Life Goes to the Movies (13 page)

Night after night with him gone off as usual I sat on Dwaine’s bed and read, piecing together the bones of his past like a paleontologist piecing
together a pterodactyl. And I learned a few things. I learned, for instance, that he left the Army rather suddenly and under less-than-ideal
circumstances, that he spent time in an Okinawa brig before being packed into a transport plane bound for Oakland, where he spent a night shivering on
a beach, gripping his balls to keep his fingers from freezing. Such were the only direct references to the war, save for a yellowed newspaper clipping
from the Daily News:

Veteran Dies at War Memorial

TAMPA, Fla., Oct. 14 (AP)—Wearing a military jacket and clutching divorce papers, a veteran of Vietnam committed suicide Tuesday at the foot of
the Vietnam War Memorial in Tampa. A police spokesman, Henry Crow, said the 39-year-old veteran, John Desmond Hurly, was found with a pistol in his lap
after shooting himself in the head as he sat on the grass beneath a flagpole.

Under the clipping Dwaine wrote, “Just what is it, exactly, about the word ‘mercy’ that God can’t understand?”

6

With Dwaine behind the wheel and the United States rolling by under and around me, I stretch out in the back seat, feigning sleep, turning pages. This
book, taken from the aluminum trunk (the key to which I found in an orphaned sweat sock) finds Dwaine in the Peace Corps, stationed at a former R&R
resort at Pattaya Beach, on the Gulf of Siam. This was where he met the pirates, the ones who gave him the machete. They lived on a junk moored in the
harbor. In exchange for practicing their English on him the pirates taught Dwaine how to hand-roll the local sinsemilla and walk barefoot on the
junk’s sail booms.

Rising from the tropical mists a thousand yards from Dwaine’s hut was a jungle-clad hill nicknamed Monkey Mountain. At dusk the monkeys would
come down to the beach to scavenge for food. One monkey became Dwaine’s pet. Dwaine named him Father Pike, after the man who tried to make a
priest out of him, and kept him in his hut. This didn’t sit well with Frank Sitwell, Dwaine’s Peace Corps supervisor, whose name fit him to
a ‘T’, since he did nothing all day but sit at his desk throwing darts at a board. He told Dwaine “get rid of the monkey” or it
would be “disposed of.”

Dwaine’s Peace Corps duties consisted of handing out malaria pills and mosquito netting and lecturing locals on the evils of stagnant water. But
Dwaine found the Corps highly disorganized, and little in the way of malaria control was achieved. When Dwaine complained to Sitwell, his supervisor
suggested that he was suffering from exhaustion, that he should take a vacation. When Dwaine insisted that he felt fine the suggestion morphed into a
standing order. “Come back when you’re feeling better,” said Sitwell.

Before leaving Dwaine asked his pirate friends to board Father Pike, which they gladly did.

And so where did I vacate to? Why, Udorn, where else. The scene of my former captivity. Except for a few rusting Quonset huts the airbase was gone,
vanished, its tarmac broken and overgrown. It was like those closing scenes in
Papillon,
showing the ruins of the prison buildings at Devil’s Island, decayed and overgrown, with Steve McQueen’s voiceover sneering,
“I’m still here, you bastards!” I pitched a tent on the former grounds of the 498
^th
, my old unit. And though I hadn’t packed any weed and was stone sober, still, I dreamed more dreams than ever before in one night while
getting bitten by the world’s largest mosquitoes  …

Two weeks later, when Dwaine returned to Pataya Beach, as he was driving up to the harborside in his Jeep, he noticed a thick plume of smoke rising
from it. Closer, he saw the pirate’s junk half sunk and burning. He jumped out and ran shouting toward it, only to be stopped by a line of Thai
police armed with wooden batons. (“Okay, okay, take it easy, you fascist fucks!”) As they held him back Dwaine heard cries mixed
with the pops and squeals of burning timber. He stood there feeling helpless, watching until all that was left of the junk were a few floating chunks
of charred timber and swirling clouds of acrid smoke.

The next day Dwaine marched into Sitwell’s office and tendered his resignation, which Sitwell gladly accepted. In exchange Dwaine was offered a
one-way ticket to any destination of his choice.

“What’s your pleasure, Fitzgibbon?” said Sitwell. “And don’t take all day deciding, I’ve got other matters to
attend to here.”

