Moonwalker, Chapter 2

“We didn’t study Vietnam in school. Pretty much all I know is from Life magazine. That picture of the girl on fire running down a dirt road—you must have seen it?”

One of our favorite customers had just left the café, although he wasn’t exactly a paying one. He was bi-polar and basically homeless, smelled to high-heaven like b.o., wet wool, (why did homeless people wear wool in summer? I just couldn’t fathom how they could stand their own smell, let alone how I felt about it) and dread locks, which could smell kind of alluring on hot Rasta-guys, or even hippies who sometimes bathed, or at least doused themselves with patchouli. He sat in the corner all day most days, at the same table, and I let Zoe give him free coffee.

“He’s a Vietnam vet,” she told me. “We should give him free coffee.”

“Did he tell you that?” I’d never heard him speak.

“No. But it’s obvious.” I

wasn’t sure how it was obvious, but I felt sorry for the guy and let him drink free all day. Better here than a bar, I thought. Besides, he had a habit of rearing up like a fire-breathing dragon whenever anyone really snippety approached the counter, someone who you knew was going to hassle us for the attention, those types that viewed anyone who served them as someone they could dump their thwarted anger on. Anyway, Zoe had got me to thinking about Vietnam, which led to my asking her if she knew that picture from Life.

“Never seen it,” she answered, throwing back her thirteenth espresso shot of the day. She always shot for thirteen because that was her lucky number. I wasn’t supposed to let her have more than three a day, but I wasn’t very good at bossing anyone around.

“I keep forgetting you’re only twenty-two, probably because I can’t handle that we have the same job.”

“You’re my boss.”

"When’s the last time I bossed you around?”

“How old are you again?”

“Forty.”

“Whoa.”

“Exactly. It’s a pretty famous picture. Are you sure you haven’t see it? Just what do they teach you these days in school?”

“I wouldn’t know. I went to art school.”

That was Zoe’s stock excuse for just about everything. I’d only known her a month but I’d heard her use it at least once a day since we’d started working together. It was kind of frustrating, but I had to admit useful. I kept meaning to come up with a stock answer myself for why I was a 40 year old barista, so I wouldn’t seem so sullen whenever someone asked me what I was going to do with my life like serving coffee wasn’t doing something. Since when did you become so concerned with the deeper meaning of life, I wanted to say to them with a sneer. Do you realize that coffee you’re drinking was probably harvested by a child slave and that cup you’re going to throw away when you walk out of here is burying our planet? We supposedly only served organic fair-trade, but I had my suspicions. I didn’t trust anybody. There was no excuse for the disposable cups. The owner kept saying he was going to get biodegradable ones, but I don’t see what difference it would make. It was too late. The world was choking and even if somebody figured out how to the Heimlich maneuver on Planet Earth, we’d just end up polluting space with all the junk we’ve consumed and thrown away.

“My parents were in Vietnam. They met there. My mom was a nurse and my dad was a doctor. Pretty crazy, right? My mom got pregnant with me right after they got married so she could get out of the Army. They made you quit back then when you were pregnant. In the good old, sexist days. Way better than now. Now they make women shoot people in Iraq.”

“I don’t think they make them.”

“Well, let them then. What a way to prove yourself.”

“Come on, those girls are defending our country!”

“No comment.”

“What’s that supposed to mean? Do you want us all to be communists?”

“Wasn’t that your government’s plan? That girl in the photo looks a lot like you, you know.” Zoe was Chinese, not Vietnamese, but I thought this would get her attention, loop her back into our storytelling, the only real pleasure I found in working in a coffeehouse. She drifted off easily due to her habit of looking at herself in mirrors she didn’t even pretend to hide. “Look at me. I’m so cute,” she liked to tell herself. My insult didn’t work. She had her earphones in and was on her way out the door.

“Bye,” she said, too loud because she couldn’t hear herself. I flipped the lights off and locked the door, stepping out onto the uneven cobbles of Wickenden Street where I’d locked my bike to a lamppost. Somebody was going to steal it one of these days—I only had a cheap lock that could be snipped with wire cutters, but so far, so good. Nobody would want my bike anyway. It was a clunker—a beach cruiser from my former life covered in stickers from all the bands I’d seen when I was younger and thought it was fun to ride home drunk at three in the morning. Pedaling it uphill to my apartment in Fox Point was brutal.

