Red Bird

GEEEEZUS JAHOSEFAT TAA MURGATROID!!!!!!

You want hypocrisy?   I’ll give you hypocrisy! 

I didn’t write one word of today’s monograph until Thursday-go-to-meeting time.  Later, back here once again (Once AGAIN entrenched in my office cave!), I will be finishing the Sacred 2000+ Words of the Day around teensy-weensy o’clock.  Even that possibility is slim and none; considering my need for beauty rest and the demands of the Mutts and all.

And why? (I want to hear a crashing resounding rhetorical WHY?? From all you reader-snarkers out there!)

Because I couldn’t ‘think’ of an intro prologue to the storyline.  That’s like saying I couldn't think to breathe when I got up this morning.  I have a nuclear-powered thinker in my skullcap: It must be—it never turns itself off.  When I sit up for a 3:00 AM smoke-and-dangle, I can hear it rehearsing the chatter and idiocy it intends to emote with the coming dawn.

I blithely allude to the Muse Brothers, Ed and Holden, as the source; but from daybreak till night-night, it’s my nurtured insanity that fuels this sticky keyboard.

‘I’ll clean today’--another lame stupid excuse.  I did a Costco run for shit I didn’t immediately need, I did two loads of laundry, a day ahead of schedule.  I drank a potful of coffee and smoked about 30 cigarettes (Who’s counting?).

And I sat here at this fricking 42” monitor the livelong day, going to e-mail every time my genius I-phone chirped and running to my blog for the daily reader’s count (Oh, Yes!  I’m watching you!)

I did consider re-hashing some of my jaded remarks directed at Eisenhower, Dulles, the Bush-Men, or Mittens-Lyin’; but had to reject this idea as redundantly repetitive.  Crapadoola!   If I can’t practice my personal brand of demagoguery on the Republicans, who then would make an equal candidate to use as foil for barbed wit?

Well, time for the truth:  I am coming at last to the monographs I have postponed. These are the ones that will truly expose me as postal-chaotic-crazy Corky.  Wrap-him-in-a-rubber-room-and-throw-away-the-key Crazy Corky.

I mean, did you know that Bill Gates celebrated his 55^th birthday this week?  Did I say squit about that?  Shit no.  I could write a book taking pokes at that guy and yet I let that golden opportunity slip right past. Who am I kidding?  No prologue fodder?

Later, I will write 100 times on the blackboard after school, ‘I am a lying scut. I am a lying sack of doo.  I tell fibs and wet my pants.’

And now, to procrastinate yet one more day, I will tell a story with less grit and more hysteria:  Come-I-now to speak of the Big Red Byrd.

My relationship with EN-1 Byrd began on Day One of the Boathouse.  I was sitting there at the radio when the chief snipe of the Division came swaggering in, his perpetual burnt stogie an appendage out one side of his mouth, his cover cocked at a rakish angle.

He was big.  He was freckle-carrot-colored.  He was walleyed to the point of looking as a chameleon does when it looks in two different directions.  He had what I thought of as a pugilist’s face gone to middle-aged pudgy.

He was one mean-looking motherfucker.

In our first once-over look, that peculiar thing that men rarely do, of two stranger dogs sniffing asses, we came to the mutual realization of our intense dislike for one another.  I was prescient on the acceptance that this guy was to spell trouble for me one day.  My intuition was to prove accurate in time.

He smelled Wise-ass College educated privileged middle-class punk on me.  I smelled lifer from Hellfire on him.

Since the age of ten, I have known military people and have lived in the middle of military life.  My parents had only their brief time during the Big War when Dad was in the Army Air Corps and Mom had a job at Ft. Sam Houston.  As such, neither of them was well versed in the ways of the military.

When the family followed my father to the United Kingdom in 1955, Mom and Dad, not cultivated in military custom, befriended enlisted and officer with equanimity.  All ranks were welcome in our home and mingled freely at the holiday parties frequently held in our big house.

The enlisted men I came to know in my parent’s domain were all intelligent industrious career-minded individuals.

The enlisted men I came to know in Viet Nam barely rose to the level of sentience.  In writing about them as I have done, giving them the label of Lifer Caste, I have bestowed upon them more class than they ever deserved in reality.

To a man, they were uneducated crass louts intent on preserving themselves for a future retirement that would likely be as devoid of human feeling as all their years in uniform.  People teach us how to regard them; the lifers taught me repeatedly how drink, sloth and arrogance could despoil themselves and those around them.

