Roads, Mills, Laps

Writing about the USS Taylor tour, made me remember the Dog and Pony shows that I used to have to put on for the brass and the whitehaired, white-skinned Senators at Fort Bragg a long time ago.

It was so long ago, Senator Strom Thurmond was alive. In fact, when I had to give him the Dog and Pony show, he was walking: barely.

Well one day I drew the short straw; it was my platoon that got picked to demonstrate the capabilities of the XVIII Airborne Corps. We had to depict flawless urban warfare executed by America’s best warriors: MOUT. We were it; we were the belligerent actors in that grand play. Senator Thurmond: that old womanizing curmudgeon; that supreme racist KKK Dixiecrat centenarian, we had to make pretty for him of all people. He represented the people of South Car’lina; he was then chairman of the all-powerful Senate Armed Services Committee too. That diaper-wearing, oatmeal-dripping fool: he had his hands on the billion and fiddie dollar purse strings. He was supposedly democracy incarnate; the mass of okely-dokely people empowered this curmudgeon of a man to make the big appropriations. Yay!

We spent days (24/7 days) getting ready for this circ d’ grande. We had to pick the best looking Sergeants–a mishmash of 2/504’s square-jawed Adonises and bit-part Mr. Potato Heads; we had to polish our equipment–making it look like Hollywood props in the hands of John Wayne and Audie Murphy. We had to perform for the Brigade Commander; then the Division Commander; then the Corps Commander. Our men had to make crisp movements; they had to act like obsequious robots. They entered and cleared rooms with their AR-15s drawn. The enemy (then a bumbling ragtag collection of incompetent South American insurgents wearing battle-dress uniforms inside out) died instantly, making demise-of-bad-guy moans. At the end, a black helicopter–the XVIII Corps’ deus-ex-machina–descended and evacuated our poor casualties, proving to the taxpayers that, like the movie Blackhawk Down, we will never, ever, leave a brave man behind. We practiced; boy did we practice. We were fed lines and then learned them rote. We moved left, right, left. We said, “Room One Clear!” We fired two rounds-boom! boom!–when we kicked the door open using machismo and polished boots. We dispatched the drug dealing-bastards; left them writhing and dying. Then we radioed to HQ and gave meaty Officer Poncherello-esque thumbs ups.

We did it at night too.

Then we did it again during the day.

The Colonel called for a large, four-wheel generator: an eight-Kilowatt generator summoned from the bowels of the motorpool. It had to be hitched to a deuce and a half, driven by a jaded Haitian-American with a slight lisp.
It arrived so quickly, because it only took a phone call from the Colonel. The Colonel was an Old Testament God: He could get whatever He wanted using spite and spittle.

“You get me it now!” He barked.

“Roger, sir,” the fawning Bridage duty officer said like a modern day Amos n’ Moses.

Out in the middle of a scrub oak-strewn field we strung multicolored Xmas lights; we installed a 36-inch television and a VCR to tape our great shenanigans. The General arrived amidst wailing sirens and saluting sycophants; he called for bleachers and a juggling clown astride a patriotic unicycle: That all came an hour later. The Brigade’s official artist was summoned. He was ordered to make a sand table that resembled our multi-level stage. He followed orders, making things look really nice for that influential Senator from South Car’lina.

“Make it nice,” the General warned.

“Roger, sir,” the artist responded.

We had to press our uniforms with heavy irons and shave twice using Gillette XTREME razors. Our cap bills were folded into perfect parabolas using water and a small drinking glass. Our Kevlar helmet liners were ironed. Dust and wayward hairs were lifted off our battle dress uniforms using Scotch tape. Our company commander had to practice his walk–a rooster-like strut yes, the cock of the walk. Our company commander loved his strut; he also loved hunting deer and listening to Garth Brooks. “I will sail my vessel till my river runs dry,” he used to sing nostalgically, humming as if he was in the first row at the concert at Branson.

And oh what a play it was: All our equipment had to be shined and made black using edge dressing that was purchased in the PX. The token casualty had to lay still–no moans were allowed in our dog n’ pony world. Any visible hands had to be knife-edge straight. The water in the hanging lister bag had to be free of the taste of rubber. The latrine’s seat looked like the polished treasure of the Sierra Madre; the walkway to the theater was free of all weeds and rocks greater than 3/4 of an inch in diameter; no living thing crawled or grew in the path of the Armed Service Chairman.

Someone accidentally called it a circus: he was silenced–frogmarched, actually, into a one way-heading Humvee, back to the stockade. No sarcasm: sycophants only, please. Rebellion was impossible; this demonstration thrived on obedience and good manners.

When Senator Thurmond eventually arrived, he was escorted by his puppet masters: dyspeptic aides with comb-overs who wielded cell phones and one-word dictates: the guys who made the real decisions. Thurmond had a palsy; he shook like a epileptic prop in a snakeoil Evangelist’s revival tent. Though he could walk, he wasn’t allowed to; the aides pushed him down. He was put on a Rascal-esque motorized wheelchair. (We had to clean it well in advance with a bottle brush and a concotion of Simple Green and Windex.)

