Diary of a Baby Killer's Baby

Envy

2005-12-30T22:51:00.000-08:00

Growing up, I was the envy of all my friends. Not because I was pretty, popular or smart, but because of my parents.

My mother and father were hip, clever, casual, fun. They were Berkeley kids of the sixties and knew how it was. There wasn't a lot to get away with, but they were there. As adults my childhood friends tell me they envied my family, though most of them had intact, solid homes.

My family was casual, but far from spontaneous. We drew heavy curtains, waited for dark to fall. We knew all the ways people love and we practiced and perfected our skills. We knew the meaning of appropriate, and when it was more charming not to be.

Now I look back on family vacation photos, and though the memories are often sweet, I am bathed in sympathy and self-pity for the skinny girl in the pictures. Her hair is never quite right and she holds herself in an uneven way. I can smell her time coming. I can feel it.

There is always something left unsaid. I race to unearth it, give it life. I'm afraid that if I continue this way, I'll lose my way. I'm following my instincts now, trying to tie up loose ends, reaching for the moments.

My family is not what it once was to me. They are skeletons and ghosts and witches and goblins. They are saints and poets and martyrs. Fiction and fact are all the same here. That's why it's hard, why the promise lies in the joints.

My mother is feline, loving, selfish. My father a dog, braced with loyalty, upheld by instinct and honor. Though I pity the foursome in the photos with Macaws on their shoulders and drinks in flower-adorned coconuts, I'm glad their story doesn't finish there. There's not great waves of light, but there are moments, I promise, just wait and see.

Tattoo

2005-07-14T13:25:00.000-07:00

Before his hand shook, my father drew perfect eyelashes, sailor’s anchors and hearts pierced with cupid's bow, all on a face he adored.

A clown face. A face mismatched with tears and laughter. My brother would later tell me about an old Mexican tattoo tradition. “Laugh now, cry later” is the phrase. He has my name stitched in blue-black on his forearm, a pretty senorita looking a bit to the side, the hint of clown's makeup on her profile, my telltale birthmark above her left eye.

In prison the tradition is to tattoo a tear below the eye, a badge of sorts. Proof of suffering, bearing witness and a way to bypass the real thing. I don’t know when the shaking began, but like many second children, my brother was not graced with my lashes, my heart and arrow. When our hands meet, mine holds his steady for a fleeting moment, but my father taught us to always let go. The two of them tremble like leaves and stand like Oaks.

Until recently, I believed I too might inherit my father’s tremor. His mother, my sweet grandmother who denied the damp backs of her forefathers with perfect English, also writes shaky earthquake letters, a gift of blood. But now I’m reading, reading too much too long. Reading about this war, trying so hard to blur the lines. But my eyes don't fail me and I'm learning shaking hands come from other places. Tremors, they say, are not always simply a gift of genetics. While sweet grandmothers may inherit them by birth, fathers often come by them through a fine mist rained down on foreign lands.

Now I’m seeing the faint outline of grease paint on my father. He mocks my brother's badges, calls him less than a man. But the truth is slowly emerging, like the secret agent ink we used to grapple over out of cereal boxes. My mothers lemons always coaxed out the messages, like omens and whispers, tart and irresistible.

Sleep

2005-03-17T15:22:00.000-08:00

My father is staying with me these last few days. Sick with a cold of some kind he insists on sleeping in the back room, doesn’t want to disturb me with coughing fits deep into the night. Of all my father’s health concerns, his chest has never really alarmed me. Even though he was in the hospital for Christmas a decade ago, even though a common cold quickly turns into atypical pneumonia doctors take weeks to diagnose, it was only recently I became worried.

It is because he’s talking to me, confiding in me. He went to the doctor because he was waking at night, evey night with chills, fevers, sweating. The doctor looked him over and he tells me that he told the doctor that his tremor wouldn’t get him, neither would the disease his father had, it wouldn’t be his heart or cancer, he told the doctor that it would be his lungs that would catch up with him. I am so fucking horrified by this. I cannot conceive of my father dying and going on. I would like to make an official request to the universe that I get him, in acceptable health, for at least another 25 years. That is what I want.

Earlier he had dozed off a couple of times watching TV with me, this is common. He pushes himself for me, I know. Finally he says goodnight and goes into my cold back room where I’ve laid a sheet across the couch and place a quilt I made, my first quilt, folded in half across it. And a couple of hours later I’m ready for bed and I hesitate, know how cold it is back there, I can hear him snoring. I finally decide to cover him with a second quilt and quietly creep into the backroom, carefully, without making a single small sound.

He is deep asleep, still. I slowly raise my arms and begin to lower the quilt, as if onto a sleeping bear. And the moment the edge of the quilt brushes his calf, buried below a sheet and the first quilt he is up like a jackrabbit. Literally is upright in a split second and I jump and immediately apologize to his disoriented and darkened face, just a little scared and more regretful. He is fine, he says no problem, he says he is warm and I leave.

I go to bed myself with a pit in my stomach. I’m not sure why. I wonder what he dreams about. I wonder how long this will last, will he jump from his sleep when he’s 70? Will he propel cats across the room from a deep slumber? Will this always be here? I snuggle deeper into my own quilts, shiver from the chill in this winter air and think hard on light things, fireflies and dusk in late spring.

September, 1968

2005-03-01T13:31:00.000-08:00

My mother and her friend, a nice Southern girl who my mom met dealing cards in Tahoe, drank a bottle of cheap blush and then convinced my grandmother, the one who scrubbed the tub after every bath, to lay on the diningroom floor so my mother could pierce her ears.

