Chickenhawk: Back in the World - Life After Vietnam

That last bit just went by me. The fact that Knox liked what I’d written was exhilarating in itself. That he was going to try to sell it was a triumph. Just before we left New York, Knox had sold Bill’s vampire bat book, Nightwing, and the film rights for hundreds of thousands of dollars. It changed Bill’s life. He was on the Today Show, for chrissakes! He’d even gone to the publisher who was giving him crap about not sticking to the outline of his Russian novel and bought the thing back so he could do it his way. Wow!

Yes, indeed, I figured it might take a couple of months, but I was definitely on the road to success now. And I was happy.

CHAPTER 10

March 1980—I figured it might take a few weeks to sell a book, so I waited a month to call Knox.

“Knox, I don’t mean to bother you, but—”

“Yes, you do.”

“I do what?”

“You mean to bother me. Look, Bob, this is a tough sale. Don’t hang around waiting on pins and needles. This could take a long time. Why don’t you get a job?”

Good advice. The money from my severance was almost gone. I’d decided that I’d finish the Vietnam book if somebody bought it; otherwise, it was just too damn painful to do. Instead of looking for work, I started a book about something fun, something I was fascinated with: robots. Back in 1970 I’d read an article by Marvin Minsky of MIT. He described a little robot they’d built that just wandered around the lab on its own. When its batteries got weak, it’d find its way to a receptacle, plug in, and recharge itself. I thought that was amazing. Minsky also said that the thing, which had a TV camera for an eye, would just loiter around the place, staring at people. One woman in particular, a secretary at the lab, often found herself the object of this mechanical scrutiny and said it was unnerving. Minsky claimed not to know why the little pile of parts did that. I was drawn to artificial intelligence by that article and was reading everything I could find on the subject.

When I decided to write a novel, I figured I’d make the hero a machine.

Eventually I realized it would take more time to write a novel than I had. My Vietnam book was somewhere in limbo. I was not getting rich like I’d imagined. I applied at the local plastic pipe factory as a plastic-pipe-extrusion specialist and was turned down. I read the classifieds every day. I wasn’t getting anywhere. Luckily, Elliott called and said he wanted to come down. He wanted to go on a big canoe trip down the Suwannee River.

I’m usually not one to point out personal abnormalities, but I have to say here that Elliott is rich, always was. He’d inherited a comfortable fortune when his dad died and had a steady income from a portfolio of stocks and bonds. On our trip to see Willis, he’d advised me that a good investment to make was in railroad cars. Buy ‘em—thirty thou or so—and lease ‘em. This was gibberish to me—at any moment, without too much trouble, Patience and I could put our hands on maybe twenty bucks.

So Elliott showed up in a rented car and we all decided to go to our hometown, Delray Beach, and visit my father on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday before we went on our big river adventure. Patience and I stayed with my parents in Deerfield Beach. Elliott stayed with his mother in Delray. It was spooky visiting Delray Beach again. Lots of changes. South Florida had become overgrown with condos built on land that had been covered with sea-grape trees and sand dunes when I was a kid.

When we came back up to High Springs, Elliott and I began to get our gear together for our trip down the Suwannee River.

This would’ve been a fun trip under normal conditions, but Elliott and I had differences that began to surface and produce tensions. Little things cropped up while we were getting ready to go: Elliott would say let’s go out tonight for dinner. We’d think he meant he was buying (he’s wealthy and he asked), but he didn’t. So we almost get stuck for a check at a restaurant we never would have gone to had we not been invited. We’d have to point this out to Elliott. He wasn’t trying to be unthinking or uncaring; it just turned out that way because he didn’t, couldn’t, understand what it was like to be actually, honest-to-God, poor.