Tag: Jay Morse

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Episode II: Tasos the Buffalo

Thessaloniki, Greece

Fickle are the emotional meanderings of solo travel, and touching down in Greece after almost two days of frustration elevated my spirits substantially.  I had only to get to the station to catch the next train to Skopje, and after talking to a security guard, had only to find a bus to take me there.  Outside, a double-length city bus is waiting, and as I get on as the only occupant, I ask the driver if this goes to the train station.  He smiles and gives half a head nod.  I am not confident.

“Train station?,” I ask again.  He downgrades the smile to a befuddled grin, adds a shoulder shrug and does away with the half head nod.  I try my limited German: “Bahnhoff?”  Again, same response.  Eff it; it’s late and I am tired.  I open my hand to reveal a stack of change, the first of many times I entrust my money to the honesty of strangers, and he gives the universal hand-and-arm signal, that touching of pockets usually reserved for able-bodied beggars and methadone addled youth that says “sorry, no change.” It is my turn to shrug and half-smile, and I take my seat for my own private ride to the I’ll know it when I see it Thessaloniki train station.

For the first ten minutes, I am alone.  But the airport is on one side of the second biggest city in Greece, the train station on the other, and two a.m. on a Sunday morning in any big city can quickly turn into a side-show.  There are the typical black leggings and mini skirts, plus face piercings and fake leather jackets, faux-hawks and vodka residue emanating from twenty-something pores. Admittedly, this is just a single, long stretch of road in a big city, but she is not pretty.  Graffiti is the theme of choice, and it blankets the square, angry stanchions holding up building after building of six- to eight-storey cut-out structures on either side of this main drag.  It is a bit shabby, I suppose, to personify a stanchion, but if you saw them you would think that building is mad at something. Through the windows and opened doors of the bus I see a man driving his moped the wrong way down the narrow sidewalk; a giant dog lays sprawled in front of a store entryway, guarding it through intimidation more than skill; a young man and woman, she a midget and arguably a cross dressing one at that, board the bus at one stop and get off at the very next.  The city outside the window goes by in stops and starts; nothing on this road seems to be built outside of the 1970’s and they are a blur of geometrical, unspirited grayness.  Even the dilapidated government buildings look more Disney Land Haunted Mansion than Foundation of Democracy.

It turns out I do not, in fact, know the train station when I see it, and the bus driver unhappily stops a block and a half past my stop after I muscle my way to the front of the bus to tap him on the shoulder.  It is nearly 3 a.m., and the train station, battered and dirty, is not open.  Dated font Greek block letters above the entrance doors foreboding, a few homeless men and apparently at least one other early traveler, she with an old hardside suitcase, gather under the overhang and out of the wind and chill. In front there is a plastic-blanketed shop selling snacks and porn, the man behind the narrow sliding plexiglass window confirms for me that this is the train station. I ask if I can catch a train to Macedonia from here.

“Yugoslavia?,” he bellows.  He is portly and bearded; an unkempt but kind face. “No,” I answer, clearly missing my cue, “Skopje.”

“Skopje is in Yugoslavia,” he says sternly, though I have no doubt he understands my intent. He is giving me a lesson.  “This is Macedonia.”

Though we stand (he sits) in current day Greece, this was once Macedon, home of Alexander the Great and the kingdom of one of the greatest empires to ever govern the earth.  Greeks are justifiably proud of their history – Herodotus, perhaps the father of history, was from here – and so me calling Macedonia “Macedonia” has touched a nerve.  The new Macedonia, or the more geeky “FYROM” (the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia) has been a country only since 1991, and the Greeks, or more specifically the Macedonian Greeks, are not happy about it.  I buy a beer, an Amstel Light tallboy, exchange introductions, and then ask Tasos about Kosovo.

“Yugoslavia?,” I ask.  He answers yes.

And Bosnia? “Yugoslavia.”

“Montenegro?” He looks at me over the top of his glasses.  “Yugoslavia.”

I ask where Alexander the Great was from, and he answers “that goes without saying.”

I laugh, crack open my beer, dig my fleece cap and gloves out of my backpack, pull them on tight, and look over the newspapers.  I have noticed, in the short time I’ve been in Greece, that all the anglicized versions of Greek words look to me like some variant of “Vasili Tasikos,” prior to five minutes ago the only Greek guy I knew.  I drink my beer quickly and buy another, again holding out a palm of coins to Tasos and letting him take what he needs.  I stand next to the ice cream refrigerator, cold but out of the wind so warmer than anywhere else.  A homeless guy and I share a 10 meter cheers over our Amstel Lights.  There is warmth in unity. I pepper Tasos with questions until he finally, during a pause, says “Jack, come inside and get warm.”

Tasos Vouvolis – he says his last name means buffalo – has been working here at his uncle’s shop for almost ten years.  He is also a plumber, but says business is not always good, so works here on weekends. His English is good, his voice the temper of an ascetic rather than a non-native speaker reaching for words. Tasos talks about the Greek economy; his concerns that because Macedonia has unfairly taken the name Macedonia (Tasos prefers they left it to history), who knows what else they will take; about Gypsies; about America and our wars.  A man buys a porno mag, Tasos first puts it in a clear bag but then switches to a non-transparent black bag because the man “is shy.”  He comments softly on each customer: he is a country boy, he is a methadone addict, he is a taxi driver, he doesn’t know what he is.  I count the different number of cigarettes Tasos has for sale, and come up with 267.  He teaches me “neasa kala” as a farewell – be good, be well – I teach him “keep it real.” It matters not that I never talk like this; “keep it real” will leave Tasos in good stead whether he travels to America or sits here for the next ten years and talks with the occasional American.  I run across the street to buy Tasos and I a snack. I do not know how Europeans continue to get away with putting a fleshy pink hot dog in a croissant and calling it a breakfast pastry.  Tasos serves me Russian tea, and then it is 5:30 a.m. and the train station doors open and though I am already feeling only goodness, the opening of doors has lifted me.  I am on my way.

**************

I count six people waiting for the Thessaloniki to Belgrade train, though I will get off in Skopje, Macedonia.  The train waits for us, so covered in graffiti I mistake it for scrap, cars waiting to be cannibalized for other, functioning trains.  An official looking man directs me to stop taking pictures and then tells me this is the train to Skopje.  It is a rolling museum, urban modern art on the outside and communist bloc remnant in.  But it is clean, and empty, and I can sprawl out in the darkness facing forward, my shoeless feet resting on the seats in front of me, marking the beginning of the rows of seats facing towards me, ambidexterity on rails.

I drift in and out of sleep, I am a moderate insomniac despite, or because of, two bedless days on my feet and closing my eyes only on airport and airplane seats.  I wake to slivers of sunlight coming in through the right hand windows, cypress trees outlined against a rising sun.  A man comes through the train to ask us for our papers, and as I begin to shuffle through my back pack he lazily throws his left hand at me, letting me know not to worry about it.  He is a universal bureaucrat, not a greenhorn looking to make his name but a man beaten down by years of repetition and nepotist supervision, he is a casual participant in the process.  He does not need my ticket; he practically regrets his authority.  I am clearly a foreigner and a paying customer, and there is no reason I would be sneaking into his country when his experience says I should be sneaking out.  At the lonely Macedonia border I spy a Nirvana poster and hope it is both the literal and the figurative.

Two hours later I deboard in Skopje, and a man immediately accosts me and offers a taxi.  He says he was a translator for the Americans and KFOR for ten years.  I tell him I would rather walk, that I like the feeling of a pack on my back in an unfamiliar city.  He asks if I need a hotel, I tell him eventually, and he says he is not familiar with the Hotel Eventually.  This is, I think, a good beginning.

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Episode III: Climbing Jacob’s Ladder

I exit Skopje’s train station, ignoring all calls of you need a taxi but still curious about the professional courtesies of underemployed taxi drivers.  They stand close together, smoking cigarettes and talking until someone walks by, disengaging from each other long enough to shout out four or five you need a taxis. Some are more aggressive than others and will crowd you for a few steps, quietly pointing out the folly of you walking somewhere when you could oh so easily get in my taxi.  Very cheap.  But I continue on, doing my best to discreetly carry my two-inch thick guide book, as if the back pack and tan cargo pants somehow aren’t enough to give me away.

After ten minutes walking the wrong way and one solicitation for directions to the city center, I arrive in downtown Skopje to see a city under construction.  Skopje has a walled Old Town, but the new town has fences as well, seemingly around everything.  At my hotel (the Hotel Square, a “Unique Solution”) I ask the young man at the desk about the all the work going on.  Alexander tells me it is new government and international money, and they are not only restoring infrastructure, but building monuments as well, “to Alexander and King Phillip II.”  Perhaps Tasos’s fears weren’t misplaced.

I check in, drop my bags, and ask Alexander for dinner recommendations.  He tells me only to “watch out for small gypsies,” saying “watch” with that throaty “hwa” sound for which no character exists in the English alphabet.  I go out, promising to keep my eyes peeled for small gypsies, and find a city all to myself.  It is a Sunday in the tourist off-season, but I am exhausted so it is just as well.  I eat, read about Alexander, and drink several of the local beers before dragging myself to bed.  Skopje TV, after hours, turns into a soft-core pornography telethon, and there on my television screen are several not-small ladies in varying stages of undress and all wearing hands-free headsets.  They are apparently answering caller requests, unimaginative ones at that, though clearly talking far more to one another than to lonely men on the telephone.  It is sad and a bit pathetic, on many counts, and though I am exhausted, I watch it until I see one of them turn around on the couch she’s sitting on, placing both hands on the back of the couch and causing it to break, her and the girl next to her tumbling over the collapsed couch and away from the camera and into a girl standing upright behind them, frilled buttocks and camisoled shoulders everywhere.  Perhaps the callers aren’t so unimaginative after all.

I wake, early and refreshed, and cross the Vardar River over the six-hundred year old Stone Bridge and into the Carsija, Skopje’s old town.  People are up and about and moving with a purpose, everyone bypassing a red-panted yellow-jacketed older man with darker skin and shoulder length oily black hair.  He stands erect, looking straight ahead but at nothing, hand extended and palm up, distinguished all the more so for his colorful clothing in a black denim city, stark; a cigar store Indian on a centuries old Balkan bridge.  The Carsija is centuries old as well, left over from the Ottoman Empire, and has been the cultural center of the city since around the year 1400.  It is alive this morning, children and adults alike passing through on their way to tend to Monday’s activities, though the lack of tourists allow the adults time more social than business.  I pass by idle shoe-shine men, unambitious watch and trinket stands on the cobble-stoned streets, groups of men gathered for coffee.  I spend the day in the Carsija, drinking coffees, eating stewed lamb and kebabs, baffled at the dizzying number of jewelry shops, and envying the camaraderie of the Pit Bazar, the farmer’s market.

