The biggest problem, even though two of every three working townspeople commuted to San Francisco, was not gas but the new local cost of living. By November the initial impact of high energy costs was followed by a loss in San Martin of 17 percent of the town’s appeal as an All-American bedroom community, as measured by the average sales price of a home. Those who were caught financially extended or overextended, found their worlds quaking.
By December ’73 capital had dried up. Those who had, held on. Those who had lent, demanded their due. The financial rains stopped. Ty’s outgoing cash depleted his reservoir. And someone, somewhere was watching.
“What the fuck!” His voice was loud, booming, angry. Even cushioned by the dense vegetation and towering redwoods the sound reverberated in the canyon. He hollered it again. He stomped the broken macadam of Miwok Road. He jumped, turned, kicked a clod of dirt that had fallen from between the treads of the D-7 Cat. “No fuckin way!” He gritted his teeth, seethed at the building inspector, the three policemen, the city’s wetland’s officer. Only a half hour earlier he’d been home, with Olivia, doing a few lines, laughing, when the tenant called. “Impossible,” he’d said.
“Mr. Dorsey, they’ve made us remove all our personal things. We’ve got it all scattered out on the lawn.”
“They can’t do that!”
“They have. And they’re unloading the bulldozers. You’d better get out here.”
Now Ty exploded again. “You goddamn son of a bitch.”
“One more crack like that out of you”—the police sergeant stood, squared, one hand on his belt, one gesturing at Ty—“and I’ll bring you in for disturbing the peace.”
Ty threw his hands straight up, his lips pulled back, his gold caps flashing. He was speechless, overwhelmed, overpowered. Finally he blurted, “You CAN’T do this!”
“Certainly can. You should have answered all those summonses,” the sergeant snapped. “You expanded this way beyond the original footprint.”
“That wasn’t me. That was Lloyd.”
“Your name’s on the papers.”
“Where my tenants goina go?”
“That’s their problem.”
“Come on, Mr. Bailey,” Ty pleaded with the building inspector who was ten feet beyond the sergeant. “Give me one day. One day!”
“I’ve given you six months,” Bailey called over his shoulder. The two dozers were now positioned against the northeast side of the rebuilt Victorian. On the opposite side, corralled by additional police officers, stood eight tenants amid piles of their clothing and effects. “Court says it comes down. That expansion was illegal and you knew it. This is single-family residential.”
“One day,” Ty shouted.
“Time’s up,” Bailey said. He raised his right arm.
From above came the increasing revs of the diesel motors, then the clank and squeak of the plow blades being raised by the hydraulic pistons, then the ka-thunk as the operators shifted. Ty closed his eyes, turned away, put his hands to his ears. Of all his real assets this was the only one with substantial equity, and within thirty-five minutes it was nothing but a crushed and broken pile of boards heaped into a foundation hole. Even the foundation the dozers broke here and there, wherever they could get traction in the dirt, which had been a new lawn.
“You owe Elmont. You owe me. You owe anybody else?”
It was now 10 December 1973. To add insult to injury the city of San Martin had sent Ty a bill for $3,700 for destroying his Miwok Road Victorian. Now here, on the front porch of his Tin Pan Alley home, was this man, this very big man who said he represented two of Ty’s clients, this very big man who said he’d bought a note himself, discounted, six months earlier and the balloon payment—of $16,000—had been due on Halloween. He hadn’t received one red cent!
“Come to my office tomorrow morning,” Ty said calmly.
“What office?”
Ty’s eyes skittered. “Great Homes Realty,” he said quickly.
“You son of a bitch,” the big man said. “I want my money. Now!”
“You think I keep that kind of money here? in my house?” Now Ty acted angry. “I do business during business hours. Ten o’clock tomorrow morning. In the office. Bring the note and I’ll give you a check for—”
“You pay me in cash, Mister.”
“What are you, some kind of idiot?” Ty stepped from the doorway to the porch, aggressively confronting the big man. Again he felt sick, stress-induced sick. Even the bitch had dumped him, had blown him off only moments after she’d inhaled his last line. Ty shoved the big man in the chest. “Get the hell outta here!”