"I was so drunk I forgot to numb the second lobe!" my mother giggles 35 years after she forgot the ice, 20 after she 'got sober', 5 after she disappeared for a week.

I look carefully now at my grandmother's 90 year old lobes. They are soft and stretched and when I ask her how long she's had the holes she tells me, "Oh, I had it done just last week. That oriental girl at the salon you know." I look into her milky eyes and wish I could shrink into one of those big opal studs and go back in time. Watch from her lobe at all that has passed. Smell my grandpa's cologne when they embrace, whisper in her ear to punish my mother, make her sit in a corner. Tell her to write a second letter to that dark-skinned boy in Vietnam.

That same month my grandmother felt the dull needle casually pierce, my father realized he was afraid. After an overnight flight, a stop in Japan, he and hundreds of other boys deplaned to the mindnumbing heat that would cradle him for 11 months.

"When we got off the plane, the guys who were leaving were waiting to board," he tells me now from his little home hidden in the mountains, deep in the forests of Northern California. I nod, a coward behind the camera. "They watched us from behind the fence and all I remember is one guy looking straight at me as I came down the stairs, and I heard him say, 'You guys are fucked'".

Song of the South

2005-02-28T15:42:00.000-08:00

When I was a kid, my father loved the movie Song of the South. Actually, I don't remember ever seeing it with him, but he used to sing the 'Zip-a-dee-do-da" song and in moments of challenge he loved to mimic Brer Rabbit and in a deep southern accent squeal "Please don't throw me in the Briar patch!" Or the punchline that came once Brer Fox thought he had inflicted the ultimate punishment on the smartass rabbit: "I was born and bred in a briar patch!"

I just thought it was one of those things that tickled him, but today I know my father is Brer Rabbit. He has always dared the worst, and nothing pleases him more than to really piss someone off, especially anyone he considers an asshole.

After six months in Colorado Springs of typing orders and being demoted and promoted again, my father finally beat time and grade - he was promoted to an E3.

On a free weekend my father took off one deep evening riding motorcycles with his buddies. That day he'd spent swimming in the river, probably drinking too. He tells me now he sped through the dark barefoot and in only a swimsuit. Reckless and young, he can't tell me now what he was thinking. "Just living like the young do," he says. No driver's license or ID, well past the speed limit the police pulled him over and took him in. After being identified he tells me the military police picked him up and escorted him back to base cold and cocky to boot. He smirks when he tells me this story. He leans back in his office chair and the snow falls heavy outside the window behind him.

Demoted back to E1, the charges were thrown out of military court. With less than a month away from Vietnam my father was released on his final three weeks leave. Back in Berkeley, he strode the streets, hung with friends, drank deep into the night for three, four, five weeks. Nothing to lose is what I read. When he arrived back in Colorado, he was demoted back to E1 for being AWOL but his superiors tell him his judge and jury await him overseas, that is his only punishment. Four days later he takes his first step in Vietnam and is immediately promoted.

“You can’t be an E1 they said, that’s a training classification, so they put me to E2 again.”

Given a job at Army headquarters, four days in a general asks why he is still an E2 and promoted him on the spot to E3. My father tells me that it was not the culture shock that assaulted his system initially, but the time change. Because army headquarters staff had to communicate with US troops, they worked through the night. He indicates the late hours and lack of sleep put people on edge, fucked with your mind. Late one night in those first weeks he pushed paper, my father was reprimanded by a superior, a lieutenant, I think he said.

My father ignored the guy who he tells me yelled at him after 3 am one night in the office. He finally got frustrated and pushed my father. The lieutenant was punched squarely in the face and quickly demanded a court-marshall. The general who was in charge of both took pity and privately told my father while he couldn’t erase the indiscretion, “You did punch an officer”, he could minimize the consequences.

“There was always this threat they would use," my dad tells me now, sober and unfazed. "We’re going to send you to the 108th, the 108th.” He repeats the number, I don't think he knows he does, it's like a skip. The 108th was the furthest north in Vietnam you could get. It was one of those things, 'don’t throw me in the briar patch,'" He smiles at me now. I can hear him squealing those lines and making me giggle as a kid. "Cause that’s where my cousin Bob was," he finishes.

Bob was a couple of years older than my dad, his father's brother's eldest son, and happened to be stationed in the 108th. My father says the lieutenant wanted blood.

"So they told him they would just send me to the 108th and he said 'fine, good'. When I ask him if the lieutenant thought he was going to die, he answers, “Yeah, he knew I was going to this place that everyone was afraid of. He thought I was going to hell.”

2005-01-31T15:14:00.000-08:00

So there is this moment caught on tape. It is the only moment I kind of remember and it is what is keeping me from watching again, keeping me from writing anymore.

I’m interviewing my father, I can’t tell you right now what about. But I’m interviewing him and suddenly when I move to ask a question I freeze. Not just for a second. My whole brain seizes up and suddenly not only can I not remember the question, but I can’t think of a new one. I interview for a living, lose my train of thought all the time. I’m great at transitioning into something else, an expert at picking up the ball and moving with it even if I’m distracted, uninterested, elsewhere. But at this moment I lose it, and what I know is on that tape is a stretch of silence where I’m groping for words. It is that moment that I don’t remember well, but I know my mind and I know when I watch it again and see my father’s face, listen to my staggered words after that stretch of silence that I will remember how it felt and maybe even catch a glimpse of what it felt like. I don’t want to remember what was behind that moment, I want to erase it from time.

