by Edgardo Vega
“Naw, Ma,” he said. “It’s nothing like that. Thanks, anyway. Don’t worry.”
“That’s what you told me last time, you big jerk,” big, good-looking Maud said, acting like a mother. “‘I’ll be all right,’ you said, and they shot you full of holes, like they did your father in Harlem, the spic bastards.”
In retelling the story the phrase “spic bastards” had been censored and no mention made of Puerto Ricans or the more sanitized “Spanish” as the perpetrators of her life’s tragedy, now that Vidamía had deposited herself with absolute charm in a very special place in Maud’s heart, causing Maud to feel immense pride in her grandmothership.
“I’ll be fine, Mom,” Billy Farrell had said. “Really. Don’t worry, okay?”
“Billy?” Maud said, her voice starting to break on the phone.
“Don’t, Ma.”
“You got enough money?”
“Yeah, the check came yesterday. I’ll be back tonight. I just need to get out. I’ll call you.”
“I love you, you big son of a bitch.”
And, like he always did, he reminded her of what that made her. She laughed and said, “That’s right and don’t forget it” and they said goodbye; and he said goodbye to Grandpa Buck and Grandma Brigid. Dressed in jeans and a green fatigue jacket, unaware that he was making a social statement, one which forever set in motion the consciousness of war in America not as a romantic John-Wayne-from-the-Halls-of-Montezuma-to-the-Shores-of-Tripoli-come-back-and-kiss-ecstatic-girls-on-the-front-page-of-Life-magazine experience but a real spilling of blood, tearing of limbs, shredding of flesh, concussive, loud, horrific encounter with fear and death, he walked down from his grandpa’s house until he reached Broadway and then, leisurely, walked the forty or so blocks to the hit-the-elevated-train road, jack.
Forty blocks was nothing. A stroll. He was used to humping uniformed and booted, loaded down with ruck, canteen, bolo, .45 in its holster, C-rations, his big .60-caliber machine gun and enough ammo to stop a regiment, should they come across one; sneaking through elephant grass and woods, across rice paddies, up into hills; fighting the heat and the bugs and the leeches and constant wetness of the rainy season; looking out for booby traps; humping at night, looking to set up an ambush for the North Vietnamese regulars, or the fucking Cong gooks, to use the correct parlance, who never once gave up trying to infiltrate their perimeter, even after they’d surrounded it with concertina wire, a minefield, and more concertina.
“Man, they don’t give a fuck,” the sarge had said. They would simply lay down a homemade Bangalore torpedo, which was a long bamboo filled with explosives, and blow up all the claymores and antipersonnel mines and in they’d come, raising hell at all hours of the night. So they’d just go out and mess them up before they had a chance to strike. Six or seven gyrenes sneaking around at night, walking in line by holding on to a wire that the point man held so they wouldn’t get lost or separated or step on their own mines. Every once in a while they established contact and all hell broke loose and then he’d set up and let the gun do its thing, the fear tearing at him and his mouth getting dry. And then inside of him everything happening very slowly as he observed the red tracers cutting up the night and at the same time watching the enemy tracers like rapidly traveling lightning bugs whose slow delicate paths he’d followed in early summer evenings when he was a boy. Ours were red and theirs green, the bullets crossing each other in the night, each one carrying instant death. “Fucking spectacular!” Pete Farrentino had said when he first saw them. “Like fucking Christmas,” he’d said. “Yeah, peace on Earth and good will to men, mothafucka,” Bobby Carson had said. Bobby Carson was from Wichita, Kansas, and Pete was from someplace outside Detroit. Pete, the son of an Italian shoemaker, had been the quarterback on his high school team, but was too small to get a scholarship so he joined the Corps.
The two of them got it one day after they went and swept the road outside the gate, going almost a klic in either direction with the mine detectors and the dogs from the K-9 detail. When they were done and were walking back, a truck came by and hit a mine they’d missed. Afterward, they didn’t find diddly-squat, except maybe some dog nuts, teeth, and a collar and a combat boot with stockinged toes in it and dog tags with neck sinew and skull fragments where their chained metal tags with name, rank, serial number, blood type, and religion had shot up through the head. The truck had been carrying ammo so that for about twenty minutes the air was filled with round after round of all kinds of ordnance: .45s, .60s, frags, mines, our own Bangalore units, all of it going off like one big Fourth of July party forcing everybody to stay in the bunkers, some of the newer men chattering and asking if they were under attack.
