Until the Enemy Had No Face, Part 3, Behind the Smiles

By 2013, Anthony Reza thought the war was behind him and only the remnants remained, the ghosts of Vietnam, the lone survivor of a squad ambushed, left with the emotional scars, distress, hoping one day it would all fade away, with time, as the doctors at the V.A. told him, but he still struggles, not so much with memories, more from the dark thoughts, which he hides from everyone, except those who know him best, and like other combat veterans, he copes. His wife thinks for him, looking to alleviate his most recent bout, his doubts and fears and knows he does best when he travels. In this last and final excerpt from my newly completed novel, the journey behind the smiles continues, from the streets of L.A. to the jungles of Chiapas.                                                                                   

The story behind the smiles

                        

    Serena recognized the signs. If she even had an inkling that I was alienating myself, she’d barge into my backyard office and confront me. She’d force me outside, into our professionally landscaped backyard, a small oasis in the suburbs on L.A's Westside, blocks from the Beverly Center, and say, “You need fresh air.” Once she stuck a sprig of rosemary beneath my nose and said, “This is reality.”

     When it’s bad, I can’t help but feel there’s a catastrophe about to happen, and it cripples me. Intellectually, I know it’s foolishness, but my body goes into protective mode, what I call my “turtle syndrome,” a shelter from the pain outside.

     If it isn’t too bad, and I think I can handle it, I’ll tell Serena it’s just my work, too much stress. She knows when I’m denying the truth, like the time she said, “No, Anthony, I can tell stress and from distress. If it’s an albatross on your neck, it can be a curse or absolution, depending on how you handle it. You’ve got to deal with it, fast, before it’s out of control.”

     This time, she wasn’t going for my excuse about “overwork.” She dropped her role of analytical sociologist and matched my cool Westside procrastination with her fiery Eastside bluntness, “Get real. You can’t mess around with this. If it gets out of control, it’s hard to reel in, and you know it.”

     “Serena, no, really, I’m almost finished, just polishing off the anthology, a little more editing, a stronger conclusion, and it’s done.”

     “Stop. The book’s been done. You’ve overcooked it. I’m going to send a copy to Willie and let him decide.”

     “No! Not yet.”

     Guillermo “Willie” Perez, descendant of parents from Ecuador and raised in Terry Town, up the Hudson River, was V.P. of a mid-size press in New York. Willie published a history text I co-edited with a colleague from U.C. Berkeley. It’s still in print and selling well in college classes. Willie took a chance and published two of my smaller books, one taken from my travel journals describing a trip by bus into Mexico, the second, a Chicano historian’s critical look at the Vietnam war, nominated for a National Book Award, and both earning enough to cover my advance and bringing a little profit to the publisher.

     We were on a first name basis after one visit to New York we did some bar hopping on the Lower Eastside, and ended up at the Nuyorican Poest Cafe, where poet and playwright Miguel Pinero had left a huge footprint. I told Willie about my proposed anthology of writings and photos of drawings, sculptures, and paintings by Chicano Vietnam veterans, it intrigued him. Still, he’d answered, “Anthony, I don’t know if the public wants another book on Vietnam. I hate to say it, but nobody cares. All that ‘thank you for your service,’ is lip service, excuse the pun.”

     “Willie, my anthology will be different, covering a variety of themes, not all about war, some existential, but by Chicano Vietnam veterans who experienced war. That’s the glue. As an historian, I’m interested to see what, after all these years, Chicano Vietnam veteran artists have been producing, and, sure, okay, how the war affected them.”

     “And, why only Chicanos?”

     “Why not? Puerto Rican and Cuban veteran-artists have a unique point of view, based on the Caribbean, island culture. They deserve their own books. Mexico and the Southwest spawned us, unique to our development as Americans.”

     I guaranteed him the anthology would be quality, the best literature and artwork I could find. “Man, Willie, there are close to 40 million cockroaches (writer Oscar Acosta’s word for Chicanos) in this country. We should be able to sell a few thousand books.”

     I sent him sample writings, stories, poems, essays, and photos of artwork I had compiled up to that point. He was impressed, shared the work with his colleagues, and agreed to publish it. That was ten years ago.

     Serena said, “If you’re so confident, why not let Willie see it, before he changes his mind, if he hasn’t already?”

     “Serena, soon but not yet. The conclusion is weak.”

     “None of this is about a book, husband, not really. It’s about Raul, right, the way he did it, abandoned everthing and everybody, without a word? I know what it’s done to you. It's gotten into your head.”

     “Partly, maybe, but it’s only because of him I’m even doing this book.”

