Chapter 3: Miss Tabitha
The timing of the break up couldn’t have been better really, not that it helped at all. The timing of bad news is only better in retrospect, and it was too soon for that comfort. I was waist-deep in self-loathing and loneliness. Funny, really, I had gotten used to having only a few friends and being alone for such a long time, I was surprised at how much I balked at the return to my old habits of reading and sketching. I had to work that weekend and had the next week off to visit my aunt in Potomac. Grover and I had plans to meet in D.C. A debauched evening was maybe just what I needed.
When I got to the station, Grover was getting ready for Colors detail. He was gathering the flags and the National Ensign out of the case in the watch room. I offered to help him and we got, Pierce, the kid from Tacoma, Washington to finish the trio. Grover was going on and on about something Petty Officer Hurdle had told him over the weekend, some psychic who lived in town and was supposedly eerily accurate. She lived in the section 8 housing just outside the base in Crisfield and did the readings for five dollars. Grover was psyched to go first thing Monday morning, he had even secured permission from Hurdle to go right after quarters on Monday. He stopped mid-rant, as we were filing out to the flagpole.
“Jesus, you look like shit.”
“Yeah, I think Susan and I are Kaput.”
“Man, I don’t know how you stayed that long with a girl that wouldn’t give you any pussy.”
He could see that he hurt my feelings. He cast his gaze down as if to apologize.
“Don’t worry about it, Wednesday night: Georgetown!”
We raised the flags and finalized plans to see the psychic. Hurdle explained to me how Miss Tabitha was the real deal. She predicted an accident that would kill his sister almost year before it happened. She also predicted the cancer that would afflict his father, going so far as to say he would have lung cancer. I thought about it and was not quite taken with Miss Tabitha’s predictions.
Hurdle described his sister as a party-girl who would often drive over for an underage pub crawl in Myrtle Beach, so her death by car accident is really no real surprise. Who knows how much information Hurdle gave to this woman during the process, or just how vague her responses were. His father, like most men in the Carolinas smoked cigarettes like they were the last things he was ever going to get. So lung cancer in a male from the South is not rare enough to warrant an immediate suspension of disbelief either.
I spent the weekend in a monochromatic fog, punctuated by brief yet frequent visits to the phone to check my voicemail. The only call was from my aunt, confirming where the key was to her place, and that she would see me Monday night. I counted down the time till I would be on the road. From 0800 to 1200 I had the radio watch. At 1100, I ate lunch with the rest of the crew watching Bob Barker on the Price is Right. From 1230 to 1530, we got underway and I showed one of the new guys, a dumb kid from Virginia Beach how to take a vessel in tow. I even watched wrestling that evening rather than read, because it was easier to count off the hours with television’s half-hour division.
Monday came, with no message from Susan and as promised, after quarters, we all piled into Grover’s car and drove the ½ mile to Miss Tabitha’s.
The house was a duplex, fashioned to look like the more beautiful Victorian-style wood homes in the area. When I pulled up in front of her lawn, with its brown grass yard and plastic flowers in the window, I could feel how drafty the places were without having to go inside. I was ashamed at having to work for a government that would provide such shitty housing to its less affluent citizens. The sentiment was ham-handedly concurred with when Pierce said: “God DAMN! This place is a shithole.” Of course, he felt that the poverty of the inhabitants was wholly due to their own stupidity and laziness. While I held the moral high ground of understanding that these folks were a product of systematic racism and lack of economic opportunity. The truth is, these people were poor. Beyond that, neither of us could truly say why or how.
We knocked and were greeted at the door by a youngish black boy wearing a sweatshirt bearing the name of the local high school. He stared at us all vacuously while we explained we were looking for Miss Tabitha. I should rephrase what I just stated. I explained, while Pierce and Grover looked at the floor and shuffled their feet. The boy yelled toward the back for his grandmother, and I caught a whiff of the inside of the house. A strange mix of moth balls and home cooking mingled in my sinuses, shocking me a bit until everything balanced out. It was the olfactory version of leaving a matinee theater showing and having to squint for a few minutes until your eyes adjusted.
