Carry Me Home (85 page)

“Tony?”

... blood gushes, erupts ...

“Tony.” Wap called him gently. “Tony. It’s 1976. We’re at High Meadow.”

“UH!” Tony’s eyes opened. He did not breathe. His eyeballs flicked. On the open side of the lean-to he could see their small camp, the low berm he’d built the day before, vegetation, open lanes. The sky had faded to deep blue. It was dusk.

“Almost time to go,” Bobby said softly.

“Um,” Tony sat up. His back was stiff. His right leg tight.

“Movin out in one five,” Bobby said. “Best eat something.”

An hour later they sat across from each other at the fire circle. Through the shaft between the hemlocks they could see the clear sky, yet with their vision so tunnelled Tony could make out only Cepheus.

“
Yuh
o
.” Bobby was laconic. Then, “Damn it, Man. I’ve been marchin in place since I returned. That’s what hit me in the lean-to. You too. Just marking time. Losing six fucking years. Yeah”—Bobby’s voice rose, his hands began to shake—“some good stuff’s happened. But
some
good stuff happens to a blob of shit on the sidewalk. There’s no fuckin time to waste anymore. This is URGENT!”

“What is?”

“Getting off the fucking ground. Understanding why we haven’t before. Correcting it. Taking off.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means you gotta transform. It means the next move is up to you.”

“Maybe the next move is up to my chemical im-fucking-balances.”

“You control it.”

“You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about. It’s a neurotransmitter imbalance that causes mania and depression. That’s what the
doctors
say.”

“Fine. Did they tell you
why
you had a chemical imbalance?”

“Why?!” After last night’s finale, Tony had not expected to be back in a pissing contest. “They don’t know why! That’s what ticks me off. Cause I killed people. It’s ... They don’t have a clue. You got a broken leg, they give you a crutch. That’s their approach.”

“Exactly,” Bobby said. “That’s all they can do. Chemical imbalances are caused by something. Maybe something you saw. Or did. Or maybe it’s diet. Who knows? But something caused the onset. Then the system went out of whack. That increased the depression, pushed the imbalance. Fuck the drugs. That only keeps you from getting to the original problem. Makes you stick where you’re at. Keeps you from taking off.”

Spit flicked from Tony’s lips. “I know the goddamned problem. Everything’s been fucked in my life, everything since Nam. And I’m not takin any drugs.”

“No it hasn’t,” Bobby said. “Not since Nam.”

“How the hell do you know?”

“In Philly? You were crazy then? When you met Linda? Go ahead, tell me you were nuts then.”

Tony did not respond.

“In Nam? Were you crazy in Nam? I mean truly schitzo?”

Still no response.

“Once you had to pull your weight and you did.”

“I do now.”

“You work hard. You’re a great worker. But you’re not pulling your weight. You’re hiding. And so the fuck am I. We did it once. We can do it again.”

Tony was exasperated, exhausted. “What the fuck, Man. Over.”

“No,” Bobby said. “There’s no ‘what the fucks’ to get you off the hook. It’s decision time, Man. It’s time to make the decision and never look back.”

Tony reached out, grabbed a stick from the pile, ran a hand over it breaking off a few dry twigs. “
Hè
.” He held the stick vertically before his face, grasped it in a steel fist, glared at Wapinski, at the drawn wrinkled features reflecting the sporadic bursts and ambient glow. “One condition,” he said. “Consult me. Fill me in. Don’t treat me like your fuckin pet. Like you keep no animals except Josh and Tony. And don’t you ever give anybody any unconditional handouts. You want a platoon sergeant?! I’ll fuckin out-sergeant anybody in the fuckin world. You develop the programs. You let me run em.” He snapped the truth stick straight out, his hand just above the flame.

Bobby reached, grabbed, quickly, attentively, neither being burned. “This is the program,” he began. He spoke at length, spoke like a military instructor first mentioning the main points, then backtracking to fill in. He spoke of his own family, moved on to EES, not simply the technical and production ends but the cause he called
attitude evolution
. From there he outlined his thoughts on farming and was surprised to have Tony adopt his phraseology of cause and attitude evolution as Tony took over to describe reduced-pesticide methods, water and soil conservation techniques that would allow for minimal chemical fertilizer usage without affecting yield. For the first time he listened to Tony’s report on chardonnays, “... drinkable, marketable, in demand.”

Then Bobby asked, “Can we produce wine here?”

“You mean actually be a winery instead of selling the grapes?”

