Why Are We in Vietnam?

by Norman Mailer

  They also on freak activities. Not just fucking two or three forty-year-old women on separate shots in the bathroom in one night, after all that’s nothing once you read the Marquis de Sade, but they off on real freaks. For instance, they are digging corpses in Tex’s father’s funeral parlor, I don’t mean the ultimate, the boys are never without some kind of jammed-up taste and principles but listen city slickers from the East, they are engaging in private autopsies, undercover undertaker surgical activities—this weird unpalatable action to be explained on the basis that it gives them powers. They are not hunter-fighter-fuckers for nothing, no, nor with enclaves of high ability in karate, football, sports car, motorcycle, surfboard, and certain notions of the dance, as well as genius inquiries in electronics and applied existentialism without having to snoop here and there for powers, which they get from crime, closet fucking, potential overturn of incest since Tex is almost not above trying to get Hallie Jethroe in one closet fuck this very night, plus ghoul surgery on corpses which is demonological you may be shit-and-sure, and derives from their encounter with all the human shit and natural depth of their Moe Henry hunt two year ago.

  So back to Alaska where the boys got their power. And they got them all Alaska style, as weird and wild-ass as the entrails of a wild-ass goose, just listen to this: D.J. was in such a murder ball of sick disgusted piss-on-dad after Rusty took claim of the bear that he couldn’t sleep for fear he’d somnambulate long enough to beat in Rusty’s head, so up he got, tapped Tex in his bunk, wide-awake as well, and in one whispered minute they decided to split and make a little trek right that night into Endicott Range. And that’s where they are now (in D.J.’s mind two years later) right out in those hills eight miles already from Dolly Ding Bat, packboards carrying tent-cloths, grub, rifles, blankets, man they made their packs in the dark without waking Big Luke, Al Bell, Ollie, Rusty, or the medium assholes (who are all sleeping sound as slaughtered cattle) and off they go, taking the trail up the mountain, staying to the trail till dawn which is like four in the morning this part of September after the long Arctic twilight night of June and July and the very short night of August, so now the weather getting ready to take the dip into winter, they are working on the last of the early dawns.

