Wag the Dog (30 page)

They all look at me. I say, “Anybody want another round?”

“Don't let 'em intimidate you,” Steve says.

“I'm not intimidated, I'm a beer drinker.”

“I hear you,” Marlon says. He signals to the waitress. At the prospect of another free one he slurps down the gin and tonic that's currently in front of him a little faster than he's been doing.

“What I am getting to, is AIDS.”

“Oh Lord protect my dick,” Marlon says.

“You'all ever try any that safe sex?” Shavers says. “Sheeit, you might as well be doing it yourself. And rubbers, you better off doing it yourself.”

“Dogs you been doin' it with, you need a full body condom,” Marlon says.

“You so old, you manage to do it, you probably die of happy and surprise 'fore you die of the AIDS,” Shavers says.

“Problem with you men is you so lost in your dozens and trash talking you forget that there is a political situation going on.”

“Nobody forget there's a political situation goin' on,” Steve says. “An economic one too. We just want to forget it.”

“In the sixties the black man was on the rise,” Red says. “And the white man couldn't stand that. America couldn't stand that. So Whitey went to work on ways to stop the black man. It was the CIA in charge. Now this here is a public and documented fact. Even the lying, prevaricatin' Jew-run white media, they admits to this fact. Which is that the CIA in the name Air America became the number-one heroin runners in the entire planet They run the opium out of the Golden Triangle, and they made an alliance with the Italian and the Jew Mafias to sell exclusively in the black ghetto. To destroy the black man.”

“That's the truth.”

“I read that.”

“Amen.”

“Alright,” Red says. “White man, are you going to deny that?”

“Are you with the CIA?” Shavers asks out of nowhere.

Everybody looks at me like maybe I am and Shavers is on to something important. “My man, here, with the CIA?” Steve says, he puts his hand on my shoulder. How drunk is he? What's he going to say? There are things that he knows that these people should not hear. “You don't know, you can't imagine half the things that this here man done. But let me tell you what. You can't tell a book by lookin' at the cover. He may look like a redneck, motherfuck Polack, but he's a lover. That's what he is. My man here, to whom you are being so very rude, is the true love of Magdalena Lazlo.”

Everybody has to make a comment about that. None of it offensive, most of it impressed. Except Red. “You know, I am in the middle of makin' my philosophical point and I would like to recommence that when you all get bored admiring on
how fine a piece of . . . ” He looks at me and decides not to say “pussy.” I understand by that hesitation, which is not politeness, but an acceptance of a boundary, that this is not a dangerous place. These are just five old men, though not necessarily with more years than me, but old. Who are not going to rise up in their blackness and provoke an incident to destroy this particular white person. Five men with nothing to do but meet in the back of a bar during the day, passing time, dragging out cheap beers, with talk that doesn't mean action, talk that just passes the time, because they have no place else to go. No mission. No function. No job.

No job. That's what's happened to Steve.

“That wasn't enough. So the CIA, they decides to attack the black man through his greatest strength. So they invented a disease you get with your dick. Acquire Immune Deficiency Syndrome. And they field-tested it out in Africa. Then they brought it to America. See, the black man he's more capable of sexual pleasure than your white man, plus he got a bigger, more powerful dick than the white man and he use it more. Ain't that the truth. Ain't that the truth, white man?”

“I don't know,” I say. “I never had a black man's dick. How do you know so much about white men's dicks?”

“Ou-wee. He got you.”

“Done got you good.”

“Amen.”

They're laughing and repeating the punch line. “Steve,” I say softly, “can you and me talk. Privately. I need to talk to you about something.”

He looks around, sees an empty corner, the other side of the pool table. He grabs his beer by the neck and lumbers up. I do the same with mine and follow him. It seems he doesn't have to explain or make excuses.

I hear, as we're walking away, Red still talking. “Alright. He made a funnin' remark. But I'm talkin' ‘bout reality here and you are choosin' ignorance. CIA made AIDS. It was the establishment, the honky, uptight, own-all-the-money, establishment counterattack on freedom and good times. Read the statistics, Goddammit. Forget the faggots, tha's just a smoke
screen. A smoke screen, to detract from the real target. The real target is you.”

Steve and I sit down. He's got a lot of pride, and I can tell that right now he's in a world of hurt. I'm guessing about him losing his job, but I'm pretty sure I'm right. When he tells that story about me carrying him out, he doesn't bother to say he returned the favor. Steve is a person with a kind of pride. He don't cry and he don't beg. Even when he was out there, in the killing zone, he might have cursed out loud, but he didn't cry and he didn't beg. If he doesn't want to tell me that he's a man with a wife and four children, with no way he can think to earn a living, then I'm not going to ask. I understand about that kind of pride.

So I come up with an idea of how to help him while pretending that I'm not. Which, as it turns out, is an idea I should have had anyway. “I'm hoping,” I say, “that you can get away from your job for a while. I need some help. There's only two people in the world I trust. And Joey, he's dead.” Steve knew Joey. Knows how he died. He was there. Joey died in Nam. “So if you can get away from the fuckin' line, I got a job for you. I can't give you no seventeen something an hour, but I can swing fifteen, if that'll do you.”

