Bad Dog (Excerpt) by GenPop Books

Thet i mei s1 9 6 8 . Thet i mei st hepr e s e nt . Ba dDo gi st hef i c t i ona l me moi rofaf i r s t g e ne r a t i on Ame r i c a n, awr i t e rdi s i l l u s i one dwi t ht hel a s tha l fc e nt u r yofhi sc ou nt r y ’ shi s t or y . Hei sak i d whog r a du a t e df i r s tf r om Bos t on’ sRox bu r ys t r e e t st he nf r om Ha r v a r d,ama ni nhi ss i x t i e s wa t c hi ngVi e t na mr e pl a y e di nI r a q ,adr a f tdodg e rf r om af a mi l yofv e t e r a ns ,ay ou ngma n whos epr omi s et oac hi l dt of i ndhe rmi s s i ngf r i e ndi smor ei mpor t a nt t ha nhi sf l i g ht t oCa na da t oa v oi dt r i a l f ordr a f te v a s i on. Wi t haVe r montdou bl ehomi c i dea ndk i dna ppi nga ti t sc e nt e r , Ba dDo gt a k e st her e a de rf r omar u r a l f a r mhou s ei nt oat a l ea bou tf or e i g nwa r sa ndt hel i e st ha t ha v el e du si nt owa r s , at a l eofl i v i ngt hr ou g ht wobou t sofna t i ona l ma dne s s .

ADVANCEPRAISEFORBAD DOG “ Ba dDo gi sar e ma r k a bl enov e li nmor ewa y st ha none ,s t a r t i ngwi t ht hedi a l og u e .I t ' ss ma r t a ndf a s ta ndr e a l ,ba r eofe x pl i c a t i on,t hek i ndoft a l ks c r e e nwr i t e r sa i mf or .Phi l pi n,t hou g h, doe ss ome t hi ngI ' v ene v e rq u i t es e e nbe f or e ,e mbe ddi ngt hedi s t i l l e ddi a l og u ei nana r r a t i v e t ha t a l mos t s e e msa noppos i t el a ng u a g e —awi l dl ydi f f u s i v emonol og u ei ns i det het e l l e r ' sbr a i n, r a ng i ngu nr e s t r i c t e dt hr ou g hme mor i e s , r i f f sonhi s t or y , ou t br e a k sofa ng e r , t hel os tdr e a msof Ame r i c a . Ont hewa yt obr e a k i ngt hes t a nda r dr u l e soff i c t i on, Ba dDo gde l i v e r ss ome t hi ngt ha t l i e sa tt hehe a r tofe v e r ynov e l —ou rne e dt oma k es e ns eoft hewor l d. ” OSEPHI NEHUMPHREYS, AUTHOROFNOWHEREE LSEON E ARTH —J “ Ba dDo gi sa f i c t i ona l me moi ra bou tc r i mea ndl i f ebya na u t horwhou nde r s t a ndsbot hwe l l . Att hec e nt e roft het a l ei sadou bl emu r de ra ndt hea bdu c t i onofac hi l d, bu tt hebi g g e s tc r i me s ofa l l a r et hel i e spe r pe t r a t e dbyag ov e r nme ntbou nda ndde t e r mi ne dt owa g ewa r . He a ddown t her a bbi thol e sofVi e t na ma ndI r a qwi t hat r i ppy , di s i l l u s i one dg u i dewhor e f u s e st oda nc et o t hedr u mbe a t sofde a t h. You ' l l f e e l c ompe l l e dt or e a dnons t opbu t f or c e dt opa u s et oc ont e mpl a t et het r u t hsone a c hpa g e . Anu nf or g e t t a bl er e a d. ” CRI ME AND FI VE MYSTERY NOVELS — DIANE FANNING,AUTHOR OF TEN WORKSOF TRUEI NCLUDI NG T WI STED R EASON, THEMOSTRECENTI N THEL UCI NDAP I ERCESERI ES “ Ph i l p i ns t a r t sa t af l a t r u na n dn e v e r o n c es l o wsd o wn . He r ei smu r d e r a n dk i d n a p p i n gs e e nt h r o u g h t hel e nsofag ood he a r t e dd r a f td od g e rwhos ema nt r ai s‘ Re a l i t yd oe snotha v emyc ons e nt . ’ ” ESSI EHUNTER, AUTHOROFB LOOD MUSI C —J “ Yo uma ya s ky o u r s e l f , a sId i d , a sy o ut i p t o ei n t ot h ef i r s t c h a p t e r , AmIi nt h e n o v e l o r i s t h i s af o r wa r d ? Ohy o ua r ei ni t a l r i g h t . I ni t d e e p ! An dt h eg a u n t l e t i st h r o wne a r l ya n do f t e n . ” YM F AHEY, AUTHOR, POET, MUSI CI AN, AND THEMI ND BEHI ND THELI NERNOTESTO THE —J I MIHENDRI XALBUM A XI S: J BOLD ASLOVE

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B A D

J O H NP H I L P I NB A DD O GG E N P O PB O O K S

NOVEL / CRI ME/ WAR

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D O G ac r i me

no v e l by

J OHNPHILPIN

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BAD DOG

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BAD DOG a crime novel by

John Philpin

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John Philpin, Bad Dog ÂŠ 2012 John Philpin First edition, January 2012 ISBN-13: 978-0-9823594-5-7 Printed and bound in the USA. Library of Congress Control Number: 2011939155 For information regarding GenPop Books distribution, personal orders, and catalogue requests, please visit our website at www.genpopbooks.com. Reproduction of selections from this book, for non-commercial personal or educational purposes, is permitted and encouraged, provided the Author and Publisher are acknowledged in the reproduction. Reproduction for sale, rent, or other use involving financial transaction is prohibited except by permission of the Author and Publisher.

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IN MEMORY Paul Robbins, 1939-2008 at high tea, rain tapped the windows, puddled in the yard, forged a weary dreary afternoon for strawberry jam and clotted cream smothering scones fresh from the oven, paper crowns to top us off in the gray, two days from Christmas

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I pay nothing to be trained. My dog is not for sale. Christian Peet, Big A merican Trip That’s one more 4th of July come and gone . . . 5-Track, “Skull Mountain” If you can’t laugh about it, it ain’t worth knowin’. Uncle John, over lunch, 1998 There’s a way you’re expected to obey Don’t bite the hand that feeds you Don’t you know what freedom means Bad dog John Trudell, “Bad Dog”

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ONE Lines Scrawled on the Queen’s Backside

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the night music plays no one notices, bothers to say, the war went on without you, is all over now no one wants to lose the touch that follows fear, the folding of two into one that arrives on the heels of violence thought and doneno one really wants the war to end Tolly Felch, â&#x20AC;&#x153;Night Musicâ&#x20AC;?

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ABSOLUTELY NO IDLING There are two kinds of people on this Good Earth: those who patiently proceed page by page through an Agatha Christie to the stunning conclusion, and those who flip to the final chapter for the denouement. Whichever you are, if you don’t wish to confront the end of the world—your last stop on the blue bus line—close this book now, replace it on the shelf, and walk away. I asked my editor, “Does someone have to die in the first paragraph—a grotesque act of violence, a corpse mouldering on the closet floor, a gunshot in black night heard only by a cat who twitches his whiskers and a neighbor who smiles—or can I provide a fair and balanced distribution of slaughter?” “It’s the hook,” my editor said. “You have to grab your readers. You are in a fierce competition. Think of books that have caught your attention, and read the opening paragraphs. It’s simple marketing.” I thought of Dickens, of course: It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.... Advertising guru Philip Dusenberry, who helped winch a B-movie actor into the White House, believes that “writing advertisements is the second most profitable form of writing. The first, of course, is ransom notes.”

