COMMANDER ANDY HAWKINS, chief psychiatrist of the neuropsych ward at Camp Pendleton, received the inevitable nickname Eaglebeak, or Eagle, early in his first tour in Vietnam when a crazy Marine attacked him out of the clear blue and bit off his nose. It became a serious medical event when Commander Hawkins developed a resistant staph infection in his sinuses, which quickly spread to his brain—a danger that is always present with face wounds. To complicate matters, Hawkins was allergic to the first antibiotics administered to him and went into anaphylactic shock. When that was finally controlled, his kidneys shut down, and he had to be placed on dialysis, as the infection continued to run rampant through his system. Hawkins developed a raging fever and had to be wrapped in ice blankets for two days, and weeks later, after his kidneys and immune system kicked in again, he came down with hepatitis B and nearly died from that. He resigned his commission, quit doctoring altogether for a time, and went to the Menninger Foundation in Kansas, where he did some work—work on himself. He wanted to regain some compassion for his fellowman before trying to go back into private practice, but his dreams of a successful civilian career were destroyed by the fact that he had no nose. He wore a tin nose, complete with a head strap, crafted by a Vietnamese peasant, and it made him an object of ridicule, led to a divorce from his wife, and prompted him to rejoin the Navy, where it didn’t really matter that much what you looked like if you had enough rank. It mattered socially—at the Officers’ Club and so on—but not on the job.
Commander Hawkins started out with a plastic prosthetic nose, but it was easily detectable, so he decided to make the best of a bad situation by wearing the tin nose and being up front about it. He was always quick to point out that he, more than anyone, realized how absurd his condition was, and in doing so he attenuated in part the sniggering he was subjected to for wearing a tin nose. What bothered him more was what he imagined people said about it in private. He became a virtual paranoid in this regard.
I was sent to Pendleton’s neuropsych facility—that bleak, austere nuthouse—some weeks after defending my title as the 1st Marine Division Middleweight Champ in a boxing smoker at Camp Las Pulgas. I lost on a K.O. My injuries resulted in a shocking loss of weight, headaches, double vision, and strange, otherworldly spells. EEG readings taken at the hospital indicated that I had a lesion on my left temporal lobe from a punch to the temple that had put me out cold for over an hour. I was a boxer with over a hundred and fifty fights, and I had taken a lot of shots, but this last punch was the hardest I had ever received and the first punch ever to put me down. I had seen stars before from big punches; I had seen pinwheels; but after that shot to the temple I saw the worst thing you ever see in boxing—I saw the black lights.
There I sat in a corner of the dayroom on the kelly-green floor tiles, dressed in a uniform of pajamas and bathrobe, next to a small, tightly coiled catatonic named Joe, who wore a towel on his shoulder. Here in this corner—the most out-of-the-way place in the ward—was one of the few windows. Occasionally a Marine would freak out and bolt for the window, jump up on the sill, shake the security screen, and scream “I want to die!” or “I can’t take it anymore, let me out of this motherfucker!” At these times Joe would actually move a little. By that I mean he would tilt to the left to give the screamer a little space. Except for me and one of the corpsmen, Joe would not let anyone touch him or feed him or change him.
As I said, Joe wore a towel on his shoulder. He drooled constantly, and he would grunt in gratitude when I dabbed his mouth dry. Joe gave off a smell. Schizophrenics give off a smell, and you get used to it. Sometimes, however, it would get so bad that I could swear I saw colors coming off Joe—shades of blue, red, and violet—and to get away from it I would get up and walk over to the wall-mounted cigarette lighter, a spiral electrical device much like the cigarette lighters in cars. The staff didn’t trust us with open flames or razor blades.
Sitting next to Joe, I would chain-smoke Camels until the Thorazine and phenobarbital that Eagle had prescribed to contain my agitated restlessness got to be too much and I fell into heavy, unpleasant dreams, or I had a fit and woke up on the tile with piss and shit in my pants—alone, neglected, a pariah. The same corpsman who changed Joe would change me. The others would let you lie in your filth until the occasional doctor or nurse came in and demanded that they take action.