  It’s hours before they speak, just working along in the early fall nip cold of the August night, breathing in hint of the chill of the frozen steam and the icy vise of magnetic north—all those cold gun blue compass needles pointing to you magnetic North—how cold can you take it? a problem which D.J. Goethe Rousseau James Clerk Max’ell pot n acid head all rolled into one Dallas T formation high school ass is going to prong into in the future or even right now—I mean do you have hard-on enough fraternity stud fucker Lambda Lambda Omicron Mu jockstrap frathouse faggot to put your red-hot daddy-loved-you ding into a cake of ice? Shit you do, Señor Shinola. Ice even numbs King Kong’s dong. And all the needles point to the North where the icy Pole is—dig, node hunter? That tip which catches all the electromagnetic focus and funnel of that electromagnetic field called earth by the common clay (otherwise known as U.S. finger fuck voter) is exactly the place where the ice is, and that ice is the orifice, now you’re cooking, cutey, that’s to where the field runs, nay flows out from the center of the earth to go around the earth into the other end (South Pole, Newton!) and back through the fires, the molten red lava flaming shit furnace at the core where the heat is, changing all the way over to ice again as the electromagnetic field and stream passes from inside blazes to outside crust, and that deep cold on the crust node pole is the Encyclopedia of Cataclysmic Knowledge all refined down in the spooky early morning chill of Alaska August night up above the Circle, man, there’re not ghosts up there, but communes of spookiness, pales, dominions, psycho swingers—even telepathies, Euripides, Alaska above the Circle is something else, and not just Aurora Borealis (which is also something else)—listen, dear limpidity of the intelligent ear which has cashed in its wax for hand-in-hand progression through these conceptual coils with D.J., we are going back to Aurora Borealis cause it is the only mountain of heavenly light which is certified to be result and product of magnetic disturbances—dig! you long patient asshole, we are on the track of something—that early morning chill is tuning the boys up because they getting the stone ice telepathic hollow from the bowels of the earth after it passed through the magnetic North Pole orifice. (Say now what’s the dif between earth and flesh? Earth orifice is ice, whereas flesh orifice? have you check out your bunghole fever reading lately? Think about that, all you concept-bound Yankee dry suck minds, y’need a little Texas oil in the pan, in the brainpan, Samantha.) That indeed is why Texas soil is so poor grit dry—all the goodness is down in that oil, all that fever and fuck lust percolating beneath. “Man,” says Tex (after four hours’ silence) “it was about time we did our split ass from that hunk shit safari.” Tex, D.J. is here to tell you, has what they call a cold mien. Yeah, a real cold mean. He’s a killer, baby, got one of those dull Texas faces to prove it. It’s when he look interested and happy that you got to watch out, cause like the poet said, somebody is going to be dead. In fact, Tex is a looker, like D.J. He’s tall, got a whippy old body, 6-1, 168 pound, all whip leather, saber and hide even when he seventeen. He and D.J. are lookalikes, except for expression, cause D.J. is full of mother-love received in full crazy bitch perfume aromas from Hallie, whereas Tex is full of ape shit daddy-love. Gottfried Hyde Senior, the fattest strongest fuck of an undertaker in Dallas ass County, had four girls in one marriage and then a fifth in the other (first wife died and he buried her with the services of his own mortician parlor—some undertakers got no shame) and second wife, the stringy Texas girl from fifty-two Texas shacks backs right to the Alamo got it up to give him a son on the second installment to emerge from her honest hardworking womb and snatch. She had a real pick and pull of a pussy, D.J. always divined, just a mean skinny Texas snapper, a lobster claw of a cunt, just the type to turn on a fat bull of a Gottfried Hyde cause he looked to be one of those massive men with a little peeny dick, who, reason suggests, like a pussy which is quick, rubbery, pinchy as a thumb and finger—what else you going to get out of a short dick but a preference for girls who got the tunnel muscle at the front tip? This study of cunnubial arts by D.J. is grand hypothetical, cause D.J., owning God’s blessing, is well hung, in fact he has a dick like a Nigger, but for hue, Renfrew, and it’s one place he got it slightly over Tex—the Measure Your Dick Department. Anyhoo (cry if you got a short dick) Gottfried Hyde was torralee and cockaloo over his son Gott Hyde Junior, and raised him with the blessing of full love till he was five or six and developed a mind of his own, but no more of that unless we can take a visit to the back rooms at the embalmers, which, being our scene set only in Alaska and Dallas ass manse, we therefore cannot. But, full of daddy-love, Tex got that mean glint in the eye for which Texans are justly proud and famous, whereas D.J. has got the sweet smile of my-momma-loved-me-and-I’m-sweet-as-a-birthday-cake kind of mean look, you know like where the hell is it coming from next? As a team, by any reckoning, they’re superbas, can’t stop them, they a natural hunting couple. And now that it’s morning, they stop, cook a little breakfast, figuring the smoke will be broken by the trees in the wood in which they cook so that Cop Turd won’t spot their fire. Besides it’s too early. They’ll assume at Ding Bat the boys are off for a pre-breakfast hike. They do not yet know that the boys is off on a bona fide tear. Cause what they see is a range of mountains ahead with real peaks, and they are going to go on up into them. (Ice needle peaks are crystals to capture the messages of the world.)

  There! You all posed y’all ready for the next adventure in the heartland of the North, well hold your piss, Sis, we’re about to embark with Tex Hyde who is, insist upon it, a most peculiar blendaroon of humanity and evil, technological know-how, pure savagery, sweet aching secret American youth, and sheer downright meanness as well as genius instincts for occult power (he’s just the type to whip asses at the Black Masses) as well as
being crack athlete. Such consummate bundle of high contradictions talks naturally in a flat mean ass little voice. Better hear it.