Death was a constant. One day somebody was there and the next day he was gone; sometimes it happened right next to you and other times you’d hear the stories, each one worse than the last, not exaggerated but amplified by the fear that eventually death, dressed in black pajamas, a straw hat, and rubber-tire sandals, would come calling. Once in a while you’d hear of lucky hits like getting a round that slid through your arm or shattered your shin and you’d be awarded a Purple Heart and be gone a while. If you were lucky you went back home a hero.
At times, they’d stay inside the compound, waiting. Word had come that the North Vietnamese Army was spotted heading their way, and Billy’d set up above the sandbags, looking out over the wire and the minefields, the sea to the east shimmering in the sunlight, reminding him of the times he and his father went fishing on Long Island Sound in his friend’s boat. To the west was Laos, another country, and the Viet Cong could as easily come that way; always looking north for the enemy, with daylight fading and communications calling for artillery, measuring the distances, until the shells, deafening and deadly in their insistence, came within a hundred feet of their bunkers; setting up the defenses in case the NVA decided to attack at night.
If the enemy attacked, they’d just call Camp Caroll or the other artillery encampments and they’d set up a ring of fire around their outpost. It didn’t matter, the Cong still came. With howitzer shells raining all around their perimeter they came. Sometimes you could just tell they were out there, you could feel their presence. He’d then fire a couple of flares to see if he could spot them. It never ended, day after day, looking for them and waiting, wanting them to come and then when they came, wanting it to be over; day after bloody, noisy, wet, hot day; choppers overhead, mortars and sporadic machine-gun fire, jet planes dropping napalm, and beyond it all, high above, the droning of the bombers as they headed north.
There were times when nothing happened—quiet, hot days, with just a slight breeze blowing from the sea, bringing memories of peaceful summers at Jones Beach or on the Sound. They patrolled the road and watched the people: small, their brown-yellow skin tight and their hair black under straw hats; sometimes a farmer herding a hundred or so ducks, all of them walking in a row; boys five and six years old controlling a huge water buffalo by grabbing the animal’s nose. Sometimes a squad went up into the wooded areas and encountered wild dogs. Marines walking, not knowing what would happen next, wondering if the enemy felt fear in the same way they did. None of them wanted to believe that some GI had been glommed by a tiger, in-country—just grabbed him and carried him off. All they found were shreds of his fatigues and torn-up combat boots, the head chewed to the bone, everything sucked out. He was fascinated by the old women with their teeth blackened or dull red from chewing betel nuts, the areas around their lips wearing the same colors in darker shades.
So he went through the streets of Yonkers with old men who had seen combat and the women who had lost men in the war staring at his desolation, knowing from his attire and his demeanor, his detachment from the pain, that he’d been in Vietnam. He crossed into the Bronx, past Van Cortlandt Park, where he’d spent long summer afternoons mowing them down with his fastball until that, too, had passed and he began drifting, more and more to the music, deciding that his life was about jazz and he had no choice
but to go with it. But something had happened and he couldn’t recall much except Joey Santiago dying in his arms.
He brushed back his long blond hair with his left hand, keeping his right one in the pocket of his fatigue jacket and then combed his beard with his fingers and climbed the stairs to the 242nd Street elevated station and took the train to Manhattan driven by a need to apologize to Joey’s mother for letting her boy die.
2. Name That Girl
That first instance of Billy’s return from the jungles of forgetfulness and into the lunacy that was American society and life in New York City was in 1971, when he was sitting by the radio and word came on July 6 that Louie Armstrong had died. As if a jolt of electricity had shot through him, he sat upright and was surprised to find himself in the present, so that his distant past, dormant except for his fixation on Joey’s death, began streaming to him clearly. He recalled Pop Butterworth taking him along to Mr. Armstrong’s house to bring him an arrangement. Billy was thirteen years old but knew about the great jazz showman from listening to his grandfather talk about “Satch” and seeing him singing “Bill Bailey, Won’t You Please Come Home?” in a film with Danny Kaye about another jazz musician that his grandfather knew. Something about pennies, but he couldn’t recall the name of the film.