I was having ten to twenty spells a day during my first month, and I was so depressed that I refused to talk to anyone, especially when some of the fits marched into full-blown grand mal seizures, which caused me much shame and confusion. I refused to see the buddies from my outfit who came by to visit me, and I did not answer my mail or take calls from my family. But as I got used to the Thorazine I began to snap out of my fits quicker. I began to shave and brush my teeth, and mingle with the rest of the neuropsych population. With Eagle as my living example, I had decided I would make the best of a bad situation; I would adjust to it and get on with my life.
As a rule, there were about thirty men in our ward—the Security Ward, where they kept the craziest, most volatile Marines in all of Pendleton. Eagle seemed to regard me as super-volatile, although I was anything but at the time. He always kept me at arm’s length, but he would get right in and mix with really dangerous, really spooky whacked-out freaks. I figured he was afraid of me because of my history as a recon Marine with three tours in Nam, or because I had been a boxer. But he was a doctor, and his professional fear made me wonder about myself.
One day a great big black man named Gothia came into the ward. I had been there about two months, and this was the first new admission I had witnessed. He was extra-big, extra-black, extra-muscular, and extra-crazy. Gothia was into a manic episode and talking fast: there was a Buick waiting outside with a general in it, and he and Gothia were going to fly off to the Vatican, where the pope urgently awaited Gothia’s expertise concerning the impending apocalypse. He kept repeating, “It’s going to come like a thief in the night—a thief in the night!” until he had everyone half believing that the end of the world was at hand. I immediately liked Gothia. He made things interesting in the ward. As my hair got long, Gothia arranged with the other brothers to give me a hair treatment, a kind of pompadour. It looked like shit, but I was flattered to be admitted into the company of the brothers, which was difficult, my being white and a sergeant and a lifer and all.
A few weeks after he arrived, Gothia bolted unseen up the fence in the exercise yard, did the Fosbury Flop over the barbed wire that topped it, and returned with a six-pack of cold malt liquor. I drank three as fast as possible on an empty stomach and had my first cheap satori—though whether it was epilepsy or the blast from the alcohol is difficult to say. As I finished a fourth can of the malt liquor, sitting against the fence in the warmth of the golden sun, I realized that everything was for the best. Years later, I read a passage from Nietzsche that articulated what I felt in that fifteen-second realization: “Becoming is justified…war is a means to achieve balance.…Is the world full of guilt, injustice, contradiction and suffering? Yes, cries Heraclitus, but only for the limited man who does not see the total design; not for the contuitive God; for him all contradiction is harmonized.”
Weird. Sleeping in the neuropsych ward at night, I sensed the presence of a very large rabbit under my bunk. A seven-foot rabbit with brown fur and skin sores, who took long, raking breaths. I didn’t want to do it, but I had to keep getting out of bed to look. Gothia, who never slept, finally came over and asked me what was the matter, and when I told him about the rabbit he chuckled sympathetically. “Hey, man, there’s no rabbit. Just take it easy and get some rest, baby. Can you dig it? Rabbit. Shit.” But by and by my compulsive rabbit checks got on his nerves, until one night he came over to my bed and said, “I told you there was no rabbit under the bed. If you don’t stop this shit, I am going to pinch you.” He said it louder than he meant to, and the corpsman on watch came over with his flashlight and told Gothia that if he didn’t get to bed he was going to write him up. I lay in the darkness and waited and listened to the rabbit breathe like an asthmatic until I had to check again, whereupon Gothia popped up in his bed and pointed his finger at me and shouted, “There ain’t no goddamn rabbit, goddamn it! Knock that shit off!”
I shouted back at him. “It’s that rabbit on the Br’er Rabbit molasses jar. That rabbit with buckles on his shoes! Bow tie. Yaller teeth! Yaller! Yaller!” For causing such a commotion we were both shot up, and put in isolation rooms. It was my first experience with a straitjacket, and I nearly lost it. I forced myself to lie still, and it seemed that my brain was filled with sawdust and that centipedes, roaches, and other insects were crawling through it. I could taste brown rabbit fur in my teeth. I had a horror that the rabbit would come in the room, lie on my face, and suffocate me.