  Moreover, take a turn, pigeons, wheel on a bird whistle, D.J. is calling you back to look at Gottfried Hyde Senior and his second wife Jane McCabe Hyde, mother of you know which Tex. Now Gottfried Senior, nickname Gotsie or Gutsy, is in his element when up to the elbows in intestinal slime or a bull fuck. He’s bull fuck faggot fucker (pederast, you ass) bull fuck sheep fucker, bull fuck waitress fucker, he’d even fuck a keyhole if it was the size appropriate to a castle door. (There’s aisles and vales in that cold metallic chamber lock.) Gutsy will fuck any orifice, nostril, ear, asshole, mouth or any crevice, navel, even cream between two fat tits (that’s a ’tweener fuck) he’ll rub your armpit off, he’ll split the crack in your athlete’s foot, there’s no telling what legion of prongings and proctorings has been delivered to the boxcar of corpses which pass through the marble halls of Mortuary Manor. Now D.J. ain’t lost his sense of exquisite impeccable taste. He’s not bullshitting you one bit—Gutsy calls his humming thriving corpse stuffer establishment nothing other than G. Hyde’s Mortuary Manor, which of course all the Dallasassians have promptly broken down to Gutsy’s Double M Kasket Klub. First question to ask yourself is Gutsy such a champion prong sadist bull fuck because he is an undertaker, or did he come into being an undertaker because he is a prong fucker first? Either way, chicken or egg, leave him loose with a cow, a horse (preferably mare—not even Gutsy 5-11, 280 pounds of human living bull can stick it up a stallion’s ass) leave Gutsy with a jackass, a goat, a poor little old dog, or a plump piece of human pudding too appetizing to be called a corpse, for the Ghost has but departed, give Gutsy a purchase on any hint of cave, tunnel, scratch, or groove, and he will take his peeny dick and lather up a storm. He even jacks off twice a day. Winston Churchill used to drink a bottle of brandy and smoke twenty cigars daily until he was eighty more and dead. Gutsy Hyde jacks off twice a night and will until he’s ninety. But he’s no freaked-out onanist—that’s just excess froth. Gutsy has come an average of eight to ten times a day, seven days a week for forty plus years. The unknown statistic in the whole State of Texas, the secret spring to the coils and crazy fucked-up clockwork of Tex, D.J.’s ace, Tex Hyde, is simply that his daddy comes more often than anyone in the whole fucking state from cowpuncher to President and back again. And how does D.J. know all this? Well, everybody in Dallas who has ever come within hailing distance of Gutsy Hyde has felt the bull advancement of his persona. I mean, he grope you silly. You get caught in a corridor with G.H., Gott in Himmel, protect your parts, Gutsy will start to breathe heavy, he put his arm around you, he rub next to you, if you good and strong, and shove him off, or slippery-wise and slip away, he’s come already, just that contact cloth to cloth, his pin in a crease of his pants, he’s hot nuts, he’s a Texas gusher. Gutsy comes all over the place out of a vast enthusiasm for life (or some such disease of unbalance as the fucked-out cynics would say) no, Gutsy presents a problem, what can make a man come so thumping much, and the answer is—D.J. whispers it—corpsemanship. Gutsy is tuned in to the Pharaoh’s art, he’s a libido hunter, a human dredge, dragging bottoms and pissing out bilge through that peeny dick of his, while consuming all aura and effluvia of libido. Gutsy is always catching and clutching a hair of the wetstone in his fat fuck greedy fingers or is equally gusto at burrowing away at the warmth, sweet, love, and fuck sugar of the universe inasmuch as these gifts of sunshine and generation are deployed, scattered, and distributed through men, women, dogs, goats, here we go again.

  Now, Tex’ ma, Jane McCabe Hyde, is on the side of being a saint. She cooks, cleans, mends, worries, does without a servant until pushed to the point of necessity, takes no time to herself, works for all, never grumbles, has the sunlight of the sea in the glint of her cornea, and in fact she’d qualify for Texas ass saint, female division, except for her pussy, that thumb and finger grip of real live snapper. Ever see a Southern Methodist halfback knife a line like a catapult had sprung him through, well, that’s the Literary Handbook Metaphor Manual for old Jane McCabe Hyde and her secret pussy which keeps her from saint category. And how does D.J. know about this secret beautiful snap spring of pussy, well, Gottfried Hyde has told everyone in town about the wonders of his second wife’s cunt, he has wanted people to know why he married her since she was then poor, unknown, plain of face, whereas Gutsy had married up first crack out, had got into some Country Club money shit, enough to set up his first Kasket Klub from which Mortal Man or Double M emerged. Yeah. So he didn’t want on the death of his first wife (whom some would insinuate was fucked to death, although after bearing four girls, others could suggest that her maternal flappy-lip old rubber box was so big, Gottfried could have put his two meat-trust hands around his peeny dick in prayer and still got in) but dying from too much or too little off Gutsy’s peeny old prick, Mr. Hyde the undertaker did not want, once his first rich beauty was gone, for people to think he was taking a single step down. So he bragged up a storm about the glories of Jane’s Secret Sleeper until some were even curious to get in for themself, although offered no chance. Jane had the blessing of the Alamo in her. All that secret springiness been passed down in the seed, boy, anybody in the direct line of the heroes of the Alamo got seed like Mexican jumping beans, cause when all those Alamo troopers maintained to their positions and didn’t piss in no pants and held their shit, tight honorable asshole in the face of certain death, and hung on, why a cloud and vale of love rose up about them in the middle of all this Mexican fire and shit storm, they was all loving their buddies so much, cause, man, they was the best bunch of sinewy high bounding zap and God streak fuckers, and each time one of them got one of Santa Ana’s rounds in his virile little old Alamo heart, why, the fuck went up to death with a spring of joy, cause his buddies and his far-gone relatives (from whom the poor trooper hadn’t had a letter in a year) were going to be nonetheless spiritual beneficiaries, and the spiritual essence of secret zinging semen went across the desert and through the air on the trooper’s last breath and gave swinger pricks and springing cunts to some of the best and worst people in Texas. (Which accounts for why it’s such a crazy state.) Yeah, go back to the martyrs of the Alamo, and add a picture of Tex and his parents, Gutsy and Jane, in cameo, and you get a notion of the kink which resides in the heart of the Lone Star. Now, carry on up to the mountains where soon…patience, patience, dear poontang, why it’s on patience and poontang that they built the West. We can always get to the boys.

