This afternoon while taking a walk some thoughts crossed my mind. I drifted back to a time when I first thought of joining the army. I'd told my friends that I was joining and that I'd be earning about eleven cents an hour. Most of them said something like, how can you afford to go away for that long? When you come back, they'd said, we'll all be in medical school. We will be finishing law school. Where will you be? What will you have?
Now many of them are working on their third careers and wrapping up their second divorces, and I'm living alone in Amarillo, TX. Things worked out pretty much the way they weren't intended, but as Joseph Heller once said, "Nothing succeeds as planned."
Now without a family to look after, or a structured job to confine me, I could waste time thinking about things that really mattered. But then, how much time at the beginning of 2013 could I afford to take out my life to search for memories of a friend from the past?
There are few trees in the staked plains of the panhandle of Texas, and I happened to look up into one of them, and suddenly I saw the monkeys. It was early in the days of my tour in Vietnam and my friend Bill and I had just had a few drinks together, wandered down a hill, and watched the little kids playing by the banks of a coffee colored river. Women were washing their clothes in the river. It seemed like a good idea at the time, so I jumped in with all my clothes on. Bill, jumped in too, but before he did, he took off his uniform shirt and laid it on the branches of a near by tree.
We were both swimming around in the middle of the river when I first saw the monkeys passing Bill's shirt around back and forth up in the tree tops. The kids on the bank were watching soberly, waiting to see what Bill would do. He yelled at the monkeys, "Hey! Give me back my shirt." The monkeys started to get worried. They began to pass around the shirt more frantically. Then they started tearing it up into little strips and passing the pieces of cloth back and forth in the bright jungle sunlight. It was something to see.
I don't know who started laughing first, but now that I think about it, it was probably Bill. Then all the kids started laughing. Then the monkeys started laughing. OK, chattering.
As I walked down the sidewalk, getting closer to home, even I had to smile. We were two kids from Texas, each weighing in at 130 pounds, with, as I thought then, nothing heavy in our hearts, not a trouble in the world. It was a moment of pure joy, just before a moment of pure hell. But the joy is how I would remember Bill.
I hadn't known it at the time that Bill would only be alive another few days. Looking back I don't think I knew much of anything back in those days. I sometimes think that Bill is still alive. Well what I think is that I knew he was in this world as long as I followed my heart and did what Iwanted with my life.
Like Jesus, or L Ron Hubbard, or herpes, I couldn't sit around waiting for my friend Bill to come back. Bill had a spirit of humanity, he had bet a little to heavily on people.
I took a right on Austin Street and walked briskly back to my apartment.
There were a few more trees along the way. But, I didn't see any monkeys.
I woke up APN. After power nap with a strange itch in my heart.