Speaking in Tongues Chapter 2: Susan

I was thinking about my father, listening to Horace Silver on a boom box and rolling paint on the walls when the door opened. I was in a bit of a rhythm so a little panic and guilt struck me as I realized that anyone from the church would be expecting a shortish black man with a paint roller in his hand, not the gangly white boy that was currently there. I was in the shadow of the door opening, so I stepped back and leaned to see who was coming in. I was hoping it was Grover. It was a girl, a young woman really, her eyes swollen with hysterical crying a soaked tissue hanging limply from her left hand. She was beautiful. She was oblivious to bits of her light brown hair stuck to her face.
I stepped closer to her and placed my roller in its tray. She surveyed the room quickly and asked:
“Where is Father Douglas”?
“I don’t know. I’m just here to paint his place.”
She had been struggling to keep her shit together and now, trapped before a paint spattered stranger, she wasn’t going to make it. I stepped forward, handed her a clean rag for her nose and hugged her. She collapsed in sobs, burying her face in my shirt. I fell in love with her a little in that moment. I just wanted to protect her, absorb all of her pain into my shirt and set it on fire. I kissed her on top of her head and smelled her hair, taking in a deep drag as she began to gather her composure.
I guided her over to an empty bucket she could sit on where she blew her nose in the rag and started pulling the matted hair from her face, gathering it into a bun on the top of her head. She reached for her purse and looked up at me realizing she had left it in her car. I handed her a pencil I had in my back pocket and she deftly slid that in to hold the bun.
I didn’t know what to say to her, the only things you can say to a stranger who is weeping uncontrollably are completely idiotic or prying as all hell. But there really isn’t anything else to say. I went with idiotic.
“Are you okay”?
She nodded and then got up to go to the bathroom. I waited awkwardly in the living room, thinking of what else I could say that might seem less awkward. I found it.
“The priest should be back in two or three days. I know this because I have to be out of here by tomorrow night. I would guess he is coming the following morning.”
She stepped out of the bathroom and for the first time I got to see all of her. Short and athletic, with long hair, now in a neater bun, her face was a little small for her head, most people would describe her as cute, a girl next door type. She had a strength though, even in this moment of vulnerability, she had a strength that I couldn’t define, but could admire immediately.
“Thank you.”
She handed back my pencil and stuck her hands into her university sweatshirt. I noticed that Horace Silver was still playing in the background.
“I’m sorry.”
The words seemed appropriate when I thought of them, but after I said them, I felt like an idiot again. I resolved to speak only when spoken to.
“I’m going to go. Thank you again.”
She turned and darted out of the rectory. I looked at my shirt, tear stains all on the front of it and decided to pack up for the day. I was far too distracted to continue painting. Who knows how many other weeping co-eds were going to be bursting through the doors of the rectory. No, it was time for a beer and a burger, in that order.
The next morning, I went back to the rectory to finish up. I had about an hour of work left, but thinking of the girl had me stretching the work a bit. Two hours later I was loading the last of Grover’s borrowed tools into my truck when a Volkswagen Rabbit pulled up behind me. The girl emerged, and again I was as surprised as the day before. Yesterday, she was tiny, vulnerable, with a wavering strength - now, in her silk blouse and black slacks with a Tupperware of banana bread, she looked older. Most people our age look uncomfortable in dress clothes. They walk around like wearing Halloween costumes at Thanksgiving. She exuded the confidence necessary to fill the awkward gaps the rest of us hadn’t developed. I was impressed.
“I’m Susan.”
She stuck out her right hand for me to shake. I took it, swallowed it in my big paw.
“I’m… Ike.”
It felt awkward to use my first name again. And it dawned on me that I didn’t know Grover’s first name.
“I wanted to thank you for helping me yesterday. I felt kind of bad darting off like that, but I was Expecting Pete…Father Douglas to be there. Here, I made you some banana bread.”
I opened the Tupperware and the slightly spicy, pulpy sweetness of the banana bread escaped into the air.
“Thank you, you look a lot better. If you don’t mind me asking, what happened?”
I closed the lid, in case the smell escaped permanently.
“My mom was waiting at the light over by the credit union, the one near the Holsum bakery.”
I knew the intersection, it wasn’t too far from my apartment.
“This guy ran the red light and she ended up in the pond with the fountain in front of the bakery. The car was covered in water, and she had to squeeze out of the window, cause she couldn’t get the door open.”
“Jesus, is she okay?”
“Yeah, she’s home now. She was in the hospital when I went to see Father Douglas and found you there. I had just spoken to my family and gathered all the troops and I guess it just overwhelmed me, you know, the thought of…”
She started to waver a bit. I didn’t tell her my mother had passed, although I thought of the day, sitting on my couch reading, when I heard the news.
“What you did, was really sweet.”