We took our boots off in the front entrance and placed them next to the boys hi-tops and a pair of broken black pumps, the heels looked like they had been chopped with an axe. We all sat on a soft couch in the middle of an immaculate living room. The young boy sat in front of the television playing a video game. A well thumbed bible with the name Miss Tabitha Hawkins inscribed in gold letters was carefully placed on the coffee table in front of us. A voice shot out from the rear of the house,
“I’ll be with you boys in just a minute, I need to get this rice done or it’ll burn itself.”
I casually perused the living room while my shipmates were transfixed on the video game. It reminded me of many older people’s homes I had been in as a child. There was a painting of Jesus on the wall next to the dark brown reclining chair that faced the enormous television. After a few minutes of checking everything out, from the family photos to the candy collecting dust in a small dish on an end-table, Miss Tabitha entered the room.
She moved slowly, with the conscious effort of age, but she appeared younger than the Eighty or so years attributed to her by Hurdle. She looked at each one of us and I made a conscious effort to look her in the eye while she explained what the process was. She said that we would meet with her individually in her dining room where she would hold our hands and get a feel for us. She told us not to discuss what she said until we left her house. She then asked if we had any questions. I felt like being a smart ass and saying something like: “Shouldn’t you know?” but refrained. I couldn’t completely restrain myself however.
“Miss Tabitha, are you Pentecostal?”
“Yes young man, I am.”
I could tell this threw her off a bit so I decided to pad the next question. I could also feel my shipmates glowering at me already.
“I don’t mean any disrespect ma’am, but how do you reconcile your use of magic with your beliefs?”
She answered me matter of factly.
“My gift is a gift of the spirit, like speaking in tongues or healing. My pastor don’t see it like that, but my pastor ain’t Jesus, and he didn’t give me my gift for seeing either. The Lord did.”
I was relieved that she didn’t appear offended by my question. She even asked one of her own.
“How did you know I was Pentecostal?’
“I saw your Sunday shoes by the door when we all took our shoes off to come in, and they looked pretty new, except both heels were broken.”
She smiled while she answered: “Boy, they ain't made a heel yet that can stand up to the Holy Ghost.”
My shipmates looked at me oddly while Miss Tabitha and I shared a laugh. She then called them in before me. I became transfixed by the video game, glancing occasionally at my watch, as time ticked slowly by.
After about an hour passed it was my turn. I sat at the dining room table and placed my five dollars into an old cigar box on my right. She took my hands in her bony, dark fingers and I felt a sudden surge of energy, not sharp, but like a dull glow had entered my body. I could not describe it as cold or hot, more like bright wave of light, blunted around the edges as it coursed with my blood. The sensation was so quick; it was like describing a vaccination. The sensation is shorter than the description and the acuity of it fades as quickly.
She looked directly at me, took a deep breath and removed her hands from mine. I saw a tear drop from her left eye, and she deliberately handed me back my five dollars. I was too confused and ignorant to know what was going on at first. I placed the five dollars back on the tablecloth. I started to open my mouth and she spoke.
“I can’t read you.”
“Why not, was it the question I asked?”
“No boy, I’m too old to be worried about any questions from anyone now. I just can’t read you.”
“Do you know why?”
“Yes.”
I waited for a response.
“Do you read the Bible young man?” She asked, looking me in the eyes.
I answered her honestly.
“I have read it ma’am, I only skipped a few parts of Numbers. Why?
“You re-read the gospels son, you re-read them and you come back and tell me about it. I can’t say any more than that.”
I couldn’t resist the smart ass inside any longer.
“I’m not Jesus or the Anti-Christ am I?”
I think she sensed my concern underneath the smart-assed exterior.
She laughed and assured me that it was not a bad thing, but that she couldn’t say any more than what she had already. I stood up as she did and she hugged me quite tightly pushing my five dollars back into my hand.
“I can’t take this Miss Tabitha.”
“You can and you will. I ain’t about to take no charity. Now you go on.”
I took the money, as she was pretty emphatic about the charity thing. Although I felt that she did technically read me. I wasn’t going to argue with her though.
“You come back when you read those gospels, you hear?”
“Yes Ma’am.”
