Confessions Of A Flag-spitter

All I do is write a stupid little book of poems in which our President gets compared to Ho Chi Minh (page 48, check it out), and I'm completely ruined, both as a writer and as a man. Even though I've never spit on the American flag in my life, that's how I'll be remembered by posterity. Here's how it happens.
      

My book of poems comes out to no acclaim whatsoever, as do most, but it's still the biggest moment of my life thus far-a life that's largely been wasted at tiny state college branch campuses, where I teach freshmen the joys of the complete sentence. The Ho Chi Minh poem is a throw-away, something I added at the last minute to fill pages, until it comes to the attention of the mind-control watchdogs at the tiny private college where I'm slated to be a guest reader one evening. I pick up my measly honorarium check at a dinner with Arthur, the English department chair, and a few of his cronies. This is insufferably boring, but gives me the chance to chat up a recently-divorced 40-something creative writing professor, Daniela, who quotes entire stanzas of my work by heart and looks hot to trot.
       So far so good, right? As we walk to the lecture hall I expect to find the usual 25 or 30 people boredly waiting-insane wannabe poets, deaf old ladies who like "culture," and slacker students making up for absences in their English classes. Instead I see three hundred people, half of them waving flags and demanding my head. Shouting Daniela down when she tries to introduce me, scattering leaflets everywhere-bright, professionally-produced leaflets that defame me for my anti-American sedition.
       Arthur and Daniela can't hide their smiles. For them this is the coup de grace, the moment their podunk program gets put on the map. For me it's the moment when I realize I've been stabbed in the back by two backwater careerist assholes. I get feisty at the microphone and swear at some kids, flip a few others off. I hadn't planned to read the Ho Chi Minh poem at all, but those snot-faced little turds calling me "Traitor!" make me want to do nothing else. So I read the offending lines over and over, shouting them out so the kids get the point.
The protestors soak up my vitriol; every minute I hang on at the mic is manna from heaven to them. A few quick cell phone calls and the TV cameras arrive. The grown-up reporters join the kids from the campus paper, and I am Front Page News. Fights break out and a ring of football players encircles me menacingly in the name of "protection." The police come and I'm whisked away by a plainclothesman, who gets me past the throngs of angry protesters outside the lecture hall.
"It's too dangerous for you here," he says as he hustles me into a waiting squad car. "We're taking you to an airport in the next county over, you'll fly home from there."

       On the way to this airport we're stopped at a roadblock. The plainclothesman mutters "Oh, shit" when some other cops shine their flashlights at us, but I can tell from the way he chats with them that he's been in on this scheme from the beginning. I'm turned over to two beefy Men-in-Black types who take me to a waiting van, but they're not the ones who question me. Those duties go to a 20-year-old named Peter Clay, who's exactly the kind of "What do I need to read for, anyway?" kind of kid who I would've flunked even twenty years ago, back when I was soft.
"So how long haff you had zis problem?" he asks me in a terrible fake German accent, mutilating some pallid imitation of Freud that he must've seen on reality TV.
"Since before you were born, sonny." I make the mistake of laughing at Peter, which means that he-understanding nothing more than the rule of force-sics the muscle-boys on me. They twist my arms and hold me down on the van's floor.
"What's the code for that?" Peter asks them, scribbling in a notebook and no doubt mis-spelling at least two words as he does.
"Subject physically provoked the questioner," says the beefier of the two Men-in-Black. He's pretty articulate, and I'd much rather be questioned by him than by Peter. But Peter has no doubt stirred up oodles of anti-liberal sentiment on campus, and this interrogation is the reward he's earned. As his questions continue, I'm unable to resist my urge to correct his grammar as I offer him the most insolent answers possible. My combativeness doesn't help my cause, and when the van stops I'm thrown into a dank concrete cavern in which I can neither stand up nor lie down.
"How do you like your free speech now, Perfesser?" Peter calls in to me through a feeding slot.
       I'm gagged and can't reply with anything more than a grunt. I can't call anybody, can't get any news of the outside world. All I get is Peter and his belittling harangues against my "betrayal" of America. He even manages to misquote Sadaam Hussein: "No person, no personal problem." I eat the crappy food they give me for the first few days, then go on a hunger strike. Lots of bad dreams of torture, though maybe they aren't dreams at all.

