‘…Flashing for the warriors whose strength is not to fight
And for each and every underdog soldier in the night
And we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing…’
Excerpted lyric, Chimes of Freedom, by Bob Dylan / 1964, Columbia Records
And for each and every underdog soldier in the night
And we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing…’
Excerpted lyric, Chimes of Freedom, by Bob Dylan / 1964, Columbia Records
It is 1969 and a Warner Bros. animated character – a huge-chested rednecked rooster previously created by artist Robert Mckimson – loudly shouts down at me, ‘Son, what is your vision uncorrected?’ Bellowing like this Foghorn Leghorn character, spitting his deep southern drawl he hollered ‘Your vision, boy!’ Leaning in, his arms folded, leering into my eyes, the large-boned Black U.S. Naval officer wore a pristine white uniform with fresh pressed leg creases like clean folded paper. In ‘69 my thoughtful progression – very deep – was that women like guys dressed in the starch white uniform of the United States Navy; however, as long as the Vietnam war raged, and both the Navy and U.S. Army were taking anyone who could walk, I immediately decided I’d rather plant myself on the California coast of Long Beach or Malibu, reefer in hand, daydreaming about getting laid and the latest Hollywood legend film, Easy Rider…
My threatening conversation with the Navy swiftly got away from me. I was now Billy the Kid riding my loud low-slung Harley hog beside Captain America on the empty road to absolute freedom. ‘I don’t know, sir, about the vision part. That’s a tough one, sir.’
At which point the officer, throwing out his chest and swinging one arm large as a telephone pole instantly forward, lashed out ripping my specs down and off the end of my nose. ‘Son, read the first line on the chart.’
I couldn’t feel my nose. I tried touching it.
‘Now, boy!’
‘What chart, sir?’
‘Aw Jesus to hell, kid…’ shaking his head, ‘The chart on the wall, son.’ I felt him softening just a bit, leaning closer in. ‘Young man, can you see the chart on the wall?’
‘Well, sir – no, sir. I don’t see very well, sir.’
‘Son, I know you want to serve your country. But, well, I see something here that I just can’t ignore. Do you know what I see?’
‘No, sir.’ I felt I’d gotten to him; that he sincerely cared.
‘A casualty! Standing right here in front of me. Death, right here in my recruitment office!
All ’cause I put a gun in your hand and you’re God-dammed blind!’
I trembled trying a giant deep breath and then throwing my chest out. I didn’t have one. I was seventeen and quietly afraid that I had only a year to live. Worse than death, I felt completely emasculated by Sargent Captain Major Foghorn Leghorn; not a bad fellow, but I found it depressing that Foghorn and I existed in the same space. A few minutes later I stood outside the recruiter’s office, a broomstick with teeth wearing Coke bottle eyeglasses, watching Los Angeles downtown traffic blaring its one great metropolitan horn inching along the street. The Coast Guard and the Navy both turned me down. Next to the Navy recruitment office sat the U.S. Army office. This left me holding my breath over a short life expectancy tour in Vietnam: No ship, just arm to arm combat, agent orange, nights in soaking wet fox holes, bombs, and death lying face down in a rice patty with my personal guys shot off; no women, no warm California breeze. I did not visit the United States Army that day. I found myself at sunset stuck in gear between depression, and yet feeling strangely thrilled at being solidly unrecruited, proud of a job well done.
I had very little schooling, my days spent shining shoes on my knees at Rick’s Barber Shop – Hair Stylist to the Stars. My future was not shaping up well, if at all. My best shoeshine tipper was country star Freddie Hart who had me running to the bar next-door and rushing back balancing his beers. He didn’t give a rat’s ass about the boot shine or the haircut, but he was always good for a five-spot in my palm.
At which point the officer, throwing out his chest and swinging one arm large as a telephone pole instantly forward, lashed out ripping my specs down and off the end of my nose. ‘Son, read the first line on the chart.’
I couldn’t feel my nose. I tried touching it.
‘Now, boy!’
‘What chart, sir?’
