by James Reston
I won’t do that for him anymore.
I will not,
no way.
MARK: Here’s a picture of me . . .
(Snaps on picture of him and some children)
CHERYL:He asked if he can take pictures of Danny and I . . .
MARK: And some kids. God I LOVED those kids.
CHERYL:I think that’s why I’m so against the artist world.
I just can’t handle his work a lot of it.
It’s because he’s done that to me.
MARK: Everybody hated them.
You couldn’t trust ’em.
The VC would send the kids in with a flag.
I never saw this, I heard about it,
the kid would come in asking for C-rations,
try to be your friend, and they’d be maybe wired
with explosives or something
and the kid’d blow up.
There was a whole lot of weirdness . . .
CHERYL:Mark’s got this series of blood photographs.
He made me pose for them.
There’s a kitchen knife sticking into me,
but all you can see is reddish-purplish blood.
It’s about five feet high.
He had it hanging in the shop! In the street!
Boy, did I make him take it out of there.
MARK: I really dug kids. I don’t know why.
(More pictures of kids)
I did a really bad number . . .
It went contrary, I think,
to everything I knew.
I’m not ready to talk about that yet.
CHERYL:You just don’t show people those things.
MARK: These are some pictures of more or less dead bodies and things.
(Snaps on pictures of mass graves, people half blown apart, gruesome
pictures of this particular war)
I don’t know if you want to see them.
(Five slides. Last picture comes on of a man, eyes towards us, the bones
of his arm exposed, the flesh torn, eaten away. It is too horrible to
look at. MARK looks at the audience, or hears them)
Oh, Jesus.
Yeah . . .
We have to be patient with each other.
(HE snaps the pictures off)
CHERYL:You know. I don’t think . . .
MARK: You know, I get panicky
if there’s any element of control taken away from me.
(I don’t like to be alone in the dark.
I’m scared of it. I’m not armed.)
I don’t like fireworks.
If I can control them fine.
I don’t like them when I can’t control them.
I’ve had bad dreams
when my wife’s had to bring me back out.
Nothing like jumping her, though.
I’ve heard about vets killing their wives in their sleep.
But this is personal—for me,
the gun was always the instrument, or a grenade.
I never grabbed somebody and slowly killed them.
I’ve never choked them to death or anything.
I’ve never beaten anybody up, well . . .
I never killed
with my bare hands.
Pause.
II
CHERYL:You know, I don’t think that
men ever really protected women
other than war time.
NADINE:Listen, nobody can do it for you.
Now maybe if I weren’t cunning and conniving and
manipulative and courageous,
maybe I wouldn’t be able to say that.
MARK: It’s still an instinctive reaction to hit the ground.
NADINE:I’ll do anything as the times change to protect my stake in life.
CHERYL:And war’s the only time man really goes out and protects woman.
MARK: You know—when I got back, I said I’d never work again.
That’s what I said constantly, that’d I’d never work again, for anyone.
NADINE:I have skills now.
I remember when I didn’t have them.
I was still pretty mad, but I wasn’t ready.
MARK: I was MAD.
I figured I was owed a living.
NADINE:I’m stepping out now, right?
CHERYL:I know my mother protected my father all through his life.
Held things from him, only because she knew it would hurt him.
MARK: And then I got in a position where I couldn’t work because after I got busted and went to prison, no one would hire me.
I did the whole drug thing from a real
thought-out point of view.
I was really highly decorated, awards,
I was wounded twice.
I really looked good.
CHERYL:That’s where I get this blurting out when I’m drunk.
Because I’m like my mother—
That’s the only time my mother would really let my
father know what’s going on in this house.
(When he’s not around seven days a week is when she’s had a couple.)
Otherwise she was protecting him all the time.
Excuse me. I’m going to get another drink.
(SHE exits)
MARK: I knew I could get away with a lot.
I knew I could probably walk down the streets
and kill somebody and I’d probably get off.
Simply because of the war.
I was convinced of it.
NADINE:I could have ended my relationship
with my husband years ago.
I sometimes wonder why I didn’t.
And I don’t want to think it was because of the support.
MARK: I thought about killing people when I got back.
NADINE:I’ve been pulling my own weight
for about eight years now.
Prior to that, I was doing a tremendous amount of work
that in our society is not measurable.
CHERYL:(Angry. Reenters)
My house is not my home.
It’s not mine.
NADINE:I kept a house.
I raised my children.
CHERYL:Now, if it were mine I’d be busy at work.
NADINE:I was a model mother.
