Made in China Chapter 9

            I felt that I had a right to go to the VFW where I had been so unwittingly recruited, duped, and felt up four years earlier, to have a beer. One lousy beer and a few cigarettes. I didn’t wear my uniform or my Blue Eagle, and my car didn’t have license plates or a bumper sticker screaming that I was a combat veteran, so thank me. What a bunch of horseshit. Modesty is a lost grace. Everyone wants something, a pat on the back, a government loan, a blow job. I don’t want anything. At the moment I was deciding if I even wanted to live. Take it back God, you jokester! This life or soul you so intelligently designed in me. I don’t want it. What a fucking miserable gift to give someone anyway. Worse than a fruitcake, a gift certificate for a detestable steakhouse. Maybe I was going to march into the VFW, get drunk, and go around back and blow my head off with the cannon, if only I could figure out how to fire it while putting my head in the right position. That would be the trick. There was a fifty/fifty chance in living and dying that night but I wasn’t going to cry about it. My Blue Eagle was in my pocket because if I decided to commit suicide I was going to be a real wise-ass and pin it on my shirt before I did. I considered it would be easy to stuff the cannon with gunpowder and the ball and then straddle it laying on top with my head hanging over the end looking down the barrel. I might even hump it for a last orgasm. Have my last smoke afterwards. Then I could take off my shoes and socks, or better still, I would have taken them off before I hopped on and it would be up to my ten toes to strike the match and light the fuse. I’m incapable of orgasm with socks on.

My life was up in the air after I returned, after Betty Brown died and I had nothing at all better to do. I wore my hat so I would at least fit in somewhat, so I wasn’t a complete outcast. I figured the VFW was a place to go and share stories and maybe I wanted to tell everyone about that beautiful dancer, Jana, and how the Turks weren’t so bad and that China and our government were the real enemies. Maybe I wanted to argue and fight. I started smoking on the flight home. We were all given Lucky Cat cigarettes which were highly addicting. Smoking was allowed these days. Who cared if they were cancerous? Your certainly weren’t going to live long enough to have the chance of developing lung cancer. “Smoke’em if you got’em,” was the brazen orange-lettered motto beneath the cat with the arrow shot through it on the pack.

Beers were half-off for vets who wore their dog tags outside of their shirt and free for anyone awarded a Purple Heart or better (with a generous limit up to six on both accounts). A Blue Eagle was better than a purple heart; at least, it was rarer. The only thing higher was The Congressional Medal of Honor but no around here received it. Everything is free with one of them and you get unlimited access to the glory hole, which is in the back somewhere. People whisper of it but no one seems to know anything about it. Not only did I live through the thick of the deadliest war in human history for four brutal years, which I would have underlined and bolded if I was so pompous, but I didn’t get a scratch on me which was good for me but which created a lot of suspicion amongst the old coots who were paranoid and skeptical of everything. They knew I was a “Blue Eagle” because it was printed in the newspaper that only old people read along with my picture. It also caused a lot of animosities amongst those who lost loved ones, or body parts, or who were severely maimed in only a few days or hours. They would look at me as though I had a lot of nerve for standing there in front of them, as though I was mocking their pain with my lack of harm, with all my body parts intact and a smile. “A smile?” they thought. It was even worse because psychologically I was fine as well (contemplating suicide is not psychologically abnormal and even with all the diseases and disasters it is the leading cause of death in the modern world, according to a doctor who later committed suicide convinced by his research). Had we lost the war, I was convinced that I would have been tried as a traitor because of my all-in-all good shape. When the bartender heard that I was a POW he gave me free peanuts. Vets with missing limbs, or who were blind or paralyzed, were entitled to unlimited free beers and hot dogs but no one ever ate over seven or drank more than a dozen and there weren’t many of those fellows around anyway.

....

I pulled in to the rain-slicked parking lot and saw Rusty immediately. He spoke to me again like we were old chums, welcomed me home, and asked to see my Blue Eagle. He had been standing there since 1985. The last WWI vet living in the area paid for him to be sculpted by some Japanese sculptor whose name I couldn’t pronounce. It was on a plaque between Rusty’s two steadfast feet like an exposed land mine. I stood there in the rain in front of him as he stood holding the same rifle with attached bayonet, not smiling but not frowning, looking straight ahead at the top of the building behind me as though it were an enemy pillbox— one foot stepping toward me, the other firmly planted in some zinc mud, presumably French. Zinc barbwire and the torso of a fallen comrade lay beside him. Rusty said the war wasn’t over. Sure it was, I argued, not realizing that he had it in him to be so philosophical. It has only begun, he said. You have another mission. I had no idea what he was referring to because I was unaware of the tragic kidnapping of my beloved Zula Zane at that point. You will see, he promised. Go inside, you’re getting wet. He had a strange accent. He sounded like a character in The Great Gatsby movie I had seen in junior high school. So being a submissive little slut of zinc statues I did as Rusty said and went inside. It was plain to see that I was the youngest man there, suicidal, sitting inside the bar listening to loud Rock N’ Roll music, smelling the stink of fifty or sixty blazing Lucky Cat cigarettes, while the TV played a news report saying that my beloved Zula Zane was being held captive by Heathcliff Bernard. Bernard promised to give her away to the lucky winner of Death Race 666. They turned down Led Zeppelin to hear it. Heathcliff Bernard was a pretty popular guy and even had his own brand of beer. He owned the Lucky Cat Cigarette Company and gave them away free to vets. Everyone else paid through the nose to be stinking addicts.

