Chickenhawk: Back in the World - Life After Vietnam

Patience drove up in our Escort. I mentioned that the dashboard was dusty. A mess like that would get you demerits in prison, I said. Patience nodded with a worried look on her face. She’d spent hours cleaning it up.

We drove to a seaside motel in Fort Walton Beach, known as the “Redneck Riviera” because it was popular with tourists from southern Alabama. We spent the day making love and walking on the purest, whitest beach I’ve ever seen. I’d asked Patience to bring my camera. I had an inexplicable urge to take pictures—I really missed making photographs. I guess I wanted to absorb myself in something I could control. I had thirty-nine hours of freedom and Patience was watching me photograph sand dunes. That night, we saw Ghostbusters and ate at a posh restaurant that served worse food than I ate in prison.

At ten o’clock Sunday night, Patience drove me back home.

I walked through the administration building, changed my clothes, and, less than fifteen minutes after she dropped me off, I was once again a prisoner. I felt relaxed. I’d felt uncomfortable at the motel. You could do anything you wanted—the choices were endless and intimidating. Meals were confusing—you had to tell them what you wanted from a huge list of possibilities. You had to decide how to dress. There was no count to positively establish that you belonged anywhere. It was also deathly quiet.

Prisoners were supposed to visit in visiting rooms.

It was no surprise that my book was going to be a best-seller in paperback. Gerry Howard told me Chickenhawk would be a best-seller before it was printed because Penguin had already gotten huge orders from the two big bookstore chains, B. Dalton and Waldenbooks. Penguin printed “National Bestseller” on the cover of the first paperback edition, and so it was.

At the end of the first week of publication, my cube neighbor, ex-stockbroker Walton, who subscribed to the New York Times (and the Wall Street Journal), showed me the best-seller list in the Book Review. Number five, on the nonfiction side of the list, read: “Chickenhawk, by Robert Mason. (Penguin, $3.95) The experiences of a helicopter pilot in Vietnam.” Walton said that was great, and maybe I ought to be reading some of the books he had about managing money and investing. He said, “Know what the hell you’re doing, and never trust your stockbroker. He’s trying to make money. For him.” Walton’s advice came from personal experience. He was convicted of fraud because, he said, some salesmen at his firm, an international investment company, made outrageous promises to their clients and a lot of people lost lots of money. The government claimed Walton knew what his salesmen were doing, but Walton just shrugged at that. “Salesmen will say anything, Bob. Just remember that.”

Walton was a frank kind of guy. He once admitted to me that he was really nervous about being in a prison filled with drug dealers. But, after he got to talk to them, he discovered they were just regular people, most of them.

I used to ask the inmates if they thought this was working, this incarceration, for people like us, people who had committed nonviolent crimes. Walton just shrugged. “When I get out of here, Bob, I’ll still be a rich man. My tennis game will be better; I’ll have lost twenty pounds; I own a house in Connecticut and one in Florida. You really want to hurt me? Take my money.” He smiled.

Walton’s smile said, If you can find. it. There were quite a few financial crooks in Eglin, and I asked them how money was really hidden. I didn’t have any to hide, but I figured the information might come in handy someday for a book. I had come to believe in Bill Smith’s motto: Don’t do it; write about it.

I read the description in the best-seller list over and over, not really believing it was me they were talking about. It felt like it was some kind of trick. I kept expecting someone to yell, “Surprise.” I sat on my bunk trying to comprehend what this meant, aware that I was due to go back to work in a half hour. I took Walton’s copy of the Book Review around to show a few of my friends, but I wasn’t free to celebrate. Having a book on the best-seller list had nothing to do with reality. I was a prisoner who ran the clothing room. I went back to work and wrote a letter for Baker about the status of our last clothing inventory.

Viking Penguin sent Patience on a big book tour in my place. She sent me her itinerary, and I called her at hotels all over the country. When I phoned her in Detroit, a man answered the phone, breathing hard. I said, “Who’s this?”

The voice, panting, says, “That you, Bob?”

I recognized Jerry Towler. I laughed. “What the hell you doing, Towler?”

“I told Patience to ask me if she ever needed anything, Bob. She took me up on it. Pant. Pant.” I could hear Patience laughing in the background.

I laughed and said, “Can I talk to my wife, asshole?”