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“Consider this book a ransom note,” I told my editor, “and when the ransom is paid, I’m absconding.” I am living through madness twice, but I don’t consider it something to brag about. The veterans of our wars live in cardboard boxes; the victims of our storms float dead in flooded streets; the vagrants from our factories beg food stamps at the welfare office. Every time The Big Fool takes a shit, he wipes himself with the Constitution. We’re rotting, and we’re starting to smell bad. My teachers told me I was lucky to live in America, where any kid can grow up to be president, where I am free to speak my mind, where I can receive a decent wage for a decent day’s work, where diligence is rewarded, and where honesty is its own reward. How did we metamorphose from a band of plucky Puritans into a nation of liars? I am neither Puritan nor pagan. If I have a religious affiliation, it is with privacy and solitude. I left the larger world in the late 1960s, and visit only when absolutely unavoidable. Yesterday was such an occasion. I drove from my home in Vermont to the airport in Hartford, Connecticut. When I stopped briefly in front of the terminal, I spotted a new sign: ABSOLUTELY NO IDLING. The warning was a cognitive grenade. Did it mean no parking? If so, why not say so? Or, did it express concern about air pollution, and should I shut off the engine, in which case I would appear to be parking? Perhaps it was directed at pedestrians, an instruction not to loiter. In any event, I froze. My wife waited patiently for me to lift her bag from the trunk to the sidewalk. She was off to Charleston, South Carolina, for an informal reunion with college friends from Duke. “What does it mean?” she asked, following my gaze. “I have no idea,” I said, relieved that I was not alone in my confusion. I retrieved her suitcase, popped its handle and readied it for rolling. “Have a good trip,” I said as we embraced. I watched her disappear into the terminal, then looked again at the sign. There was a cop at the terminal doors, a young fellow of immense proportions equipped with every gizmo and doodad imaginable. Would it be idle of me to approach and ask him the meaning of the sign? Would he think me a smartass? What if he

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didn’t know the meaning of the sign? Would he think me a terrorist? I certainly resemble one—long hair tied back, full beard, casual to shoddy attire—and he was there to capture one. In 2001, press secretary Ari Fleischer warned us all to watch what we say, watch what we do. When nobody decked him, I knew we were in trouble. Rather than risk detainment and having to explain myself—another mind bomb: EXPLAIN YOURSELF!—I pulled into traffic and started the long drive back to the sanity and security of the mountains. By the time I reached the Vermont border and breathed a sigh of relief at having survived yet another brief exposure to the high-speed, acquisitive, fashionable, anxietyridden, divided, lower forty-seven, I was sure I could never explain myself—certainly not adequately, and perhaps not at all. I stopped at the visitors’ center, unwound myself from the car, and stretched. My knees were sore, my back stiff—arthritis, the docs said—and I stared blankly at the surrounding hills of greening trees. Thirty-five years ago when I drove back from Boston on two-lane state roads, I’d stop the car in the late-night blackness as soon as we entered Vermont and take a leak at the side of the road. I was marking my territory, my wife said, and maybe I was. The act was premeditated. I planned to stand in the darkest hours and piss on Earth. Next year’s Christmas cards will have a photo. Driving at night is difficult now, and two-lane blacktop out of the question. My eyes are slow to adjust to the challenges of light and dark, and oncoming brights blind me. The highways are more direct anyway, I rationalize, and sitting in the car will cripple me if I prolong my infrequent trips. So I paused, used the rest room, stretched, walked through the visitors’ center, and sketched a rough outline of the next five days. The book was giving me trouble. Isn’t everyone writing several? I’d written eight, nine if you counted the one my agent was still shopping around. All had given occasional pause, but none had been quite so personal in content, and not one had stopped me so dead in my tracks. I was idling instead of explaining myself. It’s not as if I didn’t have other things to do. There was cutting the grass—and after six days of rain, you can just imagine—rescuing my rosa rugosa from siege by dandelions, vacuuming the downstairs, collecting and sorting the recyclables, and eliminating all traces of the four pints of Boddington’s Pub Ale I’d swallowed.

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The ale was a binge, of course. At my age, one doesn’t dare engage in a daily diet of brew. The forty-eight-hour recovery spawns neglect, and an effect on my universe similar to six days of rain. When I finally did haul myself from the sofa, the cat, a longhaired black beast named Mouse, after Walter Mosley’s psychopathic force for the good, demanded food and water. I wandered the house with a teabag in my hand. Mouse doesn’t mind my occasional dissolute adventures provided I don’t trip over him, punt his water dish, or otherwise pollute his world with my own. Like all cats, Mouse is a narcissist; like some cats, he’s also neurotic, requiring an order to his world, an unwavering structure that is never violated unless he is the one to leave the path. In this way, he is much like us, albeit without the guilt and neverending self-analysis. When I left the rest area and resumed my drive north, insight hit me like a chunk of firewood landing on bare toes: Everything happens twice, or not at all. I’d written the words years earlier in a short story I’d stuck in a drawer. The words had a narrow meaning then, specific to the story—a couple on a late-night trip to the beach, buzzing F. Lee Bailey’s Marshfield home while Albert DeSalvo escaped from the State Prison for the Criminally Insane at Bridgewater, Massachusetts. The words transcended their narrow meaning and became my third brain blast in twenty-four hours. The book had gone dead in the water because 2006 was doing a Yogi Berra of 1968. I was no longer eligible to commit murder, and there were other differences, to be sure, but America was waging an undeclared, unreasonable, ill-advised, genocidal war, this time in the Middle East and South Asia. The affair was engineered and ill-managed by a president who called Texas home, supported in his malevolence by men and women of, I assumed, reasonably good faith, whose head channels were clear for Manchurian-style manipulation. We were as mired in Iraq (sand) as we had been in Vietnam (swamp). Ideologues piloted the nation, intimidated and manipulated the press, and labeled protesters un-patriotic, subversive, enemies of American Values (i.e., no tits on the fifty-yard line) and the American Way of Life (i.e., the freedom to acquire). This generation was tame, easily confined in free-speech zones—“You go over

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there, under the elevated train, and say whatever you want. You are even permitted to cuss.” They had no soundtrack, and gone was the holiday atmosphere of sit-ins, be-ins, smoke-ins, teach-ins, and joyous levitations of the Pentagon. The craziness had come again, but this time in a no-frills package. In 1968, the evil threat was communism—a little red book and a box of dominoes. If we failed to halt the communist pandemic in the jungles of Southeast Asia, we’d be waging urban war on the hills of San Francisco. The 2006 edition of The Threat was Islamist terrorism. Contrary to intelligence assessments characterizing alQaeda as an international band of unholy brigands networked to destroy our freedoms, al-Qaeda—The Base—was an idea born of resistance to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in the 1980s, and sponsored by our CIA. If South Vietnam was our beachhead in the war on communism, we were told, Iraq played that role in the war on terrorism. Just as our invasion of South Vietnam fueled resistance to American expansionism, our invasion of Iraq increased the frequency of acts of terror. Anyway, what the hell were we doing in Iraq? Al Qaeda was in Afghanistan. They didn’t join the party in Baghdad until after the invasion. Did this shit have to happen twice in one lifetime? When that question popped into my interior monologue, the stop for Boddington’s was a no-brainer. One shit-faced, blocked writer coming up. The thought in seven words throbbed like a toothache. Then it seemed a natural for haiku. everything happens warrior’s insanity twice or not at all The Boddington’s worked its magic, and the dam broke. I was playing bridge online, trying to count the points in my hand and read news summaries at the same time. I bid one club. Administration officials again hyped the progress made in Iraq, including three democratic elections. West passed. My partner bid a spade. In January 1968, Lyndon Johnson offered his assessment of the state of the union, pointing out that South Vietnam had held three elections “in the midst of war and under the constant threat of violence.” I held four spades to the king and twelve points.

