You slump in your wheelchair, eyes on the Sharpied handwritten cardboard in your hand. Your wheels are backed up to a red brick wall, and the window next to you is closed shut, the blinds concealing the pet shop inside. The wisps of your grey-white hair concede to the left of your scalp, revealing mostly the golden reddish-flecked crown of your head. Behind the collar of your blue jacket with one red stripe, your chin hides. Your jeans sit loosely on your legs, the holes revealing the darkly tanned skin of your knees while the sandals on your feet expose time-worn travel. You hold in your hand the sign that reads “Veteran out of Work Need Help,” as if you were hanging onto a life preserver and yelling at passing ships.

Tourists on the San Diego street pass you by. Around you a merry rivalry is in progress, in which the consequences seem severe. Only one child scurries up to you, pointing to the sign and asking her mother for some change. In response, the woman grabs her child’s outstretched hand with a quick “Not today, I’m in a hurry.” 

In front of you, the McDonald’s cup remains empty, sitting alongside an almost empty bottle of orange Gatorade. Half asleep, you wonder about Vietnam, why you enlisted to serve two years twice, living without your Bible, toiletries, your new wife, your young child, even your dog. What was the purpose? 

You have a scar on your arm, the dark purple running from your left hand up to your elbow, where your arm shielded your face from the flying shrapnel of a grenade in Xuan Loc. Your body trembled as if your insides were blades of grass in a storm; you doubled up your knees, put your hands over your ears, yet you still heard the sounds. You don’t talk about it.

Once you came home from the war, you took up drinking, drowning your flashbacks in beer, and then rum, and now vodka. You took up smoking, slowly going through one pack of Cool a day, and then two. Your wife gave up trying to talk to you about buying that small house on Grant Street, or saving up for a new Chevy to replace the old Pinto, and you lost your job as cashier at Chevron. Soon, she and your daughter packed four Glad bags of belongings into the Pinto and drove to Oregon to live with her sister. You never saw your daughter ride a horse, win regionals at the National History Day contest, or get her first job at the Humane Society. She became a sixth grade teacher and now lives in Los Angeles with her husband and two kids, but you don’t know this.

For many years, you attended Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, but as soon as you left each one, your memories of death and bad choices would impel you toward the local Walgreens for the cheapest bottle of vodka on the shelves. You’d take it to your one-room apartment on El Cajon Boulevard, sit on your mattress on the floor of your empty studio apartment, and drink as if drinking were a festive bloodbath and you relished the mess that it caused.

Over time, you gave up all your dreams of opening your own laundromat, of learning French, of publishing your own book about the dark comedy of existence. You lived as if the dangers of war were still distinct, as if the battles were more than memories but rather a kind of foundation that made up your whole disposition.
Even now, you’ve become immune to people’s cursory yet judgmental glances, the way they walk past you either without saying a word or looking at you as if to say You’re pathetic Get a job. You know that you should stop the drinking and that their sneering has merit, but they don’t understand. They never lived through war, they never lost so much, they haven’t aged to the point that their bodies are older than they look. Their minds aren’t tarnished with surrender as if annihilation fits perfectly into their scheme of things.

Just now, a young man walks past with his girlfriend. He glances at her and then salvages change from his pocket, which he tosses toward your McDonald’s cup. A few coins fall on the pavement near your feet, but the quarters land inside. You want to say Thank you, but the smirk on the man’s face makes you feel as if he’s not genuine, as if all the disgust and superiority the man feels has been given a voice. While he strides away, you lean down to scrape up the shiny metallic nickels and place them into your cup. Around you, even the women in their high heels feel steady, and people glimmer while the clement weather remains pristine, yet in your poisonous air, the clouds begin to close in and your sidewalk feels like quicksand. You can’t keep warm.

You used to remember the way your mother laughed, the way her face looked even when she yelled after you broke her screen door, the smell of her floral perfume, the advice she gave you after the war. But she belonged to a time in your life that you could no longer recall. Like one-use razors from Walgreens, the sharpness of those memories has dulled and they’re mostly gone. Just as names and faces of generations of people are forgotten and buried alongside the names of others, your name and face will fade after death among those who knew you, and you will become simply a name alongside those of other dead soldiers.