My shipmates were curious as to what happened between Miss Tabitha and I. They said we had been in the dining room for over an hour. I told them and they were both pretty spooked by the whole thing. They revealed that she told them both that would live for a long time. She Grover that he would go back home very soon to live, and Pierce was told that he would get ill but not to worry, this would not debilitate him in any way.
Turned out, she was correct: two months later, Grover was transferred to Coast Guard Headquarters in D.C. Pierce would get the clap from a local girl; something that would get him a standing ovation and the nickname “Seaman Clap” for the rest of his stay in Crisfield. I started to re-read the gospels, but became distracted by self-indulgent grief. The day of the reading sat uncomfortably in the back of my mind though, as it reminded me of an earlier incident from when I was in high school.
I was friends with this girl from a family of semi-sold out hippies that I met at an animal hospital I worked at one summer. Her family clung to many of the stereotypical hippie lifestyle choices: listening to the Grateful Dead, heavy political involvement, but they were Republicans- super conservative gun –toting, vegan, pot smoking Republicans. The girl’s mom made her living doing astrological charts for people. She had quite a thriving business from her South Florida home. I was invited over for dinner by the mom once when she came to pick up her daughter from work one afternoon Over dinner, I was asked a lot of pointed questions about my birth. I volunteered the answers while joking with the girl and her sister at the table, which was super low to the ground and surrounded by Moroccan style pillows. The mother asked what time of day I was born and I told her that I was born in the morning. She became noticeably silent. I pried, but she would reveal nothing to me.
Back at work the next day, the girl began to avoid me. I wondered what I had done wrong, and replayed the evening in my head for any indications that I did something stupid. Finally, after three days of nothing more than common courtesy from my friend, I asked what was wrong. She told me it was something her mother found in my star chart. She refused to give me any details, and when I tried to buy the chart from her mom, I was denied. I remembered thinking that something was wrong with me, but tempering that in my assurance that all of this was simply New-Age bullshit.
Saturday, June 20, 2009
Speaking In Tongues Chapter 2: A Summer Reading Start
Chapter 2: Susan
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.
Being in the rectory reminded me of my father. He had left my mother a few years before she died – finally finally jumping head first into the cult that had controlled our lives for so many years. Our refrigerator was divided between meat and dairy, every passover we were to clean the house, throwing out all of the bread and flour and yeast and anything that could even remotely be leavened. My mother was not a member of the cult, but she remained with my father for years as he wrote check after check to the church and argued with her about some legalistic, Biblical bullshit that neither she, nor anyone outside of the context of the lunatic messianic Jewish mind control organization cared about. Heaven was an unattainable place without strict adherence to a lexicon of rules and regulations. We could not eat in restaurants, even the Kosher places that served South Florida's Jewish community, because Irony of Ironies, my father's Old Testament based, legalistic church was also fiercely anti-semitic. He had been desperate for structure all of his life, obsessed with rules and standards in construction, the industry he labored in, and in his daily and spiritual life. I wondered what his life was like now. I imagined him finding some solace in the severity of monastic regimentation.
Ralph Stanley's melancholy voice moaned out an old Carter family tune on a boom box while I rolled paint on the walls of the rectory. 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 craned over 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 hung limply from her left hand. She was beautiful. She was oblivious to the strands of her own hair stuck to her face. Two errant strands clung to her lips, which she held grimly in check to prevent the slightest quiver.
I stepped closer to her and placed my roller in its tray. She surveyed the room quickly, took a breath, and asked:
“Where is Father Douglas”?
“I don’t know. I’m just here to paint the 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 crumpled up in my arms, sobbing, burying her face in my shirt. I fell in love with her a little in that moment. I felt like her happiness was equal to my own. It was a surprising feeling, intense and childlike. Tender in the sense of a cut or bruise. 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 in the moment but could admire immediately. In hindsight I know it was the strength that developed from support rather than abandonment. There was no anger in her.
“Thank you.”
She handed back my pencil and stuck her hands into her university sweatshirt. I noticed that Ralph Stanley was still playing in the background.
“I’m sorry.”