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World history is war history. U.S. history is war-with-its-ownmythology history. Which is why, each Fourth of July, kids are dragged and carried to The Parade. In psych one it’s called conditioning. When the drill team slaps their rifle butts on the pavement, and the guns bounce back into their hands to be shouldered and flipped and caught again, the children at the side of the road are not learning of heroes, or successful revolution. They want to be the men and women in uniform marching down Main Street to the applause of friends and neighbors, and no one has educated them about body bags. America hates war. We were provoked. They attacked our allies. We are a peace-loving people. History is fiction, one long spin job. My Lai. Fallujah. “Oh, and Daddy? I want to be a soldier.” I switched on the BBC. They were interviewing a man who’d been heavily invested in Enron when the crap hit the Cuisinart. He was out $250,000. Two billion bucks in pensions had gone into the toilet. At the end, fury at lost jobs and savings obscured the story of a company that thrived on notional value—fanciful, unreal, fictive, imagined, whimsical notions of truth. I offered a three-spade bid, my partner went to four, then promptly went down one. It was time to get serious. Lyndon Johnson sat on the shitter while being briefed by his aides. He lied us into war, and he told raunchy, racist jokes while promoting civil rights. But LBJ issued only eleven signing statements—his qualms about the constitutionality of bills passed by Congress. The Current Occupant tossed them out like confetti, knocking at the door of one thousand signing statements in six years, the whole of Johnson’s tenure. There is no need to veto legislation when you can offer the illusion of compliance while claiming the law does not apply to you. If rules don’t apply to the head honcho, if he can decide which rules he’ll obey, why shouldn’t I do the same? The last bit of turbid reasoning was rhetorical. I sit with no begging bowl for freedom. Members of the holy family have turned up on grilled cheese sandwiches and pizza pans. Cafeterias in the House of Representatives offered Freedom Fries for a buck-twenty-five. The Big Fool stood in front of a banner declaring MISSION ACCOMPLISHED and said, “Major combat operations in Iraq

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have ended. In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed. And now our coalition is engaged in securing and reconstructing that country.” He hadn’t caught his breath before he said we were returning to the moon, then traveling on to Mars. He declared himself the decider—he decides, not us—the antithesis of a republic. Then he called himself the “commander guy.” Life as an American has become one long trip into late afternoon—somewhere between daylight and black night, in those moments we know as the gloaming. Swifts and nighthawks dip and soar in wide arcs in the graying sky, but it’s not quite time for bats to circle the garage and swoop low over the picnic table. An acid cloud came to earth in 1963 and lingered until 1969. It was a time of dreams and desperation, drunken days, Day-Glo nightmares, schemes to stay alive, funerals, madhouses filled with the sane, a killer soundtrack, and murder. I gaze out my window now, thirty-eight years later, and I see the new haze—a world filled with evil-doers, plastic wrap, duct tape, and bad tunes—and I know the toilet has backed up again. Revisionists—the folks who write history—view the sixties through a political kaleidoscope, as if that fragmented, tubular perspective is the only reality. Their artificial constructs frame a discussion unbiased by experience, they say. They are smug and brittle, tenured at one university or another, anchored with payments on the Lincoln Navigator and the second home in Vermont. With the ebb of my Boddington’s, I found a blanket and crashed. I fell asleep listening to the Beatles, and thinking I was too old for this life.

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MANNERS Boston. Late summer, 1968. The portraits on the courtroom walls were of old white men— dour, frowning, distant, sour men of old wars of words. Leaving their flintlocks at the door, they walked inside wearing white wigs and black robes and, as they sentenced their brothers and sisters to death by hanging, stood as models of reason and civilized discourse. I heard the one with a bulbous nose and soot-black eyes say, “This woman is a witch.” The men of the jury—all old white men, all property-owning, church-attending protectors of the town and guardians of the faith—nodded their affirmation. The witch was sentenced to be hanged on Gallows Hill. And were there male witches, I wondered, quickly answering my own question. They were the wizards, the Harry Potters of 1692. Giles Corey did nothing, but his spectre visited local women at the most private of moments. Corey was eighty years old—not a victim of adolescence like Harry—a farmer and member of the church in good standing. He was interrogated, he and his wife imprisoned. Corey refused to participate in the game of laws and gods. For this offense he was sentenced to be pressed—buried beneath large stones placed one at a time on his body until the air was crushed from his lungs, his tongue extruded, and blood spilled from his mouth.

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What did they do then? They couldn’t very well leave him there. Someone had to remove the rocks and see to the burial. Was there risk of contamination, demons or vagrant curses that might afflict those who carried the corpse to unconsecrated ground and dug the grave? Did someone watch the diggers, monitor them from a distance for a certain number of days in the event they or their spectres began shaking uncontrollably, spinning in place and shouting in obscure tongues, or doing the jackhammer dance between the legs of sleeping village maidens? I stretched and yawned. My attorney, Alan “Pudge” Leopold, said, “Don’t do that,” and extended his arm to lower my arms. Stretching and yawning signal a disrespect for the court, an indifference to the proceedings, to the orderly invocation of statutes and precedents—the same laws used to teach Giles Corey the power of the state to enforce its will. Maybe Corey had mastered the art of astrally projecting his penis into neighborhood virginal vaginas, depositing demon seed, then flitting out the window like a carnally-enlightened midnight breeze. It’s doubtful that seventeenth-century rape laws anticipated wizardly violations, so the old white men of that day invoked their Higher Law. They wore Captain Midnight decoder rings, slapped each other on the ass with cricket bats, and brayed prayers to the heavens. “You need to lighten up, Pudge,” I said. “It’s your life,” he whispered. And that was what I had been trying to tell the old white men at my draft board. The life I was living in 1968—whatever I chose to do with it—was mine, not theirs. If I claimed conscientiousobjector status, they said, there were forms I could complete and my application would be given due consideration. “I don’t want to join your club,” I said. “I don’t want to wear a uniform and shoot people. I don’t want to wear a uniform and empty bedpans.” It wasn’t that I didn’t appreciate what Leopold was doing for me. I did, and I’d told him so, but in recent months I had moved beyond tact. When it became necessary to destroy a village to save it, when photos of American soldiers smiling over the severed heads of Vietnamese turned up in Boston Avatar, and when history

