DREAM: CHOCOLATE DONUT NIGHTMARE

DREAM: CHOCOLATE DONUT NIGHTMARE
A couple of years ago, after a years-long string of post Viet Nam nightmares in which I would be pursued by guesome, grimacing enemy soldiers, well armed and intent on killing me, I had what I that was "The Last Nightmare." (See Rattlesnake Dreams, chapters "Money Man Pursuit" and "The Last Nightmare.") All through "The Last Nightmare,"my body felt as if it were erupting like a volcano, until I finally woke up, in a fit of violent laughter. I haven't had one of those dreams since. But just now I awoke from a mid-day nap (erratic sleep patterns). I had dreamed, a half hour ago, that I was showing Edward Snowden around Santa Cruz, California. I was buying us a bag of chocolate donuts, and we were looking for a bench under the trees downtown to sit and eat them. Guess I really am over the nightmares, huh? That is, until I wake up and remember the real one.

BATHING BEAUTIES (POEM)

                                    Bathing Beauties

Del Mar Beach,

California

I.

Slipping sideways under Cinzano umbrellas,

afternoon sun hammers ice

through thin walls of tonic glasses,

extruding beads of lime sweat.

Greased bodies sizzle,

layed out along the griddle

that is the continent’s edge:

so much sexual bacon.

In the outdoor shower,

bikinied teens preen.

At the steps to the beach,

where everyone can see,

a couple stand

so everyone can see.

He is tall, blond,

tan, seventeen.

His muscles are from play,

for playing with:

not from work,

not for working with.

She is shorter, blonde,

nubile, fourteen.

She wears four small triangles

         of blue cloth.

She wears her self-assurance

as if she had already done everything

the older men under the Cinzano umbrellas

         are wishing they could do with her

and found it amusing.

She tosses her hair,

turning to devour

the stares

that are devouring her.

                                   

II.

She is eighty.

She walks with a cane.

She has trouble with the sand.

At the other end of her life,

the soft girl’s bones of her feet were

broken, toes bent back under the arch

to form the desired opening

for a highborn man’s erection, then bound

to heal, if that is the right word, into

a different kind of foot.

They are still bound,

her childhood trapped there

like butterflies pressed

in a book.

You can see

she loves the sun.

She walks carefully

past the perfect couple

past the sizzling Californians

lifting her withered face

pushing the cane with withered hands

down to where the salt foam

washes her shortened feet,

down to where one wave’s foam

smoothes the sand with its coming,

withers the same sand with its leaving,

the withered sand a mirror to her skin.

She lifts her face

smiles into the sun

smiles toward the West,

toward China.

                                                                       ©2012 Dean Metcalf

                                                                                 P.O. Box 548

                                                                                 Joseph OR 97846

                                                                                                                                            3dmetcalf@gmail.com

CARTOON: MY INTRODUCTION TO THE McCARTHY MADNESS

Cartoon

     I was in the first or second grade, which would have been in the period 1949-51. Art was my least favorite class; most of the other kids could make drawings and paintings that even I could see were better than mine.

     The assignment was to draw a cartoon. The teacher explained what a cartoon was, and the class turned to. The topic was Communism. If I ever heard the name of Senator Joseph McCarthy, I don't remember it. What I remember is a lot of emphasis in that class, as well as in others (social studies in particular) about Communism, how Communists, also called Reds, were very bad and didn't believe in God and were trying to take over the world and yes, even America. America was good and strong because we were Christian and free, but we wouldn't stay free unless we all fought hard against the Communists. 

     The teacher approached my island of stillness in the sea of flailing elbows and crayons. She was concerned and helpful. But I just couldn't do it. I couldn't think of anything to draw, or anything that I could draw that would be recognizable. 

     She wouldn’t give up. She hovered at my shoulder, kindly but insistent: Now, think. What have you learned about Communism? Can you draw that? Just try, Dean. Don't worry, cartoons aren't even supposed to be good drawings. They're supposed to make things look bad or stupid.

     She asked what was the simplest thing I could think of that I'd learned about Communism. When that turned up nothing I thought I could draw, she asked whether I thought Communism was bad. Oh sure, I nodded. Then she asked, What's the simplest thing you can think of that's bad?

     The phrase "snake in the grass" came to mind. I'd heard my parents say it about someone they didn't trust. Good, she said. Can you draw that? Go ahead. Draw that.

     I drew a squiggly line to represent a snake, and a few pencil strokes for blades of grass. I lettered COMMUNISM underneath it in my kid's scrawl. 

     "See?" the teacher said. "I knew you could do it."

