Made in China Chapter 5

 

I joined the Army by accident shortly after Betty and I married. I responded to a “help wanted” advertisement in a newspaper, needing a job since I was newly married with another to provide for. Women couldn’t work outside of the home because of The Casanovas, so they were mostly shut-in for their protection. We were squatting in a house on Brewery Street which was as good as ours but we wanted to own our own house. The ad promised travel, good pay and benefits, but gave no more specifics or assurances. It left out death and dismemberment. I had always been intrigued by travel and I thought maybe it was a truck driving job and Betty could come with me as Bob Brown. I drove over to the address where a friendly sign with an arrow pointed down a long downward snowy lane. I should have known what I was getting into when I saw the defunct cannon behind the building, or the words VFW on the front. I had no idea what VFW meant. Virginity For Women, I guessed. Vagina Friends Wanted. Veteran never came to mind. I sat there in my car nervous as hell, considering putting it in reverse and going home. I didn’t really need a job. I could always pick for a living like my family had since I could remember. It is a perfectly decent way to make a living. It was dark and large snowflakes fell on my windshield and reminded me of faces of all the dead people I had seen in my life. Then I saw something glimmering in the distance in front of me. It was a zinc statue of a twelve foot tall soldier caught in a perpetual step with a gun in hand. He was staring at me and I almost felt threatened, or felt I had a duty to go inside. He spoke. “Get out of your car, Blatz. Go inside. We need you!”

“What do you need me for?” It didn’t feel strange that I was talking to a monument.

“A few good men…There aren’t many good men left, Blatz. We need you,” he insisted. “You will not be harmed. I promise.” I didn’t realize at the time what a grand promise that would be. It was like promising someone jumping from an airplane without a parachute that they would land safely in a silo full of feather pillows. He didn’t move, not even his lips. I focused on his face but he was staring straight ahead over me. I think he was from World War I judging by his rifle, pants and helmet. My headlights shined on his torso. I had no idea what he was talking about. I was still clueless as to what awaited me inside the strange building. But against my better judgment I stepped out and went inside. There were eagles on the doors. There was a sign that said, “Freedom isn’t free!” I should have known then what I was getting myself into, but I didn’t. A loud Led Zeppelin song with a screaming guitar riff played and there were a bunch of old men telling stories about Iraq, Afghanistan, and Iran—some with arms, some without, some in wheel chairs, some on wobbly legs covered in blue jeans which used to be popular. Beards, bald heads, crew cuts, ball caps with the names of ships, long hair, eye patches, and glasses. The smell of beer and cigarette smoke overwhelmed me as I walked in further. The man tending bar smiled at me. Everyone else peered. Everyone seemed to stop what they were doing to observe me. They stopped shooting pool, throwing darts, amid conversation at the bar. TVs played in the corners set on the same channel of a heavy-set woman bizarrely stripping. “You must be here for a job,” the smiling bartender said warmly.

I should have reconsidered at that very moment. Even Led Zeppelin stopped long enough for me to answer before ripping into another song. “Yes,” I said quietly. Adjusting, “Yes,” stauncher, vastly improved. “Heartbreaker” changed to “Living Loving Maid (She’s Just a Woman).” Very popular songs for the time, I suppose when people wore blue jeans and smoked pot. The heavy woman continued to strip on three grainy TVs. One was delayed so if she did something you liked on the others you could see her doing it again if you looked quick enough. I stood in my tracks, frightened.

“Well, come. Come!” the bartender waved a meaty hairy hand.

He gave me a pen. I filled out a form. He asked me a few questions about my health. “Well,” he said, “we’re going to need you to take a physical.

“Okay,” I said relieved. “When should I come back?”

“No, no, no!” He slapped an old guy on the head that looked like he was sleeping at the bar next to me. A broken peanut shell clung to his skinny face. “Slim, does he look alright to you?” The man raised his head groggily putting on thick gold-framed glasses wrapping the wire earpieces around his small ears. “Careful, son,” the bartender said softly before the drunken man had time to come to his senses, “he may hold your balls a little longer than he needs to, if you know what I mean.” Wink. Wink.

