Nate

By P. Lewis

Originally published in 2006, this powerful, disturbing, award-winning novel chronicles the free-wheeling mishaps of one Nathan James Morris, a talented, ambitious middle-class black kid from Prince Georges County, Maryland. At 19, he has been expelled from Freedom College for alleged misconduct. He has few friends, aside from the parasitic Guy Sellers; and save for his scholarship's chump change, even fewer dollars. Hurt, angry, and in desperate need of cash, he joins the Marines. "The road to manhood is paved with tanks and convoys!" he loudly boasts.

But he soon discovers that his own “road” has been paved with far more unpleasant things: whimsical officers, endless bomb attacks, disease, an unbelievable desolation. After the military, his “road” gets rockier....an unhappy reuniting with family, friends and fiancee....a kidnaping in Turkey ....violent confrontations with neo-Nazis and racist North Africans....his studies and miseries at C.S.U., America’s most prestigious black university, and his final days in a DC slum, as witness to (and participant in) the wild destruction of his older brother’s marriage, with a little help from the one “friend” who never seems to leave him be: Guy Sellers.

"NATE'S clear, observatory power comes from the author’s unmitigated rage against a world built on hypocrisy and spite...The insight such a writer brings to our affairs is necessary, and NATE is a necessary book, with a perspective that is dangerous to ignore."

--Hubert Adej-Kontoh, BOOKFORUM

“Lewis is an original talent whose English cuts through a lot of contemporary BS like a butcher knife....It’s important that a powerful novel such as this surfaces at a time when the black lit. scene is being smothered by a lot of dumb frivolous chick-lit and down low scribbling. Anybody want to know where the kick-behind black male literary tradition of Himes, Wright, John A. Williams went? It’s alive and well in Berlin.”

--Ishmael Reed, author of JUICE! and Barack Obama and the Jim Crow Media: Return of the Nigger Breakers

“A brutally funny novel satirizing diverse subjects from American military misadventures, African-American cultural politics, to the chaos of contemporary American life. Like the protagonists of Nathaniel West's The Day of the Locust or Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, the eponymous hero, Nathan James Morris, is a classic picaro, a naive everyman and would-be artist whose foolhardiness shows us more about American life and the human condition than would seem possible in one novel.”

--Darryl Dickson-Carr, Associate professor of English at Southern Methodist University and author of The Columbia Guide to Contemporary African American Fiction

• Language: English
• Publisher: P. Lewis
• Release date: Dec 1, 2020
• ISBN: 9780967195100

P. Lewis

P. Lewis is a notorious Berlin expat whose seditious scribblings have caused hipsters worldwide to shit their pants in fear. He lives by his wits in Berlin.P. Lewis was born in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1967. He grew up in Adelphi, Maryland. His father, Dr. Stephen E. Henderson, was the author of Understanding the New Black Poetry. From 1985 to 1992 Phil Henderson attended Howard University in Washington D.C. Henderson dropped out a number of times to travel the world during these years, going first to Germany, Holland and Belgium, then France, Italy, Spain, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Greece, Turkey, Syria, and Romania. In late 1987 to early 1988, he lived in Cairo, Egypt.Upon his return to the United States he edited a small literary magazine called Cafe Noir.After graduating from Howard University in 1992, Henderson became a member of the Fiction Collective Two, with whom he published his first novel, Life of Death, under a nom-de-plume. Between 1993 and 2004 Henderson published only sporadically in small journals.In 2006, Phil Henderson, as P. Lewis, won the American Book Award for his second published novel, Nate. The novel took five years to write and went through eight different drafts. It was finished in 1998, yet rejected so relentlessly that Henderson published it under his own imprint, eight years later.P. Lewis has been based in Berlin since 2002. Since moving to Berlin he has appeared at various venues both in Berlin and the United States, including Tacheles, Literatur-Haus, Schokoladen, English Theatre Berlin (with Lady Gaby's FUEL), Bowery Poetry Club, Curious Fox Bookstore, Amerika-Haus Berlin (with Anthony Baggette), and the Werkstatt der Kultur (with Akira Ando, Han Sato and Rashidii Graffiti).In 2018 he did a joint podcast with noted Berlin guitarist/soundscapist Sean Derrick Cooper Marquardt, and had completed the first volume of a planned series of books entitled AMERICAN EPITAPH. He has also completed a novel about pre-hipster Berlin (of 20 years past), entitled BERLIN ASYLUM.

