Reluctant Prophet

By Donnie Dale

What if a U.S. Marine, missing in action in Vietnam, emerges after hiding out for over 30 years – an emaciated, changed man whose appearance causes a worldwide sensation? This is the story of Daniel Bloodworth, the insightful war hero who returns to his homeland and finds greed, materialism, and violence. Wandering through the ruins of his former life, Daniel begins to make enigmatic, prophetic speeches about his vision for a more spiritual and contented nation.

 

Daniel Bloodworth becomes a messianic figure, drawing tens of thousands of passionate followers to his speeches - from Arizona to Texas, from California to Rhode Island. He reminds America of what her real dreams were and could be again.

 

Written by a Vietnam veteran,  Reluctant Prophet delivers an explosive commentary which is prophetic, political, personal, and timely.

• Language: English
• Publisher: A Novel Press
• Release date: Sep 4, 2022
• ISBN: 9781938968020

Book preview

1

CAPITAL

There’s gladness anticipated in a return, in the steps between outside and inside, between car and curb, street and house, ship and shore. Between war and peace. I was taking the steps gladly, with an insurgent buoyancy in my heart.

I thought I’d be happy, coming home. To family, to my family of America. It would be a reunion. A reconciliation.

It would be some consolation.

But they sneak me off the government plane in Hawaii, and my first steps on American soil are in handcuffs and pain. I clink and jingle among the air marshals and military police. They haven’t even looked at me and they think I’m the one who might be violent or crazy. A terrorist. For some reason they think I’m either a terrorist or a deserter.

Who the hell are you? says this dainty looking colonel at the interrogation.

Daniel Bloodworth. Service number 697-25-89.

Yeah yeah, we’ve checked that out. There was somebody by that name in Vietnam in 1968. Killed in action.

Missing in action is the term, I believe. When they don’t find a body.

The report says they found a lot of bodies. Pieces of bodies. One was Corporal Daniel Bloodworth.

This is Colonel Randy Ready speaking to me this way. This is the first time I’ve seen a Marine in over 30 years, and I’m disappointed. Not to mention aching from being knocked around a bit by the military cops. He’s wearing the Vietnam theater medals on the dress blue Marine Corps uniform--they had found him at a military function of some kind, a ball, maybe. He has a jovial looking face that ruins itself with that deadpan business-only look that locks itself on military and police faces.

Quang Tri Province. First Marine Division, I say.

You know there’s a law against identity theft.

Against what?

Identity theft? I have no idea what he’s talking about. I’m tired, I have jet lag and I can’t eat any of this American food. I throw it up. I try again. I throw it up. I can taste the fatty, inorganic nature of it deep in my cells.

Are you Muslim? the colonel asks. There are several other people in the room on the naval base, some in suits, some in Marine and Navy uniforms. The colonel does all the talking. One is a woman in Marine camouflage fatigues. I keep glancing at her. I’ve never seen a female Marine before.

You know many Vietnamese Muslims? I ask him back.

So you’re Vietnamese.

Do I look Vietnamese to you?

Sure as hell sound Vietnamese.

He’s right, there. I’m just relearning English, and I speak formally but with an accent as wacky-quacky as duck talk. Speaking American in Vietnamese.

You would too if you lived there for thirty years. I had to sit by myself and practice English every now and then just to—

Do you know any Vietnamese Muslims? he persists. Sounding scared.

Never heard of one. Communist Muslims? I don’t think so.

The colonel, who I assume must be in Intelligence, doesn’t get it. I’ve reverted back to my POW self, the self you go to during interrogation, the self you develop when they come after you and they hurt you inside and they hurt you outside. I didn’t expect to have to do that here, on American soil, but I’m willing. I’m not going to let assholes get to me. The Viet Cong couldn’t, the North Vietnamese couldn’t, and this man can’t.

Okay, look, Colonel Ready says. Here’s the deal. He sits down facing me, crossing his legs primly. I’m seated at a small table in an isolated back room that I now recognize as being an interrogation room. It’s disappointing, I’ll admit. I didn’t expect a marching band, but I also didn’t expect a slap in the face. I wait. He exchanges a glance with a couple of the people in suits. I take the opportunity to sneak a look at the female Marine. She meets my eye angrily. They’re all afraid of me for some reason, and they want to hurt me.

What deal?

You fess up, we go easy on you. Nice cell, good food, federal facility. Give up some names, come clean, no more games. That’s all we ask. No big deal.

I laugh.

