RATTLESNAKE DREAMS: COVER STORY
In the early 1980s a group of veterans, artists, musicians, poets and
ne’r-do-wells would hang out, drink beer, and tell stories. Some were true,
some were not so true… and some were too true to be endured, but unforgettable
all the same.
Chris Matthews was the owner of our meeting place, the Poet and Patriot
Irish pub, in an alley just off Cedar Street in Santa Cruz, near the mall.
He was a beefy Irishman with a booming voice, a giant heart,
and a well developed political consciousness. He was also a veteran of the 82nd
Airborne Division, which he never allowed us mere mortals to forget. RIP,
Chris. Also among us was Tim McCormick, who had been a Navy medical corpsman
patching up wounded Marines near the DMZ in South Viet Nam. Kenny Walker had
been a Marine Sergeant in Nam, and was also one of the best natural artists
I’ve met. He once mentioned in passing that he’d been standing next to a buddy
during an NVA attack on their position when an enemy rocket, sparks trailing,
came into their position. Kenny stood up to find his friend still standing, but
without his head, which had been taken off by the rocket and replaced by twin
crimson fountains spurting from his carotid arteries.
There was Bill Motto, a wiry, intense, scraggly-bearded two-tour Nam vet
(one with 173rd Airborne), who read more books and articles about
the kind of US foreign policy failures and deliberate deceptions of the sort
that had led us into Viet Nam, than anyone else we knew. He died too soon (he
was about 39) in a fall off a beach cliff near Santa Cruz. RIP, Billy.
There was Cris DiMaio, who is part Cheyenne, and who as a young Navy
doctor had the incredible bad luck of being assigned as Battalion Surgeon to
1/9, 1ST Battalion, 9th Marines. 1/9 was reputed to be
the infantry battalion that took the highest casualties, among Army and Marine
units, in that war. Chris was in our rap group of 7 or 8 vets who met once a
week and spilled our guts and hearts and our rage out in a small room in the
Vets Hall in Santa Cruz. He wasn’t in the group as a health professional; he
was there like the rest of us, trying to heal his own wounds. I had the good
luck to visit him, along with my wife, in Santa Cruz in 2012. It was very fine
to see him, in his home on the beach near Santa Cruz.
It had been through Chris DiMaio, by way of one of his Native American
connections (Michael Joseph, of the Santa Rosa Ranchería near Fresno) that I
was connected with Maco Stewart, the oil millionaire who financed a trip by
some North American Indians (and 3 mercenaries) among whom I was included as a
journalist in January 1985, to Contra camps in southern Honduras. We made a
couple of illegal armed crossings into Sandinista-controlled Nicaragua,
crossing the Río Coco in Miskito Indian dugout canoes. (There’s a large section
(“Rus Rus”) of stories from that trip in Rattlesnake Dreams.)
I was one of the vets, occasionally one of the poets, often enough among
the ne’r-do-wells, storytellers, and beer drinkers, who met often at the Poet
& Patriot.
Another regular was Cruz Ortiz Zamarrón, a Chicano artist who was about
half Chris’s size, but with booming voice and heart and political consciousness
to match.
And talent to over-match.
My wife and I split the blanket in 1994. We’re still friends; we both
have married again). I moved to Oregon, near where I’d grown up. (There are
several Oregon stories, from both before and after the war, in Rattlesnake
Dreams.) Chris Matthews, the founding owner of Poet & Patriot, died a
couple of years ago, from a lifetime of smoking cigarettes. We could always
hear it in his gravelly bass voice. Many of us drifted apart… but not really.
Now we had the Internet, and gradually we found one another again.
Also in the ‘80s, I began writing the stuff that had been clawing at my
insides to get out into the air since I’d thrown my gear into the back of the
truck to leave Chu Lai in 1966.
With the writing came the dreams and nightmares.
They pissed me off. No. They terrified, enraged me. They scalded my
soul. Hah. I’ll show ‘em: I’ll capture them and use them. Those nightmares were
kicking my ass on a regular basis, and like all combat vets, I wanted to escape
them.
