Category Archives: Combat Paper

First of all, I want to warn everybody who is as fucking stupid as me: do not drive vehicles without a license but with drugs. Consider it a lesson freely shared.

Not freely endured however.

So, there I am, the whole bony thing, on the side of Damen Ave, shaking like a leaf because I didn’t have my papers, or any papers save for a few torn up JOB papers scattered around a vehicle that *was not mine* with an offset printing press taking up the entire back of this borrowed hatchback, replete with a hundred pounds of inks and solvents, all looking very much like a mobile meth lab. Needless to say a thorough search was conducted while I sat in the police vehicle with handcuffs on.

Now you might be thinking that with all of my paranoid anxiety about shackle keys and handcuffs and chains and authority and that FUCKING clicking sound they make and how they put them on so tight because inside they are spineless weak little devils who want to cause malicious harm to weaker people, evil little bastards each and every one, oh I know the fucking type. Sure enough it was him. He called me a fuck up which I found unprofessional and offensive.

Well they found my weed, all two grams of it, and how I begged and pleaded and absolutely made myself feel so worthless in front of them groveling but to no avail. The car was impounded, I was impounded, but I was taking it in stride.

They cuffed me to a pole and then took turns coming in to gawk at this skinny tattooed freak wearing argyle socks, shivering and mopey eyed, like a twelve year old waiting impatiently for his dad to finish a few things around the office before they went home. They each said some little thing they thought was funny and then walked off feeling good about themselves. They told me not to be a pussy when I asked to go to the bathroom. I told them I had a condition, you  know, the kind that makes me pee a lot, and that I wouldn’t hesitate to piss in my own pants in front of him. They did finally take me.

They couldn’t seem to find the button for marijuana possession in their computer. It took five cops in total just to book me. It took another five to find my fingerprints because I had never been put in the system before.

I am currently awaiting my court date. It already cost $1300 to get the car out of impound and if you have followed this stupid little journal of mine long enough you know that this is pretty much my annual income already. I’m sure there will be more fines to come. And all of this to teach a lesson to a 27 year old veteran with no prior record save for an honorable service record with the military who was caught with so little pot that if he were to have presented it at a party it would have been shyly denied and secretly ridiculed. Congratulations Chicago Police Department. This is one major victory in your war on drugs.

Thank God I only travel with part of my stash right? We go so fucking high that night… until I broke down into tears when it finally struck me how terribly, horribly small that cell was and how when the door was shut on me I had this funny feeling. I wasn’t too long before I had identified all of the best places to hang yourself from. The Snow Ball Effect.

That is why they make these little scissors.

Well, that’s enough of that.

A blog, like the lover of a dramatic bore, gets punished with silence. Would you believe me if I told you there was nothing to say?

No, probably not.

I have thought and I’ve thought of quitting, really and for good, and about how stupid words feel now or how being a person in this place where I am so fucking sick of people and their never ending person problems that I can’t stomach the reality that my voice and my bullshit blah blah blahing endlessly about these plans that come and go is just one more whining white person on coffee in the world.

In short I haven’t written in weeks because I am absolutely sick of myself, depressed, and raving and pathetic from starvation and poverty, stressed well past the point of despair with the hopeless task of defending my completely economically ridiculous life I lead while trying to pursue an even more ridiculous dream or series of dreams about things I don’t think I really even believe in any more… its just that I don’t know what to be after admitting all these dreams are stupid. I bet it all on those fucking things and if they were to be as stupid and doomed as they appear to me now then… well… then I might go and “do something crazy” like mom warned me not to do. When I pressed her for a definition she said: “you know, no jumping off of ledges or anything.” Only mothers can see straight into the heart of a boy and understand it all.

So what else was there to do but go back into the dark laboratory of my mind wallow in my memories and start drawing out new dreams, new plans, like architectural drawings of structures built in time, dependent on space but variably, two dimensional. What do I really want to be? I used to say a writer but I know now that I’ll never make a penny for this narcassistic smut. My adventures were all fine and good but there are thousands of people who did those same things and I just can’t get past myself enough to see what it was about that time that makes it legitimately worth sharing.

