When I got out of the Navy, I joined the Navy again.\u00a0 It wasn\u2019t immediate.\u00a0 I waited three months, but I couldn\u2019t get a job.\u00a0 People say I should have waited longer.\u00a0 My mother, in particular, says I should have waited longer, but I could just tell it wasn\u2019t going to happen.\u00a0 When I graduated high school, I told my parents I was going to go to the University of Detroit.\u00a0 This was the best school I had ever heard of.\u00a0 I\u2019d never even heard of Stanford or M.I.T.\u00a0 Never.\u00a0 I grew up in a town so rural that even the state\u2019s poet laureate would refuse to write a poem about it, except we had no poet laureate.\u00a0 We barely even had poems.\u00a0 We just had trees that were black and straight and haunted as fuck.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m sorry, I won\u2019t curse again in this story.\u00a0 I promise you, but I had to emphasize that some places have haunted houses, and some have haunted forests.\u00a0 We had those and<\/em> we had haunted refrigerators and haunted baseball fields and haunted rats.\u00a0 When Halloween came, our haunted houses became even more haunted.\u00a0 The real ghosts and the fake ghosts would party with each other and the fake ghosts mostly didn\u2019t even know it. \u00a0At least that\u2019s what everybody believed after the fire happened, that a million ghosts were unleashed with the flames.<\/p>\n The fire ate our town.\u00a0 It gave full-thickness burns to our lake.\u00a0 Our church had the blisters and thickening of partial-thickness burns.\u00a0 There was the superficial redness of our Honda.\u00a0 Some schools close for snow days.\u00a0 Ours closed for burn days, for heat days, because broiled chairs and saut\u00e9ed mailboxes and fried merry-go-rounds make you so haunted that your dreams are charred nightmares and your nightmares are things that should be locked in solitary confinement in prisons so hidden that even the warden has to come back from the dead to exist.<\/p>\n I say all of this so you understand why I ran to the sea.<\/p>\n I wanted the Navy.\u00a0 I needed water\u2014boiled water, bottled water, de-ionized water, filtered water, rainwater, raw water, reverse-osmosis water, snow water; I wanted still water and distilled water, soft water and hard water, tap water and samba water.\u00a0 It didn\u2019t matter as long as I was wet and it was near.<\/p>\n They sent me to Skaggs Island, which is in California, or was, up until Bill Clinton erased it, shutting down bases that were seen as superfluous.\u00a0 Skaggs Island wasn\u2019t an island.\u00a0 And someone told me that \u2018skagg\u2019 means \u2018whore,\u2019 which even has me more confused.\u00a0 The weakest river known to the U.S surrounded the base.\u00a0 I think somehow the river flowed in a circle, which is impossible, but the military can do anything with enough funding.\u00a0 They started to close the base down when I was there, sending some people home for early-outs, which my mother nearly fainted when I told her.\u00a0 I\u2019m her only boy and her only daughter.\u00a0 She only had me, so growing up she\u2019d sometimes dress me in Batman polo shirts or blue pants with striped button-down ties and other times she\u2019d dress me in matchable sleeveless racer-back tank tops or sleeve-having rainbow shark-bite sundresses.\u00a0 I learned that the world pretended there were two sexes, male and female, but in reality there were seven thousand two hundred and ninety-eight genders.\u00a0 She said more would be created as the fashion industry grows.<\/p>\n My father left us when I was three.\u00a0 I remember being in a crocheted top dress with pleated skirt and a World Wrestling Federation baseball cap when he was hauling luggage to the car.\u00a0 I asked if he was going on vacation and he said, \u201cYes, for eight thousand years.\u201d\u00a0 I learned that my family exaggerated numbers.\u00a0 My mother, a pantheist, when I asked her if we all die, told me, \u201cYes, we die about seven million times.\u00a0 It goes on almost forever.\u00a0 But we live too.\u00a0 It\u2019s give-and-take.\u201d<\/p>\n My Chief on Skaggs Island got the idea to send me to Diego Garcia, which is an island that doesn\u2019t have \u2018Island\u2019 anywhere in its name.\u00a0 It\u2019s in the Chagos Archipelago.\u00a0 I forget what that means, but I promise you it has nothing do with Cheetos.\u00a0 On the plane ride there, we had stops in Spain, Italy, Greece, and Bahrain, so that by the end there was just seven of us on the plane.\u00a0 It was packed when we started, but at the end I remember the pilot saying, \u201cWelcome to the Island of Misfit Boys.\u201d\u00a0 In the barracks, if you got on the roof, you could see water to the left and water to the right.\u00a0 The island was a horseshoe, so thin at places that during horrible storms it would flood into two islands.\u00a0 It felt like I was living in the atrium of postmodernity, as if there could be nothing more liminal than a place that physically and dramatically changed based simply upon the level of rainfall.