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became a series of manmade, catastrophic horrors separated by days, my world turned inside-out. “It’s hard to give a shit,” I told my lawyer. I sat in the courtroom, Pudge Leopold at my side, the whitehaired Judge O’Sullivan on his dais, a jury of my peers about to be empaneled to decide what freedom means. For four years at Harvard I’d sat with friends over pints of ale, smoked Canadian filter-tips, and discussed theology, government, race, capitalism, crime. Were there any moral absolutes, we asked. Thou shalt not kill seemed a good example, but it was not. The government’s incursion in Southeast Asia was shifting into a higher gear as elected officials prepared to leave millions dead. It was personal. Lyndon Johnson wanted to kill me. He’d scheduled a Texas barbecue in the jungles of Vietnam, and my name was on the menu. All he needed was an excuse—a North Vietnamese patrol boat, say, firing on a couple of American destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin. In a telephone conversation, Johnson asked his Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, “Now, where are these torpedoes coming from?” “Well, we don’t know,” McNamara answered. “Presumably from these unidentified craft that I mentioned to you a moment ago.” And the U.S. war planes in the vicinity, Johnson asked, what were they doing? From the President’s man in a fog: “Well, presumably the planes are attacking the . . . the ships.” A school of fish on the sonar, perhaps, or the ship’s own propeller, but no North Vietnamese patrol boats bent on sinking the destroyers Maddox and C. Turner Joy. The two warships fired into the night as their air support circled above and saw nothing. Johnson, unmoved by reality, told congressional leaders that “our boys” were floating in the water. This was not politically expedient speech. These were lies told by boss liars. The truth, I was certain, was that Nguyen Cao Ky had powered up his ten-horsepower Evinrude and guided his sixteen-foot flatboat through the bay and into the gulf. He planned a quiet evening of shark fishing—baiting his hook with slabs cut from the side of

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a dog, sucking down Budweiser pounders, and smoking the best shit he’d had in months—when the whole U.S. Navy unloaded on him. Thus, there was a war. Over drinks in Leech’s Beer Garden, I was outnumbered. There would be no questioning the veracity of the Office of the President. The Office existed independently of its occupant. If the occupant preferred to take meetings and wage wars in the shitter, and if we considered that behavior offensive, we could march to the polls, cast ballots, and wait to see another old white man buy The Office. When I offered that in a republic all power rests with the citizens, and the only governmental powers are those ceded by the citizens, my cohorts waved me off. When I suggested that the aims of democracy might be colliding with the aims of capitalism, they flipped me the bird. “It’s all the same,” they said, like the chorus in a Greek tragedy just before the sky falls. At Leech’s, faith in a god won the day, every day, ale after ale. A majority at the table owned the certainty of deity and were content with their prospects. The waiting list to enter the National Guard didn’t mean shit to them. Most of them held deferments, medical diagnoses—eyes, ears, neck, back—bought and paid for. Any confusion I experienced was my problem. When Robert McNamara visited Harvard in the fall of 1966, nearly one thousand students surrounded his car to protest the war, the draft, McNamara’s presence on the campus, and the litany of lies pouring from Washington. The Secretary of Defense stood on his car and answered questions—each answer lost in a deafening storm of taunts and jeers. Were we uncivil? Why graciously accept a fool’s errand in Southeast Asia that can end in death, maiming, or psychological infarction? McNamara was pissed. He shouted into a megaphone about his days at Berkeley when he was tougher and more courteous than we could dream of being. When fights erupted in the crowd, cops whisked McNamara from his pulpit and hustled him into the tunnels under the university. We caught flak from the media. We were thugs, but worse than that, we were discourteous. Our dialogue was uncivil, obscenityfilled, and dripped the venom that often precedes violence. It was

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our right to criticize the lies and condemn the carnage, the media said, but by Jesus we’d do it with the manners we saved for the housemaster’s high tea. I was not Harvard’s fault. Before I was a criminal in Cambridge, I was a criminal in the larger world, a burglar of beach-front homes stealing flashlights, tools, kitchenware, and selling the loot to supplement my family’s welfare checks. Then I shifted my attention to the hotels, to the institutional-sized cans of food—tuna fish, beans, spaghetti sauce—a more direct way to make changes in our menu. I learned to hot-wire a car before I knew how to drive, to shop-lift before I could make change for a dollar. My only passage through the steel door at the Charles Street Jail followed my arrest at an antiwar demonstration on Boston Common. I’d been sitting on a park bench watching placardwielding protesters piss into the winds of war. I had no interest in joining their club either, but that was of little concern to the cop and his nightstick. His was not the familiar, ruddy, round face of the South-Boston-Irish cop whose blue wool followed the contours of his body like a second birthday suit. This guy was dark with an angular face, a cruiserweight in an ill-fitting sweatsuit and no badge. If he was a Boston police officer, I was Cardinal Cushing. Unlike the efficient local law enforcers who understood the proper application of a crack to the shin, this guy led with the point of his stick. Pacifists are expected to sit and accept whatever is dished out. I’d read Ghandi and heard King, and although I understood the principles of non-violence, I remained firm in my belief that an act of aggression was a deeply personal matter. A whack on the shins is law enforcement; a stick-point attack on a guy sitting on a park bench is aggravated assault. I managed to get in a straight right to my assailant’s face, and heard the sickening crunch of his nose. The constabulary considered me a public nuisance in possession of a controlled substance who resisted arrest. I expected a charge of assaulting a police officer, but the complainant had vanished. I was reading Boston Avatar in my cell when I was arrested for draft evasion. “We will reconvene Monday,” Judge O’Sullivan announced, late on a Thursday afternoon.

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“The judge golfs on Friday,” Leopold explained. “Enjoy the long weekend.” Outside the court, Leopold lectured me. “There is no way a jury is going to let you walk,” he said. “They will see in you everything they believe is wrong with America.” “War is a pathological condition,” I said. “So we’re all crazy?” “I was quoting Earl Warren.” “The federal government is after your ass,” he said. “They want to break you down, make an example of you. Earl Warren isn’t going to help you.” I shrugged. “Like I said before, it’s hard to give a shit.” Were there lights at the ends of tunnels on January 31—two weeks after LBJ’s glowing report to Congress and the nation— when the Tet Offensive brought the Viet Cong from the jungles to the cities and into the American Embassy in Saigon? On February 1, a photographer captured General Nguyen Ngoc Loan blowing out the brains of a bound suspect in the street. Was this the brand of democracy we were exporting to Vietnam, the due process that followed three elections? By the end of March, LBJ lost his appetite for carnage and bailed on his reelection campaign. On April 4, Martin Luther King was assassinated. In the early-morning hours of June 5, Robert Kennedy was assassinated. Republicans nominated Richard Nixon on August 8, and on August 26, Richard Daley welcomed Democrats to Chicago, and a police riot against protesters raged for the next two days. “I could stop yawning in court, I guess,” I told Leopold. Pudge smiled. “That would be a start,” he said. I walked away, eager to be clear of Boston’s government and business district. Men in suits carrying leather briefcases strode past. Women in short, tight skirts minced on shaky heels to the subway. They moved with purpose and direction, goals in focus, families and friends waiting at the ends of their commutes, dinners in dining rooms, a cold beer, TV, and restless sleep until morning brought them back to the dismal canyons surrounding State Street. I bought a newspaper, sat in Park Street Station, and skimmed an article about conscientious objectors and religious affiliation. Having canceled my subscription to all things ethereal and heavenly, even if I applied for CO status, I was ineligible. Quakers

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owned conscience. Pacifism had to be documented. All I wanted was to be left alone, but Uncle Sam had me by the balls and was not about to let go. To the north was Canada and freedom. It was a five-hour drive to the border, another two hours to a reception house for arriving war resisters and draft evaders. All I had to overcome was my inertia. Once done, the change was permanent. There would be no going home. A distant train growled in the tunnel, a dot of light careening from one wall to another with the uneven rocking of the cars. I tossed aside the newspaper and stood, feeling the station vibrate. Air blasted from the tunnel and across the platform, and the growl became an enraged roar.