It is kind of a joke to think of realistically trying to make a living off of paper making. Or art making for the matter. If it can’t get you fucked, fucked up or skinnier Americans just aren’t buying it. So what to do with a steady hand, composition training, endless practice drawing lines and a hateful disposition which is still technically an art? TATTOOS!

The new plan: purchase a machine, some ink, sterilization… stuff, needles, crazy foot pedal thing, and then I start practicing on my thighs. They are long and probably the meatiest parts of my body and nobody ever sees them. If I learn tattooing as quickly as I did screen printing or etching or any of this other archaic means of wasting my life then I think that in a few years I can probably call myself a tattoo artist. Until then I will be one more hill billy piece of shit giving jailhouse tattoos to creeps for drugs and somehow all of that feels much better to me than walking around hoping that somebody reads all of this nonsense and gives me a chance. That dream is definitively over.

I went out and got me a real job and I’ll work it every day and I’ll be so boring that I won’t make people uncomfortable anymore. In fact, I’ll be just like everybody else. Its just that some day I’m going to be free or I’ll die the best and worst plan making slave there ever was.

You win world. I throw the towel in. Otis Mixon isn’t a writer. He doesn’t even really exist. He’s just another self centered hipster with internet access and a WPM that’s higher than… well… me most days.

Nothing about 1801 S. Indiana Avenue looks very “veteran” to me (to stereotype a demographic which spans generations, race, religion and gender, a demographic which I am a part of) except for maybe the potholes in the streets. Everything is clean, sharp, red brick, expensive coffee. Wealthy. But this neighborhood isn’t what it used to be back in 1996 when the location was sold to the Vietnam Veterans Art Group who were looking for a home to store the growing library of work boiling out of the veterans of their generation, the Vietnam veterans. The cost? One dollar.

The deal was made by the cunning Mayor Daley under the presumption that he at one time actually wanted Chicago to be the home of the National Vietnam Veterans Art Museum. In May of 2009 the group had sold the building back to the City of Chicago Parks District Central Region for one dollar.  I needed to know why.

Until that time the NVVAM had the run of the entire building showing work on the first two floors and using the third for studio space and storage. In 2009 the Parks District issued the museum a license to remain in operation – on the third floor. One step inside of the building shows that the building is clearly no longer much of a museum at all.

First you see a zoo, children running wild in a plastic, child-safe environment. Then you hear them…

Above your head are the dog tags of the 58,209 men who died of a bad case of the Vietnam War clinking together like so many wind chimes. One visitor was quoting as saying “it sounds like Angels.” I think those are the appropriate words. The piece is called “Above and Beyond.”

You get into an elevator basked in some sickly green gas station parking lot light and you slowly ratchet up to the third floor. The door opens…

It has been called battle fatigue, shell shock, now P.T.S.D. (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder). Whatever you choose to call it, it has a flavor of it’s own and when you stand there you get the full taste of it.

The scope of this collection begins to settle in. Over 255 artists have work here. The subject is certainly War, but which? On your right is the green and black and white of Vietnam and on your left is the sandy brown, light blue of the sky, and all the photographs are digital.

I’ve come here to talk to the Executive Director, Levi Moore, about what will happen to the museum when their “license” from the Parks District is up this April. I am led to the offices in back by Joe (who I later discover is a founder of this museum) and introduced to Levi.

To start things off I say: “It must be hard to walk through the first floor every day” to which he responded “Some days it is very hard” with a long look on his face.

So how bad is it? How close are we to losing this place?

Levi says that when the license is out there is a very real possibility that the work, the whole collection, could go into storage… and it may never come back out. He has seen it happen before with the Peace Museum which closed it’s doors for similar reasons under the belief that the work would be briefly stored while a new location was found. The work now sits in a storage locker, which is infinitely better than the damp basement it had been stored in last. But surely this museum couldn’t come to that?

Levi explained that the NVAM could renew its license with the Parks District but that it must move for several reasons.

