An American Hero Snatched Into Dishonor’s Mouth

            The few visitors unlucky enough to stumble into the Meisel residence usually remark on the austerity of its rooms. There is not a cushioned item of furniture to be found, save Grandma’s hospital bed, right smack dab in the living room (her bedroom has since been usurped in a seizure of power by the grandson). Before succumbing to the late stages of Alzheimer’s, Grandma Meisel used to give this place a woman’s touch. Now, with Mama getting her hands greasy overseas, working a backbreaking night shift on an oil rig out on the Caspian, Roy heads this household, and he does so with an iron fist.

            Roy tries to manage as best he can. He is currently on a losing streak, but likes to rub his hands together in dark rooms at scary hours of the night and remind himself that all is well and that success is on its way, like an asteroid in the cosmic blackness hurtling toward him.

           

            Roy is up late again. His grandmother yelled at him from her hospital bed for not straightening up better in the living room. He got mad and yelled back, got right up in her face and called her a drain on his creativity and an overall bitch. He watched her face crumple up in fear and he even told her that he wasn’t going to change any of her diapers for the next three days. That’s when she got sad and silent and just looked blankly ahead.

He is sitting Indian style on his bed, a nearly empty jar of peanut butter and a spoon with residual muck resting on his lap. Before him on the bed is an old paper leaflet, yellowed with age. He unfolds it grinning and runs his eyes over its names and numbers. The ink has blurred with the years, the handwriting horrendous, but he thinks he can still manage to make out the names and numbers that count. He whispers something inaudible to himself about serendipity. He mispronounces the word and adds an extra syllable to it, but understands the basic idea and applies that idea to this situation. He dabs at the sweat above his brow with his thumb and takes a sip of beer. He rinses his salty mouth and swallows.

            Roy finally picks up the phone. His face assumes a taut, earnest quality, like an honest man about to go to work for his family, and he begins dialing, pressing his large fingers into the firm gray squares of the phone. Sometimes, dialing numbers at late hours, he imagines that each button he presses is launching a missile in some quiet and distant silo.  Roy glances over at the alarm clock broadcasting the late hour in bloodshot red. 3:12. It’s late as shit, and that’s what makes this even more beautiful. He flips on the recorder so that this call can be immortalized. Posterity needs this kind of brilliance.

            The phone rings three times before some sleepyhead answers it.

            “Hello,” says the old man weakly. Roy recognizes Mr. Maplethorpe right away, the same ass that always used to ask who was calling when he needed to speak to Lisa.

            “Good evening, Mr. Maplethorpe.”

            The man on the other line pauses, probably to rub his eyes and realize how absurdly late it is, and then offers Roy a feeble “good morning.”

            “I have bad tidings,” says Roy, speaking now through a T-shirt, a kind of condom for his voice.

            “What do you mean?”

            “Well, sir, I don’t know how to phrase this. I am not all that great at stuff like this.”

“What is it?”

“Well, Mr. Maplethorpe, there’s been an accident tonight. An awfully bad accident.”

            This is the beautiful part. Roy curses himself the next day for being too drunk to remember this moment clearly. He hears the man gasp at the other end of the line. It is as if his lungs have collapsed and that all the air has been sucked out of him. Roy turns his head from the receiver so that the man cannot perceive his laughter.

            “What do you mean?”

            Roy pauses a moment to put another spoonful of peanut butter into his mouth. Because this peanut butter is crunchy and won’t let itself go down without a chew, stubborn junk that it is, he has to take extra long to resume the evil.

            “Are you still there?” he asks, voice high with false concern.

            What follows is a wailing that for Roy is too funny to listen to. He puts his face in the couch cushion and lets out a string of giddy Ha Ha’s. It is so funny that he almost feels horny. He then hangs up the phone and walks over to the refrigerator to rescue another beer from the cold.

            It is the anniversary of Reagan’s death. The phone call has helped Roy cope. The Maplethorpes are Democrats. 

