The Greatest Degeneration
By Bucky McMahon
The bomb blew up
No Bikini Atoll
And the wolf’s eyes
Barrroinged!
On springs like
Wow wow wow
War was over Rover
Yet tsunamis of traumas
Of stress and nostalgia
Rolled out from the blast
Godzilla and Rodan
Boiled up from the deep
Last seen moving east
Blown back on the States
Fleeing in slo-mo
Out in the burbs
Were Momma and Daddy
New parents and nervous wrecks
Drinking and smoking
Cigars cigarettes Tiparillos
Falstaff beers and Stillbrook bourbon
Awaiting the pounding on the door
Of maniacal history
In the recent mythic past
Daddy aka the Commander
Captain of a tank platoon
He and his men sleeping in a scrum
In the woods like Lassie’s abandoned puppies
In a world at war
On the perilous road to Berlin
They must find the courage
To make the choices
Between the love of brothers
And the fate of a nation
To drive a stake
Into the heart of Hitler
Momma meanwhile in Miami
Happy kooky copy editor
Puffing pieces of victory
Dancing to the Big Bands at the Copa
Oh the men the men the men
Then wham bam thank you ma’am
Two sets of Irish twins
Eileen Pat Molly Mike
Daddy a salesman out there on a shoeshine
Riding the rising tide of American Triumphalism
Momma saddled at home
With us boomer brats
Each a genius in his or her style
Of emotional manipulation
In 1955 I battled my way
From where I’d always been
Wriggled out of infinity and in
To this narrow dimension
The world filled in my skin
Swaddled me with sensation
I lustily approved of the food
Smacked my milky gums
Tasting my own genome
And all the ancestors I had eaten
Sniffed on Daddy’s breath a whiff
Of meat stuck in the molars
Who was this carnivorous ape
And who was that third
Who walked always between
Momma and Daddy
Or lurked in the backyard
In the long black coat
It was the war
Tailing us all along
Why did I like you war
All mixed up in my childish aesthetic
With the Gothic grays
Of black and white TV
With ruins and gloomy dungeons
Ancient crimes and the atavistic shame
Of man as wolf to man
My mentor Bestoink Dooley
The Big Movie Shocker host
Raccoon-eyed raconteur
Beckett tramp in bowler hat and ragged suit
Said kiddoes horror is fun when you’re safe at home
In the paneled den Eileen Pat Molly Mike
Horror movies a Sabbath of awe
At the end of the Mighty Week
Boris Karloff in “Bedlam”
The inmates calling “Nell Bowan! Nell Bowan!”
For the cruelly incarcerated heroine
We poked and parodied “Elbowin’! Elbowin’!”
A scenery chewing werewolf named Andreas
We called “Un-dray-ussed”
Southern for nekkid as a jaybird
Some fun the birth of the pun
But reverently mum for the classics
The dripping gastrointestinal intimacy Of a Transylvanian castle
The maggot pallidity of the occupant
Dread of that egomaniac Herr Dracula
Jack-in-the-boxing up from coffin
To bite the neck of blooming love
Something fucked up about a universe
With such monsters in it
Dread too of the dry-ice rising
In ye olde ancestral wood
Howl of the wolfman terrier
Terror of the Wehrmacht
Tearing everything to shreds bad dog
The teeth the teeth the teeth
In bed by night-light
With sock-monkey security
I called on Jesus Christ of the crossroads
And by the power of the garlic bulb swore
If I survived the night
I would make myself strong
I would kill the wolf or be killed
Win win for the kid at war
A hero either way
I geared up with Daddy’s stuff
His war memorabilia requisitioned
Through Operation Santa Claus
In brief: a protoplasmic blob of plastic toys
Board games with scattered cards and tokens
The hat the dog the candlestick
The E-Z Bake Oven
Vac-U-Form fumes and goop
Of Creepy Crawlies cooking
Sulphur stink of yellowed test-tubes
Towers of Tinker Toy Lincoln Logs and blocks
Myrmidons! A thousand plastic Army Men
In action poses at ease among dinosaurs Indians
Knights with detachable armor from FAO Schwarz
Four kids times ten Christmases
The unconditional Momma love exuding
A squalor up from the big red toybox
Creeping further every day of the Mighty Week
Before Daddy comes home on Clean-up Friday
Our blob reaching by then sometimes
Into Daddy’s sacred shrines and in a word
A military word
Rat-fucking his stuff
Promising Momma we’d put it back
And then we just didn’t
Web belt canteen mess kit
Dummy grenade of pig-iron
What mighty arm could chuck it
Steel helmet with built-in concussion
Stenciled with Daddy’s captain’s bars
Biggest prize his bayonet
Handle wound in leather strips
Hard as a dog chew
Blade with serrated bit near the hilt for woodcraft
The rest for homicide
I knew my alphabet
My butterflies and dinosaurs
And the order of attack
First the air assault
Then artillery to soften ’em up
Then the advance with armor and infantry (Daddy was armor)
Finally the street by street mop-up
In the shattered ruins
Hand-to-hand meant bayonet
Thrust In the guts or slash the throat
Tough guy, eh?
