Main Lines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste - Lester Bangs [185]
death around us … but then I rationalized: how better to reaffirm life? Especially given who or what we were. Corny I know, but god did I get excited. I think it was the death around us more than anything else that excited me. I pulled his cock deep into me and we made love there, just like that, for a long, long time. Fierce, regal, Mau-Mau love. There was definitely a sense of ritual about it and we both knew it. The old man kept staring through us. We must have fucked for an hour. When we came we screamed at the top of our lungs, both of us coming at once because we’d known almost from the first moment of motion that we could control it that good and way beyond, but when we came all control went rampaging out the window, we were helpless, we were monsters, we were ashamed, we were in love, our screams rose with the smoke and mingled with the screams of the dying. It made us scream even louder. When we were done, we literally fell apart, he upon his back, I on mine. I couldn’t look him in the eye after that. We sat there in awfulness for a while, listening to the death. Then I heard a noise and a Jeep came tearing through the fire, pulled up sharply and stopped almost on top of us. One of the hosts who’d been my guide through my whole tour of North Vietnam was sitting beside the driver. He was really pissed. ‘You wandered away from the group,’ he said, grim and dead and censorious and flat as all get out. I felt like a schoolchild caught playing forbidden games in the yard. I turned crimson with shame. ‘You know that is not allowed,’ he said. I couldn’t look at him either. ‘Get in the back,’ he said. I climbed up in the Jeep. I still hadn’t looked at the Cong's face since we’d fucked. We drove out of there. I didn’t look back. Later I was censured in front of the whole group. They said I was an absolutely classical object lesson in selfish, spoiled, American embourgeoisement, and what was worse, they said, utterly lacking any sense of the stupefying extremity of my own decadence. Of course they didn’t know what else I’d done. To them I’d just run away from the group. I had defected just a little bit, for just a little while, which for them meant I defected totally. They said I was living proof why Americans were too far gone for socialism and would have to be all killed or put in reeducation camps, at least until a new generation arrived not so polluted by capitalism and the cult of the individual. The criticisms were specific and uniform. Everybody knew the rules. I did too. Yet I broke them. Consciously. After a bit they turned gentler: ‘Don’t you see the foolhardiness of walking alone in the jungle? Even if there were no war, you would be foolish to do that. As it was, you were almost burned alive by your own countrymen. Was that what you wanted? To be some kind of martyr? Well, that was foolishness too. Who would have known? After the napalm, all bodies look the same. You would have been described in American news as having “disappeared into Communist North Vietnam.” People would no doubt concoct elaborate fantasies that we had tortured, brainwashed, and finally murdered you. Your schoolgirl notions of “martyrdom” would have succeeded in setting us back! Played right into the hands of your leaders’ schemes for deceiving and lying to the American people. Just another story for them to exploit, just more propaganda.’ I knew they were right, of course, and felt ashamed. When it was over, they weren’t mad at me anymore, everyone spoke of other things. But I couldn’t lose my shame. They forgot all about it, while I carried it like stigmata for the rest of my stay.”
As she was finishing her story, she heard a honk, a stopple of gander goose noise. She stabbed out her cigarette and looked down and over. Jimmy had fallen asleep in the middle of the tale. He was smiling, looking very boyish that way, cowlicked and remnants of freckles even at his age. It had been a lullaby for him. She had never told anyone else this in her entire life, not even her husband. Especially her husband. But it was okay. She knew Jimmy. He didn