Grass Man
The company First Sergeant, as a humiliation, had designed a procedure for removing crabgrass from the company lawn by means of a teaspoon. Thing of it is, Phil discovered, the teaspoon is an excellent utensil for burrowing under the tenacious roots of each Digitaria Ischaemum or Digitaria Sanguinalis. Better still, Phil found the work relaxing, even meditative, except for the leg cramps, so when no officers or noncoms were passing by, he laid almost prone on his side with his head cradled in one hand, as he developed a picking rhythm with the other. Tip of the spoon into the soft, red Georgia clay, a quick, brutal thrust under the plant, flick, once, twice, maybe thrice, and one representative of the many species of flora which man has designated as undesirable flies into the air.
On another in a series of impossibly hot Dixie summer afternoons, the lawn in front of the Company C headquarters, a part of Ft. Gordon’s U.S. Army Signal Center and School to which Phil had been assigned upon his return from a year in South Vietnam, was strewn with Phil’s handiwork. The carcasses of his victims lay randomly wherever they had fallen to the assault of his utensil. He was about to begin an offensive on yet another green underdog, when a shadow cast itself across the site of his latest planned attack.
“The fuck you doing?”
Phil shields his eyes and sees a grinning giant standing with the sun to its back. Phil momentarily considers the possibility that some sort of reverse Jack and the Beanstalk story is unfolding in which the leviathan has climbed down a great stalk of crabgrass to avenge his photosynthetic friends. Such fanciful imagining had become more frequent over the past couple of years during which Phil had become a steady respirator of another plant species that many Vietnam veterans and other rebels looked quite favorably upon, Cannabis Sativa.
“Fuck’s it look like?”
The titan continues to grin, and Phil’s mind switches to the last Batman comic he read. The Joker. The army has enlisted the Joker. The giddy laugh now emitting from the behemoth makes the idea more credible.
“Looks to me like you’ve gotten on the Sarge’s bad side.” Another enormous smile, rows of unblemished porcelain. He can just make out two gleaming blue eyes and a crop of closely cut blond hair. Are there Nordic Goliaths roaming the base? Phil decides the Brobdingnagian’s comment is not meant to deride, so he stands and extends his hand.
“I am the Sarge’s bad side. Private -- E-1 -- Phil Ailill, specializing in plant life destruction.”
Big Boy emits a boisterous laugh that is to become one of the few delights of Phil’s remaining time as a Government Issue Joe.
“Well, you’re doing a hell of a job, there, private. Wanna go rabbit and get a beer? You must be thirsty after all that killing. Name’s Bill. Corporal – E-3 – Bill Nita.”
The giant places one meaty manus on Phil’s left shoulder while grasping his right hand with the other paw. He squeezes all the blood out of Phil’s rotator cuff and fingers at the same time. It is a duel gesture of acceptance, affection and protection to which, second only to the man’s grin, Phil will turn to as refuge many times in the months ahead. If only he wouldn’t clutch with quite so much torque.
“Sarge will have me drawn and quartered. I’m already at the top of his shit list. Let’s head out after formation at 6.”
Phil finds his own reasonableness an annoying anomaly. He prides himself on unbridled recalcitrance ever since the night he was arrested in ‘Nam for curfew violation. When the giant shakes his head in agreement, a surge of adrenalin forces a new assessment from his mouth before his brain can exercise editorial control.
“Fuck ‘em. What’s he gonna do, send me to ‘Nam?”
This bromidic sarcasm had become standard esculent amongst his generation of soldiers. It seemed the perfect coverall for any and every form of planned insubordination. The giant’s smile releases itself, and a grayness passes across his face.
“You been, huh?”
“I’ve been. You?”
“Not yet. Waiting on orders.”
Phil stares hard at his new acquaintance. For a terrifying instant, he sees the giant’s face drained of life, heaped atop a pile of other corpses under a jungle canopy. He’s forced to look away, not soon enough to stifle full communication of his terror to his companion. Again, the reassuring shoulder clasp.