I’ve already erased part of it. That interview took two tapes. We got in country, I can’t tell you where or when now but we got there and I’ve lost one of the tapes. Searched everywhere but I’ve misplaced it for good it seems. I looked in my jewelry box the other day and wondered at the crappy earrings I’ve held onto for over 20 years, marveled at the pearl necklace my grandmother gave me when I was three. I am good at holding on.

So here I sit struggling to hold onto all this. I keep going back to something I wrote down after beginning all this: “When it gets hard, remember, this is important.” I wrote it after doing research on Vietnam. Reading about the veterans who beat their children bloody. The ones who chained there dark-haired petite wives to garden gates at night, the ones who sit in easy chairs today and read war books over and over, who still breathe the oil slick of that faraway place.

I’m rusty now, and reeling. Trying to navigate my way back to the place where I can write something that means anything. There are so many half-truths here. So many sentences I can't quite finish.

Time and Grade

2005-01-10T15:33:00.000-08:00

In the army, all GI’s are ranked E1 in basic training and are naturally promoted to E2 upon completion. He tells me now there is something called time and grade, if you mind your p’s and q’s for awhile you are naturally promoted over time. E1, E2, E3, etc.

My father was promoted to an E2 and demoted back to E1 more times than he can count, for fighting, going AWOL, assaulting an officer. The first time he was demoted he tells me the fight was with a crazy fucker. He says the guy randomly picked him and attacked. He tells me they started to throw punches, scuffled and were quickly pulled apart.

I have watched my father randomly confronted a dozen times in my life -- in a shoe store, at the zoo. He lets off a scent that draws people in, he is magnetic. They come to him and they want to argue, to hurt him, I always thought for no reason. After the fight he tells me the crazy guy had scratches on his face so they were called in by superiors. My dad says he was threatened with a demotion and told he had to write an essay on why fighting was wrong and apologize. He refused to do either and was bumped back to an E1. This was the first of many times, he tells me with a smile.

This time I question him.

“Do you know why he wanted to fight you?” I ask. Instead of answering he adds to his defense.

“A few weeks later that guy also attacked this other guy, a guy we called Preacher,” he says. “This kid was scrawny and carried his bible with him everywhere he went. Everyone was up in arms when he went after Preacher, everyone.

Several weeks after he was pushed back up to E2 my father and the crazy guy were walking down a staircase. He says the guy mouthed off to him, he doesn’t specify and I don’t ask. Called him a dickhead maybe? A pussy? Maybe he called him a spic, a wetback? Anyway, this man smarted off heading south on a staircase, and when he turned around to continue - or maybe to laugh - my father, four steps higher, kicked him squarely in the forehead. My father laughs at this memory. I laugh too and delight a little at our caveman nature. Marvel for a second at what brutality does: protection, admiration, courage, freedom. He cups his meathook over his face and says, “He had this huge knot.” We laugh again.

My father’s skin is deep brown, gold underneath. His fingers are thick and unforgiving, oil-stained and like tree bark. He can rub a pumice stone smooth. His hands are not built for moving across piano keys or fine handwork, he is a man you see holding a handsaw not a needle. However in the army GI’s are expected to sew on their own stripes, one for E1’s, a pair for E2’s. And the eight times my father was promoted to E2 and demoted again, I can see his thick hands holding steady, cradling a fine silver needle, and weaving in and out on that stripe. In and out of a place in between, like the space between heaven and hell, only easier it seems. Then I watch him pause a moment, lift the fabric and with a clean sharp razor blade rip those same stitches free, over and over and over.

His commanding officer also laughed when my dad was escorted back into his office He said, “I hope you haven’t sewn your stripes on all your uniforms.” I don’t know if he did or not, but he tells me he didn’t fight with that guy again. This whole conversation he is vague and paints this guy as a random freak, a violent predator, but when I ask him if he remembers his name, there is not a seconds hesitation, Barry Sanderson. When I ask him if he remembers everyone’s names, he says yes, the guys he hung out with anyway.

I see Barry Sanderson when he was six, a year after he lost his right big toe because his father couldn’t teach him to stay away from the ax used for splitting oak. Suddenly I imagine the small white rabbit he called Sundae and kept in a wood barrel in his closet, and the girl he raped when he was 13. How he cried when she wouldn’t be his friend anymore, how he swore he loved her like no other.

2005-01-02T17:08:00.000-08:00

I asked my father what the interview process has been like for him, if he thought about the interviews, was he affected afterward. He tells me it's like anything, it tickles your memory and brings you back to the smells and the feeling.

"It's like you get off this plane and it's so hot you feel twenty pounds heavier. The smells of diesel trucks running and jet planes, all these fuel smells mixed together It's confusing because it's still dark, just before sunrise and there's a million things going on, none of which you understand."

I am watching the tapes again, trying to sort it all out. When he answered this question I didn't think he understood it. I am discovering my own perception is twisted. These tapes don't lie, I am faced with my own misconceptions. I am fighting urges to snap the cassetes in half, crush them under my shoe and walk on. I am so uncomfortable watching my father move, hearing my own voice, the awkward, sterile way I make my approach.

I have spent the last week at my father's new home, deep in the woods of Northern California. It is vastly different from the terrain of our native East Bay. I have thought him moody, angry, distant, and as the days tick I'm changing my theory. My father is a joker, a wise man, a prophet. But he is also an actor, a man who cuts mountains to be a hero. I am beginning to see my father is my father, but this man in the woods is a purer version of what I have known. He spends days chopping wood, pushing snow, solitary and stoic. He is not in a mood, he is himself. We have not yet met.