In the afternoon, on my way back across the now packed Stone Bridge, I am accosted by three or four adolescent, slightly soiled children.  A boy stands in front of me, blocking my way, one hand holding his stomach, the other alternating between touching his lips and holding his cupped palm out to me.  He feigns mute; his face is dirty, hair matted down and clothes shabby, face distorted to indicate his near-tears hunger.  I am not sympathetic, I saw this kid in the Carsija, early morning, his frosted-tip hair massaged into a faux-hawk, running and laughing with his friends, I had made a mental note that here was a trouble-free kid, trendily dressed, who I could place in just about any city in the world and he would not look particularly out of place.  But now here he stands before me, tragically without voice, nutrition or hair product.  I tell him I am on to him, that I saw him earlier, and that he should ply his wares elsewhere.  No matter his English skills, the tone is clear and he immediately gets the gist of what I am saying.  He quickly switches tactics to flattery, smiling and grabbing my chest, one hand on each pec, telling me how strong I am.  He follows with a bodybuilding pose down, and though I laugh, I am not moved and I tell him to “beat it.”

And then he turns on me.  Sliding one step to his right to let me by, he relieves me of a banana, jammed into my backpack, quicker than alligator jaws.  I am alerted only by his laughing friends, and I turn to see him just out of reach, cradling my banana like a baby, cooing to it, rocking it, letting the banana know everything will be OK despite its switch of parent.  I want to grab him by his Adidas jacket and dangle him over the bridge.  He is not intimidated, and now he holds the banana seductively, kissing it lightly, provocatively, eyeing me the entire time.  His handling of the banana, a sick pederast version of licking the last piece of candy so your friends won’t eat it, gives him the win: the banana is his.  I turn and continue across the bridge for home.

I return to the Hotel Square and tell Alexander about my interaction with the locals.  “I told you,” he says, “to hwatch out for small gypsies.”  Alexander then tells me that if I see a gypsy man I should punch him.  I start to laugh, but Alexander is serious.  “If you are walking and you see a gypsy man, and he is maybe one or two man away from you, you should go to him and punch him.  In the face.  It is okay.”  I am not entirely confident in my gypsy-identification skills – in my mind they all look like Little Steven – and though I’m not sure how the justice system works here in Macedonia, I am not comfortable using “I thought he was a gypsy” to vindicate a hate crime.

****************

The next morning I plan to rent a car and drive to Ohrid, a mountain lake town in southwestern Macedonia two and half hours from Skopje.  At the rental car agency, a Donald Sutherland look-alike takes my credit card and driver’s license; he wears a thick brown rolled-neck cardigan, rectangular tortoise shell glasses hang from a chain around his neck.  His beard and hair are the yellow-gray of a chronic smoker, he gives the passive air of intelligence of a liberal arts college professor.  I ask for a map and he gives me a cartoonish, 3D folded version of just Skopje, and in Cyrillic at that.  I ask for one in English, but he only says it is no problem, Ohrid is “that way.”  Ohrid, in Cyrillic, looks enough like “Oxpna” that I am willing to take my chances, so I get into a car so small I am sure I can lift it in any emergency situation, turn on the radio to hear the tail end of Alphaville’s “Forever Young” followed by an accentless American voice proclaim that I am listening to “MACEDONIA’S NUMBER ONE RADIO STATION” and make a left turn onto the busy streets of Skopje.

There is something to city driving, particularly when you are accustomed to a short, relatively traffic-less commute, and city driving in a foreign county is especially exhilarating.  I dodge pedestrians, speed past Yugos and dive in and out of lanes, here letting a faster car pass me, here moving out of the way of an oncoming bus in the suicide lane, here deftly avoiding the cars parked half on the sidewalk, half in the right-hand lane: I am dialed in.  And the car man is right, Ohrid (Oxpna) is, in fact, that way, and soon I am on to the empty, melting-snow wet E-65 highway first to Tetovo and then Ohrid.  The sparsely-treed mountains, early spring snow and village towns look enough like my own Sierra Nevada’s that I wonder if they are close in latitude (I find out later they are less than 100 miles apart), and I immediately feel at home.

The city of Ohrid is on a lake of the same name (again, Nevada: Lake Ohrid is a visual twin of Lake Tahoe, or Tahoe of it, and they both sit half in one state and half in another), and people have been living here continuously since 400 years before Jesus was born, his influence to spread here to Ohrid some 900 years later.  The city has been ruled by Greeks and Macedons, Bulgarians and Romans, Seljuks and Normans, Ottomans and Serbians, and most recently Yugoslavs under Josep Broz Tito, but it is, at its innermost, ecumenical – a 5th Century Ottoman traveler noted 365 chapels within its walled Old Town.  There are several still standing today, and I have my choice as I again have a centuries-old city to myself.  I walk into the curtilage of the Sveta Bogorodica Perivlepta, an Orthodox church constructed in the late 1200’s.  There are cats – Ohrid is, as many of the cities I visited, overrun with cats – but no other humans as I walk once around the outside before entering the church itself.  I pay, and the woman behind the plexiglass – Jana Popaska, Doctor of History – asks me if I’d like a guided tour.  I accept, and watch as Jana clips on a laminated badge, presenting her as a “UNESCO Tour Guide.” She steps outside the booth and shows me the badge, as if to eliminate any confusion as to who is guiding and who is being guided.  She wears a white and black leather jacket, too much make-up, long black hair braided in two strands down to her waist, and her enthusiasm is infectious.  The interior of the church is covered with frescos painted in 1295, Jana tells me, by the painters Mikhail, Carlos and Nikolai, and for the next thirty minutes Jana holds my rapt attention as she covers the frescos, the church, Jesus, love, politics, Bulgarian tourists, God, and the state of the economy in general.  We stand in the center of the church, and rotate slowly in a clockwise direction as Jana first whispers the titles of each of the frescos and then follows with a description.  The Birth of Jesus, she whispers, then practically shouts EXPLANATION!

I gather my thoughts, but it is not a request, it is a declaration, and Jana explains to me The Birth of Jesus (EXPLANATION!), doing the same with The Burning Bush, The Death of Jesus, Jacob’s Ladder, The Death of Mary and several others, following each whispered title with an emotive explanation.  Her emotion would shame any other tour guide, her idolation of Joseph evident as she tells me he was 87 years old when he married the fourteen year old Mary, treating the child as a daughter and not a wife; her sadness clear as she, near tears, recounts the distraught Mary upon learning of the death of her only son.  She whispers Jacob’s Ladder, then explains that though there are many explanations, her favorite is that of Saint Gregory, who described each rung as a year in life, ascension from earth to heaven possible only by living a life of virtue, by striving to love my fellow man and to worship a loving God.  There is no Serb she tells me, no Croat no Muslim no Christian no American no Ohrid and no anything except for the love of life, and a loving heart and a loving God.

She ends abruptly, as if someone else had been giving me the tour, and apologizes for her voice which she says “sounds like a musician.”  She tells me she had taken a pill a little earlier to make her happy but she fears it has only made her crazy, and I tell her no, your voice is just like music.  We part, Jana telling me she will pray for me and will ask God to protect me wherever I go in the world.  I tell her thank you, and that I think, after today, I need it a little bit less.

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Episode IV: The Road to Pristina

I return from Ohrid, turn in my rental car and hustle to the Skopje bus station for the three-hour ride to Pristina.  I hand over a wad of denars to pay for the ticket, my stomach rumbling as I begin to feel the inner-workings of those last two for-the-road macchiatos having their way with me.  I would like to avoid a public bathroom, but I may not get a vote in the matter, and now, it seems, is not a time to be choosy.  The Skopje bus station shares a men’s room with the train station, is poorly lit, dirty, smelly, and guarded by a ruffled elderly man charging 10 denars (about 20 cents) for the right to pass.  He has an arm’s length of toilet paper, if you so desire, and Cyrillic reading material as well, and inside the broken-locked stall is a simple porcelain-lined hole in the ground.  I enter, hesitate, and reconsider: this is clearly not for the fainthearted.  But I came seeking adventure, and if it presents itself as a Balkan train station bathroom, so be it.  I pay the man, leaving my backpack at his feet, and decide against taking in my headlamp – there are, no doubt, countless things in the world worse than what awaits me, but at this point none come to mind, and I don’t need illumination to help with my evaluation.

With both mind and other processes clear, I board the bus and focus on things more important.  The short ride to the Macedonia-Kosovo border is mountainous and winding, but once across, Kosovo opens into a vast basin, the Sharr and Goljak Mountains on either side cupping a brown expanse blending the Dukagjin and Kosovo Plains, the road running through it like a daisy stem, a few houses interspersed here and there among the detritus of post-war life, wood and metal and cinderblocks and trash; oh my the trash.   Plastic and garbage line the highway from the border to the Pristina outskirts, strung-together colorful like polyethylene prayer flags, modern-day bread crumbs marking the trail to progress.  There will be progress at the end of this line, no doubt, environmental regression traded for economic progression.  People who produce so much trash are people who can afford something else.  Poor people use everything, then reuse it, but the people who leave their trash here, on the side of the road, have the luxury of selection, and either have nowhere else to put their waste or simply do not know what tomorrow will bring.

We rumble ever closer to Pristina, the rubble and scrap now forming piles, now moving back away from the road, now behind buildings, now gone completely.  In its place, progress.  Development, advancement, chrysalis, a flowering; and that’s what Pristina is, a flowering at the end of a daisy-stemmed road, the city practically blows up before me.  Shiny new boxy mirrored buildings, stuccoed and glassed, I’m at the industrialized outskirts, and then car dealerships every third building, Mercedes Benz, Volkswagen, Porsche, Hyundai, Citroen, Skoda, all here, buildings so new they must have been waiting at the international border on the backs of idling tractor-trailers, half on this truck, half on that one, Caution Large Load truck in front and back, impatiently waiting for the Kosovo Grand Opening.

Pristina is a frenetic mess, but things are clearly happening.  The city itself has been here since the fall of the Roman Empire, but Kosovo has been an independent nation only since 2008, and even that is dependent upon who you ask – the Serbian Prime Minister, Kosovo being a former state in his nation, has said that as long as Serb people exist, Kosovo will be Serbia.  Kosovo shares a border with Serbia, and was a Serbian state until 1999 when NATO airplanes, many of them American or American funded, bombed Serbia until Slobodan Milosevic, the Yugoslavian President at the time, agreed to withdraw Serbian troops from Kosovo.  It is an intensely sensitive and complex set of facts to an American ear, though I find Kosovars, many of them self-described Albanians, see it in fairly simple terms.  I am told, among other things, not to enter Serbia from Kosovo unless I came from there first, I am told to avoid northern Kosovo, where Serbian enclaves are still in abundance, I am told, more as a challenge than as a question, you are here on holiday, when I say “I am here on holiday” (illustrative is the number of pages – four – Lonely Planet dedicates to Kosovo.  By comparison, Latvia gets fourteen).  I visit the Gracanica Monastery, a few miles south of Pristina and six hundred eighty-nine years old, and find it guarded by a KFOR Swedish machine gunner.  I ask him if there is ever trouble.  “There is occasionally trouble,” he answers.

