Lost in Place by Mark Salzman

When I was thirteen years old I saw my first kung fu movie, and before it ended I decided that the life of a wandering Zen monk was the life for me. I announced my willingness to leave East Ridge Junior High School immediately and give up all material things, but my parents did not share my enthusiasm. They made it clear that I was not to become a wandering Zen monk until I had finished high school. In the meantime I could practice kung fu and meditate down in the basement. So I immersed myself in the study of Chinese boxing and philosophy with the kind of dedication that is possible only when you don't yet have to make a living, when you are too young to drive and when you don't have a girlfriend. First I turned our basement into what I thought a Buddhist temple should look like. I shoved all the junk to one side, marked off boundaries with candles and set up a shrine on a coffee table. I outfitted the shrine with objects 3 from a cookware shop, the only store in town that carried Oriental gifts: a bamboo placemat, a package of chopsticks, a sake cup, which I turned into an incense burner, and a plastic Chinese kitchen deity with the character for "tasty" painted on his stomach. Next to the shrine I placed my sacred texts: the World Book Encyclopedia volumes containing entries for China, Buddhism and Taoism and Bruce Tegner's book Kling Fu & Tai Chi, seventh in a series of manuals by Mr. Tegner, a crew-cut ex-marine and our country's most prolific authority on hand-to-hand combat. Back in those pre-smoke alarm days I was able to burn as much incense as I wanted, and as far as I was concerned a kung fu temple wasn't a kung fu temple if you could see more than five feet in front of you. Sadly, the only place in Ridgefield, Connecticut, where one could buy incense was a store called Ye Olde Head Shop, which specialized in black-light posters and rolling papers, and their incense display didn't feature traditional Asian scents like sandalwood or frankincense. Ye Olde Head Shop carried Apricot, Watermelon, Passion Fruit and something called Black Love, which came packaged in a long cardboard pouch illustrated with the silhouette of a naked man and woman, both with huge Afro haircuts, having sex. I did not dare ask the brooding hippie behind the counter for a pack of Black Love or even the more temperate-sounding Passion Fruit, so I stuck with the sexually neutral varieties, which did remind one of apricot and watermelon when you sniffed the box but as soon as you lit the cones smelled like burning card hoard. There were other details. I needed an outfit for my training sessions, hut the kung fu uniforms advertised in the martial arts magazines were too expensive. I settled on 4 dyeing my green pajamas black, but the dye did not fix properly and my uniform came out an olive-purple. Tying it with my father's red bathrobe sash, I looked like an eggplant wrapped for Christmas. Trickiest of all, however, was what to do about my hair. Real Zen masters shave their heads, as anyone who has watched the Kung Fu series on television knows. My father had never liked my long hair, and had often said that he wished he could shave it all off, so I went directly to him and asked if he'd like to have a wish come true. His response was to raise one eyebrow, which I understood from experience to be a no. As an alternative I ordered something called a Surprise Bald Head Wig from the back of a comic book. If, as advertised, it was good enough to surprise one's friends, I figured it would be good enough for my basement training sessions. When the wig arrived by mail four long weeks later, it turned out to be a disappointment. It was floppy, dimpled and a sickly gray color. I modified it by painting the reverse side of it with pink and orange Magic Markers, then powdering it with something out of my mother's cosmetics drawer. Eventually the wig did take on a fleshy appearance, but then I had to figure out what to do with all the hair my father had insisted on protecting, which stuck out from under the back and sides and hung down over my shoulders. My little brother, Erich, two years younger than I am, happened to wander into the bathroom before I had worked this problem out and declared that I looked more like Ebenezer Scrooge than "any of those bald guys on TV who wear dresses and kick people." My sister, Rachel, two years younger than Erich, thought I looked like a giant fetus. Not everyone felt about kung fu the way I did.

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In the end I scrunched the extra hair up into a ball and stuffed it under the back of the wig. When I looked in the mirror I saw a determined young acolyte prepared to go through anything to achieve physical and spiritual mastery, but my parents, catching glimpses of me when I had to run upstairs to the bathroom, saw something else. The lumpy powdered head, the purple pajamas and the clouds of smoke that appeared behind me whenever I opened the basement door convinced them that I was headed for a career as a finger-cymbal player in airport lobbies. That first summer of kung fu, while our family was in western Ohio visiting my mother's parents, Bruce Lee died. We were all having breakfast in the kitchen and my grandmother was calling my grandfather a "BB-brain" for having burned the toast yet again. "Hold on," my father said, interrupting them and turning up the sound on their old black-and-white kitchen television set. It was on a tray with wheels so my grandmother could watch the news while she peeled potatoes, shucked corn, kneaded pie crust dough, washed the dishes or ironed clothes. "Look at this, Mark," my father said. "The King of kung fu is dead at thirty-three!" the local newscaster announced. "Asia's biggest movie star died under mysterious circumstances in an actress's apartment in Hong Kong, on the eve of the release of his first American feature film. Here is a clip from one of his earlier movies." It was the famous scene from The Chinese Connection where Bruce jumps straight up into the air and kicks a wooden sign to pieces. That sign, a version of which actually did hang at the entrance to a park in foreign-occupied Shanghai earlier this century, had warned NO DOGS OR CHINESE ALLOWED. That one scene made Bruce Lee a symbol of Chinese national pride overnight. It didn't matter that his character got executed by a firing squad at the end of the movie; the scene where he demolished the sign brought millions of ecstatic Chinese filmgoers to their feet and rocketed Bruce Lee to massive superstardom in Asia. I couldn't believe he was dead. I went out to our car and sat in it all day, crying. My father felt so sorry for me he offered to take me all the way to Dayton to a drive-in movie theater that, by coincidence, was showing The Chinese Connection. We watched the movie together in the VW bus, my father trying to conceal his boredom while I burst into tears of joy and sorrow every time Bruce Lee started fighting. That night, after everyone else was asleep, I put on my wig and practiced in the dark living room, making silent but impassioned vows to my dead hero that I would never ever give up until I was an enlightened kung fu master myself. Tutorials in Asian mysticism were not offered at East Ridge Junior High so I had to design my own course of study. From my research in the World Book I learned that the Buddha, while meditating under a tree just before dawn, happened to look up and see Venus rising in the eastern sky. Somehow this vision of the shining planet helped him to achieve nirvana, a state of mind described as the emancipation from all suffering. I interpreted this literally and became convinced that Buddhism was all about becoming oblivious to pain. Building up an immunity to discomfort became my spiritual goal, and toward this end I made my Zen and kung fu practice as uncomfortable as I could. On sunny days I meditated in the crawl space; on rainy days I sat outdoors in the mud. I made Bruce Lee a symbol of Chinese national pride overnight. It didn't matter that his character got executed by a firing squad at the end of the movie; the scene where he demolished the sign brought millions of ecstatic Chinese filmgoers to their feet and rocketed Bruce Lee to massive superstardom in Asia. I couldn't believe he was dead. I went out to our car and sat in it all day, crying. My father felt so sorry for me he offered to take me all the way to Dayton to a drive-in movie theater that, by coincidence, was showing The Chinese Connection. We watched the movie together in the VW bus, my father trying to conceal his boredom while I burst into tears of joy and sorrow every time Bruce Lee started fighting. That night, after everyone else was asleep, I put on my wig and practiced in the dark living room, making silent but impassioned vows to my dead hero that I would never ever give up until I was an enlightened kung fu master myself.