Book preview

N A T E

P. L E W I S

(Winner of the American Book Award, 2006)

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Back House Books

Hyattsville, MD

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For my father

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A Back House Books Original

Back House Books

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Second Edition

First Printing (revised) September, 2011(Kindle)

Third Printing, November 2020 (Smashwords)

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© 2005-2020 by P. Lewis

All rights reserved.

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ISBN-10: 0-9671951-0-1

ISBN-13: 978-09671951-0-0

LCCN: 99-073057

First published in January, 2006 by Back House Books.

Cover design by kaf

Disclaimer: This book is a work of fiction/satire. It is not a documentary. It is not based on anyone’s real life in the past or present. Any similarities between persons living or dead or about to die are purely coincidental. Now please…get off (and stay off) my ass.

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My life. A search for the center, away from the periphery of the world I found....The search for knowledge should not be synonymous with increasing alienation and loneliness. In our particular circumstances it is so. It has been planned that way.

AYI KWEI ARMAH, Why Are We So Blest?

Something is beginning in order to end: adventure does not let itself be drawn out; it only makes sense when dead. I am drawn, irrevocably, towards this death which is perhaps mine as well.

JEAN-PAUL SARTRE, Nausea

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ONE

The door opened up to a slight, round-faced man in a black padded leather jacket, black pointy-toed shoes, red shirt and black leather tie. He had a Kangol cap stuck on his head and a smug grin scrawled on his face. Cockily sauntering in, he headed straight for the bar, where he sat, ordered a beer, looked up at the ceiling, closed his eyes, and giggled.

Oh, God, I thought—it’s him again.

I was seated just a few tables away and vainly tried to shield myself, but it didn’t work. His head craned toward my table. He rolled his eyes at me, said something to himself, stood up, and in his haste, bumped another student; the student cursed him. Guy Sellers, naturally, cursed back.

Nate, what’s up?

Guy Sellers never really had his shit together—he was just a little boy trying to be a man. He was always dressing like a pimp and always in trouble with the local authorities. But no matter how many times he got drunk, no matter how many windows he’d broken or how many asses he’d grabbed, he always managed to come clean, for he was one of Freedom College’s most beloved students. (How I hated him for it, the cocksucker.)

Hey, Nate, he continues, in a loud, hoarse voice, Why the hell are you still here? Are you crazy?

Good question: I should have asked that of myself.

No, I blurted out, resigned, I just got expelled. But I quickly added: I’m going to Coon State next semester. I read all the pamphlets about it. I realize now what I want to do. I want to be an illustrator! That way, I can make my life count for something, rather than being some dumb-ass, empty-headed Freedom nigger.

Sssssssssssh! Guy exclaimed, looking around him, not so loud, yo! You know how these niggers are around here!

Fuck ‘em, I snapped, I’ve had it. I’m on my way to C.S.U.! You know, after two years of this place, I don’t even feel like a real man? And yet, I’m fucking nineteen already. It’s crazy! This is what it feels like to be castrated!—

Coon State?

Guy sat down—I saw now he was pretending to be drunker than he really was. Man, lemme say that again. Are you dead serious? You say illustrator, huh? Okay, fuck it. Go to New York. He looked at me with those cold, unsettling green eyes I have always believed, to this day, many years after his death, to have been contact lenses. Yeah, Nate. Why not? You recall the last two years of this shit up here? Why do ya wanna go to another college to get your ass kicked all over again? Don't you realize you just wasting your life, your money? Go to New York, yo. Hell, I would. Just a simple trip to the train station is all it takes, motherfucker.

Somebody then changed the channel on the pub’s TV. Ted Morgan of Channel 9 news was blubbering about racism on mainstream college campuses. Talk about coincidences. You still wanna go to another college? Guy shot. He gave me a nudge. Like I said, New York or bust. Shit, why not do it right now? What’s the hold-up?

He took a good, long look around the darkened, dreary pub. He had something on his mind; it was eating him up inside.

Look at these niggers in here, yo....Look at ‘em. Can you believe this tired-ass shit is our race? They don’t do nothin’ but sit around, whinin’ about what some asshole said about them in the Times, or on TV or some shit, or starin’ at the fuckin’ wall, you know. An’ out inna street, it’s worse. All you see out there is so bad, why the fuck not come on in here, it’s the lesser of two evils. In here, all they do is mope around and get drunk; out there, all they do is beat each other up or shoot each other, and then here come they mamas hypocritically cryin’ their crocodile tears about shit. Oh, please! Dumb-ass bitches! We ain’t nothin’ but a goddamn cartoon race. No wonder nobody likes us. I didn’t even know we’d fallen so low in the past ten years!

