The Movies
by George Gauthier
Chapter 7
Superstition
I ran into my friend Sean Danaher this afternoon in the park. The man is eighty years old but is still going strong despite the usual health problems you would expect for a man of his years. He is one of those wise oldsters who has seen it all, done it all, and always takes what comes with an enviable equanimity. I saw how steady he was in a fight when he saved me from a mauling by a pit bull. He crushed its skull with three good whacks with his shillelagh, the Irish walking stick which helps him with his balance. Among the many ills he has been diagnosed with is profound osteoarthritis in both knees.
He takes life day by day, and appreciates that, despite his health problems, he still has decent quality of life. Aches and pains aside he gets around pretty well. Semi-annual cortisone shots keep his knees from constantly aching though he does feel a jolt of pain now and again when walking along, especially downhill. So far there are no signs of cognitive decline, the only thing besides cancer he truly dreads. He saw that happen to a close friend who died inside inch by inch over a period of years till almost nothing was left of the man he had once been. Sean lives alone now, a widower for the past four years.
My friend doubts that he will ever reach ninety but figures that just by getting into his eighties he has had a good run and really better than most. After all, at one time, there was a very good chance that he would not get out of his twenties alive. That was during a tour of duty with a company of mechanized infantry in Vietnam and Cambodia. He came back with three purple hearts and a Bronze Star with V device for Valor and a serious but manageable case of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.
I saw him talking with a couple of teenagers. Sean nodded so I came up close enough to listen but did not intrude on their conversation. It seems that when one of them tried to pull the tab on a can of soda it broke off making it impossible to open.
"This is why I still carry a church key with me," he told them, as he punctured the top of the can with two triangular holes, one an exit for the beverage a smaller one to admit air and equalize the pressure.
"A church key?" the older one asked. "It doesn't look like a key of any sort."
Sean explained that its shape originally did resemble an old fashioned key which might open the lock of a church door. The tool version started as a bottle opener to pop the tops off soda bottles. This was before twist-off screw caps. When beer cans first came into general use a century ago some means was needed to open their flat topped tin cans. Back then cans were actually made of steel which was coated with tin to prevent rust. Some unsung genius added a triangular punch to the other end of the church key, making it able to open both bottles and cans.
"Now this tool will only work on the flat top of your aluminum soda can. It won't work on the concave bottom."
The teen nodded. "I can see that, but why is the bottom hollowed in the first place?"
"The aluminum skin is very thin. The hollow shape gives it greater strength than if it were flat at both ends. At one time when soda cans and beer cans were made of tinplate, they were flat top and bottom."
"So you could open either end, right?"
"You could, but I always made it a point to never open one upside down."
"Why?"
"Superstition -- not mine but the guys I was with."
Sean explained that early on during his combat tour in Vietnam, he was cautioned by another soldier when he went to open a can of Dr. Pepper warning him that he was about to open the wrong end, the unlucky end. That would set up a jinx that sooner or later would bring bad luck, maybe not just to him but to guys he was with. The teen snorted:
"Hey, I'm just a kid, but even I know that is superstitious nonsense."
"You're right, son. It was nonsense, but I went along with it and was always careful after that never to open the bottom of a soda can. The fears of my comrades were born of superstition, but that did not make their fear any less real to them. I realized that I had better not make light of their fears and open the can at either end. In good conscience I could not add to their fears which would only be confirmed by whatever bad thing happened next, as it must in combat, whether it be in a fire fight or ambush, or by sniper, landmine, or booby traps -- even snake bite or heat stroke. Of course, nowadays drinks cans always have stay-tabs like the one which broke off on yours."
The second boy smiled slyly and asked.
"So, what if you didn't have a church key handy?"
Sean smiled and told the youngster:
"In country might not always have had a church key with me, but I always had my trusty bayonet which was more of a tool than a weapon." He then pantomimed holding it in his left hand and hitting the hilt with the heel of his right hand. With that Sean slipped the tool into one of the many pockets of his travel vest.
The boys grinned, thanked Sean both for his help and the history lesson, then went on their way. Sean told me that he was a bit disappointed. There he had just got warmed up, but the boys left before Sean got to describe pull-tab cans, colloquially know as pop-tops. Not for nothing are the Irish known for their loquaciousness or their gift of gab.
