Friday, November 9, 2012

Devil's Island






“[The Anatomy of Melancholy] is the only book that ever took me out of bed two hours sooner than I wished to arise.”

-Samuel Johnson, lifetime sufferer of depression-


The two-hour jet lag that accosts me every morning at fricking 4:00 AM is not a desire to read up on depression, but to write about it.

I leave my slumbering crew of misfits in the tangle of night-night, and pour the first cup whilst awaiting Microcrap 7 its stately power-up.

I’m short for time today; 8:00 AM with my Psych to report my progress.  Sharp at 8 and sharp at 8:02, the mental health nurse cheerfully guides me to the scales and a BP read (for my head?).  Then tap-taps the phone and the good doctor awaits me, down the hall, last door on the left.

I would like to recount this florid exchange between healer and humble patient, but I feel a need to preserve the doctor-patient confidentiality that might expose this person for what he is.

I discussed over lunch yesterday, with a literate friend, the possibility of targets to acquire when the Viet Nam monographs are relegated to history.  I have a number in mind; but I have a problem.

There are systems (government, corporations, organizations, political parties) which lend themselves to a prosodic pummeling from my busy fingers under the command of a fecund brain.

The problem lies with blasting the system without maligning the individuals encapsulated therein.  Even broad disclaimers would not prevent more than one hapless tireless worker from having their feelings hurt.  This ruthless barbarity in dissing the deserving that has passed for sardonically driven scorn should not be leveled at just anyone.

I’m confident this is a dilemma which I will work my way through.  Back at the ranch, I am not quite requiting with the monographs yet.  I have a few bones to pick ‘n gnaw my way through…

About two weeks after R and R, I took my usual running jump from the cattle car as it approached the Service Craft stop.  Every time I did this, I would remember Paul Blount.  He was new in-country as Christmas approached.  He made the same maneuver of alightment that I did, except that he was falling-down drunk.  Falling and breaking his neck on Boxing Day, he died in Yokosuka Naval Hospital nine days later, of complications.

I wish that those fleeting reminders of a young man’s senseless death could have been confined to those rides on the cattle car.  That wasn’t in the cards.

Recently, I learned his name and located his marker at Ft. Sam Houston National Cemetery.  You see, readers, of all the many good people who died in service to their country, the one for whom a candle will burn in my memory is for Paul; a guy whose very name I didn’t know for over forty years.

I can’t remember his face either.

His obituary named three sisters, but no parents.  I stopped myself from any attempt to contact the sisters.  What would I say?  What obfuscating lie did the Navy hand to them about their brother’s death?

If I came to them now, I would have to inform them that Paul died in an effort to stave the boredom that consumed us all.  He fell drunk from a moving vehicle and broke his neck.  Whatever the Navy said, it wasn’t that.  Would it bring comfort and closure for the sisters?

I think not.  I let it go.

With the cattle car lumbering off towards Deep Water Piers in a roiling cloud of hot dust, I stared down at the causeway.  Where were my skimmers?  Who had taken my fucking boats out without a fare-thee-well?  Sonavabitch!

I quick-marched to the Boathouse.  Where was Scott?  Who were all these strangers lollygagging about in my place of business?

The only familiar face was Joe, a black boatswains 2nd class, and not a lifer caste member by order of fucking Jim Crow.  Lifers were absolute egalitarians when it came to their hatred of any color of skin not as white as their own.  Except for women. They would suspend their misogynist convictions for an hour or so, nestled between a rented pair of thighs of any shade or texture.

Joe had been an auxiliary party animal in the heyday of the Boathouse Pirates.  He was one of the five guys at our one and only fuckfest in my hooch.

He was amiable and did a lot of jive shuffling around the other lifers—probably a survival technique dating back to his days in the Fleet.  We appreciated such camouflage in the face of the enemy and welcomed him into our sordid midst.

He asked me for a cigarette as he walked out the door, meaning, not in front of them.  I shook one out of my pack and as I held up a zippo to light it, he whispered, “Scott done gone.  He back down to dah Delta agin’.  Dees damn peckerwoods showed up dis mawnnin’.  Four uve dem done took yo’ boats away.  Ah think you ain’t no Skimmer Coxswain no mo’.”

Two months ago—hell--two weeks ago, I would have been on the lima-lima to that Peckerwood First Class down at HQ China Beach asking him what the fuck, over? In a totally unrehearsed way.  Now, in the funk of my inward spiral, I accepted this news with little more than a nod.

With the deception that denial affords us, my brain laid out a desperate but subdued reminder that this had absolutely nothing to do with Christina, Hong Kong or my plans to take back my woman from prostitute prison.  Nothing had changed; nothing was different from 20 seconds ago.

But everything had changed.

I stepped back into the Boathouse to begin my yeoman duties like the automaton I had become.  As I went to the radio and sat down, a first class boatswain’s mate stepped up and said, “You’re not allowed in here.  Go wait outside for muster.”  I then looked at him for the first time. 

He was pasty white and shaved bald under his cover.  He had watery pale blue eyes without any expression in them, which matched his slack-jawed face.  I don’t remember his name; he just registered as…Bullethead.