After my day of isolation, a brig rat, a white Marine named Rouse, came up to me and said, “Hey—you can tell me—you’re faking this shit so you can get out of the service, aren’t you?” Rouse, an S-1 clerk-typist, a “Remington raider” who had picked up a heroin habit in Saigon, had violet slash marks on his arms, and liked to show me a razor-blade half he had in his wallet. He offered to let me use it and often suggested that we use it together. Rouse had a lot of back pay saved up and ordered candy and cigarettes from the commissary, and innumerable plastic airplanes to assemble. He always claimed to have nasal congestion and ordered Vicks Inhalers, which at that time contained Benzedrine. Rouse would break them open and swallow the cottons and then pour airplane glue on a washcloth and roll it into a tube and suck on it. I got high with Rouse once by doing this, but the Benzedrine made me so restless that I begged Thorazine from the guys who used to cheek it and then spit it out after meds were issued.
Actually, Rouse was wrong about me: I didn’t have anything to hide, and I wasn’t faking anything. At the time, I didn’t want out. I intended to make the Marine Corps my home. At group-therapy sessions I reasonably insisted that mine was a straightforward case of epilepsy, and for this I was ridiculed by inmate enemies and the medical staff alike. When I saw I was getting nowhere, I refused to speak at the group-therapy sessions at all, and I spent a month sitting sullenly, listening to everyone argue over an old record player one of the residents had brought in to spice up the dayroom. The blacks liked Smokey Robinson and the Miracles; the war vets were big on the Doors, the Rolling Stones, and C.C.R. I started getting fat from inactivity—fat, although the food was cold and tasted lousy, and in spite of the fact that I fasted on Fridays, because Thursday’s dinner was always rabbit. The thought of eating rabbit after a night of sensing the molasses rabbit under my bed gasping for air, and hearing the air whistle between his yellow teeth as he sucked desperately to live—the sight of fried rabbit put me off food for a solid day.
When I had been on the ward about six months and my fits were under better control, a patient named Chandler was admitted. Chandler was a college graduate. His degree was in French. He had joined the Marine Corps to become a fighter pilot but quickly flunked out of flight school and was left with a six-year enlistment as a grunt, which was unbearable to him. I wasn’t sure if he was going out of his way to camp things up so he could get a Section Eight discharge, or if he always acted like a fairy. No one held it against him. In fact, a number of the borderline patients quickly became devotees of his and were swishing around with limp wrists, putting on skits and whatnot, and smoking Chandler’s cigarette of choice—Salem. Rouse was the first to join in with Chandler by wearing scarves, kerchiefs, and improvised makeup. Rouse even changed his name to Tallulah.
But Chandler wasn’t just some stupid fairy. He was erudite, well read, and well mannered. He had been to Europe. Chandler turned me on to Kafka and Paul Valéry. He knew how to work the library system, and soon I found that as long as I had a good book I did not mind the ward half as much.
Under Chandler’s influence, Gothia somehow became convinced that he was Little Richard. After about the five hundredth time I heard Gothia howl, “It’s Saturday night and I just got paid,” and Chandler respond, “That’s better, but try and put a little more pizzazz in your delivery!” I was glad to see Gothia go. They transferred him to a long-term-care psychiatric facility in North Carolina. In truth, Gothia was pretty good as Little Richard. He was better at it than Chandler was at Bette Davis or Marlene Dietrich—although at that time I had never seen Marlene Dietrich and had no basis for comparison.