I laugh the way I laughed when that NVA battalion cut through our squad and there was no other way to express my fear. I laugh the way I laughed when the VC tortured me and smiled sweetly while they were doing it. I laugh the way I laughed when I saw death in the jungle coming toward me as a tiger moving its stripes silently through stipples of sunlight. I laugh because I don’t know what else to do and abysmal fear is an emotion that can burst into translation as subliminal comedy.

This conversation goes on for a long time. All day. Then I’m so tired that gravity deserts me and I find myself tipping ever so slightly. There’s a sudden numbness to my face. A smile is still on me I believe as I faint right out of my chair. I curl there on the floor in a peculiar half-life, senses shutting down, and then I know nothing for a while.

I wake up in a nice bed in a nice room of a nice hospital of the nice Navy base. There are tropical birds singing baritone and soprano outside.

A guard sitting in a chair flees as I turn my eyes on him. I recall an ancient movie. Frankenstein awakening. The villagers fleeing. Where did that come from? I haven’t seen a movie in over thirty years. My American references are coming back, if not the American courtesies.

In come a bunch of people. One of them is the colonel. He stands over my bed, fingers interlocked in a prayerful position. It’s a penitent pose. Is it because I passed out? No.

It all checks out. I’m sorry about that.

What does? I say, smacking my lips dryly. I would love a drink of water. Where has the common courtesy of the American nation gone that they don’t think to give a man a drink of water?

Did you know you’re actually a Medal of Honor winner?

Huh uh.

Posthumously.

I let this soak in. Was everybody else killed? In my squad?

We’re working on that one. Lot of screwed up service records from that era.

I can’t think of anything to say. There’s an IV in my arm, and what I really want to do more than anything is jerk it out. It itches and it holds me anchored here. More and more people come into the room, until it’s full. This time they’re smiling kinds of people. More stand outside the open door, peeking in, looking so odd in their suits and uniforms.

Welcome back, Daniel. Welcome home.

The now jovial-seeming colonel reaches to shake my hand. I reach for him hard, tearing the IV out. I take the hand with blood trickling down my arm, accompanied by bursts of consternation from nurses who rush to me. I love this pain, I can take this pain, I think. Just before I pass out again.

The next time I wake up I’m being whisked via ambulance into nice Navy housing, near the beach. Many medical personnel bustle around, and there’s always a small herd of people in uniforms and suits bustling behind the bustlers. I stay there a week or so, nervous people fussing around me constantly. There’s more questioning, but this time there’s a different feel to it.

You say you were saved by somebody? Colonel Ready asks incredulously in one of his many visits. After you escaped the POW camp?

Hue.

The city? His tone is so deferential now.

The person. Hue Nguyen.

Okay, who’s Hue?

At this my eyes fill with tears. It’s so immediate I can’t resist their coming. I must be softening, because I would never have shed tears in front of my communist interrogators in Vietnam. I’ll have to be more careful. You can’t let your guard down. Not once. Not anywhere.

The one who saved me. A Viet Cong woman, in her previous life. She found me wandering around delirious. We lived together the rest of the time I was there.

A VC? You’re sure?

Yes.

Amazing.

She was. That was the only reason I stopped trying to get out. Our life together.

So why did you decide to come back?

She died.

Maybe he can see what I’m thinking, how sad I become, because he doesn’t respond. I think about her little body, how they laid her out, the flowery funeral with all her friends wailing desperately in the dirt, the hanging funeral scrolls and the smoke of the joss sticks.

And me, trying not to wail desperately in the dirt. Trying to get at her to touch her hand one more time as they held me back.

I’m sorry, he says, smacking his lips in emphasis. Okay, here’s what’s going to happen. We’re sending you stateside, ASAP. We’re going to set you up in Washington while we locate your people. Get you some help to show you around, get you reacclimated.

I can’t just... go?

We’d rather you didn’t.

I want to find my parents. My brother.

Haven’t been able to locate your parents yet, for some reason. Your brother is dead. He pauses in a false little show of sympathy. Deceased. Vietnam.

Odd, I hadn’t thought about my little brother in years, I don’t even feel his death. He’s been absent so long, everybody has been absent so long. I don’t cry over that one. Brother is an old, faded concept. Like mother and father.

Don’t worry, Colonel Ready says, we’ve got the president alerted to your arrival. You’ve got the American people waiting to see you.

He pauses a bit. Looking for my reactions.

Uh huh. What can I say? Bring on the marching band. Bring on the American people.

