Читать книгу Saint in Vain - Matthew K. Perkins - Страница 6

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There are a lot of people out there, and people can believe anything. My grandpa believed that there is a direct correlation between one’s use of the words Sir and Ma’am and the quality of their character. A childhood friend of mine, Tyler, believed Batman was real three years after he knew that Santa wasn’t. Sergeant First Class Murphy believed in pizza and ghosts. My first girlfriend believed that everyone has a One True Love, and my mom believed in God. Charles, our demolitions expert, believed that fired rifle cartridges held the sweetest scent in the world, to which Murphy said, Sweeter than your girlfriend’s pussy? and Charles said, Yes sir, sweeter than that. My high school chemistry teacher, Mr. Clemens, believed that the entire universe was once contained in an infinitely small and hot space, and now it’s all contained in an infinitely large and cold space. Private First Class Church believed that baseball is the only sport worth considering, and that a large amount of money could make him happy in spite of anything else. Jude believed in America. And me? I believe in the necessity of murder—not the evil kind of murder, but a real good murder.

But I didn’t always believe in that. Not even when I was a professional soldier. I guess it’s a new adaptation of mine, because for the longest time I didn’t believe in anything. I had so many beliefs thrown at me that I’d just run and duck for cover. But ducking and running is for people like me, and I’m not the bravest man I’ve ever met. That title belongs to someone else—you are going to meet him too. At some point in his life he realized that beliefs needed to be grasped onto, and the more stubborn you can hold on, the better. I think of it like those games of chicken I would play as a kid. Who could hold their breath the longest? Who would stay in the haunted basement the longest? Let’s both grab this piece of hot metal and whoever lets go first should be ashamed, whoever lets go last deserves a damned medal. That’s what believing is.

The way I figure it, running away or holding on for dear life is about all you can do, because you can’t fight beliefs—you sure as hell can’t fight them. Take it from me because I’ve been to war, and there’s nothing like war to either solidify what you believe, or bomb it back to the Stone Age. If war is good for one thing, it’s that it has the awesome power of transforming trivial beliefs into crystal clear ones. And if you don’t have any beliefs—like I did—then it will create them for you. It will reach down into the depths of your soul, if you believe in that kind of thing, and bring back up with it a noisy conglomeration of sorrow and dirt and violence. Then those things will never go away. They’ll become a part of you. No matter how far you run and no matter what you use to cover them up, that violence and that sorrow will lurk.

Between all the gods and the theories and the alien abductions, it’s about impossible to know what to believe. Some people will make it sound like that’s a new problem. They’ll say, There’s so much crap out there today, it’s hard to know what to believe. But I’m here to tell you that there’s always been a lot a crap out there. It’s nothing new. But those people love to tell you that it’s new, and they love to tell you that it’s new right before they tell you what you can believe in. They are convinced that they have figured it all out, and they want to share. However, no belief is worse than the one that needs to impose itself. That one that believes it is the belief. I hate that one, and so should you.

All of this confusion with beliefs started after I enlisted in the United States Army, where I was just competent enough to make it through basic training. And while other graduates were strutting around in their new uniform fits and catching up with family, I was looking for the nearest bar. Not because I had a drinking problem, but because I had nothing better to do, and because ten weeks is a long time to go without a drink. True to the spirit of America’s Midwest, it’s not uncommon to find yourself drinking alone at a third-rate bar when you believe you’d rather be anywhere else in the world. Like any respectable bar of its type, the lighting is poor, the music is poor, the dead heads of countless wildlife are pristine, and all of the drink specials consist of whiskey.

I don’t know if it was the ten week absence, or the pride I felt in graduating basic training, but on this particular evening I found cheap whiskey lighting the fire of my blood and my sentimentalism. After five drinks too many, it just so happened that one of my fellow graduates took a bar stool next to me, still dressed in his full graduate regalia. He was a younger, dark skinned man, and at the bottom of a shot glass I found all the drunken memories of an old Native American studies elective class I took in high school. He didn’t seem to share in my newfound passion for all those forgotten symbols and rituals. He ignored my questions about the medicine wheel, thunderbirds, coyote, etc. He said he didn’t believe in that stuff, etc.

I was going on and on without him saying much of anything. Then, over his glass of dark beer, he finally spoke up. He came from a tribe of plains Indians, but he said that all of that stuff was bullshit to him. He told me that his great-great-great-grandfather had tried to make it in the new world by becoming a stonemason. He gave a hysterical laugh and said that his great-great-great-grandfather didn’t even know that there were different types of masons. That was the kind of thing that ran in the blood of families, with secrets and crafts passed from old to young as long as the surname added up. It wasn’t something you decided to take up, he said. Through their generations, his family passed an adopted and failed lifestyle. He shook his head and took another drink of his beer. Whatever stability his family had, it had was ruined by the failed masonry endeavor. He said that he hadn’t seen his family in years. He quit his job in construction to join the army.

