I couldn’t help laughing—the Brigadier was so frenzied, so uncharacteristically verbose, so straining to seek out the utmost horizons of man’s more preposterous antics—even though I sensed in his zany nonstop monologue a volcanically simmering rage which, by some enormous regimentation of his will, he kept obstinately repressed beneath his loftily grand and comical demeanor, even though I chuckled throughout his entire erratic spiel, I knew even as I did so that he was close to a hysteria verging on dementia. Brother or no brother, the Brigadier was cracking up. And I didn’t much know what to say but I knew I had to get him off his mutually purgative and self-destructive binge.
And wherein did the Brigadier’s madness lay? It was, I thought, all the schooling to kill the “enemy,” all the strategies, the logistics, the weaponry, the intrigues, all the battles, all the dead friends, all the dead period, all the years—twenty-five in the Brigadier’s case, twenty-five, his life!—all fallen before a long-haired, geetar-strumming, pot-smoking, toot-sniffing, pill-popping, terrorist-inclined, rock-oriented, please-touch, denim revolution he neither understood nor could have appreciated had he understood.
But with what little regard I convey the Brigadier’s intelligence. What I was too dense to understand that day, even though the Brigadier tipped me off in a hundred small ways, was that he had long since ceased to trouble himself with triflingly imperceptive middle-class questions as to whether we were going to have a revolution in America and if so when it would come and how violent it would be. To the Brigadier—and he was right!—the revolution had come and gone! And what was needed was a willing adoption of a whole new set of vantage points from which to view both America and the world, an adoption the Brigadier was incapable of making. And what galled him more than anything was those politicians who professed a sympathy with and comprehension of that revolution, not in the least understanding that Vietnam was lost, the revolution was complete, and the implacable, laughable, and laughing Russkis had altered their goal of world domination not a whit, a domination that would bring with it its strident and real—as opposed to the Brigadier’s rhetorical—anti-Semitism, repression of the artist, et cetera, all those things we “freaking intellectuals” so professed to abhor. As the Japanese physicists were said to have wired congratulatory messages to our counterparts on our development of the atomic bomb, the Brigadier told me he was seriously considering wiring congratulatory messages to some Soviet spooks he knew.
11
“You want a vision of insanity?” the Brigadier said at one point. “Don’t look to General Westmoreland. Conjure up McNamara with his eighteen-ninetyish greased-down hairdo, his prissy rimless glasses and schoolmarmish pointing stick, his incredibly detailed and brilliantly hued charts and diagrams explaining in that remote gobbledygook—as euphemistic as a freaking Nazi justifying the final solution to the Jewish problem!—what we were supposed to need in Nam to see the light at the end of the tunnel. He thought he was still selling his Harvard Business School background or whatever to the stockholders of the Ford Motor Company. He was really incapable of making any distinction between prosecuting a war and Henry the Elder’s assembly line. You know, the invincible American know-how would bring us through, ‘when Johnny comes marching home, tra la, tra la.’ Yeah, just conjure up the picture of the early and mid-sixties McNamara and you recreate some ultimate vision of lunacy.
“It makes 1984 look as shallow as a futuristically inclined comic strip. Is it any wonder the ‘body count’ mentality seeped into the military and turned ninety percent of our ambitious field commanders into goddamn liars? They began to feel they were Pinto dealers whose franchises would be yanked if they didn’t somehow account for more dead bodies or Fords or whatever it was we were supposed to be selling in Southeast Asia. Or take Teddy Bear Kennedy—and you can have him! He comes over to Nam for a whirlwind tour to get a ‘firsthand look’ at the situation and goes back to Capitol Hill and tells his colleagues, those decrepit drunken old whores, and the American people that he was appalled at the corruption he found from top to bottom in Vietnam, from the province chiefs to the village mayors right into the South Vietnamese Army. Shit me a vanilla cupcake, will yuh, baby brother? Those gooks don’t have any translation for our concepts of corruption, bribery, extortion, and so forth. To them it’s all some time-honored and admired Oriental tradition and one that very early on the military had to learn to live with and adjust itself to.”
For the Brigadier my heart leaped suddenly out in sympathy, perhaps love. He was to be pitied. He was to be pitied in the way the archaeologist who carries with him some stamp of mourning for the passing of the dinosaur is to be pitied.
