Protest

I always remember this movie I saw once where a girl broke down and said abortion hits everyone hard, eventually. In a park, at a parade, unaware, every woman will be struck with her choice. A whirling soft sided blow that shoves you beneath yourself, inside someone else.

At 19 I thought motherhood was in my grasp, but a man connected to it wasn't. My mother made the arrangements, no turning back she said.

But when the plane landed she did not get off. We ate hamburgers that night and my father and I went to sleep earlier than usual. I showered in the morning and allowed him to drive my car. Distant, unencumbered, we talked shop. Upon arrival we were side blinded. The protestors came hard and high. They blocked my little Honda Civic as we tried to park. They were practiced, perfected. Don't kill your baby, they called through the shatterproof glass.

My father was composed, he wrapped his arm around me as we entered the building. The smoke alarms in the waiting room blinked slow red. He saw me to admittance and was there when they brought me out, light in the head, lighter. When we left the rally was on, but still. Dully I watched them stand behind their crimson poster boards, fetuses in jam jars, but now they were quiet. Sympathetic, I thought.

My father was no stranger to protests. He'd gone along to several before 1967. His friends were mostly educated, all angry about something. The war was wrong in Berkeley, everywhere, there was no arguing that, he tells me. "Everyone was anti-war, anti-G.I. They saw the troops as being responsible for the war. If you didn't dodge the draft you were a babykiller anyway," he tells me. When he pocketed the government's letter, some friends fell away.

That child would've been riding a two-wheeler by the time my mother brought it up one day, like we'd been in the middle of a conversation. "So anyway, someone called security, the police," she laughed. "I'm sure they were scared shitless." Two floors up they lulled me to sleep by gas as my father raged below. The face he wore was one I'd only heard stories of. The protesters masked shame, horror, held tight to dreams of saving the unborn. Secretly he battled alongside them. He ordered them silent and still. Determined I would witness their humble silence, he told them that if I didn't, their families would pay.

Coming clean

It was tanks, but not til later. Initially he spent nearly a year in Colorado. Pushing paper, pushing time. He thought he would stay there the full 24 months. Then they called his name.
"Time to go baby boy," they said. "Time to do your duty."

Suddenly he's talking to me, off camera now. Watching a commercial yesterday for a gadget that heats your shaving cream he laughed, "I used to have one of those." That's not true. But he tells me in country they handed out little packets of chemically-induced shave cream. "When you broke it the cream would heat up, like you were in a hot shower." He tells me about the giant vats of dirty water they heated. How you had to be one of the first 15 to get that hot water, or wait til noon when the flies were sweating and you wanted a cold one anyway.

He was often one of those 15. He was assigned nightwatch. Midnight to 5am he and a partner would stare into the darkness. Watching for trip flares to illuminate the night and for men in torn clothes to take aim. I don't ask if those flares ever lit. I don't want to know, not yet. He tells me once wild pigs made it across the razor wire, sent bullets of fire into their view. He never saw them because all he could see was fear and gunfire. He tells me he heard the squealing late into that night, he says it like it didn't bother him. It was a pig.

A decade later, in the little house on the hill, hallway still intact, a strange sound came from our bathroom. Sometimes it was whirring, other times it chirped, my mom thought it was a beeping, maybe an electrical problem. It was my father who peeled the little green frog off of his heel in the shower. Fifties seafoam green surround had kept the tiny invader hidden for weeks. My brother cried for the rest of the day, while my dad flicked the tiny carcass out the window. I didn't use the bathtub for a solid week. My mother finally put her foot down, forced me clean again.

I'm a bit stunned that he's talking to me now, like a friend, like a confidante. He tells me about taking those warm showers at 5 am and then skips ahead months, mentions a stretch of time when he didn't get to bathe. Tells me a little about the leave time that followed, and a cheap Saigon hotel where he stayed in the shower for over two hours.

"I didn't think I would ever get out," he says.