“Tomorrow, mothafucka. Tomorrow. You hear me!”
Inside, alone, Ty leaned back against the locked door, held his head, tried to breathe deeply but his breath came in quivering gasps like a small child crying.
Like Jessica crying, he thought. Like his own daughter crying. “Dear Uncle Phillip”—Luwan had helped her write it and Phillip had sent it on to Ty—“for Christmas I want a skip-rope and some beads. Love, Jessica.” Nothing more. Not even a “Hello,” from Phillip. “Aw shit, Man. Shit.” His jaw quivered. His quadriceps felt like jelly. He thought of her but he could not picture her.
There was so much shit coming down. If it wasn’t, Ty thought, for moving in ... No. If it wasn’t for them white racist fuckers ... The Man’s system. Set up to separate blacks from their money. They won’t let us get no piece a the pie. Set me up.
He stumbled into the dim light of the living room, searched the window wall, which faced the golf course, for shadows. He did not concentrate, did not extinguish interior lights. Instead he went to the closet in the middle bedroom where he’d maintained his cache: works, skag, cash. Without the Victorian eight-plex, he knew, even without laying out the spread sheet, that his bottom line was out-of-reach negative. And notes were coming due, secured notes on which he was sure he could default with impunity, but also unsecured notes that would bring civil action, and fraudulent notes that, sooner or later, would bring criminal action.
He went through the procedure, tied off, slapped up, shot up. Heroin. No money for cocaine. No cocaine for speedballs. Better this way. Duller. No psycho-bitch ... she’d used the term herself, about herself, said Wapinski had called her psycho-bitch. They had laughed. Laughed together ... He was floating now—dull, without pain, hours without feeling.
“One minute.” He raised his face to thumping on the door. It was midnight, perhaps two A.M. His mind was barely clear enough for him to reassemble and recache his works. “One minute.” He buckled his belt, straightened his clothes. Opened the door.
Two men burst in, slammed the door.
“Whaaa ...”
“You don’t hear well do you, mothafucka?”
“Get outta—”
One man punched Ty in the face. “You dumb!” He growled, ranted as Ty fell, folded, crumpled to his knees. “Dumb. You know that?”
Ty looked up. One man was white. One black. The black man was not the same one who’d demanded money earlier. Ty’s mind was too dusty to feel frightened, his body too dull to feel pain. He rocked to one side, began to kneel. The white man grasped Ty’s hair, squeezed hard pulling the tight curls, banging Ty’s head against the wall. He pulled Ty’s head up straight so Ty was staring at the black man. “You didn’t hear Mr. Dee,” the man said.
Ty was dumbfounded.
“You don’t hear, do you?” the black man said. In Ty’s mind the words mixed with the words of the big man earlier. “If you don’t hear, you don’t got much need for this, huh, mothafucka?” The black man nodded to the white man. The white man hammer-locked Ty’s head, squeezed hard.
Ty felt a sharp prickling at his right ear, heard the material being sliced, did not yet feel the pain. The man released him. He felt warm trickling on his jaw, down his chin. Then the man dropped Ty’s ear on the floor in front of him.
“Ya don’t use em, mothafucka. Ya won’t miss it.” The black man laughed and th
e white man laughed, too.
Ty escaped, fled. He left the house, left his fine suits and shirts and shoes, left the car, the secured and unsecured notes, left San Martin, left the North Bay. He took his works, his skag, $3,000 cash, the clothes he wore. Nine-fingered, one-eared, gold-toothed Ty Dorsey, under the name of Theodore Darsman, moved south; finally, after two months, he took up residence in a one-room unit in a run-down flophouse near San Jose. His hair grew long. Picking it out covered his ear space. He ate little, talked to almost no one, shot up the last of his skag. By March 1974, not yet twenty-three years old, he was broke, on the lam, hopeless, dopeless. On the eighth Ty, now Theo, broke two of the glass bottles of his door alarm. Then he picked up a bottom shard with his left hand. Crying like a baby, whimpering, “Dead meat don’t hurt!” he placed the sharpest edge on the heel of his right palm, pressed hard, jerked the glass back.