One day, two months into my service at Service Craft, Red Byrd and I came to the defining confrontation that was never a matter of whether; only a matter of when.

One of the reefer barges was on the blink.  No one but Byrd had any experience with refrigeration systems, so one of the duty boats gave him a lift out there, and then went off to berth a recently arrived bullet boat.

At this time, Sierra Charlie Two had imposed strict orders that the only pusher boats out in the harbor were to be the duty boats.  All others were to remain tied to the causeway—no exceptions.

I have decided not to roast our second in command, not because he doesn’t deserve it; rather to preserve the dignity of his Alma mater, the United States Naval Academy.  How in the hell and under what bizarre set of circumstances did he achieve a Congressional appointment in one of the most competitive arenas in American Education?

That was Holden Caulfield matriculating at M.I.T.  It was Alfred E. Newman awarded a Rhodes Scholarship.

Back to the Boathouse.  I had the radio com that morning.  After about two hours out on that floating refrigerator, Byrd came across the net, wanting a boat to come pick him up.

My own skimmers were unavailable, the reason now lost in the time tunnel.  I radioed back that there were no boats here at the moment; but at sight of the first free duty boat, we would come get him.

Then, inexplicably, the duty boats got very busy—receiving one job after another.  I broadcast to Byrd  that it was going to be ‘some time’ before he could be rescued from his big metal island.  We could see the reefers out about a quarter mile from the causeway.  At that distance, the silhouette of a man was indistinguishable through the waves of heat coming off the water.

We called the hole-in-the-wall, but Sierra Charlie Two was out (He was perpetually ‘out’, that turd) and Rambo was on R and R.  No one in the front office had the authority to override the standing order.

We sat there in a muddle, not knowing what to do.  A short quiet ensued.  Then came a voice on the air that we could all recognize as an enraged Red Byrd: “This is E…N…One…Byrd!  I want a boat…a BOAT!!!”

It was Oertling who shook off the paralysis that had infected the rest of us.  With a clipped acknowledge of Byrd’s ear-shattering demand, he jumped on the nearest pusher boat, fired the 671’s and tore out headed for the reefer.

I couldn’t decide what terrified me more: Bobby disobeying an order, or Byrd coming back to the Boathouse after his intolerable imprisonment.

It very quickly became an uncontested decision.

Big Red Byrd loudly crashed down the causeway and burst into our Boathouse.  He was a darker hue of red than I have ever seen on a man.  We could smell the rage coming off his body like a torrent of sweat.  There was soaking sweat as well, after his three hour wait on a radiant heater.  The interior of the reefer may have been cold, but the exterior was not.

He loomed over me, for once both eyes boring into mine.  This was not a time for the wide-eyed distraction of…what?  What is the problem?  What part did I play in your humiliating powerlessness out there?

He was honed in on me.  I caused this.  Reason was completely absent.  I kept my smart mouth shut and offered…nothing.  His intense glare was window dressing for the trembling shaking brink of an irascible lava explosion barely contained.

For the twinkling of a moment stopped dead, I thought he was going to light into me.  He could quite easily have beaten me to a mass of raw hamburger.  The moment passed; he turned on his heel and tromped back down to the Snipe Shack.

I want to believe that it was my shining mail armor of Skimmer Coxswain that spared me that day.  I think the more plausible explanation for my deliverance was that Byrd could not bring himself to an impulse that would violate the code of the Fleet: no one can strike another with impunity.  Yeah, that was it.  There it is.

Arriving back at the Division towards 1700 hrs with no excuse of where he had been the fucking day long, Sierra Charlie Two was apprised of the incident.  Airily dismissing the whole thing, he said, “Well, I didn’t mean no boats out for a situation like that!”

The fricking goddamn dweeb.  I had accumulated the bright notion of ‘making a command decision in the field’ in R.O.T.C.; meaning: do whatever is expedient. The license it promised did not extend to running a taxi over to deliver one pissed off snipe from his discomfort.

Byrd never found an opportunity for retaliation against this blond headed prick of an un-billeted sailor.  When the Division was dismantled later in the year, he was one of the first to go: re-assignment in-country, retirement.  Back to his beloved Fleet.  I never knew for certain.

The one thing I do know: is that of all the lifers that touched my life during that long year: Scott, Jerry, Joe, Dickhead, Smee, others…Big Red Byrd left the most lasting impression.

Excuse me while I go brush my teeth and take a purgative.