I felt a quivering of adolescent love humming along my insides. I shrugged my shoulders a little embarrassed.
“I was hoping to catch you here before you left so you would know everything is fine. Also, I was afraid you might think I was some sort of serial weeper or something.”
We laughed.
“Yeah, there was a poster in the church lobby saying to be on the look out, but I guess I wasn’t paying attention. It’s okay.”
She hugged me, kind of as an afterthought, and thanked me again before getting back into her car. I was walking back into the rectory when I realized I should have asked her if she wanted some coffee later. Maybe though, that would have been a little creepy. I sat down on the steps of the church and ate my banana bread.
I saw Susan again while doing a campus recruiting drive for the Coast Guard. She was sitting at a big table outside of the food court, and I was in my dress uniform with two cups of coffee in my hands. The adolescent hormonal electricity struck me when I saw the tight bun on top of her head. She was seated with three other girls each noshing their own bag lunch. All of them had carrot sticks and celery. I walked up behind her, and it was her friend Megan who noticed me first, looking up from her sandwich with a big smile. I must have looked pretty sharp in my dress uniform with the new red crow and single chevron on the sleeves, but I felt like I was wearing a wool suit.
“Hi, I’m Megan.”
Megan flitted her hand out for me to shake. I did, politely. Susan looked up, a little embarrassed to see me.
“Susan, who’s your friend”?
“I’m Ike, I met Susan when I was painting the church. She was having trouble with her Volkswagen and I helped her out.”
I don’t really know why I told the lie. I had the feeling that the truth would be out of school, and no explanation at all seemed seedy. I looked over at Susan, and could see a flicker of relief on her face.
“So sailor, what are you doing in town”? Megan asked.
“Oh, I’m here with the Coast Guard recruiter for the career fair. If you ladies want, stop by the booth. We have free pens.”
I suddenly realized that I wasn’t going to be able to ask Susan out in front of her friends, and that getting her away from them was going to be impossible. I started stalling by making polite conversation with the ladies hoping for an opportunity, dreading the fact that I was forcing one. Megan, gave me my opening.
“Are you busy on Thursday?” She asked batting her eyelashes playfully. Megan was one of those girls that flirted with everyone. It was so overt that I felt like she was perhaps making fun of me. I wasn’t sure how to take it; awkwardly standing with two cups of rapidly cooling coffee in my hands while fishing for a date was not a good place to be in to make a call on that either. I had the feeling that Megan was gobbling all of this up. I answered:
“No, why”?
“Weeeell, our club is going to English’s on Thursday at around 7:30 for a little dessert, if you want to, have a piece of pie.”
Susan cut her a look that Megan noted, but chose to ignore.
“Sure, sure, I’ll be there at around 7:30. I should get back to my booth, my coffee is getting cold. So long Megan, Bye Susan.”
“See you Thursday.”
I brought back the coffee and realized that I made a few errors in RSVPing back at the food court. I had no idea what kind of club this was, and what I was getting myself into. No matter, I thought, with Grover in the other duty section, I was spending a lot of my time alone. Social interaction on any level was a good thing. I doubted it was something too weird anyway.
I was right and wrong at the same time. The meeting was for an on-campus Christian fellowship group. A few of the kids met at English’s after the meeting every Thursday for dessert and gossip about the members who were not at English’s that night. They were a group of twelve which I found funny, but didn’t mention for fear of offending anyone. I sat down next to Susan. Megan took the seat on the other side of me, and I got to know Susan.
She wasn’t from here. She grew up in Hagerstown, Maryland, a smallish civil war era town that was just inside the Shenandoah Valley. She had run Cross-Country and track for her high school and took a scholarship to Salisbury State. Her family was Catholic, but she wasn’t so into it. The Episcopal church she attended felt more comfortable, while the fellowship group was helping her find answers to some of her more pressing spiritual questions.
I told her about my father. How he was a member of a doomsday cult in the Seventies. Each week was a preparation for the end of the world. As a kid, it seemed so normal so reasonable that the world, in all of its complexity and beauty would be destroyed in some epic deital battle between God and Satan. It was exciting to me, a weird, toe headed kid living in an all black neighborhood. I had few friends growing up. In the mid Eighties, a kid named Omar lived next door to us. He didn’t attend school, so I would subject him to the bullshit my father dished out on a daily basis. We made forts in preparation for the second coming. We stole a bunch of sandbags from the drains during a flood one year and created a machine gun nest to picj off the devil’s minions as they invaded our neighborhood. Susan found the stories funny, and my knowledge of obscure bible verses came in handy with the rest of her friends. They assumed I was one of them, a believer, and I cultivated their assumption further. I wasn’t sure what Susan thought of me at first. I was a bit edgy around her, and she the same. It was as if we had made love during a drunken stupor, awakened together and decided to see what happened if we went out to breakfast while we sobered up. Only instead of it just being the two of us, it was two plus eleven complete strangers, at least to me.