Firstly there are the many costs of building operation: upkeep, insurance, maintenance (elevators, leaky roofs, rusty pipes, it gets expensive over the years). The second issue is the neighborhood. The building had been sold when the neighborhood was undeveloped and Daley wanted it to be an extension of the Museum District, a smaller Arts District. But that never came to be. The area became residential mostly which means that it is short in: parking, easy transportation, and food. In short the area is not ideal for museum goers who want to make a whole easy package out of a trip to the Loop.

When asked why this collection belongs in Chicago, why this city should be proud to be the home of this national museum, he said: “There are three things: One- This museum was founded here and it has a history here. Two- As Joe says ‘this museum was ground zero for using art therapy to help veterans deal with P.T.S.D. And three- We provide a naked view of the impact of War. “

He finished by saying: “It is time to step up now.”

The museum has taken on a new direction since 2010 in opening its doors to the G.W.o.T. generation. Levi thinks this is the most crucial thing. Currently hosting the show “Intrusive Thoughts”, all art from the new generation, the museum is gearing up for the period that they know will be the large influx of new work: three to five years after everyone has come home and had time to think about what they’ve done. That is when you can expect to see it, Levi says.

In accepting this new generation there is an implicit desire to “pass the torch” from one generation, weary of its burden, to another generation, slightly more fresh and optimistic. A new generation more ready to deal with the modern world, though the NVAM is already taking huge measures to modernize their online gallery.

Chicago, it is time to step up now. If you want to save the National Veterans Art Museum, and if you want that museum to be here, in our city, then donate money or time to the museum. They have a goal of three million-dollars which is a sum that the work of two generations of veterans deserves and the future of our society needs. Please spread the word and encourage your friends and family to visit the museum. It may not always be there. It may, like many veterans, perish for lack of help.

I think the time has come for us, as activists, as people invested in the anti-war movement, to begin to wonder what has happened to our once great movement. I feel that we have come to engender and support inside of ourselves and our communities the kind of behavior that we presumably divorced the workaday modern world for portraying. Where we should be sewing hope we are reaping only frustration and sadness and this is not simply because the task we set out to do is hard. It is because we know that we are doing it the wrong way.

And where to start with the ways in which our way was wrong. Perhaps with the media and with what it did to us. As a short story the media did to us what it does best, what it’s industrialized function was made to do. Our message was decimated into a sound bite, fed in a palpable but unremarkable way to the population and promptly forgotten as so much noise and a bad digestion. That is what the media was made to do, but like fools we handed over our whole narrative to them on the naive gamble that they would spread our word. And they did. In so far as it made them money, and when it did not the word stopped spreading.

How entirely un-radical it is to deny your own right to your narrative. Did the movers and shakers of previous generations call ABC on the phone? Jack Kerouac? Ken Kesey? Did these people pathetically throw themselves at whatever corporate venture would tolerate them, boil the beauty out of their own stories just so it will be consumable to people who could never see the world the way that we do? Why not do as the people who actually moved generations did and take control of our voice?

What can one say of our generations other than that we have a dazzling amount of highly educated people underemployed in terrible service jobs, yet for all of these degrees floating aimlessly around there are so few people which have any tangible skills to offer, which is fine because now the only skill that is required is that one can tolerate at least three two hour conference calls a day.

This is the kind of work that arises when a payroll gets introduced into a group that was formerly all done for free. Mandatory labor. Compulsive Committed Behavior. An organization turns into an employer and begins to think like one, and in suit all of the little people who used to feel equal now feel like something less than an employee. A host of skill-less unpaid interns. All waiting for the command from… whom?

Ah, a white man. People snort and ramble out necessary guidelines and codes to show that they are in the know about gender, race and power, yet the very reality of the things we can ignore. Is this not like the culture that we are trying to provide an antithesis too? Shouldn’t we be that new thing that we want to see instead of just being what we were before we changed but SAYING that we are something new and that we are something to believe in.

I think there are so many burn outs because we all secretly know that we aren’t and we aren’t.

Unless we push ourselves independently to challenge these things and individually challenge the barriers between ourselves, but nobody really wants to do that work.

We all want our safe idea of what it should be to be protected. In short we are all full of bullshit. Fantasy. And we are determined to not fracture the calm of our fantasy “revolution” by using only safe words and tip toeing around each other politely. Because that is what they do in the regular world, right? What would most of us know about that place? We spent a long time in some pretty impolite places.

