Riding through Katrina with the Red Baron's Ghost

by J. Malcolm Garcia

  Dear Mr. Garcia, I’m a student of Bill’s. We met in class. There is talk of a national strike on May Day and I am going to NYC where some good things might work out and I want to write about it. Would you be available to talk?

  Yes, I wrote. I’d be happy to.

  Draft Notice

  (1968)

  In 1968, at the height of the Vietnam War, my Republican parents had no patience with draft dodgers or any other critics of the war. They believed that if Saigon fell to communism, all of Southeast Asia would collapse with it. Draft dodgers should be jailed and anyone who burned the flag should be jailed with them. But when my mother read in the Chicago Tribune about young men from Winnetka who had been drafted, she openly suggested, with no apparent awareness of her own about-face, that my older brother, Butch, avoid the draft. She would, she said, send him to Mexico to live with her sister.

  “I don’t think we have to worry,” my father said one Saturday morning in the breakfast nook as he drank tea with one hand and held a copy of the Tribune in the other. My mother had just gotten off the phone with her friend Joanie. Joanie knew of a young man in the nearby suburb of Wilmette who had just been drafted.

  “I’m just saying,” my mother replied, walking back to the table.

  My mother’s politics weren’t conclusions she had reached on her own, but were conservative values handed down from one generation of her family to the next and accepted without question. Her father had hoped Charles Lindbergh would run against Franklin Roosevelt for president. He also supported the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. My mother defended his positions more than twenty years later at our dinner table while she and my father rolled their eyes at news stories about hippies and the drug culture of Haight-Ashbury.

  “Those teenagers should use their money to get an education,” she said.

  My mother believed that a woman should stay home with her children and thought day-care programs broke up families. She ran errands while my brothers and I were in school, but was always back by the time we came home. Without fail the phone would ring as she was rushing to unpack grocery bags, fix us a snack, and begin preparing dinner.

  “Lord, I’ve been gone all day, and I have a thousand and one things to do before I get dinner going. I can’t talk to anyone now!”

  She would dash through the kitchen and out the screen door to the backyard, thrashing the air above her head with her hands, and instruct me to say that she was out. She would stand on her tiptoes and frame her face against the screen door, mouthing “Who is it?” as I explained that my mother was out, and no, she shouldn’t be gone too long.

  When it came to her family, however, my mother thought for herself. Butch, Michael, and I were her children, and she would protect us despite her political beliefs. As for her father, he could just roll in his grave.

  “It’s such a shame,” my mother said, reflecting on her conversation with Joanie.

  My father nodded. I reached across the table for the bowl of sugar for my cereal.

  “Ask, don’t reach,” my mother scolded.

  That afternoon I rode my bike to my friend Tom’s house. Michael left at the same time to see one of his friends. When I got home a few hours later, I ran into the kitchen, eager for something to eat. My mother stood by the counter, sorting the day’s mail.

  “Can I have a cookie?” I asked.

  “May I,” my mother corrected.

  “May I?”

  “Wash your hands.”

  My mother kissed me on the forehead. I grabbed a cookie and then took my two jars of inchworms off the kitchen windowsill.

  “Look,” I said, pointing at the leaves they’d gnawed.

  My mother didn’t hear me. Holding one letter, she walked through the living room to the foot of the stairs.

  “Chuck,” she called to my father. “Oh, Chuck? There’s a letter here from the draft board. It’s for Butch.”

  I could hear my father’s voice but couldn’t make out what he was saying.

  “All right,” said my mother.

  She walked back into the kitchen and began unloading the dishwasher. Then she went into the living room and sat down, staring at the floor. I knew something was wrong but didn’t understand what. I kept quiet and my mother did too, and together we waited for my father.

  When he came downstairs, my mother got up and gave him the letter. He turned the envelope over in his hands.

  “You haven’t opened it?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Open it.”

  “It’s not mine to open.”

  “Then we don’t know. We don’t know what it might be.”

  “It’s from the draft board, Chuck, for Lord’s sake!” my mother snapped, jabbing a finger at the return address.

