The Reason You're Alive

  I nodded, and then for some reason I just started telling her things. Not everything I’ve mentioned in this here report, but things that I had never told anyone who wasn’t a Vietnam veteran. I’m not quite sure why I opened up to Jessica. Maybe it’s because she opened up to me. Maybe it was because she felt dirty, like I did. Maybe it was because I had dirt on her, so my sharing my dirt only made things equal. Maybe it was because she was gorgeous, because she absolutely was. After decades of thinking about all of this shit, I guess I just wanted her to feel clean by comparison. No one was dirtier than me.

  Before I knew what had happened, I had talked straight through the night about my tour, and we were somehow on a beach in Sea Isle City, watching the sun come up over the ocean. There was snow on the sand, and it was fucking freezing cold, but we were wrapped up together in an old scratchy green wool army blanket I kept in the trunk. I had my arm around her, and she was leaning her head on my chest. I thought about the life inside her belly.

  On the one hand, that baby had the genes of a fucking rapist. But I had been exposed to a lot of Agent Orange in Vietnam, and I was worried about my ability to father a child myself. I wasn’t stupid. I knew how fucking terrible that potion was way before any civilians started talking about it on the news. I had seen firsthand what it could do to an entire living, breathing ecosystem. And I guess I wanted to atone for some of my sins too. Also, I knew that Brian hadn’t seen as much jungle action as I had, so therefore he had less exposure to Agent Orange. Brian’s baby probably wouldn’t be as genetically fucked-up compared to a child I might biologically father.

  I asked Jessica what she wanted out of life, and she said she only needed art supplies and a room to paint. That was easy enough to accomplish—I was sure I could make money. Any white man with half a brain in America can make a good living if he works hard and really wants to.

  And on that beach in Sea Isle City, I decided that I was going to marry Jessica and be the father to her bastard son—only I’d never tell him he was the bastard son of a lowdown scumbag rapist, and I wouldn’t let Jessica tell him either. It would be four more weeks before I shared my decision with Hank’s mother, which is also when I asked for her hand in marriage. But I had made up my mind right there and then on the beach less than twenty-four hours after first meeting Jessica. When it’s love, you just know.

  I hadn’t asked to be a killer of gooks over there in Vietnam. My government said that gook killing was what needed to be done, and so I did it to the best of my abilities. And I hadn’t asked to be a father either, but there was a young woman who needed a man to step up to the plate. It was a mission that simply needed to be done. Period.

  Learning about Brian’s death later that night in some ways sealed the deal for me. I did the moral math in my head: without a doubt, a narrative had clearly formed. God had given me a chance to atone. And after my time in the jungle, I fucking needed it. Sometimes you just have to take what comes your way and do the absolute best you can with the opportunity.

  10.

  Hank and Sue’s second date took place at the Philadelphia Museum of Art because my son wanted to educate my friend on the finer points of art appreciation, which, of course, is just another way of saying that Hank wanted to show off. Peacocks flaunt whatever feathers they got, and goddamn useless knowledge of art Hank had in spades.

  Ella and I went along to chaperone, but I made sure we kept our distance so that we wouldn’t be throwing a wet blanket over the fire we were trying to ignite.

  Hank spent a lot of time yapping at Sue in the South Asian Art section, even though they didn’t have shit from Vietnam. Mostly India, Nepal, Tibet, and Pakistan.

  Then he spent just about a millennium talking about his boys Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele, because he majored in those two clowns back in art appreciation school or whatever they call it. When it comes to Klimt and Schiele, Hank will talk both your ears off.

  There’s this one section called Masters of American Craft where they basically hang rugs on the wall and call it art, except these aren’t even fancy expensive Persian rugs but shitty half-finished American rugs.

  I don’t like Iranians one fucking bit, and Persian is just an old-fashioned word for Iranian, only your average American moron doesn’t know that these days. But those Iranian motherfuckers are the best at making rugs, you have to give them that. Bomb every single one of the Ayatollah Ass-A-Hole-A’s nuclear weapon–making facilities, but let them keep all the rug factories they want. A Persian rug really classes up a dining room, let me tell you. I even have one in my office because I like the way it feels on my bare feet. Heirloom quality. Never buy a rug from a non-Persian.