September 1984
THERE ARE STUDIES THAT have concluded that more Viet Nam veterans have died by their own hand since returning from Southeast Asia than were killed in combat. It is difficult for me to believe this even though many veterans I have known, including Ty, Bobby and myself, have been at one time or another “suicidal.” But being suicidal and committing suicide are not the same. And coping behaviors learned in Viet Nam—learned at the edge of life—have helped many of us, on that new edge, to choose survival, to choose life.
Some people have tried to make political hay from the issue—people apparently from both sides. I kid you not on this; this was said to me by a professor at Nittany Mountain College, and I’ve heard others say it and lots of the guys reported it said to them too—“They all killed themselves because they were guilty of atrocities and they couldn’t live with that guilt any longer.” Horseshit! On the seemingly other political side there have been some veterans advocacy groups who have pointed to the figures and used them to convince Congress and charitable donors that their group should be highly funded. It’s a two-edged sword. These groups have provided excellent and necessary crisis-intervention services. Yet they have a vested interest in these figures, and their campaigning may actually exacerbate the problem by lowering the suicide threshold for some vets.
There is no doubt that there have been thousands of Viet Nam veterans suicides. The figure, “over 60,000,” however, is very much in question. If I had died on Storrow Drive while racing Jimmy’s Harley like a possessed pariah from paradise, would that have been suicide? And if it had been, was it caused by Viet Nam? And if that is answered yes, is it because of my guilt feelings from surviving mostly unscathed while Jimmy and Manny got greased and Rick lost his legs? or guilt from atrocities I committed?
Even the VA, later, when it finally recognized PTSD, blew it. They were not there, generally, to cure guys. They were there to warehouse—and later to establish an excusable process, a complex set of obstacles for vets to hurdle on their way to collecting a lifetime “percentage” disability. Screw curing! Screw curing and assisting and returning the vet, healthy, to a productive life. Pay him off! Let him subsist. I’m overstating this, of course, but that’s because of how I personally was treated. Some guys were helped. Some VA programs were and still are beneficial. And lots of the suicide attempts, like Ty’s, were calculated, escapable, pleas. Had Ty slit his wrists vertically instead of horizontally, he would have died in San Jose.
19
“HOW’S IT GOING, TONY?”
“Good.”
It was Tuesday, 4 April 1972. Tony Pisano was at the start of his third outpatient therapy session at Rock Ridge Veterans Medical Center. Why he had come again, this third time, he wasn’t certain. He was eager, hopeful. Things had changed drastically from the moment he’d moved into High Meadow. He and Linda were together again, yet not together.
Tony’s new therapist, John H. Binford, Ph.D., had been brought in to implement Daniel Holbrook’s experimental program—both as researcher and as therapist. Binford was six years older than Tony, the same age as Tony’s brother, John Jr. That was part of the lure, the promise as Tony saw it, the reason Binford had gained a hold over him, held him through biweekly sessions that would continue for thirteen months. During the entire period Tony Pisano continued to take his three-a-day dosages of lithium carbonate—gradually reducing the amount from 300 to 25 milligrams.
“Have you been back to see Father Tom like I suggested?” Binford’s face was soft, friendly.
“Ah, not yet. I ah ... you know, was really busy these past few weeks.”
“You remember what I said ...”
“Um-hmm.”
“... about cleaning up the little loose ends first.”
“I remember.”
“We want to do this in order, Tony. Little by little.”
“Yeah. That’s what Mr. Wapinski says too.”
“Good. Then you’ll see Father Tom this week?”
“Yeah. I’ll try.”
“Not try.” Binford raised an index finger as if scolding.
“Okay,” Tony said.
“When?”
“Tomorrow.”
“Why not today on your way back to the farm?”
