What Things Are Made Of

We Could’ve Been Commandos,

62 We Could’ve Been Commandos, creeping through dark woods toward the parked Ford, then hunkering behind a pine to light our firecracker-strings. Juan leaped high onto the Ford’s hood, stomped quick flamenco, and dropped his “grenades.” Frank and I lobbed ours, which volleyed as we ran. Behind us, the Ford’s headlights flamed. A man bailed out, pants to his knees. “Assholes!” he screamed. While his girl (naked, we knew) cringed on the floor, we leapt into his high beams, bared our butts and, hooting, hightailed it through a blackberry maze. Mission accomplished, we believed—until orange gunfire cracked the dark. Bullets whanged overhead, clipping leaves, seeking flesh to bury in. “Oh shit, oh fuck,” we moaned: dead boys, running. Miles from the road, panting, we stopped, and lit what Juan jabbed at us. “Jeez, the asswipe tried to kill us . . .” Triumph settled in: we’d come through our first firefight! “She had big white titties,” Juan crowed. “And a red beaver, I swear.” “You never saw that,” I declared as three bones grew. Frank punched his radio. A whiny mouth-organ tuned in, then two-part harmony—Love, love me do— a bullfrog and a spring peeper, bobbing to a beat too slow for fast, too fast for slow. “The rock sensation that’s sweepin’ the nation,” some deejay blared. “Sensationally lame,” I said. “Tea-sippin’ fairies,” Juan sneered as cicadas gusted through the trees. Across the sea, girls surged at the Beatles in waves. It was June: two months before school’s mangle 63 started up again. We might have all done “it” by then. Some nympho with big titties and a red beaver might pick us up, and teach us everything. Our futures—so nearly shot down—rose up alive and solid from the forest floor: the Bouncing Betty that would take Juan’s leg; the blast of faith that knocked Frank out of college onto Portland’s streets, where he pogoed in orange Hare Krishna robes, then married a woman with three kids, and disappeared; the twenty-buck guitar that, strumming “Love Me Do” on stage at Pagoda a Go Go, exploded my anonymity, and blew me up out of my tract home in Houston, Texas, where my parents watched I Dream of Jeannie, sure I’d be a brain surgeon and buy the house next door—blew me up, lifted and spun me, with my boots and Super Beatle amp, through rolling doobies for the Byrds, scoring coke for Cream, shooting junk with strippers at The Booby Hatch—lifted and spun me, then dropped me, strung out, in the muck. I’ve crawled for years through hostile lines, carrying this dispatch. Here. ...