           

            Roy has just returned from a Veterans’ Celebration, about a five minute walk from home. He attends these meetings with a mixture of patriotic and entrepreneurial zeal. But this is the hard part. He sits on the sofa and puts his face into his hands, bites his bottom lip so hard that it almost bleeds. He sits in the silence, waiting for the fear to spike through him. Then it comes, one by one.  He tries to cover his ears but it is no use. In the distance, too close to his home, the shots begin to ring out. They keep coming, methodical sons of bitches, nastier than any firecracker on New Year’s Eve. He begins gnawing on his palms, tasting the sweat and the skin and the dirt. The shots crackle and fade, one after another. He crunches himself up, just like a frightened doodle bug balls himself up into his carapace when pesky kids pick at him. Each shot seems to whiz past his ears and send a sparkling shiver through his being. He responds to each like a fish being prodded in the water by a cane pole.

Even before this shooting bullshit, this particular afternoon had sucked.  The heat was intense, a big time skin and eye irritant. There is little doubt that its rays inspired at least a few of the skin cells of those present to convert to carcinogenic religions. On days like this, Roy calls the sun a nasty bitch (his words exactly). That never really helps, and it certainly didn’t today. But the sun and all of the heat that it rains down on Roy are only a false excuse. As sexually promiscuous as the sun might be, it was not the real reason for Roy’s premature departure from the ceremony. He did not leave early because he lacked respect for the Veterans. On the contrary, he would polish their combat boots with his tongue if they pointed their fingers and commanded him to. He did not leave because he is ashamed of crying in public. He will gladly shed his tears copiously if he is doing so in the name of the slain. Roy’s real reason for leaving the Veterans’ celebration is far more insidiously psychological. It involves something innate and basically insurmountable. He has waged war on it all his life and has failed as badly as America did in ‘Nam.

There is a medical term, a scary-sounding word with a Greek root to describe Roy’s phobia. Roy doesn’t know it though, and since you don’t even have this condition, why should you either?

For whatever reason, the sound of a gun fired in his proximity brings Roy to tears. These tears burn through the sandpaper skin on his unshaven face. That’s why Roy feels like a failed man sometimes, why he often spreads his arms like a vulture’s wings and beckons for death to come to him in the blackness of night.

When dreams are deferred, souls are cracked in half like frozen glass. When psychological bullshit, insidious genetic predisposition and corrosive societal pressure made Roy’s dream of living and dying heroically for Uncle Sam something unattainable, Roy lost touch with the world. He began to hate his fellow man, particularly those lucky enough to carry and shoot firearms. He started feeling low, even when the sun flared in the sky like a nuclear explosion. He only believes in God because he wants America blessed. He has little hope for metaphysical satisfaction after he has shriveled up in a grave.

Roy was a boy who babbled semper fi in his crib. He clenched his fists and hurled plastic grenades at those that disrespected liberty on the television.  He spent his childhood with imaginary bazookas rolling around and getting muddy in the backyard, imagining himself in the film Red Dawn, firing his arms at Soviet jerks with missile launchers, wiping out all their evil and making loud explosion sounds with his mouth and later wailing in pain on their behalf as they wiggled and writhed in pools of blood that was, appropriately enough, red.

And then came the shocking revelation of his weakness. In his adulthood, Roy has not entirely abandoned hope of recovery. To achieve better insight into his condition, he has counted off large bills to a psychotherapist, a fragile man from Poland named Tadeusz. The therapy sessions were brutal for Roy, sickly groveling before a smug, cigarette smoking and turtlenecked intellectual from a decadent continent. Once, Roy was lying on the couch with a blue headache mask over his face, talking about how he pooped his pants once at the sound of a car backfiring. Upon hearing this, Tadeusz just  kept rocking in his chair lightly to the Chopin, patting his long, thin hands on his pencil thighs, and would finally wipe his hand over his mouth and tell Roy to have more sex.  

           

            School is over with for the day for Nicky, Roy’s kid sister. She is in the living room, relaxing in ways that she loves to relax in, sitting Indian style before a television screen that flickers ebulliently. The internet ain’t yet part of her life, but the tube is, and this is meaningful. The after-school special is on, and it is on loud. Grandma is there too, snoring loudly in her hospital bed, diaper soggy with three consecutive unnoticed urinary releases. Nicky sometimes muffles these snores by taking a cushion from the sofa and putting it over Grandma’s face. This is not about killing a sick and burdensome old lady so that the hymen on her will can be cracked and the coffers of the heirs can be filled. It is about noise reduction, which is to say that the only thing really being suffocated is noise. 

