A Book of Poems
I opened up a book of poems
Reading just a couple lines
Then sat it down
Some of the strangest things are happening around here. It must be the full moon or something. First of all, during the ‘sweep and clear’, search and destroy operation this morning against seventy-three of the seventy-five flies in my place,* I witnessed something I’d never seen before – three flies ‘getting it on’, a threesome, on the edge of the blade of my ceiling fan, like a train.
You ever seen that? So, I guess humans aren’t the only ones. Wow. I killed them all with one backhand rim shot.
The other thing was while stretched out on my yoga mat, I looked over and saw a mouse just sitting there, shivering. I took a quick glance around to make sure nobody would hear me talking to a mouse, then asked it, “What the hell’s up with you?”
He just sat there on his haunches, saying nothing, just shivering, so I scooped him up in a cardboard box and freed him outside. Then later in the afternoon, there he was, still there, running around in circles.
I thought maybe he was delirious from setting off that trap, and how did the irresistible bait, peanut butter on a saltine, end up ten feet away? None of it made any sense at all.
Then, Jack Red Cloud and Juan Mesteth stopped by to cut firewood for sweat lodge, and Juan said, “It’s probably blind. Yeah, he’s blind,” he said assuredly.
“Yyyeah,” I said. “I’ve heard of blind mice before.”
“Look,” said Juan. “Even when you touch him…see? See how he reacts?”
He didn’t run when you put your finger close to him, and would flinch only when you touched him, like…like…like a blind person being threatened by something they couldn’t see.
Juan trapped the mouse in a large translucent orange 500mg prescription bottle and showed him to me. “See? One of his eyes is gone. And he can’t see out of the other one.”
I wondered if he’d lost his eye and sight from the encounter with the trap. And if so, then how did he escape? It’s still a mystery to me. One of those ‘life’s mysteries’…a blind mouse running around in circles.
Trip Wire
Immediately after
That brilliant beautiful
Blinding flash of light
A world suddenly black
Eyes of shrapnel
Face disfigured by the blast
Black pepper powder embedded
Flesh ripped red and revealed
The perfection of a prose
So eloquent and unrestrained
Oh
Oh
Someone
Please help me.
What strange weave of circumstance
Would turn him left
Instead of right
What lovely geometric symmetry
Intersecting fate and chance
Turning pages into chapters
Nothing written
Nothing blank
From a distance, the same event was described quite differently by the observer, skewing the data, omitting particulars, obscuring the realities, distorting the evidence. In fact, everyone who witnessed it, participated in it, saw it differently, each saying the other had missed the mark.
‘That’s not what happened. That’s not what I saw,’ they all said.
- end
9.08
* In the traditions of the people, I held one captive, adopting it as a member of the family, and allowed one to escape. ‘Tell the others what happened here,” I told it.
Thursday, September 18, 2008
Tuesday, September 16, 2008
What You Are Here
What You Are Here
Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, SD – God, that guy’s always so serious. Jesus. I’ve never seen the guy laugh. Only seen him crack a smile a couple of times. He stayed overnight, slept on the couch, then headed out first thing in the morning after a second pot of coffee.
I wanted him to help me cut a truckload of firewood, but he said he had a ton of work to do, left over from yesterday, all he had was sandals, and people were starting to lean on him for his time.
After he left, I got to thinking about what he said yesterday, about the refugees, when he asked me, ‘Isn’t that what you are here?’ and I wasn’t sure if he meant, ‘you’ rhetorically, like, all the Indians trapped here on Pine Ridge, or ‘you’, like, me.
Wasn’t sure, and still am not, and never got a clarification.
Here I was, the one all depressed when I pulled in from Chadron, it turned out I was the one trying to pull HIM out of the doldrums. He was in a better mood after a night’s rest.
We’re pretty much like this (crossing my fingers). If you asked me if we had a personal relationship, like I’ve been asked by complete strangers, I’d say, ‘Sure!’ He’s a friend. He can pop up at any time. He helps out a lot of people up here, and a lot of people call on him all the time.
But I forgot to ask him about that guy on the radio who said I needed to accept him as my Lord and personal savior. That’s almost the same thing Father Paul, the sun dancing priest had asked me, except he said ‘believe’, rather than ‘accept’, and I said no, that he’s more like a brother, deducing, if he’s the son of God, and we’re all already children of God, then don’t that make Jesus my brother?
“Well, he’s much more than that,” Father Paul had attested.
“Says who?” I asked.
Paul appeared stunned for a moment, then said, “Well…scripture.”
We’d previously had the ‘Word of God’/ ‘Inspired by God’, scriptural discussion under the arbor at the sun dance, between rounds, so we already knew where we stood on that one. For Paul, it was absolute truth. For me, a relative perspective from the back of a camel.
“What are you doing?” Father Paul had asked with a laugh, “trying to shake my faith?”
“No,” I replied. “These are legitimate questions, and I want to know what you think.”
Six weeks later, Dave Frankel, who was fixing toast there in Loretta’s kitchen, had said something about ‘ascended master’, and as I recall, Father Paul remained silent, but I knew he was thinking relationship-wise, Jesus is more than just one of the bros.
Well, I already know that. Too many people would say otherwise, like Dennis Hopper in Apocalypse Now, fanatically defending Col. Kurtz as a poetic genius, when everyone else, including his legion of followers, thought the Col. was mad. What one individual may think collapses under the weight of popular belief, which in Paul’s or Galileo’s case, would be ‘The Church’, which you could say, is significant.
Tom Cook, who was sitting there eating Corn Flakes, said, ‘”Jesus said, ‘All men are created equal,” to which Father Paul looked up, as if befuddled, and said, “Jesus never said that,” and Tom responded, “Well…that’s what he would’ve said, had he said it.”
Jesus was already up and fixing coffee and oatmeal on the stove when I woke up. It seems there’s never enough time to sit and talk. Over coffee, we picked up the previous night’s conversation where we left off.
“Belief is the animating and determinant force behind reality,” He said. “That’s why when Indians die, they go to the Spirit World, and when Christians die, they go to Heaven or Hell. Belief and faith is what shapes outcomes. What did you tell those kids? ‘Create your universe, then go live in it.’?”
I wanted to get all that for my next conversation with Father Paul, but Jesus was talking too fast and I’m not sure I got it all straight, especially the part about theoretical philosophical constructs. Plus, most of it was cryptic and metaphorical. You couldn’t exactly call it straight talk. His rap is always cloaked with mystery.
“What about agnostics?” I asked. “Where do they go when they die?”
“Back into the mix,” he said.
We sat here a while just being quiet, listening to the Meadowlarks, and I was wondering how love fit into it all when a fly landed on the table, and then I remembered.
“Hey,” I said suddenly. “There’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you.”
“What’s that?” he said.
“You already know everything already, right?”
“Pretty much,” he replied.”
“Is it a sin to kill flies?” I asked, “and does a ’82 Mazda have a serpentine belt?”
He responded without hesitation. “Can’t say,” he said.
Sometimes his zen-like indefinitiveness drives me crazy. But that characteristic is balanced by his unfathomable compassion, and toleration for all those sacrilegious jokes we make about him.
Like any intimate relationship, you see both the public face and that other side that only those close to you can know. Apart from the serious discussions, we like to tease the hell out of him because of ‘his ways.’
“I gotta tell you something,” I said.
“What’s that?”
“Some people are saying you have an anger problem, that maybe you should seek treatment.”
“Who’s saying that?” he asked.
“Oh, a lot of people…some of those women down in Colorado and California. And that you’re jealous, too. Jealous of Buddha and Allah.”
“I don’t have an anger problem,” he said. “Maybe they were talking about Moses.”
“Yeah. And denial isn’t just a river in Africa. No. They specifically said you.”
“Well,” he said. “Boulder or San Francisco’s no measuring stick. That’s not what they say in Des Moines or Sheboygan.”
I could see he was getting his dander up, frowning down into his coffee cup, so I thought it best to humor him.
“I saw a guy in Vang Viang, upper Laos, wearing one of the funniest T-Shirts I’ve ever seen,” I began. “It had your picture on it, very angry, pointing at the viewer, and underneath, it said, ‘Jesus HATES You!’ Whaddaya think of that?”
“I know where Vang Viang is,” he said. “I’ve seen the shirt, and I know who you’re talking about. What’s funny about it?”
I swallowed hard. “Well, don’t you see the humor in it?” I asked.
- end
9.08
Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, SD – God, that guy’s always so serious. Jesus. I’ve never seen the guy laugh. Only seen him crack a smile a couple of times. He stayed overnight, slept on the couch, then headed out first thing in the morning after a second pot of coffee.
I wanted him to help me cut a truckload of firewood, but he said he had a ton of work to do, left over from yesterday, all he had was sandals, and people were starting to lean on him for his time.
After he left, I got to thinking about what he said yesterday, about the refugees, when he asked me, ‘Isn’t that what you are here?’ and I wasn’t sure if he meant, ‘you’ rhetorically, like, all the Indians trapped here on Pine Ridge, or ‘you’, like, me.
Wasn’t sure, and still am not, and never got a clarification.
Here I was, the one all depressed when I pulled in from Chadron, it turned out I was the one trying to pull HIM out of the doldrums. He was in a better mood after a night’s rest.
We’re pretty much like this (crossing my fingers). If you asked me if we had a personal relationship, like I’ve been asked by complete strangers, I’d say, ‘Sure!’ He’s a friend. He can pop up at any time. He helps out a lot of people up here, and a lot of people call on him all the time.
But I forgot to ask him about that guy on the radio who said I needed to accept him as my Lord and personal savior. That’s almost the same thing Father Paul, the sun dancing priest had asked me, except he said ‘believe’, rather than ‘accept’, and I said no, that he’s more like a brother, deducing, if he’s the son of God, and we’re all already children of God, then don’t that make Jesus my brother?
“Well, he’s much more than that,” Father Paul had attested.
“Says who?” I asked.
Paul appeared stunned for a moment, then said, “Well…scripture.”
We’d previously had the ‘Word of God’/ ‘Inspired by God’, scriptural discussion under the arbor at the sun dance, between rounds, so we already knew where we stood on that one. For Paul, it was absolute truth. For me, a relative perspective from the back of a camel.
“What are you doing?” Father Paul had asked with a laugh, “trying to shake my faith?”
“No,” I replied. “These are legitimate questions, and I want to know what you think.”
Six weeks later, Dave Frankel, who was fixing toast there in Loretta’s kitchen, had said something about ‘ascended master’, and as I recall, Father Paul remained silent, but I knew he was thinking relationship-wise, Jesus is more than just one of the bros.
Well, I already know that. Too many people would say otherwise, like Dennis Hopper in Apocalypse Now, fanatically defending Col. Kurtz as a poetic genius, when everyone else, including his legion of followers, thought the Col. was mad. What one individual may think collapses under the weight of popular belief, which in Paul’s or Galileo’s case, would be ‘The Church’, which you could say, is significant.
Tom Cook, who was sitting there eating Corn Flakes, said, ‘”Jesus said, ‘All men are created equal,” to which Father Paul looked up, as if befuddled, and said, “Jesus never said that,” and Tom responded, “Well…that’s what he would’ve said, had he said it.”
Jesus was already up and fixing coffee and oatmeal on the stove when I woke up. It seems there’s never enough time to sit and talk. Over coffee, we picked up the previous night’s conversation where we left off.
“Belief is the animating and determinant force behind reality,” He said. “That’s why when Indians die, they go to the Spirit World, and when Christians die, they go to Heaven or Hell. Belief and faith is what shapes outcomes. What did you tell those kids? ‘Create your universe, then go live in it.’?”
I wanted to get all that for my next conversation with Father Paul, but Jesus was talking too fast and I’m not sure I got it all straight, especially the part about theoretical philosophical constructs. Plus, most of it was cryptic and metaphorical. You couldn’t exactly call it straight talk. His rap is always cloaked with mystery.
“What about agnostics?” I asked. “Where do they go when they die?”
“Back into the mix,” he said.
We sat here a while just being quiet, listening to the Meadowlarks, and I was wondering how love fit into it all when a fly landed on the table, and then I remembered.
“Hey,” I said suddenly. “There’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you.”
“What’s that?” he said.
“You already know everything already, right?”
“Pretty much,” he replied.”
“Is it a sin to kill flies?” I asked, “and does a ’82 Mazda have a serpentine belt?”
He responded without hesitation. “Can’t say,” he said.
Sometimes his zen-like indefinitiveness drives me crazy. But that characteristic is balanced by his unfathomable compassion, and toleration for all those sacrilegious jokes we make about him.
Like any intimate relationship, you see both the public face and that other side that only those close to you can know. Apart from the serious discussions, we like to tease the hell out of him because of ‘his ways.’
“I gotta tell you something,” I said.
“What’s that?”
“Some people are saying you have an anger problem, that maybe you should seek treatment.”
“Who’s saying that?” he asked.
“Oh, a lot of people…some of those women down in Colorado and California. And that you’re jealous, too. Jealous of Buddha and Allah.”
“I don’t have an anger problem,” he said. “Maybe they were talking about Moses.”
“Yeah. And denial isn’t just a river in Africa. No. They specifically said you.”
“Well,” he said. “Boulder or San Francisco’s no measuring stick. That’s not what they say in Des Moines or Sheboygan.”
I could see he was getting his dander up, frowning down into his coffee cup, so I thought it best to humor him.
“I saw a guy in Vang Viang, upper Laos, wearing one of the funniest T-Shirts I’ve ever seen,” I began. “It had your picture on it, very angry, pointing at the viewer, and underneath, it said, ‘Jesus HATES You!’ Whaddaya think of that?”
“I know where Vang Viang is,” he said. “I’ve seen the shirt, and I know who you’re talking about. What’s funny about it?”
I swallowed hard. “Well, don’t you see the humor in it?” I asked.
- end
9.08
Friday, September 12, 2008
Just Then It Got Quiet
JUST THEN, IT GOT QUIET
Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, SD – Whereas some activities require solitude, there are some things you probably shouldn’t do alone. Take for instance, swimming, running a chain saw, or going through life.
Take Four
Instance
Swimming
Running
A chain saw
Through life
Take
A running chain saw
Through life
That way, you can clear your way, and everybody will stand back.
Hector hacked Angel’s legs with a chain saw
Then cut his way through the wall.
With chain saws, there are known knowns, unknown knowns, and known unknowns, all full of allegory and metaphor. A person probably shouldn’t cut wood in flip flops. That would be a known. It’s not going to start on the first pull. That’s universal. Don’t stand directly over the saw. That’s pretty much a known.
Like the ‘buddy system’ in the water, take a friend. This person will help you by loading while you cut. They can also help you out if your saw gets bound up.* And, they can be there in case of emergency, or major arterial bleeding. All kindza shit can happen in the woods. That’s one of the unknown knowns.
So why all this chain saw business? You may have your own chain saw stories. I know two of you do. There’s probably more.
I went out today in flip flops, because the socks and bullshit ten-dollar Wally World moccasins I just got were ABSOLUTELY FULL of grass seed and little eeny teeny burrs from an earlier-in-the-day quest for ‘dead and down’ ash trees, and for the past five years, I’ve stubbornly refused to purchase a work boot or any other enclosed footwear, much to the chagrin of Tom, who’ll often say, ‘Nigga, you can’t do any work in flip flops.’
Precisely.
Like Milo laughs about Louie, saying, “Louie moved to Pine Ridge because he heard there wasn’t any work.”
If it’s not hot enough to wear sandals, then it’s time to go. But here it is September, the annual Running Strong Bus Tour came through just today, marking the end of hectivity here on the rez, and already, the overnight lows are scaring the tomatoes and making me feed the wood stove.
After presentations by Uncle Joe** and Milo, they had me do a reading for the tour. Three essays from Keeping Heart, then sitting around the fire eating Indian tacos with short one-on-one conversations with people I’ll probably never see again in my life.
In that brief interaction, what can you learn? What will you say? Listen. Listen and hear what people have to share of their lives. Paul’s little girl is in the second grade. Another lady was retired after twenty years in the air force. She was stationed in the Philippines when McCain arrived straight from the Hanoi Hilton. Judy asked who was the elephant team, and was involved in creating a tropical rain forest butterfly haven in Missouri.
Joe, concerned about American politics and the excitement of the coming election, presented a brief historical education, naming the presidents since Lincoln who had died in office when being elected on a year ending with 0. “Regan broke the mold,” he said.
There was more, but I guided him into the garden and directed him toward the cherry tomatoes. Thereafter, we became separated.
Just at sunset, it became still and quiet as the tour members meandered around the grounds at the base farm, taking digital photos, checking out the garden, the sweat lodge, the timber frame building, the greenhouse, the tractors, the beaded jewelry Loretta had collected from local artists, and the big 30 ft. tipi erected for the occasion.
The four dogs on the grounds settled down, waiting for after-dinner scraps. One of the ladies remarked, ‘It sure is peaceful out here.’
____
Sure Is Peaceful
At times it’s so quiet out here in Slim Buttes the only thing you can hear are the thoughts bouncing off the inside of your skull. Like right now, it’s dead silence.
For some strange reason, on the way home from Chadron, where I passed three cars pulled over with the occupants out fixing a flat, I was overcome by a wave of sadness, sweeping in from the distance like a prairie fire or huge shadow of a cloud passing before the sun. A sense of dread. Why? It was, in fact, a beautiful fall day.
‘All those visits to the shrink were in the fall,’ I thought, with the only alternative they could offer to twice weekly sweat lodge was VA prescription antidepressant medications and the horrifying physical reminder over at the VA of how messed up America’s veterans are. You mean, a PILL can fix it?
Best at times like that to think of the suffering of others. Who out there isn’t in pain? Everyone pretty much suffers their pain alone, it seems. There are those who’ve just recently lost loved ones. Those who’ve lost health or homes. There are many caught in the grip of alcohol, slobbery drunk before ten in the morning. Saw it today. Is that you, John Wayne? Is this me?
Diving down into the lake bottom of my heart, I drove mechanically, absorbed in the idea of human suffering, when all of a sudden in the middle of a curve atop a hill, here came someone the other way, a carload of Indians, heading into ‘Chad’ in a beat up rez ‘low rider.’
Being preoccupied, my sixth sense wasn’t working right then, in the Here and Now 3-D World, and I was on the inside of the curve, same as them. I should’ve felt ‘em coming.
I whipped the wheel to the right, fishtailed back into my proper lane, straightened her out, and had time to flip a two-fingered wave*** off the steering wheel as we passed, like everything was cool.
He had a surprised look, that other driver. His mouth was open when he went by. He didn’t wave.
Jesus was sitting here on the steps when I got back. He had shaved, and had his hair pulled back in a pony tail. I’d never seen him like that before, and did a long stare. He looked more like a guy from Seattle.
“Man, am I glad to see you,” I said. “Can you help me with this stuff?”
He helped me unload the groceries I’d gotten from town, carrying it to the trailer.
“You could’ve gone on in, y’know,” I said. “The place is open. Have you seen ‘Puff, Puff, Pass’? I got it from the video store. Pretty funny.”
He shook his head ‘no’, and we went on inside. “You hungry?” I asked him. “I’ve got Chinese ‘to go’. They always give you enough for two meals.”
“What is it?” he asked.
“Mongolian beef.”
Something was bothering him. He seemed unusually quiet as I heated water for coffee and he picked at the Chinese food.
“You still on foot, or did somebody drop you off?” I asked.
“Still hoofin’ it,” he said. “But I’ve been thinking about a little motorbike.”
“You okay?” I asked. “You seem…I don’t know…down.”
“Awww,” he replied, pushing the Mongolian beef aside like it didn’t taste good, “sometimes this reservation is…”
He just shook his head and looked at the floor.
“Depressing?”
“Yeah,” he said. “It’s almost as bad as Darfur or the West Bank, or Somalia.”
“Shantytown in Nairobi sucks pretty bad, doesn’t it? Mexico City? We’re not as bad as Mexico City.”
“Nah,” he said. “Not that bad. But here, you see so many signs of hopelessness.”
“All those places you mentioned…those are all full of refugees.”
Looking up at me directly, he asked, “Isn’t that what you are here?”
-end
*One time I had to leave my saw bound up in a tree, stuck fast like Excaliber, protruding out from three fourths of the way through the trunk, the entire weight of the tree resting on the saw. To free it, you need a pry bar, or worst-case scenario, another saw.
It’s embarrassing. If you know what you’re doing, it shouldn’t happen.
