CHAPTER ONE MY RAZOR Here it is, my razor, lying before me and my computer. As I pick up the razor and look at it, I see the words Gillette written on the slightly curved top. The razor was probably made a very long time ago, perhaps surplus left over from the second world war. It is the type which you have to screw it upwards in order to place a double edged blade into the razor. My razor is silver, not much of a razor one would think. I mean with all the different kinds of ways and machines one can use today to get the hair off your face, what's the big deal? Well for me my silver razor is very special. Not only have I had this razor for more then twenty years, it is also government issue! Not everybody these days gets a razor from his very own government. My razor was issued to me many years ago by a prison guard in the Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary. A standard government issue given to all prisoners on entering prison. Back then in democratic America, people going into prison, despite their background, race or colour, received this standard razor. It does not matter if you are Jimmy Hoffa (former leader of the Teamsters Union) or Joe Blow nobody, everybody has the democratic right to receive a government issue razor. I have had my razor since 1970. Wow! 25 years we have been together my razor and I. My life is divided up into the time before I received my razor from the government and the time after this historical event. A razor if used correctly can be very useful to a person. Not only can I scrape hair off my face, which I have obviously done for years now, but there are lots of other things I can do with my razor. I can use my razor to remind me of some of the more extraordinary events of the past. I can get extremely angry and scream at my razor.I can hold my razor and have the same feelings as a child with a pacifier in its mouth feels. It calms me down. My razor stills my soul, my rage, my fears, my vengeance and at times my razor lets me hold on to my sanity. My very being, existing and survival, on a daily basis, depends on the relationship I have with my razor. Boy, its a good thing the government, probably in order to save money, made a razor which appears to be indestructible! A friend of mine who lives in Australia, who running the underground railroad for American soldiers deserting from the armed forces during the war in Vietnam, suggested to me that I should write down my experiences in life. He said if you can't write your experiences down, play them in on a tape recorder. I said to myself that I would have to talk to my razor about this. To my friend Max I said, "Who cares about my fucking history?" A number of weeks have gone bye since my friend Max and I had talked about this stuff. I had been extremely edgy and realized that something was bothering me, when one day I threw one of my sneakers at my cat "Sputnik" or "Leo" depending on which name the cat uses. I was not angry at the cat, in fact, the cat hadn't anything to do with my anger. My cat was just an innocent bystander for my rage. Sort of like the Vietnamese who innocently got in the way of the bombs being dropped out of those B-52,s flying 20,000 feet over their heads during the war. Neither my cat knew why he got a sneaker in the head or the Vietnamese all of a sudden, out of sky, all hell broke lose when 500 pound bombs started dropping on their heads. What was bothering me was the fact, that Max had told me on the telephone that Robert McNamara had written a book. So, what's the big fucking deal? Somebody wrote a book so what. Well Robert McNamara was not just somebody, he was the former secretary of defence during the war years. McNamara was responsible for Vietnam war policy under the Johnson administration. Do you know what this guy did? He crept out of a closet somewhere, 27!, yes twenty seven years, after he left office and claims that the war was all wrong! Now that is really incredible! I who has been living in exile for over 24 years in Sweden because of my opposition to the war in Vietnam. I am told that the guy who was responsible for leading the war until 1968 has confessed that the war was all wrong! McNamara, that is an act of a political coward. There are still people living in exile. There are still people living underground. There are GI's who were crippled for life. There are 55,000 GI's who came home in body bags. There are millions of Vietnamese that died and millions more who are still suffering because of the war. McNamara its a little too late for confessions. What is it, are you trying to get Bill Clinton off the hook? You know what I mean, disarming the question of what Bill Clinton was doing during the war from being a question in the elections in 1996. Or do you need the money? That is what made me throw my sneaker at the cat I was extremely upset. I needed to talk to my razor, I needed to scream at my razor about this stuff. McNamara you fucking creep, climbing out of the closet after all these years. Bill Calley, leader of the My Lai massacre, a free man today and I still can not return to the country of my birth. Some of my children have not been able to see me their father in twenty three years and grandchildren who have never met their grandfather. McNamara, how dare you come out of the closet and open up all these doors for me again. Rage, horror, fear, sorrow, guilt, happiness and kick ass feelings. So, McNamara wants to write about the war years. O.K. well we have a story too. It is a much better story then McNamara's. It is a success story! A success story in the fact that this is one working class kid that you didn't feed into the meatgrinder as of yet. They are still trying, up to the writing of this book, however they have not succeeded as of yet. Not only that McNamara, we beat you and your employers, we won a great victory by forcing you and the people you work for to retreat. It was the largest and most humiliating defeat that the rich people and the American government have been faced with in its short history. We kicked the rich people, corporations and the American government's ass! The price has been very high, but this time in history, it was the little guy who won. Ha, Ha, Ha, McNamara we whipped your ass! Millions and millions of little people kicked the ass off one of the most powerful countries in the world. Do you realize that these fucking people, McNamara and his employers, have always been trying to kill people like me and it started before I was born. I am a poor, working class man, that is why the fatcats want my ass. 53 years old soon and for 53 years the rich people have been trying to get me killed in one way or another. So lets get my razor and me and see where it goes. Who knows, maybe some kid sitting on a rooftop in one of the projects of America, playing with his prick, like I did when I was a kid, can learn something in the struggle to survive in the future. It is 1942, October 27th 1942, the day I was born. Obviously I had no idea what was going on nor what sort of a world I was coming into on this particular day. It turned out so that at this particular time in history everybody was singing the classical song "I'm singin in the rain". It was Hollywood's answer to the long list of defeats imposed on America by the Japanese after the bombing of Pearl Harbour. Bataan, Malasia, Correquidor and Singapore. I'm singin in the rain, with Gene Kelly was the tune coming from Hollywood as working class kids marched off into Japanese prisoner of war camps. I did not know this. I didn't even know that my dad died, soon after I was born, leaving mom with three kids to raise. Who was he, my dad just going off and dying on us. I do remember that we were poor, no money, dinaro, pesetas, dollars, rupees, no we were really fucking poor. I remember that once my mom got really pissed off at me about money, because we were so poor. One evening she sent me down to the corner store with 25 cents to buy some chopmeat to have in the soup we usually ate for dinner. (In those days, it was really a privilege to get some chopmeat in the soup!) On the way home from the store, I found this dog who had been injured, probably hit by a car in his back leg. I used the chopmeat to coax the dog to follow me home to the apartment we were renting. My mom was enraged by the fact that I had used all of the chopmeat and her hard earned money on a dog. She started crying about it. I was sent to bed without supper for this horrible crime. But we got to keep the dog! That was my mom, a hard working woman of the American Telegraph Company. Yeah, back in those days there were still telegrams and people who delivered them to your doorstep. She, my mom, had to work hard and long hours in order to raise and feed three kids alone. I did not see much of my mom when I was little, she was always busting her ass to provide a roof over heads and food for the day. We never got Christmas presents such as toys. We always got new clothes at Chistmas time. For my mom it was a question of survival. My mom was so poor and it being so tough is probably the reason she married Harry. I will get back to Harry in a while, but let us zoom back into the future. My razor is pissed off at me. It is saying to me "cut the bullshit" I wasn't around at this time. I make the assumption that my life is divided into, life before my razor and life after my razor, and guess what? My fucking razor takes it seriously. So in all fairness to my razor, which has become an integral part of my life, I will hop into the future for awhile...