Profane Men (9 page)

“Let's do it, Princess,” he said as the intercom squawked into the closet-like booth.

“Ho-kaaaayyy.” She straightened up, took a deep breath, coughed, picked up the sheaf of papers from the table, pulled her chair a couple of inches closer to the microphone, cleared her throat, and began reading at the top of the first page where it said “anncr mark, brdcst tp.”

“Broadcast tape recording 47-331. Broadcast tape recording 47-331,” she said, pausing as she watched the large red pointer that was the second hand on the studio clock sweep around ten more seconds. At eight seconds in, she drew another very deep breath and began.

“Filmmaker requires the services of attractive young people who are quote into tit torture unquote. You'll make lots of cash and new friends on the set of a great bondage flick if you have looks, willingness, and lots of imagination.

“Do you enjoy seeing girls with large breasts all wrapped in rubber bands, their nipples savagely attacked by powerful clothespins and mousetraps? Young ladies with generous jugs, do you enjoy playing the role of tit slave? Do you like it when your man squeezes and pinches those big, lovely boobs of yours until you scream and beg for mercy? Fine. But why do it for free when you can make big money getting off? Let me film you and make you a tit-torture star.

“Send your photos and phone numbers to True Love Enterprises, Box 822S. Bloomfield, New Jersey, U.S.A. Show us those big, tortured titties today! We will be in Southeast Asia next month on a worldwide talent quest, so get in touch now. And you're staying abreast of all the wild haps right here on the outlaw in your radio, KILL, with a new number every half hour.”

The next piece of copy was one of those that had freaked her so badly. She took another breath and read,

“Garbled communication should be instructed to serve on the condition the garrison exert official pressure carrying weight in a joint declaration. 333 666 333. 999 333 666. 666 333 666. There should be public response before the printer's strike, after reasonable somnambulists and national defense postures prolong the normal life of the anxious air of disquietude. 666 111 666.” The words were typed on special second-specific copy sheets, and only she was allowed to record the obviously encoded messages fed down through Programming.

The badly scarred woman cued the bald man with a lacquered nail and he pressed a mercury switch, activating a prerecorded jingle that played into the tape. Her mike remained opened as she listened to the singers' voices in exaggerated a cappella, and as the last note of the call letter jingle resounded in her earphones she continued smoothly.

“Attention Seals, Marine Force Recon, Rangers, all elite specialists. Interested in reenlisting? Why re-up? Don't be a lifer loser when you can quadruple your pay and enjoy fringe bennies you've never dreamed of: R&R on the French Riviera with all expenses paid, and that's just a bonus opener. We're looking for quote a few good men to kick ass unquote. If you'd like to join a small commando unit gearing up for a special, high-risk mission that will take place sometime in the next eighteen months, let us know your current circumstances. Write Drawer Eleven, FPO, New York, New York, U.S.A. And this is Outlaw Radio KILL!”

As soon as she finished taping, she gathered up the copy and left the small recording booth and walked through the control room.

“Thanks, papa-san, catch you tomorrow,” she said to his back.

“Have fun.”

“Likewise.” The young woman stepped down and past the guard, crossed the hallway and entered another door marked sales supplies. She locked the door behind her, inserted her key into the plate of steel housing the glass-encased fire extinguisher, and swung the unit out into lock. She placed the copy in the Out slot and shoved the extinguisher unit back in place until it locked firmly again. She crossed the room and fed the memorandum into the paper shredder, making instant confetti, which was, she thought, exactly what the memo had been worth in the first place.

Using another key, she unlocked the file cabinet drawer and removed a cheaply printed form headed “p-unl-discrepancy sheet.” Sitting down at the table nearby, she inserted the page into the typewriter and typed:

“47-331. The first color exotic in this segment was a repeat unit. There was no sex insert or color exotic in the 18th position today, and the production cont. room is locked and nobody is here. I'd like to know how you expect me — ” She furrowed her brow and thought to herself, “Don't do that, stupid, don't write up a discrep when you're scared and pissed at everybody.” She breathed deeply, pulled the sheet out of the typewriter, got up, and took another discrepancy sheet form over and inserted it in the machine, typing,

“47-331. The position 9 exotic this segment was a repeat. There was no sex insert or color exot in the 18th pos and I was unable to obtain a mg from the locked prod-continuity office. Second dial twister was clustered as a number change and a Grade II intel.” She scanned the sentences she had just typed and scrawled her mark across the bottom line.

