The Banks of the Sea is published by Dalkey Archive Press
6 God and Famous
"And the souldiers
likewise demanded of him, saying
And what shall we do?"
The Rev.Thomas Ruggles
On the Usefulness and
Expediency of Souldiers
CAROL WALKED THE BLOCK from McSorley's to Sylvja's Pottery Shoppe and looked in the window to see if he could discern a message for him. There were pots and mugs and bowls and ashtrays, and a cluster of bells on thongs such as Yvetot had hanging with some plants over the sink. A girl was working in the pottery, bending over to get something in one of the kilns. She had a nice ass, and her thighs were so well apart that he would be able to put the whole palm of his hand over her crotch without spreading them. Her name was Pauline, he remembered.
Carol pissed in a doorway like any bum, then walked to 4th and Bowery and looked in on Phebe's. The place was full of gay vaqueros and perfumed stevedores and Mrs. Astor's pet horse. He walked out again and stood on the street looking at the clock on Cooper Union. Then he remembered a place uptown called Dorrian's Red Hand. He took the IRT.
Let me take you back to a land where strawberries grow in the salt sea and ships sail in the forest, back before pottery shops and marijuana, when we fell in love and drank tea and a glass of wine for the knotty pine. Remember Pandora's Box? There used to be a lot of brick-paved streets in Manhattan, great ruddy avenues, and the intersection of Bond Street and Lafayette is still all stone ballast cobbles. The old paving is still visible when dig Con Edison must and layers of asphalt are jackhammered away. And archeology is in the making at the World Trade Center where torched-off I-beams of the old Hudson Terminal building are being used to pier one of the new buildings, while through a gap in the mosaic tile floor of the old Hudson Tubes station a bulldozer can be seen at work in the new subbasement. But this is fleeting, like a Rockette named Rochelle.
Meanwhile Carol has found his way to Dorrian's, sits with a hamburger and a beer in the heated sidewalk terrace and falls into conversation with two couples. It is interesting to watch a woman "troll" for offensive behavior from her man while he is drinking so she can shake her finger at him the next morning.
"New York is only beautiful. How would you like to live in a place that's only beautiful? New York is half a dollar bill Scotch-taped to a pocket mirror."
"I didn't come here looking for somebody to love."
"You know what's wrong with her? She can't doubletalk."
"I don't know what to say, darling."
"Your politics is like an unwanted pregnancy."
The man laughs loudly and the other couple chuckle. Harmless entertainment put on for them by their companions. Remember the couple in the Silva Thin cigarette ad? Arthur continues.
"Her incomplete gestures like a cuckoo's couk in late June . . .
"Unlike Arthur's mother who looked like a whipped dog and had a floating kidney," said Diane. "Sometimes you'd think men are a different species in disguise."
This is where Carol begged their pardon and asked them for a light. Oh the Indies are a cushion of broken timbers for ships to wear themselves out on, and taxis creep through Uptown streets where little girls whose coats are too big for them are sleeping. Arthur and Diane are well and good, but Carol recognized the other guy immediately. His name was Gordon Breckenridge and he had killed a woman two years ago in Denmark. They introduced themselves.
"Where does your name come from?" the other girl, Gordon's girl, asked. "I thought it was a girl's name."
"They're daughters of Charlemagne," said Carol.
"Ah. Karl den Store." She smiled and rolled her eyes skyward like a Frenchwoman saying Ooo la la. Her name was Astrid and she was Norwegian and blonde. That must be why Arthur was needling his brunette wife, who cut her eyes at Astrid.
"The only time she has a shadow is at night," said Arthur.
"I have enemies," Diane pouted theatrically, "who would kill me for my sexual advantage."
"Yeah, like they murdered the Jews," said Carol. "Jewish women can tell when they're ovulating."
So he put his oar in and they were silent and looked at him. Then the Norwegian girl blew the lid off it.
"All women know that," she said. "They learn it from their mothers. Anything else is myth," she sipped for effectiveness, "and politics."
Her voice lilted like water and her eyes were almost oriental.
"Ah, so the chickens were inculcated," said Arthur, "and their mothers told them to keep it under the tea cozy. You don't have power unless you've got a good secret."
