I was wearing my dad’s sweater and drinking Jack Daniels from the bottle like Tom Cruise in A Few Good Men. I was watching The Deer Hunter on DVD and picking pills off the front of the sweater. It was green, and a tiny forest of wool bits was growing on the sofa next to me. I was holding my guitar and absentmindedly strumming the chords I know. G major. E minor. E seventh. G major again. I was wearing contact lenses, and they kept drying in my eyes. I would blink repeatedly and the blurry scene in front of me would come into focus. Bobby DeNiro and Christopher Walken in a POW camp. Playing Russian roulette while I sat on my sofa picking at my sweater, drinking the whiskey like I was 21, playing my guitar like it was an acoustic. The steel strings were hurting my index finger so I put it down. I get reminiscent on whiskey. The Pennsylvania town in The Deer Hunter reminds me of the Pennsylvania town I grew up in. It also reminds me (though I’ve never seen it except in pictures) of the West Virginia town where my grandfather worked sixty years ago, seventy years ago, riding a train into the earth every morning, watching a canary breathe the same heavy air he does, air pregnant with tiny particles of coal dust. Man and bird alike inhale the particles. They enter through beak or nostril, they travel down the respective esophagi, they settle in each pair of lungs. Specks, so small you couldn’t see them without a microscope, attach themselves to the lining of the lungs. The lining doesn’t reject them because they’re so tiny; it grows around them instead. Collagen fibers form, trapping the specks like spider webs, and every day another thousand or million or billion foreign particles take up residence. Air sacs, thinner than a baby’s skin, thinner than the budget my grandparents live on, thinner than the canary’s pale, wasted feathers, become striated with the fibers. The sacs are like balloons, and every added network of fibers is like a strip of masking tape on the balloon. Time goes by. There is several dollars’ worth of coal in my mother’s father’s lungs. The canary dies (what is believed to be a natural death, no cause for alarm, and they continue mining), a new one is purchased. His feathers lose their color, his wings atrophy, and he dies.
Does my
grandfather realize what the canaries’ deaths mean to him? Does he see the
phlegm he spits up in a dirty sink outside the mine shaft when he cleans up
after work – the phlegm probably nearly invisible, those black and poisonous
bodily fluids staining porcelain already stained a uniform coal dust gray, and
does he get a sense of his impending doom? He’s been staring at impending doom
for twenty-some years, since he fled Eastern Europe for Eastern America, the
threats of Nazism and Communists for the promise of democracy and capitalists,
so why concern himself with it now? He has my grandmother to concern himself
with, the half-dozen children he’s sired with her, the seventh on his (or her?)
way. So he keeps working, and dies.
I kept sitting on
the sofa and the movie ended. When I get drunk on whiskey I like to reminisce
and listen to country music – Hank Williams, Patsy Cline, Roy Acuff, Jimmie
Rodgers. I have a record player I inherited from my grandparents, and I play
45s half a century old, vinyl cracked, a patina of age on the surfaces, the
grooves looking more like age rings on a tree trunk. They still play, but only
barely. Jimmie’s yodeling comes through a wash of static; Patsy’s voice sounds
tired and monotone with all the treble knocked out. I stripped the wires on a
$175 pair of Sennheiser headphones since the turntable had no headphone jack,
being twice my age. After my grandfather died, my mother’s mother moved into an
assisted living community. My role in her exodus from the split-level up on South
Mountain in Pennsylvania was to root through the boxes she’d accumulated over
the past decades. I took three orange crates of records and the record player
as old as two of me.
I drove up to her
house a Sunday afternoon around noon after she moved out and before the house
was sold. I wanted to be home by four because the Eagles were playing the
Cowboys. I went around back where the sliding door was unlocked. Her backyard
was big and had two actual hills. One was near the house, behind the garage,
and was small. The other was steep, and an arm of the property reached up to
its top, where there was a swing set and sandbox, which became, respectively,
increasingly rusty and increasingly earthy as my grandparents aged. And as I
grew, they lost their allure anyway, and I looked instead to the forest that
loomed on the edge of the property. A fence stretched all along the back of
their plot, beginning somewhere further down the mountain, running up the small
hill behind the garage, turning left at the hill, boxing in the swing set and
sandbox on three sides, and continuing down the other side, walling off the
rest of the development from whatever grew behind the fence.
And what did grow
there? Strawberries grew, on my grandmother’s hilltop at least. A patch of strawberries
that grew ever wilder as the white paint on the swing set flaked off and was
replaced by a ferrous cancer. As weeds and ferns took up residence in a sandbox
filled more with dirt than sand. The plants in the patch had been strawberries
in name only since at least 1991, when Leonard Marshall hit Joe Montana from
behind in fourth quarter of the NFC championship, breaking his finger and
bruising his sternum. I was nine, and heartbroken, and I ran up to the hill
where I could cry without my uncles or cousins seeing me, because, to
paraphrase, there’s no crying in football. I went into the strawberry patch,
and they were thicker than I remembered. When the moon came out from behind the
clouds, I could see that the bushes, which my grandparents usually kept neatly
trimmed, had grown wild all over the patch. Creepers stretched up from the
thick layer of fallen leaves and twined themselves around branches. The berries
left on the bushes were huge and misshapen, and the patch smelled powerfully of
them, of strawberries and the decaying organic matter that fed them. It knocked
me out of my reverie (along with a nine year old’s emotional fragility, I had a
nine year old’s attention span), and I went back to the house, where I watched
Matt Bahr kick a field goal from 42 yards out without crying again.