“I'm talking to Beals. That's it. I'm getting out. There has to be a way to get out of
this,
while I still can,” she said to herself, forming the words with her lips as she thought them. She fed the other sheet into the eater with a practiced hand, and the shredder hummed and chewed contentedly.

Princess cupped her left hand behind her ear and announced to the empty room in her deepest register, “And that's the way it is.” Her shoulders sagged and she allowed herself to slip back in the chair with a disgusted expulsion of air.

Not far away a young boy named Lee threaded his bicycle through the busy street traffic with a sense of purpose and dedication. He was one of KILL's highly paid secret couriers. Lee was ten years old.

“Maggots, what is the spirit of the bayonet?”
“Sir! The spirit of the bayonet is to
kill!
”
“I can't hear you pukebags.”
“
Sir!
The
spirit
of the
bayonet
is to
kill!
”

— D.I. shout-and-response gospel

“Saddle up!” Ewell shouts and we move again. Operation Toledo Blade. Day two. Gooooooooooood 'n' shitty morning, Vietnam! We move. Rucks and rifles, dark glasses and dogtags, fruit cakes and fuck books, compasses and condoms, dragging ass through the grass.

“Don't bunch up!” Boots and bandoleers, pussy pictures and pipe cleaners, M&Ms and Marlboros, lighter fluid and Laotian red, banana clips and bug juice, LAWs and loaded dice, stumbling, rumbling, grumbling, minds and hearts on hold.

“Spread it out, goddammit!”
Playboy
centerfolds and piano wire, toothbrushes and toilet paper, the whole nine yards of semi-military impedimenta move out in a raggedy-ass line of lifers and loafers; smokers 'n' jokers; pissing and moaning and ready to find KILL and take some hearts and heinies.

“Ay lupp arip ho,” somebody mocks cadence and goes “count cadence count.”

Somebody else sings out, “Mary Mary quite contrary, shave 'at twat it's too damn hairy. Sound off — jack off, fuck you, three four.”

“Cover that shit. I am the prince of darkness,” Oreo says for no reason. Before he picked up his nickname somebody took a magic marker to his flak jacket and wrote “Sam Spade” on his cherry ass. The Prince of Darkness. Over here you better fucking well
be
the Prince of Darkness. But there were baaaaad splibs who could take the devil off. When you saw a big, rough, purple-black hardass with “Black Mass” on his cover, you could fucking believe it.

We were supposed to be searching a sector about three grid coordinates wide. And on some contour map back at battalion that may not look like jumping jackshit, but hump this terrain with a full ruck, frags, canteens, and all the rest of the good shit, and three grid coordinates is like “Three grid coordinates?
Are you fucking
crazy
!?
”

Terrain and distance have no meaning to some of those dudes. The enlisted men, the lieutenants who come up through rank or the ones that would listen to their sergeants, even the damn captains seem to have some vague idea what the realities are. But you take the senior officers — the majors and colonels and generals — those goddamn lifer scumbags will send you on any fucking nitwit mission. Twenty, thirty, thirty-five thousand meters. They don't fucking care. Up and down any goddamn shit. It isn't
their
balls that get caught between the moving gears. The worst seemed to be the fucking lieutenant colonels. I wish every one of the bastards had to come out here and hump this shit.

“Goooood ass morning, motherfucking Vietnam.” El Tee has laid the word down on us. A special forces team got ass-chewed not far from here and we are changing direction. Their CIDG (Combined Irregular Defense Group) camp was over-run by all kinds of NVA, and the survivors are hanging on by their jocks. We'll kill two birds with one stone as it were, going in to support another small-unit REACT team until the camp gets reinforced. We're promised a day or two of sandbagging until we have to get on KILL's case. So far, the station has not signed back on since yesterday. Meanwhile we'll search the three ball-smasher grids between here and the CIDG camp, which is code-named Tombstone.

The IP (indigenous personnel) in this camp are Montagnard tribesmen for the most part. We can dig the 'yards, who are reputed to be stand-up fighters and bad dudes who can and will kick Charlie's ass with any help at all. Another thing we have in common is that the 'yards hate most Vietnamese and we hate most Vietnamese. Lifelong friendships have been cemented on less solid foundations. Supposedly what was that company strength is now a shaky handful — only twenty or thirty IPs and a few green beanie “advisors” are left alive.

“I am d' Prince of Darkness. D' Ace of Spades.” Fuckin' flake Oreo, I think. O-reo speedwagon.