"The moon is made of gray matter..." said Gordon.
"New York was made for lovers," said Carol, cheerfully.
"It's as clear as new piss," said Arthur, ungallantly, "that the Willendorf Venus is a sterility symbol."
"But Arty," said Diane, "how can the Willendorf Venus be a sterility symbol?"
"For the same reason," he raised his voice a little, "that for every woman like you there are fifteen faggots."
"Ow. That hurt. I want to go home."
"I found her in Paterson. On Cult Street."
"Do you remember Don Zimmer?" Carol asked Gordon. "Used to be first baseman for the Dodgers?"
"Sure," said Gordon with the enthusiasm of the recent expatriate. "Now he's manager of the San Diego Padres."
"Remember how he used to get beaned by pitched balls?"
"Yeah. Sometimes he'd be in a coma. Out for days."
"It's a wonder it never did anything to his brain," said Arthur.
"I dunno," said Carol.
"Wha?" said Arthur.
"I don't know whether it did anything to his brain."
"Why," said Gordon, "with that buncha bananas he has in the bullpen . . ."
"Naw, man," said Carol, "he saves rubber bands. He's got two garages and one of them's full of rubber bands. Every once in a while he drives his car into it."
The waiter appeared and they paid and left. Diane and Arthur – friends of Gordon's sister in San Francisco – drove off in their Mustang, and Carol and Gordon looked at each other.
"Now I know where I've seen you before," said Gordon.
"Sweden," said Carol, softly.
They took a cab down Second Avenue and went to a place near NYU called Crewe's Head. The waitresses were pretty and there was a fire in the fireplace, and Carol and Gordon and Astrid drank and Carol got drunk. The place was full of carousing draft dodgers and all that cannon fodder on the hoof had an air of the Resurrection about it.
"Good to see you still alive," said Carol.
"You too," said Gordon.
"I'll join you on that," said Astrid, and smiled distantly like sunshine through a windowpane. They drank to the beaver whose felling a tree made the Mississippi and the St. Lawrence separate but equal.
The draft dodgers were noisily overcompensating for the frustration, in the American civilization, of men who have not known military service. Carol observed some people at a neighboring table. They were mannishly talking about their drug experiences, and the waitress brought them their brandy Alexanders and the wooden bowl full of chocolate chip cookies which the place provided instead of pretzels. One of them looked like a faggot on account of his effeminate mannerisms, but he was just a hippie who had been given a haircut by some rednecks in Florida.
"Remember the queers' table in the cafeteria in high school?" said Carol.
"Yeah, man," said Gordon. "They were always trying to recruit guys."
Gordon Breckenridge had never known military service and he wasn't the least bit frustrated. They were a lovely couple, Gordon and Astrid, and laughing they told Carol about how they met, each all alone, in the mountain wilderness in Norway and lived up there together in a cabin through the winter. They were married that summer in the village church in the valley and all the people had the same last name. They had a baby boy.
"Liten Jeppe,"she said, her voice tinkling. "Liten Jeppe på fjeld."
They were married with fiddles and dancing. Carol asked them how they met.
"Somebody was knocking on my door," Gordon laughed, "and I had to find the door. Have you ever been married, man? Wow! You ought to get married."
"Tell me pretty maiden," Carol asked her, "are there any more at home like you?"
"Let me see. There's the intellectual one, the practical one, the one who's as strong as an ox . . ."
"And the one with the flat face," said Gordon, and Astrid slapped him across the side of the head.
"I had a girlfriend," said Carol, "who I'm still hung up on. She's a call girl. Ever since she got her hooks into me my head's been all squishy like a wet telephone book. Ol' shit for brains. That's me."
"That's okay," said Gordon. "John Lennon's head is a teapot that you can take the lid off of to put more hot water in."
"She's trying to make me piss ice cubes and shit soy sauce," Carol said, watching his finger rub back and forth on the table. "Hell, she told me about all the guys who committed suicide for her. The one who deflowered her had a motorcycle accident, and there was a Marine who blew his brains out on the fantail of his ship."