  “Where’s Butch?” he said.

  “He’s out with Andy,” she said. I didn’t like Andy. He had thrown stones at me when I was in the third grade, and I hadn’t forgotten. I had been tagging along with him and Butch when they were playing basketball in the driveway and Andy had wanted me out of the way.

  “We should just open it,” my father insisted.

  “No.”

  My mother had certain rules she adhered to, no matter the circumstances. Among them was the conviction that you don’t open other people’s mail. She was just over five feet but she had a kind of stubbornness that made all of us, my father included, think twice about questioning her. “Listen to me, my friend,” she would say in a voice deeper than our basement when one of my brothers or I pushed her too far.

  However, she could not intimidate the draft board. She had no power to put it in its place. Her fear filled the kitchen. She paced and opened and closed cabinets randomly. My father bit his lower lip and drummed his fingers on the kitchen counter.

  “Stop that,” my mother told him.

  “I think we should just open the letter,” my father repeated.

  “No,” my mother said.

  “Well then, find Butch. Call Andy’s house.”

  “You call his house if you want, Chuck.”

  “Christ almighty, do you just want to worry?”

  “I said, if you want, call him.”

  My father looked at me. “Go outside while your mother and I are talking,” he said.

  “Don’t leave the driveway,” my mother warned.

  “Mom!”

  “This is not the time to argue,” my father said.

  I hurried outside. It was early afternoon and quiet. A patrol car drove slowly past our house. The officer waved and I held up my arm and he disappeared behind trees. I listened to the fading sound of his car until I no longer heard it. I thought of Butch. I wondered what would happen to him. I had an art teacher who was drafted. Mr. Simoneck didn’t return to school after Christmas break. A substitute took over for him.

  “Mr. Simoneck has been called away,” the principal, Mr. Becker, told us.

  My father had served in the navy in World War II. His ship was to have participated in the invasion of Japan, until the atomic bomb fell on Hiroshima. I had seen enough John Wayne war movies on television to think that my father would have wanted to go to war and kill Japs and be a hero. I had killed hundreds of them myself, playing outside with imaginary machine guns. I was disappointed when my father said he was glad he didn’t go to Japan. Now it sounded as if Butch would go to Vietnam. I wondered whether he wanted to, or like my father would rather not. I didn’t like the fear in my mother’s voice and the way she and my father snapped at each other. I wished Andy would get drafted.

  A car stopped in front of the driveway and Butch got out. Andy was behind the steering wheel. Butch walked over and rubbed my head, something he liked to do in front of his friends. It made me feel small, and I ducked away from him. He was tall and thin, with a mop of brown hair and narrow sideburns. He wanted to grow a mustache, but so far only blond fuzz showed beneath his nose.

  “What’s going on, Moose?” he asked.

&nbs
p; He had begun calling me Moose when I was born. Neither he nor my mother knew why, but the name stuck, just as Butch had stuck to him.

  “Nothing,” I said. “You got some mail.”

  “Mail?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How would you know?”

  “I saw Mom go through it.”

  “Who from?”

  “I don’t know. She says it’s from the draft board.”

  He stared at me. “I thought you didn’t know.”

  I followed him into the house. I heard my father still tapping his fingers against the breakfast nook table. He and my mother hadn’t moved. They both looked in our direction.

  “What’s wrong?” Butch asked.

  “You have a letter,” my mother said, sounding not like my mother at all but someone whose voice was coming from another part of the house.

  “We don’t know what it is,” my father said, giving Butch the envelope.

  “We won’t let anything happen to you,” my mother assured him.

  Butch scowled, looked at the envelope and then at my mother and father. They watched him. My mother’s eyes began to tear up, and she asked me to hand her her purse. She dug around in it until she found her sunglasses and put them on.

  “Just open it,” my father said. “We can’t do anything until we know what they want.”

  “We know what they want,” my mother said.

  “Open it.”

  “Leave him alone.”

