Towards Vorticism

thgordon

She shoots me with an AK-47, frayed bells brushing the grass around widely set, green-stained bare feet. A thick black belt rides her hips. Mid-length brown hair whispers slowly across her face…

…except I know perfectly well she wasn’t wearing jeans or a black leather belt and that she couldn’t have held the Kalashnikov, since I was doing so. Her image remains fixed in my mind as I have described it nevertheless, the rooted, delta-legged stance and wind-blown brown hair all of the real person that remains to me.

I had been scouting the breeze in the strangely demilitarized zone between our own Little Big Horn and the enemy’s Big Big Horn. Rolling up that picturesque slope while the wind pushed at my hair was almost unbearably poignant, promising a world full of adventure. The light undersides of oak leaves glimmered in the sunny void.

As I passed between the first two of a grainy trio of erupted boulders, the wind-whipped ambushing girl rose from behind the rock straight ahead firing accurately, placing points of cold on my chest. I shot back reflexively, shocked less by the surprise attack than by a girl wearing pants. Girls started wearing them much later in my recollection, about the time they became interesting. That may be why their prototype appears to me now as she was not then, in the clothes of one or more of her epigones, three of whom appeared almost immediately at my cardinal points, squeezing triggers.

Seeing through the doubly distorting lenses of what I comprehended then and what I make of it now, particularly understanding that I often enough have rationalized in retrospect particularly thorny, troubling and contradictory memories much as the waking parse dreams, it is difficult to gather, let alone explain, what I thought at age seven about girls. Certainly I had girlfriends in first and third, though not, as it happened, in second grade. Lisa alternated between girlfriend and unrequited crush depending on her mood. But I had had a meaningful relationship with Liz in Munich which was mutually affectionate and supportive. We felt that we had each other. More, we made each other happy.

It seems to me not merely that this bond anticipated and formed in some way practice for later dating, but that it was an important involvement in and of itself, complete with an emotional attachment stronger than that in most of my later relationships. We were not so much imitating our fathers and mothers as looking for love in what happened to be, given our genetic predispositions, the right place: the eyes of a fellow first grader of the opposite sex. There may be (I am tempted to say based on the anecdotal evidence of one hazily remembered childish relationship) nothing to learn about love.

Elizabeth’s salient quality, insofar as I can remember it, was companionability; she was quiet without being shy. The warmth of her breath on my arm lingers. Surfaces and contents had not separated yet, if it is not truer to say that I had not yet joined the conspiracy of the nonsensical essence. In any case, she was, so far as I knew, pretty to the core, a creature entirely defined by almond-shaped blue eyes and warm, steady breaths.

Liz was an exception to what seems to have been the childish rule of conflating the unique and the beautiful. My army made Pete its general partly because we thought his shining black hair, gilded high color and dark eyes half hidden by epicanthic folds commanding or commendable. Red hair on off-white skin and curly black hair on medium brown skin seemed equally preferable in those days to meaner alternatives.

Carlisle, Pennsylvania may have seemed a typical midatlantic town, but I tend to view it now as a Potemkin village of midatlanticana. A great deal seems to have been carefully whitewashed, including or perhaps especially the people. The two children I knew of non-European heritage were the lone oases in that fair desert except while the Washington Redskins' training camp endured. Their owner liked the town, reportedly, because it offered few distractions.

I thought otherwise, finding its garages (reeking familiarly of mildew and oil) and alleys (sun-soaked, breezy and filled with boxes which could transform into forts, tanks or what have you) very distracting indeed. It is interesting to remember how one marvelously large cardboard box once became a ship. It did not dissolve, then loom as steel over storm-tossed wave tops. Instead the taped corrugations, by hinting at rivets, became hallowed for giving my disbelief enough impetus to suspend.

My army’s great events played out in the central slope of Dickinson College campus, which rose marvelously from the rocks of Little Big Horn to those of Big Big Horn. Its forking sidewalks propitiated the only bike racing rule, which was follow the leader. I picked an upper branch the one moment I had a sniff of the lead, followed by a considerable minority (one quarter? one third?) of the pack. And this is the moment I remember: the wind shouting past my ears, the exhilaration of leading on a curving hill under the yellow sun as the pack split in two like a school of fish around a shoal. (My angle of vision seems to have moved over time to a point perhaps thirty feet directly above the calving pack.) Understanding exactly what had happened and thinking partial victory better than none, I headed for the start/finish line, then only thirty yards away, and sailed past it in slightly guilty exaltation. Afterwards an emergency meeting of my elders, convened by my brother, tried to rob me of my triumph.

The flaring top tube of my bicycle, red as the dawn, now vaguely evokes a 1967 Cadillac tail fin. My possibly mistaken memories of my brother’s bicycle are that it was gold and that it had as it was called a banana seat, which mine did not. It certainly bore three H decals. They stood, I knew, for Hubert Horatio Humphrey. I wanted three H’s on my bike as well, but concluded with admirable can-do spirit that the logistical difficulties would be too great to overcome.

