Born on the Fourth of July by Ron Kovic

Author:Ron Kovic
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Akashic Books

IAM WATCHING the young couple walk along the beach. They are walking on the wet sand just where the waves wash up to the shore. The girl is holding his hand and she is laughing. Oh I want so badly to be that guy with her. I want to feel, I want to feel again, I want to walk with a woman, I want to be just like that guy who is walking with her along the beach. Please God, I say, I want it back so bad. I will give anything, anything, just to be inside a woman again. I think of approaching them. It would be so difficult. What could I say? “Excuse me, would you like to pull my chair across the sand? Or maybe you’d like to carry me over your shoulders and I could hold your hand laughing …” NO NO NO NO, that’s not right! That’s not fair! I want it back! They have taken it, they have robbed it, my penis will never get hard anymore. I didn’t even have time to learn how to enjoy it and now it is gone, it is dead, it is as numb as the rest of me.

I watch the other women now. I see their long slim legs standing pretty. I start to get excited, my mind racing with fantasies, and then the hurt comes.…

Oh God, I never dreamed that this could possibly happen, that this part of me that had made me feel so good when I was young, that this wonderful thing that no one ever seems to want to talk about … has gone, has suddenly disappeared. It has happened so fast, so quickly. What can I do, how can I ever get it back? Everyone says it is such an important thing, but nobody wants to talk about it. The Church says if you play with it, it is a sin. Now I can’t even roll on top of a basketball, I can’t do it in the bathtub or against the tree in the yard. It is over with. Gone. And it is gone for America. I have given it for democracy. It is okay now. It is all right. Yes it is all right. I have given my dead swinging dick for America. I have given my numb young dick for democracy. It is gone and numb, lost somewhere out there by the river where the artillery is screaming in. Oh God oh God I want it back! I gave it for the whole country, I gave it for every one of them. Yes, I gave my dead dick for John Wayne and Howdy Doody, for Castiglia and Sparky the barber. Nobody ever told me I was going to come back from this war without a penis. But I am back and my head is screaming now and I don’t know what to do.

Every night after he had been to Arthur’s Bar, he would push up his old man’s wooden ramp.

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