\u00a0 And it rained hard there.\u00a0 It rained so hard that I would go outside and stand in it and it would hurt.\u00a0 It was the most natural exfoliation you could imagine.\u00a0 Then we went to war.<\/p>\n Here\u2019s where things finally get strange.\u00a0 We didn\u2019t know much about Saddam Hussein at the time.\u00a0 About the only thing I knew was that my new Chief had a cartoon of a missile being shoved into Saddam\u2019s buttocks.\u00a0 I asked why my Chief would have a cartoon like that when Disney had so many more options that were more peaceful and he said that the Navy isn\u2019t about peace.\u00a0 I asked what it was about and he made me paint the bottom of the stairs outside.\u00a0 That\u2019s a true story.\u00a0 Not the top of the stairs, but the bottom that is never seen, except by insects.\u00a0 He also told me I was a candidate to get shipped dirsup\u2014which means Direct Support\u2014to one of the destroyers in the Gulf and I told him I joined the military for the water and that being on a ship meant I\u2019d be even closer to the ocean than being on an island.\u00a0 By letter, I told my mother all of this, which was a mistake.<\/p>\n Within a week my Chief called me into his office and told me that even though it was Operation Desert Storm, I was being sent home on leave.\u00a0 Apparently, this was a high honor where they were making massive exceptions for me, so, of course, I asked why and he told me to sit down and get comfortable, so I continued to stand there and he said that my mother was getting a divorce.\u00a0 I stood there trying to process it all and I think he took that for shock, but I was just trying to remember if my parents were already divorced and, yes, they were, so I wondered if he meant to say that my mother was getting married, but I also remembered that in the military you should always keep your mouth shut, so he told me I could go home now and that I wouldn\u2019t need a ticket or reservation or anything; I\u2019d just go down to the hanger and they\u2019d put me on the first empty seat back to the states.<\/p>\n Returning to your hometown is a bit like going back inside a bowling alley when you forgot to return the shoes.\u00a0 They\u2019re sort of happy to see you, but they just saw you for what feels like seconds ago and they kinda wish you\u2019d moved on with your life, but you haven\u2019t.\u00a0 I mean, the trees were still in rigor mortis, except now with boney snow added to them, the flakes mostly failing to balance on the anorexic branches.\u00a0 When I got to the trailer park, my mother hugged me with the ferocity of electrocution.\u00a0 The kitchen was all gurgling and smoke and thermodynamics, as if it was Ramadan and Christmas and Lupercalia all in one.\u00a0 I asked about the divorce-marriage and she told me the beef-n-broccoli stir-broil and oven-roasted potatoes would be ready in a bit.\u00a0 She was making s\u2019mores-cake in a bottle and something she called \u201cThe Penultimate Greek Salad.\u201d\u00a0 She said we would be eating until we vomited, which was something that I\u2014<\/p>\n But before I could do anything, she told me to sit down on our \u2018gruel couch,\u2019 meaning a sofa the color of gruel (thank you, St. Vinny\u2019s) and she said that there is no divorce and she said that she lied to the U.S. government because she wanted me home for near-Christmas, which I was worried was a felony, but she told me that the U.S. doesn\u2019t put old women in jail for wanting to see their children during a war.<\/p>\n Then she told me that they did a study where they found that, before a tsunami, animals would run deeper into the woods.\u00a0 Birds would fly away from the shore; everything in nature would start caving internally until the shoreline was barren of wildlife, and then the tsunami would hit.\u00a0 She said that animals know and that she\u2019s an animal and I\u2019m an animal and we\u2019re all animals except some people like to pretend they\u2019re not animals so they close themselves off from precognition.\u00a0 Heck, she said, nowadays there\u2019s no cognition or recognition or co-cognition or anything; it\u2019s just un-cognition and mis-cognition.\u00a0 I waited for her to be done, the view outside the window of a snowy post-apocalypse, or maybe it was pre-apocalypse or maybe this was the apocalypse itself.\u00a0 I didn\u2019t know.\u00a0 It\u2019s hard to tell when you\u2019re all wrapped up in it.\u00a0 But we just went on with the day like that, with no more mention of lying or the Navy or extrasensory perception.\u00a0 We went walking to a graveyard where she showed me a neighbor who was dead from a fall at the mines and we went by the lake where there were ice fishermen not catching anything and we went back inside and had hot chocolate that made you think God was in your chest and then we fell asleep to the sound of the wind warning us over and over and over again how cold it was outside and howling about how badly it wanted to be with us in the warmth.<\/p>\n The flight back hurt.\u00a0 It took my legs.\u00a0 They say that even when they do aerobic activity, astronauts still have considerable muscle atrophy.