Well, it’s a new generation, I said, wanly.

New generation, shit! These niggers are cooped up here ‘cause they scared. Understand? They’re too scared to come face to face with those white motherfuckers downtown, and we don’t fight back.....Lissen, chief. Here’s what I mean. My first semester, I didn’t go here; I went to Tom Watson University near Madison, Wisconsin. Yeah....you know where that is. Well, lissen. I asked a nigger there if he knew who Dr. King was, and this nigger told me, ‘Was it that big black guy who freed the slaves?’ An’ I was like, damn, your ass is so lost! I don’t even know what to tell you, you know? An’ it wasn’t just him. Not at all. ‘Cause another time, they had this football game, an’ the fuckin’ white boys rioted. Yeah, they were all pissed off, ‘cause the niggers at homecoming had whipped their ass, okay? An’ then I felt glass an’ shit sprinklin’ me just as soon as the crackers started screamin’ shit. You know what they said, man? WE’RE GONNA KILL ALL YOU GODDAMN NIGGERS!! Guy barks, affecting a white boy’s cracker sneer. An’ that’s exactly what they did. They killed, maimed, burned, shot, stabbed, and raped every nigger as they rushed off the bleachers with anything they could get their hands on....Man, I was there, an’ you know what? I saw those niggers freeze up like ice. But shit, what else could you do inna situation like that, though? The hate on the faces of those white boys was not to be believed, Nate. They were just like the goddamn storm troopers. But if I had my gun, sure as shit, you know my ass woulda been in Brazil tonight, yo!

Why? You think you’d get away from the Law?

Law? What motherfuckin’—Nate, you still stuck on that Ronald Reagan bullshit? Don’t you know what time it is? Oh, man, please don’t tell me Malcolm X was just a brand new soft drink like this one nigger told me! I don’t mean to put you down but you sound like you still up at St. Floyd’s talkin’ that shit. You know six niggers were killed in that riot—SIX! An’ ain’t a soul in sight riotin’ up here. Look at ‘em, they’re all fucked up, they ain’t nothin’ but a dyin’ breed. Hell, I saw a pregnant woman get body-slammed on the hard concrete by a rookie cop, an’ all I heard was laughter. Some niggers even cheered! Damn! This is one fucked-up place! An’ the only reason why—

Yeah, I heard, I snorted, distressed.

Well, Nate, he said, now, quietly, There’s your New Generation for you. A generation of faggots.

The newscasters quickly switched the subject. Soon we were getting live updates on what our boys were doing in Numidia. All America was up in arms, and so was the pub—but to be honest, I didn’t know what the fuss was all about. I didn’t even know where Numidia was, let alone that it was in Africa.

Some kid was playing a radio a few tables down. The DJ maliciously flipped Ahab the Ay-rab on the turntable. Okey-doke white boys phoned in from time to time, swearing to the DJ that they’d shoot anything that moved and wore a towel. On TV, we saw our soldiers doing drills in the desert, moving into town, waving Old Glory—and the natives, happy that our boys had freed them from the iron yoke of General Ben-Bahraini, waving their hands and savagely ululating. I stopped listening to Guy and carefully watched the TV screen.... Hey, Guy snorted, nudging me and pointing to the screen, why the hell do these idiots think they’re bringing peace to the Mid-east by making a bad-ass situation worse? What’s their story? Why the fuck don’t they stay here an’ fight against those crackers up at Watson University?

Well, from what I can see, I explained, if Numidia goes, then Egypt goes—

"Uh-huh?

And if Egypt goes, so does Israel—and then Saudi Arabia, and then on and on and on. They’ll take over the world! They’ll be even worse tyrants than those asshole Soviets who are padding their asses out.

Or that Reagan bastard, who’s padding out the asses of King Ahmed’s regime, Guy quickly added. It’s all silly shit if you ask me. Why don’t they just sit down somewhere in Geneva and chill out? He gave off a dismissive snort. It’s idiotic."

But the harder I looked—at the flag, the drills, the bombs bursting in the night over Adjrar (the rebel capital), and the tanks, the harder it was to resist. I’d caught patriotic fever again. Of course, it was nothing more than a last gasp of my Republican attitudes of two years back. I admit I was a goddamn Yankee: the Star-Spangled Banner brought tears to my eyes. Nobody—so I thought—was denying me my rights; nobody—so I thought—was telling me what to think; I didn’t grow up the way my parents grew up, riding in the back of some honky’s bus. I was a free spirit. I even helped put Reagan’s ass back in the White House. (I admit it. Hell, didn’t Malcolm X use cocaine?)

