Page 16 - WTP VOl. XI #1

Exploitation (continued from preceding page)
women I wanted would bypass me for men who
had suffered. In English, he’d detailed how each one would ease him into the warm comfort of her body, desire slow-dripping from her fingertips as a prelude to the palliative care of entering her like a country.
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Vietnam was a country I couldn’t find on a map when I entered college. Eventually, I discovered
it used to be French Indochina, a country I’d seen described in the set of encyclopedias my mother
had bought, one by one, with green stamps and $25 purchases at the grocery store when I was in ele- mentary school. Calvin went to Vietnam voluntarily. So did a few other frat brothers. Most were simply shipped. The war got worse. I stayed one step ahead of the draft by becoming a high school English teacher like many of those female classmates had done. When my wife and I went to a wedding early in 1969, the fraternity brothers who attended split into two groups—those in uniform and those not. There were nods and handshakes, but mostly turned backs and conversations from which male civilians were excluded.
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Months later, Calvin ignored me completely at the homecoming football game. He sat with his wife high in the bleachers and apart from my wife and me and a few other couples. He was in full dress uniform. We didn’t speak. We didn’t even acknowledge each other. Those of us sitting together were the ones who had deferments. Anyone would have figured that out in the fall of 1969. It was the last time I saw him. The last time I saw his wife as well.
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Calvin’s wife had witnessed one of my worst behav- ior moments. As a senior, depressed and angry and drunk, I shoved my wife-to-be in a way that sent her sprawling off a shoveled sidewalk into the snow of
a stranger’s front yard. Not a hard shove. Not with malice. More of an impatient push away, but it was undoubtedly a failure of both the heart and the mind. The gesture was indelible, not even now, more than half a century later, erased. To say the snow cushioned her fall would be inexcusable. The snow could have melted that day, and she would have fallen into slush and mud. Its presence was an ac- cident. Less than half a block behind us were Calvin and his soon-to-be-wife.
“She remembers” is what I thought when she con- tacted me about the poem nearly forty years later.
She may or may not have known that Calvin had talked me down later. He’d sat in my room at two a.m. and explained what needed to come next to pre- vent me from becoming a permanent asshole, advice as valuable as any I’ve ever received. Chemical imbal- ance was not an excuse. My second chance needed to be made one-and-done by a lifetime of respect and decency. Through the grace of having more than fifty years to do so, I’ve managed to work that moment down to something like a smudge.
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Sometimes, when we played cards, gambling for small stakes to entertain ourselves, Mike Rogers would sandpaper the tattoo of a former girlfriend’s name on his shoulder. He may have used that paper on himself in private, too, but shortly before gradu- ation, he was still at it while hands were dealt, the name fainter, but unmistakable. That girl’s name accompanied him across the stage as he received his degree.
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A Master’s Degree in hand, I landed a new job at a two-year branch campus of Penn State University. In one of my Tuesday-Thursday-Saturday composition classes, I had a student who was a Vietnam veteran. He wrote a stunning essay about being ambushed and surviving while dozens of his comrades were killed.
I didn’t say a word to him about my draft deferment and self-serving anti-war attitude about Vietnam.
I was only a few months older than he was and looked younger. I imagined him sneering at me, someone he must have known would never serve. A coward maybe.
The essay read like fiction, like he was testing me, how naïve or credulous I could be because all I knew about the war was on the six o’clock news. I pointed out a few editing hints and gave him an A, but I didn’t write any comments about authenticity, risking noth- ing but his secret contempt. What I did was attempt to shape my response into a poem.
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Here is the poem Calvin’s widow spoke to in her email. I could have told her that the central event had occurred two years earlier than the date in the title, but she wasn’t interested in the nuances of memory or my autobiography or the liberties taken by poets. What mattered was there was no mistaking the pres- ence of her now long-dead husband:
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