The Returned Peace Corps Volunteer

The Returned Peace Corps Volunteer returns home after two years in the Peace Corps. You see him, very briefly, at the ass-end of his Welcome Home Party, but speech is not one of his stronger suits by the ass-end of that particular soirée. So you call him a couple days later and agree to meet him the following Wednesday at The Brothers Lounge on 38th and Farnam, your usual haunt, for drinks and a good, honest plunge into his volunteer experience. And some more drinks after that, presumably.

He shows up late and seems out of sorts when he finally arrives. Is he drunk? Already? No, you decide, he is not drunk. Just bewildered, for whatever reason. He sits down across from you at a four-person table at which only the two of you are seated, in the very darkest corner of a very dark bar. You shake hands.

"How you been, man?"
"Alright. You?"
"Doing well."
"Whatchoo drinking?"

You order a couple of Moscow Mules, the house specialty. The first round, you make clear, is on you. The drinks arrive in those little tin cups you like. Your friend stirs his Mule and stares down into his cup like he is trying to read his fortune therein, and you utilize the prolonged silence to drink in his appearance. He has changed. He looks unreal to you. His facial expressions are not quite his own, do not match the dossier of stillframes and short films you keep in your head. His movements are almost cartoonish. It's like the first time you saw a celebrity: Ashton Kutcher, at the zoo, a long time ago. They look so different in person. Shorter, for one thing, but it's mostly their movements that throw you off. They move like cartoons. Unreal. Larger than life, but weirdly diminished in real life. Unreal, or too real to be believed. You ponder this for a moment. Of course, you figure, it could be that your mental image of your friend has remained exactly the same while he has changed, which is only natural. People change. That's all they ever do, is change. It is irrational to expect people to remain the same. Two years. Who knows what he went through over there? Or whether he went through anything at all. Perhaps he is more or less the same as he ever was. Perhaps it is you who has changed. Perhaps you have gone through more shit than he has - you entertain the possibility. You reflect on all this shit while the goof stirs his drink and stirs it some more. In the end, you conclude: who the hell knows and does it even really matter?



Option A: "How was China?" you ask.
"You know," he says. "Good times. Bad times. Strikes and gutters."
"I hear you," you say.

Then you launch into a narrative about your workplace and the goings-on therein. The technical terms take quite some time to explain to your friend (who has always been fairly dense), and after you've fleshed out the details, you almost lose yourself altogether in the greasy depths of your law firm's dramatis personæ, comprised as it is of unattractive middle-aged white men who are of no particular interest to anyone - least of all you, least of all your friend, the Returned Peace Corps Volunteer. But your friend, the Returned Peace Corps Volunteer, hears you out and asks you the right questions, so you keep going. And before either of you are quite aware of the hour, it's closing time already. You pay the tab. Your friend thanks you for the drinks and bows ever so slightly in your direction. The both of you walk out to your respective vehicles together and shake hands there in the parking lot. A beautiful summer night. Trees whispering in the wind, etc. You get into your resepective vehicles. You drive north towards Midtown. He drives south, towards I-80 and The Suburbs. You think about hitting up Taco Bell. You put on the radio and switch it to the local NPR affiliate. It's the BBC World Service radio hour, which means it must be pretty damn late. Taco Bell time. Mexico, it seems, has surpassed Iraq and Afghanistan in kidnappings per capita. You order two Nacho Cheese Chalupas. You decide you are sober enough to take Dodge Street home. You reflect on the evening as you switch on your turn signal and wait for the oncoming headlights to pass so you can make that fateful/illegal left turn onto South 50th Street, and while you wait it occurs to you that you still have no idea what your friend, the Returned Peace Corps Volunteer, did for the past two years of his bizarre fucking life.



Option B: "How was China?" you ask.
"You know," he says. "Good times. Bad times. Strikes and gutters."

You both stir your drinks. Some fat guy across the bar slides a dollar into the jukebox. A song comes on. He and his buddies laugh their asses off, exchange fistpounds. You don't recognize the song, but it comes on three times in a row. Some sort of inside joke, you figure.

"But mostly bad times," says your friend, the Returned Peace Corps Volunteer. "I can't even begin to describe it. It's one thing to hear about it. It's one thing to read about it. But it's a whole other thing to live it."