**Uncle Joe will often don full regalia for official or semi-official presentations. That’s beaded moccasins, fringed deerskin shirt, and eagle feather headdress with ermine and the whole nine yards. You’d say, ‘He’s sure enough a chief.’
At a recent meeting here in Slim Buttes with some Onondaga Chiefs, Uncle Joe came in late, all dressed out like that, apologized for being late and sat down, explaining he’d been at another meeting.
De-facto and self-proclaimed tribal spokesman Chief Oliver Red Cloud, dressed in blue jeans like everybody else, sat over there, checking him out. I tried to pick up on his thoughts, but it was in Lakota, and I couldn’t tell, but the look in his eye said something, I’m not sure what…something of a mixture of a little bit of envy, a little bit of outrage, and some of ‘what the hell is this?’
After his presentation with the tour group and everyone had gone to the kitchen, Uncle Joe, now in a ribbon shirt, was folding up his ceremonial clothes inside the big 30 ft. tipi when I popped in, looking for folding chairs.
“Eeeeeeee,” I said, nodding at his headdress. “Where can I get one of those?”
Joe chuckled, then said, “Prairie Edge.”
(They just don’t give away war bonnets. You’ve really got to be somebody to get one, like they gave Clinton one when he came out. Joe is the only person I’ve seen wear one, besides a medicine man on tree day at sun dance once.
‘Prairie Edge’ is a big Indian Arts store in Rapid City, SD where you can buy a replica of any ‘real deal’ Indian artifact).
***Raising two fingers off the steering wheel, sideways, not like a peace sign, but more like ‘Rock, Paper, Scissors.’ A flash.
9.08
Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, SD – Whereas some activities require solitude, there are some things you probably shouldn’t do alone. Take for instance, swimming, running a chain saw, or going through life.
Take Four
Instance
Swimming
Running
A chain saw
Through life
Take
A running chain saw
Through life
That way, you can clear your way, and everybody will stand back.
Hector hacked Angel’s legs with a chain saw
Then cut his way through the wall.
With chain saws, there are known knowns, unknown knowns, and known unknowns, all full of allegory and metaphor. A person probably shouldn’t cut wood in flip flops. That would be a known. It’s not going to start on the first pull. That’s universal. Don’t stand directly over the saw. That’s pretty much a known.
Like the ‘buddy system’ in the water, take a friend. This person will help you by loading while you cut. They can also help you out if your saw gets bound up.* And, they can be there in case of emergency, or major arterial bleeding. All kindza shit can happen in the woods. That’s one of the unknown knowns.
So why all this chain saw business? You may have your own chain saw stories. I know two of you do. There’s probably more.
I went out today in flip flops, because the socks and bullshit ten-dollar Wally World moccasins I just got were ABSOLUTELY FULL of grass seed and little eeny teeny burrs from an earlier-in-the-day quest for ‘dead and down’ ash trees, and for the past five years, I’ve stubbornly refused to purchase a work boot or any other enclosed footwear, much to the chagrin of Tom, who’ll often say, ‘Nigga, you can’t do any work in flip flops.’
Precisely.
Like Milo laughs about Louie, saying, “Louie moved to Pine Ridge because he heard there wasn’t any work.”
If it’s not hot enough to wear sandals, then it’s time to go. But here it is September, the annual Running Strong Bus Tour came through just today, marking the end of hectivity here on the rez, and already, the overnight lows are scaring the tomatoes and making me feed the wood stove.
After presentations by Uncle Joe** and Milo, they had me do a reading for the tour. Three essays from Keeping Heart, then sitting around the fire eating Indian tacos with short one-on-one conversations with people I’ll probably never see again in my life.
In that brief interaction, what can you learn? What will you say? Listen. Listen and hear what people have to share of their lives. Paul’s little girl is in the second grade. Another lady was retired after twenty years in the air force. She was stationed in the Philippines when McCain arrived straight from the Hanoi Hilton. Judy asked who was the elephant team, and was involved in creating a tropical rain forest butterfly haven in Missouri.
Joe, concerned about American politics and the excitement of the coming election, presented a brief historical education, naming the presidents since Lincoln who had died in office when being elected on a year ending with 0. “Regan broke the mold,” he said.
There was more, but I guided him into the garden and directed him toward the cherry tomatoes. Thereafter, we became separated.
Just at sunset, it became still and quiet as the tour members meandered around the grounds at the base farm, taking digital photos, checking out the garden, the sweat lodge, the timber frame building, the greenhouse, the tractors, the beaded jewelry Loretta had collected from local artists, and the big 30 ft. tipi erected for the occasion.
The four dogs on the grounds settled down, waiting for after-dinner scraps. One of the ladies remarked, ‘It sure is peaceful out here.’
____
Sure Is Peaceful
At times it’s so quiet out here in Slim Buttes the only thing you can hear are the thoughts bouncing off the inside of your skull. Like right now, it’s dead silence.
For some strange reason, on the way home from Chadron, where I passed three cars pulled over with the occupants out fixing a flat, I was overcome by a wave of sadness, sweeping in from the distance like a prairie fire or huge shadow of a cloud passing before the sun. A sense of dread. Why? It was, in fact, a beautiful fall day.
‘All those visits to the shrink were in the fall,’ I thought, with the only alternative they could offer to twice weekly sweat lodge was VA prescription antidepressant medications and the horrifying physical reminder over at the VA of how messed up America’s veterans are. You mean, a PILL can fix it?
Best at times like that to think of the suffering of others. Who out there isn’t in pain? Everyone pretty much suffers their pain alone, it seems. There are those who’ve just recently lost loved ones. Those who’ve lost health or homes. There are many caught in the grip of alcohol, slobbery drunk before ten in the morning. Saw it today. Is that you, John Wayne? Is this me?
Diving down into the lake bottom of my heart, I drove mechanically, absorbed in the idea of human suffering, when all of a sudden in the middle of a curve atop a hill, here came someone the other way, a carload of Indians, heading into ‘Chad’ in a beat up rez ‘low rider.’
Being preoccupied, my sixth sense wasn’t working right then, in the Here and Now 3-D World, and I was on the inside of the curve, same as them. I should’ve felt ‘em coming.
I whipped the wheel to the right, fishtailed back into my proper lane, straightened her out, and had time to flip a two-fingered wave*** off the steering wheel as we passed, like everything was cool.
He had a surprised look, that other driver. His mouth was open when he went by. He didn’t wave.
Jesus was sitting here on the steps when I got back. He had shaved, and had his hair pulled back in a pony tail. I’d never seen him like that before, and did a long stare. He looked more like a guy from Seattle.
“Man, am I glad to see you,” I said. “Can you help me with this stuff?”
He helped me unload the groceries I’d gotten from town, carrying it to the trailer.
“You could’ve gone on in, y’know,” I said. “The place is open. Have you seen ‘Puff, Puff, Pass’? I got it from the video store. Pretty funny.”
He shook his head ‘no’, and we went on inside. “You hungry?” I asked him. “I’ve got Chinese ‘to go’. They always give you enough for two meals.”
“What is it?” he asked.
“Mongolian beef.”
Something was bothering him. He seemed unusually quiet as I heated water for coffee and he picked at the Chinese food.
“You still on foot, or did somebody drop you off?” I asked.
“Still hoofin’ it,” he said. “But I’ve been thinking about a little motorbike.”
“You okay?” I asked. “You seem…I don’t know…down.”
“Awww,” he replied, pushing the Mongolian beef aside like it didn’t taste good, “sometimes this reservation is…”
He just shook his head and looked at the floor.
“Depressing?”
“Yeah,” he said. “It’s almost as bad as Darfur or the West Bank, or Somalia.”
“Shantytown in Nairobi sucks pretty bad, doesn’t it? Mexico City? We’re not as bad as Mexico City.”
“Nah,” he said. “Not that bad. But here, you see so many signs of hopelessness.”
“All those places you mentioned…those are all full of refugees.”
Looking up at me directly, he asked, “Isn’t that what you are here?”
-end
*One time I had to leave my saw bound up in a tree, stuck fast like Excaliber, protruding out from three fourths of the way through the trunk, the entire weight of the tree resting on the saw. To free it, you need a pry bar, or worst-case scenario, another saw.
It’s embarrassing. If you know what you’re doing, it shouldn’t happen.
**Uncle Joe will often don full regalia for official or semi-official presentations. That’s beaded moccasins, fringed deerskin shirt, and eagle feather headdress with ermine and the whole nine yards. You’d say, ‘He’s sure enough a chief.’
At a recent meeting here in Slim Buttes with some Onondaga Chiefs, Uncle Joe came in late, all dressed out like that, apologized for being late and sat down, explaining he’d been at another meeting.
De-facto and self-proclaimed tribal spokesman Chief Oliver Red Cloud, dressed in blue jeans like everybody else, sat over there, checking him out. I tried to pick up on his thoughts, but it was in Lakota, and I couldn’t tell, but the look in his eye said something, I’m not sure what…something of a mixture of a little bit of envy, a little bit of outrage, and some of ‘what the hell is this?’
After his presentation with the tour group and everyone had gone to the kitchen, Uncle Joe, now in a ribbon shirt, was folding up his ceremonial clothes inside the big 30 ft. tipi when I popped in, looking for folding chairs.
“Eeeeeeee,” I said, nodding at his headdress. “Where can I get one of those?”
Joe chuckled, then said, “Prairie Edge.”
(They just don’t give away war bonnets. You’ve really got to be somebody to get one, like they gave Clinton one when he came out. Joe is the only person I’ve seen wear one, besides a medicine man on tree day at sun dance once.
‘Prairie Edge’ is a big Indian Arts store in Rapid City, SD where you can buy a replica of any ‘real deal’ Indian artifact).
***Raising two fingers off the steering wheel, sideways, not like a peace sign, but more like ‘Rock, Paper, Scissors.’ A flash.
9.08
Sunday, September 07, 2008
Talking About Signs
Talking About Signs
Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, SD - Indians are always talking about dreams, visions and signs. Tonight, I got a clear sign.
Shortly after returning home with Betsy, my truck, for whom I just spent a whole gob of money, a half a plane ticket, for new brakes, drums, shims, harmonic something or other, and a whole bunch of other minor stuff the mechanic discovered while working on the major stuff that he was sure I’d want done if he was me.
What’d they call that thing?...a ‘harmonic balancer.’ That was one of the unexpected minor things that could’ve become major, where a bolt had sheared off of the crankshaft pulley and needed to be drilled and tapped.
Yeah, no shit. As I explained to Footsie and Jack Red Cloud, sitting in the back of Tom’s truck on the way to Ft. Robinson with a load of tipi poles for the Crazy Horse memorial peyote meeting tomorrow, “ ‘Cattywampus’ is indeed a word, spelled with two ‘T’s and not ‘D’s,” and I spelled it for them.
And that’s what’ll happen with your fan belt and your…and I love to say this…your serpentine belt*…going to all those gizmos running off your engine…if your harmonic balancer is out of balance…cattywampus…haywire…akilter.
I held up my hand like a tomahawk chop and showed them, shaking it like a pulley running out of balance. They both nodded like they understood. Tom, behind the wheel, already knew cattywampus was a word, and didn’t challenge me on it, although he looked over at me when I spelled it.
So, okay, I got all that stuff fixed and stood there holding my breath, wincing like a man who’d just received a slap across the face, as Mike figured up my bill down at Hill’s Tire in Chadron, the guys who know Betsy inside out and do all the work on her. Earl, this time.
Paid the dude, tipped Earl for the heads up work, and brought her home, talking to her all the way, sa-weet talk all the way home. Unloaded the groceries, sat here awhile listening to John McCain say what he’s not gonna do, had a smoke, then thought maybe it would be a good idea to road test Betsy under less than desirable conditions, since it’s been raining for the past eight hours.
It would be impossible to climb the hill outside my trailer since the incline, difficult in optimal conditions, had turned to gumbo slop. The only way to make it out of here would be across the lake** and up the embankment to the road.
Uh huh. Sure.
Sometimes you need a friend around to bounce an idea off of, or a woman to tell you, “That’s stupid. Don’t do it.”
Wasn’t nobody here to advise or stop me. Fuck it. Give it a try, right?
So what the hell, that’s what I did. Went fish-tailing across the lake, spinning out two huge plumes of water, which I could hear, but couldn’t see, since it was pitch black and raining. Got across to the other side, couldn’t see, hit the embankment, went up at an angle, skidding sideways, engine racing, Betsy’s tires gnawing and clawing, trying their best to grab ahold of anything, felt like we were tipping over, ran over the only tree out there, a huge ash tree log, like it was a magnet, and ended up precariously perched atop it, high-centered, stuck, about ready to roll.
It’ll take a tow truck, or a crane, to get me out of there.
Cool, huh?
-end
*Serpentine belt. I don’t have one. All I’ve got is a simple fan belt and an alternator in there. It’s a ’60 Chevy, right? You’ve probably got one already, but if you don’t, you can ask your mechanic where you can get one.
**It’s not really a lake. Only when it rains.
9.04.8
Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, SD - Indians are always talking about dreams, visions and signs. Tonight, I got a clear sign.
Shortly after returning home with Betsy, my truck, for whom I just spent a whole gob of money, a half a plane ticket, for new brakes, drums, shims, harmonic something or other, and a whole bunch of other minor stuff the mechanic discovered while working on the major stuff that he was sure I’d want done if he was me.
What’d they call that thing?...a ‘harmonic balancer.’ That was one of the unexpected minor things that could’ve become major, where a bolt had sheared off of the crankshaft pulley and needed to be drilled and tapped.
Yeah, no shit. As I explained to Footsie and Jack Red Cloud, sitting in the back of Tom’s truck on the way to Ft. Robinson with a load of tipi poles for the Crazy Horse memorial peyote meeting tomorrow, “ ‘Cattywampus’ is indeed a word, spelled with two ‘T’s and not ‘D’s,” and I spelled it for them.
And that’s what’ll happen with your fan belt and your…and I love to say this…your serpentine belt*…going to all those gizmos running off your engine…if your harmonic balancer is out of balance…cattywampus…haywire…akilter.
I held up my hand like a tomahawk chop and showed them, shaking it like a pulley running out of balance. They both nodded like they understood. Tom, behind the wheel, already knew cattywampus was a word, and didn’t challenge me on it, although he looked over at me when I spelled it.
So, okay, I got all that stuff fixed and stood there holding my breath, wincing like a man who’d just received a slap across the face, as Mike figured up my bill down at Hill’s Tire in Chadron, the guys who know Betsy inside out and do all the work on her. Earl, this time.
Paid the dude, tipped Earl for the heads up work, and brought her home, talking to her all the way, sa-weet talk all the way home. Unloaded the groceries, sat here awhile listening to John McCain say what he’s not gonna do, had a smoke, then thought maybe it would be a good idea to road test Betsy under less than desirable conditions, since it’s been raining for the past eight hours.
It would be impossible to climb the hill outside my trailer since the incline, difficult in optimal conditions, had turned to gumbo slop. The only way to make it out of here would be across the lake** and up the embankment to the road.
Uh huh. Sure.
Sometimes you need a friend around to bounce an idea off of, or a woman to tell you, “That’s stupid. Don’t do it.”
Wasn’t nobody here to advise or stop me. Fuck it. Give it a try, right?
So what the hell, that’s what I did. Went fish-tailing across the lake, spinning out two huge plumes of water, which I could hear, but couldn’t see, since it was pitch black and raining. Got across to the other side, couldn’t see, hit the embankment, went up at an angle, skidding sideways, engine racing, Betsy’s tires gnawing and clawing, trying their best to grab ahold of anything, felt like we were tipping over, ran over the only tree out there, a huge ash tree log, like it was a magnet, and ended up precariously perched atop it, high-centered, stuck, about ready to roll.
It’ll take a tow truck, or a crane, to get me out of there.
Cool, huh?
-end
*Serpentine belt. I don’t have one. All I’ve got is a simple fan belt and an alternator in there. It’s a ’60 Chevy, right? You’ve probably got one already, but if you don’t, you can ask your mechanic where you can get one.
**It’s not really a lake. Only when it rains.
9.04.8
Friday, September 05, 2008
Sin To Kill Flies
Sin To Kill Flies
Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, SD - Much like basketball, to perfect the art form of Fly-Swatting, one must develop accuracy, technique and repertoire. Think, Kobe Bryant.
Back-hand, left-hand, underhand, ceiling shots, rim shots, back-door, screen shots, no-look, head-and-shoulder fake, double-clutch, slam dunk, sidearm slap, two-in-one, off-the-glass, ‘The Ole One-Two’, the Pizza Hut Box Slap Shot, the Bo D. ‘DFS’ (‘Dead For Sure’) Shot, the rolled up newspaper shot, the Misty Sioux Davis ‘No Bounce’ shot, and one of my all-time short-list favorites…the clean air grab.
Irrespective of man’s relationship with flies since the beginning of time, historic bacterial diseases, bouts of plague and pestilence; malaria, tse-tse, dengue fever, black fly, biting fly, horse flies, darned flies, hang-around-your-barbeque flies, cholera…huh? Well, yeah, malaria comes from mosquitos, doesn’t it? Dengue too?
Ok. But the case can still be made that flies bring some nasty shit. Holy Smokes, they eat shit. They make maggots, and leave snot on your computer screen. They’re cannibalistic, and necrophiliacs, as well. Like Dracula, they can rise from the dead to suck your blood.
“Necrophiliac?” asked Tom. “What’s that?”
“They fuck their dead relatives,” I replied. “How bad is that? Ask Louie, he’ll know. He studied the mortuary sciences.”
Sure enough. Louie knew.
He swung by here on his way to sweat lodge, and pulled up a seat at the table, immediately immersing himself in the unfinished L.A. Times crossword puzzle.
“Hey Louie, tell Tom what a necrophiliac is.”
“They fuck dead people,” he muttered without looking up.
Grabbing the opportunity to use one of Lupe’s lines, I said to Tom in a Mexican accent, “The reee-son we’re telling you this now, is so next time…you’ll know.”
Tom looked off into space with a big ‘why?’ look on his face, and I think it was Milo sitting there who, picking the question out of the air, said something comical and rude, like, ‘they can’t get away’, or something to that effect, degenerative as I recall, to which everyone laughed.
So cannibalism and necrophilia are part of a fly’s nature, the Ted Bundy’s of the insect world, along with the praying mantis. You might say there’s a place for everything in the universe, but you tell me, what purpose do they serve? Population control? Torment? Glimpse of the periphery of hell?
So I had two questions for Jesus the next time he came through. One, which I kept forgetting, is, Is it okay to kill flies? Two, Is God just in our heads? And three, does it bother him to keep wearing those pointy cowboy boots when his feet are so spread out and accustomed to sandals?
Father Paul Steinmetz unexpectedly stopped by Tom and Loretta’s the other morning, looking for Loretta, who wasn’t there, before he headed back to Minneapolis ‘for a more contemplative life’, he said. He’d been here on Pine Ridge throughout the summer, over at Holy Rosary, filing paper records onto disc and doing mass, he said.
We’d been meaning to have a theological discussion earlier at the sun dance, but the conversation never actualized, including an opportunity in the truck on Tree Day night, heading down from the arbor to main camp for our last meal for four days.
Instead, we ended up talking about the truck, my ’60 Chevy, careening without brakes down the hill.
“I can turn off the motor and coast all the way to main camp,” I told Paul, who in wide-eyed fear, grabbed the door handle and dashboard, as if to prepare for a crash or maybe a desperate last minute leap from the passenger’s seat.
“Saves gas,” I said, turning off the ignition.
I needed to reassure him. He appeared to possess no confidence in my truck or my ability to stop us, and seemed really frightened, so I thought, ‘Christ, maybe I’d better not scare the old man too much. He looks on the verge of cardiac arrest.’
We needed to slow down, for Paul’s mental comfort and heart rate, and to negotiate that sharp right-hand turn at the bottom of the hill, but we still needed enough momentum to make that final dip, and roll into camp in neutral with the engine off. I wanted to show him we could do it.
“It’s got brakes,” I said with a half-laugh, looking over at Paul. “You’ve just got to pump them six or seven times.”
He never took his eyes off the road. And we never got around to that theological discussion.
At 80 years old, Father Paul is one of our oldest dancers, never mind that he’s a Catholic priest, steeped in theological doctrine from a lifetime within the church. Bo, who ended up behind him in the lineup, laughed later, saying to Misty, ‘Your dad would probably roll over in his grave seeing me fan off a Catholic priest with his eagle-wing fan.”