“Hey, don’t worry about it, man. Long as I know I get to come back and attack grass, I’ve got something to live for, right?”
Phil manages one of those theatrical smiles of assurance he’s come to hate, the ones that mean the opposite of their alleged intent.
“I know a guy who lives off base with his wife,” the gargantuan offers. “We can hook a ride with him to one of those swill halls in town. But, really, man, let’s wait till after formation. I don’t want to think that the first time we met I got you jammed up more than you already are.”
ƒ
Phil always took point, with Bill forming the rest of their two-man platoon of din and destruction. Their default roles were simple: Phil started trouble, Bill put an end to it. Even limited by Phil’s 180 pounds of mouth only, as long as he was backed by Bill’s 280 pounds of muscle stacked 6-feet 4-inches high, there were no situations that arose wherein this pairing of irresponsibleness didn’t work well. Phil at least made a cursory attempt at keeping the antagonists to a manageable number, since he was completely without merit during the course of an altercation, other than his ability to goad opponents with a heavy stream of provocative taunts. The heavy bone crushing was always left to Bill. Upon occasion, Phil managed to create chaos even his friend couldn’t handle, usually after Phil’s consumption of impossible amounts of ethanol, which his metabolism could never process quickly enough to keep up with the speed of his bending elbow.
This is one of those nights.
Phil had often wondered if blue laws were so named because they made his alcoholism impossible to practice everyday of the week. His sense of history was like that – Phil-centric. In the world outside Phil’s reality, blue laws were first enacted in the Puritan colonies in the 17th century as a way of enforcing certain moral codes, disallowing commerce on Sundays. In the century to follow, such codes spread throughout the colonies – including Georgia – and were extended to include the sale and consumption of alcoholic beverages. The name actually evolved as a derogatory reference to the starched uprights who followed such codes. Blue laws were adhered to by bluenoses.
Phil liked to keep his nose red, and when Georgia bars closed promptly at midnight each Saturday, he and other dedicated dilettantes and bona fide boozers, mostly his fellow soldiers, headed northeast from the Augusta area for the short jaunt to the South Carolina state line. A caravan of careening cars of every vintage could be seen late every Saturday raising dust along Jefferson Davis Memorial Highway, like an invader’s convoy, crossing the Savannah River for the more libertine, seedy environs of western South Caroline. Phil and Bill were often at the head of this profligate motorcade, already wild-eyed and beyond boistous, ready to commence their weekly two state crime spree. Their favorite haunt, aptly named Pandora’s Box, had nothing to do with Greek mythology and everything to do with deranged debauchery.
As its name suggested, Pandora’s Box exuded a crotch-like aroma that seemed the perfect complement to the high-pitched screeching spewing from an array of speakers placed non-strategically around the barroom. Had the decibel levels been less than that required to ensure permanent damage to the auricular nerves, the cacophony might have been identifiable loosely as music. There was no hearing of this maelstrom; it was felt, mostly as a vibratory pain starting in the head and moving throughout the body. While such sensory pandemonium made conversation impossible, combined with the bar’s low-light motif, it was the perfect environment for being subsumed into a total loss of self. The paucity of light also helped disguise the layers of accumulated filth that would reveal the true griminess of the place in the full light of day. A visitor could seek temporary refuge from this afferent bombardment by slipping into the restroom, assaulted there by the overarching odor of urine and vomit.
It was Phil’s favorite place on the planet.
A refuge is often thought of as a place where sanctuary is possible in a contemplative atmosphere where stress is reduced and damaged nerves can heal. A solo flute echoing through the burial chambers of the Great Pyramid of Giza; men intoning Gregorian chant in a secluded monastery; shafts of soft sunlight permeating a garden, the air filled with the gentle tremolo of birds. For Phil, the opposite was true. Vietnam had transformed him into an adrenalin junkie. Incomprehensible noise, explosions, acceleration and sudden impacts were the tissue that tied him to existence. Were his physical being capable of surviving, he would have been most at home as the test subject at an annual convention of anarchists demonstrating the effects of their latest guerilla tactics on the human body, sitting along the rim of Hawaii’s Halema‘uma‘u crater awaiting a pyroclastic flow, or stuffed into a barrel about to enter the hydraulics of Niagara Falls. On this, and every Saturday night, due to the restrictive terms of his contract with the US Army, Pandora’s Box would have to do.