When he got to his observation post, my Company Commander radioed me. I radioed the Adonis-looking Sergeant who then radioed the square-jawed S.S. Corporal who kicked off the whole affair. Robots moved robotic-like. Casualties kept quiet. South American insurgents with dastardly-looking, Rollie Fingers mustaches were killed. Helicopters hovered and descended. All was good; all was made safe in the end. Both Disneyworld and the mass of taxpayers need a happy ending.

Senator Thurmond clapped.

“The boys look good,” he said, approvingly. A long trail of white spit formed between his mandibles.

“Yes sir, they do,” said the XVIII Corps Commander. (To become a Corps Commander, one has to take a class called “Glad Handing.”)

“Yes sir,” said the Brigade Commander. (Any Brigade Commander worth his salt glad hands better than the instructor of “Glad Handing.”)

“Yes sir. Private Jones, the M-60 gunner is from South Carolina, sir,” my company commander offered. This line hadn’t been rehearsed. My company commander decided, on the fly, to extemporize a bit. It worked.

“Where in South Car’lina,” Strom Thurmond said.

“Florence, sir”

“What’d he say?” Senator Thurmond asked, his hand cupped to his hairy ear.

Senator Thurmond’s aid jumped in to help the withered man. “Florence. Florence he said, Senator.”

“Florence?”

“Florence, yes sir, Florence.”

“Good. Good. It’s good to see South Car’lina boys here-ah.”

My Company Commander nodded. “Yes sir,” he said, pushing his chest forward hubristically. [This was warranted since the dog and pony show was a success.]

The Brigade Commander winked at the Division Commander. The Corps Commander saw that and smiled. Though it wasn’t in the script, it was well received. The XVIII Corps was sure to get it’s next request for fiddiemillion dollars.

Senator Thurmond was wheeled back to his Humvee and whisked away. He waved at us as he departed–his shriveled hand stuck out the window looking like the Pope John Paul II’s circa March 2005.

“Good job,” the Brigade commander said, turning to my Company Commander.

“Yes sir.”

My Company Commander turned to me. “Cut the generator,” he ordered.

“Yes sir.”

We turned it off; the Xmas lights went out; flashlight arcs appeared;my men shouted as they started cleaning up the range.

We were done about 12 hours later and then we went home to our saltbox base houses. We ate our warm cookies and drank cold milk.

Then we got up and did it again.
——–

First, an encounter with the bookie Nazi:

Before the concert, we hung out in the Borgata’s race book. The place is a giant room filled with nervous, chain-smoking men who yell at vast screens that display simulcast horse races. I wanted to get a drink and so I went up to place a bet. (You get drink tickets when you bet: You get drunk: You bet more: You get more tickets: Your bets get stupider: Money flies: ATM’s are consulted: How about another rum and coke: The next win is one win away: That’s how it goes in casinos.)

I’ve only bet on horses one other time in my life–at the Flamingo’s race book in Vegas; I waved my hands, arrogantly, at my companions, telling them that I was an expert and I knew what I was talking about. I approached the betting cage and tried to place “Lucky Brit” for the win. (Get it?)

The bookie, an emaciated specimen, a Sleestak creature hailing from Atlantic City, a card-carrying member of gamblers anonymous, looked me up and down and said sarcastically, “Don’t give me the horses name, pal, give me the horses number. Ok?”

I walked back to my companions, a bit embarrassed, and grabbed the race sheet that I was consulting and looked up the horse’s number .

I returned to the bookie and told him, “Six, horse number six.”

The man laughed and asked, “Which track?”

Back to my companions (head down, a bit red at the cheek this time, back to the sheet at the bar, now back to the greasy man).

“Meadowlands”

The bookie was enjoying this, milking it for all it was worth on a Tuesday night: “What race?”

Back again.

“Race 9.”

“That race just started. Pick another race, pal.”

I slid my hand to the next race on the sheet and settled on the horse where my finger landed: a horse named Casual Dresser, a dark horse, 12/1, for the win.

I made my bet, begged for my drink tickets, and then watched the race unfold on the topmost screen. It was at the Meadowlands. An enormous red Ford F-150 with those hideous wheel wells started the horses from a trot. The horses in turn pulled carts straddled by tiny jockeys wearing entomical-like goggles. The jockeys all whipped their horses and the race was off. (The F150 veered out of sight.) Casual Dresser labored, but gained no ground on the leaders. He was in 6th position at the 2nd turn. Casual Dresser’s jockey’s knees were bent as he slapped his horse’s back repeatedly–into fourth now! Have we hope? The whole thing reminded me of that scene out of Ben Hur: frenzied men holding onto draped reins whipping foaming beasts around repeated turns. After the first lap (This thing was a 600m-looking race on a human’s track: a lap and a half), I started to feel sorry for the horses. I thought about my own desperate stabs around endless turns on long tracks–when lactic acid seared holes in my legs, when my oxygen debt made me bankrupt (could a whip help me run a 2:29 marathon?); I felt awkward sitting there with my little beer, staring at a stupid grainy screen, sitting in the stands–holding my little $2 ticket egging on an animal on the hairy edge of existence. I stopped rooting and crumpled up the ticket. Casual Dresser ended up holding onto fourth. He disappeared from sight as the camera panned away to race #10.

