Winners & Losers by Gloria Emerson

Author:Gloria Emerson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

IN VIETNAM THEY all knew the name of the book; no man was so dull he did not recognize the shorthand of Catch-22 even if he had not read the novel by Joseph Heller. It meant lunacy, greed, a cluster-fuck, idiocy, farce, the Army. Few of them talked about the horror in Catch-22, the way Kid Sampson died in the scene on the beach. They liked to think of Yossarian rowing to Sweden and making it. Sometimes a soldier would say how really weird it was that Catch-22 was written before Vietnam.

I wanted to tell Joseph Heller this when he appeared at a fund-raising party in Easthampton that the food writer Craig Claiborne had been asked to give in his pretty modern house. The party was to raise money for opthalmological supplies for the Bach Mai Hospital in Hanoi. Too many of us were standing on the sun deck of Mr. Claiborne’s house, drinking the punch he had made himself that morning, when I was introduced to Mr. Heller after waiting for more than half my life. As one of us said “Hello” there was a warning noise, a long and high gurgle of distress, growing louder on my right. People were sinking. One woman seemed to have lost her feet, then her ankles, and a bit of her shins. The grey boards of the sun deck were ripping and gaping under the enormous, jovial weight of the party. No one shrieked or began to moan and bleed. The evacuation was swiftly carried out as the men assisted the women to the stairs. There were no injuries, no bodies on the ground. Mr. Claiborne remained composed; when it was clear that no one intended to sue him he seemed quite cheerful about the damage, although he had no insurance to cover it. Mr. Heller disappeared. There were short speeches by the swimming pool. People really paid to come to the party to see what Mr. Claiborne’s kitchen looked like, to inspect all those knives and pots, but a decent amount of money was raised.

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