We have become so fragile that now when someone speaks out against the direction that our Organizations are taking they are quickly silenced with guilt and shame at having interrupted the working of this perfect replica of the system that we ought to deny. Too radical for even the radicals. Don’t you see how, even here in this activity that we do to make ourselves feel better, we find ways to enslave ourselves and to feel worst.

So why rant and rail against it? Why attack it? Why not leave people to their illusions?

Because we will never get anywhere is all. If we continue to delude ourselves into thinking that playing their game is going to win our battles then we are lost and everything we have ever worked for has only historical value, which is to say that it dies in vain.

I challenge you to be more critical about our precious radical organizations. I know that there are people out there who feel as if things are not going the way they should. We should step up and say these things. We should take responsibility for our feelings and hint to new ways and if we are scolded then we should say “fuck the lot of you, we’ll start over as something new.” I challenge you to speak out now, not against the military, but against that which is against the military.

Three years ago this month I was packing my shit into that rucksack and screwing down the mental armor I knew that I would need to protect the ridiculous fantasy that I could be free. My hopes had been bolstered by people I regarded as heros well after I had learned that they were all degenerates, drunks, drug addicts, malcontents, etcetera etcetera as they either shot themselves in the head, overdosed on drugs, died from long term alcoholism or, on the hopeful side, receded into caves within themselves to nurse their various addictions, one after the fucking other. It was my fantasy that I would somehow forego this inevitable conclusion.

It was only supposed to be 15 months…

At first I worried how I would make it through the time and now after accidentally doubling it I don’t know if I can make it any other way.

But finally it has become too much for me. I used to be able to take it with a country smile, a dopey and humble uh-oh. Oh well oh well oh well… it’ll all work out in the end…. and all those other excuses to not be furious.

Why couldn’t I just graduate school like they had promised? Why did I owe more than 30,000 dollars when it was supposed to be free? Why did they take my G.I. Bill away? Hadn’t I earned it? Did I not get enough awards or volunteer for enough deployments, beat enough detainees? Do you, the Federal Government, realize the predicament you have created in my life?

I’ll never get that bachelors degree, which is a goddamn shame. My credits will evaporate in another year and I’ll be left with 30K in debt with literally nothing to show for it. I showed a lot of promise, but there isn’t much of a chance that that will shine through the way that I’d hoped it would. Without that fucking degree I am condemned to lifting boxes full of widgets or granola until my fucking arms fall off. All that Kant for nothing except to understand the irony of the caustic relationship between means and ends.

So now I’m praying in Chicago to just get into a community college now that they “fixed” the G.I. Bill. I’m praying that maybe they really did fix it and that I can finally live like a real person here in this country, with money to buy some fucking toilet paper. I should have known better than to pray.

They tell me I’m worth half. Exactly 50%. That is how much of a veteran I am. Half. Half the promise. So I’m supposed to accept this like some kind of android. Just shut down twice as much to compensate for lack of energy. Pay half of my bills? Right…

It seems to me that I am just about half of every fucking thing.

To be quite fucking frank, I feel about half interested in being alive to the extent that about half of the time my mind is occupied with the obsessive thought about the easy road. That one simple decision.

No bills forever. No 30K in debt. No broken promises. No hard feelings. No nothing.

I’d make excuses and apologize for raining on your parade, for saying something nobody wants to hear, and for accepting defeat, but I don’t care much any more about hurting anyones feelings. Nobody has spared me any punches in my life and I’ve lived a good deal of it with my back against the wall already.

The fucking gurus and spiritual healers will talk their shit, say I need to spin a pot or get a goddamn massage or some bullshit. They’ll talk in their big empty way about P.T.S.D. and about who we are and how to deal with us and then they’ll walk backstage and take a big old check because everything’s a fucking racket, right? Buy and sell our problems until it isn’t a problem any more.

Well I don’t need a fucking massage or a councilor or reike or hot rocks or a cathartic fucking experience.

I just want the fucking money I was promised. That is all. It sounds so simple.

I want off of this ride, please. I have had my fill.

