American Dream: A Cliché? Part 5
The Last Spin
For some people my age (maybe a little older) the war in Vietnam turned out to be a very bad thing. Many of them were sent to the jungles in South East Asia mainly as a result of the policies initiated by that fat asshole, Henry Kissinger. Many of these boys were fresh out of high schools from American cities and towns totally insulated from the outside world. The jungles made their eyes pop, their tongues hang out, and their testicles shrink out of sheer terror. Welcome to Vietnam, baby!
By the way, I hate Dr. Henry Kissinger, really hate his guts. And my respect for the great John Kennedy went way down when I heard his speech about US planes attacking “Lay-oss”! I mean go ahead and bomb and kill people in a country that has done absolutely nothing to America, but sir, at least have the decency to find out how to say its name!! Its got four letters, you fool- L-A-O-S!!
Some of the boys came back from the jungles dead or maimed, others mentally damaged, Some got into drugs in the military, some later. There are many movies, books, memoirs about them, some of excellent quality.
I have known some of these people, some over several decades. None of them were serial killers, or violent schizophrenics or hard core junkies, so not worthy of movies or anything. But there was something wrong with all of them.
BOB
Bob was just a little off. He worked as a short-order cook in the Faculty club at the University of Rochester in late 1970’s. For a short while, while I was doing my Ph. D. there, I worked as a dishwasher in the Faculty Club to supplement my paltry stipend. From time to time, he would come to the Dishwashing room to smoke on the sly and talk. The dish room was steamy and hot, so cigarette smoke was easily concealed. The dishwashing machine was a noisy monster, it would gobble up an entire tray full of dirty glasses or dinner plates on one end and spew them out, steaming and cleaned on the other side in about two minutes, with the steam hissing and the brushes clattering on the inside of it..
Bob would smoke and shake. “ This thing sounds like the Gooks (VietCong) are coming” he would shake some more and make a noise like sputtering machine gun fire – “tut, tut, tut”.
You bet he was still scared of the Gooks. He would hear them in the Dish Room, he would hear them coming around the corner in the club corridor, he would get spooked when the head cook sneaked up on him from the back to check on his order. No, he did not jump anyone, he just went pale and shivered and talked about the goddam Gooks!! Otherwise he was OK, I don’t know how long he lived with the gooks chasing him. I was fresh from India and found him to be funny – most other employees did not, they knew other people who have been to Vietnam!
RICHARD
Fast forward about fifteen years when I was freshly divorced and working as a professor at the University of Kansas. I met Richard through some other chess players.
Most of the chess players do not know how to play chess. Some of them are smart enough to know that they do not know, others are blissfully ignorant. By the time I met Richard, I was in my mid- forties and had been playing chess since my teenage years. I knew I could not play. Only in my early fifties, about eight years later, when I was severely depressed, I adopted my own chess therapy, and played for 12+ hours every day online. It helped lessen my depression and I finally learned the basic strategies and endgame maneuvers that real chess players learn in their early teens or even earlier!!. The next step was to internalize the responses to non-Nash strategies, I have not mastered that yet. Then there are other steps beyond that to be a real chess player. Chess is a hard game, indeed!
Richard did not know he could not play chess. Yet, his ambition was to become a chess master. It was like a man who wanted to sing classical music when he can not recognize the basic musical notes!
After Vietnam, Richard got soft in the head. His parents died and left him a little cute house. His whole life revolved around two things – playing chess and cleaning! He had OCD (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder), his whole house was filled up with chess boards, chess clocks and chess books and other chess paraphernalia. He had glass chess sets, pewter chess sets, brass-plated chess sets, silver-plated chess sets , as well as fancy wooden sets – they were in nice glass cases all over his house and on his coffee table. He would dust them, clean them and polish them and clean the rest of his picture perfect living room. Again and again!
No smoking, no alcohol, no drugs – this man was squeaky clean! Sometimes Richard and me would go out to dinner with Alam ( a Bangladeshi chess player and a math graduate student),. Alam and I would have a beer with our hamburger. I would watch, fascinated, a balding middle aged Richard gulping down two humongous milkshakes with his beef hamburger, in fact I found it kind of nauseating!
Alam and I would go to his house on separate occasions and will have chess marathons with him – five to six hours. It was a breeze to beat him again and again, as he made the same mistakes repeatedly, without a clue about what he is doing wrong! Alam, who initially neglected his studies because of chess , realized his chess shortcomings in a couple of years and went back to some serious mathematics. Richard and I kept on playing occasionally. His chess never improved.