You remain silent. Good friend that you are, you sense that this is the beginning of a monumental rant. As it turns out, you are not the least bit wrong about that.

"First off," he says, "it's not what they say it is. China. In the States, half the people are of the mind that China is 1984 incarnate. Big Brother and shit. The other half of the people, the China Apologists, are convinced that China is just like America, only more disciplined. Neither of those is the truth. But the truth is not quite in-between. To be honest, I have no fucking idea where the truth is anymore."

Your friend pauses, broods, stirs his drink. He takes a long sip from the thin red straw. You can hear the fluids gurgling at the bottom of his tin cup. He has already finished his first Moscow Mule. It's only been five minutes. You decide to catch up, while your friend, the Returned Peace Corps Volunteer, flags down the bartendress.

"Thanks, ma'am. Anyway. Like I said, it's not 1984. But it's not not 1984. If that makes any sense."

You nod, indicating via various/assorted facial cues that this makes no sense to you whatsoever.

"My students, for one thing, were completely brainwashed. As were 99.9% of the people I met over the course of two years. I still have no idea how they did it. The Party, I mean. How does one go about brainwashing 1.3 billion people? Beats the fuck out of me. Beats the fuck out of you. But they've done it. Mission Accomplished, as it were. The modern day Communist Party has succeeded where Mao failed. The older generation - the generation that grew up under Mao, that suffered unimaginably under Mao - are much more sane, much more capable of ... of thinking than the younger generation." Here, your friend sighs so hard that he practically spits across the table. "The young kids, the kids I used to teach - I hate to say it, but they were already a lost cause a long, long time before they showed up in my class."

He broods on this for a moment. The second round arrives. You both thank the bartendress. Your friend, you notice, bows ever so slightly in her direction. Do they bow in China? Or has your friend just gotten weird? You mean to ask him but decide to let the question sit until he has finished his rant. Because you are a good friend and what not. The inside joke song on the jukebox finally stops repeating itself. Something else comes on. An indie punk number. It's an indie punk bar, after all. It's so dark you can barely make out your Indiglo watch. You have no idea what time it is, but you hope it's getting close to closing time.

"I hate to generalize," your friend says, "but then, I've never lived anywhere where I could generalize. People are, as a rule, far too complex to be generalized. But China was different. Everywhere I went, everyone I talked to - for two years - I could predict almost exactly how they would respond to me, what they would say to me. There was a definite Chinese ... type. Everyone dressed the same, thought the same, shouted the same bullshit at me on the streets. It got to where every day was almost exactly the same to me. Which makes a man want to drink more than he should. Which makes a man smoke like a flaming pile of shit."

"Which I did," he adds, taking a long sip. "Like a flaming pile of shit."
"You still smoke?"
"Not anymore," he says.
"Damn," you mutter. You take out a pack of American Spirits and smack the pack against the back of your hand. "You mind if I sneak out for a - "
"Not at all," he says.

You sneak out for a cigarette. A beautiful summer night. Trees whispering in the wind, etc. You recognize most of the smoking crew out there. That one Far Side cartoon springs to mind, the one with the smoking dinosaurs, and you think about quitting. You always think about quitting. Never do, though. The smokers talk about the bands they're in, the record deals they're about to get. They're younger than you, almost embarrassingly so. You couldn't give a shit about their record deals, but you pretend to and shake hands with everyone on your way back in.

"Sorry," you say to your friend, who is obsessively-compulsively stirring his drink again. "Proceed."

"I dunno, man," he says. "I've never been more miserable in my life. In China, I mean. Not since high school, at least. Puberty. The Descent of the Testes and what have you. But I wasn't miserable about me in China. In fact, I'd never felt more sure of myself. But never in my life have I been more miserable about my surroundings. Not since puberty, I mean. Just imagine - "

We're already up to drink three, you realize. Or at least your friend is. You haven't even broken the seal on drink two. Your friend flags down the bartendress. You get to slurping.

"Imagine," he says. "Every day. Every time you leave your apartment. Every time you go out to do anything, you are pointed at. Stared at. Laughed at. People shout at you. Cat call you. Shout wai-guo-ren, which means foreigner, or laowai, which means foreigner, too, though it feels more like The N-Word. Sometimes they even shout the word foreigner in English, just to get your goat. Which is the worst one of all. Because you realize that they are using what little English they know, and they are using it to get your goat. Which is pretty damned sadistic of them, if you ask me. Two fucking years of that."