The group reminded me of the Ala-teen meetings and the after meeting dinners with all the kids of drunks and addicts, with their own nomenclature of addiction and liack of polished social skills. Most of them spoke in the language of church, something I had a hard time understanding, but wasn’t too worried, I was there to see if I could to know Susan a little better. The check came, was divvied and then we all burst onto the parking lot, stomachs full of food and coffee, the cool April air slithering into the voids in our shirts and sweaters.
I offered Susan a ride. She and Megan, her ride over, exchanged looks and possibly some psychic conversation that obviously ended in my favor-
“Susan, why don’t you go home with Ike, I have to head back to pick up my sister at her friends, and will probably keep you waiting like last time.”
Megan’s knowing glance my way told me I owed her one. I didn’t like being in that position, but was grateful none the less. I walked with Susan to my car, opened her door and saw that she was shivering a bit.
“Hang on” I said, then pulled the seat of my truck forward and pulled out a wool blanket handing it to her. “You look cold, and the heat isn’t working in the truck. That is unless you want to get some carbon monoxide poisoning.”
“Thank you. No, I learned my lesson from Molly Ringwold.”
The reference to the cheesy after school special of our youth was precious. It was clear to me now that Susan was comfortable, which helped me to lower my own guard a little further. She gave me directions to her apartment and we filled the time talking about her town. I had been there once, my parents thought about retiring in Martinsburg, West Virginia, which was just on the other side of the Potomac.
“What was the name of that super greasy burger place, the one that served the tiny cheesbur..”
“The one by the police station? That was the White Star Grill. Oh, my God, we used to go there after my brother’s football games when I was a kid. How do you know about that place?”
“My mother had a knack for finding the best of the worst. Maybe that’s why she married my father.”
We both laughed, then she asked:
“Your mom? Is she still alive?”
“No, cancer, about three years ago. She smoked like it was still the Seventies until the day she died.”
“I’m sorry to hear that, she sounds like she was adventurous, if she ate at the White Star after seeing the outside of that dump.”
“Hey, did it ever catch on fire?”
“Are you kidding? The place burned down like, twice, but the people who ate there all donated to have it rebuilt. I think they never, what do you call that when they spray the water on something?”
She waved an imaginary pistol back and forth in her hand.
“Pressure cleaning.”
“Yeah, they never pressure cleaned the bricks from the last fire, that’s why they had that big black streak on the front of the building.”
The truck was warming up as we idled in front of her apartment complex chatting about growing up and realizing how different we were from each other, how exotic her life seemed to me, and mine to her. Her family was pretty normal, they participated in social events, and attended functions. My family was always in seclusion, with a few trusted outsiders let in occasionally. I was raised in an environment where my family were the oddballs. We were the only whites on our block. Susan, never spoke to a black person until middle school track. Now, most of her friends were black, and I had one, country listening, pickup truck loving, German-speaking friend in this whole town.
“I had a really good time tonight.” Susan said tapping me on my knee.
“Me too, look.”
I reached into my back pocket and pulled out my official Coast Guard notepad and wrote my number on it.
“I’d like to see you again. Here’s my number. Call me if you want to drive up to Hagerstown for a gastro-intestinal adventure. Or, we can do something here. I’m glad you’re feeling better.”
“Thanks again, Ike.”
She kissed me on the cheek and darted up the sidewalk to her apartment. I waited to see that she got in before I drove back home, feeling drunk from that peck on the cheek.
Susan and I dated – if you could call it that. It was kind of like we simply became a couple without the formalized dating that occurs between adults. We were rarely alone, except when one of us was driving with the other somewhere. The only dates we had were when I prepared Chicken Marsala at my apartment to surprise her one night for dinner. I lit candles, and used a white sheet I absconded with from the station for a tablecloth on my wobbly dinette set. I put too much wine in the sauce, and the pasta was a bit al dente, but she didn’t complain. It was a quiet, pleasant evening that ended with us listening to Teddy Pendergrass and kissing passionately on my couch. Her body was tiny and kissing her should have been awkward but it wasn’t. It reminded me to keep my mouth closed. I enjoyed her delicateness.
Mostly though, we were surrounded by Susan’s friends from the Christian group. They spent almost all of their time talking about church and Jesus and blessings and about their own grace and salvation I got a little sick of it. Not to mention the fact that they were constantly prying into my own religious beliefs. Her friends were one-dimensional, noisy and boisterous about their faith with little to show for it. Who the hell was I to complain though, I had no other friends.
