Damn you, Virginia!
What jolted me out of my funk - and led me down a creative path I had never contemplated before - was the legendary March on the Pentagon, in October 1967. If I had not been able to lose myself in the hedonistic swirl of the times, I had at least been sharpening my sense of their politics. The word on the streets, as the event drew nigh, was close-to-Apocalyptic. The Johnson government was mobilising massive force to protect its symbolic Bastille; there might well be blood in the streets, and the radical crazies from the Left seemed hellbent on making sure there would be copious amounts of it. I wasn’t sure just where I stood in the ideological spectrum, but if the Revolution really was about to happen, I was as well-positioned as anyone to be its John Reed. So I packed a notebook, a secondhand movie camera, and a vial full of uppers and hitched a ride - in a VW microbus full of tie-dyed Dead Heads who seemed to think it would be a lark to have their heads cracked by police batons - to Washington.
By sheer accident, I ended up in the vanguard of the horde that made the march. Even more: I managed to end up on the very steps of the Pentagon, with only two or three rows of protestors between me and a double row of bayonets. Believe me, this was not the vantage point I would have chosen. If the SDS lunatics really did try to storm the building and shooting did break out, I was ten feet from the muzzles and utterly held in place by the pressure, behind me, of approximately one hundred thousand people. I looked nervously over my shoulder: simmering in the ripe afternoon sunlight was a restless sea of people, waving banners, playing guitars, lofting effigies and all manner of weird cultic fetishes. Before me loomed the guarded ramparts of Power. And off to the side, on the edge of a parking lot, Allen Ginsberg and the Fugs were chain-dancing, chanting their Pentagon id Exorcism: ‘Out, demon, out!’
Then, as I looked around at the snipers posted on the roof and the CIA types in sunglasses muttering into their headsets, at the banks of TV cameras and lights and microphones, while the multitude behind me chanted ‘The whole world is watching!’ I felt a sudden breakthrough to exaltation. At that instant, the whole damned world was watching, and I was at Ground Zero. The historian in me came wide awake, even as the rational part of me was half-sick with fear. No, it was not really the Bastille, or even the Palace Square in Petrograd, but there were enough similarities to get my adrenalin pumping as it used to when I was pulling point in the jungles.
It was, as they say, A Moment, and during that measureless interval, the writer in my soul stirred vigorously to life.
Suddenly, from around the flanks of the main steps, two flying wedges of gas-masked MPs charged into the crowd. Tear gas canisters popped and clubs began thudding into flesh. They were obviously under orders to move the mass of people back and simply to spread fear, and I instantly recognised, behind the lenses of their gas masks, a look I had seen all too often in combat. Knees drove into groins, and hippy-length hair was yanked out by the fistful. You can bet your ass the crowd dispersed, or tried to. I saw an opening to the left and wormed my way out of the melee, doing a bit of groin-kneeing myself, my eyes streaming tears from the gas.
And as I stood gasping for breath and groping for my handkerchief, I found myself standing a few feet away from Norman Mailer. He looked as wild as a bull with three pies in his hump, head lowered, ham-sized fists clenched, those tangled trademark eyebrows practically grinding together with determination. Taking a deep breath, he marched defiantly into a line of US Marshals blocking his path.
Christ, I was with Thoreau at the moment he was choosing to let himself get hauled off to the pokey! Without thinking, I ran forward and dove into the knot of people surrounding a man whom I considered America’s finest living writer.
The marshals, evidently, had been warned to look out for Mailer and not to rough him up. They were under no such instructions with regards to myself, however, and by the time we found ourselves sitting in the same sweatbox of a police van, I was nursing a loose tooth, a split lip, a cauliflower ear and a bruised right hand from the one good punch I’d managed to land during the fracas.
At first, both of us were too winded, too speedy with adrenalin, to do more than nod. After a while, though, Norman stuck out his hand and introduced himself.
‘I know who you are, man. What you did back there took some guts.’
‘You too, unless my personal magnetism is greater than I supposed it to be.’
Jesus, he actually talks like he writes! I thought.
‘Call it research. I’m a writer, too, and there’s a story in all this that somebody’s got to write.’
Norman looked at me sternly, pulling rank.
‘That’s why I’m here as well, sonny.’
I shrugged. I was a second-rate club fighter suddenly thrown into the ring with the heavyweight champ. No contest.
‘It’s all yours, maestro,’ I managed to croak.
As though by way of consolation, Norman patted me on the arm and said: ‘That was a pretty fair right hook you got in, I’ll say that. Where’d you learn to fight?’
‘Army.’
He studied me with renewed interest.
’Infantry, I’ll wager.’
’How’d you know?’ I responded, forgetting, for a moment, that this was the man who had authored The Naked and the Dead.
’For a flash there, you had That Look. I saw it often enough in the Philippines.’
The authorities took their own sweet time booking and fingerprinting us, and while we waited, we swapped war stories, grunt to grunt. I even told him about the Golden Nose business, although of course I did not tell him about how I came to acquire that metabolic anomaly. He seemed genuinely fascinated.
