Why Are We in Vietnam?

by Norman Mailer

  But Rusty, au fond, is deeply in disappointment, not cause A. P. Cunningham ain’t with him, but because the hunting trip is now downgraded. D.J.’s here to tell you that in secret Rusty feels like a movie star who’s going out to pump for a weekend with the best new Pumper-head Penis in Cinemaville, and then hears she’s missing the opportunity to have a commissary lunch with Prince Philip or Baldy Khrushchev, before Baldy was an ex. Well, you know a movie star, she’d rather have Big K stomp his big shoe jes once in the crack of her ass while he’s still Mr. Big than have her cunt stick-tickled into heaven for three days with no one up there in the redwoods to see it except those guests invited to the exhibition like her mother, her father and her dramatic coach. “Hit high C next time you come, Chérie, we got to get through those vocal locks,” says the dramatic coach.

  Now D.J. suffers from one great American virtue, or maybe it’s a disease or ocular dysfunction—D.J. sees right through shit. There’s not a colon in captivity which manufactures a home product that is transparency proof to Dr. Jekyll’s X-ray insight. He sees right into the claypots below the duodenum of his father, and any son does that is fit candidate for a maniac, right, T.S.? the point here, Eliot, is that D.J. will never know if Rusty dropped points in the early stages of his contest with Luke because he was dying inside for not being down at the Canaveral table where big power space decisions were being made by his opposite number, Wise-Ass Cunningham, or whether Rusty would have lost in the early stages to Big Luke on the best week he ever had, which is an ambiguity right at the center of D.J.’s message center. But proceed to study the scene.

  Give Rusty his straight shot. If Big Al Percy Wise-Ass Cunningham had been there, the set of events would have had to be different. Take away A. P. Cun and what you got—ego status embroilments between numbers, guides and executives. All right—look into it. You may never get out.

  First, Rusty spends no time trying to be the equal of Big Luke head on! He takes Luke’s suggestions, is friendly but aloof. When Luke addresses him as Sir, Sir Rutherford Jet-Throne does not say call me Rusty. When Big Luke speaks to Rusty’s two accompanying flunkies, Luke naturally picks them up by the handle of their first name, and Rusty, listening, chuckles like poor Clark Gable used to when he was near the end, that is indulgently and wisely, could be worse, man, cause the two flunkies—call them Medium Asshole Pete and Medium Asshole Bill—M.A. Pete (Assistant to Procurement Manager, Pure Pores Filters Company Office of 4C and P) and M.A. Bill (Personnel Director for Production Manager, Pure Pores et cetera Company Office of 4C and P) laugh each of them separately and respectively like Henry Fonda and Jimmy Stewart. Maybe it should be said that they are Medium Assholes with a passing grade of C. Rusty could have done better, but kid you not, it ain’t so easy. Talent ain’t hanging on meathooks in corporation land, especially when you change plans and invitations at the last minute. Some Americans giving up a lot for the astronauts.

  Now, with such for background on personnel, ask yourself Sherlock Onanist Holmes what were Rusty’s expectations from this trip, I mean Rusty is corporation, right, that means he’s a voice, man, he’s a voice, got nothing unexpected ever to say, but he got to say it with quality. These corporation pricks are not there for nothing. They may be dumb and benighted, yeah, and D.J. has wasted his adolescence in their purlieus and company mansions and has eaten off their expense accounts all his days, D.J. knows them asshole to appetite, and can tell you, Horace, they are not all that dumb. Being medium-grade and high-grade asshole, they have high competence in tunnels and channels. They can all swim uphill through shit face first although in fact corporate faces are never seen to move, for they know enough not to try to read each other’s corporate fish features when they can read each other’s corporate ass voices. Man, they pick up what you’re trying to slip by them, they buy nothing that’s not tested, not voice-tested. So look at Rusty’s problem. He goes on a Class A hunting trip—a Charley Wilson, John Glenn, Arnold Palmer, Gary Cooper kind of trip, next thing in top category you might say to a Jackie Kennedy Bobby Kennedy Ethel and the kids trip—Rusty’s stepping up out of category, reaching just a bit, but if he makes out, if he comes back and is able to say, “Well, it was not a record honey-grizzly by any means, it didn’t weigh out at more than twelve hundred, but Big Luke thought I got off a fair shot, and was, truth to tell, impressed with the coincidence that George Humphrey dropped one in the same glen just five years ago.”