  But back to the Masters of American Craft section of the art museum. There are these creepy dollhouses in plastic cubes and sundry bullshit that make my son cream his pants, he gets so goddamn turned on when in the presence of that dumb stuff. Sue did a good job faking enthusiasm, but Ella, having done this Hank Art Museum Tour monthly since she was born, was bored to tears. I took her to look at the suits of armor they have there, and we talked about princesses and knights while Sue and Hank were somewhere else, hopefully falling in love.

  Ella and I were looking up at a fake man on a fake horse, both of which were wearing heavy armor, when I told her that one of my first dates with her grandmother had been right here at the art museum.

  “Why aren’t Grandmom Granger’s paintings hanging up in this museum?” Ella asked, and I shrugged because my dead wife was the fucking best painter ever to breathe American air, but I couldn’t tell a seven-year-old the true answer to her question.

  “Was she pretty?” Ella asked, and I needed more than a gesture to answer that one, so I told Ella that her paternal grandmother was the prettiest woman who ever lived and that I fell in love with her the instant that I saw her. “One look, and I was hooked.” Of course I left out the part about accidentally killing that rapist Brian. My granddaughter hopefully didn’t even know what rape was. And like I said before, I vowed to tell no one about killing Brian, and I didn’t until now in this tell-all report because we have a fucking deal.

  But Jessica and I had gone to the art museum on our second date back in January of ’69, which took place the day after we spent the night driving around in my GTO. Jessica loved going to the art museum on Sunday mornings. I think they might have let students in for free way back in the day, but I can’t remember for sure.

  I do remember her dragging me by the hand to show me a particular portrait painted by her hero, which I already mentioned was that Frenchman named Henri Rousseau. Jessica’s high school art teacher had introduced her to Rousseau and had convinced her that his work hanging in art museums all over the world meant that anyone had a shot at making art that would be praised long after his or her death. It was obvious that her teacher thought his own art would someday be discovered and future critics would say that he was unappreciated as a lowly fucking high school art teacher, but I never said that to Jessica, because she lit up whenever she talked about this Rousseau dude.

  The painting Jessica wanted me to see that Sunday morning was the one Hank mentioned to Sue during our first family dinner together. Carnival Evening. Jessica and I stared at that painting for so long, I could tell you anything about it from memory. My dead wife could look at any Henri Rousseau for an eternity and never be bored for a second. Also, we used to have a print of Carnival Evening in our living room, so I used to study it at home too, trying to figure out why Jessica and Hank thought it was so fucking world-altering—why they had chosen this painting out of all the millions that existed all over the globe as their personal Mona Lisa. Why hang this particular Rousseau in our house, when I would have bought them any print they wanted?

  Carnival Evening depicts a costumed couple standing in front of barren skeletal trees. A full moon hangs in the top right corner. There are clouds and stars in the sky. I could never figure out if it’s supposed to be sunset and the costumed couple is going to a carnival, or
it’s sunrise and the couple is returning home. In the bottom left corner, there’s a strange structure that looks like the roof of a small house, only there are no walls underneath, so it appears to float for the most part.

  Why?

  Couldn’t fucking tell you.

  Only a single corner pillar is present—the front right—on which Rousseau painted what looks like a decapitated head, at least to me, but remember that I’ve seen horrific shit, so maybe I’m just projecting, as my VA therapist says.

  The couple has brown skin, which, aside from the connection to his mother, is probably why Hank likes this particular painting so much. The brown-skinned couple is at the center bottom. The man wears a puffy white outfit and a pointy hat that makes him look like a cross between a clown and a magician and a Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard, which is sort of ironic, being that he has brown skin. The woman wears a hat that looks like a beehive, a blue dress lined in orange and yellow, and a white apron.

