There's a Man With a Gun Over There (26 page)

Incredible. The US Army handed me the keys to another culture. If I was lucky, I would go to Germany fluent in its language, getting two years abroad courtesy of the American taxpayer. Wonderful.

Wonderful, too, my classmates Peter Everwine, Eric Lundberg, and Art Schmid from Yale. We had students from Stanford, Penn, and the University of Virginia. Steve Goldberg, who sat beside me in classroom 250 of Nisei Hall, had been accepted into the PhD program in history at Harvard. All these certified bright boys—and yes, I kept up with them. Me, little Rickie Ryan, Louise Ryan's boy from Janesville, smarter than he ever thought.

Guten Tag!

Guten Tag!

Ist daß hier die Deutschklasse?
Ja, daß ist die Deutschklasse.

Those were our first phrases in German. Wonderful.
Wunderbar
.

“
Schönes Wochenende
,” everyone says that first Friday. Have a nice weekend.

Even though we're required to wear our green army suits with their modest little PFC stripes on the sleeves, we were treated like students at an exclusive private college. We were civilized; we discussed restaurants; we went to plays like
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
at the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco. My assassins poem came out in a Bantam Book anthology. When I felt shaky about my identity, I opened the blue paperback, and there I was, on page 162, a published author.

Jenny got a job at a bakery in Carmel, and that gave us a little financial security. To celebrate, I went to the I. Magnin store and bought a green Harris Tweed sport coat I couldn't really afford and a couple of button-down collar shirts so I could pretend that I went to an Ivy League school.

In the midst of horrific danger, it was a safe little world. I'd never seen the ocean before I got to Monterey and kept inhaling its brisk air, which seemed as though it had been scrubbed clean of all impurities on its long voyage to us.

Es ist interessant.
Auf Wiedersehen!
Auf Wiedersehen!

“You have a cagey heart,” my second wife, Carol, says to me when I show her my story. “Did you ever let it out for poor Jenny?”

I don't think I did. I was frightened and wanted her comfort, but I also wanted the life of my times, which meant sexual freedom. I wasn't, I don't think, in love with her. I was in love with me.

I can still see her walking into that Carmel bakery wearing her too-large, white nylon uniform. Her slip often got caught by the static electricity in the nylon and hung at odd angles, exposing her panties beneath the semitransparent uniform. The job was belittling, and I felt so sorry for her, a Phi Beta Kappa college graduate, walking into that bakery with her underwear showing. And for what? A life in the army? What a price in human dignity we paid.

Both of us were belittled by our subservient lives. I was probably making less per hour than she was. Me, with my master's degree and my published poem. Surely I was worth more than that. I felt sorry for both of us, but you know what: I mostly felt sorry for me. I couldn't wait to get away from the army life and often drove down to Big Sur on Saturdays after I dropped off Jenny at work. I could walk the beaches there and forget who I was.

Toward the end of October 1969, I sat on a rock and filled my head with sunshine and forgetfulness. Out of nowhere three naked women cartwheeled in front of me. Their pubic hair was at my eye level.

“Groovy, soldier boy,” one said after she stood up, her breasts wiggling. The clipped sides of my army haircut gave me away. She bent over, kissed me on the lips, and grabbed my hand, rubbing it against the bristly hair of her crotch. Then she ran away laughing. I wanted to be a longhaired hippie guy with these beautiful women available to me. Why oh why did I ever get married?

I walked south along the beach, scrambling over rock out-croppings, getting my shoes wet in the ocean. I came to a cove behind a rock and found a couple moaning their way through sex. They were both naked, sitting up, perched on a blanket. She sat on his lap, facing him, languidly going up and down.

All of a sudden she opened her eyes and looked at me.

“Nice, huh?” she asked, a remark that seemed to take in the sex, the light, the ocean—the everything of being in California just then.

“Nice,” her partner said. He began to thrust harder. His eyes were still closed. “Nice.”

I walked back to the car slowly, looking for the cartwheeling girls. They had disappeared, and I drove back to Carmel to pick up Jenny from work. I was depressed. I wasn't sure I wanted a wife. I really wanted to fuck women besides Jenny. My mother had told me: I wasn't ready for marriage.

At the end of the bits of German dialogue, a crisp American voice came on the tape.

You will now hear some phrases not contained in the dialogue. You are to repeat the phrases.

39.

H
ere is the head of Henry Kissinger again, floating, bobbing this way and that. Once again, his eyeglasses become opaque when he turns toward the light.

“
Ja, ja
,” he says and, occasionally, begins laughing.

In this dream, the head of Henry Kissinger is held in place by three braided stainless steel cables that rise fifty or sixty feet from a normal-sized but headless torso seated at a desk far beneath the head. The body wears an elegant blue suit, white shirt, and silk tie. The collar of the shirt wraps around a dark hole. The cables disappear inside the hole and are anchored there inside the body.

The head nods and speaks in that avuncular Henry Kissinger manner.

“Who'd have thought an immigrant boy like me could rule the world.”

