The Reason You're Alive Read online

  That night in the hotel, I heard a knock on my door around midnight.

  I had been reading books about World War II so my father and I could have educated conversations. I envied my old man: he fought in a war that made sense afterward. I remember I was reading about Patton. That man was quotable. I was thinking about this fact when I heard the knock: “You’re never beaten until you admit it.”

  I put on a robe and answered the door. My father was standing there, wearing pajamas and the gold Rolex. There were tears in his eyes. He didn’t have to say anything—if you’re battle-tested and you’re with other battle-tested men, you never do. He reached out and put his rough, weathered hand on my shoulder. He nodded, and I nodded back. Mission accomplished.

  My father loved seeing the people he liberated. Me, personally, I don’t like the people my war tried to liberate.

  My good buddy, who was over there in Vietnam when I was over there—who’s now a multimillionaire many times over—decided to go back, planned the whole trip, had the visas, hotel rooms, flights, everything else. He was just pushing me to go with him, go with him, go with him.

  I was like, I can’t, Frank; I can’t. You don’t understand. It’s too emotional. Can’t do it.

  I never did go back, but Frank did. He loved it. He went all over on his return—Hanoi, Saigon, even into Cambodia to see the temples. But he was in a different situation than I was. He was company commander and had a construction crew over there, so he spent pretty much the whole tour building hospitals and schools and roads and stuff like that. What he did was positive. And he stayed in Nha Trang, a very nice French resort on the coast.

  “Frank, you don’t understand,” I said. “When I was in Vietnam, I didn’t stay in a hotel. I stayed in a jungle. I slept in trees. Ate canned food and snakes. Spent all my days killing people. What I wanna go back for? I got no good memories. You have a lot of good memories. I got no good memories. I want nothing to do with those people, or that place.”

  Plus, there was the memory of the bad shit I was ordered to do to that big Indian motherfucker, Clayton Fire Bear, but I’ll explain all that later.

  Regardless, I don’t have a D-day.

  Nowhere to visit.

  5.

  The second time my son, Hank, visited me in the hospital, he was a little more hospitable, so I asked him if he might bring my granddaughter for a visit. Like I said before, Ella and I have an understanding. But Hank said she was in Amsterdam with her bitch mother.

  “When are they coming back?” I asked, which is when my son began crying again. I’ve never met a man who cries more than my son, and it never fails to alarm me. He wouldn’t have lasted five minutes in the jungle. I saw a lot of men like Hank get killed quickly. They’d buy the bullet before they even began their tours, and that would make them a huge fucking liability.

  I remember this one time we were assigned an FNG—Fucking New Guy. He looked like he was twelve and could hardly stand up with all his gear on. I don’t even think his balls had dropped yet.

  “You guys are going to make sure I don’t die, right?” he said.

  And he wasn’t joking. There were tears in his eyes. He had bought the bullet on day fucking one. We all knew he’d be dead within hours, maybe minutes. Once you thought you were going to die, you did, and usually in a hurry. There was no reason to speak with him—he was already gone, and we didn’t want Death to think we had anything to do with this bullet-buying FNG.

  I glanced down at his brand-new boots, and they looked about my size. Mine were waterlogged and had a few holes. Fucking rice paddies. Jungle rot. The meat of my feet was literally falling off the bone.

  “His boots are mine,” I said to the rest of the men.

  “Why are you claiming my boots?” the FNG asked in the voice of a little girl whose beloved cat is about to be put in a sack and drowned in a river.

  No one answered him.

  Everyone claimed different pieces of his gear as he spun around, looking for eye contact and begging any of us to speak with him. We knew acknowledging him in any way whatsoever was suicide, so we pretended he wasn’t even there.

  An hour later, a sniper shot him through his left eye. We returned fire, and no one else was wounded.

  Now, why did the gook sniper pick the FNG?

  Answer: he didn’t. Death picked. The FNG had bought the bullet with his whimpering and fear. It was obvious. We were protected because we didn’t engage with that sort of behavior.