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CARDEA In January 1943, officials in Washington D.C. dedicated the largest office building in the world. Our feckless leaders named the thirty-four acre, five-sided home of the War Department, the Pentagon. In August 1943, I fell into the world at Boston City Hospital. My mother named me for her brother who died in the North Atlantic campaign. War and the Pentagon and I were knotted inextricably together. In a burst of Orwellian repackaging, the War Department became the Department of Defense. I kept my name. My oldest brother was at war in the Pacific, a Navy man on a submarine tender. Japanese fighter planes, Zeros, attacked his ship, leaving him the only survivor in a gun crew of six men. A miracle, my mother said. When the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, our neighbors spilled onto the streets and cheered. They believed the sailors and soldiers who’d fought the war would be on their way home. Just like that. Hiroshima’s seven rivers ran red with the blood of humanity, but no one said a word about the victims—shoemakers, mothers, street-sweepers, bakers, sons and daughters, clerks, gardeners. One hundred thousand souls, enough blood to qualify as a tidal wave, seconds of time, and no one came home. There was Nagasaki to bomb, swords to be broken, papers to be signed. Surrender had its protocol. We lived on the top floor of a triple-decker on Wakullah Street in Roxbury. Once upon a time, the neighborhood was a rural area

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called Rocksberry and cows grazed there. In 1943, Roxbury was the geographical center of the city, and fast becoming Boston’s Poverty Row. When I started kindergarten, my first box of crayons contained one called “flesh,” an off-white peach. The brown crayon was called brown, and the black was called black. I walked to Julia Ward Howe School on Dale Street, near where a young Louis Farakhan lived in the 1930s, and blocks from the house Malcolm Little lived in with his half-sister in the 1940s. Martin Luther King was a student at Boston University when he preached at the 12th Baptist Church on Warren Street in 1950. My kindergarten teacher asked about my accent and the country where I was born. “Boston City Hospital,” I told her. If I was from Boston, why didn’t I talk like a Bostonian? “D’ye think ye’ll ever go back home?” my father used to ask me. “I’m nae so fond o’ this land,” I’d say, according to our script. My parents were born in Scotland—he in 1897, she in 1901— in the open country between Glasgow and Edinburgh. My mother was a twenty-year-old farm girl who sailed to the United States in steerage on Her Majesty’s Ship Columbia, warding off rats and tolerating overcrowded conditions because her brother had written her and urged her to come to the promised land, the Land of Opportunity. What she didn’t know, and my uncle never admitted, was that the land of opportunity was nothing but a lottery. You bought your ticket and took your chances. It was spring, 1921. The war to end all wars was over. My father made the voyage a year earlier to meet his biological mother, to know who she was and to discover who he was. They were Scots, they talked like Scots, and so did their children. Nations declared wars; the young fought the wars and ate from cans. Those in the homeland knew sacrifice. I did not understand the difference between shortages caused by the war, and those caused by poverty, but I knew hunger. Amos and Andy disappeared from the radio; tin was scarce, and Campbell’s Soup couldn’t afford to continue sponsoring the program. There were meatless days for the war effort. I don’t remember meat, but I do remember the war. I wondered if I would ever meet the brother I didn’t know, if he really existed, and if all we did in our lives was have wars.

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Stars hung in windows, one for each of our boys Over There. Women filled jobs in the war industries. When black men took these jobs, they were resented. They were allowed to fight in the war, but only in Negro units, and white people did not want them to work. In 1942, a mob dragged Willie Vinson from his hospital bed in Texarkana, Texas, and lynched him. Vinson was a black man, an accused rapist. The governor at the time, a conservative named Coke Stevenson, did nothing, offering the opinion that even a white man would be hanged for the crime. Why bother with the courts when you have a rope and a tree? Lyndon Johnson defeated Stevenson in the 1948 race for United States Senator. Also in 1948, Nguyen Van Xuan was president of Cochin China. In May that year, his title changed to President, Pre-government of the State of Vietnam. From the time I was old enough to know, there was war and preparation for war. There was poverty. There was discrimination among people because of the color of their skin. That was the world that greeted and confused me, frightened me, and I wanted no part of it. On the first day of first grade, my teacher handed out phonics and arithmetic workbooks, and a real book with a hard cover describing the lives and adventures of Dick, Jane, Puff, and Spot. Everyone in the story was white, never argued, were always friendly and on time, were never drunk, never said fuck, their world was immaculate, and they were content to “see Spot run.” They had plenty to eat, and their families made ceremonies of eating together. I read the book that first day, not knowing that we were expected to read it aloud in class, page by painful page, as kids stumbled over words and the teacher told them, “Sound it out.” Spot runs, Puff jumps, Jane laughs, Dick sees Jane laugh, Dick laughs and never jimmies a lock. I was left to sit with the book in front of my face, staring at pages I could recite from memory. I asked my teacher when we would get another book. If we did well with the first one, she said, we would have another book—Our New Friends—to read after Christmas vacation. Those of us on the dole trooped to the cafeteria, handed in our green lunch tokens, red ones for milk, and carried our trays to the

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tables. On one shitty food day, the principal stopped at my table and told me to eat the free meal that I had been given, and to be grateful for it. “I don’t like it,” I said. “You will sit there until you eat it,” she said. At three o’clock, she returned with an angry lecture on gratitude—people paid taxes, taxes bought my lunch, and I should give thanks. In her world, breaths of kindness blew over me, and I was an unappreciative prick. She clothed and fed me, provided me with a roof and walls, a bed where I might sleep and dream and scream. And when I was old enough, I could go to war and give more thanks. I didn’t know the man who lived in a small room at the back of our apartment. He seldom came out of the room, and he pissed in a milk bottle he kept beside his bed. I was left to wonder when the man emptied his bottle and his bowels. I had no sense of the man’s size. When I visited him, he was dressed in plaid flannel shirt and chinos, but on his cot reading. He marked his place, rested the book on his chest, and taught me to spell new words. When I mastered the morning’s word, I ran the length of the hall to the living room and spelled r-e-l-a-t-i-v-i-t-y, or e-v-o-l-u-t-i-o-n for my mother and sisters. They applauded and laughed and told me what a smart little boy I was. The man in the room taught me my first survival skill. When bad things happen, grownups whisper and spell. They create an impenetrable mythology, a wall around knowledge and certainty, a beast more fearsome than any a child conjures in closets or under beds. I was at a neighbor’s apartment for a supper of beans, bacon, and greens. I behaved myself, as my sisters had cautioned me. I told this family about the man who lived in the little room at the end of the hall. “That’s your daddy,” the mother said. I looked at the father. “I don’t know,” he said. “I never met the man.” My father drank tea, his tea cups printing circular rings on his bedside table’s paper cover. He read books, underlined long passages in them, and seemed happy to see me. I knew from whispered and spelled words that my father “got crazy” sometimes, always when