"Shit" said Gordon. "Those guys just want to play Spartacus and be crucified together. Look at the Civil War. Guys dying for their sisters."
"She operates out of a phony advertising agency called The Duckrabbit Effect. It's a CIA front."
"Man, this is a foreign country and it's a ripoff. Imagine what's going to happen when the dollar falls and all those frogs, limeys, krauts, wops, squareheads, guineas and gooks come over here. There'll be fucking in the streets of Littletown, U. S. A. There won't be any secrets left. It's the Revolution malgré lui."
Carol wasn't sure immediately whether he liked the idea. He thought of Yvetot. She's what the sun has been practicing for. She's the hanged man's second wind. His heart filled with tenderness for her and he wanted to keep the foreigner at a stiff arm's length. But Yvetot was a prostitute. He formulated a description of her. She was like food that had been left in the skillet all night. She was like wearing a dirty shirt that had been ironed again. She was a fast buck.
"No more Jesus freaks," said Gordon. "They'll be doing the continental."
"What's a continental?" Astrid asked.
"It's a dance," said Carol.
"It's an obsolete currency," said Gordon.
Astrid got up and adjusted the logs in the fireplace. The flames danced and she watched them for a while, then she sat down again. The jukebox played "I'm a Truck," with Merle Haggard. Gordon appreciated the country and western music. He called the waitress and ordered more drinks. She was like an old folk song and she had a sweet bottom. She dropped a glass.
"What about Aquarius?"
"A what?" said Gordon.
"I met a man in McSorley's today who said he's Aquarius. You know, the Age of Aquarius?"
"You're sure it wasn't Norman Mailer?"
"Ha. But what if the guy actually is Aquarius? He's supposed to be around, you know."
"Then he's just a cult figure, like you or me," said Gordon, in a way which made Carol remember what had taken place in Sweden that time and what he had thought about it. They were getting around to talking about that.
"Look," said Gordon, "the hippies are all suffering, and I mean suffering, from lysergic acid poisoning. They're as superstitious as a bunch of ergotty mice. If you look at it that way then what happens is that you deprive their religion of its credibility."
"So we're cult figures, huh?" said Carol. "Then am I to understand that we are all Latter Day Saints?"
"Anything but." Gordon snuffed his cigarette. "What if some spade was to tell you his name is Holden Caulfield?"
"Dig it" said Carol, "and you ask him, you ask him if he's the Holden Caulfield."
The color TV over the bar was on with the sound screwed down and the jukebox was playing "Mathilda Mother" by the Pink Floyd. On the television screen three astronauts were being congratulated by President Troast and Mrs. Troast. Astrid thought the astronauts' wives looked like female impersonators and said so.
"Well," said Gordon, "at least they elected somebody who can keep a straight face."
Carol was pretty drunk when they left the Crewe's Head. He remembered the Japanese busboy finally sweeping up the broken glass and he remembered the waitress and that the wine tasted the way she looked. She wasn't wearing a brassiere and Yvetot's breasts were as sweet as two bats on a fungus. He felt pretty good and started shouting poetry in the dark street. It was a completely ravishing kind of toot in which you find yourself miles away and don't know how you got there. That is called Irish hyperspace.
They took a taxi across the Brooklyn Bridge, which Carol called the inside-out church, with the snow falling and arrived in the Bay Ridge section of Brooklyn where Gordon and Astrid were staying with a Norwegian family. Astrid was still nursing, which is why she had hardly drunk at all. She sat in the same upstairs room with the two men and let the baby suck while they talked. It was a sight to behold: Astrid and little Jeppe bright as a medieval allegory while Gordon and Carol tipsily alluded to filth and culpability.
"She's still in her car," said Carol, "sitting behind the wheel buried in the hillside. You say you cornholed her to death?"
"You must have X-ray vision," said Gordon. "I'm surprised those heapies didn't exhume her and do abominations. Didn't they even siphon the gas?"
"The hippies are very paranoid, you realize, and by not going to the police you allowed that commune to turn you into an idol. You're a hippie god, man. They have a can of cat food that you left there, unopened. People come there and put their cigarette packs on it."
"Bunch of Yorubas," said Astrid.
