There's a Man With a Gun Over There (14 page)

I rewind the two or three minutes and watch the scene again. I remember now. I had just gotten out of the army, but my aunt wanted to see me in my uniform.

“There's something about a man in uniform,” she'd told me over and over, clinking the ice cubes in her ever-present cocktail glass.

“There's something even better about a man out of uniform,” I said to myself, smiling as I remembered what Angelika used to say, but my smile over my little memory went away as I also recalled the day the two German Customs Police and Goldberg and I, all of us wearing civilian clothes, burst into the apartment house at Bruecke Strasse 27 in Weinheim. The pregnant woman stood in the kitchen.

“
Hey da
,” she screamed at us. “
Was ist
?”

Back there in this filmed slice of 1972, in those minutes rescued from the Heraclitean flux, I'm wearing my medals and my fraudulent marksman badge on my pressed green uniform, and it all fits perfectly. It's all a little piece of military artwork, and I don't have to worry about the
Baader-Meinhof Gruppe
blowing up a Ford Capri in my face.

Back there, in 1972, I wanted to get out of that uniform and put the medals away, forget about Bruecke Strasse 27 in Weinheim, but here is my aunt coming over to where I sit in the lawn chair. Her back to the camera (which was held by my uncle), she wobbles a little as she bends over, hands me her glass, grabs my face, and kisses me. It's as though she wants to take my whole face into her mouth.

She takes her glass back, turns then to the camera, and speaks, unaware that this is a silent film, that her address to posterity (which, at the moment, consists of my second wife and my two children) will go forever unheard. Hand on her hip, her breasts cocked, she speaks with confidence to the future and sips from her vodka.

“That's Aunt Margery?” my daughter says, surprised.

“How'd she get so thin?” my son asks.

“By reversing time,” my second wife, Carol, says.

“You can do that?” My son smiles.

Don't I wish, I think to myself. Don't I wish.

I go to turn off the projector but put the machine on
Pause
by mistake, and my thirty-year-old image shimmies there on the screen, as if uncertain what to do next. I sit there vibrating in colors, which are both vivid and smudged, my aunt holding both hands toward me, as if she's introducing me to the future.

“Yeah, you were a poet,” Dennis Martin says when I call him. “I remember that.”

Dennis and I were in graduate school together in 1967 and 1968, right before I went in the army.

“Yeah, I also remember you were crazy about Emerson. Went around quoting him all the time. ‘The poet is the sayer, the namer, represents beauty.' I always liked that quote, but then you wrote that poem, and all the Emerson stuff came to an end.”

“That poem?” At first I can't recall what he's talking about.

“Yeah, that poem. You scared everyone. Creeped us out. Don't you remember? You were channeling murderers.”

Of course. Yes. The poem.

THE MAN WHO WASN'T THERE ARRIVES

for the assassins

My life has been a pretty dull affair,

Spent in towns you didn't know were there.

My high-school annual left my picture out,

And I began to put myself in doubt

When people said they'd seen me other days

Walking briskly on the Champs Élysées

Or throwing pennies in Niagara Falls.

“But no,” they'd say, “it wasn't you at all.

He had a darker face, a finer nose . . .

Something in the way he wore his clothes.

Still I can't help but see him in your face.”

They'd walk away, thinking of another place,

A man I've never known.

Someday, for a laugh,

I'll tell them “Yes, that was me you saw at Banff,

Hooded face, looking thin and pale,

Or in Kansas stomping through the wheat for quail.

Think . . . I took pictures of your accident;

I cleaned the sickroom for your dying aunt.

I've lived with you like leaves with fall,

You've heard me walk behind you down the hall.

And like the leaves, all my faces mean the same.

They will someday drive you to my name.

Next time you'll know it's me that's come.

When I arrive, there'll be no place to run.”

“Look, Dennis,” I told him. “That's not me speaking. It's a dramatic monologue—the kind of thing Robert Browning made famous. That poem's in the voice of a killer. It's not my voice.”

“Don't give me that literary bullshit. Something dark was running through you. Remember what Whitehead said?”

Jim Whitehead was my poetry teacher.

“You scare the shit out of me” is what Jim said. “You scare the shit out of me.”

24.

R
emember the old
Twilight Zone
episode—“The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street?” In the voice-over, the show's creator, Rod Serling, said:

“This is Maple Street on a late Saturday afternoon. Maple Street, in the last calm and reflective moments . . . before the monsters came.”