Overwhelmed by boredom one afternoon in the dayroom, as we watched Chandler execute yet another “grand entrance” (a little pivot with a serious lip pout and a low and sultry “Hello, darlings”), I confided to Rouse that I suspected Eagle of being a “closet” faggot, and shortly afterward I was called into the Eagle’s den for a rare appointment. Obviously Rouse had snitched on me. I told Eagle that I thought he was a homosexual because he had surfing posters in his office, and I watched him scribble three pages of notes about this. Eagle’s desk was cramped, and his office was hot in spite of a pair of twelve-inch portable fans beating like they could use a couple of shots of lightweight motor oil, and I began to perspire heavily as I watched Eagle write. He was a spectacle—a tall man, cadaverously thin, with his long, angular legs crossed tightly at the knees, his ass perched on the front edge of his chair as he chain-smoked with one hand, flicking ashes into a well-filled ashtray on his desk while he scribbled at the notepad on his lap with his other hand; turning pages, lighting fresh cigarettes off the butts of old ones, scribbling, flipping the pad, seemingly oblivious of me until he looked up and confronted me with that incredible tin nose. “Do you realize that you are sweating?”
“It’s hot.”
“It’s hot,” he repeated. He looked down at his notepad and proceeded to write a volume.
By now I was drenched with sweat, having something very much like a panic attack. Without looking up, Eagle said, “You’re hyperventilating.”
Everything was getting swirly. Eagle dashed out his cigarette and reached into a drawer, withdrawing a stained paper sack from McDonald’s. “Here,” he said. “Breathe into this.”
I took the bag and started breathing into it. “It isn’t working,” I said between breaths.
“Just give it a minute. Have you ever done this before? Hyperventilated?”
“Oh, God, no.” I felt like I was dying.
Eagle pushed himself back in his chair and placed his hands on his knees. “There’s more at work here than just a seizure disorder,” he said. “I’m seeing some psychopathology.”
“It’s that fucking nose,” I said, gasping. “I’m freaking out.”
“You don’t like the nose?” Eagle said. “Well, how do you think I feel about the nose? What am I supposed to do, go off on some island like Robinson Crusoe and hide?”
“I didn’t mean that,” I said. “It’s just—”
“It’s just too fucking weird, isn’t it, Sergeant?”
“Yes, sir,” I said. “Not normally, I mean, but I’m on all this medicine. You’ve got to cut back my dosage. I can’t handle it.”
“I’ll make you a deal. I’m going to cut you back if you do something for me.”
The paper bag finally started to work, and everything began to settle down. “What?”
Eagle removed a notepad and pencil from his desk. “Take this. I want you to jot down your feelings every day. This is just between you and me. I mean, it can be anything. If you were a kind of breakfast cereal, for instance, what would you be? Would you be—oatmeal? Would you be—mush? Would you be—FrankenBerries? Would you be—Count Chocula?” Eagle reclined in his chair, extracted a Lucky Strike, and lit it—with the same effeminate gestures, I noted, that Chandler used to light his Salems. Eagle had very broad shoulders for such a thin man. The sleeves of his tropical uniform were rolled up past his elbows. He brushed what few strands of hair he had back across his shiny pate. It was impossible to ignore his nose. He looked like an enormous carrion bird, and although I knew I could break him in pieces, he terrified me. He took a deep drag and exhaled through his tin nose. “Would you be—a Wheatie?”
“Don’t try to fuck with my head!” I protested, crushing the McDonald’s sack. I got up and stalked out of Eagle’s office, but that night, when I went to bed, I found the notepad and pencil on top of my footlocker.
To disprove Eagle’s theory that I was borderline psycho, I began to write what I thought were mundane and ordinary things in the diary, things which I thought proved my mental health, e.g., “A good day. Read. Played volleyball and had a good time smoking with the brothers. Picked up a lot of insight in group. Favorite breakfast: Shit on a Shingle. Two hundred push-ups. Happy, happy, happy!” I found such a release in writing that I started a diary of my own—a real one, a secret one, which I recently glanced through, noting that the quality of my penmanship was very shaky.
JANUARY 11, 1975: Sick.
JANUARY 13, 1975: Sick. Managed to read from Schopenhauer.
JANUARY 15, 1975: Borrowed some reading glasses and read Cioran. Sickness unto death. Better in the evening. Constipated. Food here is awful. There are bugs crawling on the wall and through the sawdust that is my brain. My personality is breaking down? I am having a nervous breakdown? Curiously I don’t have the “stink” of schizophrenia.