He reaches out his hand again. It’s been a pleasure to meet you. Sorry about that earlier stuff, by the way. You know how it is. I take his hand, but I still don’t trust him. I don’t know how it is.

Later, to the press, they call what I had gone through a debriefing. But what took all that time, I guess, was for them to decide I was legitimate, sane and sanitary enough for American consumption.

2

CAPITAL

In D.C. everything was off-key right away. The blackboard-scratchy squeal of the engines of the jet when it set me down. The wobbly floor of the odd contraption that snaked out to the plane to get us. The big diamond cluster ring cinching the wedding finger of a bulbous bodyguard escorting me along Washington’s crowded streets. A drawly hum of conversation across this capital of the world, people talking bad weather and bad news. The stores the stores the stores, how could there be so many stores?

This strange country itself. The United States of America. An organization so brazen and outlandish I wondered if I could call it home again.

At the airport in D.C. crowds lunged out so hard I looked back to see if some celebrity had gotten off the plane behind me. People in all directions were shouting, shoving. Toward me.

What startled was not that they were here to see Daniel Bloodworth, but the impression that they were desperate to locate something more profound than me, something they might take back to their homes and use in some profitable way. They seemed so needy, these goggle-eyed people. As the crowd began to lose control of itself, I was guided, a skinny man running as fast as he could, to a waiting limo. The crowd followed almost silently, eerily, sprinting in athletic shoes, flapping ties and windy skirts. Not knowing what it was they sought, I fled like a monster shaking off angry villagers. Hesitant to let them take me apart for it. The military people hid me low on the back seat of a limousine as big as a Vietnamese house.

It was a long first day of waving at people who carried little flags on sticks. I met the president and other high officials who wanted to be seen with me. Cameras were as thick and predatory as spiders’ eyes. I had no idea who was what.

Even my Commander-in-chief had to be pointed out to me so I could shake his hand. The man made it plain who I was. That I was still a Marine. That here, now, in 2006, my country was very proud of me, for holding out against incredible odds. America owed me a debt of gratitude for setting an example in time of war. I began to see their quotes in quotes, began to see what they were up to with these clichés.

That they needed me more than I needed them.

The president announced that he’d ordered a bonus added to my accumulated back pay, bringing it to over a million dollars. That didn’t even include retroactive interest or tuition for the college I’d missed by going off to war in 1968. He thanked me repeatedly, I nodded in the only form of gratitude I could muster. I acquiesced to the spectacle.

This strange, confused-face/smiley-face president took me out to a news conference on the lawn, pinned several medals on me in front of a crowd, and introduced me to people he described as ordinary citizens honoring me for my dedication to country. One was a one-legged veteran of some kind of disturbance in the Middle East who said he knew exactly what I was going through. But they whisked him away before we had time to exchange explanations. They had to sneak me out of back doors of crowded press rooms that night to get me to the house where I was to stay. Apparently it was a government residence where supplicant foreign dignitaries slept, a mansion to my way of thinking. My hideout.

They leave me alone that night. Exhausted, I sleep as inert as a bullet in a body, and in the morning they send Otis Pilsbury for me.

What is it these people want? I ask Otis, my chauffeur, my security.

It is the first time I speak to Otis. I had talked to the chubby vice president, who met me at the airport along with some sharkskin senators and dying Supreme Court justices and the like, but at that time Otis was just my driver. Today we’re alone for a few minutes. He offers to steer the monstrous black car through the capital area to refresh me on America.

What do the politicians want? he asks, cagey. We roll down streets lined by trees skinned dead by winter. A deciduous nation, I realize. Coming from the jungle, it is strange to see the trees so naked, the emotions so uncamouflaged.

No, these people, these crowds.

Because everywhere we go that second day there are jostling hordes of people. Politicians with wide, practiced smiles and handshakes that pump so hard at me. Am I some kind of slot machine they can extract their fortune from if only they exercise me hard enough?

Otis could pretend to be obtuse, I discovered later, but in this case he may simply be misreading me. We hadn’t gotten to know each other yet, and the politicians and bureaucrats were his boss, not the people.

We get out at the Lincoln Memorial, hiking by it like mincing tourists trying to get at the tricky essence of a new country. Abe is back in his dark nook, shooting out my lungs with his barbed meanings. The ugly old hero sits on his throne like a doomed fighter pilot in his ejection seat while reporters chase us to the car. Heaving questions as far as javelins over a line of police.

