I told her my name and asked for hers.
“Jessica,” she said, and then went on to explain that she was Roger Dodger’s kid sister. I’d later learn that she had been coming around the house to try and help get her brother out of his drug haze, but instead had ended up getting sucked into the scene and participating. If you were in that house, you had pot smoke in your lungs whether you wanted it there or not.
To make a long, awful, fucked-up story short, Jessica didn’t manage to get Roger to stop using drugs to escape his Vietnam memories. It was the other way around: Roger got Jessica to start smoking pot and tripping, because he believed it would help cure her depression, which, to be fair, was severe. People thought LSD cured everything back then. I never took the stuff myself; I had enough wild images in my head already. Since Roger was a consummate drug user and constantly having sex with teenagers—he loved the Catholic schoolgirl uniform—he often lost track of what his sister was doing in his house, which is how Brian got to Jessica. Put a lamb in a cage with a tiger, and there will be blood.
What I didn’t know at the time was that Brian was dead. Someone finally found him, naked and ice cold, hours later. He had so many drugs in his system, it was assumed that he overdosed or simply fell down and hit his head too intensely on the hardwood floor. Brian had a wild bush of hair on his skull back then, so maybe no one saw the bruise on his temple, I don’t know. Or maybe he really did overdose on drugs, and I’m just taking credit for a punch that really wasn’t all that impressive. I mean, you don’t exactly have to be Smokin’ Joe Frazier to knock out a man who is tripping off a veritable cornucopia of drugs.
The point of this tale is that up until right now, only two people in the world knew that I had coldcocked Brian before he died: Jessica and me. The cops never questioned me about Brian’s death. I’m not sure that anyone else even remembers my being in the party house that day—they were all so fucking high. And Jessica never said anything to anyone else about my dropping Brian like the sack of shit he was.
That’s all I know. Brian died. No one connected me to his death. I wasn’t about to give myself up, either. I’d killed a lot of gooks in my day, and if I thought about it—which I don’t—I’d probably get to feeling sadder about the little yellow bastards I offed than I would about Brian. Honestly, the local police probably also celebrated a deadbeat Vietnam veteran’s death. Drugs were a great patsy scapegoat too. America hates drugs. And Brian became a poster child for just saying no in that community. Everyone was happy with that narrative. End of story.
Before you get to feeling too bad about Brian’s untimely demise, allow me to prove to you that he absolutely deserved to die. You’re probably already feeling squeamish about two Vietnam veterans partying with and screwing a bunch of girls in high school, right? Well, if you think that’s bad, it gets even worse. Brian’s fucking wasn’t always consensual. That’s right. Brian was a piece-of-shit rapist. A true misogynist, to use one of my son’s favorite insults.
But Jessica and I didn’t know Brian was dead when we left the house that day. We just thought he was knocked out, sleeping it off on the bedroom floor. Jessica asked me to get her out of that crazy place, so I put her in my 1964 GTO, and we drove around on the snowy roads, smoking cigarettes and listening to the radio.
I had been around enough fucked-up people to know that Jessica needed time to process whatever the fuck hellish ordeal happened to her in that house, and I didn’t have anything else to do that day. Several times I asked her if there was anywhere she wanted to go, and she kept asking if we could just drive. Gas wasn’t free, but neither was love, and some part of me knew right there and then that I had fallen hard and irreversibly. I didn’t want to fuck this young girl, I wanted to help her—but I also wanted her to like me, even love me. Mostly, I wanted her to think of me as the opposite of that rapist disgrace to his country, Brian.
After hours of driving in a huge circle around Philadelphia, which took us into Delaware, Pennsylvania, and even up to Trenton, Jessica asked how I’d been able to come home from the war and do better than her brother Roger. “Do you have a secret?” she asked.
I didn’t know how to answer that one. To be honest, I have often wondered why so many of my combat brothers were unable to rejoin civilian life. Some never really left the jungle. Many others never could keep a job, let alone make the sort of money I made. I wish there were a formula or a set of instructions I could give to other veterans, but the truth is, I don’t really know why I didn’t end up dead or burned out on drugs and alcohol. Something inside my brain switched when I was eating fucking snakes and sleeping in trees and killing gooks. Fuck this shit, it said. I’m going home to the greatest country in the world, and I’m going to make something of myself. Never again will anyone make me live the way I was forced to live in the jungle. I’m going to use my freedom.
I think that many Vietnam vets believed that no matter what they did, they would never have any control over their lives. Powerful, faceless men would always pull the strings, so why should the powerless non-string-pullers give a fuck? Playing the puppet while high became easier than cleaning up enough to cut strings and kill puppet masters. I understood their logic, and believe me when I say I still haven’t killed all of the puppet masters, not even by a long shot. But I decided that I wanted to pull at least some of my own strings, even if I could never pull them all.
I couldn’t have said as much back in the GTO, cruising around with Jessica. I might have been to Vietnam and back. I might have killed hundreds of gooks. But I was still just a kid.