He danced the entry and exit rounds, between Lou and I, with Bo behind him. Tom asked us to keep an eye on him. We teased him out there a little bit, “Pick ‘em up, Father Paul. Look alive!......You okay?”
“Yeah, I’m okay,” he’d say, beginning to shuffle his feet.
“Just checking.”
It was good to see him when he popped in the door the other morning. Over toast, eggs, and orange juice, we sat with Tom and David Frankel, who had just wrapped up his work downstairs for this legal leg of the water fight with the uranium people.
“Did you know that flies are necrophiliacs?” I asked. “Do you think it’s okay to kill them?”
“What?” asked Paul, taking a seat at the kitchen table.
“Do you think Jesus would say it’s okay to kill flies?”
David softly asked, “Father Paul, would you care for some breakfast? Some eggs? Some orange juice?”
“…and, if so, what about someone on life support?”
“I’d like some orange juice,” he said. “Christ would probably say all life is sacred.”
“And then, bacterial life. You’re killing them with an antibiotic.”
“Well, there’s good bacteria, and bad bacteria.”
From there, the conversation went off track, then back on, hopping around absolute truth, relative gods, discarded gods, irrelevant gods, the God gene, Jungian archetypes, 2000-year old desert camel gods, semantic twists and turns, and Paul kept reconciling everything…the pipe…the dance…our animistic pagan ways…through his Jesus filter. “Jesus was the first sun-dancer,” he said, “the first pipe-carrier.”
Well, Paul wrote, ‘The Pipe and Christ’, so what would you expect? And that got me to thinking about another question for Jesus.
W…Wait a minute.
“WHAT?” Jesus didn’t carry no pipe! That’s blasphemy!”
“Well, figuratively,” said Paul. “You could say Christ was a pipe-carrier.”
I knew he’d say that. Jesus was the common denominator in all things, ‘the Alpha and the Omega’, as Father Paul would say, and did. What’s the opposite of cognitive dissonance? That would be something like ‘cognitive harmony’, to continue the symphonic analogy, or maybe ‘adaptive cognitive resonance’, incorporating new info into a new world view, huh? Not necessarily a 180 degree ‘flip-flop’, or changing your mind, but kind of like, changing your mind.
- end
9.2.08
Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, SD - Much like basketball, to perfect the art form of Fly-Swatting, one must develop accuracy, technique and repertoire. Think, Kobe Bryant.
Back-hand, left-hand, underhand, ceiling shots, rim shots, back-door, screen shots, no-look, head-and-shoulder fake, double-clutch, slam dunk, sidearm slap, two-in-one, off-the-glass, ‘The Ole One-Two’, the Pizza Hut Box Slap Shot, the Bo D. ‘DFS’ (‘Dead For Sure’) Shot, the rolled up newspaper shot, the Misty Sioux Davis ‘No Bounce’ shot, and one of my all-time short-list favorites…the clean air grab.
Irrespective of man’s relationship with flies since the beginning of time, historic bacterial diseases, bouts of plague and pestilence; malaria, tse-tse, dengue fever, black fly, biting fly, horse flies, darned flies, hang-around-your-barbeque flies, cholera…huh? Well, yeah, malaria comes from mosquitos, doesn’t it? Dengue too?
Ok. But the case can still be made that flies bring some nasty shit. Holy Smokes, they eat shit. They make maggots, and leave snot on your computer screen. They’re cannibalistic, and necrophiliacs, as well. Like Dracula, they can rise from the dead to suck your blood.
“Necrophiliac?” asked Tom. “What’s that?”
“They fuck their dead relatives,” I replied. “How bad is that? Ask Louie, he’ll know. He studied the mortuary sciences.”
Sure enough. Louie knew.
He swung by here on his way to sweat lodge, and pulled up a seat at the table, immediately immersing himself in the unfinished L.A. Times crossword puzzle.
“Hey Louie, tell Tom what a necrophiliac is.”
“They fuck dead people,” he muttered without looking up.
Grabbing the opportunity to use one of Lupe’s lines, I said to Tom in a Mexican accent, “The reee-son we’re telling you this now, is so next time…you’ll know.”
Tom looked off into space with a big ‘why?’ look on his face, and I think it was Milo sitting there who, picking the question out of the air, said something comical and rude, like, ‘they can’t get away’, or something to that effect, degenerative as I recall, to which everyone laughed.
So cannibalism and necrophilia are part of a fly’s nature, the Ted Bundy’s of the insect world, along with the praying mantis. You might say there’s a place for everything in the universe, but you tell me, what purpose do they serve? Population control? Torment? Glimpse of the periphery of hell?
So I had two questions for Jesus the next time he came through. One, which I kept forgetting, is, Is it okay to kill flies? Two, Is God just in our heads? And three, does it bother him to keep wearing those pointy cowboy boots when his feet are so spread out and accustomed to sandals?
Father Paul Steinmetz unexpectedly stopped by Tom and Loretta’s the other morning, looking for Loretta, who wasn’t there, before he headed back to Minneapolis ‘for a more contemplative life’, he said. He’d been here on Pine Ridge throughout the summer, over at Holy Rosary, filing paper records onto disc and doing mass, he said.
We’d been meaning to have a theological discussion earlier at the sun dance, but the conversation never actualized, including an opportunity in the truck on Tree Day night, heading down from the arbor to main camp for our last meal for four days.
Instead, we ended up talking about the truck, my ’60 Chevy, careening without brakes down the hill.
“I can turn off the motor and coast all the way to main camp,” I told Paul, who in wide-eyed fear, grabbed the door handle and dashboard, as if to prepare for a crash or maybe a desperate last minute leap from the passenger’s seat.
“Saves gas,” I said, turning off the ignition.
I needed to reassure him. He appeared to possess no confidence in my truck or my ability to stop us, and seemed really frightened, so I thought, ‘Christ, maybe I’d better not scare the old man too much. He looks on the verge of cardiac arrest.’
We needed to slow down, for Paul’s mental comfort and heart rate, and to negotiate that sharp right-hand turn at the bottom of the hill, but we still needed enough momentum to make that final dip, and roll into camp in neutral with the engine off. I wanted to show him we could do it.
“It’s got brakes,” I said with a half-laugh, looking over at Paul. “You’ve just got to pump them six or seven times.”
He never took his eyes off the road. And we never got around to that theological discussion.
At 80 years old, Father Paul is one of our oldest dancers, never mind that he’s a Catholic priest, steeped in theological doctrine from a lifetime within the church. Bo, who ended up behind him in the lineup, laughed later, saying to Misty, ‘Your dad would probably roll over in his grave seeing me fan off a Catholic priest with his eagle-wing fan.”
He danced the entry and exit rounds, between Lou and I, with Bo behind him. Tom asked us to keep an eye on him. We teased him out there a little bit, “Pick ‘em up, Father Paul. Look alive!......You okay?”
“Yeah, I’m okay,” he’d say, beginning to shuffle his feet.
“Just checking.”
It was good to see him when he popped in the door the other morning. Over toast, eggs, and orange juice, we sat with Tom and David Frankel, who had just wrapped up his work downstairs for this legal leg of the water fight with the uranium people.
“Did you know that flies are necrophiliacs?” I asked. “Do you think it’s okay to kill them?”
“What?” asked Paul, taking a seat at the kitchen table.
“Do you think Jesus would say it’s okay to kill flies?”
David softly asked, “Father Paul, would you care for some breakfast? Some eggs? Some orange juice?”
“…and, if so, what about someone on life support?”
“I’d like some orange juice,” he said. “Christ would probably say all life is sacred.”
“And then, bacterial life. You’re killing them with an antibiotic.”
“Well, there’s good bacteria, and bad bacteria.”
From there, the conversation went off track, then back on, hopping around absolute truth, relative gods, discarded gods, irrelevant gods, the God gene, Jungian archetypes, 2000-year old desert camel gods, semantic twists and turns, and Paul kept reconciling everything…the pipe…the dance…our animistic pagan ways…through his Jesus filter. “Jesus was the first sun-dancer,” he said, “the first pipe-carrier.”
Well, Paul wrote, ‘The Pipe and Christ’, so what would you expect? And that got me to thinking about another question for Jesus.
W…Wait a minute.
“WHAT?” Jesus didn’t carry no pipe! That’s blasphemy!”
“Well, figuratively,” said Paul. “You could say Christ was a pipe-carrier.”
I knew he’d say that. Jesus was the common denominator in all things, ‘the Alpha and the Omega’, as Father Paul would say, and did. What’s the opposite of cognitive dissonance? That would be something like ‘cognitive harmony’, to continue the symphonic analogy, or maybe ‘adaptive cognitive resonance’, incorporating new info into a new world view, huh? Not necessarily a 180 degree ‘flip-flop’, or changing your mind, but kind of like, changing your mind.
- end
9.2.08
Friday, August 22, 2008
Keep Your Head In The Game
Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, SD –
Correction
As a writer, it’s embarrassing to print retractions and corrections. It demonstrates to the reader that you screwed up, and you’re admitting it. That’s ok. That’s part of journalistic integrity, and yes, there is such a thing.
Clarifications are of another order. The need to clarify arises from not being clear in the first place, or not explaining thoroughly enough for the reader’s benefit and understanding, unless the sketchy nature of the material is intentional.
A couple of entries back (‘Is That You, John Wayne’ 8/01/08), I wrote about ‘being dead in the water until the cavalry arrives.’
That’s a figure of speech requiring correction. Out here, the cavalry doesn’t arrive. The Indians do.
The Indians do eventually arrive. Of course, they’re runnin’ late, on ‘Indian Time’. Until they do, it’s good to try to knock out 300-500 words a day.
‘Cavalry Arrives! Indians, Too Late.’
____
I used to work with common themes, but that’s not always possible when one’s notes cover a six-month period, written on the backs of envelopes and train tickets. Sometimes, I can’t even remember what they were made in reference to, like this note here, ‘Zip-Lock Body Bags w/ Handles.’
Now, that could be a story idea, or it could be a manufacturing concept, an improvement over what is being used now, black rubber. Why not put some color on those bags, anyway? Make ‘em red, white, brown, and black, like the guys inside. You could color-code them that way. Christ, paint THE FLAG on ‘em. That’s what they died for.
Came back home in a fucking garbage bag.
“Can I see him?” she asked, apprehensively.
“No, ma’am,” replied the chaplain, directly. “You wouldn’t want to see him.”
A guy on the radio just gave me the title, ‘Keep Your Head In The Game’. Now, all I need to do is build a story around it, even if it doesn’t make sense.
Here’s one, to the tune of ‘The Peppermint Twist’:
“Wellll, they gotta new deal, and it goes like this…”
Boppa do ba, boppa boppa do ba,
Put a flag on the casket so it all makes sense…”
Can’t help myself, folks. We have a couple of wars going on, and we shouldn’t forget it. Those guys, and women, are pulling three and four tours, routinely, because of the manpower stretch of two wars. Makes a one-year tour in the ‘Nam look like a walk in the park.
I don’t have too many bad war dreams, but one of my worst nightmares is…I’m still in uniform, just got back to the States, and a Sergeant comes up to me and says,
“You’ve got to go back.”
My worst nightmare is the reality for your sons and daughters.
____
Liars All
The tale-telling began in the gym bleachers during lunch in high school, when I would entertain my classmates with musings spun from partial facts and woven into cheerful, breathtakingly tales that evolved into sordid, twisted, nailbiting horror stories involving our teachers, Deans, and Principal, earning me the title, ‘Story Bear’.
This tendency to fabricate, rooted in repression and denial, which I learned much later in an intro to psychology class, continued throughout reform school, a term in the Pythagorean Institute For Unrepentant Youth, the Job Corps, a short stretch in the state penitentiary, a tour in the ‘Nam, and thereafter, worked its way into print and broadcast journalism.
My editors always said, “This didn’t happen. They didn’t say that. You made this shit up.”
After journalism, it was a short ethical slide into the practice of law, where I continued lying as an art form at Keogh, McAllister & Nabb. They might bristle at the use of their names, and that of the firm, but they well know defamation won’t hold up in court if it’s the truth.
What I discovered was a capacity to fabricate ANY story, not only to avoid punishment as a child, but to later further my own career, like Pulaski, making up names, dates, quotes, scenery, setting, and all kinds of shit, with enough exacting detail to make the story true. Think, ‘Yellow Cake’.
Or, ‘WMDs’, the stuff of folklore, a of couple new ones for our 21st century lexicon, thank you Gen. Haig, thank you Mr. Buckley. ‘I.E.D.s’. Thank you. Thank alll you guys, sooo mush.
What I also learned, is that for a comedian or a reservation entertainer, it’s important that your audience knows you’re lying. It’s vital.
For academics, historians, car salesmen, statisticians, politicians, journalists, talk show hosts, White House and Pentagon spokesmen, diplomats…just about everybody else…your insurance adjuster…tax accountant…home equity loan agent…the plant, the mole, the stooge, the snitch…it’s quite the contrary, where deception is the rule.
Deception and manipulation of everything within one’s universe, one’s sphere, one’s psychic bubble of whatever we perceive reality to be, until everything shape-shifts and conforms to that lie, right?
You and I can do it. Whole nations can do it. We can go kill for the lie. We can die for the lie.
Everybody lies. It’s true. Never mind a stack of Bibles. They did a survey, and the results said we’re all a bunch of fucking liars.
Manny is about the only one who’d talk straight. One day with Manny at the house, my dad told me, ‘Son, I’ve done for you about all I can do. I’m gonna turn your training over to Manny, here.’
As soon as my dad left, Manny was direct. He told me, ‘Bic, you gonna have to strive for mediocrity.’
“Don’t bullshit me, Manny,” I said. “I’m in the bottom 20 percentile.”
“No,” he said. “You can do it. You can work yourself up to mediocrity, but it’s going to take a lot of effort.”
“You just gotta keep your head in the game,” he said.
Thunderclap will talk straight, refusing to purchase a collective lie, and that’s what pisses everyone off. But what many in the listening and viewing audience fail to understand is that America looks different from a pair of moccasins. That’s a radical view from anybody else. Black people, too. And Latinos.
America looks different through pimp glasses. All through being raised, I heard, ‘You gonna have to be twice as good as the white man to get anywhere.’ And that was white folks telling me that.
Like the lady said, talking about McCain accusing Obama of playing the Race Card. ‘Race Card? He’s been playing the Race Card all his life. Annapolis is the Race Card. The Country Club is the Race Card. Naval fighter pilot is playing the race card. Marrying an heiress and sliding into the U.S. Senate is playing your Race Card.’
A syndicated talk show host on the radio said, “‘Elitist’. That’s just a code-word for ‘Uppity’, isn’t it? And you know what goes with ‘Uppity’.”
Raised by a single-parent mom? Is that elitist? Going to Harvard Law School. Now, THAT’S UPPITY.
A caller in to my show said, “What’s wrong with having somebody smart in office? We’ve seen what electing dumbfucks can do.” We had to bleep that last part on the air, but I can print it here.
‘Political Correctness’? That’s a way of saying, ‘not saying what’s on your mind’. When you’re the only one in a whole group of ‘others’, it’s surprising how honest and politically incorrect people can be.
So, why would any American say they were ‘happy to see those towers come down’?
Thunderclap didn’t say that. He wouldn’t say that. Another Oglala Indian did, now deceased, a leader, a racist, a veteran of Vietnam, Wounded Knee II, and Yellow Thunder Camp, whose ancestors were at Wounded Knee I, an all-American butchering job that the people here haven’t forgotten. Their names are on the monument that’s out there now.
Anyway, I learned if I told a lie often enough, I not only deluded the give-it-to-me-in-a-simple-sound bite unsuspecting public, but myself as well, re-mapping brain circuitry and re-creating history as we would have it. You can see how this issues not only from grandpa’s rocking chair, but also at the highest levels of government.
All of this sudden realization truth-be-told unfolded during a weekly scripture-study and prayer group in the basement of the…I probably shouldn’t SAY what denomination…church.
For illumination, it’s odd that we were always working in the dark. We were all seated in the dark around a candle, holding hands in a circle, eyes closed, and our group facilitator, Everett Dundy, began with something that sounded like, “Lard, lettuce be like sheeps in the fold…’ At least, that’s what I heard.
And then we went around the circle, each person contributing a line to the prayer;
“…Give up the silver, give up the gold…”
“…wheat from the chaff, thy will be done…”
“…chance a getting in be a million to one…”
You might be thinking it was a black church, right? But no, that’s just the way they ran it out, in the spirit. In fact, everyone there was white, but me and Meek Jefferson, who was black as a skillet…‘Roach in yo’ bathtub, make you wanna killit.’
Meek was a pretty good poet, all free-form, and so black he sucked up all the light, and you couldn’t see him when they turned the lights back on. More like a shadow. Ha. Ha. No offense, Meek.
Anyway, to me, it sounded a lot like modern day rap, and this was many years ago, before Buddha, and long before rap became popular on the stoops and street and recording labels. But rap started with black people, with its roots in cotton fields and the banks of the Congo.
Remember the Black Poets rapping about ‘Niggas Are ‘Fraid of Revolution’? Remember that? Album came out in the late ‘60s. Chambers Brothers, too, were rapping, and it all came out of the church.
So, okay. Rap started with black people. Nobody’s going to argue that. And it came out of the church, so what’s the point?
I can’t remember. I can’t remember where I was going with this, but anyway, it wasn’t a black church, and when the prayer came around to my turn, I had to think for a while, and when the silence became unbearable, I had to spit something out, and I said something really stupid and inappropriate…I can’t recall exactly, because of what happened before they turned the lights back on…something like… “yo’ mamma sed jus’ ‘cause you be ‘fraid…” I remember was the first line, and then I went on with six or seventeen more lines…couldn’t stop myself from bustin’ out into rhyme…broke loose the hand-hold and come up out of my seat, ‘free-stylin’ strong…steppin’, steppin’, steppin’ ‘round the circle, but what came out shocked everyone, and one of the elderly women there stopped me and said “a person shouldn’t use language like that in a church basement*,” and I said something about the circle that resulted in some sort of folding-chair tussle in the dark, and shit, before they got to the light switch, all kinds of hell broke loose.
____
1576 - An important date in history? No. That’s the word count. They said to be an important American writer, you’ve got to crank at least 500 words per day. If you’re striving for mediocrity, then 300 will do. The 1500 may appear impressive, until you divide it by seven days.
Martin Frobisher, an English navigator, discovered ‘Frobisher’s Bay’ in Canada in 1576.
Don’t ever forget.
end
*I gotta tell you this. At a peyote meeting once, NAC, Native American Church, a guy got up to speak in the morning, and being ‘all peyotied up’, sort of lost his bearings and began using profanity during his talk. Some of the bros sitting there said, ‘Hey, somebody go straighten that guy out.’
One of those Indians, being peyotied up himself, got up and confronted the speaker. “Hey!” he said. “We don’t use that kind of fucking language in our church.”
8.08
Correction
As a writer, it’s embarrassing to print retractions and corrections. It demonstrates to the reader that you screwed up, and you’re admitting it. That’s ok. That’s part of journalistic integrity, and yes, there is such a thing.
Clarifications are of another order. The need to clarify arises from not being clear in the first place, or not explaining thoroughly enough for the reader’s benefit and understanding, unless the sketchy nature of the material is intentional.
A couple of entries back (‘Is That You, John Wayne’ 8/01/08), I wrote about ‘being dead in the water until the cavalry arrives.’
That’s a figure of speech requiring correction. Out here, the cavalry doesn’t arrive. The Indians do.
The Indians do eventually arrive. Of course, they’re runnin’ late, on ‘Indian Time’. Until they do, it’s good to try to knock out 300-500 words a day.
‘Cavalry Arrives! Indians, Too Late.’
____
I used to work with common themes, but that’s not always possible when one’s notes cover a six-month period, written on the backs of envelopes and train tickets. Sometimes, I can’t even remember what they were made in reference to, like this note here, ‘Zip-Lock Body Bags w/ Handles.’
Now, that could be a story idea, or it could be a manufacturing concept, an improvement over what is being used now, black rubber. Why not put some color on those bags, anyway? Make ‘em red, white, brown, and black, like the guys inside. You could color-code them that way. Christ, paint THE FLAG on ‘em. That’s what they died for.
Came back home in a fucking garbage bag.
“Can I see him?” she asked, apprehensively.
