Denemen Keese, a man of mixed race and no small amount of gumption, served nearly two tours of duty in Vietnam before the Tet Offensive pulled the ground out from under the war, early 1968, and then the whole world warped far and wide, much funhouse mirror confusion ensuing. It looked like the global cabal was about to maybe topple and the youth and factory workers were gonna, I don’t know, join arms and return us to planetary degree zero. Yeah, right. With their seventeen different kinds of Maoists who all hate each other? Denemen took note of the fact that the Japanese students made the French students look like pussies. I mean, you just never know who’s gonna suddenly disembowel themselves in a traffic roundabout, am I right? Denemen once wrote me when he was over there and asked me to tell Jane Fonda that he wasn’t a baby killer because if he’d killed any babies he hadn’t visually clocked them first and therefore hadn’t even known he’d done it. He would sometimes joke like that. It played better with some folks than with others. Fuck ‘em if they can’t take a joke, like they say over in Austin. How did he feel about the war and his experiences in Southeast Asia? In plain fact, he liked combat and he especially liked it on hash and heroin. The jungle just basically agreed with him and armed combat at close range thrilled him in a way that he hadn’t expected. He glorified in killing and confessed that sometimes it nauseated him to recall the blood frenzy, though his mentality as a whole could never have become so crude and inhuman were he not constantly high and facing stresses and pressures of an intensity he could never have imagined. Showing camaraderie and solidarity with your combat brothers meant despoiling the remains of the enemy; they’ve been doing it since way back. The night he heard that Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated, Denemen was planning on killing his commanding officer with a fragmentation grenade, a growing trend in 1968 that was actually a wide orchestrated plot involving a system of couriers and underground G.I. newspapers that funded and organized personnel for the execution/murder of officers, non-commissioned or otherwise, all this intersecting and intertwining with the trade in contraband and sex. He never would get to kill the officer he’d targeted, largely because before he could he got high on a whole sheet of acid one night and the extremely obscene scene he made, which evidently involved copious gunfire inside the base, got him punted hard and fast, drop it like it’s hot. He loved to brag that he was the first soldier they ever sent back to the U.S. to rest. Through connections in the counterculture and the drug culture, Denemen ended up befriending and then going into a long and fruitful professional partnership with former Yippie! organizer Jerry Rubin who in later years became a bit of a libertarian and a kook, like a hippie Howard Hughes or William Randolph Hearst. Denemen worked for Mr. Rubin almost twenty years until the latter passed on and Denemen served as pallbearer at his funeral. He was astonished and then giddy to recognize Jane Fonda in attendance at the funeral…as though they’d gone and grabbed Discreet Anonymous Celebrity from central casting, but Denemen Keese weren’t never nobody’s fool; he’d seen her sure as shootin’. I once asked him about Jerry Rubin and the kind of man he was. Denemen’s casual response: he died doing what he loved…jaywalking. After working for nearly two decades selling real estate and assorted chemicals in Austin, Texas, where cowpoke locals affectionately called him ‘Diphthong,’ Denemen spent his remaining years pursuing his true love—painting—in the hills just north of Taos, New Mexico.
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