But that is for yesterday, and Pristina is for today.  Apart from the Grand Hotel, prominent both for its size and location near a busy intersection and for the industrial grime shower-stall stains all over its facade, every building seems new.  Pristine Pristina.  I find a side alley hotel, boring and fungible outside but spotless and tasteful on the inside, the black-and-white suited owner selling me on the in-room jacuzzi and wireless internet, though he is marginally contemptuous when he learns I don’t have a laptop.  My room is equally pastelled parts Stevie Wonder and Queen Elizabeth, and after dropping my bags and having a cappuccino, I head into the city.

I walk the packed sidewalks, everyone going to or coming from, knee-high boots and jet black hair and Jackie O sunglasses ubiquitous.  Urban Pristina is a maze and has accumulated as much trash as the suburban, so I try to look up instead of down.  The streets are unannounced, the concrete structures new and unpocked, the old ones aged or bombed beyond recognition or shrouded in scaffolding and I only get my bearings after stumbling upon the caged and bubble-wrapped National Public Library.  It is unlike any other building I have ever seen.  I eventually work my way back the direction from which I came, and soon realize I am woefully lost.  Not an unusual occurrence, and typically intended, but my internal gyro is effected by further bad luck: it is St. Patrick’s Day, and I seem to have found the only city in the world without an Irish bar.  Again, a cappuccino; again, a request for directions; again, helped by a stranger.  I am practically walked back to the Hotel Begolli, and after taking my first bath in about a decade, the terrible European techno-pop blaring beyond the point of recognition from the jacuzzi radio assuaged by multiple Pejas (“Kosovo’s Finest Beer”), I sleep, dreamless, the streets outside my window quiet.

I leave Pristina the next morning, on a bus and via Bil Klinton Boulevard, heading for Peja, or Pec, depending on your Albanian or Serbian point of view.  It is a beautiful town at the base of the more beautiful Accursed Mountains, and I waste the day away on a rooftop bar reading about Alexander and Henry Adams and talking with my waiter who has a friend in New Jersey and two girlfriends in Pec and would like to go to America, but it is so hard to get a Visa.  It is easy if you are American, he says, you can go anywhere you want to, your passport is like a get in free card but it is very hard to get into America.  I tell him that it is, I suppose, all a matter of timing and that he’s just a little late, a few hundred years ago his ancestors could pretty much go wherever they wanted.  This appears to be of little solace.  But a few hours later I am reminded again what it is to be American, and this time I am humbled: it is midnight, I am on a bus and leaving Kosovo for Montenegro, and at the international border a guard is saying Josep, Josep, until I realize he means me.  “Joseph?” I answer, “Morse?” And he, from the front of the bus, leans his big bus-driver hatted head towards me and says “Josep.  American.  Come here.”  And my first reaction is an internal should I bring all my things because this might be bad. I should bring all my things because this might be bad but I leave my pack in my seat and go forward, the guard tall and stern.  “You are here on business?” he asks and I say no, holiday.  “Holiday?” I hear, for not the last time.  “Holiday?” Yes, I reassure him, I am here on holiday and then the man says I have a brother in New York and my sister lives in Utah.  Utah! Utah! and I am safe.  “Utah is a long ways from Kosovo,” I offer, and then tell him I am from Nevada.  “Nevada,” he says.  “You have good horses.”  And I am overjoyed and I love this Kosovar border guard, at midnight, the day after Saint Patrick’s Day, on my Balkan holiday.  We do have good horses, I answer, and beautiful mountains and a star-filled sky at night and a high desert that smells, after it rains, like earth brand-new.  He hands my passport back to me, and I take it, but he doesn’t let go.  “God bless you,” he says, “and God bless your country for defending Kosovo.  God bless you and God bless America” and I find myself not knowing what to do with all these people asking God to bless me.

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Waking the Grand Wizard

Part 1

Around a hundred and ninety years ago, in a central Tennessee basin teeming with dogwood, red oak, and poplar-treed expanses splotched by canebrake and Bluestemmed barrens, the blacksmith William Forrest and his young wife Marian gave birth to Nathan Bedford Forrest, their second child. Ten more followed, as well as a move to Mississippi, where 13-year old Nathan soon found himself paterfamilias, his father dead and this being Mississippi in 1837 where, I like to think, they commonly used words like paterfamilias. Nathan, possessing only a rudimentary education as it were, quit school and went to work to support his family, though the primitive conditions of 1840-ish Mississippi alleviated him of many mouths to feed, five of his eleven siblings (including Fanny, his twin) killed off by yellow fever.

Nathan was an aggressive, resourceful kid, and legend has it that at twenty years of age, he shot and killed two men and, using throwing knives, injured two others, all brothers Matlock, avenging the murder of his uncle and employer, Jonathan. Apocryphal or not, Nathan was clearly a man of action: he took over his uncle’s livery and livestock business, married, moved to Memphis, and built an empire through his dealings in cotton plantations, livestock, real estate, and slaves. By 1859, Nathan was retired and had in his possession well over one million dollars. That’s twenty-seven million dollars in 2010 money, if we use the Consumer Price Index, but if we go with the more bourgeois Relative Share of Gross Domestic Product, Mr. Forrest was worth a little over three billion dollars, putting him just south of Misters Gates and Buffett on the Forbes list of the world’s richest men.

In November of 1860, America elected Abraham Lincoln president, and barely a month and a half later South Carolina – fearing the abolition of slavery – seceded from the Union. Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana and Texas quickly followed, and by April 12th, 1861, relations between the Union and the seven Confederate states had degenerated to an armed stand-off at Charleston, South Carolina, resolved (sort of) only when Edmund Ruffin, a scholarly 67 year-old farmer from Virginia, pulled a lanyard that lit a fuse and lobbed a mortar round from Fort Johnson, over Charleston Harbor and into the Union-occupied Fort Sumter, starting the Civil War.

Between April 17th and May 20th, Virginia, Arkansas and North Carolina seceded, and on June 8, 1861, Tennesseans voted 2-to-1 to join suit. By mid-July billionaire Nathan Forrest enlisted, as a private, in the Tennessee Mounted Rifles. Four years later he was a three-star General, had been directly engaged with and fired upon by enemy forces almost one hundred and eighty times, taken over 31,000 prisoners, cemented his status as World’s Greatest Cavalryman, allegedly ordered or condoned the wholesale slaughter of surrendering (and defenseless) black Union soldiers at Fort Pillow, and uttered the timeless adage “war means killing, and the way to kill is to get there first with the most men.” Lesser known, but of great importance to this story, are his post-Civil War activities: Nathan Bedford Forrest was the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.

And here is where I begin each morning: I leave my house in Tennessee at about 5:30 am, getting on the interstate at Exit 1, ensuring I stay left to avoid the tractor-trailers parked in the narrow shoulder overnight; head west on I-24 to exit 86, now in Kentucky; then drive south on Highway 41A amidst the closest thing we have to rush hour traffic. Across the street from Jenna’s Toy Box, recently put off-limits by the Commanding General not for their extensive porn-and-bong collection but for their equally extensive synthetic marijuana offerings, I make a right through Gate 5 and onto Fort Campbell, but only after showing my identification card to, more often than not, the contracted security guard and advice-dispensing Mr. Williams (“stay dry now!,” or “keep smilin’, you almost made it to Friday!”). From beginning to end, the road at Gate 5 – Forrest Road – is just nine-tenths of a mile.

But it’s not the length, I’m told, but rather what one does with it. And what Fort Campbell has done with it is put the Office of the Staff Judge Advocate – my office, the place where I spend about 60 hours a week doing my best to lead, guide, and mentor fairness, integrity, and, hopefully, justice – right at about the half-way point of Forrest Road, named after a man who, if we look through the Yankeeist of eyes, achieved vast wealth on the unwilling backs of black men, dedicated four years of his life fighting against America, then headed up a new organization that has spent the last century and a half inciting violence against just about anyone who wasn’t white and Christian.

Aside from a short, nondescript road at Ft. Campbell, Nathan Bedford Forrest is memorialized by, at a minimum, a town in Arkansas, a county in Mississippi, high schools in Tennessee and Florida, a park, a university building, monuments in Nashville; Selma, Alabama; and Rome, Georgia; over thirty historical markers throughout the state of Tennessee and at least one figure in pop culture (run, Forrest). He is a favored Son of Tennessee and of the South, and is remembered accordingly. But he has nothing to do with Fort Campbell, no connection to any unit ever garrisoned here. The Screaming Eagles of the 101st Airborne owe their lineage to, of all things, a Union unit from Wisconsin. The entirety of Forrest Road sits, in fact, in Kentucky, not in Tennessee.

Mumbai was once Bombay; Volgograd Stalingrad; and Istanbul Constantinople. Russell Jones (RIP) was known as Ol’ Dirty Bastard, Dirt McGirt, Big Baby Jesus, Joe Bananas, and, fleetingly, the Old Dirty Chinese Restaurant. It should be a minor inconvenience to rename a mile long stretch of asphalt on an Army base. But this is the South.

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The Ninth Life

My grandfather spent the first months of his life as a widower sleeping above the covers of his decades-old queen size bed. Changing the sheets required the initiative of his daughters; my grandfather felt that if he washed anything he would lose, forever, the pillow-case smell of his wife. He and my grandmother had been married some fifty years when she died over twelve years ago, and in some sense, I think, he has simply been waiting around to die.

Over the last few days, it seemed increasingly likely that day had come.  My grandfather isn’t supposed to have aspirin, but had unknowingly been swallowing 325 mg of the stuff each time he followed up his vanilla ice cream with an Alka Seltzer tablet.  The aspirin ate a hole in something, he started leaking blood internally, then throwing it up.

We have been down this road before.  Several times in the last few years, and a few isolated events over his lifetime, have prompted his five children to make the one- to seven-hour trek from the nether regions of Nevada to his hospital bedside, muscling past the hovering priest and fawning nurses (even in the throes of death, he’s a bit of a charming fellow).

But again my grandfather has defied the cumulative effects of age, odds, loneliness and preservatives; again his children have packed up and went back home, heads shaking in equal parts admiration and disbelief.  To be fair, for a man who subsists almost entirely on bear claws and Hot Pockets, every day he gets up is a spit in the face of the devil himself.

A funeral is an ablution for the life of man.  Tragic and cheerless for those who die young; a maudlin celebration for those whose lives have been full and satisfying, but an ablution regardless.  It is also, unfortunately, a chit you can use just once.  But why?  Why are there no eulogies for the living?

My grandfather has always been, with the exception of his brief hospital stays, in full control of his faculties.  He continues to hunt and ride horses even in his 87th year, walks daily, and possesses a wit that seems to only get more lascivious as he ages (he recently told his nurses he didn’t want an X-Ray because he was worried it would make him sterile).  He takes my grandmother with him just about everywhere he goes, she the permanent resident of the left side of a small oak box, he the would-be tenant of the right. He buys her flowers regularly. When he comes into town on cold-day errands he leaves grandma at his youngest child’s house so she won’t get cold, and if he wants to stay only briefly grandma provides a ready-made excuse: can’t stay long, I’ve got your grandmother in the car.