I got the feeling that they sensed that I wasn’t one of them. Like the Saved had a certain scent about them that I lacked. I didn’t know how to play this. I kept acting normally, politely deflecting any probing questions into the nature of my faith; or lack thereof. This is was really what caused the breakup, according to Susan anyway, my utter lack of faith. I think we were both sort of looking for that moment, that first moment when we met. I wanted to see her vulnerable and strong simultaneously like she was in the rectory doorway, or when she held her coffee early in the morning, clutching it close to her in both hands. She wanted to feel the presence of whatever it was that made me love a stranger without reserve and I couldn’t give that to the girl that I spent most of my free time with.
So there it was, Susan and I were hovering, over what, I wasn’t sure. I had fallen into a sort of comfort. Most of the church types had given up on converting me after a few months, which forced them to have a non-religious conversation with me. Some of these people even knew what I did for a living. Mostly though, those were the girls. The guys were Ritalin-focused on conversion. Any and all conversation with me was designed to get me to say I love Jesus with all my heart. Eventually, I lost my shit.
The fellas from Susan’s crew had all gone to some major Jesus fest on the grounds of the National Mall in Washington D.C. They got together, rented buses, got cheap hotels, and joined with a bunch of their fellow Christians to bring back traditional male female roles into post-modern America. They were also given the mission to double their efforts in converting the non-believers, specifically in their home towns. In order to create a national voting bloc, or open the world to the salvation of Christ.
The following Thursday, at English’s chicken, we all piled into several booths and ordered our coffee and pie. I normally sat next to Susan, but that night I was surrounded by dudes. Susan looked at me perplexed, and my spidey-sense was tingling.
“Ike, did your parents believe?”
That was Chris, a plump, short haired kid who sometimes led the group in prayer when the official campus associate of The group was away on business.
“Did they believe what?”
I wasn’t going to make it easy for them. I was like the Russian Army I backed up and burned everything in my path.
“C’mon Ike, don’t play games with us.”
James, the kid with the retainer played the bad cop in this interrogation. Interesting choice, I thought.
“Did your parents attend church?”
I gave the question some thought and decided I would answer all of their questions truthfully, just to see what their reaction was.
“Yes, my father is a member of a dangerous religious cult, and my mother was Anglican.”
My candor, the word cult, and the use of the past tense in reference to my mother had a couple heads turning toward our conversation. Susan’s was one of them.
“What was the name of the cult”?
“It is none of your business. Next question.”
I didn’t want to hear more rhetoric about my father’s faith and its flaws according to mainstream dogma. How my father’s view is too legalistic, and most of all I didn’t want their pity. I didn’t need reminding how fucked up my dad’s world view is, I had plenty of memories for that.
James apologized, but it was Chris who I glared at waiting for the next question. I thought it best to go on the offensive. I flanked them.
“Just what is it that you want from me exactly? How are my personal religious beliefs any business of yours? If it is truly a matter of faith, as you all so eloquently put it in all of your lectures, then isn’t it conceivable that spending your time arguing about the trappings of everyone else’s faith is pointless?”
“We’re just trying to help you Ike. We are concerned for your soul.” James said weakly.
“I think you are more concerned with your own egos.”
I stood up to leave, reaching into my pocket to pay for my pie and coffee, looking at Susan. She looked away in shame. I tossed a ten dollar bill on the table and began to walk out. My better judgment apparently fled before me.
“Another thing, for a bunch of Christians trying to improve the world, I have one question for you: What have you done for the least among us, huh?”
They all looked up, but around me, not at me.
“I thought so. You aren’t Christians, you’re a self-help group of mutual masturbators. Good night.”
I went home still angry from the confrontation - angry with myself for losing my cool, and the stupid kids for asking me. I tried to read, I tried to sleep. Mostly, I waited for Susan to call me.
The next morning I headed to the station.

Ellison Iowa draft

The train smelled of diesel fuel and close quarters. Thomas sprawled all gangly over the seats nibbling orange peanut butter crackers and reading Invisible Man. The train pulled through the night oblivious to the Midwestern cold. Thomas was tired, cooped up tired. He thought about visiting the lounge car again, but the competitive conversation reverberating off the bulkheads made reading impossible. His insides craved some action - action Ellison wasn’t giving him.
Thomas was returning from an interview at a tiny liberal arts college in Indiana. The trip from Florida was an act of heroism – heroic enough for the admissions department to overlook the fact that his GPA made him appear slightly retarded. He was the kind of student professors wanted to take a chance on – capable of great things, possessing a wealth of ideas and intelligence but with a disappointing lack of what academics call “give a shit.”
He fell asleep, aware of the cold air seeping into his sock through the hole in his sneaker when the train stopped somewhere in Ohio. He feigned reading while new passengers boarded, awkwardly stumbling with too much luggage. They were too encumbered to notice him staring over the pages of his book. One man was apparent, in a grey short brimmed hat with a burgundy band, a white oxford shirt and a canary yellow tie tucked squarely under a burgundy vest. The man’s luggage looked as if a bomb had gone off near it. He pushed the bag forward with a burgundy polyester leg.
