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Tony Gentry

August 1991: Happyland

Updated: May 17

Fifth in a series of stories from my time working as an occupational therapist at the Manhattan VA Hospital.


Welcome to Happyland, my man! You know, like that place in the Bronx, disco that burned down? They only had one way out, that little door to make the bouncer look big? Even the windows bricked up? Happyland Leisure & Social Club they called it. That’s why I put the sign on my door. My one door. That won’t lock. The one window. That won’t open. Plexiglass, you can’t break it. Check out this beat, call it techno-Caribe, marracas like crickets, and I guess these girls what, ululations? Bed and a chair is what I got. Sun heats up the plexi glows all smeary gold and kinda pulses like. Bar drinks here, they liquid drugs in paper cups, fair shots, actually. But I can’t get to my baby. I can’t get to my girl. In Happyland, you gotta dance. If you can salsa, or at least you gotta shake it some.


Nights in here they show videos on the wall. You wouldn’t believe what they suppose is entertaining. And the only outfit you get is these old cheap pajamas, like pea green colored, with snaps you see on baby clothes, some kind of cheap polyester with all the stains the last guy oozed that they couldn’t get out. I mean, this whole line of grandpas, all of them in these itchy old pajamas, and they’re all one size and the men got missing legs, they got bony arms, they’re just swaddled in these things. You see them coming down this hallway that’s pea green, too, or sometimes it’s this pink shade somebody had to plan to clash so good with the pajamas. I mean somebody had to stay up late just to organize this mess!


These old guys, half of them not even shaved, and hooked up to IV bags and colostomy bags and feed tubes plugged straight into their gut or trachs jammed into their throats or lines up their nostrils strapped on with bandaids across the bridges of their nose so their heads rear back to try to make an airway. And they ogle at you in what has to be agony but of course their hands are strapped to the chair so they can’t rip the thing out or even get a scratch. And I wouldn’t blame them, man, they’d do it, they’d rip the tube right up out of their gullets like a fishing line hooked with blood and snot altogether in one wailing belch up through the nose, anything to get that fucking feeding tube out from where it don’t belong.


You don’t believe me, you look in their wild old eyes sometime. That would make a video. See your own fish-eyed reflection rolling there. Aww, look, guess who else be wearing them goofball slippers made of sponges, the designer pj’s. Oh yeah, you’re in it, too, baby, this is Happyland. You want the real disco, you know how the beat just drop, DJ front some nasty old flute shit. Come up eery and cold and everybody’s neck swivels, gone to church on the flute, on the float, baby, waiting for the drop, here it comes. Take your ass to Arabia, now we down! Disco got smoke and fire and a junkyard stink. Oil and blood all boiling up together make a black cloud Terminator world. And then that miles of void flat out to nowhere when the meds kick in and your head goes deep like sunset in the sand.


Hundred Hours War they call it, smart bomb take a left turn in a window and all that shit. Stealth bombers. The promo will tell you we cut in clean, look how cool we play. But that ain’t what it was. But you try to tell somebody. Which is why I got the pictures to prove it.   Check out this one here. Page One: I call it the stone beginning of Happyland, my de-virgining over in the once upon a time. Cherry pop. You can’t tell from the picture, see, but on the road back from Kuwait they had these long ditches, these trenches, and we just chased them over the edge, where they thought they’d be safe or some shit. I mean, this is just the dirty desert, man, flat as a rug, there is no place you can hide, and this picture here, this is when they begin to get the picture.


You can’t see it too well, we were moving when I took it so it’s blurry, but believe me it came on fast and freaky. They want to get out now. This picture don’t show the noise, you have to imagine from the smoke. I’m in a bulldozer like you’ve never seen, got a 20-foot plow blade, and it can move. We had like 50 in a row and every one making tracks. Ran in a mile-wide phalanx side-by-side Mad Maxxing it. Kicked up our own sand storm behind us. And tanks, too, with blades on the front. This picture is like halfway through the job, I wouldn’t call it a battle. I’m not going to be taking pictures in a fire fight, right? There was nothing to do. And this picture, I pasted it in next to that one, because look, ten minutes later, where’s the ditch? Where’s the bad guys? Right? We’re sitting a thousand tons of bulldozer, a thousand tons of Abrams tank on them that’s where. And check this guy, he’s actually dug his way out, he’s just about out of there, got a leg up and that’s when he gets plugged, like a rat in his hole. Look at this other guy. Now you see him, now you don’t. Vaporized.


We just sat there in the desert, dead as Mars, machines idling. Climbed up on the hood and took pot shots. Or ran ‘em over. Or took a half-ton bulldozer blade and just smushed them. Like roaches coming out of their holes. Look how the sky, it’s white, it’s just as white as everything else, I mean like a white rubber skullcap clamped down on us all. But I know, hey, I get what it does to you, to look at my little photo album. I can imagine what you think of me for this. But dude you came in here, you see the sign. Happyland.


Night and day, sleep, awake, it’s the beat. Check this, how I got me these skanky pj’s and this ragged old wheelchair, first thing I know, I wake up on my living room floor and somebody’s howling. Turns out it’s me and I’m grabbing my knee, look up my wife she’s got a baseball bat, my own softball bat that goes plink when you get a hit, and she don’t have a stitch on and she’s howling too. Plinked me good, yeah she did. Check these knuckles, nobody’s even looked at it yet, feel like a handful of needles. Bedroom wall’s just moon craters, wake up and my arm’s up to my elbow in the next apartment. And this time, she’s preaching, says I kicked her clean across the room in my sleep. And came at her like some kind of zombie, thus the bat. I was asleep man. I was asleep at the disco! I mean, we used to like each other!


So I get up on this one knee, the other all smooshy like a bag of glass, still a mess really under these pins, and my leg I mean it folded backwards and I fell on it. You could hear the tendons pop like rubber bands. I’m laying there screaming and she’s standing over me not a stitch on screaming, I just want to jump up and take that bat. But my leg is folded up like a wallet in my lap, and that’s funny to both of us, really. Cops come in and we’re laughing and crying at the same time. I tried to throw a pillow at her. Put some clothes on girl! They think this is fucking hilarious. And that’s the last I know about that night.


Yo, whatever. I can lock my brakes. I can make it down the hall. I can get on and off the john, wipe my ass, I can do all that, no problem, okay? But buddy that ain’t the story. I’m just laying down some truth. People been sold a big con. Desert Storm is what they advertise. It’s all Happyland to me. Before all this, I was a dumbass, like you are, no offense, most people are. Like my little woman she so fine and we leave the Mets game early on a Sunday afternoon just to stretch out in the grass. She had seventeen bridesmaids, three day event two weeks before I left. I had to bring up cousins from the island just to get them escorts. She got pictures of all that and she can have them.


Look I want you to have this picture album. I know it cold anyway. They say this whole deployment wasn’t any kind of war, over in a week and all that, chased old Saddam back to his castle, but these pictures say different, right? The other ones, the pictures up in here between my ears, I can isolate, snapshot, do a still frame anytime. Which is the trick, I suppose. Pull a Michael Jackson, freeze it on tip toe, then walk it back and the girls all wet themselves. That’s why the sign on my door. Everywhere you look, it’s Happyland, and what I know now, what any of these old guys can tell you, we got a fire in the disco. All the exits blocked, man, the door’s lit up, all eyes be rolling, and we together understand what they won’t tell you yet. Busted knee or not, the only way out’s in a bag.

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