‘Aw Jesus to hell, kid…’ shaking his head, ‘The chart on the wall, son.’ I felt him softening just a bit, leaning closer in. ‘Young man, can you see the chart on the wall?’
‘Well, sir – no, sir. I don’t see very well, sir.’
‘Son, I know you want to serve your country. But, well, I see something here that I just can’t ignore. Do you know what I see?’
‘No, sir.’ I felt I’d gotten to him; that he sincerely cared.
‘A casualty! Standing right here in front of me. Death, right here in my recruitment office!
All ’cause I put a gun in your hand and you’re God-dammed blind!’
I trembled trying a giant deep breath and then throwing my chest out. I didn’t have one. I was seventeen and quietly afraid that I had only a year to live. Worse than death, I felt completely emasculated by Sargent Captain Major Foghorn Leghorn; not a bad fellow, but I found it depressing that Foghorn and I existed in the same space. A few minutes later I stood outside the recruiter’s office, a broomstick with teeth wearing Coke bottle eyeglasses, watching Los Angeles downtown traffic blaring its one great metropolitan horn inching along the street. The Coast Guard and the Navy both turned me down. Next to the Navy recruitment office sat the U.S. Army office. This left me holding my breath over a short life expectancy tour in Vietnam: No ship, just arm to arm combat, agent orange, nights in soaking wet fox holes, bombs, and death lying face down in a rice patty with my personal guys shot off; no women, no warm California breeze. I did not visit the United States Army that day. I found myself at sunset stuck in gear between depression, and yet feeling strangely thrilled at being solidly unrecruited, proud of a job well done.
I had very little schooling, my days spent shining shoes on my knees at Rick’s Barber Shop – Hair Stylist to the Stars. My future was not shaping up well, if at all. My best shoeshine tipper was country star Freddie Hart who had me running to the bar next-door and rushing back balancing his beers. He didn’t give a rat’s ass about the boot shine or the haircut, but he was always good for a five-spot in my palm.
⸎ ⸎ ⸎
SOME WILL TELL YOU they protested the war while being religious conscientious objectors; that they served God first and God said, ‘Thou shalt not kill.’ I did not recall God taking a position against war. My position of protest on the war did not qualify as conscientious objection; I had no record of attendance at any temple or church. My political platform was stolen from the lingua franca of new-left nationalism popularly expressed in the underground press of the times – The Los Angeles Free Press; The San Francisco Oracle; Ramparts, and Rolling Stone magazine – intended to rise above and beyond any government structure, ‘Individual dissent is considered necessary to the health of the nation.’ I’d read that in a magazine. I was scared shitless. My plan was to run. Human fear being emotionally complex, I will draw a short map.
In 1968, at sixteen years of age I watched a close-up clip on the evening news of South Vietnamese Gen. Nguyen Ngoc Loan, chief of the national police, firing his pistol directly into the head of suspected Viet Cong officer Nguyen Van Lem, also known as Bay Lop, on a Saigon street. At the end of the shockingly short and extremely close-up clip, Nguyen Van Lem lost a sizable portion of his head. The CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite took a station break. I skulked off to my secret hideaway, an alley between two buildings, rolled three joints and chain-smoked them because I wanted to be properly psychologically prepared for the run… for whatever.
Another twelve months passed during which I managed to ingest a diet of numerous illegal drugs: Mexican reds, Rainbows, Panama Red Marijuana, Cocaine, Orange Sunshine Acid, Mescaline, Codeine, Red Opium, Yellow Abbots, my trusty acetone huff rag, and some small amount of food. I became a rather happy, if thin, well-adjusted young man. One evening, at seventeen years of age, I read a short but historically powerful novel by blacklisted author Dalton Trumbo titled Johnny Got His Gun. Johnny was a soldier left with only a brain, conscious of being bathed and fed by ward nurses in a veteran’s hospital because being a paraplegic without arms and legs he could not accomplish these tasks. When I finished the last of the book, I stole a fifth of gin from my local liquor store, rolled another dozen joints, and smoked and drank vomiting and shaking all night. The next day, as the night before slowly dissipated, I continued drinking and I kept drinking every day and every night, all day and all night, until I was twenty-three years old and no longer draft eligible for the U.S. Army. I became a functional problem drinker.
