Ouroboros

OUROBOROS

by

WILLIAM WHITE-ACRE

copyright 2021 by william white-acre

Smashwords Edition

white-acre.wixsite.com/photography

Prologue:

He feels the insistent sting of a pulsating desire. It is relentless. There is rippling energy coursing through his body, as he continually readjusts to his environment. Day. Night. The next twenty-four hours arrives and he assesses the changes. The VTA, ventral tegrental area is on red alert, pumping dopamine, stimulating his expanding brain. He is thinking on a different plane, not unlike a chess master playing against numerous opponents simultaneously. Patterns are constantly changing. He eyes perceive stimuli like blueprints.

A rat scurries away and he traces the rodent's progress even though it is dark in the abandoned building. The acuity of his vision has increased three fold. Like a cat, he can focus easily in near blackness. And like a dog his sense of smell has changed and he picks up a scent. It has an olfactory ripeness to it. A vague hint of fruit, with a fine layer of alcohol drifts on the musty and mildewed closeness of the building that dates from early in another century. Sniffing again, he knows it is a human source. Close. In the next room.

Listening, he hears the distinct rumbling of snores. This brings a smile to his face, the face he no longer recognizes, now transitioning daily...hourly.

PART ONE: For What It's Worth

Chapter 1: South By South

Maurice Worth came south as a child. By car. A long journey. Many hours on roads that predated the famed Interstate highway. Sitting in the backseat of his father's five year old two-tone Ford Crestliner, he could barely see out the window as they passed by verdant farmland and through numerous small towns. His father was so proud of that car. All the way from Cincinnati. It was the 1950's. His parents, in a move counter to the northern trend of migration African-Americans had been making for decades, were returning to the South of their ancestry, a land of Jim Crow laws and institutionalized racism that ran so deep it was enshrined in continuing discrimination that was hardened and refreshed on a daily basis. Land of water fountains for whites and separate water fountains for coloreds. A new version of slavery had proved to be enduring, transactional, constantly reappearing in a different shape and form. Thousands upon thousands of Blacks had departed for northern cities, hoping to escape a region that ignored Federal mandates routinely and was adept at maintaining a status quo that was able to grin as it fortified the boundaries of its self interest.

The Queen City had once been an important way station in the revered Underground Railroad, responsible for helping to spirit slaves towards freedom. Crossing the Ohio River was often the last barrier to achieving the rewards of a just humanity. His ancestors had made that journey, arriving as the Civil War was raging across the landscape, leaving behind bloody mayhem in its wake.

His father was a pastor. His church stood on Liberty Avenue in Cincinnati. Spirit Tabernacle Church was nothing more than a store front place of worship but had a devoted congregation and had been a pillar of the community for many years. That is why his decision to move to Atlanta was so bewildering to many of his flock, who thought returning to the South was odd, even foolhardy. I have been called, he informed them one Sunday, inserting the news into his sermon at the end. The Lord needs me there, he added, trying to reinforce the import of his decision.

Why Atlanta? God had a chore for the pastor to do. His brethren needed help. The travails of segregation needed combating and the city had been the putative capital of the south, not Richmond. The Confederacy had been birthed in the deep south and inexplicably selected the Virginia city as the seat of its power. It was a historical item that perplexed some historians but proved to be a simple oversight by others. History to the descendants of the Civil War from the Confederate states followed a singular path, starting and ending with the right of the South to secede. The reasons didn't include the scourge of slavery, which, in their retelling of the war, was of minor concern. Minimizing the sole commercial engine that buttressed the South's economy was a glaring omission, one which assuaged any guilt lingering throughout the generations.

The Atlanta of Maurice's youth was circumscribed by segregation and de facto laws ever more punitive than any existing ordinances on the books. Jim Crow ruled. It was deceptively simple. The Black man was free but only as an historical aberration. Four years of bloody war that had occurred in the near past didn't apply. The Confederacy lived on in another incarnation, kept intact by a white populace fearful of being overtaken by societal changes and events beyond their control.

