A Story about Someone I Never Knew

  

The first rule of writing is you must know your subject.

If you don’t, you might as well stare at a blank page for all eternity. Even then  inspiration won’t strike. Words just won’t march across that empty flat white surface, stop and come to attention and live if you don’t know what you’re writing about.

I never really knew Rocky.

That’s not going to stop me from marshalling up in words the young man I knew, whoever he was. If someone or something forced me to pursue the oddly absurd task of writing about a person I never really knew, it would have to be Rocky.

Rocky was a shadow, an invention, an oddly flamboyant character created by someone unknown. He was some hidden human being I never met who constructed an interesting new persona in New Hope almost fifty years ago.

Forgive me if I don’t have any other name to call him, a real first name and surname. He was just Rocky, and that fabricated personality was a good friend, mostly because he was such a justifiable phony, preferred to party and seemed to need friends. He also liked a good laugh, which always helps when you are so broken you desperately require a new identity.

Rocky was a combat veteran of the most-hated war in American history, the Vietnam War. I’m sure he used his real name in the military, but when he lived in New Hope he switched to his make-believe moniker in everyday life. He affected a kind of Hispanic accent that was transparently false. He consciously and consistently stuck to it, year after year, speaking in Pidgin English meant to resound with a Spanish tone. He deliberately talked in broken English so that his words sounded like foreign round stones coming off his tongue, but I could always understand him and I didn’t care.

I figured he didn’t want to be the person he had been in Vietnam, and that was good enough for me. I’d accept the humorous and tragic fabricated man he presented day after day without questions.

If I had been through what he had, I wouldn’t want to be him, either.

Once he was telling me a story about a man he knew, and his accent broke.

“This guy went …”

He stopped in mid-sentence, realizing his mistake of speaking in good English.

“I mean, he go,” he corrected himself.

I had to laugh. I didn’t care about the mistake of good English.

If you were young and lived in that era, you would remember his affectation as “freaking out.” You freaked out over the myriad horrors of the time, from the jungle war in Southeast Asia to the murders of liberal politicians like the Kennedys and Martin Luther King and Malcolm X to the race riots. It seemed murder and death and hate and vitriol were everywhere, like today. If you freaked out, it was a sign you had turned from hate to love as a way of life.

You re-invented yourself from the middle-class killing drone you were taught to be into a flower child.

Rocky looked every bit the hippie. His daily uniform consisted of jeans and a jean jacket embroidered with colorful designs redolent of weed. He sported two long, thick braids of dirty blond hair far down his back, a baseball cap and an untrimmed beard that never seemed unkempt. His shoulders were slightly slumped forward, as though he had marched many miles with a rifle, and his eyes were bright blue.

Somehow, he got the idea that I was French, so he rarely called me by my first name. Instead, he greeted me with the name he made up for me, consistent with the way he had freaked out.

“Hey, Frenchman, how you doin’?”

It always made me laugh. I was always “The Frenchman” to him.

“Hey, there go The Frenchman.”

New Hope is a gay town, but Rocky was far from it, although his appearance once got him into a fight with some young fools who came to town looking to beat up a gay. To their everlasting regret, they attacked Rocky by Fran’s Pub, mocking him and misidentifying him as gay because of his colorful appearance. He promptly beat the living daylights out of all three of them.

He once convinced me and several others to come to his karate class for a lesson, so aside from his combat training he had martial arts training. I barely got through the hour-long class. I guess as Rocky he still needed to be able to defend himself, while I avoided that.

It always seemed that Rocky was afraid. That’s understandable, given the memories he had to live with, but it gave him a dangerous aura rather than a peaceful one. People feared him, but I didn’t. Fear can make you seem something you’re not and make you do awful things. A woman once punched him in the face for talking to her girlfriend. He promptly decked her. Panic, unlike those three young fools who attacked him, does not discriminate when provoked. Punching a woman I think was the result of an instant reflex that fear had ingrained in him during the war: he reacted to her punch in the only way his fear would allow: self-preservation. There was no thinking before punching her: panic made him do it.

Another time, he and I were walking back to John and Peter’s after a Sunday softball game. We were taking a shortcut along the railroad tracks to return the softball equipment to the bar, where it was stored during the week. I was carrying the bats and he was carrying the bases and other equipment.

“Give me a bat,” he said, stopping on the tracks.

“That’s okay, Rock. I got them.”

“No, give me a bat. I need to have a bat. I don’t go without no bat.”

I understood why immediately. We were walking through a deserted part of the tracks, and he did not want to walk unarmed while I carried all the weapons. That made him sweat inside. I gave him a bat and he settled down.

I guess he didn’t even trust The Frenchman.

Our mutual friend, Jim Woolsey, told me a story about the time Rocky was in his house and a Special Forces vet came to visit. In Vietnam, the Special Forces had a particularly violent, ruthless reputation. Who knows what Rocky saw when that apparition intruded?

“Rocky just shut down as soon as he saw him,” Woolsey told me. “He looked down and wouldn’t say a word, nothing. He froze.”

The last time I saw Rocky was in the grocery store. He was walking with a cane and limping badly.

“Hey, Frenchman, how you doin’?”

“What the hell happened to you, Rocky?”

“Ah, I get in a fight. I was beat up this guy, so he shot me in the leg.”

Toughness only goes so far. Bullets don’t care how hard you are. Rocky had a limp.

I learned some years ago on Facebook that Rocky had died of cancer. He had moved to Upper Bucks County, but was alone when the cancer struck. As he lay dying his “friends” came into his apartment and stole his belongings. The man who posted that said what a travesty it was, treating a veteran that way, and thought it should be stopped. Rocky was too weak to prevent his “friends” from taking everything he owned, and he simply had to endure their thievery in his death-agony.

In the end, the person he had been could not escape himself. None of us can, but while he lived happily in New Hope under his new identity, his escape was a roaring success.

He will forever be Rocky, just because he did not wish to be the suffering vulnerable vet he was coerced into being.