by Ben Fountain
“Billy!” woofs Dime. “You’re flaking on me.”
“No, Sergeant. I’m just thinking about dessert.”
“Thinking ahead, good man. God-damn I trained them well.”
“They certainly can eat,” Albert observes. “Hey, guys, you can slow down. It’s not going anywhere.”
“It’s chill,” Dime answers. “Just keep your hands and feet away from their mouths and you won’t get hurt.”
Albert laughs. He is having only a mixed green salad and fizzy water, along with a barely touched “Cowboyrita” on the side. “I’m gonna miss you guys,” he tells them. “It’s been an experience getting to know you fine young men.”
“Come with us,” says Crack.
“Yeah, come to Iraq,” A-bort urges. “We’ll have some laughs.”
“No,” Holliday objects. “Albert gotta stay here and make us rich, ain’t that right, Albert.”
“That’s the plan,” Albert responds in a studiously mild voice, and there, Billy thinks, there it is in that soft deflation at the end, the almost imperceptible slackening of ego and effort that denotes the triage mode of the consummate pro. “I’d just get in the way,” Albert is saying, “plus I’m pretty much your classic pacifist twerp. Listen, the only reason I went to law school was to stay out of Vietnam, and lemme tell you guys, if my deferment hadn’t come through, I would’ve been on the bus for Canada that night.”
“It was the sixties,” Crack observes.
“It was the sixties, exactly, all we wanted was to smoke a lot of dope and ball a lot of chicks. Vietnam, excuse me? Why would I wanna go get my ass shot off in some stinking rice paddy just so Nixon can have his four more years? Screw that, and I wasn’t the only one who felt that way. All the big warmongers these days who took a pass on Vietnam, look, I’d be the last person on earth to start casting blame. Bush, Cheney, Rove, all those guys, they just did what everybody else was doing and I was right there with ’em, chicken as anybody. My problem now is how tough and gung-ho they are, all that bring-it-on crap, I mean, Jesus, show a little humility, people. They ought to be just as careful of your young lives as they were with their own.”
“Albert,” says Mango, “you should run for something. Run for president.”
Albert laughs. “I’d rather die. But thanks for the sentiment.” The producer is clearly enjoying himself, a smiling, avuncular presence not so much slumped in his chair as taking full advantage of it, as comfortably shored against gravity’s downdraft as Jabba the Hut on his custom throne. “Why’s he fucking calling us?” Crack asked when Albert first got in touch, after a quick Internet search confirmed that he was what he said he was, a veteran Hollywood producer with three Best Picture Oscars from the seventies and eighties, plus the distinction of having produced Fodie’s Press and Fold, the biggest money-losing film in the history of Warner Bros. “It was that year’s Ishtar,” he likes to say, laughing, wearing the flop like a badge of honor, for only an A-list player could engineer that kind of legendary bust, and anyway the third Oscar came a couple of years later, so he was redeemed. The midcareer sabbatical was his choice. The paradigm was shifting, the studios moving away from long-term producer deals, plus he’d just gotten married for the third time and was starting a new family. He had all the money he’d ever need and decided to step back for a while, but now, three years on, he’s itching to get back in the game. Thanks to old friends he’s got a solo shop on the MGM lot, with a secretary and assistant provided by the studio. “I like where I am right now,” he told Bravo in their first face-to-face. “No overhead, no pressure. I feel like a kid again, I can do whatever I want.”
And if his hot young wife (Bravo googled her too) is miffed that he’s not home on Thanksgiving Day, well, she’s a good kid. She understands the demands of his work. Albert watches with interest as several Stadium Club patrons stop to pay their respects. The men have the hale good looks and silver hair of successful bank presidents or midsized-city mayors, tanned, fit sixty-year-olds who can still bring the heat on their tennis serves. Their wives are substantially but not offensively younger, all blondes, all displaying the taut architectonics of surgical self-improvement. So proud, the men say, going around shaking hands. So grateful, so honored. Guardians. Freedoms. Fanatics. TerrRr. The wives hang back and let their men do the honors, they look on with vaguely wistful smiles and not an ounce of evident lust.
Enjoy your meal, the men say in parting, with the stern yet coaxing manner of white-glove waiters. “They sure do love you guys,” Albert observes after the group moves on. Crack snorts.
“If they love us so much, how about if their wives—”
“Shut,” Dime woofs, and Crack shuts.
“I mean everybody loves you guys, black, white, rich, poor, gay, straight, everybody. You guys are equal-opportunity heroes for the twenty-first century. Look, I’m just as cynical as the next fella, but your story has really touched a nerve in this country. What you did in Iraq, you went head-to-head with some very bad guys and you kicked their ass. Even a pacifist twerp like me can appreciate that.”
“I got seven,” Sykes says, which is what he always says. “Seven for sure. But I think it was more.”