“Shit, Fred. Shit!” The old reptilian looking man with peered at me from behind those glasses. He smiled sleazily. I didn’t trust him. What teeth he had were stained yellow from Lucky Cat cigarettes, an empty pack of which lay open before him.  The way he said, “Let’s go to the back,” made my skin crawl. In the back, he made me squat and cough. Then he cupped my balls as promised. He closed his eyes and smiled and hummed oddly as he held them, feeling them the way a bowler grips a bowling ball. I pulled away and pulled up my pants and went back to the bar feeling as though I had been duped and this was some kind of gay bar. A moose head on the wall appeared to be laughing at me. The men smiled. I eyed the exit before a large man with a green jacket saw me and stood in front of it crossing thick tattooed arms.

The bartender smiled, “Well?” he asked Slim.

“He’s fine. Yes, sir. A good boy, indeed!” He sniffed his skinny hands desirously.

“Good! Goddamnit, Jimmy! Ring the bell!”

A muscular fellow who was shooting pool put down his cue and pulled a rope near the red-felt table. A framed picture of John Wayne hung above the table. A large copper-looking bell which hung from the smoke-filled rafters rang out. It had an eagle on it. Everyone cheered and held up their beers for a brief moment, not so eagerly, as though it were a reflex to the bell. The bartender stood in front of a small stack of paperwork. He gave me a blue pen that clicked with “Property of the U.S. Government” printed on it. “Sign here…and here…and here! Welcome to the U.S. Army!” He shook my hand. Custer was about to get massacred in a painting on the wall behind him. He poured me a shot of Wild Turkey, on the house.

Two months later, I was in Turkey fighting in the Wild Turk War. I was away for a long, long time and that is why, I originally supposed, that Betty started to screw the dope that brought the mail. I could never send her flowers, which she adored, so every letter that I wrote to her began like so:“In lieu of Flowers, Betty Brown…” Those three dots led to passionate verse that I wrote her but it wasn’t really for her. It was for someone I had never known—for someone who was probably dead. I was in Belgium fighting with our French and Chinese allies against the Turks who became a superpower, and who were known as the Wild Turks. They came out of nowhere and were led by a madman named, Alexi Olavstauss, half-Russian, half-Turk, who was mad as a hatter and bent on ruling the world. Olavstrauss had wiped out most of his opponents with the use of a new sort of nuclear weapon that spread along the surface of the Earth without making any sort of mushroom cloud. It wasn’t dropped by plane; rather, it was shot by tank. The Israelis and the Iranians were no longer with us since earthquakes caused what nuclear arsenal they had to detonate before they could launch them at each other…same with Pakistan and India…same with Korea, which had only recently unified after years of war in a treaty with all the civility of an incestuous affair.

 Ho hum.

....

Every man who joined the military was given a new penis. The penis you were given was what they called “long and strong,” a perfect uniformed seven inches and shapely as a large dill pickle. Men were joining just for the penis incentive. Some boasted they took a cut in size because men are an ignorant species who think shit like that really matters. It was made of a rubber-type material that hardened when you bent it. The purpose for the replacement penises was to make the American soldier even more uniform than he was already and to give those with shorter ones incentive to join. God knows what they did with all the old penises but the operation was considered to be a hell of a perk. Standing in line for all of our shots and our penis replacement I began thinking it over and decided I had an unsettling problem with getting a uniformed “perfect” penis. It came in olive drab, chestnut, desert khaki, or classic camouflage, and men stood in line holding color samples in their eager hands pondering the different options. Those penises, by the way, were made in China and on the underside engraved letters declared it. I got my mandatory shots but when it came time to getting in the line for the penis I stealthily ducked out which no one seemed to notice. I said I had to use the restroom to the guy behind me.