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Tutorials in Asian mysticism were not offered at East Ridge Junior High so I had to design my own course of study. From my research in the World Book I learned that the Buddha, while meditating under a tree just before dawn, happened to look up and see Venus rising in the eastern sky. Somehow this vision of the shining planet helped him to achieve nirvana, a state of mind described as the emancipation from all suffering. I interpreted this literally and became convinced that Buddhism was all about becoming oblivious to pain. Building up an immunity to discomfort became my spiritual goal, and toward this end I made my Zen and kung fu practice as uncomfortable as I could. On sunny days I meditated in the crawl space; on rainy days I sat outdoors in the mud. I 7 made sure that all of my stretching, punching and kicking exercises hurt, which any good athlete could have told me was a bad idea, but I hadn't asked any athletes for their advice. Meditation for me involved trying to concentrate on "emptiness" -- a squirmingly unpleasant challenge for any thirteen-year-old-while my crossed legs ached and my nose itched. I didn't realize it at the time, but there was a fundamental difference between what I was doing and what most real Buddhists do. The Buddha himself abandoned a comfortable life because he could not stand the hypocrisy of being a chubby prince when there was so much suffering all around him. He made himself homeless and destitute first and then sought nirvana because he figured that it was worth seeking only if it was available to even the poorest person on earth. I, on the other hand, wanted to become a Zen master because I hoped perfect enlightenment would make me more popular-specifically, more datable. As the youngest and shortest boy in my class, I was convinced that I would go to my grave without having sex unless I did something extraordinary with my life. Although it may be true these days that you can't throw a rock in America without hitting a psychic or a Tibetan lama or a yoga instructor, in 1973 becoming a Zen student in Ridgefield qualified as extraordinary. I hoped that if I became a living Buddha, I would never again have to hear the words "You're just like a little brother to me" when I asked someone on a date. Then there was kung fu. From the movies and television programs I saw, I gathered that one of the key benefits of being a Buddhist monk was that you could beat the crap out of bad people without getting emotionally involved or hysterically tired. You were always on the moral high ground because you were a pacifist, but if someone was foolish enough to throw a punch at you anyway, surprise! Kung fu turned you into a cross between Sugar Ray Robinson, Mikhail Baryshnikov and Mahatma Gandhi. My hope was to impose this surprise on at least one of the eighth-grade assholes who used to pick on me for being tiny, polite to adults and a cellist in a youth orchestra. Last but not least, I wanted to become a Zen master because I thought it would impress my father. Like most boys, I wanted to prove myself by doing something my father couldn't do, but also like most boys, I thought my dad could do anything. He could drive, paint, name the constellations, set up a tent and had been in the air force-what else was there? The answer came the first night I saw David Carradine, about to be ambushed by a gang of murderous cowboys, sit cross-legged on the ground and play his bamboo flute. I could hardly contain my excitement; this was definitely something my dad couldn't do. My dad knew he was about to be ambushed by murderous cowboys, first he would shake his head with disgust and say that he knew all along that something like this would happen to him. Then he would pace back and forth for a while, muttering curse words and wondering aloud at the foolishness of people who romanticize the Wild West. Finally he would resign himself to the inevitable, consoling himself with the thought that his murderers, like everyone else in the world, would die soon enough, the sun would eventually grow cold and all of this madness would be mercifully consigned to oblivion.

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Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris

AT THE AGE OF FORTY-ONE, I am returning to school and have to think of myself as what my French textbook calls a true debutant. After paying my tuition, I was issued a student ID, which allows me a discounted entry fee at movie theaters, puppet shows, and Festyland, a far-flung amusement park that advertises with billboards picturing a cartoon stegosaurus sitting in a canoe and eating what appears to be a ham sandwich . I've moved to Paris with hopes of learning the language. My school is an easy ten-minute walk from my apartment, and on the first day of class I arrived early, watching as the returning students greeted one another in the school lobby. Vacations were recounted, and questions were raised concerning mutual friends with names like Kang and Vlatnya . Regardless of their nationalities, everyone spoke in what sounded to me like excellent French. Some accents were better than others, but the students exhibited an ease and confidence I found intimidating. As an added discomfort, they were all young, attractive, and well dressed, causing me to feel not unlike Pa Kettle trapped backstage after a fashion show. The first day of class was nerve-racking because I knew I'd be expected to perform. That's the way they do it here it's everybody into the language pool, sink or swim. The teacher marched in, deeply tanned from a recent vacation, and proceeded to rattle off a series of administrative announcements. I've spent quite a few summers in Normandy, and I took a monthlong French class before leaving New York. I'm not completely in the dark, yet I understood only half of what this woman was saying . If you have not meimslsxp or Igpdmurct by this time, then you should not be in this room. Has everyone apzkiubjxow? Everyone? Good, we shall begin. She spread out her lesson plan and sighed, saying, All right, then, who knows the alphabet? It was startling because (a) I hadn't been asked that question in a while and (b) I realized, while laughing, that I myself did not know the alphabet. They're the same letters, but in France they're pronounced differently. I know the shape of the alphabet but had no idea what it actually sounded like . Ahh. The teacher went to the board and sketched the letter a. Do we have anyone in the room whose first name commences with an ahh? Two Polish Annas raised their hands, and the teacher instructed them to present themselves by stating their names, nationalities, occupations, and a brief list of things they liked and disliked in this world. The first Anna hailed from an industrial town outside of Warsaw and had front teeth the size of tombstones. She worked as a seamstress, enjoyed quiet times with friends, and hated the mosquito . Oh, really, the teacher said. How very interesting. I thought that everyone loved the mosquito, but here, in front of all the world, you claim to detest him. How is it that we've been blessed with someone as unique and original as you? Tell us, please. The seamstress did not understand what was being said but knew that this was an occasion for shame. Her rabbity mouth huffed for breath, and she stared down at her lap as though the appropriate comeback were stitched somewhere alongside the zipper of her slacks . The second Anna learned from the first and claimed to love sunshine and detest lies. It sounded like a translation of one of those Playmate of the Month data sheets, the answers always written in the same loopy handwriting: Turn-ons: Mom's famous five-alarm chili! Turnoffs: insecurity and guys who come on too strong!!!! The two Polish Annas surely had clear notions of what they loved and hated, but like the rest of us, they were limited in terms of vocabulary, and this made them appear less than sophisticated. The teacher forged on, and we learned that Carlos, the Argentine bandonion player, loved wine, music, and, in his words, making sex with the womens of the world. Next came a beautiful young Yugoslav who identified herself as an optimist, saying that she loved everything that life had to offer .

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The teacher licked her lips, revealing a hint of the sauce-box we would later come to know. She crouched low for her attack, placed her hands on the young woman's desk, and leaned close, saying, Oh yeah? And do you love your little war? While the optimist struggled to defend herself, I scrambled to think of an answer to what had obviously become a trick question. How often is one asked what he loves in this world? More to the point, how often is one asked and then publicly ridiculed for his answer? I recalled my mother, flushed with wine, pounding the tabletop late one night, saying, Love? I love a good steak cooked rare. I love my cat, and I love My sisters and I leaned forward, waiting to hear our names. Tums, our mother said. I love Tums. The teacher killed some time accusing the Yugoslavian girl of masterminding a program of genocide, and I jotted frantic notes in the margins of my pad. While I can honestly say that I love leafing through medical textbooks devoted to severe dermatological conditions, the hobby is beyond the reach of my French vocabulary, and acting it out would only have invited controversy . When called upon, I delivered an effortless list of things that I detest: blood sausage, intestinal pts, brain pudding. I'd learned these words the hard way. Having given it some thought, I then declared my love for IBM typewriters, the French word for bruise, and my electric floor waxer. It was a short list, but still I managed to mispronounce IBM and assign the wrong gender to both the floor waxer and the typewriter. The teacher's reaction led me to believe that these mistakes were capital crimes in the country of France . Were you always this palicmkrexis? she asked. Even a fiuscrzsa ticiwelmun knows that a typewriter is feminine. I absorbed as much of her abuse as I could understand, thinking but not saying that I find it ridiculous to assign a gender to an inanimate object incapable of disrobing and making an occasional fool of itself . Why refer to crack pipe or Good Sir Dishrag when these things could never live up to all that their sex implied? The teacher proceeded to belittle everyone from German Eva, who hated laziness, to Japanese Yukari, who loved paintbrushes and soap . Italian, Thai, Dutch, Korean, and Chinese we all left class foolishly believing that the worst was over. She'd shaken us up a little, but surely that was just an act designed to weed out the deadweight. We didn't know it then, but the coming months would teach us what it was like to spend time in the presence of a wild animal, something completely unpredictable. Her temperament was not based on a series of good and bad days but, rather, good and bad moments. We soon learned to dodge chalk and protect our heads and stomachs whenever she approached us with a question. She hadn't yet punched anyone, but it seemed wise to protect ourselves against the inevitable . Though we were forbidden to speak anything but French, the teacher would occasionally use us to practice any of her five fluent languages . I hate you, she said to me one afternoon. Her English was flawless . I really, really hate you. Call me sensitive, but I couldn't help but take it personally . After being singled out as a lazy kfdtinvfm, I took to spending four hours a night on my homework, putting in even more time whenever we were assigned an essay. I suppose I could have gotten by with less, but I was determined to create some sort of identity for myself: David the hard worker, David the cut-up. We'd have one of those complete this sentence exercises, and I'd fool with the thing for hours, invariably settling on something like A quick run around the lake? I'd love to! Just give me a moment while I strap on my wooden leg. The teacher, through word and action, conveyed the message that if this was my idea of an identity, she wanted nothing to do with it . My fear and discomfort crept beyond the borders of the classroom and accompanied me out onto the wide boulevards. Stopping for a coffee, asking directions, depositing money in my bank account: these things were out of the question, as they involved having to speak. Before beginning school, there'd been no shutting me up, but now I was convinced that everything I said was wrong. When the phone rang, I ignored it. If someone asked me a question, I pretended to be deaf. I knew my fear was getting the best of me when I started wondering why they don't sell cuts of meat in vending machines .
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My only comfort was the knowledge that I was not alone. Huddled in the hallways and making the most of our pathetic French, my fellow students and I engaged in the sort of conversation commonly overheard in refugee camps . Sometime me cry alone at night. That be common for I, also, but be more strong, you. Much work and someday you talk pretty. People start love you soon. Maybe tomorrow, okay. Unlike the French class I had taken in New York, here there was no sense of competition. When the teacher poked a shy Korean in the eyelid with a freshly sharpened pencil, we took no comfort in the fact that, unlike Hyeyoon Cho, we all knew the irregular past tense of the verb to defeat. In all fairness, the teacher hadn't meant to stab the girl, but neither did she spend much time apologizing, saying only, Well, you should have been vkkdyo more kdeynfulh. Over time it became impossible to believe that any of us would ever improve. Fall arrived and it rained every day, meaning we would now be scolded for the water dripping from our coats and umbrellas. It was mid- October when the teacher singled me out, saying, Every day spent with you is like having a cesarean section. And it struck me that, for the first time since arriving in France, I could understand every word that someone was saying . Understanding doesn't mean that you can suddenly speak the language. Far from it. It's a small step, nothing more, yet its rewards are intoxicating and deceptive. The teacher continued her diatribe and I settled back, bathing in the subtle beauty of each new curse and insult . You exhaust me with your foolishness and reward my efforts with nothing but pain, do you understand me? The world opened up, and it was with great joy that I responded, I know the thing that you speak exact now. Talk me more, you, plus, please, plus.