During that same period I lost two friends to the prison system on charges of holding, using, and dealing narcotics. One of them was murdered while incarcerated. A guard discovered his body in the basement with his intestines pulled out as a warning to all conscientious objector inmates. My other friend committed a murder while serving a ten-year sentence (due to get out in two years) and his ‘two to ten’ became ‘seven to life.’ Additionally, I had four friends come home in body bags from Vietnam, and one other who, living on the streets, had committed suicide by blowing himself to shreds using a High Standard sawed-off shotgun leaving the wall behind him looking like a Jackson Pollock splattered nightmare. I had nothing to do with it, still, he had shown up at my door the night before he killed himself asking if I had time to talk. I told him I was in a mood and no. I was ridden with guilt over it, wondering if he would be alive if I had just given him a few minutes that night. I was probably the last person to see him alive, but I silently felt ashamed and never mentioned it to anyone.
These are my pre-emigration memories of that sentimental time from the middle-fifties to the middle-seventies, a twenty years period during the Vietnam war we refer to as the Forrest Gump Sixties when the 1970 Kent State Massacre exploded – four killed and nine wounded, and most of those had not participated in the protest. They were herded like animals for slaughter while National Guardsmen fired into the crowd, and we were taught to be thankful that at least we are not Chinese running from Tianamen Square, or East Indians running from the Massacre of Amritsar, or currently those private citizens turned soldiers, bravely fighting but also running through train stations, airports, and sea ports from the Ukraine.
We were the love generation: the flower children; the hippies and yippies and baby boomers; lost travelers with sea bags and rucksacks on our backs sleeping in bus stations and airports. We wandered searching for a beautiful life, a safe life, a spiritual dream where people did not kill one another. What I wish to put across here is that, as I see it, most immigrants are not terrorists, rapists, mafioso, gangbangers, or welfare cons. They are, no matter what else they are doing, likely searching for some kind of thing and some kind of place more spiritually sane than the things and places they have left behind; and they are probably driven by a hushed gnawing visceral fear for themselves and their families. Leaving one’s country, the culture one is raised in, and the people one has been raised by, is often a desperate fleeing from fear, yet contains a lone fear of its own creation. I have heard immigrants referred to as invaders. That in itself is a frightening turn of phrase for all sides, designed by governments to turn insecure blind humanity against itself, and it is this strategic rhetoric that is the first rule to establish during a grab for power and the making of a totalitarian state.
To complete this abbreviated background that led to my emigrating I would like to state for the record that I did not know anyone named Forrest Gump; I did not believe in the Ten Commandments – though it made a helluva fine film – and God loomed as a huge question mark for me. To lay it out plainly, I had a will to live and that is why I babbled a convenient justifying, inane, youthful philosophy, more lingua franca, about love saving the world.
At seventeen what did I know about love? I ran fast and far nine-thousand miles from home. I ran because I was afraid. I landed at Lod Airport in Israel where I could not speak, read, or write the language. I got off the plane, plastered on Heineken’s with a few dollars in my pocket. I did not know how to ask for help. I looked for the men’s bathroom, a major deal since I couldn’t read the signs on the doors. I held a tourist map telling me where to go, but I couldn’t read the language on the map. I threw it away. Finally, in the bathroom I closed the stall door, dropped my only cardboard suitcase, and cried. I was poor and hungry, tired of surviving on drugs and alcohol alone in a world I didn’t understand. I stood holding onto the wall, an immigrant.
I had not arrived in this foreign country to take advantage of anyone. I was not in Israel to steal or rape or bomb. I did not come to take from the system or live off of anyone’s taxes. I did not know the system, or how to take it, or how to fill out forms. Much like today’s immigrants who arrive at America’s borders, I did not know what the coming darkness would bring, or what the days ahead held for me. I was just an immigrant.
