FIC: "Cut and Restored" (M*A*S*H)
The first of two sitcomathon stories--because when I stress out I write too much instead of too little. ;) Written for the lovely and talented mandysbitch, who requested Hawkeye/Trapper and the prompt "You ask what I remember?"
Title: Cut and Restored
Author: Malograntum Vitiorum
Fandom: M*A*S*H
Summary: An old man and a young writer. Life has a way of going on.
I'm afraid this book is going to be half made up of explanatory notes, but this chapter does need a little bit of preface. It was originally part of the previous chapter, "Boston Marriage," when I wrote it for web publication. I cut it from the piece for a number of reasons. At the time, I'd have said the tone or the pace didn't fit the rest of the essay, but really I cut it because I was chicken; despite the full cooperation of its subject, I worried that it would somehow get someone somewhere in trouble, and I didn't want to cause any distress to any innocent person with what was supposed to be a celebratory piece. Here it is printed for the first time in its entirety, as I should have posted it two years ago.
AS CROWDED as the coffee shop is, the buzz of conversation is silence itself compared to the miscellaneous noise I've been listening to all morning at City Hall--we're still so nearby that when the door opens we can hear the revelry and protestors and revelers drowning out protestors--and so it's here that I've taken Ben, the man who stood out from the crowd and fascinated me from the moment I arrived.
It's rare that men stand out from the crowd to fascinate me, but this one is an exception. I knew I had to get to know him better before we even spoke. When he tried to wave me off on my first approach, I kept at him until he finally relented and agreed to step away from the crowd with me. And now that we're getting acquainted, he's such a charmer that he somehow manages to pay for both of us, over my protestations that my publication would pick up the tab.
But then, I'm giving him some leeway for his old-fashioned manners; unlike most people on whom I fixate in crowds, he's at least fifty years my senior.
"So who're you writing this up for again?" I tell him where my column appears, and he breathes a laugh. "Gay dot com," he repeats back to me, saying each syllable separately and slowly. "Gay dot com."
When I first saw him outside I'd have put him in his mid-seventies, but now that he's sitting still I wonder if he's older. He looks physically fit, solid but slender, and his affect reminds me of older military vets I've known. He's wearing a slightly old, but well-kept, professional suit that suggests he has a job. Probably, though, I was judging mostly by the lively twinkle in his eyes, which shone in the clear light of this spring morning with an alertness and curiosity that I don't see in many octogenarians.
Now that we're away from the crowd and the noise, I'm not sure what to say to him. I don't want to be too abruptly personal, so I answer his questions instead, satisfying his curiosity about what I do, what my website does, how long it took me to get here today. He eventually drops "when I was in Korea" into the conversation, giving me the opportunity to confirm my suspicions that he was a vet; I tell him how much he reminds me of one of my favorite people, my grandfather, who served in WWII.
He smiles lopsidedly. "I don't mean any disrespect to your grandfather, who I'm sure is or was a fine upstanding gentleman who served his country honorably, but I've reminded a lot of beautiful women of a lot of people in my life, and I gotta say that one isn't my favorite."
I apologize for the comparison with a smile, and he waves it away. "Oh no, I better get used to it sooner or later. You realize I'm eighty-eight years old." I open my mouth--to tell him he looks younger--and he waves a hand at me again. "Don't worry, I didn't drive myself here. I actually flew on a damn plane. I went through all the security nonsense and threw out my nail clippers and got inspected, infected and detected and probably deloused as well, you know I counted it up and I'm spending four times as long getting to airports, getting from airports, and being bored out of my skull at airports as I am actually flying on planes on this trip?"
Maybe he sees a hint of amusement on my face, because he pulls up mid-rant and says, "Forgive me, I seem to have come down with a case of the olds. It's benign, you know, but it's also terminal. Feel free to stop me anytime."
I take him up on his invitation. "So why are you here today?"
"Didn't you see the sign?" I did, of course, but he pulls it out from behind his chair anyway. "I've never done anything like this before in my life, you understand. But I'm very old, and." He looks at the sign, a hand-lettered square of posterboard about sixteen inches by eleven. "Well, I'm very old."