Thomas wondered if someone had taken a rasp and attacked the man’s face with it, scouring the deep brown flesh until it hung in meaty chunks from his cheeks. His eyes matched his tie, yellow. Thomas looked directly into those infected eyes and nodded. This was the action Thomas was looking for.
The man sat kitty corner to him, allowing for observation. Thomas returned the neighboring seat to its original upright position, and was able to see the man as he settled into his seat. The man pilfered through his belongings, shifting from his pockets to the luggage to the pouch of the seat in front of him. He shifted his legs, crossing and uncrossing them compulsively without deliberation until he suddenly folded into sleep. Thomas opened Invisible Man and began to read.
The man awoke and began searching again. His hands made rodent noises as he scraped his long yellow fingernails across everything within reach; nails on tray tables, on the armrest, on the fabric of the seats. His movements, gnawing, grew louder and more desperate. Suddenly he piped up, his voice as textured and coarse as his face. His words erupted from some other organ, someplace more southerly and dark – feverish.
“I’m Gonna kill all you motherfuckers!”
That woke everyone up, and not just a little bit either. Thomas snapped up and peered into the man’s seat. It was darker there, like the light was being absorbed by the seats or the man’s bag.
“I need a cigarette!”
Thomas looked at the grandmother who sat across from him and in front of the man in the vest. Her arms drawn up close, eyes set straight. She must have believed the man in the vest, at least about the first part.
He repeated: “I’m gonna kill all you motherfuckers”
He stretched out the all you for effect. Thomas peered into the unnatural shadow around the man and could not make out any movement.
He belched out “I need a cigarette!”
He continued to cough up more strangeness:
“First they had me on an airplane, now they got me on a bus. I know, I’m gonna kill all you motherfuckers! I need a cigarette!”
This wouldn’t last long. Earlier, while reading in the dining car, Thomas witnessed a fight between a drunken man with a bluish tattoo of what looked more like a large bruise than a mermaid or a bulldog or whatever bullshit forty year old men liked when they were younger. The drunk argued with the bartender and threw a drink in her face. Within seconds, the train had stopped, and the drunk and his luggage were tossed forcefully overboard. Amtrak was not to be fucked with. Thomas waited for the coming confrontation while pretending to read.
The conductor appeared in the doorway with a flashlight. Systematically shining his light into each row of seats, a few people stirred, the grandmother looked at the conductor, motioning toward the lunatic.
“This motherfucker can’t see me. I’m hidin’! Who in the fuck do y’all think you are messin’ with! Now I am hiding; he can’t see me.”
The conductor continued, unphased by the fact that a lunatic in a strange outfit was screaming out that he was invisible and was going to kill everyone on the train. The conductor passed the man in the vest, who was still shouting, without lifting his flashlight to even acknowledge the seat had an occupant.
Thomas was blissfully observant.
“Y’all motherfuckers are bigger than me! You got no power over me. You can’t destroy me, ‘cause I’m too motherfucking small. I’m like a lepton motherfuckers! I need a Motherfucking cigarette!”
Thomas too wanted desperately to have a cigarette. He searched his backpack for something to offer the man in the vest. He continued his rant about power and the establishment’s inability to nullify him. He complained about being “shuffled around” and “packed away”, never rising from his shadowy corner.
The Puerto-Rican woman with the adorable two year old, loomed nervously over his seat. In her left hand was a packet of cigarettes and a lighter.
“Here,” she said, “take the cigarettes. My daughter is sleeping. Would you please be quiet.” Her voice trembled, but her resolve was firm. The man lifted his hand and a cigarette appeared between his craggy fingers.
“You already have a cigarette. Do you need a light?”
“Yeah, that’s what I need. I need a light.”
The man in the vest reached out with his other hand to reveal an old brass lighter, worn, but still functional. A raspy, cackle erupted from his lungs and if you couldn’t see his face, you would think he was coughing. His jaundiced eyes were wet with mocking tears. The Puerto Rican woman disappeared.
He laughed on and off for a few minutes until he announced loudly that he was going to lie down. He stood up, unfolding his pixie stick frame from his cave, stretched himself out on the aisle of the train and fell asleep, snoring from the same moist organ that he spoke and laughed with. It smelled like burnt fur and cheap liquor. Thomas looked down at him while he slept, canary yellow socks under the cuffs of his burgundy pants. Despite the smell and the snoring and the death threats, Thomas remained a voyeur.