His name is Cleotis Warren. He was a stone dope dealer and chili mack candy pimp who ruled about an inch of turf in some ghetto shithole. He was a gofer in a three-man setup with Slimjim Jimmy Jackson and Luther Potts, who was a freak they called M'Bulu. Cleotis and Slimjim and M'Bulu ran the project deal for Michigan Flash, who was a well-connected black mobster of local infamy. Flash was as close to real blood as Cleotis had ever known.

He had adopted him off the street when Cleotis was a little kid and raised him as his gofer. Put clothes on his back. Taught him how to mix and mule. Gave him spending money and wine. Taught him bitches. Dope. Gave him a little piece of the projects. Showed him how to dress. Gave him a home.

Cleotis lived in a storefront marked doctor soul's miracle healers. He had his own place in the back room, and out front the ladies who ran the joint, Mama Lacey and Reverend Sister Jane, sold Indian blood tonics, rare herbs, magic potions, occult medicines, spells, dope, and a couple of fairly decent dream books.

Their store was located between Madam Dorothea's Fortune Parlor and Reba's Black Cat, which was a notorious bar and whorehouse. Here, and in the projects, Cleotis learned to deal shit and girl and smack and various brands of slow death to the processes, high conks, wraps, dos, and afros that populated his world. His warmest memories now are of riding up front with M'Bulu, with Slimjim and Michigan Flash in the backseat of Michigan's El-Dee pimpmobile, listening to lady's junkie blues sadder than nighttime in Jackson's jail come throbbing out of the car radio as the liquid tenor of the Prez cooled the set, and hearing Michigan lay down his lessons in life. The car was his school.

“Youngblood, you got to git that pimp shit out of your head, boy. You ain't got the heart for it, stud. You wouldn't make a pimple on a real pimp's black ass. Those bitches would chump you off for a fat man's ass, you wouldn't last the night, light. Whatever you do, blood, you got to do from strength. You chase a thing, it's a John's weak cop, you stalk a thing, it's a mack's strong chops, dig? You busted from jump street, boy. Can you dig it?” He would hang on every golden word. This was a Ph.D. in Street.

Oreo bops along like the flaky fuck he is. Ten thousand miles from the ghetto without ever really leaving it.

“Step right up, the Prince of Darkness got what it takes to make you all right. I'm good and my shit is outta sight . . . Let me get your ass so high you'll fly. I got Sizzle by the cap, Umgawa by the double dime bag, Nitro-Jam by the quarter piece. Yellow jackets, pink ladies, buzzbombs, girl, boy, crank, skank, Tulsa twist, Acapulco Gold, Panama Red, Indian Root, or Hollywood loot if you got the loot I gots the hoot!”

I do some speed. I have got to pull my shit together.

“Have no fear, the prince of the night is here.”

“Come on, goddammit, don't bunch up like that!”

We are slated to pick up some supporting personnel at Tombstone. Our team gets a hot-shot forward artillery observer who will also have his own arty RTO. Their job is to call in and target artillery strikes as we probe farther into The Badlands. If KILL is found, for example, and it has a heavily reinforced defensive position, we'll prep the mother with our air show. The FO and El Tee can play dueling radios for all we fucking care.

Each of us fearless warriors carries five to six quarts of water, and we still have Cs for at least a couple of days. But we are going to get
lots
more water and real soon. The clouds are dark and threatening. Another nice little tropical shower is on its way to give us something else fun to work with today.

The damp poncho liners and wet towels and shit from yesterday are just barely dry, but that's show biz. Some of us have humped this AO before. Ewell, for one, searched several months ago looking for a downed pilot in a mission that took him in here before, and he knows the locations of several old tunnel complexes and bunkers. For all the fucking good that is going to do. Still, it's something.

As we get to the trees, we feel the rain open up and the shower penetrates the green canopy, soaking clothing and equipment and turning the trail into muddy slime again. The day is barely underway. Lots of hours left. We slice through the trees near an overgrown footpath. Heat and humidity are a bitch. I am speeding pretty good. I drop enough quarter grains nowadays that a good hit of old Kool-Aid and a little snort of Peruvian flake is about all I need to start singing funny songs.

“The evening breeze, caressed her knees, Brenda Lee.”

I think of five hundred things I'd rather be doing, four hundred places I'd rather be, eight hundred people I'd rather be with. I make a list of my forty-three favorite things. These are, in order:

Chi, money, cars, pussy, clothes, trucks, motorcycles, getting laid, speed, booze, tit bars, coke, rock, hash, skivvy houses, pharmacopoeia, partying, cunt, jazz, pussy, smoking, drinking, never thinking of tomorrow, eating, eating pussy, jacking off, watching two girls fuck, fucking two girls, bossa nova, making off, eating more pussy, fucking, thinking about fucking, thinking about eating pussy, fantasizing about thinking about eating pussy, skag, big bands, dope, cold beer, steaks 'n' shakes, tits 'n' clits, playing hide the salami with the old beaver cleaver, and pussy.

