Chickenhawk: Back in the World - Life After Vietnam

I was still in school, in my senior year. When I signed up for my final photography classes, though, my instructor, Todd Walker, said I’d been goofing off, and he had decided to give my space to somebody who’d appreciate it. I panicked. Photography was the only thing I had left. I spent the next two weeks working around the clock producing several projects, all having to do with sequential photography. I did a slide show with sound and black-and-white slides that flickered like an old-time movie. One of the shows had Haysup, the rocking horse I’d built in Texas, sneak up on Jack and kill him, which Jack thought was fun. I also made three photo cubes with eighteen bizarre images of the same doorway on their faces. Each face had scenes like a shark floating in through a door, the door opening to the middle of a sidewalk, a naked girl walking in through the door. Aside from being a legitimate reason to take pictures of naked girls, the idea was to create random story sequences by tossing the cubes. I showed a new project each time the class met, impressing the students and Walker. Walker relented at the end of the semester and allowed me to continue.

In the summer of 1971, we moved to a five-bedroom house near the university and rented three of the bedrooms to three other students to pay the rent. Patience and I were still on shaky ground and it got shakier. We had an argument in which I confessed the abortion. We decided to get a divorce when I graduated (otherwise, I would lose some of my VA benefits—let’s not be too fucking nuts). Patience went to visit her mother in Maine. I sent Jack to stay with my parents. When Patience came home, nothing had changed—we were in mourning over our dead relationship. Jack came home with symptoms of our problems: he had a nervous twitch and cleared his throat constantly.

Patience yelled at me a lot, pointing out what a jerk I’d been and still was. She began to see a shrink at the university and one day she came home and instead of yelling said, “I love you. Do you love me?” Her shrink, she later told me, had asked her how I felt—was I sorry? did I love her?—and she had to admit she had no idea. So he said to go home and ask. I did love her, and I was sorry, and that was what she needed to hear. We were on the mend.

After I graduated in December 1971 (the first person in my family’s history to get a college degree; as hollow a victory as I’ve ever won) Mary came to see me. She was on her way to Indiana and wanted me to go with her. With Patience and Jack watching, I walked her out to our backyard and said no. I felt bad watching her cry. It wasn’t love;I think it had something to do with honor. I was responsible for at least part of her pain. She called me terrible names, and I thought she was mostly right.

My degree was in art, so I figured I could make a living at it. While Patience worked on her last semester, I started a photography company called Silver Graphics and tried to drum up business. I did one wedding and a few pictures of an architect’s model buildings. Then nothing.

I decided to apply for a government job as an aircraft dispatcher, a civilian who inspects aircraft and certifies which ones are flyable and assigns their crews for military reserve units and the National Guard. If there was a position for which I was overqualified and should have no trouble getting, I thought, this was it. Waited around rubbing my hands together; cushy damn government job coming up. Got a letter back saying that my disability (fifty percent service-connected nut) made me ineligible for the job. The envelope had stamped on it: Don’t Forget, Hire the Vet. I complained: how stressful can such a job be? Sorry, that’s our policy. Wrote my senator. Sorry, he answered, I tried, but they say—

My dad, a realtor in south Florida, suggested that I import some of the pocketknives like the ones I’d brought back from Spain; we could sell them by mail. Neither of us knew squat about importing or selling by mail, but since he and a friend were willing to pay my way over and buy the first batch of knives, and since I was broke, why not?

I decided to become an importer.

Back to Almonaster la Real. I had a fairly good time seeing Pepe and the gang again, but I felt awkward and unsure of myself as an importer. After I found the place where they made the knives, I bought a few hundred. I had a week to kill before my plane left, so I drove to Algeciras in a rented car and took the ferry to Tangier.