My friends and I memorized that when we were kids. We liked to go around growling those sentences, pretending that we were the monsters, scaring ourselves and then laughing.

There weren't any monsters, were there? And if there were monsters, they weren't us, were they?

I once lived on one of the world's Maple Streets. 531-A East Maple Street, to be exact. 531-A East Maple Street, Fayetteville, Arkansas, if you want the whole address. I was in graduate school, writing poems and studying for a degree in creative writing.

It was 1968. Just as we'd planned, Jenny and I got married on December 30, 1967. It was a sweet time. We figured the war would end any day. Nineteen sixty-seven was the year of the summer of love. It was an auspicious time. No monsters anywhere, right?

Jenny and I thought seeing John Lennon on the cover of the first issue of
Rolling Stone
was cute. Remember that? He was dressed as a World War I soldier. He had a part in the movie
How I Won the War.
It's all a little period drama. Just a little bit of history. Nothing to do with us, right?

The specifics of the new year slowly come back to me, or at least some of them do.

It's New Year's Day, and I have the flu, an aching, gut-wrenching flu. Oh, I remember now. It's the Hong Kong flu, and then Jenny gets it, and we begin our married life fighting off this attack from Asia, so, OK, there were microscopic monsters and, then, for some reason, the world starts spinning faster. And then it's hard to keep up with 1968, as if we're running to jump on a carnival ride. Faster and faster, it goes. Round and round, and up and down. Nineteen sixty-eight. A Tilt-A-Whirl of a year.

It's the year of the Tet Offensive and the Prague Spring, which promises freedom from the Russians until it spins round and becomes the assassination of Martin Luther King on that motel balcony. That baby floating in space at the opening of the movie
2001: A Space Odyssey
falls like innocence abandoned down to where Bobby Kennedy dies on the kitchen floor of a Los Angeles hotel as the crackle of small-arms fire in Chicago at the Democratic presidential convention punctuates the night while the musical
Hair
opens and the Age of Aquarius dawns on Broadway, and Congress repeals the requirement for a gold standard, and Elvis, in his leather suit, makes the girls squeal, as if they're orgasmic, coming right there on network television.

Me, I'm watching much of the year go by in the grainy black-and-white pictures of my little Magnavox thirteen-inch TV.

Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?

“I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your president,” Lyndon Johnson solemnly announces as if trying to drown out those chants.

Yes. Nineteen sixty-eight was quite a year. My generation thought that we would save the world. Isn't that what the rock-and-roll lyric says? “We can change the world/Rearrange the world.” Mimeograph a list of demands. Take to the streets with some posters, and it's as good as done.

The little, tiny, hardly noticed part of 1968 that barely gets a mention is the end of graduate school deferments.

Hello, Rick, it's Nazi time for you, my friend.

Boom, boom, snare.

It's first two beats on the bass drum and then one on the little snare drum for the army and air force ROTC students every Friday during the school year as they form up and then march in tight formations across the lawn of the university.

Boom, boom, snare.

I am in a classroom on the second floor of a building erected in the decade after the Civil War. The windows of the building must be over ten feet tall. The course is English prosody, and we are studying the Robert Browning poem, “How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix”:

I sprang to the stirrup, and Joris, and he;

I galloped, Dirck galloped, we galloped all three;

“Good speed!” cried the watch, as the gate-bolts undrew;

“Speed!” echoed the wall to us galloping through;

Behind shut the postern, the lights sank to rest,

And into the midnight we galloped abreast.

“Mostly anapests,” Professor Jim Whitehead, with great exuberance, declaims.

Out there on the spring lawn the ROTC cadets in their blue and green uniforms arrange themselves into ranks and files and then march across the lawn to the tune of the war's booming anapests.

Boom, boom, snare.

Boom, boom, snare.

Yes, the ancient anapests of war. They form squares and rectangles and then single lines that meet and turn.

I sprang to the stirrup, and Joris, and he;

I galloped, Dirck galloped, we galloped all three;

The young girls with the snapping flags behind them and the rattle of the drum to their left watch their boys group and regroup. The girls in their tight uniform blouses and ascots. Saluting as the boys pass. Their breasts cinched into pointed brassieres that make their chests look like twin traffic cones.

They're the Angel Flight, but is anyone really thinking of what angels might have to do with the military? Is anyone really thinking of death this spring afternoon?

I sprang to the stirrup, and Joris, and he;

I galloped, Dirck galloped, we galloped all three . . .

Boom, boom, snare