Well, even a chess fanatic needs money to survive, and maybe some female companionship to be happy. Here Richard used his white privilege to the max. He had no marketable skills. I saw him working as a photographer in those little corner stalls in Department stores. In the early nineties, digital cameras were not around, people would get their portraits or family pictures taken either at a regular professional studio (which cost more) or at those little kiosks at department stores or supermarkets, with a curtain and an old-fashioned camera and some default backdrop scenes. He was the harmless middle aged balding white guy with a stupid smile who was a perfect fit for this photographer’s job. The only other thing I heard him do was to work at data entry at computer centers – an awfully boring job!.
Both jobs did not pay that good. Richard worked for about six weeks and then would quit, and use the money to last about two additional months or more! He often lived on the verge of poverty when the money almost ran out, eating just one meal and playing chess by himself all day in his kitchen, shutting off the lights in the rest of the house to save electricity. Yes, his white privilege allowed him to do this. When the money really ran out, he could walk into a new place and would get hired on the spot for a new job!
Although he had very little money, he was tall, not fat, and looked harmless; single mothers and divorced women in their mid-thirties or older would sometimes hook up with him. After the intimate encounters, the poor woman would get a big surprise! Richard would play chess by himself all day and ask his lady friend to vacuum, polish and dust all day! Needless to say, these relationships did not last too long!.
Using his white privilege, he would walk into a country music bar (Lawrence was predominantly white), hang out for a while and usually would get a new girlfriend when he needed one.
This went on for a while, I lost interest in playing chess with him after a few years. I do not know how long he tried to become a chess master. The last time I heard about him was in 2010 or so, that he has found a good girlfriend and is retired (from what? He was never really employed haha!)
In retrospect, Vietnam destroyed his life. He lost all motivation and ambition to be educated and to become a successful professional He wasted his whole life on trivial things. There are many people like him among the veterans. They don’t go crazy, they don’t kill people, they don’t become homeless, they just quietly and slowly start rolling down the shutters of their lives from a very young age. They are the early quitters! What a social loss!
MIKE
Mike was tall, athletic, and very handsome when I met him in his early fifties, in around 1992 or so. He grew up in Vermont, far away from Kansas where I lived. After a stint in the army, he got into alcohol and drugs.
Mike was a spinner. He kept spinning his life for several decades. On a roulette table, there are thirty-six numbers and a zero. You pick a few numbers and bet on them, a single number pays 36 to 1. A simple game of pure luck, no skill involved ! Most people would choose a few of their favorite numbers and stick to them for the duration of the session. Then there are the crazy spinners. They would bet on four or five different numbers for a few minutes, and suddenly switch to a completely different set of numbers. You will see them in the casinos either howling with anguish or jumping in joy in random order, again and again!! Do they win more than the regular gamblers? Of course not, the probabilities remain the same , but there is this thrill of
“ I switched from 16 to 13 just now and 13 hit right away OMG” !
The spinners are dumb , fatalist gamblers. In life, the spinners usually suck big time, because it is obviously better to bet on one profession or one lover than to switch around constantly. But explain that to Mike!
I really don’t know about what Mike experienced in Vietnam, all I know is that he started college afterwards and managed to get his Bachelor’s degree in Business through his years filled with drugs and alcohol.
For a few years, he bet on the right stuff. He was every young woman’s dream right out of college. A beautiful young lady hooked up with him. Mike got married, got a decent job and had two children, all this in a short period of time.
Then he spinned off. Started sleeping with other women. A lot of other women.
His wife left him and went to her own family in Salina, a little town in Kansas, with the kids.
From this time onwards until the end , for about twenty years, Mike’s life was basically drugs, alcohol and women; serious gambling; rehabilitation programs, dismissal from jobs and getting new jobs. I refuse to give an accurate chronological description of his life, I don’t really care, But these are the noteworthy events:
In the early eighties, in spite of his wild lifestyle, he came to visit his kids at Salina. He really loved them. Coming to Salina from Vermont was a huge pain in the butt. First you drive about two hundred kms to a decent airport. There are no direct flights to Kansas city, so you spend about six or seven hours on two short flights and a layover. Then you rent a car at KC airport and drive for about 300km to Salina. You go back the same way.
I did something very similar to visit my kid at Midland , Michigan throughout the 90’s. Going from Lawrence, Kansas to Midland was also a drive- fly- wait- fly-drive deal. Then you return again through another round of drive- fly- wait- fly-drive. Apart from the money spent , you are physically exhausted, and frustrated because after all this traveling and spending the whole weekend, you actually spend only a few short hours with your kid.
Around 1987, Mikey got lucky. He accepted a job at the University of Kansas. His pay was decent although not enough to support his wild lifestyle and gambling. But of course, now he could visit his kids. Salina was about one hundred miles away, less than two hours by car.
His job had an impressive title: “Director of Concessions”. Actually, there were several kiosks in numerous university buildings where a single employee sold snacks, soft drinks and occasionally pre-made sandwiches. Mike was in charge of all those kiosks. His main job was during big game days at the big stadium where numerous stalls sold junk food to hungry spectators. His office was a little cubbyhole underneath the bleachers at the big stadium.