And that probably should have been the end of our conversation, but the passion and whiskey that flowed through me wasn’t sedated. I spun on my barstool and I reminded him of the beauty and the power that lie in the ritual of the ghost dance. I spoke of the trickster Coyote, and how he had bravely stolen fire from the gods to give to man. I told him that Manifest Destiny and masonry could suck one. But he was fed up with my drunken rant and I knew it was time to shut up. He finished his beer and said to me, Man, I’m just here to get laid.

He said that to me and walked away. At first I just figured that this guy is just a lot like me—just trying to get away from all the noise. Trying to get away from all the beliefs. A glance at the evidence would show that he believes in drinking beer and trying to have sex with women, and that’s probably good enough for a lot of people. It’s not enough for me, but I do hope he got laid that night.

My encounter with that young man may not seem so remarkable on its own, but less than two years later, in a similar bar and on the eve of my combat deployment, I thought I saw him again. This time, if it was him, he sat on the other end of the bar with his dark beer while I drank quietly on my whiskey until I couldn’t tell the difference between my ass and my elbow. It may seem like your classic case of pre-war over reaction, but if you ask me, it wasn’t reaction enough. You must understand that before I ever set boots on enemy soil (and just before this particular night) I nearly died to a god damn hot dog. I’ll get into that story later—just know that I’m not kidding. I was terrified. I felt doomed. I was so afraid to be in a war that by the time we got to Iraq I was literally hoping to die, just so I wouldn’t be afraid anymore. That much fear for that long of time can really wear on a person. I got to the point where I was even afraid of myself. I just saw myself as one more thing that could get me killed. And so on that occasion, I drank whiskey like it was the last time, because I thought it was. And when the man with the dark beer was helping me into a taxi at the end of the night there was no talk about thunderbirds or getting laid. He said, You’re going to be fine, bud. I know it.

I doubt he ever knew it, but you know what happened? Through all the haze of whiskey and fear and self-pity, I happened upon a moment of clarity and I believed him. For no good reason, I believed him. The next morning I began to think that maybe I was going to be okay after all. The weight on my chest lifted slightly and I felt like I could breathe again. I became convinced that that guy knew something that nobody else knew. I was sure that we happened upon each other on those two nights because he served a purpose. Never mind that I wasn’t even sure it was the same guy. Never mind that. For a time it appeared that my dark beer’d stranger had changed my life. That experience did a lot for me as far as believing goes, until it was all shot and blown to hell just a handful of months later. For that brief time I was no longer running from all the noise. I wasn’t quite a believer, but it was the first time I felt relaxed since the moment before I saw a plane flying into skyscraper.

The difference with me is that I was drinking on the Kool-Aid, not handing it out. That takes a different kind of person, and I don’t know what to make of the people who spend their lives making the Kool-Aid. Teachers and pastors and preachers and writers and economists and journalists and politicians and prophets and theorists and scientists and all the like. They spout on and on about how this paradigm is better than that one. They endlessly rant that such and such religious beliefs are the way to heaven, and such and such aren’t. Sunnis and Shiites, democrats and republicans, whatever and whatever, Amen. They’re an interesting sort, and a real dangerous one too. Are they liars? I guess if someone really believes in something then they aren’t lying, they are just mistaken. And if they really, really believe it, then I suppose they have a responsibility to share it with as many people as possible. I mean, if you really believe that eating an apple a day is the secret to a long and healthy lifestyle, then wouldn’t you try to tell as many people as possible? What if you believed that lowering taxes would improve the lives of everyone in a given political division? You’d push for change, right? And what if you thought that a certain group of people was a major threat to your lifestyle and to your loved ones? Would you kill them? And what if you believed in God? Plant someone who believes there is a God next to someone who believes there is not. Neither is a liar, but one of them is mistaken. Maybe somehow both of them are. Hell, I don’t know.

So you either run away from all these beliefs, only to realize that there is no escaping them, or you gotta take your pick—just pick a set of them and hold on for dear life. And let me assure you that when you finally decide on what you believe in, it’s going to feel good. There’s going to be plenty of reasons why you settled on what you did, and they are all going to make perfect sense. Beliefs bring with them a sense of purpose and a sense of security. They make the chaos of the world seem neat and understandable, and there’s going to be a bunch of little signs and events that happen that are really going to solidify each belief for you. Congratulations.

That’s usually the case, anyway. For me? When I finally had to start believing, I found myself running through a small town with a high-powered rifle in one hand and a dangerous set of convictions in the other. I never pegged myself as a murderer, but that’s what beliefs do to you—they mess you up. Now I know that my experience isn’t a typical one, but it brings me to one more point—people will kill for their convictions.

People will kill for them if only because they believe that beliefs are worth killing for. I sure as hell believe that to call a man mistaken over something he really believes in is about the most dangerous thing you can do. He might shrug it off or he might go to war with you. I found my safety, for a time, by running from the noise. Just be sure to call it something other than “noise.” Call it beliefs. Call it worldviews. Call it the heart. Call it a feeling.

My friend, call it whatever you need to, so long as you can get the hell out of the way when the war comes.