Vietnam seemed to grow out of my navel like an improbable lotus flower this morning. Maybe that’s just because Three Seasons is on IFC now. Ironically they shoot in a bar called Apocalypse Now…It’s Ironic because the film stars Harvey Keitel who was supposed to play the Martin Sheen role. Indeed, the first thing to go wrong on that impossible shoot, was Francis realizing that he had to fire Harvey. He was right too. There is something so perfect about Martin Sheen’s awesome good looks (like an overaged drunk/drugged James Dean….I think Sheen was thirty and ended up with a major heart attack…It’s not like Charlie’s bad boy behavior was born in a vacuum, but then: Charlie don’t surf!). Anyway, Sheen’s face has that sheen of America (names are destiny) all California surf scrubbed corn. I guees Coppola saw Bad Lands and it hit him like an Irish Pub epiphany.
Anyway this film (and by “this film” I mean Three Seasons…remember?) has a great deal of lotus imagery and it must have something to do with the saffron gates….I mean they must have created some sort of odd unconcious Buddhist practice in me…like counting prayer beads (does anyone else wonder how the Catholics stole this for the Rosary?..but sill a rose is a rose is a rosary…and you can’t copyright no beads…or beats says flavor flav pill). So I’m basically chanting Om Nam Renge Kyo …or whatever it is (some secretary at MTV once gave me a card with the sutra on it…she said she could see in my eyes that I was unbalanced and should start chanting…she was like those guys in that Hal Ashby – Jack Nicholson film about the Navy The Last Detail…Om Nam Renge Kyo…). This Buddhist stuff has really started to put the Zap on my head. My chemistry is mostly German/English…you Know Anglo Saxon…WASP. Our idea of meditation is a dose of Guilt, a Lord’s Prayer, and a Martini.
And so that brings us to Willoughby and George Bush, who are, if nothing else, brothers in arms. Willoughby is a character whose sutra chant is “I don’t want to die.” I came up with him while canvasing the bad lands of Brooklyn and New Jersey during the last election. Willoughby is in the throws of an existential crisis…and for me, the last election was about as close as you can get to existential crisis and still call it politics. I was going door to door begging for money for the Democrats. I don’t like asking for money for myself, snd so the idea of begging for politicians is a pretty long stretch, but it was a crisis and I didn’t want to die. I knew if I spent those months sitting on the couch yelling at CNN, I’d hate myself in the morning.
BEAT: Well we lost! We didn’t, but Kerry sure did. It is as if he wanted to loose, but then you see: Vietnam….Vietnam…Vietnam. It is a many petaled flower that never seems to die. You cut it’s lovely head off and it just grows out of the mud and shit and gore again and again like Simbionese Liberation Army Patty Hearst Snake head. Again the only trenchant image of the late twentieth century may be Orson Welles in an infinite mirror to be seen with Brian Wison singing “Our Prayer” from Smile on in the background.
I was born in the Spring of 1967…on the fifth day of may (like Dylan’s Sara and the nation of Mexico) right before the summer of love would open with its lysergic petals like a perverse viral strain of Swiss chocolate. That war was my childhood and if I really go into the whole Buddhist reincarnation mythology: well I think I died in Vietnam and was reborn in America. I had unfinished business with the Americans….For one thing they’d taken my right leg…for another they’d taken my life. And that brings us back to the dog’s leg. The bandages are off and the infection is getting better. I am relieved.