“No, ma’am,” replied the chaplain, directly. “You wouldn’t want to see him.”
A guy on the radio just gave me the title, ‘Keep Your Head In The Game’. Now, all I need to do is build a story around it, even if it doesn’t make sense.
Here’s one, to the tune of ‘The Peppermint Twist’:
“Wellll, they gotta new deal, and it goes like this…”
Boppa do ba, boppa boppa do ba,
Put a flag on the casket so it all makes sense…”
Can’t help myself, folks. We have a couple of wars going on, and we shouldn’t forget it. Those guys, and women, are pulling three and four tours, routinely, because of the manpower stretch of two wars. Makes a one-year tour in the ‘Nam look like a walk in the park.
I don’t have too many bad war dreams, but one of my worst nightmares is…I’m still in uniform, just got back to the States, and a Sergeant comes up to me and says,
“You’ve got to go back.”
My worst nightmare is the reality for your sons and daughters.
____
Liars All
The tale-telling began in the gym bleachers during lunch in high school, when I would entertain my classmates with musings spun from partial facts and woven into cheerful, breathtakingly tales that evolved into sordid, twisted, nailbiting horror stories involving our teachers, Deans, and Principal, earning me the title, ‘Story Bear’.
This tendency to fabricate, rooted in repression and denial, which I learned much later in an intro to psychology class, continued throughout reform school, a term in the Pythagorean Institute For Unrepentant Youth, the Job Corps, a short stretch in the state penitentiary, a tour in the ‘Nam, and thereafter, worked its way into print and broadcast journalism.
My editors always said, “This didn’t happen. They didn’t say that. You made this shit up.”
After journalism, it was a short ethical slide into the practice of law, where I continued lying as an art form at Keogh, McAllister & Nabb. They might bristle at the use of their names, and that of the firm, but they well know defamation won’t hold up in court if it’s the truth.
What I discovered was a capacity to fabricate ANY story, not only to avoid punishment as a child, but to later further my own career, like Pulaski, making up names, dates, quotes, scenery, setting, and all kinds of shit, with enough exacting detail to make the story true. Think, ‘Yellow Cake’.
Or, ‘WMDs’, the stuff of folklore, a of couple new ones for our 21st century lexicon, thank you Gen. Haig, thank you Mr. Buckley. ‘I.E.D.s’. Thank you. Thank alll you guys, sooo mush.
What I also learned, is that for a comedian or a reservation entertainer, it’s important that your audience knows you’re lying. It’s vital.
For academics, historians, car salesmen, statisticians, politicians, journalists, talk show hosts, White House and Pentagon spokesmen, diplomats…just about everybody else…your insurance adjuster…tax accountant…home equity loan agent…the plant, the mole, the stooge, the snitch…it’s quite the contrary, where deception is the rule.
Deception and manipulation of everything within one’s universe, one’s sphere, one’s psychic bubble of whatever we perceive reality to be, until everything shape-shifts and conforms to that lie, right?
You and I can do it. Whole nations can do it. We can go kill for the lie. We can die for the lie.
Everybody lies. It’s true. Never mind a stack of Bibles. They did a survey, and the results said we’re all a bunch of fucking liars.
Manny is about the only one who’d talk straight. One day with Manny at the house, my dad told me, ‘Son, I’ve done for you about all I can do. I’m gonna turn your training over to Manny, here.’
As soon as my dad left, Manny was direct. He told me, ‘Bic, you gonna have to strive for mediocrity.’
“Don’t bullshit me, Manny,” I said. “I’m in the bottom 20 percentile.”
“No,” he said. “You can do it. You can work yourself up to mediocrity, but it’s going to take a lot of effort.”
“You just gotta keep your head in the game,” he said.
Thunderclap will talk straight, refusing to purchase a collective lie, and that’s what pisses everyone off. But what many in the listening and viewing audience fail to understand is that America looks different from a pair of moccasins. That’s a radical view from anybody else. Black people, too. And Latinos.
America looks different through pimp glasses. All through being raised, I heard, ‘You gonna have to be twice as good as the white man to get anywhere.’ And that was white folks telling me that.
Like the lady said, talking about McCain accusing Obama of playing the Race Card. ‘Race Card? He’s been playing the Race Card all his life. Annapolis is the Race Card. The Country Club is the Race Card. Naval fighter pilot is playing the race card. Marrying an heiress and sliding into the U.S. Senate is playing your Race Card.’
A syndicated talk show host on the radio said, “‘Elitist’. That’s just a code-word for ‘Uppity’, isn’t it? And you know what goes with ‘Uppity’.”
Raised by a single-parent mom? Is that elitist? Going to Harvard Law School. Now, THAT’S UPPITY.
A caller in to my show said, “What’s wrong with having somebody smart in office? We’ve seen what electing dumbfucks can do.” We had to bleep that last part on the air, but I can print it here.
‘Political Correctness’? That’s a way of saying, ‘not saying what’s on your mind’. When you’re the only one in a whole group of ‘others’, it’s surprising how honest and politically incorrect people can be.
So, why would any American say they were ‘happy to see those towers come down’?
Thunderclap didn’t say that. He wouldn’t say that. Another Oglala Indian did, now deceased, a leader, a racist, a veteran of Vietnam, Wounded Knee II, and Yellow Thunder Camp, whose ancestors were at Wounded Knee I, an all-American butchering job that the people here haven’t forgotten. Their names are on the monument that’s out there now.
Anyway, I learned if I told a lie often enough, I not only deluded the give-it-to-me-in-a-simple-sound bite unsuspecting public, but myself as well, re-mapping brain circuitry and re-creating history as we would have it. You can see how this issues not only from grandpa’s rocking chair, but also at the highest levels of government.
All of this sudden realization truth-be-told unfolded during a weekly scripture-study and prayer group in the basement of the…I probably shouldn’t SAY what denomination…church.
For illumination, it’s odd that we were always working in the dark. We were all seated in the dark around a candle, holding hands in a circle, eyes closed, and our group facilitator, Everett Dundy, began with something that sounded like, “Lard, lettuce be like sheeps in the fold…’ At least, that’s what I heard.
And then we went around the circle, each person contributing a line to the prayer;
“…Give up the silver, give up the gold…”
“…wheat from the chaff, thy will be done…”
“…chance a getting in be a million to one…”
You might be thinking it was a black church, right? But no, that’s just the way they ran it out, in the spirit. In fact, everyone there was white, but me and Meek Jefferson, who was black as a skillet…‘Roach in yo’ bathtub, make you wanna killit.’
Meek was a pretty good poet, all free-form, and so black he sucked up all the light, and you couldn’t see him when they turned the lights back on. More like a shadow. Ha. Ha. No offense, Meek.
Anyway, to me, it sounded a lot like modern day rap, and this was many years ago, before Buddha, and long before rap became popular on the stoops and street and recording labels. But rap started with black people, with its roots in cotton fields and the banks of the Congo.
Remember the Black Poets rapping about ‘Niggas Are ‘Fraid of Revolution’? Remember that? Album came out in the late ‘60s. Chambers Brothers, too, were rapping, and it all came out of the church.
So, okay. Rap started with black people. Nobody’s going to argue that. And it came out of the church, so what’s the point?
I can’t remember. I can’t remember where I was going with this, but anyway, it wasn’t a black church, and when the prayer came around to my turn, I had to think for a while, and when the silence became unbearable, I had to spit something out, and I said something really stupid and inappropriate…I can’t recall exactly, because of what happened before they turned the lights back on…something like… “yo’ mamma sed jus’ ‘cause you be ‘fraid…” I remember was the first line, and then I went on with six or seventeen more lines…couldn’t stop myself from bustin’ out into rhyme…broke loose the hand-hold and come up out of my seat, ‘free-stylin’ strong…steppin’, steppin’, steppin’ ‘round the circle, but what came out shocked everyone, and one of the elderly women there stopped me and said “a person shouldn’t use language like that in a church basement*,” and I said something about the circle that resulted in some sort of folding-chair tussle in the dark, and shit, before they got to the light switch, all kinds of hell broke loose.
____
1576 - An important date in history? No. That’s the word count. They said to be an important American writer, you’ve got to crank at least 500 words per day. If you’re striving for mediocrity, then 300 will do. The 1500 may appear impressive, until you divide it by seven days.
Martin Frobisher, an English navigator, discovered ‘Frobisher’s Bay’ in Canada in 1576.
Don’t ever forget.
end
*I gotta tell you this. At a peyote meeting once, NAC, Native American Church, a guy got up to speak in the morning, and being ‘all peyotied up’, sort of lost his bearings and began using profanity during his talk. Some of the bros sitting there said, ‘Hey, somebody go straighten that guy out.’
One of those Indians, being peyotied up himself, got up and confronted the speaker. “Hey!” he said. “We don’t use that kind of fucking language in our church.”
8.08
Tuesday, August 19, 2008
Vetting For Veep
Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, SD – “He’s a danger to himself. The best thing for your friend to do is, stop writing his own material, and have you do it,” said George, my advisor and sounding board.
But George thinks all my stuff is funny, which I know isn’t true, because some of it is supposed to be serious, so I know he’s just being kind, since that big on-stage fiasco in Milwaukee several years ago during a promotional tour that didn’t pan out.
Clarification
Before we proceed any further, uh, there uh, is something I need to clear up right away in case they tap me for the VP slot in the upcoming election.
I’ve been advised to get this out of the way to free up my delegate support, and so there won’t be any ‘Swift-Boating’ by the opposition, or, like John Edwards, be faced with embarrassing lies during the vetting process. On down the line, I don’t want someone later asking, ‘What qualifies him to be horseshoe champ?’
Those ‘fell-on-a-grenade’, ‘got shot down five times’, ‘shivering in a rat cage’, ‘got shot out of a helicopter and fell 500 feet through triple-canopy jungle’, ‘division horseshoe champ’ stories simply aren’t true.
Okay? I was a clerk’s assistant, pay grade E-3. 1200 air combat hours? Horseshit. That was Wayne Marshall who did all that stuff.
That photo of Brig. General Davis shaking my hand? That was a ‘cut and paste’ job of my head on the body of another guy, with magic marker touch-up. Gen. Westmoreland and me in Saigon? Same same. Cut and paste.
Despite the widely-circulated story that launched my undeserved heralded vet status, I never went down behind enemy lines, and never organized the escape from VC rat cages deep in the jungle near the Cambodian border. That was Rambo. John Rambo. I never even got close to Cambodia.
Besides saving the officer’s mess hall from those two rampaging monkeys* and retrieving Yogi’s I.D. from a Vietnamese whore,** the most noteworthy thing I did in Vietnam, as an assistant to the company clerk, was to illicitly promote every enlisted man in the company by one pay grade.
This was possible because of a number of interwoven and ironically circumstantial factors; first, the slots were available. Next, our company commander had received an emergency leave back to the U.S. for treatment of a rare tropical rash on the backs of his hands, so before his replacement arrived, we were commanded by a Captain who liked to fly and didn’t care for administrative work.
He shortly thereafter rotated back to the States, and before an official commander, a major or above, arrived, we were in the hands of a lowly 1st Lieutenant Webster who didn’t know shit from shine-ola, administratively speaking.
He was however, a gifted and accomplished, but dangerous pilot. Greedy for flight hours, and having a reputation for ‘a magnet-ass’, he too, preferred flying over office work, and kept his name up on the flight duty roster.
Thus, Rosie and I simply took all forms and documents in for a sign-off, which we eventually stopped doing altogether, when we began forging the necessary signatures.
With an absentee commander, rule of the company then fell to our ranking sergeant, who somehow got an emergency reassignment to Saigon, quite a feat to begin with, and then to Belgium, even more astonishing. Not bad. We never knew the hows or whys. One day, he was just gone. They said he knew somebody.
So there was a period of several weeks, between the departure of our ranking officers and NCOs, none of which was combat-related, mind you, and the arrival of their replacements, where we experienced a command power vacuum, which really isn’t all that unusual in a combat zone, where for one reason or another,*** lesser beings are suddenly thrust into positions of responsibility. You can probably see how that could happen.
Accordingly, the operations of our 12-helicopter Company, fell into the hands of Rosie, a short-timer E-5, and me, a lowly Private First Class, a PFC. Sad Sack.
The war churned on of its own inertia with people talking about ‘the light at the end of the tunnel’, and everybody continued doing what they were supposed to do, flying medevac missions day in, day out, except me and Rosie.
We got right to work right away and sent off the necessary paperwork on up the line to guys like us working the other end at battalion headquarters, and a couple months later, after the arrival of a new company commander and a new 1st Sergeant, who, fresh from the States, didn’t know squat, we had an enormous awards and promotions ceremony, which made everyone extremely happy that day.**** BIG-ass party in the compound that night.
I got a set of wings, a DFC, a CMB, a Vietnamese Cross and a promotion to Specialist 4th Class, ‘Spec 4’. A couple months later, a Purple Heart and some air medals and a Presidential Citation rolled out of the pipeline. All of the new people didn’t know shit. They just sort of looked at you in awe.
For their gratitude, people gave Rosie several bottles of Johnny Walker Red, oscillating fans, a reel-to-reel tape recorder, a pair of Converse All Stars, a Nikon FTN, an AK-47, a Swedish 9mm pistol, and two new ping pong paddles. I gave him a 40 ft. parachute.
In the absence of any authority, it was a fantastic idea, a great move. Everybody went up a rank. A bunch of us got decorations. All the Warrant Officer pilots got medals. The ‘newbee’ commander and first sergeant must’ve thought they’d just joined a unit of for-real, gung-ho, John Wayne-in-the-sky guys.
They must have also wondered about our motto above the HQ entry: ‘We Fly The Shit, Every Day’.
“I can make you E-4, no higher,” said Rosie, looking up over the old Remington typewriter***** on which he was hammering out an original with three carbons from the First Sergeant’s desk. “You’ll need four months time-in-grade to make E-5. You want some awards?”
“Sure,” I said. “They’ll look good later in a run for congress or any judge I might have to face. Make me a hero.”
I never knew Rosie’s first name. His last name was Rose, and he had four big roses on his chest, and a huge heart with ‘Linda’ under it, tattooed on his forearm, with some slinky babe over the heart, who I presumed, must have been a representation of Linda.
Besides me, he was the only one in the company who knew how to type. Rosie was a ‘short-timer’, with only a few weeks remaining on his tour, and as such, he didn’t give a damn about anything anymore, ‘cept going home, like any short-timer. I was there in training, to act as company clerk until Rosie’s replacement arrived from the States, an acting job.
All the time, throughout the war, there were guys coming and going like that as their 12-month tours expired, and probably more often than not, there were gaps of manpower in various capacities. I don’t think our unit was an exception.
If you were to ask, ‘Who’s in charge here?’ everyone would have said, “Lt. Webster, I guess.” If they asked, ‘Who knows what’s going on around here?’ they would say, “Rosie”.
“What do you want?” he asked.
“How about a Congressional Medal of Honor?” I suggested.
“No way,” he said. “You’ve got to fall on a grenade or charge a machine gun nest. You know what ‘CMH’ stands for don’t you?” he asked. “ ‘Casket with Metal Handles’. You have to die.”
“Screw that, then. How about some Silver Stars?”
“No can do,” he said. “Those go to pilots.”
“Then, what have you got?” I asked. “Make me a medic. Everybody loves medics. Fabricate some missions under hostile fire. Hot LZs (Landing Zones). Juice it up.”
“That, I can do,” he said, making notes. “I can get you a DFC, a Distinguished Flying Cross…easy…a top award for an aviator…‘for demonstrating complete disregard for his personal safety, urged the pilots to proceed through concentrated enemy fire to evacuate the seriously wounded U.S. troops on the ground.’
“Hey. That sounds fucking great!” I said, imagining myself in a parade with a chest full of ribbons and decorations, people applauding my run for the senate. My head started to swim.
Rosie continued, “That’ll be automatic promotion to E-4, and we can toss in a Purple Heart, a Vietnamese Cross, a Combat Medic’s Badge, some routine air medals, and a set of wings.”
“All from one mission?”
“No,” Rosie replied. “We’ll have it spread out over six or seven months, back-dated. We can cook up some shit. It’ll look good.”
“Don’t I have to get hit for a Purple Heart?” I asked.
“We can make it something small,” he said. “like frags…‘while attending to the wounded , the corpsman then suffered wounds from an exploding B-40 rocket’…or an incoming mortar round…something along those lines. Out-patient. Ambulatory. We can doctor your personnel records to reflect anything…get Harrington to sign off… Nobody’ll ever know. This is the fucking ‘Nam.”
“I like the idea of falling through triple-canopy jungle after being shot out of the helicopter on a dangerous hoist mission into Laos or Cambodia,” I said. “You know, some really phenomenal shit that stretches the limits of credulity. Can you do that?”
“Sure,” said Rosie. “We fly the shit. We fly the shit, every, every day.”
“And how about some dramatic story of escaping?” I continued. “No…directing an escape…from enemy rat cages, deep in the jungle, near…near…the DMZ…no…The Plain of Jars…no, the Ho Chi Minh Trail...everybody knows the Ho Chi Minh Trail…after being shot down.
“And toss in some believable shit for face validity,” I added, “…like…‘division horseshoe champ’.”
“You’re not that good,” said Rosie. “That would be too easy to uncover.”
“Ok. Skip that,” I said. “but have me doing all that other stuff. Make it look good.”
“Sure,” said Rosie. “Give me an outline of what you want, with all the important elements, and I’ll work with it.”
- end
*“What the hell’s going on in here?” I said, stumbling onto them ransacking the officer’s mess. It was wholly circumstantial, not heroic. Anybody in the same situation would’ve done the same thing. One of those ‘place and time’ coincidence kinda things. I didn’t think it deserved an award, but it got me a special commendation.
**Yogi was trying to use his I.D. as barter in a transaction. As interpreter, I said to the girl, “G.I. I.D. same same money on payday,” thereby spontaneously and quite unintentionally inventing a fractured English euphemism, ‘same same’, that caught on like wildfire first in the Central Highlands, then Saigon, then throughout all of Southeast Asia.
***Guys were dropping like flies.
****That was that day. Several weeks later, a Colonel Haskell from battalion HQ came up-country with an aide, conducting an inquiry into the inexplicable sudden spike…‘rash’, he called it… in promotions and awards from our unit that wasn’t reflected in correlative enemy activity in our AO (Area of Operation).
Our commanding officer and first sergeant weren’t even in-country at the time under investigation, and like I said earlier, didn’t know squat. Rosie had long since gone back to the States, on the street in civvies, and I guess I was the only one, wearing those big, thick, black-frame, geeky, army-issue glasses, who they called up from the horseshoe pit and grilled on the spot one afternoon in the commander’s office.
I was praying they wouldn’t ask me how I got all those combat awards as an assistant company clerk. Had they looked at my records, I’d’ve been dead meat. Fortunately, they were looking at our unit records collectively and didn’t examine too closely any particular individual. My knees were shaking when I left there.
“What do you do here?” asked Col. Haskell.
“Pay strict attention, Sir,” I said honestly.
They all laughed except the Colonel, who looked at me quizzically like he wasn’t certain if I was an imbecile or a wiseass. “No, Specialist,” said Haskell. “I mean, what is your duty?”
I wasn’t sure. My brain raced for an answer while they waited. Finally, I said, “To fight communism, Sir…defend America’s freedom…uphold the code, Sir?.”
“No. No. No, son,” said Haskell, shooting a glance at his aide that said, ‘Can you believe this fucking bottom-of-the-barrel idiot draftee? No wonder we’re losing the war.’
“It’s not a multiple choice question, son,” he said. “What is your job here, at the company?” he asked.
It was paramount to act like a befuddled interim trainee company clerk moron, which was fairly easy with those glasses, steamed up and sweaty from the run up from the horseshoe pit. I told them I didn’t know anything, that I was pretty much a gopher, and that during the time in question, Rosie had handled all the paperwork.
*****the very machine from which you received those early tales from the ‘Nam.
8.08
But George thinks all my stuff is funny, which I know isn’t true, because some of it is supposed to be serious, so I know he’s just being kind, since that big on-stage fiasco in Milwaukee several years ago during a promotional tour that didn’t pan out.
Clarification
Before we proceed any further, uh, there uh, is something I need to clear up right away in case they tap me for the VP slot in the upcoming election.
