Why Are We in Vietnam? Read online

  Preface

  This is the only novel I ever finished under the mistaken belief I was writing not this kind of novel but another. Living in Provincetown on the edge of those rare, towering and windy dunes which give the tip of Cape Cod a fair resemblance to the desert of the Sahara, I had begun to think of a novel so odd and so horrible that I hesitated for years to begin it. I did not like the story; it came to me with fear. I imagined a group of seven or eight bikers, hippies and studs plus a girl or two living in the scrub thickets which sat in some of the valleys between the dunes. Only six feet high, those thickets were nonetheless forests, and if one could find a path through the thorns and cat briars, nobody could track you, not in a hurry. So I peopled the thickets with characters: my characters were as wild as anyone who ever came to Provincetown. It is not a tame place. Years ago, a First Lady was once told it was “the Wild West of the East,” and that is not a bad description. The tip of Cape Cod curls in on itself in a spiral—the long line of the dunes comes around like the curve of one’s palm and fingers as they close into a fist—it is one of the very few places in America where one comes to the end of the road for a more profound reason than real estate ceasing to be profitable. In Provincetown, geography runs out, and you are surrounded by the sea.

  So it is a strange place. The Pilgrims landed there before they went on to Plymouth—America began here. The Pilgrims lost interest in scrub pine, mournful winds, and sand in the land. They moved on, left ghosts. Whaling captains settled in later, left ghosts. In winter the town is filled with spirits. One can go mad in that rainy climate waiting for March to end. It is a place for murderers and suicides. If decades went by without a single recorded homicide, that record ended abruptly with a crime of true carnage. A few years ago, a young Portuguese from a family of fishermen killed four girls, dismembered their bodies, and buried the pieces in twenty small and scattered graves.

  That catastrophe was not a good deal worse than anything I had already contemplated for my gang, since I conceived of them making nocturnal trips from the dunes into town where out of the sheer boredom of an existence not nearly intense enough to satisfy their health, they would commit murders of massive brutality and then slip back to the dunes. Motiveless crimes. I saw a string of such crimes.

  I was, as I say, in fear of the book. I loved Provincetown and did not think that was a good way to write about it. The town is so naturally spooky in mid-winter and provides such a sense of omens waiting to be magnetized into lines of force that the novel in my mind seemed more a magical object than a fiction, a black magic.

  Nonetheless, I began the book in the spring of ’66. It attracted me too much not to begin. Yet because I could not thrust Provincetown into such literary horrors without preparation, I thought I would start with a chapter about hunting bear in Alaska. A prelude. I would have two tough rich boys, each as separated from social convention as any two rich boys could be—Texans I would make them out of a reserve of memories of Texans I had served with in the 112th Cavalry out of San Antonio. The boys would be still young, still mean rather than uncontrollably murderous—the hunting might serve as a bridge to get them ready for more. They would come back from the Alaskan hunting trip ready to travel—Provincetown would eventually receive them.

  Now, anyone who reads the book which follows this preface will see that nobody ever gets to Provincetown. The chapter on hunting becomes a half-dozen chapters, a dozen chapters, it ends up being all of the book. If I wrote those chapters wondering how long it would take to extricate myself with novelistic integrity from all the elaborations of the hunt I seemed more and more bound to get into, it was not until those boys were back in Dallas and I was getting ready to move them East that I realized two things.

  (1) I had nothing further to say about them.

  (2) Even if I did, I could no longer believe that Tex and D.J. could still be characters in the Provincetown novel. They had another quality by now.

  So I lived with my manuscript for a few months and ended by recognizing that I hadn’t been too bright. I had written a novel not a prelude. The book was done. Later, a number of readers would think Why Are We In Vietnam? was far and away my best book. I thought I had never written a funnier book.

  In retrospect, I was less certain, however, of the humor. For when Sharon Tate was murdered in the summer of ’69, and the world heard of Charles Manson, I could wonder what state of guilt I might have been in if I had written that novel of desert murderers. How then could I ever have been certain Manson had not been sensitive to its message in the tribal air.

  But then writing has its own occult force. At its best, we never know where our writing comes from nor who gives it to us. If Jack Kennedy’s name is invoked in the first sentence of An American Dream, nine lines farther down that page, a man named Kelly is mentioned. Later in the same Chapter we learn Kelly’s middle name is Oswald—Barney Oswald Kelly. That chapter appeared in Esquire about a month after the assassination, but it had been written three months earlier, a coincidence to force one to contemplate the very design of coincidence.