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he drank. Sometimes he had to go away. Once, I traveled with my mother by train to visit him. She called the place a hospital, but the word j-a-i-l was carved in the stone above the entrance—Charles Street Jail. I sat on a bench and waited. My mother was allowed through a locked steel door. With this heritage, I embarked on my career of topping roofs, tricking window locks with a pocketknife, packing tins in fish netting, and eluding the cops who gave chase. My eighth-grade teacher called me a budding delinquent. I did no homework; I was growing up a dullard; I was always in trouble; I fooled around in class. The truth was I’d already blossomed. “You’re going to end up on the streets,” my mother said. I stated my case: school was boring, and I was cooped up, trapped. “Besides,” I told her, “I’m already on the streets.” Moments like these were part of the landscape, my personal Dick-and-Jane time, no big thing. I walked to the beach and sat in the cold sand staring at the Atlantic, willing it to erupt in a thundering wave to cleanse the world, level it, and give at least one small spit of land back to the Natives. Barely a nudge above nothing on the Richter. A young woman knocked on the classroom door and asked for me. “I don’t know what you’d want with him,” the teacher told her. As we walked the corridor, the woman said she had some tests she would like me to take. “What kind of tests?” I asked. “Some are about what you know. Others are about how you solve problems.” We sat across from one another at a low, round table in the gym teacher’s office. During a break, she asked what I liked to read. “The book I’m reading now is called Crime and Punishment. It’s by a Russian writer.” “Dostoevski,” she said. “You read it?” “It’s a famous book.” We talked about Raskolnikov, his actions and motivations, the role guilt was expected to play in people’s lives. “Is it a feeling?” I asked. “Guilt? People call it a feeling. It’s when you’ve done something you know is wrong and your conscience bothers you.”

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“Because you’re afraid you’ll get caught?” She leaned forward in her chair. “You’ve been in trouble here at school, right?” “Some.” “You certainly didn’t have a good feeling about that,” she said. I shrugged, imagining feelings—good and bad—as traps on either side of a narrow path through a dense wood. “There’s no point in agonizing,” I told her. “What’s done is done.” She asked me to read some paragraphs and answer questions about them. Then there were math and logic problems. At the end, we talked more. “What would you like to be when you grow up?” she asked. I told her there was so much to explore in the world, so much to think about that I couldn’t pin myself down to any one thing. “If you had to choose, what would it be?” “I wouldn’t.” “Just pretend.” “A writer.” “How come?” “Because then I could write about all the places I go, the things I do, the people I meet—especially the people. Writers get to think about things, to look at problems in different ways, to sort out fact from fiction.” “Have you thought about college?” “We can’t afford it. My father taught himself. That’s what I’ll do.” “What’s it like for you at home?” Her question was like questions the social workers asked when they wanted to stick me in summer camps and programs for poor kids, or send me to Christmas parties where I could hang out with my partners in poverty. “Just fine,” I answered. A month later, the guidance counselor summoned me to his office to prepare a schedule of classes for my freshman year in high school. “College prep,” he said, grabbing a white card from a pile on his desk. “I’m not going to college.” He peered over his glasses. “Look, son,” he said. “You’re a smart kid. This way you keep your options open. Talk it over with your parents, have them sign the card, and get it back to me.”

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“I like to learn,” I said. “I don’t like school.” I spent that summer mowing lawns, and unloading trucks at Tide’s Inn. With the money I saved, I bought pants that were not second-hand and shiny-assed. Achieving decent grades in English, Latin, the maths, the sciences, was effortless. Social studies was another matter. James Joyce wrote that history was a nightmare from which he was trying to awaken, James Baldwin that we are trapped in history, and history in us. Oscar Wilde’s take was my favorite: “The only form of fiction in which real characters do not seem out of place is history. In novels they are detestable.” In my room at Harvard’s Adams House, I rolled awake from a dream—a cast of a dozen, action and inaction, pustulant with meaning. Someone pounded on the door, but in my sleep, a woman with kelp in her hair stood on a beach and banged a drum. “Weed, answer the door,” I yelled. I grabbed at elusive dream fragments. Icarus was there, his wings already a mess, and there was a bear, not threatening, but intense, and a young boy who built squat sand castles with high walls around them, and the girl with her drum and the most beautiful ass I’d ever seen. I reached out, wanting only to caress that perfect, loincloth-clad vision, but the bear was a bother to the livestock, someone said, and I smelled melting wax. “I’m the one knocking,” Weed said. “I can’t take this shit,” I muttered. “What?” “You’ve got a nine o’clock.” I glanced at the clock. Eight-thirty in the bloody morning. “Go away,” I said, remembering the only Saturday class I had not been able to avoid in four years at Harvard: “Gods and Clods”—contemporary religions and religious leaders. I pushed myself to a sitting position and watched the room spin. I was dressed in the previous day’s clothes and had slept on top of the blankets. I stumbled through the living room and into bathroom. “Weed,” I called from the urinal, “have you noticed that Mel has the uncanny ability to form a perfect O with her lips, an O of astonishment, of an innocent awed by life, stunned by her own cleverness?”

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“What are you reciting?” I wandered back to the living room, pulled on a flannel shirt, slipped into mocassins, and hunted my notebook. Gods and churches. Every gang of six or eight whipped up their own deity, provided their own translations of the book or books, or wrote a whole new tome, rented storefronts until they erected their own buildings and stocked them with statuary, candles, and slots for depositing checks and cash. Lenny Bruce called them Religions Incorporated. Weed found my notebook under a pile of laundry. “You don’t smell too good. You’re also wobbly. You gonna make it?” I grabbed a Harvard Crimson and a Boston Globe from the stacks of newspapers in the hall, walked down four flights, winced at the bright sun on Bow Street, and headed for Massachusetts Avenue and the Yard. I followed the footpath behind Widener Library, then the paved walk to The Statue of Three Lies—John Harvard in bronze. The plaque on the statue’s base informs: John Harvard, Founder, 1638. Charles Bullfinch designed the statue in 1815 without benefit of a guiding portrait of the college’s first benefactor. When Daniel French cast the bronze in 1884, his model for the head was Sherman Hoar of Concord. The college was established in 1636 by the court of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. That about covered it. I slapped my pockets, felt for a cigarette, and found a wrinkled Marlboro but no matches. I scanned the ground, but the litter pickers had been thorough. The cigarette dangled from my lips as I sat on University Hall’s stone steps and opened the Globe. Mel was a smoker. She walked through the Yard to class and I called to her, asked for a match. “I hope that’s not a pickup line,” she said with a laugh. Mel loved everyone, but preferred women. She joined me on the steps and offered her matches. “We’re gonna be late,” she said. I didn’t move. “Have lunch and beers with me after class,” I said. That morning’s lecture provided me with more than I ever wanted to know about Roman household gods—Robigus, god of mildew, Fortuna, goddess of good luck, Cardea, goddess of door hinges.