  Arm in arm, they share a concerned glance as they move out of the trees and into the cleared land—maybe like they just finished doing something dangerous in the forest. Believe me, I know that fucking look.

  Jessica used to say shit like “The play between the moonlight in the sky and the barren forest is fantastic.” To me it was just another painting in a place filled with thousands, but I was no artist. I admit that I couldn’t paint anything remotely as interesting as Henri Rousseau could, but I still didn’t get why Jessica loved this dude so much.

  So I asked her. Turns out Henri Rousseau was a lowly toll collector for much of his adult life. Some old-time French elitists used to call him a “Sunday painter,” which meant he was not a pro. They also called him a “naive painter,” which basically meant the same thing, only it had the added effect of making him sound like a child. Others called what he did “primitive,” which would have been racist had he not been white, albeit French.

  Any fucking way, Henri Rousseau started painting the way he felt like painting, which often meant dreaming up crazy scenes that featured animals he had never encountered in real life and in jungles he had never been to.

  He has this crazy painting hanging in MoMA in New York City called The Dream, which depicts a naked woman reclining on a couch in the middle of the jungle. A black werewolf-looking cat man plays a horn behind two female lions emerging from the leaves and flowers. I know because we had this one hanging in our house too, in the TV room. I’d stare at it whenever TV got too boring, which was often. An elephant, a snake, a monkey, and a few birds are in the foliage. This is some crazy LSD-trip shit, believe me. And everyone said so when it was first displayed, only they didn’t know about LSD yet, they just thought it looked fucking insane.

  Rousseau would hang his wild paintings at the big fancy French art shows, and people would openly mock him. That Spanish motherfucker Picasso even got a bunch of artists together to throw a mock party to “celebrate” Rousseau’s peculiar brand of genius, and mock him they did unmercifully. All of the critics and great artists of the day thought Rousseau was a fucking bush-league hack at best and completely bonkers at worst, but he believed in what he did enough to keep going, painting his bizarre jungle scenes like a middle finger held high. Something inside his heart told him he was a genius and all of the French assholes around him were wrong, which I could understand, being that the French are almost always wrong, even about themselves.

  A week or so after Jessica and I met, we went to MoMA in New York City and looked at The Dream for the first time, because she had always wanted to do that. She stood in front of that big-ass painting for ten years, and then she told me that when a reporter asked Henri Rousseau about The Dream and why he had painted a sofa in the middle of the jungle—no doubt mocking him under the guise of journalism, because all reporters are petty gossips and liars—Rousseau allegedly replied, “Because one has a right to paint one’s dreams,” only in French, not American English. I didn’t give a shit about any of this, but I loved the way Jessica’s face lit up when she was talking about art or painting or gazing at the work of her heroes.

  And that’s all Jessica wanted to do. Paint her dreams. I remember all this shit about Henri Rousseau because Jessica told me about the French toll collector billions of fucking times and we took countless trips to art museums all up and down the East Coast, for many of which Hank was present, so instead of facts about baseball players and comic books, he knows these art stories too.

  And so while Ella and I were talking about knights and princesses in the armor section of the art museum, Hank was probably telling Sue the same shit about Henri Rousseau that I’m telling you here, not that you probably give a flying fuck about art, being that you work for the government. But you did tell me I had to tell you absolutely everything that has happened to me since I returned from Vietnam, especially everything related to my disabilities, and I’m trying to do my best here, condensing almost fifty fucking years into this little narrative, which is a truly heroic feat considering that your employer—Uncle Sam—cut out part of my goddamn brain not too long before all this shit went down with Sue and Hank. Fuck you a lot for that, by the way. And I am still to this day not entirely myself, so this isn’t exactly easy. You already know I have never backed down from hard.

  But standing there looking at the fake horse and man in armor at the art museum, holding my granddaughter’s hand, talking about my dead wife, all of a sudden it felt like a lightning bolt had struck my skull. Before I knew what was happening, I was on the floor, convulsing and foaming at the mouth. I kept trying to pull myself together because I didn’t want to frighten Ella, but I had no control. Zilch. It was like someone had plugged my brain into a socket and then jacked up the electricity as high as it would go. Fucking seizure.

