Edwards, David

Ashes of Vietnam

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Written by David Edwards

NOTE:  I returned from Vietnam with baggage I didn’t take there. I had no full awareness of it until decades later, whereupon I wrote this anger poem, which was in some measure cathartic.  I most felt its impact reading it aloud and deliberately with a wounded soul.

CONTROLLING THE FIRE:  LIFETIME ANGER MANAGEMENT

 THEN a good soldier at twenty I went whole where you ordered and did what you told me to do for a year and came home, heart cracked and bleeding for a beautiful people who wanted peace but were paying exorbitant taxes on a scrap between you and Ho which should have been settled by gentle men but instead became a grapple to see who would be king of the mountain for a day or so. While you played Sisyphus, lives that counted were being pounded into the earth, many into their own and brothers into a foreign one.  Once having done my dastardly bastardly duty I came back with a newfound madness and anger at the blowing wind to a hostile home, a place I left to happy-horn Herb Alpert but returned to bold-bugle Barry McGuire sounding out destruction, a madder place and angrier at me than I could know while in the Reds’ rockets’ glare with shrapnel spinning in air seeking me out.  It was you, Lyndon, who merited the many missiles of spittle we, the ordered, sustained on your behalf, and equally the bullets you ordered for Jack, who planned to preclude the journey you sent me on and intended to quit your second-term mission to his succession.  Dwight had forewarned us of you and your friends, the military-industrial complex glued together by the kind of politics you embraced and fostered while Woodstock and Haight-Ashbury rolled a different stone in heads, the sort that grew from pebbles into one bigger than yours.  Harry had quickly washed his hands with the charcoaled atoms of a proud people, but you chose to lather us with the slow soap of body-count accounting, laundering the books with the myth of Tonkin and the promise of a better world, one that you never delivered, a vow which netted nothing from a gross loss.  Then expletive-deleted Richard came along and at least got us the hell out of that hell but then impelled us into a new room in that manifold mansion where deceit is falsely painted white THERE.

 NOW fifty years on from ground zero the explosions of anger have not died out but are managed by the life sentence of un-paroled imprisonment locked away under the thick skin of necessity.  No comfort, but a curse, I recognize my fellows with inmate intimacy, whether low on homeless streets of despair or high in marbled towers of prosperity.  Like an invisible code on their foreheads there for my scanning, their living ghosts whisper of familiar farms bought far away, which first appeared as rice paddies to quicken people but then ended up only starving them into oblivion by the pestilent bullets that ate into their flesh like a violent carcinoma spreading poison quickly to their quick.  We unwillingly live with this lingering daily death, though not with a constant consciousness.  It seethes subcutaneously with wildly variable temperatures, but we always feel it there, often with numbed scar tissue and sometimes with tender lachrymal response.  Our souls were napalmed and agent-oranged in that small space for that short span, and the tendrils of those implantations punched holes in our lives, limping little mollified through all the rages of our roads to the places we now reside.  Toxins still spill from our pores but only in measured volumes to preserve humanity.  We have become war-to-grave managers of a parasitic hitchhiker we unknowingly picked up on a side road to our highway, a leech that seeks to bleed us of the life we desperately try to preserve to a peaceful end.  If we are successful, we keep private a beast that lives to gain generalship of all we count precious.  Lives lost, loves lost, families lost, fortunes lost, aspirations lost, minds lost, all in a holocaust of war-ignited costs have issued from this internal infernal adversary that defies both excision and exorcism and but scarcely abides containment.  But Lyndon, the chaos of my anger is the least of your concerns in your new country and is left to me to manage HERE.

CONFRONTING A BULLY

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Written by David Edwards

In 1959 in Odessa, Texas, Mike Capra struck fear in the hearts of most sixth-grade boys and many of the girls at Burnet Elementary School.  Mike was a big guy with a bad attitude.  He had dark hair with a flattop haircut, and after school hours he usually wore a black tee shirt with a pack of cigarettes rolled up in the left sleeve.  It was my first year at Burnet, where I also was a sixth-grader, and my family had moved just a few houses away from where Mike’s family lived.  On occasion I saw Mike’s father go to and from their house in his Ford pickup, and unsurprisingly, he had dark hair with a flattop haircut and usually wore a black tee shirt with a pack of cigarettes rolled up in the left sleeve.

