Finally, even before my term of duty was over, they sent me home with a dishonorable discharge. I guess I dragged my ass too often in response to some order some ROTC officer gave me, and let my mouth get a bit loose with comments about the horror and stupidity of what we were doing. One of my buddies said that the reason they sent me home was that some of the officers were afraid I’d accidentally throw a hand grenade into the officers’ mess hall. Actually, that thought never occurred to me, except now and then during the week.
Back home in ’66 I became a hippy. My dad threw me out of the house both because of the dishonorable, and because of the pot smoking, and most of all because of the lazy losers I was hanging out with—my hippy friends—especially the gal I got involved with not long after I got back.
Sandy was a smart, sexy lady who was so alienated from “America” she made me look like an establishment conformist. She got antsy if a day went by without her protesting something, and those somethings were usually somethings most Americans thought were great: like drafting kids to go kill Vietnamese, bombing defenseless people, billy-clubbing war protestors, keeping women and niggers in their place, making more nuclear bombs—stuff like that. I was hooked on her, but she was hooked on everyone: there didn’t seem to be a single person being persecuted by the government that she didn’t think deserved at least a good lay, with her often being the provider. Sleeping around wasn’t exactly unheard of in those days, but Sandy probably set some sort of record.
Well, for six years I lived the life of a hippy radical, even long after I’d given up trying to find Sandy in a bed without someone else already there. Got arrested six times, spent eight months in jails, smoked enough dope to get lung cancer, slept with enough gals to satisfy a teenager’s daydreams, and somehow survived.
But when Richard Nixon buried McGovern in ’72 I decided to resign from the human race. Not that Nixon was much worse than any other guy who usually gets elected, but somehow that election made me feel nothing was ever going to change. The American people seemed happy with whatever the bigwigs thought was right. I was unhappy with whatever the bigwigs thought was right.
So by my late twenties I was burned out: just wanted to be left alone. I wasn’t a wild man any more. Didn’t want to protest anything, didn’t want to get stoned with friends, didn’t want to sleep around. Just work hard, save some money, read books, watch sports on TV, and settle into what was expected of me.
I went back home to Eastern Long Island and began taking a series of dead-end jobs that kept my body sharp and my mind dull: worked in an ice plant, on a road crew, became a plumber’s assistant, worked in a warehouse moving boxes the size of elephants from spot A to spot B, and finally got a job on a fishing boat that took three- and four-day trips out onto the Atlantic. My father was a working stiff and I was returning to my roots. Why was the fishing job the one that I began to stick to? Not the fish. Rather it was getting away from land, from people, from the lies I felt were smothering me. Hard, hard work away from land and television is a good way to stop worrying about what a mess humans are making of the world. And then I finally got lucky and met Carlita.
* * *
Picked her up at the side of the road. Actually her little Honda had a flat tire and I drove merrily by not planning to stop. But I happened to glance in my rear-view mirror and noticed this incredible ass sticking out as she bent over staring at the flat. I braked my pickup truck, swerved into the nearest driveway, turned around, and went back to pull in behind her. The ass was even better in close-up. The rest is history.
“Need a hand?” says I.
“As a matter of fact, I don’t,” she says, although all she’s done so far is take out the jack. “Thanks anyway.”
“Well, glad to hear it,” says I, “but I can change this thing in five minutes and it’ll take you fifteen. Let me do it for you.”
“No, thank you.”
Up close, her big, dark eyes made her cute but not beautiful. And her voice and face were as stern as a judge pronouncing the death sentence.
“Hey, all I’m actually interested in is hanging out with you a bit, and getting a chance to look at you. If you’d rather I just stood and watched I can do that, but if I’m gonna come on to you, you might as well get the tire changed.”
This little speech surprised her, and she looked at me a long moment and then smiled this marvelous face-lighting smile.
“Okay, big boy, go ahead,” she says. “But when you’re done I’ll be driving off into the sunset.”
“I expect you will,” says I, “but I’ll have gotten to spend ten minutes with you.”
“I thought you said you can do it in five.”
“I can,” says I, pulling the jack over near the flat and taking the tire iron to remove the nuts. “But I’m not highly motivated to do it with my usual speed.”
She smiled again.
I changed the tire, chatting her up as I did.
“You look like you got some Latina in you,” says I. “Where you from?”
“Born in Cuba,” she says, kneeling down beside me and taking each nut as I swirled them off.
“When’d you leave?” says I.
“1982,” she says. “I was ten years old.”
“Family mad at Fidel?” says I, jacking up the car.
“We were very happy in Cuba and with the revolution,” she says and I could feel her bristling.
I stopped my work for a second and looked at her.
“Good,” says I.
“But why do you call him ‘Fidel,’” she says, “and not ‘Castro’ like most Americans.”
“Hey, I’ve always appreciated anybody who stands up to a colossus to try to keep their own country for their own people.”
“Most Americans don’t see it that way.”
I went back to work. “’Course not, and at first neither did I,” says I. “I was in my early teens when Fidel marched into Havana, and I believed whatever my daddy and the New York Post told me. Which was that Castro was a commie bastard who was stealing people’s property and shooting innocent citizens.” I then let out a loud grunt as I tried to pull off the damn tire.
