Excerpt from Delano by John Orozco

My Big Toe

You might think I'm stupid for shooting off my big toe, but at the time it seemed like a good idea. Even before they sent me to Vietnam, I wasn't entirely convinced that going into combat was good for my country, the Vietnamese people or myself.

Don't misunderstand me; I'm not noble, and I'm not entirely against the army. The army is a good thing for a lot of people who would otherwise be socially out of place because of their homicidal tendencies.

What I was primarily against was that my life and well-being were about to be put at risk for a cause I did not fully appreciate.

And to think that this was expected of me while hundreds of thousands of young men my age were having the times of their lives, smoking dope and getting laid in perfectly safe environ-ments.

But don't think that shooting off my toe was some kind of foolish lark. There were serious consequences. First, I could have been courtmartialed if my scheme had been discovered, and this would have been an entirely different story. Second, I had to learn how to walk without a big toe on my right foot. My advice to anyone whoever feels the necessity to shoot off his toe is to shoot off a little one. It's probably not as debilitating, and it will serve whatever purpose

you have just as well as if you had shot off a big one.

There are probably a lot of people who will think that what I did makes me a selfish coward, but that doesn't necessarily make me a bad person. In fact, selfishness, and what I prefer to call a healthy survival instinct, are exactly what made this country what it is today.

I didn't always see things this clearly, but I've come to terms with myself living in a remote part of Northern Califomia. In fact, I've made what most of my friends would call a phenomenal transformation. Today, in spite of the war, drugs, wicked women and higher education, I'm at long last at peace with the world.

You may ask just how this transformation occurred, and I have every intention of telling you.

It wasn't easy.

I owe part of my self-enlightenment to Winston Ashford Gonzales. Without him, I would have probably ended up married and teaching in a public school. It's not that he simply taught me how to cut corners, though that was part of my success. He taught me a way of seeing and doing things without the excess baggage of guilt.

I don't believe that I was ever one of those guilt-ridden souls who harbored deep resentments. But Winston noticed in me a healthy irreverent quality, and he helped me develop it into its full

potential. That was Winston's special skill. He could see through people. He understood their motives immediately. For instance, when he learned of my missing toe, he knew instantly that it had a self-serving motive behind it.

I have to admit there were times when I did not trust him, and I actually felt bad about some of the dishonest things I did. But after sorting it all out, I've forgiven myself. Winston would be proud of me. The only regret I have now is that I didn't know him sooner.

I suppose I should get on with the story and tell you about myself.

I inherited my father's Mexican oval face and high cheekbones. I inherited a strong chin from my mother. I also got her blue-green eyes that seemed out of place with the long, black eyelashes I got from my father. If it were not for an errant baseball, my nose would be perfect. But a girl once told me I was lucky it was hooked and skewed, or I would be pretty.

I always tried to simplify my life as much as possible. What complicated this simplification was that I could not stand to hurt other people, even when they deserved it. Also, I found that it was easier to lie to them than to argue. In fact, I agreed with most people just to shut them up. And because I agreed with whatever they said, people who didn't really know me believed that I thought just as they did. People who knew me better thought I was a flake because, inevitably, I contradicted myself.

I learned to survive by going with the flow, and I always took the path of least resistance. For example, I calculated that the certainty of losing a toe would be better than the uncertainty of going into combat, and then I pulled the trigger.

Of course, I did consider other options. If it had not been my toe that got me out of the army, it probably would have been a Section Eight. To this end, I had confessed to the Army shrink my fear of Oscar, my parents' German Shepherd. The dog had persecuted me throughout my childhood.

The shrink, of course, understood my fear clearly.

"You see, Eddie," he said, "you have a phobia rooted deep in your libido. It's really not Oscar you're afraid of, but your latent homosexuality."

"But I'm not a hom. . ."

"You have to stop denying it! You have to confront your demons!"

"I didn't say anything about demons."

"Now, Eddie. We've discussed these paranoid delusions of yours concerning your parents' dog. It's really not the dog at all. You're crying out for love and acceptance. Confront your demons, Eddie, and Oscar won't bother you anymore."

I considered where the doctor was going with this line of reasoning, and I decided to shoot off my toe.

On the day I returned home to Southern California, Oscar recognized me immediately and attacked. As I stepped up to the front door, Oscar had the seat of my britches between his teeth and was getting dangerously close to my huevos rancheros.

My mother answered the door and Oscar let go.

"Yes?" she asked, fumbling with her glasses.

By the time she got her glasses in place, the asshole dog was wagging his tail and licking my hand.

"Eddie!" She seemed pleased, and then she turned to the dog.

"Yes, yes, Oscar. Eddie's home. You're happy to see him, aren't you, boy?"

She took me by the arm and led me, a little too quickly, into the house. I limped slightly as we entered the living room, where my father sat in front of the TV. They noticed the limp and a look of concern crossed their faces.

Never one to show his emotions, my father muffled his greetings and said nothing about my limp. I noticed that he had gained a considerable amount of weight since I'd seen him last.

"Is it bad?" asked my mother with a worried quiver in her voice.

"No. Sometimes I don't notice it at all. They say I'll compensate and find my balance."

My father gathered himself quickly.

"I'm sure you don't want to talk about it, Son," he said. "So, have you any plans? For the future?"

"Oh, Lazlo! Let the boy get comfortable before you lay into him," said my mother. She turned to go into the kitchen.

"Geezus H. Christ, Millie! I got a right to know," replied my father, craning his neck in my mother's direction. "Who pays the bills around here, anyways?"

He looked back at me, expectantly.

"I figured I would kind of take it easy for a while, Dad. I'm not yet used to this war wound."