The only disruption, albeit a consistent one, to Phil’s weekly indulgence in persistent over-stimulation was his lack of the coin of the realm. A private’s salary was a stingy stipend, and Phil often found himself coming up short just when he felt his sinews tightening in a way that assured him he was still alive. Bill was generous enough to augment Phil’s bottomless thirst for alcohol when he could, but his corporal’s salary often, too, gave out at critical moment’s in the midst of Phil’s voracity. The crucial factor was the positioning of a given Saturday’s debauch in relation to payday, which came, sadly, but once a month. The further the two adventurers got from seeing the rumpled face of the company paymaster, the more likely they were to have only shrugging shoulders as a response to a bartender’s extended open palm. The last Saturday of the month was the worst, for payday was at least a tantalizing, excruciating stretch into the following Monday, if not longer.
This is the last Saturday of the month.
Bill looked across the table at Phil’s face with the anticipation of a child about to witness the detonation of his first M-80. He felt a mixture of dread and wonder as he watched the subterranean currents within his friend slowly burble towards the surface. They had consumed the last beer either could afford, and Bill knew they could equally ill-afford to hang out longer at the Box, or Phil’s unpredictability would soon turn him mustang. It would be hooves and horseshit aplenty before the body count could even begin. Bill inhaled deeply in preparation for his attempt to shout above the din.
“Sget outta here, man!”
Phil raised his head and turned it to one side. His chest swelled, as if trying to expel overly long compressed quantities of bile.
“Fuck this place! Fuck it!”
Phil propelled himself from his chair like he might be expecting to gain altitude, perhaps wishing to jettison himself from the room over the bobbing heads of the assemblage. Without warning, he veered to that side of the room closest to the tiny kitchen where the Box produced varying forms of grease saturated dishes customers used as part of their prolonged attempts at suicide by toxic consumption. Bill sensed imminent danger, but was blocked from Phil by a phalanx of party goers. He stretched a long arm in Phil’s direction, able only to grasp air. Phil was stealthily snaking his way to the small slit that connected the kitchen with the bar, a tiny shelf with heating lamps where the one nonplussed waitress could retrieve victuals for selected members of the gyrating throng who packed the joint. At the moment, two orders of burgers with fries were awaiting her servile ministrations. Bill could make out Phil’s expression of delighted lunacy as he reached for the switch that controlled the heating lamps. With a quick flick of a finger, Phil flipped off the lights.
Survivors of car accidents or other near death experiences universally tell of compressed time as the defining characteristic of their flirtation with the Angel of Death. This slow motion effect now saturated Bill’ perception, forever to stamp his memory of the minutes to follow as if a lifetime had been squeezed into the space of a sub-atomic particle. The other component of observation he noticed was a sense of absolute disembodiment. He had no legs to move with, nor arms with which to push. He could no longer hear the raucousness of the room. His breathing had stopped, for there was no awareness of “body,” so there were no lungs. The only window to consciousness was vision, and it had widened to include almost everything peripheral. To complete the surreality, only two people in the room were in motion – Phil and his newly emerged pursuer.
Phil was two feet beyond the spot where the light switch protruded from the wall. As he attempted to gain traction and speed for the front door of the Box, a bouncer had appeared, apparently from a parallel dimension where he laid in wait for such occurrences, and was now within striking distance of the unsuspecting Phil. Bill watched with impotent horror as the bouncer’s arm came up and swung in a perfect arc across the top of Phil’s scull. It could have been nothing more than a rebuking slap to the apex of Phil’s cranium, had not the bouncer’s arm extended into a thick, 2-foot long wooden truncheon. There was a loud crack, and a spurt of bright red hematic fluid flew up from the middle of Phil’s pate. Phil’s impish countenance was as suddenly replaced with a look of surprise and dysphoria.