Got it. Had to get up and go back to the trunk to get the spare. She stood up as I passed her. Watched me take out the tire and go back to crouch down to put it on. She kneeled again beside me.
“What made you change your mind?” she asks.
“A Mexican girlfriend. She kept telling me that Cubans were much better off than most people in Haiti or the Dominican Republic or Central America and forced me to read some books. Seems the New York Post and most Americans had it a bit wrong.”
We finished the job in silence, me putting the jack and the ruined tire back in the trunk and she thanking me and offering me her hand.
“Gonna drive off into the sunset now, are you?” says I.
“Yes,” she says. Gives me a long intense neutral stare and then moves away and gets into her car, giving me another look at her incredible ass and making me feel gloomy at what I was losing.
She started the car and then turned and looked back at me.
“Five one six, three two three, sixteen twenty-two.”
She flashed that wonderful smile and drove away.
I rushed to my pickup, scrambled to find a pencil, then rooted around the floor for a piece of waste paper. Wrote it down: 516 323-1622.
First time in my life I was glad I’d always liked playing with numbers.
Anyway it turns out that Carlita’s as paranoid as I am. Having a mom who was Cuban and a dad who was Irish meant to Americans that she was one hundred percent Latina. Her parents named her Carlita Lopez so with her last name of O’Reilly she was pretty unique even before she’d finished teething. Latinos weren’t treated too nice in the Irish neighborhood in Brooklyn where her mom and dad moved when they came to the States, so from the time she was first called “greaser,” “nigger,” “wetback,” and “Mexcrement,” at the age of four, she wasn’t too happy with the world
she found herself in. And it didn’t help with the local Cuban community that she and her family liked Fidel and most of them hated Castro. So she worked hard to escape this world, and by working thirty hours a week for six years at various jobs, she put herself through college and law school and became a lawyer.
After she passed the New York bar exam, she worked for ten years for an Hispanic non-profit organization trying to get immigration laws reformed. Lots of luck. It looked like God had programmed every Republican in the country to fear invading Mexicans more than anything in the world. The idea that a single Mexican who had come into the country illegally might be permitted to stay was as bad to those guys as letting a convicted child molester become a guidance counselor in a grade school. Carlita got so frustrated and burned out she gave up not only her job with the Hispanic Freedom Forum, but all lawyering. Said the law was an ass, the whole legal system an asshole, and she wanted nothing more to do with assholes. She became a CPA and helped poor people with their taxes for almost nothing and, to put food on the table, helped rich people with their taxes for everything she could suck out of them. She was as good at that as she’d been at lawyering and began making good money.
So Carlita is, like me, not happy with the state of the world or of American politicians. She said what made me stand out from the younger guys she was usually getting involved with was that I seemed to see all the bullshit we were wading in, while most other men thought it was green grass. ’Course, it didn’t hurt matters that even in my fifties I was something of a hunk compared to most of the guys I saw her with.
Although it took me three years, I was smart enough to get her to marry me. And we’re doing pretty good, mostly because early in the game I discovered the secret of a good marriage: total capitulation. I discovered arguing with Lita wasn’t a smart strategy. Telling her what to do wasn’t a smart strategy. What works is surrender: what Lita wants Lita gets. ’Course it helps that every time I surrender and throw myself at her mercy, Lita grants amnesty and tends to come halfway back to my position. And being a smart gal, when I begin agreeing with her and surrendering, she sometimes begins calling me a wimp, but that only leads to our laughing together.
The fact is I’ve learned over the years that for us humans, being right is a losing strategy. The more convinced I am that I’m right, the more unhappiness I cause others and myself. I think one reason I love to bullshit is that when I’m doing it I’m never in any danger of thinking I’m right.
So after marrying Lita I was smart enough to settle down and save enough to buy a boat instead of muscle away as a crew member. And then to have a couple of kids and become the disgruntled old geezer I am today, living happily ever after.
Yeah, right.
When Louie the Arctic dog came into our lives Lita was as happy as me and the kids, and when it looked like some authority would inevitably come and want to haul Louie away for examination, interrogation, and dissection, she and I saw eye to eye: we wanted to try to save Louie from our fellow humans.
EIGHT
(From Billy Morton’s MY FRIEND LOUIE, pp. 52–58)
About four days after we’d decided to keep Louie, things began to fall apart. It started with a small crowd gathering outside our house. Looking out the living room window, we saw a TV crew from a local Riverhead station. A few people knocked loudly on the door, but I shouted back from inside that there was nobody home.
I didn’t have to tell Louie to hide, but he was so curious about everything that he kept wandering by the living room window wearing an old floppy cowboy hat of mine, a pink towel over most of him and a big pair of dark glasses just below the rim of the hat. He looked like a pumpkin wearing a cowboy hat moving on one long stilt.
Then three state police cars arrived and, instead of busting into our house, they began shooing away the crowd and the TV crew, forcing them to the far side of the road a hundred feet back toward Greenport. Although one police car and several cops went to keep the crowds down at the end of the street, two more cars pulled in and three cops ran around to take up positions at the rear of our house.