  I put on my new socks and boots and was grateful to be alive, glad that Death and I still had an understanding.

  But my crying son, Hank, and I weren’t in the Vietnam jungle; we were in a Jefferson Hospital room in Philadelphia. So I asked what happened with Femke.

  That no-good foreign devil had tired of America and was yearning for her motherland. Turns out Femke was also fucking another European on the side, a visiting professor from Amsterdam who specializes in bullshit global warming theories and breaking up marriages.

  “You let her take your daughter out of the country?” I asked my son, because that was not good. Things got complicated once you were out of the United States, and I imagined fighting an international custody battle would be much easier if you actually had possession of the child here in the USA.

  “She just took Ella,” my son said, his eyes welling up. “I woke up last week, and they were both gone. Just like that.”

  Kidnapping.

  Hank went on to say that he had never done anything wrong; he had never been mean to his wife, had done everything she had asked, had bought the house she wanted in her preferred neighborhood, the car she wanted, a wardrobe they couldn’t afford—gave her everything she asked for, allowed her to send Ella to the private Friends school Femke had picked out, which was when I interrupted.

  I told him his defense, outlined his entire problem. Women tire of men who give them anything and everything they want. They may think they like their men castrated, but every woman has needs, and it takes a wild stallion to satisfy. A tamed, broken, ball-less stud is no stud at all.

  This man-to-man got Hank to cease crying for a second, long enough to call me crude and sexist. He couldn’t resist bringing up his mother too.

  I pitied my son, and I blamed myself for his troubles. Maybe I should have been harder on him. Maybe I should have made him play football when he was in high school instead of allowing him to spend so much time painting, like his mother used to do.

  Jessica taught Hank how to sketch and paint just as soon as he could walk. They spent years together at the easel she set up in his bedroom. Hand over hand, Jessica tried to pass on her gifts to our son. And he was a good pupil. You have to give him that. He would do anything and everything my wife told him to do. And they painted brilliant pictures together, hand over hand—but the genius vanished from the canvas and paper whenever Jessica took her hand off Hank’s. He knew he was talentless even when he was in elementary school, but he faked it for fifteen more years, even after his mother was gone. You have to admire his determination, if nothing else. Finally he admitted he didn’t have his mother’s gift, became an art dealer, and married a foreigner.

  “It’s funny,” he said, as we sat in my hospital room. “I tried to do the opposite of everything you did, Dad, and yet here we are, both alone.”

  So I said, “We need to go to Amsterdam and get Ella back. I have some contacts who can get us guns once we’re in country, and—”

  “What the hell is wrong with you?”

  “Don’t you want Ella back?”

  “Of course I do,” he said, “but this isn’t the sixties, and we’re not in the Vietnam jungle. I don’t solve my problems with violence! Most people don’t.”

  My son makes asinine statements like this every single day, while men all over the globe kill and kill without mercy. Does Hank not even watch the fucking news? Does he not realize he’s free to spout all of the stupid, misinformed, unchallenged civilian rhetoric he constantly promotes becaus
e we have the biggest and best military in the world, and we have always killed our enemies? Every day. Funded by our tax dollars, by the way, which my son pays just like everyone else. Could he really be so fucking naive? Without the military we’d be speaking German or Russian or maybe even Japanese right now. Does my son have any idea what a Nazi or Communist regime would have done to Flower Power hand-holders like him?

  Hank went over to the window and continued his sniffling. It was strange how much I pitied him. If he weren’t mine, I probably would have despised Hank Granger, but he was the closest I’d ever get to producing an heir, and so my emotions continued to betray me.

  “She’s gone on hunger strike,” he said, and I could tell he was happy about this fact by the way his voice lifted.

  “Ella?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” he said.

  Ella was seven years old at the time. The body needs vitamins and fuel at that age so it can grow properly, and so I expressed concern, which prompted my son to raise his voice again, saying he knew that and so did Femke, and that’s why she was putting Ella on a plane back to Philadelphia immediately. So all of the boohooing was for nothing.