"So Sean, was it really worth the effort when you were over there, carrying the extra weight of several cans of warm soda in your rucksack?"
"It didn't happen that way. The mechanized infantry didn't get around by shank's mare, not usually. We rode atop our APCs, armored personnel carriers. And the sodas were kept nice and frosty in a cooler."
"You had a picnic cooler with you?"
"No, not a picnic cooler; this was something special, a medical container designed for the transport of whole blood. It was made of stainless steel, stood waist high and looked kinda like a square garbage can. I don't know how it wound up on our track, but someone must have liberated it from the 12th Evacuation Hospital in Cu Chi."
"Liberated?"
"OK, it was stolen. Midnight requisition, five finger discount. Whatever or however it was ours."
"Where ever did you get your supply of ice?"
"Where else? Army supply channels. On the transport manifest they listed ice as class V supplies which got it top priority for transport by chopper. That way it would not melt en route."
"I am almost afraid to ask. What is class V other than bootlegged ice?"
"Ammo."
I shook my head. Sean shrugged:
"Your tax dollars at work."
"And why the Hell not. We had so few comforts as it was. One thing we always did have in the mechanized infantry was pure fresh water, brought out in a six-hundred gallon tank mounted on a trailer which was nicknamed a water buffalo. We'd fill plastic jerry cans from a spigot and transport them atop our APCs. Since they were black in color the water got heated up by the tropical sun providing us with hot showers by evening."
"So you took a sponge bath with the hot water in your helmet?"
"No. We shaved that way but rigged a shower from a cylindrical canvas bag with a shower head at the bottom. We'd hang it off a stake braced atop our APC, then spin the shower head to let the water drain briefly to wet our bodies down but just enough to soap up, close, then open up again to rinse off afterwards. It was small luxuries like that which made life more tolerable than for straight-leg infantry who might have to fill their canteens with the polluted water from a ditch. Sure the Army provided water purification tablets which made it safe to drink, but the pills had the flavor of iodine, which was a disincentive to keeping hydrated."
"Were the C rations really as bad as their reputation?"
"No, not really. As you must know C rations came in cans. Only special forces or Lurps (the is LRP for long range patrol) got MREs, freeze dried rations which were just being introduced during my time in country. We ordinary ground pounders had to make do with C rations though we did get hot food shipped to us in Melmac cans with our weekly supply run."
"The problem with C rations was monotony. Every case held the same twelve ration packs with the same meals. To keep everyone honest, you had to pick your box of C rations blind, meaning with the labels down and the boxes shuffled, otherwise everyone would just memorize the position of the tastier ones.
"Fingers crossed we all hoped to get lucky and pick a pack with either pineapple chunks or fruit cocktail as dessert. Of the twelve packs, almost no one wanted the one with lima beans, and no wonder with that yukky taste. In my not so humble opinion, the neolithic farmers who first domesticated the lima bean have much to answer for. Anyway lima beans aside, that left eleven boxes. The beef stew, ham and eggs, and spaghetti and meat balls weren't too bad if eaten piping hot. Sometimes though you could not stop to heat them up. Cold and greasy C rations were no one's idea of a square meal."
"I can only imagine. So where would you find dry sticks for firewood in the jungle? They don't call it a rain forest for nothing."
"Who used wood? No, we broke off a piece of C-4 plastic explosive and set it alight."
"Seriously? Plastic explosive? What if it went off?"
"It would not go off just like that. To set off plastic explosives you need both heat and pressure like from a blasting cap. Pressure alone merely deforms plastique like modeling clay. Heat alone sets it to burning with a hot flame and no smoke, ideal really for a small cook fire. Unfortunately not everyone remembered the fact that when it came time to put out the fire you had to douse it not stamp it out. If someone got careless and tried kicking dirt over the fire and then tamping it down with his feet the results could be unfortunate. Heat plus pressure makes C-4 explode."
"You mentioned that your combat rations were monotonous. I have also heard combat duty in general described that way. The saying goes: 'War is long periods of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror.'"