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Mississippi Solo by Eddy Harris

THE MISSISSIPPI River is laden with the burdens of a nation . Wide at St. Louis where I grew up, the river in my memory flows brown and heavy and slow, seemingly lazy but always busy with barges and rugs, always working -- like my father --always traveling, always awesome and intimidating. I have watched this river since I was small, too young to realize that the burdens the Mississippi carries /arc more than barges loaded with grain and coal, that the river carries as well sins and salvation, dreams and adventure and destiny. As a child I feared this river and respected it more than I feared God. As an adult now I fear it even more . I used to have nightmares filled with screams whenever I knew my family planned some excursion across the river and I'd have to go along. That old Veteran's Bridge seemed so weak and rickety. My imagination constructed a dilapidated and shaky span of old wooden slats, rotted and narrow and weak with no concrete support anywhere. The iron girders that held the poor thing up were ancient and rusty, orange and bumpy with oxidation where they should have been shiny and black. The bridge wavered in the wind and was ready to collapse as the car with my family in it approached, and then we would plunge through the air after crashing the brittle wooden guardrail and we'd dive toward the river. Everyone screamed but me. I held my ears every time and waited for the splash. It never came. I always awoke, always lived to dream the dream again and again, not only when asleep but even as we crossed the river . The river was full of giant catfish and alligators, ice floes and trees that an often enraged and monster-like river had ripped from the shores along its path. . The Mississippi. Mighty, muddy, dangerous, rebellious, and yet a strong, fathering kind of river. The river captured my imagination when I was young and has never let go. Since I can re member I have wanted to be somehow a part of the river as much as I wanted to be a hero, strong and brave and relentless like the river, looming so large in the life and world around me that I could not be ignored or forgotten. I used to sit on the levee and watch the murkiness lumber down to the sea and I'd dream of the cities and towns the river had passed, the farms and fields and bridges, the magic in ' the debris picked up here, deposited there, and the other rivers along the way: Ohio, Illinois, Arkansas, taking all on a beautiful voyage to the Gulf of Mexico and beyond. I wanted to go too, I wanted to dip first my toes in the water to test, then all of me, hanging onto whatever and floating along with it, letting the river drop me off wherever and pick me up later and take me on again. I didn't care where, I just wanted to go. But my parents wouldn't let me . But now I am a man and my parents can't stop me. I stand at that magical age, thirty; when a man stops to take stock of his life and he reflects on all the young-man's dreams that won't come true. No climbs up Everest, no try-out with the Yankees, no great American novel. Instead, reality: wives and babies and mortgages, pensions, security and the far-away future. No great risks. No more falling down. No more skinned knees. No great failures. I wondered: is all this inevitable? I've never minded looking stupid and I have no fear of failure . I decided to canoe down the Mississippi River and to find out what I was made of. ONCE THEY HAVE REACHED a certain age, dreamers are no longer held in high esteem. They are ridiculed instead, called loony and lazy, even by their friends. Especially by their friends! Dreams are delicate and made of gossamer. They hang lightly on breezes and suspend as if from nothing. The slightest wind can tear them apart. My dream was buffeted by my friends. What the hell for? they asked me. What are you trying to prove? Why don't you just go over Niagara Falls in a barrel? And this was from my friends. God, how that hurt. One . friend even told me to take a bus, for God's sake. Instead of helping me fly, my friends were pulling me down, and laughing at me . Putting a canoe into the headwaters of the Mississippi and aiming it for New Orleans is not something a man is supposed to do. It is not considered normal or sane. Perhaps it is the danger involved, or perhaps it is too much an act of desire and determination, an act of passion and volition, or simply too out of the ordinary .
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. . For whatever reasons, my idea met with disapproval, and instead of childish jubilation 1 approached canoeing the river with doubt and sorrow-sorrow because the glory with which I first came upon this adventure was dashed by friends. Like Galileo before the Church, I was ready to relinquish my radical approaches and be normal . But this dream of mine, still suspended on die breeze and delicate as ever, was just as real as those flimsy summer spider webs hanging in the air, and just as clinging. Once the webs attach themselves to you they are hard to get rid of. And so it was with my desire to ride the river . 3 A MAN BLESSED with a flood of ideas has the luxury to squander them, to sift through his wealth until he finds the right idea for . the right occasion. He may lose a great many of them, but he can afford it . When a man has only one great notion, it becomes all the more valuable, a jewel, a prized and noble possession. He cherishes it like a kid with his last stick of candy. He guards it, he secretes it away, taking it out every night at bedtime just to look at it, to hold it up to the light and ponder it and wonder just when to taste it at last, all the while being haunted by its existence and his burning desire to hurry up with it. An obsession . For weeks I ached with the thought of doing the river. But I had no canoe. I had no camping gear. I had no money. The initial reaction from my friends had left me secretive and without allies to support even spiritually my idiotic plan. And pretty soon it would be too late to go. Already it was the first week of October and Minnesota, where I would start, had seen its first snowfall . One friend came to mind and I warmed to him not because he could help give birth to this dream I had, but because of all the people I knew, Robert would at least listen to me and not tell me I was crazy. He would not tell me to give it up . He was an old man, and every time I went to see him I was sure it would be the last I'd see him alive. He's been my special friend since long before I can remember, more like an uncle than just some old man I knew and liked, the kind of friend who will . always understand. He is always your last resort, when he should be your first. An old man from a long time ago when every problem could be solved with a couple of drinks and a couple of hours of talking-with him mostly listening. When you need good advice, the one to wm to is the one who listens well; the best talk, the best advice comes from yourself . Robert and I used to drink sodas together, back when he tried to teach me music. About the time I was heading off for college, I graduated to beer. Tonight I would be doing advanced studies .. Tonight, he did most of the talking . A skinny black man with a head shaped like a peanut, Robert had very little hair and what hair he did have he wore cut so close to his scalp it looked more like razor stubble. He always wore a fedora, either grey or brown, even indoors . Normally I would come to him and he'd be working on the transmission of his car or taking his stereo apart and putting it back together. He was always tinkering with something and there was junk lying all around. I'd come over and watch him and hint in roundabout fashion that something was bothering me and he'd tinker patiently with me and we'd take our time until we'd squeezed the problem out. Then we'd have a look at it and a drink . But not today. Today he wanted to get right to it, as if he were in a hurry. Not that he had someplace to get to, but a different kind of hurry, as if he hadn't much time to waste anymore . ''Well, let's get to it," he said. And I knew this session was going to be different from all the others. If there was any advice or wisdom to offer, he was going to give it out straight and not have me scratch around until I found it . "I haven't seen you in a long time," he said. "Something must be bothering you. What is it?" I felt like a worm of a man who only calls his friends when he needs some favor. But more than that, I felt all
