My room was nice, with a view of a vast desert of dirt and sand that came right up to the hotel, with a random tent every few hundred yards in the distance. Ding-dong. Guess who was there? Henry! Who flew in from Boston. I hadn’t seen him in a while, and Jesus Christ, was he big and beautiful. We called home to say that we were okay and stuffed our faces on potatoes, salmon, eggs, croissants, and coffee that the butler kept bringing. Just crazy to think where we were and where we were going.
IRAQ AND BACK
The military staged the invasion of Iraq from Kuwait, the central hub for the supply line of goods and services needed for the huge undertaking of invading a country. Soldiers leaving the battlefield came to Kuwait to decompress and be physically and mentally assessed before being either sent home or back to another deployment. We spent our first day there, driving to the different camps where our soldiers were deployed. I met hundreds and hundreds of people that first day and felt an immediate connection, drawn to each other by a common curiosity. Soldiers came toward me taking off their sunglasses and gloves, and I took off my sunglasses too so we could really see each other, all of us thinking the same thoughts about each other—“What the fuck are you doing here? I’ve seen your picture on TV, I’ve read about you in the newspaper. You look just like I imagined, but who are you really?” I chatted with each new person for a few minutes, shook hands, signed autographs, and posed for pictures. Henry turned out to be the perfect person to bring. He was the same age as the soldiers, so when I had to move onto the next person, he continued the conversation with people who wanted to talk a little longer. The troops were happy to see me and were the politest Americans you would ever hope to meet, but mostly, they were tired and burnt-out from their twelve-month rotations. They were exhausted from the anxiety of the mortar attacks and Humvee explosions. One kid came up to me and caught me off guard. His dialogue was so hokey it felt like he was reading a script, but he wasn’t. “We’ve been catching a lot of terrorists and it’s true what they say. ‘It’s really scary to see your first dead guy but after that, you kind of get used to it.’”
The next morning, we went to the airport to fly into Baghdad, and while we waited to be issued our sleeping bags, helmets, and bulletproof vests, we played basketball with the Air Force soldiers in an airplane hangar with a huge hole blown in the roof by a missile. Our ride into Baghdad was on a Lockheed C-130 Hercules—a huge, cavernous warplane, the kind you see in old war movies, that can carry tanks and Jeeps and hundreds of soldiers. The flight crew invited Henry and me to fly in the cockpit, and the two of us collapsed ourselves into the tiny bucket seats in back, trying to stay out of the way. They gave us headphones so we could talk and listen to each other as well as hear the tower. The tower was operated by Kuwaitis, which is only as it should be, but the communication was not confidence-instilling.
“This is Air Force 346920. Tower, could you please repeat that? Did you say Saleed?”
“Saleesh.”
“Saleesh?”
“Saleech.”
“Saleech?”
“Saleed.”
“So is that, Simon-Alpha-Largo-Edgar-Edgar-Dollar?”
“Could you repeat?”
There is such a thing as too much information, and I was definitely hearing things I didn’t need to know. The copilot then informed the captain there was black smoke coming out of the “left sidebar,” but they decided it was probably some minor oil burn-off and we were on our way to Baghdad. “You can’t over-think these things. Sometimes you just have take your best shot,” said Captain Hale after taking off, a great philosophy for anyone. He was a reservist who flew in the first Gulf War, as well as for Trans World Airlines, and was called up unexpectedly. I spent the flight standing over his shoulder chatting, a lot of it commiserating about how hard it is for a dad to find a way into his fifteen-year-old daughter’s life. When we started to descend into Baghdad he told us, “We are going to be doing a tactical approach and landing. I am going to descend very rapidly and in a slightly unconventional manner. I am going to be coming in right over Saddam’s Water Palace. We are going to be really low, so you are going to have a great view of it. The tile on the roof is amazing. We have to go in as fast as we possibly can. The speed gives us options in case we need to take emergency evasive action.” Henry and I started to head back to our seats to get out of the way, but the captain stopped us. “Actually, it would be better if you could stay up here with us. We can use the extra sets of eyes. Keep looking out the window. If you see anything like a trail of smoke, or something that looks like a fence post flying at us, let me know.”
“Oh . . . Okay.” The radio man and navigator left their stations in back to scrunch up in the front with the rest of us to get a better vantage point—seven of us with our noses pressed to the window of the cockpit, watching for flying fence posts. Henry and I were, in the tiniest way, in the battle.