In the brief period between the years when we were the wrong nationality and the decade when we were the wrong religion, my brother and I might not have chosen to advertise quite so strenuously that we were the wrong party. But we clung to our faith as obstinately as many another. It did not seem to hurt us: in Carlisle we passed, blessedly, for normal blue-eyed children, soldiers in the bicycle-borne boy army, fueled by sugar and Saturday morning cartoons.

We often biked to the junior high school to play everyday games like kickball, baseball and football. I associate it, first of all, with the awe and envy owed to any child competent at a sport. A boy named Guy or Gary, I think, appeared one day with an oiled glove and a Phillies cap, throwing a real baseball with a loose, easy motion, the shirt pulling across his chest as he threw. I wished that I, too, could pitch with an oiled glove, though his choice of teams seemed (for lack of a better word to describe a seven year old’s sense of the déclassé) hick.

The Phillies passed awkwardly for a home team in Carlisle, even though we were closer to both the strangely pristine Washington Senators and the very intriguing Baltimore Orioles. Rooting for a southern team, however, would have been unthinkable in the northernmost town ever occupied by Confederate troops. Overwhelming yankee sentiment and the consequent lack of willing confederates partly explain why the two military role playing options were cowboys and Indians and Americans and Viet Cong. The popularity of the former probably did not owe anything to the victory over Dwight Eisenhower’s Army team won by Jim Thorpe, Pop Warner and the Carlisle School for Indians en route to the 1912 national championship.

There was no escaping the latter. The Vietnam War played in every warm, smeared newspaper and grainy black and white television. It was not, I would have admitted if pressed, the best war in the world. It was not nearly so good as World War II, which I had portrayed in crayon, complete with exploding Germans, to while away my time in Germany. But the Vietnam War had its points, and it was our war, so we loved it. Its fashionable, contemporary feel inspired ever-more realistic games. We moved from cap guns to air guns to armies with ranks which fought set-piece water battles.

Given children’s nature, it was inevitable we stereotyped General Pete as the noble-minded if none-too-swift American, brimming as he did with what seemed the defining qualities of bonhomie and guilelessness.  Why on earth he promoted me, the quintessential Viet Cong, to corporal, lord of coevals, I could never quite fathom.

Nepotism could be safely ruled out, I decided on the golden morning of my apotheosis. It was certainly true that I might, in theory, have benefited from being the younger brother of the colonel. Yet, aside from it seeming, based on seven years’ experience, anathematic that my brother would have used his superior status to help me, being the younger brother of the commander in chief had done Chris, now under my orders, no good.

It was also possible in theory, and certainly tempting to my I (the Freudian ich, customarily mistranslated as ego), to believe that somehow Pete, or perhaps even my brother, had marked my stellar exploits. But which ones? Little dramas raced through my mind. The two hours trying unsuccessfully to rig a Viet Cong air gun to go off (in the right direction!—that impossible detail!) when a uniquely unobservant and miraculously clumsy American tripped a string? The long and lazy arc described by a spinning hand-me-down Beatle boot to crown my kickball follow-through? There were so many possibilities, but the only likely one, I believe I concluded quite soberly, was size. I was bigger than the other second graders. Pete, who was not detail-oriented, might well have been laboring under the illusion that I was in third grade.

The key to the affection and esteem my brother and I, among others, felt for Pete is lost to time; the words “everyone liked him,” though fairly accurate in reflecting my memory, do not, of course, help much. It may be that Pete never had an unkind word for anyone, but this is a rationalization and a guess, based on both a dimly recollected memory of proximal ease, and a clearer one concerning the extraordinary patience he showed his younger brother, which, I felt, was both highly praiseworthy and entirely unnatural. (A seven year old blonde Ringo-Chris still looks up at Pete and me docilely from time to time. We are on the sidewalk in front of the junior high school. A bicycle is resting upside down on its seat and handlebars. The wheel spins.)

Our army’s command structure reassured me, in any case, that my elders and I were on the same page. If asked to choose a general for our army, I would certainly have picked Pete for his charisma. For second in command, I would have looked for a German General Staff officer type, someone with a keen logistical mind, able to handle strategy, organization and supply, and would have settled without a second thought on my brother. As they had.

The night before the war with the Amazons, my brother had laid out our weapons by the kitchen sink for cleaning, testing and filling, keeping them martially parallel to the sink’s short side and evenly distributed in horizontal space. The crux of our fraternity was that he had taken Prussian order for his very own in Germany, while I had opted for Wandervogel goofy-headedness. With defeat to an army of girls threatening, it was reassuring to think, however--as my brother checked off the “filled” box in his absurdly neat inventory of our weapons--that defeat would not be due to slapdash preparation.

My AK-47 water rifle, a birthday present of genius, had the best effective range of all our army’s weapons, about three yards. But it was still a fairly light and endurable arm compared to the point blank shirt-plastering power of General Pete’s mustard bottle, a long, slim cylinder which still presides elegantly over ballpark condiment tables. That shiny Friday evening—the long summer sun reflecting off formica?--I tested a ketchup bottle with genuinely disappointing results. 

