Life at 18
My 18th birthday was celebrated with Dad and Joan at a Memphis bar called the Hot Air Balloon. (This was the 18 years of age drinking age era). I ordered a Singapore Sling, because it seemed appropriately exotic, and downed two more before they took me back. I got into a terrible fight with Dad in the car because I was making typical grandiose statements of a naive drunk and as usual he didn't have the equanimity to allow someone to grow into a new experience. Harsh words were said, and he left the next day for New York (he was selling muffler franchises at the time) without any resolution. This sets the tableau for his return two days later. I picked him up at the airport; we hardly spoke a word on the way back. I was first to walk up the steps to the door; the house was empty since Joan was working and Lori was spending the night elsewhere. I walked through the threshold of the trailer door, and an invisible force picked me up off my feet and slammed me to the ground.
As with the description of what happened with my uncle Harry, this events makes a significant detour from what we collectively understand as consensual reality. In his case, I included the disclaimer that it was a third-person narrative shared with me. In this case, it happened TO me. I wasn't high, I wasn't drunk, I did not have a break from reality. More than this, I had a witness - Dad who was on my heels saw what happened. After being body slammed into the carpet, I felt an intense pressure holding me down. Dad was screaming "what's going on?" and then we both had a second paranormal intrusion - the lights flickered and a smell of sulfur assaulted both our nostrils. It was coming from Lori's room, and I could sense this terrible presence in the trailer. Dad correctly assessed we needed help, and thankfully was able to reach a woman by phone he knew who was extremely spiritually gifted. Her name was Anna Hazlewood; she had clear vision of the spirit world and as well could interact with it. She began praying for me, and within a few minutes I was able to move and the smell dissipated.
In time, a fuller explanation was developed. Joan prior to being with Dad was in a relationship with a woman who practiced witchcraft. According to other sources, she had placed a curse on him out of jealousy. The nexus of why that night I was attacked was this - Lori and Jodi had been playing around with some sort of witchery, such as a Ouija board or voodoo. This provided the portal for the negative energy from Joan's former lover to be expressed. Many things can be explained away, but what happened to me almost 47 years ago as I write this remains vivid proof to me that there are realities that transcend rationality.
Some real world negativity came into play when Joan's youngest child Eric came home from the military academy he attended full-time. The reason for him being there in the first place was that he was a hell raiser already at 13. Things never progressed for him in fact - he has been in prison several times for assault and robbery. But as soon as Eric came back I became invisible to Joan. This was understandable even to me at 18, but so many slights and outright shuns began to occur that I began to deeply resent my situation and long to be back with the rest of my family.
Now dad had lured me to come to Memphis with the promise that he would get me started in college. After I finished the classes and received my high school diploma, I asked for him to take me to the local college to register. He played dumb as if he had never promised this and said he didn't have the money. Okie-dokie, plan B. I would get a job and pay my own way. I had an interview scheduled that Joan had agreed to take me to, but the time came and went. Hours later, in traipses Joan and Eric who had been shopping. She apologized but then turned and left me again so the two of them could have "quality time."
I made my own quality time by packing the few things I had, walking to the highway and sticking my thumb up. 8 hours later, I was back in Fort Smith and walked to a new address on the north side where they were living after being kicked out of Allied Gardens for non-payment. This is an ongoing pattern in my life - it takes a long time for me to reach the breaking point, but when I do the wheels come off the bus.
The next day, I made a decision that has for better or worse defined much of my adult life. I went to the local military recruiting center, took the entrance test and qualified for the Air Force. Within a week, I took a bus to Little Rock to go through a day of physical and psych exams, and having passed those set my entry date for October 4th. Since I had scored quite high on the entrance exam, I had my choice of specialties I could train in, and I was excited to find that there was a radio/TV broadcaster slot open. I had held a wish to be a sports broadcaster for a long while before, so this seemed like a perfect fit. More on that to come.
There was one huge loose end to tie up before I left Fort Smith for, it would turn out, forever. The financial situation was as always dire for the family. Mom finally broke down and called her sister Judy, begged for help, and for once she responded, flying to Fort Smith to meet us and help them get set up in a nice apartment complex, paying for several months rent. It would be the first and only time I ever met my aunt, but I was always appreciative of that. When the day came for me to leave, it was surprisingly unemotional as the move I was making felt right.