Dive-bombing into Baghdad was an E-Ticket ride. This C-130 is a big old machine. They have been using the same model since the 1930s, with some technical upgrades, so it really felt like being in a Jimmy Stewart movie—the headphones crackled, seven large faces pressed to the windshield, the plane rumbling and creaking, as Old Reliable Captain Hale tried to create an impossible-to-hit moving target. The mechanized voice from the computer blared the message over and over, “You are too close to the ground! You are too close to the ground! You are too close to the ground!” He skimmed just above the ground in this flying eighteen-wheeler, approaching the airport. He pointed out the Water Palace and he was right, the tiles were magnificent, especially at a 180-degree angle. Right above the runway, he pulled into a straight-up climb. I mean, straight up! He circled back to the airport to land on the second pass and, just like that, we were safely in a war zone.
The Air Force had set up a huge camp at the airport and Henry, Tracy, and I dumped our stuff in a tent which was going to be our home for the next few days. We felt relatively safe, but it was a dangerous and fluid situation, with bombs going off in the distance, helicopters landing, fighting equipment parked everywhere, and ammunition being loaded and unloaded. The USO and the military handled me like the entertainment cargo that I was, expertly shipping me from place to place according to an itinerary I had no control over. It was an emotional rollercoaster, laughing and joking with one group of warriors, tearing up with others who shared their fears and losses with me, and in stunned silence looking at a refrigerated tractor-trailer, filled with dead Iraqis who had yet to be identified. I steeled myself in a way I never had before and learned things about this side of the Human Experiment that I had very little understanding of. The Bush military brain trust had no real plan on how to best engage in urban warfare, and it was left to these soldiers to figure out how to deal with the local populations, to tell good guys from bad guys, all while trying to gain the trust of a city they were invading. The soldiers we met were incredibly smart and well-trained, but what was even more impressive was their understanding of the importance of the human interactions that would be needed to really win this war.
That first day we went from station to station across the entire base, seeing the cogs and gears of the war machinery and saying “Merry Christmas” to the warriors who make it all happen. I had seen pictures of war on TV, of soldiers patrolling, fighting, wounded, and dead. But I had failed to realize the city of people behind those pictures, like the unsung movie crews I worked with. You never see pictures of our brave young women and men doing laundry or sanitation work or serving food. But their asses are on the line too, and nothing is going to happen if the troops don’t get fed. Each unit was so proud of their contribution, gave us a tour of their place, and had us try out their equipment. The fire department let me drive a “war fire engine,” a monster-sized, bullet-proof truck with huge water tanks and remote-control hoses that can send water a hundred yards. I was hosing down one of Saddam’s old Boeing 747s when Henry got out of the truck to take my picture, so I aimed the hoses at him and chased him around the runway. He hid behind the fire captain’s Jeep and I ended up soaking them both pretty good, which got a huge round of applause from the troops.
We met the soldiers who went on the streets of Baghdad to find and buy back weapons and bombs. The captain told me that a lot of the weapons they recovered were turned in by kids, and they could buy a mortar from a ten-year-old kid for a Tootsie Roll. He showed us a shed where they kept the confiscated weapons before they destroyed them, pulling out guns, bombs, a bucket of grenades, and a suicide vest. In a ridiculously dangerous slapstick moment, another soldier hurrying by accidentally kicked over the bucket of hand grenades, sending them flying around the shed, clanging off the cache of unstable weapons. The world stood still for a good five seconds, which is five years in “you’re a dead dog” time, but those guys thought it was the funniest thing they had ever seen. Later in the day, we met the guys at EOD, Explosive Ordinance Destruction, whose job was to destroy the confiscated weapons. Henry and I took turns blowing up the bombs and mortars, remotely triggering explosions. I’ve been on movie sets with big stunts and big explosions, and this was a very different sound. It came through the ground as much as it came through the air. The sound waves had a real physical presence. You could almost see the sound waves pushing through the ground and the air.
We met Major Sugiyama, who led SFS, the Security Force Squadron responsible for the safety of the airport, who let me drive a gun-turreted Humvee that they used to chase down the people who were lobbing bombs into the base. I tried on the fifty pounds of equipment that each of them wore when they patrolled the vast perimeter. The soldiers got a good laugh at how awkward I was in it, and I made a mental note to get in touch with my chiropractor when I got home. When I asked if they were keeping Saddam captive on the base, he gave me a sly smile and said that was information that was above his pay-class. But I thought I smelled the rat.