On film I ask him again about arriving in Vietnam.

"We were all lined up with our duffle bags ready to get on this plane,Flying Tiger Airlines, throw some more water on board fuel back up and... I remember they're waiting to go home and they're giving you shit, you have no idea what's gonna happen. I remember that's how it was when I went home too. All this fresh meat coming in. All the guys are fresh and neat in their stateside fatigues."

I am caught on the word fatigue. Uniform? What?

"States were a little more streamlined, " he tells me. "Built to be tucked in and have creases in the sleeves and kind of a different color green, still the olive drab, but different."

"So what did you do after that?"

"After getting into country?"

He says this like I know. Like 'country' is a real place to me.

"Yeah."

Protest

2004-12-20T20:23:00.000-08:00

I always remember this movie I saw once where a girl broke down and said abortion hits everyone hard, eventually. In a park, at a parade, unaware, every woman will be struck with her choice. A whirling soft sided blow that shoves you beneath yourself, inside someone else.

At 19 I thought motherhood was in my grasp, but a man connected to it wasn't. My mother made the arrangements, no turning back she said.

But when the plane landed she did not get off. We ate hamburgers that night and my father and I went to sleep earlier than usual. I showered in the morning and allowed him to drive my car. Distant, unencumbered, we talked shop. Upon arrival we were side blinded. The protestors came hard and high. They blocked my little Honda Civic as we tried to park. They were practiced, perfected. Don't kill your baby, they called through the shatterproof glass.

My father was composed, he wrapped his arm around me as we entered the building. The smoke alarms in the waiting room blinked slow red. He saw me to admittance and was there when they brought me out, light in the head, lighter. When we left the rally was on, but still. Dully I watched them stand behind their crimson poster boards, fetuses in jam jars, but now they were quiet. Sympathetic, I thought.

My father was no stranger to protests. He'd gone along to several before 1967. His friends were mostly educated, all angry about something. The war was wrong in Berkeley, everywhere, there was no arguing that, he tells me. "Everyone was anti-war, anti-G.I. They saw the troops as being responsible for the war. If you didn't dodge the draft you were a babykiller anyway," he tells me. When he pocketed the government's letter, some friends fell away.

That child would've been riding a two-wheeler by the time my mother brought it up one day, like we'd been in the middle of a conversation. "So anyway, someone called security, the police," she laughed. "I'm sure they were scared shitless." Two floors up they lulled me to sleep by gas as my father raged below. The face he wore was one I'd only heard stories of. The protesters masked shame, horror, held tight to dreams of saving the unborn. Secretly he battled alongside them. He ordered them silent and still. Determined I would witness their humble silence, he told them that if I didn't, their families would pay.

Coming clean

2004-12-15T06:53:00.000-08:00

It was tanks, but not til later. Initially he spent nearly a year in Colorado. Pushing paper, pushing time. He thought he would stay there the full 24 months. Then they called his name.
"Time to go baby boy," they said. "Time to do your duty."

Suddenly he's talking to me, off camera now. Watching a commercial yesterday for a gadget that heats your shaving cream he laughed, "I used to have one of those." That's not true. But he tells me in country they handed out little packets of chemically-induced shave cream. "When you broke it the cream would heat up, like you were in a hot shower." He tells me about the giant vats of dirty water they heated. How you had to be one of the first 15 to get that hot water, or wait til noon when the flies were sweating and you wanted a cold one anyway.

He was often one of those 15. He was assigned nightwatch. Midnight to 5am he and a partner would stare into the darkness. Watching for trip flares to illuminate the night and for men in torn clothes to take aim. I don't ask if those flares ever lit. I don't want to know, not yet. He tells me once wild pigs made it across the razor wire, sent bullets of fire into their view. He never saw them because all he could see was fear and gunfire. He tells me he heard the squealing late into that night, he says it like it didn't bother him. It was a pig.

A decade later, in the little house on the hill, hallway still intact, a strange sound came from our bathroom. Sometimes it was whirring, other times it chirped, my mom thought it was a beeping, maybe an electrical problem. It was my father who peeled the little green frog off of his heel in the shower. Fifties seafoam green surround had kept the tiny invader hidden for weeks. My brother cried for the rest of the day, while my dad flicked the tiny carcass out the window. I didn't use the bathtub for a solid week. My mother finally put her foot down, forced me clean again.

I'm a bit stunned that he's talking to me now, like a friend, like a confidante. He tells me about taking those warm showers at 5 am and then skips ahead months, mentions a stretch of time when he didn't get to bathe. Tells me a little about the leave time that followed, and a cheap Saigon hotel where he stayed in the shower for over two hours.

"I didn't think I would ever get out," he says.

The Farmer in the Dell

2004-12-10T06:31:00.000-08:00

The first and only time I recall my father and I being really alone, we spent a day at my grandmother's house when no one else was home. I remember breathing in and out, the safety he moved into every room. We were together then, like a father and a daughter, it was not a dream, I'm sure of that. My mother had been admitted again. He took me to Fairyland in Oakland and bought me a giant yellow plastic key that swung from a blue string around my neck, made the larger-than-life fairytale scenes come true. A six-foot giant baby in a cradle swayed in the tree tops and Little Bo Peep swiveled sadly searching.