My grandfather is simple.  My gut tells me that definition means something different to you than it does to me, but I don’t know a better single word to convey my admiration for the man.  Dictionary-dot-com lists twenty-nine different uses, and of those I think the one coming closest is free of deceit or guile; sincere; unconditional.

A high-school graduate, in his lifetime he has been a first-generation American, a hair-tonic hocker, a newspaper boy, a retriever of moonshine for the drunks under Bayonne’s bridges, a sailor, a World War II veteran, a pipe-fitter, a miner, construction worker, heavy-machine operator and a member of the Greatest Generation.  He is a pioneer, part of the post-World War II westward migration; a cowboy, a hunter, an amateur rancher, artist, and leather-worker; a husband, father of five, grandfather to eighteen and great grandfather to sixteen (with number seventeen on the way).

He is also, for me, an unfalteringly good example of what it means to be a man.  He wishes ill-will to no one, and is the least judgmental person I know.  I have never heard him raise his voice and never heard him swear in anger.  He deflects praise, takes responsibility for his actions and expects others to do the same. His most prized possession – he told me once – is his family.  No contest.  I know every man sins, but I wager we could use both hands, less thumbs, to accurately account for the times in his life he has lied, cheated, or stolen (and make fists if you want to count the times he failed to correct it). He used to drink, daily, but when he realized he was an alcoholic he just quit.  No twelve-step program, no intervention, no relapse – he just quit.  Simple.

He uses words sparingly.  I once read Ernest Hemingway won a bet by writing a story with just six words (For sale: baby shoes.  Never worn); I think grandpa could give him a run for his money.   If something doesn’t sit well with him, he might say “that’s not right.”  Only later, after I began to develop my own moral compass, did I realize he didn’t mean “that’s incorrect,” but something much, much closer to

life is but a series of decisions, of interwoven threads not only keeping you tethered to the ground but keeping your friends and families close, close where they can pull you back down, if need be, or even give you yards of slack to make your own way.  If you are lucky, you can pull them right along with you, or let them lead you back on course.  But if you make that choice, or tolerate those who choose to make such decisions, even in passing, you might take those first steps down a path that ends someplace you just don’t want to be.

He grew up in Bayonne, New Jersey, one of the most densely populated cities in America, but home is, and has been, a double-wide trailer at the end of a quarter-mile long dusty road in the high deserts of Nevada.  And though his blood is Irish, and his heart belongs to a dead German, his soul is unmistakably and firmly set in the salty dirt of the sagebrushed American West.  Here was – is – his dream: to own a horse, to be a cowboy, to raise a family and work the dirt and hunt and fish and never take more than you need and respect others and have your own space.  And he did it, he has it all – maybe not much to you and I, but it is everything he ever wanted.  Simple.

Josey Wales is one of my favorite fictional characters, and I have only recently put a fine point on the reasons why: but for the six-shooters and the inclination towards serial killing, he is a man who reminds me of my grandfather.  I think he and Josey would get along right well.  Neither say much, but say what they’re going to do and do what they say.  Both kind to animals and lovers of the earth, they have understated senses of humor, respect other people and above all else love their families.

Appropriate, then, to borrow Josey’s simple words for a fallen companion and put them to my living grandfather: I rode with him, and I got no complaints.

 

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Curtains for the Zen Dog

I killed my dog on Monday.  To be more precise, I suppose, I told a vet to kill him.  I wasn’t the trigger puller, or in this case the plunger-pusher, but it felt like it.

Late Sunday night Mojo pissed himself, on his bed, and then couldn’t stand up to move out of the mess.  For almost 18 hours his pulse rate was at a drug-influenced 170-200 beats per minute, but uninhibited it raced to 300.  It should have been a steady 110.  On the way back to the clinic Monday evening, the cardiologist told me he had collapsed once again, and though when his heart was pulsating in the lower range of that 170-300 frame he was literally pulling the vet techs around the hospital floor, they had to give him drugs more and more frequently and his lows were causing him more and more distress.  Three of the four valves of his heart were paper thin.  “It is not a bad thing,” she said, “to put down an 11 ½ year old Great Dane.”

I know this, I told her.  Most Great Danes live 8-10 years, frequently have hip and heart problems, and lug around significantly less than 180 pounds.  But this was my friend, a dog who has been, with the exception of his several brief stays with the Jenks’ and two long ones with my mom, my roommate and companion for the last eleven years.  That’s almost 30% of my life.  It’s 73% of the time I have been in the army.  It would be 15% of my entire time on earth should I live to my 74th birthday, the average age of an American male.  Euthanizing an 11 1/2 year old Great Dane might not be a bad thing, but it is certainly not a good one.

In his younger years Mojo was, in the most emphatic sense of the word, a beast.  He would pull me on my mountain bike, on a dead-on sprint, for almost two miles.  More than once he pulled me off of it.  He inadvertently broke my mother’s forearm in a game of tag.  He could play touch rugby for hours, was a decent hiker but a terrible swimmer (distances were limited to however far he had to go to drape himself over me floating on my pool chair).  He was in a few fist-fights and liked being around fringe characters.  He possessed a pair of the biggest testicles you ever saw, and didn’t mind me showing them off.  He was a great roommate. Though he didn’t bark much, and would never bite anyone, if he was home I never needed to close (let alone lock) a back door when I was at work for the day.  He was house-trained so quickly and so well that I once mistakenly blamed one of my friends for drunkenly wetting my bed when I was out of town for a weekend.  And if he did make a mistake, he always told me so, usually as soon as I walked in the door. He could be rough around the edges, I will grant you.  His breath was atrocious. He sometimes picked on smaller dogs, leaving me feeling like the guy who shows up at parties with the belligerent frat boy no one really likes but pretends to.  He was never accused of being brilliant; his sheer dumbness, in fact, may have been his most endearing quality.  But his drawbacks became nothing but background noise when he leaned against you or dropped his enormous head into your lap and stared at you with his slightly crossed eyes.

Mojo had taken well to our Capital Hill neighborhood, and no one had perfected pretentiousness better than he.  I would leave him in the front yard while I sat on the porch, reading and smoking a cigar, my view of Mojo obstructed by a hedge row but knowing exactly how he was sitting: front legs stretched out, head up and nose elevated slightly above parallel, hind quarters off to his left.  Sphinx-like, were the Sphinx dressed in business casual.  One could not walk by without noticing Mojo, sitting in the sun, a Zen dog in an ambitious city.  People would, more often than not, talk to him.

“You are huge.”

“You are a horse.”

“Oh. My. God.  You are beautiful.”

 Not once in two years did Mojo rise from his position to meet a dog-less person (and those with dogs usually moved along quickly).  He rarely bothered to even make eye contact, and would frequently shift his gaze further away from whomever was standing in front of him, his answer to all compliments uniform: “I know this.  Now please move along so I can ignore someone else.”

But now here we sit, facing one another, him on a lowered stainless steel cart, me on the floor with my legs under him, one arm around his neck and the other scratching his belly.  He looks sad, but I don’t know if it’s because he is, in fact, sad, or if it’s a product of me bawling childishly.  I know we can’t sit here all night long, but I’m not sure what else to do. I impulsively take a picture of him with my cell phone and immediately regret it. The picture is stygian, his face long and skinny and cartoonish like a Pat Oliphant sculpture.  A few friends are here with me, and I ask them to step outside so I can I tell my dog, in private, how much I love him and how thankful I am to have had him as a friend for so long.  I hug him once for my mom and once for me.  He barely raises his head.  And then death knocks on the door.

Death, oddly, looks an awful lot like a thirty-something Connie Chung. She carries in her hand three syringes: one large filled with a milky fluid, one large filled with something appearing to be watered-down Pepto Bismol, and one small.  The first shot, death/Connie Chung tells me, is anesthesia, which will put Mojo to sleep so he feels no pain or discomfort.  The second, and I think the third – I’m not really listening at this point and so I don’t know what she said – induce cardiac arrest.  What I do know is that there is asleep and there is dead.  Asleep feels like Mojo asleep.  I can see his chest heaving, still feel his heart racing.  My own heart races; I want to stop this.

“Hey!  Ha Ha!  Just kidding!  Sometimes Mojo and I like to play jokes on each other!  He licks my face when I’m asleep, I pretend I’m going to euthanize him!”

But Connie Chung is quick, and the second syringe is emptied and then the third.  And though I am familiar with my dog asleep, dead is another matter.  I feel the full weight of his anvil-sized head, see and hear his last breath, feel the cart move as his 180 pound body, for the first and only time muscleless, fully relents to gravity.  A forearm slips off the table.

I am, probably, Godless.  But I love life, and karma, and symmetry, and existentialism is a pretty cool concept and maybe just maybe Elysium is a real place.  I like to think so.  And sometimes life gives us those little reminders that we all come and go, and good often replaces bad, and trees grow in dirt, and being with is usually a better thing than being without.  If you’re lucky, the timing of these reminders is such that it’s harder to write it off as mere happenstance when it is so obviously and joyously karma or symmetry or, if you prefer, God.  Such is my Mojo-less ride home, when I call my good friend Patrick, waking him because he’s been up all night with his wife Andrea helping her to deliver their new daughter.  I had previously suggested they name her Patandrea, but they’ve gone instead with Fiona.  I jokingly tell Pat that Fiona’s and Mojo’s spirits have passed one another in the other-world, and we should hope Mojo’s spirit hasn’t inserted itself into Fiona’s body.

Pat says she could do a lot worse.

 

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Five Nights in May

When I was 18 my cousin Mike and I had plans to see every major league baseball stadium in America.  There were 28 teams at the time – the Rockies and Marlins were added when I was a senior in college – and we were going to borrow a motor home and spend our summer driving across the country.  We didn’t make the trip, of course, to my regret (another trip I regret not taking: floating, with my cousin Joey, the Walker River from its source in the Sierra Nevada Mountains to its terminus at the base of the Wassuk Range near Hawthorne, Nevada.  Still time for that one).

Whatever stopped us?  I don’t remember.  I suspect money, bravery, lack of a motor home.  Perhaps a girl or two.  But I have, in those twenty years since 1989, slowly ticked America’s baseball stadiums off my list.  I remember them all: the cavernous Metrodome, its awful gymnasium-feel compensated for by Raul Mondesi, cannon tattooed on his right arm, roving right field; Yankee Stadium, her welcoming denizens telling the Twins fans – a pastoral family of four – to “sit the f**k down you corn-eating f**cks,”; Turner Field in Atlanta where my friend Jeff and I were able to sell tickets for the seats next to us to two lovely coeds who later beat the snot out of us at pop-a-shot; Citizen’s Bank Park in Philadelphia against the rival Mets, the stadium electric everywhere except right next to me, my girlfriend at the time knowing this is it; the hallowed ground of Wrigley Field, in my outfield seats early enough to get a little buzz going and to cheer Sammy Sosa as he sprinted to centerfield and back, finding pure joy in the sunshine and ivied walls and  camaraderie of the bleachers (the same fans would constantly remind Sammy – no brain surgeon – of how many outs there were).