Then I thought up something. You know something, Guy, I guess you’re right about skipping school, I told him. Life is the best school there is. So, I’m going to join! I can’t wait! I gotta see the world, I gotta experience! And once I’m out of the war, I’ll be a real man. Just wait! The road to manhood is paved with tanks and convoys!

Oh, please, Nate, Guy chuckled, dismissively, havea drink an’ cool off. It ain’t what you think. Trust me.

But I couldn’t take anymore: I got up.

Hey, where the hell are you going?

Me? Hell, Guy, I roared, putting on my coat, barely even hearing myself in my excitement, I got a future awaiting me!

Nate, he told me, calmly, don’t be a fool.

Oh, no, I continued, slipping the strap of the bag around my shoulder, That’s not foolish—THIS is foolish, sitting in this fucking bar all day whining about life. I’d rather be in a fucking war. C’mon! What’s four years in the service, anyway?

You wanna know, motherfucker? You really wanna know, since you’re so goddamn smart?? I’ll tell you! Look at what’s happening right now in Adjrar—

Fuck Adjrar! I belched hysterically. Where the fuck is this place, anyway? Transylvania?

Wait’ll they send you there, he laughed, jerking his finger in my direction. ‘Cause you don’t know shit. You do not know SHIT. You got your head up your ass, motherfucker, but my eyes are wide open! I’ve seen it happen to a lotta niggers like you! You think you’re ready for the world, an’ they cut your fuckin’ ass down! You so dumb, you think Harriet Tubman was a porn queen! And he raised his voice an octave as the students grew louder. DUMB REPUBLICAN NIGGER!

You can say what you want, I shouted back, walking away from him, but what the fuck do you know or even CARE about Harriet Tubman or Malcolm X? You’re just like all the rest, a fuckin’ ego-centered coon with a fuckin’ inferiority complex. Fuck YOU, asshole. You’re not my motherfuckin’ father OR my motherfuckin’ mother, okay. You never gave two shits about where I was at, so why should you care now? FUCK you, stupid-ass cocksucker. Fuck you AND your asshole friends AND that fuckin’ fat whore you stole from me. ‘Cause this is my life, goddammit! Not yours! Mine!! MINE!!—

And with those famous few last words, I deserted the Yellow Dog Bar and Freedom College, never to see either of them again.

TWO

Okay, I thought. No need to panic. So what if the draft board classified me as 1-A: me, a weak, skinny, asthmatic motherfucker, who had every bone in his body broken from the neck down. It was too late to turn back. The past was past; to hell with everybody.

I was not remorseful. I’d been dragging my demoralized ass around Freedom’s college campus for the better of two years. I remembered little of what I learned, save for one thing: reputations do not a school make. Freedom College was one of those venerable, nineteenth century institutions, whose main aim was to make industrious Christians out of black guys. Everything about it stunk of the old plantation; everything about the school’s social and academic life was shoddy, fraudulent and substandard. Jack Mioff, the dean of Freedom’s Fine Arts department, was a perfect illustration of what I mean. He was a bona-fide Freedom Man—a fine, well-dressed, well-mannered, distinguished gentleman—but that last afternoon, he had distinguished himself by smashing my nose against the wall of his office. I had shamed the university, so he said. (Never mind how it really went down, how my painting teacher told me to drop out and work in the post office, or the insults I received at the hands of Guy, who threatened to blow my head off, or my girlfriend, Rhonda, who dumped me for him, or, last but not least, that latest misadventure, in which I’d bashed my drawing teacher in the head after he tried to make me blow him—all that was as nothing.

(But Mioff had been trained not to listen to guys like me. He was, after all, what he was, a cog in a creaking old machine. He was all of a piece with my drawing teacher, who was all of a piece with the chairman, who was all of a piece with the prexy, the Board of Trustees, and the cops. My mistake was thinking that some of them were different in their approach to educating niggers.)

And yet, I thought, I had somehow managed to survive. I had endured the unspeakable. I was still seething from bad recollections, but I wasn’t bitter, and I still had a soul. Camp Jejune would be milquetoast.

So it happened that one morning, I was scaling up this ancient stone wall when I felt something smash me in the side of my face. I wake up, only to realize that I am not in bed. Oh, yeah, I thought—I really did join the armed forces. This big, bald-headed oaf, whom I was sitting next to, kept exchanging glances with another big oaf in the seat opposite him. They looked like they were keeping some little secret. The others were also bald-headed and also giggling; most of them were white, but there were a sizable number of Negroes among them. Okay, okay, I can handle this, I’m not some weak motherfucker, I told myself, trying to fight off that sinking feeling that always overtook me in those young years. But even then, though I was fundamentally lazy, though I always balked at the idea of making great moves, I was still not the kind of man to back down from his word.

