in—the key is getting one of those guys attached to your deal. Same thing in Hollywood, there’s maybe twenty, thirty people at any one time who can make a project go. The names might change from year to year, but the dynamic’s the same, the number stays about the same. You get one of those people attached to your deal, you’re gold.”
“Swank,” Crack offers.
“Swank is gold,” Albert confirms.
“Wahlberg?” Mango asks.
“Marky can make a project go.”
“How ’bout Wesley Snipes,” says Lodis. “Like, you know, say we got him to play me.”
“Interesting.” Albert ponders a moment. “Not this movie, but I tell you what, Lodis. I’ll see if I can get you the bitch part in his next film, how about that.”
Aaaaaaaannnnnnnhhhhhhh, everybody slags on Lodis, who just grins with food mashed all over his teeth. They’re interrupted by a Stadium Club patron who wants to say hello. It’s never the young or middle-aged men who stop to speak but always the older guys, the silverbacks secure in the fact that they’re past their fighting prime. They thank the soldiers for their service. They ask how is lunch. They offer praise for such assumed attributes as tenacity, aggressiveness, love of country. This particular patron, a fit, ruddy fellow with some black still in his hair, introduces himself with a lavish trawling of vowels that comes out sounding like “How-Wayne.” Soon he’s telling them about the bold new technology his family’s oil company uses to juice more crude out of the Barnett Shale, something to do with salt water and chemical fracturing agents.
“Some of my friends’ kids are serving over there with you,” How-Wayne tells them. “So it’s a personal thing with me, boosting domestic production, lessening our dependence on foreign oil. I figure the better I do my job, the sooner we can bring you young men home.”
“Thank you!” Dime responds. “That’s just excellent, sir. We certainly do appreciate that.”
“I’m just trying to do my part.” And that was cool, Billy will later reflect. If he’d just said enjoy your meal like everybody else and returned to his lucrative patriotic life, but no, he got greedy. He had to squeeze just a little bit more from Bravo. So, he says, just from your own perspective, how do you think we’re doing over there?
“How’re we doing?” Dime echoes brightly. “Just from our own perspective?” The Bravos fold their hands and look down at their plates, though several can’t help smiling. Albert cocks his head and pockets his BlackBerry, suddenly interested. “Well, it’s a war,” Dime continues in that same bright voice, “which is by definition an extreme situation, people trying very hard to terminate each other. But I’m far from qualified to speak to the big picture, sir. All I can tell you with any confidence is that the exchange of force with intent to kill, that is truly a mind-altering experience, sir.”
“I’m sure, I’m sure.” How-Wayne is gravely nodding. “I can imagine how hard it is on you young men. To be exposed to that level of violence—”
“No!” Dime interrupts. “That’s not it at all! We like violence, we like going lethal! I mean, isn’t that what you’re paying us for? To take the fight to America’s enemies and send them straight to hell? If we didn’t like killing people then what’s the point? You might as well send in the Peace Corps to fight the war.”
“Ah ha,” How-Wayne chuckles, though his smile has lost some wattage. “I guess you’ve got me there.”
“Listen, you see these men?” Dime gestures around the table. “I love every one of these mutts like a brother, I bet I love them more than their mommas even, but I’ll tell you frankly, and they know how I feel so I can say this right in front of them, but just for the record, this is the most murdering bunch of psychopaths you’ll ever see. I don’t know how they were before the Army got them, but you give them a weapons system and a couple of Ripped Fuels and they’ll blast the hell out of anything that moves. Isn’t that right, Bravo?”
They answer instantly, with gusto, Yes, Sergeant! Throughout the restaurant, dozens of well-coifed heads whip around.
“See what I mean?” Dime chortles. “They’re killers, they’re having the time of their lives. So if your family’s oil company wants to frack the living shit out of the Barnett Shale, that’s fine, sir, that’s absolutely your prerogative, but don’t be doing it on our account. You’ve got your business and we’ve got ours, so you just keep on drilling, sir, and we’ll keep on killing.”
How-Wayne opens his mouth and flaps his jaw once or twice, but nothing comes out. His eyes have receded deep into his head. Behold, Billy thinks, the world’s most mindfucked millionaire.
“I’ve gotta go,” How-Wayne mumbles, glancing around as if checking his escape route. Don’t talk about shit you don’t know, Billy thinks, and therein lies the dynamic of all such encounters, the Bravos speak from the high ground of experience. They are authentic. They are the Real. They have dealt much death and received much death and smelled it and held it and slopped through it in their boots, had it spattered on their clothes and tasted it in their mouths. That is their advantage, and given the masculine standard America has set for itself it is interesting how few actually qualify. Why we fight, yo, who is this we? Here in the chicken-hawk nation of blowhards and bluffers, Bravo always has the ace of bloods up its sleeve.
By the time How-Wayne leaves, the Bravos are openly sniggering. “You know, David,” Albert says, gazing thoughtfully at Dime, “once you’re out of the Army, you really ought to consider acting.”
The Bravos hoot, but Albert seems serious, and Dime does too because he asks quite solemnly, “Was I too hard on him?” which cracks everybody up, yet he sits there completely straight-faced. Several Bravos start chanting Holly-wooood while Day tells Albert, “Dime ain’t no act, he just like fucking with people,” to which Albert answers, “What do you think acting is?” which inspires another round of hoots. As all this is going on Dime leans toward Billy and murmurs:
“Now dammit, Billy, why did I give that man such a hard time?”
“I don’t know, Sergeant. I guess you had your reasons.”
“Dear Jesus. And what might those be?”
Billy’s pulse takes off. It’s like being called on in class. “Hard to say, Sergeant. Because you hate bullshit?”
“Yeah, maybe. Plus I’m an asshole?”
Billy declines to answer. Dime laughs, sits back and waves for a waiter. When he turns back to Billy there it is again, The Look, his gaze so frank and open-ended that Billy can’t help but wonder, Why me? At first he feared it was the start of some hideous gay thing, gay being virtually his sole reference point for prolonged eye contact from a fellow male, but lately he doubts it, a conclusion that required no small broadening of his view of human nature. Dime is after something else, some acknowledgment or as-yet-to-be-determined insight, though Billy knows if he described it to your average third party it would come out sounding gay, just based on a strict visual rendering of the trigger event. You had to be inside it to understand the pure human misery of that day, the desolation, for instance, one among many, of seeing Lake up on the table fighting off the docs, howling and flailing and slinging blood like he wasn’t being saved but skinned alive. Billy has come to see that as the breaking point, the bend in his personal arc that day. There was before and there was after, and whatever of his shit he still had together he lost it then, broke down sobbing right there on the aid station ramp. Surely his mind would have cracked from shock and grief had not Dime shoved him into a supply pantry, slammed him up against the wall and pinned him there as if bent on bodily harm. By then Dime was weeping too, both of them hacking, gagging on snot, covered in mud and blood and sweat as if they’d just that moment climbed gasping and retching from some elemental pit of primordial sludge. I knew it would be you, Dime was hissing over and over, his mouth a butane torch in Billy’s ear, I knew it would be you, I knew it I knew it I so fucking