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the frustration that surged through Robert and made the squiggly vein in his temple twitch, frustration I was noticing for the first time . I told him my plans, that I was going to do the river. I told him the obstacles that blocked me, that I still had no canoe, no gear, no money, and that everyone I knew had said it was impossible and stupid. And he said: . "Don't you listen to them. They got no imagination. They got no vision. And it makes them jealous because you do, and they'll try to stop you, try to change you. But don't you let them." It was not advice. It was a command . Robert had at one time been a wonderful tap dancer. His apartment was littered with photos and newspaper clippings and momentos of when he and his partner used to tear up the boards on the circuit. Their special routine: standing back to front, only inches apart and dancing in unison, so swiftly as to be a blur, their timing so exquisite that from head on you could see the movements of only one man. The big time called, movies, New York, but he never went. He never said why, but now I had a glimpse . He turned instead to music, taught himself the trombone, played in local jazz bands and learned music so well that he did most of the arrangements for the bands he played in. Again there was a chance for the big time. Again he stayed in St. Louis . He got married, had children, and settled into a normal job . The closest he got to music any more was teaching it to me. He used to give me trumpet lessons. The jobs he settled for were all a black man in those days could expect: shining shoes, being a custodian in office buildings and schools, mopping and . polishing floors, cleaning desks and mending broken things . He reached across the table and grabbed me. His fingers were long and bony, his hands strong from building things. He held me by the wrists and squeezed me hard . "I know you can do it," he said: "I have confidence in you . . Always have." Canoeing? Writing? His eyes gathered in the soft light around us and sparkled with a thousand secrets . "And maybe there ain't nobody else who does," he whispered, "but we don't much care what they think about us no how . Do we?" The old man licked his lips, his dry-looking tongue flicking out past his dentures, feeling the air and smacking his lips lightly as if he were tasting something. He wore an expression 1 took to be sadness, but maybe it was just fatigue or longing. Maybe it was the inevitable expression of commingled jealousy and exhortation an old man finds when he knows his time has come and gone and all he can do is pass the baton . He pulls down a bottle of whiskey from the shelf and one glass. Before he comes to sit again he pauses and looking down at me he shifts the false teeth in his mouth and nods to himself with a satisfied smile. He grabs a second glass from the shelf and slides it across to me. Without a word, Robert was telling me plenty . He leaned in close. His eyes squinted, studying me . We sat quietly just like that for a moment. 1 squirmed in my seat until we drank. Our drinking is clean, without ceremony. No clinking of glasses, no toasts. Just eyes locked, his on mine, and the simultaneous raising of glasses to lips . The whiskey burns. 1 emit a noise you might hear in a cartoon . Robert screws up his face as though suffering with each swallow. He clears his throat with a guttural, teeth-clenched "Aaah!" When he finally speaks, he whispers . "Ate you afraid?" ''Well,'' 1 reply. "I'm no expert canoeist. 1 swim okay, but-" ''That's not what 1 mean." "What else is there to be afraid of? Drowning? Freezing to . death? Wild animals? Or just
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not being able to take it?" ''Well,'' he says. "If you get out and you can't take it, that sure is going to mess with your mind. How you deal with failure is just as important as the failure itself, but that's not what I'm talking about neither." He reaches slowly for the bottle and he pours. This time, before we drink, he tilts his glass toward me . "You're black too, you know," he says. His smile is cunning . "Or have you forgotten?" "I haven't forgotten, but so what? What's that got to do with anything?" He takes a long slow sip and sneaks a peek at me from over the rim of his glass . "\What is it you're wanting to do?" "Canoe the Mississippi." "From where?" "From the beginning." And where's that?" "In Minnesota." "In Minnesota," he repeats. "Do you know how many black people there are in Minnesota? About six." . He takes another sip . "And how far you planning to go?" "New Orleans." . ''Through the South," he said. He sips again. "From where there ain't no black folks to where they still don't like us much. 1 don't know about you, but 1 might be a little concerned about that." Then 1 see the river. First as a blue line on a map. Then, as Robert talks on and 1 see myself out ~ere, a black man alone and exposed and vulnerable, the blue line blurs and fragments until there is more than one Mississippi River. There is the river of legend, the Father of Waters. The river of steamboats and gamblers. The river flowing with the tears and sweat of slaves. 1 can hear the beating of Indian drums and the singing of slaves resting in the shade of plantation willows on the banks of the old man river. The river has come alive in my mind, the sights, sounds and smells of the river in my imagination . But I know the river won't be like that, fur trappers in buckskin shirts, paddlewheelers piled high with bales of cotton, Indian canoes sliding silently. I know it won't be like that, but I don't know what to expect. If I had any idea before of how it might be, I don't now . . Robert says to me: "Did you ever stop to think that your friends might not want you to do this because it might be dangerous?" . "No, I never did. They just made fun of me." "You know how friends are. Maybe it's their way of saying they don't want you to get hurt." I hesitate. "Maybe." I'm not convinced . "Maybe they don't want you to get shot by some redneck in the woods. Maybe they don't want you to fall in and drown. Or maybe they're trying to protect you from something else." ''What's that?" "You see, everybody thinks his way is the right way. The Bible- bangers think God is the answer. A man with a wife and kids and a house and a good job, if he's happy with them all, he thinks that's where satisfaction comes from. Everybody thinks he knows what's best so when a friend comes by with a different way, especially a risky way, you want to save him. You see?" "I see," I say, but I'm really confused. "But what about imagination and vision? What about jealousy?" "Oh, I'm not saying they're not jealous. Envy is what fuels their convictions. When a man secretly wants what you have and maybe he's ashamed of it and maybe he knows he can never have it, that's when he goes out of his way most to make it seem worthless . Just like some men are reassured by other people's failure . That's where vision and imagination come in." . "Without vision and imagination," Robert says softly, ''you never look for your own path to glory. And glory can mean Mount Everest or Nobel Prizes or a wife and kids and security. It can even be canoeing down the Mississippi. But it takes vision to see what shoes fit you and what shoes fit the other guy. And the thing to remember is: don't take it all so serious. Failure is horrible, but it's not the worst thing there is."