MARCH 14, 1975: Vertigo. Double vision. Sick. Can’t eat.
MARCH 18, 1975: There is a smell. A mousy smell.
APRIL 34, 2007: I am a boxer dog of championship lineage dating back to the late nineteenth century, when the breed was brought to a high point of development in Germany. I have a short, clean brindle coat involving a pattern of black stripes over a base coat of golden fawn. At seventy-five pounds, I am considered large for a female. My muzzle is broad and gracefully carried, giving balance and symmetry to my head. In repose or when I am deep in thought my face is the very picture of dignified nobility.
APRIL 40: My under jaw is somewhat longer than the upper jaw and is turned up at the end, as it should be. The jaw projects just enough to afford a maximum of grasping power and holding power (but without the exaggeration and underbite you sometimes see in poorly bred or inbred boxers). Once my jaws are clamped on something it cannot escape.
My entire muzzle is black. My nose is completely black, the nostrils wide and flaring. My eyes are of a deep brown and are set deeply in the skull. I do not have that liquid, soft expression you see in spaniels, but rather assertive eyes that can create a menacing and baleful effect when I am irritable. This is particularly the case when I fix my piercing stare on its target. I can burn a hole through steel and escape this Mickey Mouse jail anytime I want, and I will as soon as I get my rest. Arf!
APRIL 55: Before my accident I was a circus performer with the simple-minded animal consciousness of the here-and-now. That I had been a great hero of the circus—the dog shot from cannons, the dog that dove from fifty-foot platforms into shallow barrels of water, the dog that rode galloping stallions bareback—that I was Boris, the Great One, a celebrated hero of Mother Russia, beloved by my countrymen meant…nothing to me.
Eagle has me back in his little office, and he confronts me not only with my fake diary but with my real one as well. I’m pissed that they’ve been rummaging through my personal gear.
“Let me get this straight. You say you were this circus dog in Russia, and you got a brain injury when you were shot from a cannon?”
“I forgot to wear my safety helmet.”
“So a famous neurosurgeon put your brains back together and sent you to a health spa—”
“Only the V.I.P.s went there. Nikita K. was there. I knew him. Dancers from the Bolshoi. Army generals. K.G.B. officials. Chess champions.”
“And you…a dog?”
“I wasn’t just a dog. I was the Rin Tin Tin of Russia.”
“You’re pretty bright and well informed. How can you know all this kind of thing?”
“Because it’s true,” I said.
“How would you like it if I sent you to the brig?”
“Fine. The brig would be fine. I’m a howlin’ wolf. Put me in a cage or let me go.”
Eagle drummed his fingers on his desk, changing pace. “Tell me something. What does this old saying mean to you? ‘People who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones’?” Fingers drumming. “Well?”
“I don’t know—”
“ ‘A rolling stone gathers no moss.’ What does that mean?”
“Don’t know.”
Eagle began to write furiously.
“Why would anyone live in a glass house? It would be hot,” I said. “And everyone could see you.”
“I hear you like to read Kafka. That’s heavy stuff for a young guy. You’re pretty bright. Have you ever read any books on abnormal psychology?”
“Hey, man, just let me out of this motherfucker. I’m going down in this place. Put me in a normal ward and let me see a real doctor.”
“I’ll give it some thought. In the meantime, I’d like you to check this out,” Eagle said, clapping me on the shoulder. He handed me a copy of Love Against Hate, by Karl Menninger.
STARLOG, JANUFEB, 2010: “Gate is straight/Deep and wide/Break on through to the other side.…”
There was an old piano in the dayroom. When a Marine freaked out and broke the record player, Chandler started playing the piano day and night—driving me crazy. “Canadian Sunset” over and over and over again! One night I rubbed cigarette ashes all over myself for camouflage, crawled into the dayroom recon style, and snapped off the little felt hammers inside the piano. Shoulda seen the look on Chandler’s face when he sat down to play. This was not insane behavior. I knew I was not really insane. I was just a garden-variety epileptic temporarily off my game. Thrown a little by the war. I laughed and said to Chandler, “Hey man, what’s the sound of one hand clapping?”