Before the pretty pig-tailed girl is a gift from a brother who has trouble giving. It is a book, and not exactly any old run-of-the mill book with letters that surge crudely out and drip on its jacket. It does not recount the adventures of sorcerer boys and make the awestruck  masses slap their knees and thank Britannia for its humor.  It is, one could say, a book of far greater educational value, intended for the high of brow, the kind of person who puts their hand tight over their heart when they hear the “Star Spangled Banner.” The title reads 250 Covert Chinese Characters: How to Write Them and What They Really Mean. The book, authored by an arms dealer living on an island in the South Pacific, is an introduction to the ‘language of hell,’ a kind of primer for code-breakers and lovers of freedom. Rather than introducing the beginner to the essential vocabulary, to the ancient and venerable characters, such as ‘food,’ ‘good,’ ‘happy,’ and ‘coitus,’ this book is geared towards those that regard China with nothing but suspicion and malice. The characters here are said to be used in Chinese nuclear submarine codes, and this book, one of only six known copies in existence, is rumored to be highly classified information. Roy is himself no bibliophile, has a remarkable mistrust for the written word. Yet when he came across this gem one night on an online bazaar, Nicky’s ninth birthday present was good to go.

Roy comes into the room with his hands in his pockets. Two dimes and a good luck silver dollar jingle merrily within. He is wearing a camouflage T-shirt, two sizes too small to exaggerate the size of his pecs. It is the same shirt he was wearing yesterday for the Veterans’ celebration and for the last two weeks for that matter. His is not as well shaven as a soldier should be, and there is a dollop of toothpaste smeared into his thick red mustache. Despite this, his face is tight and grave.

“What’s going down?” he asks, flaring his nostrils in a sinus-inspired snort. No cocaine involved.

Nicky kind of raises her head up and shoots a suspicious look at her older brother.

“Just learnin’ a little Chinese. Just following orders.”

“Good girl. I like what I see.” He says this gesturing to the stick men lined on the paper. The characters, in actuality fabricated entirely by the author, are said to be the official Chinese characters for the phrases “capitalist scumbag” and “Kill Sam!” The author urges the reader to seek them out and underline them in the China News Daily, and to load another bullet into a pistol each time this is done.

Roy squats and runs his oily index finger across the page.

“What does this one here mean?” he asks smiling. His teeth are crooked and his bank account is not copious enough to crown the rotten of their bunch. Braces are for the weak anyway, he would say. Thomas Jefferson lost his teeth at forty.

Nicky looks up from her calligraphy-stained paper and arches the thin smudges of blond over her eyes. She has not yet mastered the art of lying.

“I don’t know what they mean,” she says ruefully. “What does it look like to you?”

Roy bites his lip and looks darkly at the figure, fixing his gaze on it. He bounces on his knees as he squats and runs his eyes up and down, from character to ceiling. After a moment of contemplation, his head begins to hurt and he repositions the paper upside down. This done, the meaning of this character, undeniably a pictogram, shoots into his head like a stray bullet. Roy has the tendency to view desultory doodlings as labia, and that is exactly what he sees here. Vulgar it is indeed! Two large, grotesquely large labia, joined at the edges and opening in the middle. It is too obvious to conceal,  but he does not want his baby sister thinking about the body and its dirtier sides. Sex is only as good as the Americans it begets. Motherhood and pregnancy can wait until after the war on terror is over, after all of the world’s evil and communist have been smoked out thermonuclearly.

“It looks like crud. Looks evil,” he says flatly.  

“Uh huh.”

“Know the number of the beast,” he says, snapping his finger and aiming it at his sister like a pistol.

Grandma rises briefly from her slumber, removes the boulder-like couch cushion that has been pressing against her wrinkled and frail face. With a grimace on her worn face, she props herself up and gazes blankly at Roy.

“Have you seen Pepe?” she asks weakly, hardly audible with the television booming out a commercial.

Roy casts a nasty look in Grandma’s direction. Why can’t the lady just sleep and stop asking question, mend her friggin’ wounds already like a good soldier.  