Still not really comprehending that I was now as vulnerable as all the other fish on the causeway, I got up from the chair which was no longer mine, and joined the work crews of the damned, out milling around, waiting for muster.

Just as it turned 0800 hrs, Bullethead emerged, flanked by two other non-coms who were as nondescript as he.  Joe followed them and stood to the side while the three of them faced the company. He slouched in a submissive posture.  His rank meant nothing to those motherfuckers.  All they saw was another nigger to ignore.

Muster had always been one of those more tedious moments in a lot of tedious moments that comprised most days.  A novel feature this morning was Bullethead’s first address to the swab scum E-3’s.  In a high raspy voice, clutching papers and looking up to see if anyone had fallen asleep standing up, he screeched, “Antenshun tah oarders!” and in one sentence revealed himself as uneducated, rural in origin and completely void of imagination.

I could read a lot into the way someone called attention to orders.

Slurring his way through the roster, stumbling on any name more complex than Smith, we became accounted for and then assigned to work details.  The only positive thing to happen that day was that I was assigned to Joe’s crew.

The other two boatswains mates may not have known Bullethead any longer than I had, but they were already practicing lifer lore, sucking up to the head guy and making as if they had all been shipmates since puberty.

Since lifers have a sense of smell akin to a snake’s, they would have smelled smart-boy college-kid on me and contrived to put me out of my misery by making me more miserable than I already was.

Well, how the mighty have fallen.  Here I was, chipping hammer in hand, beginning my first day on Devil’s Island, and doing the work I had for so long disdained as the province of lesser mortals.

The few remaining pusher boats were mostly junk, not having been maintained by a serving crew on a daily basis.  The reliable twin Jimmy 671’s still pulled their weight, but the hulls and decking were a mass of rusted waste.  The holds that were once festooned to comfort and accommodate three guys smelled of mildew and diesel.

With Joe leaning against a causeway shack with shade from the overhang, he smoked and watched us working on the boats in the hot sunlight of another day.  He was lenient in permitting us water breaks, but smoking had to be done while working. 

After two days of the relentless banging of ten hammers, Joe declared the deck ready for paint.  Out came the five gallon drums of red lead, a paint concoction which would be one of the first to go under future EPA rules.  The fumes alone could make a man sick.  We begged Joe to let us use rollers.  He allowed this deviation with the warning, “Best not be no holidays!”  Holidays were bubbles left in the paint surface.  When the paint dried, these bubbles would pop open from the heated trapped air, exposing the metal.

After red lead came the grey; after the grey, on to the next boat.  The mindless repetition of labor permitted me to slide down into my insane musings, to continue with the important job of solidifying fantasies with the unattainable goal of having them come true.

Frosty was the only consistent interruption.  His perpetual good spirits and upturned attitude did not penetrate my defenses; but he never relented trying to get through to me.  I tried hard not to let my growing irritation with his cheery banter show too much.  After all, he was just being…Frosty.

He wisely avoided talking about Hong Kong, preferring instead to tell me in unending detail about his hometown of Detroit.  Detroit!  How in the fuck could anyone be enthusiastic about Detroit?

I lost count of days without ever relinquishing the countdown to my ten-day relief before end of tour. One day, Joe came up and said something to me—about the work I was doing, about—I don’t remember what.  For whatever reason, he suddenly became the focus of all my troubles.  Loss of Christina, dashed hopes, irritability and powerlessness came rushing up; as I looked into his sweaty round black lifer face.

I came up from a crouch; hammer raised high; murder my intent and went to put the tip of the chipping hammer into his eye.  As I started my vicious swing towards the end of my young life, something arrested my arm.  It was Frosty.  He was holding me back, preventing me from the killing blow.  Joe’s eyes were open full wide, the whites a contrast to his dark skin.

They both worked at calming me.  I became shockingly aware of the enormity of what I had almost done.  Joe told Frosty to take me up the causeway to cool off.  Had Joe not been a friend, I would be walking up the causeway to the brig and certain court martial for threating a superior with bodily harm. Or worse.

After a couple of cigarettes, Frosty accompanied me back to join the work crew.  I murmured my apology to Joe, who kindly dismissed the moment, and life on the causeway resumed its dull beat.

That fraction of a second on the causeway is one that stretches to seeming hours when I relive it.  Frosty and Joe are lost to me, as all those people from my Viet Nam days are lost.  If they could read my words here and now, would they perceive the lifelong agony of my regret for a pittance of an incident that they forgot an hour after it happened?

Of all the wrongful shameful disgraceful things I did before and since that awful fissure in time, nothing has affected me more profoundly than that instant when I lost all semblances of civility and humanity; and arose to end the life of one of my brothers.

As God has surely forgiven me for that egregious transgression, I hope that you too, dear reader, dear brothers and sisters, can find your way to forgiveness as well.

I have fruitlessly tried to forgive myself…but I am not there yet.

Perhaps the day I enter rest upon the celestial plane, I will meet again with my brothers, to rejoice in the triumph that death must surely bring and offer them the round of beers that I could not offer them in my waning days on Earth.

And maybe a doogie…or two.












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