“We gave you a new penis,” the commanding colonel with the greatest mustache I have ever seen said proudly on our first day of camp, “long and strong! But what we can’t give you are balls. Men, you will face some terrible fighting unlike anything the United States has ever before seen. The likelihood that you will return is as small as your old penis.” Men looked down at the floor. The military is all about making you feel like a pile of shit then molding the pile of shit they create into something everyone can be proud of. But we are men and this is what we do. We die for country, for freedom. Besides, what else is there to look forward to?”

No one really understood why we were fighting the Turks. If Alexi Olavstrauss wanted to rule all of Europe, what did it matter? We were an ocean apart and the world was drastically becoming less global in the past ten or fifteen years. He had some good ideas after all and seemed like a pretty likeable fellow from what I saw on TV. He didn’t believe in genocide, or nuclear proliferation. He wanted a return to civility, and didn’t want a world predicated upon the buying and selling of oil. He hated China who was our chief ally. The reason we were here, the brighter among us knew, was to pay back the massive debt we owed to them. He despised the whoring of Chinese women and the Turkish Empire was the only region in the world where you couldn’t find anything made in China except for on the black market. There is always a black market. He loved trains and horses and preached that technology went south with the automobile, although, critics lambasted him for using tanks and aircraft to fight his war, and even a nuclear sling-shot bomb. He was a radical environmentalist who had the greatest beard I have ever seen in my life. It was the sort of beard a person could get lost in, swirling in mystical swirls. Like a bushy animal lying in wait on his face, a wonderful living thing, a mythical beast far too fantastic to be real. He wore a Russian fur hat which he bragged was faux fur. He wore a bomber jacket made from the leathered skin of the corrupt Turkish president he ousted in the revolt. Soldiers determined to kill him and end the Wild Turk War dreamed of cutting off his beard and returning home with it, but it always seemed like such a crime to me to hear them speak of it. Something that wonderful should never be defamed. 

We got three days of leave in France before we were sent to the front lines near Belgium. The Chinese provided women for our pleasure, some of whom hung out in camps often wearing camouflage jackets and helmets with miniskirts or just panties and heels smoking cigarettes laughing and joking, soulless and vile. They fucked on demand; all you had to show them was your dog tags. Most soldiers took advantage. If there weren’t girls in camp there was surely a nearby whorehouse in a shelled-out building. I went to a whorehouse with my old buddy, Robot Titanium, from back home. I sat in the lobby reading magazines and the Chinese girl at the front desk asked me repeatedly in remarkable English, if I was interested yet, at least a dozen times. “If you’re homosexual we can arrange for one of our boys…”

“I am not homosexual,” I said sharply.

“Well, if you would look through one of our magazines I am sure you will find someone of your liking…”

“No, I will not. I am married.”

She looked puzzled. Indeed, marriage was an odd condition, an institution near extinction. “Very well. Would you like something to smoke, snort or inject?” she asked passively.

“No, thank you.”

“Tea?”

“No.” The magazine I read was an old Car and Driver from twenty years ago, May, 2011, that had a Mustang featured in it. I fell in love never dreaming that one day I would find a nearly identical car. I switched magazines and read about feminism at the turn of the century from a Cosmopolitan. How to have a volcanic orgasm!; 20 things you should never divulge to your partner about past partners; Cheating 101. It said that women were experimenting in rampant sexual promiscuity to feel empowered. American feminists endorsed it, strippers, and porn actresses; whereas, feminists in Europe opposed using sex for power. My head spun wildly. “How did that work out for you?” I asked satirically.

“Excuse me?” the girl asked. She thought I had sprung interest.