The words seemed appropriate when I thought of them, but after they exited my mouth, 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- now, in her silk blouse and black slacks with a Tupperware of banana bread, she looked older. The strength I sensed only the edges of the afternoon before was fully-formed and it was the edges that were undefined. I felt far more awkward than she appeared to be. 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 cinnamon 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 greedily, 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 I guess it just overwhelmed me, you know, the thought of…”
She started to waver a bit, but she willed her lips back into the grimace from the day before. 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 vibrado 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 tried dating quite unsuccesfully in high school. I went out with a girl it took me three months to tighten up the courage to ask out, and she laughed at me. Another girl, one I used to surreptitiously draw pictures of while she sat in class, I got to know through a mutual friend and found that I didn't really like her at all. I also found that my drawings were simply part of a narcissitic shrine to herself. She had no idea it was me who drew them. My true disaster of a date though was with a college girl who asked me out while I carried her groceries to the car.
We went out for sushi, something new to me, and while I sat admiring the bright colors and shapes of fish flesh filleted beofre me, I grabbed the big inviting scoop of wasabi and popped it in my mouth. A half-hour of weeping and water chugging later and I was back at my house, embarrassed and alone on a Saturday night. For about a week I had a superhuman sense of smell. I spent those days like a dog, sniffing everything for its nuance and essence. After the wasabi incident, I gave up on dating for a while.
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 again 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 Kelly 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 and no underwear.
“Hi, I’m Kelly.”
Kelly 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”? Kelly 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. Kelly gave me my opening.
“Are you busy on Thursday?” She asked batting her eyelashes playfully. Kelly 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 Kelly 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 Kelly 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 Kelly, 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. Kelly 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, like the volume had been turned down a notch. 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 pick 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 lack 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 Kelly, 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.”
Kelly’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 had been surrounded by friends her entire life, been involved in sports, and after-school activities. I had one, country listening, pickup truck loving, German-speaking friend in this whole town, and hadn't spoken to anyone I knew from high school since, before graduation.
“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 definable 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 as a tablecloth on my wobbly dinette set. I put too much wine in the sauce, and the pasta was a bit mushy, 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 savored 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. With every casual exchange of words I could see them scheming, their collective eyes alive with the Holy Spirit. Normally, I would politely evade their pries by cutting conversations short, or simply smiling and nodding vacantly when they would “academically” mention what the love of Christ had done for them. 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 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. I wondered if they were attempting to
“Did your parents attend church?”
He had difficulty with the word 'church' I thought this was funny.
I gave the question some thought and decided I would answer all of their questions truthfully, just to see their reaction.
“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 your Father's cult”?
His voice held genuine concern, but it felt mocking and cruel.
“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. Piles of non-kosher food rotting in black garbage cans in the South Florida heat, Domesticated ducks, the ones with the disgusting orange shit on their faces, pecking and digging into the garbage while my mom and I pulled away in the big yellow Cutlass. The house felt so silent and still, and even at five or six, I knew I was never going to be there again.
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 composure, and angry at the Jesus freaks for provoking me. The night was a series of halves.I half read, skimming over the words without focus, and I half slept, turning and kicking the sheets off of me. Mostly, I waited for Susan to call me.
The next morning I headed to the station.
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.
Being in the rectory reminded me of my father. He had left my mother a few years before she died – finally finally jumping head first into the cult that had controlled our lives for so many years. Our refrigerator was divided between meat and dairy, every passover we were to clean the house, throwing out all of the bread and flour and yeast and anything that could even remotely be leavened. My mother was not a member of the cult, but she remained with my father for years as he wrote check after check to the church and argued with her about some legalistic, Biblical bullshit that neither she, nor anyone outside of the context of the lunatic messianic Jewish mind control organization cared about. Heaven was an unattainable place without strict adherence to a lexicon of rules and regulations. We could not eat in restaurants, even the Kosher places that served South Florida's Jewish community, because Irony of Ironies, my father's Old Testament based, legalistic church was also fiercely anti-semitic. He had been desperate for structure all of his life, obsessed with rules and standards in construction, the industry he labored in, and in his daily and spiritual life. I wondered what his life was like now. I imagined him finding some solace in the severity of monastic regimentation.
Ralph Stanley's melancholy voice moaned out an old Carter family tune on a boom box while I rolled paint on the walls of the rectory. 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 craned over 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 hung limply from her left hand. She was beautiful. She was oblivious to the strands of her own hair stuck to her face. Two errant strands clung to her lips, which she held grimly in check to prevent the slightest quiver.
