When my brain got all fucked up and I crashed my BMW and the doctors told me I needed to go under the knife, I kept the medical report to myself. I knew I wasn’t gonna die. Only the good die young, and I had lived nasty. I’ve done things you can’t even imagine.
The postsurgery problem was this: the doctors wouldn’t release me from the hospital unless I was accompanied, and I didn’t want to put that on any of my good friends, hence the call to my only son. To be one hundred percent honest, one of my best friends ultimately pressured me into making that call when she finally figured out I hadn’t let my son know I was in the hospital, but I’m gonna talk about Sue—who just so happens to be genetically Vietnamese—later and not now.
“You can’t live on your own anymore,” Hank said in my hospital room.
“The fuck I can’t!” I said, holding onto my dog tags, which were rubber-banded together with my father’s and hung around my neck for good luck. I told my son it wasn’t my time to kick the bucket. I wasn’t buying the bullet just yet, so he was gonna have to deal with me for a little while longer. “Sorry for the inconvenience.”
He kept saying, “What are we going to do with you?” like I wasn’t even there.
I told him he could just drop me off at home. If he was feeling kind, he could get me a cheesesteak from Donkey’s Place in Camden, which he never would have done, because it’s in a rough black neighborhood. Despite being so-called liberals, my son and his wife don’t mix much with black people, especially blacks without at least two fancy degrees.
Me, I’ve always got along with the brothers. I have no problems with them. Always tried to get them jobs whenever I could because it used to be hard for blacks to find steady employment here in America. They have been here a long time. Fought wars with us. Survived slavery even. You have to be a tough motherfucking race to survive slavery. I tip my hat to the Jews here too. But they got their own country already, and Egypt was a hell of a long time ago. Blacks deserve more than recent modern immigrants who want to take over the country five seconds after they arrive, but try saying that to the likes of Hank and Femke. I even like legal Mexicans too, because they are hardworking. I always hire legal Mexicans to do my lawn work. You’d be a fool to hire a white man.
The hospital food was inedible. Fucking Jell-O is not a meal. The snakes I killed and cooked in Vietnam just to stay alive tasted better than the shit they served there. They charge a small fortune for it too, whether you eat it or not. Robbery. I tell you. Might as well have held a gun to my head and taken my wallet while I was too sick to get out of bed. Bastards. They should shoot all hospital executives, along with every single politician.
“So you admit you can’t get out of bed,” my son said triumphantly, like he had caught me in a lie.
So I told him, at first, I couldn’t get out of bed. They chiseled and sawed my fucking skull open, for Christ’s sake. I wasn’t the goddamn man of steel. I admitted it. But I’d since recovered. And I had been able to get out of bed for days. Took a week and a bucket of stool softeners just to get me shitting again. But I made that happen too.
He didn’t think I could walk, so I gave him a demonstration by taking a leak in the attached bathroom. When I returned, Hank looked at me like I was Jesus Fucking Christ walking around with holes through my wrists and ankles, but the expression on his face wasn’t a happy one, which was when I realized he was rooting for me to be put away somewhere or simply die.
He said I needed to be monitored, and I said he was dead wrong, which was when he started crying about looking bad in front of the doctors and nurses, saying they had given him quite a guilt trip for not coming earlier. Apparently, he felt he had to explain to the entire fucking world the reasons that he and I weren’t speaking, which he said wasn’t “a fun conversation” for him.
“And who is this Clayton Fire Bear?” he asked.
Hank didn’t deserve to know the answer to that particular question just yet. Instead, I told him that doctors and nurses are paid good money, so you don’t have to explain shit to them, but he just kept crying about what the hospital staff thought of him as if they thought anything at all. Did he not realize that we’re all just meat, and that slabs of meat are run in and out of hospitals around the clock every day of the year?
Hank raked his fingers through the little hair he has left on top. He should have shaved his head ten years ago, but that would make him look like his army vet father, and his European wife wouldn’t want that. She’d rather have everyone talk behind Hank’s back, laughing the whole time at the few long strands of hair he’s clinging to.
Then Hank said, “What if you had died in surgery and we never got to say good-bye?”
There were girly-man tears in his eyes, and he was blinking more than a sweet little actress trying to win a golden trophy. No doubt he was thinking about his mother again.
“I’ll know when I’m gonna die,” I told him. “Everyone who survived the Vietnam jungle is well acquainted with Death. I know that motherfucker better than you know yourself.”
“This isn’t time for your superstitions,” my son said, because he didn’t know goddamn anything.
His biggest opponents in life were the foreign she-devil he chose to sleep with and the heart-attack-inducing civilian stress he created for himself. Hank’s never really had to confront anything too challenging. Like most Americans today, he had been afforded the luxury of na?veté. His life had never been on the line. He never had to wipe his face clean of his friends’ blood and guts. Never had a Vietnamese anatomy lesson. Never tried to scoop up his buddy’s steaming hot insides off the jungle floor and make them into a person again.
You’d think he’d thank veterans like me for that gift of na?veté, but you’d be wrong. Not even on November 11. Instead, he voted against a man who actually survived the Hanoi Hilton. The boy I raised from birth campaigned and voted for a man named Barack Hussein Obama. Hank celebrated like he had single-handedly won a war when the liberals took over the White House. McCain never had a prayer.
3.
It’s hard to talk about war with people who haven’t seen real action. You don’t understand. You will never understand. And so I can’t tell you everything. But if you listen the right way, you might just learn a thing or two anyway.
My father served in World War II under Patton. Stormed Normandy. When I was little, I used to ask him about his war experience, hoping for epic stories full of gunfire, tanks, and Nazi-killing glory. When I was a kid, he only ever told me two tales. Neither had anything to do with death or violence.