“Well, my man, you's in luck.”

“I'm glad to hear that.”

“General fuckin' Motors is going out of fuckin' business. They ain't cutting the chairman and the managers, of course, they cuttin' the niggers and the rednecks on the line. How many years I been building Chevrolets? How many years I been building and buyin' American? How many years, Joe? Fuck 'em.”

“I'm sorry to hear that.”

“You figured that, didn't you? That I down on my luck. You my frien'. Which it ain't easy to say about no white man, but fuck you, Joe. I don't need no charity. No I don't and I don't want it.”

“Fuck you, Steve. Sit down. I need help. Sit down, I'll explain it to you.”

B
EAGLE WENT BACK
to the preprogrammed montage. There was an inevitability to what was to come. There had been a second wave of Vietnam films. They had, by now, not just created, but established, a revised memory of what had happened. And where they had gone on-screen, Beagle suspected, was where he was about to take America in reality.

Beagle punched up the Center Screen.
Uncommon Valor
came on.

Gone were
Platoon, The Losers, Gardens of Stone, A Rumor of War, Full Metal Jacket,
all the high-brow, morbid, and septic studies in self-hate.

One by one, Beagle refilled all the screens:

Gone was the moral confusion. Gone was the defeatism. In the new films the Vietnamese were the bad guys, as cruel as Nazis, as treacherous and lying as Japs. The American invaders had become innocent victims. The answer to Rambo's immortal question, “Do we get to win this time?” was a resounding “Yes!”

That was it. That had to be it.

Black, everything went to black. Silence. All screens off.

“Do I have it?” Beagle asked himself. “Do I have a fucking movie here? Or not?”

There it is. The central myth. America the Invincible. America the Good. Finally falls, and finally fails. On her knees and not looking so good ever since. Well, maybe it was time to go back.

Beagle had read
MIA; or, Mythmaking in America.
He found it quite convincing. He was pretty sure that there were no MIAs or POWs in secret prison camps. He also knew that
Uncommon Valor
was a fiction based on real events although the real events were based on fictions and that they costarred several major Hollywood actors. Retired Special Forces Colonel James “Bo” Gritz actually mounted two rescue missions in 1982. He was funded by William “Captain Kirk” Shatner, who put up $10,000 in return for the movie rights, and Clint Eastwood who put up $30,000. Clint met with ex-actor, then current president, Ronald Reagan, to bring him in on the plot. This telegram was sent to Gritz in Thailand.

But in two attempts Gritz failed to find even that one U.S. POW. Nor had the CIA in years of clandestine searching.

It would be easy enough, Beagle figured, to put some POWs in Vietnam, or Laos, or wherever. That shit was done all the time. Hadn't Hitler put some dead Poles in German uniforms and accused the Poles of killing them in order to prove that he'd invaded Poland in self-defense? Filmed them too. Hadn't the Gulf of Tonkin incident, which became the legal basis on which the U.S. committed half a million men to Vietnam, been stage-managed?

If it went fast enough—find them, go to war, win the war, get them out, and get it over with—no one would have time to argue about it.

It seemed to be the answer. Plant some POWs in Nam.
Go in not with some half-assed Chuck Norris commando raid or Rambo one-man band, but with the whole of the United States Army, Air Force, Marines, and Navy. Not piecemeal. Not
escalation.
All together—bigger than D-Day, better than the Inchon landing—march straight into Hanoi, grab some Commies, try 'em for war crimes, shoot 'em, announce we won, and have a parade. It would work. Joy. Delirium. Days of triumph, crowns of glory.

Why wasn't Beagle happy with it? What was wrong with it?

Katherine Przyszewski was thirty-eight years old. She was divorced and a single mother. Her daughter was sixteen, her son was ten. Outside of the film business, away from Hollywood, far away, somewhere off in reality like Erie, Pennsylvania, or Fort Smith, Arkansas, or Eau Claire, Wisconsin, she would have been considered a very attractive woman. She had real red hair, fair skin, and blue eyes. But between work and her children she didn't have time to go to the health club daily. While her job at CinéMutt, as Beagle's personal secretary, paid very well by her standards, her standards did not even imagine thrice-weekly sessions in her own home with her own personal trainer. She therefore had neither a washboard tummy nor buns of steel. She had had nothing surgically altered or implanted, therefore she had laugh lines around her eyes and her merely average-sized breasts, made only of flesh, sagged when she stood and flattened when she lay on her back.

Beagle liked her. She was competent, very calm at the office, and had no aspirations to be an actress. Or producer or screenwriter or director or anything whatsoever in the movie end of the movie business. She didn't think making coffee, making restaurant reservations, sending his clothes to the cleaners, getting his car inspected, or buying gifts for his wife, were vile, deviant, and degrading acts of sexism. In short, she helped make the life part of his life simpler. She, in turn, liked her job, liked her boss, and liked the pay.