’The sense of smell is unjustly neglected, much maligned by being written about only in connection with vaginas and toilets’ (he pronounced the word with the gnarly Irish brogue he was then affecting in his public speech, ‘ter-let’). Then he startled the hell out of me by writing his unlisted Brooklyn Heights address on a scrap of paper and saying: ‘Write a war novel, kid. If you can write it as good as you talk it, you’ll have something. When you’ve completed the first hundred pages or so, send ‘em to me and I’ll tell you if they’re worth a shit.’
So as soon as I bailed myself out and got back to New York, I did just that. I fussed with outlines and chronologies and made some false starts, but then, one lonely night when I was about to crack the seal on fresh bottle of bourbon and hammer myself to sleep, I remembered Virginia’s pot-pourri bag. I had not even fondled the damned thing since ‘Nam, except to pack it away in a bottom drawer. But the instant I remembered it, clarity enveloped me like a gilded halo on a Byzantine icon.
My hands shook as I retrieved it, untied the drawstrings and put my nose down into whatever essences still brooded there for me, compounded to match the profile of my soul by a woman who had become, in my rational mind, almost a myth.
One hit was all it took, and I was back in Vietnam, on a trip as vivid as anything the acid-heads could have conceived. It was as though my senses had become transposed: nose for eyes, scent for touch, turning me into one big quivering dousing-rod of a receptor.
But there was one crucial difference: along with the rot, pain, terror, blood and corruption came the bronzen scent of pure courage, the plough-horse-stubborn effluvia of endurance and stoicism from the warriors. Not only my comrades, but those at-the-time faceless little men who outlasted every massive horror our technology could throw at them, who could march twenty miles and still fight a battle, fuelled by nothing but a few handfuls of congealed old rice.
It would be an exaggeration to say that the novel ‘wrote itself’ in that moment of epiphany, but the sculptural outlines of it manifested themselves like a bronze by Rodin. I was visited, almost palpably, by the two main characters: one would be an amalgam of every brave American I had ever fought with, and the other would be a fleshed-out version of the gaunt, pain-ravaged enemy soldier I had killed in that reeking tunnel-complex. The story would be theirs, their live
s and deeds and sufferings and ultimate deaths, as intertwined as Yin and Yang. I would grind no axes, make no apologies, follow no agendas. My model would beThe Iliad, nothing less.
Six months after that night, I sent Mailer the first three hundred pages. Two weeks went by before I got a growly-voiced telephone call from him: ‘Come over and let’s get drunk together, you son of a bitch! You’ve written a great book.’
As soon as I’d hung up, I whispered: Thank you, Virginia!
Thanks to Norman’s recommendation, the completed manuscript landed right on the desk of Putnam’s senior fiction editor. They bought it, but warned that it could not actually be published until ‘the political climate’ was right. I never quite understood that (and Mailer fulminated about it in commiseration), but for once in my life, my timing was perfect: six months later, the film The Deer Hunter came out, to extravagant reviews, and the media moguls took that as a sign that it was now okay to treat the Vietnam War as History, not as some untouchable sore on the body politic that equated with box-office poison. I thought that movie was the most over-rated piece of shit I’d ever seen (and flayed it savagely in a critique for Commentary after my own novel had squatted on the bestseller list for a few months), but I can’t deny the importance it had in paving the way for my book.
A lot of plum writing jobs fell my way after that, and of course the film Paramount made out of the Vietnam novel copped three Oscars. What followed was a predictable curve: three Trophy Wives (and three messy divorces), a long-running column in Esquire, six more novels (each received respectfully, but none, to my mind, on par with the first one), and a drinking habit that was probably spotting my liver by the time I was forty. And of course, the usual round of celebrity gigs at workshops and literary soirees, the most recent of which was the one at my Alma Mater, terminating in that sour encounter with the green-eyed coed and her proper little story.
Mine was a success story, to be sure. But there were nights when me and the Jack Daniels pulled out that old, yellowed, first-novel manuscript and I wept to see the untainted purity of so much that was in it, ached for the now-impossible dream of finishing that paean to pre-Vietnam innocence. If I had only known a tenth of what I knew now about my craft, what a fucking book that would have been!
But of course I could no more finish that book now than I could will myself to become eighteen again.
But no less could I leave my old campus without once more following that route to The Gardens. Would Virginia know of my career? Would she sometimes ache to remember our idyllic nights and our ravenous hunger for the feel and taste and (of course!) the smell of each other’s flesh? She would be, what? Forty-five, forty-six, now? Had she found ‘by instinct’ another mate? Had she buried her mother, or merely repotted her?
After so many years, that period of my life had become a legend even to me. The pot-pourri bag was still with me, like a talisman, but I had never opened it again since the night it conjured, as though by magic, the shape and structure of my first, best, published book. Whatever other rewards and satisfactions I had known in my career, Magic had not been an ingredient - I used up the last of it from the pot-pourri bag like some latter-day Merlin who had hoarded one valedictory spell to cast at King Arthur’s flaming burial-ship as it sailed into the mist between worlds.