"She wanted a poop job, a brown," Gordon said, "and I was giving it to her."
He rose from his seat and the famous dimensions of his cock were apparent in the crotch of his moleskins, which were purchased at Troelstrup's in Copenhagen. Gordon the Okie Breckenridge. He was a cult figure all right
"And she just died," he said, "right after I came. She had a D-cell vibrator going in her scrump and " guess it must have been too much for her heart. Maybe it was nirvana."
Carol and Gordon giggled the way little boys do who have gotten a little girl to piss into a pop bottle.
"She called herself Marie," said Gordon, "because she'd married a Frenchman and was hoity-toity. That was in Copenhagen. I liked the idea of crossing to Sweden with her afterwards. Rites of passage."
Poor Marie. Have you seen Marie talking to the soldiers in the square?
"Back in Fresno she was Mary Krudlick and had blackheads on her nose. One day Ma and Pa and us kids had a picnic in Roeding Park. I was ten or eleven years old. Anyway, I went off into the trees and was idly playing with myself when these three teenage girls came up to me and sniggered, like. Shit, man. American girls. Well one of them, Mary Krudlick, gave me a nickel and told me to call her up when I was fifteen."
Carol shut his eyes. He heard Astrid burp the baby, and she and Gordon exchanged a few words in Norwegian. Everything was whirling and he almost fell off the chair. He opened his eyes and there was little Jeppe smiling to him and laughing. Norway. Glaciers and fjords. The water in the mountain streams is green as absinthe.
"As much as anything," Carol said, "wars are fought for genetic resources."
He told them about the improvised target practice with Yvetot's BB gun and how it had corrected his opthalmic condition. He could shoot again.
"Sounds like somebody has plans for you," said Gordon. "I'm going to give you Arthur and Diane's address and telephone number. They live in Fort Lee, New Jersey, just across the George Washington Bridge. You can walk there."
He and Astrid set up an Army cot for Carol. They told him about the Swedish Seamen's Union on Hanson Place, right there in Brooklyn, and how he could get a berth on a Scandinavian ship.
Carol had a comfy bed with fresh sheets, a fluffy pillow, a couple of Navy blankets and a patchwork quilt. He was grateful from the bottom of his heart.
"Sufficient unto the dog are his dreams," he said. "Thanks a lot, and have a good night."
A clock ticked cozy as a locket and the house creaked and smelled lived in and good. There was a painting of an old Norwegian steamship in the room and in the darkness Carol pretended he was aboard it, ploughing through the South China Sea with his Kodak. He thought of Imogen and knew that she was worried about him. He should have phoned her. He would.
He woke up as grumpy as a menstruating hobbit and stumbled around the sleeping house with a hangover. It was still dark. He crept down the stairs and out into the streets. Was it the coverlet of snow on them that had lured him out of his warm cot among friends? He found a subway, and by the time he got to Manhattan the sun was rising like an east orange.
"Men are always standing in corners pissing"
He was on Delancey Street. The piers of the Williamsburgh Bridge rose immense like part of the gray sky and hunkered.
"Shhh. The welfare recipients are sleeping."
It was so early, and what was he doing out on the street? It was cold and he should be home in bed where he belonged. He walked to East 3rd Street.
"He casts a wrong shadow."
He went inside a tenement and quietly climbed the stairs. The luncheonettes would be open soon, and the blood banks.
The trouble with Imogen was that in living with her he was becoming just another urban phenomenon, in his case one of those insincere young men who succeed because they accommodate themselves to the delusions of ambitious women. But what was he becoming in his fealty to Yvetot?
He sat on the top step and smoked a cigarette, then stepped out onto the roof. The sun was a little higher now, like the proof of the pudding, and the morning seemed so slow in its advance that it must be giving him time for something. He strolled in the thin snow and shivered, walked to the false cornice and looked down into the street. Far to the east a Department of Sanitation garbage truck was in operation. It was so quiet in the neighborhood that he could hear the garbage men's voices.