  Butch turned the envelope over in his hands. He found a corner by the flap that wasn’t glued and wiggled his little finger into the gap. His hands shook. I tried peering over his shoulder and he shot me a look. The silence in the kitchen, fragile as glass. Butch worked his finger along the length of the envelope until he could tear it open. He pulled the letter out, and it dropped onto the floor. He wiped his hands on his pants, picked it up, and read it. After a moment, he let out a sigh. “It’s a form letter.”

  “Let’s see that,” my father said.

  Butch gave him the letter and my father put on his glasses. Butch sat down and pressed his face into his hands.

  “Letty … it’s a change of address form,” my father observed. He voice was tense. He tried to hide his annoyance. “They’re updating their records. In case he had moved. That’s all. Look.”

  He held it out to her. She read it and then turned her back. Her shoulders shook. She stared out the window at the spot she used to watch when I would play in the driveway. She took off her sunglasses and reached for a Kleenex. Then she walked into the dining room and we heard the muffled sounds of her crying as she went upstairs. My father gave Butch the letter and followed her.

  “Letty …” he said, his voice trailing off.

  I don’t remember what we did that night. I imagine that Butch, Michael, and I set the dinner table as usual and waited for my father to fill our plates in the kitchen. We would have taken them into the dining room and stood by our chairs until our mother sat down. I’m sure she reminded us to keep our elbows off the table and to sit straight. We would have cleared the table after dinner. Later, my father would have watched the ten o’clock news while my mother paid bills in the kitchen. The letter, I know, was not discussed then or ever again.

  Butch never went to Vietnam, and the war had all but ended when Michael and I were old enough to register for the draft. Unlike so many other young men, my brothers and I were spared.

  When I visit home now, Butch and I get together at his house in Glenview, Illinois, not far from where our parents live. We drink beers, discuss the news, and take political positions. He’s a Republican. I’m a Democrat in the George McGovern mold. We have new wars. He recalls the draft.

  “After you signed up for the draft, they threw all the birthdays into a hopper,” he told me. “Depending where you lived, the pool was larger or smaller. I was lucky. My pool included all the suburbs around us. In the lottery, my birthday was 161. It was listed in the newspaper. They never called me up, though.”

  American GIs seemed so old when I was a kid watching the war on the news. “And that’s the way it is, March 16th, 1968,” Walter Cronkite would intone. Now I’m at least twice the age of the average grunt.

  These days, Butch cautions me not to accept any more reporting assignments in Afghanistan.

  “And definitely don’t go to Iraq,” he says.

  He supports both wars, as do our parents, but they would be frantic if I returned to Kabul or went to Baghdad.

  When I took my sixth trip to Kabul, in 2005, I told Butch but not our parents. He asked me if I was trying to get myself killed, but I returned in one piece as I’d assured him I would. Ironically, he died a year later of congestive heart failure.

  I have not experienced combat. I did see the body of an Afghan farmer killed by a mine in 2002 on the road to Bagram Air Base. He looked like he was sleeping while the lower half of his body drained into the hard soil. His donkey, untouched, brayed just feet away.

  In the summer, when I see people stretched out on beach towels tanning their backs, heads rolled to one side, eyes closed, I’ll sometimes think of that farmer. I’ll see him. The way he was on the ground under the sun, clear blue skies all around. I’ll hear his donkey too.

  I go about my days propped up by the habits of my upbringing and today’s technology. My phone buzzes with text messages, emails fill my inbox, Facebook informs me of a friend’s request. I expect to be surprised … and am grateful when I’m not.

  Gypsy

  (1986)

  I imagine it this way.

  Gypsy awakens from a restless sleep, stretches, hears his bones crack. Sees how the curtains in his room at the Cadillac Hotel absorb the light of a late afternoon on Eddy Street in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district, and at that moment decides to start drinking again.

  He doesn’t remember having a booze dream, just woke up and decided: Today is the day I’m going to get fucked up. Something clicks into place. Thank God, it’s been settled. For days he had been agitated and unable to sleep. His body ached from the weight of his bitterness. He tried to read some of his old textbooks on alcoholism and its treatment, tried to take pleasure in his term papers and the comments scrawled in red by his professors, Nice insight! and Excellent observation! but those evening extension classes at U. C. Berkeley had been nothing but a betrayal, an illusion of accomplishment, and he tossed the books and his notepads across the room with a rage that kept him awake at night. He had done everything he should, and still he was denied the promotion he deserved.