I’ve been advised to get this out of the way to free up my delegate support, and so there won’t be any ‘Swift-Boating’ by the opposition, or, like John Edwards, be faced with embarrassing lies during the vetting process. On down the line, I don’t want someone later asking, ‘What qualifies him to be horseshoe champ?’
Those ‘fell-on-a-grenade’, ‘got shot down five times’, ‘shivering in a rat cage’, ‘got shot out of a helicopter and fell 500 feet through triple-canopy jungle’, ‘division horseshoe champ’ stories simply aren’t true.
Okay? I was a clerk’s assistant, pay grade E-3. 1200 air combat hours? Horseshit. That was Wayne Marshall who did all that stuff.
That photo of Brig. General Davis shaking my hand? That was a ‘cut and paste’ job of my head on the body of another guy, with magic marker touch-up. Gen. Westmoreland and me in Saigon? Same same. Cut and paste.
Despite the widely-circulated story that launched my undeserved heralded vet status, I never went down behind enemy lines, and never organized the escape from VC rat cages deep in the jungle near the Cambodian border. That was Rambo. John Rambo. I never even got close to Cambodia.
Besides saving the officer’s mess hall from those two rampaging monkeys* and retrieving Yogi’s I.D. from a Vietnamese whore,** the most noteworthy thing I did in Vietnam, as an assistant to the company clerk, was to illicitly promote every enlisted man in the company by one pay grade.
This was possible because of a number of interwoven and ironically circumstantial factors; first, the slots were available. Next, our company commander had received an emergency leave back to the U.S. for treatment of a rare tropical rash on the backs of his hands, so before his replacement arrived, we were commanded by a Captain who liked to fly and didn’t care for administrative work.
He shortly thereafter rotated back to the States, and before an official commander, a major or above, arrived, we were in the hands of a lowly 1st Lieutenant Webster who didn’t know shit from shine-ola, administratively speaking.
He was however, a gifted and accomplished, but dangerous pilot. Greedy for flight hours, and having a reputation for ‘a magnet-ass’, he too, preferred flying over office work, and kept his name up on the flight duty roster.
Thus, Rosie and I simply took all forms and documents in for a sign-off, which we eventually stopped doing altogether, when we began forging the necessary signatures.
With an absentee commander, rule of the company then fell to our ranking sergeant, who somehow got an emergency reassignment to Saigon, quite a feat to begin with, and then to Belgium, even more astonishing. Not bad. We never knew the hows or whys. One day, he was just gone. They said he knew somebody.
So there was a period of several weeks, between the departure of our ranking officers and NCOs, none of which was combat-related, mind you, and the arrival of their replacements, where we experienced a command power vacuum, which really isn’t all that unusual in a combat zone, where for one reason or another,*** lesser beings are suddenly thrust into positions of responsibility. You can probably see how that could happen.
Accordingly, the operations of our 12-helicopter Company, fell into the hands of Rosie, a short-timer E-5, and me, a lowly Private First Class, a PFC. Sad Sack.
The war churned on of its own inertia with people talking about ‘the light at the end of the tunnel’, and everybody continued doing what they were supposed to do, flying medevac missions day in, day out, except me and Rosie.
We got right to work right away and sent off the necessary paperwork on up the line to guys like us working the other end at battalion headquarters, and a couple months later, after the arrival of a new company commander and a new 1st Sergeant, who, fresh from the States, didn’t know squat, we had an enormous awards and promotions ceremony, which made everyone extremely happy that day.**** BIG-ass party in the compound that night.
I got a set of wings, a DFC, a CMB, a Vietnamese Cross and a promotion to Specialist 4th Class, ‘Spec 4’. A couple months later, a Purple Heart and some air medals and a Presidential Citation rolled out of the pipeline. All of the new people didn’t know shit. They just sort of looked at you in awe.
For their gratitude, people gave Rosie several bottles of Johnny Walker Red, oscillating fans, a reel-to-reel tape recorder, a pair of Converse All Stars, a Nikon FTN, an AK-47, a Swedish 9mm pistol, and two new ping pong paddles. I gave him a 40 ft. parachute.
In the absence of any authority, it was a fantastic idea, a great move. Everybody went up a rank. A bunch of us got decorations. All the Warrant Officer pilots got medals. The ‘newbee’ commander and first sergeant must’ve thought they’d just joined a unit of for-real, gung-ho, John Wayne-in-the-sky guys.
They must have also wondered about our motto above the HQ entry: ‘We Fly The Shit, Every Day’.
“I can make you E-4, no higher,” said Rosie, looking up over the old Remington typewriter***** on which he was hammering out an original with three carbons from the First Sergeant’s desk. “You’ll need four months time-in-grade to make E-5. You want some awards?”
“Sure,” I said. “They’ll look good later in a run for congress or any judge I might have to face. Make me a hero.”
I never knew Rosie’s first name. His last name was Rose, and he had four big roses on his chest, and a huge heart with ‘Linda’ under it, tattooed on his forearm, with some slinky babe over the heart, who I presumed, must have been a representation of Linda.
Besides me, he was the only one in the company who knew how to type. Rosie was a ‘short-timer’, with only a few weeks remaining on his tour, and as such, he didn’t give a damn about anything anymore, ‘cept going home, like any short-timer. I was there in training, to act as company clerk until Rosie’s replacement arrived from the States, an acting job.
All the time, throughout the war, there were guys coming and going like that as their 12-month tours expired, and probably more often than not, there were gaps of manpower in various capacities. I don’t think our unit was an exception.
If you were to ask, ‘Who’s in charge here?’ everyone would have said, “Lt. Webster, I guess.” If they asked, ‘Who knows what’s going on around here?’ they would say, “Rosie”.
“What do you want?” he asked.
“How about a Congressional Medal of Honor?” I suggested.
“No way,” he said. “You’ve got to fall on a grenade or charge a machine gun nest. You know what ‘CMH’ stands for don’t you?” he asked. “ ‘Casket with Metal Handles’. You have to die.”
“Screw that, then. How about some Silver Stars?”
“No can do,” he said. “Those go to pilots.”
“Then, what have you got?” I asked. “Make me a medic. Everybody loves medics. Fabricate some missions under hostile fire. Hot LZs (Landing Zones). Juice it up.”
“That, I can do,” he said, making notes. “I can get you a DFC, a Distinguished Flying Cross…easy…a top award for an aviator…‘for demonstrating complete disregard for his personal safety, urged the pilots to proceed through concentrated enemy fire to evacuate the seriously wounded U.S. troops on the ground.’
“Hey. That sounds fucking great!” I said, imagining myself in a parade with a chest full of ribbons and decorations, people applauding my run for the senate. My head started to swim.
Rosie continued, “That’ll be automatic promotion to E-4, and we can toss in a Purple Heart, a Vietnamese Cross, a Combat Medic’s Badge, some routine air medals, and a set of wings.”
“All from one mission?”
“No,” Rosie replied. “We’ll have it spread out over six or seven months, back-dated. We can cook up some shit. It’ll look good.”
“Don’t I have to get hit for a Purple Heart?” I asked.
“We can make it something small,” he said. “like frags…‘while attending to the wounded , the corpsman then suffered wounds from an exploding B-40 rocket’…or an incoming mortar round…something along those lines. Out-patient. Ambulatory. We can doctor your personnel records to reflect anything…get Harrington to sign off… Nobody’ll ever know. This is the fucking ‘Nam.”
“I like the idea of falling through triple-canopy jungle after being shot out of the helicopter on a dangerous hoist mission into Laos or Cambodia,” I said. “You know, some really phenomenal shit that stretches the limits of credulity. Can you do that?”
“Sure,” said Rosie. “We fly the shit. We fly the shit, every, every day.”
“And how about some dramatic story of escaping?” I continued. “No…directing an escape…from enemy rat cages, deep in the jungle, near…near…the DMZ…no…The Plain of Jars…no, the Ho Chi Minh Trail...everybody knows the Ho Chi Minh Trail…after being shot down.
“And toss in some believable shit for face validity,” I added, “…like…‘division horseshoe champ’.”
“You’re not that good,” said Rosie. “That would be too easy to uncover.”
“Ok. Skip that,” I said. “but have me doing all that other stuff. Make it look good.”
“Sure,” said Rosie. “Give me an outline of what you want, with all the important elements, and I’ll work with it.”
- end
*“What the hell’s going on in here?” I said, stumbling onto them ransacking the officer’s mess. It was wholly circumstantial, not heroic. Anybody in the same situation would’ve done the same thing. One of those ‘place and time’ coincidence kinda things. I didn’t think it deserved an award, but it got me a special commendation.
**Yogi was trying to use his I.D. as barter in a transaction. As interpreter, I said to the girl, “G.I. I.D. same same money on payday,” thereby spontaneously and quite unintentionally inventing a fractured English euphemism, ‘same same’, that caught on like wildfire first in the Central Highlands, then Saigon, then throughout all of Southeast Asia.
***Guys were dropping like flies.
****That was that day. Several weeks later, a Colonel Haskell from battalion HQ came up-country with an aide, conducting an inquiry into the inexplicable sudden spike…‘rash’, he called it… in promotions and awards from our unit that wasn’t reflected in correlative enemy activity in our AO (Area of Operation).
Our commanding officer and first sergeant weren’t even in-country at the time under investigation, and like I said earlier, didn’t know squat. Rosie had long since gone back to the States, on the street in civvies, and I guess I was the only one, wearing those big, thick, black-frame, geeky, army-issue glasses, who they called up from the horseshoe pit and grilled on the spot one afternoon in the commander’s office.
I was praying they wouldn’t ask me how I got all those combat awards as an assistant company clerk. Had they looked at my records, I’d’ve been dead meat. Fortunately, they were looking at our unit records collectively and didn’t examine too closely any particular individual. My knees were shaking when I left there.
“What do you do here?” asked Col. Haskell.
“Pay strict attention, Sir,” I said honestly.
They all laughed except the Colonel, who looked at me quizzically like he wasn’t certain if I was an imbecile or a wiseass. “No, Specialist,” said Haskell. “I mean, what is your duty?”
I wasn’t sure. My brain raced for an answer while they waited. Finally, I said, “To fight communism, Sir…defend America’s freedom…uphold the code, Sir?.”
“No. No. No, son,” said Haskell, shooting a glance at his aide that said, ‘Can you believe this fucking bottom-of-the-barrel idiot draftee? No wonder we’re losing the war.’
“It’s not a multiple choice question, son,” he said. “What is your job here, at the company?” he asked.
It was paramount to act like a befuddled interim trainee company clerk moron, which was fairly easy with those glasses, steamed up and sweaty from the run up from the horseshoe pit. I told them I didn’t know anything, that I was pretty much a gopher, and that during the time in question, Rosie had handled all the paperwork.
*****the very machine from which you received those early tales from the ‘Nam.
8.08
Friday, August 15, 2008
Every Dog's Day
Reuters – 8/15/08
Reuters reporter Peter Dieter recently held an interview with Gen. Hubert R. Creager (Ret.), former chief military tribunal judge at Guantanamo, Cuba, holding facility for many Taliban and other enemy combatants of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Dieter found the general at his home in Gaithersburg, MD. Excerpts of that interview:
PHD: “Uh, General. You don’t need your uniform. There’s no camera crew. This is for newspapers.”
HRC: “I still like wearing it, if that’s okay with you, Mr. Dieter. I wear it every chance I get. I’m proud of my uniform, and I’m proud of my country.”
PHD: “SURE. Sure thing, Sir.”
HRC: “Is it on? Is it running? I don’t want to get caught like Jesse Jackson, saying some stupid shit while the tape was rolling that later ends up in print, ha ha. How’s your coffee? Ok?”
PHD: “Yes, it’s fine…ready?…uh, General, could you get your dog, please?”
HRC: “ROY! STOP! GIT YER ASS ON OVER THERE…ya good for nothin’…LLLAY DOWN!
“He used to do that to everybody who came over here, then we had him fixed after he went after the wife of the Chairman of the JCS, but sometimes he still…Iiiiiiiii don’t know. We thought, ‘take him to the country, let him run,’ but hell, this IS the country.
“He’s a good dog, don’t get me wrong.”
PHD: “Yes,Sir. I’m sure he is. If we could move on to other things…I have an interest in the trial of Thunderclap, you may remember, the Sioux Indian comedian who was sent to Gitmo after an incident aboard a United Airlines flight in 2003.”
HRC: “Mr. Dieter, we don’t say, ‘Gitmo’…that’s something you journalists came up with. For the record, it’s ‘Camp Delta’. And yes, I remember Mr. Thun…”
PHD: “But wasn’t it Camp X-Ray before that? And wasn’t it the troopers stationed there who named it ‘Gitmo’?”
HRC: “Don’t interrupt me, Dieter. Yes. It was……Mr. Thundercloud was delivered to us in May of 2003 in the custody of a U.S. air marshall, and was then in-processed just li…”
PHD: “Why did they change the name?”
HRC: “What? Goddammit, don’t interrupt me. You asked me a question. Let me answer it. Where was I? Turn that thing off.”
PHD: “They changed the name because it reminded people of skeletons, right? Were you in on the name-change?”
HRC: “Where did you hear that? That’s preposterous. We deny it. I thought you wanted to know about Mr. Thundercloud’s trial.”
PHD: “That’s ‘ThunderCLAP.”
HRC: “Yes, I know. That’s what I said…I remember his showing up for court in a Hawaiian print shirt and his breezy, cocky, I-don’t-give-a-shit civilian attitude. He tried to turn the whole proceedings into a kang…into a farce. Had all those Muslims in an uproar by the time he left.
“Generals Harlan (US Army, Ret.) Hatchet (Gen. USMC, Ret.), and I pressed for execution before Gonzales (fmr. US Atty. Gen.) left office, but Moorehead (Gen. USAF) and Davis (Col., US Army) blocked our motion.
“Don’t use those names. Don’t use ANY of those names. That’s just the way the vote went…for your info…off the record…just so you know the patriots from the pansies on the panel. They’ve got a whole new crew, now. We all got swept out with Gonzales.”
PRH: “You wanted him executed for telling jokes on an airplane?”
HRC: “Do you think that bringing down a U.S. airliner with 268 passengers on board is a laughing matter? You can’t fuck around in the air anymore, son. They say he once brought down a house…a walking time bomb.
“That flight was over NEVADA for Christssake. Don’t you realize the implications of that, Boy? Stella Burnheart was on that flight!”
PHD: “Excuse me, General, but do you think you could refer to me as ‘Mr. Dieter’. I’m a grown man. Who is Stella Burnheart?
HRC: “The only thing that saved your boy’s ass was his status as a Vietnam war hero…now there’s an oxymoron for you…”
PHD: “My Boy? He’s not my ‘boy’. I don’t even…”
HRC: “Don’t interrupt me, Dieter…and some left-wing ACLU who-de-do lawyers in Washington. We held him for as long as we could, but we had to let him go. Our hands were tied. We tried our best.”
PHD: “He’s NOT my ‘boy’. I don’t even like the guy. His humor is sick. It’s not even humor. I just wondered if you actually thought you could execute a U.S. citizen without due process of law…”
HRC: “Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Why are you carrying those ‘Get Out Of Gitmo Free’ cards?”
You think that’s funny?”
PHD: “Mr. Thunderclap had them made up and asked me if I would give them to you for distribution to the inmates…look, there’s an attorney contact on the back…specializes in wrongful suits…and again here, in Arabic…if you could…y’know…someway…”
HRC: “You think that’s funny?”
PHD: “No. No. No. I’m just…he said you might still…
“They say you retired under a clou…that you and the others retired under pressure. Is that true?”
HRC: “NO! That’s a barn load of horse hockey. I retired to spend more time with my family, after giving 40 distinguished years in uniform to this great country…which you wouldn’t know anything about, because you’re a Nazi, aren’t you, Dieter?”
PHD: “Sir, I am a naturalized U.S. citizen. I work for a respectable news agency.”
HRC: “I’ll bet your daddy was SS. Dieter? SURE. Why is it you still talk with a thick German accent? I fought the Nazis in the Big One, Dubya Dubya Two. Battle of the Bulge.
“So cold out your balls…DON’T interrupt me, boy…that was a good war, when you could shoot a prisoner right on the spot and no questions asked. He dies, or you die. Simple. None of this hide-among-the-civilians ‘enemy combatant’ shit. A prisoner of war is a prisoner of war, regardless of what else you might want to call them.”
PHD: “Excuse me, General. I’m not a Nazi. And, isn’t that exactly the point the Supreme Court was trying to make? Prisoners have rights?”
HRC: “Whaddaya trying to say? We don’t need no goddamn supreme court in this terror business. A prisoner gives up his rights when he picks up a gun. You Nazis weren’t soft on the Jews and they weren’t even blowing anything up.”
PHD: “Sir, I’m not a Nazi. And, prisoners don’t have guns.”
HRC: “What’d your daddy do? We have expediencies to handle the enemies of our great country, fully in accordance with the, uh…with…our practices…our legal judicial parameters…to effectually achieve our maximum desired outcomes...in the larger interest of our national security. I did what they asked me to do.”
PHD: “That sounded scripted, General. Don’t they call that ‘extra-judicial’ practices? You can’t just hold people and torture them indefinitely.”
HRC: “Why not? Hell, boy, it’s all judicial. Every one of them dogs gets their day in court, juuuust like your boy Thunderbolt.”
-end
8.08
Reuters reporter Peter Dieter recently held an interview with Gen. Hubert R. Creager (Ret.), former chief military tribunal judge at Guantanamo, Cuba, holding facility for many Taliban and other enemy combatants of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Dieter found the general at his home in Gaithersburg, MD. Excerpts of that interview:
PHD: “Uh, General. You don’t need your uniform. There’s no camera crew. This is for newspapers.”
HRC: “I still like wearing it, if that’s okay with you, Mr. Dieter. I wear it every chance I get. I’m proud of my uniform, and I’m proud of my country.”
PHD: “SURE. Sure thing, Sir.”
HRC: “Is it on? Is it running? I don’t want to get caught like Jesse Jackson, saying some stupid shit while the tape was rolling that later ends up in print, ha ha. How’s your coffee? Ok?”
PHD: “Yes, it’s fine…ready?…uh, General, could you get your dog, please?”
HRC: “ROY! STOP! GIT YER ASS ON OVER THERE…ya good for nothin’…LLLAY DOWN!
“He used to do that to everybody who came over here, then we had him fixed after he went after the wife of the Chairman of the JCS, but sometimes he still…Iiiiiiiii don’t know. We thought, ‘take him to the country, let him run,’ but hell, this IS the country.
“He’s a good dog, don’t get me wrong.”
PHD: “Yes,Sir. I’m sure he is. If we could move on to other things…I have an interest in the trial of Thunderclap, you may remember, the Sioux Indian comedian who was sent to Gitmo after an incident aboard a United Airlines flight in 2003.”
HRC: “Mr. Dieter, we don’t say, ‘Gitmo’…that’s something you journalists came up with. For the record, it’s ‘Camp Delta’. And yes, I remember Mr. Thun…”
PHD: “But wasn’t it Camp X-Ray before that? And wasn’t it the troopers stationed there who named it ‘Gitmo’?”
HRC: “Don’t interrupt me, Dieter. Yes. It was……Mr. Thundercloud was delivered to us in May of 2003 in the custody of a U.S. air marshall, and was then in-processed just li…”
PHD: “Why did they change the name?”
HRC: “What? Goddammit, don’t interrupt me. You asked me a question. Let me answer it. Where was I? Turn that thing off.”
PHD: “They changed the name because it reminded people of skeletons, right? Were you in on the name-change?”
HRC: “Where did you hear that? That’s preposterous. We deny it. I thought you wanted to know about Mr. Thundercloud’s trial.”
PHD: “That’s ‘ThunderCLAP.”
HRC: “Yes, I know. That’s what I said…I remember his showing up for court in a Hawaiian print shirt and his breezy, cocky, I-don’t-give-a-shit civilian attitude. He tried to turn the whole proceedings into a kang…into a farce. Had all those Muslims in an uproar by the time he left.
“Generals Harlan (US Army, Ret.) Hatchet (Gen. USMC, Ret.), and I pressed for execution before Gonzales (fmr. US Atty. Gen.) left office, but Moorehead (Gen. USAF) and Davis (Col., US Army) blocked our motion.
“Don’t use those names. Don’t use ANY of those names. That’s just the way the vote went…for your info…off the record…just so you know the patriots from the pansies on the panel. They’ve got a whole new crew, now. We all got swept out with Gonzales.”