Dwaine plucked a dart from Sitwell’s dartboard, aimed it at a map on the wall over his desk, and threw it.

It landed in Belfast, Ireland.

7

East of Indianapolis Dwaine turns off the interstate and heads north on Route 31. I ask where we’re going. “Oz,” he says.

“We’re following the Yellow Brick Road.”

Soon we’re hiking through a muddy plowed field. It’s late in the afternoon, the sun burnishing everything, including the dome of the
University of Notre Dame, copper. As we head toward the dome Dwaine tells me how Father Pike—not the monkey, the man—picked him up
hitchhiking after his visit with Brother Jack. At the end of their ride, following a lengthy discussion of war, politics, religion, and art, Pike had
Dwaine convinced that he might be priestly material, and encouraged him to apply to the seminary at Notre Dame.

“Which,” said Dwaine, “I ultimately did.”

Dwaine took to his theological studies well (he explains this as his boots and my sneakers make obscene farting sounds in the mud). “I plowed
through Aquinas and Saint Augustine and made a fetish of Lao Tzu. I loved the whole idea of being a priest, of saving people’s souls instead of
their blown-up bodies.” It’s the first clue he’s given me to his war duties. Saving blown-up bodies. So he wasa medic.
“Trouble was,” Dwaine admits as we stand there, watching the dome’s colors shift from brilliant copper to molten red, “there
was this little requirement called celibacy that I was not terribly good at, in fact I confess that I failed at it miserably. That movie we made about
the seminarian being found in his dorm with a townie girl? That was me, of course, only I didn’t castrate the son of a bitch who ratted on me,
though I should have. The next day I go into Father Pike’s office. The look on his face, like I’d totally betrayed him. I had a knack for
betraying fathers. Anyway so much for my becoming a priest. ”

He bends down, picks up a handful of soil and holds it under my nose. By the light of the setting sun I see little metallic flakes sparkling in it.

“Bits of gold leaf blown off the dome by the prairie winds,” Dwaine explains. “You could say this is very rich soil.”

He lights a cigarette and smokes, blowing rings that float away like haloes in search of angels.

“Are you sorry about not becoming a priest?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Like I said, the celibacy thing, that was a real sticking point. Besides, there’s other ways of ministering. You
know the old saying, ‘Preach the gospel at all times, if necessary use words’? That’s why movies are so great. You can preach without
preaching. You can show people the light without telling them what to believe or how they should think or act or what they should do with their money
or their dicks. Although I still hold a place in my heart for the Church. It’s a beautiful thing. As a kid I fell in love with the stained glass
windows, with the light coming through all those colors. Now I make movies, or anyway I plan to make them. And like I think I said before, movies are
just another kind of stained glass window, only the windows keep changing: they tell a much more complicated story.”

We stand there until the sun finishes setting, then head back to the Bonneville, the orange light of Dwaine’s cigarette tip the brightest on
earth.

8

West of Effingham we stop at a truck stop where the waitress calls us “honey” and “doll face” and wears a pencil tucked behind
her right ear. As we lunch on twin burgers and milkshakes (Dwaine’s vanilla, mine chocolate) from a pocket of his pea coat he withdraws a
tattered, tea-stained document. “It’s all here, babe—in black and white,” he says, tapping it with a nicotine-stained finger.
In fact the document is written in blue ballpoint on yellow legal pad paper.

“What is that?” I ask.

“My contract with Dexter Groon. Fucker owes me three grand.”

“How come you never told me this before?”

“Because it’s too embarrassing, that’s why. The guy screwed me. And it gets even worse.” Dwaine takes out his latest
black book, opens it to another newspaper clipping, this one also from the Daily News: a list of Academy Award winners for 1977. Bottoming the
list: Alphabet City, Best Short Animated Feature, Dexter Groon, Writer/Producer/Director.

“When we get to Hollywood, soon as we do, it’s payday.”

9

To keep each other from falling asleep at the wheel we devise a game called Pure Truth. Whoever sits in the passenger seat must answer truthfully, with
total unblinking candor, whatever question the driver puts to him.

We get one question each.

