Absence of the Hero (24 page)

“Stop looking at me,” I told him.

“
FUCK YOU
!” brother Jack screamed at me.

We drank on into the night and the brothers discussed their plans in front of me. I was honored by their trust. And they were right to trust me because, although I didn't believe in them, there was no place I could go to that I did believe in. They were nice young boys and they drank right along with me, and they had brought their own drinks with them which was more than could be said for most of my visitors.

Suddenly, about 2
A.M.
brother Jack focused upon me. He was then very drunk, bits of spittle running and hanging from his chin. “Then you don't believe in us?” he asked me.

“Not really.”

“Well,” said brother Jack, “fuck you!
FUCK YOU, FUCK YOU, FUCK YOU
!”

There was some silence, then the other brothers went on talking. Brother Jack just stared at me. I was the Enemy. I was either in or I was out. Join or jerk-off into that dark night.

“
FUCK YOU
!” he screamed again.

He slumped a bit forward on the couch, leaned a bit to the right, and then spilled over onto the rug. He was out.

“Where's your car?” I asked Robbie.

I walked over and picked up brother Jack. I followed Robbie out the door and into the night. The car wasn't far down. Robbie opened the back door and I dropped brother Jack on the rear seat. As he landed, his eyes opened and he looked at me.

“
FUCK YOU
!” he screamed.

I went back in with Robbie and the brothers and we drank a little more and then they left. . . .

Two or 3 nights later Robbie knocked on the door. I let him in and cracked 2 beers. Robbie took a hit.

“Well,” he said, “the brothers took a vote on whether to kill you or not. . . .”

“They did?”

“Yes, and you won by one vote. It was 4 to 3 against killing you.”

“Great. Which way did you vote?”

“I voted against killing you.”

“Have another beer.”

“Thanks, I will. But I'm here to tell you it's all set.”

“What's all set?”

“The distribution of literature.”

“What literature?”

“Hank, I told you all about it.”

“I was probably drunk. Tell me again.”

“All right,” said Robbie, “I've written up the Ultimatum. I've got 40 copies in the truck right now. You've got to help me deliver them. You promised.”

“What Ultimatum?”

“To Richard Nixon, to
Time
magazine, to the
TV
stations, to several governors, members of the Senate and the House of Representatives, to the
New York Times
, to the
Christian Science Monitor
, to all the people who should know.”

“Know what?”

“That unless air pollution is stopped we are going to blow up the cities one by one. We are going to blow up the dams and we are going to blow up the sewers, we are going to destroy each city, one by one, until air pollution is stopped.”

“Listen, when you get ready to blow up East Hollywood can you give me a couple of days warning? Last thing I want to do is drown in shit.”

“We'll warn you. We are gong to get the air cleaned up.”

“And you're going to put shit in the streets?”

“A few must be sacrificed for the good of the many.”

“And I promised you that I would help distribute these pamphlets?”

“Yes, one night you did. And now the Ultimatums are all packed in large envelopes, stamped special delivery, first class. It really cost the brothers some money. Each pamphlet is 26 pages long, detailing our demands. What you and I are going to do is distribute one Ultimatum to each of 40 mailboxes throughout town. If we put them all in one mailbox we might be in danger of being detected.”

“Jesus Christ, Robbie, I can't do that! I don't believe in your program! It's crack-pot, it's ignorant, you'll drown more people in water and shit in a year than bad air can kill in a decade!”

“One night you promised me, Hank.”

“What's wrong with all the other brothers?”

“I admire you, Hank. This is a big thing to me. I want to be with you when we do it.”

“Nothing doing, Jerko. . . .”

The poor freak sat there staring at his shoes. I walked out and got a fifth of vodka and two glasses.

“Look,” I said, “let's drink this. You can sleep on the couch tonight and in the morning we'll take your truck down to the city dump and put those Ultimatums where they belong.”

I poured us two full glassfuls.

“You came from the factories and the streets,” he said. “When I first read your writing I knew that you were an exceptional man, that you were one of us.”

“Don't butter my ass, Jerko. I like shit where it belongs. I consider the sewage system one of man's greatest inventions.”

“We voted against killing you, Hank.”

“That's no gift. I have a suicide complex. . . .”

. . . Well, we drank the fifth, we finished the fifth, and I stood up and said, “Well, let's go.”

“You mean you're going to help me do it?” asked Robbie.

“It'll be a cheap thrill. . . .”

“I knew you'd do it!”

We walked outside and got into the truck. It had a flatbed in back but the brothers had built some kind of structure upon it, a round whorl of tin with another hunk of tin soldered to the back. And there behind our seats were stacked the 40 Ultimatums.

Robbie drove. We stopped at the first liquor store and got a gallon jug of cheap wine. We drove off.

“Now,” said Robbie, “here's our first mailbox!”

It was at Hollywood and Vine. Robbie pulled up and I reached back, got an Ultimatum, got out, and dropped it in the mailbox. I leaped back in and we gunned off.

I felt something. I felt like a child rapist. We passed the bottle.

“A
beautiful night,” said Robbie. “Did you read the address label?”

“Yes.”

“Who got mailed the first Ultimatum?”

“Richard Nixon.”

From then on it was mailbox after mailbox. Robbie had a map, the mailbox distribution was carefully planned. Then we were in Watts, in honor of our black brothers. I dumped an Ultimatum into a Watts mailbox and leaped back in.