That day Pop Butterworth had said, “Louis, you remember Buck Sanderson? Played banjo down in Memphis. We came up to New York in the thirties. Used to play Dixieland with Pee Wee and those fellas. This is his grandson, Billy Farrell. He plays a very fine piano.”
Mr. Armstrong laughed, his eyes all crinkled, and touched Billy’s blond head, looked into his eyes and said, “Well, Pops is gonna have to sit down and play with the young man one of these days. Is that okay?” Billy looked confused and, pointing at Pop Butterworth, said, “We’ve played together a few times.” Mr. Armstrong laughed and made a raspy noise of delight in his throat. Mr. Butterworth later explained that Louis Armstrong called himself Pops.
Now, as if he had awakened from a long sleep and was walking through a thick haze, Billy began to take notice of the world around him. It should also be noted that during 1971, the last year on planet Earth of Louis Daniel “Satchmo” Armstrong, he of the voice, the trumpet, and the handkerchief, an additional number of noteworthy events took place. Richard Nixon, then president of the United States, announced a trip to the People’s Republic of China, for “Ping-Pong diplomacy,” as the press labeled his efforts. To prepare for this momentous event Nixon said that there was no reason why that vast country shouldn’t be admitted into the United Nations. Also during this year the Reverend Philip Berrigan was indicted, along with five others, for conspiring to kidnap U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. Everybody was reading Jerzy Kosinski’s novel Being There, about the effects of TV on American society. Wishing to capitalize on this massive interest in television, the government, with cameras recording everything, killed twenty-eight prisoners at the Attica State Correctional Facility in upstate New York in a concerted air and ground attack of unprecedented brutality in which 1,500 law enforcement officers participated.
In Super Bowl V, the Baltimore Colts beat the Dallas Cowboys 16–13. The Pittsburgh Pirates won the World Series and Roberto Clemente from Puerto Rico won the Most Valuable Player Award. In other sports, meanwhile, 1971 was the year William Calley was convicted of massacring more than a hundred women and children in Vietnam, in the village of My Lai. During this same year, the New York Times, convinced that their mission truly is to bring us all the news that’s fit to print, published The Pentagon Papers on the official role of the United States in Vietnam. Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the information, was indicted for being an ethical fink. On the other side of the planet, the United States continued its massive air bombardment of North Vietnam, while in Washington, D.C., where the orders originated to pound the little slanteyed, black-pajama-wearing, rubber-tire-sandaled, rice-eating, conicalhat-wearing, tunneling little bastards, the Weather Underground caused $300,000 worth of damage when they placed an explosive device in a Senate bathroom. The significance of the target has been lost on many but perhaps these self-proclaimed patriots, in spite of the seriousness of their mission, had a sense of humor and were forecasting the phrase “shit happens.”
Drifting in and out of his walking delirium, oscillating between reading subway signs for SALEM cigarettes (get some they’re cool; no, not Kool, cool, minty) and seeing red and green tracer bullets in the night and hearing the rumbling of bombers as they headed north, everything about him boku dinky dao, Billy Farrell thought about God and wondered how He chose this one and not that one for extended duty on the planet and in the case of that one why He had visited so much misery on him, meaning Joey Santiago, who got hit but remained alive more than an hour moaning and crying, one hand gone and a leg shattered; PREPARATION H: for your hole, that’s what the H stands for (“Yeah, up yours, too, Flanagan”), and afraid and shocked that his young life, which had only a few memories in it, would suddenly cease to exist, Billy’s own brain like a camera fixed on the scene but unable to push down on the shutter button to complete the picture, instead taking in each and every detail, such as the way the rice grass in the paddy was bent and how the water drifted in little circles, everything together, like a multipleexposure photograph.
As the wound in the middle of Joey’s chest began to dry in the sun—TRAIN FOR COMPUTERS (“What about a train for people?” “Yuck, yuck, Flanagan, you’re a sick fuck”)—Billy watched as the flies came to feed and lay their eggs, from which maggots would grow and produce more flies, which would find other dead and dying soldiers or dogs or water buffaloes where they could rest their weary bodies and deposit life because they didn’t know any better; his own body, as if joined to Joey’s, becoming more and more rigid. Numbed by the desire to join his friend and buddy and also be dead, Billy eventually decided to forgive the flies for swarming around Joey and entering the punctured helmet to sit on his own head. In the middle of that rice paddy and the horror of that experience, Billy prayed with the fervor and trust of his childhood and vowed then to never allow anger to be part of his life.