As quickly as the time/space continuum had congealed into moments of agonizing listlessness, it now expanded into a frenzy of seismic activity. Those closest to the action screamed and began to move away in unison, a field of human wheat blowing in a summer’s breeze. The bashing bouncer was joined by another steroidal creature, each man roughly lifting Phil’s limp carcass off the barroom floor, hauling him like a combat casualty from the field of battle. The tips of Phil’s shoes carved two crevasses of cleanliness across the grimy floor as he was dragged away, all three men disappearing through a nearby door that Bill had never noticed, till now. It was one of those portals intended to remain undetectable until its dark purpose was required, and Bill knew instinctively what awaited his wounded comrade on its other side.
A third brute had appeared to guard the door, but Bill shoved him aside, giving the ogre an opportunity to asses his chances. One look at Bill’ raised hams, and the troll backed into the protective anonymity of the crowd. Bill kicked the door open, and froze in place. The pistol that had been rammed inside Phil’s mouth swung towards the commotion at the door and pointed itself directly at Bill’s face. He wondered if Ft. Gordon had enough neurosurgeons on standby to work simultaneously on two recently shattered heads. The thought of lying next to Phil as they both had dead brain tissue removed was oddly soothing.
“You come in here looking for trouble, motherfucker, and you found it!”
The gorilla with the gun was holding Phil in a chair with his other hand. Phil didn’t look much like Phil, his face and shirt soaked in the red juice of life. Somehow, he managed a tiny smile. Bill slowly raised his arms into the air.
“No, man, no! We’re cool here, man. I just came in to take my friend home, that’s all man. We cool…we cool. All right? I know he’s a stupid motherfucker, and he shouldn’t of turned your light off, but you got him good, man. He’s learned his lesson, right Phil? You learned your lesson, right man, right?”
Bill knew the longer he talked, the less likely a round was going to get squeezed down the barrel of that pistol.
“Yeah, Bill, sure, I learned my lesson. Never fuck with assholes.”
When Phil grinned, his teeth were obscured by accumulated crimson. He looked like a battered boxer at the end of 10 rounds of mismatch. Bill buried his face in his hands, refusing to take in what was to follow. Pistol packer slowly lowered the gun, turned to Phil, and let out a small chuckle. The pistol smashed across Phil’s face, and the sound of his nose cartilage shattering and two teeth being torn from their lodgings could probably be heard outside the room.
“Your friend here’s got a mighty big mouth.”
Pistol packer was addressing Bill, as one of his sycophants handed him a wash rag to clean his hands of Phil’s coagulate. Mercifully, Bill noted, the pistol was exchanged for the towel.
“Got a big nose, too, that he likes sticking in places it don’t belong. But I think with the improvements I’ve made, he ain’t goona be using his big mouth…or his big nose…for a long time.”
Penitentiary humor. The owner or manager or whatever he was, as well as his four lieutenants, had enough scars and tattoos in evidence to make it obvious that they had done time in places where this sort of bravura was considered hilarious. They cackled at the boss’s vapid idea of a witty one-liner. Phil was going in and out of consciousness. Bill slowly lowered his arms.
“Get this monkey outta here,” the gorilla said. “Don’t never bring him back. I see you two in here again, you’re gonna wind up at the bottom of the Savannah.”
“Yeah, sure, no problem.” Bill cautiously made his way to the bleeding heap that was his friend. Phil felt himself dropping into the void.
Leaving Pandora’s Box was cinematic. The Red Sea mob parted for Bill’s Moses, as he carried the unconscious Phil across the room. It seemed as though Phil’s blood covered the interior of the entire bar. Certainly it oozed with gusto onto Bill, as he cradled his friend’s unrecognizable head, and Phil was already awash from stem to stern in the stuff. Bill walked slowly to the door, trying to remember that household tip regarding the removal of blood stains. The results of this carnage would require an industrial strength application of whatever it was. A clothes burning bond fire would probably be best.