They’re just glad to see you, Otis finally says. There’s been unbelievable publicity about you coming home.

Oddity, I guess.

No no, Otis says. Hero. You’re the only one to come back in, I don’t know, thirty years. They love the idea of you. They’re hungry for something to believe in.

The idea of me. Maybe that is when I first have that kind of thought. Other people are thinking about me? They have an idea of me? What can it be? Daniel Bloodworth, last Marine out of Vietnam, poor mad refugee straggling home in a hastily-bought suit as over-sized and shapeless as a body bag? Am I the only idea they can find? What can I give them to believe in? I have nothing.

Apparently, I am to be exhibited as an innocent from a safer, softer era. They are afraid reality will gobble me up. Not much fear here for a man who had hidden for thirty years like a ghost on sun-scorched delta plains and in foggy mountain rainforests. Stumbling upon fragments of dead Hueys and Phantoms as I evaded first the communists and then the tigers.

Americans are trying to rehabilitate me? From what I can tell by looking at the news, they are the ones who needed counseling. Two wars going and a sinking economy? And they’re condescending to me?

My entourage grows. Claudia Boudreaux is introduced the second day as we jet to New York City for the parade. It’s a quick, this-is-Claudia-she’s-going-to-help-you-arrange-things kind of introduction as we head for the sleek little plane.

Hi, she says shyly.

Hi, I say shyly.

It takes me some hours to get up the nerve to talk to her. I was used to carrying thoughts around for weeks in the rain forest, then babbling them to the first old ong co I met flopping along in tire sandals on a back trail or paddy dike. Diction, logic, tact--all of that had gone native over the decades.

Claudia is oh so foreign with her round European eyes and tough, as yet undetermined American backstory. She has a calm way of handling the tensest situations and a tense way of handling the calmest situations. She has that direct, crisp North American manner of addressing you right in your face.

She scares me to death.

Fifty-plus years old (I had lost count) and I am struck dumb as a water buffalo. In the parade through Manhattan, she rides three cars back locked in a black limousine with security people. As I dutifully wave to the crowds from my convertible I keep turning, trying to catch a glimpse of her through a blight of ticker tape which, they tell me later, is shredded computer documents.

Is this guy really going to make the average Joe feel better about being unemployed? I hear somebody in the crowd say. We are stopped in cliff shadows on Broadway. He is a local cop in his best blue suit walking protection, talking to another cop. What I mean is, is this guy coming back from the jungle going to give us the hots for life? He and his partner slowly glint reflective sunglasses across the crazy crowd, looking for assassins--of the president, I assume. Look how skinny he is, like one of them concentration camp victims or something. Yeah, they’ll have him signed up for diet food commercials inside the week.

The cops don’t know I can hear them with ears finely attuned to rain forest minutiae and village skittishness. They are cut short by a surge from the multitude that wedges into the path of the car, a blunt blade of well-wishers etching brisk little shouts through the supercooled air. Even policemen on nervous, frothing horses can’t stop them though the limo lumbers on like an elephant pushing logs with its trunk. These people won’t be moved back until the president and I reach out and touch their hands.

Naive me. I think it is the president they are drawn to.

Near the end of the parade I see a little Amerasian girl perched on the shoulders of a skinny, bearded man in the shoulder-to-shoulder crowd. "Chao co!" I yell in greeting, standing up on the seat for a second before I fall to my butt with the motion of the car. But the girl doesn’t hear, the man turns his head. Nobody here understands Vietnamese.

I’m about to cry. She is what Hue Nguyen’s baby would have looked like if we’d been able to have one, and now she’s lost in a wavering throng as crowded as the history of war.

3

CAPITAL

So they fly me back to Washington and I stay another night in the government house. They come to talk to me late at night as I’m fumbling around the place discovering how they’ve changed the packaging of old, familiar toiletries and thinking the day’s excitement is over.

It’s Otis and Claudia, my handlers. I’ve just gotten out of the shower, from which water pours endlessly. I have on my shorts and flip flops, clopping around on oiled hardwood floors that probably go back to the Spanish-American or some other war. They don’t knock or anything; they have their own key and are filled with government officiousness.

Accustomed already to bureaucratic surprises but not liking them, I pull my pants on and slip into a purple Hawaiian shirt given to me a week after I got off the plane from Vietnam, when they finally realized I was for real and began showering me with apologetic gifts.

We came to tell you we still can’t find your parents, Claudia says, clacking hard heels on the wood floor. Her big brown eyes are a little hyperactive, as if she’s impressed with how important we all are and wants to finally admit it to herself.