He took me to a liquor store across the street and let me buy a grocery bag full of chocolate and cream-filled delight. We didn't go home, though it was the same distance as my grandmother's house. We set up camp, a TV on my grandma's livingroom floor, though the TV in the back room was bigger, and color. I rested my face in the deep umber shag and watched 'Via Allegre' that afternoon. My dad made me grilled cheese and promised we would learn to tie flies together. I knew what contentment was. Kinship ruled, I was in a foreign land. It would be the only day of it's kind. Later we were divided by the law of gender, mother taking daughter, father taking son. Planets misaligning, stars colliding.

That night we went back to our empty home. I slept in my parents bed, my dad on the couch. In the morning I woke on my mother's side, to sledgehammers, dust, the soft smell of sheetrock melting away. When I walked out into the hallway it had disappeared. Our house sat on a Eucalyptus encrusted hill, and my father had made passage to the basement once only accesible from the outside. I looked down a full floor into the damp concrete and heard him say, "Stairs. Your mom wants a staircase to get down there. Soon, anyway."

My father clasps his worn hands today, he knows what work is. Cuts and scars, scars on scars. He jumps ahead, to the side, and tells me Agent Orange is like olive oil, slick and soft with staying power. He remembers someone asking, and being told it was safe. Back then he might've laughed at the prospect of a dying embryo, a shaking hand. He was in it just to get home, he repeats this to me, again.

Eventually my mother would come home again too. Years later she would sit me on our front doorstep, with a giant bulging belly and breathlessly tell me I would have a baby to play with soon. She was full, and showed me down to a place I knew was made of solitude. She did not do this out of malice, but fear and ignorance. Eventually that baby would come to pass and those stairs would lead to my bedroom. Long and narrow, no rail to guide you, designer wallpaper my mother smoothed by hand, matching cornflower blue curtains. I was the envy of all my friends with that big room in tow. No one ever knew I hung up paint-stained sheets for years, desperately trying to build a space of my own, as my father remodeled the upstairs, one room at a time.

Suicide

2004-12-05T21:11:00.000-08:00

When I was in high school, my first year, a very popular and quiet boy on the verge of graduating locked himself in his mother's car and inhaled with sweet intent. The whole school, 1000 people, cried the next day. I called my mother from a payphone and asked to come home. Two tires nearly flat, she picked me up and promised to comb my hair later that afternoon.

My father spent 30 days short of one year in a country I've never seen. He watched a few of 50,000 men killed. He watched his friends die, I think this is true. He tells me now of andrenaline rushes like heroin, of heroin like adrenaline. He tells me what I missed.

The week after my mom picked me up, my best friend and I fished green buds out of a film canister in my father's sock drawer. We walked down Telegraph and ate pizza on the curb, we giggled because it was the day before homecoming.

The boy in high school, his name was Michael, was not my friend. And less than two years after my father watched his friends die, he saw my mother panic during labor, told her she wasn't doing it right. He tells me now what you do with soldiers who can't hack it - get the fuck out, we want killing machines. And while he says that he did not taunt the soldiers who shit their pants, or cried, he didn't take their hands either.

Wasn't doing it right. She has not, will not ever forgive him for this. But then he held me for the first time, held my wet bloody head in his hands and though I cried for the next six weeks, at night I slept on his chest. I think now I must've heard him breathe, been close enough to see him clearly, but I don't remember. It was December, 1972 and four months later, the last soldier was put on a plane out of Vietnam, going home.

In my formative years, the last thirty or so, they have estimated that at least 100,000 boys, like Michael, like my father, got into their mother's Cadillacs, El Dorados, headed for higher ground. I'm beginning to hear those deep breaths, feel that intent, I'm breathing in time with them, making a wish for each one.

2004-11-29T21:44:00.000-08:00

Sound bombs

See no evil, speak no evil

2004-11-29T21:12:00.000-08:00

What I know is that my father did something with tanks. Drove them? Maybe. I've seen him get in tractors, buses, a helicopter once. Any vehicle it takes an average person months to learn, he can operate within a couple of minutes. Maybe he navigated, or manned the guns. I don't know yet, but it was tanks, and what I do know is that one day the gun was shot off and my father was standing next to it. Sound stopped for him, silence started. He watched doctors scribble notes to him on white legal pads for the next eight days. They told him they could not help, that Jim Morrison was dead to him. They told him he would not hear his name called again, not by a woman, not by an enemy. But they did not send him home.

As an infant, later a child, I rolled. With my hands clamped over my ears, in bed at night, I rocked back and forth, I did not suck a thumb or cradle a well-worn stuffed bear. I clenched my teeth and sometimes my elbow would gently brush the wall, over and over. In the morning, my sleeve would tell with small blood stains that came out in the wash. My mother laughs that I rocked apart three cribs as an infant. Later my long dark hair would inextricably matte, knit to my skull in the mornings, beyond repair. Such silly unkempt hair was a humiliation, I cut school at 7, spent days nestled in the library. At night I hummed and danced my dance. I sang jingles, rhythms, told stories to distract. Deaf ears lead to a quiet heart, I think.

He can hear. He hears me now. But we still both talk loud to each other because at 31 my hearing is going and I press him to tell me that maybe it's genetic. We're riding down the street in his fifty year-old station wagon, restored. Maybe that gun never went off, I think. Maybe he's never ridden in a tank. This car is a replica of his mother's first, a 55 stationwagon. Maybe it was all a dream. Maybe he lied to me, didn't watch cowboys in camouflage pat down six year-olds, spit the color of shit. Maybe not. But a car's driving by and like those old jokes he says "What?" and I say "Oh, nevermind." I hum a little now, tap my toes and he can't hear it and I can't hear him and his tank is rumbling past my brain like gunfire, like a story told too loud.