The Lower East Side reminded Billy not of his high school days, when he’d come down with his friends to cop grass, but of Da Nang—people talking and him not understanding and the smells so foreign that he had numerous flashbacks of explosions, rapid-fire shooting, whining mortars, and whirring helicopters. He controlled himself and didn’t run for cover but nervously kept telling people he was looking for Joey Santiago’s family, going up and down from Fourteenth Street to Houston and from Houston to Canal Street, from Third Avenue to Alphabet City and the FDR Drive and then cutting back over Houston and crisscrossing the streets down to the Henry Street Settlement, talking to junkies and housewives alike, to little kids and Jewish peddlers—pleading with them and showing them the picture of Joey in a green undershirt with his dog tags around his neck, until he found Elsa Santiago, who would become Vidamía’s mother, on Orchard Street, walking home from Seward Park High School.
What Ursula Santiago didn’t want to tell her granddaughter, Vidamía, was that her father had somehow managed to get himself down to the Lower East Side and over a period of a week had located Joey’s family. Utilizing every spare moment, he asked one person after the other until he found Elsa and came up to their apartment, looking like some lost soul, pale and thin and like the life had been drawn out of his eyes, and said he’d been with Joey when he died. “Viet Cong grenade, mortar maybe,” he’d said. “I’m not sure.” He told them that he and Joey were best friends. Elsa Santiago, just fifteen years of age, who had brought Billy into the house, watched him worshipfully, so that Ursula knew that her daughter was smitten and the first time she got a chance she’d go off with him like a bitch in heat. And that’s exactly what had happened.
Elsa remembered a letter she had received from Joey with a picture of him and Billy, their hair in crewcuts, smiling and without a care because they were Marines. Semper Fi, you hump. It was
like a dream come true, because reading the letter she had fallen in love with the handsome blond boy and recognized him now even through the beard and the sadness, which he wore permanently. Smiling boldly, she said, “You’re Billy Farrell, ain’t ya?” and knew that someday she would marry him (so went her fantasy), so that before they had spoken ten words or taken ten steps there had been an enormous outpouring from Elsa’s primed Bartholin’s glands, which caused the nylon and cotton fabric covering her virgin loins to become soaked and fragrant with love. Her eyes became blind to Billy’s manual disability so evident to everyone who saw him when he had to display both hands—such as the times he had to cut steak or read a newspaper or a book in public or help someone lift something.
Vidamía sat staring out of the window of her Tarrytown prison, confined there by her mother, the former Elsa Santiago of Rivington Street in the Spanglish-speaking Warsaw Ghetto of Latin America, from which Elsa had eventually escaped through effort and travail to obtain a Ph.D. in psychology. Thus armed, Elsa had established a private practice of psychotherapy-cum-counseling-of-marital-irregularities-and-discords. And when Vidamía was six years of age, Elsa, having just finished her undergraduate work at Hunter College, wed a certain Mr. Barry López-Ferrer, a C.P.A. of considerable art, who, it was rumored in business circles, could balance and make dance any number of accounts on the head of a financial pin, provided you gave him enough música for tax write-offs. Together the two made money faster than it could be printed. They took this inky currency and invested it every which way, in mutual funds, real estate, stocks, and municipal bonds, so that in eleven years this hyphenated conglomerate of Puerto Rican ingenuity, without much beating around the pubic area—and in spite of anything one might hear about this other chosen people’s lack of git-up-and-go—was worth two cool million dollars, give or take a couple hundred thou. They now affected the lifestyle of the rich and famous, complete with muchos Mercedes (and not Santiago or López, but of the Benz variety), together with cabin cruisers, multiple homes (and orgasms), trips to Europe, memberships in private clubs, and enough plastic pecuniarities and credit ratings to rebuild a small underdeveloped country or even the South Bronx if they so wished—which they did not—opting instead to do good deeds in their own community of Westchester County through the United Way and recognized hospital and church charities, taking care of the homefront, so to speak, where it could be more appreciated since it is a well-known fact that truly poor ghetto denizens have, among their many flaws, a horrid sense of gratitude. And in any case if the Puerto Ricans who were left behind were going to make anything of themselves they had better do it as Elsa and Barry had, by pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps, referring to Operation Bootstrap, a U.S. program to further justify colonial rule on the island.
