Why Are We in Vietnam?

by Norman Mailer

  Eh bien, you may now inquire, be you reader, Good Lord, or the angel who’s passing on this message from my asshole transistor to God, whyfor does Doctor Jekyll have such a total rejection of all the positive elements in his rich secure successful environmental scene including social backing, strong sentiment, national roots, loci of power, happy physical endowment (wait till you hear more about that) and clearly individualistic and highly articulated parents?

  And D.J. says in answer: ever read The Concept of Dread by Fyodor Kierkegaard? No, well neither has D.J. but now he wants to know how many of you assholes even knew, forgive me, Good Lord, that Fyodor Kierkegaard has a real name, Sören Kierkegaard. Contemplate that. You ass.

  Anyway, D.J. is up tight with the concept of dread. He don’t have to read S.K. S.K. can stick dread up his own ass. The time is near, man. D.J. has ideas like nobody else. He sees through to the stinking roots of things, contemplate Eternity the poets might say, take a mind picture, D.J. can watch his own ass being created on Time Recaptured TV Time, eye on Big Daddy’s back while he stinging D.J.’s ma, D.J. a #1 ghost on the #1 spermatozoa. Think of that. Maybe that’s how Herr Dread gets in. Cause D.J. has seen his father while D.J. up high on pot, and face of Rusty goes thru chord changes then. Strange sounds, man. Neo-occult chromatics. Crowns and diadems. An octave of farts. Hurtlings, hard-edge work, cockroach scamperings, caterwaulings, rivers of cream—oh, Mary, forget it, D.J. is putting you on, that’s LSD shit and William Burroughs in horse land, not sweet old tea. No, via grass, man, D.J. has seen Rusty as follows: (1) the smiling Ike grin goes away, and so do all those Henry Cabot Lodge grins, instead there’s a thin lippy old hole cut for his mouth—like the first slit on an operation—skin peels back, and in the wound there’s teeth—D.J. happens to know those teeth are real, cause his daddy bit him once five years ago—that’s a tale! (Can you wait for your next Intro Beep?)—but those teeth look like ten grand worth of superaesthetic dentures. And his nose takes a metamorphosis or two out of the Onassis Aristotle Bank of Ideal Forms. Well, now Rusty’s got normally some kind of big pointy nose with fleshy backing, good shape, but it’s a tool, man. On pot, it looks suddenly like a hand, got a red mean finger at the tip, stab you right in the middle of your lie, or grab your mouth and twist it off. It’s a shit converter of a nose—any flunky talking to Rusty and not knowing what to say cause he’s hiding some fuckup is going to find all that hardpan constipated Texas clay in his flunky gut turning abruptly to sulfur water and steam. Not to mention specks of zipping around deep-sea shit. Of course, if the flunky farts in his panic, forget it, Rusty can’t bear the sight of a man who ever broke under pressure. But it’s Rusty’s eyes kick off the old concept of dread in D.J. Fyodor Sören Kierkegaard Jethroe because they remind him of his favorite theory which is that America is run by a mysterious hidden mastermind, a secret creature who’s got a plastic asshole installed in his brain whereby he can shit out all his corporate management of thoughts. I mean that’s what you get when you look into Rusty’s eyes. You get voids, man, and gleams of yellow fire—the woods is burning somewhere in his gray matter—and then there’s marble aisles, better believe it, fifty thousand fucking miles of marble floor down those eyes, and you got to walk over that to get to The Man, which is only the way his eyes look to D.J. when on pot, cause you know in a photograph or just shaking his hand, Rusty’s eyes are okay, sort of dead ass and dull with a friendly twinkle—typical American eyes—and when he’s turned on, like when he’s ready to prong a passing cunt in a hurry—which D.J. estimates is six eight times a year—or when he’s about to consummate the big signing (listen to the silent bagpipes) in some ten-month pass-the-buck or stand-and-fuck game of negotiations, why then Rusty’s eyes are like yellow coals, liquid yellow fire ready to explode in its own success. Horses away! Polo mallets up, Bostwick! if D.J. wouldn’t take to pot at family dinners he might not have such a Fyodor Kierk kind of dread looking into Big Daddy’s chasm and tomb. But that dread’s out there, man. Because Rusty is also the highest grade of asshole made in America and so suggests D.J.’s future: success will stimulate you to suffocate! Yeah, if they any higher grade asshole in America than Rusty why they got something on the ball comparable to life stuff, cosmological matter, Zen archery, hot shit satori, Highways and Byways of LSD, or plain hardpan thriftily won, modestly assumed, holy acquired plain old Christian Grace and Get-up, Go, Spunk. Now, they ain’t that many in America. D.J. despite time overseas will not presume to assert authority in these matters for foreign lands, but in America the most stable and dependable human product we turn out, and our schools, businesses, armed forces, and legislative halls are proud to be so filled with the product, is a medium- to high-grade asshole like Rusty, who in turn obeys the orders only of G.P.A.—who, in case you forget, is Mr. Great Plastic Asshole. So don’t be too hard on Rusty. He’s a pig with a wild snouty mouth, but he’s got good blood.