Now, verging on fifty, I was a practical, world-weary man, and it was inconceivable that the things I thought I had seen and experienced in The Gardens had been real. Such things do not happen outside of fantasy tales ... or dreams.
But just the same, I thought as I drove that once-familiar route towards The Gardens, I had to know. If I could, after so many years, reaffirm that my private mythology was indeed based on real events, a real and unforgettable love affair, perhaps the grace of Magic would touch me again. If it did, and my liver didn’t give out, what strange and marvellous tales might I yet be able to write?
* * * *
The hamlet of Haynesville - at whose only traffic light I had first seen that sign pointing towards The Gardens - was now a fair-sized town, the little general store was gone, replaced by a Wal-Mart and a Blockbuster video emporium. The hand-painted sign was also gone, of course, but that was no surprise. I was driving on automatic pilot, riding a tide of memory that flowed inexorably towards the site of my own personal shrine and, if she was still there, its priestess.
Once more, I drove through the narcotic opulence of honeysuckle, now in full riotous bloom. I parked on the highway’s shoulder and approached the house quietly, instinctively going into that heightened state of sensory alert I had known on combat missions, although it struck me as slightly absurd that my body should react in such an extreme manner.
Evidently, Virginia, or somebody, was still in business, for The Gardens were as lush and well-tended as I remembered them. The house, however, when it finally came into view, had a dilapidated air to it: paint peeling in long dingy strips, one shutter hanging askew like a droopy eyelid. As I silently mounted the steps, I wondered: should I knock?
There was no need. The front door was open, and when I peered through the screen at the dark hallway, I saw her standing in silhouette at the entrance to the kitchen, arms folded placidly, as though my appearance after a quarter-century was neither surprising nor unexpected.
I entered and walked towards her, then stopped halfway, just looking at her. She had fleshed out some, but that only made her seem earthier, riper. Her cornsilk hair had turned a lustrous grey, but it still had the flow and fullness of youth. An astonishing sword-stroke of desire cut through me. We appraised each other for a moment, then she spoke:
‘I knew you would be coming.’
‘How did you know that, Virginia?’
She laughed, and there was just enough of an edge to the sound to make my skin prickle.
‘You forget how much I know about genetics, about the power of blood and kin.’
‘I haven’t forgotten anything, and I have no idea what you’re babbling about.’
Again that wise, knowing, sad and somehow chilling laugh.
‘It’s your son’s birthday. What loving father would miss such an occasion?’
‘What the fuck are you talking about, woman?’
‘The last time we made love - the night before you destroyed some of my most precious plants by tearing yourself free of their embrace - that was the night, and part of the process, that made me pregnant.’
Now she sighed, with genuine regret.
‘If only you had stayed unconscious for a little while longer, if only I had had a chance to explain things to you, my God, what a life we would have enjoyed together!’
She shook her head as though banishing the phantoms of memory.
‘But enough of that! What’s past is past, what’s done is done. And now, it’s time for you to meet your son.’
At that instant, my arms were pinned by a grip so fierce and unyielding that none of my rusty, basic training counter-moves could budge it. I did manage to drive one elbow into the chest of the powerful man who was restraining me, but I might as well have smashed it into a cinder-block.
Helpless, I watched Virginia come towards me, unscrewing the lid of a mason jar full of cotton wadding. As the first fumes of the chloroform seared my nostrils and napalm started bursting in my brain, I struggled like a gored bull, but the iron grip that held me never lessened.
The last thing I heard her say, as she clamped the jar over my mouth and nose, was surprisingly gentle:
‘Welcome back to The Gardens, my only love.’
* * * *
It has become difficult for me to think of ‘time’ in terms of days and weeks; now it seems more natural to think in seasons. With effort, however, I can for brief intervals reclaim some dim simulacrum of my consciousness as it was before the transformation, and during those brief, disturbing, spells, I estimate the passage of almost a year.
At first, until Virginia concocted the nostrums and aroma-blends that kept me both paralysed and numb to pain, I was
restrained, by padded wires, to numerous stakes, like a vulnerable sapling. I was catheterised, of course, since urine, while I still produced it, is acidic and bad for my soil. My solid wastes, however, simply dropped from their usual orifice, fertilising the ground below. Virginia was always a believer in organic horticulture and during my frequent early moments of madness, the writer in me - still alive and kicking somewhere deep inside - found the very idea highly risible.
Now that I have taken root, of course, the wires and stakes are gone.
My son, who is indeed a strong young man, even though he cannot or will not speak, and might be judged by the outside world as a simpleton, proved to have a good heart. When I dropped my shit, he cleaned me tenderly and applied ointments to my frequent rashes.
Now he waters me, twice a day, and assists his mother, very efficiently, in preparing the nutrients that are regularly mixed with my soil. Virginia seems pleased with my development.
Dark Terrors 5 - The Gollancz Book of Horror - [Anthology] Page 63