Despite how little I knew, the war was the shadow I played in as a child, even though it looked like I was just counting clovers under the rhododendron in front of our raised ranch house. My ears pricked up a like a dog’s anytime I heard the word “Vietnam” on the radio, or on the TV, which I was only allowed to watch if I’d cleaned my plate like a good girl of Shake ‘n Bake or Hamburger Helper. An only child enamored with the large Brady Bunch, I developed a hearty appetite for the artificial, and though they thought I was too young to be affected by the images on the CBS Evening News, I knew that when Walter Cronkite came on each night to announce the latest body count, that there was something seriously amok in the world.

And when our next door neighbors’ son came home from “overseas,” not to come out of his bedroom for the rest of my childhood, I knew my parents had secrets they weren’t telling me, secrets that must have been so terrible there wasn’t a manual on how to tell them. Not even the authority figures could figure it out.

My parents’ bedroom was on the other side of the house. They couldn’t hear his record player like I could through my open window, so they never understood why my favorite songs were “Where Have All the Flowers Gone? and “One Tin Soldier.”

I’ve retained this taste for melancholy melodies to this day and I still will only listen to music on a record player. I scour thrift shop bins for songs about the moon that I play all night, hoping I’ll figure out what it wants from me so I can finally sleep. I’ve never forgotten those hours when the space between me and the neighbors’ son was filled with lost flowers and a tin soldier riding away from hope. I leaned on the windowsill, looking to his window where the white gauze curtains never moved, even when it was windy. I wished he would open them and look back and tell me we were going to find the flowers, but when he finally did I took my wish back.

His face was so gaunt and pale I thought it was a skeleton at first. He had ripped the curtains off. It lay on the ground beneath his window like an empty ghost. The only prayer I knew was “Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep,” but I knew that wasn’t enough to keep me from the truth I saw in his eyes, ice-blue like a wolf’s, shadowed by black lashes and bruised by an exhaustion that couldn’t be relieved by sleep.

I wouldn’t understand what I saw until I was much older. Snakes and chains, young girls burning; bodies facedown in mud, fertile with organ-blood and brains. A world without singing or music of any kind, shocked into silence, afraid of the sound of its own heartbeat.

Eyes wide open, seeing everything I wasn’t supposed to see. This is what “Vietnam” meant. No wonder my parents kept silent. So did I. I became afraid of the sound of my own heartbeat. I might have disappeared from the world right then if it wasn’t for him. I don’t know why he did it, knowing what he knew—how the stories really ended, but he opened his mouth and a song poured out. It was a song that could be seen, not heard. I saw the notes become images of children clustered around the feet of a storyteller in a village where all the houses were made from gingerbread like in a fairy tale—a beautiful woman whose hair flowed free like a hippie’s to her waist. She wore bells on her ankles, feather earrings, and her long skirts brushed the ground.

She sang:

Listen, children, to a story
That was written long ago,
“Bout a kingdom on a mountain
And the valley-folk below.

On the mountain was a treasure
Buried deep beneath the stone,
And the valley-people swore
They’d have it for their very own.

I didn’t learn any of this in school, I wanted to tell Zoe, but she was already out of sight. She and her girlfriend only lived a block away and said the neighborhood was great. “All our friends from college still live here.” I didn’t have any friends from college, or any from anywhere else really, and I didn’t know my neighbors, who I don’t think wanted to know me. I lived on a block that was so quiet it felt like everyone was hiding from snipers or vampires, although it was probably the police. There were a lot of pit bulls and four-in-the-morning screams followed by silence, that was unnerving, to say the least. I even heard a gunshot last week, but didn’t tell anybody, especially my mother who was so happy I’d finally signed a year-long lease.

Go ahead and hate your neighbor,
Go ahead and cheat a friend.
Do it in the name of Heaven,
You can justify it in the end.
There won’t be any trumpets blowing
Come the judgment day,
On the bloody morning after…
One tin soldier rides away.

There had been a soldier next door, but no kings or mountains in my suburban neighborhood, or treasure I was aware of, which didn’t stop me from wondering if there was one buried in the swamp behind our house; and there wasn’t a valley filled with greedy people, just normal Americans trying to make a living. It was just a street of raised ranches in the Connecticut woods, still quiet enough the other side hadn’t yet been developed. I wasn’t allowed to play there, and I didn’t. I was a good girl.