Lita and the kids and I were talking about what the hell was going on when a third car, a nondescript Ford, pulls into the driveway. We all stood at the window and watched two men get out, talk briefly to some big-shot state policeman and then stride up to our door.
I went to the locked door and waited as one of the men outside knocked. Twice.
“We’d like to speak to Mr. Morton,” a voice says loudly.
I thought about playing possum and keeping mum but my curiosity always gets the better of me.
“What about?” says I.
“It’s a private matter that we can’t discuss through a closed door,” says the loud voice.
“And who are you?” says I.
“Agents Johnson and Wall of the National Security Agency,” says the voice.
“And what do you want to see Mr. Morton about?” says I.
Silence. Maybe whispering.
“We have to come in, Mr. Morton,” says the loud voice. “We can ask the police to break the door down, or you can open up on your own.”
Well, Lucas was reporting that there were now four policemen at the back of the house and two on the back porch, and Carlita spotted another car pulling up in front, and these voices sounded pretty sure of themselves. So I decided that I liked our door in the shape it was in and not the shape the cops would leave it in. I opened it.
The two guys standing on the porch looked harmless enough, medium-build, good-looking in a dull sort of way, and dressed in nice suits—although all suits look nice to me so they could have been cheap. Lita came up beside me and we all stood for a few seconds staring at each other.
“Won’t you come in,” says Lita quietly, and she steps back to open the door wider.
“Thank you,” says the loud-voiced one. “I’m Agent Johnson and this is Agent Wall.” Johnson was a round-faced, young-looking guy with rimless glasses. Looked like he might have been nice if the government hadn’t got him.
Wall was a bit heavier and would probably play the bad cop to Johnson’s good cop.
“Please sit down,” says Lita, backing toward the living room. “Can I get you something to drink?” Jesus, was she faking it.
“That won’t be necessary, ma’am,” Johnson says. “But thank you.”
The two agent guys followed Lita into the living room, glancing around sharply, and then, first Johnson, then Wall, sat down on the couch.
I planted my butt in my rocker, and Lita sat on the arm of the big soft TV chair. Lucas and Jimmy had come in too, and ended up standing on either side of Lita, both frowning fiercely at these guys. Where Louie had gotten to I didn’t know, but I managed not to peer around for him. He would certainly want to listen so I figured he was probably disguised as a huge hat and sitting on top of my head.
“So, what’s up?” says I.
“We’re here about the possible misuse of a computer in your house,” says Johnson.
A computer!
“Misuse of a computer, huh,” says I. “Someone watching porn?”
“Mr. Morton,” says Johnson. “May we please see all of the computers you have in this house?”
Computers. Not a hairy beach ball, but computers. Or maybe both Louie and computers.
“Not unless you tell me why.”
Agent Johnson gave me a long neutral stare.
“We have evidence that one of your computers was used to access certain government systems. Such activity is illegal. Technically it may be terrorism. We can confirm our evidence by examining your computers. Then, of course, we will have to determine which member or members of the household were responsible for the offense.”
Well. Obviously it wasn’t me. I sometimes can’t even get into my own email, much less get into the NSA’s. Lita mostly used the computer in her Southold office. Jimmy and Lucas are awfully bright, but not that bright. It didn’t take me more than two-thirds of a second to realize that go
od old Louie was playing games. I couldn’t help feeling proud of the little guy.
“Well,” says I, “I can tell you who the culprit is. It was that damn Arctic dog we found. And he’s hiding right now in this house. I’ll help you find him. I’m not going to protect any terrorist who messes with the National Security Agency.”
Well, ’course that’s not what I said. A lot of good red-blooded Americans might have said that, but not me. And not Carlita. And not the kids. What I did say was: “I’d be happy to let you examine our computers,” says I, “but no one in this house has any interest in the… NSA, not even sure we know what it is.”
Agent Johnson gives me another long stare.
“Mr. Morton,” he says, and the stare turns to stone. “We’re quite certain that you know a great deal about the National Security Agency, so please stop playing the innocent old hick. You have a record of anti-government activity that goes back fifty years. You have harbored in this house a strange creature that apparently is highly skilled with computers. Let’s cut the bullshit: where is this ‘Arctic dog’ that you claim was killed but obviously is still very much alive?”
“You think Louie hacked your computers?” says I, stalling for time.
“Who’s Louie?” asks Johnson.
“Our deceased Arctic dog,” says I. “If he hacked your computers I am truly sorry, and if he should suddenly rise from the dead, I assure you I’ll tell him ‘bad dog!’”
Little Jimmy giggled, but Agent Johnson again went into scowl mode.
“I’m afraid, Mr. Morton,” he says, “that you don’t realize the gravity of the situation. Hacking into government systems is a terrorist act. Anyone aiding and abetting the individual… or creature… that committed such an act is liable under relevant sections of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act 1986 and the Patriot Act of 2001 to the same penalties as the terrorist himself… or itself.”
“Pretty hard to aid and abet a corpse,” says I. “Especially when the corpse has been a hundred feet under water for four days.”