He sighs. You nod. You don't really think it sounds all that bad, but your friend's brow is furrowed in a way that suggests some sort of personal injury that you are not quite privy to, because it is probably deeply internal. His forehead looks like a page out of a Mead® college-ruled notebook.

"College kids - strangers, adults - will shout fuck you in your face as they pass you in the streets. But that doesn't really bother you all that much. Direct hatred, I've found, is much easier to deal with than sideways, peripheral, perpetual disdain. China made me an angry person. I came to appreciate hip-hop in China. Imagine that. I'm not black or anything, but I can almost imagine ... "

He trails off, cracks his knuckles. Drinks.

"Anyway. You come to think of yourself almost as a kind of superhero at the end of the day, just because you didn't kick the shit out of anyone. Two years of that bullshit and I only maybe flipped off a couple of douchebags, only mouthed off to a handful of hecklers. A less patient man than me - a more dignified man, perhaps - would've wound up in a Chinese prison. It was tough in the beginning and it never got easier. If anything, my nerves were totally shot by the end of it. I could hardly even look at people by the end. My last month in the country, I remember, I was out trying to buy a roll of toilet paper and some kid approached me and told me to go fuck myself. Then he walked away. I had to bite my tongue in half just to keep myself from going all medieval on his ass. So to speak. But bite my tongue in half I did."

Your friend blushes. You can't tell if it's the drink, or if he is on some level ashamed of everything that he has confessed to you over the past five minutes. Already, despite your best efforts, you are rather bored. Your chair creaks as you wiggle from one ass-cheek to the other. You stifle a yawn just in time for your friend not to notice (he is busy stirring his drink again) and you find yourself studying the cleavage of a brunette hunkered down over the pool table, just to keep your morale up, just to keep yourself awake.

"I almost went crazy back there. I swear I did. The worst part wasn't the heckling. Or the xenophobia. Or being so different from everyone else," he says. "The worst part was the monotony. The absence of hope. Every day was the same. There was no trajectory. No plot. And once you've lost the plot - "

He's stopped stirring his drink, because there is no drink left. He is lapping you. He flags down the bartendress. His fourth Mule is lined up for the slaughter. You're still nursing Mule two. You're fine with that. It is you, after all, who is driving.

"But the funny thing is," he says, "as bad as I thought it was as the time. As uneventful, as awful as most days were. Now that I'm back. Now that I'm here. It doesn't seem that bad at all. I just feel like I'm bitching about a great big nothing. China already feels like a dream. A great big cloud of vapor. What I've told you tonight is more than I've told anybody. And it's probably more than I ever will tell anybody else. The truth is, I no longer want to talk about it. Not to anyone. I just feel like I'm whining. And I'm not a whiner. I'm not. Sure, I had wanted to talk about it for a good long while, but only when I was there. Now that I'm home, it's not really worth talking about, is it? It doesn't matter. It was all just a dream. It doesn't exist to me anymore, not really. And anyway, nobody cares. I'm sure you don't. I mean, not really. I mean, you listen. Because you're a good guy. But - "

Your friend nods at the brunette hunkered over the pool table.

"Your mind is wandering."

You nod and finish your second Mule. You order your third. Why the hell not? This is getting depressing. Your friend, the Returned Peace Corps Volunteer, stands up and wobbles his way over to the jukebox. You already know two of the three songs he's going to put on. He's very predictable in that regard. You're not sure about the third, though. That much remains a mystery. He wobbles back to his seat. You both sit around thinking of things to say to one another. After a while, "Let It Loose" by The Rolling Stones comes on. Followed by, surprise surprise, "Mother of Pearl" by Roxy Music. Then - an actual surprise - "Waiting Room" by Fugazi.

"Shiieeeeet," you say. "Man, I didn't know you were into Fugazi."
"What the hell is Fugazi?" he asks, genuinely puzzled. "I was just pushing buttons up there."



Option C: "How was China?" you ask.

Your friend, the Returned Peace Corps Volunteer, laughs a bit. Then he laughs some more. The drinks arrive. He drinks his. You drink yours.

"Let's not talk about me," he says. "Let's talk about you."