He holds the sign up in front of his chest so I can read it again. It's addressed to the mass of couples lined up outside City Hall, a line that seems to me, as I glance out the window, not to have diminished all day. It's the sign that stole my heart.
FIFTY YEARS AGO, the sign says, I WOULD HAVE BEEN IN LINE WITH YOU.
"I don't exactly know what came over me. You know, I didn't even wave signs in the Vietnam marches, though I went to a lot of 'em, I'll tell you that. You oughta ask me about this John Kerry character later." (I must confess that, in fact, I forgot to return to this subject.)
"Can you tell me more about it, though?" I prod gently. "If you would have been in that line. . . then presumably something, you know, presumably someone in particular. . ."
He puts away the sign slowly and quietly, turning away from me for a long moment, and I'm afraid I've gone the wrong way with it, that he's going to go silent and I'll never hear his story. Then he folds his hands on the table, leans in, presses his lips together, and after a couple false starts says:
"You have to understand what it was like over there."
And he talks--and talks--the isolation of being thousands of miles from home in an absurd undeclared war--the gallows humor of Army doctors--the heat, the cold, the smell. Themes that run through so many vets' stories--getting away with things, contraband, illicit booze, conspiring to commit sanity under the noses of the government bureaucracy. The deeply specific and personal horrors--children sweeping mines, families selling their daughters to Army men, friends there one minute and dead the next.
I could write a book on this guy, but I'm not destined to write it today, because without thinking about it I've set my pen down; it seems vulgar to pull out bullet points from his stories to be condensed, rehashed, for a two-thousand-word piece on the internet. So I just listen, remembering what I can, but mostly tracing the shape of the story to preserve in my memory. He follows a roughly chronological path, looping out in digressions, savoring the memory of a well-timed prank, a kind moment at Christmas, a dumb kid who pulled a dumb stunt but still got sent home alive. At some point I take my eyes off his for a second and the clock on the wall tells me it's been half an hour. He's nowhere near done.
Through it all, holding it together, is something not to be found in my grandfather's Korea stories. Woven into it all is the story of how, for what must have been a tragically brief time, two young surgeons kept each other sane. Stealing moments alone in awkward places, making a home together in a too-crowded tent, becoming family in a way even they barely understood. Managing somehow to find love knee-deep in blood, which was in a way the ultimate defiant act--one that they couldn't get away with for long.
Two lovers in an unreal place, parting--when one was shipped back to reality--without a chance to say goodbye.
"So--" Because I haven't yet learned my lesson about when to stay quiet and when to direct the conversation. "After the war. . .?"
He pauses half a beat, shifting gears a little. "Well, I went back to Maine and he went to San Francisco." He quirks an eyebrow, watching for my reaction. "Yeah. San-Fran-cisco. Before it was. . . San Francisco. On second thought, maybe I shouldn't tell you that? I don't want anyone to get in trouble. I mean, he's dead, of course." This he says quickly, almost offhandedly, staring into his coffee mug. "He got old. He died after he took a fall, but really he died of being old. At my age you go to more funerals than weddings." He goes quiet for a second, taps his hands on the table. "Anyhow."
He looks up at me and his eyes are clear again. "How old are you, Emma?" I admit to my age. "Twenty-three!" he repeats back, as if amazed that anyone that young is even sentient. "All right, Emma, twenty-three-year-old Emma." He's revving up his wit, and I can't help but smile.
"Look, Emma, here's what I want you to understand," he says. "I know people in this country are unhappy 'cause we got our kids dying overseas and we got this fuckin' joker in the White House--and let me tell you," he digresses, leaning in closer and pointing a bony finger at me, "I'm going to live long enough to see that fuckin' joker and his friends with their hard-ons for violence get kicked out of office if it kills me--pardon my French. So, I hear all the young people going fundamentalist this, fascist that, dictatorship the other. And when you write your article for gay dot com I want you to tell them I said, look--look at this." He turns half-around and sweeps his hand toward the window to take in not just the glimpse of the couples lined up for their marriage licenses but the whole state of Massachusetts, or maybe, it feels like, the whole history of gay liberation.