After I put the piano out of commission, I noticed Chandler was losing weight. They had him on some new medication. He quit camping around and took a troubled leap into the darkness of his own soul. He grew quiet and started sitting in the corner with catatonic Joe. A black Marine, a rotund and powerful murderer from South Carolina named Bobby Dean Steele, was admitted to the ward for observation, and he began to dominate. Despite the charges pending against him, he was buoyant and cheerful. He walked over to Joe’s corner a lot and would say, “Joe-be-doe, what’s happening? What’s the matter, man? You saw some bad shit in the Nam, didn’t you? Well, that’s okay. We’re going to fix you up—not those doctors, but us, the jarheads. We’ll help you. I know you can hear me. Go easy, man.”
Bobby Dean Steele gave Joe back rubs and wiped his face and in a matter of a few days was leading him around the ward in a rigid, shuffle-step fashion. The patients began to rally around Joe, and soon everyone was giving him hugs and reassuring him. One of the corpsmen warned me that catatonics often snap out of their rigid stupors to perform sudden acts of extreme violence. It was a catatonic who had bitten off Eagle’s nose, he said.
For a brief period during Bobby Dean Steele’s tenure, my temporal-lobe visions jumped more and more into grand mal seizures. Just before the fits, instead of having otherworldly spells, I felt only fear and would see the black lights of boxing. I was having very violent fits. In one of these I bit my tongue nearly in half, and for two weeks I sat in Joe’s corner with Chandler, overloaded on anticonvulsants. My corpsman came by with a little spray bottle and sprayed my tongue. It had swollen so much that I could not shut my mouth, and it stank. It stank worse than schizophrenia, and even the schizophrenics complained. Bobby Dean Steele and I got into a fistfight over the tongue, and I was amazed at my ability to spring into action, since I felt nearly comatose when he came over to the corner and started jawing at me, kicking at me with his shower shoes. I got up punching and dropped him with a left hook to the jaw. The sound of his huge body hitting the tile was like that of a half-dozen rotten melons dropped on concrete. Bobby Dean Steele had to be helped to the seclusion room, but I was not required to go there, nor was I shot up. I guess it was because my tongue made me look miserable enough.
When Bobby Dean Steele came out of isolation, he was so heavily loaded on Thorazine that his spunk was gone, and without his antics and good cheer there was suddenly no “character” on the ward. Joe, who had seemed to be coming out of his catatonia, reverted back to it, but rather than seeking out his corner, he assumed and maintained impossible positions of waxy flexibility wherever he happened to be. It was like some kind of twisted yoga. I had heard that Joe had been at Khe Sanh during the siege and, like Jake Barnes in The Sun Also Rises, received a groin wound—that he had lost his coconuts. I often wonder why that is considered such a terrible thing. I brought this up and was roundly put down. Better to lose your sight, arms, legs, hearing, said Rouse. Only Chandler, who rarely spoke up anymore, agreed with me. “If there was a hot-fudge sundae on one side of the room and a young Moroccan stud with a cock like a bronze sculpture on the other,” he said, “I’d make for the ice cream.”
Eagle came to Chandler’s rescue, just as he had bailed me out for a while with the diary idea. Eagle appointed Chandler his clerk, and in a few weeks Chandler began to put on weight. As a clerk, he was allowed to leave the ward under the escort of one of the corpsmen. Invariably he went into Oceanside to the bookstores or to restaurants to gorge on big meals. He brought me delicious food in doggie bags, and books: Dostoyevsky, Spinoza, Sartre—the writers he insisted I read—and the lighter stuff I preferred. I was reading a lot and having fewer seizures; I had begun to get better. Chandler was better, too, and up to his old mischief. He constantly mimicked his new boss, and his devastating imitations were so accurate that they actually made me realize how much I respected Eagle, who had the advantages of a good education and presumably had a history of confidence and self-esteem, but now, with his tin nose, had been cut adrift from the human race. The humiliation of epilepsy had unmanned me, and I felt empathy for the doctor. At least I looked like a human being. According to Chandler, Eagle had no friends. Chandler also told me that Eagle would get drunk and remove his tin nose and bellow, “I am the Phantom of the Opera. Ah ha ha ha!”
