by Thomas Laird
“I’m not a Freudian, but dreams are important. What do you dream about?”
“I had a dream last night. I was a kid on the southside again, and I was running after the ice cream guy, you know the guy in the truck with the little musical jingle. He wouldn’t stop for me even though my old man gave me a dollar and I was supposed to buy ice cream for everybody in the family.”
“Sounds very metaphorical, Danny,” she laughs out loud.
“I actually had that dream, Doctor. I wouldn’t lie to you.”
“I know you wouldn’t.”
She folds her hands on the table like a well-mannered school child. It is probably apparent to her that I’m attracted to her, and she is likely aware that I’m trying to tell her shit that’ll please her in her official capacity as my therapist/analyst.
“Tell me what you experienced. Tell me what you remember.”
She’s got me cornered. There’s forty-five minutes remaining in the session, and I’ve got no place where I can escape. I can’t lie to her because she reads me as well as Lila does.
Dr. Fernandez is no dummy. She’s heard cops try to evade her before, and as I said, I have this pressing desire to please her. And ravish her, too. I’m sure she’s aware of the heat I’m throwing her way, and I’m sure she’s used to that kind of male reaction to her presence.
I tell her that I joined the Rangers for the challenge. If I was going to be in the Army, I didn’t want it to be the four year hitch and then back to civilian life and the usual run of the mill time spent doing my duty. I wanted to see if I could endure, and I figured joining the most elite corps in the Army would let me find out if there was anything about me that was out of the ordinary.
My size is average. I’m not very tall and I’m not particularly the most muscular specimen anyone has ever seen. I’m just ordinary. But I kept believing there was something extraordinary in me even though people couldn’t spot it on my exterior. Heart, is what I was thinking about. If I couldn’t beat them in size and bulk, I could outlast them in perseverance.
Ranger training was all about outlasting the enemy. The legend is that the corps started with Roger’s Rangers in the French and Indian Wars, but the reality is a lot more contemporary. There was Darby’s Rangers in World War II—they were the guys who breached the Germans’ defenses at Normandy in 1944. And their exploits continued in Korea. So heritage and history have a lot to do with why I signed up for Ranger training.
It was as difficult as the media had written it was. Most of the men who signed up with me bailed out before it was over. I hold nothing against them. Everybody wanted to give it up at one point or other. I lasted. I took it. And I finally got through it. I think the training I received is part of the reason I rose through the ranks so quickly, here in the CPD. Discipline was not lacking, where I’ve been. We never lost our sense of purpose in-country, either. Most of us didn’t do dope or do it very often. Most of us kept our GI haircuts and most of us didn’t disrespect our country, even though we had suspicions that Vietnam was a bullshit beef with very suspect motivations at its core. We were Americans. We were Rangers. But we didn’t need any fucking country western anthems to keep us on task. We didn’t need public approval, either. We carried out our orders and killed the enemy.
Our only flaw was the trust we put in other people, back home, to do the right thing before they sent us into the shit.
So I tell Dr. Fernandez all of the above and she listens intently.
I really didn’t have very many night sweats. I know that a lot of ex-grunts do and did, but I wasn’t one of them. I have the occasional nightmare, but nightmares are not exclusive to Vietnam vets. And I haven’t had a single urge to go up to a high place and start wasting a big number of civilians. I’ve had no compulsion to waste any politicians who are too dumb to deserve to live.
It was our War, for better or worse, and I suppose God will be the only legitimate judge for the things I’ve done. As I said, I’m not a practicing Catholic, but I don’t have any roiling regrets about my trigger time in-country. Fuck it and there it is.
“I want to continue seeing you once a week, Danny.”
“Do you date your nutty patients? Ever? Any exceptions?”
She smiles winningly. I’m not sorry I made the half-joke.
“Next week? Right?” she aims the same warmth at me.
I want to sigh brokenheartedly, but I just get up and leave with a shit-eaten grin, instead.