"Look out there, Emma. You think that joker in the White House is happy with that? And you think there's fuck-all he can do about it?" He grins, the look of a man who's been happily bothering authority figures since before I was a twinkle in my grandmother's eye. "No, and no again. So tell 'em that, Emma. Tell 'em it ain't over until it's over. You've gotta tell 'em, because nobody believes me when I just say it, because I'm so damn old."
It must be clear from my expression what a bittersweet joy it is to listen to this, because he taps my elbow and says, "Hey, hang on there. You're feeling sorry for me, aren't you? Don't try to deny it. I just caught you feeling sorry for me. What are you doing a crazy thing like that for?"
I start to answer, and to my embarrassment I find I'm actually crying. I try to tell him why--how moved I was just seeing him with his sign outside to begin with, and how his life story, even from the brief snapshot he's given me, is so much more, what, clearly not tragic and he'd just laugh if I said "inspiring," but it means to much to hear these stories (it's around this point that he produces a handkerchief, which I take gratefully) and, I tell him, to see him come out here to celebrate other people's happiness when he had lost that happiness, when he'd had it for such a short time so long ago and then had to come home from the war and never got back together with the one he loved--
"Hey, hey, slow down, sweetheart, blow your nose." I do, feeling extremely silly, but about to feel even sillier. He pats me on the arm consolingly. "Who said anything about 'never got back together'?"
I stare at him over the top of his handkerchief and there's that smile again, the smile that gets away with things. Of course there would be more to the story, and while my mind is bursting with possibilities, the sly gleam in his eyes also says, clear as day, and it's none of your business.
I try anyway. "Did you--"
"Are you in school, Emma?" And the bastard spends the rest of our time together talking about my schooling, my parents and my love-life, and won't say a word about anything else. Privately, I decide that Ben and the love of his life exchanged passionate letters throughout the sixties, and reunited around the Summer of Love, following the other man's divorce (amicable, naturally, so that I don't feel bad for thinking it). Or that they carried on a guilty on-and-off affair, meeting every couple years at medical conferences and other such excuses, and after they broke it off they never spoke again, and that's why Ben doesn't want to talk about it.
Or they never said a word to each other from the end of the war until the other man's wife passed away sometime in the early nineties, and then they quietly reunited as old men, still and always in love, and Ben, the more lively of the two, took care of his would-be husband until he tucked him into bed for the last time.
Whatever the truth is, I'm sure it's better than anything I could imagine.
Two weeks after the 2004 election, I posted a truncated version of this chapter on my personal blog. Not half an hour after the post went up, I received the following email. For cosmetic reasons, I've made two slight edits--the original email was in all caps, and included the postscript "PS HOW THE HELL DO I MAKE THE FONT BIGGER ON YOUR DAMN SITE"--but other than that, I reproduce it here exactly as written. I don't think I could add anything to it if I tried.
Date: Tues 14 Nov 2004 06:58:04
From: pierceb@xxxxx.edu
To: emma@gay.com
Subject: Finally
So you did write me up after all, and just considered me unprintable? You wouldn't be the first. You realize I could have *died* between our interview and now, personal resolve or no, and how would you have felt then?
Of course, it looks like I'm going to have to stay alive for another four years (at least). Fortunately, I've tricked a number of otherwise sensible young people, mostly my former students, into dropping by the house regularly to listen to my war stories, check that my refrigerator's stocked, fix my damn computer and make sure I haven't unexpectedly croaked in the bathtub. With their help I should be able to stay informed, fed, and boring for as long as necessary.
I say mostly students--one of them is the granddaughter (around your age) of a certain individual. She's a very kind young woman who came out here to turn old library books into pottery or something at the Maine College of Art. Thanks to your blog I may now be able to tell her some things that I imagine she already knows.
All things considered I can't say I mind being alive at the present moment. It's not as if I have something better to do.
Yours very sincerely,
Ben Pierce M.D.
-end-
Actual Author's Notes: Gay.com is of course real, but I have imagined it here as something more akin to the Advocate's site than its actual format. I was not in Boston when the first gay marriage licenses were issued, but the story is heavily influenced by my experiences in Oregon during the brief time in 2004 when my county was doing the same. (To the cheerful elderly man who stood outside the County Clerk's office that day holding the sign that I've put in Hawkeye's hands: I apologize for using your line without permission. Your sign had the addendum "MAYBE IN 2004 I WILL BE", and I hope it came true.)
