Ben answered (a), O answered (d)
(she is her mother’s daughter),
Chon answered
(f) It doesn’t matter.
Because there are things he will not talk about. Things he has seen, things he has done in IraqandAfghanistan. Things you don’t burden other people with, memories that you try to prevent from overwhelming your brain and your nervous system, but that you can still feel on your skin. Movies that your mind privately screens on the inside of your eyelids.
These are things that you do not put into words.
They are ineffable.
Therefore, to fill the sad silence — underscored by O’s chant of I hate this trip I hate this trip I hate this trip — on the ride to John Wayne-Orange County Airport (you cannot make this shit up) Chon goes neo-Spiro Agnew on the subject of neo-hippies.
35
Chon thinks that neo-hippies are grungy, pasty-faced-from-vegan-diets (“Eat a fucking cheeseburger, Casper”), patchouli-oil-stinking, Birkenstock-wearing, clogging up sidewalks playing hacky sack (why don’t they save syllables and just call it a dirtbag), leaning their crappy single-gear bicycles against the doors of Starbucks, where they order Tazo green tea and borrow other people’s laptops to check their e-mail, sitting there for hours and never leave a freaking tip, doing semi-naked yoga in parks so other people have to look at their pale, emaciated bodies, parasites.
Chon wishes Southern California would secede from the rest of the state so it could pass a law sending any white guy with dreadlocks to a concentration camp.
“Where would the camp be?” Ben asks him.
This is known as “egging him on.”
“I don’t know,” Chon mutters, still pissed. “Somewhere off the fifteen.”
The problem (okay, one problem) with building concentration camps in Southern California, Ben thinks, is that contractors would trip all over each other trying to rig the barbed-wire bid. Also that you have a governor whose accent is, well…
… uhhhh…
“Of course,” Chon mumbles, “I suppose liberals would block it.”
Chon also hates liberals.
The only liberal he doesn’t hate is Ben.
(This is known as the Ben Exemption.)
Liberals, Chon will opine when he’s on a rant-and he’s on one now — are people who love their enemies more than their friends, prefer anyone else’s culture to their own, are guilty of success but unashamed of failure, despise profit and punish achievement.
The men are dickless, sackless, self-castrated eunuchs cowed into shame of their own masculinity by joyless, anger-filled shrews consumed with bitter envy at the material possessions,
not to mention multiple orgasms, of their conservative sisters (“You should have stopped him buying The Fountainhead, ” Ben tells O.
“Who knew he was in the fiction section?”)
Liberals took a pretty decent country and
Fucked It Up to the point where kids can’t read Huckleberry Finn or play dodgeball — dodgeball, that perfectly Darwinian game meant to ensure the survival of the fittest because the others are too perpetually concussed to propagate — and any dune surfer with a grudge feels he can fly planes into our buildings without fear of the Big One being dropped on Mecca like it should have been five seconds after the towers came down (Nancy Reagan would have pressed her husband’s finger on the button for him and turned the Saudi peninsula into the glass factory it deserves to be)
— except that liberals want to be loved.
Ben disagrees The liberals in the California State Legislature would not block a bill creating concentration camps as long as they got campaign contributions from the concrete manufacturers, the drivers hauling the inmates through the gates were unionized, and their trucks had the requisite minimum MPG standards and used the commuter lanes.
Ben knows California would be zapping guys at the pace of the Texas Versus Florida Bush Brothers Sibling Rivalry if the electric chair were solar powered.
“They don’t use Sparky anymore,” Chon tells him. “It’s lethal injection.”
Right.
Narcotics are illegal, so we use them to execute people.
For crimes.
36
Anyway, this is all well and good verbal fun and games but what matters isn’t what Ben and Chon say to each other, it’s what they don’t.
Chon doesn’t tell Ben about Sam Casey getting ripped off and beaten up, and his response to said provocation, because Ben wouldn’t approve and he’d get all bummed out about the necessity of force in a world that’s supposed to be about love and peace, blah blah.
Ben doesn’t tell Chon about the weird interaction with OGR because, well, it’s just weird and random and probably nothing, and besides, what’s Chon supposed to do about it? He’s on his way to the Stan, he has enough to worry about (like staying alive), so Ben doesn’t want to bother him.
And so they miss this critical junction, this intersection of events, this opportunity to put one and one together and get
One.
One same problem.
They’re not stupid, they would have put it together, but “would have” is just another way of saying
“didn’t.”
37
They walk Chon as far as the security line.
Where O hugs him and won’t let go.
“I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you,” she says, unable to stop the tears.
“I love you, too.”
Ben pries her off, hugs Chon himself, and says, “Don’t be a hero, bro.”
As if, Ben thinks.
Chon’s on his third deployment with a fucking SEAL team. He is a fucking hero and he can’t be anything but.
Always has, always will.
“I’ll be cowering at the bottom of the deepest foxhole,” Chon says.
Yeah.
They watch him go through the line.