LEANING TOWARD THE LIGHT

(c)1998, 2013 Dean Metcalf

Look how far:

thermonuclear orange light leaps clear

of the sun, scoots 9 minutes

across the universe

to bounce now off Saturday’s

last clouds, fracture

into soft golds and greys, filter

past sparse October leaves

         across Front Street,

tilt through a vertical slit

in the window blinds, skip

a cool glance off a varnished

pool table rail, slide

these last few feet

into my retinas

like a softly-tapped

bank shot: 2 ball,

         side pocket.

The planet has turned today’s

final corner. As the last light leaves,

I notice for the first time

tension in the small of my back:

I have been tilting ever

         farther forward,

following the fleeing color

like some vertebrate houseflower

in a room with one window,

lamenting the leaving

of that which makes me green,

leaning toward the light.

Dean Metcalf

RED CHIEF, WHITE CHIEF

Red Chief, White Chief

     We were back at the TEA camp in early afternoon. My notebook has this 2:44 pm entry: "Gary Fife just came by from the creek: 'Somebody just hung out the Stars and Bars.'" I looked out from under the rolled up tent flap. A large Confederate flag was draped on the front of the mercenaries' tent. Gary "says he's descended from Stand Watie, a Cherokee who was the last Confederate general to surrender."

     Then Gary began to tell a story he'd heard from his people - I believe it was from the Cherokee side - about how the decision was made to go to war. He said he wasn't sure about the details, but that the tribe had two chiefs, a Red Chief and a White Chief. The Red Chief was the war chief, whose job was strictly military: once the tribe decided to go to war, he was supposed to make decisions that would bring success, and to lead the warriors in battle. But, precisely because of his fighting ability and experience, he was never allowed to make the decision about whether to go to war. That decision was made by the White Chief, in conjunction with the tribal council. The White Chief would often be a woman. It was her job to be the guardian of life, and to never let the warriors' enthusiasm for fighting get them into a situation which brought more death than life to the tribal community. I thought it was the most sensible political idea I’d ever heard.

BANNING

Banning

     Poor people and servicemen on leave traveled by Greyhound. So the trip through the January night to my first permanent duty station after boot camp was just an extension of my childhood. Except for how I smelled: twentyfour hours in a closed bus wearing the same dress green wool uniform works its own alchemy, a brew of stale sweat, wet wool, tobacco smoke, and dry cleaning fluids which has to be stored in the synapses of every veteran.

     It grew bitingly cold as the bus moved deeper into the January night and the California desert. Sometime in the middle of the night we were disgorged at the bus stop in Banning. There either was no bus station, or it was closed. Two or three of us on our way to the Marine base at Twentynine Palms had to wait outside for the local stage that would take us on our next leg. There was a bench to sit on, and a concrete wall to lean against. The bench was occupied by two old men. I was puzzled that they weren't home in bed, since they weren't waiting for the same stage we were, and there didn't seem to be anything else happening in Banning that time of night. 

     I wasn't interested in sitting anyway. I was too cold. My wool overcoat was near the bottom of my seabag, that monster of design inefficiency that is long and narrow and opens only at one end, so anytime you want anything that isn't on top, you have to unpack the goddamned thing to get what you want, then repack it. This usually occurs when a drill instructor is yelling at you to hurry up, or when your bus is leaving.

     Besides being cold, I was sleepy and hungry and homesick and needed a shower. My uniform was rumpled, and, I was sure, twisted all around my body. I felt like shit.   

    One of the old men was eyeing me. I wasn't used to traveling in uniform; later I would find that some people would avoid even eye contact with you, while others would talk your leg off. But this time, I simply noticed that I was being watched. I felt too miserable to care why.

     The old man finally spoke: "Look at you, boy," he said to me. "You don't know how lucky you are. Just look at you. Young, strong, proud... got your whole life in front of you. And just look at how you fill out that uniform."

     I grumbled that I sure as shit didn't feel very proud at the moment, and as far as how I filled the uniform, I'd probably get my ass chewed for it if an officer saw me right then.

     "Well, I still say, you don't know how lucky you are," the old man insisted. He turned his face away, speaking now more to his own past than to me: "You can complain all you want, but I'd give anything in the world to be in your shoes right now."

SAIGON TRIPTYCH 1968

Saigon 

1. LA Cop

     Some things from that summer are a continuum in my memory: I recall traveling to the place, who was there, where I went next. Other things are isolated, like one of those oldfashioned photographic portraits with just a face in an oval: no background, no past, no intimations of the future. 

     This story is like that. Somewhere in a hallway of MACV (Military Assistance Command, Vietnam) Headquarters in Saigon, I was talking to a man, a stocky middleaged American. He wore civilian clothes and a sidearm. He was telling me that he was a cop; he'd been walking a beat in Los Angeles when opportunities opened up for American policemen to go to Saigon and work as advisors to the police there. 

