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 And if there is even one commonality between his teenage combat experience and my young life it is this: the reasons for his joining up. Seven fucking volunteered for service during Viet Nam for the same screwed up reason so many men do shit they shouldn't be doing: for daddy. He did it to be like his father. He knew better. He was whipping out infantile Monets in crayons on his bedroom walls as a kid and getting punished for it. He knew he was an artist but he ran off to Nam to be a good soldier to please the old man. Fuck the old men! Yeh, I can relate to that. I'm just lucky my dad was never a soldier, or a banker, or worse. Who wants to be a salesman? Not me. And somehow, I managed to avoid it all these years. But to be sure I've wasted plenty of hours and days bellyaching over what a loser I was because I was a writer. Whoa. Let's get off of me. This was about Seven. Seven the soldier cat, the army brat. Seven the cranky curmudgeon with art up his ass. Seven the die hard warrior for art. Seven the two-wheeled, toy encrusted glue junky. Jill says he calls himself Seven because he lost one life to a bullet in Nam and another to a car wreck in Boston. Nine minus two equals Seven. Seven. He's a master and a menace. The other day at Ned's mother's house in Portland, he called for help getting out of the bath tub and got no reply. So he managed it himself. A short while later he was out on the front porch staring down the five or six steps to the ground and again calling out for help. It's a big place, and all of us were around the other side of the house screwing with our cars and packing. No one heard him. So what does he do? He grabs hold of a dog chain tied to the house and essentially repels down the stairs backwards in his wheelchair. Thus the menace. He could have killed himself, and I for one would have felt guilty as hell. And I would have been stuck with the care of his dog Baby, which would have been one mouth too many on my budget. Seven has painted half a dozen paintings as gifts for our hosts along our journey. He just does it. He is a master. With his beard and weathered face, he looks like Hemmingway or a pirate. I don't know. I'm just glad to be traveling with him. It is because of him that I'm on this journey. And truly without him I may not have lasted this long. Ned's Family Home, Portland He's only..
I'm working on two cookies at once.
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