  Okey-doke, Henry. The thing to understand is that a high-grade asshole is characterized by a specific and even unique property which endows him because of it with his rank—it is that a high grade of A.H. is not easily recognized as any kind of A.H., and usually appears the contrary. Despite the cock and bunghole details D.J. has furnished you up to here on some few of Rusty’s opinions and habits, the portrait has been highly unfair to high-grade assholes because it has emphasized the hole rather than the high grade. Therefore, attention America to how Rusty shapes up in a contest against a man who is not an asshole—to wit, Mr. Luke Fellinka, head guide and hunter extraordinaire for the Moe Henry and Obungekat Safari Group on a hunting trip up in Brooks Range, north of Arctic Circle, Alaska. Yeah, follow along on this. Get your head clear. Get ready. Followers of D.J. are going to be hung on Alaska for a lot of high-grade genius rating consciousness now, because Rusty is the most competitive prick there is, and Big Luke is a sweet old bastard, who’s so tough that old grizzly bears come up and kiss his ass. Yeah.

  Intro Beep 3

  Yeah, Rusty’s a competitive prick, you know, he played for TCU, third All-American AP 1936, 1937, like back in there! look it up! and he was showing D.J. something few years ago on the back lawn of the Dallas ass mansion we inhabit, father and son—details on request, pen pal!—and he demonstrated to me I could not run around him. Well, of course D.J. did just that for a while, he ran the fucking ass off and around Rusty cause D.J. at thirteen had a presumptive hip dip halfback’s butt about as big as Scarlett O’Hara’s waist and he could use it like a double pin universal swivel, and Rusty had acquired a considerable amount of dead ass sticking his brave plunger up all blindly into the cunt-refined wickedness of Hallelujah’s sophisticated rumps and vaginal radar rays masers and lasers. I mean, he was like the charge of the Light Brigade, not so light, and she was one with all those houris and Fakirs and Cossacks and Turks up in the hills who wait to pick each zippy point of meat-nip and therefore know where to cut on down on the Light Brigade and cut off a piece of that charge for themselves. O Kuklos, great god of the seasons, bring back the fox trot, cause D.J.’s embarrassed to tell what’s next, how, he, thirteen-year-old swivel ass flunkout in classics at the time, was running Third Team All-America TCU tackle Rusty Death-row’s middle-aged dead ass into the Dallas lawn fertilizer when D.J. made a fatal misestimate of reckoning—he felt sorry for his dad. He let him tackle him just once. Jes once—right in the dry linty Dallas old navel of Texas. Rusty was so het up, he flung D.J. and—mail in your protests—he bit him in the ass, right through his pants, that’s how insane he was with frustration, that’s how much red blood was in his neck, and man, he hung on, he nearly lifted D.J. up in the air with his deathly teeth—he would have if he hadn’t been a deacon at St. Martin’s. That poor D.J. He was a one-cheek swivel ass running on one leg for the next ten minutes while Rusty tackled him whoong! whoong! over and over again. Trails of glory came out of his head each time he got hit. “Randy,” said Rusty, afterward, “you got to be a nut about competition. That’s the way. You got to be so dominated by a