Enter Dr. King and the vaunted Civil Rights Movement, which swept across the South in the Sixties, riding the coat tails of social opprobrium originating in some parts of the north as it was unexpectedly carried by the new Democratic party. It was an unlikely metamorphosis, ushered in by Presidents known simply by their initials: JFK and LBJ.

Milestones were met, passed, ushering him, (hurtling perhaps), his advancement towards a reckoning. Years before he had left his secondary hometown, retracing his history, back towards the north, back to Ohio where he was born. The reason (s) were obscured by addiction and its grip on his sense of reality. Scars were prevalent, obvious, on display. A lifetime of living on loan, as he liked to describe it, had scratched out an outline against his psyche, leaving behind what he considered a well earned view of futility.

Several co-habitations later and Maurice was spent, both spiritually and physically. His times in church were ineffective,, reaching, always striving to grasp at anything that might give his life some sort of purchase, something to cling to. Drugs, and booze, gave him that, a reason to not have a reason, as he was fond of phrasing it, his life and its inherent wanted and unwanted accumulations. Even with a mind cluttered by a wanton collection of memories, and lacerated by competing sources of inebriation, he still had a way with words, a voice too, which was deep, rich, and chock full of authentication. Born in the North but raised in the South, he had his own viewpoint, unique and stained by events. You couldn't take that away from him.

Of course you could; he had long ago been marginalized by a society bent on reclaiming its recent history. No one had to look very far to see some statue proclaiming to all who cared to look that the violent side show that concluded over a century before had been a travesty and had concluded unsatisfactorily for a rather large slice of the population. War by whatever name always superseded political will but seldom vanquished the spirit the original animus was imbued with. Not extinguished. Left to smolder. Unattended. Guilt with a white hue didn't materialize. It only regrouped and went on a bender, drunk on wholesale victimization, soon to be ingrained, even institutionalized across state lines, seeping into classrooms, dorms, churches, and the minutes of government meetings.

Southern living is about statues and statutes, a Civil Rights leader had once been quoted as saying, his answer to what it had been like to grow up down south. Laws were on the books, ones that were enacted to keep a firm grip on the new status quo, while statues of Confederate Generals kept watch over the towns and cities, stationary, unmovable. Everyday people passed by and paid silent homage to historical heroes. Others, they quietly fumed and wondered where a wrong turn had occurred.

He was the recipient of this large scale re-education plan, with a little help from the Supreme Court, who in their wisdom sought to enshrine the civic criminality in print, using long rambling doublespeak to inform everyone that the tentacles of law can ensnare each and everyone with ease. Then again, he would live long enough to reach one of those mountaintops they were talking about when Atlanta would become a chocolate town, answering no longer to the dictates of curved spine crackers but to a coterie of black voices in positions of power. The state of Georgia might have still been smarting from that lunatic general who marched through with an arsonist's gleam in his eye, nursing a monumental grudge as a result, but in Atlanta a zone of limited sanctuary had been carved out.

Little solace, really. Not unlike other nigger towns that dotted the southern landscape, separate but equal was the mocking battle cry. Legal decisions didn't mean shit when turned over to the real world functioning out there, a dimension that included no voting rights, no opportunities, nothing that might resemble anything resembling fairness.

Maurice Worth like to say: My name's Worth but it ain't worth much. Raised in Atlanta, specifically in Vine City, he had a ground level view of the streets. Many nights were spent around the Bluff, a compressed neighborhood surviving on a diet of drugs and the rapid mercantile nature of commerce forever skirting the laws. Living in public housing, at John Eagan Home, his perspective narrowed until all he could envision was small scale despair and slow motion degradation. Despite his father's holy optimism and the relative success of his freshly founded church, life was lived within the confines of a shrinking sense of purpose.