PRH: “You wanted him executed for telling jokes on an airplane?”
HRC: “Do you think that bringing down a U.S. airliner with 268 passengers on board is a laughing matter? You can’t fuck around in the air anymore, son. They say he once brought down a house…a walking time bomb.
“That flight was over NEVADA for Christssake. Don’t you realize the implications of that, Boy? Stella Burnheart was on that flight!”
PHD: “Excuse me, General, but do you think you could refer to me as ‘Mr. Dieter’. I’m a grown man. Who is Stella Burnheart?
HRC: “The only thing that saved your boy’s ass was his status as a Vietnam war hero…now there’s an oxymoron for you…”
PHD: “My Boy? He’s not my ‘boy’. I don’t even…”
HRC: “Don’t interrupt me, Dieter…and some left-wing ACLU who-de-do lawyers in Washington. We held him for as long as we could, but we had to let him go. Our hands were tied. We tried our best.”
PHD: “He’s NOT my ‘boy’. I don’t even like the guy. His humor is sick. It’s not even humor. I just wondered if you actually thought you could execute a U.S. citizen without due process of law…”
HRC: “Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Why are you carrying those ‘Get Out Of Gitmo Free’ cards?”
You think that’s funny?”
PHD: “Mr. Thunderclap had them made up and asked me if I would give them to you for distribution to the inmates…look, there’s an attorney contact on the back…specializes in wrongful suits…and again here, in Arabic…if you could…y’know…someway…”
HRC: “You think that’s funny?”
PHD: “No. No. No. I’m just…he said you might still…
“They say you retired under a clou…that you and the others retired under pressure. Is that true?”
HRC: “NO! That’s a barn load of horse hockey. I retired to spend more time with my family, after giving 40 distinguished years in uniform to this great country…which you wouldn’t know anything about, because you’re a Nazi, aren’t you, Dieter?”
PHD: “Sir, I am a naturalized U.S. citizen. I work for a respectable news agency.”
HRC: “I’ll bet your daddy was SS. Dieter? SURE. Why is it you still talk with a thick German accent? I fought the Nazis in the Big One, Dubya Dubya Two. Battle of the Bulge.
“So cold out your balls…DON’T interrupt me, boy…that was a good war, when you could shoot a prisoner right on the spot and no questions asked. He dies, or you die. Simple. None of this hide-among-the-civilians ‘enemy combatant’ shit. A prisoner of war is a prisoner of war, regardless of what else you might want to call them.”
PHD: “Excuse me, General. I’m not a Nazi. And, isn’t that exactly the point the Supreme Court was trying to make? Prisoners have rights?”
HRC: “Whaddaya trying to say? We don’t need no goddamn supreme court in this terror business. A prisoner gives up his rights when he picks up a gun. You Nazis weren’t soft on the Jews and they weren’t even blowing anything up.”
PHD: “Sir, I’m not a Nazi. And, prisoners don’t have guns.”
HRC: “What’d your daddy do? We have expediencies to handle the enemies of our great country, fully in accordance with the, uh…with…our practices…our legal judicial parameters…to effectually achieve our maximum desired outcomes...in the larger interest of our national security. I did what they asked me to do.”
PHD: “That sounded scripted, General. Don’t they call that ‘extra-judicial’ practices? You can’t just hold people and torture them indefinitely.”
HRC: “Why not? Hell, boy, it’s all judicial. Every one of them dogs gets their day in court, juuuust like your boy Thunderbolt.”
-end
8.08
Thursday, August 14, 2008
Going For The Gatorade
Going For the Gatorade
Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, SD - I don’t want to say too much about the sun dance, other than it’s four days of prayer, sacrifice and exertion, with people making extreme personal offerings. Even if you aren’t doing anything extraordinary beyond the four-day food and water fast, and dancing in the sun for four days, that’s enough.
Many sun dances are strict and disciplined (‘Uncle Rick [Two Dogs] don’t give us no water or NOTHING,’ said Misty, her face all sun burnt and happy after four days), whereas others are more sympathetic toward the dancers, like, after a particularly hot and hard day, they might give you some juice at night…or overlook the cooler of sport drink those guys had over there in their tipi. On ice.
We laughed about running an extension cord to the back of the tipi, off of a generator, so we could hook up a fridge, a fan, maybe a television set, a sofa. Roll out a nice carpet.
But technically, you’re not supposed to have water during the day, or at all. THEY SAY. But, it’s up to you, you and your god (here, ‘Tunkashila’), and whatever discipline one follows is self-imposed.
We observe general propriety in respect to our elders, along with many traditional formalities, but we don’t have a lot of shoulds and shouldn’ts at our dance. A ‘kinder, gentler’ dance, they say.
If it’s the third day and 105 degrees in the middle of the afternoon, and there’s a bottle of warm Gatorade going around, usually people won’t refuse a swallow or two. And after listening to those Mohawks relate their legendary stories about the sacredness and restorative power of the water, the strawberry, and the maple syrup, you don’t feel bad at all about having a cup full of that mixture at the end of the day.
It’s all good, man. Talk about bringing people Back To Life! We joke around about, “I don’t know about you guys, but I’m in it for the strawberry water.” You can refuse it if you like, but nobody does. Gotta love those Mohawks.
As chief medical officer, I give out lemon drops on the afternoon of day three, maybe day two, and nobody has ever refused those, either. Head honcho said, ‘Gimmie two.’
Despite all the hardship and seriousness attendant with the dance, there’s a lot of humor floating around, too, both intentional and inadvertent, like a few years ago when one of the ‘first timers’, there on a vision he’d gotten earlier in the year, was laying at the tree on the buffalo robe, and when he saw the scalpel in Tom’s hands, his eyes got big and he said, “I’ve changed my mind!” and tried to raise up.
Loretta, on her knees at the tree, praying with the sun dance pipe throughout the entirety of the piercing rounds, budged from her sphinx-like pose and turned her head slightly, looking down at the young man, a full-blood Indian. I’m not sure if one of her eyebrows lifted slightly or not, but the look on her face said, ‘Oh? That’s a first.’
We pushed his shoulders back down on the robe, and Tom told him, “It’s too late.”
The kid was twisting and squirming and kicking his legs when he got stuck, and Tom had to tell him, ‘Hey, hey now. Be still.’
Tom pierced him, we stood him up, and hooked him up to his rope, with him pale in the face, weak at the knees, and foam at the corners of his mouth...good to go. Just like in Vietnam, I lied and said to him, ‘Everything’s going to be okay. Blow your whistle.’
I don’t know how it is for others. Seems like, what the boss man say in ‘Cool Hand Luke’?...‘You got to get your mind right.’…if you can remember that it’s an offering, and you don’t want to give a gift grudgingly, now do you?
And you’re giving it in exchange for all those prayers you’ve been making, then, Holy Smokes, hey, if you want it to hurt, that’s gotta be okay, and if it don’t then, that’s okay too, and…Hereiyam…I’m yours, and I’m smilin’.
Yeah, maybe. Until they stand you up, hook you up, and you find yourself out there on the end of that rope trying to get loose three, four, five, six, seven, eight times. Well, that’s a different story.
Flip on your face, flip on your ass, break your pins, break your rigging, break your rope, break everything but your flesh...hook back up again…make your best prayer, make your best magic, make your best plea…make you feel like some kinda puppet.
Well, there are easy years, and there are hard years.
In our first dance together at Devil’s Tower, my bro, the late Mike Afraid Of Bear, asked our sun dance leader there, the late Gerald Clifford, whaddaya do when you’re getting pierced?
Gerald said, ‘Don’t fight it.’
Just about any kind of surrender can be a very difficult thing.
One of the veterans, been dancing about ten years, along with his father and his son, came to the tree to be pierced…I won’t say his name, but his initials begin with Robb Reddeman. He wanted to be pierced standing, with his back to the tree. I looked down at the scars on his chest and asked him, “Do you know what the judge said?”
“What’s that?” he asked.
“Haven’t I seen you up here before?”
It’s not a comedy show, for sure, but sometimes the humor helps take the edge off the suffering, and brings us back to human. Life, death, hunger, disease, cripples, refugees, and orphans…that’s serious. The rest is a walk in the park.
Jesus was hanging on the cross and asked Peter to come closer. Peter approached and said, “Yes. What is it, Master?”
Jesus said, “I can see your house from here.”
See what I mean? The old Buddhist monks and the old Indian men are the same way. Nobody’s taking themselves or what they’re carrying around in their heads too seriously. It’s the young guys who seem to be the over-zealous. You ever hear of an old man strapping on a suicide vest?
He (Jesus) stopped by here a few weeks after the dance to thank everybody, and I told that joke right in His presence while a bunch of the bros were sitting around the table having coffee.
Everybody laughed but Jesus, but his lips curled at the corners there just for a second, like, maybe he’d already heard it, but it was still a pretty good one. Then, he looked over at me and gave me this look that said, ‘I feel so sorry for you, you pathetic maggot.’
I sloughed off his telepathic comment and said straight-faced, ‘You probably know…over in Africa, they paint you black.’
Everyone laughed out loud except Jesus, and he opened his mouth to say something, thought otherwise, then gave me that same look.
“Little black baby Jesus…black Jesus on a donkey…black Jesus on the cross.”
Before he could say anything, I said, “Just kidding, man. Everybody knows you’re white.”
Everybody was laughing until they looked over at Jesus, then they all chilled like you do when you see the boss ain’t laughing. He just stared at me like he didn’t think it was funny, but we’re okay.
He knows. He knows how we are around here, how we'll tell a joke on someone with 'em sitting right there, and how we only tease the ones we love.
He was dressed like a 'Big Indian', with black wide-brimmed hat, hair pulled back into a pony tail, red neckerchief, black cowboy shirt with white mother-of-pearl buttons, hot-looking tight-ass blue jeans, and pointy cowboy boots. 'Why you dressed like that?' I asked.
'Only way I can get a ride up here,' he said.
_____
We were laying around the ‘spill-over’ tipi between rounds, seven of us in there; Bo D., Sonny Bass, Dave Frankel, Ted Ebert, Steve Hall, and a new guy to our dance, Terry Richards. All veteran dancers, having danced at least five years. Many had danced a decade. It was good.
Our tipi was a gift from dancer Mike Albin, a very nice gift. People do stuff like that at dance, preparing all year long for giveaway and getting ready, working on their stuff. I gave away two squadron of aircraft this year, till I ran out. John had T-shirts made. People give Pendletons, star quilts, flesh, blood, all kinds of things.
The big 30 ft. tipi was full, as it has been since about the third year in ‘The Canyon’, when our numbers went from seven dancers that first year, to a dozen, then twenty, then twenty-seven, and finally leveling off at about 40 dancers, a full arbor.
That’s why we need a ‘spill-over’ tipi to accommodate all the extra dancers. Up top this year, we had two big 30-footers for the men and women, and a couple extra smaller tipis for the women, and two or three extras for the men.
Anyway, just to give you a picture. Our tipi was 24 feet at the base, and tied at 20 ft., a nice solid stack against the wind. Some of the guys have staffs, a long shepherd’s kind of instrument bent into a medicine wheel circle at the top, and usually adorned with eagle feathers, otter or rabbit, and maybe bells or ermine.
Steve gave one to David this year, a very nice gift, and both he and Terry had one, all of which they planted in holes in the middle of our tipi, just off the foot of my cot. Terry also had a cool owl and hawk bonnet covered with feathers that had belonged to his father, and he placed it atop the middle staff. I think he only wore it one or two rounds. “It’s too hot,” he said.
So anyway, we’re all laying there resting in between rounds, and I sat up on my cot and said, ‘Eeeeeeee, you guys. I woke up early this morning and saw those staffs first thing when I opened my eyes, and it looked like three…BEINGS…standing over me.”
“There was three of ‘em, you guys,” I continued, like I was relating a story of the phenomenal. “The guy in the middle was wearing a bonnet full of feathers.”
They all laughed, because in dim light, it sort of looked like three thin figures…like, spirit beings…standing there, and Terry started wildly swinging his fists and shouted, “GET BACK, YOU FUCKERS!”
Everybody exploded in laughter, and Terry continued, “Feathers all over the place…staffs all broken up and scattered around…fur all over the place…You guys was lucky I was awake.”
Everybody was laughing so hard our sides hurt, and Terry was relentless, saying, “You guys was lucky I was awake…they was going for our Gatorade!”
end
8.08
Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, SD - I don’t want to say too much about the sun dance, other than it’s four days of prayer, sacrifice and exertion, with people making extreme personal offerings. Even if you aren’t doing anything extraordinary beyond the four-day food and water fast, and dancing in the sun for four days, that’s enough.
Many sun dances are strict and disciplined (‘Uncle Rick [Two Dogs] don’t give us no water or NOTHING,’ said Misty, her face all sun burnt and happy after four days), whereas others are more sympathetic toward the dancers, like, after a particularly hot and hard day, they might give you some juice at night…or overlook the cooler of sport drink those guys had over there in their tipi. On ice.
We laughed about running an extension cord to the back of the tipi, off of a generator, so we could hook up a fridge, a fan, maybe a television set, a sofa. Roll out a nice carpet.
But technically, you’re not supposed to have water during the day, or at all. THEY SAY. But, it’s up to you, you and your god (here, ‘Tunkashila’), and whatever discipline one follows is self-imposed.
We observe general propriety in respect to our elders, along with many traditional formalities, but we don’t have a lot of shoulds and shouldn’ts at our dance. A ‘kinder, gentler’ dance, they say.
If it’s the third day and 105 degrees in the middle of the afternoon, and there’s a bottle of warm Gatorade going around, usually people won’t refuse a swallow or two. And after listening to those Mohawks relate their legendary stories about the sacredness and restorative power of the water, the strawberry, and the maple syrup, you don’t feel bad at all about having a cup full of that mixture at the end of the day.
It’s all good, man. Talk about bringing people Back To Life! We joke around about, “I don’t know about you guys, but I’m in it for the strawberry water.” You can refuse it if you like, but nobody does. Gotta love those Mohawks.
As chief medical officer, I give out lemon drops on the afternoon of day three, maybe day two, and nobody has ever refused those, either. Head honcho said, ‘Gimmie two.’
Despite all the hardship and seriousness attendant with the dance, there’s a lot of humor floating around, too, both intentional and inadvertent, like a few years ago when one of the ‘first timers’, there on a vision he’d gotten earlier in the year, was laying at the tree on the buffalo robe, and when he saw the scalpel in Tom’s hands, his eyes got big and he said, “I’ve changed my mind!” and tried to raise up.
Loretta, on her knees at the tree, praying with the sun dance pipe throughout the entirety of the piercing rounds, budged from her sphinx-like pose and turned her head slightly, looking down at the young man, a full-blood Indian. I’m not sure if one of her eyebrows lifted slightly or not, but the look on her face said, ‘Oh? That’s a first.’
We pushed his shoulders back down on the robe, and Tom told him, “It’s too late.”
The kid was twisting and squirming and kicking his legs when he got stuck, and Tom had to tell him, ‘Hey, hey now. Be still.’
Tom pierced him, we stood him up, and hooked him up to his rope, with him pale in the face, weak at the knees, and foam at the corners of his mouth...good to go. Just like in Vietnam, I lied and said to him, ‘Everything’s going to be okay. Blow your whistle.’
I don’t know how it is for others. Seems like, what the boss man say in ‘Cool Hand Luke’?...‘You got to get your mind right.’…if you can remember that it’s an offering, and you don’t want to give a gift grudgingly, now do you?
And you’re giving it in exchange for all those prayers you’ve been making, then, Holy Smokes, hey, if you want it to hurt, that’s gotta be okay, and if it don’t then, that’s okay too, and…Hereiyam…I’m yours, and I’m smilin’.
Yeah, maybe. Until they stand you up, hook you up, and you find yourself out there on the end of that rope trying to get loose three, four, five, six, seven, eight times. Well, that’s a different story.
Flip on your face, flip on your ass, break your pins, break your rigging, break your rope, break everything but your flesh...hook back up again…make your best prayer, make your best magic, make your best plea…make you feel like some kinda puppet.
Well, there are easy years, and there are hard years.
In our first dance together at Devil’s Tower, my bro, the late Mike Afraid Of Bear, asked our sun dance leader there, the late Gerald Clifford, whaddaya do when you’re getting pierced?
Gerald said, ‘Don’t fight it.’
Just about any kind of surrender can be a very difficult thing.
One of the veterans, been dancing about ten years, along with his father and his son, came to the tree to be pierced…I won’t say his name, but his initials begin with Robb Reddeman. He wanted to be pierced standing, with his back to the tree. I looked down at the scars on his chest and asked him, “Do you know what the judge said?”
“What’s that?” he asked.
“Haven’t I seen you up here before?”
It’s not a comedy show, for sure, but sometimes the humor helps take the edge off the suffering, and brings us back to human. Life, death, hunger, disease, cripples, refugees, and orphans…that’s serious. The rest is a walk in the park.
Jesus was hanging on the cross and asked Peter to come closer. Peter approached and said, “Yes. What is it, Master?”
Jesus said, “I can see your house from here.”
See what I mean? The old Buddhist monks and the old Indian men are the same way. Nobody’s taking themselves or what they’re carrying around in their heads too seriously. It’s the young guys who seem to be the over-zealous. You ever hear of an old man strapping on a suicide vest?
He (Jesus) stopped by here a few weeks after the dance to thank everybody, and I told that joke right in His presence while a bunch of the bros were sitting around the table having coffee.
Everybody laughed but Jesus, but his lips curled at the corners there just for a second, like, maybe he’d already heard it, but it was still a pretty good one. Then, he looked over at me and gave me this look that said, ‘I feel so sorry for you, you pathetic maggot.’
I sloughed off his telepathic comment and said straight-faced, ‘You probably know…over in Africa, they paint you black.’
Everyone laughed out loud except Jesus, and he opened his mouth to say something, thought otherwise, then gave me that same look.
“Little black baby Jesus…black Jesus on a donkey…black Jesus on the cross.”
Before he could say anything, I said, “Just kidding, man. Everybody knows you’re white.”
Everybody was laughing until they looked over at Jesus, then they all chilled like you do when you see the boss ain’t laughing. He just stared at me like he didn’t think it was funny, but we’re okay.
He knows. He knows how we are around here, how we'll tell a joke on someone with 'em sitting right there, and how we only tease the ones we love.
He was dressed like a 'Big Indian', with black wide-brimmed hat, hair pulled back into a pony tail, red neckerchief, black cowboy shirt with white mother-of-pearl buttons, hot-looking tight-ass blue jeans, and pointy cowboy boots. 'Why you dressed like that?' I asked.
'Only way I can get a ride up here,' he said.
_____
We were laying around the ‘spill-over’ tipi between rounds, seven of us in there; Bo D., Sonny Bass, Dave Frankel, Ted Ebert, Steve Hall, and a new guy to our dance, Terry Richards. All veteran dancers, having danced at least five years. Many had danced a decade. It was good.
Our tipi was a gift from dancer Mike Albin, a very nice gift. People do stuff like that at dance, preparing all year long for giveaway and getting ready, working on their stuff. I gave away two squadron of aircraft this year, till I ran out. John had T-shirts made. People give Pendletons, star quilts, flesh, blood, all kinds of things.
The big 30 ft. tipi was full, as it has been since about the third year in ‘The Canyon’, when our numbers went from seven dancers that first year, to a dozen, then twenty, then twenty-seven, and finally leveling off at about 40 dancers, a full arbor.
That’s why we need a ‘spill-over’ tipi to accommodate all the extra dancers. Up top this year, we had two big 30-footers for the men and women, and a couple extra smaller tipis for the women, and two or three extras for the men.
Anyway, just to give you a picture. Our tipi was 24 feet at the base, and tied at 20 ft., a nice solid stack against the wind. Some of the guys have staffs, a long shepherd’s kind of instrument bent into a medicine wheel circle at the top, and usually adorned with eagle feathers, otter or rabbit, and maybe bells or ermine.
Steve gave one to David this year, a very nice gift, and both he and Terry had one, all of which they planted in holes in the middle of our tipi, just off the foot of my cot. Terry also had a cool owl and hawk bonnet covered with feathers that had belonged to his father, and he placed it atop the middle staff. I think he only wore it one or two rounds. “It’s too hot,” he said.
So anyway, we’re all laying there resting in between rounds, and I sat up on my cot and said, ‘Eeeeeeee, you guys. I woke up early this morning and saw those staffs first thing when I opened my eyes, and it looked like three…BEINGS…standing over me.”
