—
JOE CAME and got me from Severance and we went and got drunk with Roy. We made a big deal out of the drinking, the way you will when you’re young and you drink and a day’s momentous. Joe was just back from Camp Lejeune, and he’d be in town for a few weeks before his reserve battalion left for Fort Irwin and then Iraq. And now I was enlisting in the Army because I’d been saying I would. So we thought we were hot shit. It was Tuesday night.
We ended up at a bar on Mayfield. The place was dead, but we got to meet a Knight of Columbus. He had a black leather jacket on and his hair coiffed like he was Frankie Avalon or Robert Blake or one of those guys. He looked to be in his 50s. He asked us what we were carrying on about, and Roy explained it for him, and he approved. He said, “You know I used to teach hand-to-hand combat to the Special Forces guys down there at Camp Lee-Joon.”
Joe said he’d just come from SOI there.
“What’s SOI?”
“School of Infantry.”
“Yeah I forgot.”
The Knight of Columbus liked Joe because Joe looked like a TV dago, and so we had his company.
As for the barmaid, she was in her late 20s. She had white-blond hair and a tan that cost money, and she was skinny except for she had a little pooch in the front that gave a false impression of her being some months pregnant. We had been there before and we had seen her then; the pooch didn’t change, and she’d always act stuck-up like she was the one who served drinks to Ben Affleck or somefuckingbody. At first I’d just assumed she was a cunt, but then I’d come to wonder if there wasn’t a sadness in it.
The Knight of Columbus had been showing us fighting moves, and now he wanted to buy us a round. That’s how I saw that the barmaid wasn’t shitty to him. She even called him Mr. Something-or-Other. And I thought, There’s something to be learned here. But before I could figure out what it was, the Knight of Columbus made a toast.
“I bet you make it home alive, Joe,” he said. “Your friend here I’m not so sure about….Sah-loo!”
We drank the drinks. Roy said he was going to enlist in the Marines as a machine gunner. Everyone agreed it would be a fine thing for him to do. I said I had to go take a piss. So I did. I punched the bathroom mirror on accident when I was washing my hands. The mirror fell off the wall and took the sink with it.
I didn’t stay.
It had been a tremendous fucking crash and I needed to warn my friends. The barmaid was making for the wreckage. “We gotta go,” I said. “I mean like we gotta go right fuckin now.”
The barmaid was cussing in the bathroom and we said goodbye to the Knight of Columbus. He said not to worry about the barmaid. “That whore has had two abortions,” he said.
We didn’t have far to run to get home, and we had a fistfight in the driveway till one of the neighbors said he’d come down and shoot us if we didn’t be quiet and go to bed. So we went inside.
I called Emily. I wanted her to tell me I was good, maybe thank me or something. But she had her mind made up to give me grief, and I shook my head because I didn’t understand. I said, “Dearest, I told you before that I was gonna do this and you didn’t say anything then.”
She said, “That’s because I thought you were full of shit, baby.”
* * *
—
I WENT and saw my parents the following evening. They were doing alright. They thought the shit with the Army was dumb, but they were doing alright. They’d just bought a house, a nice house with plenty of room. I wanted nothing to do with it.
I said I was going Thursday to MEPS for a physical and some other tests, and if those went well I’d be at basic in a couple weeks. Sergeant First Class Space had said I’d fill out a wish list of the duty stations I’d like to be assigned to in order of preference, and since practically everybody got one of their top three, I was more or less guaranteed to stay close to Ohio. So I’d be able to visit often. And the life insurance policy was good for $300K if I opted to pay for the kicker.
My dad said, “Are you sure there isn’t anything else that you would rather do?”
I said I didn’t know what else there was to do.
My mom said, “I don’t see why you don’t wish to continue with your studies.”
I said, “What studies? I failed out of school eight months ago.”
“You can always go back,” she said.
“And I might. And if I do, the Army will pay for it. Sergeant First Class Space said—”
“Who the fuck is this sonofabitch? I’d like to speak to him.”
I said that couldn’t happen.
She said, “Why not?”
I said it was something I was doing on my own.
* * *
—
THURSDAY I found out I was color-blind. It wouldn’t be a problem though because 91W was one of the few MOSs you could hold in the Army while color-blind. “Because you already know what color blood is,” they said.
There was a lot of standing in line, and our legs ached because we weren’t used to it. They had us strip down to our underwear and duckwalk the circuit of a big room. The big room smelled like balls (unwashed) and feet (ditto) and open ass (regardless), and there was a lot of inadequacy to be seen in the big room. Fat kids. Acne. Acne on the face. Acne on the body. Skinny kids. I was a skinny kid. I wasn’t strong. We looked like shit. We’d grown up on high-fructose corn syrup, with plenty of television; our bodies were full of pus; our brains skittered. They called us one by one into another room, a smaller room wherein there was a man whose job it was to check everybody’s asshole. He had you bend at the waist and spread your ass apart with your hands so he could get a good look at it, and when he had seen enough he said, “Okay.”
They took me. By three in the afternoon I had signed a contract and I was sworn in. Roy came and got me from MEPS, and he drove me up to Elba so that I could stay with Emily my last two weeks as a civilian. Joe had come along for the ride. Snow was falling when we passed Erie. By the time we had passed the exit for Jamestown, it was all-out night and the traffic on 90 was bound up in a proper storm. We were boxed in by semis. They were all around us, rattling against the wind. Were one of them to jackknife, were one of them to not see us and then change lanes, we’d have had a fair chance of death by machines out on the roadway. But we didn’t worry about it. We had Roy’s car and we had cigarettes; we had heat and music; and all the way through the tolls outside Elba, we didn’t ever doubt that we were some of the ones who wouldn’t be killed.
It was ten o’clock when we got to Emily’s. They dropped me off and turned the car around and went home.
* * *
—
THIS WAS my first time seeing Emily in her hometown. All the last summer she’d been saving up to go to school in Montreal. She’d worked a third shift six nights a week at a Walgreens. And she’d been living with her aunt, and her aunt was religious. So there’d been no time or place for me then.