Across the street a dog started barking on the roof of the Good Humor barn. Carol thought of summer and wondered what the Good Humor men did in the wintertime. Then he heard a noise behind him and turned around. In front of the stairhouse and brandishing a yard-long two-by-four was a big white man. He gnashed his teeth at Carol and hefted the piece of lumber but the dog – the man had a dog with him, a Doberman with savagely bandaged ears. The dog's jaws snapped and it let out a high-pitched snarl and lunged. Carol thought of himself as Orion at the horizon. He clambered over the rows of slated-shut chimneys, to the next building and the next, jumping onto the snow and tarpaper, trying the stairs. They were all locked. He had to find a way down. At the back of a roof he found a fire escape ladder that was painted green as go.
He descended quietly and with trepidation. One's steps are led where one's thoughts center, he observed. This was Yvetot country and he needed refuge. What if he went to her storefront and rapped on the window with a special code, and she let him in and let him appreciate her bed again? But if escape was as easy as a green fire escape then he was in that damned ESP school and they would have him dancing like a bear. He had to climb over two backyard fences before he found a cellar door that could be opened. It was really a cinch. It wasn't locked but only latched from inside, and it was a matter of removing a nut from a screw and pushing the screw in with a paper lollipop stick so that the latch fell apart. It was all fairly lubricated and easy to do without any tools and he was sure it had been set up for him.
He reassembled the latch like a good boy and found his way through the cellar with the aid of his Jap Ronson. He had that fear of stumbling over a corpse or falling into an open grave. The water was turned on somewhere in the house and the pipes gave a screech, such a sound as lizards made before they became acceptable as birds.
He was scared. Back on the street he started walking in the direction of Yvetot's place. He could ask her if there was any mail for him. But he had a perfectly good lockbox at the post office and his mail was being forwarded to it. He could put it to her straight, that he . . . But he mustn't be in love with her. The only thing wrong with him was that he was horny, hungry, and hung over.
He could throw himself at her feet, athlete's foot and crud that she got from her customers. What if she was doing an all-night and had a dude in her bed at this moment? She was a hooker and had all those hatracks at her disposal and didn't need Carol except for his love. That's what she wanted all right. That he should love her, from a distance. She needed the security of a man's love even though his physical presence was no more desired than the deceased Jesus's, and then when she decided to have his children he would – if she had set up the coincidences correctly – be waiting for her. Otherwise he would be dead and thinking of her. An enormous gulf of foreclosure opened before him.
He was about to turn the corner into her street when the front and rear doors of a parked Chrysler sedan opened and two heavies looked at him. Happiness is a warm gun momma. They were hit men, and the Chrysler's motor was running. One of them smiled and spread his legs a little, obscenely suggesting a parked car hustler, so Carol could see the pistol in his lap. He saw it and kept on walking. It might have occurred to him that he had enough money in his shoe for a week's rent at the Albert but he was angry and felt put-upon. He gnashed his teeth and cried out "My God!" and Aquarius responded with the affirmation that all is fodder for his pen. He remembered that he had a brand new notebook and a new ballpoint in the pocket of his lumber jacket. He stood on Second Avenue with the bums watching him and wrote: She awoke and opened her eyes and stretched. She was wild-eyed with dreams like the eyes of cattle that have just come in from their summer range . . .
Imogen loved him. She was asleep in their bed dreaming furiously: Two astronauts fell into the sea and one of them released his helmet so that it would surface and signal their rescuers. The two men slowly rose to the surface and one of them, he without a helmet, was picked up by a boat. Meanwhile a nearby whale has approached. It gets right up close to the boat and sheds a great tear, which falls plop on the astronaut's head and drowns him.
He walked past the Men's Shelter at East 3rd and Bowery. The Toad Palace. The bums waiting for a kiss from the princess. A bum who looked like his father winked at him and smiled. He crossed the Bowery, and on Lafayette Street found a chalk inscription on the wall of the Women's Shelter. It read: I HAD A CUNT AND IT BLED. It was only a little way further downtown, in Lispenard's Meadows, that some three thousand women whom the British had shanghaied were stockaded for the use of the soldiers.