"I have heard that said too, but I myself never got bored. For one thing I was always busy while on the move. Unlike most infantry soldiers I was given access to tactical maps since I was really good at map reading, what the Army grandly calls the Art of Land Navigation. Where we went was not up to me, but it was my job to keep track of our movements. My platoon leader relied on me to keep him oriented, especially when our platoon of four APCs was operating out of sight of the main body of our company or when we went out on foot by ourselves to set up an ambush. This was before GPS. Nowadays anyone can follow a pulsating blue dot."
"Unlike a lot of guys I never sat around bored during down time in a fire base, base camp or just a temporary night lagger. They may have had nothing to do, but that downtime was when I got caught up on my reading. I have always been an avid reader. Now although we had no access to a lending library, we would periodically receive care packages of paperback books. I usually found something of interest in the selection since I was one of the few soldiers who would read serious literature like an historical novel or an anthology of the writings of Samuel Johnson and James Boswell."
"One thing I did find boring was digging foxholes and filling and stacking sandbags. But I did it willingly enough knowing that a wall of sandbags might be all there was between me and the blast of a RPG or a mortar bomb. Which is why we were actually safer in a night laager than on the move. When you were sitting atop an APC your feet were more than six feet off the ground and the rest of you even higher, big as life. Targets. All you could do was cross your fingers and hope they missed or some other guy got hit."
"You didn't really think crossing your fingers would help, did you, Sean?"
"No, of course not. I meant that metaphorically. No, I have never been superstitious. While it is true that I would not walk under a ladder, that is not from superstition but only common sense. You don't walk under a ladder for reasons of safety. Something might fall onto you from above, or you might trip over the footing or bump into it, bringing the whole thing crashing down. As for other common superstitions, I never believed in ghosts, I did not wear a cross in country, nor did I have a lucky number. Some guys carried a lucky charm like a rare coin or a rabbit's foot, which was a thing back in day. I considered that nonsense but never told them so."
"A rabbit's foot? Really?"
"Strange but true. There are a bunch of legends about where, when, and how to kill the rabbit and which foot to cut off. Not that those sold commercially were harvested in accordance with those arcane rules. It is really macabre if you think about it, to carry the severed foot of a dead animal on your keychain as a good luck charm. After all the foot did not bring good luck to the rabbit, so why should it work at one remove for a human being?"
"So no, Troy. I was never superstitious. As a kid I even had a black cat as a pet. She was the runt of the litter which no one wanted for fear of bad luck. So I adopted her. I called her Midnight. She was cute, and smart, and affectionate, and mischievous, exactly what you want in a pet. She was a bright spot in my childhood. We had fifteen good years together till she died while I was overseas."
"You mentioned that you didn't you wear a cross over there? Weren't you raised Irish Catholic?"
"Yes, I was, but you don't want anything shiny on you in combat. It defeats the purpose of camouflage, which was why our jungle fatigues were green in the first place. If you were lurking in ambush a gold cross or eyeglasses lenses or even metal frames were too shiny. Another thing, artillery fire support bases would periodically lob illuminating rounds into the sky to help sentries see what was going on outside the wire. Air force photo reconnaissance jets would drop flares which worked like giant flash bulbs to let them photograph the landscape at night. Whatever."
"Besides, by then to me the cross was meaningless. I had lost my faith when I was seventeen after I realized that I was a Catholic only because of an accident of birth into a family of Irish Catholics. Most people don't chose their religion. They are simply born into the one their parents profess. So religious belief is really a matter of parentage and geography and the pageant of history. It really makes no sense to believe whatever your folks believe just because they do or that your community does."
I also asked Sean why he favored travel vests and jackets with lots of pockets. He admitted that it was an old habit stemming from his days in the service. He felt practically undressed if he didn't have his gear with him.
"What gear? You're not in combat. From what you've told me, back in the day the gear you carried included three bandoliers of ammo, four hand grenades, a single smoke grenade, signal flares, two canteens, maps, compass, first aid pack, insect repellent, and a cleaning kit for your rifle not to mention your weapons: an M-16, a 45 caliber pistol, and a bayonet. I don't see any of that on your person."