Mike’s modus operandi was to extort lunch money, or sometimes lunch from kids.  What he offered them in return was a mafia-like protection, which they correctly understood to be protection from him.  Those who resisted his offer routinely wound up with some variety of bodily harm, along with standing threats of future injury, especially if they ratted on him either to parents or teachers.  So far as I knew, no one ever did. 

Supplementing his well-earned sinister reputation, Mike had a curious enterprising side to him.  In early November, I saw him displaying on school grounds during lunchtime and recess a placard attached to a stick he held announcing his Saturday fight against Dennis Sutton and Don Butler, both strapping boys.  The event would be held on a hill in a nearby vacant lot, and admission to the event would be at a cost of five cents, to be collected in advance.  I never learned what incentive possessed Dennis and Don to fight Mike but thought it probably was that they liked their two-against-one odds and wanted to be the heroes who stomped the school bully.  Unfortunately for them, that didn’t happen.  I wasn’t there, but the following Monday it came to my ears that Mike in a dirty fight had downed both of them and pushed them off the hill.

After that, I felt in my bones that it would not be long before I would receive Mike’s visit of intimidation, so I realized I had to plan for it.  My first thought was that I was the fastest runner in the school and that I could simply run from him without being overtaken.  But I soon abandoned that plan in favor of another, one that might work better.  I began its implementation by asking my parents for an early Christmas present—two pairs of boxing gloves.  I then approached Mike in a friendly way at his house, seeking to get on his good side, if he had one, while knowing that I was unlikely to become his friend, for Mike had no friendships.  I found that he liked animals and took care of many in his backyard—dogs, cats, snakes, raccoons, badgers, and other strange ones that I couldn’t recognize.  I helped him feed them and clean up their messes while engaging him in conversations about his best fights, which he was pleased to recount.

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TROUBLE IN TOWN

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Written by David B. Edwards

Mac, Jimmy, and I were school pals.  In 1962 we were freshmen at Lee High School in Midland, Texas, population 50,000.  My brother Larnie was a seventh-grader at Alamo Junior High, a feeder school to Lee.  All three of us 14-year-olds proudly carried our newly-acquired driver’s licenses.  It was a Friday night in October when the four of us went cruising around town.  Mac drove his parents’ Pontiac station wagon.  Jimmy rode shotgun, and my brother and I occupied the back seat.  Ordinarily, we three would be performing as Lee High band members at our team’s football game, but this mercifully was a bye week for the weak, winless Mighty Rebels, who needed some time off to nurse their bruises both of body and ego.  Our cross-town rivals, the Midland High School Bulldogs, were playing the Lubbock Monterey Plainsmen this night in Midland’s Memorial Stadium.

Around seven that evening we began our cruise along Illinois Avenue, and then over to Cuthbert Avenue, exchanging blinking headlights and honking horns with other cruisers coming our way, none of whom we knew yet who were as excited as us to be acknowledged.  Nearing the intersection at Andrews Highway, Mac turned into the driveway of the popular Burger Chef, home of the 19-cent hamburger.  A quarter was burning a hole in my pocket, so I looked forward to sharing a burger with Larnie.  It would be a brief pleasure, because the Chefburger was not much larger than my quarter.  But as it turned out, that delight was not to be.  Sitting on one of the outdoor tables were four cigarette-smoking, thuggish-looking Midland High upperclassmen, who to me resembled buzzards perched and waiting to score a kill before going to their ball game.  In short order we morons handed them that opportunity.  As Mac drove by them he shouted out his window to the thug-buzzards, “Crap on MHS!”  All four threw down their cigarettes and ran to their ’57 souped-up Chevy to come after us.  Mac gunned the Pontiac and sped back up Illinois Avenue toward our side of town.  The chase was on.