Before we were sent to basic training in San Antonio, we had to make a one-day stop at Little Rock for final processing. I was brought to a cubicle where an airman was waiting with bad news: my slot at broadcasting school had been pushed back six months. If I wanted to do it, I would have to return to Fort Smith and delay my entry by that amount of time. It wasn't an option for me to do that; I was ready to be free and live my life. I asked for options and was presented several, one of them being medical lab technician. It sounded better than the alternatives, so I chose that. And yet again, a significant part of my adult life was heavily influenced by one decision made in seconds, as I will later expand.
My first airplane flight was from Little Rock to Dallas, then a transfer for a second flight to San Antonio. The next six weeks were a blur of the insanity that has been well-described by so many others, so I won't go into extensive detail, but there are a few incidents that still stand out 42 years later. One major positive change for me was getting three nutritious meals a day of what to me seemed to be an unlimited menu of quality and quantity. I laughed at people who criticized "mess hall" food; they had obviously never had to starve before like my family had far too often. I put on extra pounds quickly even though every day was full of marching and physical exertion.
I was woefully out of shape even though I wasn't really fat, so physical fitness was a challenge for me. Hazing was a big tool the training instructors used in that era, and I was singled out early as someone who was holding everyone else down due to poor performance. All it took were two instances of everyone else in our flight of 40 people to have to do extra laps since I had fallen behind, for me to up my game. The standard was running 1 1/2 miles in combat boots in under 14 minutes. I began using every bit of free time, or "liberty" as it was called, to walk across the street to the track and do extra running. Within a few weeks, I not only was keeping up but was beating several other guys and on our formal timing day at the end of training I finished in the middle of the pack in 12 and a half minutes. This experience gave me confidence that I could achieve goals if I put enough effort into it.
Other episodes were funny or shocking. One of our TI's as they were called for short was a 30-something black man, Sgt. Stiggers, who had a fairly bushy mustache which seemed to press the USAF grooming standards because of its bulk. He was apparently very proud of it at any rate, as constantly twirled the ends while berating us for some imagined shortcoming (Note: Military basic training is 95% that - playing mind games with young people to see if they will break. The physical part is not nearly as difficult). Sgt. Stiggers had the habit of barging into our dorm and demanding "Fire!" at which someone was supposed to produce a lighter to fire up his cigarette (Yes, imagine a world when authority figures could fire up tobacco products indoors at a whim. Kinda makes me nostalgic). On this one day, he barked out his usual request, and a guy leaped to satisfy. What he had forgotten was he had turned his Bic to full flame, so when he struck it it torched a good foot into the air, and with a vaporous cloud of burnt hair the sarge's mustache was reduced in half. We were shocked, but not as much as the Sgt. who froze in place for 5 seconds from the shock. If only video had existed then, one taken of that moment would have been viral. Needless to say, that airman's life was a hard pull after that until the end of training
There was a bulky muscular guy in our flight named Ian who was from New York City and certainly carried himself with the stereotypical cocky attitude one would expect. He became a particular target of the TI's who seemed to delight in trying to provoke a reaction from him. To give some context to what would happen with him, just prior to our arrival at Lackland AFB for training, the CBS TV news magazine "60 Minutes" had done an expose of physical abuses recruits had suffered there in the past. Apparently there were no rules before to limit aggressive contact, and there were many who had suffered disabling conditions because of it. There had been strict limits imposed going forward in response to this; however, the instructors were allowed to defend themselves IF attacked first. This one day, we were standing at inspection of our lockers, which involved four assholes with God complexes hovering like peregrine falcons ready to attack prey, each of us being challenged verbally with scathing aspersions to our discipline and manhood. The point was to see if any of us would break from the rigid stance of attention from letting our emotions over come us. At my locker, they accused me of various rule violations, two TI's screaming in each ear, but I kept to the script: "Yes sir! No sir!"
When they moved to Ian, the intensity was amped. He made the mistake of arguing with one of them. This particular short TI had what seemed to me to be a Napoleon complex, as he took the resistance to be a direct throw down against him.
"SO YOU WANT TO FIGHT ME YOU FUCKING PUSSY?. HERE I AM, DO IT, FUCKING HIT ME!"