CHERYL:I’d be painting the walls,
I would be wallpapering the bedroom.
I would be making improvements.
I would be . . . linoleum the floor.
I can’t do it.
Because it’s not mine.
MARK: I thought of killing people when I got back.
I went to a party with a lady, Cheryl, you know,
later we got married—
She was into seeing people who were into LSD.
And I had tried a little acid this night,
but I wasn’t too fucked-up.
And we went to this party.
NADINE:I tried to explain to Mark
that Cheryl may not always want from him what she wants right now:
looking for him to provide, looking for status.
CHERYL:And Mark will never be ready to have the responsibility
of his own home. Never. Never.
MARK: And there was this big guy.
I was with a friend of mine who tried to rip him off,
or something like that.
He said, the big guy said:
Get the fuck out of here
or I’ll take this fucking baseball bat
and split your head wide open.
CHERYL:And I’m being stupid to ever want it from Mark.
MARK: I started to size up what my options were . . .
NADINE:(Shaking her head)
Looking for him to provide, looking for status.
MARK: In a split second, I Knew I could have him.
He had a baseball bat,
but there was one of these long glass coke bottles.
I knew. . . . Okay, I grabbed that.
&nb
sp; I moved toward him, to stick it in his face.
I mean, I killed him.
I mean in my mind.
I cut his throat and everything.
CHERYL:Because your own home means upkeep.
Means, if there’s a drip in the ceiling
you gotta come home and take care of it.
NADINE:But between us, I can’t understand why a woman her age,
an intelligent woman,
who’s lived through the sixties and the seventies,
who’s living now in a society where woman have finally been given permission
to drive and progress and do what they’re entitled to do
. . . I mean, how can she think that way?
MARK: My wife saw this and grabbed me.
I couldn’t talk to anybody the rest of the night.
I sat and retained the tension and said;
“I want to kill him.”
They had to drive me home.
It was only the third time I’d been out with my wife.
CHERYL: That fucking dog in the backyard
—excuse my French—
That dog is so bad. I mean,
there are cow-pies like this out there.
(Demonstrates size)
And when I was three months pregnant and alone here—
when Mark and I—
when I finally got Mark to get out of here—
I came back to live
because I just could not go on living at my girlfriend’s,
eating their food and not having any money and
—and I came back here
and I had to clean up that yard.
MARK: It wasn’t till the next day that I really got shook by it.
My wife said,
“Hey, cool your jets.”
She’d say, “Hey, don’t do things like that.
You’re not over there anymore.
Settle down, it’s all right.”
CHERYL:I threw up in that backyard picking up dog piles.
That dog hasn’t been bathed since I took her over to
this doggie place and paid twenty dollars
to have her bathed.
And that was six months ago. That dog has flies.
You open the back door
and you always get one fly from the fricking dog.
She’s like garbage. She . . . she . . .
MARK: I think my wife’s scared of me.
I really do.
She’d had this really straight upbringing.
Catholic.
Never had much . . . you know.
Her father was an alcoholic and her mother was too.
I came along and offered her
a certain amount of excitement.
CHERYL:My backyard last year was so gorgeous.
I had flowers.
I had tomatoes.
I had a whole area garden.
That creeping vine stuff all over.
I had everything.
This year I could not do it with that dog back there.
MARK: Just after I got back, I took her up to these races.
I had all this camera equipment.
I started running out on the field.
I started photographing these cars zipping by at
ninety miles an hour.
NADINE:What’s important to me is my work.
It’s important to Mark too.
MARK: She’d just gotten out of high school.
She was just, you know, at that point.
She was amazed at how I moved through space.
NADINE:We talk for hours about our work.
MARK: ’Cuz I didn’t take anybody with me.
NADINE:We understand each other’s work.
MARK: I moved down everybody’s throats verbally.
First of all it was a physical thing,
I was loud.
Then I’d do these trips to outthink people.
NADINE:His jars are amazingly original. Artifacts of the war.
Very honest.
MARK: I’d do these trips.
NADINE:You should sec the portrait Mark did of himself.
MARK: I had a lot of power, drugs,
I was manipulating large sums of money.
NADINE:He has a halo around his head.
(Laughs)
MARK: She became a real fan.
NADINE:And the face of a devil.
CHERYL:That dog grosses me out so bad.
That dog slimes all over the place.
My kid, I don’t even let him out in the backyard.
He plays in the front.
That’s why his bike’s out front.
I’ll take the chance of traffic before I’ll let him out
to be slimed over by that dog.
NADINE:She decided to have that child.