  Now, pick up on the potential pitfalls. If Rusty is bird-turding he’s got a lot of cabbage verbiage for which he can be faulted on. Take: fair shot. That could mean great shot; could mean piss-ass shot. George Humphrey’s name equal to Pope Pius in certain executive Dallas ass chambers; therefore it’s got to be dropped like a feather on velvet. Honey-grizzly has to be enunciated as if you was up tight enough with that variety of bear to tweak his nuts. So on. Mark this, fellow Americans, and file it 2R—Ready Reference—each time Rusty runs into mood-gearings of attention back home in the office, he is going to have to turn to M.A. Pete or M.A. Bill and say, “Isn’t that so, Pete? isn’t that so, Bill?” and they’re going to have to say, “It sure is, Rusty,” and say it without a trace of strain, they’re yes-men, it is expected of them to be dauntless in their gut yes as they go through the yes ass gears, but perfection breeds perfection, the critical ear gets as sharp as a mad-dragster maniac-type genius listening to two 427 cubic inchers put in tandem—their yes has to have perfection precisioned. Well, even with professional bullshit, and that’s the secret of the corporation—it is filled with men who are professional bullshit packers—there is a limit. A yes-man will strain his gut to produce—they are the unsung heroes of America (reason they’re unsung is they can’t get their tongue out of the boss’ ass long enough to sing) but strain a gut as they may they cannot strain it past its own true natural elasticity. Something bona fide has got to happen, they can’t just go up to Alaska woods, get drunk for a week, buy a bear skin in Fairbanks or McGrath, take pictures, and slip a suppository up the folks back home, those Texas ears too sharp. There’d be a soupçon of caviar shit in the voice and that would put a rick-tick-tick in the narrator’s disc. So Rusty’s got to produce something big enough for his boys, M.A. 1 and M.A. 2, to say you’re right, Rusty, with an easy harmonious concordium of voice, a choir of Texas ass-purring where the yeah boss you go right ahead and kick my Nigger ass gets a Texas hum. For then corporate power is cooking in Rusty’s veins.