A gat in the ribs of my onesie
And then one foggy
Eileen Pat Molly gone
To Maculate Hart (the spotted deer)
Of Mary Catholic
One righteous American boy
Son of a hero and a saint
Geared up and moved out
Headed for the backyard piney wood Ardennes
To drive the Nazi host from the haunted shed
Soldier private Dave Delonne
Replacement from two doors down
Saluted my captain’s bar and my bayonet
Cover me here dig in move out
Lay down suppressing fire soldier
Authority is fun but
He slunk off in a funk
Cursing you’re not the captain of me
I’ll see you shot for desertion
Or is it have you shot and see you hung
No matter I got the major on the horn
Permission to fall back denied
Do you hear me denied
I rogered that and threaded a fresh roll of caps
I would take the shed alone
Sure you could call it a suicide mission
What other kind was there
Such hard-bitten dialogue
Ran naturally in our heads
The constant recitation of the epic
The tongue probing the pulpy hole
Left by sixty million departed souls
In the movies I mean and on TV
Combat! Starring Vic Morrow and Rick Jason
Matched pair of Hollywood B-listers
One blonde one brunet
Like Joe and Frank Hardy
Shorthand for everybody
In a hard-luck platoon
An hour weekly portion
Of intolerable anxiety
Always creeping on tippy toes
Cover to cover quiet as rabbits
Timid as deer
The soundtrack synaesthesiac
An aural olfactory for the hunter and hunted
Woodwinds tootling whiffs of alarum
Now blaring horns carrying a hot blast of Fritz
Achtung bitch!
Another and another and another
Square-jawed Aryan Californian extra
Crescendo of brass a beat of silencio
Then Crack!
The guest star stumbles hit
Ratatatat! Ricochet pee-ooww!
The tensely awaited firefight erupts
Brought to you by Hai Karate cologne
And Gillette close shaves
All that sensory orchestration
Easily administrated by a boy
Alone in Georgia piney woods
The play danger the immanence
Of the magnetism of death
I ran towards hot flying steel
Deliciously alive
Doing a sort of hula of evasion
In a simian crouch
Head pulled in like a turtle
For as far as I believably dared
Then flung myself on the blessed earth
Panting like a lover
Nuzzling the resinous needles
Never wanting to leave her
Never never never
Yet knowing leave you must
Also I was partial to Sgt. Rock comics
The catastrophe in hieroglyphs
The exhausted Dogface
Red eyes and Bluto stubble
Starburst explosions
From the potato-masher
Shell-casings leaping like popcorn
The dive-bombing Stuka
Foreshortened to a blur of props
And stubby guns strafing
Dropping death-dealing turds on Easy Company
Their every panel was a BenDay dot nightmare
Embedded in war like pine-boring beetles
Bulldozer dim bulb lineman on BAR
Ice Cream Soldier lethal waif with veins of antifreeze
Sgt. Rock the ultimate father figure
Emptying his Thompson gun
Bullets of pure chagrin fountaining from his brow
Here was Daddy’s temper
His subsumed rage
When the lawnmower wouldn’t start
When the screw stripped
The Christmas light blinked out
The jackasses in traffic ahead of us
The war exhausted all his patience
Exhausted his parental urges
Carrying his men to Berlin like a carton of eggs
Renowned for his intelligence and caution
Beloved by his platoon
As he loved his men
His gunny sergeant sleeping curled at his feet
Like Superdog with a submachinegun
Daddy sold tank-like cars
Drove a Chrysler Imperial
His PTS steed
Twice into collisions with trains
The armor saving him
And maybe the booze
A good provider
And perfect stranger
No wonder we kids so fucking boring
Compared to war
And goddamned expensive
Still he could be a wit in his cups
A Henny Youngman Yahweh
His one-liners or the highway
His brood his straight guys
As for me the last and least and worst
My role was to play dumb
My motto Non Serviam!
My stratagem the lie
I made my greasy slide
Into the sebaceous pit of puberty
Knowing by then little proto-hippie
Long-haired pacifist smartass
War had never ended
Only shape-shifted and re-infected
The Sleeping Giant would never sleep again
Destroy the village
To save the village
Kill a gook for president Nixon
Agent orange exfoliation
Napalm scorching naked children
Crispy Critters on both sides
And all along Daddy drifting to the right
Buying the dominoes
The bright shining lie of
The greatest degeneration
The three folks he despised the most
John Lennon Hanoi Jane Phony Joanie Baez
He snarled their names as he carved the Sunday roast
And I would think: there it is
There’s the wolf
Now it’s in the house.
***
Bucky McMahon writes, paints, and sculpts in Atlantic Beach, Florida. While studying Creative Writing with Jerome Stern and Janet Burroway at The Florida State University, he wrote a humor column, “Barmadillo,” for the Tallahassee Democrat. As a contributing editor for Esquire, and a correspondent for Outside Magazine, he reported from many exotic and tragic locales around the world. His feature stories have been anthologized in the Best American Writing series, for sports (twice) and travel. He is the author of Night Diver, a collection of adventure yarns and cartoons based on dreams.
