Pynchon as protagonist--1 of 4

[Paul Di Filippo]

Sent this post yesterday, and it never showed up--trapped in the list's 
size filter, I expect.  So I'm breaking it into parts.


Original message follows:





Foax--because the subject's been raised, I'm taking the extreme liberty 
of posting my story "World Wars III" to the list.  It stars Our Boy.

It originally appeared in 1992 in the UK zine INTERZONE, and then in my 
collection LOST PAGES.


The graph breaks are a little screwed up, because I had to dig up the 
file from an old computer and software.  Hope it's still readable.

Thanks for your indulgence.


WORLD WARS III

"Is history personal or statistical?"
--T. Pynchon.

This happened in Hamburg on the eve of J-Day, the night
of that now legendary USO triple bill:  the Beatles
opening for the Supremes and Elvis.  Sort of a chorus of pop
Valkyries the brass had kindly arranged for all us Jivey
G.I. Joes and Jolly Jack Tars, before booting us over the
edge of the steaming crevasse--filled with prop dry ice, or
leading straight to Hell?--into the gaping maw of the massed
Warsaw Pact troops, chivvied so recently out of West
Germany, harried and weary, but far, far from beaten.
Half the North Atlantic fleet, it seemed, had put in at
Kiel two days before, for refueling and provisioning.  All
hands were forbidden shore leave.  Scuttlebutt had it we
all--or at least my ship, the U.S.S. Rainbow Warrior--would
soon be
  steaming for Gdansk, to participate in a humongous
amphibious attack, which--given the Polish defenses around
their shipyards, led by the already legendary young Major
Walesa--had about as much chance of success as the
Republicans had of beating J.F.K. and Stevenson in the next
elections, or Woody Allen had of playing the romantic lead
against Sinatra's wife Mia.
Those were our chances, that is, if the patrolling
Russkie subs didn't sink us first en route.
This prospect did not sit well with Pig Bodine and me.
It wasn't so much that we were scared of dying.  Gee whiz,
no.  Three years of battle had cured us of that childish
fear, innoculating us with the universal vaccine known as
war-anomie.  It was simply that we didn't want to miss the
big show down Hamburg way.
"I seen the Beatles before the war," said Pig, "right
in Hamburg, at the Star Club.  Man, they could rock.  I
thought they were going somewhere, but I never heard anymore
about them.  I didn't even know they were still playing
together."
Bodine was lying upside down on his bunk, head hanging
floorward, trying to get a cheap--and the only
available--high from the rush of blood to his head.
Physiology recapitulates pharmacology.  Above the bunk hung
a tattered poster of James Dean and Brigette Bardot in From Russia With 
Love. (The Prez, Fan in Chief of Fleming's novels,
had an identical one, only autographed, hanging in the Oval
Office.)
Pig's enormous hairy stomach was exposed below--or,
more precisely, above--his dirty shirt; his navel was
plugged with some disgusting smegma that resembled
bearing-grease and Crisco.
Bodine's navel-jam fascinated me at the same time it
repelled me.  Coming from a white-bread background,
illustrious Puritan forebears and all that, good school and
the prospect of a slick entrance into the corporate life at
Boeing, I had never met anyone quite like Bodine before.  He
represented some kind of earth-force to me, a troll of
mythic proportions, liable at any moment to unleash a storm
of belches and farts capable of toppling trees, accompanied
by a downpour of sweat and jizm.
I had known Bodine for ten years now, since I had
dropped out of Cornell and enlisted in the Navy in '55.
Peacetime.  It seems so long ago, and so short.  Twenty
years between the first two, and twenty more till the third.
Had They been planning it all along, just biding their time
until the wounds had healed and the people had forgotten,
until the factories could retool to meet the new specs from
the R. & D. labs?  Was peace, in fact, like diplomacy,
merely another means of waging war...?
Bodine had been my constant companion through all that
time, even when I had made it briefly into officers'
territory, before being busted back.  (And that's another
story entirely, but one also not entirely innocent of the
Presence of the Pig, Germanic totem of death, he.) We had
been through a lot of craziness together.  But even so, even
knowing him as I did, I could not have calculated the vector
of the madness we were about to embark on now, nor its fatal
terminus.
"I think I heard something about them a year or two
ago," I replied, imagining Pig's mouth as occupying his
forehead and his eyes his chin.  It barely improved his
looks.  "The guy named McCarthy--"
"McCartney," interrupted Pig.
"Whatever.  He was arrested on a morals charge.  Got
caught with some jailbait.  And then his buddy, Lemon--"
"Lennon."
"All right already with the teacher riff.   Do you
wanna hear the story or not?  Lennon started shooting heroin
when the war broke out, and had to spend some time in a
clinic.  This must be a comeback tour."
"I could use a little cum back myself," snorted Pig.
"Left too much in the last port!  Snurg, snarf, hyuck!" This
last approximating Piggy laughter.  "God, I'm going
ship-crazy!  I gotta see that show and get laid!  Dig me--do
you still have that Shore Patrol rig we swiped?"
"Yeah, why?"
"Just lissen--"
And so, several hours later, all tricked out, we
prepared to breach our own force's
defenses.
It was dark, and Benny Yoyodyne, slowest of the slow,
was on duty guarding the gangway.  I was wearing the S.P.
armband, harness and nightstick, and had my sidearm strapped
on.  Pig was in cuffs.
"Halt!" said Yoyodyne, brandishing his rifle like some
Annapolis frosh.  "No one's permitted to disembark."
"It's okay, Benny.  They just need Bodine on shore for
his court-martial tomorrow."
Yoyodyne lowered his gun and scratched under his cap.
"Court-martial?  Gee, I'm sorry to hear that.  What'd he
do?"
"You know the soup we had last week?  The one that
tasted so grungy?  He pissed in it.  They discovered it when
they saw the distinctive urine corrosion in the kettles. The
Captain had seconds, and nearly died."
Yoyodyne turned six shades of green.  "Good Christ!
what a--a pig!" 
  
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