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When I was ten years old I brought my dad to school for show and tell.
It was the Friday before Memorial Day and I told everybody my dad was a hero. I'd seen lots of pictures, in my house, on his dresser, of him in his fatigues, sitting on a big tank or something. He looked cool as shit, you know. In one shot he was smokin' a cigarette and even though he told me I should never smoke, I'd still put a toothpick or pen cap in my mouth and stare at myself in the mirror, tryin' to imitate his pose. Yeah, he was cool. Joe Cool. So when he said he'd come into my class, Ms. Kinnian's class, I was ecstatic. And I was like ten, like I said, and it's like still a real vivid memory. Yeah. He came in, in his dress uniform, with a whole bunch of medals I'd never seen before tacked to his chest. They sparkled, chimed as they bounced while he walked. Man, I sat up straight, made sure everybody paid real good attention. Now, it was real quiet. My dad gets up in front of the class, a thick waft of mouthwash on his breath and he says: "The last thing you learn before they send you to Vietnam is the rabbit lesson."
My dad. My dad used to tell us this story, about when he was a kid. He and my uncle were up in the attic of their house in Cambridge. It was a two story wooden box, if you ask me. And that was where my dad slept, in the attic, in a little room just over the kitchen. Small. But he made it his own, you know. Put up posters of Fenway Park and a little American Flag pennant and shit. And it had these big heating vents in the floor that led down to right over the stove. So when the jets were on you could smell whatever was cooking. Like on Saturday mornings when my grandma would cook breakfast; eggs, bacon, toast. She wouldn't bother to wake my dad up. She'd just hit the jets and let the smell shoot up the ceiling. Woke him up every time. Anyway, when my dad was a kid, my uncle and him would always play up there. Like board games or Cowboys and Indians. They'd build these forts out of orange crates. Not the color orange but the little crates like tangerines were sold in. Like balsa wood and shit.
And my dad would always make my uncle be the Indians. My dad was always the cowboys, always beatin' on the natives, right. So one time my uncle decides to steal a box of matches from the kitchen—give the Indians fire arrows. He lights 'em and starts throwing these matches at the fort. My dad thinks its funny so he strikes the outside of the match box and puts it inside the orange crate. "Powder room" he yells. The whole fort starts smokin', fillin' up the attic. My dad's laughin', coughin'. My uncle holds his breath. Then they heard a thud. Two feet hit the stairs. See my grandmother was in the kitchen-- and the jets well... reverse the bacon story. She starts up the stairs and my dad panics. "You boys smokin' up there?" He tosses the fort out the window. It lands on the neighbors garage, right on the spot the guy weatherproofed the day before. Goes up like boom! Like the little powder room.
Guy's a prick. Cops come.
Second degree arson. Sends my dad to juvie for eleven months.
Yeah, guy's a prick.
It was 1969. He gets out in February of '70. Drafted like two weeks later.
Joe Cool.
Yeah, he told me not to smoke...
But he might as well have bought me my first pack, you know.
So, I went to the V.A. right after I got back from my second tour. Like, about a week after I got back... cause I had these headaches. And I mean, I used to get headaches. Like when I had a test at school and my mom was coming into my room to wake me up, I'd get a headache. Or when some asshole got in my face and got me upset for no good reason. Like cut me off in traffic and made me sit behind him for like twenty minutes on the freeway. I'd get a headache. But when I got back it was different. It was every day for all day. I'd wake up and I'd have a headache. I'd go to sleep and I'd just sit there on the mattress cause I had a headache. A vice grip on my temples. Tightened every time I breathed. Tighten to the point I could feel the blood moving through my veins, capillaries, all the way from my heart to my head. A balloon that was filling up with too much air. So I went to the V.A.. First day there they send me to this room where this bitch takes my temperature for an hour. Once with the stick under my tongue twice up the... well I ain't got to demonstrate. All three come back the same. 98.6. Been 98.6 my whole life.
I could have typhoid with a scarlet fever chaser and I'd still be 98.6. So they give me these pills and send me home. I come back a week later. Same shit. More pills. Then I come back the week after that. Every week for a month. Headaches. Pills. Temperature up the... Finally they send me to this shrink. A retired Drill Sergeant. Some shrink, right? Made a living off of tearing men down, now they want him to build them back up. So I ask him about all these guys comin' back, feel depressed, then offin' themselves. These hundreds of guys who just couldn't take it. Didn't want to live with the headaches and the nightmares and the pain. So they kill themselves. I ask this seven foot ten, giant of a man, whose sideburns are shaved above his ears-- bic-like, marine-like-- I ask him what he thinks about that and he says, "I think them guys would have killed themselves anyways."
The Rabbit Lesson.
"The last thing you learn before they send you to Vietnam is the rabbit lesson."
When they say that, my dad said, the drill sergeant holds his k-bar, like so. He looks over the whole company of troops and says "make sure you find the anus of the rabbit and slide your blade downward, over the stomach, then the neck." He cuts. Then he peels the skin back and pulls the insides out, throwin' 'em all over everybody. Blood hits you in the face. The drill sergeant looks at you and he says: "You might have to do this if you ever get lost in the jungle."
Only thing is, Your Honor— Only what they don't tell you, sir... Is that there ain't no fucking rabbits in the jungle. No rabbits in that desert shithole neither. All them rabbits is over here. At home. Waitin' when you get home. Only now, Your Honor, you're telling me-- everybody's telling me I can't do like they told me. Like they taught me. I ain't supposed to do that no more.
Well, I sure wish somebody'd told me that. After I got out. I sure wish my dad had a picture of that on his dresser, sir.
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