The Pontiac was no match for the Chevy, which soon caught up with us on Cuthbert Avenue.  Speeding alongside us, the thugs angrily motioned for us to pull over, as if there were any chance we would actually do that.  Nevertheless, we managed to graciously present them with the functional equivalent of pulling over.  Mac, though sometimes indiscrete with his scatological exclamations, was at the oddest times law-abiding to a fault.  This was one of them.  In those days Texas law did not allow taking a right on red after stop.  The red light to Cuthbert Avenue where it dead-ended at Midland Drive was notoriously long.  So there we sat, hopelessly stymied in the dark at the red light as the Chevy’s brakes squealed behind us and our executioners came running to do the deed.  Fortunately, all our doors could lock and all the windows could close.  They grabbed at the door handles and pounded on the windows and hood.  They tore the radio antenna off and whipped the car with it.  I glanced at Larnie to see if he was all right.  He had snatched Mac’s football helmet from the storage area behind our seat and strapped it on.  Mac was a bench-warming quarterback on our freshman football team and his helmet had a face mask that I was sure Sonny Liston’s best Sunday punch couldn’t penetrate.  At least Larnie would survive to tell Mother and Dad what happened.  I had serious doubts about my own survival.  Just then, the light turned green and Mac out of pee-level panic slammed the car in reverse and knocked one of our tormentors down.  Quickly finding a forward gear, he peeled out on the right turn while the bad guys raced back to their car. 

As Providence would arrange it, before our pursuers turned the corner Mac took a hard right into the first alleyway between the neighborhood houses.  The alley was L-shaped, so he made the second right, parked, and turned off the lights and motor.  Mac whispered to us, “Okay, if they find us and things go bad, I’ll tell them when I said MHS I meant Monterey High School, not Midland High School.  Sorry, that’s the best I can do.”  Just then the Chevy boys rocketed past the alley and didn’t see us.  We all sighed a chorus of relief and waited in silence longer than we had to before heading home.  Larnie and I were disappointed in not getting that Burger Chef treat but were happy to be alive.  I still don’t know how Mac explained the damaged Pontiac to his parents.

OH, THE PRICE OF ADOLESCENT LOVE!

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Written by David B. Edwards

My first boss in gainful employment was Carl.  I met him when he hired me but rarely saw him thereafter.  But before I tell you more about him and the circumstances of my job under him, I must relate to you the more compelling story that begat this one.  So, here goes.

June 1964 began the summer between my sophomore and junior years at Robert E. Lee High School in Midland, Texas.  I was 15 and joined my best school chums Mac and Jimmy in a little business at the Caravan Motor Hotel on the western edge of town.  We would go to its parking area every morning at four, where we checked the tire pressures and washed the windows of the guests’ vehicles.  We left filled-out cards under the windshield wipers reading, “GOOD MORNING!  As a courtesy while you slept – Your windows were washed, and your tire pressures were checked:  LF ___ psi RF ___ psi LR ___ psi RR ___ psi” For our labor, the hotel paid us one dollar per vehicle.

We usually finished our work by sunrise and were then free to indulge in whatever our summer teenage profligacy demanded until the next morning.  The hotel allowed us swimming pool privileges, so we often spent the entire day there.  One such August day, as I practiced the springboard dives I had learned at the Midland YMCA, it happened.  I not only fell in, but even the more, dived into, love.  Her name was Susie.  She was 15, naturally blond, and the most beautiful creature I had ever seen.  When I saw her entering the pool area I attempted to do my best dives to draw her attention but was too distracted to concentrate.  Quickly abandoning that approach, I took the direct one and introduced myself to her.  It wasn’t much better in my tongue-tied state.  But I did manage to learn her father was in the oil business and was moving the whole family, including eight kids, from Chickasha, Oklahoma to Midland.  When I heard that, the only words that came to mind were, “O frabjous day!  Callooh, Callay!”  I had memorized Jabberwocky in sophomore English.  The next word that occurred to my benumbed mind was “smitten.”  I could hardly wait to get to my dictionary to see whether it described me.  It did.  As it turned out, I should also have looked up “addicted.”

After a month’s arm’s-length romance, school began and Susie was there.  My parents expected this year to be a productive one for me in three principal pathways – academics, music, and athletics.  As the first semester progressed, I regressed in all three of those areas, to the point I had no interest in anything but Susie.  My parents acutely felt my languor and became increasingly concerned, and Susie’s parents pretty much withdrew their welcome mat from me.  By November I realized I somehow had to extricate myself from this web of my own spinning.  After some difficult thought, I brought a proposal to my parents, to which they agreed. 