Nothing reflects American cities, and her citizens, like a baseball stadium.  The NFL may be the biggest money-maker, but the stadiums are generic affairs, interchangeable monstrosities housing interchangeable 120 x 53 yard fields treaded upon by superhumans unlike you and me and occupied, for most of the league’s cities, just eight days a year.  Sometimes they host soccer games.  Blech.

But baseball stadiums are different.  They are personal, revered.  They are America’s churches, our young nation’s versions of Westminster Abbey and the Arc de Triomphe and the Parthenon.  Fenway Park in Boston was built in 1912, Wrigley in 1914.  And it’s no coincidence all the new stadiums are built to look old, classic, rustic.  Even the field dimensions are personal, and no two in America are the same.  I have seen twenty-two of them since that failed summer plan, and because I have been blessed with canceled classes for the next four days, this week I will see three more as I visit five stadiums in five nights: Kansas City, St. Louis, Cincinnati, Chicago, and Des Moines (so it’s not a major league team, but it is between Chicago and home).

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Albert Pujols, the Poverty Line, and Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs

Being excited about Major League Baseball in the first week of May is equivalent to being excited about your one boring friend’s New Year’s resolution to “really spice things up this year.”  But what if he really meant it?  What if he did something to prove it?  What if he jumped out of an airplane, or decided to walk across Utah, or invented heelies for adults and then cruised around the mall?  Forget the creepy factor – would you stay and watch?  Would you congratulate him for his bravery?

You would if you were Kansas City and your boring friend was the Royals.  For game one – a Monday night in KC (a school night!) – 22,000 fans not only stayed the duration to watch Zach Grienke pitch a 6 hit, 10 strikeout, complete-game shutout against the White Sox, but gave him a standing ovation both after the 8th inning and before the ninth and didn’t sit down until he finished getting hugs and high-fives from his teammates after the game.  Grienke threw his second-to-last pitch 95 miles an hour, prompting the crowd to erupt once again and putting a smile on my face that didn’t leave until I headed for my car.

This is baseball.  I can admit that it might not be a sport (if you can smoke and play it, it’s probably a recreation.  Plus it’s a haven for professional athletes possessing that rare combination of fat and weak – google Bartolo Colon, Matt Stairs, Sidney Ponson, David Wells, Antonio Alfonseca, John Kruk), but watching the game being played correctly – seeing a diving grab up the middle, a back handed flip for a double play, a hitter absolutely baffled by a change up, a ball hit so hard you know, you just know, it’s gone as soon as it comes off the bat, well that’s a beautiful thing.  A thing so beautiful it brings me together with Emo teens sporting awful forward swept hair dos and wearing spandex-laced denim jeans and converse All Stars; young couples wearing matching Royals jerseys, “Soria” scrawled across the back; old women using walkers with punctured tennis balls cushioning the supports; that girl wearing the “shuck me, suck me, eat me raw” t-shirt; and kids, kids everywhere – that is a beautiful thing.  A necessary thing.

On the way out of town, driving I-70 East on a straight shot towards St. Louis I listened to a man call in to the Kansas City am radio sports station and share how he listened to the game with his son, them sitting in his truck outside his house because his “line of work keeps us right above the poverty line” and am radio was the only way he could experience a game; sharing that moment with his son and explaining to him what it meant for Zach Grienke to pitch a complete game shut-out, what it meant for 22,000 fans to not leave their seats on a Monday night – a school night! – in the first week of May, what it meant to him to have that moment of serendipity, bliss, and nostalgia because that’s what he did with his own dad, sit on the tool box in the back of his dad’s truck on his boyhood farm and listen to George Brett or Hal McRae hit bombs, listen to a crowd roar when Dan Quisenberry came in to finish the game.  This is baseball.

There is a man in St. Louis named Albert Pujols, and aside from the unfortunate pronunciation of his last name, he is revered by Cardinals fans as, perhaps, the second coming.  There are not many like him in the sport – Derek Jeter in New York probably; Barry Bonds a few years ago in San Francisco maybe – who command the respect and adoration of an entire city.  Albert Pujols, because of what he can do to a baseball, because he can spot the rotation of the threads on a ball less than three inches in diameter coming at him from 60 feet away at 90 miles an hour and can not only tell exactly where that ball is going to cross the plate but can hit it, absolutely murder it, sending it over the outfield fence and causing thousands upon thousands of people to leap from their seats in synonymous joy.  What is this?  What void does Albert Pujols fill in those lives, what is this thing he possesses that brings together people, old and young, bad clothes and good?  What is this thing that causes Bob from St. Louis to give me, unsolicited, $90 tickets along the third base line so I too can hang around for three and a half hours in order to share in this thing, watching Albert Pujols crush a baseball 370 feet in the bottom of the ninth inning, game out of reach but no one leaving just so they – we – can talk about him on the way back to our cars or busses or trains?

In the early 1940’s Abraham Maslow posed a theory that human beings have stratified needs, psychological needs causing you to first meet the necessities of life, air and food and water and sex and sleep, and not until these were met could you move onward and upward to things like security and health and friendship and intimacy, confidence and self-esteem, and not until you met these needs could you move to the top, to spiritualization and religion and morality.  But I disagree.  I don’t think it’s a pyramid, I don’t think it’s a scale.  There is something to Albert Pujols, to baseball, to watching Zach Grienke pitch a complete game shutout the first week of May, to sharing the roar of a crowd and the success of your home team as you sit in your old truck on your dirt farm with your son at your side, school night be damned, there is something fundamental to this feeling, this necessity, on par with the very necessities of life.  This is baseball.

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The High Life

The Gateway Arch rises from the banks of the Mississippi River in St. Louis, implausible and angled and silver and alien, instantly evoking in me memories of The White Mountains, a favorite childhood book about extraterrestrials come to subjugate Earth’s youth.  Designed in 1947 by Eero Saarinen (he of the TWA terminal at JFK; Washington Dulles Airport; and the “Tulip Chair.” Like on Star Trek.  You know the one) and built from 1963 to 1965, it is as wide at the base as it is tall, and it’s the tallest monument in America – at 630 feet about 80 feet taller than the Washington Monument and almost twice as tall as the Statue of Liberty.  Here I met a days-old college grad, on his way from Pennsylvania to California to be a back country guide at Yosemite; spied a cigarette smoking and Diet Coke drinking Amish couple; and chatted (listened, mostly) to a uniformly khaki and polo-dressed couple from St. George, Utah, returning to the Arch twenty years after their honeymoon (“the trees have grown so big!”).

You can stand on the ground, immediately under the Arch and staring upwards with your head rocked back so far it’s impossible to keep your mouth closed, or you can ride to the top in surreal, miniature and plastic sterile pods, folded up in a windowless egg with a man about my age wearing a flannel shirt, too-tight jeans and a Donald Duck wristwatch.  It truly is a marvel, and standing in the 17’ wide top of the Arch, looking down on the flooded river and surprisingly sleepy downtown, provides the proper motivation to think bigger than you really are, or should be.

So on my way east, in the beginnings of an off-and-on three day rainstorm and mulling over my doctor friend’s posit that “veterans and heroin addicts are impossible to kill,” I called the Cincinnati Reds office and asked them for a press pass for that night’s game.  I am a writer, no?  No, no, not a “blogger.”  A writer.  A reporter on life, just taking a little baseball and hotdogs and apple pie (and Guantanamo, and bailouts, and the False Reports of the Secularization of America! and right-to-life and Iowa Negotiated Hog Report and the Fairness Doctrine – the Midwest has a lot of a.m. radio) middle-of-America trip and thought I’d stop by your nice little stadium and then write a story about it. I have, like, 60 readers. Or so.

An optimist would assume the worst one could say is “no,” but Josh from the Reds, he no optimist, offered a much, much more thorough response.  “We don’t credential bloggers.  And you’re coming tonight?  You wouldn’t just show up at someone’s house and expect to be let in, would you.”  Not a “would you?” less Josh indicate an interrogative and an opportunity to respond, but would you as in who do you think you are and who do you think you’re talking to? And we don’t credential BLOGGERS.

Not credentialing bloggers is good policy, no doubt, but advance warning is necessary?  Seriously?  Are there no Mormons in Cincinnati?  No Jehovah’s?  No Girl Scouts, no Little League, no Amway?  I would – do – expect to be let in if I just showed up at someone’s house, and most people I know would probably let you in.  But lesson learned: prior to watching Bronson Arroyo give up 9 runs in three outs (that’s called karma, Josh from the Reds), I emailed the White Sox and changed my approach.  Not a blogger, but a writer for a website, and here’s my link, and I’m seeing five games in five nights, the last night in Des Moines (Des Moines!), and I don’t want access to players but maybe hang out with real writers and see what they do and how they do it and it would make a good story and there’s a war on, don’t you know?

I did not, in fact, invoke the “war clause,” but it was unnecessary, as Ray Garcia and Scott Reifert are not only optimists but are also Major League Baseball’s finest Vice President of Communications/Coordinator of Media Services and Champions of the Little Man and . . . they gave me a ticket.  And a media package, and access to batting practice where I could size up Carlos Quentin (he’s big) and A.J. Pierzynski (bigger) and even stand next to Jerry Reinsdorf, owner of both the White Sox and the Chicago Bulls and the 52nd richest man in America.  And I paid them back by ruining Mark Buehrle’s Perfect Game.

Not “perfect game,” as in the sun is shining but it’s not too hot and it’s not crowded so we can hang our feet over the seat in front of us and the beerman knows us by name and we can see perfectly Ichiro’s laser throw to third holding the runner at second and there’s a beautiful human being at your side and we just can’t stop smiling but perfect game as in Perfect Game.  As in

 

scorecard

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

and no walks and no errors and not even a sniff of Detroit’s batters figuring out Buehrle’s speed and timing and location.

Athletes in general are a superstitious lot, baseball players particularly so, and a Perfect Game is an untouchable, an unspeakable.  It has happened just 17 times in the 132 years of the sport; they are magical and to see one, to be in the presence of greatness, of such infinitesimal rarity would feel like that first time you were twelve was it? maybe eleven and jumped off a cliff, it seemed so high and you were so scared but you jumped anyway and plunged into the water, kicking like a madman to get to the top but doing your best to appear nonchalant, so nonchalant when you yelled at your buddy still on the cliff it’s easy don’t be a baby – just like that but better and I know I shouldn’t but I had to send a text to a friend anyway to let him know i’m in chic watching a perf game thru 6 and he rightly, rightly responded you just effed it up go get a beer.

But it’s a text! A text is not spoken, a text should not violate the rule, but the very next hitter hit the ball on a rope to the first baseman – he caught it for an out – and the next batter hit a double into the gap and then Buehrle walked two batters and the bases were loaded.  And I ruined Mark Buehrle’s perfect game.