“Why are you doing this?” the TV reporter asked. No Sarah Slip. No tits.

Bernard was a former Unites States President, the sixty-some, which wasn’t as special as it once might have been. He was a former car salesman, so he was a master of spinning anything. He was a fat-old gadfly who could talk the panties off a nun. “Hell, I am doing this out of generosity for my friend Ms. Zane and for her would-be hero. The world is so barren of heroism and heroes. We need a hero!” He said loudly looking directly at the camera. “Hell, Ms. Zane needs a hero! It will be such a romantic chapter in the history of this country! Like John Smith and that Indian bitch...whatsherface.”

“But hundreds, thousands of people will be killed trying to get across the United States. Does that not bother you?” the young reporter asked. He was a British virgin. Bernard smiled like he was getting an erection.

“Ho hum! Hell, people die by the thousands every day, whipped up in humdrum tornados; drown in some goddamn boring tsunami, killed by crazy men, diseases, disasters, boring stuff! Hell, I am giving men the chance to die to save a beautiful woman! If they die, hell, least it’s for something!”

The reporter was being charmed just as Americans were being charmed by the Satanist who said, “hell” way too much. He was only the second president from Arkansas and the first Satanist. “What does Zula Zane think of this? I mean you have shown video of her bound and gagged...”

Bernard laughed. “Hell, women like that sort of thing. Hell, Zula is in love with the idea. She warmed up to it. We had a medical professional put her in an induced coma.” He flicked a remote control and on a TV between he and the reporter Zula was lying on a bed perfectly still with her eyes closed like Sleeping Beauty. “But when Prince Charming comes along and gives her the magic smooch, she will be right as rain. You can see she is attached to a heart monitor and is doing just fine.” Everyone’s eyes were staring at the TV inside of the TV, at Zula’s beautiful face. “Hell, all of her vitals are normal. All her Romeo needs to do is inject her with this serum and she will wake up.” Bernard held a vile of blue stuff in his shaking right hand. He had Parkinson’s. There wasn’t anything anyone could do. A cure was once discovered about a decade ago but some anti-abortion group burnt up the medical lab, pissed off because they used dead babies that weren’t doing anything anyway.

Hell, that’s how Heathcliff Bernard became a Satanist—when the Christians pissed him off. The people who burnt that lab were Christian fundamentalists, not those middle-of-the-road people, or those Sunday Christians, or the sane Christians who don’t take everything so fucking literally. He was in the early stages of Parkinson’s then and was a gnat’s eyelash from the cure when it all went up in smoke. The scientist who discovered the cure was killed in a separate attack by more Christians about the same time his lab burned. He didn’t believe in sharing his Nobel Prize worthy research because he didn’t trust anyone. He was killed while eating at Olive Garden with his lovely girlfriend whose mind he was fucking over a plate of pasta primavera and an endless salad bowl. He was shot twice in the left eye by a gunman named Danny who had never fired a gun before and who wore a silver crucifix outside of his plain white shirt. Danny wanted to go to Heaven and prayed outside the restaurant that he would if he did this thing, as he called it. “Thou shall not kill” was watered down by someone smarter than him who gave him the gun and the time and place. People do that in times of war, too. There’s an Christian asterisk on every commandment. The scientist’s head collapsed in that plate of pasta making it look even worse than what it was; his brains were splattered on some terrible art print on the wall behind him and no one would ever know his name.

The girlfriend, incidentally, who had been mind fucked by her much older and conveniently wealthy scientist boyfriend was brought in by professionals to analyze what she remembered about the cure to Parkinson’s because he had literally just told her how he did it. She couldn’t remember consciously so they hypnotized her and tried to weasel it out of her. No luck. The then ordure hit the fan in 2027 and no one cared about it anymore because so many people were dying of other things. Heathcliff Bernard married the girlfriend and she became first lady of the United States which was no more prestigious than being President. When he realized she was never going to remember the cure, he is rumored to have killed her, cut open her skull and tore apart her brains with his fingers screaming madly, “Hell, it’s in here somewhere! I know it!”

Needless to say I didn’t go around back and straddle the cannon and light the match with my ten toes and blow my head off. Suicide is so unimaginative even when it is creative. I hopped in my Mustang and headed home thinking of how I could possibly win Death Race 666, and Zula Zane. “Good luck!” Rusty said. “You must be wise enough to realize we will never see each other again. Not in this life time anyway. So goodbye is in order.”

“Will I die, Rusty?”

“What do I know?” He said. “I’m made of zinc.”

“Goodbye, Rusty.”

Then I noticed he was covered in bird shit.