In 1968, at sixteen years of age I watched a close-up clip on the evening news of South Vietnamese Gen. Nguyen Ngoc Loan, chief of the national police, firing his pistol directly into the head of suspected Viet Cong officer Nguyen Van Lem, also known as Bay Lop, on a Saigon street. At the end of the shockingly short and extremely close-up clip, Nguyen Van Lem lost a sizable portion of his head. The CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite took a station break. I skulked off to my secret hideaway, an alley between two buildings, rolled three joints and chain-smoked them because I wanted to be properly psychologically prepared for the run… for whatever.
Another twelve months passed during which I managed to ingest a diet of numerous illegal drugs: Mexican reds, Rainbows, Panama Red Marijuana, Cocaine, Orange Sunshine Acid, Mescaline, Codeine, Red Opium, Yellow Abbots, my trusty acetone huff rag, and some small amount of food. I became a rather happy, if thin, well-adjusted young man. One evening, at seventeen years of age, I read a short but historically powerful novel by blacklisted author Dalton Trumbo titled Johnny Got His Gun. Johnny was a soldier left with only a brain, conscious of being bathed and fed by ward nurses in a veteran’s hospital because being a paraplegic without arms and legs he could not accomplish these tasks. When I finished the last of the book, I stole a fifth of gin from my local liquor store, rolled another dozen joints, and smoked and drank vomiting and shaking all night. The next day, as the night before slowly dissipated, I continued drinking and I kept drinking every day and every night, all day and all night, until I was twenty-three years old and no longer draft eligible for the U.S. Army. I became a functional problem drinker.
During that same period I lost two friends to the prison system on charges of holding, using, and dealing narcotics. One of them was murdered while incarcerated. A guard discovered his body in the basement with his intestines pulled out as a warning to all conscientious objector inmates. My other friend committed a murder while serving a ten-year sentence (due to get out in two years) and his ‘two to ten’ became ‘seven to life.’ Additionally, I had four friends come home in body bags from Vietnam, and one other who, living on the streets, had committed suicide by blowing himself to shreds using a High Standard sawed-off shotgun leaving the wall behind him looking like a Jackson Pollock splattered nightmare. I had nothing to do with it, still, he had shown up at my door the night before he killed himself asking if I had time to talk. I told him I was in a mood and no. I was ridden with guilt over it, wondering if he would be alive if I had just given him a few minutes that night. I was probably the last person to see him alive, but I silently felt ashamed and never mentioned it to anyone.
These are my pre-emigration memories of that sentimental time from the middle-fifties to the middle-seventies, a twenty years period during the Vietnam war we refer to as the Forrest Gump Sixties when the 1970 Kent State Massacre exploded – four killed and nine wounded, and most of those had not participated in the protest. They were herded like animals for slaughter while National Guardsmen fired into the crowd, and we were taught to be thankful that at least we are not Chinese running from Tianamen Square, or East Indians running from the Massacre of Amritsar, or currently those private citizens turned soldiers, bravely fighting but also running through train stations, airports, and sea ports from the Ukraine.
We were the love generation: the flower children; the hippies and yippies and baby boomers; lost travelers with sea bags and rucksacks on our backs sleeping in bus stations and airports. We wandered searching for a beautiful life, a safe life, a spiritual dream where people did not kill one another. What I wish to put across here is that, as I see it, most immigrants are not terrorists, rapists, mafioso, gangbangers, or welfare cons. They are, no matter what else they are doing, likely searching for some kind of thing and some kind of place more spiritually sane than the things and places they have left behind; and they are probably driven by a hushed gnawing visceral fear for themselves and their families. Leaving one’s country, the culture one is raised in, and the people one has been raised by, is often a desperate fleeing from fear, yet contains a lone fear of its own creation. I have heard immigrants referred to as invaders. That in itself is a frightening turn of phrase for all sides, designed by governments to turn insecure blind humanity against itself, and it is this strategic rhetoric that is the first rule to establish during a grab for power and the making of a totalitarian state.
To complete this abbreviated background that led to my emigrating I would like to state for the record that I did not know anyone named Forrest Gump; I did not believe in the Ten Commandments – though it made a helluva fine film – and God loomed as a huge question mark for me. To lay it out plainly, I had a will to live and that is why I babbled a convenient justifying, inane, youthful philosophy, more lingua franca, about love saving the world.