ƒ
Tiny flashes of white light, while the world spins by at immeasurable speed. Blackness and lacuna. More lights, these of varying color and symmetry.
“Just lie still, little brother. We’re gonna get you fixed up.” Bill’s voice echoes from several miles distance.
No visions now, only pain. The sensation of rising gorge, a taste of acidic, effulgent emetic.
“Goddamn it, not in the fucking car!” Why does Bill’s voice smell like vomit?
Tires digging to a gravely stop. Voices in some sort of contest, one trying to layer itself atop the other. Hands everywhere, on his legs, under his arms and neck. The merciful sensory deprivation, once again, of falling into the depths of a well.
The light is white and bright. This must be the tunnel, comes the thought. Uncle Bob is here to welcome me to the Other Side! This dream is brought into question by Uncle Bob’s stern rebuke.
“Yer a fuckin mess, private. A disgrace to the uniform. What happened?”
Don’t they know everything here already? And why is he bringing up that old canard about official clothing having some sort of significance? Are they as stupid up here as they are down there? Uncle Bob comes into focus. He’s wearing a white coat, like a good angel should, but sprouting from the top is a military shirt with captain’s bars. Oh, dear God Almighty Father, I’ve been sent to Army heaven, Phil thinks, as his panic rises. Maybe that’s what happens when you die while still in the ranks. Remanded to a place of the eternal stint, no discharge allowed because you didn’t finish your contract on terra firma.
“Like I said, sir, he fell.”
They must have shot them both. How else could he hear Bill’s voice?
“Kind of a magic fall. Like that bullet that took Kennedy out.” Uncle Bob has developed a wry sense of the absurd since his demise.
Phil tries to speak, and the neuralgia of missing teeth and a swollen proboscis causes a spasm of nausea. These compete with the agony at the apex of his head. “I still have a body, I’m still alive, this isn’t Uncle Bob, I am in deep ship,” all dawn at once.
“Fell on concrete, sir. Did kind of a swan dive.”
The “s” words have a little whistle to them. He has been transformed into a wounded bulbul. He feels a tenderness and endearment for himself, another innocent avian blasted from the sky. Uncle Bob seems unmoved by these sentiments, staring back with a mask of icy unconcern.
“If I get a police report, or a civilian complaint, that contradicts your account…gentlemen…” – his gaze draws Bill into the indictment – “…I will be speaking with your commanding officer. “
He makes a few more pen marks on Phil’s chart for dramatic punctuation.
“Till then, I’ve sown you up, Private Ailill, so you and your buddy can get the hell outta here.”
Why do they always have to put so much emphasis on the word “private?” I know I’m at the bottom of the pecking order, low man on the totem pole, blah, blah, Phil thinks. Always got to rub it in, though. It they carried a salt shaker, they could apply some sodium for maximum effect.
ƒ
If there was a place on Phil’s head that didn’t throb with excruciation, he couldn’t find it. It would be at least a week before the base dentist could see him. There was little point in resisting the inevitable; whenever he opened his mouth, he looked like one of those local inbred crackers who lose their teeth as part of their daily non-hygiene program. Besides, the broken nose had turned into a spectacular rainbow of colors and had swollen to softball dimensions, and most people’s eyes grew wide with amazement as they were inexorably drawn to the sight of this grotesque vision. His nose resembled more a gigantic pustule or tumor than a device designed for air intake. When Phil rolled over in his sleep and this bulbous growth came into contact with the pillow, the resulting sensations were an immediate entrée into his own private planetarium. Stars exploded across his brain, and the boys in the barracks had become tempted to tape his mouth shut in order to spare themselves his squeals of nocturnal torment. Pity prevailed, for everyone knew that such a strategy would result in Phil’s asphyxiation. Phil had become a mouth breather, as there was no possibility that atmosphere could pass through the tangle of mangled tissue once identifiable as nostrils.