desire to win that if you was to squat down on the line and there facing you was Jesus Christ, you would just tip your head once and say, ‘J.C., I have to give you fair warning that I’m here to do my best to go right through your hole.’ ” Actually, if Rusty had ever seen J.C. on the line he’d have shit, he’d have said with a little funky wink, “Are we going to be so fortunate as to get you for the Contemporary Speaker’s Series at Southern Methodist?” no, D.J.’s here to say that Rusty bit his ass so bad because he was too chicken to bite Hallelujah’s beautiful butt—she’d have made him pay a half million dollars for each separate hole in her marble palace. D.J., as you may have divined, is a manly clean-featured version in formal features of his mother, and don’t look like a puma or a George Hamilton at all, light brown hair, green eyes, he’s just good-looking, that’s all. And he was a son of sufficiently decent comportment to follow his daddy’s advice. So soon as the fucking game was over (can you imagine the two of them on the back lawn of that Dallas manse?) why D.J. just limped broke-ass to the gardener’s shed, picked up a pick-axe handle, and bopped his daddy over the dead center of his head, blood still running down from that bite. When Rusty didn’t fall and in fact an electric shock traveled from his head down the pick-axe handle into D.J.’s overheated heart, why our boy knew in some competitions sanity was better than being a nut, so he split, man, he took off on one leg and a wound in cheek of his ass, and it took a week of negotiations by his ma to bring him out of the hideout in Mineral Wells where she’d stashed him and into audience with his father again. Who, of course, sent him to military school out in the general vicinity of McQueeney, Texas. “If it was good enough for Pres. Eisenhower, it’s good enough for you,” well, that was a comic book military school, all Nazi-type Texas-style state trooper wolf bugger faggots and little languid queer types from Norlins. There was even a Frenchy Montesquiou. En passant, D.J. tied a couple of pricks into pretzels and made his escape, and could if so choosing have given Linnit Fixit material for his unwritten book on the grope habits of the Southwest.

  Now, of course, Rusty Jethroe ain’t an habitual asshole with anyone but his son. In fact, it was an excess of love which produced such a high focus and over the threshold area of hate as those cuspy little marks on D.J.’s one of two buns which D.J. now incidentally explains to those Dallas debutantes and just plain common fucks who are lucky enough to get drilled by him and Tex, as the circular cornada produced by the slivers of a horn shattered on a fighting bull which he had engaged in a tienta south of Guadalajara, Mexico, and what’s the pity, he tells the girls, is that he might have been able to distinguish himself if it hadn’t been for the fact that the bull was hurt sufficiently to be withdrawn from the fucking ring while they played the Virgin of the Macaroon—that’s how dumb those young Texas cunts can be, better believe it—and all the poor Mexican wetbacks sitting in the stands threw cascades of hot piss at him from their empty paper cups used originally for beer (in one spout, out the other) and D.J. would lick his lips, and look the sweet little Dallas cunt in the eye, and say, “Honey, that piss smelled just like your sweet little home-cooking crotch before you git up in the morning to swab it down,” and your Disc Jockey here to tell that would start a real fight in the back seat of the car with D.J. his pants half-mast and laughing his ass off, and the girl developing muscles like cables made of guitar strings, they would have like to garrote him—the smell of her pussy is sacrosanct to a young girl! Mexican hot piss! Why even a little-headed, thin-nosed, big-jawed, six-foot Dallas girl would have imagination enough to know what Mexican hot piss would smell like from the Rio Grande all the way to the floodlands of Anchorage, Alaska. Or even beyond to the hunting cabin.

