“[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.