“You ought to get out of the army.”
“Get out of the army? What the hell would you imagine I’m going to do? Hang around in that limp-wristed undisciplined Cub Scout pack? I’m seeing Nam through to the end”—the Brigadier would not of course make it to the end—“and then the army and I shall quit each other, kaput, slam the door in each other’s faces. And may God have mercy on us both. Especially the army.”
“I guess you’ll never make your brigadier’s star.”
“My brigadier’s star! My star! It was never mine. It was always yours, for Christ’s sake. It was some power fantasy you were living out through me. What kind of a chance did you imagine I had, a high school graduate and a two-bit reserve officer into the bargain? You got any idea what it means to make bird colonel as a reserve officer? You know how many light colonels there were, say, last year at the height of the Tet offensive—we called it the counter-offensive, for Christ’s sake? Seven thousand! And you know how many would be passed over for bird? Plenty, freaking plenty, and I’m not only talking about guys like myself or even freaking college ROTCs, I’m talking about regular skinheads from the Point, VMI, and the Citadel. I never even got to the war college at Carlisle, a must to make general. Even had I been in the right place at the right time—and you can be sure, baby brother, that I usually made damn sure I was in the place at the time—I still never would have made my star as a reserve officer.”
The Brigadier was laughing. It was a silly, derisive laugh, causing his tall angular body to seem to creak about at the joints.
“In the last twenty years you know how many reserve officers have been offered their stars? Guess? Don’t bother. I’ll tell you. One! One goddamn reserve officer! And you know what he did? He told the Pentagon to shove its star up its ass! True. True story. I shit you not. The guy is still a legend in the army. I can’t think of the admirable gentleman’s name. Let’s say it was Hobbs. Whomsoever, as a member of the joint chiefs might say when testifying before a congressional committee, whenever old Hobbsie’s name comes up, one of the guys at the club invariably sighs and says, ‘Yeah, old Hobbsie, ain’t he the guy who told the army to empty its bladder on its star?’ And everyone cries ‘Yeah, yeah,’ takes a morose, pensive sip on his drink, and shakes his head in wondrously awed salute to old Hobbsie. You know the kind of thing. Everyone wishing he had the balls and the opportunity to tell the army the same thing. Hobbsie, the last pariah. The Last Pariah, a title for you. Gratis.”
So the Brigadier, who would never be a brigadier but forever a colonel, and the army would after Nam call it quits, kaput, slam the door in each other’s faces, and may God have mercy on them both, especially the army. For a flashing instant I facetiously wondered if, on retirement, the Brigadier would have his name listed in the telephone directory as Col. W. R. Exley but the thought no sooner entered my mind than it exited because I knew that when the Brigadier quit something he owned the obstinacy to quit it forever.
Like the members of any profession, I said, guys in the army had an annoying habit of working on the tacit and smug assumption that laymen knew precisely what they were talking about Not only didn’t I understand the regular-reserve distinction, I said (“What the fuck’s the difference if either designation of officer has been in twenty-five years?”), but I also thought he’d been to every command sc
hool the army had to offer and didn’t understand this war college at Carlisle abruptly becoming an obstacle to his making general.
It was very simple. At any point in his career the Brigadier could have applied for a regular commission, but he had no doubt that without a college degree the commission would have been denied him, despite the honors bestowed on him. He probably should have applied and made the overture anyway. “The goofy bastards always want to know if you love them, you see. They want to know whether you are serious, interested in doing thirty years and assuming responsibility at staff level or whether you are a hot-dog dilettante just pulling your pollywogger and biding your time until you get your twenty in, any time after which you might pull out, buy a motel and beer bar in New Smyrna Beach, Florida, sit in the sun, and let the regulars suck ass, jockey deviously, and cut throats to achieve rank. However, some time in the fifties they introduced some fine print into the regular’s contract, some fine print that made a lot of us very nervous. If, for example, I’d become a regular and on retirement had moved over to Langley or into the Department of Defense, my regular’s pension would be cut and adjusted to the salary I was receiving from the CIA, whereas if I made the move as a reserve officer I’d draw both full pension and full salary—double dipping, as we say, on the exalted level. It was the army’s way of assuring themselves that regulars had no incentive for leaving the army until they had thirty years in. Hence, from the day I refused to make an attempt to meet requirements for a regular commission, say, picking up a degree at night school, whatever meager—and it was very meager indeed!—chance I had of going to Carlisle—believe me, kiddo, the Harvard or Cambridge of the army!—or achieving general staff level was nonexistent. Non, non, non, nonexistent. The choice was easy for me, though. I was never that fond of the army in any event.”