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Later, over cheeseburgers and draughts with Mel, I pondered the portability of Roman deities. “I guess there’s a lot of travel involved in being an empire,” I said. “They had gods of convenience,” she said. “All they had to do was get the offerings and the rituals right. They didn’t have to be kind to anyone, or get to services on time.” “The next time I come unhinged,” I said, “I’m dropping to my my knees and laying it on thick to Cardea. She’ll re-hinge me, put me back on track with the empire.” Mel’s mouth formed a perfect O. There was a party on Brattle Street that night. Mel and I read, talked, and slept away the afternoon at the Charles River. As we walked to Brattle Street that evening, Mel asked, “What are you going to do about the draft?” “Avoid thinking about it,” I said. I called it Mel’s groove: iceberg off the starboard bow, got a life boat? It wasn’t a bad groove for the times. There were only a few of us 1As and soon-to-be 1As who hadn’t decided among Canada, jail, the Coast Guard, the National Guard, or a new identity. We had made the trek from denial, through nihilism and anarchy, to the snarling rage of a cornered dog. Mel kept me grounded and reasonably human, and there was always Cardea in a real pinch. The Brattle Street party was a two-keg affair for a Boston College football player, Chip, and his fiancée Dayle, a physical education major at Boston State. Chip carried the ball; Dayle had perfect American tits and ass, and a head shrouded in a mold of yellow hair. The chipmunks would marry, honeymoon, then he would enter Officer Candidate School, and she would return to live with her parents. Chip fucks Dayle, and the babies roll off the assembly line and into a wood-paneled station wagon in Newton. The apartment was smoke-filled, packed tight with students and townies, and vibrating with the Beatles at top volume. None of the smoke offered THC. To that crowd, Reefer Madness was gospel. They were card-carrying 1As with smiles, true believers fully prepared for Johnson’s Jungle Soiree. A half keg into the evening Mel found Amanique, a kindred soul, and I wandered away. We lived in the rumpus time, when the day wore a cloak of lies, and night was for haunted sleep. Our most savage bouts of

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insanity were reserved for when we tried to make sense of it all or even parts of it. I knew I wouldn’t die—not right away. From the time I was very young, sleeping in a crib on Wakullah Street, I had an occasional visitor. I saw only his eyes, or a few wisps of hair, but I grew accustomed to his presence. The first time I got a good look at him was in Dudley Square. My mother held my hand as we returned from Charles Street Jail, stepping from the bus into light snow and the neon horror that was the square. He stood thirty inches at the shoulder and easily topped one-hundred-and-fifty pounds. His coat was light gray with darker markings on the back and snout. The animal’s eyes did not radiate menace; he appeared curious, as if wondering why I was freezing my ass on a snowy Boston night. I let go of my mother’s hand and approached slowly. That moment—looking into the wolf ’s eyes, extending my hand for his inspection, seeing him stand to his full height and shake off the snow—was a perfect click in time. He’s been around ever since, always nearby, communicating with his eyes or a tilt of his impressive head. I would die when it was time for me to die, and my friend would give me ample warning.

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BOOTISM The train swept through black tunnels—fleeting, tattered, Barnum-and-Bailey posters plastered on the walls. To be totally awake was to acknowledge the day, to take ownership of my trial. To sleep and dream was temporary respite at best. To sleep without dreams was nearly impossible. The car filled with Red Sox fans, loud and energized in blue, red, and white, returning from a game at Fenway Park, commuters with tired eyes leaving halls of commerce, an afternoon drunk leaning one way to sleep, then another, as passengers on either side shoved him away. The drunk had it balls-to-the-wall over other passengers—they could rearrange him, but he remained unmoved. “Change seats with me,” I said, to one of the drunk’s bookends. “Why?” “The life of a wino is hard.” He barked a short and disgusted laugh, and we changed seats. The drunk settled against my left shoulder, stinking of the alley, of muscatel, damp wool, old piss, dry sweat, hygiene gone south. He wore a sock on his left hand. Who are we, and how did we become? What is the world, and why? And where do we find answers? Not in the sophistry of old white men who call themselves leaders, or those who write down the stories of the gods. The subway crowd thinned at Lechemere Station, then again at Central Square. I rested my drunk across the bench seat. He slipped his socked hand between his face and the rough fabic of his coat.

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On late-night bus rides home from high-school basketball games in distant towns, I’d gazed at white colonial homes, estates with acres of lawn, smaller Cape Cods with lights on and a television’s glow. I wondered what my life would be like, if I would ever own a house, if I would marry, if I would have a car, and if I would remember those long, dark bus rides. Or, would I sit on the subway, inebriated, shoved first one way, then another, until the mob thinned and allowed me the space to stretch? I stood at the kiosk in Harvard Square waiting for traffic to ease, then crossed to Brattle Street for the walk to Leech’s Beer Garden. The Square hadn’t changed. I had become a visitor, an occasional interloper. New faces floated from the houses to the Yard and back. Hair grew longer on the men, a mixed bag on the women, but all the faces shared lines of determination, furrows of confusion. They were students in the near world, protesters of the charnels their houses of government were creating in what was now the far world. On the day of the commencement of my trial for crimes against the government, Leech’s Beer Garden was nearly empty—too late for the burgers-and-beers crowd, too early for the dedicated drinkers. Mel waited. “So?” she asked, as I slipped into the booth. “So, jury selection is next,” I said. “I don’t know why you’re doing this,” she said. “They have to find you guilty. Did you evade the draft? Yes.” “I’m reality testing,” I said. “Where’s Weed?” “He’s on his way,” she said. “I asked him not to wear his uniform. Was that wrong?” Jimmy Weed, my college roommate for three years, had enlisted. “He can wear what he wants,” I said. “He goes to California tomorrow. Will you go to jail?” “Monday or Tuesday for me. The judge can’t fuck with his golf game.” “What are you going to do?” “I’m going to put some money in the jukebox. Get us some beers.” I shoved nickels and dimes into the slot and punched letter and number combinations: Blue Cheer, “Summertime Blues,” the Stones, “Paint it Black,” Hendrix, “Purple Haze.” I was creating a colorful evening—the colors of a bruise. Weed arrived in uniform. “You look like GI Joe,” I said.

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“Marines,” Weed said. “Life is a costume party.” “Did Pudge make you wear a necktie?” Mel asked, as we joined her. “He had it in his briefcase—a Harvard tie with little silver veritas crests all over it.” We were an odd threesome—Mel, the tall bisexual with long hair the color of jet; Weed, the lanky Marine; and me, with ponytail, beard, and hundred-year-old buckskin jacket. I’d rescued the jacket from the rubble of a razed servants’ quarters on an estate at the beach. “Remember the Bootists?” Weed asked. “Let’s drink while we reminisce,” I said. “To all Bootists everywhere,” Weed said raising his glass. I’d been walking near Central Square late on a winter night. It was cold, the soot-coated, roadside snowbanks decorated for Christmas with candy wrappers, empty cigarette packs, and one yellow rubber boot. I looked in all directions and saw no one. The boot was new, placed there, not lost in a mad rush to the subway. I carried it back with me to Adams House and set it on the mantel in our living room. Weed found it there in the morning. “Decorate it for Christmas,” I told him. “I got it instead of a tree.” “Where’d you get it?” “Central Square. You know that tree lot down there? There’s a boot lot right across the road. It was cheaper than a tree.” “This is somebody’s boot,” he said, peering inside. “Mary O’Malley,” I said. “’Tis a tragic tale. Each boot comes with the story of its owner.” “You’re full of shit.” “Judge not,” I said. “Mary was eighteen and lived with her parents in the housing project. She had ten little brothers and sisters, and always helped her mother with the kids, with the cooking and cleaning. Liam O’Malley got laid off at Ford in December last year, and it looked like the holidays were in the toilet. But he scraped together what little he’d managed to save and bought each kid a small gift. He saw these gorgeous yellow boots in the window at Woolworth’s. He knew Mary would love them, but he didn’t have enough for the pair and, figuring one golden slipper was better than none at all, he bought it.” “So how did it end up on the lot?” Weed asked, fully into the spirit of my tale.