  So, too, had I written in Barbary Shore about a secret agent named McLeod who had been, in his time, a particularly important Soviet agent. He lived in a cheap room on the top floor of a cheap rooming house just across the hall from the narrator. Writing the book, I always found it hard to believe that such a man would be found in such a place, and that simple difficulty of not quite believing what I wrote did not help to speed the writing of the book. A year after it was published, I rented a room in a dank old building with high ceilings called Ovington Studios on Fulton Street in Brooklyn not a half mile from the rooming house in Barbary Shore, and on the floor below during those ten years I kept the studio was Colonel Rudolph Abel, the most important Soviet spy in America—or, at least, so was he described by the FBI when the arrest was finally made.

  We will never know if primitive artists painted their caves to show a representation, or whether the moving hand was looking to placate the forces above and the forces below. Sometimes, I think the novelist fashions a totem just as much as an aesthetic, and his real aim, not even known necessarily to himself, is to create a diversion in the fields of dread, a sanctuary in some of the arenas of magic. The flaws of his work can even be a part of his magical strength, as if his real intent in writing is to alter the determinations of that invisible finger which has written and moved on. By such logic, the book before you is a totem, not empty of amulets for the author against curses, static, and the pervasive malignity of our electronic air.

  Intro Beep 1

  Hip hole and hupmobile, Braunschweiger, you didn’t invite Geiger and his counter for nothing, here is D.J. the friendLee voice at your service—hold tight young America—introductions come. Let go of my dong, Shakespeare, I have gone too long, it is too late to tell my tale, may Batman tell it, let him declare there’s blood on my dick and D.J. Dicktor Doc Dick and Jek has got the bloods, and has done animal murder, out out damn fart, and murder of the soldierest sort, cold was my hand and hot.

  Well, now, friends and lovers, that means you out there in all that implosion land, dig into this—no such thing as a totally false perception. Have you ever contemplate? Listen, dig, Edison says—quote this from McLuhan—“I start with the intention to increase the speed of the Atlantic Cable, but when I’ve arrived part way in my straight line I meet with a phenomenon, and it leads me off in another direction and develops into a phonograph.” And that’s how Miles Davis was born. Bangalore, don’t snore—here’s the bulge: Edison was hip, baby, the way you make it is on the distractions. Leave a little of your shit behind each time, that’s charity for all. There is probably no such thing as a totally false perception. Por ejemplo, I say Christ is in this toothpaste tube. Duba doo, duba duba doo—there has to be some grain of true. By gum, man, bite on D.J.’s Texas dick—America, this is your own wandering troubadour brought right up to date, here to sell America its new handbook on how to live, how to live in this Electrox E
dison world, all programmed out, Prononzo! (this last being the name King Alonso gave to the Spanish royal condom). Well, Huckleberry Finn is here to set you straight, and his asshole ain’t itching, right? so listen to my words, One World, it’s here for adolescents and overthirties—you’ll know what it’s all about when you and me are done, like the asshole belonged to Egypt, man, and the penis was the slave of the Hebes and the Brews, for they got it girdled with a ring of blood fire, and the nose was the Negroes, for they split it. Now, remember! Think of cunt and ass—so it’s all clear. We’re going to tell you what it’s all about. Go go, Dr. Jek tell the folk, we’re here to rock, the world is going shazam, hahray, harout, fart in my toot, air we breathe is the prez, present dent, and God has always wanted more from man than man has wished to give him. Zig a zig a zig. That is why we live in dread of God. Make me another invention, Edison. Bring in the electric come machine. Do you know I think there’s a tape recorder in heaven for each one of us? and all the while we’re sleeping and talking and doing our daily acts, bonging the gong, blasting the ass, chewing the milch, milking the chintz, and working the jerk, why there is that tape recorder taking it all down, this is D.J. broadcasting from Texas, from Dallas, Big D in Tex, and listen children to your old dear ma, ever notice how blood smell like cunt and ass all mix in one, but rotten, man, the flesh all rotten like meat and fish is biting each other to death, and Death where is your gates, Mother Fucker, are they hot? Big ass tomb, big ass tomb, the fish are in the fireplace and the nerve’s begun to sing, make it cool, D.J., make it cool.