How long this goes on, I can't say. But at last I'm rescued by Daniela, who's had a fight with Arthur and a change of heart about setting me up. She sacrifices her body to young Peter in order to get me released, and I'm placed "ON WATCH" by the government-which means I'm forever condemned to have creeps like Peter taking every class I teach, describing my further "betrayals of America" in incomplete sentences on the pages of their government-issue notebooks.
       I return to work, but it's clear that (a) I'm not welcome, and (b) I'm not going to have a moment of privacy in my entire life. Fortunately I have a second cousin who's an international drug-trafficker, and through him I'm able to escape the U.S. on a plane to Columbia. There, after indignities in the name of freedom I forget the instant they occur, I'm discovered by American agents and run away to Brazil, where I catch a steamer for the island of Curacao and then fly to Amsterdam-a city I've longed to re-visit ever since spending a year of college there.
Once I'm safely in Amsterdam, everything is peachy keen and my story is quite well-known. I even find my book of poems-with the Ho Chi Minh piece front and center this time-in a tourist shop window, and I'm regarded as something of a culture hero. Prestigious job teaching at a top-shelf university? Mine. Interviews with leading European intellectual magazines? Mine. The three best girlfriends I've ever had in my life? Mine. Freedom of speech without recrimination? Ditto.
       Life continues in this vein for two years until I'm finally taken down by American agents posing as Finnish literature professors. They throw a party for me and tell me how much they admire me, really butter me up with their post-colonialist readings of my poetry. They say bad things about America, and I-always wary of spies-resist the urge to join them. But somewhere along the line, after priming me with a combination of hashish and absinthe, they set me up for the ultimate indignity.
       In the famous picture, it appears that I'm spitting on the U.S. flag that's draped over a couch like a blanket, and I'll admit that the impression is pretty convincing. What really happens, though, is that I have to cough up a huge chunk of phlegm that lodged in my throat after the hashish-and-absinthe binge, and I'm unable to get to the bathroom in time-understand that I haven't been this wasted in decades. Instead I find a trash can near the couch and spit into it; from the angle of the camera, it only looks like I'm spitting on the American flag. But I swear to you, my phlegm didn't land anywhere near it.

       Within three hours my pseudo-Finnish intellectual "friends" have distributed the offending photo to news sources and websites all around the world, and my protectors decide I've gone too far. They let me go as part of a long-in-the-making Dutch/American extradition deal, in which I'm exchanged for a trio of Muslim bombers. Before you can say "Due Process" I'm back in another cell in an undisclosed location. This cell is bigger than my last one, at least, and even has a TV. But all I ever see on that TV are reruns of my reading at the podunk college where I got set up, of my interrogation at the hands of Peter, of TV talk show hosts demanding my exile and/or execution. Every hour, on the hour, I'm subject to psychological torture in the form of our President, dressed up like Ho Chi Minh and singing to me.

Ho! Ho! Ho Chi Minh!
You're never gettin'
Outta jail again! 
 
         It's a miserable life, and I'm so drugged up I don't know how long it stretches. Years? I don't even know who's President anymore. I'm vaguely aware that my life has become a cautionary tale against something, though I can't remember what. Freedom of speech, probably. Small press literary publishing, maybe. Coughing up phlegm in the presence of the American flag, certainly.
One morning, at the end of the film, I'm given new drugs that make everything seem like it's made of cockroaches. My body, your body-all nothing but cockroaches, bound together with their own filth and wriggling in the shape of a leg, the shape of an arm. The shape of a gun sliding into my doomed, innocent mouth as the screen fades to black and a single muffled gunshot rips through the theater.

"Steven Wingate's short story collection WIFESHOPPING won the 2007 Bakeless
Prize in fiction from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference and was published by
Houghton Mifflin in July 2008. He can be found online at
www.stevenwingate.com."