Me being in Chicago in the summer has become kind of a joke. My friends all laugh. So he’s back. For now. Like I couldn’t help myself. And they laugh again when I say I’m going to say. He’s said that before. It makes me feel stupid. Has this whole life been a mistake?

I got stuck. It wouldn’t let me go. I wanted to find work and stay the last two summers. I tried. But something always went wrong.

I wanted to get out of this lifestyle. I wanted off this crazy ride. They all think that it is very fun to be free. It isn’t. Or I’m not free, or something. I am scared and poor and broken and the world moves by too fast. I can’t even hide how scared I am any more. I shake like a leaf. Maybe it is just diet.

Art and writing will never be some miracle solution. I was wrong about that. I will never be able to get over myself to be the kind of artist that I would have to be to make money and solve my kind of problems and even if I did I lost interest in the whole pursuit when I look out at these crazy people and this disgusting world they chose to live in and how there is no room for art anymore. Not inside of people’s minds. Silly thoughts don’t pay the bills. That is what scares me the most. It scares me because I believed so hard, and that belief was stupid.

It’s like finding  out that God isn’t real all over again.

We joked on the Paper Trail that some day the Moon Ladder would come.

The moon ladder was the ladder that hangs from the moon that we’ve been waiting for. It’s a silly symbol of the slow crawl away from society. It’s the impure hope for fame and money. It is the escape from the rules and regulations of this planet.

DCam would get angry at us because we sounded unprofessional and the curators would think we were taking this whole thing too lightly and all that just made the joke funnier. It was a code. The art world was bullshit. We came for the booze and the money. It is the secret that nobody wants to tell you, so they blather on about the meaning of their pieces. The meaning of my pieces was always very simple: this is Hell. And they called me whimsical.

Anyway, this joke became a philosophy. All of a sudden I was using the terminology with a serious face and a serious heart because I know that I am waiting for the Moon Ladder in every way that I could. I am preparing myself. Sharpening my skills. Building a stronger, governmentally funded financial scheme.

BUT!

For all of that to work I have to survive here in Chicago. I need for this landing to stick. I need a break here. I cannot take this much longer. I have kept myself intact for the most part but I no longer have what it takes to make it “on the road” inside of me. This is where I have to wait for the Moon Ladder. From a grimy studio with a beater and a screen printing set-up.

If it never comes that sounds like a good enough life for me.

The list of things that could go wrong this year is pretty full between waiting on the VA for multiple papers and ratings. There is the looming danger of finding out how to afford going to school for one month without being paid to do so. Then there are the things that can happen which nobody could count on. The kind of things that make you drop cheese on the floor in the grocery store and then pack everything up and go somewhere else because everywhere reminds you of somebody who isn’t there any more. When those things happen it is inevitable that drinkers will drink, smokers will smoke, and runners will run away. And I am all of those things.

Please wish me luck. I need very much of it right now.

Love,

Otis

SM 0258 sat in the back of an empty cafe. Behind the rancid smoke of the cheap cigarette his bad skin was twitching, wrinkling the thin fabric that was tightly stretched over his sharp bones. His eyes were pink around the edges, painful blisters growing at the base of the eyelashes which flashed over vacant eyes held widely open, a reflection of the complicated mixture of a total lack of thought or feeling with a sort of sickly shock. This concoction, though, appeared to be at nothing in particular.

His coffee had become cold between his nervous grippings and letting go’s and mid-motion changes of heart or stomach. He was thinking they were all against him. Job listings were sprawled across the table, stained with coffee and annotated with symbols which had ceased to find meaning any more to their maker who was still occupied staring morosely through the world with a cigarette wrapped between chapped and nervous lips.

They were all against him. He didn’t even need to explain why to himself any more. He didn’t even feel crazy about it any more. They were obviously against everybody like him. He wished desperately for so many years that he would be proven crazy, that nobody would ever make it so clear that they were truly against him, but they did.

They sent him to the war and they made him do awful things and when he said he felt awful they sent him to a room with a bag of drugs and told him not to come out until he could tell them that he was happy. He hadn’t come out for a very long time and when he told them that he was happy he was sure they knew that he was not, but he had been so bad to them that they wanted to believe him as much as he wanted them to believe him. They all knew, though, that it wasn’t true. SM 0258 would never be happy again.