Carol felt that he had taken account of his contingencies and could therefore go ahead and get his nose dirty. He did not go to the Albert and ask Shem and Dora if he could sleep on their couch nor did he go home to Imogen's warm loins where there was love for him and concern for his well-being. He thought of Yvetot and hated and desired her, and resolutely set about finding out what the United States was cooking up. One of the first things he discovered on that beaming March morning was a smouldering heap of rubbish. Twenty-five cubic yards of it. There had been a fire in a private sanitation truck and it had disgorged its load right there on Seventh Avenue just south of Sheridan Square.
It was next to the curb directly in front of an off-Broadway theater which was running a play about heroin addicts. The private garbage truck was parked down the street, and although the fire department had already hosed and gone the rubbish was still steaming. Carol gave it a good going-over. It was commercial refuse, some from an upholsterer's loft, but the bulk of it was the broad red and black ribbons of paper backing for roll film used in such cameras as Hasselblads and Rolleis. There was so much of it. There were cascades of empty film spools and sheave upon sheave of ruined photographic paper. It smelled like a burned village.
There was quite a bit of traffic at this hour: people going to work, faggots walking their dogs, and long black Cadillacs sidled past the heap of rubbish, parking lights on, exhausts pooping. Some of them drove around the block and came back for a second look, for they were the limousines of witch generals who were scrutinizing the suddenly resurrected garbage for auspices as though it were the entrails of a bird. It didn't look good for the empire. They saw Carol poking around in the mess, Carol Gamewell at the top of the heap, and they might have known what it was he found there among some soggy prints. He found a picture of a dead guy in a coffin.
It was obvious who Carol was, of course, to the morning people, the weirdos, the hardhats in their pickups and the coughing generals, for his anonymity was missing, it wasn't on him, he wasn't packing it. It is an affidavit far too valuable to walk around with in this town of rotten egg silverware and exposed children and the botch of Egypt.
He was a cockatrice laying his foul egg on the dungheap. He was a Communist. A red. Communists, as everybody knows, are cuckoo birds which lay their eggs in the nests of other birds. In other words, he was crackers. Carol was "reading" the message in the casual script of the trash for it told him things like sermons in stones, the pictograph of accidental surfaces, the false language the ancient Greeks called koinos spurios. Like the afternoon he was mooning around in Central Park and he stooped over and picked up a piece of paper and read on it, handwritten and in plain English, What are you doing in the park today and why did you pick up this piece of paper? Cautiously nonchalant, he discarded the photograph of the corpse and made his way down off the trash pile. He looked like a chimney sweep. The Toad Prince cometh.
Here comes Carol, walking down Seventh Avenue with his hands in his pockets. He is hungry and thinks about breakfast. How would he like to eat some knuckles? Five guys come toward him and they too are horny, hungry and hung over. It's the same five guys from McSorley's the night before. They recognize Carol and close in on him.
"Say, buddy. You wouldn't know where we could get a piece of ass, would you?"
"I could tell you," said Carol, remembering them and truculent, "but I'm not a pimp."
"How'd you like to get kicked to death?" another one asked.
"Dark is stark," he replied, in a nasty South Bronx accent, "but sepia is creepier."
There was a fat guy wearing a sweatshirt under his lumberjacket and the sweatshirt had EAST VIRGINIA on it, Yvetot's home state. One of them would have been a cuckold except he'd never had a woman. And there was a coon, too. Carol dug the coon. It was the faithful companion of boy pranks, the bunch of them having been nursed by the same android mammy. One of them had a cleft palate.
Carol had replied correctly to their question.
"Just what the fuck are you?" asked the cleft palate.
"I'm Orion Man, you Jew's harp," said Carol, and spat.
"You maht jus' be breakfuss, too," said the coon.
"That's for you, cocksucker," said Carol, and gave cleft palate the finger.
"Chalfont," said the fat guy to the coon. He sounded like a panty waist. "Chalfont your Mammy wants you to come suck on her black titty."
That black guy was really burnt up. He kicked at Carol's groin, but Carol caught it in his hands and with the strength born of intolerance twisted the android's foot off and tossed it over his shoulder to the rubbish pile.
"Violence is for fruits," said Carol.
"That's what you're getting," said East Virginia and they jumped him.