“Um. Okay.”
“You sought Father Tom out for that job, didn’t you?”
“Yeah.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. Kind of a last resort, I guess.”
“You were raised in a strict Italian-American home? In the strict Catholic tradition?”
“Aw, I don’t think it was so strict. You know, it wasn’t rammed down our throats.”
“I want to get to something here, Tony. And I think we’ve got to get to the root of who you are before we can go on. Tell me about growing up. Tell me about being Italian and Catholic, about what it meant to you.”
“I don’t see what the fuck this has to do with shit.”
Binford held up both hands, gently, lackadaisically, halting Tony. “You agreed, remember? Try it my way for a few sessions. This’ll help me understand where you’re coming from, okay?”
“Okay.”
The session lasted fifty minutes. Tony told John Binford about growing up in Mill Creek Falls, about Thanksgiving and Christmas and Easter dinners, Memorial Day and Fourth of July picnics, about Jimmy and Annalisa and playing hide ’n’ go seek with them and his brothers, playing on warm summer nights under clear skies, how special it all seemed. Church was a disruption, a task, an obligation, a duty to perform, enforced by Jo and Aunt Isabella. Holy days were forced upon the children who griped and complained. “It’s boring. It doesn’t make any sense.” Still they went. God. Duty. Honor. Country.
“And sins,” Binford said quietly.
“Sins?” Tony responded.
“It would be a sin to miss mass on Sunday, wouldn’t it?”
“Oh, yeah. You’d go straight to hell for that.” Tony chuckled. “And for lots of other things. But I don’t think that was very important to us.”
“Still, lots of things could send you to hell, huh?”
“Oh yeah. I think they even told us it was a mortal sin to masturbate.”
“And to steal?”
“Yeah.”
“And to kill?”
“That’s like numero uno.”
“Tony, I’ve been over your combat record. I’ve seen your citations. I’ve read Dr. Holbrook’s reports. You killed a lot of people in Viet Nam, didn’t you?”
Tony went instantly from relaxed to tense. He felt Binford had ambushed him. “Maybe.”
“Maybe?” Binford was stern.
“You got the record.”
“I want you to think about this. I want you to think about your views of killing and your deeds. Do you view what you did as sinful? And isn’t it that sinfulness that caused you to be guilt-ridden and depressed? Is that the key to your acting out, Tony?”
“Wait one fuckin minute.” Tony slid to the edge of his chair. “That’s not it. You think I shoulda been a scumbag like those bastards who went to Canada or Sweden?”
>
“I’m not saying that, Tony. But you didn’t see yourself as a murderer before you went to Viet Nam, did you?”
“I didn’t then. I don’t now!”
“Right. You don’t see yourself as a killer now, do you?”
“No I don’t.”
“But by your own accounts you’ve killed a dozen human beings. Maybe more.”
“In combat!”
“I’m not saying it wasn’t justified.”
“That’s right.”
“But you grew up believing it was a sin. See? This is an unresolved conflict in your subconsciousness. You have to be able to come to terms with those traumatic events before those deep-seated feelings of guilt and remorse will stop manifesting themselves in self-destructive behaviors.”
“That’s more fucked up than I am.”
“Is it?”
“You bet your sweet ass. There it is. I’ll tell you what’s fucked up. I’ll tell you what’s sinful. All this amnesty bullshit for draft dodgers.”
“Does that make you angry?”
“It sure does. Did you read the testimonies before that Senate committee?”
“A little ...”
“Kennedy and McGovern, talking like the righteous thing to do was to crawl off to Canada! I’ll tell you, there was that one guy, Kelly, lost a son in the A Shau. He had it right. He said somethin like if Kennedy’s definition of honor, righteousness, and high moral standards was running away, then that was labeling all of us who didn’t run away as immoral and dishonorable.”
“And you feel you did the moral and honorable thing?”
“I know I did. If I hadn’t been there, it would of been worse on those people. I was a god damned good sergeant ...”
“Protected your men?”
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