It was time to throw some dice.

We only bet about $50. The table was one of those sad tables where crumpled people finger dwindling chips and prop their heads up with their nicotine-stained hands; where dice move quickly around the table; where the stick men grow weary raking in everyone’s lost dreams. I tried to change the mood, as I always do. I yelled and patted backs. I high-fived and pointed at the fat man with the pinky ring who just threw a fever five. I was going to change the mood–it’s all about the mood. It was my turn to throw. I palmed the dice and tossed them high. I called the number: a “YO”, an eleven, and it appeared. A few people took notice. I called the number again and it appeared again. The table clapped. I threw it again; I got a backslap and a high five; the pit boss watched me closely.

I threw a five.

Then I threw a seven: I became a villain. The table sighed; those men put their heads back on their hands.

Time to go see Morrissey.

He was due to appear at 9:15. The lobby of the event center was full on an eclectic mix of people–hardly a crowd worthy of the man. A paunched man with a skull shirt talked to a bartender who poured him a $9 beer. A little child–about five or six–sat on his father’s shoulders. The father had a hip purse and wore a leather hat. There, in the corner, see that guy with the manblouse on, what the hell is he doing here? Ah, there are some people I expected: tattooed women with night-black dyed hair wearing Moz. tee shirts and skin-tight plaid pants. We walked into the arena and were led to our seats which were big-time shitty ones–up high and to the left. Here’s the surrealistic thing: there were 40 rows ahead of us with no one sitting in them. And now here’s the ironic thing: A fat woman sat right in front of me. The stage had three big black and white pictures of James Dean. Some lady was announcing over the speaker all these bad things–some obvious villains of the left: “Jesse Helms”, “Jerry Falwell”, “rednecks”, “the All-American way” (what about my Division, the 82nd Airborne, they are the All-Americans, are they bad?) “apartheid”, “miscarriage”, “the imprisonment of Nelson Mandela”, “the shadiness of his corrupt, murdering wife…” (wait, she didn’t say the last one)

The lights dimmed and the lady stopped her propagandistic rant.

Moz. strolled on the stage and the sparse crowd lept to its feet. I was here to sit down–I’m 35 years-old and so I remained sitting. I protested: I wanted to be in some lounge at some table ordering drinks, sitting cross-legged, listening to Bengali in Platforms, not screaming madly at some washed-up crooner with a gray pompadour. Finally, the tragic thing: The fat woman in front of me stood up and blocked my view. I grabbed my date’s hand and we walked down 39 rows to the first one. The ushers didn’t say anything. Good.

Morrissey is a fucking mess. He wore a long, untucked shirt and black slacks. A bit of a paunch appeared; a jowl formed. His band was made up of mostly twenty-something good-looking men wearing tight white tee shirts and black pants. They reminded me of the robotic servile women in Robert Palmer’s Addicted to Love video: ugliness with beautiful bookends.

He sang well–that’s for sure. He opened with a Smith’s song (That bouncy The Boy With the Thorn in his Side) and then transitioned to his solo material. From time to time, he’d tear off his shirt–exposing his undefined flab, his manboobs–and bolt off the stage like a scared deer. This happened at least three times. People fought for his sweaty shirt. He’d reappear again in a new shirt and thus the cycle would repeat.

He didn’t want to be there; he mocked us, making fun of Atlantic City–his tour’s final destination. I found it fitting for him to end it all in front of a thinned crowd in a dumpy gambling town where crackwhores and serial killers are but a stone’s throw away. He was the loser–not us.

He had a cold and wiped his nose incessantly–his voice cracked. He royally blew Reel Around the Fountain, causing the poor girl next to me who was lost in a dreamy singalong to stop singing. At one point, he told a fawning woman who wanted him to kiss his hand that he couldn’t, that it was “disgusting.” She begged him; he refused and withdrew. He pleaded with the crowd not to scream, but they did anyway.

Oh the drama.

I just sat there with my arms crossed. I didn’t hop and dance or wave my hands in that modern rock motion to that tired, yet still good How Soon is Now? I supposed it was what I expected. I knew this man was washed up–like Elvis in his Aloha from Hawaii 1973 tour. He was a pilgrimage. I just wanted to come, witness, and then leave. I didn’t want his shirt or a bottle of his Lourdes-like sweat. I didn’t want to pass him a love note or hold his meaty hand. I certainly didn’t want to tap my feet and sing along like a Coldplay groupie. I wanted Bengali in Platforms and Dial a Cliche. I wanted a dark man–an introspective man that he once was–to sing softly in a dark lounge to but a few of us.

I got none of this.

Instead I got to be Bobby Brady when he finally met that guy who’s parents were gunned down by Jesse James. But my memories of where I was when I sang his songs, what I was going through, who I was with, they hold their own meaning and are beyond him. His flab and his greedy disinterest can’t smite them.

Sadly though, his ego, his tired, sweaty act in front of a small group of skull-shirted men with leather hats and salacious homoerotic tendencies has left me a bit scarred.

I’m never going to see Morrissey again.

A few years ago, I impulsively decided to buy an air ticket to Dublin, Ireland and escape my problems–my sadness. I was invited to a friend’s wedding there and I figured why the hell not?