The glow of the cigarette reached the end of his bony, scarred finger and burned the tip that he had blistered the week before trying to clean up the mess he’d made at his last job. Jobs. He put the cigarette out sharply and waved his finger about. The thought of jobs and the new burn caused him to reach for his pill dispenser. It was a neat gadget and he felt good when he held it to his mouth. He hated the feeling of the pills in his mouth. This particular dose did not sit well and soon he found himself in the grimy bathroom vomiting. The sight of all the pills in the vomit made him vomit more. After some time there was nothing left in him so he cleaned his bad face and resumed his gloomy post at the table.

He cleared the job listings away because they made him feel pathetic. He knew the reality of his situation. If he could get an interview he’d probably blow it when they ask where he’d been for the last ten years. No explaining that, especially with the War Crimes Act. If he found a sympathetic employer to put him in some out of the way position the boss would quickly come to realize that between the mental illness which led to all sorts of near violent outbursts and the pills which melted SM 0258 into a sleepwalking, glassy eyed waste of company time and money there was little room to actually get any work done. It was a tale as old as time.

All the people he’d known from The War were having the same problems. He couldn’t even feel special about his condition. That is how against him they were.

The door opened and  his eyes became alert. They flashed to the doorway where there was standing a man who could have been anybody, but really looked like he was somebody. His suit was sharp and dark, somehow blacker than black. His bones were sharp and angular. He at once seemed arrogant and relaxed. SM 0258 hated him terribly.

The black suited man seated himself at the table nearest to SM 0258’s and further he sat facing the nervous young man. There was something about the man in the black suit, and it was almost certainly in the way that he moved, that SM 0258 found deeply disturbing. He moved like the mechanized loaders which had loaded into his bomber the horrendous explosive devices which occupied so many of his daydreams. But it wasn’t entirely like the movement of those either. It was as if one of those had donned a suit and begun a dance made to mock the creatures which had given it such a disgusting task to accomplish. SM 0258 hated the loaders because, to his simple mind, it seemed like one of them could also be doing his more disgusting task to drop the payload into the atmosphere over rebellious colonies. Surely they would not wake up at night howling in a way that had proven that no sexual partner could stand. Robots don’t even have sexual partners.

The black suited man that moved like a machine had ordered and his coffee had come but he had not touched it. For that matter he hadn’t done anything, not even taken his eyes off the psychologically fragile veteran sitting across from him who had recently vomited up his afternoon’s dosage of antipsychotics (1,000 mg), antianxiety (800 mg), anti-depressants (1,200 mg) and miscellaneous medicines (2,500 mg). SM 0258 became quickly irate.

“What the fuck do you want you fucking robot? You wanna give me bombs? You drop your OWN fucking bombs!” demanded 0258.

Despite the clearly irrational basis of the remark the black suited man remained motionless. It was only his mouth which moved and made it clear that his mouth was not connected to his face in the conventional muscular way, but in some other, nearly muscular way, which meant without a doubt that this man was indeed a robot when he said “we want you to help us end The Industry.”

The lights went out. The bad face of SM 0258 was visible for a brief period as the cherry on his cigarette brightened, then dulled again, and then disappeared altogether into, presumably, the ash tray, though it very well might have been the extended arm of the robot man in the black suit. It was hard to tell.

As I was walking down the street, as weird and gangly as on usual days, I heard a familiar call come from a car that was passing by me at about thirty miles an hour. I wish that I could say that it was unusual to hear what I heard, but that would be a lie, but it would also be a lie to say that even half of my days have not exposed me to this phenomenon of male insecurity.

The words that were said were: “FUCKING FAGGOT!”.

Even before I had my first flood of hormones or figured out the joys of masturbation I was already learning to cower inside of myself from this particular breed of hostility.

In fact, by the time that I started to develop in the sexual way I had already been thoroughly and exhaustingly trained to hate men. My first father had abandoned me and my mother and my next swore at me and occasionally hit me (probably because he himself suspected that I was one of these “fucking faggots”) and the hillbilly tractor boys would beat me with my own shoes while chanting this now familiar terminology which they had also learned before the blooming of their own sexual identities. But I will not launch off into some long winded and unnecessary self-defense, trying to assure you, the reader, that these accusations are inaccurate. To make any explanations now would be degrading in the fullest for both of us.