  The next thing I knew, I was in an ambulance headed back to Jefferson Hospital and all of the fucking moron doctors and cold bitch nurses within. And the Puerto Rican EMT riding next to me is saying everything is going to be okay. So I said I just wanted to go home and we didn’t need to bother with the hospital. He kept trying to smooth-talk me like Puerto Ricans do, saying I just needed to undergo some routine tests, using that easy Puerto Rican way that helps to get them laid so often by women of all ancestries, but I wasn’t Tony, he wasn’t Maria, and this sure as hell wasn’t West Side Story, and I told him so.

  I don’t think he had ever seen West Side Story, because he made a strange face, which was surprising, because I would think all Puerto Ricans would have seen the only musical about their struggle to integrate into American society. Maybe Puerto Ricans don’t like musicals, which would explain why we haven’t yet made Puerto Rico a state, because musical theater is in every true American’s heart, whether they are brave enough to admit it or not.

  I fucking love musicals, which is something you probably wouldn’t have guessed, because most people stereotype Vietnam veterans as non-musical-theater patrons, let alone enthusiasts. But you don’t have to be a homo to love musicals. That’s a common fallacy, because of the fact that almost every gay loves musical theater. I go to musicals with Gay Timmy and Gay Johnny all the time. We even have a subscription together at the Forrest Theatre, but that doesn’t make me gay, not even in the slightest.

  Chicago is my favorite musical. I have the DVD of that one, and I watch it all the time, even though Timmy says straight men always like Chicago best. I don’t like Richard Gere’s politics because he’s a pussy liberal, and fuck the Dalai Lama for not going after China more aggressively, but I have to admit Gere is pretty good in Chicago. Catherine Zeta-Jones and Renée Zellweger are both grade-A pieces of ass in that film, which is how you know they make musicals for non-gays too.

  Anyway, I’m in the ambulance when I remembered Ella and so I asked the Puerto Rican EMT what happened to my granddaughter and he said he didn’t know because he just got me on the stretcher and put me in the vehicle. That was the extent of his job description. And I almost had another heart attack right then and there, worrying about Ella
, who I thought must have been scared to death watching me convulsing on the floor. Thank God I wasn’t driving this time.

  But thank God twice because—along with Sue and Hank—Ella was there at the hospital shortly after I arrived, which made me happy because it meant my granddaughter was okay, but sad because my seizure had fucked up Sue and Hank’s second date. No one falls in love at a goddamn hospital, that’s for sure.

  We had to wait a long time for a room to open up, and then even longer for the bullshit tests because hospitals are run even more inefficiently than the Obama White House. I also had to stay overnight because the doctors who needed to read the test results were on some faraway mountain skiing. They had all made so much fucking dough off my brain surgery, super rich people don’t work on Sundays, and there’s always fresh powder in the world somewhere.

  They all came back in on Monday with huge grins on their thieving faces and fantastic tans—white masks where their ski goggles had been—to read my test results and determine I needed an adjustment in my meds, which they themselves had originally prescribed, by the way, but do you think they apologized for giving me a combination of pills that made me feel like I was taking a ride in the electric chair? Hell no. The yahoos just gave me a different combination of pills and told me to trust them, which I had to do, because the alternative was death, or so they said. And I pay for my own health care too, so this is the best available in the land of the free. I’d have been dead long ago if I were relying on the fucking VA hospitals.

  The next day Ella was in school and Sue was at work, so it was just me and my boy. Because he doesn’t know shit about medicine or how powerful men operate, Hank kissed all of the doctors’ asses unabashedly. It was pitiful. Powerful men never respect the ass kissers, they only respect power, but my son had somehow made a good living smooching the sphincters of rich people, so he wasn’t about to listen to his old man when it came to dealing with arrogant skiers who sometimes practiced medicine whenever the snow melted or they got tired of the slopes. I knew Hank had written off my opinions long ago, and so I saved my breath.