Charlotte and me sitting in the Elks Lodge in Tacoma enjoying our drinks and the atmosphere when the heavy metal band starts up next door, their sound check. First the drummer, then the guitarist, and last the vocalist whose voice is so guttural, so primitive, so animal, it sounds like the very insides of a person writhing in pain. Like if you could mic the colon. So incongruent with the pleasant vibe it works. But how thin the walls. We look them up on Spotify, a lot of fake blood, ripped clothes, chains. But it’s all ages and soon their fans emerge in drips and drabs, in black with bushy beards and piercings, leather.

Charlotte’s reading The Things They Carried for school and wanted to watch Full Metal Jacket to keep with the ‘Nam theme but I moved her to Apocalypse Now instead. Then I ordered Dispatches, the memoir written by war correspondent Michael Herr (the same guy who co-wrote the screenplay for both films).

Maybe it wasn’t fair, but I really didn’t need to re-watch Full Metal Jacket. But Coppola’s film I’d seen three times and would gladly watch again. So I told Charlotte that Lily and I had watched it together on the roadtrip coming back from Utah after she’d graduated from boarding school. Maybe it could be a bonding moment.

She doesn’t recognize any of the actors, just the young Harrison Ford, the young Laurence Fishburne. Most are young except Brando. When the film ends there are no credits, just a black screen. And Charlotte wants to talk about it, it made her think. She says I didn’t like any of them, and maybe that’s the point.

There’s a style of mushroom shaped like a flying saucer the color of pancakes stacked and wedged into the base of the tall trees. It’s just the state park but at times I can imagine it’s as wild and dense as the jungle. The outlandish bird calls and stillness. Woodpecker like machine gun fire. The look of the forest in the Pacific Northwest in late spring when it’s rained and the brush is so thick you can only see the trail as long as you’re on it.

My staff is so smooth it’s like it was hewn. I swing it to practice defending myself but I’m not so good. It would be more of a bluff. Getting here while it’s still dark would mean like 4:30 now.

I heard about Michael Herr’s book from Mary Karr, the memoirist. And I learned that she’d had an affair with David Wallace, who’d threatened to kill her abusive husband, which makes sense. Karr seemed to have this edge to her life and I could picture the two of them hitting it off. Karr trying to teach her students to find the edge in their lives and writing, the visceral. Wallace experimenting with straight-up memoir himself his last book—but Infinite Jest is memoir in disguise.

It’s like Herr mic’d the soldiers he features in Dispatches, he caught the sound and cadence of their speech and made it so believable. That’s what they were trying to do with Martin Sheen’s character, the film’s narration. It’s like they lifted some of Herr’s passages verbatim. You may not like what they’re saying but it does sound real. And the authentic creates its own energy and allure, even if it’s hard to look at.

Categories: Creative Nonfiction, Memoir

Tags: Creative Nonfiction, journal writing, pacific northwest