Saturday morning, after the Bugs Bunny/Roadrunner hour, I filled up water balloons at a fountain in one of the campus’s buildings. Due to the fat chance of using them effectively in open warfare—try pegging a skittery, dodging eight year old from any distance with that slipping blob—water balloons were our nuclear weapons, hoarded for the ultimate inundation.

I was highly conscious, particularly when adults passed, of occupying a liminal area of mores; there were plenty of activities actively banned for children, and a few openly permitted. Filling water balloons at indoor fountains lay somewhere in between. It would have been banned had old people known we had any desire to do it, but as it was, they limited themselves to making me feel uncomfortable as they passed. The building was strangely dark, thanks to the brightness of the day. I wanted to move away from the censuring glances and into the sun but felt chained to my task in an unpleasant arrangement I would now call work.

Nothing dates that era more decisively than a general love of liberty. We ran away from adults every chance we had, which suited everyone perfectly, as we found each other crashing bores. It was a push whether we were more vastly indifferent to cocktails or they to water wars. I should have been grateful, since marshalling the seven to ten year old community seemed the best idea anyone had ever had. And the fun was so evident that it was not limited, for once, to boys. It had conjured a girl army into existence--which seems nearly as unlikely to me now as it did then--who ambushed me five score and five years after J.E.B. Stuart became the first and last person to whoop it up in Carlisle. (Deprived of his eyes and ears, Lee consequently blundered into Meade at Gettysburg. Carlisle therefore takes credit for winning the war.)

Carlisle’s Army War College would have recommended I reopen my lines of communication exactly as I did, about-facing promptly and turning away for the last time from the girl I will never forget. The fight with the girl who had closed the picture perfect quadruple envelopment behind me was quick and one-sided. My gun was considerably stronger in the five to seven foot range we fought than her little, somehow-space-themed squirt pistol, which, along with the streaks my rifle painted across her shirt, are what she is reduced to in my memory. As I wondered how much longer I could weather the fire of three guns on my back, she sidestepped towards cover. I slipped past her and ran, not without a pang of regret for the sad fate of a beautiful ambush.

Events between my escape and the final assault are lost to time. Next thing I know we are preparing ourselves to invade Big Big Horn, full water buckets and water balloons at the ready, boulder-covered backs to its uphill side, showing just the kind of strategic nous characteristic of my brother. Attacking from the far side of our fort gave us the advantages of both the high ground and surprise. (Though the girl army could hardly have missed us trooping past and the surprise was therefore entirely theoretical, it remained, we all must have felt, stylish.)

At that moment, as grimly task-oriented as only small boys and soldiers can be, we were a highly confident and utterly determined army. We had turned out to be stronger and faster, better organized, better trained, better led, better motivated, and above, all, better armed. The little squirt gun my Kalashnikov had outgunned in the ambush was symptomatic. Surely a little begging could have earned one of those semi-translucent orange Lugers which were our army’s standard small arm, having an interesting sweet spot in the three to four foot range. The enemy had not spent the night before, clearly, testing weapons and ransacking the refrigerator for possibilities. They were water war dilettantes.

At a single wave from the Asian American boy’s hand, the European American boys stormed the fort, without meeting particularly vigorous resistance from the modishly dressed European American girls. Two or three boys caught and held down the Amazon general while others poured buckets of water, water balloons and small arms fire on her until she surrendered. Soaked to the skin and thoroughly demoralized as she appeared (though, to her credit, not in tears), I thought to myself, oh, how the mighty have fallen, or sentiments to that effect, and, finding the spectacle unedifying, sat down and fixed my eyes on the undersides of wind-stirred oak leaves.

Though the specter of defeat by girls had been mortifying, victory brought only dull relief mixed with guilt. Pete and my brother did not involve themselves in the decisive action of the battle either, as it was close enough to beating up a girl as made no difference. We left it to our rather more thuggish officer corps. I seem to remember Guy’s (or Gary’s) Phillies cap bobbing around in the whirlwind of twisting bodies and arms.

I still wonder where the wind-whipped ambushing girl came from and where she went, and would like to talk to her, if possible, to find out if she can separate some of my reality from some of my fantasy, to discover if she has the vaguest memory of me, the ambush, or the battle, and to see, out of idle curiosity, what life has made of her and vice versa.

The psychological fetishists of half a century past would have argued that the image of a girl appearing ex nihilo to shoot me with a water gun became unforgettable because it mimed burgeoning eros. More interesting, at least to me, is that this image is a portal to the past, revealing events through its distorting glass, from the ambush to the battle to our water army, out to the bicycle races, my relationship with my brother, the year in Carlisle when I was seven and, finally, the United States, Vietnam, race, gender relations and the earth in 1968; a prism which joins and refracts them all; a Brahman lotus from which a delicate and accidental universe whirls onward.