Chickenhawk: Back in the World

Knox’s office was in Greenwich Village. We got to his place around ten. His wife, Kitty Sprague, let us in. Knox beamed and said, “Author, author.” I smiled, but after the reality of the sentencing, being an author just paled to insignificance. “Thanks, Knox. By the way, I just got sentenced to five years in prison. You think you could lend me three hundred bucks?”

“You’re broke?” Knox asked.

“Yep. Twenty-five hundred doesn’t last as long as it used to.”

“Where you going from here?”

“Thought I’d go meet my editor at Viking and then Patience and I are going to Maine.”

“You going to work up there or are you going to fuck off?”

“No time to fuck off. I can work there as well as anywhere.”

Patience parked near a fire hydrant on a side street in the middle of New York City and waited for me. I walked into a huge building on Madison Avenue and took the elevator up to the Viking Penguin floors. While I waited in the reception area, I felt a lot like a poor relation visiting a rich uncle. After a minute, Gerald Howard came out. He was a young guy, younger than he’d sounded on the phone. He still didn’t know about my arrest and he looked to me then like someone who’d turn pale if he knew he was talking to a convicted felon. We went to his office.

We chatted. Gerald sat in front of a window overlooking the city.

I could see a comer of Central Park in the distance. The differences between our worlds were profound, but we had an overlapping interest—Chickenhawk. By some strange process that I still don’t understand, my manuscript came to be read by someone who liked it and could do something about publishing it. Gerald Howard was the right man at the right time. He was a young editor in the Penguin paperback division, and he wanted to be a hardback editor for Viking. This was to be Howard’s first hardback book. He had just gotten the second part of my book a couple of days before and had already read it. I was relieved to hear him say it stood up to the first part, was even, in fact, better.

While Howard talked, I was distracted and made poor conversation. The fact that I’d just been sentenced to prison wouldn’t leave me. I kept thinking about Patience waiting downstairs, and felt conscious of the time. I told Gerry, as he insisted I call him, that I was happy he liked my book, but that Patience was the real writer in the family. She’d be famous someday. I looked at my watch and said I really ought to be going and how soon did he think Viking would be sending me a check.

“I’ll get them to expedite the check,” Gerry said. “Knox says you’re broke.”

“That’s a fact. And—” I almost said and going to jail, but I was afraid they’d change their minds. I shrugged.

“Well, that’s going to change,” Gerry said. “I have a good feeling about this book.”

Gerry walked me back to the reception area and we said good-bye.

By dusk the next day, Patience and I were in a cabin on a lake in Maine.

Patience has lots of relatives, and they all come to Maine in the summer. Aunt Priscilla stayed two cabins down the shore, Aunt Pat lived two cabins up the shore. Uncle Roger lived across the lake. Patience’s brother Chris lived up the road year-round; her sister Vickie, also a permanent resident, lived three miles away. They all knew me because Patience and I had been here while I was in the Army, before and after Vietnam. Now they knew I’d been convicted, was going to jail, and also that I’d sold a book. Nobody, including me, knew how to act, proud or ashamed.

I had my electric typewriter and a pack of paper. That’s all it takes to be a writer. I worked at the kitchen table in the cabin. And as long as I worked, I felt okay. I began part three, which I called “Short Timer’s Blues.” This was a tough one to remember. Near the end of our tours, the pilots were just plain overworked. I and my buddy, Jerry Towler (who I was calling Gary Resler in the book because I still hadn’t heard from him), had each flown close to a thousand missions by the time we’d transferred to the Forty-eighth Aviation Company, called the Blue Stars. As we got closer to our departure date, and as the missions got hotter and hotter, and when the Army forgot about their promise to rotate short-timers back to ass-and-trash duty in Saigon and other places, I began to have real problems: hallucinations. I saw my electric razor burst into flames—as real as life—in the mosquito netting over my cot one night near Dak To. I had weird periods when I’d lose my balance while I walked. I had temporary blackouts when I’d see my face suddenly an inch from the page of a book I was reading and not know how I got there. I was losing it.

And now I was losing it in Maine.