Another conductor entered the train, big gut hanging over his belt like a fertility symbol. The conductor stopped in front of the man in the vest, shined his powerful Mag-lite directly into his horribly scarred face and paused. He didn’t budge. The conductor nudged him with a patent leather toe. He didn’t budge. The conductor hovered over him as he slumbered in the aisle. The conductor was doing some sort of math in his head. He stopped figuring, turned around, and lumbered off toward the dining car; presumably to get some help to toss the man from the train. Thomas waited watching as the man slept quietly on the floor.
The motion of the train and the darkness though won out over Thomas’s watch-standing and soon he was lulled off to sleep. When he awoke, the man in the vest was getting up and re-contorting himself back into his old seat. The smell of a lit cigarette stabbed at the air as he began smoking in his chair. Thomas skooched his butt lower so he could better observe what the man was up to.
The man in the vest smoked, rigid in his chair. The cigarette, a non-filter, was smoked down to the butt and extinguished on the arm of his seat. The man shifted around a bit, fidgeting, searching for comfort. A fart trumpeted from under the seat - a half note with timbre vibrato, and of course a stench, all sulphur and nitrates. The smell was the opposite of cleaning chemicals. The odor hung and clung to the air in the car for a few minutes until it was finally beaten back by notes of diesel fuel, old coffee and sweat.
He remained silent for the rest of the night. Thomas would check on him through the crack in the seat as the man slept in his chair, the muted light of dawn rhythmically chopped by the motion of the train, he looked relieved. Thomas finished Invisible Man that morning, just as the train was pulling into Union Station in Washington D.C. where he would switch trains to ride back toward Miami.
Shuffling off the train, Thomas made his way to a newsstand and picked up a copy of the Washington Post. While waiting in line for coffee and a muffin Thomas read that Ralph Ellison, author of Invisible Man, had died of pancreatic cancer the night before.

Speaking in Tongues: Chapter 1: Ike

Chapter 1: Ike

I arrived in Crisfield Maryland, straight from 9 thrilling weeks of boot camp, in the middle of February. Mist hung over the fallow cornfields framing the highways of the Chesapeake Bay. I pulled up to the station at dusk anticipating a guard house and marching Coastguardsmen on the campus of the base. Instead, I drove to what looked like a large house from a government subdivision for people in the witness protection program. The building was Grey, with a looming asphalt shingle roof. There were two boats moored up at the dock, and one construction vessel for maintaining the buoys and lights in the bay. There was no sign out front welcoming one to the station. If I hadn’t seen the utility boat and the buoy tender, I would have passed right by the building.
Grover was the first shipmate I saw. He was fresh from boot camp himself. He sat in the watch room, feet up on the radio array, chatting with his mother on the phone. It was one of the strangest things I can recall, this short, dark-skinned black kid speaking in perfect German on the phone. I placed my sea bag on the deck of the station and asked him if he was the officer of the day.
He laughed, then asked me in perfect American English, “You German?”
I got this a lot. With my prominent forehead and the rather cubist cut of my skull, I looked a bit Prussian.
“My grandfather was from Southern Germany, my grandma from München.”
“Yeah, my dad is an Army officer. My mom, she’s from Stuttgart. I was born and raised in Germany. I’m Grover. You need to go down the hall and check in with Petty Officer Hess.”
Grover indicated the long hallway, buzzed me in, then returned to his conversation.
I checked in with Petty Officer Hess. The man was a prick. He was in the TV room with a few others watching hardcore pornography on the big screen; nothing like flickering lights and a gangbang to get you ready for service to your country. Lingering for a moment I looked at the faces of my shipmates, all transfixed on this woman as she mimicked ecstasy with her voice, her flat eyes looked like someone just told her that the doctor was going to be a few minutes late. I tapped on the door frame and asked to see Petty Officer Hess. The room jumped in unison. The TV snapped back to pro wrestling, which I found somewhat ironic.
“Who in the fuck wants to know”?
Hess was a local, born and raised in St. Michaels, another tiny dot of a town on the bay with quaint lighthouses, bed and breakfasts and rusting trailers. He stood up quickly and I found my boot camp reflex was to lock into the position of attention. This was a mistake, akin to a dog rolling over to display its belly. Hess was an inch or two from my face, looking up at me with his sharp face inches from mine. I gazed across the room finding a particular burrow in the grey cinderblock wall I could exploit for the sake of not looking Hess in the eyes. Two other of my fellow Coastguardsmen got up and flanked Hess.
“I smell boot.”
One of his flunkies, a Petty Officer Burrell pushed his paunch into my flat stomach as he got close. I think they must have had spaghetti that night, or pizza. Their collective breath was awful. I kept looking at that burrow thinking I could will myself into it somehow.
“Where in the fuck are you from…HA-anus?”
My name is Haines. He was trying to rattle me.
“Broward County Florida, Petty Officer Hess.”