I hadn’t really been alone like that since 1989, back when I was 16 and on my own in Switzerland–back when fear was defined as sitting in my “host” familiy’s house, in my little room of that 500 year-old house throttling that fucking chinchilla that kept me up all night.

I flew from JFK to Dublin, alone. I slept in a hotel room, alone; I walked the streets of Dublin–alone. I ran through Phoenix Park, alone and I drank–alone. Man did I drink alone. I fucking rolled in true Irish style–spilling my salty tears into thick, foamy glasses of Guinness–black pond water, absorbing everything, reflecting nothing. I started drinking the moment I got there. Well, maybe not the moment I got there. I had to buy the latest edition of Irish Runner and get my greasy palms on some sort of buttery pastry and then I started drinking.

I was stuck in Temple Bar the first night. My hotel was some ancient place where pasty white Irish hostesses dialed on antediluvian phones connecting you, two-ring Eurotrash style, to God knows where. This was the Irish flytrap;this was the place where dumb,ugly Americans–blarney stone-buying neanderthals with dopey southern accents and fifth-removed relatives seemingly everywhere–disposed of their disposable income

I pissed the day away. I remember reading some historical markers about Joyce,then wishing I could write like Joyce, then wondering how I could write like Joyce when I never even tried to read the fucker. I heard Joyce is hard to read; I still haven’t tried to summit Ulysses.

I remember reading in my cherished copy of Irish Runner (complete with pictures of legends Alistair Cragg that Marc Carroll) and realizing that people win podunk 5Ks over on the cold, rainy Emerald Isle in 14:XX and then I remember thinking about Jumbo Elliot, Providence College, and how kickass the Irish are at running. Per capita, they have to be at the top.

I did run. Sadly, it was only about 5 miles. I saw some Tinkers underneath campfires and thought about U2 and a feathered-hair Bono walking the grimy streets of Dublin in like 1978 before Dublin and Ireland got all classy and snobby, before that stupid Euro, before tax shelters, before IBM and Dell and dotcom greed–back when dirty men wielded dirty tools and made things like boat anchors out of glowing iron right in the center of that once dirty city.

I contemplated an upstart Morrissey and angry crowds assembling during the Easter Rising of 1916. I passed the statue of “Big Jim” Larkin–that socialist, that trouble maker–with his hands up towards the sky. I related to him for a moment; I wished his idealistic spirit the very best and then I moved on.

I remember the Liffey and Thom Yorke crooning about floating down it. (It was bright green and capable of walking across, at the time. Jesus, what a sick looking body of water.)

The night was nothing but more drinking. David, my dear friend and the groom-to-be (now runner/climber/blogger) met me for dinner and then we walked to the cigar store where we bought a real Cuban Cohiba to be lit up on his big night.

He had to leave–had to do groom things–and then I was alone again.

I remember floating through the Temple Bar–of smoky pubs and wonderful music. I can still hear the melodic drone of the Uilleann pipes and the pit-pat beat of the Bodhran. I’m thinking of the irony–of how the Irish can sing and dance and play such happiness under such depressingly gray skies. I’m a mutt, but I’m at least 53% Irish and so I hold on to these happy, carefree people. I put down my tent next to them. I make fast friends and hide my ‘Merican accent.

I am home.

The night slips fast. It spins into a frenzy. I’ve had too much; I forget where I am.

Here I am!

A football match is on one screen; a hurling match the other. Balding men with cigarettes crowd around the TV with the football match. The roar of the digitized crowd blends with cries of the balding men. Some strange European match has come down to the final seconds. Handsome Eurosoccer players with thick thighs kick balls high. The balls disappear behind those gray-orange shadows found in frenzied football stadiums at dusk.

The match ends;the balding men scream. Beer sloshes and middle fingers appear.

Everyone orders another round. I’m face down in Temple Bar.

I manage get to my room and watch the lights spin. My wood-paneled walls crawl; my pedestal sink overflows. My clothes come off and then the lights dim.

I lay on my bed–alone.

Secure. Safe. Hopelessly drunk.

Fiercly independent. A runner, again.

Happily alone, again.

Free.
————–
To be continued.

I’m mellowing out.

It’s late afternoon, after a decent 14-miler at some sort of pace under 6:45. I’m listening to Danny Elfman’s great band, remembering this grand song played crapily through a cheap pair of duct-taped, wannabe-walkman headphones. I’m in my room; I’m seeing myself through a fog. There I am, dutifully doing my homework, searching my face for new zits, keeping my eyes on the prize: massive over-achievement on a Shock N’ Awe scale, supreme ass kissing, straight A’s, populist elections, subsequent acceptance letters and resultant backslaps. I’m seeing fractions and geometric diagrams–penciled shapes on white, ruled paper slapped together in a burgeoning three-ring binder.

Now…stop the tape. Switch the walkman to Live105.

Dave Wakeling’s singing.

Next subject: English. I reach for a different binder (red this time) and sing along. I write out, in bubbly cursive, the definitions for assigned hard words such as: schmaltz, ennui, and surfeit. I don’t know their meaning and so I reach for my dictionary. I don’t labor much to memorize them; I string some easier words down, to the right of those hard words and tap my foot to the English Beat–to Wakeling’s voice that accompanies this grand exercise in block-checking.