Buddhists Riot

2004-11-27T21:10:00.000-08:00

In 1963 my parents were sophomores at Berkeley High School. My father was assigned to two lunch periods and two shop classes. While he tested high, he was known as a fuck-up. Dark-skinned, poor and handsome, he ate nails and dated fair-skinned rich girls. He was a boxer by nature, the fourth of six children and the eldest boy in a family that bled loyalty.

Forty years later, the blossoming lines in his face contradict his boyish charisma, his infallible instinct. People lose adoring children and faithful dogs to my father. He is a snake charmer.

Even I was not immune to it. His charm translated into a power that affected the tides, made dogs howl, the moon rise. Growing up, I knew no fear in strange places. Though violence was never on the surface, it simmered below and the heat kept me a confident child, always safe in the knowledge that my father would kill for me. And while all this was true, my father is a pacifist. Stone-still in a storm.

In 1963 the United States began to intervene in Vietnam. In late May, Buddhists rioted in South Vietnam. Buddhists riot, after they are denied the right to display their flag during a celebration of Buddha's birthday. I think I can see them now, dropping lotus blossoms as they smash garbage cans, turn whispers into howls. South Vietnamese police and troops shoot at the Buddhist demonstrators. They kill one woman, and eight children.

My father didn't watch the news. He was smoking pot in People's Park and teaching his buddy Gordy how to hot-wire Corvettes. He knew about the war, grew up on Telegraph Avenue for Godsakes. But he was a punk, a shithead. He leaned on the hood of a 55', glassy-eyed and quiet, he smiled at the sky.

Deferring

2004-11-22T19:43:00.000-08:00

"In 67 I had a chance for a deferment then. Berkeley Fire Department. They wanted me to become a firefighter. Public service deferment. I passed up on that because it was so close, I mean, weeks of when I was supposed to leave and I thought, 'Do I really want to be a firefighter for the rest of my life? Probably not.' But it was two years. I mean, I could do two years standing on my head. Who wants to send me to Vietnam?" He laughs, leans back in his chair, his father's chair. "You know, I'm a big screw up, a party boy."

Almost imperceptably he pauses here. I rewind and watch it on the video monitor two, three times. There is a pause, he turns his head slightly and smiles as he lowers his voice and says, "So I passed up on that."

I watch it again and shut the camera off. Later I ask him if he ever regretted turning this down.

When I was six I came home from school to an empty house. I had no key and took shelter in spikey shrubbery two houses up the road. I sat there for an hour, maybe less. It was close to forever. My mother came home and was mortified, it was the only time. Several years back I dreamt a therapy-induced dream. My adult self went down that road and stumbled across the child in the bushes. She sat in my lap and I whispered to her, finger combed leaves out of her tangled dark hair. When my mother called, she got up to go and I cried for two days after this. Cried for the want to stay and keep her warm and green.

I know my father would never admit to this regret. He was a born fighter, a reluctant soldier, a resigned killer, a constant survivor. He doesn't look back.

"No," he says, looking straight at me, slightly to the left of the camera lens. He smiles now, of course. Shifts slightly in his father's oak swivel and says, "What else would there be?"

Narrarator

2004-11-17T13:08:00.000-08:00

I'm beginning to lose sleep over my own story. Beginning to wake at 3am and wonder if it is my story. Is it mine to tell? Am I good enough to tell it? Am I reliable? Competant? What exactly does this job require. I scan my qualifications and they always appear to fall short. I'm trying to move toward a place where I can tell it and love it like my favorite stories. Where I can forget that autobiographies don't sell. No one believes truth unless it's sheathed in multi-colored fiction. In my favorite story, it would be clear from the beginning that my wound is geography, that it is also my anchorage, my port of call.

If I were writing my favorite story, the one that took me furthest as a child, my mother would've believed in the dreams of animals. She would tell me that bees dreamed of honey and that the osprey dreamed of slow-motion herring. She wouldn't dream of nights without my father. She wouldn't wake to his ghost beside her and dull-edged chopping knives sweaty beneath her pillow. She would've raced us at dusk to watch the moon rise, and I would've believed she had brought it there, just for me.

She would not have woken my father late nights over hooting owls and she would not have been met by his warm sudden fingers milking her smoothe throat. If this were my favorite story, it would be an autobiography, my story, not my father's. It would not tell of fear or blood. It would be a book on tape, abridged. A lullabye. I would be an only child rocked in the lap of my family, it would take place deep in southern Mexico, or on a cool, rainy hillside north of Washington state. In a warm place, free of drafts. If this were my story, the end would have come much more quickly than it does.

The real story

2004-11-14T22:34:00.000-08:00

I ask my father why he registered for the draft. He doesn't give me a good answer. He looks me in the eye, but not for long. I believe him anyway, I believe everything he says.

"Most of my friend's were going to school and getting their college deferments. But I chose to work and do what I wanted to do," he says this and gives a small shrug.

I hear myself on the videotape saying, "Right, uh-huh." every so often, too often. I see the edge of my hand flutter past the screen, hear myself cushion every word, providing answers with my questions: "So did you think you'd be drafted - or were you just 18 and not really thinking about it?"