The words snapped out of me, sharp and clean. I was going to be fine.
“Broward County, where in the fuck is that”? He didn’t wait for an answer. “You know Florida looks like a giant cock all hanging in the ocean out there, what part of the cock is Broward on?”
“Right where the doctor snips you, Petty Officer Hess.”
Two other guys in the TV room started laughing, and Hess gave them a scowl to shut them up. Their gaze fixed back on the TV, watching wrestling with the same expression as the porn.
I was asked a series of ridiculous questions, had my manhood questioned a few times, and nearly puked from the smell of Petty Officer Burrell, until they became bored. Someone had me toss my sea bag into an empty berthing area where I would sleep and told me to pick a locker and get out of my dress uniform. Hess took the folder that contained my orders and filed it on Chief Hawley’s desk.
Crisfield is probably the worst place for a single person to live. It is a small, deeply religious town of crab fisherman and crab fisherman with the occasional crab fisherman that moonlights as an entrepreneur during the off-season. These businesses were as follows: the IGA grocery store where locals picked up groceries and did not seem appalled by the fact that the floor was always sticky. There were a few seafood restaurants – most of them specialized in serving crappy crab cakes to the few tourists that were shanghaied into coming into town. There were two standout restaurants in town though when I arrived; the absolute worst Chinese food restaurant in the world and the third worst pizza place in the United States. There were a few bars and a pretty decent seafood place, but you couldn’t eat there unless you were a local, and if you were in the Coast Guard, forget it. The crabbers hated us. So much so that an effigy of our Chief was tied to one of the pilings that marked the entrance to Smith Island, a small island of yet more crab fisherman that inhabited the Central Chesapeake, a stuffed Coast Guard flotation suit was full of bullet holes and set on fire.
Several of my colleagues were locals from the Chesapeake Bay area, Hess and Burrell, who represented the leadership when Chief Hawley and Petty officer Jaines weren’t here. Jaines was from the Chincoteague area, and was tolerable. It was rare for the Coast Guard to station so many people so close to their home towns. I theorized this was because being locals, they could better understand what other locals were saying on radio dispatches. Most bay natives had this thick, Old English type of accent. It sounded like speaking Gallic with a mouth full of rocks. Whenever I had to answer radio calls I would often ask to have things repeated because I could only pick up a few nouns, like boat, and motor, and crab. I would listen for key verbs, like sinking, burning or drowning, to make certain whoever I was talking to was not in danger. Most radio traffic went something like this:
“Coasguard, mumble jargon, mumble, spittle mumble jargon, old ass word, boat.”
“Vessel calling Coast Guard, this is Coast Guard station Crisfield. Say again, over.”
“Coasguard, slower mumble jargon, mumble, spittle, tongue twisting verb that I am certain does not exist in the lexicon, boat.”
“Vessel Calling Coast Guard, this is Coast Guard station Crisfield. Say again, your message was unclear, over.”
There would be more mumbling where, if I was fortunate, I would determine the vessel’s name, at which point I would tell the poor, salty crabber to standby while I would go and fetch one of the local translators. The translator would walk in to watch room and say something like…Oh, that’s the Jennie Mae, She just wants a radio check on channel 81.
Within a month, I had fallen into a sort of nautical rhythm. Grover and I shared an off-base apartment in Salisbury, a town about fifty miles north of Crisfield. All of the single Coasties lived in Salisbury in the same apartment complex with every other Coastguardsman on the Eastern Shore. Salisbury wasn’t bad. It had a University and a movie theater in the mall. There was English’s, a phenomenal fried chicken place, and a few taverns here and there. Downtown had a used record and book store where I would spend a lot of my free time. It was a pretty boring life.
Grover and I would carpool into the station, arriving at around 7AM. We would meet with the other crew that had been on duty for the last few days and pass on the information between the crews. Then, Hess would give us our daily assignments while the chief and Jaines would make sure that the work actually got done, and would administer the occasional exam to a shipmate that was ready to fly solo on one particular job or another. Mostly though, they drank coffee.
In the afternoon, after Chief and Jaines left, we would get underway and patrol our little section of the Chesapeake. In the winter, this was like patrolling Mayberry. The water, a flat, matte grey was devoid of much boat traffic. We would practice towing, navigation, piloting, orientation or whatever Hess and Burrell could think of. Hess, a terrible instigator, would moor up at the public dock on Smith Island, within sight of the headless and bullet-ridden effigy, then get out and stretch his legs by peering into the low decked work boats that bore the names of crabbers’ daughters on their sterns. The crabbers hated this. When Hess would approach, the percussiveness of his boots would set the fishermen chatting on their decks into a stern silence.