So, in late December I found myself on a Greyhound bus with a one-way ticket to Long Beach, California.  My mother’s sister Margie, my uncle Brownie, and cousins Cindy, Danny, and Janet met me at the station and brought me to their home in Long Beach, where I would spend the next semester at R.A. Millikan High School.

Cindy was my age, Danny a year younger, and Janet in elementary school.  I think we were all aware of the general plan – just keep David busy and give him time to work himself out of his fix.  As I was to learn, the operative word there was “work.”  After school hours and on weekends, Cindy worked at a fast-food emporium called Master Burger.  Within a week I was the newest burger flipper there.  And potato peeler.  And dressing maker.  And “grill sergeant.”  And floor cleaner.  And order taker . . . well, I did everything that had to be done.  Later military KP duty would be no problem for me.  My interview with Carl lasted maybe five minutes, and then he was off, like the Lone Ranger away into the hills.  I suppose he had more stores to manage or more pints to hoist.  What I was left with was a troupe of characters out of Central Casting.

It was my good fortune that level-headed Cindy was there to break me in on the work and clue me in on how to best deal with the troupe, which I viewed as a veritable Hydra of bosses.  First, there was John, a mild-mannered PhD student in something, perhaps psychology or nerdology, complete with the stereotypical shirt pocket plastic pen-and-pencil holder and Coke-bottle eyeglasses.  I couldn’t understand much of what he said, but he didn’t hold it against me.  Then there was carefree Carrie, who was in her mid- to late twenties.  She was a buxom party girl who drove a 1956 Chevrolet station wagon kept in immaculate party condition.  Nothing was serious with Carrie.  Vince, in his early to mid-twenties, was the Errol Flynn type, the swashbuckling lover boy who captained a flashy new Corvette.  In the summer months he worked on a trawler somewhere off the Oregon coast.  The remainder of the year he spent as a college student, I think in acting (a natural fit), and, at least when I was there, as a hamburger maven.  My last boss in this slate of dramatis personae was pretty Maggie, who was 19.  If there is anyone I’ve known who fits the description “drama queen,” it is Maggie.  I don’t recall her doing much work, because she was usually on the office telephone or the nearby pay telephone engaged in either fiery- or teary-eyed disagreements with one of her boyfriends or family members.  Maggie could emote more than anyone I ever knew, and I made it a point to stay out of her mercurial way.  My best guess is she wound up in Hollywood doing what came naturally to her.

Thankfully, the school year ended with my return to Midland mostly rehabilitated.  Nonetheless, my parents took no chances on my recidivism to Susie-ism.  They moved the family 126 miles away to Lubbock, just beyond my reach to her.  She eventually married Kelly G., a good guy on the baseball team. 

So, in Lubbock I met Jan. . . .

A Day of Temptation Goes Up in Smoke

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Written by David B. Edwards

I was nine and my brother Larnie seven.  It was summer, and we had ridden a Greyhound bus from Texas to semi-rural Oklahoma to spend it with our grandparents, who had retired there.  Little did I suspect that this day, Monday, for me would be like no other.  We had been to Sunday school the day before, where we met a boy who for a few days was visiting his grandparents living just down the lane from us.  The boy, Tommy, sidled up to me after the lesson, knowing from our outset introductions of the nearness of his grandparents’ house to that of ours.  He whispered to me, “I have some cigarettes.”  Not quite knowing how to respond, I replied, “Congratulations.”  Tommy continued, “They’re Winstons, and I can bring them over tomorrow.”  I asked, “Why?”  Riveting me with a stare of disbelief, he stated the obvious:  “So we can smoke, of course.  The only thing is, I can’t find any matches.  Can you?”  I told him that I could take the matchbox from off the gas heater in the living room.  To further the scheme, Tommy skewed it more to his tactical advantage by suggesting that we do the deed at my place: 

“I don’t have a good place to smoke.  Do You?”

“I think so.  There’s a private place behind the chicken coop in back of the house.”

So, it was set.  Tommy would smuggle his contraband to the appointed place at ten on   Monday morning, and I would meet him there with the firepower.  Though weak in succumbing to this infernal temptation, I had enough of a grasp on its possible consequences to realize that I needed to formulate a strong domestic plan of secrecy.  For this I needed Larnie’s complicity.  Sunday afternoon I briefed him on my plan to carry out the clandestine deceit.  He was to station himself as lookout high in the big elm tree between the house and the chicken coop and watch for either grandparent coming out the back door.  In that event Larnie was to warn Tommy and me with his whistle.  One of Larnie’s talents was his powerful whistle, which could reach blocks away. 