“I mean if we’re going to be detoxifying guys—”

Now they spoke of the dilemma of starting a winery with workers who might be alcoholics. “I’ve been through detox,” Tony said. “Only about one in ten are actually physically dependent. It’s genetic. The rest drink for other reasons. To be numb. To take the edge off. Sometimes for fun. Sometimes it becomes habit and after a while habit becomes something you depend on, physically.”

“That begs the question,” Wapinski countered. “If we’re going to have alcoholics here we better be dry.”

“Not true,” Tony said seriously. “For a year you’ve been talking about responsibility. We’re dry here. A guy’s fine. He leaves here for the real world. You haven’t taught him a fuckin thing. Sometimes I want a drink. Sometimes I want to get drunk, fall down, laugh, be stupid. So fuckin what?! We’re developing a fanatical antialcohol attitude in this country when the real issue is drinking
and
driving. You talk about risks, you talk about decision making, about taking the plunge, about fun, about getting out of the self. If you’re physically addicted, you’ve got to learn to stay away. Otherwise you just have to learn to drink responsibly. Control it.”

Bobby burst out laughing. Tony was so serious.

“Fuck you,” Tony snapped. He sat back, crossed his arms, jammed a heel into the rock ring.

“No. No. No.” Bobby coughed out the words. “It’s ... it’s just ...” He rolled to his side laughing, making Tony even angrier. Then he grabbed the small pack he’d brought, opened it, pulled out a new fifth of Jack Daniel’s. “
Hè
.”

Tony stared. Then he too began to laugh. Bobby took a swig, passed the bottle. “The Yards in Nam,” Bobby said, “wouldn’t trust you unless you’d get drunk with them.”

Again the bottle passed. Bobby moved on to the Community. He didn’t know what to call it. Still he laid out the plans he’d made, fully including Tony for the first time. “... take care of our own ...” he repeated. “... a retreat. A center. Teach them to become unstuck. To take off. Grab a piece of life. An incremental program to teach them to make decisions. Stay as long or as short as you want. No government regulations. Work in the barn, the vineyard ...”

“Just don’t give me all the shitheads,” Tony said.

“What does that mean?” Bobby was perplexed.

“You talk about dregs, Man. About down-and-outs. Open it up, Man. Open it up to just guys in need. Or guys who want to be here. Want to help. Let some of em set examples for others. If you only take the worst, we’re not goina move off square one.”

“Well ...”

“Make entry formal. Like basic. A series of rites of passage. Each passed means greater responsibility, more freedom. Just like in the Corps. Call us NAM. Like we did in San Jose. That’ll be our cause.”

The night was crystal clear, cold. Both Bobby and Tony had their sleeping bags wrapped over their backs, pulled up over their necks to their ears. They were feeling mellow. Bobby talked of transformations, of attitudes, of building self-reliance and commitment, of tenacity and teamwork, of establishing habitual, efficient mechanics of everyday life, of his grunt theory of psychotherapy, which combined a teaching of basic life skills with a think-it-out, tough-it-out, no self-pity, one-foot-in-front-of-the-other philosophy. Very slowly it occurred to him, even if it had not occurred to Tony, that Tony had, in the past ten months, already transformed.

Bobby thought to say this to Tony but he did not. Instead he talked about the High Meadow Code, about his files, his attempts and false starts. “This is where it’s all headed,” he said. “This is what has to be done to get to an Ethic for Our Times.” He moved a quarter way around the fire. On the ground he drew an arrow pointing away from the fire. Beside it, beginning at the arrow base, he marked the letters PFFEIPS. “I think it’s kind of the time-lapse of the self,” Bobby said. “Kind of time layers. Physical, financial, familial, emotional, intellectual, political, spiritual.”

“I gotta pee,” Tony said. He stood, swayed. They had eaten little. It had been nearly a year since he’d had a drink. The bottle was half-gone. Still, from the dark looking in, looking at the circle, at Bobby in the glow of the small fire, it struck him. He returned, sat, rehunched under the sleeping bag, said, “It doesn’t work because it’s not a circle.”

“Yeah,” Bobby said. “Yeah.” He too was feeling the alcohol. “I like a circle,” he said. “The Great Circle. The Fire Circle. Everything connected. A to Z. Alpha to omega.”

In the wee hours they finished the bottle, laid it in the coals for a meltdown, talked on, ranted, chuckled, challenged each other. At one point Bobby said, “That’s what we’re goina turn around. Attitude ev-oh-lu-tion. Ev-oh-lu-tion!” At another, “Let’s build a basketball court.”