Patients came and went, and time passed—I had been in the nuthouse for fourteen months. I was becoming one of the senior patients on the ward. We got very good meals on the anniversary of the founding of the Marine Corps, on Thanksgiving, at Christmas. In fact, at Christmas, entertainment was brought in. I remember a set of old geezers who constituted a Dixieland band. They did not play that well, but it made for a welcome break in the routine of med calls, of shower shoes flip-flopping across the kelly-green tiles, of young men freaking out at the security screen near Joe’s corner, of people getting high on airplane glue and Vicks Inhalers, of people trying to kill themselves by putting their heads in plastic bags, of the long nights in the ward with the bed springs squealing from incessant masturbation, punctuated by nightmares and night terrors and cries of “Incoming!,” of the same cold starchy meals over and over again, of a parched mouth from drug dehydration and too many cigarettes, of a life without hope.
When the band took a rest between sets, two old farts, one white and one black, played a banjo duet of “Shanty Town” that brought tears to my eyes. Then a group of square dancers came in. They were miserable-looking middle-aged types in Western getups, the women with fat legs. You could sense their apprehension, and I realized that I had forgotten how frightening someone like Bobby Dean Steele, who had been copping an attitude of late, wearing an Afro and a pair of black gloves, must have seemed to people like them. Once the music began, however, the misery was erased from their faces and replaced by a hypnotic expression as they mechanically went through their paces. From my folding chair, swooning on phenobarbital, overly warm from all the body heat, I was in agony until I saw—with a rare and refined sense of objectivity—that their sufferings and miseries vanished in their dancing, as they fell into the rhythm of the music and the singsong of the caller’s instructions. And for a moment I saw myself as well; I saw myself as if from on high, saw the pattern of my whole life with a kind of geometrical precision, like the pattern the dancers were making, and it seemed there was a perfect rightness to it all.
One day after chow, Bobby Dean Steele was summoned to the meds kiosk by one of the doctors, and a corpsman buzzed a pair of enormous brig chasers through the heavy steel door of the ward. They cuffed Bobby Dean Steele, while the resident on duty shrugged his shoulders and told Steele that he was being transferred back to the brig to stand General Court-Martial for three counts of murder in the second degree. It had been decided, Chandler informed us, that Bobby Dean Steele was not especially crazy—at least not according to observation, the M.M.P.I., and the Rorschach. Chandler told us that Steele would end up doing twenty years hard labor in a federal prison.
My own departure was somewhat different. Eagle called me into his office and said, “I’m sending you home. Don’t ask me whether you’re cured or not. I don’t know. I do know you were an outstanding Marine, and I have processed papers for a full disability pension. Good luck to you, Sergeant.”
“Thank you.” I was dumbfounded.
“When you get home, find yourself a good neurologist.…And keep your ass out of the boxing ring.”
“Yes, sir.”
As I turned to leave, Eagle saluted me. I returned the salute proudly, and I heard his booming, operatic laugh start up after I pulled his door shut behind me.
The next morning I collected over nine thousand dollars in back pay and I went out to the bus stop with my seabag on my shoulder. A master sergeant came by, and I asked him what time the bus came. He told me that I could not leave the base until I got a No. 1 haircut and I told him to forget it, that I was a civilian. A moment later a jeep pulled over and a captain with an M.P. band on his sleeve hopped out. I showed him my discharge papers, the jump wings on my set of blues, the Navy Cross and the two Silvers, and he said, “Big fucking deal. You got a General Discharge, Sergeant. A psychiatric discharge, Sergeant. I want you off this base immediately.”
“Well, give me a ride and I’ll be glad to get off the motherfucker,” I said. I was beginning to see cockroaches crawling through the wet sawdust inside my skull, and I kept wiping my nose for fear they would run out and brush across my lips.