On Monday at ten everything was in place.  I had secreted the matchbox behind the coop, Larnie had assumed his perch, and Tommy had just arrived on his bicycle with the Winston pack to join me.  He extracted two and handed one to me.  “You see,” he said, “this top part is called a filter, and it makes the smoke taste better.”  I told him, “Okay, now hold it up to your mouth and I will light it.”  Tommy did so, as did I.  I then lit my own.  As we puffed away, we both also began to cough profusely, and I could swear that Tommy was turning blue after a minute.  Even so, we knew nothing of inhaling and only did so accidentally.  My eyes started to burn and to tear, and I found it hard to breathe.  Nausea was setting in.  But I wasn’t about to let on to Tommy that I hated this stuff, and from his appearance I suspected he felt likewise.  We both slipped off the log we were sitting on and to the ground.  Oddly, I felt like we were floating in a hazy calm just before a tornado strike.  That feeling shortly proved to be premonitory.  

As we lay there looking up, after a few minutes I became aware of our large smoke volume output, and just as I was about to tell Tommy as much, my grandfather tore around the corner with ill intent as he flailed away in my direction with his thick old razor strop.  Without much discussion, he proceeded to administer condign justice to a wayward delinquent.  At that moment he appeared to me as the Grim Reaper, swinging his scythe and targeting me with determination.  My immediate self-condemning thought was why in the world would I be so stupid as to bring upon myself this terror for doing something I hated.  My erstwhile loyal friend Tommy quickly lit out on his bicycle, his plan of escape working perfectly for him.  The words “bat out of hell” come to mind.  I never saw him again.  Meanwhile, I was left to face, more aptly to butt, the punishment that I had hoped to avoid by employing Larnie as my fail-safe.  After leaving a substantial impression on my psyche and a few lesser ones on my backside, my grandfather withdrew, taking the matches with him and ordering me to throw the cigarette butts away.  He never mentioned the incident again.  

So, what happened to my brother, my early warning system?  After suffering the compulsory corporal and oral lashing through which a miscreant boy must pass, I took the earliest opportunity to debrief Larnie:

“What happened to you?  You didn’t whistle, so I got hurt.”

I had to pee, so I got down to go to the bathroom.  When I got to the back door PawPaw was there and told me to be quiet and go inside, so I did and watched him go after you.”

What could I say to him?  He had to go, and I couldn’t blame him for that.  Forever after, if I needed his help on something I made sure he went to the bathroom first.

My grandfather’s old razor strop had likely spoken eloquently and often to my father’s dorsal aspect with far more power than it did from the septuagenarian hand that addressed mine on that day.  What should have been a rite of passage turned out rather to be a rite of stoppage.  After that, in the many years since, I have never been tempted to take another puff, and for that unique day, forever imprinted on my volitional being, I am still thankful.  

MY OLD SHIRT

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Written by David B. Edwards

                                   

What is it about my old shirt that makes it inscrutably self-perpetuating?

I still put on this veteran rag, now fifty years in service.

It has holes, and its neck sags, like mine.  Its edges are frayed,

also like mine.  The appeal that drew me to pick it has in course

wilted and faded away into nondescription.  Like me.  I in long habit

bear it about the house and in bed, and it has worked a war or two.

These sewn sinews once insinuated into a seasoned soldier, but

its fight has so fatigued that it no longer can come to attention.

This battleworn trooper now has to repose on its ragged own, without my

ordering which uniform pleats it must assume, as it formerly allowed.

And for my part, I would not begrudge its unrepentant desertion.

Something there is about this closet patriarch, though, that compels me to keep it,

even cherish it.  Perhaps because over critical life times its fabric has

woven into mine, and I have become as comfortable with it as with

myself.  It is a shirt not short of the scars of history, my own biographer

with learned entries etched by my sweated stress into its tattered tablet.

It in this protracted partnership absorbed me, the me with stormy struggles,

and has by trained frequency forsaken its own form to conform to mine.

So, what is it that endears this old shirt to me and endures?