     “Come on, Anthony. Look at yourself, three, what four days, unshaven and still in pajamas.” She looked at her watch, “And 3:00 in the afternoon. This is as much about you as it is about him, right?”

     After 25-years of marriage, Serena knew when to step in, no matter what excuses I invented. When it wasn’t too bad, she’d drag me for a hike up to Topanga in the Santa Monica Mountains to search for fossils and arrowheads or drive to Oxnard, Ventura or Santa Barbara where we stopped at historical landmarks along the Camino Real, she’d get me into the sunlight and away from the dark. Sometimes, we’d spread a blanket out at Wil Rogers State Beach to watch the sunset and talk, no subject off limits, pulling out of me what I held inside. She appealed to my common sense and reminded me if anything happened how much the family would lose, a voice of understanding and compassion.

     Sometimes, when it was bad, like when I couldn’t get my hands to stop shaking, when nothing worked, and the world was closing in, we’d drive out to Olvera Street and get caught up in the crowds, arts and crafts, and music, or we’d cruise to different towns on L.A.’s Eastside, out to Downey, Commerce, or even Azusa, at the base of the San Bernardino mountains. We’d have a late lunch, walk through town, and return home.

     After we first married, and I had an episode, Serena called Raul Armenta, a childhood friend, a Vietnam veteran, and a psychologist. Raul would take me out, and we’d talk. He and I had met up a few years after we’d both returned from the war. We stayed in contact, encouraging each other through rough periods during graduate school, so he knew just what to say, how to pull me back from the brink. It bothered me that I couldn’t reciprocate, but at least I could be there for him, which, apparently, hadn’t been enough.

     Raul was no longer an option, not since he’d split to who knew where, leaving behind his daughter, family, and friends, many of us completely perplexed and questioning our own emotional stability. If Raul cracked, what chance did the rest of us have?

     Sometimes, Serena forced me to call friends in my veterans’ support group or Dr. Evans at the V.A., who tried to put me on medication, which I refused because of the terrible side effects, the drowsiness, sleepless nights, dull brain syndrome, combined with a myriad of physical ailments, or he’d recommend me checking into the V.A., to recuperate at the DOM, a short-term residential facility, but before it reached that point, Serena would get me to travel, a bit risky but, from what she saw, over the years, the best antidote for my condition.

     She’d say, “Fly somewhere. Trust me, Anthony, you’re always better when you return, energized, the old you. Maybe go see Hank or Pablo. You’ve been promising to visit them.”

     Both were friends, Hank from Highland Park and Pablo from Culver City, professors, and original members of Raul’s first Vietnam veterans support group. We met in grad school. Like me, they were psychic gypsies in the early days when the V.A. had nothing for us, and we had to seek our own cure, often in destructive ways, which to us was just heavy partying, disappearing for a while, sharks constantly moving.

     Once they finished their degrees, guys like Hank and Pablo traveled the adjunct route, picking up part-time teaching gigs in backwater towns and cities, until they landed tenured positions, Hank in Washington, Tacoma, and Pablo in Louisiana, of all places. They’d been on my case to visit them, for years, but I never did. We’d meet up whenever they flew into town to see their folks and friends.

     This time when Serena suggested travel, I’d said, “I don’t know if I’m up for travel, Serena, with work and the semester starting soon.”

     “Bull, man. You always travel during your semester breaks.”

     “Fly some place…I don’t know, what about everything I’ve got to do here?” I tried to sound as rational as I could. Serena operated on logic and reason. For her, everything had to make sense, like so many times when she’d find lost objects, a screw, a nut, a nail, or any insignificant object, she knew it didn’t just fall out of the sky. She couldn’t rest until she found its home. She had a kitchen drawer filled with miscellaneous objects, all organized and labeled, even the date she found it.

     Chiapas popped into my head. I figured that would drop her interest in my traveling. “Maybe, I can fly to San Cristobal de Las Casas?”

     Her face sagged. “Seriously, Anthony, Mexico, now, when times are bad down there.”

     I appealed to her sense of logic. “Chiapas is in the south. The violence is mostly in the north or along the border.”

     “No, man. It’s everywhere, bodies turning up in kid’s playgrounds.”

     “That’s just American media hype.” I reminded her about a Vietnam veteran I’d met at a bar in the Yucatan, Billy Serna, I think was his name. He’d told me about an expat community of Vietnam vets residing in Chiapas, up in the hills outside San Cristobal, a tight group of guys living off their military disability, guys sick of America’s so-called civilized society.