“There was three of ‘em, you guys,” I continued, like I was relating a story of the phenomenal. “The guy in the middle was wearing a bonnet full of feathers.”
They all laughed, because in dim light, it sort of looked like three thin figures…like, spirit beings…standing there, and Terry started wildly swinging his fists and shouted, “GET BACK, YOU FUCKERS!”
Everybody exploded in laughter, and Terry continued, “Feathers all over the place…staffs all broken up and scattered around…fur all over the place…You guys was lucky I was awake.”
Everybody was laughing so hard our sides hurt, and Terry was relentless, saying, “You guys was lucky I was awake…they was going for our Gatorade!”
end
8.08
Tuesday, August 12, 2008
Do I Know You?
Do I Know You?
Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, SD- I gotta be driving the oldest truck on the reservation. For sure. A lot of people wave at me, thinking they should probably know someone who drives an old farm truck like that.
So, my favorite line to use on a man in his 70s or 80s is, ‘You’re probably too young to remember when Chevy came out with this truck,’ just for openers, just to see what kind of response the question can elicit.
Usually, I have to repeat it, since a lot of those old fellows are hard of hearing, then they always chuckle, draw closer, and tell me in a strained whisper what models they bought, and how long they drove them.
This conversation usually takes place at a gas pump, a parking lot, or some other place where they can see ‘Betsy’, my 1960 hunk of iron with wired-on plates expired in April of 2006. The model had an ashtray but no seat belts. Has defrost, but no place to set a drink. Cab designed for a guy with short legs. The cigarette lighter, if you wanted one, would be an ‘add-on’.
With Jesus, Buddha, Rong Po Thuot, and an eagle feather all riding along together on a bed of sage, you could say it’s a multi-denominational dashboard. I don’t know about other places, but over here, they ride together okay.
Of course, Betsy’s got some idiosyncrasies that come with her age, like the headlights just going off for no apparent reason in the ‘high beam’ mode. And when you’re going down the road, straight and level, there’s this loud ‘Clank’, like some kinda adjustment, from somewhere down in the chassis or drive train or rear axel, I can’t determine.
And then there’s no brakes, I had to tell Bo the other day after his tire went flat here and his spare wasn’t any good. He and Misty borrowed the truck to take their tires for air. Reckless maniac behind the wheel that he is, Bo’s one of the few people who I’d let drive her. When he hopped in behind the wheel, Betsy asked, ‘Do you know what you’re doing here? Are you chu-ah?’
“Sure I’m sure. You’ll be okay,” I told her. “Misty will keep him in check.”
“You’ve got to pump them six, seven, eight, nine times, downshift, and then you’ve got some brakes,” I told him.
The oil pressure and temperature gauges work. All the others; fuel, carry a gas can with five extra Gs; speedometer, listen to engine RPMs and watch the fence posts; dome light, use a flashlight; instrument panel light, what for? battery voltage, either cranks or it doesn’t; turn signals, use your hands; floating horizon indicators, there’s two, I don’t know why – it isn’t an aircraft. All that stuff, you don’t really need. Just the basics. The wipers work. On. Off.
Just the basics, like under the hood. You pop the hood (basic, easy-to-find latch), and you see a straight-six engine block, an air cleaner, and an alternator. That’s it. There’s enough extra space in the engine compartment to put a picnic basket, cooler, floor jack, and small child.
At the automotive shop where I was purchasing my third gas cap,** the kid behind the counter looked out the window at my truck and said, laughing, ‘Me and my buddy took one (a 235 Chevy engine) out and tried to blow it, just for the hell of it, and couldn’t do it.’
That’s about all you need to know. How would I describe her character? Reliable. Dependable. Can do a day’s work today and tomorrow.*** Same same woman from Montana. Don’t overload her. Don’t run her hard or fast. Check her vital fluids. If something major’s wrong, get it fixed. Let the minor shit slide. Treat her good. Keep her running straight. Keep her on the road.
____
Thunderclap In
Hey, almost forgot to tell you. Thunderclap’s IN!
I started leaning on him about having time to take culinary classes and go to the gym, but he didn’t have time for the troops, and how Hope always made time for the troops, even if Ann Margaret wasn’t with the troupe…only comedian to span five wars, count ‘em…a historical feat…got a sandwich, an aircraft carrier, and a desert golf classic named after him, co-starred with Judy Garland…brought Nancy Sinatra to Camp Rio, and he finally said, ‘Okay, okay, okay. I’ll do it. Depends on the time frame.’
Great, huh? Big surprise. Yeah, me, too. I thought he’d say no, especially after his last experience there. I don’t know if you heard. Despite his stockade experience and what people say, he’s a true patriot at heart. I know the guy.
It’s the administration, not his country. Paul’s in it more for his guilt trip and resurrecting his career, and Lee would just like to escape his country for a while, whereas Thunderclap would do it strictly for the benefit of the troops (I’ll bet you thought, ‘In Harm’s Way’ was coming, didn’t you? Sorry. Not gonna use it.).
Thunderclap was a trooper himself. He’ll do it for the troops and Hope’s memory, and all the laughs he gathered for troops on foreign soil. For all the soldiers away from home and their loved ones whom he made laugh for a little while, and forget where they were. Wow. What a mission. Makes me…gulp…some kinda way.
Even if they get everything organized in Iraq to the point American forces are withdrawn, there’ll still be a lot of work in places like Kabul and other heavily concentrated, heavily fortified areas.
That’s six of us, one Mexican, two Asians, if we can pull Su away from her tour work, one Brit, if we can work around Paul’s bowling league schedule; two Indians if Milo commits, and Thunderclap is still free, as in, not in jail; and me, enough to put the act on the road.
If we could get the Right Reverend Dr. Harold Johnson, a really funny, really black man from Indianapolis, that’d be great. Like the multi-cultural reach? With six people, we could cut the individual performance times to ten minutes each, and I wouldn’t have to go up at all, although I’d sure like to someday say that I got run off a stage in Baghdad.
Everybody is dealing with the same kind of time-frame obstacles, like inflexible commitments to their full-time jobs (Manny used to say, ‘You’ve got to be good enough to give up your day job.’) in the Real 3D World.****
As opposed to your computer screen or a figment of your imagination, which is to say, the screen could very well be one’s real, 3-D world, but before, before the Berries, before the desktop screen, before tv, before the 500-channel sleaze merchants, and even before radio got here, to the rez, a figment of one’s imagination was a true and valuable traditional cultural entertainment exercise that people practiced publicly as an art form. Oratory, or rhetoric, I think they called it. Guys like Thunderclap, he came more out of the Lenny Bruce mold.*****
Although he could prove a liability when it comes to dealing with the military and the government, especially after getting…nobody gets ‘thrown off’ a flight…(‘Comic Bothers Mary, Other Passengers On Flight’, AP 5//07/03) those passenger complaints and the flight attendant and the marshall involved.
It wasn’t what you’d call ‘a tussle’, but the incident got him removed from coach, ‘an upgrade to first class,’ he called it, even though he spent the remainder of the flight in cuffs.
The net result after a controversial round-about trip through Cuba, was his being barred from all domestic carriers within the continental U.S. So now he must depart the U.S. from Canada as a foreign national and fly back in on somebody else’s airline, effecting at least a delay or temporary detainment at any U.S. international airport (‘Comic Protests Detainment at LAX’, AP 12/26/04).
All for shooting off his mouth and pissing off everyone, just like Manny said you should never do, but which he always seems to be incapable of avoiding, even on an airplane. It’s happened twice.
Those people didn’t pay for no comedy club. All they wanted to do was get into Los Angeles, through customs, and to wherever they were going. They didn’t want some unwelcome, in-flight, low-life, coach class, no-talent, no-name wannabe comic going through his ‘Nigga UP in the White House?’ routine.
Sure, I thought it was pretty funny. Not his best stuff, but pretty funny, especially the response from around the world…people in Zimbawe and France all happy…till you got to England and Alabama…just the silent, sullen facial expressions were priceless…like people eating lemons or non-Indians reacting to tanega soup…while repeatedly asking the question with exaggerated incredulity, ‘a nigga up in the White House…? followed by no comment, just the expressions…pretty good stuff, but you can’t win over a mixed-bag captive audience like that.
Somebody’s gonna get pissed off. Somebody’s gonna get offended. You got too many races, too many ages, too many sensitivities, too many nationalities going on, too many kids…you can’t do an airplane.
A tube full of people fastened in at 30,000 feet is totally different than sitting around coffee with the boys on the rez, or a Southside Chicago comedy club.
You’re always going to get some kid asking, ‘Mommy, why is that man talking to everybody?’ or some baby crying, or some jerk in the back yelling something like, ‘Hey Fuckhead. Get back in your seat.’
Turns hostile too quick. Everything too quick. Mr. No-Neck in the back stands up, determined to personally handle the situation. Attendant eyes full of fear and concern, talking fast and sideways into a phone. Everybody’s looking. A mortified old lady shrieks hysterically as her back-from-the-tomb husband tries to calm her.
Everybody’s talking now. People in first class wonder what’s going on back in coach. Beefy hands take hold from the back, and before you know it, poof, anonymous in a chain link Guantanamo kennel cage, praying along with everybody else for Allah to smile upon the U.S. Supreme Court. Poof. Lock ‘em in the caser. Rendition. Vanish. Just like all them buffalo, huh, Mr. T. Clap? Holy Smokes, Catfish, tell me it ain’t so.
After they removed him from coach, the marshall told him if he started any shit up in first class, he’d put a muzzle on him. Thunderclap said first class or no first class, he wasn’t going to be treated like no DOG, and the guy said, ‘Up to you, Mr. Thundercloud,’ so he had a couple glasses of wine, ordered the cordon bleu and kept his mouth shut until the post-flight interrogation (‘Comic Paints Ugly Gitmo Picture’, Reuters 7/21/03). Better menu, better everything up there, anyway, he said.
So, I don’t know if we should still headline with the guy, or just go with some kind of clever idea for the whole show. Best thing for us is probably some hot all-girl Philipino band with lots of hot chicks with their asses hanging out of canary yellow patent leather short shorts, you know, like, where everybody would show up to see them, and we’d be the, whaddayacallit?...we’d be the warm-up act…the preliminary act.
Whenever I hear that word, every time, I hear the echo of Manny’s encouragement before my first tournament; ‘You make it past the preliminaries, Bic, you can advance to maybe the finals.’ he told me, unconvincingly, looking away when I looked up so our eyes didn’t meet.
As if I didn’t already know that. “Yeah, but I’ve got to wade through the quarter-finals and the semis first, Manny,” I told him. Sometimes that guy’s advice was absolutely worthless. That year, I got my ass kicked in the first preliminary round. But what the hell, I got invited.
____
Whaddaya get when you cross a right-wing talk show host and a poodle?
HA! I knew you’d get it. Not that hard to figure out.
____
Before sweat lodge I approached those two new guys from Seattle standing off to the side, and asked in an anxious voice, ‘You guys done this before?’
‘No,’ they both said, uneasiness in their voices. One of them muttered something about a sauna, but not a real, Native American sweat lodge ceremony.
They waited for me to say something, but I let the silence draw in on us, gathering fear. The older of the two was uncertain, waiting for me to tell them something about the ceremony. The younger guy was getting ready to ask me if it was my first time, too. I positioned myself so the fire could reflect the fear in my eyes when I glanced over at the lodge and whispered, ‘Is it gon’ be dark?’
The older guy started to laugh, but didn’t. ‘Yes,’ the young fella said.
____
Pimp-Out On Sanam Luang
Did I tell you about that kid and the kite?...the make-believe kite I was flying?...did I tell you about that already?...walking across the Phanang Luang, Sanam Luang or whatever it is, that great big-ass parade grounds adjacent to royal palace in Bangkok.
There’s maybe a thousand or so people hanging out, picnicking, vendors selling chicken on a stick and Pepsi and Fanta orange in sacks of crushed ice, a couple hundred flying kites, right?...stop me if you’ve already heard this…and so I’m crossing the grounds and enjoying the event or festival or whatever it was, since I like kites already…and there’s these two teenage boys coming the other way, walking right toward me, so before they notice me, I began flying my imaginary kite, tugging gently on the string and holding the ball in my other hand, my head turned up toward the sky, and watching them approach out of the corner of my eye, slowly walking right at them.
They started moving over to the right, and I moved in their path, and when they moved back to the left, I went over to the right, and just when they were a few feet away, I turned quickly and handed my string to one of the guys.
He started to reach out, then looked at my empty hands, and then looked up into the sky, no kite, and then back down at my hands while his friend pointed at him and laughed out loud, covering his mouth, while I stood there grinning.
“Mai talok,” the kid said, ‘not funny,’ as they walked away. His friend thought so. I thought so, too.
Pretty good, huh? I’d like to work it into the act some way.
____
Digger said some other comic stole my slo-mo replay routine. Said he saw a guy do it on cable tv. A slight variation, but you could tell he stole it, he said.
I could provide the details, which are pretty damned funny done live…stop and go pattern, slo-mo, got the guy beat, big-ass smile, reception, TD, spiking the ball, end zone celebration with the wavy knees, high-five-ing the fans on the way back to the bench…then the whole thing all in herky-jerky reverse, all the way back to the huddle…just like those old practice films…put Harold Johnson in stitches.
Yeah, you can’t put anything out over the internet these days without somebody stealing your idea, and then you’ve got a big court battle over somebody taking credit for something you’ve done. Like, Scarface, for instance.
Or those science lab credits for your bachelor’s degree. Yeah, you know what I’m talking about.
____
I suppose you’d like some reservation news. As you know, we’ve always got some kind of drama going on. Or trauma. Besides the teenage suicide in Oglala last week, just last week end, the girl down here on the corner hung herself. Yeah. And last year, her sister did. Too much.
People ain’t got no money, ain’t got no gas. Daily drama. Dalai Lama.
And then, here today, Lupe’s truck caught on fire on the way back from Oglala. Bad carburetor, we supposed. Leaky. Ninety-seven degrees out. Poof. That’s trauma.
Now, some will no doubt say, ‘That’s because…’, trying to attribute causal factors, like, ‘He didn’t put out tobacco’, or ‘He didn’t smudge his truck’, or ‘His old lady must’ve been pissed…’…actually, I’ve witnessed a really pissed off woman fry an entire ignition system by sheer force of psychic negativity…‘It’s totally fried,’ the mechanic said. ‘What happened?’ he asked…but, Indians are superstitious, like Misty sitting in front of a machine at the casino, having really good luck, she said, when this lady she knows came up to her and started to put her hand on her shoulder.
Aiiiiiieeeeee! Misty recoiled back, nearly coming out of the seat, hollering, “DON’T TOUCH ME!”
____
Lupe and I passed each other on the highway, waved, hit the brakes, turned off, backed up and sat talking from our truck cabs without getting out, the way we do out here.
“Where you been, Man?” I asked. “I no see you too long. You forget your bro?”
“I been with my woman,” he said. “You know how it is.”
“Yeah. You no show at sweat lodge. Last year you tell me, ‘You my best bro’ for ever and ever, amen.’ What’s the matter? You don’t know where I live? You got a truck...you got gas.”
“You know how it is,” he said again.
We met again over at Louie’s, drank coffee, and left after about an hour. On the way home his truck caught fire.
____
Toilet Paper, Over the Back
At some sun dances the dancers are treated like gods. Aiiiieeeee; they won’t let you doing anything, and helpers wait on you hand and foot. Really nice. First in line, and all that. Pretty cool. You feel special until someone brings you back down to earth. It’s not the same everywhere.
After the dance was over, I was down in main camp, feeling special and probably looking for some watermelon and a chance to talk with some supporter friends before they broke camp and headed home.
I found a couple of women friends who’d been working in the kitchen, and were sitting on lawn chairs outside their camp.
Compounded by just finishing up the dance and having recently returned from Asia, where the women leap up and wait on a man like a servant, I was struck by the difference in our liberated American women when I approached and said to those women, “Hi, Girls. Got anything to drink around here?”
One of them replied, “Yeah. There’s some water in one of those coolers over there, nodding to coolers sitting outside her rig, some thirty feet away. As I turned and walked over to her truck, she hollered, “Bring us one.”
It was Bryan and I sitting having coffee at a café with Su, our interpreter, when one of us asked what Thai men want from a woman. Illustrative of the clarity and simplicity of the thinking, Su said, “Good sa-peak, good sa-mi, good take care…fami-ly…you need for mair-lee…dtong lub ma-ma and pa-pa.”
“What’d she just say?” asked Bryan. I was the interpreter for the interpreter.
“Good speak, good smile. Take care of family. Must love mama and papa to get married,” I said to Bryan. “What else?” I asked.
“Food. Launly…clean hou…make beauti-ful. Mah-sa.”
“What’d she just say?” asked Bryan.
“Laundry…clean house…massage. Is that it?” I asked.
“Pancake. Evey woman IN the world hab pancake.”
We laughed, and she added, “No buttafly! Don’t hab too much IN the world.”
“That’s pretty much what American men want, too,” I said. Bryan asked, “Okay, now. What do Thai women want?”
“Lub only one. No chain (‘change’),” she said.
“What else?” asked Bryan.
“Cannot do man work,” she said.
“What else?”
“Sa-weet talk evey day,” she said. “Numba one make lub.”
“Is that it?”
“Money to me. Take care. No butta-fly.”
We laughed again and said, “Do you know what American women want?” Bryan and I alternated;
“Money, big. House, big. Maid, ugly. Work, same as man. Husband, good. Sensitive, very. Listener, good. Freedom, her. Father, good. Clean up after self, socks. Educated. Motivated. Drive a certain car. Help around house. Help with kids. Mow the yard. Cook. Feed the dog. In touch with feminine side. Car, hers. Bank account, hers. No back talk. Get it yourself. Up to you. Toilet seat, down.”
Su held her hands out, palms down, bent 90 degrees at the wrists, fingertips pointing together, level, then slowly lowered one hand and raised the other. “In Thailand,” she said, “not same.”
____
Milo was sitting here at the kitchen table when I finally remembered to ask him about his interest in participating in the Bob Hope Memorial Comedy Tour to Iraq and Afghanistan.
He cocked his head slightly, squinted his eyes slightly, and softly said, ‘What?’
I gave him a hyper-enthusiastic run-down of the project, the people involved , and that Thunderclap might headline our act. Milo asked, “When? What kind of time-frame are you looking at? 2008? 2009?”
“Oh, the war’s gonna be going on for some time,” I told him gleefully. “Even if they kick us out of Iraq, we’ll still have work in Afghanistan regardless of who wins.”
“Then, after the election?” Milo asked.
“Oh, yeah. After the election. We can’t pull this off with Bush in office. Of course, you’ll have to do your own writing, produce your own material, y’know, not off-the-cuff. Stuff for the troops.”
Milo pursed his lips but didn’t give a definitive answer, but to ask if it was for charity or Iraqi children’s hospitals, or something, which I hadn’t thought of, but considered a good idea. Another Indian guy from Yankton, I think it was, had done a similar thing, he said, with puppets.
“I thought we’d do it for travel, drinks and a place to stay,” I said. “But we could charge…I haven’t thought about the financing…we’re just putting it together right now."
Milo kind of nodded his head. Ask while he’s still nodding, right? “Then you’re in?” I asked. “Or should I tell them, you’ll consider it?”
Milo nodded, which for me, is as good as a definite YES, which is what I’ll tell all the others. “All depends on the time-frame,” he said.
We went on talking about other things, like a wind turbine or something. I thought it was odd that he didn’t ask me about going into a combat zone and the Department of Defense, or Thunderclap, or Paul, or Lee.
- end
*There ain’t no first footnote
**In my absence, exceedingly desperate Indians pried off my locking gas cap and drained the contents of my gas tank, in the process, screwing up the neck and lip of the tank so that replacement caps rattle loose and off, usually somewhere along Slim Buttes Road.
***that was yesterday. Today, Betsy towed Lupe back some dozen miles from the Oglala turnoff, after Lupe’s truck caught fire. Fortunately, I looked back in my mirror and saw him emerge from the truck and wave his arms frantically. We put it out with water I had on board. ‘Always carry water,’ I told him.
On the way home, I gave Betsy a pat on the dash, and told her, ‘Good job, Old Girl. You pulled a truck ten, twenty years younger than you. Hardly raised your temperature two degrees. Nice job. Tomorrow, you can rest.’