I stepped closer to her and placed my roller in its tray. She surveyed the room quickly, took a breath, and asked:
“Where is Father Douglas”?
“I don’t know. I’m just here to paint the 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 crumpled up in my arms, sobbing, burying her face in my shirt. I fell in love with her a little in that moment. I felt like her happiness was equal to my own. It was a surprising feeling, intense and childlike. Tender in the sense of a cut or bruise. 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 in the moment but could admire immediately. In hindsight I know it was the strength that developed from support rather than abandonment. There was no anger in her.
“Thank you.”
She handed back my pencil and stuck her hands into her university sweatshirt. I noticed that Ralph Stanley was still playing in the background.
“I’m sorry.”
The words seemed appropriate when I thought of them, but after they exited my mouth, 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- now, in her silk blouse and black slacks with a Tupperware of banana bread, she looked older. The strength I sensed only the edges of the afternoon before was fully-formed and it was the edges that were undefined. I felt far more awkward than she appeared to be. 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 cinnamon 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 greedily, 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 I guess it just overwhelmed me, you know, the thought of…”
She started to waver a bit, but she willed her lips back into the grimace from the day before. 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 vibrado 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 tried dating quite unsuccesfully in high school. I went out with a girl it took me three months to tighten up the courage to ask out, and she laughed at me. Another girl, one I used to surreptitiously draw pictures of while she sat in class, I got to know through a mutual friend and found that I didn't really like her at all. I also found that my drawings were simply part of a narcissitic shrine to herself. She had no idea it was me who drew them. My true disaster of a date though was with a college girl who asked me out while I carried her groceries to the car.
We went out for sushi, something new to me, and while I sat admiring the bright colors and shapes of fish flesh filleted beofre me, I grabbed the big inviting scoop of wasabi and popped it in my mouth. A half-hour of weeping and water chugging later and I was back at my house, embarrassed and alone on a Saturday night. For about a week I had a superhuman sense of smell. I spent those days like a dog, sniffing everything for its nuance and essence. After the wasabi incident, I gave up on dating for a while.
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 again 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 Kelly 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 and no underwear.
“Hi, I’m Kelly.”
Kelly 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”? Kelly 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. Kelly gave me my opening.
“Are you busy on Thursday?” She asked batting her eyelashes playfully. Kelly 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 Kelly 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 Kelly 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 Kelly, 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. Kelly 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, like the volume had been turned down a notch. 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 pick 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 lack 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 Kelly, 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.”
Kelly’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 had been surrounded by friends her entire life, been involved in sports, and after-school activities. I had one, country listening, pickup truck loving, German-speaking friend in this whole town, and hadn't spoken to anyone I knew from high school since, before graduation.
“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 definable 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 as a tablecloth on my wobbly dinette set. I put too much wine in the sauce, and the pasta was a bit mushy, 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 savored 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. With every casual exchange of words I could see them scheming, their collective eyes alive with the Holy Spirit. Normally, I would politely evade their pries by cutting conversations short, or simply smiling and nodding vacantly when they would “academically” mention what the love of Christ had done for them. 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 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. I wondered if they were attempting to
“Did your parents attend church?”
He had difficulty with the word 'church' I thought this was funny.
I gave the question some thought and decided I would answer all of their questions truthfully, just to see their reaction.
“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 your Father's cult”?
His voice held genuine concern, but it felt mocking and cruel.
“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. Piles of non-kosher food rotting in black garbage cans in the South Florida heat, Domesticated ducks, the ones with the disgusting orange shit on their faces, pecking and digging into the garbage while my mom and I pulled away in the big yellow Cutlass. The house felt so silent and still, and even at five or six, I knew I was never going to be there again.
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 composure, and angry at the Jesus freaks for provoking me. The night was a series of halves.I half read, skimming over the words without focus, and I half slept, turning and kicking the sheets off of me. Mostly, I waited for Susan to call me.
The next morning I headed to the station.