  Intro Beep 10

  Yeah, the boys is up in the boreal-montane coniferous forest biome (dig! shit ecologist big university librarian groper) and that biome may run from Labrador to western Alaska, but it about ready to give out, it’s had it, all that three- to four-thousand-mile patch of balsam fir and black spruce, piss on that, wolverines, we ain’t seeing much more of the tamarack on the stream sides, and the willows, the birch, the alder and the poplars (all concealing their Doppler effect, Wolfgang!) no, the boys are stepping up the south slopes of the foothills of the Brooks Range and those mountains ahead, forget it, that’s where the real church of the spirits goes congregating in cathedrals of black ice, blue ice, white snow, land of the dream spirits, listen asshole America, D.J. your disc jockey is telling you, where you going when you sleep? well, hole, there’s only one place you go, and that’s into the undiscovered magnetic-electro fief of the dream, which is opposed to the electromagnetic field of the earth just as properly as the square root of minus one is opposed to one. Right! They never figured out yet whether light is wave, corpuscle, or hung up on finding her own identity, all they know once you get down to it is that light is bright, and therefore not necessarily opposed to being part of Universal Mind, henceforth known as UM which is the fat frog you calling for, Volta, when you clear your throat (um) and look for inspiration (um). Cough up an oyster, roll that phlegm, diddle it around your finger, Clem—you can’t get fucked for less—here is the sweet intimate
underground poop: when you go into sleep, that mind of yours leaps, stirs, and sifts itself into the Magnetic-Electro fief of the dream, hereafter known as M.E. or M.E.F., you are a part of the spook flux of the night like an iron filing in the E.M. field (otherwise glommed as e.m.f.) and it all flows, mind and asshole, anode and cathode, you sending messages and receiving all through the night, if you had your nose in garlic and been bum fucking the wrong cunt, well the route this yere night is through the dreams of the witches, that’s a circuit, Perkins, lots of shit, and if you clean as milk and had your nose all day up the antiseptic asshole of Big H the Corporate Hospital Corporation, why then your dreams got to go through the incinerator where they pile all the old hospital bandages, all that dried blood pus shit green gangrene bladder gut mess—that’s a battery—from all the surgery of the day which surgery had duly excised and thereby assassinated one hundred plus organs from seventy-eight patients, a confusion in the Divine Economy, as all those organs taking millions of years to make (think of the evolution of the cells) are now being flushed in a gush into the incinerator while the surgeons get their clean whiskey-free libidinal juice—I mean, man, just think of being able to knife somebody and get paid for it—anyhow, Mr. Clean Milk, with your nose up Corporation’s antiseptic asshole, it seems by this itinerary that your dreamland route, your M.E.F. trip ticket, your private sleep circuit goes right through that incinerator bag in the hospital gut pile, dream on that, all your messages all going through those amputated organs, ugh, all the Bunnies dreaming of nunneries, no matter what route, if the message go from you across the bed to your dear mate (rot in your own bad breath, spoiler mine) or if you flinging a thought all the way from Dallas to Alaska and back again, just no chance, know this, you a part of the dream field, you the square root of minus one, you off in a flux, part of a circuit, you swinging on the inside of the deep mystery which is whatever is electricity, and who is magnetism? for they the in and out, the potential and actual, the about to be and the becoming of Something—we cannot call it love, the lust of Satan, can that be? Magnetism potential and electricity the actual of the Prince himself? whoo-ee, say D.J., cause his genius brain can grope ultimates and that’s not for every short-hair butterball in town, no, figure this, the electricity and magnetism of the dream fief is reversed—God or the Devil takes over in sleep—what simpler explanation you got, M.A. expert type? nothing better to do than put down Mani the Manichee, well, shit on that, D.J. is here to resurrect him through a point of declaration in the M.E. fief which is this—all the messages of North America go up to the Brooks Range. That land above the Circle, man, is the land of the icy wilderness and the lost peaks and the unseen deeps and the spires, crystal receiver of the continent. Wait and hear. Goose your frequency.