\u00a0 I wondered where I was, who I was.\u00a0 I wondered if the military was trying to turn me into nothing, trying to shrink me.\u00a0 The most weak I ever felt in my life was after boot camp.\u00a0 I thought it\u2019d turn me into the Incredible Hulk.\u00a0 I got pneumonia in boot camp and when I graduated I looked like a used old golf club.<\/p>\n On my first shift back, I counted my Chief saying the f- word one hundred twenty-three times.\u00a0 I marked them down each time, but sometimes they came so fast that I missed some.\u00a0 He was on the other side of my cubicle.\u00a0 His disembodied voice said there were \u201cno immediate plans\u201d to send me to the Gulf.\u00a0 Because my mother was struggling with the struggles of struggle-divorce.\u00a0 The horrors of horror-loss.\u00a0 I noticed my Chief was nicer to me, which meant more distant from me, which meant leaving me alone, which meant less yelling. \u00a0There wasn\u2019t any friendliness or humanity or benevolence, just the grace of aloofness.\u00a0 Until one day he said I was going to counseling.\u00a0 The division officer was demanding it.\u00a0 They\u2019d been keeping an eye on me and I was \u201chyper-asocial,\u201d which is a term I\u2019m sure they coined just for me.\u00a0 They expected me to have transformed upon return.\u00a0 They wanted me to be a sailor who was ready to defend his country.\u00a0 I told the Chief I was ready before he even asked, that they could send me to the front lines, that I was prepared to be Bruce Willis in Die Hard<\/em>.\u00a0 I should have kept silent, because this made him think I needed counseling beyond the divorce stuff.\u00a0 Anyone who actually wants to go to war must be insane.<\/p>\n The counselor, I\u2019d come to find, was the Chief\u2019s brother.\u00a0 They do that in the military sometimes, or at least used to, that is, put relatives together on the same base.\u00a0 It supposedly keeps up morale.\u00a0 You feel like you\u2019re at home; nothing makes you more nostalgic quicker than getting into a fistfight with a sibling.<\/p>\n His office walls were decorated with medals and ribbons, not the Medal of Honor or the Navy Cross, but plenty of Overseas Deployment ribbons.<\/p>\n \u201cSit.\u201d<\/p>\n I was sitting.<\/p>\n \u201cMarksmanship,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n I was looking at one of his massively enlarged versions of his ribbons on the wall.<\/p>\n \u201cPistol,\u201d he said.\u00a0 He put his chest out.\u00a0 I wondered if he could keep inflating, if he would blow up like a balloon and press up against my face for the rest of the counseling session.\u00a0 \u201cSo,\u201d he said and waited for me.\u00a0 I think it was a counseling tip he learned in Counseling School, an online course that one can successfully pass in a week with due diligence.\u00a0 Silence draws out the patient.<\/p>\n I waited.<\/p>\n He waited.<\/p>\n I waited.<\/p>\n He got sick of waiting.\u00a0 \u201cYou\u2019re parents are getting divorced?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cYes,\u201d I said too quickly.<\/p>\n \u201cTalk about it.\u201d<\/p>\n I didn\u2019t know what to say.\u00a0 My father could be anybody.\u00a0 I would be making him up on the spot.\u00a0 There are so many professions\u2014teacher, lawyer, professional cuddler, ethical hacker, acrobatic talent scout, registered nurse, un-registered nurse, pastor, bastard, sheriff\u2019s mistress, accountant.\u00a0 I could keep going for miles.\u00a0 I chose lawyer.\u00a0 It seemed like it would have threat hidden underneath, that maybe he shouldn\u2019t dig too deep or I\u2019d sue.\u00a0 I imagined my father graduating from the best law schools.\u00a0 What were the best law schools?\u00a0 I had no idea.\u00a0 Central Michigan University?\u00a0 Jackson Community College?\u00a0 Calvin Theological Seminary?\u00a0 I only knew Michigan colleges.\u00a0 It made me realize the importance of traveling, just for the ability to lie accurately.\u00a0 I noticed the Chief\u2019s brother studying me.\u00a0 The pained expression on my face from trying to make up a proper university must have displayed as years of familial discontent, plates shattering against taxicab windows, clothing thrown down the stairs of brothels in Wyoming.\u00a0 I don\u2019t know.\u00a0 But it seemed that he was imagining all of the pain that I was supposedly imagining.\u00a0 I thought for a moment of confessing, but realized double jeopardy.\u00a0 In the military, you can be tried both as a civilian and as a serviceman.\u00a0 They can hang you more than once, kill you more than once.\u00a0 And military prisons are known to be even worse than civilian prisons.\u00a0 I kept my mouth shut.\u00a0 I kept my eyes shut.\u00a0 I tried to imagine he wasn\u2019t there.<\/p>\n \u201cYou don\u2019t happen to suffer from any . . . things that I should know about?\u201d he asked.<\/p>\n I opened my eyes.\u00a0 \u201cNo.\u201d<\/p>\n I realized my sanity was at stake.\u00a0 Navy psych wards are worse than civilian prisons.\u00a0 He was judging me, writing up a report.