I didn’t cry at
my grandfather’s funeral, either. Now I stood at the back of the house, looking
into the kitchen through the sliding glass door. The door was almost opaque
with organic material, particles of dirt and plant matter blown through the air
to this pane of glass, where they stuck in multicolored whorls and splotches.
Instead of opening the door and entering the empty house, I walked up the big
hill behind the house. I wanted to see if the swing set was still there, or if
it had completely rusted away, leaving only the plastic components: the
skeletal arch of the slide jutting out of the ground, tilting slightly as it
sinks into the earth, the seats of the swings, anonymous blue strips
half-buried by overgrown grass and strawberry bushes. But it was all still
there, and the sandbox too, although that was half-buried by overgrown grass.
The strawberry
bushes were gone, swallowed by the forest. I walked out into the forest,
looking for the places I discovered a decade ago. I found the dump with my
brother – we crested a hill and saw a man-made landscape below. We saw
mountains of tires, a river of car seats and mattresses running between them, a
field of fast food wrappers dotted with twinkly shards of glass. I found the
pond on my own, going out past the dump one afternoon while my mother drank
coffee inside and argued with her mother. It was over another hill, an
irregular green oval prominently marked with “NO FISHING” signs. This time I
didn’t find either, but I did find a hunter’s blind, littered with empty shell
casings, and an empty campsite with four army surplus tents and the damp, smoky
remains of a campfire. The sun sank low in the sky and I lost my bearings. I
circled around, returning to the abandoned campsite. The tents cast long
shadows in the late afternoon, and I stood there for a while, trying to
reorient myself with the sunset (rises in the east, sets in the west). I
crested the hill to the south and looked down on the valley below.
It wasn’t the
same way I came. The valley was deeper, the vegetation thicker, but south led
down the mountain, back to the house, so I continued. There was another
campsite here, this one bigger and at least semi-permanent. Hastily constructed
barracks were positioned around a clearing, and this campfire was smokier than
the last, more recently doused and abandoned. There were still supplies laying
about – mess kits, more shell casings, and a bulky radio transmitter. I walked
through the camp and deeper into the forest. The vegetation was thicker here
than before, but the sun was almost completely gone, so I kept heading south. I
entered a clearing, and in the twilight I could see rice paddies stretching out
to the left and right. I picked my way across the clearing, continuing south,
trying to keep my boots from getting too damp. Up ahead, Sarge held up a fist
and we all froze. He swiveled his head, looked into the blackness ahead and the
sky above. He gestured emphatically toward the jungle ahead, and we broke into
a jog. I was four or five strides from cover when I saw the bombers swing low
to my left. Three of them, fat with stubby wings, opened the mouths in their
bellies and vomited up a stream of napalm on the far end of the paddies. We
reached the jungle and hunkered down, seeking shelter behind the overgrown
ferns, swatting away the overfed mosquitoes that swarmed down on us. We heard
them before we saw them – two dozen Viet Cong fleeing the napalm burst. Sarge
held up his hand for us to hold fire. They got closer, and then we could see
them, lit from behind by the napalm fires, not looking to their right, where we
lay quietly. Sarge gave the sign and we opened fire, mowing down the first wave
of them. Tracers painted luminescent lines across the sky above and the next
wave of VC took cover wherever they could and opened fire on us. Motown took a
hit and screamed “Medic!” as Esposito loaded the grenade launcher. The
pineapple arced up into the sky, lit by the glow of napalm suffusing the
clearing, lit by the linear fires burned into thin air by the tracers and
fading before the grenade hits behind the knot of VC crouching in the middle of
the clearing. The explosion was loud, even in the din of rifle bursts and
multilingual shots, and it was so bright that I closed my eyes and turned away,
feeling the heat on my cheek, feeling the greasy camouflage paint melt and ooze
down my neck. Sarge motioned for Joker and me to check the clearing, so we
crawled the five yards through the paddy, hiding behind a dike, popping up
every few feet to check for any movement. Time slowed and the thick, stinking
water soaked through my pants. I was constantly checking my legs for some kind
of indescribable tropical insect, the kind that you hear horror stories about
around the campfire at night. We got to the middle of the clearing, just on the
other side of the dike from the VC. On three, we jumped up and fired a full
round into the shapeless mass in front of us. Joker lit a flare and we picked
through the mess, counting 25 dead VC and one still alive, moaning in
Vietnamese through a ruined jaw. Joker shot him once in the head and we headed
back into the jungle.
Fifteen minutes
later, I was standing in what had once been a strawberry patch. The sun had set
and it had to be at least halftime. I picked through the boxes of antique
clothing, outdated newspapers and two generations of high school yearbooks for
two hours. When I left, I had a milk carton’s worth of paperback novels, three
orange crates of records I hadn’t bothered to look through, and the record
player, which was at that point more than twice my age. The Cowboys shut out
the Eagles, 34-0. 1998 was a rebuilding year.
I finished the bottle of Jack Daniels without throwing up. I watched the director’s cut of Apocalypse Now, and fell asleep sometime after Martin Sheen met Dennis Hopper like I always do, waking up right before he kills Marlon Brando. Willard put on the jungle makeup and crept through Kurtz’s lair with a machete, and the sun came up slowly, turning the sky gray first, filling the heavens with lint. I went to sleep at eight, pulling the window shade down, denying the truth of the sunrise. I always sleep with my headphones on, listening to the needle scratch through a lock groove over and over again until I fall asleep.