“I don’t believe that at all. And such restrictions seem silly as hell to me. I mean, with your obviously not undistinguished military career.”
“Silly? Say what you mean. It’s freaking absurd, like everything else in the freaking army.”
Later, I told the Brigadier I was going to have a good scrubdown in the shower, after which I was taking him to a small bistro in the Village and letting him buy me dinner.
“Scrub up all you damn please but I’ve already made plans to have dinner with a friend. At a place in the Village called the Coach House. Do you know it?”
“Yeah, I know it. It’s not far from where I’m going. I’ll walk you there when we get off the subway. I just hope your pal has a lot of loot. The cheapest thing on the menu is chopped steak and that goes for eight hundred dollars. And the menu is a la carte!”
“My friend is treating.”
“What the hell does he do?”
“As it happens, he’s a captain in the New York City police. Intelligence.”
“A captain? How old is he? And if he’s a captain, he won’t have to go for dime one, even at the Coach House.”
“Probably not. We served together in Berlin in the fifties. Let me tell you, baby brother, this guy was the best I ever saw. He and another guy, a Top, once walked right through Checkpoint Charlie to get a look at the Russkies’ new T-54 tank.”
“And just how the hell did they do that?”
“Swedish passports. Listen, allow me to spare details, will yuh? You might learn something. When they got to the tank, they discovered the Top had forgotten the film for the freaking camera—I shit you not! So this ballsy bastard, my pal, and this Top, knowing precisely what time the Russian sentries would come by, kept crawling in and out of the tank to avoid them, and they stayed in an hour longer than they were supposed to (I know because I was waiting for them!), adding, as you can well imagine, more brown stains to their skivvies than they ever did in combat, as well as adding no few to mine. With a tape measure my main man measured everything on the tank, length, width, thickness of armament, estimated the caliber of the weaponry, and so forth. Even then our boss—that chickenshit prick—was so furious about their forgetting the film that my guy said, fuck it, he’d walk back in and get the pictures. The Top said, “Not with me you fucking won’t walk back in!’” The Brigadier laughed heartily. “And a week later my guy did walk back in and came out with the pictures. I mean, this guy I’m meeting is the best.”
When we’d left the subway and I’d walked him to the Coach House, the Brigadier tried to persuade me to join them for dinner, explaining that their conversation would be the same old nonsense, how much the cop wished he’d stayed in the army and how much the Brigadier wished he’d have joined Manhattan police intelligence and could bug marvelous characters like Joey and Meathead Gallo. When he saw that I was adamant, feeling, as I did, that I would severely hamper their conversation, he started up the Coach House steps, stopped, turned, and with a bitingly ironic laugh issued the Irish platitude, “Up the revolution.” I winced. That was more meaningful than one of the last things the Brigadier would say to me from his deathbed:
“I wonder if anyone ever told Dustin Hoffman he overacts.”
PART THREE
In the Days
Before I Shot My Sister
1
A don’t know if the following epistolary indulgence—my paranoia run amok?—will ever reach you. When I walked to the post office for the morning mail with Hannibal Cooke and he caught me trying to post a letter to the Maui County authorities, reached out, grabbed my left wrist, snapped it as though it were a parched twig, then relieved me of the letter and handed it over to O’Twoomey for his clangorous scrutiny and sinister caveats about any such future actions on my part, even then no one believed me and the explanation was given out that while drunk I’d fallen from bed. I doubt there is a resident of Lanai who didn’t accept that as readily as he knows he’d be jobless if pineapple were abruptly found to be a carcinogenic agent.