Sometime in the early 1980s, after waking too many times drenched in
sweat and terrifying my wife with startling transitions from sleep to
wakefulness, I decided two things: One was that I would train myself to turn,
in sleep and during a nightmare, and confront my pursuers, instead of
continuing to flee them.
And I would learn to write the dreams down.
For a few years, the process of forcing myself to remember and record
the dreams made things worse. Convincing myself that in the long run it was
worth it to capture the dreams instead of fleeing them is one of the best
decisions I’ve ever made, given the fact that I had lived through the Viet Nam
war and, in any case, I could not escape it.
I do not know of, nor have I read of or been told about, any combat vet
who has actually reached the end of his string of post traumatic dreams. [WAIT! I JUST REMEMBERED WILLIAM MANCHESTER'S WONDERFUL BOOK GOODBYE, DARKNESS. THAT'S HIS MEMOIR OF WWII COMBAT IN THE MARINE CORPS, AND HIS OWN RE-VISITATION OF POST-COMBAT NIGHTMARES. I RECOMMEND IT FOR ALL COMBAT VETS, ESPECIALLY MARINES.] I’m
sure there are some others; I just haven’t met them. This is why I say – perhaps more
often than people want to hear – that I’m the luckiest combat vet I know.
Cruz
Ortiz Zamarrón, our artist friend from Poet & Patriot days, had grown up in
San Antonio, Texas. He now had relocated to Lake Tahoe, on the
California/Nevada line. I had been writing all the time, and a book was shaping
up. It was the project I’d promised I would do, as I tossed my gear on the
truck to leave Chu Lai. It had stories about growing up in Oregon, because I
had begun to see that soldiers – or, in my case, Marines – didn’t come out of
nowhere, but were boys who came from American homes, broken or otherwise.
I had many dreams/nightmares. Some I remembered, captured, wrote down. Some I lost.
But sometime during the Poet & Patriot days, while working as a carpenter
and contractor, I had a long dream which was clearly from the string of post Viet
Nam nightmares. But it was also different. It was very long. It was very clear.
In fact, translucent. It was very powerful. It told a story. And it ended well,
for me, as one of the two central characters in the dream.
The other main character was a rattlesnake the size of my arm, but much
more powerful. And it spoke to me in the dream. We talked, eye to eye, as the
howling circle of my people urged me to kill the snake with the pistol they had
given me, and which I now held in my hand.
That dream is the title piece for this book: Rattlesnake and Pistol.
I got in touch with
Cruz. We exchanged email addresses. I sent him the narrative I’d written about
the conversation between the rattlesnake and me, told him I wanted that to be
my book cover, and asked him to paint it. He said he couldn’t do it. His body
wouldn’t perform; he could no longer hold a paint brush properly with his right
arm. I begged him to do it, because of what I knew about him and his art, his
relationship with art and life. Please, I said.
He said he’d try to
do it with the computer.
He exceeded my
expectations, surprising me in a revelatory way: his painting depicts me, as a
young Marine with a pistol, confronting the grandaddy of all rattlesnakes,
being urged on by the crowd behind me… all reflected in the rattlesnake’s eye.
OH, BY THE WAY: look at me. I mean, look at the dream image of the young Marine holding the pistol. That's me, reflected in the rattlesnake's eye, with my people, crowded around behind me, urging me to "Shoot the snake!" Now look at the figure of Dean, as painted by Cruz. Look at my hair. See the letters Cruz painted into my hair, starting over my right ear: "P..E..A..C..E"
I didn't see that, until he told me: PEACE. Cruz told me before he published the painting, so I could have the option of taking it out. I threw back my head and laughed at the sky: "No, Cruz...leave it in. Leave it in!"
That's our cover. Thank you, Cruz.
Rattlesnake Dreams is available in paperback from Amazon - 398 pages, $22; or as ebook from createspace.com, $8; or ebook from kobo.com, also $8. Your choice.
CONTACT THE AUTHOR: 3dmetcalf@gmail.com