At seventeen what did I know about love? I ran fast and far nine-thousand miles from home. I ran because I was afraid. I landed at Lod Airport in Israel where I could not speak, read, or write the language. I got off the plane, plastered on Heineken’s with a few dollars in my pocket. I did not know how to ask for help. I looked for the men’s bathroom, a major deal since I couldn’t read the signs on the doors. I held a tourist map telling me where to go, but I couldn’t read the language on the map. I threw it away. Finally, in the bathroom I closed the stall door, dropped my only cardboard suitcase, and cried. I was poor and hungry, tired of surviving on drugs and alcohol alone in a world I didn’t understand. I stood holding onto the wall, an immigrant.
I had not arrived in this foreign country to take advantage of anyone. I was not in Israel to steal or rape or bomb. I did not come to take from the system or live off of anyone’s taxes. I did not know the system, or how to take it, or how to fill out forms. Much like today’s immigrants who arrive at America’s borders, I did not know what the coming darkness would bring, or what the days ahead held for me. I was just an immigrant.
⸎ ⸎ ⸎
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I DON’T OWE AMERICA more rage or rancor, and no more happiness or sadness or bitterness or fear. And I don’t owe Israel anything more. I landed in a small country at war. Not a world power, but a small country politically younger than my own, infinitely poorer than my own, and not at war far away, but at war where they live. I ran to escape a war along with others on the run from wars and absurd violence, and we ran head-long into the middle of another war because in a world that is at war with itself where is it safe, where is the dream? I did not know it those first few days, but Israel had – in their poverty yet great spirit and need – been honorably cunning in contemplating their needs and mine, having planned and legislated in preparation of my arrival to create a win-win situation. They did not tell me not to arrive until I knew their language or had a sponsor, or a job, or a place to live. They found me a combination room and board, and language school, and a number of jobs suitable for one such as myself, an ignorant uneducated immigrant, another runner who could not tell anyone yet that he arrived with fear and hope and more baggage than they might surmise from just eyeing my cardboard suitcase. They were honest and straight forward. They did tell me that while Israel maintained a relationship with the United States, their citizens did not like Americans. The Israeli government realized they were part of a whole world and therefore bore a responsibility to their fellow man to be the language teacher, the sponsor, the employer, the landlord, a food and clothing source, and an example of the underlying ethic and morality of their culture, because I did not know their culture and needed space and time to learn, because it takes people-power to fight wars and grow a country. I worked stoop labor in the fields, and I washed dishes, and I worked in a factory, and I cleaned toilets, and I worked on a fishing boat, and I lived in a shack on a an agricultural-commune freezing at night and broiling during the day with an outhouse a block away, and a straw-filled dripping wet window box – their answer to air conditioning – in front of which I kneeled praying for a breeze, swatting at cockroaches, eyeing with disdain lizards crawling up my walls.
