The Language Of Cannibals

eyes, and wore his long, yellow hair in a ponytail held in place by a leather thong. The men in the camouflage vests were staring at me as if they'd never seen a dwarf before. The man directly to my left, a Hispanic, wore a heavy flannel shirt despite the heat. Directly across the circle was a spindly, emaciated-looking veteran who wore a blue polyester suit that was baggy on him and which only served to highlight the network of red, alcohol-ruptured veins in his nose and cheeks. Although they'd been carrying on an animated conversation before I came over, all the men were now silent, their expressions wooden as they stared at me.

'Excuse me,' I said, addressing all of them, 'I didn't mean to interrupt.'

The emaciated man with the blue polyester suit and broken veins giggled nervously, an abrupt and grating sound. 'I ain't seen anyone as small as this guy since I left 'Nam,' he said in a high-pitched voice and giggled again. 'Who let the VC in here?'

Under other circumstances his remark might have called for a razor-sharp rejoinder from my vast repertory of counter-putdowns, but I decided from the look of him that he already had enough problems; there was pain in his nervous giggle, the soul-ache of a man who must struggle at all times to try to speak and behave normally or risk falling into the scream I suspected was always lurking at the back of his throat, like the tickle of a cough. Certainly, a disproportionate number of our Vietnam veterans seemed to have more than their share of emotional and physical problems, and I hadn't come over to trade barbs with one of the nation's walking wounded.

Turning to Trex, I said evenly, 'I just wanted to tell you that I admire your painting.'

The big man's features softened somewhat, and he was obviously pleased. He nodded slightly and opened his mouth to speak, but he was interrupted by the braying laughter of the man with the hostile, mud-brown eyes and pony tail.

'Jesus, Jack,' the man with the ponytail said, 'you finally found somebody who likes the smell of all that shit in your head. That painting of yours is the creepiest flicking thing I've ever seen. It doesn't make any fucking sense.'

Trex glanced sharply at the man with the ponytail, and then at the man in the polyester suit. They both abruptly fell silent, and the ponytailed man looked down at the floor.

'Thanks,' Trex said simply as he glanced back down at me, 'I appreciate the kind words.'

I didn't much care for this crew; there was too much alienation, too much insularity, too much thinly veiled hostility radiating from the men like body odor. But I also knew that such feelings were by no means unique to this small group. I tried to make some small talk, in a manner of speaking, and my conversational gambits were met with a modicum of polite, mumbled answers. The tension in the air remained. I felt like the cop who had accidentally wandered into the local gambling den; everyone was covering his hands and chips and waiting for me to go away.

After complimenting Jack Trex once again on his painting, I went away.

I fortified myself with a glass of white wine and some Jarlsberg cheese from a buffet that had been set up, then wandered through the rest of the rooms on the ground floor, examining the rest of the display of crafts and artwork. I saw nothing else that interested me. Jack Trex, with his primitive technique and sketchy command of material, was in no danger of becoming a professional artist, but there was real passion radiating from his canvas, feeling that belied the wooden, remote manner he displayed when I had tried to talk to him. I saw no comparable display of emotion in any of the other paintings, wood carvings, macrame, and pottery that constituted the rest of the show; it all seemed to me rather institutional, like baskets woven by mental patients during art therapy. There were lots of land- and seascapes, but they all lacked depth and feeling, like paintings of paintings or works executed by artists whose minds were on other things-which, I thought, was quite likely the case with some of them. Post-traumatic stress syndrome, it was called. There was no group that suffered more stress- related emotional and physical problems than America's Vietnam veterans, but with the obvious exception of Jack Trex's painting, none of that inner conflict was reflected in the work I viewed.

A close friend of mine to whom I owed my life, a very mysterious and multigifted man by the name of Veil Kendry, was not only a Vietnam veteran but a world-class artist whose works now hung in private collections and museums all over the world. From Veil I had learned not only a great deal about the catastrophically rending effect the Vietnam War had had upon the men who fought there but also about the pain and potential in the human heart in general; from Veil I had learned of, and witnessed, the power of art to transcend-and, finally, to heal- that pain, sublimating rage, violence, and vague hurt. But the artist first had to be willing to communicate, to try to describe the shapes and colors of the maelstrom within. Again with the sole exception of Jack Trex, I saw no one in this place making such an effort-not judging by the flat, emotionless quality of the work I examined.