They pinned him up against a parked car and beat him with their fists until their arms got tired. Then they dumped him onto the pavement and kicked the wind out of him, and when he was writhing on the sidewalk in an effort to breathe they kicked him in the head until they thought he was unconscious. As they left him curled up next to the parked car he heard one of them say, "You can tell 'em you got the Schlitz kicked out of you in New York."
Carol opened his eyes and counted silica glints in the sidewalk. Perhaps he belonged to the Hess family, which has never been dedicated to public purposes. But he was an indecent exposure and there were gawkers. He didn't even have to move and soon there was a police car and the officers asked him questions. He didn't answer them and soon there was an ambulance. They picked him up and he saw the blood on the sidewalk. They asked him his name and he wouldn't tell them so they took him to Bellevue.
By the time they got there he was able to sit up, but he didn't like what he saw and made a break for it. Four cops ran after him and tackled him out on the ramp, pummeled him and dragged him to an old wooden wheelchair, sat him in it and viciously handcuffed his arms behind its back. They knew what they were doing and nearly broke his arms. Carol felt pretty good. He looked down at his feet. The policemen had taken his belt and shoes and now he could walk on water. The admitting nurse said something to him in Danish and he gave her his name. The most ineffable sweet warmth spread through his sore body and the only thing he felt was the singing of his poetic self, his whole spirit. The policemen levered his arms and tightened the handcuffs, but he didn't feel anything except the honey-fuck sweetness of religion.
"Bet that hurts, doesn't it?" said one of them. The nurse looked at Carol and he felt her telling him that it had damned well better. Carol groaned as though he were in pain. Evil begins with the first lie.
"And the souldiers likewise demanded of him, saying, 'And what shall we do?'"
"I think you guys oughta go play with your yo-yos."
The padre was lying to the troops, inasmuch as he gave them only half the gospel verse, expecting they were either too cowed or too ignorant of Scripture to dispute his sermon. It was a sermon which satisfied the Crown and the colonial authorities, preached to an artillery company at Guilford, Connecticut, on May 25th, 1736, the day of their first choosing their officers:
"Among the many that came to hear John's ministry and enquire their duty, the souldiers came also to him and demanded of him, 'What shall we do?' The whole of the account is perfectly souldier-like, the enquiry is expressed with the very air and spirit of a souldier in it, they demanded, they speak as men of true greatness of mind, as persons who were not accustomed to be denied. 'Tis recorded of the other persons, that came before to John that they asked, ––But the souldiers demanded, And what shall we Do? And by John's gentle and pious answer and directions to them, 'tis abundantly plain . . ."
There's money in cannon fodder. Ever wonder how German militarism got started? It was the Hessian mercenaries in the American Revolution. The Duke of Brunswick received eleven dollars and sixty cents for each soldier who was wounded, and three times that amount for each one who was killed. He expressed regret that the men were not killed fast enough to enable him to collect the larger amount for their deaths and to furnish others to take their places. During the eight years of the war the principality of Hesse Cassel received from Great Britain for the soldiers that it contributed £2,959,800.
"I am not come up into the pulpit to teach the arts of war. This is not the business of a minister of the Kingdom of peace. But as souldiers may demand of such And what shall we do: so as the Gospel descends to consider men in every condition and station they are placed in Providence. As it instructs them to be faithful in the calling in which they are, so it abundantly countenances and encourages persons being trained up in martial knowledge; and that those that have abilities therefor, endeavor to furnish and accomplish themselves as good souldiers . . ."
Cornhole dryfuck American names American places popcorn fart shit from Shinola are on the lips of pimpled faces cluster fuck circle jerk turd in the punchbowl those who read these lines of wit fucking shitass cocksucker pogue roll their shit in public places shitheel brown nose motherfucker.
"This land of Christians has in a peculiar manner found the advantage thereof. Under God, our lives, our religion, our liberties are owing to the valiant & martial achievements of those of our forefathers, who were mighty in battle. Else to all human probability, they would have been swallowed up at once, as it were, by the vast numbers of their Indian enemies, whose tender mercies are cruelty. I can't look back upon the great Major Mason, in the Pequot War, without a peculiar regard and honor to his memory, nor are the succeeding worthies in later times of trouble to be neglected or forgotten, who signalized themselves in valor and success, against the Narragansset Indians and fort. . . "
Seriously. On the Great Seal of the City of New York there's an Indian with his bow 'n'arrow and a white guy playing with his yo-yo.