"Well, don't dwell on it. You fall off a horse, you gotta get right back on him."

"Where are we going to keep a horse, Lazlo?" ridiculed my mother, returning from the kitchen with a pitcher of lemonade.

My father ignored her and continued.

"There's a lot of boys far worse off who've made good."

My mother removed her glasses. She seemed to be considering my father's statement.

"Look at Helen Keller," she declared. "She was blind and deaf, yet she learned to be useful. She had a positive attitude."

But a positive attitude was elusive for the time being. I soon discovered that, in my absence, my parents had taken the liberty of giving away all my prized possessions-albums, posters and the typical assortment of paraphernalia valued by a generation I no longer felt connected to.

To make matters worse, my father had let my car fall into disarray. The tires on my VW bug were completely flat, and the battery was dead, so when I wanted to go into town, I had to take my old bicycle.

At first I thought it a blessing in disguise. With the wind in my face, I glided happily along, reliving the simple pleasures of my youth. Abruptly my euphoria came to a halt when I heard the burst of a siren.

To make a long story short, I was cited by a cop for having a broken bicycle reflector. Later, as I held the ticket in my hand, my disappointment grew. Defiantly, I threw it away-an act I later came to regret.

But at the time my biggest disappointment was that all of my friends were gone. Being away from home for the first time, I had fantasized what it would be like seeing my old buddies-all the bragging and lying. But they had gone their separate ways. All of them except Conrad Christopher.

Conrad. Here was another disappointment altogether. But Winston would have loved him. It was Conrad's idea that I go to college.

I was reluctant to see him at first. There was more than a little bad blood between us. He had stolen my manic-depressive girlfriend, Carry Ann Fowl, and married her. I didn't think he would ever forgive me for that.

But after several days of doing nothing and going nowhere, I decided that having a half-assed friend was better than having none at all.

"They say all over town you're some kind of war hero, Eddie," he said, as we walked down the quiet tree-lined street near his apartment.

"Well," I mumbled modestly, "it's no big deal. I did what I had to do. Knowing you, you would have probably done the same thing."

Behind the cover of an overgrown pepper tree, Conrad produced a large, yellow bomber. He lit it with a ceremonious motion, his hand cupped over the burning end of the joint, and sucked in the smoke deeply.

"Have you thought about what you're gonna do now that you're home?" he asked, handing it to me.

"You too? My father's been giving me the daily third degree about my future."

"Well, Carry and I kind of wondered what you would do when you came home," he said, exhaling the potent vapors. "Carry says you're a bum. But then, no one would ever have dreamed that you would come home a hero. Maybe you'll surprise her."

I inhaled and thought about Carry. According to her, I was a total screw-up. Maybe I was, but Carry, regardless of what Conrad wanted to believe, only hated me because I refused to marry her, despite how much money her father had.

I passed the joint back to Conrad and sized him up.

Even if Carry had never entered the picture, Conrad and I would still have had a strained friendship. He could never believe that I really didn't want to be like him. He had a personality sculpted by greed and ambition-a candidate for executive ulcers, high blood pressure, and a headstone fit for the richest dead man in the cemetery. He was the only person I ever knew who carried a photograph of his car in his wallet.

My goals in life were very different from Conrad's. I liked money just as much as he did, but he would do anything for it. He even married for it. Of course, by now he must have realized that he was going to earn every penny of it. Carry was no free ride.

What made me different from Conrad was not so much what I wanted; it was what I didn 't want. I did not want responsibility for anything. My goals had always been quite simple: to sleep late, eat what I wanted, go where I wanted, and do as I pleased. That was why I hated the army so much. And that was why I didn't want to confound my life by getting married.

"Have you thought about going to college?" Conrad asked.

This was the kind of suggestion Conrad knew would irritate me. I had been a horrible student, and he knew it. I suspected that he was trying to rub the past in my face.

"Think about it, Eddie. College fits your life style. Don't forget, you're now entitled to the GI Bill, right?"

"Cut the crap, Conrad. You know I was a pretty lousy student. What college would accept me?"

"Hell," he said. "I'm not talking about Harvard. There are plenty of state colleges that would probably take you. Besides, you can always plead minority. You've got the right surname. They'll let you in. They're looking for Mexicans. Haven't you heard of affirmative action?"

The irony staggered me. In high school they had put me in retard classes. They assumed that because my last name was Delano, I couldn't speak English. But I wasn't angry about what they did. Underestimating me had suited me fine because I was rarely assigned any homework.

"My grades were really bad, Conrad. I don't think affirmative action would make that big of a difference."

"Then tell 'em you're black. There you go. With a Mexican surname and you telling them you're black, they gotta let you in."

This kind of angling was exactly the kind of thing Winston would have loved about Conrad. But I knew the way Conrad's mind reasoned, and I didn't like it. To him there were degrees of racial depravity. To be of Mexican heritage meant you were only partially screwed up. To be black meant you were a little more screwed up. Being both meant you had to be so screwed up that society owed you something and had to let you into college.

I thought about confronting him on this issue. But that would have required a lot of effort, and it hardly seemed worthwhile. Besides, people couldn't really be changed unless they wanted to be. The best way of dealing with someone like Conrad was to be practical.

I thanked him for his suggestion and told him I would think about it. In fact, I did think about it, and once past the insulting innuendo, I discovered it really wasn't a bad idea. What did I have to lose if I told the college I was both black and Hispanic?

Indeed, while lying on my back in the hospital contemplating the loss of my big toe, I had come to the realization that life was a game in which, in the end, no one won much of anything. But that was acceptable. And if there were any rules, they were vague. A person could be a victim of circumstance, or he could make up his own rules.

And maybe, if he was lucky, he could have a little fun along the way.

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