  Now that he has decided to drink, he feels calm and almost falls asleep again. He folds his hands behind his head and plans. He’ll do his shift at the Ozanam Center as scheduled. When he gets off, he’ll wait for me. I’m interviewing for shelter director at nine. Gypsy had pushed me to apply, and he’ll want to wish me well. Then he’ll start drinking.

  When Jim Curtis, the director of the Ozanam Center, hired me in May 1983, he assigned me to nights: 10:30 p.m. to 6:30 a.m., five days a week, Saturday to Wednesday.

  My first evening, the shift supervisor, Bill Vidaver, took me up a flight of stairs to a room filled with intoxicated men and women. Some of them were shaking. Others were passed out. Still others smoked and stared at the floor as if they were ashamed. A deep brown carpet made the dimly lit space even dimmer. Six round tables took up one side of the room, and four couches provided additional places to pass out when the thirty-bed dormitory behind the kitchenette filled up.

  A man with thinning black hair, a handlebar mustache, plaid shirt, jeans, and boots sat behind a desk. He glanced at me and then turned away to change stations on a radio playing Muzak.

  “This is Gypsy,” Bill said. “Gypsy, this is the new kid.”

  Gypsy looked at me again.

  “I’ll tell you who the assholes are around here,” he said.

  Still in his room at the Cadillac, Gypsy rolls a joint. He is sober. Not clean and sober. Sober, period. Not like some of the other recoveri
ng Ozanam staff who smoke dope but say they’re sober and clean. That bugs him. The lies. He never pretends he doesn’t smoke pot. Gave Little Stevie a joint one morning on Seventh Street when Stevie had the shakes so bad he couldn’t walk, just rattled in place like an idling car with a bad engine. Stevie had been on the street fifteen years easy. Drinking maybe longer. He and Gypsy hung out together when Gypsy was doing his thing. A sight, the two of them. Gypsy over six feet and Little Stevie peaking at five foot four on a good day. Face dirt-streaked, scraggly goatee, mop of brown hair, long tobacco-stained fingers dancing with the jitters, Stevie, shaking uncontrollably, looks to his friend Gypsy for help.

  Gypsy held the joint that morning until Stevie’s body ceased quaking long enough for him to clamp his trembling lips around it. He inhaled so long and deep Gypsy thought he might burst. After another hit Stevie collapsed, higher than God, in the doorway of a used clothing store. Gypsy left him there to buy a mickey of Thunderbird at Fred’s Liquor store a good two blocks away. He gave it to Stevie, who held it in both hands like an infant with a bottle of formula and downed it in four hard swallows, his Adam’s apple dancing up and down his throat. Then he belched and let out a long sigh, staining the air with the venom of his breath.

  “Thanks, Gypo. You loan me a dollar?”

  “You pay me back?”

  Stevie laughed, showing toothless gums flecked with bits of weed. Gypsy gave him two dollars, one extra for inflation, he said, and walked to work. He felt good about helping Stevie but a little ashamed too, because he felt he was better than Stevie. He had beaten booze. The framed certificates he’d accumulated from the alcoholism classes he’d completed at Berkeley hung on his walls. Maybe it wasn’t superiority he felt but confidence. Maybe he was just grateful not to be in the same shape as Little Stevie. He didn’t know, didn’t dwell on it. He pocketed the joint and kept walking.

  Hands clasped behind his head, Gypsy imagines his first swallow of Jack Daniel’s. It will fill him with warmth like a spring day after a long winter, gradually spreading its heat into every muscle, until all the stiffness in his neck and shoulders vanishes and his head clears of anger. The booze will burn his throat, leave his mouth dry and in need of more. He’ll order a beer and another shot of Jack, run his tongue against his teeth. He has a reservoir he needs to fill.