“You’re a psycho,” the master sergeant said. “Go out there and wreak havoc and mayhem on the general population, and good riddance.”
“You could cut me some slack,” I said. “I was a real Marine, not some rear-echelon blowhard, and by the way, fuck the Corps. Eat the apple, and fuck the Corps. I curse the day I ever joined this green motherfucker.”
“I want you off this base and I want you to hump it off this base,” the master sergeant said.
“You mean I don’t have to get a haircut after all?” I said in my best nellie voice.
“Fucking hit the road, Marine. Haight-Ashbury is that way.”
“Well, fuck you,” I said.
“And fuck you. Go fuck yourself.”
I threw my seabag down and was about to fight when a Marine in a beat-up T-bird pulled over to the bus stop and asked me if I needed a lift. Without another word I tossed my seabag in his back seat and hopped into the car. Before I could say thanks he hit me up for five bucks in gas money. “It’s twenty-three miles to Oceanside,” he said. “And I’m runnin’ on empty. I ain’t even got a spare tire, no jack, no nothing.” He looked at me and laughed, revealing a mouth filled with black cavities. He said, “Hey, man, you wouldn’t happen to have a cigarette, would you?” I handed him my pack. “Hey, thanks,” he said.
“That’s all right,” I said.
He lit the cigarette and took a deep drag. “You want to hear some strange shit?”
“Why not?” I said.
“I just got six, six, and a kick.” The Marine took another pull off the cigarette and said, “Six months in the brig, six months without pay, and a Bad Conduct Discharge.”
“What did you do?” I asked. I was trying to stop the vision of bugs.
“AWOL,” he said. “Which is what I’m doing now. I ain’t going to do no six months in the fucking brig, man. I did two tours in Nam. I don’t deserve this kind of treatment. You want to know something?”
“What’s that?”
“I stole this fucking car. Hot-wired the motherfucker.”
“Far out,” I said. “Which way you going?”
“As far as five bucks in gas will take me.”
“I got a little money. Drive me to Haight-Ashbury?”
“Groovy. What are you doing, man, picking your nose?”
“Just checking for cockroaches,” I said weakly. I was afraid I was going to have a fit, and I began to see the black lights—they were coming on big time, but I fought them off. “What was your M.O.S.?”
“Oh-three-eleven, communications. I packed a radio over in I Corps. Three Purple Hearts and three Bronze Stars with valor. That’s why I ain’t doing six months in no brig. I just hope the ’P. waves us through at the gate. I don’t want no high-speed chases.” The Marine lit another of my cigarettes from the butt of the first one. “Hey, man, were you in the war? You look like you got some hard miles on you. Were you in the war? Did you just get out? You’re not going AWOL, too—that ain’t no regulation haircut. Man, you got a headful of hair. On the run? How about it? Were you in the war? You got that thousand-yard stare, man. Hey, man, stop picking your nose and tell me about it.”
Arf!
“Goddammit, are you zoned or what?”
Bow wow!
“I can’t believe this shit. That motherfucker ’P. at the gate is pulling me over. Look at that. Can you believe this shit? They never pull you over at this gate, not at this time of day—and I haven’t got any identification. Shit! Buckle up your seat belt, nose-pickin’ man, we are gonna motate. This fucking Ford has got a blower on the engine and it can boogie. Haight-Ashbury, here we come or we die tryin’. Save us some of that free love! Just hope you get some of that free lovin’—save me some of that good pussy!”
The Marine slammed his foot down full on the accelerator. The T-bird surged like a rocket and blew by the guard post, snapping off the wooden crossbar. For a moment I felt like I was back in the jungle again, a savage in greasepaint, or back in the boxing ring, a primal man—kill or be killed. It was the best feeling. It was ecstasy. The bugs vanished. My skull contained gray matter again. I looked back at the M.P. in the guard post making a frantic call on the telephone. But the crazy Marine at the wheel told me not to worry, he knew the back roads.