“Nothing. Sorry. The walls of the small whorehouse were paper-thin. In fact, holes were covered with magazine pages taped together, half-naked women, advertisements, blurry words. I could hear Robot working his way into a woman. By an odd coincidence, Led Zeppelin played in the backroom. The girl at the counter danced and hummed along. “People tell me baby. You can’t be satisfied….” Robot was telling jokes I heard a hundred times. Breaking the ice. “….let me tell you baby you ain’t nothing babe but a….”  I accidentally made eye contact with the girl. “….I should have quit you baby, such a long time ago….I wouldn’t be here with all my troubles, down on this killing floor…. Squeeze me baby, till the juice runs down my leg…oh squeeze me baby, till the juice runs down my leg!” Baseline to kill for. Drums pounding sensually in the back, paper walls palpitating. Screaming, moaning, groaning… Then we could hear voices. The girl at the counter kept bobbing her head to the music acting as though she heard nothing or as though what she heard did nothing to her. She was numb the way someone who works at a pet store are numb to the parrots.

“I see you in military!” the pretty voice of a China girl said loudly.

“Yes. Me military!” Robot replied proudly. He had asked for the newest girl they had when he ordered. The girl who spoke the worst English. Actually, the boob asked for “the yellowest girl” they had. You could say anything you wanted to them. Nothing bothered them so long as they were getting paid.

“Oh, so big, so strong!”

“Long and strong!” he called out to which another man in another room doing the same thing let out a macho grunt of comradeship.

I began reading a recent Sports illustrated. Dad was in it dressed in a spandex white one-piece killing rats the size of bears with his javelin. I wanted to tell the girl at the counter that he was my father but I didn’t. No one every believed me, after all I was beige and he was chocolate-brown. I was proud of him, even in pictures.

More Led Zeppelin… “With a purple umbrella and a fifty cent hat…live it, love it. She just a woman!” Robot stumbled out disheveled, tucking in his shirt, smiling like a boob, his hat on sideways. The girl at the counter barely noticed him. She had seen it all before. He put his hand on my shoulder. “Blatz, buddy, you are missing out. I don’t know what you got against pussy. Specially since we can’t get no disease.” He stopped to play air guitar along with Jimmy Page for a moment then we left, never to return.

My military experience lasted for four years. Once a year, I was allowed to come home for a month months, “to fuck the wife and walk the dog,” as they said, and then back to war I went, where absolutely nothing was accomplished except that a lot of people were killed which after a while didn’t matter much to anyone. I could kill someone the same as opening a bottle of beer. My company lieutenant, a younger man than me, twenty, I think, gave me an accommodation that I still wear from time to time on my chest. It is a Blue Eagle and it has the word Superstes above it on the blue and white striped ribbon. It looks impressive. I was not given that award for doing something extremely well, nor for killing more of the enemy than anyone else, nor for saving someone’s miserable life; I was given the award because I lived through four years of shit, through the very thick of it. For some reason, the enemy’s bullets or laser beams didn’t find me. I was never in the right place at the wrong time, or maybe, as three of the four chaplains said to me all of whom died during my four years of service, I was protected by God, as comical a preposition as that may be. I wasn’t so narcissistic to believe I was special. Religion is a hot tub of narcissism and I am proudly a Humanist.

Robot was killed shortly after the whorehouse, blistered by a flame-throwing tank. Ho hum. From there I would lose many more close pals in all sorts of creative ways that if you are religious you must believe that God devised, some tragically comical, but all real doozeys. Sometimes the chaplains would lead us in prayer before were to launch an assault, or before we knew were about to get hit and I could not get over the humor in it. People with their eyes clothes asking God to keep them safe, fuck everyone else! So long as they made it home they would be happy. The best was when they’d say that God was on our side as though he wore flying our flag or wearing our uniform. And the poor dopes actually believe it. It says “agnostic” on my dog tags because I am not so cynical or close-minded that I believe in nothing but I also don’t have my head up my ass and believe in any man-contrived dogma. The odd thing is though I never said a single prayer to save myself, I didn’t die. And I lived through some harrowing shit. The religious ones of every faith were so angry I lived that I believe there was a coordinated effort between the Jews and the Catholics, to assassinate me on behalf of the Father, the Son or the Holy Ghost, or all of the above. They obviously failed. There were only a few of us that lived through the war and there were only a half-dozen Blue Eagles issued. My commanding officers died three times in four years and after a while people started sticking by me like I was some kind of lucky rabbit’s foot.  A wise blind man in a village we passed through told me that Superstes is Latin for survive. He smiled as he rubbed the eagle between his fingers. He was wearing rags and dirty and holding a scraggly dog. I took his word for it.  