Homework’s done and so that means it’s time to go skateboarding. Wait, Commodore-64 first–gotta punch the fat green dude…gotta kick the ninja…gotta grab the lantern. There.

The computer gets turned off, the chair: never pushed in. The door: left halfway open. My mom’s on the phone in the living room–a gigantic serpentine cord twists around the corner of the kitchen. She sits with her apron on and waves to me,whispering when dinner will be. I’ve got my shred glove on; it was once a protective gardening gauntlet; it’s now got a truck’s riser stuck to it, care of a healthy dose of glue from my father’s hot glue gun.

The house door closes hard, making the Windsor chimes from the broken doorbell peal ever so slightly. My mom’s still on the phone. I stay in the house watching her talk to someone while I observe my shadow flicker past the olive tree in the front lawn. The skateboard’s hardened wheels click and clack as they ride over the rubberized cracks in the sidewalk.

The house now grows silent; the fog lifts; the songs are over and the memory fades.

This album sends a chill up my spine.

Do you own any music that does this–that brings the past to your feet. Ever listen to a song that slaps you in the face?

I rediscovered this album tonight. I had it once on my Walkman–the ungreased plastic cogs humming during the quiet parts. I listened to it on the plane to Switzerland in 1989, looking down at the neat, European countryside below, contemplating solitude and absolute freedom; I listened to it curled up in a fetal ball in my third story room of my Swiss host family’s 300 year-old house thinking about America’s sins. I heard Street Fighting Years as I gazed out of the Swiss train as it sped me to Aarau, to my high school. By the time I got to This is Your Land, I was walking up the neat steps of the train station to my first class which was Ancient Roman history–taught by the coolest and smartest of teachers who bought us beer once school was over (at Pickwick’s Pub)–from the man who taught me that Rome had a prehistory. I never knew about the Etruscans. The furthest you get into Rome in American schools is Cliff Notez’ Julius Caesar.

Belfast Child is the one that really makes me shiver.

I’m outside my home–kicked out for being a conservative rebel in a liberal rebel’s house.

Really alone.

I’m there right now. The album was worth buying tonight.

You all have music like this don’t you?

Ranger Class 5-95. Follow the red arrow to the lucky, sad-sack son of a bitch who got a very nice, very forgiving ranger instructor on his last patrol in the Florida Phase.

I stumbled upon this site today with all the class photos digitized. (Jack?)
——————–
Chuck Norris would be proud; your tax dollars at work, makin’ progress.

No this isn’t what you think it may be; it’s not a legal brief, detailing the repressed memories of child sodomy. Rather, it’s a few innocent memories on a Friday night. Perhaps it’s a controversial write-up, so buckle your seatbelts or just flat-out ignore it if you are sadly looking for marathon drivel which is almost extinct on this space, being replaced instead by religion, raging sore throats, and rapacious, sycophantic Army officers. My apologies up front; how dare I speak my mind on an unsponsored website that I pay for. For shame! I wear my hairshirt; I wallow amid shanks of hackenfleish; I gaze sadly upon my atrophied legs. ($50,000 question spinning around in some of your heads: Should I hyperlink to this guy? One moment he’s normal, all runner-boring, the next he’s talking about altar boys! Arrgh!)

I guess I can consider myself one of the lucky few: I escaped the clutches of circa-1980 pederast priests and their slimy, covering-up bishops who wear the dainty robes and spooky miters of un-Christlike privilege. (In my opinion the rank of bishop and above = the Roman Catholic/New Testament equivalent of these guys. WWJD? I dunno, not hang out with them and their fancy garbs that’s for sure.)

I am writing about a few of my experiences as an altar boy at Saint Dominic’s Parish in Benicia, California. They are all good memories, so if you want to get mad at the Catholic Church, go somewhere else tonight. There’s plenty of people out there in cyberland who have a damn good reason to be mad at the mother church or whatever its called. But I’m not one of them tonight. I’m an apologist of sorts, I guess–but barely.

For the most part, the priests that I served with were saints. There was Father Carr. He was an aging Irishman who drank like a fish. He stumbled about in front of the altar as if he were in a pub. The altar itself: the bar. Me, at the beginning of the Liturgy of the Eucharist, when the altar boys are supposed to pour the wine into priest’s chalice for him to eventually bless, consecrate, and then drink: the bartender. Father Carr would quietly ask for more.

And I never cut him off.

He was stern, but fair, extremely conservative (he once preached in a homily that he regretted the viscous hijacking of the word ‘gay’) but loving. He called me his favorite altar boy; he taught me to pay attention to detail–a skill that would come in handy years later at West Point when I was folding my black dress socks into anal retentive little balls of misery on forlorn Saturday nights.

I have intermittent memories of Father Carr. He comes and goes, walking about the church, from the chancel, to the nave, up to the altar, on various Sundays; I was always in front of the his procession, holding the golden cross, making sure that the dying Jesus was facing the right way. Father Carr traipses about in my head, getting older, getting more frail–eventually dying while still serving at my parish.