“Pepe is fucking dead, Grandma. Go back to bed. This is sleeping time.” It is around three-thirty in the afternoon.

When she receives this news, old news of a dog that in truth was run over by a dog-hater on a three-wheeler some seven years ago, her face kind of crumples up. The wrinkles dig deeper into her forehead, like furrows in a riverbed after a long drought. She rubs her sharp thumb into her right temple and feels confusion wash over her being. Before she begins to cry, she forgets why she is sad.

Roy would not go to the bowling alley if it weren’t the place where cash is made. His only bowling experience dates back to a few unhappy rounds in sixth grade P.E. He  hates everything about the place, the communist uniformity of the pins, the shiny, slippery blackness of the balls, the dorky shoes, the Vaseline all over the floors. But what really undermines Roy’s happiness are the sounds. When the rolling black mass collides with the chalky white and sends the cones flying about in all directions, Roy has been known to put his hands over his ears and drop to the floor cursing, like the crazed men in Vietnam foxholes being bombarded with mortar fire. The few assholes who know about Roy’s real fears, those that he likes to call friends, sometimes take cool sips of their Milwaukee piss and howl “Incoooooming!!” just as the rolling and heavy black is about to collide with the rows of hard dental white. They high five as Roy drops to the ground and assumes the fetal position, slap each other on the back for being dicks.

Roy and the clients meet and greet and take a seat in the corner.

“I have an order coming in tomorrow,” says Roy with an easy voice, sipping some non-alcoholic beer.

The customers, militia men who scorn ‘civilized’ life, care not for words or numbers, smile back at their man.

“What ‘ya got for us, Roy Boy?”

Roy hates when they call him this, fears that it sounds intensely homosexual, probably the title of some San Fran skin flick. He tightens his eyes and takes a sip of one of their beers.

“The goods stuff is good to go, amigos,” says Roy proudly. “And its beauty is for the taking. I have things that you will like. Things that will make you smile. Uzis. Anti-tank. Flamethrowers from WW Dos. Gas masks taken off of dead Taliban.”

One of the men leans back and narrows his eyes. Were smoking allowed in the alley, he would light a cig and blow smoke in Roy’s direction. Underneath the flimsy plastic table around which they are gathered, he places his right foot, tightly packed in a black leather combat boot, over Roy’s, vulnerable in a brown and white bowling shoe. He begins to press and play a little footsie, not because he’s gay but because he wants to know what kind of man he is dealing with. He smiles as Roy’s face loses its relaxed quality, appreciates the pain he sees in it, pain surging to the brain.  

Roy tries to smile but feels like his foot is about to explode under the weight of the combat boot pressing onto it. He kicks himself free and nearly overturns the table in the process. Beer bottles shake dangerously. He is Magic Roy, the man with the good goods, the guy in the camouflage who unpacks truckloads of beautiful and shiny things that kill copiously.

One of the potential customers, a stout man with a baseball cap of a trucking company and a plastic net in the back covering what is left of his oily gray hair, stands up in indignation.

“Well, I don’t see how we can do business here. I have a large wallet, Roy. I love our country more than you know.”

“I ain’t doubting it.”

“And you see where I’m coming from? I want to protect Lady Liberty from all the fucking extremists. They’re out there, looking up her skirt.”

Roy sips their beer again and nods, leaning back on his chair. The footsie play has subsided.  In the distance, a bowling ball crashes into another row of pins. He starts feeling scared but then remembers that the deal can be clinched with the right response.

Twenty minutes later, he is around two thousand dollars richer. Thirteen of these new and crisp dollars are invested in a twenty-four pack of one of Milwaukee’s butter-colored brews. Twenty-five cents are popped into an ailing Ms. Pac-Man game at the gas station. Roy ignores the Taiwanese store owner’s request not to open up the cans right there in the store. He sips reverently from his can, sets it on the base of the arcade game, and focuses all of his mental energy on escaping death on the screen. Roy’s vessel of hope is eaten summarily and ugly sounds are made by the machine. Roy is tempted to spit out his beer all over the machine, like a mad warrior from Germania, but he remembers that honor befits the fallen soldier and that it is four in the AM, just about time to make some more prank calls to strangers.

