Sonny’s Purple Heart

But it’s too late to say you’re sorry. — The Zombies I Man, if you’re dead, why are you leading me to drink after five sober years? Sonny, can I get a witness? I had a Snow White vision of the prodigal son returning to America that day of my final hangover. I tried to clear the mixture of cobwebs and shooting stars from my brain with spit-warm Budweiser, but the hair of the dog just was not doing the trick. I ended up pummeling myself seven times that day and named each egg white load for a Disney dwarf. The first was Dopey. The final was Sleepy, I think, or Droopy. II Last year you scrawled a letter to me about your first and final visit to the Vietnam Memorial and how your eyes reflected off the shiny black stone and shot back into your brain like guidons unfurling the stench of cordite and the boy screams of men whose souls evaporated into morning mists over blue-green jungles. You had to be there, you said. That’s where you caught the cancer, you said. III Sonny. Tonight I had a dream of Mom’s death twenty years too late and now my eyes will not close like I imagine the lid on her cheap casket did. I was not there when she died. Home on leave from Basic Training, you stood in for me because I was running scared through the drugged-out alleys of America, hiding from those Asian shadows that would finally ace you and now, now in the dark victory of your Agent Orange cancer, it gives me not one ounce of ease to say fuck Nixon and Kissinger, fuck all the generals and all the armies of God and fuck me, twenty years too late. IV History is history and thank God for that. When we were wise-ass American boys in our fifth grade geography class, we tittered over the prurient-sounding waves of Lake Titticaca …Titti … ca-ca and we never even had the slightest clue that Che was camping out en las montañas de Bolivia … We never knew American chemists would kill you slicker than slant-eyed bullets. V Damn Sonny. Five sober years done squeaked by like a silent fart and I’m on autopilot, sitting in a bar hoisting suds with ghosts, yours and my slowly evolving own. When we were seventeen with fake I.D.’s, we got into the Bucket of Blood in Virginia City and slurped sloe gin fizzes while the innocent jukebox blared “She’s Not There” by the Zombies. Later that drunken night you puked purple splotches onto my new, white Levis and a short, few years into your future this lost nation would award you two purple hearts, one of which your mother pressed into my hand that bright day we filed you under dry desert dirt.