I do know that he had a sense of humor, spraying me with his hands during the part of the Eucharistic Liturgy when the priest is supposed to cleanse himself of his sins by dipping his fingers into a bowl of water held by the altar server. He’d wink as he did it, absolving himself of his liabilities in his unique, ablutionary way–as if to say to me, ‘Tag, you’re it!’

Another memory of him was on a Good Friday in some vague 198X year. My mother, in a moment of supreme religious zeal, mandated that some of my brothers and I were to accompany her, in the middle of the school day, down to Saint Dominic’s to hear the Dominican priests speak about the gravity of this morbid day, this bleak day–this holiest of days for those who bask in the masochistic misery of the perpetually sinning scion of Adam. Dominican priests are a unique bunch: after all, these were the guys who were ordered by Pope Gregory IX, to enforce the eradication of the heretics during the infamous and ridiculously unjust Inquisition. They didn’t fuck around: Good Friday was their day. They were gifted speakers (their order: called ‘the order of preachers,’ their nickname: Domini canes, translated as ‘dogs of the lord’*) and even more so when the subject was a dour, morbid one–when all things were depressing guilt-trips meant to take each and every parishioner through the final moments of Jesus’ life, through his scourging, through his humiliation. We felt his nails in our hands; we fell three times.

We suck: we suck: we suck.

My last memory of Father Carr saying mass was the morning that he had his stroke. I was so hardcore that morning that I was serving two masses. My parents and family weren’t there. It was just me; I was the senior acolyte that morning. I was taking some neophyte 4th Grade wastoids through the mass. They were to follow me because I was in charge: I was Father Carr’s favorite. They poured wine when I told them to; they laughed when Father Carr sprayed them with his sins, but did it quietly, damnit.

Everything that day was just normalcy–Catholic masses thrive on normalcy. 99% of the people go there to eat the crunchy wafer and take home the bulletin, laying it on their kitchen counters to show family members their badges of zealotry–to sow grade-A GUILT across a house divided.

Well it wasn’t normal that day; those who where there didn’t get their little wafer, their little guilty seed to sow. Father Carr had a stroke. I think it was before the consecration of the Eucharist. He started speaking weird. His voice became pained and then it sounded surreal. Then it went out.

He stood there, completely confused.

The parish looked back uncomfortably; Father Carr moved his lips like an actor in a silent film. He eventually had to give up on it all, sitting down in his priestly throne next to me. He looked over at me with a helpless, far-away look. He moved his lips, but I didn’t know what he was saying. There was no comedy that day; I wasn’t his cordial bartender or the happy recipient of his showering sins.

I was pathetic.

I just sat there for what seemed like minutes. Eventually the lector went over and checked on him, concluding that he wasn’t A-OK. The lector asked if there was a doctor in the house; some lady wearing a large-brimmed hat stood up and walked down the nave, her head looking down in embarrassment. And that’s all I can remember about that day.

The rest of it is shoved into some dark pocket of my mind. I can remember that I faced Jesus on the cross the right way that day; I can remember that I led some yearlings, showing them how to bow and kneel, how to ring the bells properly, letting them peal themselves beautifully to silence. But I don’t remember the most important thing: I don’t remember how the audience of wafer-seeking, block-checking cattle concluded that all was not normal that day. I don’t remember how they reacted to Father Carr’s stroke. That to me, is the most important part.
I assume now, almost twenty-five years later, that at some time they must of gotten up and just left the church in silence, making damn sure that they got a bulletin on the way out.

Father Carr died a couple weeks after that. I last saw him in the garden outside the church shaking people’s hands after mass on a bright, cloudless California morning. He was a typical stroke victim-half paralyzed, speech slurred and all that. He shook my hand and said goodbye to me: He told me that I was the best altar boy he’d ever had.

I have never forgotten him. I hope he’s in a good place, bellied up to a bar, toasting happier, less-lonely times.
—————————–
*If you don’t believe me about these guys then how about this:

Last year I took my daughter to a CHILDREN’S MASS at St.Dominic’s on Xmas eve. The kids were all happy, decked in their fancy dresses, dreaming of their materialistic Santa and their sugarplums. The post-Vatican 2 Manson-clan-looking choir had their bongo drums and their tambourines ready for the mother of all Age of Aquarius-like Lord’s Prayers. All was happyland, until the priest, a menacing man with scouring pads for bushy eyebrows, a man looking like he himself collected dry tinder for the heretics’ roasting stake, Eagle Scout-style, rose from the sanctuary and proceeded to say the following prayer: “For sowing seeds of RANCOR in our families, Lord have mercy.”

Anyone with a military background recognizes the title of this posting. Everyone else thinks about the Beatles’ song, “Hello Goodbye.”

In 1996, I was the S-1 of the 2nd Battalion of the 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 82nd Airborne Divsion. The S-1 is the personnel officer–the unfortunate sod who manages the underpaid high school dropouts who process the pay, the awards, and all the other paperwork that shits through a military bureaucracy at the rate of a constipated octogenarian. I was also the Battalion Commander’s right hand man. Yay, lucky me!

God help us.