Title: Cut and Restored
Author: Malograntum Vitiorum
Fandom: M*A*S*H
Summary: An old man and a young writer. Life has a way of going on.
I'm afraid this book is going to be half made up of explanatory notes, but this chapter does need a little bit of preface. It was originally part of the previous chapter, "Boston Marriage," when I wrote it for web publication. I cut it from the piece for a number of reasons. At the time, I'd have said the tone or the pace didn't fit the rest of the essay, but really I cut it because I was chicken; despite the full cooperation of its subject, I worried that it would somehow get someone somewhere in trouble, and I didn't want to cause any distress to any innocent person with what was supposed to be a celebratory piece. Here it is printed for the first time in its entirety, as I should have posted it two years ago.
AS CROWDED as the coffee shop is, the buzz of conversation is silence itself compared to the miscellaneous noise I've been listening to all morning at City Hall--we're still so nearby that when the door opens we can hear the revelry and protestors and revelers drowning out protestors--and so it's here that I've taken Ben, the man who stood out from the crowd and fascinated me from the moment I arrived.
It's rare that men stand out from the crowd to fascinate me, but this one is an exception. I knew I had to get to know him better before we even spoke. When he tried to wave me off on my first approach, I kept at him until he finally relented and agreed to step away from the crowd with me. And now that we're getting acquainted, he's such a charmer that he somehow manages to pay for both of us, over my protestations that my publication would pick up the tab.
But then, I'm giving him some leeway for his old-fashioned manners; unlike most people on whom I fixate in crowds, he's at least fifty years my senior.
"So who're you writing this up for again?" I tell him where my column appears, and he breathes a laugh. "Gay dot com," he repeats back to me, saying each syllable separately and slowly. "Gay dot com."
When I first saw him outside I'd have put him in his mid-seventies, but now that he's sitting still I wonder if he's older. He looks physically fit, solid but slender, and his affect reminds me of older military vets I've known. He's wearing a slightly old, but well-kept, professional suit that suggests he has a job. Probably, though, I was judging mostly by the lively twinkle in his eyes, which shone in the clear light of this spring morning with an alertness and curiosity that I don't see in many octogenarians.
Now that we're away from the crowd and the noise, I'm not sure what to say to him. I don't want to be too abruptly personal, so I answer his questions instead, satisfying his curiosity about what I do, what my website does, how long it took me to get here today. He eventually drops "when I was in Korea" into the conversation, giving me the opportunity to confirm my suspicions that he was a vet; I tell him how much he reminds me of one of my favorite people, my grandfather, who served in WWII.
He smiles lopsidedly. "I don't mean any disrespect to your grandfather, who I'm sure is or was a fine upstanding gentleman who served his country honorably, but I've reminded a lot of beautiful women of a lot of people in my life, and I gotta say that one isn't my favorite."
I apologize for the comparison with a smile, and he waves it away. "Oh no, I better get used to it sooner or later. You realize I'm eighty-eight years old." I open my mouth--to tell him he looks younger--and he waves a hand at me again. "Don't worry, I didn't drive myself here. I actually flew on a damn plane. I went through all the security nonsense and threw out my nail clippers and got inspected, infected and detected and probably deloused as well, you know I counted it up and I'm spending four times as long getting to airports, getting from airports, and being bored out of my skull at airports as I am actually flying on planes on this trip?"
Maybe he sees a hint of amusement on my face, because he pulls up mid-rant and says, "Forgive me, I seem to have come down with a case of the olds. It's benign, you know, but it's also terminal. Feel free to stop me anytime."
I take him up on his invitation. "So why are you here today?"
"Didn't you see the sign?" I did, of course, but he pulls it out from behind his chair anyway. "I've never done anything like this before in my life, you understand. But I'm very old, and." He looks at the sign, a hand-lettered square of posterboard about sixteen inches by eleven. "Well, I'm very old."
He holds the sign up in front of his chest so I can read it again. It's addressed to the mass of couples lined up outside City Hall, a line that seems to me, as I glance out the window, not to have diminished all day. It's the sign that stole my heart.