But, then again, I had never really been out on my own. Freedom College didn’t count: mommy and daddy had arranged that whole setup. I didn’t drive a car, didn’t have my own apartment—hell, I didn’t even know how to boil an egg. All the money I had was part of a monthly allotment sent to me by the scholarship fund, pulled out of the school account just hours after my expulsion. I imagined it would tide me over well for a few weeks. Until I patted my chest and found that all four hundred and fifty four dollars of it had been stolen.

Not long after finding that out, the scenery just outside my window began to get bleak. We’d been driving for hours through endless forests, only to watch these strange buildings appear. They looked like life-sized dollhouses. The roads grew hopelessly treacherous; they were all lined with loblolly pines and bent stop signs and corner stores, some of them so old that WHITE and COLORED signs were still visible beneath thin coats of paint. These quaint hangovers soon gave way to an unbelievable jungle of strip joints and fast food restaurants, shitty shopping malls, dingy cut-rate motels, pawnshops, and, of course, more fast food restaurants and more life-sized dollhouses.

It was utterly unbelievable, the architecture of a nightmare. Yet nobody around me seemed to be paying it any mind. They were just as indifferent towards their surroundings as they were towards my dire straits. When the bus stopped, my head was so awash with anger and fear that I moved off clutching my duffel bag like a blind man.

I noticed that a bunch of officers were already there to greet me. They looked exactly like cops. After we shuffled off—I was the last to leave—the Marine Corps police wandered in and out the bus, checking for shit, then casually (but carefully) frisked us. A non-descript, bespectacled white man of medium height suddenly appeared, greeted us, calling himself General McIntyre. I felt reassured when I heard his voice, seeing him in his crisp, neat blue uniform—it made me think that I hadn’t just killed myself and woken up in hell.

Those feelings didn’t last long. No sooner than I entered the barracks the fears started coming back. The barracks were not that old, but they were not in very good condition; the cots were as small as coffee tables and it was very cold and musty and smelly. I noted with a quaking heart that everybody in the bunker (that’s what I called it, because that’s what it was to me) was, save for two Hispanics, all white. I moved the trunk up to the bed I was assigned, trying not to look at my bunkmates unpacking and snarling in Southern accents.

Now, I thought, I realize why I chose Freedom College over Brown: because I wanted to be with my people. To their credit, however, the white boys didn’t wrap a noose around my neck. They kept a respectable distance and sort of just half-stared at me. Besides, many of the recruits began deserting in such vast numbers than soon I nearly had the whole barracks to myself.

I found I had a tougher constitution than I had imagined. The officers taught me that pain was simply weakness leaving the body. They were right; in fact, it was the most right thing they ever said, and they didn’t even know it. I gradually began to let go of my fears; but I was still dogged by a strange sense of nakedness, one that had nothing to do with my bald head. Tough constitution or not, the kids in my bunker told me I cried in my sleep. Only stubbornness can explain why I stuck out all that training, day after day, week after week, twisting and twirling guns that were so dangerous that the slightest slip-up could have cost me my life.

No, that’s not quite true. I was from Freedom College, after all. That’s where they taught young black men to respect authority, no matter how wrong. They drilled it into you by crushing your self-esteem. Everything you did was a reflex motion. You, the person, weren’t quite there, even as you were lumbering up and down obstacle courses, wading in ice-cold streams until your balls froze, or standing up in a razor-straight line at five in the morning while some sergeant, black or white (it didn’t matter, they were interchangeable), was watching you to see if your eyes blinked. It was nothing but an elaborate form of self-contempt; that was the real reason why I endured.

But the more comfortable I felt in this routine, the more my old habits began to force their way to the surface—like, say, defying authority figures. It was nothing special, merely the flip side of my awe of authority figures. Typically, I joked around with one of them while on duty. The next thing I knew, I was standing before his desk.

Private Morris, he began, you think this shit is funny to you?

No, SIR, I barked, idiotically.

Well, why the fuck you keep on laughin’ during training an’ what-not?

I always laugh under pressure, SIR.