Dwaine goes first. He wants to know about my heroes. I follow the rules and hold nothing back. I tell him all about my earliest childhood heroes, about
Popeye and Soupy Sales and Diver Dan and Superman and Secret Service Agent James West of The Wild, Wild West—a James Bond/Western TV
series notable for its plucky theme music and balletic fight sequences, whose hero wore muscle-hugging brocade vests. From small screen heroes I move
on to the big screen, to Cagney and Bogart and Cooper, to Cary Grant and Burt Lancaster, working my way up to Brando, whom I first encountered inA Streetcar Named Desire on the Million Dollar Movie.At first the movie disappointed me, since it had nothing to do with streetcars. But
Brando was no disappointment. With his torn sweaty T-shirts, his mumbling brutishness, and that upper lip frozen in a permanent adolescent sneer it
took no time at all for him to jump to first place in my long line of heroes. “What was it about Marlon?” I wondered out loud. Was it that
face of his, so like the map of America, grinning like a naughty boy one minute, smashing table settings and buttering Parisian assholes the next? But
it was Brando’s pure Americanness that won me over, his owing nothing to the old world. That more than anything else made me want to be like him.

The Bonneville hummed along, the moon a bright fingernail clipping up in the sky ahead of us. A coyote reamed the night with its howls.

“To think,” I shook my head and said to the passing world, “of all the time I wasted trying to be Marlon Brando.”

“Don’t feel too bad,” Dwaine said. “Think how much time Marlon Brando’s wasted. And what does it say about us,
incidentally, that the two greatest twentieth-century American icons of hip masculinity, Elvis Brando and Marlon Presley, happen to be, or to have
been, save for the color of their skins, black men?”

“I hear they both have or had small dicks.”

“Brother, Marlon and Elvis don’tneed big dicks; they arebig dicks.”

10

Then it’s my turn. I’m thinking great, this is it, my big chance to fill in the Arizona Crater of Dwaine’s past, to tap the source of
those neon-stained nightmares of his.

“Tell me all about Vietnam,” I say. “And don’t say it was like an exploding dog, or any damn crap like that.”

We ride in tight-packed silence for at least another twenty minutes, when suddenly Dwaine switches to an unpaved bumpy side road, battering the
Bonneville and ourselves, passing by twisted old lady trees and mounds of aborted highway dirt.

“Now where are we going?”

He lights a cigarette with the car lighter and says nothing.

We climb up into the foothills. There, in what seems like the middle of nowhere, Dwaine parks the Bonneville. From among quarters and Rolaids in the
utility tray he grabs a pack of Juicy Fruit gum. I follow him up a trail to a series of bubbling soda springs. Steam rises from them into the dry
desert air. It’s just like Dwaine to know the springs are there. Only when naked and sitting in hot bubbling sulfurous water does he finally get
down to talking.

“The dog was part Pekingese, part wolfhound and mostly mongrel,” he says, folding a stick of Juicy Fruit into his mouth, handing me one.
“It had been lying dead on that dry dusty street in Udorn for days, putrefying under the tropical sun. Day after day I’d pass by and the
carcass would still be there, still lying in the same place, getting more and more bloated. Don’t ask me why, but the natives, they refused to
touch it, like it was cursed, like it was the hundred-headed dragon of the Hesperides. One day I’m walking by it on the way to a cafe and KABOOM!—the thing explodes like a booby trap. All the rest of the way down the street I’m picking maggots out of my face and
hair.”

The water smells of sulfur and is very hot. Steam floats up into my nose, burning my nostrils. It’s twilight. The desert sky is the color of an
overripe peach, the earth purple below it.

“That’s it, babe. I’m sorry, but that’s the best answer that I can give you. That was Vietnam.”

“No GODDAMN FAIR!” I say. “You’re supposed to tell everything! I followed the rules! I told you everything! Now you do the
same. Fucker! Fair is fair!”

Dwaine nods, conceding.

“Okay,” he says. “You’re right, babe. I’m sorry. Let me try once more.”

He waits a moment or two before beginning again.

“You know those dreams I keep having? Well, it’s always the same dream. I’m falling out of a helicopter. In the army I was a medic. I
rode in helicopters all the time. We’d pick up the wounded in them. My job was to patch them up while door gunners strafed the jungle canopy for
sappers. Anyway—” He lights and drags deeply on a cigarette. “—one day me and these two other medics, we really did fall
out of a helicopter, no shit. They tried to come back for us, but the jungle canopy was too thick and there were too many snipers around. Long story
short, babe, soon me and my fellow medic were taken prisoner by the V.C. They brought me and Stevie—that was the other medic’s
name—to this bamboo hut built over a river. And that’s where they tortured us.”