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Too Close to the Falls by Catherine Gildiner

Over half a century ago I grew up in Lewiston, a small town in western New York, a few miles north of Niagara Falls on the Canadian border. As the Falls can be seen from the Canadian and American sides from different perspectives, so can Lewiston. It is a sleepy town, protected from the rest of the world geographically, nestled at the bottom of the steep shale Niagara Escarpment on one side and the Niagara River on the other. The river's appearance, however, is deceptive. While it seems calm, rarely making waves, it has deadly whirlpools swirling on its surface, which can suck anything into their vortices in seconds. My father, a pharmacist, owned a drugstore in the nearby honeymoon capital of Niagara Falls; My mother, a math teacher by training rather than inclination, was an active participant in the historical society. Lewiston actually had a few historical claims to fame, which my mother eagerly hyped. The word "cocktail" was invented there, Charles Dickens stayed overnight at the Frontier House, the local inn, and Lafayette gave a speech from a balcony on the main street. Our home, which had thirteen trees in the yard that were planted when there were thirteen states, was used to billet soldiers in the War of 1812. It was called into action by history yet again for the Underground Railroad to smuggle slaves across the Niagara River to freedom in Canada. My parents longed for a child for many years; however, when they were not blessed, they gracefully settled into an orderly life of community service. Then I unexpectedly arrived, the only child of suddenly bewildered older, conservative, devoutly Catholic parents. I seem to have been "born eccentric" -- a phrase my mother uttered frequently as a way of absolving herself of responsibility. By today's standards I would have been labeled with attention deficit disorder, a hyperactive child born with some adrenal problem that made her more prone to rough-and-tumble play than was normal for a girl. Fortunately I was born fifty years . ago and simply called "busy" and "bossy," the possessor of an Irish temper. I was at the hub of the town because I worked in my father's drugstore from the age of four. This was not exploitative child labor but rather what the town pediatrician prescribed. When my mother explained to him that I had gone over the top of the playground swings making a 360-degree loop and had been knocked unconscious twice, had to be removed from a cherry tree the previous summer by the fire department, done Roy Ed Sullivan imitations for money at Helms's Dry Goods Store, all before I'd hit kindergarten, Dr. Laughton dutifully wrote down all this information, laid down his clipboard with certainty, and said that I had worms and needed Fletcher's Castoria. His fallback position (in case when I was dewormed no hyperactive worms crept from any orifice) was for me to burn off my energy by working at manual labor in my father's store. He explained that we all had metronomes inside our bodies and mine was simply ticking faster than most; I had to do 'more work than others to burn it off. Being in the full-time workforce at four gave me a unique perspective on life, and I was exposed to situations I later realized were unusual for a child. For over ten years I never once had a meal at home, and that included Christmas. I worked and went to restaurants and delivered everything from BandAids to morphine in the Niagara Frontier. I had to tell people whether makeup looked good or bad, point out what cough medicines had sedatives, count and bottle pills. I also had to sound as though I knew what I was talking about in order to pull it off. I was surrounded by adults, and my peer group became my coworkers at the store. My father worked behind a counter which had a glass separating it from the rest of the store. He and the other pharmacists wore starched white shirts, which buttoned on the side with MCCLURE'S DRUGS monogrammed in red above the pocket. The rest of us wore plastic ink guards in our breast pockets which had printed in script letters MCCLURE'S HAS FREE DELIVERY.
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(The word "delivery" had wheels and a forward slant.) I worked there full-time when I was four and five and I suspected that when I went to school next year I would work a split shift from 6:00 to 9:00 A.M. and then again after school until closing time at 10:00 P.M. Of course I would always work fulltime on Saturday and Sunday when my mother did her important work with the historical board. I restocked the candy and makeup counters, loaded the newspaper racks, and replenished the supplies of magazines and comics. I read the comics aloud in different voices, jumped out of the pay-phone booth as Superman and acted out Brenda Starr "in her ruthless search for truth," and every morning at 6:00 A.M. I equipped the outdoor newsstand of blue wood with its tiered layers with the Niagara Falls Gazette. My parents were removed from the hurly-burly of my everyday existence. My father was my employer, and I called him "boss," which is what everyone else called him. My mother provided no rules nor did she ever make a meal, nor did I have brothers or sisters to offer me any normal childlike role models. While other four-year-olds spent their time behind fences at home with their moms and dads, stuck in their own backyards making pretend cakes in hot metal sandboxes or going to stagnant events like girls' birthday parties where you sat motionless as the birthday girl opened her presents and then you waited in line to stick a pin into a wall while blindfolded, hoping it would hit the rear end of a jackass, I was out doing really exciting work. I spent my time in the workforce delivering prescriptions with Roy, my co-worker. One thing about a drugstore: it's a great leveler. Everyone from the rich to the poor needs prescriptions and it was my job to deliver them. Roy, the driver, and I, the assistant who read the road maps and prescription labels, were dogged as we plowed through snowstorms and ice jams to make our deliveries. The job took us into mansions on the Niagara Escarpment, to the home of Dupont, who invented nylon, to deliver hypodermic needles to a new doctor on the block, Dr. Jonas Salk, an upstart who thought he had a cure for polio, to Marilyn Monroe on the set of Niagara, to the poor Indians on the Tuscarora reservation, and to Warty, who lived in a refrigerator box in the town dump. The people we delivered to felt like my "family," and my soulmate in this experience was Roy. He was different from my father, the other pharmacists, and Irene, the salmon-frocked cosmetician. He was always in a good mood and laughed at all the things I found funny and never told me to "calm down." He made chestnuts into jewels, bottle tops into art, music into part of our joy together, and he always saw the comedy in tragedy. He never put off a good time, yet he always got his work done. To me that was amazing, a stunning high-wire act done without a net. He effortlessly jumped into the skin of whomever he was addressing. He made each life we entered, no matter where it was pinned on the social hierarchy, seem not only plausible, but inevitable, even enviable. Every town has its elaborate social hierarchy and cast of characters. Maybe all children are fascinated by the idiosyncratic, those who have difficulty walking the tightrope of acceptable behavior in a small town where the social stratification is so explicit and the rules feel so inviolable. Those who opt out of the social order are as terrifying as they are enviable. Maybe I identified with these people because I was trying, even at four, to work out how and why I was different. Whatever the reasons, my interest in whatever it took to be different, or to be the same, began early and has persisted. They say 6 TOO CLOSE TO THE FALLS architects always played with Legos. Well, I'm a psychologist who was always interested in what the social psychologists refer to as "individual differences," or the statisticians refer to as "the extremes of the bell curve," or what we colloquially refer to as "the edge." Roy and 1 made up complicated systems for working together efficiently. He threw magazines to me. 1 printed "Return" on them if they were past a certain date, threw them on the bright red upright dolly, and we whipped out to pile them on the return truck when it beeped. 1 always rode on top of the magazines and Roy pushed the dolly, tearing around corners of the store. (We set an egg timer and always tried to beat our last time.) Roy loved to bet, and after 1 got the hang of it from him, 1 found it gave life just that bit of edge it needed. Our days were packed with exciting wagers. For example, we never just rolled the dolly back from the truck; instead we played a game called "dolly-trust." Roy would drop the dolly backward with me standing upright on it and then he would grab it one tiny second before it hit the
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cement. 1 felt my stomach dropping and my knees would go weak but 1 had to trust him. If 1 twitched or stiffened one muscle, I lost the bet and had to line up all the new magazines and he got to be boss. If I never made a peep, I got to be boss and he had to do the job. The winner was merciless in extracting obeisance from the other. The magazines had to be arranged exactly as the "boss" suggested. If one was not equidistant from the next or, God forbid, hidden behind another, the "assistant" had to pile them up and start all over again. At precisely 10:30 A.M. each Saturday all the employees had a break. We sat around the large red Coke cooler where the ice had melted and we fished out our Cokes. I had to stand on a wooden bottle crate to reach inside. Roy had a game, of course, to make it more interesting. Each twisted green Coke bottle had the name of a city on the bottom, indicating which bottling plant it had come from. Roy would yell out a city and whoever had the bottle with the closest city had to pay for all seven of the Cokes. Roy knew every city and what cities were closest to it. Whenever anyone challenged him and we looked at the map of the United States in the toy section, he was right. Once I lost my whole salary when he yelled out "Tulsa" and I had Wichita and Irene had Oklahoma City. When I was in grade one Sister Timothy, my teacher, told my mother that she had never met a child who knew more about geography than 1 did and that one of the advantages of having an only child is you can give her so much in terms of travel. My mother was perplexed since I had never been more than thirty miles from Lewiston. Roy said people learn best when the stakes are high. 1 liked looking at things Roy-style. When my mother's best friend's son finally died after being in an iron lung for years, my mother said it was so unfair to die at the age of six. When I told Roy that Roland had died, he seemed happy and said, ''I'll bet he was glad to get out of that iron caterpillar and move around." He also knew things that were interesting to me. My father dabbled in chemistry as a hobby and my mother was devoted to history, neither of which interested me. One smelled and the other had already happened. Roy had been all over the United States. ~e had driven semis and been a cowpoke. When we loaded Borden's Milk Chocolate with the cow on the package, he would tell me about his sojourn out west when he branded cattle and birthed calves. If some of the calves had "hard times gettin' out" (I wasn't exactly sure where they came out) they had to have their little legs handcuffed together and then the cowboys pulled them out with all of their strength. The poor critters who lost oxygen at birth were so dumb they couldn't learn to stay away from the electric fence and had to be tied up. At exactly 12:30 P.M. each Saturday, Roy and I headed out for an afternoon of prescription deliveries. My mother taught me to read when I was four but Roy's mother had never taught him to read because, as Roy said, she had so many children she didn't know what to do. Roy had to quit school and go out and work from the age of eight. I told him to stop "bellyaching" (a word I got from him) since I was only four at the time. Roy said he could top me in two ways: he had brothers and sisters in fourteen states 'of the Union and he had what I longed for-a driver's license. It was a match made in heaven. I read the address aloud, and Roy drove to it. Music was not a part of my life. My father listened to the news and my mother sang in the church choir and my mother's friend Mrs. Aungier taught piano. I was going to start piano lessons when I was six. I had no idea that there were ways to make music other than through the piano or the church organ, until I met Roy. He always blasted a radio listening to Bessie Smith, Louis Armstrong and Jelly Roll Morton. Roy and I would perform duets and I would be Ella Fitzgerald and he would be Louis Armstrong. I remember the seasons by the songs we sang. We drove our green Rambler into the sun with burnt-orange maple leaves gracefully floating over the gorge in Roy 9 the cool air and we sang "Ain't Misbehavin'." Sometimes we'd forage along the gorge for the best specimens of acorns and chestnuts for jewelry-making and Roy would make glittering necklaces, which I wore till they shriveled in the Winter. For the employee Christmas party we sang a duet of "Mean to Me" in Loretta's Italian-American restaurant, called The Horseshoe, and even Loretta's husband came out of the kitchen to clap.
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Sometimes we would have deliveries that were far away. My father specialized in rare medicine that only a few people needed, so he had customers in other cities and on Indian reservations and even in Canada. Roy and I would have lunch on the road. My parents would never let me play the jukebox, saying it was a waste of money-"Five plays and you could have bought the record" was my father's take on leased fun. Roy always plied me with nickels and we played everything right from the machine in our booth. As usual, we shared our mania for time management and we would bet how many songs we could hear before our hamburgers arrived and how many while we were eating. He was right the first few times and won money off me, but I began to catch on and learned to eat with great speed or to languish over my pie. I was amazed that everyone from Batavia to Fort Erie knew Roy. There wasn't one truck stop where people didn't wave and call out his name, especially the waitresses. I guess Roy stood out, with Tootsie Roll fingers that looked bleached on the palm side, and a funny accent that I figured was Western. He also had a laugh, which shook his whole body and filled any room we were in-even our church with its vaulted ceilings.