Outside their immaculately kept apartment, just beyond the front steps, there was a yawning chasm of festering discontent. Poverty thrived. Only alleviated by the temporary transport from the obvious by bouts with diversions that only drugs could deliver. He grew into this societal strait jacket, which was strapped on him at an early age. His world was bordered by the filth strewn streets. His mind had been set by a bifurcated universe: easily recognized by a binary color spectrum. In black and white, as they say.

Ambition shrunk. Any aptitude atrophied. Turning eighteen delivered him to a promise land no one had promised. Selective Service had a deceptive ring to it, like it might be desirable, even ushering in a fortuitous future. It wasn't. It was directly from a nether world, a world where you were expected to adhere to regulations that simultaneously exploited you as it exhorted you to do your civic duty. Catch 22 on steroids. Dr. Frankenstein meet Kafka. Sign here. And here. We'll be in touch.

The letter arrived soon enough. His mother nervously fingered the envelope, finally handing it over to her son, while his father clung to a Bible and muttered out a worn and tattered prayer. The government, the same one that couldn't afford him full rights in the community, wanted him to appear. Maurice balled up the letter and tossed it against the kitchen wall. No need to finish reading it. He saw the evening news enough to know what his destiny was and what it included.

Induction came swiftly, arriving like a dream turning in on itself, a nightscape of harrowing realizations each more terrifying than the last. Even now, many (many) years later, he could hear the thump-thump-thump of the rotors resounding from the Hueys, like an evil addition to his heart beat. Just out of High School. So young he barely started shaving. With a callow view of the world, blunted by aimless nights on the streets, slinging, existing for another day, he boarded a bus, pick in Afro, trying not to let his bewilderment show. His mother, sister, and father stood curbside, tears on cheeks, silently petitioning the Lord to keep him safe. Embarrassed at first by their public display of emotion, he forced a laugh, telling them he would be back in no time, don't worry. His father muttered a few passages from the ever present Bible he carried, while his mother tried not to wail. They knew. Everyone knew. The war over in that place no one had ever heard of before was nothing but a churning meat grinder, grinding up the youth of America each and every day. Saw it on the news. In the newspapers. Heard about it in the songs on the radio.

1969. The vaunted 60's were hurtling towards an abyss, strung together by withering ideals that were decaying rapidly, replaced by a reality leaning towards sluggish oblivion. The Civil Rights Movement had been whacked by murders, then riots, resulting in an election that brought a President bent on a Southern Strategy adroitly exploiting fear. Fear of crime. Fear of the black man. Fear of hippies. Fear of fear itself. It inculcated a feeling in the population, one that it was all coming apart at the seams. Just look at the neighborhoods on fire around the nation. Listen, you can hear it in song, sung by long haired types high on drugs. Elementary propriety had been corrupted, replaced by festering anarchy.

Maurice sat in the chair while a man shaved his hair off, down to the stubble on his skull. Then he was ordered out of the chair, replaced by a wise cracking white boy from who knows where, with hair down to his shoulders. On the floor the strands of hair was almost ankle deep. A line went out the door, appearing like human sheep there to be sheered.

Get your goat smellin' asses in a line! the drill sergeant screamed, already red in the face, his mouth twisted into a mask of anger. It had begun. Boot camp would follow. Weeks and weeks of dehumanizing orders, commands, insults comprising a confidence stealing regimen. Hour after hour your sense of self was picked clean then replaced by a sinister group think, a shared barrier against doubt and corrosive second guessing. All moving in one direction.

The inexorable current took you along as you bobbed on top of the surface, putting in here and there to learn new skills, ones that would allow you to survive another day, another night. Might even bring you out the other end. Might not. Only one thing needed: hate. A burning laser like beam of animus directed at Charlie. Comes out at night. Like a demon. Almost invisible. Blood red eyes. Unmerciless. Able to kill you, your whole platoon too. Punji sticks you can't see. RPG in your hooch while you tried to sleep among the building nightmares cued up ever night. 82mm mortar round landing right next to you. Nothing but body parts seeping blood into the earth. Satchel charge detonating while you dozed on the wire, letting combat weariness overtake you for a moment. No need to call in a Medevac. Too late, much, much too late for that. You went to sleep in your barracks wondering what scenario your Drill was going to spring on you the next morning, what story line would he drum up and how your eventual demise will play out.