We cut through a narrow opening between some trees and I flash on them. Fuckers look like they were planted right before Noah built his ark. Our eyes scan rapidly from side to side, from treetop to trail. This would be a fucking beauty of a place to get ambushed. We stop. White has his hand up and is sniffing for a sign.

We read his mojo like Baby read Bogie. He has all these neat hand jobs like the old tit sign for “boob” as in booby trap. He stands frozen and so do we, taking lots of instant Polaroids of the mean green. We see a recently used path that cuts in front of our route and White cups his ear. I listen. With no movement we can make out a faint trickle of water through the raindrops that is fairly close. Water and a trail mean only one thing — gooks! They go together like mortar fire and snipers.

The trees are humongous in here. Shadows cast across the path and put our route in great pockets of black. The sun is somewhere up there, but it's not getting through this shit. Eyes strain checking out every shape, trying to discern shadow from substance. Where the fuck is Rod Serling when you need him? Who knows what evil lurks in the jungle . . . de Shadow do! Speed kills. I'm starting to get that nice little thump in the old valentine from Ma Dexi's morning runners. That old throbbing in my bird whenever I think about you. Them old hard-core heatstroke heart attack blues.

It is blacker than a Motown pimp's balls in here, big-ass leaves that could wipe a dinosaur's butt, could hide any fucking thing. We are getting surrounded by some serious fucking jungle. Moving through the narrow openings of trees, now vines creep around us just to keep our attention. The floor is a wet, oozing slime of rotten vegetation and tiger piss, for all I know. Eyes always moving, scanners out. Eyeballing from side to side, picture the shadows as quadrants, boxing the compass, compassing the box, whatever.

We have slowed down, now making more of an effort to avoid twigs, vines, branches, anything that makes noise. Just because nobody ahead of you tripped that fishing line don't mean nothing, Jim. We watch for wires, lines, strings, things, any damn deal that didn't grow here. The water sound is nearer now and we're running spooked from it

It is a decent-sized creek bed with broken twigs and branches and trampled leaves every damn where. Kilroy was here. El Tee signals guns up and we put a fire team on both sides as we fill our canteens. One side is White, Ewell, the Dutchman, Washington, and Big Merle. The other side is Harold. That's got that shit covered. Nobody wastes a whole lot of time filling canteens.

The smell of gooks is all around, overpowering. The path goes off to the left of the creek bed under a protective “roof” of tree limbs that have grown out from either side of the path and made a neat, green tunnel. Some of us would like to set up a hunter-killer patrol and check it out, but El Tee says now is not the time. Ewell says there's an opening not far up ahead and we move out, away from the path, slow going, rucks nice and wet and heavy.

Out from under. The route takes a steep turn. We are cutting diagonally to the path we'd been following, such as it was, and White and D'Allesandro spell each other with a machete. The trees have opened on a steep hillside. It's all how you walk. You don't go up a hill the way you go down a hill. You don't cross a log bridge the same way you'd walk a Viet paddy dike. You don't walk through elephant or saw grass the same way you walk through the jungle. You plant your feet differently. You hold yourself different ways, move in different rhythms. I never have figured out how to walk in wait-a-minute vines.

You plant your feet on edge going down a steep hillside. It really kicks your ass walking that way with this heavy a ruck, and sometimes you don't turn your foot enough or it's slick or your boot just doesn't grab and the foot slips sideways and whooooaaaa you start down the hill ass over tea kettle, grabbing for anything — a vine, a tree root, a buddy's rifle barrel, a blade of grass, your dick — any damn thing. I hit the bottom of this sucker, arms scratched to shit, legs cramping and hurting, and as I make my way to the bottom, “Bbbbbllllllll-aaaaaaaammmmmmm!” and the concussion blast knocks me forward in a shower of dirt, rock, twigs, leaves, and Oreo. He has grabbed the wrong thing sliding down the steep hillside or one of us pulled the pin and old Oreo was the one nearest to the chi com when the fucker blew.

I get up wiping my face from where I went down and look back up at Oreo in time to watch his lights go out. I never did notice how yellow the whites of his eyes were. The light just goes right out of them as I'm looking up at him on his back. He's dead in about twelve seconds. Gonski.