That was one order Ian should have never obeyed. As I and I'm sure everyone else watched out of the corner of our eyes, he hit the TI with a powerful short jab and he went down. This was like blood in the water for sharks who had been confined to cages, but were now suddenly freed. Billy clubs appeared in the other TI's hands and Ian's screams filled the dorm as they began to destroy him him with heavy blows. When the grim event was done, he was a bloody mess, moaning incoherently until medical attendants came to pull him onto a stretcher and take him to the hospital. After the TI's departed, none of us wanted to talk about what we had seen as though if we denied it we wouldn't have to deal with the implications.
The end of basic couldn't come fast enough for me, and I was thrilled to move on via bus ride to my training base at Wichita Falls, some 400 miles to the north. Sheppard AFB was a garden of delights for me compared to Lackland. The first shocking blast of freedom came when I ventured outside my dorm room {two to a room instead of a 40 man open bay) and saw a vending machine just around the corner that dispensed cold cans of beer for 25 cents! Since our school didn't start for a week, we were given light duty details that only took four hours and the rest of the day was free. The airman's club was just across the street from the dorm, and it was exhilarating to walk up, order a cocktail and listen to music without worrying about strict adherence to military procedure.
When classes began, the nineteen week-long academic part of training - first chemistry, then microbiology and hematology, then finally blood banking - was very easy for me, and I would eventually rank 3rd out of our class of 21. (This ranking came into play with a pivotal decision a few months later with yet another confirmation that our destinies are indeed ruled by the "Butterfly effect" - the broader outcomes of our lives are more often than not dictated by the smallest decisions).
I quickly found a comfortable niche in the pecking order and made several friends. I decided to switch dorm rooms and room with a charismatic guy named Jim who was selected to be the student leader of our 2nd shift classes for the entire medical squadron, which numbered over 120. This gave us a few privileges not available to others, because I was also the flag bearer for our marching formation, and as such we were excused from morning detail the others had to perform and we could go back to sleep after eating breakfast since our formation didn't fall in until 11:30. Girls, though probably only 20% of the student population, were now freely talking to me and I to them so that was a welcome change from high school and I began to slowly climb out of my regressive shyness.
I made a quick trip for Christmas to Fort Smith where I played Santa for my brothers and sisters, and had to get back before the New Year commenced. On the 31st, bored and more than a little curious, I went to a massage parlor, as they were called then, just past the front gate of the base. I didn't really know what to expect - maybe a hand job at the utmost - but the sensations of the first female hands on my body, having never had a massage before - were more than worth the $25 I paid for the hour. Nearing the end, the girl who was in her mid-20's, cute if not beautiful, asked if I wanted "something more." Expecting the handy I agreed. I was shocked when she stripped her clothes off and for the first time I saw a live female in the nude.
The next 30 minutes were a blur. Yes, protection was used (provided by her since I had no clue this could possibly happen); yes, it was full consummation; yes, there was a quid pro quo for her "extra" services; yes, I was happy to lift the yoke of virginity off of me; no, I don't remember her name. As I walked back to my dorm, I tried to digest the experience. It wouldn't be the last time I had passionless relations with a woman, but even then I found the entire experience lacking ... something. Guess that's why I have always pursued relationships instead of brief encounters because sex just isn't satisfying enough as a strictly physical act devoid of emotion.
Now this little bit of TMI is done, I had multiple chances with other girls at Sheppard despite the M/F ratio being against me. Part of it was I was genuinely a nice guy and I think girls sensed that; another was I had physically became a bit attractive after shedding the pounds and developing more mature features. One who actively pursued me for awhile was Debbie, a waif under 5 feet who was very experienced and had burned through several guys even in our brief time at school. I was attracted to her, but was scared that I wouldn't be able to measure up in performance and would end up feeling inadequate. One weekend, a group was going to a cabin at nearby Lake Texoma and she specifically invited me to come with her. Once again, I was 15 year old Bob on the bus becoming scared when a girl came onto him. I told her I had other plans. She looked at me and said "really?" since there was an unlimited string of guys who would have jumped at the chance to bed her, and surely enough that weekend one did. I spent the days psychically kicking myself for being such a wimp, wondering if I would ever man up.