With jangled nerves, Maurice survived BCT and went on to AIT. Another fort this or that but same story line. More war prep. This time, more selective, specialized. He knew his designation. His rank was immaterial. His MOS crystallized his own personalized war effort: 11 Bravo. He knew, like the others, that he was cannon fodder. Wars in antiquity on up to modern times had always relied on ground level fighters, men (sometimes women) who were expected to advance the strategic agenda. Real estate had to be captured, held, and not relinquished. The metrics of war were unexpectedly simple. He was a rifleman. Flesh and blood with a tiny instrument of war in his hands, so it might have been written up in any hand book the Army cared to distribute. The M-16 to be precise, a rifle so maligned that even Congress had at one time raised objections about its effectiveness. Squirrelly as hell, an instructor had once said in a moment of honesty, his assessment definitely not sanctioned by the brass. The failure rate was so high that it caused alarm bells up and down the chain of command on more than one occasion, resulting in an official correction to the training schedule, leaving the troops to be taught how to clean their weapon with religious zeal, in the dark, in their sleep, all the time. Still, jammed breaches caused an unknown number of deaths in combat, which were concealed from the public.

Yet, that was Viet Nam. It was a yawning orgasm of absurdity that made satire seem normal. Year after year of false reports, greasy excuses, screwy rationales, all to make the insane enterprise keep revolving. Glorious and almost satanic fire power, purchased by the unsuspecting tax payer, peppered the landscape, leaving behind a destruction that inverted your sense of reality. B-52's cruising above, dropping gargantuan amounts of bombs. Napalm plopped down willy-nilly, leaving behind something that only Dante could describe. Howitzer barrages. Mortar rounds piercing the quiet. Agent Orange seeping into everything, chemically nibbling at every square inch. Mines just waiting to extract another person from the living. Body counts being bandied about like some wartime fantasy league data.

Maurice came home on leave, his last foothold until it was time to leave the real world behind and embark on his own personal trip to the unknown. The only benchmark he knew was his departure date. Like all the others, he only hoped it wasn't a one way ticket.

Oh my god, just look at you, his mother cried out upon seeing him in his uniform, unable to believe her eyes. They hugged for a very long time, as his father hovered around them, uncharacteristically speechless for the moment. His sister sat at the kitchen table almost glaring at him, now, like many in the country, skeptical about the war and suspicious of anyone participating in it. She had been edging towards the siren call of Black Power for some time and had even attended an H. Rap Brown speech not two weeks before.

The nation was now split about the war effort, half no longer believing the laughable characterization the government was peddling. The other half still clinging to a decaying patriotism that demanded fealty to a preposterous construct, one that said all was well and America was standing guard against the menace that was Communism. More and more weren't so sure anymore. After Tet, in 68, where the Viet Cong quite nearly wrested the country back from the imperialist invaders, staging battles here, there, and everywhere around South Viet Nam, catching a slumbering giant asleep, almost powerless, a long standing national zeitgeist began to crumble. Not the good guys. Not any more.

It was a gut punch to the Pentagon. Even though the Tet Offensive wasn't successful, not militarily anyway, the proverbial writing was scribbled on the wall. All of America's technological advantage didn't mean squat when up against a nationalistic fervor so potent it gnawed away at military superiority like some supernatural termite eating away at a rotten foundation. Confidence shaken, the national mood soured as it inexorably headed towards the unthinkable: Defeat. Korea might have been an unsatisfying tie but Viet Nam was looking more and more like what most didn't want to contemplate. Declare victory and go home, someone joked, putting an exclamation point on the level of ludicrousness so prevalent within the scope of the war effort.