In the third week of June the real heat begins—temperature-wise, I mean. The mercury soars into the mid-nineties. What had been a mild late spring emerges as a brutal early summer. With the heat comes murder, and a few of them are black hookers. But the MO is different, totally, and none of the new victims on our white board are twin-killings. Nobody was made to witness their partner’s demise and then killed or left insane, the way one of the girls was in the initial case we think Franklin Toliver was responsible for.
Homicide is all about endurance. If you have a low tolerance for frustration, then our department in the CPD is not for you. Go teach school or milk the stock market for millions. You don’t want my job. The irritation factor is sky high. Our clients can’t speak for themselves, so there’s always that extra challenge for our branch of the law.
Lila treats me like a partner but not as a lover or a friend, and it’s making me very disturbed. I talk to Fernandez about it, and she says I have to talk it out with Lila, but then I start to notice Dr. Fernandez’s magnificent breasts. Or I’ll scope her exquisite booty, whenever she stands and turns around, which is painfully rare in our sessions. I know I’m being a chauvinistic pig, and I know Lila would ream me for all the above, but my shrink is too well gifted by God for me not to notice. I try to keep things professional when I see the doc, but I spend way too much of the hour fantasizing about seeing her without her doctor’s “suit” on. She dresses in these severe unisex outfits that drive me wild with desire. I don’t know if I can continue with her, and I know the issue is mine, not hers. It’s not her fault that she is one of the most beautiful women I’ve ever seen in my life—and no exaggeration.
If she wound up as Lila’s secret lover, I’d be fucking devastated.
But I will try to keep it in my pants, figuratively, from now on, when I see her.
Lila comes into my office.
“Still love me?” she asks.
But there’s no smirk on her face.
“Yeah, as a matter of fact,” I tell her.
“Let’s take an early lunch.”
We drive over to her apartment.
“Is there any chance your roomie—“
“She moved out last night,” Lila says as we park in her complex’s lot.
We walk up to the entry. Lila slides her ID card into the slot, and the door opens. We take the elevator up to her floor.
She opens her door, and we’re inside. The door to the roomie’s bedroom is opened, and I can see into it. The shades in there are opened, and the sunlight fills the unoccupied bedroom.
“What happened to all the career business and the ‘it’ll get in the way of our partnership’ stuff?” I ask as we sit on her couch.
Apparently most of the furniture belongs to Lila because all the living room chairs and couches are still here.
“I haven’t had a woman as a lover in eighteen months, and my roommate was never one of them. She had more boyfriends than a mutt has fleas, Danny.”
“You still didn’t answer my questions.”
“I don’t know. Why does every damn thing have to have a reason?”
“Why all of this? So abruptly? Can you see why I’m asking?”
She stands before me.
“All my life I heard people asking me why I was going to the Academy. Then why was I going to fly jets in combat. Why was I going to kill innocent babies in that goddamned useless war. All these damned questions, Danny. Then I meet you. I’m just fresh out of a relationship with some woman who winds up being stupider than Rea
gan’s astrologer, and I see you and the seesaw begins again. I’ve been attracted to men and women, boys and girls, all my life, but I never had a relationship with a female until my mid-twenties. I thought that that one was it, the permanent happening in my life. But I was wrong. As usual. I always make shitty personal calls.
“And then you come along and stir the pot and I don’t know my ass from my left nipple and I tell myself I’ll go slow, real slow. And then you and I go to bed, and I want the white picket fence fantasy bred into all good American little girls, only I tell myself it’ll all go bad the next time some attractive member of my own sex flaunts it in my face.
“Believe it or not, Danny, I was kinda thinking of you, about all this. I knew how Mary fucked you all up, and I swore I’d never do anything like that to you. I couldn’t bear it if I hurt you that way. Now do you understand?”
She bends down and kisses me.
“I’m really not the bitch you think I am. Am I, Danny? Tell me. Please?”