Then he laughs again.

The body at the desk aligns and taps some papers and puts them in a neat pile. “
Ja, alles in Ordnung. Alles klar
.”

Everything in order. Everything clear.

Across the front edge of the desk is a row of old-fashioned, wooden-handled stamps.

Occasionally a young man in a Harris Tweed sport coat much like the one I bought at I. Magnin presents himself to the headless body and looks up at the head of Henry Kissinger with a kind of awe.

“You are a fine young man,” the head of Henry Kissinger booms. Then he throws his head back and laughs. “Yale is it, young man? Are you a Yale man?”

The head of Henry Kissinger looks down. The lenses of his glasses are opaque.

“Yessir, Mr. Kissinger. Class of 1967. A Yale man, yes.”

“Very good,” the head of Henry Kissinger says.

His right hand, yards beneath his head, picks up a stamp and stamps the young man's face. The stamp head is circular, a foot across.

CIA, the black letters across the young man's face read. CIA.

“You are one of us now,” the head of Henry Kissinger proclaims. “One of us. Yes, yes.”

Then I am standing there in my Harris Tweed sport coat.

“You, young man. Where are you from?” the head of Henry Kissinger asks me. The arms of the body in front of me cross on its chest. I can see the head, far above, swaying back and forth on the steel cables.

“Columbia perhaps. You look like you might be a Columbia man.”

“Arkansas,” I say. “The University of Arkansas.”

The right arm of the torso reaches toward the stamps and stops in midgesture.

“I have Harvard,” the head of Henry Kissinger booms. “I have Yale and Princeton and Columbia. I have Stanford, but not Arkansas, no. I don't think you're one of us, young man. You're just not smart enough. You'll have to move along.”

I back away from the desk and pull out a .45.

Bam. Bam. Bam.

I fire and fire some more. The spent cartridges clatter on the floor, smoking as they fall. I miss him every time. I am sweating and terrified.

“I'm a killer, you fucker,” I scream up at the head of Henry Kissinger. “You don't understand. I'm a killer.”

“I'm sorry,” Henry Kissinger laughs. “You missed. You didn't qualify as a killer. Remember? Peter Everwine did that for you. Peter went to Yale. I'm sorry. You're just not one of us, are you?”

But I want to be, don't I? I want to be one of us. I start to cry.

“I'll try, sir,” I say. “I'll do what you tell me to do. I'll do whatever you say. Just give me a chance. Give me a chance.”

40.

O
n Wednesday, October 15th, our German teachers took all four or five classes of their students on a field trip to San Francisco. We went to the German Consulate, where we watched an earnest black-and-white movie about a plot to assassinate Hitler, a movie to prove to us that there were “good” Germans as well as these stock SS villains gleefully exterminating Jews.

What did I care about the difference between “good” and “bad” Germans? The Hitler era was a long time ago. Besides, I had my Harris Tweed sport coat on. I thought I looked pretty elegant. God, I was excited. I just wanted to inhale the wonderful possibility of learning a new language in the company of my bright new friends. I wanted to walk narrow cobblestone streets in Europe in my new green jacket.

After the movie, our teachers took all twenty or thirty of us over to Schroeder's German restaurant on Front Street in our civilian clothes. It was a delicious feeling, being in the army and leaving my uniform behind. Our group included two Green Berets. They were hillbillies, one from Tennessee and the other from West Virginia. They didn't look so good out of uniform, though. They looked diminished in their short-sleeved shirts and out-of-style brogans. One of them had a faded tattoo on his forearm. Shabby, shabby. The rest of us, dressed mostly in tweed coats of some kind, look as though we're on our way to teach a university class. Those tweed clothes are our real uniform, and we look jaunty.

While the dark paneling, the beer steins, the murals, and the buck heads on the wall of the restaurant were Germanic clichés, I didn't care. The place seemed European to me, far more European than anything I'd ever seen. I was so excited about the possibility of going to Europe that I could hardly contain myself.

The streets around the restaurant were crowded that day. It was a national day of protest against the war in Vietnam. Since many of the protesters wore black armbands, it was also a day of mourning.

Most of us PFCs were against the war, but we didn't say or do anything as we walked through the throngs of demonstrators. We didn't want to jinx our chances for assignments in Germany.

Even my euphoria couldn't cover up what a strange day it was. Here we were in the army walking among thousands and thousands of antiwar protesters. In the restaurant, we sat under stuffed boar heads and sang “
Deutschland, Deutschland über alles,
” which is still the anthem of Germany.

“What's a little compromise among friends,” Goldberg said. “We're the good Americans, right?”

Out of our group, only Neil Renner, a charming blond kid who wore John Lennon glasses and punctuated his speech with little whistling sounds, had the courage to make his opinions known and showed up at the lunch with a black arm-band around the sleeve of his tweed sport coat. The rest of us looked away, embarrassed. When Neil tried to make a joke, we studied our plates filled with sauerbraten and spaetzle as if he weren't there.