That was the good news.
The ledger of Phil’s military misery had expanded exponentially since that memorable night in the womb of Pandora’s Box. No official complaints had been filed, but an informal stream of grandiose tales had made their way across the vast expanse of Ft. Gordon. Each assumed a scope of legendary proportions. By the time the story filtered back to company headquarters, Phil and Bill’s misadventure has assumed the trappings of an epic poem on the scale of Beowulf. To the enlisted men, Phil was a majestic hero. To the brass, he had assumed a mantel of malevolence normally reserved for a classic antagonist, not unlike Beelzebub, the prince of demons himself.
Phil was therefore surprised only by the timing of his excoriation by the company commander. Usually the captain from Alabama’s backwoods was precise and surgical when administering humiliations to the young malcontent. Public floggings were his favorite, and Phil had lived through countless company formations during which he was the primary recipient of Captain Baker’s fulminations, always delivered within millimeters of Phil’s countenance. This time, apparently, the captain simply could not contain himself and wait for a communal execution. Upon hearing the rumors behind the news while sipping suds at the base NCO club, he underwent an instant permutation, leaving his humanity behind to emerge as unmodulated electricity. Such shapeshifting was made possible by the white hot loathing that he had developed over the last few months, ever since the insubordinate Private Ailill had emerged as the bane of his army career.
On a moonless night less than a week after the Incident, as Phil euphemistically referred to it, Phil had one again thrown himself into the mercy of his bunk. Moments after finally dropping to sleep amidst his latest round of agony, Phil felt the foot of his bed rise in seeming defiance of gravity. Before having time to adjust to this defiance of physics, his body became a projectile, catapulted like a medieval missile from a torsion-powered ballista. He landed, of all unpleasant places, flat on his face. Bleeding anew, he rolled over to find the distorted mask of the captain, replete with sour beer breath, inches from the inflamed tissue of his muzzle.
“Fell, did ya? Right into a good pistol whippin’, swat I hear!”
Phil became mesmerized by the small dollops of spittle that darted his way from the captain’s flapping beak. He recalled those Asian raptors he had seen photos of in National Geographic, and imagined that at any moment, the captain’s longing to devour him would overcome the man turned bird of prey, and he would begin gnawing at the center of his face. He remembered the article that went with the NG photos, about the “sky burial” of Tibetan Buddhists who dismembered their dead before giving the pieces over to the local buzzards on a mountain top. The thought of being digested by the redneck perched above him sent another spasm of wretchedness through Phil’s being. These meanders were abruptly interrupted as the captain clenched a fistful of Phil’s t-shirt, and lifted him to a standing position. It made Phil feel like a tissue puppet in the hands of a deranged four year old.
“Yew and yer stupid friend are on report! Article 15’s for the two of yew. “
Startled that there was enough space left between them to sustain the maneuver, Phil recoiled as the captain leaned in closer. Had Phil blinked, his lashes would have touched his commander’s grimacing visage.
“Guess yew know what that means, hey, shit fer brains?”
ƒ
Phil looks up from his tool, wipes away streams of sweat with his sleeve, and stares at Bill, who is pretending deep engrossment in his work to avoid having to speak to his companion.
“Hey, I already told you. I am fucking sorry, okay? What more do you want from me, man?”
Bill continued to stare icily at the ground beneath his fingers.
“Look at it this way, pal; you didn’t have to wait till you got back to learn this new skill, one that will serve you well when you get out and must become a productive membrane of society.”
Despite his effort to retain a stoical expression, Bill’s face begins to soften. Phil is certain he notices the beginnings of a smile at each end of his friend’s pursed lips. Phil reaches over and lightly punches Bill in the upper arm, a gesture he has learned never to overdue, unless he wants a crippling blow in return.
“You’re a grass man now, pal. Yeah, a real class…grass man…”
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