She starts to cry, and then I get up off the couch and take hold of her. I guide her out the door, and I head us back to the parking lot below.
“Name your poison. I’m buying you the most disgustingly overpriced lunch in the Loop,” I tell her as we walk out into the lot.
Before she can get in behind the wheel, I hold her tightly and I kiss each wet eye.
16
It’s the age of “The Evil Empire.” There’s a Commie in every bush. Santa Claus is a Red. Ernest Hemingway leaned toward Pink and the Loyalists and toward his drinking buddy Fidel Castro, El Commandante. We’re going to build weapons out of Star Wars, killer satellites, to zap our greatest enemies, the Russians.
That was why we were in Vietnam in the ‘60s and ‘70s, no? To stop the cascading drop of the dominoes. We were the Dutch boys with the fingers in all those Asian dikes. We were the forerunners of a technological, bloodless war—at least no blood so’s you’d notice. Hellfire would rein on The Evil Empire and Democracy would reign a thousand years. Sounds sort of like The Third Reich, doesn’t it?
Fifty-eight thousand and more of us died, along with a lot more Vietnamese, to stop the new Huns, the new Barbarians. Trouble was, I could never really tell if I were the solution or part of the problem. Things were confusing, in spite of my resolve to get the job done—which we did, mostly.
And we still lost that obscene war. We still came home in disgrace.
However, attitudes, like waistlines, are constantly changing. First we’re hawk, and then we’re dove. It’s hard to tell the players without a scorecard. In Vietnam, the bad guys didn’t always display their colors, like the black knights who opposed Camelot. There was no blue and gray. They didn’t sport swastikas or wear red stars on their caps. The Chinese Army wore uniforms, and the NVA could be spotted, sort of, on occasion. Otherwise it was a turkey shoot minus the fucking turkeys. You couldn’t always be certain you were popping a VC honcho or operative or whether you were tearing up indigenous personnel by mistake. We took our best shots, but it was very possible innocent bystanders went down, instead, sometimes. Collateral casualties mar every fun fucking loving war.
It’s becoming the age of cybernetics, the papers and all the media have announced numerous times. Computers are taking over. The Selectric II I use at work for my paper reports is a mastodon, a furry relic, I’m informed. We’re into the age of ether. All data will be carried electronically.
I like my IBM. I know it’ll be easier to print out corrected copy via a keyboard hooked to a computer, but I’ll miss the directness of my written tasks as they still remain direct, today. I’ll miss the fucking clacking. I’ll miss White Out or those little tabs you stick in the carriage or the “X” button that deletes mistakes on my Selectric II.
Adapt or die, motherfucker. It was the same law of Darwin in the jungle, too. Adapt or perish. You swim with the tide or it washes over you.
You listen to your Captain telling you to back off the perpetrator of six homicides (that we’re aware of) or you get taken off the case altogether.
Or Franklin Toliver becomes the fucking Invisible Man, and you just hope you won’t be bagging and tagging new duos from the hood, black girls who were supplying the world’s oldest service—to the worst possible service-ee, our boy Franklin.
Prostitutes are engaged in the most dangerous profession in the world, next to combat grunts and harried husbands. Whores get killed off in the thousands across the nation every year, but it’s difficult to post an exact number on their fates because many of them die or disappear and they’re never reported as MIA, missing in action.
You must excuse all the military terms used above, but it is a lot like combat duty, if you’re a lady of the pavement. They get slashed and they get shot and they get dismembered and even burned alive. I’d say they earn combat pay. I know they’ve chosen an immoral and unpleasant way of making a living, but if you ever saw where some of these girls, and young men, came from, you might not be as harsh in your judgment toward their demises.
They had it coming. Right? They asked for it because they chose to put themselves in harm’s way. Correct?
Since when do any of us good Jews or Christians or Moslems or Buddhists get to pass judgment on our other fellow travelers in this life? The book says, “Judge not, lest ye be judged,” or something close to that. You wouldn’t think you’d be hearing bible text from a non-participant like me, now would you?