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“Tragic,” I said, shaking my head. “Mary’s sister was sick with pneumonia, so during the storm last week, Mary pulled on her boot and hobbled to the drugstore for castor oil.” Weed laughed. “For pneumonia?” “The O’Malleys didn’t have the advantage of a Harvard education,” I explained. “They had to make do. Anyway, Mary walked out of the drugstore just as the snowplow roared by. They never found Mary, but there was her boot on top of the snowbank.” “I agree,” Weed said. “We should decorate it.” When I returned from classes late that afternoon, Weed stood in the center of the living room admiring his work. The boot was festooned with ribbon, caps from Wild Turkey bottles, a peyote button, a candle, a photograph of Lenny Bruce, another of Che Guevara, an empty beer can, and a Trojan still sealed in its wrapper. “Nice touch,” I said. “Wasn’t the winter solstice a fertility thing?” “Trojans prevent tots,” I reminded him. “Not that one. I stuck a pin through it.” “A true Bootist,” I said, and the Bootists were born. When we’d laughed our way through the origins of Bootism, Mel hardened her O-mouth and said, “What if somebody had used that condom?” “Somebody did,” Weed said. “We never found out who took it, but they’d tampered with a religious icon. They deserved whatever they got.” “Twins,” I said. “The clap, maybe.” “What about the poor girl?” she demanded. “An accessory after the fact,” I said. “You two are dangerous.” The evening passed like that until Mother Mel assured us of the decency of what each of us was doing. “The rightness or wrongness of this war isn’t the issue,” she said. “All wars are evil. Weed is following his conscience and you’re following yours.” “Weed, are you a warrior of conscience?” I asked. He sipped his beer and looked away. “If I didn’t enlist, they’d draft me,” he said with a shrug. “My mother asked me if I loved my country. I didn’t know what to say.” Leave your mind behind, wave a flag, tie ribbons to trees, support the troops, the president, the nation, and whatever you do,

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ask no questions, hold no opinions, express no dissent. Do you love your country? Thomas Jefferson so loved his country that he claimed a people’s right to revolution. When a government is guilty of “a long train of abuses and usurpations” and the exercise of “arbitrary power,” the right to revolution is transcended by a duty to dismantle and replace the offending government. “There is no decency in any of this,” I said, swallowing the last of my beer. “The only way the dog gets out of the trap is to chew off his own leg. Weed’s in the trap, and he doesn’t want to part with his leg. Me, I’m chewing like a sonofabitch.” “Bad dog,” Weed said. Weed wasn’t much of a talker, and Mel seemed stuck in her groove until she asked a new question: “Where did you go the night I met Amanique?” Weed knew I’d borrowed his Volkswagen, the Beetle he’d since given me as a goodbye gift because he’d have no use for it in the jungle. Mel knew only that I’d vanished. “Church,” I said. “Fuck you,” Weed said. “Smartass,” Mel added. “It’s a story for another time,” I said. “When’s the next time we’ll all be able to sit over beers and just talk?” Mel asked. Years, I thought. Maybe never. “If Weed tells us about his trips to Newton—Alpert, Leary, psilocybin—then I’ll tell you what I did that night.” Weed shook his head. “Like you said, it’s a story for another time.” No one spoke on the walk to the Square. We stood at the kiosk and embraced in a huddle of three. Weed promised to write. Mel wiped away tears with her sleeve. Then Weed was gone. On the walk to her apartment, Mel slipped her arm around my waist, and I draped mine across her shoulders. “I’m not sure what bothers me more,” she said, “Weed in Vietnam, or you in jail. Was he really part of the psilocybin experiments?” “One evening a week he drove to Newton,” I said. “He’d get back late morning the next day. At first he said he was learning some kind of meditation, then he said it was the drug thing.” “You staying tonight?” Mel asked.

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“You mind?” She shook her head. “Amanique’s in San Francisco.” “Is that her real name?” I asked. “She’s French.” “I know she’s French. No nickname? ‘Manny’ or something? And why does she always bristle at me?” Mel laughed. “One, she thinks you and I had a relationship in the past. Two, she says you exude unexpressed violence. That’s almost a quote. She might’ve said ‘extreme violence’.” “What did you tell her?” “It’s come up more than once. I tell her we were never lovers, and I tell her you’re a non-violent person.” The former was true. Mel made frequent appearances in my fantasies, but even in that forum we never quite consummated our relationship. I would fumble with a zipper that refused to unzip, a bra hook welded in place. Invariably, I thought of Amanique—five feet, eleven inches of perfect posture, a hawk’s nose, and the predatory bird’s electric black eyes. It was the eyes, a tonal shift, and a quirky little wrinkle that appeared and disappeared on her left cheek that gave her away. Amanique was an inveterate liar. Mel couldn’t see the brittle, frigid, razor-tongued harpy I knew. “She’s never unpacked,” I said. Mel frowned. “It’s like she doesn’t live in the apartment. Where is her stuff? Everyone has stuff. She comes and goes, and there’s never anything of hers left around—a book she’s reading, dirty laundry, something.” At her apartment, Mel got us each a beer and we sat at an open window. “So,” she said, “what are you gonna do?” “I’m going to Canada,” I said. “When?” “I’ll be gone before you get up in the morning.” “Holy shit.” “I’ll stop at my sister’s for a couple of days, but yeah, that soon.” Mel retrieved a tissue and dabbed at her eyes. “This is so fucked up,” she said. We sat in silence for several minutes until Mel said, “Your brothers were military. When you were growing up, what did your father tell you he wanted you to be?”

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My father was dead, and he’d leaned against me on the train to Harvard square that afternoon. “Did he ever tell you?” What could he say? My father didn’t know me. He knew he had a smart little shit on his hands, but how could he know he’d sired a pretender who lived just outside the world people called real and normal and average? Reality did not have my consent. I imitated life, wore smiles and frowns, mimicked postures and poses, flirted with the notion of feelings. Mel had her mantra and I had mine: hold the world at arm’s length. “Used cars,” I said. “I’m serious.” “Just maintaining distance,” I said. Distance was critical, the only leverage I had with a world I’d never understood. I was an outsider, one who had erupted into being right here at home—a domestic alien, a stranger in a familiar land. “Really,” she insisted. “Nothing,” I said. “He never told me.” “What about your mom?” “They didn’t think like that,” I said. “My brothers were military, my sisters were wives. They probably expected me to join the Navy. I don’t know. Future is a concept we never got into much.” “What about you?” she asked. “What did you want to be?” I took a long pull from my beer. “I always said I wanted to write, but I think I said that just to shut people up.” Did I mean journalism? That profession was institutional and produced a regular paycheck—a good job. No, I didn’t want to write for a newspaper. Poetry then? The opposite extreme—no security, no public interest, obscurity. No, I’m not a poet. What then? “I want to write a book,” I told Mel, “one book, true and not true, with characters who drift in and out, a plot that fades and flashes and fades again, a story that is fragments, bits of this and that just like life is, with no real chronology because what seems important at one moment is reduced to shit the next. At the end, every detail, every thought, every idle reference will be connected, all one.” “Give me an example,” she said, lighting cigarettes for both of us.

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“Virginia Woolf,” I said, “Jacob’s Room. Maybe Tristram Shandy, Joyce’s Ulysses. There are others, but I’m not thinking of them right away.” “Just one book?” “Just the one.” “Then what?” she asked. “I’d live off the royalties.” She laughed. “But what would you do with your time?” “Learn how to stop thinking.”

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B A D

J O H NP H I L P I NB A DD O GG E N P O PB O O K S

NOVEL / CRI ME/ WAR

D O G ac r i me

no v e l by

J OHNPHILPIN