One month of bad art for the wrong reasons made this month of good art with sincere reasons that much sweeter. Oh the joy of putting the hands to work in a meaningful way. So far I had come to rue the persistent cultural belief that without a job that pays one is not really doing any work. I say fuck that. My friends and I all do good work and we do it for free. We do it because it needs to be done and it is just easier to do it without payment than to involve all that complicated money.
I was reflecting on this sentiment when the Drews finally came home. D.Bob flopped into the bed. It looked like some invisible hand threw a rubber chicken with a hippy wig on. Sheets of paper were drying all over the room, stuck to every flat surface that we could find. We had a day to rest and recover, but that day was it. After that we would be going up north on the train for another workshop in some remote location. Get well soon D.Bob.
D.Cam and I bummed around our new neighborhood, walking real slow and taking it all in. I wanted to tell him how good it felt to be around a real friend again. Somebody old that I already knew. Somebody I already had stories with. Maybe I did tell him, maybe I didn’t. I don’t remember. I am often guarded about emotions around other boys lest they get any suspicions as they so often did around me. I grew up in the country. I knew what time it was. In a lot of the world emotions are gay. But who wouldn’t be a little gay for D.Cam, the soldier savant with the golden idea. Anyways, we drank coffee somewhere eventually. I drew pictures. He wrote letters. The day passed slowly. It felt nice to not have anywhere to be. It was the first day of its kind in quite some time.
When we opened the door to the hostel the air that greeted us smelled like disease. D.Bob was shirtless in the room, immaciated and sickly, pouring yogurt down his swollen throat. I was, for just a moment, completely disturbed by the scene.
That night I had to share the bottom bunk with D.Bob. I didn’t sleep much as I tried to focus my jedi mind powers entirely on my immune system. White blood cells, I know I have asked a lot of you in my life, especially this last year, but if you’ve ever saved us from anything before, and I know you have because we’ve been through the worst, please spare us from this one. I think that they actually heard the message.
The next day we woke up at the crack of dawn. I hardened myself against the coming of a day that felt as difficult as even the worst basic training morning when I didn’t know how to reconcile my bodies laziness with the task at hand which would take amazing amounts of energy and momentum. I just knew that we would make it.
D.Bob forced himself to come, though we begged him not to. He’s a trooper.
An hour later we were in the train station with our agent Nicholas. D.Bob couldn’t carry anything so we gave him one of the suitcases. I took the hit on carrying our plastic bins which were full of fiber, molding felts and half damp paper, all held in by two large boards ratchet strapped on. There was no fun way to hold this thing and pull around a suitcase at the same time. I knew this would amount to a very uncomfortable day.
The LZ was a veterans rehabilitation live-in center a few towns north of London. We’d be out there all day, then that night we had to come back to London. D.Bob was popping anti-biotics like tictacs and sipping off a hidden bottle of whiskey on the train. Nicholas spoke very dryly. He had an aristocrats swagger and it rankled my sensibilities. I stared at him suspiciously while I pushed a packaged sandwich into my mouth, chewing slowly as he talked with D.Cam and the English countryside whizzed by. He liked to talk about fancy things. And as most of my time was spent making fun of fancy people and their silly shit it seemed obvious from the very get go that our relationship would be touch and go.
I had expected this center to be some institutional building with terrible flourescent lighting and patronizing staff which baby the veterans as if they were invalids. I don’t know why I expected this. I was just prepared for a mental institution. As prepared as you can be for something like a mental institution. I did not, however, expect the acres of beautiful rolling land complete with willow trees and a little spring, with all kinds of neat areas to sit around and think about things, but nobody was out thinking about things. They were all waiting inside like puppies excited to be let out to go pee. They were very happy to see us, those old timers.
When I say old timers I imply all due respect. These are our fellow veterans who have been at this for years, dealing with the fucked up social status of being a freak, a fallen angel. We’re all family, and they’re our elders. Sure we weren’t from the same country, and to be honest I didn’t even know about the wars that these guys had fought in. But not a G.W.o.T. vet in sight.
Our POC told us that they were around. She suggested that they were probably just hiding. I imagined them peeping out from the slats in windows trying to figure us out. Truth of the matter was they just didn’t give a shit. Just another craft project coming to try to patch up those old head traumas with a few pounds of clay or construction paper and markers.
We wheeled our operation out to the back yard where we could work in the sun. D.Bob laid down in the grass while D.Cam and me set up shop in a quickness. In an hour we had her chomping down on that fiber while people milled around looking at our little lady do her work. They were interested now. Machines. Simple machines working simply and doing beautiful things. I believe that it is an innately beautiful thing.
They got to work pulling sheets immediately. They were very excited to learn this and they picked it up a lot faster than the kids we had dealt with at the museum to whom paper-making might just as well have been Evolutionary Biology. They’re dumb, they don’t know what they’re doing. Maybe it was just those kids.
I didn’t really know how to do it myself yet. I was still pulling fat, inconsistent sheets that looked like egg carton material, so we were all learning together. D.Cam tried to show me a few times but I only learn by failing a thousand times until I finally get it right once and then I know it. That day wouldn’t come for a long time with paper-making.
One of the guys got really creative and decided to put cigarette butts into the beater. His defense for this was that the butts were symbols of PTSD’s oppression. I liked it. Unfortunately we never got the smell of cigarette butts out of her, but it was worth it.
D.Bob was still passed out in the grass. He had occasionally gotten up throughout the day to oversee things but it was a scary sight. He looked like a zombie and he was so obviously contagious with something awful that he had to be avoided like a bringer of plague.
It was really great to see these guys getting into the paper so thoroughly. It can be awkward when people are not into it and they just stare at you bored and anxious to go, but here they could smoke and laugh and they were really plugged into the idea of the thing. That’s the important part with Combat Paper. It is so much more than just craft. Its a chance to take license over your own story even if for just that one afternoon, but hopefully that will stick in you like a seed, like it did with me. It gives those of us who have given ourselves, our individuality, up to take it back, to claim responsibility for your own history and to take agency over your own future. Or maybe that only happened to a few of us. At least they got a cool journal at the end.
This was a kind of test run for the program here. England’s version of the VA ran this project out here and they were showing interest in contracting Combat Paper to facilitate workshops here semi-permanently or at least repeatedly. Or at least that is what I picked up from the adult talk.
I was kept out of all of the business matters because I’m kind of a flake, as you may have already gathered. People can tell from a mile away that business and me do not go hand in hand, and D.Cam did the good deed of sparing us both the awkwardness of involving me, though it was also a disappointing reminder of my weakness in character.
While cleaning up I forgot that our motor was electric and just totally hosed it down. D.Cam came up to me and very calmly kinked the hose and said in his somber, pacifist calm “whatchu doin dude? Gotta pay attention homie.” and he pointed to his eyes coyly to indicate that I needed to smoke less weed and pay more attention. His advice was totally fair. At least the motor still worked. When we had her all taken apart and put away we peeled Drew off the ground and carried him to the taxi, then the train, then the bus. We lost Nick in the train station because he was going in a different direction so the burden of the beater and our fallen comrade was shared between D.Cam and I. It was a most tiresome endeavor.
The Paper Trail 