| TheWestVirginiaSurfReport issueNINE "Celebrating sixty years of a sexually active Cloris Leachman" |
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I'll Be With You Tonight
Henry hadn't understood what was going on in Vietnam any more than he understood what was going on inside his briefs. The Viet Cong uprising, unneeded erections -- they confused him equally. Henry was thirteen and a rapidly changing boy in a rapidly changing world when he got his first real taste of rebellion. There on the TV screen in front of the heaving Dad-like substance in the recliner was a bushy haired man chaining himself to something solid in protest of the war. Henry didn't expect to hear about troops being pulled from the bush because of this action but it intrigued him nonetheless. And Henry would read comic books and see ads for patches and posters depicting peace signs and doves juxtaposed with Sgt. Rock ripping out of a nazi jugular, and a twinkle would come to his eye. And the twinkle would come in Sandford, Montana, in which he had spent the first fourteen years of his life, a town that no longer existed, a town he wasn't supposed to talk about. Henry had many recollections of life in Sandford but it was made very clear, after his family's sudden move to Chesterville, that those memories were not to be discussed or even acknowledged. It was never spoken, but very much implied, that if he ever mentioned Sandford harm would come to someone very close to him. Henry's father told a story of a man whose wife had been hollowed out and shot through the rapids of a major U.S. river, like a skin canoe, because he had "loose lips." Henry was receptive to these rather subtle implications and kept quiet for sixteen years. Perhaps because of the deep brand left by his slightly commercialized taste of sixties rebellion, Henry constantly longed to go against the grain and find out what the hell was going on. He was scared by the fear he saw in other faces when he would edge towards the subject, but at the age of thirty he decided to just do it. Henry secretly worshiped at the altar of Abbie Hoffman and the other sixties activists. He thought they were extremely cool and imagined they got laid a lot, despite their overwhelming grotesqueness. This aspect particularly appealed to Henry and he wanted to catapult him- self into their league by exposing the obvious cover of Sandford, Montana. Henry knew better than to talk to his parents but could always make his sister break. After three visits to her kitchen, Gloria agreed to talk, but only under the pretense that the subject never be brought up again. Henry agreed and she told him that Sandford was the town closest to an early nuclear testing base and the radiation had turned the place into a hellish nightmare. The government bullied the people out, set them up in new homes and built a big fence around the town marked U.S. Government- No Trespassing. Henry was ecstatic. It was better than he had imagined. He couldn't have invented a better cause. He would be famous and have chicks stacked up like fire wood. He kissed his sister on the lips and clicked his heels like a man possessed. After six months of constant searching Henry found the fenced-in Sandford, and along the way met a man who talked openly. Paulie, as he was called, told stories that both horrified and excited Henry. Vampire owls, bamboo grass, and babbling lunatics bedded down in their own jet-black excrement were all apparently indigenous to this charming little hamlet.Henry, having lived through the Reagan years, knew the importance of image and proceeded with great caution. He devised a plan that would ensure the story of being told no matter what happened to him. With any luck at all he'd have to go into hiding like Abbie. Girls can't resist a guy on the lam, he reasoned. With, the help of Paulie, Henry planned not only a tour of Sandford with a video camera but also a second hidden camera that was linked to an independent satellite that would record all proceedings as they happened, no matter what. Paulie informed Henry that the government had grown lax in protecting Sandford over the years and that they probably wouldn't be bothered. Paulie said he had visited Sandford many times with no problems.The tour date arrived and Henry was vibrating like a '67 Valiant. Paulie led him to the hole in the fence and they entered with all the assurance of seventeen year old virgins. For some reason Henry felt like breaking out in a Dylan medley. The memories washed over him like a warm summer wind. Wagner's Market, Art's Flowers, he knew them all but had forgotten. Bowen's Pharmacy, Grassie Iron Works, wow! Henry was talking now, to the camera. Everything was coming back to him. It was as if he saw a picture developing, only something was wrong. He was seeing the negative. Trees he had climbed as a youngster were now gnarly behemoths that one wouldn't dare approach. The skies were full, of fucked up birds. Henry saw his parent's house. He walked up the frightening steps and opened the scary door. Inside was a collection of Granny Smith insects ,that scampered away with the sudden movement. Henry led the camera man through the living room, to the kitchen, and into his own bedroom. He poured his heart into the camera as the emotions bubbled within him. He directed the action to a window that overlooked a field in which he had frolicked as a child. He swung open the curtains and outside was a landscape of six-foot wet dream briefs that had been buried by a puberty-stricken Henry seventeen years earlier. The brawny crop of huge underwear with his name sewn into the back and his identity welded to the front, swayed in the wind. And Henry blushed on live satellite feed as three CIA agents whooped and hollered on his hollowed-out mother in the Colorado River. |