The sergeant—black and virtually neck less, with a rock-hard Indian face of dark-brown coloring—nodded matter-of-factly, and got up from behind his desk. He coughed, circled me standing before him, and closed his door. I fully expected a fist in my stomach or a boot in my crotch. Naw, he breathed, I ain’t gon’ hit’chu. I ain’t even gon’ waste my breaff whippin’ your stupid ass. You ain’t even worth it, punk-ass bitch. ‘Cause you ain’t even a man to begin with, an’ I don’t hit girls. You know what I’m sayin’? Private, you ain’t nothin’ but a punk-ass faggot mothafucka. But I likes you, dough. Yeah, I likes you. You just like some silly-ass pet I’d buy for my son at the pet shop, ain’t even trained yet, ain’t even broken in. Well, I got news for you. He took a deep breath, then got very, very close to my face. You excited now, mothafucka? You like some nigger like me up in your face? Wanna gimme a mothafuckin’ kiss?

My impulse was to reach for something and crush it over his skull, but I merely whimpered in the negative. Naw, the sarge snarled, you ain’t even good enough for that. But I been watchin’ you, dough. An’ I’m gon’ have your black ass sent to Adjrar. You know, where all dem wars an’ shit is goin’ on. How’d you like that, mothafucka? We’ll put your mothafuckin’ ass onna front lines an’ maybe you’ll come back with something to laugh about, funny-boy. ‘Cause I’m not jokin’ with you, bitch. I’m gon’ DO it.

I left his office, quivering but, strangely enough, still smirking. I knew somewhere in my naive head that he could actually do that, even though it was against Marine regulations: any recruit (officially, anyway) could quit whenever he felt the going was too rough. By then, I hadn’t been in the unit six weeks. I forgot about the threat, and concentrated more on trying to broaden my pathetically small circle of friends by hanging around the dingy bars and motels in town. There were always a few bloods hanging out down there, anyway, so one night I decided to make myself known. I saw three black guys standing around near the entrance of the Foxhole with two white boys. Rap music was blaring loudly from the inside. I walked up to the five of them as they spotted me and said, hey, what’s up?

Three of them—one black man and two whites—stopped, stared, and said absolutely nothing. They looked at me for about five seconds, then turned back towards each other, exchanged glances, and giggled. I was immediately incensed. One thing I always hated was for other people to laugh at me, for as long as I could recall, that’s just about all anyone ever did whenever I was around. Forget it, Nate, I thought to myself.... You already got two or three of these Marine jerks you can talk to. Isn’t that enough? Does the whole world have to kiss your ass?

I moved into the Foxhole, the rap music got louder. It was Party Time by Kurtis Blow, but mercifully, the excited shouts and curses from dozens of off-duty soldiers drowned out the horrible saxophone. The only lights in the Foxhole were those purple and red lights coming from the stage, where one of their downtrodden, sunken-faced Korean girls was awkwardly twisting and squirming. I took no interest in the scene. There were even more Korean girls scattered about the bar, most of them already occupied with other soldiers, but I was really looking for Jerome Gates. Nothing sexual; I simply needed someone trustworthy enough to unload my anxieties on—and Jerome Gates was the only guy I could trust.

I found him at the bar, seated next to a white guy named Earl Cunningham. It was all the better that Jerome wasn’t in my sorry division. He was a corporal in the 3lst Ostrogoths. He was fairly tall, about six foot one, with unusually large feet, light brown complexion, straight profile and large light brown eyes which looked like they were popped out all the time. Maybe it was his sarcasm that endeared me to him—for I knew he didn’t really like military life; in fact, he hated it, or at least made a good pretense of hating it. I found that strange, because he was actually up for promotion to sergeant if only he made it through those last few hurdles.

That night, however, he seemed unusually depressed.

I’m gonna be outta here, soon, he told me, when I approached.

I don’t see what’s so depressing about that, I countered, I thought you said this place was a piece of shit.

No, no, he replied, snorting, not quite like that. The 3lst division is decamping, we’re shipping out. Jerome took a deep breath, as if he was waiting for his executioner to whisk him up to the guillotine. Fight? You mean, in Numidia?

South Numidia, he said, and sighed. Well, all I can hope is that that place has been bombed up enough by the time we get there. That way there won’t be enough of them left to shoot us.

Me, too.

Why, you goin’ over, too?

Well, my sergeant told me I was going, I blurted out, unsure of myself. Jerome’s brow furrowed; he picked up his glass of beer. You mean, he told you that—

Yeah. He said he was gonna ship me out to the front lines ‘cause all I do on duty is smirk and laugh.

Jerome was drinking his beer when I uttered those last few words, and suddenly spat his beer onto my uniform, laughing. He what?!

