at the same time, and therefore we were set to return stateside at the same time too.

  It was a long thirty or so hours on the bus, and I mostly sweated profusely and smoked Marlboro Reds. Everyone else on the bus was twitchy too. There were some guys who tried to make jokes at first, just to keep things light, but they didn’t find a large enough audience, I guess, because the jokes stopped an hour into the drive.

  My orders were to report to Fort Riley, which is exactly what I did. When we finally drove onto the base, my worst fear came true. My veins became thick with adrenaline. My heart nearly exploded. That tall-ass Fire Bear was off in the distance, smoking a cigarette and just staring at our bus, waiting for us to exit. Before I could get a really good look or figure out what the fuck to do, I was thrown onto a smaller bus with a bunch of guys who looked even more jungle than me, and we were taken to another place that was more like a hospital. Just as soon as I arrived, I understood that this was where all of the really insane vets got sent. It was a total loony bin, with guys staring at the walls and drooling and pacing and shaking uncontrollably for no reason at all except for the nightmares playing on the insides of their skulls. Walking into that secret medical facility was a real wake-up call. I wanted out just as soon as I was in, and I made that perfectly clear, so much that they had to restrain me the first night. That took four big black guys. Maybe even five, but they hit me with a chemical restraint, and then it was lights out.

  When I woke up, I immediately realized my mistake. When I met with one of the headshrinkers that day in his office, I let him know that I had decided to make something of my life—that I wanted to study business and I didn’t want any more drugs in my system. All I needed was my honorable discharge, I told him, and I’d be on my way.

  The shrink in charge of my file was an older man who had served in World War II, so I told him about my father, and that seemed to hold weight with him. I remember he gave me a cigar. It was almost impossible to get cigars in Vietnam, so this was a big treat, and this old man knew it too. As we sat in his office, smoking the cigars, he got me to tell him about my adventures in Vietnam, which eventually led to my talking about Tao.

  Over the course of several meetings and dozens of cigars, there was much debate over whether Tao was real or my mind had invented him as a sort of alter ego, like I said before. My military shrink tried to convince me that I wanted a partner in crime, someone to share the blame for all I had done in the jungle. He argued that Tao was an innocent whose homeland had been invaded and whose family had been raped and killed. Tao had a legitimate and concrete reason for killing Vietcong, unlike me whose government sent him halfway around the world and then said kill the yellow faces just because. The old shrink, whose name I can’t recall now, was very convincing. He seemed to like me and my future plans to take the Temple challenge and make a lot of money, like all good Americans should.

  In spite of that first night when the brothers had to restrain me, it was obvious that I was by far the sanest man in this little secret hospital. Everyone knew it. The staff even let me outside at night to smoke cigarettes with them under the stars, which they never would have done if they thought I was crazy as all the rest.

  On my last night in that place, I woke up, and there was this other absolutely fucking nuts Vietnam veteran sucking my dick. At first I thought I was dreaming and tried to wake myself up, but then I realized I was truly awake.

  “What the fuck are you doing?” I screamed, and then kneed that motherfucker in the stomach hard, knocking him to the ground. He came at me again with his mouth open, so I leaped out of bed and beat the shit out of him. Once I had him on the floor, I just kept pounding away on his face. I couldn’t stop if I wanted to. Instinct took over, and I did what I was trained to do by my government. It must have taken fifteen orderlies to get me off that crazy dick-sucking motherfucker, but not before I had blinded him in both eyes.

  Since it was self-defense and I was a sexual assault victim and only members of the military would be able to truly understand all of this objectively, the old man who was in charge of my file moved swiftly and had me tried in a military court of law. He testified on my behalf. I was convicted and ordered to pay a two-dollar fine. They gave me two cartons of cigarettes and sent me on my way with an honorable discharge. The old shrink said he pushed for me to be tried in a military court ASAP because, once convicted, I could never be tried in a civilian court for the same crime. I realized he had done me a solid and thanked him for it.