Eventually the mighty allied forces won the war and we were all allowed to go home, whoever was left, bloodied and dismembered. Before leaving, the grateful Army gave us all a big Chinese turkey dinner to celebrate the victory over the Turks and even the vegetarians ate it by order of a commanding officer. I ate it somberly thinking of Alexi Olavstrauss, who committed suicide rather than being captured by the Chinese or the Americans. The Russians, allies of the Turks, were obliterated by Chinese forces and the vast expanse of their land became an utter wasteland plagued with child prostitution, gambling, disease, filled with gangs and tribes, warring factions locked in a seemingly perpetual Civil War. Alexi Olavstrauss’ dreams for a better world died with a bullet to his head and the profitable Chinese Empire remained, becoming stronger with the lands they conquered but didn’t want. They quickly learned the value of selling realty.

Ho hum.

I found a letter I wrote to Betty Brown when I was cleaning out her things after her death which went like so…

In lieu of flowers, Betty Brown, I haven’t screwed any China girls, women in the loosest sense of the word, obedient sex slaves. I do nothing at all that could be construed as sexual relations, not even so much as a look, while other soldiers, let me tell you, engage in open orgies in our barracks, with or without women. I hear the military used to be completely heterosexual, well, it isn’t anymore. I spend my nights cleaning my rifle, or buffing my boots, and a few of the others who know of my war record of perpetual safety, think maybe that I am some sort of divine entity…impervious to desire, pure, innocent, and they watch me clean my gun, who I named Luella, after my dear mother. I have the cleanest gun in the United States Armed Forces! They call the women the Chinese give us the only possible name to describe them…

 Fortune cookies…the companies favorite is a gal named Lo Mein.

We both felt so damn sorry for each other at the train station that we thought marrying each other would make us happy and give us some sense of stability in this insane world. Marriage is a nuclear weapon. Certainly, it could be reasonably expected, that I would die. The chances of survival were literally one in 4,000,000 for a four year tour. When I showed up at our doorstep, the welcome mat with the daisies beneath my perfectly polished boots, surprised that she was still there and that our house and everything in it had not been blown away by a tornado, or that she had not been kidnapped by a band of roaming Casanovas, I was wearing the Blue Eagle on my chest. The Blue Eagle of survival! “How’d you get that?” She asked nervously at the door. I knew something was amiss.

“Didn’t die,” I replied. She lived as Bob Brown again, cut her hair off, put some boot black on her upper lip and wore Levi’s and flannels. When she answered the door she was wearing a trucker’s hat that said Cat Trucking which she had bought at the flea market. She spit her tobacco out in the hollies but I couldn’t get past the tears in her eyes.  

I found her diary and read it recently, long after her death and even longer after the Wild Turk War. The mailman was the only fellow that knew she was Betty not Bob. Her secret was safe with him so long as she put out, which she did anytime he asked for it so not to be exposed and left to fend for herself against mindless rabid Casanovas who patrolled neighborhoods routinely cruising slowly in their large trucks, “The Wanderer” blaring obscenely. There were no laws to protect women from them. The Supreme Court ruled that in these times it is visceral for men to rape women with the excuse of being not guilty by mental defect or disease. All of the men who stood trial were found not guilty, eighty eight of them. Rape became as trivial a law to break as littering. I felt so damn sorry for Betty reading her diary. I felt so damn sorry for all women, even the Chinks.