     She looked at me like I was crazy. “Dude, Anthony, are you still with that. It was like twenty-five years ago, and you said he was talking about the 1980’s. Listen to yourself. That makes no sense.”   

     “You never know,” I said. As a kid, I lived in an imaginary world, where anything was possible, driving my pragmatic parents nuts. When my friends couldn’t think of things to do, I’d flood them with ideas. That was my strength, my imagination or my ability to try what others wouldn’t.

     In faculty meetings, these people with M.A.’s and Ph. Ds from prestigious universities, sometimes, either couldn’t think of a solution to the simplest problems or came out with the most complicated, irrational solutions. I’d spit out three or four common sense solutions in a few minutes, leaving them in awe, as if I’d said something profound. My Uncle Joe was like that, figuring ways to fix a toster, a television, a power mower, a leaky pipe, or problemss with difficult people. For him, and a lot of my relatives, if there was a way, he for damn sure had the will.

     I realized, some years ago, I often reversed numbers when I made telephone calls. Then I noticed I’d also reverse letters, sometimes words, misunderstanding the text. No wonder I’d had a difficult time in school, like with comprehension and math word problems. Maybe that’s why people thought I had a savage wit, my responses to what I thought I heard instead of to what I did hear.

     Dyslexia came as an epiphany, even if I only had a mild case. Could that be why my mind wandered during lectures, as a student, when I sat in class or when anybody hit me with complicated instructions. As a kid, I’d trained myself to focus if anybody told me something important. In the Army, sometimes I could see my sergeants’ faces grow suspicious, wondering if I really hadn't heard them right or I was just joking around, at times trying to stifle their laughter at my response.

     My imagination ran wild when I read stories, seeing so many thematic strands in plotlines and characters’ personalities. Instead of teaching history the usual way, focusing of facts, dates, and names, I turned historical figures, events, and locations into stories, the wilder the story, the better the students learned.

     I reasoned with Serena, explaining I’d always wanted to visit San Cristobal, a colonial town, and take pictures to show my students where the Zapatistas had rebelled against the Mexican government and rich land owners. She said “no, definitely not.”

     “No problem, then, I’ll just stay here and keep working.”

     “That won’t work with me, Anthony. I know what you’re up to.”

     “What do you mean?”

    “Don’t pull that reverse psychology on me.” She crossed her arms. “Come on, anything happens in Chiapas, damn, man, you’ll be far away, near Guatemala, bro’. Seriously, it could be dangerous.” Before I could answer, she added, “What about Mexico City?”

     Th idea of travel started the old juices flowing, the excitement I’d feel whenever I finished all the arrangements and prepared to start off on my journey, the feeling of excitement when the jet backed away from the terminal. It took a moment for the idea to percolate. “Mexico City?” I’d visited many times, the first to make a “manda” to the Virgin a Tepeyac, to fulfill a promise my mom made if I returned home from Vietnam.

     Serena said, “You complained how you never had enough time to see the city, like the Museum of Anthropology. Go there, and, besides, it’s safe compared to other places in Mexico.”

     I repeated, “Mexico City.” The itch to travel got stronger. It could work. I guess. She’s right. I always rushed through the Museum of Anthropology. I could take my time. Archeologists had uncovered new Aztec ruins under the zocalo, even if I wasn’t much of ruins-guy. It might give me a chance to edit my book, rest, and bring Serena peace. “That might work.”

     “It’s a good compromise, as long as you promise to stay there, right?”

     “Alright,” I gave in. “Yeah, I promise,” I said, not really sure, something heavy stirring inside me. “And you’ll notify me if Tiburcio Reynoso sends me anything.”

     “Anthony, please. Enough with your anthology for now. Let it go.”

     “They say Reynoso wtinessed the alleged atrocities. I need to know what he saw, so okay, I guess it's about a lot more than my book.”

     A sick look covered her pretty face, “The awful things Raul and those guys did in Vietnam to those villagers was confirmed and documented.”

     “You can't know unless you were there. I won't believe it until I hear from Reynoso. Something, anything he might know could help us learn more about Raul and why he'd up and leave everything, his entire life, his family, his career.”

     “Anthony, it's been twelve years, and you don't know he left, by choice. There were confirmed sightings of him in Tijuana, alone, hanging out in rank bars, with a prostitute, drunks, and narcos. Anything could have happened to him there. It's Mexico."

     The image she painted wasn't the Raul I knew, a former psychologist and university vice-president, but that's where we left it, until a couple of weeks later, I ended up standing in a busy terminal in LAX, a ticket to Mexico City in my pocket.