“Yeah, sure. Like the one you had in California.”

“Something simpler.”

“You ever play bladderball?” Tony asked.

“Huh?” Bobby focused on him, unsure he’d heard.

“It’s a Viet Namese game played with a pig’s bladder,” Tony said. “Your grandfather had pigs, right?”

“Ye—”

“Jimmy once wrote about it. You take a pig’s bladder and blow it up. The kids play soccer with it.”

The night did not end. “Guy once said to me,” Bobby said, “‘if you don’t plan your life, someone will plan it for you. And he isn’t interested in your best welfare.’ Something like that. There’s five billion people on earth, Man. A billion more than a dozen years ago. As the number goes up, as the species becomes more successful, the individuals lose value. Those that survive will be those that take charge of themselves.”

As the sky lightened Tony Pisano and Bobby Wapinski were back to talking about layers in reference to the theory of expanding beyond the self. The idea fascinated Tony. “Maybe it’s like stages. You have to go through the first to get to the second. But you’ve got to delaminate for the self to be stable enough to be the foundation for the expansion.”

“Yeah,” Bobby said. “That’s the challenge. That delamination. That becoming unstuck. We’re all affected by it. The whole country. We’ve got to decide right here and now. We’ve got to have the courage to decide, the discipline to try, the perseverance never to give up.”

“Driven by elation.” Tony chuckled.

“Yeah,” Bobby said. “And it’s urgent. Life is urgent. Me, you—we don’t have the right to waste it. We’re stuck because we don’t know. We’re stuck on unfinished business. Were we hoodwinked? Used? And if we were, does that negate the cause?”

“Um,” Tony nodded but he wasn’t certain he’d followed Bobby’s line of thought.

“We went,” Bobby said. “We fought. I saw it as an ethical obligation. But was it really right? Or was it wrong?”

“I don’t know,” Tony said. He rose. Shook out his bag.

“What could have been?” Bobby said.

“What should have been?” Tony countered. “Or should be now?”

“Yeah. Let’s make a vow,” Bobby said. He too rose. The fire was out. The bottle was a misshapen ugly gray form amid the ash.

“I vow,” Bobby began, “to make the effort, to expend the energy, to discover the truth about—”

“No ...” Tony interrupted. Bobby paused, frowned at him. “I ... can’t. Not just yet. There’s ... there’s something I got to find out first.”

I
N ANOTHER WEEK OR
so it will be eight years since the first Fire Circle, since the true beginning, for me at least, of community, of a return to brotherhood, of the outset on the journey to the high meadows of the mind.

By the end of 1976 Bobby had received dual degrees in civil and design engineering, and by March 1977 he had his general contractor’s license and his plumbing I and II licenses. Sara had obtained her Pennsylvania teaching certificate, and Linda was back pursuing midwifery certification. I’d enrolled in a correspondence course in sustainable farming and had received my first certificate. I also began courses in veterinary medicine and economics. Farming is much more than dirt and seed, plowing, soil erosion, planting and reaping. It is more than irrigation and fertilization, pesticides, fungicides, herbicides and cultivation. It is more than potassium, phosphorus and nitrogen; more than chores and tractors, barns, crop rotations and winter covers. Farming includes tax preparation, crop per dollar per acre ratios, marketing, advertising, distribution, labor laws, personnel management, EPA regulations and retirement annuities. I’d just scratched the surface and Bobby was pushing me to expand beyond the farm, pushing me to vow to discover ... to become unstuck ... to grow beyond the self to the community.

He and I busted our butts preparing for the personnel expansion. We installed a new septic system—tank, drywell, distribution box and leaching fields—out beyond the little barn. (He’d wanted it closer in but all I could think of was gallons of cold urine collecting in my still-secret bunker, so I convinced him closer was ideal for the basketball court he wanted.) He paid to have a new well pounded and refracted. We cleaned the old pig barn, roughed in a kitchen, a shower room and a two-holer bath. The guys, we figured, could make finishing it their project.

It was during this time that the small array of solar collectors on the roof of the White Pines Inn really began to pay dividends. Aaron Holtz did for High Meadow and Environmental Energy Systems what ten grand in advertising dollars could never have accomplished. “C’mere.” He’d grab lunchtime clients, dinner patrons, evening drunks. “Feel this.” He’d grab their wrists, turn on the “cold” water tap before the dishwasher, and warm or scald their hands depending on that day’s solar insulation. “Saving me a ton of money,” Aaron would say.