My Battalion Commander happened to be a man with a Kindergartener’s grasp of the English language, a toddler’s grasp of world history, and an embryo’s grasp of basic world geography–a man who literally swaggered into a room bowlegged as if he had been stradling a super-sized cow all day. He rode a Harley with his wife on the back and thought he was John Wayne; he neighed like a horse undergoing a circumcision–even more so when he saw me rebelling with my long hair and my John Lennon glasses, me enduring the last months of my prison sentence like Dumas’ protagonist in The Count of Monte Cristo, Edmond Dantès, shackled up in my Château d’If: my little hobbit-sized office next to the Colonel’s papal-like palatial estate.

He called me his “Radar O’Reilly.” I called him old horsey or that zany, panpipe-playing satyr. (He looked like the worst parts of a horse and a man put together, like some sort of terrifying Greek mythological amalgamation, spawned by a wanton Zeus experimenting with bestiality.)

or I called him ‘fucking asshole.’ All names carried the same weight.

We didn’t get along too well.

Anyway, besides babysitting wife-beating, crackpipe-smoking clerks and processing meaningless awards for wife-beating dropouts, I had the job of running the Hail and Farewells. These things were a production of sorts, a monthly, regimented routine where all the white collar managers (read: the upper crust, the officers), got together at some restaurant and said goodbye to the people leaving the unit and welcomed the new people coming into the unit.

These things were a repeating horror film with the following plot thread:

-Officers show up at restaurant. They all have short hair (high and tights). In the summer, the officers have collared shirts, khaki shorts and Teva-esque sandals. Shirts are tucked in and belts are visible. It’s so bad that some shirts have dress-offs.

-Officers order drinks at bar. Same shit: Coronas in the summer; Sam Adams in the winter.

-Groups form. 1-block, careerist asslickers with short hair go to one corner. Jaded rebels with a penchant for quoting Marx, sporting longer hair, go to another corner. Bourgeois here, Proletariat, there. Unsuspecting, generic ROTC graduates, the 2-blockers stand in the middle with their hands in their khaki short pockets. They hold their beers (Budweisers) and look around for hot chicks.

-Jimmy Buffet plays in the bar. If it’s not Jimmy Buffet, then it’s Hootie and the Blowfish, guaran-damn-teed.

-Motorcycle noises heard outside–in swaggers the colonel with his entourage like they are entering a saloon. If there were double doors, they’d be pushed open, wild west style.

-Colonel hollers, “S-1! Get over here!”

S-1 says in a Smithers-esque tone, “Yes sir! Enroute!”

-Everyone eats things like BBQ pork and steaks. Meat is required. Killed things must be consumed at all costs. MEAT DAMNIT!

-Conversations ensue. The subjects range from who’s having an affair, to who’s got a threesome lined up, to who’s gay. In other words,the more seminal fluid that can move across a membrane, the more cruelty towards the recipient woman, the better; everything is AOK as long as its not between two guys. If it involves gays or the anal area of a man, then the homophobic cards are played by unassuming men with latent, homoerotic tendencies.

-Colonel stands up and reads notecards. The S-1 diligently prepares these. The notecards describe everything about people in the Battalion coming and going as well as about who’s Stepford wife is pregnant. Stepford wife pregnancy mandates cheers to the lucky male stud; it requires manly, Russell Crowe-in-Gladiator comments like, “Hooah, Ride’em Cowboy!!!”

-Colonel, being the horsey cro-magnon boob that he is, can’t read the King’s English and so he squints and says, “Who wrote these?”

-S-1 reluctantly raises his hand. Damn, 1-cent words.

-Colonel says: “S-1. Did your mama teach you to write?”

-Depending on how many days are left in the S-1’s service he says one of the following:

a. “Yes sir.”
b. “No sir.”
c. “Maybe sir, it depends on which mama you are referring to: my mama or yours?”

-Regardless of which answer is given, Colonel says, “Goddamn S-1, you are killing me. You’re fired.”

-Room erupts in sycophantic laughter. S-1 puts hands up and gives his best Alfred E. Neuman-what-me-worry impression.

-Men newly arrived to the unit are announced and stand up, Colonel gives them a unit coin.

-Colonel says: “Don’t lose this coin. If I catch you without it, you owe me a beer. I drink Bud, bud.”

-Room laughs again. Sycophants in the front laugh hard enough to be distinguished.

-People leaving are announced and stand up. Colonel gives a framed plaque containing the unit colors to them.

-People leaving give goodbye speech.

-Colonel wraps up the night with the following: “Men, you are all warriors. Shit, even the S-1 is a warrior (laughter in the front again). As Henry the Whateverthefuck once said, ‘You are a band of brothers and I will serve with you happily and shed my blood with you, my brothers.’” Room grows silent contemplating this Shakespearean abortion.

-Colonel swaggers out. Harley noise enters the quiet room. Colonel drives off with his woman on his back, into the sunset.

I bring up all this because the one night that the script deviated was the night that the Jesusfreak officer, Captain J. said goodbye. He was always that guy who was too nice; if you were having a bad day and you wanted to vent on someone, stay the fuck away from Captain J.