We saw corruption as well, though we didn’t know we were seeing it. In the flight tower, we met an Australian pilot and his mate who had just flown in. They pointed out their plane, maybe a Boeing 727, and told me it was filled with money. They were flying in all the new money without the picture of Saddam on it from wherever it was printed. They didn’t know how much there was in value, only in weight. Two tons of fresh dinar, which we later found out disappeared. We only saw Abu Ghraib from the outside, later to discover that torture and war crimes were being committed inside while we were there. We saw private companies with political connections like Raytheon, Halliburton, and Bechtel setting up permanent shop on the bases, taking over energy fields and palaces, paying their American workers much more than the average soldier was making, and using cheap Bangladeshi workers for the physical labor. And everywhere we went, the food was shit. Fast food, junk food, corn dogs, and bad cafeteria food was all there was to eat for these poor people. How the fuck are you supposed to function at the level necessary in this life-and-death world when all they give you for fuel is fast-food crap?!
We saw glimpses of the horror of war as well. Rescue Ops’ job was to helicopter into a “situation,” get the wounded and dead onto the helicopter, and bring them back to the hospital. They had to be able to parachute, scuba-dive, fly helicopters, shoot guns from a helicopter, and, oh yeah, be doctors! They had just gotten back from a mission. A Humvee with two soldiers had rolled into a river. Another soldier driving by jumped in and saved them both but drowned. Rescue Ops soldiers jumped out of their helicopter into the water, rescued the two soldiers and recovered the body of the other, and their exhaustion and sadness were palpable. Lt. Col. DeLorenzo oversaw the large grouping of tents housing triage centers at CASF, the medical facility housing x-ray machines, recovery areas, administration desks, and operating rooms. He carried the weight of the world on his shoulders, getting twenty-five injured soldiers flown in every few hours, stabilizing them, operating if they had to, and getting them on a transport plane to Germany as fast as they could. “We are the best because we have to be. We owe our best to our warriors,” he said. The kids who worked at the morgue did their work under a huge American flag, which was so moving to see. I visited the hospital and had to hide my shock at how gruesome the injuries were to these young men, chatting about my movies and signing autographs while my heart broke for them. And frankly, it must have been slightly surreal for them, dealing with their own fears and sadness and pain only to have Marv from Home Alone standing by their bedside.
I hosted Bingo Night, with three to four hundred men and women who took the game seriously. The final game of the night got crazy with the whole place cheering and chanting. But most fun for me was a chance to give out the letters I had brought from the schools in Malibu. For an hour after the game, hundreds of soldiers hung out and read letters, and we laughed and felt a connection between us and home. One letter from a second grader said simply, “Dear Soldier, I hope you don’t die. I like carrots.” We laughed for five minutes about that one. Beat that, Bob Hope.
I thought sleeping would be tough, but it wasn’t. The war does not stop at night; it actually accelerates, because the enemy likes to attack at night. Outgoing mortar fire was muffled by the sounds of planes and helicopters taking off and landing, transporting more guns, more wounded women and men to the hospital in Germany, and more corn dogs to keep the troops fed. I slept differently than I had ever slept before, restful but aware. I had to pee in the middle of the night, walking the two hundred yards to the latrine through a very different kind of “City That Never Sleeps.” When I got back on the cot, I felt good—alive even while sleeping. Weirdly peaceful.
The third day we were supposed to fly out in the morning to Kirkuk, then into Tallil, where we would spend the night. But for security reasons, they wanted us to stay in Baghdad for the moment. I was relieved to not have to take as many dangerous flights, and there were enough soldiers to meet in Baghdad to keep me busy for a year. We visited the other side of the airport, now escorted by a new military officer, a rather flamboyant man who we will call Major Fun. He asked us if we would like to go into downtown Baghdad to the Haji Market and “maybe buy some jewelry for your wife.” We loaded into an armed convoy of Humvees and Jeeps and drove into the city. A husband and wife owned the jewelry store. Evidently Major Fun spent a lot of money there, and they were very glad to see him. He assured them that we were okay and said that I was a movie actor. The woman let out a little squeak and said, “Home Alone?” She got out her camera. They hugged me and Henry and showed us all the jewelry and paintings and boxes. By the time we finished shopping and headed for a restaurant across the plaza, word had gotten out that the Home Alone actor was in town. I will never forget the group of kids who had been playing soccer in the road, surrounding me, chanting, “Marv! Marv! Marv!” The power of the movies crosses all boundaries and cultures, and the Power of Marv to bring these kids, who were living their childhood in a war zone, a smile humbled me to my core. But Major Fun had a lot more tricks up his sleeve.