More than all, it has become my loyal comrade with arms

that has got not just my back, but my front and my sides, covered

and refuses to retire.

 DBE

HOW MY YOUNG BROKEN LIFE WAS FIXED

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Written by David B. Edwards

September 1961 I had recently turned thirteen and thought my happy life was over.  I needed a way out of my predicament and wasn’t finding one.  The eldest of four children, each separated by two years from the next, I at length concluded my only out would be by means of self-help.  No one seemed to understand the problem, and I couldn’t well articulate it.  I began eighth grade at San Jacinto Junior High School that month, and I didn’t like anything about it.  In the summer, Dad had moved our family to Midland, Texas, population 55,000, from Odessa, a rival town 22 miles to the west, population 80,000.  I had seen enough by late September to know I loved Odessa and hated Midland.  How can a boy be expected to stay in a place he hates?  For me, it was a maximum-security prison from which I had little hope of release or escape.  And my maladjustment was only worsened by my observation that the other five family members liked Midland. 

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A TERMINAL BEGINNING

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Written by David Edwards


In a dusty, windblown, tumbleweed-populated out-of-the way place in West Texas, I made a decision that would govern my entire life to follow. I was approaching eight years old in the spring of 1956 ─ spring, when new life emerges everywhere, even in the unforgiving harshness of the desert. The rains had come and the cacti blossomed in resurrected vitality. My sister Vicki was born that year, and this was her first home. This was the right time for my new birth.
In those days the place was known as Terminal and was home to maybe 1,000 residents who lived in old Army barracks built in World War II for bombardier trainees. During the war, the base was designated Midland Army Air Field, and there the training in the ultra-secret Norden Bombsight took place. In 1946 the military ceded the airfield to the city of Midland, which for a few years rented out the extant barracks to civilian families. My family was one of those. We lived across the street from the Tri-County Orphanage, and I recall with delight riding the bus with those children first to Sam Houston Elementary School and then to North Elementary School in Midland. At home we had an old television with poor reception to the two, sometimes three on clear days, area stations, so as often as I could I stole away to the nearby fire station at the landmark red-and-white checkered water tower, where the firemen allowed me to watch their color television, the first I had ever seen. I often crawled through an unlocked window to play in the grain-filled Webb-Davis warehouse down the way.
My upbringing was not a religious one. I recall having attended church only once before that life-transforming night in the spring. It was at the invitation of the large family living across the street from us, who brought me to their Sunday school class. Afterward, I only remembered the teacher writing the word “SIN” in large letters on the blackboard.
Months after that visit I lay on my bed in the dark reciting a poem-prayer that I had recently read somewhere: “Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.” Prior to that night I typically would then drift into sleep. But this night would be different, monumentally different.
I began to tremble in a mysterious fear as I finished my prayer. Would I die tonight? Then in the darkness, Someone pulled the reassuring bed covers up over me, and my trembling stopped. The door neither opened nor closed before or after this experience, yet Someone’s presence became wonderfully palpable to me. Intuitively, I softly called into the darkness, “Lord Jesus, forgive my sins.” Even before my cry found completion I had an unmistakable sensation that the Presence which had been only outside me now flowed inside me. I prayed, “Thank you, God.” and went into a serene sleep.
After that night, I could not fully understand, much less explain, that event. But immediately there was an undeniable consequence of my personal cataclysm: my conscience had sprung to life—I no longer had the ability to lie that I formerly had, and as time went on, I could not participate in the destructive deeds of my peers, such as vandalism, theft, and the setting of fires in vacant lots. All such misdeeds would bring a conscience full of condemnation even in the contemplation of them. Intuitively, I fled from all such wrongs, and my fleeing has continued to this day.
Even more meaningfully, I received God Himself as my new life. Through a difficult human experience, including war combat, I have relied on Him and sought His counsel in all things as my real “inside Man.” In my years since Terminal, I have found that He has well-equipped me with the sensitive spiritual capacities of intuition, conscience, and loving divine companionship. From that pivotal night in the spring of 1956, He has not for one moment neglected me or abandoned me. So for me, to live simply means that I keep my spiritual eyes constantly turned and focused on Him within. My oxymoronic beginning in Terminal set a sure course for the rest of my life, for which I am eternally grateful.
DBE