Timmy Ray, poor boy from Kentucky.
Football scholarship.
Degree in Business Administration.
Respectable job, bored.
Enlists with best friend in Marines as a macho trip.
Vietnam, what a crock.
This ain't football. And it ain't fair.
Schemes to get out,
disobeys an order to lead his platoon on patrol,
but the friend doesn't know about the scheme
and takes a different platoon on patrol,
gets shot up bad.
Timmy Ray goes to help the friend, is shot.
It's all blood and mud, man, blood and mud.
Friend paralyzed, Timmy Ray okay.
Timmy Ray is court-martialed, discharged.
The friend takes an overdose.
"No moral here," Timmy Ray says. "My
war story. That's all."
Timmy Ray makes sculptures, big metal things.
No people.
"The human body's been done," he says.
Downtown in front of an office he welds a pile of
globes and names it "Love" so he'll get paid
but, he says, it's really "Moose Brain."
These days, Timmy Ray's hand
trembles. He volunteers at a suicide
hot line. No moral there,
either. Moose brain.