Mike settled down in his little office under the stadium. He was a good boss, a decent man.
The women on campus all gossiped about the silver fox.
BTW. the university had about thirty thousand students and 2500 staff, so the main food service, not in Mike’s domain, consisted of two massive dining areas, several not so small cafes and a separate food service in the dorms. During the 30+ years I worked there, food was uniformly bland and/or bad everywhere on campus – a classic case of inefficiency of protected monopoly!
Mike had a good physique in spite of his lifestyle because he exercised regularly, That’s how I met him, at the local gym around 1992, I think. This was not the University gym but a city gym, Mike hung out with a lot of local people – real estate agents, cops, local businessmen. His group was a boisterous, obnoxious bunch. When I met them, they talked behind my back about me being a teaching assistant impersonating a professor, me getting a job in the university through affirmative action etc. , and they mocked my accent. Not really too far behind my back, within my earshot! It took a couple of years before I was accepted in their circle. In spite of my initial reluctance, I found that these people were alive, as opposed to most of the middle-aged college professors that I found boring as hell. I could gossip with these people about girls, sex and money and politics; I could call them sons of bitches or worse and they would laugh. Reminded me of my high school days!
I never got close to Mike, he was one of the guys in the group, I watched him, specially his stupid gambling! Casinos were still not around in Kansas city, the only casinos were in Las Vegas and Atlantic city, both far away. Mike would fly to Vegas often. Of course, he would lose money, but one time he won 9000 dollars – that’s his take home salary for three months!
So he would not even cash the casino chips, He brought back 90 one-hundred dollar chips from Vegas and put them at his home on the coffee table. He showed off to his friends, proudly, and next week he went back to Vegas and lost it all!! I mean , you win accidentally once, three months of your salary and don’t even spend any of it – dumb, dumb, dumb!
I told you he was a dumb spinner!
His stupidity caught up to him in his love life, finally, with some disastrous consequences. He started dating one of his employees at one of the kiosks. I actually talked to the woman, she was a good-looking divorced woman in her late thirties. She had a special child, I think autistic. Mike and her girlfriend found it difficult to be intimate in her home. The child would come to their bedroom at night and start screaming- if you know about autistic children, you would know they are very difficult to handle.
There were lots of solutions to this problem. They could have hired a babysitter a couple of evenings a week, they could have rented a hotel room for god’s sake, but no, Mike had the stupidest idea! They started meeting in his little cubbyhole office for sex. I mean not once or twice, but regularly.
This did not go well. Once they were caught, the University dismissed both of them.
Mike was without a job in his mid-fifties, with a lot of gambling debts and no prospect for professional employment in the future. He tried some minimum wage jobs in desperation. After driving a bus for eight hours a day for few weeks, he knew he was not fit for it any more and the money was not enough to pay for his expenses and his massive gambling debts.
Finally, shamed, humiliated and pretty much broke, Mikey went back to Vermont to be with his folks. He wasn’t coming back. We felt bad for him.
Lo and behold, in a couple of weeks, there was a big murmur in the gym. Mikey had called and said he had hit the jackpot. The chatter went like this:
“What happened to Mike”?
“ Mikey told us he met his old sweetheart from high school in Vermont. Her husband died recently. They hooked up and she is going to take care of him for the rest of his life!”
“ Apparently, she is loaded! Mikey was really excited. He said his ship had come in, finally!”
Hmm. That was totally unexpected!
Questions remain. Did this thing just happen or was he stalking her for a while? Knowing Mike, as long as he had a job and some money, he would rather be with a younger, prettier woman –the woman who always wanted the silver fox! Beth, the sweetheart, was his age. Sure, she was a beauty forty years ago, but not so much right now. Maybe only when Mike was pretty much hopeless, he surrendered to her. We shall never know.
Be that as it may, its been an almost astounding twenty years and Mike has been living the dream. He lives with Beth in a mansion in beautiful Vermont countryside. In summer they go to some exclusive resorts in the mountains of Colorado, and in winter, they retreat to exclusive resorts in Florida. They come back to Vermont every Fall to see the gorgeous foliage. I don’t think Mike has a penny to his name besides his social security pension, which would be rather small in his case. Beth is really loaded and she really loves him and takes care of all the expenses. Mike is a well-kept man, indeed!!. Mike’s son has a great job in Lawrence, he visits his son occasionally to spend time with three beautiful granddaughters. His daughter though, lives far away and does not keep in touch with him.
Mike looks great for a man in his late seventies, – ruddy cheeks, tanned, with a headful of white hair. He don’t spin no more. The last spin hit big time.
Bravo Mike!! He showed us that miracles can still happen! The American Dream lives on!
