Chickenhawk: Back in the World

Anxiety symptoms returned. After dinner at a Chinese restaurant, I felt dizzy and confused. I could barely walk when we left and I fell to my knees on the sidewalk outside. My heart was clinking around in my chest like loose change. Patience drove us home. I lay in bed. Patience put her head on my chest and listened. My heart was going: ThumpThumpThump. Thump. Pause. Thump. Pause. Pause. It was like I’d just come back from Vietnam. We lay there in the dark. There was nothing else we could do. This had happened so many times before. It had to be anxiety, but was it? We fell asleep not knowing if one of us would wake up in the morning.

After a year, sales were dismal. When it looked like we were going belly-up, Don threw in the towel and went back to Florida. Patience and I stayed because it was all we had.

I called my childhood friend Bill Willis, the technician who had helped me get the job at Radiation. I asked if he wanted to manage production at the plant so I could work on sales. He’d just quit a job in California and said yes. He flew in and almost immediately I realized I’d made a mistake. Bill was a terrific technician, but a terrible manager. He wanted to do research into all kinds of different ways to make mirrors when what we needed to do was get the ones we had already made out the door faster. He was just doing what he did best; I’d hired him for the wrong job. We argued for two months about doing research until I got the courage to fire him. My delay had only made it worse. Bill had brought his wife, Sarah, from California and they’d gotten an apartment. I arranged for the company to pay his expenses back home. When he left, he shook hands with me and said I’d done the right thing.

A few weeks afterward, my body sent me a painful message, saying that it had developed an extreme dislike of alcohol. What a shock. Alcohol was as much a part of my biology as my blood. The message was a headache so horrible I couldn’t see straight when I woke up. I tried working that morning, but words didn’t make sense through the pain.

Some employees told me about eight new emergencies. I heard: buzz buzz glock. I felt like puking for hours. By noon I’d gotten so pissed off—booze had let me down—I decided to quit drinking. I had one of my employees take me to a local high school and bought some pot. (That’s where he got it. The kids ran a smooth operation there—lookouts in the playground, pre-measured marijuana in five-, ten-, and twenty-dollar convenience packs—very entrepreneurial.) I switched to smoking pot after work. It wasn’t as strong as booze, but it was less toxic. I began to feel better immediately.

Abe took me to lunch at a stevedore diner on the docks one winter day.

Eddie’s Diner, hot and steamy, crowded with dockworkers wearing knit caps and fingerless gloves, was in the corner of a warehouse. You picked up a steel tray at the door and got in the serving line. Abe said, “Stevie, make us a couple of the chef’s specials, okay?”

Stevie, a toothless guy with huge, hairy arms, grinned. “You got ‘em, Abie.” Stevie grabbed two loaves of Italian bread, sliced them in half like he was making a hoagie, and ripped out most of the bread, leaving shells. He flopped the shells on plates and ladled in mealy meatballs, clotty gravy, and big chunks of boiled potatoes. He put the top on each sandwich and squashed it flat with his hands. Gravy and potato chunks oozed out the edges. He plopped them on our trays. “Great, Stevie,” Abe said. “This is a complete meal, here.” Stevie grinned and said, “Eat one every day the rest of your life, Abie, and you’ll live that long.”

We walked to a table covered with junk. Abe cleared the table. The sandwich was utterly tasteless, but filling. Abe ate a few bites, put it down, lit up a cigarette, and smiled at me. For the first time since I’d known him, he asked me what I’d done in Vietnam.

Vietnam veterans were in the news: going nuts, killing people.

“I flew slicks.”

“What’s that?”

“We flew the grunts into battle. We were a crew of four in a Huey helicopter: pilot, copilot, crew chief, and gunner. We flew in flights of four ships, four flights to a company, usually. When we got close to the ground, we usually took heavy machine gun and rifle fire.”

“You had armor?”

“Yes. The seats were armored. We had an armored side panel. The bullets, however, were mostly coming from the front during the assaults. You couldn’t move during the landings—to try to dodge the bullets or anything. You couldn’t duck. You couldn’t hide. You couldn’t turn around. You had to stay together, on course. Both pilots held the controls in case the other got hit. When the bullets got close, all you could do was tighten your stomach. Sit there. Fly into the bullets.”

Abe grimaced. “Damn.”

I nodded. “You can do this for a while, but it starts to fuck up your mind. I flew a thousand missions.”

Abe leaned back on his chair, puffed some smoke, nodded. “Sounds like a bad time, Bob. I’m sorry you had to go through that.”

“Me, too.”