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THE THINGS THEY CARRIED by Tim O'Brien

First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross carried letters from a girl named Martha, a junior at Mount Sebastian College in New Jersey. They were not love letters, but Lieutenant Cross was hoping, so he kept them folded in plastic at the bottom of his rucksack. In the late afternoon, after a day's march, he would dig his foxhole, wash his hands under a canteen, unwrap the letters, hold them with the tips of his fingers, and spend the last hour of light pretending. He would imagine romantic camping trips into the White Mountains in New Hampshire. He would sometimes taste the envelope flaps, knowing her tongue had been there. More than anything, he wanted Martha to love him as he loved her, but the letters were mostly chatty, elusive on the matter of love. She was a virgin, he was almost sure. She was an English major at Mount Sebastian, and she wrote beautifully about her professors and roommates and midterm exams, about her respect for Chaucer and her great affection for Virginia Woolf. She often quoted lines of poetry; she never mentioned the war, except to say, Jimmy, take care of yourself. The letters weighed 10 ounces. They were signed Love, Martha, but Lieutenant Cross understood that Love was only a way of signing and did not mean what he sometimes pretended it meant. At dusk, he would carefully return the letters to his rucksack. Slowly, a bit distracted, he would get up and move among his men, checking the perimeter, then at full dark he would return to his hole and watch the night and wonder if Martha was a virgin. The things they carried were largely determined by necessity. Among the necessities or nearnecessities were P-38 can openers, pocket knives, heat tabs, wristwatches, dog tags, mosquito repellent, chewing gum, candy, cigarettes, salt tablets, packets of Kool-Aid, lighters, matches, sewing kits, Military Payment Certificates, C rations, and two or three canteens of water. Together, these items weighed between 15 and 20 pounds, depending upon a man's habits or rate of metabolism. Henry Dobbins, who was a big man, carried extra rations; he was especially fond of canned peaches in heavy syrup over pound cake. Dave Jensen, who practiced field hygiene, carried a toothbrush, dental floss, and several hotel-sized bars of soap he'd stolen on R&R in Sydney, Australia. Ted Lavender, who was scared, carried tranquilizers until he was shot in the head outside the village of Than Khe in mid- April. By necessity, and because it was SOP, they all carried steel helmets that weighed 5 pounds including the liner and camouflage cover. They carried the standard fatigue jackets and trousers. Very few carried underwear. On their feet they carried jungle boots -2.1 pounds - and Dave Jensen carried three pairs of socks and a can of Dr Scholl's foot powder as a precaution against trench foot. Until he was shot, Ted Lavender carried six or seven ounces of premium dope, which for him was a necessity. Mitchell Sanders, the RTO, carried condoms. Norman Bowker carried a diary. Rat Kiley carried comic books. Kiowa, a devout Baptist, carried an illustrated New Testament that had been presented to him by his father, who taught Sunday school in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. As a hedge against bad times, however, Kiowa also carried his grandmother's distrust of the white man, his grandfather's old hunting hatchet. Necessity dictated. Because the land was mined and booby-trapped, it was SOP for each man to carry a steel-centered, nylon-covered flak jacket, which weighed 6.7 pounds, but which on hot days seemed much heavier. Because you could die so quickly, each man carried at least one large compress bandage, usually in the helmet band for easy access. Because the nights were cold, and because the monsoons were wet, each carried a green plastic poncho that could be used as a raincoat or groundsheet or makeshift tent. With its quilted liner, the poncho weighed almost two pounds, but it was worth every ounce. In April, for instance, when Ted Lavender was shot, they used his poncho to wrap him up, then to carry him away across the paddy, then to lift him into the chopper that took him away. They were called legs or grunts. To carry something was to hump it, as when Lieutenant Jimmy Cross humped his love for Martha up the hills and through the swamps. In its intransitive form, to hump meant to walk, or to march, but it implied burdens far beyond the intransitive.

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Almost everyone humped photographs. In his wallet, Lieutenant Cross carried two photographs of Martha. The first was a Kodacolor snapshot signed Love, though he knew better. She stood against a brick wall. Her eyes were gray and neutral, her lips slightly open as she stared straight-on at the camera. At night, sometimes, Lieutenant Cross wondered who had taken the picture, because he knew she had boyfriends, because he loved her so much, and because he could see the shadow of the picturetaker spreading out against the brick wall. The second photograph had been clipped from the 1968 Mount Sebastian yearbook. It was an action shot - women's volleyball - and Martha was bent horizontal to the floor, reaching, the palms of her hands in sharp focus, the tongue taut, the expression frank and competitive. There was no visible sweat. She wore white gym shorts. Her legs, he thought, were almost certainly the legs of a virgin, dry and without hair, the left knee cocked and carrying her entire weight, which was just over one hundred pounds. Lieutenant Cross remembered touching that left knee. A dark theater, he remembered, and the movie was Bonnie and Clyde, and Martha wore a tweed skirt, and during the final scene, when he touched her knee, she turned and looked at him in a sad, sober way that made him pull his hand back, but he would always remember the feel of the tweed skirt and the knee beneath it and the sound of the gunfire that killed Bonnie and Clyde, how embarrassing it was, how slow and oppressive. He remembered kissing her good night at the dorm door. Right then, he thought, he should've done something brave. He should've carried her up the stairs to her room and tied her to the bed and touched that left knee all night long. He should've risked it. Whenever he looked at the photographs, he thought of new things he should've done. What they carried was partly a function of rank, partly of field specialty. As a first lieutenant and platoon leader, Jimmy Cross carried a compass, maps, code books, binoculars, and a .45-caliber pistol that weighed 2.9 pounds fully loaded. He carried a strobe light and the responsibility for the lives of his men. As an RTO, Mitchell Sanders carried the PRC-25 radio, a killer, 26 pounds with its battery. As a medic, Rat Kiley carried a canvas satchel filled with morphine and plasma and malaria tablets and surgical tape and comic books and all the things a medic must carry, including M&Ms for especially bad wounds, for a total weight of nearly 20 pounds. As a big man, therefore a machine gunner, Henry Dobbins carried the M-60, which weighed 23 pounds unloaded, but which was almost always loaded. In addition, Dobbins carried between 10 and 15 pounds of ammunition draped in belts across his chest and shoulders. As PFCs or Spec 4s, most of them were common grunts and carried the standard M-16 gasoperated assault rifle. The weapon weighed 7.5 pounds unloaded, 8.2 pounds with its full 20-round magazine. Depending on numerous factors, such as topography and psychology, the riflemen carried anywhere from 12 to 20 magazines, usually in cloth bandoliers, adding on another 84 pounds at minimum, 14 pounds at maximum. When it was available, they also carried M-16 maintenance gear - rods and steel brushes and swabs and tubes of LSA oil - all of which weighed about a pound. Among the grunts, some carried the M-79 grenade launcher, 5.9 pounds unloaded, a reasonably light weapon except for the ammunition, which was heavy. A single round weighed 10 ounces. The typical load was 25 rounds. But Ted Lavender, who was scared, carried 34 rounds when he was shot and killed outside Than Khe, and he went down under an exceptional burden, more than 20 pounds of ammunition, plus the flak jacket and helmet and rations and water and toilet paper and tranquilizers and all the rest, plus the unweighed fear. He was dead weight. There was no twitching or flopping. Kiowa, who saw it happen, said it was like watching a rock fall, or a big sandbag or something - just boom, then down - not like the movies where the dead guy rolls around and does fancy spins and goes ass over teakettle - not like that, Kiowa said, the poor bastard just flat-fuck fell. Boom. Down. Nothing else. It was a bright morning in mid- April. Lieutenant Cross felt the pain. He blamed himself. They stripped off Lavender's canteens and ammo, all the heavy things, and Rat Kiley said the obvious, the guy's dead, and Mitchell Sanders used his radio to report one US KIA and to request a chopper. Then they wrapped Lavender in his poncho.
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They carried him out to a dry paddy, established security, and sat smoking the dead man's dope until the chopper came. Lieutenant Cross kept to himself. He pictured Martha's smooth young face, thinking he loved her more than anything, more than his men, and now Ted Lavender was dead because he loved her so much and could not stop thinking about her. When the dustoff arrived, they carried Lavender aboard. Afterward they burned Than Khe. They marched until dusk, then dug their holes, and that night Kiowa kept explaining how you had to be there, how fast it was, how the poor guy just dropped like so much concrete. Boom-down, he said. Like cement. In addition to the three standard weapons - the M-60, M-16, and M-79 - they carried whatever presented itself, or whatever seemed appropriate as a means of killing or staying alive. They carried catch-as-catch-can. At various times, in various situations, they carried M-14s and CAR-15s and Swedish Ks and grease guns and captured AK-47S and Chi-Coms and RPGs and Simonov carbines and black-market Uzis and .38-caliber Smith & Wesson handguns and 66 mm LAWs and shotguns and silencers and blackjacks and bayonets and C-4 plastic explosives. Lee Strunk carried a slingshot; a weapon of last resort, he called it. Mitchell Sanders carried brass knuckles. Kiowa carried his grandfather's feathered hatchet. Every third or fourth man carried a Claymore antipersonnel mine -3.5 pounds with its firing device. They all carried fragmentation grenades - 14 ounces each. They all carried at least one M-18 colored smoke grenade - 24 ounces. Some carried CS or tear-gas grenades. Some carried white phosphorus grenades. They carried all they could bear, and then some, including a silent awe for the terrible power of the things they carried. In the first week of April, before Lavender died, Lieutenant Jimmy Cross received a good-luck charm from Martha. It was a simple pebble, an ounce at most. Smooth to the touch, it was a milky white color with flecks of orange and violet, oval shaped, like a miniature egg. In the accompanying letter, Martha wrote that she had found the pebble on the Jersey shoreline, precisely where the land touched water at high tide, where things came together but also separated. It was this separate-buttogether quality, she wrote, that had inspired her to pick up the pebble and to carry it in her breast pocket for several days, where it seemed weightless, and then to send it through the mail, by air, as a token of her truest feelings for him. Lieutenant Cross found this romantic. But he wondered what her truest feelings were, exactly, and what she meant by separate- but-together. He wondered how the tides and waves had come into play on that afternoon along the Jersey shoreline when Martha saw the pebble and bent down to rescue it from geology. He imagined bare feet. Martha was a poet, with the poet's sensibilities, and her feet would be brown and bare, the toenails unpainted, the eyes chilly and somber like the ocean in March, and though it was painful, he wondered who had been with her that afternoon. He imagined a pair of shadows moving along the strip of sand where things came together but also separated. It was phantom jealousy, he knew, but he couldn't help himself. He loved her so much. On the march, through the hot days of early April, he carried the pebble in his mouth, turning it with his tongue, tasting sea salt and moisture. His mind wandered. He had difficulty keeping his attention on the war. On occasion he would yell at his men to spread out the column, to keep their eyes open, but then he would slip away into daydreams, just pretending, walking barefoot along the Jersey shore, with Martha, carrying nothing. He would feel himself rising. Sun and waves and gentle winds, all love and lightness. What they carried varied by mission. When a mission took them to the mountains, they carried mosquito netting, machetes, canvas tarps, and extra bug juice. If a mission seemed especially hazardous, or if it involved a place they knew to be bad, they carried everything they could. In certain heavily mined AOs, where the land was dense with Toe Poppers and Bouncing Betties, they took turns humping a 28-pound mine detector. With its headphones and big sensing plate, the equipment was a stress on the lower back and shoulders, awkward to handle, often useless because of the shrapnel in the earth, but they carried it anyway, partly for safety, partly for the illusion of safety.