"I need, and shall say little under this head. The proposition being evident from those that are foregoing, and the end and design of souldiers. Let me just observe to you, almost every country have their differing ways of making war upon their neighbors. And almost every country, or age, makes some alterations in the instruments and methods of war. Besides, there are many stratagems & methods of making war that are very useful and necessary to be known by souldiers. In a word, how to be and how to endure hardness as good souldiers..."
I was on leave in New York, and because I hadn't gotten laid and had to go back to the coast the next day I went to Greenwich Village and picked up a soldier in the San Remo. He gave me a blowjob. It was my first blow job and that dogface darned near got lockjaw trying to make me come. You know what I mean? And I never did develop a taste for blow jobs.
"Victor Immature on a Greek Vaseline barge."
Our gunboat had gone aground under fire in the Mekong Delta and the Army sent an amphibious armored vehicle out to take us off. We all made it and it was a beautiful maneuver, Cong mortar shots exploding all around us and we could hear the shrapnel splat on the sides of the amphib. Well it was pretty crowded in there – feets, farts and assholes – and some of the guys were laughing their heads off and things were going pretty good. Now, the crew of the amphib had a few Vietnamese whores and they like started pulling a sleeve down off a shoulder and exposing a tit, and things like that, and one of them had her little daughter with her. I was lying on the deck just sort of relaxing and grooving on it and the whore – she was pretty good-looking too – and her little daughter didn't have any pants on underneath their skirts and I could see everything. The mother had some scars like old rash marks on her thighs and stomach, like from some kind of venereal disease. Not that she had it then, but from some earlier time, and I think there was something, she had some kind of sore on her lip, like a cold sore covered with a concealing cosmetic. But her little daughter stood on my hands while I was lying there and I held onto her feet and she balanced as I slowly lifted her up and down. She was laughing. Now that I think about it, that baby girl was circumcised. She probably, yeah, I guess she'd had all four lips taken away.
Each crater was twenty to forty feet across and five to twenty feet deep. The craters were very numerous and there were many generations of them from different air strikes. In the older craters a few sprigs of Imperata grass were sprouting in the center. The most recent ones were bare of vegetation but contained some rainwater. Moreover, the ubiquitous missile fragments in the ground cut the hooves of the water buffaloes, causing infection and death of the animals. From an altitude of thirty thousand feet where they were unheard and unseen from the ground, a typical B-52 mission comprising seven aircraft delivered 756 five-hundred-pound bombs in a swath saturating an area about half a mile wide and three miles long, that is, nearly a thousand acres. On a schedule of four or five missions per day of seven sorties each, the B52s alone were creating about 100,000 new craters a month. In the seven year period from 1965 to 1971 Indochina was bombarded by a tonnage of munitions amounting to approximately twice the total used by the U. S. in all the theaters of World War II. This staggering weight of ordnance expended by the U. S. military forces in the seven years between 1965 and 1971 is equivalent to the energy of 450 Hiroshima nuclear bombs. Of the 26 billion pounds, 21 billion were exploded in South Vietnam, representing an overall average of 497 pounds per acre and 1,215 pounds per person. Over the seven years the displacement of soil by bombardment proceeded at a rate of nearly 1,000 cubic yards of soil per minute. But bombardment and defoliation were by no means the only methods used by the U. S. military in its struggle with vegetation in Indochina. The effectiveness of massed tractors organized into companies for extensive forest clearing was in some ways clearly superior to that of chemical herbicides. The tractor, called a Rome plow, was basically a twenty-ton Caterpillar tractor fitted with a massive eleven-foot-wide, 2.5-ton plow blade and with fourteen tons of armor plate. In a land-clearing operation in August, 1971, about thirty such plows scraped clean the remaining areas of the Boi Loi Woods northwest of Saigon. According to information released by the Army, at least three-quarters of a million acres were cleared in this manner through mid-1971.
Copyright © 1987 by Kenneth Tindall