Nights were spent with friends smoking hash and opium, drinking, running and hiding from the draft or paternity suits back home, and sitting around a large Bengal radio listening to the BBC world news; exploding bombs could be heard fourteen kilometres away across the Jordan river; we made love, washed clothes, brushed our teeth and shaved in a communal cold water sink, and when the sun rose we went to work. I traveled between three different communes. The war lived everywhere I lived, however, like the citizens I carved out a life. They took fair care of me and I did not want to steal from them. I worked for them because it was fair. The menial labor I worked at awaited me specifically set aside for immigrants. One day a headshot of myself, wearing a hairy natural so long that I used it to carry cigarettes in, appeared on a magazine cover at a bus station in Afula. I had to ask a soldier passing by what the headline read. ‘It says, Invasion of the Hippies.’ For a runner, fame in a small country at war can be problematic; eventually, as a now recognized new immigrant I was invited by law to join the army. Along with the army the local police wanted me on possible narcotics charges. Amongst other events, I had lived through a bombing while visiting Nazareth, and witnessed an eight-hour screaming miscarriage in a country where the hospitals were hard-pressed to send out ambulances to the countryside on the weekends. At this point in my journey I knew the drill and heard radio talk of an amnesty back home. At nineteen I had grown. I pulled on my paratrooper boots, packed my sea bag, grabbed my guitar – certain to be the next Bob Dylan – and ran like hell. These were my late sixties-early seventies years. When I returned to America, a girl with no sense of direction, She Who Spreads Light, who had spent those same years living in Berkeley basements, sleeping in public parks, selling underground newspapers on the streetcorner in her overalls, and taking lost walks through Oakland, carrying pet rats on her shoulders, returned home by chance to the Los Angeles neighborhood where I lived. We met, argued, made love, argued, took a ride in a VW minibus with flowers painted on the sides to city hall and got married. ⸎ ⸎ ⸎
TODAY, I AM A SENIOR citizen living in the United States. I am still married and argue only at rare moments with She Who Spreads Light, and we own a small house. I feel that I am part of a well-intentioned – if not always wise or agreeable – community, a world of humanity, and certainly a part of this universe. I am bald. I do not smoke or drink. I live clean and sober (no slips) for the past 44-years. I have learned a few things about love; you have to be there with both sober feet on the ground, not running away. We save plastic and metal for the immigrant worker who comes on his bicycle cart once a week. He collects it rain or shine and turns it in to a state-run recycling center. My wife and I converse with him for a few minutes every week as best we can in his language. When winter arrives, my wife offers blankets and old coats to the poor who live in the parks and freeway underpasses. These ones and others who live in hope and fear are not bombing anyone, they are not stealing our jobs. Some people in my community, the ones who use immigrants to mow their lawns and clean their houses, look askance at our acceptance of poor immigrants or less fortunate Americans. Fortunate Americans feel they are under attack and losing their way of life. They will not speak to the immigrants or about them. If they did speak to those whom they feel are invaders they would find that they share a common ground – insecurity and fear.
I am an American born and raised. Although, living with my past I am also an immigrant and this I will never forget. Don’t pity me. For the other Americans who have emigrated or are the American grandchildren of immigrants, if you cannot take some moments to say hello and offer some small help to our new immigrants, to enrich and deepen your own living journey, it is I who pity you. Youngbear Roth is retired and resides with his wife of forty-eight years in Los Angeles, California. Since returning to the United States, the author has published essays on touch therapies and energy healing, lectured on the California university circuit, and written for film and stage. Youngbear’s fiction writing is stored and available for reading at The Richard Brautigan Library--Clark County Historical Museum, Vancouver Washington. |
The immigrants are coming
I see them on the evening news eating my meal at sunset Air conditioning buzzing in the background Worrying about sauce stains On my favorite shirt They are fording a river waist deep Dragging worn rucksacks and sea bags The president tells us they are an invading force They may be Democrats They may throw rocks! My wife has outlawed shirts with food stains The immigrants, a primitive people Don’t give a rat’s ass about food stains I think about this, look at my wife and smile. The immigrants with stained torn shirts are coming I see them holding babies I see them holding their aging and infirm I see them stepping forward Inch by inch leaning on their walking sticks Attempting to outrun the shadow Of death the immigrants are coming. The immigrants are coming I search for news about this on Google On the computer that fights wars On the computer that put me out of work I search for news about the immigrants Who cut the grass Who clean the houses Who scrub hotel toilets Who wash the dishes Who the president refuses to pay While teeing off at Mar A Lago Calling out the military With rifles, guns, grenades, flame throwers, vests, face masks, and shields Because the immigrants are coming Shivering wet, hungry, in wheel chairs An invading force that may be Democrats That may throw rocks The immigrants are coming. We need weapons of mass destruction We need a wall like the wall In an old black and white movie Dark and gray with the shadow Of barbed wire on a Berlin night The immigrants are coming Home some of them say They won’t make it because We will attack by land, by air, by sea We will tear apart the flesh already torn Break the bones already broken Rob the spirit already stolen While they throw rocks... The immigrants are coming As they have come from Russia Poland Latvia Ireland Scotland Italy Germany Japan China Iraq Iran Latin America England. The immigrants are coming May the gods bless them And keep them well. |
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