MARK: Later on, it got into this whole thing.
We lived together and with this other couple.
NADINE:It’s madness.
Everyone was against it.
MARK: It was a whole . . . I don’t know whether I
directed it . . . but it became this big . . .
sexual thing . . . between us . . . between them . . .
between groups of other people . . .
It was really a fast kind of thing.
Because no one really gave a shit.
CHERYL:Oh, shut up!
NADINE:His theory is she’s punishing him.
MARK: I don’t know why I was really into being a stud.
NADINE:Now no man has ever been able to lead me into sexual abuse.
MARK: I wasn’t that way before I left, so I don’t know.
Maybe it was like I was trying to be like all the other people.
NADINE:See, she participated. She had the right to say no.
CHERYL:That dog jumps the fence, takes off.
I have to pay twenty dollars
to get her out of the dog pound.
She is costin’ me so damn much money that I hate her.
She eats better than we do.
She eats better than we do.
NADINE:She must have thought it would be fun.
And wow! That was that whole decade
where a whole population of people that age thought that way.
CHERYL:My Danny is getting to the age where there’s gotta be food.
I mean he’s three years old.
He goes to the freezer he wants ice cream there.
He goes in the icebox there’s gotta be pop.
I mean it’s not like he’s an infant anymore.
NADINE:Every foul thing I’ve ever done,
I’m not uncomfortable about it.
And I don’t blame anyone in my life.
CHERYL:These things have to be there.
And it’s not there.
NADINE:I don’t blame anyone.
I’m sorry, maybe you have to be older
to look back and say that.
CHERYL:But there’s always a bag of dogfood in the place.
Anyways I run out of dogfood,
Mark sends me right up to the store.
But I run out of milk I can always give him Kool-Aid
for two or three days.
Yeah—that’s the way it is though.
We haven’t been to the grocery store in six months
for anything over ten dollars worth of groceries at a time.
There is no money.
III
MARK: You’d really become an animal out there.
R.J. and I knew what we were doing.
That’s why a lot of other kids really got into trouble.
They didn’t know what they were doing.
We knew it, we dug it, we knew
we were very good.
IV
CHERYL:I’d turn off to him.
Because I knew that it was hard for me to accept—
you know what he . . . what happened and all that.
And it was hard for me to l
ive with, and him being
drunk and spreading it around to others.
(To MARK)
How long has it been since anything like that happened?
MARK: Well, last July I hurt you.
CHERYL:Yeah, but Danny was what a year and half so everything was pretty . . .
MARK He was exposed to it.
My wife, uh, Cheryl, left one night.
CHERYL:Don’t.
MARK: She left with, uh, she had a person come over and pick her up and take her away.
I walked in on this.
I was drunk. Danny was in her arms.
I attacked this other man and . . .
I did something to him.
I don’t know.
What did I do to him?
Something.
CHERYL:You smashed his car up with a sledge hammer.
MARK: I, uh, Dan saw all that.
CHERYL:He was only six months old though.
MARK No. Dan I think he knows a lot more than we think.
He saw me drunk and incapable of walking up the steps.
Going to the bathroom
half on the floor and half in the bowl.
He’s a sharp kid.
Cheryl and I separated this spring.
And he really knew what was going on.
NADINE:Christ, I hate this country.
I hate all of it.
I’ve never really said it before.
MARK: I come in and apologize when I think about the incidents
that I’ve done in the past now that I’m sober,
and I feel terribly guilty.
I’ve exploited Cheryl as a person, sexually . . .
it wasn’t exactly rape, but . . .
CHERYL:I can’t deal with that at all.
But I find that if I can at least put it out of my mind it’s easier.
If I had to think about what he’s done to me, I’d
have been gone a long time ago.
NADINE:I have yet to be out of this country, by the way.
And I’m criticizing it as if I think it’s better everywhere else.
MARK: See, I wanted to get back into the society and
I wanted to live so much life, but I couldn’t.
I was constantly experimenting.
CHERYL:It was awfull . . .
He’d pick fights with people on the streets.
Just about anyone. It was like a rage.
He’d just whomp on the guy.
Not physically but he would become very obstinate,
very mean and cruel. In bars, handling people . . .
(To MARK)
You have to be nice to people to have them accept you.
MARK: I don’t know.
I was afraid.
I thought people were . . . uh . . . I mean
I was kind of paranoid.
I thought everybody knew . . .
I thought everybody knew what I did over there,
and that they were against me.
I was scared. I felt guilty and a sense of . . .
