Drugs

“The Flashback”

December 15^th, 1974

I know that it’s been a few weeks, but I’m feeling better now and can finally sit up properly to write. The doctors put me on Methadone, which helps too. Mom just brought over my suitcase, so I can keep this diary in it, locked away. No one must ever see this. Purple Heart or not, they’d throw me in prison for the rest of my life if they knew.

I know, I know, you’re probably saying to yourself, now why would you write about this if you never wanted anyone to know? And the answer is: I have to write this down on paper, for my own sanity. I have to explore my own feelings, to understand my condition. That’s what the doctors keep telling me, at least. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, they said. That’s funny. As if you could put a label on madness.

______________

Sleepy pointed his index and middle finger out sideways towards my face, his thumb mimicking the hammer of a gun. “Are you fucking calling me a liar or somethin’ motherfucker?” The last word he practically spat out at me.

I wiped his spittle off of my forehead & scanned the front of the house and then up and down the block. Sleepy wasn’t the one I was worried about. We actually used to go to school together. His real name was Jerry. I’d seen that white boy, Joe Terry, kick his ass, way back. Joe Terry for christssake. I could handle him. But from my experience, these types of guys like to gang up on a brother. Didn’t seem right, but there it was.

As if on cue, one of Sleepy’s cousins creaked open the front door, and then nodded behind him. They all poured out of the house then, eyes alert, trained on me. I could see a few touching their pieces while looking up and down the street, just like I had. They may have been homeboys, but they weren’t completely stupid, after all. We’d been trained to do the same thing in the army.

“Naw man,” I told him, “I didn’t do any shit like that, homeboy.” I had to be tough and firm. They could smell fear, and I’d be as good as dead if I showed any weakness. Shit, at that point I already figured I was dead. At least this way, I could go out with my dignity.

They huddled around me. The only one other than Sleepy that I knew was Tiny, his bigger brother and bodyguard. He stood next to Sleepy and folded his arms, tattoos crisscrossing like barbed wire. The others formed a semi-circle around me, my car at my ass, trapping me. I briefly considered making a lunge inside the car, but figured I wouldn’t make it.

Sleepy’s eyes shifted back and forth, fast, searching my eyes for the truth. Either that or he was high as a motherfucker, which he frequently was. Actually, now that I think about it, it was probably a little of both. Not surprising, but the way he was acting worried me. He looked like he was about to snap. I told him I didn’t know about any of the shit that’d gone missing. Told them I’d only been to his pad twice, wait, three times to get high, and I ain’t never done nothing like take his shit. Tiny responded by sucker punching me in the gut. He was a big guy, but he was fast too. That’s probably not fair either, because I was understandably out of it. I'd just cooked up the dose Sleepy had sold me.

I ended up puking all over Tiny’s boots, which earned me a few kicks to the ribs. They picked me up off the grass and dragged me inside. I wanted to fight back, but I was so out of breath all I could do was hang there like a sack of rice. Brown hands bore me up the steps and through the threshold of the house.

“Over here,” Tiny instructed, and I was dragged to the nearest bathroom, my head stuck in a toilet. I remember hearing their laughs even though my head was submerged in filthy piss water. I puked again, still submerged, and that’s when the darkness claimed me. I mercifully can’t remember what happened next.

At least that was what I told the cops. They told me I was lucky to be alive.

What really happened is that I snapped.

Just like when we were assigned to patrol right outside of parallel 39. The villagers had sent out an elder to greet us, but he was unfortunately also carrying a large machete. They had said the same thing then, too. Post Traumatic Stress disorder. Stupidity is what it was. And I wasn’t the only one that took a life that afternoon. That whole village had paid for their mistake with their lives.

I resolved to make these motherfuckers pay as well.

When my head came up out of the toilet, they were still laughing at me. Filthy water sluiced down my head, along with chunks of puke that were now floating in the toilet water. My head swam and I gagged hard, filth still coming up out of my mouth. Someone grabbed my hair from behind and I tensed, trying to rise. A swift boot to my kidney doubled me over the toilet again. The pain was a fire that blazed hottest where I'd been kicked. Fireworks blasted over the black canvas behind my eyes as I rode out the pain. When I was finally able to open them, I could see a pair of boots behind me. I think they were Tiny’s. At the time, though, I didn’t give a shit whose boots they were.