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On ambush, or other night missions, they carried peculiar little odds and ends. Kiowa always took along his New Testament and a pair of moccasins for silence. Dave Jensen carried night-sight vitamins high in carotene. Lee Strunk carried his slingshot; ammo, he claimed, would never be a problem. Rat Kiley carried brandy and M&Ms candy. Until he was shot, Ted Lavender carried the starlight scope, which weighed 6.3 pounds with its aluminum carrying case. Henry Dobbins carried his girlfriend's pantyhose wrapped around his neck as a comforter. They all carried ghosts. When dark came, they would move out single file across the meadows and paddies to their ambush coordinates, where they would quietly set up the Claymores and lie down and spend the night waiting. Other missions were more complicated and required special equipment. In mid-April, it was their mission to search out and destroy the elaborate tunnel complexes in the Than Khe area south of Chu Lai. To blow the tunnels, they carried one-pound blocks of pentrite high explosives, four blocks to a man, 68 pounds in all. They carried wiring, detonators, and battery-powered clackers. Dave Jensen carried earplugs. Most often, before blowing the tunnels, they were ordered by higher command to search them, which was considered bad news, but by and large they just shrugged and carried out orders. Because he was a big man, Henry Dobbins was excused from tunnel duty. The others would draw numbers. Before Lavender died there were 17 men in the platoon, and whoever drew the number 17 would strip off his gear and crawl in headfirst with a flashlight and Lieutenant Cross's .45-caliber pistol. The rest of them would fan out as security. They would sit down or kneel, not facing the hole, listening to the ground beneath them, imagining cobwebs and ghosts, whatever was down there - the tunnel walls squeezing in - how the flashlight seemed impossibly heavy in the hand and how it was tunnel vision in the very strictest sense, compression in all ways, even time, and how you had to wiggle in - ass and elbows a swallowed-up feeling - and how you found yourself worrying about odd things: Will your flashlight go dead? Do rats carry rabies? If you screamed, how far would the sound carry? Would your buddies hear it? Would they have the courage to drag you out? In some respects, though not many, the waiting was worse than the tunnel itself. Imagination was a killer. On April 16, when Lee Strunk drew the number 17, he laughed and muttered something and went down quickly. The morning was hot and very still. Not good, Kiowa said. He looked at the tunnel opening, then out across a dry paddy toward the village of Than Khe. Nothing moved. No clouds or birds or people. As they waited, the men smoked and drank Kool-Aid, not talking much, feeling sympathy for Lee Strunk but also feeling the luck of the draw. You win some, you lose some, said Mitchell Sanders, and sometimes you settle for a rain check. It was a tired line and no one laughed. Henry Dobbins ate a tropical chocolate bar. Ted Lavender popped a tranquilizer and went off to pee. After five minutes, Lieutenant Jimmy Cross moved to the tunnel, leaned down, and examined the darkness. Trouble, he thought - a cave-in maybe. And then suddenly, without willing it, he was thinking about Martha. The stresses and fractures, the quick collapse, the two of them buried alive under all that weight. Dense, crushing love. Kneeling, watching the hole, he tried to concentrate on Lee Strunk and the war, all the dangers, but his

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Lying, a Memoir by Lauren Slater

CHAPTER 1 I exaggerate. CHAPTER 2 - THREE BLIND MICE The summer I turned ten I smelled jasmine everywhere I went. At first I thought the smell was part of the normal world, because we were having a hot spell that July, and every night it rained and the flowers were in full bloom. So I didn't pay much attention, except, after a while, I noticed I smelled jasmine in the bath, and my dreams were full of it, and when, one day, I cut my palm on a piece of glass, my blood itself was scented, and I started to feel scared and also good. That was one world, and I called it the jasmine world. I didn't know, then, that epilepsy often begins with strange smells, some of which are pleasant, some of which are not. I was lucky to have a good smell. Other people's epilepsy begins with bad smells, such as tuna fish rotting in the sun, dead shark, gin and piss; these are just some of the stories I've heard. LYING I 5 My world, though, was the jasmine world, and I told no one about it. As the summer went on, the jasmine world grew; other odors entered, sometimes a smell of burning, as though the whole house were coming down. Which, in a way, it was. There were my mother and my father, both of whom I loved-that much is true-but my father was too small, my mother too big, and occasionally, when the jasmine came on, I would also feel a lightheadedness that made my mother seem even bigger, my father even smaller, so he was the size of a freckle, she higher than a house, all her hair flying. My father was a Hebrew School teacher, and once a year he took the bimah on Yom Kippur. My mother was many things, a round-robin tennis player with an excellent serve, a hostess, a housewife, a schemer, an ideologue, she wanted to free the Russian Jews, educate the Falashas, fly on the Concorde, drink at the Ritz. She did drink, but not at the Ritz. She drank in the den or in her bedroom, always with an olive in her glass. I wanted to make my mother happy, that should come as no surprise. She had desires, for a harp, for seasonal seats at the opera, neither of which my father could afford. She was a woman of grand gestures and high standards and she rarely spoke the truth. She told me she was a Holocaust survivor, a hot-air balloonist, a personal friend of Golda Meir. From my mother I learned that truth is bendable, that what you wish is every bit as real as what you are. I have epilepsy. Or I feel I have epilepsy. Or I wish I had epilepsy, so I could find a way of explaining the dirty, spas6 I Lauren Slater tic glittering place I had in my mother's heart. Epilepsy is a fascinating disease because some epileptics are liars, exaggerators, makers of myths and highflying stories. Doctors don't know why this is, something to do, maybe, with the way a scar on the brain dents memory or mutates reality. My epilepsy started with the smell of jasmine, and that smell moved into my mouth. And when I opened my mouth after that, all my words seemed colored, and I don't know where this is my mother or where this is my illness, or whether, like her, I am just confusing fact with fiction, and there is no epilepsy, just a clenched metaphor, a way of telling you what I have to tell you: my tale. The summer of the smells was also the summer of new sounds. There were the crickets, which I could hear with astonishing clarity each evening, and the rain on the roof, each drop distinct. There