  And that’s just the sort of mother my daughter-in-law is. Her global-warming-professor sex romp through Europe trumped her maternal duties. Her husband’s father was fighting for his life after brain surgery, and she’s off fucking some overeducated Dutch weatherman. Part of me was happy, I admit, just to be rid of her, because there was no way she’d be coming back. Even Hank knew it. Or so we thought.

  “I’d ask where I went wrong if I didn’t already know your answer would be horribly offensive,” Hank said.

  I just nodded. There was nothing that needed saying anyway at that point. The facts spoke loudly enough. I was sorry for my son’s pain, but I couldn’t help thinking he had brought it on himself by picking a woman who was bound to betray him at the first sign of trouble or even boredom. I sniffed her out more than a decade ago. I didn’t need to tell Hank I was right—he now knew. The kicker was, he hated me for being right all along because it made him doubt himself, mistrust his instincts and his rosy dumb-civilian worldview.

  The next time Hank visited my hospital room, Ella joined him. She gave me a big hug and a kiss right away, which was good medicine, let me tell you—it’d been so many months since I last saw her. I told her I missed her like crazy, and she said she missed me “crazier,” which produced a big-time fucking smile on my face.

  Ella had lost a little weight. Her arms were a tiny bit thinner and her cheekbones were a little more prominent, and that made me want to put a bullet between her selfish mother’s eyes, but I managed to keep those feelings to myself as Ella told me all about her solo trip across the Atlantic Ocean. She had sat next to a nice older lady—no doubt American—who shared her mints and even let Ella have the window when she had been assigned the aisle.

  What type of mother puts her seven-year-old daughter on an international flight without adult supervision?

  Ella was sitting on the edge of my hospital bed, holding my hand, telling me about the canals in Amsterdam, when she reached out and touched the bandage on my head. I asked if she wanted to see my scar, telling her the doctors had stapled it shut and you could still see the staples.

  My pussy son protested, but I peeled the bandage off anyway.

  “Whoa,” she said, lifting her little eyebrows. And then she asked if I knew about her mother’s new boyfriend.

  “Your mother is a traitorous bitch, Ella. A real Jane Fonda,” I said, which pissed off Hank, even though he knew I had spoken the truth. He kept blaming my cursing on the brain surgery, telling my granddaughter I couldn’t help it, as if I never ever cursed before you people cracked open my skull and got me thinking so much about Clayton Fire Bear.

  I don’t think Ella understood what I had said anyway, because she started talking about Gandhi and nonviolence and not eating to get what she wanted from her mother, which, in this case, was to come home to the land of the free.

  I once read that Gandhi used to sleep naked with his own teenage niece and force her to take baths with him. Apparently he beat his wife too. But I didn’t want to talk with Ella about a wife-beating sexual deviant and how schoolteachers lie, so instead of setting the record straight on India’s most famous pervert, I told her that I was just glad she was back in the best country in the entire world, the United States of America, and my little granddaughter nodded proudly, because she is a true patriot.

  Then she said she was glad I was going to be living with them, which made me look over at my son, who explained I needed to be supervised for a time.

  Ordinarily, I’d have told him to go fuck himself, but it was obvious that he needed me to help him put his life together after his wife had run out on him. Hank was going to need a hand with Ella and was just too shy and weak to ask directly for assistance. So I let that slide too, and told Ella I was very excited to be moving in with her.

  “Do you want to stay in my room?” she said.

  I told her I needed my own room because of the nightmares. I still sometimes wake up screaming, soaked in sweat. Ella said she had bad dreams too, so it was okay. I appreciated her trying to bond with me, but my granddaughter didn’t understand a few things. Primarily that it’s really fucking dangerous to interrupt my sleep, because I used to reflexively kill anything that woke me up in the jungle—rats, snakes, gooks, insane perverts (which I’ll tell you about later), whatever the fuck. And that killer instinct remains strong to this day. Instead, I just told my granddaughter that I preferred my own room with a lock on the door and left it at that.