  Thus, D.J. your hot hustling guide has by native wit brought you back to the confrontation between Rusty and Big Luke the Paragon Fellinka and Ollie Totem Head Water Beaver, and their guide assistants, and the various minions and flunkies and Tex and D.J. Nose to nose soon will be Luke and Rusty. Hold on.

  Chap Three

  Now Rusty was supposed to go originally on Alaska safari with his opposite number Al Percy Cunningham, the managing director of Tendonex, which is 4C and P’s answer to Fiberglas. Rusty and Al Percy C. had reserved an Alaska guide eighteen months in advance, you know the type that is a guide for Charley Wilson or Roger Blough or J. Edgar—I mean, that’s who you got to be if you want to get this guide right away, like he wouldn’t even take Senators, and you was a Congressman and you wanted Big Luke Fellinka and his assistant Ollie the Indian Water Beaver, forget it, you could lie down on your back and say Big Luke if you consent to be my guide you or Ollie can take one big crap in my mouth just for openers, and Big Luke would yawn. D.J. and Tex read right away the #1 reason all the minions of the Great Plastic Asshole were slobbering over the bear grease on Big Luke’s boots. It wasn’t just because among Alaska guides he was primus inter pares (you have just had the first and last of D.J.’s Latin) it wasn’t cause he got eight clients out of the Brooks Mountains once in a record September blizzard, or fought a grizzly or two bare hand to a kind of draw and had the scars to show it (looked like vines and thorns had grown over an old seam of welding on his back) it wasn’t even his rifle work which in offhand shooting could put in 25 one-inch five-shot clusters at 100 yards, and at two hundred yards in a half-ass clearing of woods could now and then drop a bullet into the eye of an Alaska wolf as directly as you could drop your finger in your own eye—no, what made Big Luke The Man was that he was like the President of General Motors or General Electric, pick one, I don’t give a fuck, he had like the same bottom, man, I mean D.J.’s here to tell you that if you even a high-grade asshole and had naught but a smidgeon of flunky in you it would still start—you may purchase this in full confidence—it would still start in Big Luke’s presence to blow sulfur water, steam, and specks of hopeless diarrhetic matter in your runny little gut, cause he was a man! You could hang him, and he’d weigh just as much as Charley Wilson or Robert Bonehead McNamara, I mean you’d get the same intensity of death ray off his dying as you’d get from some fucking Arab sheik who had ten thousand howlers on horses to whoop and scream for the holy hot hour of his departure to Allah. So you can see what a hoedown of a hunting trip it would have been if Al Percy C. alias Kid Tendonex and Rusty had each been burning up that Alaska Brooks Mountain Range brush trying to light a light of love in Big Luke’s eye, but Al Percy Cunningham was called off at the last by the Astronaut Program hotline into 4C and P because the real hoedown just that week of departure was between Fiberglas and Tendonex to see who was going to get the contract to put a plastic Univar valve and plug into the bottom of the collapsible built-in space suit chemical toilet in the Gemini (Roman Numeral Unstated) which contract is no superhuge kettle of lobster shit in volume dollars, but just a reasonable 58 million, although Tex and D.J. agree that little Univar plug is First Priority, cause let it malfunction and those astronauts will be swimming in orbits of dehydrated processed food shit (their own—a gritty performance, eh Maurice?). However, it’s edge. Does 4C and P, Tendonex Division, or FCA (Fiberglas Corp. of America) get to be the first to fling their product into space; besides there’s rumors, Rusty tells us, that smooth plastic in outer space tends to exhibit Independent, Autonomous, Non-pattern-directed Ductile-type Magnification and Expansion Assertions in Non-Operational Gravitational Ultra-Multi-Mach Ellipsoid Program-Oriented Satellite Capsule Negotiations, which is to say that smooth plastic is growing plastic hairs on its palm while in such jerk off orbit. A big sweat is on. Whose research program has anticipated any of this? “Cunny’s sweating this week,” Rusty tells the boys. “I told him to load up with Pure Pores once his balls started to get wet, and he just gave me a sick little hunky hunk heh-heh. Probably wanted to haul off and split your dad with an axe.”