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was the piano, which my mother did not tell us about, her secret scheme, delivered one day in ropes and pulleys, its forehead branded "Lady Anita." "Return it," my father said. "I can't," she said. "I've h a d it engraved." "Anita," he said. We were standing in the living room. "Anita, there's no room to move with this Steinway in here." "Since when do you move anyway?" my mother said. "You play pinochle. You pray. You are not a man who requires room." I never witnessed one of their fights. My father was, by nature, private and shy. My mother, though flamboyant, did LYING I 7 not display emotion in public. Whenever a fight came up I was banished to my room. I, however, had long ago discovered that if I put my head in the upstairs bathroom toilet bowl, I could hear everything through the pipes. "We can't afford this," I heard my father say. "You," my mother said, "had the chance to partner up in Irving Busney's bakery business." . And so it went from there, as it always did, fights containing words like you, and you, fights about bills and house repairs, vacations and cars, fights with false laughs -- ha! and ha!, and sometimes crashing glass, and other times, like this time, such silence. And in the silence -- a silence of moments, hours, days -- my mother started to play. A strange thing happened then. I could see the sounds she made, the high piano notes pink and pointed, the low notes brown and round. I don't mean this metaphorically. I watched the colors and I watched my mother. She had no talent, but she didn't stop. A driven woman, my mother never knew the way time might slow in a tub, the pleasure of a stretch. I watched her hands arched, her neck stiff, and I felt my eyes go fuzzy and saw spectrums in the room, colors much more beautiful than the sounds from which they sprang, her repetitive rhythms, twinkle twinkle little star, and three blind mice, bonking and chasing their tails. And then one day, as the mice were being blind, I went with them. My sight shut down; it was black; I could not see. 8 / Lauren Slater "Mom," I said. I held on tight to the side of the piano. ''I'm practicing," I heard her say. "Mom," I said. "I can't see." She stopped. "Of course you can see," she said. "You have two eyes. You can see." "It's dark," I shouted. "How many fingers am I holding up?" she asked. "I can't see your fingers," I said. "Of course you can see my fingers," she said. "You have two eyes. Now look." I felt her grip my chin, force my face toward her. "How many fingers? Think." I heard some panic in her voice now, but not a lot, because my mother believed you could conquer anything through will. "Two," I said, a total guess. "Exactly," she said, triumphant. And just like that, I started to see again. She said exactly and the angles came back, as though her words determined the truth and not the other way around, the way it should be: something solid. I could see again, most of the time fine, but not always. First I smelled jasmine, and then I had whole moments when the world went watery, when I saw the air break apart and atomize into dozens of glittering particles. Ahead of me shapes and colors suggested the billowing sails of a ship, or LYING / 9 a zebra floating, when in reality it was just a schoolgirl in the crosswalk. I had not known, until then, that beauty lived beneath the supposedly solid surface of things, how every line was really a curve uncreased, how every hill was smoke. At first the vision problems frightened me because I thought I was going blind, but as weeks went by, I settled in.
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I thought of the vision the same way I thought of the smells, as a secret world. I became dreamy, sometimes hours and hours passing, and afterward, although I hadn't been asleep, I would feel I was waking, and my head hurt. This is how epilepsy begins. It begins beautifully, and with only slight pain. "Lazy," my mother said. The colors cleared and she was standing over me, frowning. "Stop staring into space," she yelled. "Get out there and do something." What she meant was do something gorgeous with your life. "Work," she said, and Latin and Greek, and math to master my wandering mind, hers was a household of dream and muscle both. I went into the woods a lot that summer. The woods were cool, and I could close my eyes, and if colors came when the birds cooed or the oak trees creaked, I didn't have to worry; I could drift. And if the colors didn't come, and the world smelled only of itself, then I could play. I found toads in those woods, and Indian arrowheads. I cut a worm in half and made two worms. I got blood beneath my fingernails and bird dirt on my palms. "You," she said, when I came home one day, "are filthy." She slapped me, hard, across the cheek. I hate to say it, but it's true. My cheek. And then, she reached across the piano keys, a longing in her look now, and smudged her pinkie to my soiled face. Looked at the dirt I'd transferred to her finger like it was chocolate. Oh, that she could sink so low. Oh, that she, like me, could sleep. Put your finger in your mouth, Mom, go on. This, the gift I gave her. Even before the smells and sights and, later, the terrible slamming seizures, even before all this, my mother thought I was doomed, which, in her scheme of things, was much better than being mediocre. I was disobedient and careless, I climbed with boys, I ran with boys, and where, she wanted to know, where would this end? I would surely become a street girl, and wind up being shipped to a filthy brothel crawling with hairy tropical bugs in Buenos Aires. For my part, her predictions confused me, because they didn't seem to match the facts of my mundane life-the facts, the facts, they probe at me like the problem they are-I was, I thought, it seemed, mildly curious, fond of red-eared turtles, good at reading but bad at math, with teeth a tad bit yellow. For her part, her predictions seemed to excite her, because when she spoke of them her words had a certain slinky sound, a lush quality to the consonants, filthy she would say like a hungry person pronounces chocolate, brothel she would say, like, well, like someone longing for and scared of sex. I wanted to get my mother a gift. I scratched at the ground with sticks, split the milkweed pods. Not this, no. Not that, no. I went to the store in town-Accents Unlimited-and roamed amongst vanillascented candles, heart-shaped pillows, but I knew none of it would do. The year I turned ten, the year of what I called my colored hearing and my smells, my father gave her his surprise. I think he loved her, or, like me, her unhappiness was his. He partnered up with Irving Busney in the bakery business, and now we had toppling apple muffins in the mornings and a double salary from a double job -- prayer man and business man -- and so he announced a vacation. We went to Barbados. We flew. We flew! I had never been on a plane before. I loved the bubble windows, and the stewardesses who wore wings on their busts. I loved Logan Airport, in Boston, from which we departed on a snowy day, a typical New England winter day when the trees were in ice and the old slush stank and everyone was grumpy. We left
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early in the morning, when the air was blue and only a few lights flickered in our neighbors' windows. We were extremely excited. On the island, we were going to stay in a place called the Princess Hotel. My mother had brought me to Decelles the week before, and the saleslady took us to the Winter Cruise Section, and I got to buy a bikini with dots on it. I got sandals with turquoise stones studded along them. I got white gloves-for dinners, my mother said-and crisp white dresses and also shorts. And we left Boston on a snowy dawn, dark airport, smell of grime and fuel, and I drank chocolate milk as the plane went up. And a wonderful, ecstatic feeling came over me, a feeling which I attributed to the plane, but which I now know happens to some epileptics when the altitude changes, like you are getting closer to God, and gold, and sweet and smells, and I saw the sun rising in the sky from a whole new vantage point. The tawny sun rose like a lazy lion, all hot fur in a pink safari sky. The plane roared, and then was quiet, and I said to my father, "Are we flying?" And then we landed, and just like that the world was different. The ecstasy passed. Fear came, a distinct sense that something horrible would happen soon. A stewardess leaned close and said, "It's not the jungle here, you know, it's a lovely island," and I said, "Yes," but the fear, which I now know, like the ecstasy, is also a part of the pre-seizure state, wouldn't pass. We went down the plane's steep stairs. "Please, God," I was saying to myself, "please, God, let her like this." If you had asked me then just why I was afraid, I would have told you, My mother my mother please let her be pleased my mother. I would not have told you about the epileptic's electrical arousal in the brain's emotional centers, how the fear and joy, the intense prismatic sharpness of things, all come from something as small as a single cortical spark. That was not my story then, and it is not my story now, although it is the right story, the true story, not my mother but matter more basic still; or is it? Here's what was true. Barbados. Palm trees with leaky coconuts, the humid wind that blew in our faces as we walked across the runway. There were a lot of black people, and no snow. Outrageous flowers, redder than crayons, waved in the wind. A cab took us to our hotel. The Princess Hotel. Would this, finally, be what it was she wanted? What we did. Deep-sea fishing on a glass-bottomed boat. Caves, where Basien bats hung upside down. Pina coladas, plums in sauce, raw sugar sucked straight from the cane. This is what I remember best about Barbados. The sugarcane. Everywhere we drove there were fields and fields of it, stalks harvested under hot sun by men with small machetes. Chop chop. Castles of sugar and sweat. The sun always shone, except for the squalls that scrabbled across the sky, opened up on us, and then departed, leaving the sugar mounds damp and pooled in places. I loved those hills of sugar. There, the fear went away. Wet from the ocean, wet from sweat, I rolled in the mounds and came to her like candy. I watched her. Please please let her be pleased. When the captain pointed out the coral, I looked for the movements of pleasure in her mouth, but found none. I watched her like I should have watched my sinking sickening self.

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