Speaking In Tongues Chapter 1: A Summer Reading Start
Chapter 1: Ike
I arrived in Crisfield Maryland in the middle of February, straight from 9 thrilling weeks of Coast Guard boot camp. 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 gray, with a matching 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 moved with and talked with utter confidence about things he knew nothing about. He was angry and ignorant and stupid. All one needed to do is deprive him of sleep or feed him alcohol, and he was a racist epitaph spewing bastard son of a culture that lacked any curiosity about anything outside of the Del Mar peninsula. Hell, even Salibury, with its University and shopping mall was looked at askance. Hess was in the TV room with a few others watching hardcore pornography on the big screen; nothing like flickering lights and a gang bang 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 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, so close I must have looked like two people to him, a sort of blurry negative of myself. I gazed across the room finding a particular burrow in the gray cinder block 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 could smell months of digesting food with each exhalation. I kept looking at that burrow thinking I could will myself into it somehow.
“Where in the fuck are you from…HA-Anus?”
My last 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'll bet you're a cocksmoker ain't you?”
“I don't think you're allowed to ask me that question, Petty Officer Hess.”
“I don't need to ask you, you fucking faggot, I can smell the cock on your breath.”
He was agitated, so I decided that asking how he came to know what cock smelled like was a bad idea. Burrell, belched hot garlic and the smell of used dental floss in my face while Hess ordered me to go fuck myself. He then 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. Ubiquitous seafood restaurants – most of them specialized in serving crappy crab cakes to the few tourists that were shanghaied into town. There were two standout restaurants in town when I lived there; 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 originally 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. He had been in the Coast Guard for almost fifteen years and had lived in Seattle, San Francisco, Miami, and Port La Vaca, Texas. It was clear that he had been affected by his time abroad while aboard ship, and he was an affable, if not absent, leader. It was rare for the Coast Guard to station so many people so close to their home towns. I theorized this was some unwritten policy 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 non-married 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 disengaging sort of 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 brownish gray, 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 work boats to give the impression that she was not welcome among the crabbing set. Chief Hawley burned in effigy, 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 his executive 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, other than my suspected homosexuality, I was separated from the others. I don’t think my shipmates 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.
I arrived in Crisfield Maryland in the middle of February, straight from 9 thrilling weeks of Coast Guard boot camp. 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 gray, with a matching 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 moved with and talked with utter confidence about things he knew nothing about. He was angry and ignorant and stupid. All one needed to do is deprive him of sleep or feed him alcohol, and he was a racist epitaph spewing bastard son of a culture that lacked any curiosity about anything outside of the Del Mar peninsula. Hell, even Salibury, with its University and shopping mall was looked at askance. Hess was in the TV room with a few others watching hardcore pornography on the big screen; nothing like flickering lights and a gang bang 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 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, so close I must have looked like two people to him, a sort of blurry negative of myself. I gazed across the room finding a particular burrow in the gray cinder block 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 could smell months of digesting food with each exhalation. I kept looking at that burrow thinking I could will myself into it somehow.
“Where in the fuck are you from…HA-Anus?”
My last 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'll bet you're a cocksmoker ain't you?”
“I don't think you're allowed to ask me that question, Petty Officer Hess.”
“I don't need to ask you, you fucking faggot, I can smell the cock on your breath.”
He was agitated, so I decided that asking how he came to know what cock smelled like was a bad idea. Burrell, belched hot garlic and the smell of used dental floss in my face while Hess ordered me to go fuck myself. He then 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. Ubiquitous seafood restaurants – most of them specialized in serving crappy crab cakes to the few tourists that were shanghaied into town. There were two standout restaurants in town when I lived there; 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 originally 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. He had been in the Coast Guard for almost fifteen years and had lived in Seattle, San Francisco, Miami, and Port La Vaca, Texas. It was clear that he had been affected by his time abroad while aboard ship, and he was an affable, if not absent, leader. It was rare for the Coast Guard to station so many people so close to their home towns. I theorized this was some unwritten policy 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 non-married 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 disengaging sort of 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 brownish gray, 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 work boats to give the impression that she was not welcome among the crabbing set. Chief Hawley burned in effigy, 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 his executive 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, other than my suspected homosexuality, I was separated from the others. I don’t think my shipmates 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.
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