Major League baseball stadiums are cathedrals and Perfect Games are unspeakables and Jerry Reinsdorf is the 52nd richest man in the United States but if it’s Middle America that you seek, you need go no further than the High Life Lounge in Des Moines, Iowa.  There are decent chain restaurants in just about every city in America, chain restaurants with good service, and good food, and a good atmosphere, places like The Rock Bottom Brewery or Old Chicago’s, but chains are, after all, by nature impersonal.

But there are also pseudo-chain, shadow-chain back-alley, dark corner, cracked sidewalk establishments in every town, disconnected commercially but a veritable network emotionally, spiritually, celestially, where it’s not that you don’t want to be seen, but rather don’t want it to seem like you want to be seen yet relish that moment when you can just let it slip out that you’re in the know: let’s meet at _____ and it’s that much richer if the invitee needs directions.  Bob Dobb’s in Tucson and the Cap Lounge in DC and the Beach Tavern in Tacoma and – you know the one in your own town.

The High Life sits on the corner of 2nd and Market in Des Moines and the $2 PBRs taste like holy water after shelling out $8 for keep the change beers at Kauffman, Busch, Great American, and US Cellular stadiums.  There is shag carpet on the floor and dirty brown formica covering the bar and black naugahyde stools pushed up to it.  It has eight taps visible, one each Old Style and Pabst Blue Ribbon, two Lite, three Miller High Life and one Guinness, off by itself at the end of the bar like an accountant at a teamster’s party.  The décor is late 70’s and the clientele not much later, and I wish I could tell you it’s been a Des Moines staple for that long, but it’s been around since . . . 2005.

Yet, it was a good beginning to the Iowa Cubs, because if the Cubby Bear on Addison puts you in the proper mindset for Wrigley, the High Life Lounge puts you in the proper mindset for AAA baseball.  Though just one step down from the bigs, and for many organizations just an hour or two down an interstate, the atmosphere at AAA baseball is closer kin to your kid’s little league game.

This is truly a family affair.  I heard a little girl in line next to me tell her mommy that man is wearing a purse (it’s a man-purse, honey, and don’t point at the man); bought a $12 ticket that let me sit anywhere in the park (even the cheapest $4 tickets are within foul ball souvenir territory); envied old couples bundled up in shared blankets; and watched eleven – eleven – First Pitches: two small children, a local congressman, three people appearing on behalf of the local ALS, a local boy-makes good with the World Champion Pittsburgh Steelers, and four others who threw out their First Pitches so quickly and anemically I failed to either hear their names or write them down.

And all of them, every last one, even the little girl who took a full two minutes and the announcer’s public encouragement to just throw it to the man in blue standing behind the plate, everyone of them was applauded roundly.  Is this baseball?  Or is this Iowa or anywhere else in the Midwest or America for that matter?  Every half inning had a contest, a throw-it-through the tires or musical chairs in the oversized blow-up baseball gloves or a scholarship raffle or little kids racing wearing huge, baggy clothes and both t-shirts and hotdogs shot out of a compressed air gun – hot dogs, and more hot dogs and more hot dogs and this is America.

All American sporting events start with the Anthem, but it is endemic to baseball.  It is usually performed well, sometimes especially so.  But occasionally, I think, it is superlative, and if done correctly it can do to you what that Perfect Game does to you, what that first post-cliff dive gulp of air or that random where did that come from? memory of that first really, really good kiss can do to you.  On this day, a cloudy, windy, slightly cold night in Des Moines, Iowa, a young fellow – challenged, I think; touched, exceptional, mentally retarded – played the American anthem on his Casio keyboard.  And it was beautiful.  And no one, not a soul, not a breeze, not a flap of flag or drop of cup or cough or awkward laugh escaped during this mistake-ridden rendition of the Star Spangled Banner, and I, after five days of baseball, and America, and occasional loneliness,            just             felt             good.

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Airborne Ranger, Airborne Ranger

Fourteen years ago this summer I suffered through the most miserable two and a half months of my life – 17 days each in the soupy July air of Fort Benning, Georgia; the frying pan-hot Chihuahuan Desert of eastern New Mexico; the demoralizingly steep ascents of the Appalachians; and the dysenteric swamps of the Florida panhandle; all largely on a meal a day and little to no sleep.  The reward was a Ranger tab, yet conventional Army wisdom still derisively labels me a “leg” – a non-Airborne qualified soldier.  But now here I am back at Ft. Benning hoping to remedy my deficiencies, this time at the U.S. Army Airborne School.  I am the senior officer in my class, and one of just two Majors out of over five hundred students.  The vast majority of my classmates are younger than my youngest sister; many, I find, were born the year I graduated from high school.  The training is geared specifically towards these Privates who are, regrettably, prone to not be where they are supposed to be, when they are supposed to be there, and not wearing the uniform they are supposed to be in.  For their trespasses I am yelled at (always respectfully, never directly), forced to do push-ups, flutter-kicks, ski-jumpers, and the grossly underestimated “overhead clap.”[1]

I am, as some have reminded me, no longer twenty-four.  I know this.  I am thirty-seven.  But no one here knows this, so on the outside I am a rock.  I always do my “optional” ten pull-ups and twenty push-ups each time we are released for the day.  I sound off vigorously with an “Airborne!” each time I hit the ground.  I never complain, I never doze off in class, I do everything Sergeant Airborne tells me to do, enthusiastically and without delay.  But inside I am dying.  The bottoms of my feet hurt.  The side of my neck is friction-burned from the straps of the mock-parachutes.  I have fire ant bites on my legs and hands.  I cannot feel, inexplicably, the this little piggy had none toe on my right foot.  I quietly await what, by all indications, seems to be the early stages of a hernia, and I think I pulled a muscle in my triceps opening my hotel room door.  But still I am here, and after two weeks of training and five jumps from a C-130 Hercules airplane, I will no longer be a dirty, nasty, non-Airborne qualified leg Ranger.

Zero Day and Ground Week

Airborne Ranger, Airborne Ranger, where have you been?

Around the world and back again.

Despite some anxiety – this will be the first time I’ve been around Joe[2] on a regular basis in over three years – I show up as close as possible to the Zero Day “no later than” report time of 1200 hours.  I am a cagey veteran, a veritable old-timer given the apparent average age of my classmates, and my Army experience has taught me that reporting any earlier than absolutely necessary only means you’ll either get tasked to go do something or just end up waiting that much longer.  I file into a classroom with about 200 other soldiers, holding in my hand my orders directing me to Ft. Benning; an Airborne physical stating I tested negative for HIV, have no blood in my stool, and am generally an able-bodied male; and an age waiver signed by my boss stating that despite the age limit of thirty-six, I should be allowed to attend Airborne training.  The soldiers around me are clearly brand-new to the Army – many having just arrived from Sand Hill, the basic training area for infantrymen – and do not need an age waiver.  The soldier sitting to my right appears to have a zit for each of my years.  I hear an audible gasp from the group as I stand after the administrative sergeant calls out “any majors here today?”  The NCO, a red-headed Sergeant First Class whom I immediately dislike, calls out for the other officer ranks, then directs us all in the completion of four forms he had previously passed out.

 

“Airborne, take everything off your desk and put it under your seat.  Everything Airborne!  Get everything off your desk or else you jackasses will fuck everything up, and I don’t have the time to be fucking with you.  Now, reach in that folder and take out THE TOP SHEET AND THE TOP SHEET ONLY.  On that first sheet, fill out block one where it says ‘last name.’  In this block you should put your last name and your last name only.  Airborne!  Did I tell you to fill out block two?  Don’t get ahead of me airborne, because you’ll just fuck everything up.  You don’t do shit until I tell you to!  Now, in BLOCK TWO” – he sends a condescending look in the direction of the overly ambitious jackass – “put down your first name and your first name only.  Fill it out in standard Army black letters and in ENGLISH ONLY.  I don’t want to see no Japanese hieroglyphics.”

It takes us over an hour to do what should have taken ten minutes, a trend that continues for the remainder of my time here.  I have to show, for the six hours of Zero Day I have spent at Airborne School, a helmet, a moldy canteen, a sunburn and an order to show up early Monday morning.  It’s going to be a long three weeks.

The Army frequently uses the “crawl, walk, run” method of instruction, which essentially means we train to the lowest common denominator, and so we spend most days crawling like a figurative nine-month old.  Though I am staying in Officer’s Quarters away from the Bravo Company area, where the soldiers sleep, I have to report each morning at 0450 hours for “forced hydration.”  This is where we stand around the second floor of the barracks (we’re in second platoon – note the symmetry) holding a full canteen of water until Sergeant Airborne shows up, reels off a few disparaging remarks, and then tells us to “DRINK UP AIRBORNE.”  We then guzzle the entire canteen.  After a few minutes, we solemnly move downstairs and outside to wait in formation with the rest of the company.  The cadre waits inside until the last possible minute (I went into their office one morning and found them sleeping, sprawled out like a bunch of cats), yelling through an open window if they need to talk to any particular soldier.

Sergeant Airborne yelling out the window for a specific student is one of my favorite parts of Airborne School.  It is five am, five hundred students have just guzzled a canteen full of water, and we all know we will stand around for approximately thirty minutes waiting for the cadre to come outside and run us to the training area.  This routine accommodates that basic human need for interaction, even at five am, and the company area quickly comes alive with human chatter, sounding like cicadas emerging from their seventeen year sleep.  Conversation is stopped only (but always) whenever we hear one of the windows slide open, Sergeant Airborne’s head emerging to yell out a roster number: “Charlie Three One Seven!”  Immediately five hundred voices respond.  “CHARLIE THREE ONE SEVEN!”  The cicada love song then resumes, and I giggle internally.

The main purpose of Ground Week seems to be to teach us how to fall down correctly, employing the “PLF” – the parachute landing fall.  In short, this consists of landing with your feet and knees tightly together, and hitting, preferably consecutively, your five “points of contact”: the balls of your feet, the outside of your calf, your thigh, your butt, and then your pull-up muscle, hopefully exposed by you keeping your elbows together in front of you and high up above your face.  This sequence of events, developed in the 1940’s, is the basis for the Army-specific directive, to “get your head out of your fourth point of contact.”  Feel free to adopt it into your own library of colloquialisms.  Ideally, the PLF will save you from serious injury, because the T-10 Delta parachute – a version of which has also been around since the 1940’s – is designed to get you to the ground safely, but more importantly, as quickly as possible.

This is not the landing you’ve seen on television, where a rainbow-clad skydiver pulls on toggles just before impact, hitting the ground running, yet softly, like a Pelican landing on terra firma.  This parachute was designed with the soldier in mind, specifically the enemy soldier, who is probably shooting at you as you fall from the sky, so getting down quickly is of utmost importance.  The trade-off is that you hit the ground harder than you’d like to, and to be able to properly minimize the impact is a good skill.  So we practice falling down.  Again.  And again, and again.  We practice falling down from our standing position.  We practice falling down from a 2’ wall.  We practice falling down while sliding on a cable.  We practice falling down facing forwards, facing sideways, facing backwards.  We practice falling down moving in all directions while sliding on the cable.  To emphasize the importance of keeping feet and knees together, we bunny-hop around the practice pit with our legs welded together, like we’re training for a gunny sack race but can’t find a gunny sack.  Not wearing underwear was a decision considerably lacking in foresight, as the sweat building up in my man-regions has nowhere to go.