“Here I am,” I said, “leaping in and out of this truck dumping literature into mailboxes and I don't even
believe
in what the literature says. I am more insane than you are.”

After the last Ultimatum had been mailed Robbie drove me back to my place. We went in and finished the jug of wine. I offered him the couch for the night. He thanked me but said that he had to leave; he had to tell the brothers about the glorious night of the deliverance of the Ultimatums. He left and I locked the door and sat on the couch in the dark and drank a can of beer. I got up, walked to the bedroom, got my shoes off, fell on the bed and slept, fully clothed. . . .

It must have been 2 months later, about one o'clock in the afternoon, when Robbie knocked. He looked very sad.

“Sit down,” I said, “I'll get you a beer.”

“You go ahead,” he said. “Nothing for me.”

I came out with the beer and sat across from him.

“It didn't work,” he said.

“What?”

“All those Ultimatums, to the president, to the press, the
TV
, the magazines, the governors, it didn't work. Nothing was ever published, nothing was ever said, nothing was ever heard.”

“Did you really have the dynamite, the know-how to carry it through?”

“Yeah, we had it, we knew what to do. Then something else happened.”

“What?”

“Women. Up in the Oregon hills where we were hiding out with all our foodstuffs, our guns, the dynamite, it didn't work. Some of the brothers had women with them, and then some of the brothers started cheating on the other brothers and fucking their women. And the other brothers started fucking the other women. All the trust left, everybody started hating and fighting each other. It just broke up, the whole thing just broke up.”

“Robbie, that kind of thing happens everywhere,
it's only normal.”

“Maybe so, but it broke us up.”

“You need a drink.”

“I'm not like you. Drink doesn't solve my pain.”

“No, it doesn't solve it, it just takes it into a different stratosphere.”

“I'll face it head on.”

“Good luck.”

Robbie stood there and we shook hands. He left then. I sat there. I heard an engine start. Then he was gone. . . .

Three or four weeks later I came home one night and there stacked high on my porch and against the door were the Oregon foodstuffs: sacks of flour and sugar, sacks of beans, hundreds of cans of soups; salt, coffee, dried beef, canned tomatoes, canned milk and cream, pouches of tobacco, cigarette papers. No note, just that, and air pollution. . . .

The next strange one who came by was a fellow about 10 years younger than I, one Martin Johnson, who claimed he was going to be the next Maxwell Perkins. He was almost bald and had little tufts of red hair about each ear. He was extremely clean, scrubbed, and carried what I thought to be a kindly and dangerous smile.

“You are one of the better writers around,” he said. “It's good to meet you.”

“Sit down,” I told him. “Care for a beer?”

He sat down. “No, thanks. I don't drink much. I just bought Robert Creeley 18 cocktails.”

“We can find a bar somewhere if you wish.”

He ignored that. “I'm starting a press, the
Red Vulture Press
, and I'm going to start out with a broadside. Do you have a poem I might look over?” he asked.

“Open that door over there,” I pointed to the closet.

Martin Johnson got up, walked over, and pulled the door open. A mountainful of poems wavered a moment, then spilled forward onto the rug.

“You wrote all those poems?” he asked.

“Yeah.”

“What were they doing in the closet?”

“Well, when I finish 3 or 4 poems, I open the door a tiny notch and jam them in.”

“Why don't you send them out?” he asked.

“No money in that. I write dirty stories.”

“Mind if I look some of these over?”

“Go ahead.”

I went into the kitchen for another beer. I stood at the kitchen window watching a young girl on the steps next door putting on a pair of roller skates. She was facing me and wearing a tiny skirt. She was about 8 years old. Quite a little lady. I watched her get up and skate off. Then I walked back into the other room. Martin Johnson was sitting on the floor reading the poems. After he finished each poem he made a comment:

“This one's good. . . .”

“This one's great. . . .”

“This one's not so good. . . .”

“This one's immortal. . . .”

“This one's good. . . .”

He kept reading. Then he stopped. “I really don't have time to read all these but I'd like to come back . . .”

“O.K.”

“Meanwhile, I'd like to take this
one to publish as a broadside,” he said. It was
called “An Afternoon Stroll Down the Avenue of Death.”

“Help yourself,” I said.

The next strange one who came by called himself Red Hand. He was 22, a kid off the road, slight, wiry, talkative.

“I ran across your stuff, man. Straight language like I've never seen before. I just had to come see you.”

“It's O.K. Care for a beer?”

“Sure.”

I went out and got him one. When I came back in he was doing the old cigarette roll with one hand act. He took the beer with his other hand.

“See this coat I got on?”

“Yeah.”

“Looks like a new coat, don't it? Know where I got it? City dump! You'd be surprised what people throw away! There's nothing wrong with this coat. Just a slight rip in the shoulder. There's that rip, so the buyer threw it away. I got it, I put it on. Nothing wrong, a few bugs in it, that's all. Lots of good stuff in the dump. People throw away perfectly good things. I find oranges, nothing wrong with them. . . .”

“Sit down, drink your beer.”

“Your stuff is straight, man. There are so many phonies. You know Bob Dylan? That Oakie wail he puts on? That's not him, man. That's a fake. Come on, I'll buy you a drink at a bar.”