On our way back to the airport base camp, he took us to Saddam Hussein’s Water Palace, the one we had caught a glimpse of as we rocketed into town. He spent the entire thirty-minute drive telling us of all the “fabulous” marble that Saddam had used to build the palace and a critique of what he would have done with the place if it was his. Saddam’s palaces were actually a series of palaces inside enormous compounds, and one of the palaces at the Water Palace was his son Udai’s, of the famed boy band Udai and Qusay. (Udai was a horrible person. At a party for Mrs. Mubarak, the First Lady of Egypt, he beat a man to death in front of everyone. No charges, no arrest.) The palace had been bombed, the “fabulous” marble turned to rubble. Major Fun said, “You should take some home. Everyone takes some. You can ship it. If you send it from the base, it goes straight through and no one checks it. I’ve sent all kinds of stuff home. My mom is keeping it at the ranch. Here, take something like this.” He picked up an hourglass piece of gray-and-white speckled smooth stone, about two feet high and eight inches around, which had been part of the marble railing at Udai’s bachelor pad. It weighed, I found out when I shipped it home, fifty-five pounds. It was beautiful, and I was overcome with greed. “How fucking cool would it be to have a big-ass piece of Udai’s palace at my house? And free shipping!” Henry wasn’t sure it was cool, but it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and I took it. I put it in the back of the Jeep, and we rode away with it. I was officially a looter.
We drove further down the Water Palace road until we arrived at the big man’s house, Saddam’s Palace. Henry and I were blown away by the grandest ballroom imaginable, 150 yards long, fifty yards across and fifty feet high, like an arena football stadium. It had marble floors and columns, and grand balconies at either end, overlooking the lake and orchards and gardens. Except it was all smashed. It turns out bombs have real consequences. They are not just numbers and maps, they are concrete and rebar. They are life and limb. Piles of lumber and metal—and marble. Major Fun came up the staircase carrying a pristine piece of white marble, engraved in Arabic and with beautiful faces sculpted in relief. This thing must have weighed at least a hundred pounds and he was all aflutter with his home decorating find. His physical training paid off as he summoned his inner Arnold Schwarzenegger (and his inner Martha Stewart) to make it back to the Jeep with his ultimate living room accessory. He said he probably shouldn’t be doing it but “what the hell,” as he wrapped it gently in a blanket and laid it next to my ill-gotten gains.
Our last night in Iraq, we were invited to join the Special Forces Unit for dinner at their camp, which was in a different palace, Saddam Hussein’s Personal Palace. This one had not been bombed and had been taken over by our troops because it was so secure. When we arrived, our jaws dropped at the ornate rooms we walked through to get to the cavernous dining room, complete with the biggest marble table imaginable. (Major Fun was probably trying to figure out how to sneak it back home.) We mingled with fifty or sixty soldiers, athletic Young Turks, all Special Forces elite. We sat down for a dinner of boxes and boxes of Whoppers and Quarter Pounders and Hot Apple Pies, with Red Bull to wash it down. It was the perfect metaphor for the war, eating off the table of our enemy to prove we have won, but serving an American Shit Sandwich to our warriors, and with no seat at the table for the Iraqis who suffered under Saddam.
The commanders sent word from upstairs, asking if we would like to go say hello to them. The Young Turks selected to escort us were thrilled, as most of them had never been to the Command Center. They lived up the road in another palace, so we were all excited as we ascended the spectacular staircase into the inner sanctuary. Major Fun was overcome by the design of the staircase and started sashaying up the stairs like a glamorous movie actress saying, “If I had a staircase like this, I would glide up and down it every day,” which caused the macho Young Turks’ jaws to drop about a foot. So funny.
The Command Center was where they planned all of the raids, killings, capturings, and reconnaissance missions, which the Young Turks then carried out. The first commander I met was Mario, a handsome, incredibly strong-looking Latin man in his forties with an easy smile. Mario was discipline personified. While Mario showed me around, Henry and the Turks took off to explore, like kids at a haunted house. Mario was as surprised as anyone to be living in one of Saddam’s bedrooms and sleeping in his bed. The servants who worked there told him that Saddam used to have young girls, twelve or thirteen years old, one in this bedroom and one in another across the hall, and go back and forth between them, and Mario couldn’t get that out of his mind. He told me that before he was stationed here, he was in Afghanistan living in a cave for six months, and he seemed like he would be just as comfortable in either place. Talk about stories to tell.