  Hank watched us talking with this distant look on his face. We used to call it the thousand-yard stare back in Vietnam. Men got that when they had seen too much horrific shit or when they had simply given up, which was different than buying the bullet.

  Regardless of all that, I knew my son’s head was fucked, and here he was now, all alone with a seven-year-old daughter to take care of. My old man’s dying words echoed in my head once more. It was clear that I had one last mission. And I always, always, always complete my mission.

  6.

  The first thing that happened when I moved into my son’s house was this: Ella and I had a tea party. This was to welcome me, because my granddaughter is a hell of a lot more thoughtful than her foreigner mother. My son, Hank, did not attend.

  Normally I don’t have tea parties with little girls, but I made an exception because my granddaughter allowed me to have real coffee. So the tea party was just barely manly enough to be okay.

  Ella drank pretend tea out of a pink plastic cup. Every time she took an imaginary sip, she stuck out her pinkie like she was the Queen of England. She was also wearing white gloves and a tiara made of rhinestones that sparkled like the thing was plugged in.

  I was wearing my default safe outfit: camo pants, jacket, and bucket hat. We had stopped at my home on the way, so I was also packing heat again, which felt good, like coming up for air after diving deep down into the ocean, but my antigun son didn’t know that I was carrying. Just a small Glock in an ankle holster. Nothing too serious. No AK-47 or anything like that. Left my bazooka at home. Didn’t even bring my flamethrower.

  “Why the hell are you in full camouflage?” Hank asked, because he didn’t understand what it was like to be under attack and vulnerable. He didn’t have a Clayton Fire Bear.

  My nervous, untrusting son actually patted me down when we left my house, because he had banned me from carrying a firearm. “I’ll allow you one knife only,” Hank said, because I can’t really sleep without a knife under my pillow. They had to knock me out with powerful drugs every night in the hospital, and my goddamn liver needed a break from all those extra chemicals. But Hank doesn’t know about ankle holsters, because he’s an ignorant gun-hating liberal.

  To be fair, Hank lives in a safe neighborhood and has a state-of-the-art security system, which he said was the reason we wouldn’t need to bring any guns, but
if my year in the army taught me anything, it was this: you never fucking know.

  “Do you have any imaginary friends, like Mr. Peanuts?” Ella said to me during our tea party, after she had introduced me to everyone.

  Mr. Peanuts was an invisible elephant who liked his pretend tea strong and his pretend cookies peanut-flavored, hence the name Mr. Peanuts. He was allegedly seated to my right, but only Ella could see him. That was the deal with Mr. Peanuts. On my left was a real doll named Julietta who liked her tea “stronger than an elephant’s” but was on a strict diet, so she ate no imaginary cookies and took no imaginary lumps of sugar, nor did she take imaginary milk. Julietta could not see Mr. Peanuts either, and therefore doubted his existence.

  “I had a friend named Tao once,” I said to Ella.

  “Towel?” she said. “Like what you use to dry yourself after a bath? That was his name, Towel?”

  “Close enough,” I said. “He was Cambodian. They have moronic names over there. He couldn’t read or write, so not even he knew how to spell it. I have no idea either. But I think it might have been T-A-O. That’s my guess.”

  Then she asked why he couldn’t read or write. Was he blind?

  And I told her that Tao was poor. Too poor to go to school. His parents were farmers. But the Vietcong killed them.

  She wanted to know why the Vietcong had killed Tao’s parents, and so I told her the Vietcong were very bad people. Not nice. They killed by the thousands. She wanted to know who the Vietcong were, so I said, “Communists. Bad guys. Our enemy.”

  It was nice to see Ella so concerned for Tao. She was biting down on her lip and twirling her hair around her finger. My granddaughter is compassionate.

  She wanted to know what Tao did after his parents were killed, so I told her he escaped. Lived in the jungle. Ate snakes to stay alive. He was amazingly resourceful. Would have been extremely successful had he been born in America. Maybe would have even made president. But he wasn’t lucky as we are. He was born in a shithole country.