  Chap One

  “Well, now,” said Mrs. Jethroe, the mother of this extraordinary late adolescent on the fast receding previous page, the one who calls himself D.J. (if you recalled) “well, now,” said she, “what am I going to do with Ranald? He’s as obscene as a barmaid and just as barmy. The boy needs to be spanked. I would just as soon spank a puma. He’s evil,” said Mrs. Jethroe to her psychiatrist, who is a Jewish fellow, nothing other, working his ass off in Dallas, which means so to speak that he must spend eight to ten clammy periods of fifty minutes each listening to Dallas matrons complain about the sexual habits of their husbands, all ex hot rodders, hunters, cattlemen, oil riggers, corporation gears and insurance finks, zap! Well, like every one of these bastards (as Mrs. Jeth—call her Death-row Jethroe—might say when her breath is big! like the bottom of a burnt-out bourbon barrel) well, every one of these bastards has the sexual peculiarities of red-blooded men, which is to say that one of them can’t come unless he’s squinting down a gunsight, and the other won’t produce unless his wife sticks a pistol up his ass—that man is of course a cop. If the psychiatrist wasn’t such a fink and such a nice Jewish fellow type as to be working for the general good and wheel of society, and if he wasn’t afraid of drilling a little career-and-cancer piss right into the heart of Texas, he would write this book about the ejaculatory jump habits of cops, big ass Southern redneck cops all bullwhipped and bullshitted up into putteez, son, they come more ways—I froth at the mouth, said the killer, but don’t think it’s spit. Well, what’s to say, D.J.’s mother, Death-row Jethroe, is the prettiest little blonde you ever saw (looks like a draw between young Katherine Anne Porter and young Clare Boothe Luce, whew) all perfume snatchy poo, appears thirty-five, is forty-five, airs, humors, curl to her mouth, half Texas ass accent, half London wickedness, trill and thrill, she’s been traveling around the world, Heartache House in Bombay and Freedom House in Bringthatpore, shit, she’s been getting cunt-tickled and fucked by all the Class I Dongs in Paris and London, not to mention the upper dedicated pricks of Rome and Italy while her hus, big daddy Rusty Jethroe, is keeping up the corporation end all over the world including Dallas, Big D, Tex. That’s some end, son, Big N we call it. Mum’s first name is Alice. They found her vagina in North Carolina and part of her gashole in hometown Big D. Why? Why was her parts metaphorically blasted? Because, man, she used a dynamite stick for a phallus. You try that sometime for lots of hymen. D.J.’s father, Big Daddy, old Rusty, has got the dynamite. He don’t come, he explodes, he’s a geyser of love, hot piss, shit, corporation pus, hate, and heart, baby, he blasts, he’s Texas willpower, hey yay!

  Does this idyll of family life whet your curiosity, flame your balls, or sour your spit? Don’t argue, Alice Hallie Lee Jethroe is speaking to her Doc, Clam Fink, the Texas Jew, actually his name is Leonard Levin Fichte Rothenberg, pronounced by all big mind Texans as Linnit Live’n Fixit Rottenbug.

  “Well, now Lionhard,” says Hallelujah Death-row, D.J.’s sweet blond mother to Dr. Fixit, that little ole rottenbug, “will you jes take a fix on what dear Ranald has to say about everything? It’s enough to make a mother wipe up Aunt Jemima’s puke. For I love him like a jewel even if he is a thief. But he’s out of his mind. Poor sad little fellow. He’s so delicate and beautiful even if he is barmy as a barmaid.”

  “Hallie, let’s adjust our sense of the real,” says Dr. Hebrew Hairy. “Ranald’s delicacy and beauty are memory engravings, perhaps are chromosomal etchings, RNA, DNA, RNA, DNA, one for the left eye, one for the right.”

  “RNA, DNA, RNA, DNA,” says Hallelujah.

  “The facts,” says Fichte, “are these: Your son, Ranald, is six feet one at the age of eighteen, and is considered highly attractive by his social compeers, as well as mean and vicious.”

  “He read the Marquis de Sade at the age of fifteen.”

  “And the drug addict William Burroughs, whom personally I can’t see as a talent, I mean give me a hot pastrami sandwich, is now his hero.”

  “Do you mean the Hot Pastrami, Live’n Fixit?” asks Hallelujah.

  “No, sir, I mean William Burroughs. Adjust your sense of the real, Alice Hallie Lee Jethroe, the time has come to program out your attitudes. I saw Ranald at your request, he was recalcitrant, charming, gracious, anti-Semitic, morally anesthetized, and smoldering with presumptive violence, a host of incense, I mean incest fixes, murder configurations, suicide sets, disembowelment diagrams and diabolism designs, mandalas! Face into the eye of the real, Hallelujah, he’s a humdinger of a latent homosexual highly over-heterosexual with onanistic narcissistic and sodomistic overtones, a choir task force of libidinal cross-hybrided vectors.”

  “He has high-breed vectors all rights,” says Hallelujah, “he’s got the cunningest ancestry, in fact, cause we’re on my mother’s side from the Norloins.”

  “New Orleans?”