“Listen,” Albert says, “what Bravo did that day, that’s a different kind of reality you guys experienced. People like me who’ve never been in combat, thank God, no way we can know what you guys went through, and I think that’s why we’re getting push-back from the studios. Those people, the kind of bubble they live in? It’s a major tragedy in their lives if their Asian manicurist takes the day off. For those people to be passing judgment on the validity of your experience is just wrong, it goes beyond wrong, it’s ethics porn. They aren’t capable of fathoming what you guys did.”
“So tell them,” says Crack.
“Yeah, tell them,” says A-bort, and Bravo strikes up a spontaneous chant, tell them, tell them, tell them like a frog chorus or monks at prayer. The nearby Stadium Club patrons smile and chuckle like it’s all a high-spirited college prank. As abruptly as it started, the chanting stops.
“Tell Hilary to tell them,” says Dime.
“I’m trying, hoss. Lotta moving parts to this deal.” Albert’s cell hums and the first thing he says is, “Hilary’s officially interested.” Then: “Sure she is. It’s a very physical role and she’s a very physical actress. Plus she’s a patriot. She really wants to do this.” Pause. “I’m hearing fifteen million.” Pause. “Will there be politics?” Albert rolls his eyes for Bravo’s benefit. “Larry, you know what von Clausewitz said, war is simply politics by other means.” Pause. “No, you illiterate, not The Art of War. The German guy, the Prussian.” Silence. “My ass you read The Art of War. You might’ve read the CliffsNotes for it. I could believe you read the blurbs.” Albert’s eyes glower down as he listens. Big listen. Mouth twitching, hairy fingers fribbling the tablecloth.
“Tell me this, Larry, how could you make a movie about this war and not be political? You want a video game, is that what we’re talking about?”
The Bravos glance at one another. Could do worse, is the general thought.
“Okay look, how about this for politics. My guys are heroes, right? Americans, right? They’re unequivocally on the right side and they also unequivocally kicked ass, now when was the last time that happened for this country? There’s your politics, Lar, it’s all about feeling good about America again. Think Rocky meets Platoon and you’re on the right track.” Pause. Eye roll. Uh huh, uh huh, uh huh. “Listen, we’re at the Cowboys game right now and I’m telling you, I’ve never seen anything like it. They can’t take a step without getting mobbed, it’s like the Beatles all over again. People respond to these guys in a very visceral way.”
The Bravos look at one another. What’s amazing is a lot of what he says is true.
“Look, talk to Bob. He could use a hit right now, and I’m bringing him one on a goddamn silver platter.” Silence. “Jesus.” Silence again. “Well fuck me, it is Thanksgiving. Just trus
t me when I say Hilary’s interested. You’ll be glad you did.”
“Problems?” Dime asks when Albert clicks off.
“Nah. All normal.” Albert takes a drink of Cowboyrita and winces. “It’s all accountants running the studios these days. Midgets in Maseratis, tiny men in big suits. They have to google themselves every morning just to remember who they are.”
“Didn’t you say Oliver Stone went to Nam?” Sykes asks.
“Yes I did, Kenneth. Did I fail to also mention he’s a lunatic? And he can’t bring the money anyway. Look, if I have to hit the street to make this film that’s what I’ll do, that’s how much I believe in you guys.”
No one knows what this means exactly, but the buffet beckons. When they go back for seconds—only Dime, Albert, and Major Mac stand pat—a long line precedes them, but as soon as people notice Bravo standing there they move aside and urge the soldiers forward. At first Bravo declines, which triggers a merry hue and cry. Go on! people insist in mock-scolding tones. Get on up there, go! They nod and chuckle as the Bravos pass, heartened by the sight of these fine, strapping American boys with their big broad shoulders and excellent manners and ability to eat everything in sight. Everyone is happy. It is a Moment. A point has been made, assumptions proved, and now they can all go forth and enjoy the day. Billy’s hangover has been shocked into remission by the onslaught of calories, and on this second pass he marvels once more at the gorgeous food, the woody grain of the turkey beneath its golden crust, the lush, moist plaids of the vegetable casseroles, the luxuriant mounds of stuffing, and the six different kinds of mashed and whole potatoes, including an exotic purple variety with the strangely pleasing texture of leavened mildew. Here in the God-blessed realms of mainstream America you eat civilized meals and take civilized dumps, indoors, in peace, on toilets that flush, in the common decent privacy that God intended as opposed to the wide-open vistas of the barbarous desert, nature nipping at your ass like a pit bull puppy. So perhaps, it occurs to Billy, this is the whole point of civilization, the eating of beautiful meals and the taking of decorous dumps, in which case he is for it, having had a bellyful of the other way.
Walking back to the table they start giggling. No reason, they’re just punchy, the food has given them a glucose high, but on arrival Dime tells them to sit the fuck down and shut up and he is not messing around. Something has happened. What happened? Soon they will learn that the powerful producer-director team of Grazer and Howard has relayed its desire to make the Bravo movie, Universal Studios has even verbally committed, but all on condition that the story relocates to World War II. But for now the only thing Bravo knows is that Dime is suddenly OTR, on the rag, while Albert carries on as if everything’s cool, placidly keying in a message on his BlackBerry. “A master of the psyche,” Shroom said of Dime, after the sergeant spent the better part of a morning smoking Billy’s ass for leaving his night-vision goggles in the Humvee overnight. Push-ups, crunches, stress positions with sandbags, then six deadly laps in hundred-degree heat around the FOB’s inner perimeter, roughly the equivalent of four miles. “You’ll never figure him out, so don’t even try,” Shroom advised.