But I’ve begun to participate, after all. I told Kelly I’d start going to mass with her, and I have. We go to the Sunday eight o’clock at St. Mark’s Church in Oak Lawn on the southwest side. I’ve been to four in a row, now, and it’s late July. I can’t say I’ve heard every word of every homily, but I try to listen to what’s going on. Just remembering when to stand and when to sit and when to kneel tasks me a little bit. As I say, it’s been a long time. I don’t remember many of the prayers except the Our Father and the Hail Mary and the Glory Be. The prayer to St. Michael about fucking the devil up is a little sketchy in my memory, but it’s starting to come back, as is the confession thing. I haven’t been to formal confession since they made us all go, back in high school. So I’ve got a lot to confess, and I figure this Saturday may as well become a point of departure for me, spiritually speaking.
The spiritual element is something I’ve ignored greatly throughout most of my life. I might’ve whispered a few Hail Marys out in the jungle after blowing someone’s brains out upon the departure away from the ambush site, but I don’t count any of that as spiritual. If praying to get away with killing someone, in a war or anywhere else, is considered religious, then I’d rather join a fucking voodoo cult. You can’t really believe any loving God listens to some asshole praying to get away with homicide, can you? Well, if you can, you ought to join Psy Ops, those crazy bastards who work with the CIA or whatever letters they’re sporting currently.
I never thought I’d go back to the Church, and who knows? It may not take, eventually. But I’ve actually enjoyed being with my daughter at mass. We go out for breakfast after the eight o’clock, and the last three Sundays, here in July, we’ve met up with Lila at a restaurant. Lila and Kelly alternate on choosing where we eat. I just like being with them both.
They’re beginning to sound like two close girlfriends. Kelly shows unreal excitement in her eyes when she talks about going off to Northern in August (with her boyfriend, Michael. She doesn’t call him Mike, as I do) and when she talks about nursing and about maybe going all the way for an MD, someday. I don’t think I’ve ever been happier than I am when I just sit and listen to the two of them.
Lila is a professional listener. She has that talent in an interrogation room. Which is why I let her handle the bulk of the interviews we conduct for the CPD. She really hears people. She doesn’t listen sideways, as some cops do. As a lot of civilians do, as well. She actually connects up to the person, whether they’re lying or telling gospel. Lila has a bullshit meter in her head. She knows liars immediately.
My daughter is truly blooming before my eyes, and it’s very difficult not to water-up when I realize her transformation. It really is like a rose, when they bloom and their gorgeous petals open up and flourish. There has never been an event in my life that resembles her metamorphosis, except maybe her birth, which I missed because of a war. Kelly was as near death as any wounded GI I’ve ever witnessed on the battlefield. I’ve seen men literally gasp their last. I’ve seen the bulb turn off behind their eyes.
I always expected the worst-case scenario phone call telling me that my daughter was found dead in some alley or on some street. That’s how junkies die, and Kelly was a junkie for a few years.
Something or someone saved her. Maybe it was Sr. Catherine or maybe it was Mike Carroll. But I think it was a combination of the above—and I think my daughter had more than a little to do with it, herself.
Any drug counselor, and I’ve known several outstanding therapists, will tell you that no one ever goes straight unless they make up their own minds that they’re going to. No program, no guru, no priest or nun or reverend or rabbi or mullah can help you be free of that mountain of a monkey on your back. You are the only person who can deliver yourself, ultimately.
Kelly dragged Kelly back from the edge of the abyss. I felt impotent to help her, most of the time. You can’t lock them up or bitch them out of it. It has to come from within. There has to be sufficient character to pull this kind of miracle off.
Kelly saved Kelly. Nobody else. The word “proud” is far too insufficient to express how I feel about her. She’s not all the way out of the woods, yet. Life is never that facile. There’ll be tests, hurdles, the usual.
