Chickenhawk: Back in the World

“No problem. We have some great used telephone company vans. I can arrange a loan for you. All you need is a small down payment.”

“How small?”

“Let’s see.” I calculated, using car-salesman training: We took in a fleet of these junker vans from Southern Bell on trade. Worth maybe a hundred and a half wholesale. Company wanted three. “On a nine-hundred-dollar loan, they’d want a hundred and a half down.”

“Don’t have it.” The guy went back to work. Normally I’d quit screwing with such dismal prospects, but there was absolutely nothing else to do except sit inside and swelter and smoke cigarettes and try to work up some interesting car salesman stories with the other salesmen.

“No problem.”

“What do you mean, no problem? I don’t have any money!”

“You don’t have any money, right?”

“That’s what I said.”

“No problem. We go to a loan company—friend of mine—and borrow the down stroke!”

“You can do that?”

“Why not?”

The guy shook his head, painted a few strokes, while I waited on the sidewalk. He looked down. “If you can do all that, I’ll buy the damn thing.”

I made enough money to buy the stuff we needed and pay the rent. Plus I had my choice of new cars to drive. I hated it. This was rear echelon, black-market-motherfucker work.

I decided to join the Army Reserves. Maybe I could fly helicopters again. Needed current flying time for a job. If I flew again, I’d be happier, stop drinking so much. Wouldn’t need Valium, either. There were no aviation units in Gainesville. The closest one, in Jacksonville, didn’t need pilots. I join the Gainesville Army Reserve, planning to transfer later.

The reserve guys were mostly pissed off because they’d joined the reserves to avoid Vietnam; and in 1973 the goddamn war was over but they had another five years to put in. I thought this was funny as hell. Tough break, warriors. My unit was a finance company. They didn’t know what to do with a chief warrant officer pilot at first, but they decided to send me to school at Fort Benjamin Harrison, Indiana, to learn how to be a unit personnel technician, UPT. I would be a UPT, if that was what it took to fly again.

For about six weeks, I was once again an active-duty warrant officer. This time, though, I was on an administrative mission, as they called it.

The pay was much better than I’d gotten in combat.

I went to summer camp with the warriors. With all my medals, I looked like Audie Murphy to them. Another unit was at camp, an aviation unit. I went for a visit. The pilots were like me, real people. One asked me if I’d like to try it again.

We got into a Bell Loach (LOH—light observation helicopter). I’d never flown one of these things. I put on a flight helmet for the first time in years. Familiar sound: turbine whines, cries to fly. Rotors blur, whop, whop, whop. The pilot said: “Go ahead. Take it up.” I lifted the collective, felt myself floating again. Is there anything as magical? Leaned forward and we skimmed over the ground and I leapt into the sky. I rolled and wheeled through the air, seeing the earth as it is, feeling ecstasy for twenty minutes. God wanted me to fly. Pilot said we had to go back. I nodded. Came back to the grass field. Some of the warriors had come to watch. I flew close to the ground, came to a hover. I sat there floating, not wanting to ever touch the earth again. I turned. Hovered to the parking spot. The ground pulled me down.

CHAPTER 6

March 1974—I decided to start my own car company while I worked at Ford, buying wrecks and fixing them up to sell for exorbitant prices with my brother-in-law, Bruce. For some stupid reason I’ve forgotten, we took in a brand-new attorney as a partner and somehow, though we sold cars, Bruce and I never made any money. Since I spent most of my time with our new company, the Ford place got tired of paying me for doing nothing and fired me. In a couple of months, the attorney disappeared with the checkbook.

More bad luck: my sister, Susan, was home when their kerosene heater exploded in their rented house. She and the kids got out, but they lost all their belongings, including the thesis Bruce was working on for his master’s degree. Things were not going well.

Strategic withdrawal: Patience and Jack and I moved to the Shack, a run-down house in a low-rent part of town. Wind slipped between the warped clapboards of the Shack as it slowly moldered, listing, back into the earth from which it had come. I felt terrible about it—I was a failure as a provider. Couldn’t seem to get money together.

We lived on a tight budget at the Shack. We ate six chickens a week on food stamps. Patience made our own bread. We never bought more than five dollars worth of kerosene at a time for the heater. Heating the breezy Shack was a hopeless task anyway. Patience and I had a feather bed; Jack, now ten years old, slept under twenty pounds of blankets. Luckily, Gainesville is a sunny place in winter and you can get warm during the day.

I sat in the sun a lot, thinking about what to do next.