Just like the girl she said she could lead me to.
We were standing on a corner in the Northwest, a few doors down from a building where kids crashed. It wasn’t a South Bronx burnout, not even abandoned, really. The kids had moved in while the owner waited for financing on the renovations he would need to rehab the rental units. The way I heard it, the place had running water, but no electricity. Probably no heat, either, but the weather kept that from being a big deal.
It had taken a couple of more weeks, and another extension on Kevin’s money, to get this close to Bobby Ray. We weren’t pals, exactly. But he wasn’t distancing himself from me by body language anymore, deliberately warning kids off, the way he did when I’d first come up on him.
“I know a lot of people,” he said, vaguely.
“Bobby Ray, I asked you if you know her, okay? Not who she hangs out with. Not what she’s up to. And not where to find her.”
He gave me a measuring kind of look. I knew what that meant. A question he wanted answered. Bobby Ray was a trader. Info for info. He kept his street position by being in the know. You couldn’t buy his knowledge for money, and that’s why he got so much of it for free.
“Is it true you were a mercenary?” he asked me.
I kept my face blank.
“What do you mean by a mercenary?” I said. “Like a ‘soldier of fortune’ in the movies? Someone who gets paid to kill people in a country where the only law
“I don’t know, exactly. I never really thought about it. A lot of Vietnam vets you meet out here say they were—”
“I’m not a Vietnam vet,” I cut him off. I don’t mind lying about who I am or what I’ve done, but something about posing as a Vietnam vet makes me sick to my stomach. Tens of thousands of kids sacrificed to testosterone politics and business-worship while their better-born counterparts stayed home and partied. Back then, the only sincerity was in the antiwar movement. But that rotted at its core when movie stars started preening for the heroic torturers of the VC.
It was an impossible tightrope to walk—oppose the war, but support the soldiers—and most fell off to one wrong side or the other. A few of the antiwar radicals died, and a few more went to prison. Some of them are still there.
Some of the white members of the “underground” surfaced to yuppiedom. But the blacks couldn’t go back to where they’d never been. The profiteers and the cherry-pickers found new targets, the SLA survivors got paroled, and ex-Panthers and former SDS members ran for Congress.
Some revolutionaries of that era stayed true. Leonard Peltier is still buried alive in a federal POW camp. But he gets less media attention than Vanilla Ice. And
The war itself was as big a lie as the “war on drugs.” Politicians announcing a war, sending others to do the actual fighting . . . then fixing it so they couldn’t win.
And the kids who died for the lie—all they got was their name on a fancy slab of marble.
It’s a whole syndrome now: people pretending to be Vietnam vets. Especially popular among guys in the financial industry, for some reason I don’t get . . . probably the same twits who think they grow bigger balls every time some Internet stock runs up. See, it’s chic to “support” the people who fought over there, now that it’s over. So every guy who tries to glom a handout, he’s a Vietnam vet. People who would have had to be three years old when they enlisted, they’re Vietnam vets. They’re running for office, working a barroom, hustling women . . . all playing that liar’s card.
And now we’re all buddy-buddy with Vietnam, right? Like it never happened. Hell, business is business, and the slopes over there like McDonald’s even better than the niggers do over here. Great market for cigarettes, too. And you can’t beat those cheap labor costs with a stick . . . although it’s okay to beat the laborers.
MIA. Money Is All.
I turned eighteen while Vietnam was still raging, but I was safe from being called up—they didn’t have a draft board in prison. They had one in court, though. Plenty of guys my age went when judges safe from the draft did their patriotic duty by letting young men trade a sentence for an enlistment. That’s how Wesley learned to work long-distance—Uncle taught him some new tricks.
I got out of prison while it was still going on, but I never went near the army. I ended up in another jungle, on another continent. A genocidal war fueled by tribalism, but ignited by nondenominational lust for oil.
Years later, a government spook told me I was still listed on the Nigerian registry of war criminals. Good joke. The Nigerian government is a fucking crime cartel, holding whole tribes down by military violence, while their privileged classes spend their time making the country the international scam capital of the world.
I’m a veteran of a lot of things. War is only one of them. But Vietnam’s not on that list; and there’s something special about it keeps me from adding it to the fabric of lies I roll out for strangers.
“So where’d you learn the military stuff, then?” Bobby Ray asked. A clever kid. Or one who had been interrogated by professionals often enough to learn some of the tricks himself.
“Why is anything like that important?”
“You never know,” he said, solemnly. “You never know what something’s worth.”
“That’s true,” I said. Thinking I wouldn’t have to go through this crap if I was back in New York. My references were all over the street there. And the threads were never so tangled that I couldn’t find someone who knew me
There was an upside, sure. Nobody looking for me, either.
“I’ve been in military conflicts under foreign flags,” I finally said. “Good enough?”
“Do you know, like, karate and shit?” he asked, pronouncing the word “cah-rah-dee,” not “ka-rah-tay.” I liked him for it.
“Nope.”
“So you’re, like, into weapons?”
“I’m a pacifist.”
“You don’t look like that was always the case.”
“When I was your age, I did a lot of stupid things.”
“Yeah? Like what?”
“Going to prison.”
“For what?”
“For being stupid.”
He waited for me to add something. Finally, he realized I was done.
“What kind of name is B.B.?” he asked.
“Same kind as Bobby Ray.”
“You know, I’m thinking it might just be. Bobby Ray, that was the name my mother . . . I mean, my . . . Anyway, that was the name I was born with. Sounds kind of like a hillbilly one, right?”
“If you mean Appalachian, yeah.”
“Well, so does B.B. You ever notice how, sometimes, the white people who hate blacks the most, they’re the ones most likely to have the same kind of names?”
“It’s not so surprising. They come from the same places.”
“The South?”
“Poor.”
“Oh. Yeah. Does B.B. stand for anything?”
I measured the depth of his eyes. Made the decision. “Baby Boy,” I told him.
His face went sad enough for me to know he got it.
