Free The Apprentice Lover by Jay Parini

bullshit all night because you can’t sleep and don’t want to, in case you don’t wake up. Eddie and I talk all the time. Iowa is nowhere, I tell him. Back in Pennsylvania we pronounce it O-hi-o.
    We tell stories when we can’t sleep, trading them like you and I used to trade baseball cards. He knew everything there was in just a few nights about all of us. About Mom’s fat ass and Dad’s big empty tasteless zucchini and your humongous fucking classical brain and literary presumptions. Is that the word? I’m no fucking writer, but I know what I like.
    PFC Fucking Massolini. Who’s that? I got another month or so here, they tell me, in Saigon. Then up country we go, over the river and through the woods. Can’t wait. Proud to serve. Mr. Rawhide himself, with my M-16, gas-operated, ready to rock. Got twenty rounds in the magazine. Thing weighs 8.2, not including the strap. And not including the fucking grenade launchers they’re hoping to teach me to launch, which means you’re also stuck with ten or so extra rounds of ammo. A lot to hump and haul through mosquito swamps and elephant grass when you’ve got jungle rot and wanna scratch and dust your balls with DDT.
    Eddie’s part Indian, he claims, so they made him the medicine man. (We call him Sitting Bullshit.) Bastard’s gonna haul bandages, iodine, plasma, morphine, tape, hypodermics, all that glassy, gooey, spooky shit. Save your fucking life in the right (or wrong) situation, so he’s got to haul it. The walking drugstore.
    Speaking of humping, you still got your cherry? I hear those girls in the Ivy League are pretty damn tight-assed, all talk and no action. A hand-job in the library stacks if you’re lucky. Come out here, and get laid in style. There’s a whole street in Saigon, Ding Dong Avenue, they call it. Stopped by last night. You’d love it, man—regular shopping mall for tits and ass. Take your pick, honey. You stand in the lobby and point, then the Momma unites you in the elevator, till death do you part. The bitch takes you upstairs, saying things with a shit-eating grin like “Americans big money” and “U.S. soldier good man inbed.” Nice bathtubs, where she scrubs your nuts and prick. Big beds, mirrors on the ceiling so if you’re into that kind of kinky shit you can watch yourself hump (if you’re on your back). Or maybe she can watch you hump. They seem to like it, the fucking, though you can’t tell shit from their Shinola. I can’t anyway, but what did I ever know?
    Dad got all emotional and told me the night I left that he learned something in The War, but he never said what. Started to say something about Italy. About Salerno. But the words didn’t come easy and he just quit talking. Like whatever he learned over there wasn’t worth saying or was too deep to spit it out. I don’t honestly think I’ll learn a fucking thing in Nam. Don’t believe there’s anything much to pick up here except the crabs.
    â€œIs there a God?” Eddie keeps asking me—it’s like the biggest question in Iowa, he claims. “If so, how did he think up all this shit? How did he come up with Nam?” Maybe he’s a demonic genius, I said to him. Maybe he’s bored. This whole fucking mess happened because there’s nothing on TV up there in heaven, and you can’t lay an angel.
    I told Eddie he should ask you the biggies, and that there’s more to you than meets the eye. Underneath it all, you got some balls. I believe that. You come on quiet at first, but then somebody bangs up against your wall, and you squeal.
    By the way, if Uncle Sam Wants You, take my advice. Give Uncle the big finger. No good is coming out of this war, that’s for sure. Whatever Dad says, he’s wrong. He’s “so proud of me,” he writes. Mom writes nothing, though she sends clippings from the Wilkes-Barre Record. Just the