  So Rusty’s problem is simple. He can’t begin to consider how to go back without a bear. He got a corporation mind. He don’t believe in nature; he puts his trust and distrust in man. 5% trust, 295% distrust. He figures if Big Luke wants him to tag a bear, that’s the ball game—if Big Luke don’t want him to, then Rusty is left close to being a dead ass this season. He’ll be caught stalking around in the brush with a guide who’s holding such a rep he can afford to save himself for his major clients and make the minor executives like Rusty do a little work for him. Rusty has taken a full estimate of Big Luke and has this to decide: man to man, if you put each in the other’s job from birth, Rusty could have done everything Luke did except those twenty-five five-shot one-inch offhand clusters, cause that ain’t practice, that’s magic, and Rusty is modest about magic, but Big Luke in Rusty’s shoes would not have gone as far because he might be, bend your head (in secret) too fucking lazy. First thing, smack off, Luke tells Rusty that it’s not the best season this year for bear, and when Rusty, all modesty and politeness, allows as how he’d like to make a push against these poor possibilities, Big Luke, who’s coming on one hundred out of one hundred relaxed, kind of smiles, crinkly introductory humor humoring, and says, “They’re scarce now. When bear get lonesome they can smell far.” Well, Big Luke got a presence, not much of a face, just a big sunburned mug of a face like a pie with a lot of scars in it, he looks just like Big Ollie Water Beaver except paler, for Big Ollie is as dark as an old leather jacket, but Big Luke sends out a wave every time he has a thought, you can
feel it, and around him you can get messages back, you can feel that one bear out in those woods sending out its message—don’t come near, motherfuck—that message transmitted from the bear to Big Luke and relayed to us, you can tune in on the madness in the air, you now know where a pine tree is rotting and festering somewhere out there, and red ants are having a war in its muck, and the bear is listening to those little ant screams and smelling that rotten old pine, and whoong goes his nose into the rot, and he bites and swallows red ants, slap, bap, pepper on his tongue, he picking up the bite of death in each ant and the taste of fruit in the pulp, digging that old rotten tree whose roots tell him where we are, capisce, Luigi? There’s a fucking nervous system running through the earth and air of this whole State of Alaska, and the bear is tuned in, and big Luke, and Ollie and the assistant guide packers, and the ants, and Tex and D.J., and the air, man, the air is the medium and the medium is the message, that Alaska air is real message—it says don’t bullshit, buster. And Rusty of course reads this not, cause Big Luke is pouring salt in his ass. Big Luke is mean. “Lot of caribou,” Big Luke says. “Think about starting the week with caribou.” Well, Rusty would as soon start the week with rabbits as caribou deer. D.J. reads this easy—let Rusty presume to come back from the Brooks Mountain Range of Alaska to Big D, Texas, air distance 3,247 miles (check not on this detail, for D.J. has just estimated it—who the mother-butter is going to make such a small-ass measurement of distance but a hotel lobby type tourist?) let Rusty travel all that round trip 6,000 plus miles, spending 6,000 plus dollars on D.J. and himself—not all tax-deductible either, you fuck, and present himself at 4C and P with a deer’s head and no bear. Rusty and his status (who are as up tight with each other as two plump yoni—that’s Hindu for cunt, son!—doing sixty-nine in the long Hindu night) can now take a double pine box funeral—they’ll never get off his ass at Combined Consolidated, no, no, the office staff will wet their little pants waiting for Christmas so they can send him an anonymous set of antlers off some poor ass spavined Texas buck twice the antlers in width of measurement and holding four more points than the one he air-freighted back from Alaska—you know they’ll do that at the office if they got to dig up an old ranch hand’s bones and glue them together for antlers, Rusty knows a piss cutter when it scratches his scrotum—thank you very much, Mr. Luke Fellinka, but no thanks on that deer.

  “Say, Luke,” says Rusty, “I sure hope you put the hair on a bear for us cause I’m feeling like the poorest safari victim you’ve had all year,” and Big Luke says, “We, sir, have no safari victims, just happy clients and disappointed clients, and sometimes you can’t tell by looking at their face, not by the time they get home.”

  Intro Beep 4

  Think of something black-ass and terrible, black as a tumor in your brain, black as the black-ass consciousness of that crippled Harlem genius which D.J. shoves up for gambit as one possible embodiment for his remarkable brain. Shit, shit, and shinola, death in your breath, death in your breath gives a hump to the lung like the silent sound of a pocket turning inside out in the black-ass black-ball closet. Bishop Berkeley, goes the mad comptometer in old D.J.’s head, am I the ideational heat of a real crazy-ass broken-legged Harlem Spade, and just think myself D.J. white boy genius Texan in Alaska imagining my opposite number in Harlem land, when in fact, Good Lord, when in fact, I, D.J., am trapped in a Harlem head which has gone so crazy that I think I sitting at a banquet in the Dallas ass white-ass manse remembering Alaska am in fact a figment of a Spade gone ape in the mind from outrageous frustrates wasting him and so now living in an imaginary white brain, or is that ether-load man? is not D.J. really white, really walking at sixteen into the vale where the death of breath crosses all eternal wires, and D.J. is merely tapped in for touches of intellectual luxury to some fucked-up little bedridden Spade, or is that the abortive consciousness of a tumor beginning right under the medulla oblongata of his white brain a knot of psychic hatreds congregated in molecule dance to design a new kind of flesh, sarcoma, melanoma, carcinom’ and Nome and Barrow, Alaska, Fairbanks—late afternoon?