At the hospital, when Dr. Jim was X-raying the wrist, taping it, and capping the tape with a tautly drawn leather wrist band, I kept trying to signal him with what I imagined were foreboding winks. Then Hannibal, with that uncanny animal instinct of his, sensed nervous duplicity on my part and placed his six-feet-seven-inch, 275-pound, lean, and bemuscled frame directly behind Jim so I was unable to make a gesture Hannibal couldn’t see. Not that Jim picked up on anything. In distress he has a nervous habit of twitching his mustache and blinking his eyes. Perhaps he thought I was mocking him, perhaps he feels I suffer the same distracting tic and that we are brothers in affliction. Whatever, his ministrations completed, he gave me a hail-fellow jovial poke between my shoulder blades and assured me I’d be back on the golf course within two weeks.
God of Israel, Alissa, if I am forced to play another eighteen holes with O’Twoomey, Hannibal, and Toby, I shall go round the bend completely. My so-called oldest pal in the world, Wiley Hampson, about whom you’ve heard so much from me, says I’m that anyway—”the most mental,” he said, “I’ve ever seen you.” One night when he was drunk the infuriating bastard had the audacity, in oh-so-high-and-mighty and censoriously slurring tones, to tell O’Twoomey that if he were really my patron, as O’Twoomey claims to be, he’d have me institutionalized in some decorous asylum Wiley knows of on Oahu.
“Tut, tut,” said O’Twoomey. “My dear Frederick shall prevail. Yes, Frederick shall prevail.”
Wiley is so obsessively absorbed in building his new prefab house that he apparently doesn’t notice I can’t go to the can without Hannibal deciding his bladder needs relieving at the same time. On those infrequent occasions I’ve got Wiley alone for a few seconds and told him with menacing earnestness that I am literally O’Twoomey’s prisoner, he gives me a simperingly absurd smile, erratically twirls his index finger round and round at his temple, and repeats the same tired lines.
“You got it made, Ex. You got it made. The Counselor was right. Boy, was the Counselor ever right.”
The Counselor was a mutual friend, with whom we had gone to high school, and his cynically endearing description of me was: “Exley could
go into a strange town and be fixing parking tickets for the natives within two weeks.” In other words, Alissa, my pal Wiley is not only insensitive to what’s happening and believes I’ve so exercised my alleged guile on O’Twoomey (who—you must believe me, Alissa—is the ultimate paranoid in this scenario) that I live in regal splendor on O’Twoomey’s largess and that I’m little more than a slob and an ingrate and ought in thanksgiving to be kissing O’Twoomey’s reeking scaling feet.
Two nights after Hannibal broke my wrist, Malia and Wiley had us over for mai-mai baked in some lovely way Malia does it with lemon, onion, garlic, and mayonnaise, accompanied by cauliflower, green corn, and those petite red-skinned boiled potatoes, a concession to the harp O’Twoomey of course. Save for an infrequent glass of Chablis, Malia doesn’t drink, Hannibal and Toby both use pakalolo (Hawaiian for “crazy smoke”), but before dinner O’Twoomey, Wiley, and I were putting away the Jameson’s in majestic style. Suddenly Wiley repaired to the John to take a leak. I leaped to my feet, followed him into the can, and moved him to one side of the bowl as though my urgency was such that, as we had as kids, we’d have to pee at the same time.
“Hannibal broke my wrist when he caught me trying to mail a letter to the Maui County police chief.”
“Jesus, Ex. You get off that nonsense before the men in the white jackets really do come after you. I mean, c’mon, pal, get off it.”
Hannibal burst through the door, stood hovering intimidatingly behind and above us. “Quick. Hannibal go too.” Which is the way Hannibal talks.
Wiley said, “Piss between Exley’s legs.”
Alissa, O’Twoomey is going to kill me and the irony is that I haven’t the foggiest idea why. Do you know the only thing that saved my ass when he read that aborted letter? Although to the authorities I stated in unequivocal terms that I was being held captive on Lanai, I did not mention who my abductors are and went on to say that it is all some grisly and ghastly joke. Before God, Alissa, I honestly do not know—or most of all care—what nefarious nonsense these guys are up to, which doesn’t negate that whatever it is involves staggering amounts of money—forget that innocuous crap I told you about sweepstakes tickets—and that at one awful moment they unjustly assumed I had overheard a conversation or come across some document relating to their enterprises.