What I was interested in was the knife handle peeking out from inside of them.

Whoever the owner of the boots were, they were right-handed too. I just swung my hand down and made a lucky grab. Not waiting for hands to rush me, I brought the blade up behind me and stabbed the arm that had ahold of my hair. I was running on pure adrenaline now, knowing this’d be my only chance. They’d have to kill me now if they could get me. The guy behind me made a high-pitched yell and fell back onto the bodies behind him.

That stopped their laughter.

I jumped up off of my knees, and slashed out again as I turned, trying to keep them at bay. Feeling the blade carve through yet more skin, I was aware of how it yielded to the parting of the knife, almost like a hot knife through butter.

It was good, so I kept at it.

Moving out of the bathroom, my boots splashed through waves of blood, and I took note of how some of it splashed in patterns on the wall, and then dripped onto the floor. There were people on either side of me, but I ignored them and went straight for Sleepy in the front room. He was backing away from me, stopping when he hit the couch, a knife in his hands. Someone's shiv lashed out and I felt a cold sharpness slip in between my ribs. I didn't turn my head, but just walked right up to Sleepy and punched the knife straight through his neck. A river of blood followed the blade's exit, splashing onto the threadbare carpet. He vainly tried to hold it in with his bare hands before dropping.

The remaining people hesitated with Sleepy taken out. Or perhaps they saw the bodies around them and stopped to pause. Whatever it was, I wasn't about to let it pass me by.

Moving as fast as my brain and body would allow, I picked up a pistol covered in blood at my feet. The three remaining brothers saw me start to raise the gun, and rushed at me, pointing their blades at my face. I fell back onto the couch, firing even before I'd landed. Point blank. Dead, everyone.

The gun was hot now, so I placed it down beside me on the couch. Wiping sweat off my brow, my hand came away red and sticky. I'm still not sure why, but I chuckled at that. I figured killing a whole roomful of people was sufficient enough reason .

On the table next to the couch I noticed a syringe; its white plunger still stuck out, unused. And there, beside it was a bent spoon, tossed aside. Someone inside must have been interrupted right in the middle of shooting up.“Well, no sense letting it go to waste,” I announced to the room, and laughed out loud this time.

Man, was that a good hit. Considering I had just had one about 20 minutes beforehand, it should have killed me. I was probably hoping that it would, at that point. The darkness that pulled me down was welcome, and I went willingly.

_____________________

I awoke to a slap to the face, and grabbed at the gun immediately. In front of me, a small Vietnamese lady crouched in a shallow pit, waving a blade in my face. Tears were streaming down her cheeks, and she was talking that sing-song language of theirs. I could taste the venom spitting from her lips as she yelled at me, brandishing the knife. She pointed down at several of the dead bodies around her, their faces covered in mud, piled up in the ditch she was standing in. Some of them lay half submerged in the water of the rice patties around us, waiting to be shoved into the ditch.

I glanced around. We were in a South Vietnamese village. All of the villagers had been killed, and this is where we'd brought their corpses. Their lifeblood painted the dirt and puddled in the water like gasoline; shimmering at the surface. All around us were the dead.

Her ranting reached a crescendo, and she screeched suddenly, coming down with the knife straight into my chest. Only it didn’t catch my chest. I shifted on the couch, and the blade imbedded itself into the gristle and bone of my shoulder. I figured that was just about enough and raised the gun and fired. Shooting from the hip, I caught her right between the eyes. She fell to the ground like a sack of bricks.

When I pulled the knife out of my shoulder, I yelled for as long as I had breath. I'm covered in blood, I realized, and turned my shaking hands over, staring at the sticky mess. I could feel the warm blood from the wound in my side starting to dry already .

This can’t be happening, I remember saying to myself. I checked the woman's face again. Besides having a smoking bulllet hole in her forehead, she was definitely Vietnamese. I focused in on her face, not wanting to look at the other bodies piled up around me. My hand unconsciously began stroking the familiar fabric of Sleepy's couch, and it somehow helped. Pretty soon I couldn't even stand having the woman look at me, so I nudged her hip with the toe of my boot. She went tumbling back down into the shallow pit, joining the dead.