  I sometimes feel bad about blinding one of my fellow veteran brothers. He didn’t choose to sexually assault me. War had driven him out of his mind, robbing him of the ability to make healthy choices. He was like a drunk stumbling around barefoot in the desert. But rattlesnakes don’t give a shit if you’re blackout drunk when you step on them—they just strike and pump your ankle full of venom. And horrific violence also happens when you try to suck a sleeping combat-tested US veteran’s dick. Like I said before, I had been trained to terminate anything that woke me up in the middle of the night, even when it wasn’t related to my dick being sucked by another man. So it was what it was.

  I never told anyone about this shit before, of course, but I would think about what happened from time to time, even though—as you might imagine—I tried to avoid thinking about it as much as humanly possible. But I have sometimes also wondered if this was why I was so quick to coldcock Brian, and also why I fell for Jessica so hard at first sight.

  I don’t even know the name of the man I blinded. I wonder if he ever regained his sanity and made it out of the loony bin. Did they even tell him my name? Would he have been sane enough to remember what happened? Would he come after me?

  This is why whenever I see a blind man about my age walking around tapping the right and left sides of a sidewalk with one of those long, thin sticks, I have a panic attack. First time that happened, I thought my heart had stopped. That blind-man tapping noise triggers all sorts of uncomfortable feelings that I’ve never been able to articulate proficiently. Regardless of all that, I thought I would just put this unfortunate story in here now. It’s probably already in one of your secret files, so it may have been the pink elephant in our metaphorical room or whatever the fuck you want to call this here report.

  I checked with my lawyers, who assure me there is absolutely no way anyone—not even the government—could press charges against me now. It was self-defense anyway, and any man on a jury would be on my side. Even gays would be horrified to wake up that way, so this isn’t about being anti-homo, which I am not anyway. The man who sexually assaulted me was crazy, not gay. Needless to say, this was not a fun conversation to have with civilian lawyers. But make no mistake about it, I was the victim that morning, and if you prematurely tell anyone about this sensitive information, for obvious reasons, I will gut you like a pig and wipe your entire fucking family off the face of the earth. Nothing personal, but it’s easier to trust people like you when you’re scared shitless.

  12.

  A few days or so after my postoperation seizure, Gay Timmy gave me a call on my cell phone. He left this long message chewing my ass out for m
issing my personal training session. I was supposed to ease back into my workouts, and Timmy had taken the time to construct the perfect plan, which required that I missed absolutely zero sessions. He had also given me one of his most sought-after time slots, a gesture not lost on me. Everyone wanted the 4:30 p.m., but he reserved it for my sorry ass, because we’re tight.

  But with everything that happened, I had forgotten all about my session and missed it. No excuses—that slipup was on me, and I had to man up about it, which I absolutely did. Lucky for me, I’d had a bona fide seizure and the hospital bills to prove it, or that would have been it for yours truly working out with Timmy. He has a million and one people waiting to take your place and get rock-hard, Navy SEAL fit.

  When I heard the message on my phone, I knew I had to call back quickly. I was pretty sure Timmy would forgive me for having the seizure, but I wasn’t so sure about the fact that I had not canceled my appointment. I got his voice mail, which was good, because I could explain everything without his chewing out my ass again.

  Like I also told you before, Timmy and Johnny were always having me over for dinner parties. I didn’t much care for gay dinner parties, but I appreciated being included. To pay them back, I would pick up the bill whenever we had dinner out on musical theater nights. And I would also take them to the Union League every now and then, even though gays raise eyebrows among my conservative Republican friends there. But fuck those bigoted people. I’d go to war with Timmy and Johnny any day of the year. Even on gay pride day when they wear rainbows all over their bodies, which is not good camouflage, to say the least.

  But I still got the sense that my favorite gay couple was a little insulted about my never having them to my place for dinner. I didn’t mind having gays in my home one bit, only I could not cook gay food. But Hank always cooked gay food, and so I had a eureka moment while I was leaving the message for Timmy. After I told him all about my seizure in the art museum and meeting a rare Puerto Rican who didn’t know what the fuck West Side Story was, I explained that my son, Hank, cooked like a gay man, and therefore I was absolutely sure they would enjoy having dinner with me at Hank’s house. Then I invited them over for that Saturday night.