We went through so much fucking stress in our unit, but Captain J. had a corner on the happy market. Not surprisingly, he played guitar and some Biblical verse was always on the tip of his tongue. The letters of Paul to the Thessalonians seemed to apply in all things. From missing night vision goggles to dealing with that misogynistic NCO, Saint Paul was there, back up on his Damascus-bound horse, spreading THE WORD. Yebe, thoube, shallbe. Aba daba koba. Shazam! Thessaly was us, the simian ingrates, the sinners and the wifebeaters in 2-504, the Marxist rebellious officers and Captain J?, well he was naturally Saint Paul with one hand raised, ready to give an okely-dokely, sign-o’-the-flaming-cross blessing, strumming his folk guitar with the other.

Captain J. gave a 15-minute speech that night and had us all pray at the end, our heads bowed, Captain J. laying on his hands and shaking them for effect, squeezing bits of Jesus into us. He told us that we all had to accept Jesus Christ as our personal savior and lordddddddduh. At the time, I was sitting next to a friend and peer, D. who happened to be Jewish, the only Jewish officer in a 500-mile radius. D. just put his head down and shook it. I felt horrible for him; I felt angry. This wasn’t my Army.

By then Captain J. was done with his blessings and said, “Amen,” walking off the stage.

Naturally, the Colonel was oblivious to it all. Jesus, Judasim, whatever–it was about Harleys and chicks; it was about hairy, gimpy machomen in leather chaps. Wait, did he just think that? Strike that, S-1.

When it came time for me to say goodbye, I just said this, “Goodbye.”

The Colonel slapped me on the back and asked me if that was it.

I nodded my head and gave myself the Battalion colors that I had framed for myself. It was fucking pathetic.

I’ve never looked back; I’ve never wished that I had stayed in; these people were awful examples of supreme ass kissing and righteous bigotry. The experience: mind-numbing, foul-tasting. The Battalion colors today aren’t on my wall. They hold no place of honor; I’ve got no war movie nostalgia about them. I think they’re in my basement somewhere in some box underneath piles of dirty Army socks.

They belong there: they deserve nothing but smelly foot odor.

The whole place, the whole experience resides in the septic parts of my brain: the parts where wasted experiences get flushed, where drippy, poopy, freshly-shit intolerant evangelicals come to rest–the place where the Colonel and his bootlickers lay–the place where the strata of these creatures form until they get stirred up and come together, forming a turbid mass of regretful memory.

I can’t forget them; I wish I could.

In the first post of my drunken, candied orange slice phase, I have chosen to honor my best friend, Justin.
Let me tell you a bit about us before he gets a link:

-We met in German class Freshman year (Benicia High School). Our teacher was very gay (not that there is anything wrong with it). We liked German so much that we used to visit our teacher at lunch and hang out there; he liked us so much that he used to make us wear dresses sometimes during class (something is wrong that). I’m a forever a ‘boxers’ man because of that experience.

-He can ollie very high.

-He is referred to by others as Jut, but I gave him the moniker, ‘Snidollie,’ which has only stuck with me. Everyone else calls him ‘Jut.’ Yes, I was a rebel even back then.

-In a desperate attempt to skate a pool, we snuck into the Benicia sewage plant in the middle of the night. We got chased and one of us went into the shit.

-He has many tattoos.

-He has many children.

-He ran his own record label: Springbox records.

-He and I were there when Green Day played at my friend’s house.

-He saw Op-Ivy’s last concert.

-He was in a successful band that sounded a lot like Helmet. When he sang he was awesome, but when others sang there was a lot of screaming; I didn’t like the screaming. Please make it stop.

-He speaks fluent Russian.

-He was a day trader and has shorted my ex-company’s stock. Yay!

-He is double-jointed and is the life of the party with his chest bone.

-He used to have a vial of water that he said was the AIDS virus: I believed him. It was scary; I handled it with more care than water from Lourdes.

-We once skateboarded all night long. We were part of a gang called, “Skaters From Moscow.” This was back when all things pre-Gorbachev Soviet were the ultimate symbols of rebellion. The all-night-long thing was called, “Skate Till Dawn” and was a bit too bowling-for-dollars-ish/Bobby and Cindy teeter tater-ish. Nevertheless, we succeeded in staying up all night.

-He had a VW squareback that had many strange stickers on the back. One of them said, “Skateboarding is not a crime.”

-I went to juvenile court for skating on the street. (See reason for sticker, above.)

-He was in the Air Force as a translator on a plane, got out, day traded etc. and now is a Captain in the Air Force. He is now stationed in Afghanistan fighting the barbarian jihadist fuzzies who infiltrate from Waziristan hellbent to restore the righteous and women-hating ways of the Taliban again. Go get ‘em Jut. Turn them into little pieces of Visigoth DNA, please. (Warning: serious ‘playa hater’ violation in effect.) Do that and then come home safe and sound to be reunited with your wonderful family.

Please stop by his blog and say ‘hi;’ he could use your support. He’s away from home; he’s in harm’s way, in the land of the timeless Jezail rifle and the Khyber pass; in the land where flag-draped coffins of fallen NATO soldiers and unknown spook warriors get loaded up the ramps of C-130s bound for Dover AFB or wherever. The rest of us bitch about cankles and shittily declining run times. Think about it for a second.

Thanks,

The management