Roy is not concerned with comfort. No chairs in this house invite guests to sink into them and feel good. All furniture is made of wood that he himself acquired in his business dealings. The sofa in this house rivals any medieval church pew in the trauma it inflicts on the lower back.

What matters to Roy is putting the two most important women in his life through the school of hard knocks. One of these women is eighty-four; the other is nine. One has lost large parts of her mind to Alzheimer’s. The other is learning about the trajectories of North Korean missiles and can name forty-eight of the top fifty most wanted terrorists without batting an eye or thinking, even for an instant, about pink fairy-tale ponies.

            The living room is about overcoming the fear of death. The unlucky few that make it into this house and see Grandma rolling around on her hospital bed usually bite their lip and bite hard to keep all the words of astonishment from flying out of their mouths like wild-faced bats out of a cave. Roy loves watching people react extremely to Grandma. Three women, sure lays, as good as the gold in their purses that he put there, put their hands over their faces and in their drunken state made sounds that remind anthropologists of our relation to the howler monkey.

            Over Grandma’s hospital bed, slightly singed pencil caricatures of Bin Laden and various Iranian rogues and mullahs hang. Foreheads of this gallery of evil have been punctured by what Roy hopes will be taken for bullet holes. His friggin’ phobia made shooting up the pics with actual guns impossible, and he even pleaded with Sergey, his favorite Ukrainian arms supplier, to perform this puncturing for him, but Sergey held out his palm and laughed into Roy’s face, silver teeth shining. Roy shoots them up with red plastic pellets from a Wal-Mart toy pistol, and although this activity terrifies his grandmother, it helps him overcome his primordial fear of weapons.

            Roy views his life as a work in progress. In the bathroom each morning, he reminds himself that things are on their way up. On his toilet is a dogeared copy of Norman Vincent Peale.

Roy has stayed up late recently watching documentaries on the Christian channel. The documentaries are as enlightening as they are spiritually uplifting. Many deal with biblical history and the incontrovertibility of all the veracity in those pages. They often feature the teary-eyed confessions of Darwinists, bearded rogues admitting defeat before the Good Book, kissing the first pages of Genesis with monastic tenderness and dedicating their beards to St. Paul rather than monkey boy Charlie.

Lately though, the documentaries have been less spiritual and more historical, really friggin’ relevant if you ask Roy. History for Roy is like water in a boiler, and it’s a gettin’ hot in there he likes to say.

He is slumped in the sofa, but his lethargic posture is only a front. There is serious thinking going on in his head.  Tonight’s documentary hits too close to home. It is about  the cultural revolution in China, and the Meisel family television, a tired Zenith from the seventies with a frightening antenna on its top, coughs up images of the godless streaking across the screen en masse, a horde of bayonet-stabbers chanting their sing-song language, stabbing all that loves liberty.

Roy begins getting the munchies and shuffles his way into the kitchen.

Nicky is sitting at the kitchen table. She has a coloring book spread out before her. Vulgar pastels fill the almond shaped forms. Boundaries are disrespected. Postmodern tastes appear to pollute the purity of the portrait, a famous mouse created by a man with a dubious mustache and even more dubious political leanings. Coloring books have it rough in this house. Roy has explained to friends and relatives at Nicky’s birthday parties that they are for the weak, for the mentally disabled.

            Roy stands darkly over his sister, arms akimbo, legs shaking with anger, sweat dripping down his five o’clock shadow, stomach still empty. The bag of Cocoa Roons that he had hoped to munch on during the documentary has been fed to the invalid in the hospital bed.

            “I know what’s wrong with you now,” says Nicky, nonchalantly, coloring in her spaces and biting her lip, more concerned with the coloring than with her older bro’s feelings. “I know why you are so angry at everybody, why you act like a bad ass and yell at me and Grandma.”

            “Oh yeah,” he says, pulling out some strawberry milk from the ice box. “What might that be? What the fudge is wrong with me.”

            “Well, Roy, I know that you are really a scaredy-cat.”

