This is a work of fiction. Names of characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination and are used fictitiously; any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locations is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2015 by Dennis Milholland – All rights reserved. Other than for private, not-for-profit use, no part of this work may be reproduced, transmitted or stored in any form or by any means, other than that intended by the author, without written permission from the copyright holder.

Careful! This is a work of fiction containing graphic descriptions of sex between males and critiques of religion and governments. And last but not least, Nifty would like your donations.

Farewell, Uncle Ho

by Dennis Milholland

questions and comments are welcome. www.milholland.eu / dennis@milholland.eu

Chapter 22 (Tues., Dec 27, 1966)

"Uh-ten-hut!" Haruki circled me with a look of total disgust on his sculpted face. "That is not the position of attention, Trainee."

"I'm sorry, Sir." I thought would be the proper reply.

"What did you call me?" He yelled in my face.

"Sir?" I tried not to laugh.

"I'm not a 'Sir', You Filthy Scumbag!" His face was getting red from yelling at me. "I'm not a fucking officer. I work for a living. I AM YOUR DRILL SERGEANT. And you will call me: 'Drill Sergeant', not 'Sir', do I make myself clear?"

"Yes, Drill Sergeant." I couldn't help myself, I broke out laughing.

He was back in my face. "You think this is funny, Maggot?" He pointed to the floor. "Drop and give me twenty!"

"Twenty what, Drill Sergeant?" I really didn't have a clue as to what he meant.

"Push-ups, You Nelly Civilian Faggot." Haruki was still emphatically pointing at the floor. And was pretty speechless, when I did.

And that got him out of his Drill Sergeant mode. "Wow, Chūgokujin, how many can you actually do?"

"Don't know, forty five, fifty maybe." I stood next to him, at what I thought was the position of attention.

He chuckled and said in his normal, loveable voice: "Relax, Trainee." and giggled. "Let's go into the kitchen and play Hippie, for a while. I can only take just so much of this fascist, heel-clicking bullshit at any one time."

Barney was on his bed, looking at us skeptically, probably wondering what all the yelling had been about. And I was grateful to Haruki for not overdoing it. I knelt to pet Barney. "It's okay, Boy, we still love each other."

"Yeah, but we'll have to work some more on Drill and Ceremony, a lot more." Haruki pulled out his tobacco pouch and retrieved the black cube. And then in his Drill Sergeant's voice: "What do you call a marine, Trainee?"

I jumped up, at which Barney looked disgusted, and stood at attention. The dog yawned. "A bullet sponge, Drill Sergeant."

"Fall out." He placed a joint on the table across from him. "Smoke 'em, if you got 'em."

I lit Haruki's joint then mine, using, what I thought was his dad's Zippo. He looked at me with a certain sadness. But no other emotion was visible. "I want you to keep that lighter."

I fingered the lighter and discovered the engraving: Sgt. Hernandez, Torii Station, Okinawa" on the one side and 'Fuck it before It fucks you' on the other. "Was this your father's?" My breath caught, when I remembered that he was a retired officer. "Was he stationed in Okinawa?"

He shook his head and he sighed. "No, I was." A long toke on his joint ensued. "It was the last thing my father was ever able to force me to do," His voice became harsh from bitter memories. "was to enlist in his Army." His smile was lopsided. "I had applied for a passport while I was still in high school with the intent of skipping country to avoid the draft. Then I got the idea of applying for political asylum in Cuba, since my granddad still lived there." His next toke would have choked me.

It took him quite a few seconds before he exhaled. "To make a long story short, he had me arrested because I was going to flee the country. He'd found the passport while 'inspecting' my room along with a couple of letters from my granddad--"

"-- this must have been when I was in France, since we saw each other quite a few times when I was doing my two years at City College. How did you send letters to and from Cuba, anyway?"

"To answer your second question, first, I sent them through the Cuban delegation at the UN. As a matter of fact, it was when you were in France. I was arrested at Idlewild on the 11th of September '62. I was about to board a flight to Mexico City with a connecting flight to Havana, smack-dab in the middle of the missile crisis."

"But the Vietnam war hadn't even started in '62." I took a toke and a drink of water, since my mouth felt like cotton wool. "At least, as far as America was concerned."

"It had nothing to do with Vietnam." Haruki got up to get a bottle of Chivas Regal out of the pantry and two glasses. He continued only after having returned to the table and poured us a good measure. "I hate war and the military." His glare was stern, making his silent toast potent. "My mother's family was from Nagasaki. The only reason she wasn't nuked along with the rest of them was because she'd been studying music at Juilliard and married my dad in 1940." His voice now slipped into an aggressive tone. "And in 1942, six months after I was born, upstairs in this house, she and I were picked up by the FBI and shipped off to Rohwer Internment Camp, in Desha County, Arkansas. My hero father joined the Army to save his own ass from deportation and to become a citizen." He breathed deeply. "Then they moved us to Heart Mountain, Wyoming. My first memories were in an American concentration camp complete with watch towers and barbed wire."

He kissed my hand and I tried to keep myself from quivering. "And, five years ago, my grandmother was on vacation at their cottage at Playa Girón, when she was killed by American gun fire during the invasion."

I was still holding onto his hand and apparently looked confused when he laughed but not at me. "That's the beautiful beach where the Yankee invasion took place in '61. Now, the propaganda machine in this country calls it the Bay of Pigs."

"Yeah, they generally paste inappropriate labels on things, which then stick." The sips of whisky were becoming smoother. "And what happened when you were arrested?"

"Can I trust you, Chūgokujin?" His eyes were searching mine for any behavioural inconsistencies.