What I wish to do here is find out why. I want to talk it out.

I’ve always been an “odd duck” if you will, and if you know me I’m sure that you will. From the beginning my dear mother had assured me that I only received this kind of verbal assault because I was unusual, because there was something inside of me which was unlike what was inside of these other boys, and that they were jealous. I never believed her when she said that they were jealous, but I did very much believe that their classification of me was the path of least resistance towards putting me in some box that they could understand.

Even as I made my first lunch time announcements that I was going to join the military, my only hope to prove myself to these boys (which at the time I had desperately hoped to do) I was me with the skepticism of the shit kickers. One of them said: “They don’t let faggots in the military.”

Well, instead of making an unquestionable man out of me, my six years in the military were speckled as heavily with these slurs as space is with stars. I became to know myself as “FAGGOT” and to respond as if it were written on my name tape.

It was during this time that I realized the true nature of this hatred.

They weren’t jealous of my internal beauty. They wanted to fuck me and they hated themselves for it.

Why else would they spend so much time fretting over who it was that I chose to fuck. Certainly they had nothing to worry about. They were mostly fat and smelled always of farts and whiskey. They touched each other frequently, enjoyed watching pornography in large circles of other men, talked almost exclusively of other men as homosexuals and women as “sluts” and “whores” to be fucked (or so often raped) violently and without joy. Of course I would not want, in even the most deprived of landscapes, to ever touch one of these men with anything other than a knife. They disgusted me.

Despite all of my attempts to convince them that I enjoyed the company of women and that I had never even met a man that I could tolerate, much less enjoy the prospect of loving, I stayed in my little easy box. They made jokes about putting me in a dress and gang raping me. One of them pinned me to my bed in an attempt to actually carry through with the act. Even amongst my “friends” I still found myself answering for this perceived “disorder”.

And even now, at the age of 27, I still hear the word regularly. I can read it on the faces of my peers and passerbys alike. Even a few of my ex-girlfriends who had become more like men than women in their fear and deep seated need to please manly men had used the same term for the same reasons that boys had. To put me under them because they were afraid of me.

I have often wished that my life were as simple as to be a homosexual. To be what they say that I am so that when they say their stupid words I could have the anger of the victim and not the questions about what it is in me that causes such disgust and revulsion amongst most men, even those that think they are “over it”.

It is the way that I walk and the way that I talk. But what gives them the right? Nothing. Just their own anger and their frustrations, and, as I am led to guess, their repressed desire to share something with another man through the hateful barrier that they can only cross when they are playing homoerotic games with each other, or preening over sexual conquests with other men, finally feeling the joy that they missed while having their sex.

This analysis isn’t going to get me anywhere. It hasn’t for years. I only want to confront it. I am sick of being a quiet victim who carries inside of himself all of these questions. I am sick of choking back the anger when I hear these words. I am sick of the violence that wells up inside of me when I know that these hateful rapists cover the nation from sea to shining sea sewing future harvests of likewise tormented young men and women who live in fear of the uncontrollable hate of men who hate themselves and what they secretly think about when they are playing their boy’s games.

So I am a FAGGOT, and I’m proud of it. Not because of who I choose to love and to touch and to endure time with, but because it has been my name and it has been my calling for 27 years and I am proud to share it with everyone else who has known its violence.

If this is your name too then be proud. There is no greater height to attain as a male than to be opposite “them” in their own spectrum. Be who you are. Own it. The strangeness that they attempt to classify is just awesomeness waiting to make you into something more than them, and they are sad that they weren’t something more themselves.

On the gnat infested evenings when we, the bitchers and moaners of MotorCycle Awesome, were sitting on the stoop drinking our beers while both bitching and moaning we would see your pudgy frame running on the ridges across the road from our housing complex which we lovingly called TK Plaza. We’d laugh about your dedication while we got fat and drunk. We thought you were crazy.