            Roy, remarking on her indifferent coloring-book smirk, slams his freshly poured glass onto the butter-colored Formica of the kitchen counter. A ghastly ring of pink Pepto-Bismol-like fluid rises towards the sky, as if out of hell. Roy’s wearing his “God is Awesome!” T-shirt.  A tawdry pink stain lands right on Jesus’ forehead.

            “Assface!” The walls of the old house seem to shiver in fear after the eruption of these two nasty syllables from his mouth. He has a pink milk-mustache and Nicky, who has finally lifted her eyes from her coloring bubbles, notices this and almost giggles. Grandma moans out something incomprehensible in the other room. The television sickly mumbles something about Communist malfeasance. Roy forms a V with his thumb and pinkie and clamps down on his temples. A pick-up drives down the street, reggatón blasting unashamedly out of its rear speakers. The world sucks temporarily.

             

           

            Roy never really expected he would have the balls to deal weapons. I mean, for obvious reasons, the mere sight of guns, let alone anti-tank stuff, make him want to poop his pants.

The elders misjudged him, never took Roy for an ambitious boy. His high school counselor, Ms. Liu, urged him to sack groceries so that he might “shoot to the apex of the rainbow.” This was her standard phrase, used to urge her kids to pursue their dreams, but Roy, having consulted his dictionary to attain the meaning of “apex” and the proper spelling of “rainbow,” saw in that trajectory an ICBM.

He found his suppliers at Veterans’ meetings. Yes, the man is that smart and resourceful. Sure, he spent years building up to this, attending meetings to honor the glorious and the slain, and of course those slain gloriously. He paid what he called a “tithe” to various organizations responsible for insuring that American values are not urinated upon, metaphorically speaking of course, by infidels, homosexuals, communists, bohemians, and various other groups that are too frightful to put on a uniform. These organizations, in turn, respecting both Roy’s love of liberty and his hatred of all things red, not to mention his cutthroat entrepreneurial spirit, furnished the boy with things that make booming sounds. We’re talking shoeboxes full of grenades that never blew up in Vietnam. We’re talking golf bags with bazookas. We’re talking enough bullets to kill entire Chinese provinces.

Roy knew he was getting into trouble. He had never done dangerous stuff before. He wanted to serve his country somehow, though, and of course he wanted to get the monkeys off his proverbial espalda.

An American Hero Snatched Into Dishonor’s Mouth!

If you consider this shoddy wording for a newspaper headline, then you might be right. Yet if you consider the source, then the shoddiness of these words no longer makes your brain itch as much.

 The newspaper that printed this headline was the Oak Hollow Community News. The journalist who thought up the article did so in the drive thru of a fried chicken restaurant. He resides in a nursing home. He once wanted to seduce Roy’s grandmother but was unsuccessful in this endeavor.  He was awfully excited about the story though, so giddy that a nurse was called to change his birthday diaper.

Roy is behind bars now. That’s what is meant by “Dishonor’s Mouth.”  It was not a uniform-wearing agency that made the lucky discovery of hand grenades and anti-tank hellfire. It was, rather, a handy group of senior citizens, some of them veterans, most Republicans like Roy.

It was a phone call that tipped them off. A sister worried about her brother’s mental health and fearful of the explosives in the garage just had to talk.

For the trusty group of local neighbor citizens on patrol, the discovery of warlike items in Roy’s garage was the most astounding incident in Oak Hollow since the serial molestation of dogs by a crazy-haired mailman in the mid seventies.  It was a big time story.

By some in the League of Oak Hollow Veterans, the most formidable poker association in all of East Texas, Roy was a true patriot, a man one should pin a medal to rather than put behind metal bars. Some of those folks have written letters to our hero in prison. “Pick up yourself, youngster. You serve us proud. You’ll deal weapons once more, and we’ll need them.” These and other encouraging words were written by wobbly old hands onto Big Chief Notebook paper and then mailed off to Roy in the Big House.

Now, looking back on his personal debacle, Roy can smile. There was a prison break a few months ago. An East German dude named Arno tried scaling the barbed wire. Guards with shiny aviator sunglasses filled him with holes. All the gunfire made Roy hug his pillow tight and pretend it was a teddy bear. The other inmates still don’t know much about Roy’s phobia, and for this, he is eternally thankful. Should you ever be sent to the same prison, think of him well and do not spread what you have just been told.