"True enough. These days my gear is less bulky, less weighty, and entirely civilian. I do carry a first aid kit, a compass, a tape measure, a police whistle, a Swiss Army knife, a multitool, earbuds, my phone, sunglasses and reading glasses, a book reader, a plastic bag handle, a flashlight, a signal mirror, a poncho, and a two day supply of meds just in case. My only weapon these days is pepper spray to fend off overly aggressive dogs."
"Don't you count your shillelagh as a weapon."
"No. It can be used as a weapon, but then so can a rock or a Number 2 pencil. Real weapons have only the one intended use. Not so with improvised weapons to which we turn to for lack of a real weapon." My shillelagh is really a prosthetic limb, a third leg as it were, to help me cope with my bad knees. My joints aren't just creaky, my left knee literally moans when I stand up."
"I hear what you say but I still would not want to be on the receiving end of a whack by that big stick of yours."
"Understandably. Anyway, as I started to add when you asked about my shillelagh, the best item of gear I carry these days is my iPhone which does the work of a bunch of different gadgets so many that even this vest wouldn't have enough pockets for all of them."
"Gadgets? Such as?"
Sean ticked them off till he ran out of fingers saying:
"Well, let's see... timepiece, calculator, rolodex, transistor radio, appointments calendar, shopping list, notepad, GPS, magnifying glass, dictionary, foreign language translator and even a digital wallet with my credit cards, fare cards, and loyalty cards. Admittedly some of those I had already consolidated into a single device called a PDA for Personal Digital Assistant, which was once must-have but now obsolete. Technology changes so fast these days."
I just shook my head. I suspect that his need for all that gear shows that Sean has not got over his PTSD quite as much as he supposes.
Those About to Die
I recently watched the TV series "Those About to Die" which is set in ancient Rome. The title comes from the custom in the gladiatorial games that just before they fought the combatants would salute the emperor and tell him "We who are about to die salute you."
The series is being shown on the Peacock streaming service. It is full of action of gladiatorial combat and chariot races set against a backdrop of intrigue and power politics. I really hope they do a second season.
The series has a good cast headed by Anthony Hopkins. True he is really too old at eighty-six to portray a tough middle-aged no-nonsense general like Vespasian who reigned after the death of Nero. Vespasian turned over command of his army in Judea to his son Titus and let him finish the suppression of the Jewish Revolt. Vespasian then proclaimed himself emperor, rallied the Danubian legions to his cause, and went on to defeat the armies of the other claimants in what came to be called the Year of the Four Emperors, meaning the four successors to Nero: Galba, Otho, Vitellius, and Vespasian, so it really was a year of five emperors counting Nero.
The best part of the series for the gay audience is the subplot about the love affair between the emperor's son Domitian and his slave boy Hermes portrayed by the scrumptious Alessandro Bedetti who is all of twenty-one years old. Palpitations!
Theirs was a toxic relationship fraught with the potential for a tragic outcome. One was a prince of the empire, the other his sex slave. At one point, with Domitian's best interests in mind, Hermes offers a suggestion on a political matter. Domitian chides him with a reminder:
"I keep you around for your mouth and your ass."
As I told Kyle:
"You knew it was going to end badly. Now I don't want to spoil the movie for you, but Hermes is young and impulsive and his libido eventually gets him into bad trouble and his wagging tongue into far worse."
"Now even before you watch the series you should check on YouTube for a sixteen minute compilation of the scenes about this tragically romantic subplot about the star-crossed lovers Domitian and Hermes. Even without being up on the historical context you will be able to follow their story thread without bothering with the rest of the plot."
"Also on the internet I found that the divine Alessandro had starred in an earlier TV series with the intriguing title of "Nudes". Though produced in Italy, it is set in Norway. The series is an anthology about three teenagers whose lives are thrown into crisis when their nude pictures go viral over social media. I could hardly wait to binge watch it -- Bedetti's four episodes at least. Ideally I can catch it in the original Italian. I don't need a version dubbed in English or with subtitles since I am fluent in that language."
"On second thought, you'd get more out of the series if I filled you in on the historical background. You STEM types aren't really into the humanities like some of us are."
"Hey, I am more than just a hard science nerd. I do occasionally read biography and history. In fact I once read a whole set of histories inherited from my grandfather. It was called 'The Story of Civilization' by Will and Ariel Durant."