Mario introduced me to John, the other commander, standing by a detailed set of maps on the wall with pins stuck in them. Also in his forties, he seemed like he might have gone to an Ivy League school or something: smart, doing something good but somewhat secretive. He gave me a tour which included the other bedroom in Mario’s nightmare Saddam story. John had a mattress on the floor and Saddam’s armoire up against the window as a shield against incoming shrapnel. He had rigged a clothesline running from the armoire to a nail on the wall, on which he was currently drying his socks. Henry and the Young Turks ran in excitedly, saying, “You got to come do this! It’s so cool.” Mario, John, and I followed them into the bathroom where they were taking turns having their picture taken sitting on Saddam’s gold toilet holding his gold AK-47. I knew it was a picture I would regret even before I took it. Talk about shitting on the guy.
John and Mario opened up a little about the war. They guessed we would be in Iraq for at least ten years. They confessed that the mission was vague now that the original mission of finding weapons of mass destruction had been abandoned. They asked why I came, and I said I wanted the troops to know that all Americans supported them. “I am a Democrat who thinks very little of the Bush administration. I come from Malibu, one of the more liberal communities in the country. And every man, woman, and child I told that I was coming here invested in me their love and thanks to deliver to you. We are for you, we are with you, and we are worried about you. People are against the war because of the politics of it, not the warriors. And Malibu sends all their love and gratitude.” I think I told them something that they didn’t know, and that they were pleased to hear.
John presented Henry and me with a Special Forces Challenge Coin, a gold coin with the Special Forces insignia on it, making us honorary members of the unit. He said, “The thing about the coin is that you have to have it with you at all times. If you are ever in a bar and one of your Special Forces brothers slaps down their coin, and you don’t have your coin with you, then you have to buy the drinks. But if you do have your coin, then the guy who slapped down has to buy.” We all shook hands and said goodbye. I don’t know what came over me, but as we were climbing down the stairway, I noticed a room on the second floor where a meeting was going on and, for some inexplicable reason, I decided I should “entertain” these guys. There were about fifteen men sitting around a big table with maps in the middle, an overhead projector, and video screen, obviously in the middle of a very important meeting. And I thought, “Wouldn’t it be funny if I took the Special Forces Challenge Coin that I just got and slammed down on these guys? When am I ever going to get a chance to do that?”
I strode right up to the big table and without a word, slammed my coin hard, startling the men, men who are very dangerous when they are startled. The room froze for a good thirty seconds. No one said a word. Henry and the Young Turks had followed me into the room, but were now silently slithering away, trying to act like they didn’t know me. This was supposed to be funny but no one, and I mean no one, was laughing. The smart thing might have been to pick up my coin and run but, like or not, I was a freshly minted honorary brother in the Special Forces, and I was determined to use the power of my coin to make them laugh. They definitely wanted me to get the fuck out of there, but I stared them down, one by one. I wasn’t moving until they slammed down their coins. Lives hung in the balance. The sooner they gave up, the sooner they could get back to their planning session, which you can bet involved lives hanging in the balance. One by one, I broke them. They went around the table, digging into their pockets. Most had their coins with them. Some slapped down an empty hand. One guy slapped down a condom, sending a clear message as to what he thought of this comic bit. When we’d gone around the room, I pointed to all the ones who had failed to produce and who now owed me a beer. I picked up my coin, wished them a Merry Christmas, and strode back out of the room. That group of guys either had the driest sense of humor I have ever witnessed, or they really were on the verge of killing me. The Young Turks greeted me as though I had just scored the winning touchdown. “Do you know who those guys are? Do you have any idea of what you just did?”
“I thought it would be funny. What was going on in there?”
“We have no idea. Those guys are totally top secret. Those guys don’t even have names! . . . Damn, you’re crazy!” (No, just an idiot who forgot there was an actual war going on that these people were fighting!)