The Farmer in the Dell

The first and only time I recall my father and I being really alone, we spent a day at my grandmother's house when no one else was home. I remember breathing in and out, the safety he moved into every room. We were together then, like a father and a daughter, it was not a dream, I'm sure of that. My mother had been admitted again. He took me to Fairyland in Oakland and bought me a giant yellow plastic key that swung from a blue string around my neck, made the larger-than-life fairytale scenes come true. A six-foot giant baby in a cradle swayed in the tree tops and Little Bo Peep swiveled sadly searching.

He took me to a liquor store across the street and let me buy a grocery bag full of chocolate and cream-filled delight. We didn't go home, though it was the same distance as my grandmother's house. We set up camp, a TV on my grandma's livingroom floor, though the TV in the back room was bigger, and color. I rested my face in the deep umber shag and watched 'Via Allegre' that afternoon. My dad made me grilled cheese and promised we would learn to tie flies together. I knew what contentment was. Kinship ruled, I was in a foreign land. It would be the only day of it's kind. Later we were divided by the law of gender, mother taking daughter, father taking son. Planets misaligning, stars colliding.

That night we went back to our empty home. I slept in my parents bed, my dad on the couch. In the morning I woke on my mother's side, to sledgehammers, dust, the soft smell of sheetrock melting away. When I walked out into the hallway it had disappeared. Our house sat on a Eucalyptus encrusted hill, and my father had made passage to the basement once only accesible from the outside. I looked down a full floor into the damp concrete and heard him say, "Stairs. Your mom wants a staircase to get down there. Soon, anyway."

My father clasps his worn hands today, he knows what work is. Cuts and scars, scars on scars. He jumps ahead, to the side, and tells me Agent Orange is like olive oil, slick and soft with staying power. He remembers someone asking, and being told it was safe. Back then he might've laughed at the prospect of a dying embryo, a shaking hand. He was in it just to get home, he repeats this to me, again.

Eventually my mother would come home again too. Years later she would sit me on our front doorstep, with a giant bulging belly and breathlessly tell me I would have a baby to play with soon. She was full, and showed me down to a place I knew was made of solitude. She did not do this out of malice, but fear and ignorance. Eventually that baby would come to pass and those stairs would lead to my bedroom. Long and narrow, no rail to guide you, designer wallpaper my mother smoothed by hand, matching cornflower blue curtains. I was the envy of all my friends with that big room in tow. No one ever knew I hung up paint-stained sheets for years, desperately trying to build a space of my own, as my father remodeled the upstairs, one room at a time.

Suicide

When I was in high school, my first year, a very popular and quiet boy on the verge of graduating locked himself in his mother's car and inhaled with sweet intent. The whole school, 1000 people, cried the next day. I called my mother from a payphone and asked to come home. Two tires nearly flat, she picked me up and promised to comb my hair later that afternoon.

My father spent 30 days short of one year in a country I've never seen. He watched a few of 50,000 men killed. He watched his friends die, I think this is true. He tells me now of andrenaline rushes like heroin, of heroin like adrenaline. He tells me what I missed.

The week after my mom picked me up, my best friend and I fished green buds out of a film canister in my father's sock drawer. We walked down Telegraph and ate pizza on the curb, we giggled because it was the day before homecoming.

The boy in high school, his name was Michael, was not my friend. And less than two years after my father watched his friends die, he saw my mother panic during labor, told her she wasn't doing it right. He tells me now what you do with soldiers who can't hack it - get the fuck out, we want killing machines. And while he says that he did not taunt the soldiers who shit their pants, or cried, he didn't take their hands either.

Wasn't doing it right. She has not, will not ever forgive him for this. But then he held me for the first time, held my wet bloody head in his hands and though I cried for the next six weeks, at night I slept on his chest. I think now I must've heard him breathe, been close enough to see him clearly, but I don't remember. It was December, 1972 and four months later, the last soldier was put on a plane out of Vietnam, going home.

In my formative years, the last thirty or so, they have estimated that at least 100,000 boys, like Michael, like my father, got into their mother's Cadillacs, El Dorados, headed for higher ground. I'm beginning to hear those deep breaths, feel that intent, I'm breathing in time with them, making a wish for each one.