     I told the man I was a journalist. He gave me this strange look, from deep within himself, then said something like, "...huh. You want a story...." and hinted that he knew one that would curl my hair. I said I was all ears. He said he couldn't really tell it, that it was secret. But he wanted to tell it, I knew by the way he stayed rooted where he stood, the way he quickly and repeatedly engaged and disengaged my eyes with his. I said we could go somewhere and talk. I said I could keep his name out of it. He said he couldn't do it. But he wouldn't move to leave, and I wouldn't either, so we both just stood there. I leaned against the wall. Casual. I gave little prompts: "So, police work?" That kind of thing. He would shift his weight, start to turn away, then turn back and say one more thing. This went on for a while. Police work, well, yeah. They would go out at night. They would go to villages, towns. Just a few men. They had a list. Suspected VC. Big shots. Sometimes names get added to the list. He paused, shifted, spoke to me with his eyes, pleading with me to understand what he was saying but not saying: Lotta names get crossed off the list. 

                     

2: Kids

     I was walking alone in Saigon, in the outskirts of the city where refugees had put together shanties from the heavy cardboard sleeves that bound cases of C rations, wood from ammunition crates, and other detritus of war. It was hot. No. It was hot: the sun seemed a huge cymbal from the devil's own band, clanging out waves of molten brass that all but banished blue from the sky. The sun, and foot and vehicular traffic, had pulverized the dust of the street into the finest powder, which, with the passing of any foot or wheel or furnace-breathed breeze, rose in gritty ubiquitous clouds and hurried to stick itself to anything that claimed kinship with moisture: skin, eyes, teeth. No young men were present. (In Vietnam, it seemed you were mostly in places where there were no young men, or only young men.) The eyes of women caught just enough sunlight to reflect it from the shanties' dark interiors. Children owned the streets.

     I came upon a little girl standing alone in a wide dusty street. She wore filthy bib overalls, and a plastic bracelet on her left wrist. Snot was running from her nose; tears from her eyes. She was holding Black Label beer cans to her ears with both hands, in the way kids all over the world will hold sea shells to their ears, listening to the ocean. She held the pose as I photographed her; the picture has been published several times.

     I was walking down a very wide street, if that is what we should call a flat dusty strip bounded by refugee shacks. Children rushed out from within, between, behind the shacks in twos, threes, hordes. They surrounded me, shouting in shrill voices in the language they'd learned from GI's: "Hey, you! Fuck you! You give me money!" Small hands curled into claws worthy of predatory birds and tore at my wrist watch, skin, clothes. My notebook was yanked from my hip pocket. It was important. I wheeled and bent over to retrieve it. Business cards of journalism contacts fell from my shirt pocket; a child's hand darted in and plucked my pen from the same pocket. They worked together like coyotes, front and back. 

     Later that day, a friend and I caught an Air Viet Nam Boeing 727 to Phnom Penh, Cambodia. That night, I dropped into an exhausted sleep in my bed in the Hotel Mondial, and had a nightmare about the Vietnamese children. Like a two part television special, it began with a recap of the day's events, then continued beyond what had happened that afternoon.

Dream: Vietnamese Children 

I'm walking down the Saigon street. A few of the children are running up and tugging at my hands and clothes; then one stops squarely in front of me on the sidewalk and cups his hands and sticks them in my face and says, "You! Fuck you! You give me money!" I say no but they won't step aside so I just keep moving through them. There are so many now that I am wading as in hipdeep surf, and there is more tugging and I push them away and yell "didi!" and they yell back at me with their shrill angry voices and more of them come and they get closer and finally one of them snatches the Vietnamese phrase book from my back pocket. I turn quickly and it falls to the ground. The kid backs up. I bend over to pick it up and a notebook and a pen fall out of my shirt pocket and some loose papers begin to scatter as the wind flips the pages of the notebook. I reach for them quickly but the children are all over me grabbing for my things. A kid behind me has my wallet almost out of my back pocket and I drop everything else and turn to grab him and, turning, I fall. I'm on my back now in the deep dust of the street, clutching the wallet to my gut with both hands. Smaller, clawed hands with terrible strength wrench it from me and the sky is lost in a cascade of leering children's faces. Sticks and rocks come at my face from among those smaller faces and the sticks get bigger and the faces blur together and I see nothing else and feel only the now painless thudding about my head and the dust in my lungs, and the children's shouts fade into a cacophony of shrieking laughter and that stops suddenly and there is only the thudding and then the barking of a dog out in the darkness.