Yeah, I talk to her. You bet. Don’t you?
****seen the T-shirt?
*****More of a social critic than a comedian, wouldn’t you say? He just used comedy clubs as a truth serum platform. Although unlike Thunderclap, he didn’t go ‘over the top’ with his audience. He usually heard, ‘Right on, Man,’ as opposed to, ‘Get the hell off the stage.’
8.08
Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, SD- I gotta be driving the oldest truck on the reservation. For sure. A lot of people wave at me, thinking they should probably know someone who drives an old farm truck like that.
So, my favorite line to use on a man in his 70s or 80s is, ‘You’re probably too young to remember when Chevy came out with this truck,’ just for openers, just to see what kind of response the question can elicit.
Usually, I have to repeat it, since a lot of those old fellows are hard of hearing, then they always chuckle, draw closer, and tell me in a strained whisper what models they bought, and how long they drove them.
This conversation usually takes place at a gas pump, a parking lot, or some other place where they can see ‘Betsy’, my 1960 hunk of iron with wired-on plates expired in April of 2006. The model had an ashtray but no seat belts. Has defrost, but no place to set a drink. Cab designed for a guy with short legs. The cigarette lighter, if you wanted one, would be an ‘add-on’.
With Jesus, Buddha, Rong Po Thuot, and an eagle feather all riding along together on a bed of sage, you could say it’s a multi-denominational dashboard. I don’t know about other places, but over here, they ride together okay.
Of course, Betsy’s got some idiosyncrasies that come with her age, like the headlights just going off for no apparent reason in the ‘high beam’ mode. And when you’re going down the road, straight and level, there’s this loud ‘Clank’, like some kinda adjustment, from somewhere down in the chassis or drive train or rear axel, I can’t determine.
And then there’s no brakes, I had to tell Bo the other day after his tire went flat here and his spare wasn’t any good. He and Misty borrowed the truck to take their tires for air. Reckless maniac behind the wheel that he is, Bo’s one of the few people who I’d let drive her. When he hopped in behind the wheel, Betsy asked, ‘Do you know what you’re doing here? Are you chu-ah?’
“Sure I’m sure. You’ll be okay,” I told her. “Misty will keep him in check.”
“You’ve got to pump them six, seven, eight, nine times, downshift, and then you’ve got some brakes,” I told him.
The oil pressure and temperature gauges work. All the others; fuel, carry a gas can with five extra Gs; speedometer, listen to engine RPMs and watch the fence posts; dome light, use a flashlight; instrument panel light, what for? battery voltage, either cranks or it doesn’t; turn signals, use your hands; floating horizon indicators, there’s two, I don’t know why – it isn’t an aircraft. All that stuff, you don’t really need. Just the basics. The wipers work. On. Off.
Just the basics, like under the hood. You pop the hood (basic, easy-to-find latch), and you see a straight-six engine block, an air cleaner, and an alternator. That’s it. There’s enough extra space in the engine compartment to put a picnic basket, cooler, floor jack, and small child.
At the automotive shop where I was purchasing my third gas cap,** the kid behind the counter looked out the window at my truck and said, laughing, ‘Me and my buddy took one (a 235 Chevy engine) out and tried to blow it, just for the hell of it, and couldn’t do it.’
That’s about all you need to know. How would I describe her character? Reliable. Dependable. Can do a day’s work today and tomorrow.*** Same same woman from Montana. Don’t overload her. Don’t run her hard or fast. Check her vital fluids. If something major’s wrong, get it fixed. Let the minor shit slide. Treat her good. Keep her running straight. Keep her on the road.
____
Thunderclap In
Hey, almost forgot to tell you. Thunderclap’s IN!
I started leaning on him about having time to take culinary classes and go to the gym, but he didn’t have time for the troops, and how Hope always made time for the troops, even if Ann Margaret wasn’t with the troupe…only comedian to span five wars, count ‘em…a historical feat…got a sandwich, an aircraft carrier, and a desert golf classic named after him, co-starred with Judy Garland…brought Nancy Sinatra to Camp Rio, and he finally said, ‘Okay, okay, okay. I’ll do it. Depends on the time frame.’
Great, huh? Big surprise. Yeah, me, too. I thought he’d say no, especially after his last experience there. I don’t know if you heard. Despite his stockade experience and what people say, he’s a true patriot at heart. I know the guy.
It’s the administration, not his country. Paul’s in it more for his guilt trip and resurrecting his career, and Lee would just like to escape his country for a while, whereas Thunderclap would do it strictly for the benefit of the troops (I’ll bet you thought, ‘In Harm’s Way’ was coming, didn’t you? Sorry. Not gonna use it.).
Thunderclap was a trooper himself. He’ll do it for the troops and Hope’s memory, and all the laughs he gathered for troops on foreign soil. For all the soldiers away from home and their loved ones whom he made laugh for a little while, and forget where they were. Wow. What a mission. Makes me…gulp…some kinda way.
Even if they get everything organized in Iraq to the point American forces are withdrawn, there’ll still be a lot of work in places like Kabul and other heavily concentrated, heavily fortified areas.
That’s six of us, one Mexican, two Asians, if we can pull Su away from her tour work, one Brit, if we can work around Paul’s bowling league schedule; two Indians if Milo commits, and Thunderclap is still free, as in, not in jail; and me, enough to put the act on the road.
If we could get the Right Reverend Dr. Harold Johnson, a really funny, really black man from Indianapolis, that’d be great. Like the multi-cultural reach? With six people, we could cut the individual performance times to ten minutes each, and I wouldn’t have to go up at all, although I’d sure like to someday say that I got run off a stage in Baghdad.
Everybody is dealing with the same kind of time-frame obstacles, like inflexible commitments to their full-time jobs (Manny used to say, ‘You’ve got to be good enough to give up your day job.’) in the Real 3D World.****
As opposed to your computer screen or a figment of your imagination, which is to say, the screen could very well be one’s real, 3-D world, but before, before the Berries, before the desktop screen, before tv, before the 500-channel sleaze merchants, and even before radio got here, to the rez, a figment of one’s imagination was a true and valuable traditional cultural entertainment exercise that people practiced publicly as an art form. Oratory, or rhetoric, I think they called it. Guys like Thunderclap, he came more out of the Lenny Bruce mold.*****
Although he could prove a liability when it comes to dealing with the military and the government, especially after getting…nobody gets ‘thrown off’ a flight…(‘Comic Bothers Mary, Other Passengers On Flight’, AP 5//07/03) those passenger complaints and the flight attendant and the marshall involved.
It wasn’t what you’d call ‘a tussle’, but the incident got him removed from coach, ‘an upgrade to first class,’ he called it, even though he spent the remainder of the flight in cuffs.
The net result after a controversial round-about trip through Cuba, was his being barred from all domestic carriers within the continental U.S. So now he must depart the U.S. from Canada as a foreign national and fly back in on somebody else’s airline, effecting at least a delay or temporary detainment at any U.S. international airport (‘Comic Protests Detainment at LAX’, AP 12/26/04).
All for shooting off his mouth and pissing off everyone, just like Manny said you should never do, but which he always seems to be incapable of avoiding, even on an airplane. It’s happened twice.
Those people didn’t pay for no comedy club. All they wanted to do was get into Los Angeles, through customs, and to wherever they were going. They didn’t want some unwelcome, in-flight, low-life, coach class, no-talent, no-name wannabe comic going through his ‘Nigga UP in the White House?’ routine.
Sure, I thought it was pretty funny. Not his best stuff, but pretty funny, especially the response from around the world…people in Zimbawe and France all happy…till you got to England and Alabama…just the silent, sullen facial expressions were priceless…like people eating lemons or non-Indians reacting to tanega soup…while repeatedly asking the question with exaggerated incredulity, ‘a nigga up in the White House…? followed by no comment, just the expressions…pretty good stuff, but you can’t win over a mixed-bag captive audience like that.
Somebody’s gonna get pissed off. Somebody’s gonna get offended. You got too many races, too many ages, too many sensitivities, too many nationalities going on, too many kids…you can’t do an airplane.
A tube full of people fastened in at 30,000 feet is totally different than sitting around coffee with the boys on the rez, or a Southside Chicago comedy club.
You’re always going to get some kid asking, ‘Mommy, why is that man talking to everybody?’ or some baby crying, or some jerk in the back yelling something like, ‘Hey Fuckhead. Get back in your seat.’
Turns hostile too quick. Everything too quick. Mr. No-Neck in the back stands up, determined to personally handle the situation. Attendant eyes full of fear and concern, talking fast and sideways into a phone. Everybody’s looking. A mortified old lady shrieks hysterically as her back-from-the-tomb husband tries to calm her.
Everybody’s talking now. People in first class wonder what’s going on back in coach. Beefy hands take hold from the back, and before you know it, poof, anonymous in a chain link Guantanamo kennel cage, praying along with everybody else for Allah to smile upon the U.S. Supreme Court. Poof. Lock ‘em in the caser. Rendition. Vanish. Just like all them buffalo, huh, Mr. T. Clap? Holy Smokes, Catfish, tell me it ain’t so.
After they removed him from coach, the marshall told him if he started any shit up in first class, he’d put a muzzle on him. Thunderclap said first class or no first class, he wasn’t going to be treated like no DOG, and the guy said, ‘Up to you, Mr. Thundercloud,’ so he had a couple glasses of wine, ordered the cordon bleu and kept his mouth shut until the post-flight interrogation (‘Comic Paints Ugly Gitmo Picture’, Reuters 7/21/03). Better menu, better everything up there, anyway, he said.
So, I don’t know if we should still headline with the guy, or just go with some kind of clever idea for the whole show. Best thing for us is probably some hot all-girl Philipino band with lots of hot chicks with their asses hanging out of canary yellow patent leather short shorts, you know, like, where everybody would show up to see them, and we’d be the, whaddayacallit?...we’d be the warm-up act…the preliminary act.
Whenever I hear that word, every time, I hear the echo of Manny’s encouragement before my first tournament; ‘You make it past the preliminaries, Bic, you can advance to maybe the finals.’ he told me, unconvincingly, looking away when I looked up so our eyes didn’t meet.
As if I didn’t already know that. “Yeah, but I’ve got to wade through the quarter-finals and the semis first, Manny,” I told him. Sometimes that guy’s advice was absolutely worthless. That year, I got my ass kicked in the first preliminary round. But what the hell, I got invited.
____
Whaddaya get when you cross a right-wing talk show host and a poodle?
HA! I knew you’d get it. Not that hard to figure out.
____
Before sweat lodge I approached those two new guys from Seattle standing off to the side, and asked in an anxious voice, ‘You guys done this before?’
‘No,’ they both said, uneasiness in their voices. One of them muttered something about a sauna, but not a real, Native American sweat lodge ceremony.
They waited for me to say something, but I let the silence draw in on us, gathering fear. The older of the two was uncertain, waiting for me to tell them something about the ceremony. The younger guy was getting ready to ask me if it was my first time, too. I positioned myself so the fire could reflect the fear in my eyes when I glanced over at the lodge and whispered, ‘Is it gon’ be dark?’
The older guy started to laugh, but didn’t. ‘Yes,’ the young fella said.
____
Pimp-Out On Sanam Luang
Did I tell you about that kid and the kite?...the make-believe kite I was flying?...did I tell you about that already?...walking across the Phanang Luang, Sanam Luang or whatever it is, that great big-ass parade grounds adjacent to royal palace in Bangkok.
There’s maybe a thousand or so people hanging out, picnicking, vendors selling chicken on a stick and Pepsi and Fanta orange in sacks of crushed ice, a couple hundred flying kites, right?...stop me if you’ve already heard this…and so I’m crossing the grounds and enjoying the event or festival or whatever it was, since I like kites already…and there’s these two teenage boys coming the other way, walking right toward me, so before they notice me, I began flying my imaginary kite, tugging gently on the string and holding the ball in my other hand, my head turned up toward the sky, and watching them approach out of the corner of my eye, slowly walking right at them.
They started moving over to the right, and I moved in their path, and when they moved back to the left, I went over to the right, and just when they were a few feet away, I turned quickly and handed my string to one of the guys.
He started to reach out, then looked at my empty hands, and then looked up into the sky, no kite, and then back down at my hands while his friend pointed at him and laughed out loud, covering his mouth, while I stood there grinning.
“Mai talok,” the kid said, ‘not funny,’ as they walked away. His friend thought so. I thought so, too.
Pretty good, huh? I’d like to work it into the act some way.
____
Digger said some other comic stole my slo-mo replay routine. Said he saw a guy do it on cable tv. A slight variation, but you could tell he stole it, he said.
I could provide the details, which are pretty damned funny done live…stop and go pattern, slo-mo, got the guy beat, big-ass smile, reception, TD, spiking the ball, end zone celebration with the wavy knees, high-five-ing the fans on the way back to the bench…then the whole thing all in herky-jerky reverse, all the way back to the huddle…just like those old practice films…put Harold Johnson in stitches.
Yeah, you can’t put anything out over the internet these days without somebody stealing your idea, and then you’ve got a big court battle over somebody taking credit for something you’ve done. Like, Scarface, for instance.
Or those science lab credits for your bachelor’s degree. Yeah, you know what I’m talking about.
____
I suppose you’d like some reservation news. As you know, we’ve always got some kind of drama going on. Or trauma. Besides the teenage suicide in Oglala last week, just last week end, the girl down here on the corner hung herself. Yeah. And last year, her sister did. Too much.
People ain’t got no money, ain’t got no gas. Daily drama. Dalai Lama.
And then, here today, Lupe’s truck caught on fire on the way back from Oglala. Bad carburetor, we supposed. Leaky. Ninety-seven degrees out. Poof. That’s trauma.
Now, some will no doubt say, ‘That’s because…’, trying to attribute causal factors, like, ‘He didn’t put out tobacco’, or ‘He didn’t smudge his truck’, or ‘His old lady must’ve been pissed…’…actually, I’ve witnessed a really pissed off woman fry an entire ignition system by sheer force of psychic negativity…‘It’s totally fried,’ the mechanic said. ‘What happened?’ he asked…but, Indians are superstitious, like Misty sitting in front of a machine at the casino, having really good luck, she said, when this lady she knows came up to her and started to put her hand on her shoulder.
Aiiiiiieeeeee! Misty recoiled back, nearly coming out of the seat, hollering, “DON’T TOUCH ME!”
____
Lupe and I passed each other on the highway, waved, hit the brakes, turned off, backed up and sat talking from our truck cabs without getting out, the way we do out here.
“Where you been, Man?” I asked. “I no see you too long. You forget your bro?”
“I been with my woman,” he said. “You know how it is.”
“Yeah. You no show at sweat lodge. Last year you tell me, ‘You my best bro’ for ever and ever, amen.’ What’s the matter? You don’t know where I live? You got a truck...you got gas.”
“You know how it is,” he said again.
We met again over at Louie’s, drank coffee, and left after about an hour. On the way home his truck caught fire.
____
Toilet Paper, Over the Back
At some sun dances the dancers are treated like gods. Aiiiieeeee; they won’t let you doing anything, and helpers wait on you hand and foot. Really nice. First in line, and all that. Pretty cool. You feel special until someone brings you back down to earth. It’s not the same everywhere.
After the dance was over, I was down in main camp, feeling special and probably looking for some watermelon and a chance to talk with some supporter friends before they broke camp and headed home.
I found a couple of women friends who’d been working in the kitchen, and were sitting on lawn chairs outside their camp.
Compounded by just finishing up the dance and having recently returned from Asia, where the women leap up and wait on a man like a servant, I was struck by the difference in our liberated American women when I approached and said to those women, “Hi, Girls. Got anything to drink around here?”
One of them replied, “Yeah. There’s some water in one of those coolers over there, nodding to coolers sitting outside her rig, some thirty feet away. As I turned and walked over to her truck, she hollered, “Bring us one.”
It was Bryan and I sitting having coffee at a café with Su, our interpreter, when one of us asked what Thai men want from a woman. Illustrative of the clarity and simplicity of the thinking, Su said, “Good sa-peak, good sa-mi, good take care…fami-ly…you need for mair-lee…dtong lub ma-ma and pa-pa.”
“What’d she just say?” asked Bryan. I was the interpreter for the interpreter.
“Good speak, good smile. Take care of family. Must love mama and papa to get married,” I said to Bryan. “What else?” I asked.
“Food. Launly…clean hou…make beauti-ful. Mah-sa.”
“What’d she just say?” asked Bryan.
“Laundry…clean house…massage. Is that it?” I asked.
“Pancake. Evey woman IN the world hab pancake.”
We laughed, and she added, “No buttafly! Don’t hab too much IN the world.”
“That’s pretty much what American men want, too,” I said. Bryan asked, “Okay, now. What do Thai women want?”
“Lub only one. No chain (‘change’),” she said.
“What else?” asked Bryan.
“Cannot do man work,” she said.
“What else?”
“Sa-weet talk evey day,” she said. “Numba one make lub.”
“Is that it?”
“Money to me. Take care. No butta-fly.”
We laughed again and said, “Do you know what American women want?” Bryan and I alternated;
“Money, big. House, big. Maid, ugly. Work, same as man. Husband, good. Sensitive, very. Listener, good. Freedom, her. Father, good. Clean up after self, socks. Educated. Motivated. Drive a certain car. Help around house. Help with kids. Mow the yard. Cook. Feed the dog. In touch with feminine side. Car, hers. Bank account, hers. No back talk. Get it yourself. Up to you. Toilet seat, down.”
Su held her hands out, palms down, bent 90 degrees at the wrists, fingertips pointing together, level, then slowly lowered one hand and raised the other. “In Thailand,” she said, “not same.”
____
Milo was sitting here at the kitchen table when I finally remembered to ask him about his interest in participating in the Bob Hope Memorial Comedy Tour to Iraq and Afghanistan.
He cocked his head slightly, squinted his eyes slightly, and softly said, ‘What?’
I gave him a hyper-enthusiastic run-down of the project, the people involved , and that Thunderclap might headline our act. Milo asked, “When? What kind of time-frame are you looking at? 2008? 2009?”
“Oh, the war’s gonna be going on for some time,” I told him gleefully. “Even if they kick us out of Iraq, we’ll still have work in Afghanistan regardless of who wins.”
“Then, after the election?” Milo asked.
“Oh, yeah. After the election. We can’t pull this off with Bush in office. Of course, you’ll have to do your own writing, produce your own material, y’know, not off-the-cuff. Stuff for the troops.”
Milo pursed his lips but didn’t give a definitive answer, but to ask if it was for charity or Iraqi children’s hospitals, or something, which I hadn’t thought of, but considered a good idea. Another Indian guy from Yankton, I think it was, had done a similar thing, he said, with puppets.
“I thought we’d do it for travel, drinks and a place to stay,” I said. “But we could charge…I haven’t thought about the financing…we’re just putting it together right now."
Milo kind of nodded his head. Ask while he’s still nodding, right? “Then you’re in?” I asked. “Or should I tell them, you’ll consider it?”
Milo nodded, which for me, is as good as a definite YES, which is what I’ll tell all the others. “All depends on the time-frame,” he said.
We went on talking about other things, like a wind turbine or something. I thought it was odd that he didn’t ask me about going into a combat zone and the Department of Defense, or Thunderclap, or Paul, or Lee.
- end
*There ain’t no first footnote
**In my absence, exceedingly desperate Indians pried off my locking gas cap and drained the contents of my gas tank, in the process, screwing up the neck and lip of the tank so that replacement caps rattle loose and off, usually somewhere along Slim Buttes Road.
***that was yesterday. Today, Betsy towed Lupe back some dozen miles from the Oglala turnoff, after Lupe’s truck caught fire. Fortunately, I looked back in my mirror and saw him emerge from the truck and wave his arms frantically. We put it out with water I had on board. ‘Always carry water,’ I told him.
On the way home, I gave Betsy a pat on the dash, and told her, ‘Good job, Old Girl. You pulled a truck ten, twenty years younger than you. Hardly raised your temperature two degrees. Nice job. Tomorrow, you can rest.’
Yeah, I talk to her. You bet. Don’t you?
****seen the T-shirt?
*****More of a social critic than a comedian, wouldn’t you say? He just used comedy clubs as a truth serum platform. Although unlike Thunderclap, he didn’t go ‘over the top’ with his audience. He usually heard, ‘Right on, Man,’ as opposed to, ‘Get the hell off the stage.’
8.08
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