"Wow! Really old school though not without value. Still let me fill you in on the background to the TV series."
"Here we go again," Kyle sighed, "Another one of your potted history lectures."
All right, I was apt to fill in the historical background during almost any discussion, including remarks on the history of the science of chemistry, (Kyle's field of study was physical chemistry), but then I had myself lived through nearly four thousand years of that history.
"Titus was the first born and very much the favored son and a successful general in his own right. His younger brother Domitian was twelve years younger and was never intended to succeed Vespasian. As a general and sometime consul Titus participated in court deliberations and himself commanded the Praetorian Guard. By contrast Domitian was appointed Magister Ludi, the Master of the Games. He put on the gladiatorial fights and the chariot races held in the Circus Maximus spectacles which were the mass entertainment of the day. The Roman state strove to keep the populace of the capital compliant via the grain dole and the often deadly spectacle of games, the original Bread and Circuses."
"In the series Titus was portrayed with a beard, but all emperors till Hadrian forty years later were clean shaven. The beard was Hadrian's sign of his love for all things Greek, if you take my meaning."
"Despite his reputation as a tyrant, Domitian was an effective emperor. He was ruthless but efficient, an autocrat who got much done in his fifteen years on the throne. He entrusted Agricola, his governor of Britannia, with the task of conquering Scotland, it inhabitants a perpetual thorn in the side of the Romans on that isle. The campaign was a huge success. The Caledonians confidently but oolishly mustered a huge army to crush the Romans by sheer force of numbers in a pitched battle. They really should have asked how well that approach had worked for Boudicca forty years earlier. It was just what the Romans wanted them to do. The dreams of the Caledonians destroying an entire Roman army died a bloody death. The clash did indeed turn out to be a battle of annihilation but one with the opposite result intended. Agricola then built Rome's northernmost legionary fortress at Inchtuthil near modern Dundee plus a string of forts which blocked the exits of the glens leading out of the Highlands."
"Most of what we know about Agricola's campaign comes from the admiring biography written by the eminent historian Tacitus, his son-in-law. After Agricola victory at Mons Graupius his supporting naval fleet finished circumnavigating Britannia proving that it was an island after all, a very large island to be sure, but an island nevertheless. It could never be used by enemies marching from Scandinavia, earlier thought to be connected."
"That allowed Domitian to withdrew several legions to deal with the far more important frontier on the Danube which was threatened by barbarian incursions all along the line from what today is Austria to the Black Sea. Now emperors always had to suspect that a successful general would try to usurp the throne or maybe find himself compelled by his own legions to claim the purple. By the standards of the day Domitian treated Agricola reasonably well, sending him into a comfortable retirement instead of arranging a convenient assassination."
"Domitian not only was popular with both the army and the people, he has a better claim to being one of the Five Good Emperors than his short-lived and weakling successor Nerva who failed to resolve the Empire's financial problems and never won over the support of the army. No surprise then when a coup by the Pretorians forced Nerva to adopt the popular general Trajan as his heir. It was Trajan who expanded the empire to its greatest ever territorial extent. His three successors, Hadrian, Antoninus Pius, and Marcus Aurelius were also effective at their jobs.
"Domitian got a bad reputation because he humbled the Senate, limited its powers, and periodically purged it of those plotting against him. When I say purged I don't mean Domitian just had them expelled from the senate or sent into exile. He had them killed. So the Senatorial class hated him, and they were the ones who wrote the histories of his reign after his death. The movie makes him out to be a reincarnation of Caligula or of Commodus which he was not."
"Wasn't it Gibbon who made up the list of the Five Good Emperors and gave them their collective title in his 'Decline and Fall'?" Kyle asked.
"Good guess, given Gibbon's praise of the Pax Romana as the happiest age in human history, but it was actually Niccolò Machiavelli though not in "The Prince" but in a largely unknown book published posthumously, "The Discourses on Livy".
Kyle then stepped toward me and said:
"Enough with the film critique and history lecture! Get out of your clothes."
"Turned you on, have I?"
"It's why I keep you around, for your mouth and your ass!"
With that we got it on and did what comes naturally to lovers who are intimately familiar with each other's bodies and expert at pleasuring other males.
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