Picking up the gun and raising it, I placed it in my mouth and cocked the hammer. Click. Again. Click.

At the time, I must have found something funny with this, as I took to laughing. I don’t remember how long I laughed, but something got my attention, and I had to stop to hear it. It sounded just like a little child crying. Searching for the source of the child, my ears tried to filter out the jungle noises from the cries. I resolved to get up, to find out where it was coming from. I had to see what it was.

Sitting up from the couch, I shuffled around the ditch of dead bodies and stepped down onto a little grass-lined path. Watching my boots, I noticed little marbles embedded in the dirt path, and smiled at the thought of children playing there. The crying continued to gain volume as I got closer to one hut in particular.

Moving the fronds aside to enter, I saw a tiny brown baby, swaddled in cloth. Its cry was deafening in the small space, and it rang in my ears as I entered. The baby's tiny hands were pumping the air and its whole body shook in fear. Crouching down next to it, I made shushing noises and put out my pinkie finger for it to hold. When I did, a searing circle of pain bore through my skull, and I stopped, shaking my head. I lay my hand across my forehead as if to test my temperature, blinking away the residue of pain. Then it hit me again. And then again. The pain mimicked the baby's screaming in flashes of white hot lightning that pulsed through my brain and exited through my eyes. They came in staccato groupings then, bunching up and embedding themselves in my head like icy metal shrapnel. I tried to rise and leave the hut, but was forced back down to one knee as my head swam. The jungle noise outside rose to set a dull, roaring counterpoint to accompany the needles of pain slicing into my skull. The baby's cries then drew out in to a wider spectrum of pain, and it was like sheet metal bisecting my body over and over again, the jungle noises from behind me washing over my back in a tidal wave of sound. I dropped to the floor in a fetal position, cradling my head between my forearms. My hands gripped my ears, while I could feel my teeth gritting against the agony of the white wall of noise. My throat muscles tensed as I yelled out, raging and pushing back with whatever noise I had. Then, mercifully, nothing but blackness overtook me.

I felt myself floating in a void, unable to catch my bearings, unable to make any sense of time. And yet, the blackness was a welcome change and I relaxed, let go. As soon as I did so, I could feel my body being borne up, as if put on a track, and then I felt movement. My mind gave in to the darkness as I moved along, slower at first. The more my mind gave up, I found, the faster I moved along the track to where ever it was I was being taken. I would be lying if I didn't say that I was glad to leave everything behind.

After that, I can't remember anything until the medic shot me up with the epinephrine. That was the damnedest thing in the world. One second I was as dead as a doornail, drool frothing out of my mouth; and the next, I was jolted awake and confused as hell. For a second, I have to admit that I thought I'd died when I saw the medic's light flashing in my eyes. I was just thankful he wasn't Vietnamese and demanding my rank and serial number.

December 16^th, 1974

A reporter from the Register came in today to interview me. Arlene Bukowski, she said her name was. She also said that I was a hero for saving the child in that house. She waited two beats and threw in that the mother’s death was unfortunate. I simply nodded back at her.

"Is that the arm that she stabbed you in? The left one?"

I nodded again. "She went for my heart, but I was able to move. The doctor said it missed a major artery by a half an inch."

"One second, please." She turned and held up her hand, the extended index finger asking for a moment while she fumbled with her purse. She produced a thin, cigarette-like microphone, and then a recorder out of her purse, and set it on my side table. She pressed the white play button and the red record button at the same time, with two fingers.

"Oh, do you mind?" she said, gesturing absentmindedly at the recorder next to her. I just blinked at her by way of response. She spoke into the thin, cigarette-like microphone. "Subject Harrison Franks states that the knife wound to the shoulder was one half inch from hitting a major artery." Then she stuck the microphone in my face, and sat back in her chair. She was thumbing through her questions in the notepad in her lap.

She would have already seen the police report, so she knew what had happened. Hell, she probably already had the story written. She was just looking for a quote or two from me to insert into her story, to pump it up. I might have told her exactly what had really happened, but I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. Besides, who would believe me?