We spend the last day of Ground Week jumping out of the 34’ Tower, the first occasion where I feel like I’m doing something kind of cool.  We do it both “Hollywood” – wearing only the parachute harness and a reserve parachute strapped in front of you – and “combat load,” which includes all of the above plus a thirty-five pound rucksack hanging from your waist.  Once we’re geared up, we walk up five flights of stairs, where a Sergeant Airborne hooks our harnesses to a pulley resting on a cable suspended 34’ off the ground.  Once hooked up, Sergeant Airborne gives a smack on the ass, indicating it is now time for you to jump out the door.  I give a vigorous kick and throw myself into a tight body position – chin tucked into chest, elbows in tight, feet and knees together.  I fall for just a fraction of a second until the harness catches, and then slide down the cable to other students waiting to unhook me.  With the exception of jumping off a tower, this is not a pleasurable experience.

If you’d like to get a taste of this, here’s a suitable recreation:  Take two seat belts, run them between your legs and then over your shoulder.  Fasten both, ensuring a buckle is digging into each clavicle.  Now squat down, and have your buddy cinch the belts up real tight.  Now stand up.  If you are unable to stand completely upright, then you’ve done it correctly (if, however, you feel your scrotum being pinched in between a belt and your thigh, you probably have some adjusting to do).  Now go get a computer monitor – not a flat screen, but one of the old school big ones.  Fill it with sand, and hang it from your waist.  Take two more seat belts, and run them through the two existing belts, right about at the front of your shoulders.  Make sure that when these belts extend straight up, your head doesn’t fit easily between them.  You want to reproduce the feeling of having your neck filleted as the straps rapidly shift from front to rear.  Now go walk up five flights of stairs.  Tie your two shoulder belts to the railing.  Jump off.  Repeat ad nauseum.

Tower Week

Airborne Ranger, Airborne Ranger, how did you go?

In a C-130, flying low.

 

The highlight of Tower Week is supposed to be the 250’ tower, where some students are slowly reeled up by a cable hooked to a parachute, and then dropped.  Think the Free Fall ride at Six Flags, and you’ll have the visual.  But we’re on a shortened training schedule, both because of a post-wide “Safety Day” and because of the four-day Memorial Day weekend, so the Tower is scrapped.

Instead we do a lot more hanging around, sitting in the bleachers and bullshitting in between either Sergeant Airborne or some uptight student yelling at us to “shut the fuck up.”  And for the majority of our down time, I’m pretty happy, because being around Joe again is invigorating.  Though my description at the end of this essay might leave you somewhat hesitant about the kismet awaiting Joe, have no doubt – he’s someone you want on your team.  And Joe is funny.  There are two female ROTC cadets in our platoon, both under 21 and attractive.  They are the object of much affection, and watching and listening to the mating call of Joe is hilarity of the highest order.  One afternoon I overhear two Marines one-upping each other in their efforts to impress Female Cadet, the winner clearly the Marine who proudly states he once teabagged[3] an anthill for $100.

We’ve now spent almost eight days together, for extended hours, and the student appointed as my squad leader annoys me.  He’s a 39 year old National Guard E7 from Oklahoma, and though his hayseed routine was initially endearing, it’s quickly become tiring.  He is a brownnoser, a Spotlight Ranger, a suckass, a sycophant, and has chosen Airborne School as his forum to display his leadership skills.  He also lacks what we call “situational awareness.”  One morning, after several rear PLFs, a Sergeant Airborne asked us if we wanted to do more.  My E7 responded affirmatively, the only one of 500 students.  Not like in “hooah Sergeant Airborne, you can’t smoke me!” but like in “shucks Sergeant Airborne, I sure would like to practice one more time.”  Later in the day, while assisting soldiers, he began calling off everyone’s number before they slid down the apparatus, as if the Sergeant Airborne was illiterate (our roster numbers are painted in big black letters on both the front and back of our helmet) and the student was mute.  Here’s our conversation, verbatim:

“Sergeant, if you feel the need to call out each person’s roster number, then just have them do it.”

“Oh no sir, I’m good, it’s not bothering me.”

“But it’s bothering me.”

On the last training day before Jump Week, I lock my keys in my truck at approximately 0440 am.  We spend all morning in our Physical Training uniforms, first conducting a company run and then, for no apparent reason, walking through an outdoor shower.  This is fine for all the Army soldiers, not so fine for the Marines.  The Army PT uniform consists of a thick gray t-shirt and black water repellant shorts.  The Marine Corps PT uniform, on the other hand, is a thread-bare thin olive drab t-shirt and a pair of short silkies,[4] and the cold water additive has rendered the rest of us observers at an impromptu spring-breakish scene.  My Marine Corps platoon sergeant looks like he’s been shrink-wrapped.  I can tell his religion.  After about 20 minutes, he tells the formation that some people are a little uncomfortable around the wet Marines (I have to admit, it’s difficult not to stare), and tells all his mates to use their canteens to discretely cover themselves.  So now I have about 10 strapping Marines (they’re all Force Recon guys) walking around holding their canteens below their waist like fig leaves.  They look ridiculous.

We end the morning (and the day) with a platoon photograph.  We arrange ourselves from tallest to shortest.  I put myself in front of three or four guys who I’m fairly certain are taller than I.  My weekend safety brief to all the soldiers consists of “don’t be a jackass.”  I hope I can follow my own advice.

At 8:30 pm, about two hours after calling “Pop-a-Lock,” I am visited by a tricked-out Jeep Wrangler with no visible company logo.  Out steps a 350 pound kid in jeans and a sleeveless tee (not the homemade type, but purchased, indicated by the hemmed arm-holes), white deodorant residue both hanging from the hairs protruding from his armpits and spread liberally across the sides of his shirt, markings of the hard day’s work put in by his mammoth and pendulous arms.  He sticks an air bag into the door jamb of my truck, inflates it enough so he can reach a beefed-up clothes hangar through the crack, and then unlocks my door.  Sixty-five dollars for about thirty seconds of work – I hope jump week goes a little better.

Jump Week

Airborne Ranger, Airborne Ranger, how’d you get down?

In a T-10 Charlie, big and round.

I am not afraid.  Though I’m uncomfortable in the harness, I am not sweating.  My heart rate is normal.  I am essentially indifferent as the loudspeaker calls out “CHALK FIVE, STAND UP AND FACE THE AIRFIELD.  KEEP YOUR FEET AND KNEES TOGETHER AIRBORNE.  IT’S GO TIME.”

It’s about noon inside the chute warehouse, and an overhead door slides up, revealing a C-130 Hercules rolling up the tarmac towards us, her four turboprop engines whining noisily.  She turns the corner, the lowering tailgate visible through the combined heat waves from the ground and the aircraft itself.  We shuffle towards the back of the plane, entering in reverse order and passing two or three of our instructors, who will act as Jump Masters on our flight.

As soon as we are seated, the plane begins to roll, and Jump Master beings his routine.

“TEN MINUTES!”

Sixty of us call back, “TEN MINUTES TEN MINUTES TEN MINUTES!”

Jump Master shouts, “GET READY!”

It has not been ten minutes; closer to thirty seconds.  As he shouts his second command, the jump door of the aircraft rolls up, revealing the passing tree line below us, and the tenor inside the belly of the airplane changes significantly.  A soldier sitting across from me turns his head from the open door to me, his mouth and eyes wide open.  I give him the “OK” sign, and we sixty call back “GET READY!”  I smile at the soldier.  This will be a breeze, a walk in the park.  We are trained, we are ready, equipment always works, and we have a reserve anyway.

Jump Master calls back to us, “INBOARD PERSONNEL, STAND UP!”  We repeat it back to him, and the first five jumpers in the two inner rows of cargo net seats struggle to their feet.

“OUTBOARD PERSONNEL, STAND UP!”  I repeat his command as I stand myself.

“HOOK UP!”  Jump Master simultaneously makes a sign-language “X” with both of his hands, and we twenty standing jumpers move to unhook our static lines from our reserves,[5] placing them on the cable running over our heads.

“CHECK STATIC LINES!”  It is imperative that your static line go from the cable overhead, through your hand, and over your shoulder to the parachute on your back.  Underneath your shoulder is bad juju, so you first check your own static line and then the line of the jumper in front of you.  If all appears to be well, you tap the helmet of the jumper in front of you and tell him “safe.”  This is passed forward until it gets to the Jump Master, who then shouts –

“CHECK EQUIPMENT!”  We repeat the command while running our hands along the brim of our helmet, our chinstrap, the buckle on our chest and then on each leg.  The last man in line, after checking his equipment, slaps the backside of the man in front of him and yells in his ear “OK!”  The command is passed forward until it reaches the last man, who confidently thrusts his open hand into the face of the Jump Master and yells “ALL OK JUMP MASTER!”

The Jump Master slaps the jumper’s hand, then turns to the door.  He stomps down one foot, checking the stability of the ramp, then methodically but deliberately checks the door jambs for any protrusions or sharp edges – it’s a truly dramatic scene.  He then looks at the first jumper, affirmatively shoving his finger-extended hand in his face, and shouts “STAND IN THE DOOR!”  The first jumper then hands the Safety (a non-jumper there to ensure a smooth exit from the aircraft) his static line, puts a hand on each side of the reserve at his waist, and then turns so he is facing out the door.

I cannot see him (I am the eighth of ten jumpers on my side of the airplane), but I have no doubt his eyes are as big as Oreos, his pulse racing, breathing heavy, his brow littered with sweat.  But not me.  I am solid, coolly indifferent to jumping out the door.  The light at the front of the aircraft turns from red to green, the Jump Master shouts “GO!,” and we are moving.  I shuffle forward, hand the Safety my static line, and turn towards the door.

When one jumps out of an airplane moving at 130 knots 1200’ above the ground, one is supposed to exit the door by jumping up six inches and out thirty-six.  One is supposed to tuck one’s chin into one’s chest, keeping elbows in tight to the ribs and hands firmly gripping the sides of the reserve parachute hanging at one’s belly.  The jumper is then supposed to count to four – one thousand two thousand three thousand four thousand – then move hands from the reserve parachute to the risers of the opening parachute above his head.  Once the jumper confirms he has an open and untwisted parachute, he then looks for other jumpers, ensuring not only he is keeping a safe distance from the other jumpers, but also that he is falling at a rate of descent consistent with the other jumpers.  At approximately 100’, the jumper is supposed to reach up and pull down on the two risers in the direction opposite of any drift, keeping eyes squarely on the horizon.  One does not look down once below 100’, as he is supposed to “feel” the ground with the balls of his feet.  Once the jumper feels contact, he should execute his perfected PLF, landing expertly.