He says, all I do is laugh. He sounded like he was serious.

So why are you laughing all the time, then?

I can’t help it, I always laugh under pressure, I complained.

Jerome shook his head and had a brief exchange of words with Earl at his elbow. In the meantime I ordered a Coke and heard the record change from Kurtis Blow to Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go. You should have never joined, Jerome now laughed, almost banteringly. Why did you join if you can’t take the shit seriously? Why’d you join?

I wanted to get away from college, I said, unable to come up with a better excuse. Jerome laughed again. Hello, Nate. Do you know what time it is?

It’s wartime, shot Earl next to him, lifting his beer up to his lips.

Yeah, Jerome nodded, so you know what that means? 100,000 U.S. troops have been called over to restore order in Numidia on an indefinite basis. Some go to the North, to keep the regime intact, but most are heading down south to go one on one with the rebels. That’s me, see—an’ it’s probably gonna be you, too, sleeping in the desert or in specially set-aside areas with all those wild animals tearing at your tent an’ shit. Ever see those action sequences of Vietnam? Well, that’s just what it’s gonna be like.

I can handle it, I boasted.

Oh, you think you can?

Sure, I added. I wouldn’t mind fighting to keep our man in power!

Earl craned his head up at me. OUR man? You mean King Ahmed? Are you serious? This guy is a fuckin’ loser! He actually shined Reagan’s shoes when he visited this country! All he’s ever done is kill his own people. He’s even worse than General Bahraini, that wacky goofball Ay-rab who’s threatening to steal our oil rigs. Huh, he snorts, and sets his beer down. If you ask me, I’d let the rebels take it. I mean....is it really worth risking our lives for these fuckin’ nobodies?

The lives of Americans are at stake, crooned Jerome.

You mean to tell me that Americans live over THERE?!

I’m afraid so, he added.

Well the hell with them, they had no business there, Earl laughs, quietly. Serves them right for wanting to live over there. Shit, you know untill recently I didn’t even know where the damn place was?

Me neither, I said.

All you gotta do is check the map—it’s in North Africa, Jerome says, finally. "So, Nate—think you can handle it? If you can’t, here’s a tip. Go down to the General’s office and tell ‘im you want out. But if that doesn’t work, the MP’s around here are pretty lax, you know, so if you want, slip into some civilian clothes and follow the train tracks to Atlanta. It’s about fifteen miles from here.

No, I said, suddenly, I think I’ll stay.

But in the following few weeks, I quickly changed my mind. The discipline may have been brutalizing, but the social situation was completely murderous. Soldiers stole my money and my clothes, waitresses wouldn’t wait on my table, B-girls flashed guns when I approached them, and the locals were so racist, they spat, screamed slurs, and threw rocks and bottles and rotten fruit whenever they saw a black face. But what did the high-ranking officers have to say about it? Nothing. None of them batted an eyelash when I told them about my stolen $454, the mountains of hate mail, the spray-painted swastikas on my locker, the death threats hidden in my uniform pockets, the bits of broken bulbs that were left in my bed, the barrage of obscene phone calls, the coded hate messages white lieutenants gave me when they supposedly trained me to fight somebody else. But why should they have listened? Upon close scrutiny of General McIntyre, I saw that he was really nothing, just a small, insignificant man who didn’t have half my goddamn brains.

What was the point of serving a force that told me, in so many words, that I was just a piece of shit?

In the end, I was robbed and beaten by six drunken off-duty soldiers, all of whom were black, and all of whom knew me. When the officers turned a deaf ear this time, I decided to screw them. I bought a whole suitcase full of cheap clothes at a faraway thrift store; I kept the suitcase in an abandoned dumpster. Then, at mess-hall time, I skipped away from base, retrieved the suitcase, went into the bathroom of a Burger King and put on a black shirt, dark-blue pants, tan sweater and an old, beat-up, grey topcoat several sizes too big for me. I tied a stolen bed sheet to the base of the shitbowl to cushion my fall. I hurriedly forced the window open. Walk, don’t run, to the nearest train tracks, I thought, vowing never to return, and never let my adolescent fantasies get the best of me, ever again.

But I didn’t find any train tracks; all I saw was that same old potholed road. I walked up, taking stock of the precious few cars that zoomed past; their drivers were almost all white. Most of them gave me the finger as I passed. Some of them slowed, rolled down their windows, stuck out their shaved heads and barked NIGGER; others threw empty bottles. Even the black passengers ignored me. Finally I lost patience and pulled out my gun. I stepped in front of the very next car. The car stopped momentarily, then slowly drove past me, as if the people in the car suddenly recognized me.