"Okay, Haruki, let me make this simple." I relit my joint. "Upstairs, in one of my bags, is my membership card in the French Communist Party." His eyes almost went round. "And do you know who one of the founding members of that popular group was, on Christmas day in 1920?" He shook his head. "The freedom fighter, Ho Chi Minh."

"Holy shit, Chūgokujin!"

"Yup, Babe, it's you, me and Uncle Ho."

***

After we'd sat down on the bed looking at my membership card in the PCF for the year 1966, inspecting the square, green, three-Franc dues stamps with their white hammer and sickle, a little more than five minutes had passed. He wanted to know why I'd joined. I told him that being a member of a scorned minority confined to a cramped ghetto in Lower Manhattan surrounded by slum tenements pretty much did the trick.

Then, he showed me his secret. He took me up to the third floor. The room to the right of the stairs looked like a war museum. It contained uniforms, rifles, medals, you name it. He seemed a little embarrassed at my dropped-jaw reaction.

"You remember Orwell's 1984 that we read in English class our Junior year in high school?" I nodded that I did. "Well, this is my hate room. I come here to chant: 'Hate, Hate, Hate.' at everything in here. It's the only release that I have."

Looking around in amazement, I recognized models of a Zero, The Bockscar, a U2 spy plane. On part of the wall to the right, there was a gallery of small portraits including Hirohito, Truman, Batista, Kennedy, Haruki's father. He'd framed his induction orders, his movement orders, his separation papers. Flags and pennants were hanging from the ceiling.

I pulled us close, his back to my front. "Where's the picture of your mother?" I whispered into his ear.

He chuckled innocently. "I don't hate her." His ass brushed against my awakening cock. Suddenly, his voice went cold. "I feel nothing for her."

My voice, on the other hand, sounded concerned. "Are you still able to love, at all?"

His eyes sparkled . Energetically, his left hand took mine and he guided me to the front room directly above his bedroom. "This is my love room." The intensity of the sunshine reflecting off the snow outside nearly blinded us as he opened the door.

The walls were covered with photographs of people, some of whom I knew from school and the neighborhood, others I didn't know. He pointed out pictures of his grandparents, obviously taken in Havana. I recognized the once mob-run Hotel Nacional de Cuba in the background, perched on a hill just above the seawall and grand boulevard, called the Malecón.

He had black-and-white photos of himself as a boy being held by his granddad. There were pictures of him at a beach, one of which was obviously Coney Island, and another with the Cuban flag in the background. When I chuckled he wanted to know why.

"Well, I have always had trouble remembering which is the Cuban and which is the Puerto Rican flag." He grinned, but only shrugged, not mentioning the fact that I'm part Cuban, as well.

Then I saw one, which made me shiver. It had been taken in the prison camp, but the young man holding him, as well as the possibly three year old Haruki, were smiling. A fence topped with barbed wire and a watchtower in the background were clearly visible. When he noticed where I was looking, he whispered: "It was as good as any of us thought it would get, ever again. It's really very easy to smile. A couple of months later, the kid who was holding me, and who I really loved, was drafted into the Army."

"Aw, come on." was my spontaneous expression of incredulity. "They drafted people out of concentration camps?" His response was a nod.

He went on to point at several pictures he'd taken of me on our various school outings. He explained the pictures of Army buddies at their station in Okinawa.

The huge surprise for me came in the form of a framed, eight-by-six, black-and-white, picture of Haruki and me huddled close, with our heads together and laughing, as if we didn't have a worry in the world. I remember when Rodney Bartholomew had taken it as a photography-class project. That was the day that Haruki had won his first gold medal at a major track meet; I had been one of his biggest fans. But what I didn't know was that Haruki had placed that much importance on my having congratulated him; I had been only one of many fellow students and teachers, whom he'd hugged that day. Nor did I know that he'd kept a copy of this picture, much less had it framed.

In the center of the large room was an oversized, light brown, Napa-leather divan with woolen throws and large pillows. He laid me down on the couch, put an LP on the Bang & Olufsen stereo and lay down next to me. Dvorak's New World Symphony, part one, 4th movement started enveloping us. Although, for the most part, fast paced, I found the piece soothing and happy, very appropriate for a love room.

***

We came out of our daze when the record finished. Haruki kissed me leisurely but not without passion. When he abruptly ended the kiss I became confused. "Come on, I have some survival tricks that I have to show you."

He bounded off the couch, pulling me after him, out of the love room and into the hate room. He picked up a pair of combat boots and closed the door. "These are mine, so they should fit you." Still totally docile from our session in the love room, I let him herd me down the stairs and into the kitchen with neither comment nor resistance.

Rummaging in a household cupboard, he produced a can of paste wax along with soft cotton cloths. He switched doors and came up with black boot polish and a shoe brush. "The floor wax is something that you'll have to hide, preferably in your laundry bag or under your mattress, if you have a bottom bunk."

Haruki opened the tin of floor wax and applied some with a small sponge to the left combat boot, then he took the Zippo, struck it and held it under the upside-down boot. "Holy, fucking shit." was my comment as it burned with an intense blue flame.

He proceeded to spread the hot wax over the boot with a cotton rag. The shoe brush was next to buff the undercoat. The black boot polish was evenly applied next. Again the Zippo melted the polish. This time he only used a cotton rag and spit. I'd seen the spit and rag routine used by the shoe-shine men, making an incredibly rough living at Penn Station and along Times Square.

"The two pairs of boots you're going to be issued will have been dyed black but will never have been really polished." I was paying close attention, mainly because Haruki was doing this out of love, giving me an advantage over the others. Nobody had ever done anything like this for me, ever. "The advantage of using floor wax first, is that you're sealing the leather, making it water proof, and smoothing out the rough spots. And the shine will impress the most hardened of Drill Sergeants." He giggled. "Now, Chūgokujin, you do the other boot."