My friend Cori asks if he will tell me the whole story, if he will leave anything out. "No," I answer without hesitation. "I know he will tell me the truth." And he will, I believe he will. The question she didn't ask is this: Do I have the guts to ask the right questions? Am I willing to travel that far? Am I ready to become a believer?

It's been a month since our first interview. Since I first said the word Vietnam. The questions I asked stopped at the San Francisco airport. They stopped in California, miles and miles before he went to that other place. If I let this go, my father would never bring it up again. He would tell me tasteless jokes and help me remodel my house. He would confide in me like a friend, watch my dog whenever I go out of town. I see his old young face and I know I have to do this.

I'm looking to the sky for direction now, questions that don't have right answers. I want to cover my eyes, crawl under the table. But I know only a fucking wimp would do that. My father wears all weather boots now. They cradle his soft dark brown feet. They are ageless, wrinklefree, yet he hikes more than anyone I know. I'm thinking of investing in some expensive Rockports this winter. Really go all out. Sky's the limit, you know?

Jackpot

2004-11-10T14:50:00.000-08:00

The Vietnam draft lottery began on December 1, 1969. With radio, film and TV coverage, the capsules were drawn from the container, opened, and the dates inside posted in order. The first capsule - drawn by Congressman Alexander Pirnie (R-NY) of the House Armed Services Committee - contained the date September 14, so all men born on September 14 in any year between 1944 and 1950 were assigned lottery number 1. The drawing continued until all days of the year had been paired with sequence numbers.

My father's birthdate, September 10th, was #71 out of 365. Too bad he'd been drafted two years earlier. By December 1, 1969 my father was home in his own bed again. His younger sister tells me now, "The man who came home looked like my brother, but I didn't know him."

I'm making lists of questions now in hopes my father will give me answers. Questions about weather, culture and practice. The ink is running low on my favorite pen and I'm scratching deep into the notepad, phrases like 'Did you' 'Have you'.

I'm thinking of buying a new ink pen, but I'm trying not to let my luck run out just yet. If I'd had a go at that lottery, been born just 25 years earlier, my number would've been 78. Born December 27th, I was drawn just seven capsules after my dear old dad. I wonder, what are the odds?

Definition

2004-11-09T23:07:00.000-08:00

Dioxin, [noun] die-ox-in: Any in a family of over 200 chlorinated organic chemicals. The term is most commonly applied to
a particular chemical, 2,3,7,8-tetrachlorodibenzo-paradioxin which
is an impurity in the defoliant Agent Orange. Dioxins are known
to cause skin diseases, birth defects, miscarriages, and cancer.

Residue, [noun] rez-i-doo: Something left after other parts have been taken away; "there was no remainder"; "he threw away the rest".

or

Matter that remains after something has been removed.

First draft

2004-11-07T23:26:00.000-08:00

A couple of weeks ago my friend Chelsea and I met at the Claremont, a grand old hotel in the Berkeley hills, close to our roots with a view. She lives in Texas now, but we grew up together and a bagel shop I frequent has a coffee named after her, aptly described as sweet and nutty. She's a very political creature, a die-hard Democrat, this is one of the mysteries of our friendship, since at 31 I have never voted and consider it charming that I obstain from all forms of the news.

During this visit the presidential campaign comes up. I'm not sure how, but I know I'm not to blame. I mention stem-cell research, only because of my father and she tells me something that I still have yet to shake: "Well that's your vote this year then, you have to vote for your dad."

So less than a week before the legal deadline I mail in my official voter registration. I am now a registered voter. And while I know nothing of candidates or issues, I know my father needs medical help that doesn't yet exist.

In 1965, three months after he finished high school, my father turned 18 years old. He moved to Texas, for a girl he tells me shyly, slyly now. Anne Richmond, a debutante. Her father had a lot of money and connections. When my father was 16 he met Marlon Brando, a buddy of the old man, and rode motorcycles with him. "So I registered," he tells me now, "because it was the law."

The law , like he cared. "They were catching up with people and pushing you ahead in the line if you weren't registered," he explains. I pause with this answer. My father could hotwire a car at 13 years old, the law was not a concern. He watches me take this in. His eyes are hazel, layered green and gold. Mine are brown, dark to nearly black. I ask him if he thought there was a chance he would be drafted.

He fills his cheeks with air and looks up for an answer. Tips his chin down and exhales with a small laugh. "No," he says. "I just figured if it happened I would figure something out. Maybe something would happen with the war. Maybe I would go to school and get a deferment. Maybe this, maybe that, but none of that really happened."

He takes a long drink of his water, and I watch it quietly slosh in his tremulous hands. None of that really happened, he says.

Bedtime stories

2004-11-04T13:09:00.000-08:00

Daddy, will you tell me a story? Will you tell me a story about warriors brave and fair-haired princesses in far off towers? Will you tell me a love story? A story of a boy and a girl and happily ever after? Daddy, will you tell me a mystery story? A murder mystery maybe? A tale set in the jungle, a fairytale with lions and tigers and bears. Daddy, will you tell me a story about you when you were a little boy? Daddy, will you tell me a story about me?

I asked him if he would talk to me. My dad and I talk a lot. We talk about cars, family - we tell jokes.

I pinched the sides of my calves, held my breath and I asked him to tell me about Vietnam. Now he slowly looks into a video camera before me and begins to tell me a story. I ask lots of small questions, take it slow. No need to get to the action scenes too quickly. He smiles his daddy smile and begins, "Once upon a time...", I hold my breath.