Chief Hawley, and Hillary Clinton were the two most hated people on the planet for these crabbers. Hillary, I cannot explain, but there were enough Rush is Right and Impeach Hillary stickers plastered on the workboats to give the impression that she was not welcome among the crabbing set. Chief Hawley though, that was personal.
During a boarding, basically a safety inspection by Coast Guard, Chief Hawley boarded the boat of one Richard A. Smith, Mayor of Smith Island. The Mayor, late already to some appointment or other at a mainland bar, was not happy to see a bunch of gun-toting kids in orange snowsuits poking around on his boat. He started complaining, loudly. The chief asked the mayor to be quiet, to which the mayor asked for the Chief’s information and threatened to call his Congressman, his Senator, hell, he was going to take us to the Supreme Court if necessary. One of my shipmates, a kid named Pierce, spilled the mayor’s coffee on the deck causing the mayor to completely lose all composure.
The mayor was suddenly darting toward the chief, a stream of filth exiting his normally prayer-book mouth. Chief Hawley ordered the mayor to step back, to which the mayor told chief Hawley to not so politely go fuck himself. The chief then pepper sprayed the mayor and cuffed Mayor Smith on the deck of his own boat. We then impounded the vessel and towed it back to Crisfield with the screaming, handcuffed, mayor seated on our quarterdeck. Hess was only flaming the hatred these people already had for us. I always elected to stay on our 41’ utility boat while the boys went about pissing off the locals.
My non-participation in the subjugation of crab fishermen to our authority was another reason I was separated from the others. I don’t think they personally disliked me, in fact, I think if I were able to read their minds, I would find that I wasn’t a part of their daily thoughts at all, except when it came time to hand out the shittiest work at the station. Grover and I were called “yard niggers” by Hess and Burrell. The worst tasks on the work detail were always gleefully given to us each morning. If the dumpster needed scrubbing, because it was dirty, Grover and I would get scrub brushes, degreaser, and the pressure washer and crawl into the smelly green box, an especially pleasant way to spend a hot July afternoon.
We accepted the moniker with a sense of personal pride. Grover never indicated that it bothered him in the least that we would be sent to dig ditches for the new irrigation system, or clean out the gutters in the early Spring. To be honest, I think they could have called us anything they wanted, as long as we avoided Hess and Burrell. We even joked about getting Yard Niggers tattooed on our arms, but better judgment got the best of us. Grover and I spent all of our duty time together. We ate meals, in the galley together, were often on the same boat crew, and other than sleeping, pretty much were inseparable.
At home, things were different. Grover would see his dad in DC for the weekend. I would lurk around coffee shops and the bookstore in the mall ordering and reading the most pretentious literature I could find. Grover and I had little in common other than the fact that we were yard niggers. He had far more in common with our shipmates than I did. Grover liked the pop country that they would listen to while washing the boats. Grover liked NASCAR and was really a melanin-hogging version of the others.
On duty, we were the best of friends, but at home, we rarely saw each other. Grover would get side jobs, painting or building sheds and the like, borrowing tools from his friends, neighbors and shipmates, borrowing my truck to haul lumber and supplies to his job sites. He was an industrious fucker in his spare time. Me, I would eat fried chicken, run a few miles through the neighborhood and read.
In August, Grover was transferred to the other duty section. This meant we would never see each other. Our schedules would directly conflict, no more carpools, no more yard niggers, we would each be in the apartment by ourselves on our days off. It did mean good things for Grover though. He would now be under the command of Petty Officer Huddle, a plump North Carolinian with an egalitarian quality about him. Huddle led subtly, asking his men to do things for him rather than assigning tasks in relation to how well he regarded you. Grover was a bit put off at first, he had a number of things to settle at home, and having to spend 125 hours at the station was going to torpedo a number of his projects.
Huddle gave Grover a day off to take care of things but that going to be a few days into the week. That didn’t work out for one of his projects. Grover pulled me aside after hearing the news about the shift change and asked me to finish a side job he had painting the rectory of the local Episcopal church. He offered to split the cash with me, and threw in a couple of movie passes. I agreed. Oh, I also had to pick him up on his day off so he could get his car. I guessed that was what the movie passes were for.
After duty, I headed straight to the rectory with a small brass key. The rectory was almost completely painted. The furniture was gathered in the center of the room covered in opaque plastic. The walls had been primed and the first coat was nearly complete. I found Grover’s tools neatly stacked in a corner of the living area. The apartment was perfect for a single man. It had a tiny bedroom with a twin bed and dresser set. The closet was a small walk in completely stuffed with flannel shirts. The living area would be considered a great room if weren’t so cozy. A tiny kitchenette, all the appliances and cabinets covered in plastic, was connected to a television-less living area that had two comfortable chairs, a small sofa, a bookshelf and a tiny breakfast table. I put on one of my old Coast Guard T-shirts while I perused the books on the priest’s shelves, then got to work.