They were two guys, both black, one tall and dark-skinned, the other fair-to-medium with large, fluffy grey and black curls. Why, I thought, these guys look exactly like my father and my brother Lucius....

Oh, God, my father groaned, looking at me pointing a gun at him. He snatched his face away from me. Lucius planted his in the palm of his right hand and shook his head. God, God—please, dear Lord, tell me this is all a dream, my father added with a pathetic cry.

No wonder he ain’t written us in seven months, Lucius snorted.

Lucius revved up the engine and made like he was leaving. Their car moved on past me when I threw my suitcase down and like a little child, dashed after them, screaming. The car slowed down again. This time, one of the car doors opened. I slipped in the back wordlessly and they immediately took off.

My mother said nothing when I crawled in the door; she just stared at me. I don’t think I said anymore than two or three words to her before I moved back up the stairs to my bedroom. The entire house seemed so oddly shrunken....especially my bedroom. I found it hard to believe I had actually lived there. It looked like it was made for dolls. But I couldn’t spend the next three months living in and out of movie houses until I enrolled at Coon State.

I tried to explain to my parents what happened, taking great care to leave out the bad details. I naively thought I could eke some understanding from them. But I had been away too long. They were too wrapped up in their own misery, still stuck in the past, unwilling to let all that old shit drop. My mother, scared of good clothes, scared of books, scared of bold thought and action, scared of everything, was trying to tell me what it was to be an adult—when it was obvious to anyone who knew her well that she never really grew up: all her life, even after raising four sons, she’d remained a frightened little girl, always content to remain on the same street and sit on the same porch....and my father? The high school teacher, the author of several novels—what had become of him? He’d retired from his rinky-dink job, and now, in his golden years, he was devoting his remaining energies to brandy, to vomiting all over the bathtub, the carpet, the kitchen floor, the coffee table, and in general making horrifying scenes with my mother in which, as usual, all the neighbors would gather round and stupidly stare. My younger brother Vernon? He was living in a stinky apartment with his crack-fiend friend. The other, older one? He was still at the house, living in his glass cage, absolutely spoiled, an appalling specimen of a man who was never allowed (for fear of his mother) to fully become one. A twenty-seven year old woman who’d gained fifty flabby pounds, who sat in his room all day, playing chess games with himself. Out of work, out of ideas, out of touch with reality.

The situation at Wormwood was so bad that after four weeks, I wished I hadn’t gone AWOL. Every day there was an argument by either my mother or my father or by Lucius. I soon avoided going downstairs altogether for fear of running into them. And going outside was no escape. The neighborhood was even more run-down and hostile. Our own house looked like a slave shack—the grass was uncut, the front and backyards were cluttered with trash and beer bottles; the hatred I felt in my heart for it all could barely be put into words.

One afternoon, however, I received a mixed blessing. Somebody rung up the house and my mother answered the phone. Not before long, I heard my name being mentioned in a tone of voice I dreaded. My mother began to cry, and then she shouted my name. I understood what was behind those tears. Nathan James Morris had goofed again.

I locked my door and turned the air-conditioner on, but it was too late: I was trapped. A couple hours later, I heard an enormous roaring and squawking up Mound Street. A whole fleet of Military Police jeeps and specially-marked military cars had surrounded our house. The nosy neighbors came out, looking real dumb in their slippers and tacky clothes, scratching their heads, gawking, pointing, talking crap. I slipped back into bed, not knowing what else to do. And here came my father, smashing his foot through my door in drunken rage. He broke the lock, the door flew open. His eyeballs were popping. Okay, motherfucker, he snarled, get out, get out. Get out of this family, you’re on your own from now on.

No.

You got yourself in this jam, now you work it out. His words were slow and icy.

I told you I changed my mind, I groaned, underneath the sheets.

My father pulled the sheets off and yanked something from behind his back. It was his old World War Two pistol, still loaded and deadly. Get up!! he shot, pointing the barrel at my head, while the MP’s moved noisily up the stairs and stopped right by the door. I saw two of them, white guys, exchange glances at the ridiculous sight of a father threatening to kill his son. You got yourself in this shit, now YOU work it out, my father repeated.

I angrily pushed his gun away, but he thrust it back. Then I thought, maybe this is all for the best. Maybe they were right. Yeah. Go back, and then transfer to some place like Numidia, where all they were doing anyway was sitting in the desert, having fun. I let my drunken father lead me