Nothing, sorry, Otis says, apologetic but not sorry. There’s just no family by that name in the country.

To be exact, there are dozens of them, Claudia says, but none of them claim you. No son missing in action. They must be dead. It’s been thirty years, and the heart attack rate has gone sky high.

I read that, I say, quacking a little less with every conversation. Probably need to eat more rice and less sugar. You two want to sit?

I motion to the chairs and sofas and loveseats in the big living room as if it’s mine. It’s been set up for visiting potentates, who would want to invite in their diplomatic corps or expatriate relatives. I’m trying to imagine some of the Sri Lankan or Bangladeshan politicos who would have stayed here. But my parents are dead, apparently, and there’s a conflict between the part of me that has assumed for thirty years that I wouldn’t see them again and the part that needs my mommy, my daddy.

You’ve been the top story in every news medium every day since you came back. Your parents would have to be hermits not to have heard a report or seen your face on the front page of a newspaper. I’m sure sorry.

Claudia means it, I can see. Probably not because she is able to put herself in my place, but because she’s able to relate my situation to some home crisis of her own. How I know that, I don’t know. The great American faces around me are just so obvious now that I see them again.

Are you from Washington, Claudia? In asking this I enter a personal dialogue with a woman for the first time since Hue Nguyen died, not counting one of the Marine interrogators in Hawaii who tried to sweet-talk me into admitting I was trained in Afghanistan by Islamists.

Missouri. This is home now. DC.

She turns to Otis as if expecting confirmation. His beefy nod gives no hint that he’s known this compact, energetic woman more than twenty-four hours. Well, okay, they’re government agents not wanting to get personal. I ponder that. Otis was introduced to me as a security man. That may not have been a lie, though I’ve never heard of the Department of Homeland Security and I know he’s something else too.

Claudia, on the other hand, may be what she claims to be, a White House aide sent to help me schedule my itinerary and organize my days. Otis called her a courtesy from the president’s staff. From what I saw of the president, he has his handlers too. Maybe all people nowadays, the semi-important ones anyway, have to have handlers. Or, more scary yet, maybe we all just accept this dictatorship of the handlers.

What’s the occasion? I ask. For some reason I feel like the emissary from Kuala Lumpur beseeching the rich Americans.

Oh yes, Claudia says, pretending to have her memory jogged. The White House wants to know whether you would care to speak at a ribbon-cutting the Secretary of Transportation is attending in Newark tomorrow. As kind of a hello to America. You can say whatever you want, of course.

I thought Newark burned down.

Newark did? she asks Otis. There was a fire?

Recently? Otis asks me, totally puzzled.

No, no. In 1967, before I went to Vietnam.

Oh. I assume they rebuilt it, Claudia says, chuckling. That was before I was born.

Blacks, Otis says. Rioting. Pissed off bad. He’s about my age or a little younger, so he would know.

What would I say to America? The thought befuddles me. Hell, I can barely work up the courage to talk to Claudia.

There’s an undercurrent here, though, the deep and calculated reason why they’re my handlers. I realize I’m being touted in the media as a new symbol of America rising from the doldrums, as a man capable of bearing away massive wreckage from the past, as some good-luck charm against oncoming economic pain or some undisclosed element the columnists can’t agree on the analysis of. But there’s something else, maybe a lot of something elses.

Whatever you want to, Otis says. Tell the country you’re glad to see us again. I don’t know. Speeches are not my field, old buddy.

I’m sure one of the White House speech writers could give you a hand, Claudia says nonchalantly. An it’s-great-to-be-back kind of thing.

Ah. I see how it is.

I look them over. Otis is one of those big men with a deep voice. An old buddy type. Seems like he’s reaching down for a little more bass to give that primal male impression. I heard one of the Secret Servicemen refer to him behind his back as The Doughboy because of his size and name, and he looks like an old cop, gone fleshy and tame but with the muscle memory of danger still alert deep in his retinas.

Claudia is a professional, a near-beauty who steps lively up on her toes. She has a subtle whistling lisp, so slight that for a second I mistook it for the affected accent being laid on by the Ivy League chipmunks I’m introduced to. Thin and small with a ridge-nosed face, she’s overlain herself with Professional Clothes. Suit with mid-skirt and shoulder pads, all black. Everybody in town wears black, as if the government is in mourning.

We trust you to be tasteful, says Otis, who, as taste goes, does not seem full.