Next thing I knew, I was behind the wheel, joyriding around the grounds in a specially armed and armored Toyota 4Runner, complete with gun turret, up the road to the Young Turks’ Playhouse, a smaller palace, high on a hill overlooking Baghdad. It was a fraternity house for young killers—a gym, big screen TV, PlayStation, bedrooms galore with mattresses on the floor, and not much else. It was time for us to leave, but as we were saying our goodbyes, we were jolted by the unmistakable rumble and blast of a bomb going off. It was a pretty big blast, although not that close, but they asked us to come back inside and wait until they had a chance to check it out. After about ten or fifteen minutes, a sleek young man wearing a black, crewneck, long-sleeve shirt came over and asked us in a hushed voice if we wouldn’t mind waiting in another room. The silky man, Doc, escorted us to his office/operating room/pharmacy. It had the feel of a big den in a modern castle but instead of books, the walls were lined with industrial-sized shelving holding Costco-size jars of various drugs. Leather easy chairs sat next to a doctor’s examining table, with movable lights and trays and cabinets. Six Young Turks were already in the room and told us not to worry about the bombing, which was a relief. Doc walked over to the door I was standing near and threw the dead bolt. “Odd,” I thought. He glided across the room to another door and bolted that one as well, almost ceremoniously. He was making a bit of a show of it, and it certainly had me curious. What is it that we need to lock in? Or lock out? He walked back across the room to me, and said, “As your host I would like to inform you that . . . the bar is open. While it’s true that there is an absolute ban on alcohol in this country, we happen to be pretty good at making things happen. I have beer, wine, Chivas, Dewars, some nice vodkas, and Jägermeister. What can I get you?” I got the picture. We were going to party, fraternity style. Henry of Harvard was right in his element. I, responsibly, said that we didn’t want to stop them if they needed to respond to the bombing at the bottom of the hill. They said that it was a hotel that was hit and insisted that fire and rescue would take care of it for now. “We’ll probably have to go out later, once they find out who did it.”
“Then I’ll have a scotch.”
The evening that followed is a collage of stories and incidents which somehow found a branch to hold onto in a brain flooded with alcohol. It was a night of decadence, danger, machismo, fast friends, sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Like hanging with great friends in a great New York bar, but with guns and a license to kill. They were letting off steam, getting drunk with Marv from Home Alone, and spoke freely about the job requirements of being a killing machine. Every day they climbed mountains or went scuba diving or jumped out of a plane and killed people, just like we played when we were young, all that heroism and killing, but for real. Gino was short, pugnacious, to-the-point, and fearless, a seasoned veteran of many operations and on his way to being a commander if he wanted to. He said his motto was, “Kill to Live,” and that the Iraqis didn’t scare him because they shot like they were scared, hiding behind a wall and just sticking their guns out and spraying them around. He acted out “sissy-shooting,” looking like Pee Wee Herman, and said he had the advantage because, “I just keep coming at them,” swinging his rifle into place to show me how deftly he closed in on his target. “I’m trained on them. So as soon as they show themselves at all, blam, I’m ready.”
A handsome, cocky young man named Mike said his motto was “Kill for Fun.” This one I can’t shake, because from his point of view, that probably seemed about right. Chevy was the only woman, taller than any of the men on the team, like a seventh-grade class where the boys haven’t had their growth spurt yet. She told us that the first time she jumped out of a plane, she was so excited she hit her head on the short exit door and almost knocked herself out. She laughed at herself. Aaron was a tough warrior but hadn’t shaken the experience of having to kill a young boy as he approached Aaron’s truck with an AK-47 in his hands. I tried to talk to all of them about their families, but they didn’t seem to want to talk about that much. At one point, there was a knock on the door and these killer soldiers suddenly looked like teenagers, hiding the liquor when mom and dad come home early. It turned out not to be the commander, but rather four more members of the team, just back from patrol. There was an intense energy radiating from them, the adrenaline of having just been out there doing God knows what. They joined the party.
One of the other guys had been quietly making Henry and me bracelets from parachute cord. That was his thing. He made them for everyone. Another one of the guys we hadn’t met piped in with a story of seeing weapons at an Iraqi wedding procession and shooting up the party. It was hard to take it all in, the confusion that must cause to a person’s soul. I walked by a group playing darts and Chevy handed me one of her darts to throw for her, and believe it or not, bull’s-eye! The room went nuts! Wax on, wax off, bitch! Between this, the coin-slamming incident, and just being Marv, I was a God to these fine, young, drunken people. Doc, the bracelet guy, and Gino took turns calling their wives and put me on the phone, introducing me as “the real Home Alone guy!” I thanked them for lending us their husbands and wished them Merry Christmas. I took the opportunity when I was talking to Gino’s wife to lobby for the idea of them all moving to LA and Gino becoming an A-list stuntman, vowing to introduce them to my friends and connections. He would have been awesome at it, although for all his skills, I don’t know if he was trained well enough in the art of bullshit to survive Hollywood.