  Chap Four

  Well, by the light of the twilight D.J. does a little estimating. There’s guides and guides in Alaska, some for scratch-ass hunters, and some for poobahs where the idea is to bring the trophy to the man so that John Foster Dulles types can make the record book without ever getting their cheese wet crossing a brook. By the end of the first night in Fairbanks, while they lolling around getting acquainted in a super deluxe motel bar of a dark chocolate-red velvet interior looks like it was flown up from Seattle (which it was, en route from Hawaii where they imitating the English Pump Room in Threadnelly Gate, London W. 1) D.J. and Tex analyze it out—Big Luke used to be a big hunter, but those grizzly scratches have weakened his Arnold Toynbee coefficient—he interested less in challenge than response—if he caught his share of the three grand a head without having to lead various grades of assholes and tough but untrained adolescents into the brush to look for Mr. Wounded Honey Grizzly holding the head of a magnum in his bear gut and a last dream of murder in his bear eye, well, Big Luke, despite the big man death-guts charisma, may have had his day. Who’s to say there is no actors in Alaska?

  Listen to the dialogue: “Luke, I’m a stubborn Texas son of a bitch,” says Rusty, lifting his bourbon in the Fairbanks, Alaska, motel bar (empty near but for three old couples from Kansas on an airline tour of Anchorage, Fairbanks, Barrow, Nome, and Juneau, with dips into Kotzebue, Unalakleet, and Homer, and a brother and sister at University of Alaska entertaining their ma and pa up to visit from Portland)—this lack of activity may be given total attributability to the vacation-directed personal vector imperatives of the American mind which shuts up action after Labor Day. This is after Labor Day, early September in Alaska, two years (to remind you) before the period of D.J.’s consciousness running through his head, hence form is more narrative, memory being always more narrative than the tohu-bohu of the present, which is Old Testament Hebrew, cock-sucker, for chaos and void, “Yeah, I’m stubborn,” sighs Rusty tenderly, sipping his bourbon like his mother had brought him up on mother’s milk and moonshine, “I don’t want to carry on about where I’ve hunted, because I could tell you about going for wild boar in Bavaria, and for elephant in Africa—although I never got the elephant, my gun-buddy Ram Fedderstone got it, I just got a kudu, a snake, an African antelope, and a zebra. I always say I paid five thousand—you count them—bucks for a goddam convict suit.”

  “How about that, Pete?” said M.A. Bill, getting in the big chuckle first.

  “Shee-it, Rusty,” said M.A. Pete, “that’s a beautiful set of head and shoulder zebra stripes in the Bomb Shop” (which is what Rusty calls the Jethroe den, the Bomb Shop).

  Rusty turns his head, like a maidenhead being told she’s pretty, sort of a “It’s not for me to say,” and then he turns his keen shit hue executive eyes on Big Luke and says, “I even got in on a tiger hunt with the Maharajah of Pandrasore, but that I don’t count because I was present in ‘semiofficial function,’ ” a big wink, man, whatever the fuck semiofficial function is CIA supposed to convey, professor, “and we didn’t even carry rifles. There was an array of Hindu peons up ahead each with a kris on a bamboo stick, and they did the sticking. The Maharajah’s function, it turns out, is to be some variety of the Great White Hunter. The majesty of his attendance on the hunt brings tigers up where there were none before. If there’s a tiger this side of Tibet the Maharajah’s magnetism will draw him. Sure as bird shit on a parasol, damn if we didn’t attract three tigers.”

  “Maybe I get to learn a couple of new things about hunting from you,” says Big Luke F.

  “Say, Mr. Fellinka, I may look like a variety of Texas bull, but not that big, I swear. No, no, no. I’m not here to instruct, I’m here to imbibe. At the foot of a master. I just want to make a point, teacher. I want to cut the fiercest mustard you ever tasted with a piece of bear steak, I want to behold Bruin right in his pig red eye so I’
ll never have to be so scared again, not until I got to face The Big Man. Listen, Luke, here’s what I suspect is true—it is that you are the Maharajah of this woods and this range of earth, and so I’m expecting you to make the impossible become directly possible and we’re going to carry our stretch of hunting to what I would call a successful termination.”

  “Was a berry blight in August,” says Big Luke, “Now the bear are out digging roots in the brush. That’s a little thick there. A little too thick to bring a party in. Get a thorn in your eye, gun gets tangled, you can be looking at the ground about the time Friend Bear is putting an arm over your neck.”