FIFTY YEARS AGO, the sign says, I WOULD HAVE BEEN IN LINE WITH YOU.
"I don't exactly know what came over me. You know, I didn't even wave signs in the Vietnam marches, though I went to a lot of 'em, I'll tell you that. You oughta ask me about this John Kerry character later." (I must confess that, in fact, I forgot to return to this subject.)
"Can you tell me more about it, though?" I prod gently. "If you would have been in that line. . . then presumably something, you know, presumably someone in particular. . ."
He puts away the sign slowly and quietly, turning away from me for a long moment, and I'm afraid I've gone the wrong way with it, that he's going to go silent and I'll never hear his story. Then he folds his hands on the table, leans in, presses his lips together, and after a couple false starts says:
"You have to understand what it was like over there."
And he talks--and talks--the isolation of being thousands of miles from home in an absurd undeclared war--the gallows humor of Army doctors--the heat, the cold, the smell. Themes that run through so many vets' stories--getting away with things, contraband, illicit booze, conspiring to commit sanity under the noses of the government bureaucracy. The deeply specific and personal horrors--children sweeping mines, families selling their daughters to Army men, friends there one minute and dead the next.
I could write a book on this guy, but I'm not destined to write it today, because without thinking about it I've set my pen down; it seems vulgar to pull out bullet points from his stories to be condensed, rehashed, for a two-thousand-word piece on the internet. So I just listen, remembering what I can, but mostly tracing the shape of the story to preserve in my memory. He follows a roughly chronological path, looping out in digressions, savoring the memory of a well-timed prank, a kind moment at Christmas, a dumb kid who pulled a dumb stunt but still got sent home alive. At some point I take my eyes off his for a second and the clock on the wall tells me it's been half an hour. He's nowhere near done.
Through it all, holding it together, is something not to be found in my grandfather's Korea stories. Woven into it all is the story of how, for what must have been a tragically brief time, two young surgeons kept each other sane. Stealing moments alone in awkward places, making a home together in a too-crowded tent, becoming family in a way even they barely understood. Managing somehow to find love knee-deep in blood, which was in a way the ultimate defiant act--one that they couldn't get away with for long.
Two lovers in an unreal place, parting--when one was shipped back to reality--without a chance to say goodbye.
"So--" Because I haven't yet learned my lesson about when to stay quiet and when to direct the conversation. "After the war. . .?"
He pauses half a beat, shifting gears a little. "Well, I went back to Maine and he went to San Francisco." He quirks an eyebrow, watching for my reaction. "Yeah. San-Fran-cisco. Before it was. . . San Francisco. On second thought, maybe I shouldn't tell you that? I don't want anyone to get in trouble. I mean, he's dead, of course." This he says quickly, almost offhandedly, staring into his coffee mug. "He got old. He died after he took a fall, but really he died of being old. At my age you go to more funerals than weddings." He goes quiet for a second, taps his hands on the table. "Anyhow."
He looks up at me and his eyes are clear again. "How old are you, Emma?" I admit to my age. "Twenty-three!" he repeats back, as if amazed that anyone that young is even sentient. "All right, Emma, twenty-three-year-old Emma." He's revving up his wit, and I can't help but smile.
"Look, Emma, here's what I want you to understand," he says. "I know people in this country are unhappy 'cause we got our kids dying overseas and we got this fuckin' joker in the White House--and let me tell you," he digresses, leaning in closer and pointing a bony finger at me, "I'm going to live long enough to see that fuckin' joker and his friends with their hard-ons for violence get kicked out of office if it kills me--pardon my French. So, I hear all the young people going fundamentalist this, fascist that, dictatorship the other. And when you write your article for gay dot com I want you to tell them I said, look--look at this." He turns half-around and sweeps his hand toward the window to take in not just the glimpse of the couples lined up for their marriage licenses but the whole state of Massachusetts, or maybe, it feels like, the whole history of gay liberation.
"Look out there, Emma. You think that joker in the White House is happy with that? And you think there's fuck-all he can do about it?" He grins, the look of a man who's been happily bothering authority figures since before I was a twinkle in my grandmother's eye. "No, and no again. So tell 'em that, Emma. Tell 'em it ain't over until it's over. You've gotta tell 'em, because nobody believes me when I just say it, because I'm so damn old."
