Let Me Be Frank With You Read Online Free PDF Page B

don’t), whether you’ve been eating garlic or onions or pizza or choucroute garnie and brush your teeth eight times a day, being “older” makes you worry that you reek like a monkey’s closet. Sally assures me I don’t, that she’d give me “the signal.” But if the machine’s winding down, its parts start to fester. I’ve lately begun brushing mytongue morning, noon, and night, since the tongue’s the petri dish for every sort of rankness. In general, it’s fair to say that as you get older you experience a complexer relationship with the ongoing—which seems at odds with how it should be.
    I wait in my car, chewing, beside the ruins of my house. There’s no reading matter available. I’ve left the Times at home. Here’s only a pamphlet Dr. Zippee amusedly gave me, depicting the exercise routine for relieving movement-inhibiting neck pain. Cartoons show a little round-headed stick figure rotating his bubble head and smiling to exhibit the golden way to neck happiness. In other squares he’s displaying a mouth-down frown to show the “wrong way”—that leads to traction, invasive surgery-through-the-throat, painkillers, Betty Ford, if not all the way to Rahway. I do feel new Rice Krispies at shoulder level, which makes me wrangle my neck around. Tension’s the culprit; the tension of Arnie Urquhart not goddamn being here like he said he would.
    The only other reading material in my car is a copy of We Salute You , the publication we volunteers put into the hand of each Iraq and Afghanistan returnee the moment after we shake that hand and declare “Welcome home! Thank you for your service!” We Salute You is a useful cache of vital information pertaining to anything the home-leave soldier might need, want, or encounter in the first six hours stateside (assuming no one’s meeting him or her, as surprisingly happens much ofthe time). We Salute You is printed by a cabal of right-wing, freedom-forum loonies out in Ohio, who nonetheless manage to do a damn good job because they don’t stuff our magazine with any of the gun-control-anti-abortion-back-to-the-stone-age bullshit they do put in their regular anti-Obama mailings. I know, because these publications came to my house, until I made a complaint with the Post Office, after which they still came, right through the election—though by now the crackpot Ohioans might’ve concluded their message didn’t get through.
    We Salute You is printed for each U.S. port of troop entry—L.A., New York–Newark, Boston, Houston, Seattle, even Detroit. It’s twenty gray newsprint pages (an online edition’s in the works) full of important phone numbers, e-mail and postal addresses for whatever geographical area the trooper or marine or airman first puts a foot down on home soil. Panic attack, suicide, drug and alcohol abuse helpline numbers are included. Veteran-friendly taxi companies. Directions to transportation hubs. Numbers to purchase a phone card. Every church you can think of, including Muslims, atheists, and Agnostics Anonymous. All these numbers are, of course, obtainable by anyone—though not in such an easy, free-of-charge, depoliticized format. There’s also plenty of less expectable info. Clean Vietnamese massage boutiques. Outfitters for mule pack-ins to the Sierras. A clearinghouse foronline sites to help you find a former girlfriend who’s abandoned you. Chat-line numbers dealing with revenge issues. Private phone numbers of all U.S. congressmen and senators. Sites for how to buy Cuban cigars and condoms by the gross. There’s an LGBT strength-in-numbers line. Even a number for a Socrates Death-With-Dignity support league, where psychologists with degrees from Oberlin and Macalester try to talk a soldier back from the brink while seeming to understand that death might seem the only option.
    Our mission, of course, occasionally