“He’s an asshole,” said Billy.
“Yeah, he is. And that just makes you love him more.”
“Fuck that. I hate the son of a bitch.”
Shroom laughed, but then he could, he and Dime had served together in Afghanistan and he was the only Bravo who Dime never smoked. This exchange took place in the shade of the concealment netting that Shroom rigged up outside his Conex, to which he would repair in his leisure hours to smoke and read and ponder the nature of things from the camo camp chair he bought in Kuwait. It calms Billy to think about him thus arranged, barefoot, shirtless, cigarette in hand, and with a book in his lap, Slowly Down the Ganges. He was heavy into the whole ethnobotanical mystic trip and even looked like a giant shroom, a fleshy, slope-shouldered, melanin-deficient white man with the basic body type of a manatee, yet he possessed a prodigious blue-collar strength. He could one-hand the SAW like a pistol and ready-up the .50 cal, and forty-pound sacks of HA rice were like beanbags in his grasp. Every other day he shaved his head, a surprisingly delicate orb that seemed a couple of sizes too small for the rest of him. In heat conditions his face lit up in swirling lava-lamp blobs, and he didn’t so much perspire as secrete, producing an oily substance that covered his body like a slick of stale pickle juice.
“If people lived on the moon,” Dime liked to say, “they would all look like Shroom.”
It was Shroom who told Billy that Dime’s father was a high-powered judge back in North Carolina. “Dime is money,” he said. “But he doesn’t want people to know. And you know what that means.”
No, Billy said. What does it mean?
“It means that money’s old.”
They made the oddest of odd couples, handsome Dime palling around with mooncalf Shroom, and they seemed to know more about each other than would be considered healthy in a normal environment. From time to time Dime would allude to Shroom’s horrific childhood, an apparently epic tale of hard knocks that included a stint in some sort of religious institution for waifs, or, as Dime called it with never a batted eye from Shroom, the Anal Redemptive Baptist Home for Misplaced Boys of Buttfuck, Oklahoma. Billy supposed that’s where Shroom came by his impressive repertoire of Bible verses, in addition to such gnomic pronouncements as “Jesus was not a U-Haul” and “We’re all God’s Pop-Tarts whether we like it or not.” In Shroom World, bricks were “earth biscuits,” trees were “sky shrubs,” and all frontline infantry “meat rabbits,” while media pronouncements on the progress of the war were like “being lied to on your tombstone.” Early on, before they’d seen any real action, Billy asked him what being in a firefight was like. Shroom thought for a moment. “It’s not like anything, except maybe being raped by angels.” He’d say “I love you” to every man in the squad before rolling out, say it straight, with no joking or smart-ass lilt and no warbly Christian smarm in it either, just that brisk declaration like he was tightening the seat belts around everyone’s soul. Then other Bravos started saying it but they hedged at first, blatting “I love you man” in the tearful desperate voice of the schmuck in the Budweiser ad, but as the hits piled up and every trip outside the wire became an exercise in the full pucker, nobody was playing anymore.
I’m going down. Like a slide show, alive, dead, alive, dead, alive, dead. Billy was doing about ten different things at once, unpacking his medical kit, jamming a fresh magazine into his rifle, talking to Shroom, slapping his face, yelling at him to stay awake, trying to track the direction of the incoming rounds and crouching low with absolute fuck-all for cover. The Fox footage shows him firing with one hand and working on Shroom with the other, but he doesn’t remember that. He thinks he must have been cutting Shroom’s ammo rack loose, pulling the release on his IBA to get at his wounds. Is this what they mean by courage? Simply doing all the things you were trained to do, albeit everything at once and very fast. He remembers the whole front of his body being covered in blood and half-wondering if any of it was his, his bloody hands so slick he finally had to tear open the compression bandage with his teeth, and when he turned back to Shroom the big bastard was sitting up! Then going right back down, Billy sliding crabwise to catch him in his lap, and Shroom looked up at him then with his brow furrowed, eyes burning like he had something crucial to say.
“He’s your sergeant,” Shroom said that day outside his Conex. “It’s his job to make your life as miserable as possible.” Then he went on to explain to Billy how Dime’s mastery of the psyche involved intermittent doses of positive reinforcement, intermittent being a more effective behavior-modification tool than a consistent program of same. Whatever. From all his reading Shroom knew lots of useless stuff, but what Billy is thinking here at the Stadium Club is, Thank you for making us feel like shit, Sergeant! Thank you for ruining this delicious meal! Probably the last non-Army-issued or -contracted-for meal they will get for so
me time, but no matter, they are scum-sucking shitbag frontline grunts and their task at this moment is to shut up and eat.