It must be clear from my expression what a bittersweet joy it is to listen to this, because he taps my elbow and says, "Hey, hang on there. You're feeling sorry for me, aren't you? Don't try to deny it. I just caught you feeling sorry for me. What are you doing a crazy thing like that for?"
I start to answer, and to my embarrassment I find I'm actually crying. I try to tell him why--how moved I was just seeing him with his sign outside to begin with, and how his life story, even from the brief snapshot he's given me, is so much more, what, clearly not tragic and he'd just laugh if I said "inspiring," but it means to much to hear these stories (it's around this point that he produces a handkerchief, which I take gratefully) and, I tell him, to see him come out here to celebrate other people's happiness when he had lost that happiness, when he'd had it for such a short time so long ago and then had to come home from the war and never got back together with the one he loved--
"Hey, hey, slow down, sweetheart, blow your nose." I do, feeling extremely silly, but about to feel even sillier. He pats me on the arm consolingly. "Who said anything about 'never got back together'?"
I stare at him over the top of his handkerchief and there's that smile again, the smile that gets away with things. Of course there would be more to the story, and while my mind is bursting with possibilities, the sly gleam in his eyes also says, clear as day, and it's none of your business.
I try anyway. "Did you--"
"Are you in school, Emma?" And the bastard spends the rest of our time together talking about my schooling, my parents and my love-life, and won't say a word about anything else. Privately, I decide that Ben and the love of his life exchanged passionate letters throughout the sixties, and reunited around the Summer of Love, following the other man's divorce (amicable, naturally, so that I don't feel bad for thinking it). Or that they carried on a guilty on-and-off affair, meeting every couple years at medical conferences and other such excuses, and after they broke it off they never spoke again, and that's why Ben doesn't want to talk about it.
Or they never said a word to each other from the end of the war until the other man's wife passed away sometime in the early nineties, and then they quietly reunited as old men, still and always in love, and Ben, the more lively of the two, took care of his would-be husband until he tucked him into bed for the last time.
Whatever the truth is, I'm sure it's better than anything I could imagine.
Two weeks after the 2004 election, I posted a truncated version of this chapter on my personal blog. Not half an hour after the post went up, I received the following email. For cosmetic reasons, I've made two slight edits--the original email was in all caps, and included the postscript "PS HOW THE HELL DO I MAKE THE FONT BIGGER ON YOUR DAMN SITE"--but other than that, I reproduce it here exactly as written. I don't think I could add anything to it if I tried.
Date: Tues 14 Nov 2004 06:58:04
From: pierceb@xxxxx.edu
To: emma@gay.com
Subject: Finally
So you did write me up after all, and just considered me unprintable? You wouldn't be the first. You realize I could have *died* between our interview and now, personal resolve or no, and how would you have felt then?
Of course, it looks like I'm going to have to stay alive for another four years (at least). Fortunately, I've tricked a number of otherwise sensible young people, mostly my former students, into dropping by the house regularly to listen to my war stories, check that my refrigerator's stocked, fix my damn computer and make sure I haven't unexpectedly croaked in the bathtub. With their help I should be able to stay informed, fed, and boring for as long as necessary.
I say mostly students--one of them is the granddaughter (around your age) of a certain individual. She's a very kind young woman who came out here to turn old library books into pottery or something at the Maine College of Art. Thanks to your blog I may now be able to tell her some things that I imagine she already knows.
All things considered I can't say I mind being alive at the present moment. It's not as if I have something better to do.
Yours very sincerely,
Ben Pierce M.D.
-end-
Actual Author's Notes: Gay.com is of course real, but I have imagined it here as something more akin to the Advocate's site than its actual format. I was not in Boston when the first gay marriage licenses were issued, but the story is heavily influenced by my experiences in Oregon during the brief time in 2004 when my county was doing the same. (To the cheerful elderly man who stood outside the County Clerk's office that day holding the sign that I've put in Hawkeye's hands: I apologize for using your line without permission. Your sign had the addendum "MAYBE IN 2004 I WILL BE", and I hope it came true.)