20/20 Hindsight

2004-11-02T23:59:00.000-08:00

The story I have always known is that my parents met when they were twelve. I always thought it was a romantic story.

They were friends growing up, my parents. The story goes that my mother's high school boyfriend was my father's best friend. After graduation, my parents dated eachother. I knew that later on, when he proposed, she refused repeatedly and finally said yes in a jealous rage over another girl. So the time in between graduation in 1965 and marriage in 1970, I filled in myself. I know what love is, and I imagined passion and a bond that would lead to my conception and life as I've known it.

They dated, I am now told, in the late sixties, you know how things were then. In his final 30 days in the states, my father took some time to visit my mother in Wyoming, where she attended college. In pictures she is slim, bombshell blonde, always smoking.

I once heard her joke to a friend that he was supposed to leave on a certain date and that a week later they were skiing in Colorado and she asked,

"Weren't you supposed to leave a week ago?" and he said,

"What the fuck? I'm AWOL already. What are they going to do? Send me to Vietnam?"

She laughed like this had been a really clever joke. My father always has been a kidder. In pictures he is sometimes smiling, his hands are rarely visible. All this, I knew as history.

What I didn't know until recently was that my parents were only casual lovers. My father returned to the states one year later and married my mom within six months. When he was at war, she wrote him, once.

Bittersweet fruit

2004-11-01T08:21:00.000-08:00

When I was five I went to stay at my grandmother's house for two days. No one told me where my parents were. I don't remember who dropped me off. This was not a special treat, time for me and grandma.

It was close to Easter, I know that much. My grandmother cut toast into tiny triangles and let me watch 'Via Allegre', even though I couldn't speak Spanish. I was mesmerized by the ferris wheel, the Spanish children laughing all day in an amusement park. Though foreign, they were magic to me, poetry in lace-trimmed blouses. My grandmother tucked me in tight, I wiggled to catch my breath and wished to stay forever. Two days of quiet and softly buttered toast and suddenly I was picked up by my father.

At home things would go on, they probably thought I would not remember these days, or the ones that later came to pass. I suppose I hugged my mother when I got home. In bed, deflated, she probably smiled. I wonder if they bothered to give me any explanation. There would not be any real talk of a baby for several years.

A decade would pass before my mother told me that the doctor blamed Agent Orange for these losses. It would be another decade before I understood that it was not a man with a secretive job that hated my father, but an invisible mist that rained down on a country that it would take too long for me to believe existed. I am the eldest of four children, but my brother and I are seven years apart and each an only child, by most definitions.

Revisionist History 101

2004-10-30T07:39:00.000-07:00

I took US History in high school. I remember the teacher, the classroom, I can still see the names that were carved on my desk. I traced them with my finger, avoided splinters while resting my head on the cool, rough surface. The other students watched movies in the dark, I kept my eyes closed, head down. I know they learned about Vietnam, probably spent several weeks on the subject. They walked fingers over geographical blues and greens. Memorized dates, names and numbers. Studied wide-eyed photographs to decipher the truth. I'm sure there were tests and that I must have taken them. I remember that desk and Dezi luvs Mitch por vida.

The truth is this: I only know the word Vietnam. I know that my father was there before I was born. I know they call it a war. This is what else I know: My father did not speak a word of his 11 months overseas for a full decade after he came home and married my mother.

I also know this: some years back he walked into a veterans memorial hall filled with memorabilia and dropped to his knees. I know he made it to the restroom where another vet lay his hand on my father's shoulder and told him that he was not alone. "He said, 'most guys have this reaction'." My mother whispered this secret into my 10 year old ear. I did not see it happen, maybe it didn't happen at all.

But in my child's mind, I watched my father fall, I can see it even now. I see his jester's face, hazel eyes out of focus. I see him fall, then comforted. I can see it, but it is a fictional tale to me. A movie in the dark.

I have only seen my father cry twice in my life, both for family death. I think it was this secret that sent my small body reeling away from Vietnam. I simply and secretly decided it was off the map.

Step one

2004-10-27T13:40:00.000-07:00

Fifteen days from today is November 11th. It will be the second Veterans' Day in over 30 years that I have recognized my father as a war veteran.

Some people ignore the fact that they are overweight, others live in the denial of alcoholism or childhood abuse, for most of my life I have chosen to ignore the 11 months my father spent in Vietnam.

I'm not quite sure why this is, but I'm ready to figure it out.

Brother

2004-03-23T07:14:00.000-08:00

In a caravan, I am always nervous with my father behind me. Even navigating off pavement, I worry every slight turn of the wheel, wonder if I rode the brakes a bit too long. I fear he will steer from behind and measure my inadequate skills. Afraid he will realize I'm not as large as I appear to be. That I am not the first-born son he'd hoped for.

My brother, named for him, barely shares this kind of blood. Urban dweller, he slices ink into his skin to define his boundary lines. Etches my name with a clowns face, outlines my father's with hammers and fish hooks, never fills in the details, forgets to add color. A different sort of soldier, never enlisted, yet to be drafted. He's AWOL and no one knows it, no one seems to care. My baby brother who begged for kisses I would not bestow. Always beats his enemies to the punch. He spends his down time pressing needles into flesh, sucking slow-moving smoke that my child's mind sees as graceful dragons. This mind waits for them to dissipate into the skies, for everything to become clear to him.

Love on my sleeve, I nestle caution in the crook of my arm, steer clear of his fight, I never trust the self-governing. Keeping my eyes on the road, holding my breathe to maintain a constant path, so that my father might nod and say, "Yes".