This is not how it works for me.  It turns out that I am totally and unequivocally mentally unprepared for the violence about to befall me.  As I move to exit the door, I am sucked out before I can get my first “thousand” out of my mouth.  My chin is in my chest, but only because the risers being yanked out of my pack have slammed my head forward, knocking my helmet down over my eyes in the process.  I have a tight body position – elbows in, feet and knees together – but only because I am scared shitless.  I can see a sliver of scenery from the underside of my helmet, and I watch it turn from tree to ground to tree to sky and back again.  I feel like a cigarette being flicked from a fast moving car.

I do not count to four thousand, mostly because my jaw is clenched shut but also because I am chanting, in my head, to the God of Agnostics: chute open chute open chute open chute open.  I stop tumbling, fix my helmet, and then look up to see my risers twisted.  As I was instructed, I quickly grab a riser in each hand, pulling apart as hard as my panic-induced arms will allow, and bicycle my legs like I stole something and my Schwinn is the getaway car.  I untwist, the risers parting to reveal a gloriously open, unobstructed, fully inflated chute.

She is beautiful.  I want to name her.  I think I want to name my children after her.  I sheepishly look around and collect myself, feeling like I just took a spill on my skateboard at a quiet intersection – did anyone see that? – and settle in to enjoy the ride.  I then notice that I am falling faster than everyone else in front of me.  This is not, I think, supposed to happen like this.  Shouldn’t the first one out the door also be the first one to the ground?  I crane my neck to see the jumpers behind me, but nothing – I am falling faster than them as well.  I look for the smoke pot on the ground, lit to help us see which way the wind is blowing so we can execute the appropriate PLF.  The smoke seems to be moving only upwards, directly at me, and I am falling only down, directly at it.  They did not teach me how I was supposed to land if I was falling straight down.

I hear a voice.  “AIRBORNE STOP LOOKING AT THE GROUND.”  I have no idea where the voice is coming from, and cannot see its source, but it reminds me to keep my eyes on the horizon.  I need to feel the ground as I land, first touching with the balls of my feet, then calves, then thigh, then butt, then pull-up muscle.  This PLF, I think, needs to be a good one, because I am falling really, really fast.

I do, in fact, feel the ground with the balls of my feet.  A microsecond later I feel the ground with my ass, and then, like it’s the tail end of a childhood game of “crack the whip,” I feel the ground with the back of my head.  I have skipped my second, third, and fifth points of contact but added a sixth.  I lay there for a few seconds, spread eagle, partially disoriented but mostly grateful to be on the ground and alive.  When I sit up, I see a Sergeant Airborne (the source of the voice I heard) sitting on a cooler, only about fifteen feet from me.  His right hand, holding the bull horn, is draped lazily over his right knee.  His head is hanging down, and I can tell he is laughing.  I give him a “what the f**k” look, and he swings the bullhorn up to his lips.

“ARE YOU OK AIRBORNE?”

“FUCK NO I’M NOT OK!  That hurt.”  He laughs.  He goes back to the bullhorn.  “YOU HAVE TO TWIST YOUR BODY AIRBORNE.”

“When?,” I ask.  Because there is absolutely no time between my feet and ass and head hitting the ground.  But there are already more jumpers floating down, so I gather up my equipment and start running across the drop zone to the staging area.  I am the first one back, by a good five minutes.

Jumps two, three, and four go much the same, though on my second jump I land on a packed road rather than the tilled ground, seeing stars after my head hits; on my fourth jump I am dragged across the drop zone for ten feet or so before I can unhook the chute.  I have no idea why I fall faster than everyone else – I’m really not that much bigger – but for all subsequent jumps I make sure I am the last one out the door so that I will not interfere with anyone else as I come down.  I still make it back to the staging area first. For each jump I am progressively more nervous, but loathe them all equally.  We jump twice on the first day and twice on the second day, needing only one jump on day three to get our fifth, and Airborne-qualifying, jump.

The last day comes early.  We have to be at formation by 3:30 am, and we silently run the mile to the airfield.  Once we get there we practice exiting from both doors of the mock aircraft and go through our practice PLFs for Sergeant Airborne – I am, admittedly, phoning it in at this point, as I have yet to have a PLF work for me.  We eat a cold MRE for breakfast.  We are in the harness – combat load for jump five – by 6:15 am.  This morning my squad will be on the second aircraft, and I am very much looking forward to being on the ground and out of this torture device of a parachute harness as soon as possible.  There are a limited number of Jump Masters, and they do double-duty both for the Jump Master Personnel Inspection in the harness shed and as the Jump Masters on the aircraft, so once we’re inspected, we can’t get back out of the harness.  I don’t drink water so I won’t have to pee, and pass time trying new ways to sit on the wooden benches to alleviate some of the pain.

The first jumpers are scheduled to get on the plane at 1000 hours, but the hour comes and goes.  Then eleven.  Today is overcast, and we need the clouds to be no lower than 1700’ – 1200’ is jump altitude, but we’re required to have 500’ of clearance.  I ask a passing Air Force pilot about the ceiling: Only 700’.  The clock reads noon.  The sergeant in charge (NCOIC) gets a waiver from the commander so we can jump at 1000’ instead of 1200’.  But the clouds are still only at 900’.  I volunteer to jump from 900’.  I volunteer to jump from 700’, 500’, whatever it takes to get out of this harness.  It’s now one o’clock.  A soldier two down from me passes out from dehydration.  We yell for Sergeant Airborne, two of us clumsily unhooking the passed out soldier from his gear.  The NCOIC unsuccessfully tries to get the commander to allow us to drop combat gear.  Another soldier wets his pants, the rest of us informed by the NCOIC conducting his end of the conversation with another Sergeant Airborne over the loudspeaker (“WHY IS ONE NINE EIGHT GETTING OUT OF HIS GEAR?”  Seconds pass. “DID HE GET THE PARACHUTE WET?”  More seconds.  “DID HE TELL ANYONE HE HAD TO GO?”).

At 1345 hours – one forty-five pm, and seven and one half hours after getting into the harness – Sergeant Airborne comes over the loudspeaker.  “CHALKS FIVE AND SIX, STAND UP AND FACE THE AIRFIELD.”  At this point, there is neither elation nor relief.  I want to get out of the harness but am, to be honest, fairly apprehensive about this last jump.  I will exit the door, no doubt, but I am not particularly looking forward to it.  We trudge out the door, wait for the aircraft, walk up the back of the ramp, and sit.

And then?  And then.  And then.  And then, over the airplane radio, music.  No, not music, but an anthem.  The anthem of my senior year of college, Everlast’s opus, that homage to kicking ass, self-aggrandizement, and yes, jumping around.  And why not?  Why not jump around?  I’m about to exit an airplane with fifty pounds of crap slung off my body like an overloaded bandito, and I deserve to serve your ass like I’m John McEnroe.  I deserve a little jumping around.  A smile replaces my grimace as I drift back to 1993, sitting on our dryer in the filthy basement of the Green House, my friends around me smoking a joint as we stare together at the wood floor above us, pulsating with the synched bacchanalian jumps of a hundred of our closest friends living the dream.  Over the plane radio it begins, pack it up, pack it in, let me begin, I came to win, and the Jump Master is literally packing us in.  He seats one of us, then makes us lift our rucksacks up as high as possible as he squeezes someone else into the seat directly across.  There is barely room for one person with a ruck, but he needs to squeeze thirty per side.  He makes everyone raise their hands in the air (get up, stand up, come on throw your hands up) as he shoves us to the back of the plane.  But I do not care.  I am 37 and have been sitting on a wood bench for almost eight hours and I have to pee and there’s a metal bar grinding into my shin and I don’t care, because across from me I see an ROTC cadet, a young kid looking all of his twenty years, mouthing – yelling – the words to Jump Around and I cannot help but be overcome because this is one of those days, one of those moments that doesn’t come around all that often but when it does, it reminds me that I really, really like what I do.

I exit the aircraft fifteenth of fifteen and am flung from the door like litter.  My chute opens – no twists – and I watch as I pass fourteen other parachutists on my way down.  I pull the release lever for my rucksack at about 200’, and it dangles on its cord thirty feet below me.  I find the smoke pot to gauge the wind; it’s pushing me to my left.  At 100’ I reach up and grab the two right risers and pull down as hard as I can, my eyes on the horizon.  I feel the ground with the balls of my feet, then my left calf, then my left thigh, my left butt cheek, and finally my left pull-up muscle.  I keep my elbows in front of my face, my momentum swinging my feet and knees – held firmly together – up and over.  I unhook the parachute and start to get out of my equipment, and hear a Sergeant Airborne through his bullhorn: “NICE LANDING SIR.”

I want to hug somebody.  Instead, as I reel in my parachute, I utter, under my breath, that one word I have heard over and over so many times the last three weeks, to the point I never want to hear it again:

Airborne.

[1] For this exercise, stand with your feet shoulder width apart, arms extended out and parallel to the ground.  Keeping your arms straight, move your hands upward until they touch, then return them to shoulder level.  This is a four count exercise – one, two, three (one!), one, two three (two!).  Do 200 of these.  Seriously.  Now do push-ups.  Now do more overhead claps.

[2] “Joe” is a slangy name given to soldiers of any rank below that of sergeant, and it should convey to you a vivid image of his idiosyncrasies.  Joe owns both an XBox and a PlayStation.  Joe took his enlistment bonus and bought an ’08 Ford Mustang GT, financing the balance with a double-digit APR.  Joe smokes – he’s likely to chew as well – and has a tribal tattoo on his arm and shoulder.  He owns denim shorts, and frequently sports them with a “Linkin’ Park” concert t-shirt and a DC skateboards hat.  Sometimes you have to remind Joe that he needs to wash between his toes.  Though he likes girls, Joe’s not real sure how to relate to them, and so is prone to do things like flicking or punching them in the arm, much like a fourth-grader lustily reacting to the early pangs of puberty.  Joe has a big heart, with which he isn’t entirely sure how to deal.  Joe works hard, and most importantly, Joe will do anything for his fellow soldiers (and by proxy, you), including but not limited to: lie, display common sense-defying acts of loyalty, steal, provide back-up in a fist fight, assist in the cross-border transportation of marijuana, and dive on a grenade.

 

[3] Recounting here the definition of “teabagging” is simply too much for me, so I’ll instead refer you to http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=teabagging.  Reader beware.

[4] Army Rangers and Special Forces wear shorts consisting of essentially the same material, sometimes referred to as “Ranger Panties.”  The shorts are typical of what you’d see on any world-class marathon runner, expect Marines and Rangers aren’t usually built like world-class marathon runners.  They’re built like, well, Marines and Rangers, and so the shorts are really, really short and really, really thin.

[5] The system works like this: inside the aircraft and a little over 6’ from the floor are two cables running the length of the airplane.  On each soldier’s back is a parachute, with a nylon “static line” starting at the bag holding the parachute intact, protruding out of the pack and then over your shoulder.  At the end of the static line is a metal hook.  This metal hook goes onto the static line, and when you jump out of the aircraft, the hooked line pulls the bag and parachute out of your pack.  You are hooked to your hopefully opening parachute by four “risers,” pieces of think nylon webbing that run from the chute to your harness.