Years later, the Sarge (Spencer “Leek” Abbot) e-mailed everybody he could track down that he had met a guy named Pervis Huddle who swore on his dentistry practice that in the first grade Mercurial (aka Pfc. Mercurial T Blamesmith), soon after becoming a capable reader, looked at the field trip permission form (a trip to a potato chip factory) that the teacher (Miss Ivana Cleave) had just handed out for the students to have their parents sign (back when it was okay for teachers to refer to their students' legal guardians as parents), Mercurial looked at the paper and said, “Nah, that's not it.” Thus, the Sarge claimed (and after all he was obviously the most obsessed by Mercurial's obsession) that he had found the earliest documented instance of Mercurial's insistence that a given piece of paper was “not it.” Furthermore, the Sarge argued, this ancient piece of evidence further buttressed his longtime assertion that Mercurial was fated from early on, uncannily prescient, and otherworldly meticulous—ergo, sane in a completely insane way, yet still, damnit, sane.
My first witnessing of Mercurial's peculiar pulp rejection came three hours after I had arrived at Fort Dix, which would have been six weeks after Mercurial's, by which time his “habit,” if not his legend, was well-established SOP. It was a grocery list, of all things, that I had found peeking out from under my bunk, a hastily scrawled half-a-dozen item list containing nothing more intriguing than Preparation H and Wheat Germ. Mercurial was the only other one around, lying on his bunk playing an early handheld video game of tic-tac-toe. “This wouldn't be yours, would it?” I showed him the list. He looked at it, even seemed to consider the possibility for a second, then politely handed it back to me, “No, this isn't it.” I didn't think much of the specific nature of his reply (that this wasn't his shopping list, but it could have been, let me know if you come across another one) until the next afternoon, when Sarge (with his usual posterior-embedded insect) put us all on “police call” to clean up the wind-blown mess around the barracks. “Assholes and elbows, that's all I want to see, men. If it's not growing, pick it up.” Well, some brass's poor toady must have dropped a briefcase on that windy day because there were papers everywhere, reams of the stuff drifting against barrack walls like so much snow. You could, and we did, bend over and scrunch up a good five or six pages in each hand every two steps; all of us, except Mercurial, who deliberately picked up one piece of paper at a time, scanned its contents, shook his head, said, “No, that's not it,” crumpled it, threw it in the large plastic bag Tunch Skowron held, and moved on to the next piece. Well, that day might have been the day when Mercurial's legend was etched in stone, and it certainly (from my vantage point) was the day Sarge's ample buttocks parted enough for the ultimate bug to ensconce itself.
Soon the tales were pouring in. A minuscule sample: Flex Gerace reported going to a base deli with Mercurial and watching Mercurial methodically pull numbers out of the “now serving number...” machine, inspect each one, and say, “Naw, that's not it.” Goof Hlavaty swore he saw Mercurial go through each paper in Sarge's in and out boxes (while the two of them were dusting Sarge's office) with the same result: “Nope, that's not it.” Phil Oxbow said base chippy Maria Handsov told him that one night, after entertaining Mercurial, he spent two hours going through her typing class folders and announcing that each and every sheet of paper was indeed, “not it.” Felix Snivel came back from the dumpsters one evening to report that Mercurial was standing in one, with two to go; as of yet, Snivel said, Mercurial had not found “it.”
The “it” of course was cause for all sorts of speculation, especially since all Mercurial would offer, when questioned about “it,” was a cryptic, “S'personal. I'll know it when I see it.” A love letter from an abandoned or abandoning Hometown Honey, birth certificate, combination for some lock, instructions for a new-fangled clock/radio that Mercurial had but never used, directions for a buried treasure—these were some of the more pedestrian explanations given. Vinnie Trotz theorized the phantom piece of paper was Mercurial's mother's spaghetti sauce recipe that she evidently had taken with her to her grave. Thorax Vesuvius, whenever the subject came up, which it did more frequently as every piece of paper within a hundred yard radius of Mercurial came to be examined and discarded, would spit and say something like, “Probably just a Xerox of his pecker he drunkenly made and then drunkenly lost.” Miles Offish, betraying the sensibilty that years later made him a CIA field op in American Samoa, took a piece of paper one day, magic-markered a big “IT” on it, and stuffed it at the bottom of a pile of papers within Mercurial's ken, but despite the crowd that had gathered, Mercurial, when he finally came upon it after carefully inspecting the entire pile, just shook his head and said, “Nuh uh, that's definitely not it,” and placed the paper on top of the stack and went outside for a smoke.
After the fact, of course, when we had been filling sandbags, running supplies to the high school gym, and keeping (as opposed to enforcing, because those flood victims in upstate western New York were the most peaceable natural disaster victims of all time) the peace in Elmira, New York, for more than a week, a week of unadorned boredom to make you wish you could have a week of R'n'R in Hell, a week that was the furthest thing from any armed glory your pre-inducted ass could ever dream of, then, of course, the “it”--recently uncovered—tortured all of us with its simplicity and genius.
It had been a Monday around noon, about three days after the rains had started and about thirty-six hours before we were deployed to Elmira (that's how perfectly genius-like Mercurial was, let's face it), when Sarge snapped. Mercurial was found sitting on the floor with a tipped over metal waste basket next to him. The entire contents of the waste basket were the emptyings of what must have been the base's entire allotment of three-ring-binder hole punchers: thousands of little paper circles were scattered all about the sitting Mercurial, who would wet a finger, pick one up at a time, look at it, remove it from his moist finger with fingers from the other hand, inspect the other side, announce that “nada, that's not it,” then flick it back into the waste basket and move onto the next one. Sarge, after being summoned to view the spectacle by Hughie Buck and Sassafrass Gumshot, watched Mercurial for a good ten minutes, then made a nauseous face and sound from his gut and exploded. “Now, Blamesmith! To Colonel Stunt. Now!”
What ensued in the base psychiatrist's office was verified by Sarge who, the next night, while we all packed for Elmira, wined and dined Colonel Dr. Alphonzo Stunt in order to learn the supposedly confidential facts. Mercurial walked in with a note from Sarge hastily explaining his, Mercurial's, paper-perusing-and-refusing mania (a note Mercurial scanned while taking the elevator up to Stunt's fourth floor office and announced to Virginia Tobago, receptionist for base urologist Dr. Art Dekko, who was returning from her lunch break, “No sir, that's not it”) and as he handed it to Stunt made a beeline for Stunt's waste basket and started rifling. After reading Sarge's missive, Stunt managed to ask Mercurial a few questions, to which Mercurial responded with mono-syllabic obfuscations. Stunt showed him a few Rorschach cards, which Mercurial dutifully dismissed with several, “No, that's not it”s. Then Stunt, “an absent-minded sonofabitch,” as Sarge would thereafter call him, handed Mercurial a piece of paper with a statement of the Army's patient confidentiality policy. Mercurial looked it over and casually handed it back to Stunt saying, “No, that's not it.” It was then that Stunt, “an inattentive, shameless layabout,” as Bert Wert (who had had some bedwetting issues after returning from Elmira) would later describe him, who (Stunt) had a standing 1:30 Monday afternoon tee time (come rain, snow, or sleet), pulled out of his desk a piece of paper, scribbled a few sentences on it, ostentatiously signed it, and handed the paper over to Mercurial, who, seeing the words “Section 8 Discharge” in bold at the top, barely glanced over the rest of it, folded it carefully, and as he started to tuck it in his breast pocket, unsmilingly, totally business-like, said (to Stunt, himself, the world, who knows?), “Yes, that's it.”
Dave Van Ronk-Yas, Yas, Yas
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