You wanted to be a Ranger. I never knew why. I figured you just wanted to kill people. I think now that it was more than that. I think you wanted our approval and the approval of other men. You were like us. You were one of the Garbage People trying to prove to you and everybody else that you were more than where you came from. But I couldn’t see that then.

On one afternoon when I was getting back from the Camp I met you in the road. You showed me the tattoo of the tiger on your arm and asked me all about mine. I judged you then because I thought that you were a square. A company man. A yes man. I thought you had a killer inside of you. You were just trying to make some common ground between us. You, the soldier, and me, the hapless freak. You were trying to be my friend in a place where I had none. And I pushed you away because you weren’t like me.

Later that year I was reading books in my room underneath the pornography and dinosaur stickers when I heard a great crashing of bottles against the paper thing wall which separated my room from yours and our house from your house where all the Fisters lived. I went next door to see what the score was.

You were all drunk in the middle of the day, even Sergeant Plaxton who was always a kind of compass pointing towards the true soldierly way. Scut was cooking up one of the large rodents that lived on the island on your grill and talking about how him and his dad and “tag teamed” some woman together. You, Tenasi, Plaxton and Scut had been busy throwing your empty bottles at the wall. The broken remains were stuck in the dry wall. I wanted to laugh but somehow I could only hate. Rooster and Dobber and Deuell all found the scene very funny, however.

Towards the end of our easy deployment you got this wild hair and you started talking about volunteering for this mission to Iraq. How completely crazy. This year had nearly killed me in all of the painful absense of freedom but yet you clamored for more. How was I to understand?

Back at home Christmas came and I’d more or less forgotten you and Hickox and Tenasi and all the others who had volunteered for the mission. I was home from Chicago with my girlfriend at the time, this spoiled rich girl named Laura. I was standing on the balcony of my mom’s apartment in Charlotte. Next door was a member of the unit, a sergeant, I forget his name. As I smoked on story above him he casually said:

“Did you hear about Dresky?” He was putting up Christmas lights.

I remember how the cigarette became unreal between my fingers then. “No, Sergeant. I have not.”

“They hit a bomb. He’s burned real bad. Whole body. They say it burned his face off. His eyelids. Everything.” And still he continues to put up these fucking decorations, not a hint of emotion in his words. In my own head the world had disappeared and I entered into a hallucinatory plane of terror and nightmares. I could see your burned face.

I ran into the back room of the house and crumpled on the ground sobbing under the bed. Soon my mom came to find out what had happened since her nearly happy son had left for a smoke and come back ruined. I tried to tell her but the words couldn’t come out around the tears and I pushed her away. Since then I have pushed everybody away.

You hung on for six months down in the San Antonio burn ward. We speculated on your chances at survival. They say that infection is the real killer with burn victims.

And infection did kill you. Eventually. Six months of eye-lidless pain, wrapped in gauze, forced to stare out continuously at the world without the ability to shut it off. To sleep. To dream. By now your burned face was a nightly host of my dreams. You would come to me in a burning HumVee and you stopped at my feet as flames licked out from where your eyes should be. This is Hell. Every time. You never said a word.

In July you finally died and I felt the most disgusting feeling I’d ever felt. Relief. Thank God that you had found some peace. I made the mistake of vocalizing my relief and lost the respect of everyone in the unit if I’d ever had it to begin with. How could I be happy that you were dead? How could I be happy knowing that you were burned so terribly? As always, even my concern with me and my own happiness rankled in my stomach when I knew it was you who would never again know a day of happiness. Or sadness.

We fired artillery shells from our Howitzers for you. I wrote you a poem that I have forgotten on our guns shell for you. In the moment of silence that followed the deafening thunder of our goodbye, with tears in our eyes, we held our first memorial to you, Dreasky.

Since then I have held countless memorials to you down dusty and lonely roads, on every drug I can find to kill my pain, I have memorialized your life and enshrined my few memories of you and I take them out and dust them off and I cry again to prove that I still can. I will carry you with me everywhere I go. I will live for two inside of the gloom created in your absense.

I have never been able to accept the death of young men for the government. It was a terrible decision to join the military and to meet you and to learn to respect your kind.

Sleep well Dreasky.