  “Yis, from Norlins, the Norlins Frenchy Montesquious and the Bat Fartsmotherers.” But seeing that Levin Fichte is living on her word, she just knocks over a bottle of one of his urine specimens, adieu albumen! and says, “Mon Doo Ginsberg, you’re sure full of shit for a doctor, don’t y’know there are no fine Southern families called Fartsmotherer? Lord knows we ain’t that fucking stupid, why even British county stock wouldn’t be called Fartsmotherer, maybe Assknocking, but not the other, you can’t analyze me Living Fichte if you don’t know things like that, oh poo I wish you was an Italianate Jew, all earthy and Levantine and suave and had a cunt-tickler of a mustache, instead of your clammy cold Lithuanian brow, what are you, a Talmud hokum? speak up, ass, I just wish you was good enough to kiss my sweet perfumed powdered old pooty-toot, hey Linnit? am I getting out my egressions now?”

  “I would not call them aggressions so much as identity crises,” said Linnit.

  “Oh, poo, let me tell you about the Montesquious. Half-Portuguese, half-French, all that hot crazy blood packed one-quarter into me, for the other half of mah mother was just straight Arkansas mule, the Mulies, why they the richest family in Arkansas then, hot out of Peezer, Arkansas, and they used rat paper for tar paper on the Chic Sale, that’s how benighted was their latrine, army folk of course, the MacArthurs used to kiss their ass. And my daddy, well he was just a lover of a husband to my ma, and he must have had a dick on him like a derrick, do I shock you, Dr. Jew?”

  “To my cornplasters.”

  “Oh, Linnit, you’ll be the death of me yet. Listen to this ol
d hen cackle. Well, Daddy was Indian for sure, and he had a personal odor like hot rocks in the sun which is in me all mixed with the fine sauces of Franco-Portuguese Montesquiou rut—I mean you should smell my armpits, noxious to some, a knockout to others, I keep them perfumed of course, we want no barmaid’s fatal scent on Hallie Jethroe, so I wash, Dr. Rothenberg, three times a day, I don’t want nothing but a soupçon of my good sweet crazy full-blooded woman’s scent on the breeze off my knees, just enough for to keep the breed alive, talk of high-breed vectors, well, my own sweet husband, Big Daddy, David Rutherford Jethroe Jellicoe Jethroe, Rusty, is just as high breed as you want, I can’t even follow Rusty’s family, they’re all marshals, and bastards and cowboys, and one desperado, and one railroad tycoon, and one professor at Harvard, first Texas professor they ever had in Upper Clam City, near Clamsville, which is what I call Harvard, now Linnit, you’re a Harvard man, tell me straight and clear what I am going to do with Ranald, he’s insane, that boy, and he looks just like George Hamilton the actor, who I think is Instant Heaven, he’s so brood-looking, yes, there’s something Hebrew about Ranald, he’s so big and dark and mysterious for eighteen, and he goes all the way back to Egypt you just know unlike you, dear Jew, you Talmud hokum, you clammy Have-it grit, I suppose I now have to pony up my fifty dollars for the hour.”

  “Madame, you owe me eleven hundred and fifty.”

  “You’ll have to bust a nut to get it, Rottenbug.”

  “I’ll torture you, I love torturing gentile females. All that white buttermilk flesh. Yum, yum. Yum, yum, yum.”

  Hey, hey, they really talk that way? That little blond lady, Hallie-perfume and powder on the poo—she talk that way? And Rottenbug going yum yum yum—is he out of his fucking skull? Wait and see. Nobody’s got any OK patience any more, just cannibals asking for chocolate on their stick—how the hell do you know what Hallie’s saying to Linnit and Fixit saying back? Wait and see? You know what they’re doing. They’re talking about Tex, Tex Hyde, Gottfried “Texas” Hyde Junior, that’s D.J.’s best friend, and know what, get that drop of cream off your jeans before you grow hair in your hand, this is the pitch, Tex is half-German and half-Indian on his father’s side, Redskin and Nazi all in one paternal blood, and his mother, well, bless his mother, Tex Hyde’s mother is jes old rawhide Texas ass family running back thru fifty-two shacks where in each shack the beans in the pot have been stuck on blacky inside side of the pot for six weeks—those beans look like gravel, Marshal Bean—yeah, Tex’s mother runs fifty-two shacks right back to the Alamo where all old saddlesore real Texas ass families run back to, why lick the scab on LBJ’s knee if one-tenth of all the Dallas ass families that go back to the Alamo was really there, they’d have all drowned in shit they were so congested and Santa Ana could have thrown his marijuana seed on the top and there’d be a forest of hemp now right in the heart of Texas. Which is a favorite theory of the voice you hear now submitted which is that the best hash and cannabis is grown on fertilizer of human shit, who is there to disprove an honest man’s folklore?