\u00a0 I decided to be boringly sane.\u00a0 I would make up William Shakespeare quotations if needed.\u00a0 I\u2019d mention the joys of David Letterman reruns.\u00a0 I tried to recall a Detroit Lions statistic, but I couldn\u2019t even remember a player\u2019s name, ever.\u00a0 Donald Haslenn?\u00a0 Was that a person?\u00a0 Tubby McGuire?\u00a0 What was that?\u00a0 A plumber?\u00a0 A friend from back home?\u00a0 Elliott Smith?\u00a0 That seemed real.\u00a0 I could imagine a real person named Elliott Smith.\u00a0 Elliott Smith sounded like a running back.\u00a0 But what do running backs do?\u00a0 Tackles and ball throws?\u00a0 Running and spiking the touchdown?\u00a0 What were the statistics on those?\u00a0 I\u2019d make them up if needed.<\/p>\n \u201cWell,\u201d the Chief\u2019s brother said, \u201cIf you ever need to talk, I\u2019m here.\u201d\u00a0 He closed his little book.\u00a0 He had a little book.\u00a0 I wondered if he was reading while my eyes were closed.\u00a0 He opened the door for me to be free.<\/p>\n They sent me to the Philippines for a psych eval.\u00a0 The Chief\u2019s brother was sure I was being torn apart by a parental divorce so hurtful that I couldn\u2019t put it into words.<\/p>\n I didn\u2019t want any more flights.\u00a0 They flew me with another kid who got caught making out with his Bible.\u00a0 Swear to God.\u00a0 Apparently his bunkmate walked in and saw him tonguing Corinthians.\u00a0 Of course, sometimes people lie so that they can have the room to themselves for a few days.\u00a0 You can\u2019t trust anybody in the military.\u00a0 I wanted to ask the kid what it was like to French kiss the names of the apostles.\u00a0 In some ways, it seemed kind of a nice thing to do.\u00a0 I remember watching him walk away from me when we landed.\u00a0 He looked like he was walking straight into a life of standing in rainstorms for buses.\u00a0 I don\u2019t know what happened to that guy, but they had me do Rorschach stuff.\u00a0 They held up a blotch of black paint and asked me what it looks like.<\/p>\n \u201cIt looks like a Rorschach test.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cYes, but what else does it look like?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cJust a Rorschach test.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cYes, I know, but use your imagination.\u00a0 What else does it look like?\u201d<\/p>\n I used my imagination.\u00a0 I saw devils and said that I saw hearts.\u00a0 I saw dead impaled oxen and said I saw a peace sign.\u00a0 I saw pregnant hippos floating up into gigantic zephyrs and said that I saw a heart inside of a peace sign on top of Abraham Lincoln\u2019s kind beard.<\/p>\n They passed me.<\/p>\n I went back to my command.\u00a0 We were in the heart of it all, the pumping vessels of war.\u00a0 My Chief sent me dirsup with a Marine unit.\u00a0 They needed someone who did the little that I did.\u00a0 I was more of a nuisance, appreciated when I was silent.\u00a0 All I remember is seasickness, the feel that I wanted to defecate and urinate and spit and vomit and sweat all at once.\u00a0 It was like I wanted everything out of my body including myself.\u00a0 We landed on beach and soon walked and rode our way into desert.\u00a0 About all I remember was the constant odor.\u00a0 It was like the smell of headache.\u00a0 There was a wind that wasn\u2019t a wind; it was the continual burning of a distant oil well, of oil that was unwell, of sick oil.\u00a0 The Lieutenant Commander had a mustache like a sand dune.\u00a0 I realized that where you grow up follows you everywhere.\u00a0 The heat ate us.\u00a0 I was divorced from nature, remarried to distance, dating fire.\u00a0 If I ever got back home again, I promised myself to run until my lungs caught flame, to sprint until I got somewhere safe, and that still hasn\u2019t happened yet.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" When I got out of the Navy, I joined the Navy again. It wasn\u2019t immediate. I waited three months, but I couldn\u2019t get a job. People say I should have waited longer. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":16208,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[2343,2337,2340,1158,2339,2342,2338,2335,2341,2336],"class_list":["post-16115","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-fiction","tag-abraham-lincoln","tag-desert-storm","tag-detroit","tag-fire","tag-hulk","tag-lieutenant","tag-mines","tag-navy","tag-psych-eval","tag-skaggs-island","writer-ron-riekki"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16115","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16115"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16115\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16174,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16115\/revisions\/16174"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/16208"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16115"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16115"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16115"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}