The Grand Tour Read Free Page B

drunk enough not to care.
    Richard looked around. Farther down the row, Vance sat and talked to an older guy with a Sundance Kid mustache and bolo tie. A creative writing professor if he’d ever seen one. Probably poetry—the lowest of the low. Eileen had dragged him to enough faculty parties for him to know. A bunch of worthless, forced eccentrics, he thought, not a wishbone of talent to snap amongst the lot of them. Get cornered at a party by that type and it’s all over, forget any hot nooky wandering around.
    The director of the English department, a friendly, serene fellow whose name Richard had thus far found completely impossible to remember, approached and patted him on the arm.
    “I’m going to go up and say a few words to introduce you, then you’re on, okay?”
    “And what happens?”
    “Normally people read a chapter from their book.”
    “Okay. That’s it?”
    “Well, normally people take questions afterward.”
    “Okay. Then normally what? Normally.”
    The director gave him a complex, piercing look of amusement and concern, leaned in, and said, “Normally, we go get shitfaced at a restaurant afterward. You’ve done that part beforehand, though. Then, if you’re wondering, normally there’s a party at someone’s house and my wife takes her shirt off and embarrasses me. Normally.”
    “Sounds good.”
    The director patted him again on the arm, then walked to the podium. The crowd applauded loudly. He cleared his throat and spoke, occasionally looking at Richard.
    “I’m going to keep this brief. The university is pleased to kick off our fall semester reading series with Richard Lazar. Richard’s book
Without Leave
—a memoir about his experience in Vietnam—was published earlier this year to widespread acclaim. It revived the career of a writer the
Chicago Tribune
called ‘a forgotten treasure, lost on the seabed of literary detritus, luckily reclaimed.’ Dan Rosenbluth from the
New York Times
said of Richard, ‘He is, perhaps, the most talented writer overlooked by literary culture in America.’ Ladies and gentlemen, Richard Lazar.”
    Richard walked to the podium, to a welter of violent applause. Looking around the auditorium at people’s faces, he was struck by their general look of happy attention and interest. It seemed truly amazing to him that any of them cared what he had written, what he thought about anything. The crowd’s smiling indulgence reminded him of Eileen and himself watching two-year-old Cindy climb the stairs. It made him wish he’d brought along the pellet gun he kept at home for shooting coyotes, so he could fire off a few rounds into that unbroken wall of condescension. He suddenly felt very tired and wanted to lie down on the cool, tile floor.
    He put the book on the podium. His book. It was a hardback, and the cover featured a picture of him in his army greens, taken by his father after Basic and before shipping out, the only time he could remember the old man being proud of him. His name was embossed across the bottom in a slick typeface. Looking down at the cover, his name, the podium, and the blur of faces in front of him, he momentarily forgot what he was supposed to be doing and just stood there.
    “Sorry,” he said, shaking his head. There was a murmur of generous laughter as he fumbled the book open and thumbed past the table of contents and dedication page, the deckled edges conveying an authenticity and gravitas about his life that felt richly undeserved. Where was the goddamn chapter? An uncomfortably long silence ensued, but he eventually found the folded page corner, cleared his throat a few times, and began to read.

CHAPTER TWO
    JULY 1971
    I had been AWOL two days by the time I reached the outskirts of Saigon. The last stretch, I spent in the back of an old Datsun truck filled with burlap bags of rice. My lap was heavy with the rucksack that I cradled like a fat, lolling baby. The truck had no shocks, and at first I’d felt every pebble on