We?

What the White House has asked Otis and me to do, Claudia says, is stay with you for a while. Help you acclimate. We recognize that this world is not the one you left in 1968.

No way is it. Crime, population, computers, cars, you name it. It’s all faster and crazier. You don’t want to end up history.

History?

Wasted, fragged, blown away.

Are you carrying a gun, Otis?

Me? He looks so puzzled when I ask.

A gun.

What do you think?

I think you are. I know he is. I can smell gun oil, hear the subtle lisp of the pistol squeaking in its holster when he bends too far. Where I came from I had to have that talent, and I suspect I want to keep it active. It’s one of the skills in the package called staying alive.

Nobody’s supposed to know that but me.

I understand. I don’t know it either. And another thing I don’t know?

Yeah?

Is whether I like this escort service.

Every bit of it is at government expense, Claudia says, as if that were the critical point in any debate.

"Why is that?"

You’re kind of a national celebrity. A hero.

Oh? They want to remake my tragic history? Now? After all the lost years? There’s something strangely odious about being thought of in those terms.

This country has gone through some very hard times. Cities terrorized, economies shattered, leaders despised. Like that. It’s good to have you come back and tell us we won.

Especially against the Orientals, Otis mutters. It’s always something. Now it’s the Arabs. Damn people won’t leave us alone.

We didn’t win. They won.

"You won, then."

I just stayed alive.

Isn’t that a win?

Do you want to make a little speech? Claudia presses.

I’ve never given a speech. I wouldn’t know what to say.

Let me know in the morning. We’ve got a speechwriter standing by.

As soon as my escorts leave for the night I wonder what’s going on. Apparently I go to Newark as an ornament of the administration, which I’ve heard has its own little war getting out of hand. The war dead are buried in the back of the newspapers and in this new internet thing, but they’re there. I slip into bed early to rest my irritation over that. Heaven forbid that dead soldiers would disturb anybody’s sleep.

The silky sheets, chosen I suppose to please those visiting diplomats, don’t encourage me to sleep well. I hear noises, the machinery of the city I suppose. My skinny frame can’t seem to warm those slick sheets, and I slide around all night like a car hydroplaning on wet streets.

4

CAPITAL

They pick me up early. The awakening roadways of the capital look so calm. Spring light, grayed by cold air, warms the stone hides of buildings and spotlights curled cotyledons poking from flower beds. I have to bundle up in sweaters and coats they’ve provided me. I’m still accustomed to the tropics, and two weeks of debriefing in Hawaii didn’t alter that.

There’s a helicopter breathing deep and warming its arms on the lawn of the White House, and the President is in front of an audience welcoming me like a long-lost brother. I have time for a quick hello and butt kiss before they put me on the chopper and wave me off.

The cameras multiply every time I go out, and even at seven in the morning, the lawn is crayoned in with the colorful coats and worshipful faces of demographically selected tourists. Transportation secretary, a teddy bear in glasses, is introducing himself to my escorts, but my concentration is sucked away by the lift of the helicopter. I churn a little in its belly. It’s been a long time since I rode the Hueys, but the vertigo and nausea are perfect reminders.

Instead of leaning over to look at a sea of swaying elephant grass through a wind chime of brass as the door gunner busts caps at the treeline, I’m seeing the cheery white buildings of the capital tilt into the bubble, which tries to burst itself on the Washington Monument. We beat our rotors toward a direction I can’t identify. The Transportation man shouts twaddle over the motor noise of memories that rattle as harshly as an angry M-60. When we reach an airport we board a tiny jet and take off again. This country is exhausting just in the departing and arriving.

So we come to what I suppose is Newark. Yet another limousine meets us, and we come to what I suppose is downtown. There are stumpy office buildings. A crowd streams in from all directions to meet us. I haven’t seen so many black faces since sixty-eight. Many fascinating brown Latino and Asian faces too. White faces stick out like bare thumbs in worn-out gloves.

The crowd gravitates to me as I hide behind the tinted windows of the stopped car. I easily find the Vietnamese heads, like the Chinese and Japanese only not so round, stretched a little tighter on the bones, always without the well-fed shine. Old friends and treasured enemies with so many tragic stories to tell.

Somebody opens the door for me. The eyes are so intense as I stumble away from the car and I turn to get a picture of myself reflected in the smoked windows. I see my black-gray hair shorn close, thin shoulders as loose as a hanger in a floppy suit, face tight-lipped and