I decided that there was a great deal of emotional repression in the Cairn chapter of Vietnam Veterans of America. It depressed me.

Before leaving I decided to view The Language of Cannibals once more. I left the main viewing area, turned down the corridor where Trex's painting was hanging in its out-of-the-way, dimly lighted setting. I stopped a quarter of the way down the corridor and studied the man who was studying the painting. He was about five feet nine or ten, with the compact frame and erect bearing of a former athlete who was fastidious about remaining in good shape. He had a full head of chestnut-brown hair, razor-cut in a short, conservative style. He was wearing a finely tailored, brown seersucker suit, light blue shirt and brown tie, pale brown loafers with tassels. Seen in profile, he had small ears, high, pronounced cheekbones, a strong mouth and chin. I felt I'd seen him somewhere before and that I should know who he was.

The solid man in the seersucker suit seemed totally absorbed in the painting, unaware that I was studying him. I watched as he leaned forward, peering closely at individual sections, apparently trying, as I had done, to find some meaning in the strings and clots of the letters themselves. After a few moments he backed away a step, leaned to one side and then the other in order to view the painting from different angles.

He wasn't a movie or rock star; I was certain of that. And he wasn't a celebrity in the usual sense.

He was. . the confidant of, an aide to, a celebrity. Ah.

The man's name was Jay Acton, and I had seen him-very briefly, in an unguarded moment when he was unaware that he was being photographed-in a PBS documentary on extreme right-wing influences in America.

Jay Acton was an aide to-and, the documentary had strongly hinted, the intellect and strategist behind-a curious fellow by the name of Elysius Culhane, the self-styled 'last of the conservative purists.' Culhane's words in his syndicated newspaper column and over the air on the political television talk shows he regularly hosted or appeared on were sometimes insightful, but always abrasive, and were raptly absorbed by millions of Americans.

To me, the man was a baying full-mooner. I considered Elysius Culhane a not-so-subtle Nazi sympathizer, a shameless hypocrite, a zealous ideologue, and an aggressive intellectual thug. He was a master of language, despite a slight speech impediment that caused him to occasionally slur two or three words together, but this man's language was not a descriptive or analytic tool for carving truth. It was just one more weapon to be used against what Culhane perceived as America's enemies-'godless communism' in general and all Russians in particular, glasnost and perestroika and the crumbling of the Evil Empire or no, liberals, moderates, humanists, women who had abortions and doctors who performed them, the Supreme Court, unmarried people who did not practice chastity, homosexuals, and any nation, institution, or individual not reflecting or espousing 'Christian values,' as he defined them.

In his autobiography, If You're Not Right You're Wrong, rumored to have been ghostwritten by Jay Acton, Culhane described his upbringing as the 'runt' in the rough-and-tumble world of a Roman Catholic, working-class family with eleven children headed by a hard-drinking father and a manic-depressive mother who spent more time in mental hospitals than her home. I'd thought his father sounded more than a bit abusive, single-handedly ruling his brood of children with fists and a leather strap, but Culhane had written glowingly of a childhood dominated by a father who 'taught me what real values are, and wasn't afraid to lay on the leather when you got it wrong.' He had been educated in Roman Catholic schools run by priests, nuns, and brothers who 'brooked no nonsense when it came to the meaning of the blood of Christ and America's hallowed place in God's plan for the world.' Near the end of the book, after coming perilously close, within a verb or two, to calling for a coordinated, preemptive nuclear attack on Russia, China, and the 'Arab world,' he lamented the fact that all American children had not had the benefit of his upbringing. Elysius Culhane was always looking to lay on the fists and leather, at home and abroad.

Culhane had cut his political teeth as a fund-raiser in the political twilight world of Lyndon Larouche, a fact he denied but which had been confirmed by a number of reporters, then left when Larouche's ship began to sink under