The next weekend, Jim and I had planned to go camping. I was all set, had rented a tent and sleeping bag, and then at the last minute he cancelled. For a girl. Ordinarily, I would have played it off this affront to the "bros before hoes" ethos, but after my previous stupidity I felt betrayed. As mentioned my class rank gave priority for me to select which second-phase training base I would choose to go to for nine months of hands-on lab experience. Jim wanted to go to Ohio since it was closest to his home in Iowa, and since he was my closest friend I was convinced to join him. I had already filled out my preference for that base, but on this Friday as I saw Jim take off with the girl, I knew I had an hour left before the deadline. I walked to the base office and changed my destination to Travis AFB in northern California. After returning on Sunday, Jim was shocked when I told him; everyone else was shocked on Monday when the official assignments were released since my being higher on the priority list knocked people out of their spots and sent them places they didn't want to go to. Needless to say I was the AntiChrist for a few days, and a few guys threatened to beat my ass although nothing came of it.
That one impulsive, emotion-driven decision had consequences I could never have comprehended at the time. My immediate and distant futures were shaped by it, since my following assignments after training were based upon where I was currently at. So, from Ohio, I possibly could have been sent to Florida; from California there were other exclusive possibilities. The lives of others as well: relationships, careers, etc., were to some degree significantly different than if they had gone to their original choice before I upended the apple cart. I will refer to this in later chapters to solidify this point, but I remain as convinced of the Butterfly Effect as I am of the presence of oxygen.
One quite funny event, though we couldn't laugh at the moment it happened, went down just a week before graduation. We assembled in our hallway for weekly dorm inspection as per usual on Friday, wherein our rooms, our grooming and uniforms would all come under scrutiny of the squadron commander Captain Poe. When the Cap walked around the corner, his second-in-command yelled out "DORM ATTEN-HUT!" We responded as always by clicking our boots together in the rigid attention stance. The vibration of 40 pairs of combat boots laying it in to the floor created a vibration wave, one that in this instance was powerful enough to vibrate the apparently-loosened front cover of the water fountain and cause it to fall with a "CLANG!" onto the floor.
All eyes turned to it, but the cover was no longer the subject of interest. It was instead the three baggies full of weed that some paranoid airman had squirreled away in the fountain's underbelly that had us bugging out. Captain Poe homed in, grabbed the bags and made an on-the-spot highly skilled deduction: "Marijuana!"
"Miller! Schlimmer!" We came rushing up at his behest. "Take this to Lieutenant Pennington in his office!"
We complied quickly, trying to suppress giggles as we flew down the stairwell. In Pennington's office, we presented him with the find. Now he was an unusual officer, as he always wore his hair beyond the boundaries of regulation and generally seemed to have an ironic attitude toward military life. It was rumored that he had been busted from first to second looie because of his own flirtation with the green goddess. His response was to open all three bags, take a deep inhale of each, and then calmly assess the situation thusly: "Looks like third floor is coming up with some good shit this year. Dismissed!"
We spun around after saluting, dove back into the stairwell, and lost it with laughter. We often wondered after that how much of the evidence DIDN'T make it to the police.
Having been car-less for a long time, I decided to buy a vehicle at the tote-the-note lot off base, and purchased a 1968 Subaru, which looked as though the maker had taken a VW Bug, reverse engineered it, then added some room at the back to avoid patent infringement.
I loaded my stuff and said my last goodbye to Wichita Falls, then had a two-week Arkansas stopover.
After enough drama, which there was always plenty of with the Millers, I cut my vacation short a few days and began driving to northern Cali. I had the absurd notion that, to save money, I would only stop at rest stops sleeping in the car for a few hours at a time. My resolve waned on the first night somewhere west of Amarillo, and I purchased a motel room. Feeling more rested on day 2, I whizzed through New Mexico and into Arizona. Somewhere before Flagstaff, I renewed my original plan and pulled into a rest stop around 10 PM. I quickly fell asleep but was awakened after only minutes. I felt in the most profound way a sense of menace emanating from just outside my window. Where I was parked behind the rest stop there may have normally been lights, but that night it was pitch black. By instinct, I turned the key and as soon as the engine caught I shifted into reverse and spun away from the visceral sense of danger. Back on the highway after a few more hours, I began to get drowsy but by this time I had passed the last outpost of civilization in northern Arizona, Flagstaff, and without a map to read I had no clue how far the next town might be. My drowsiness became more profound, and at some point I must have fallen fully asleep at the wheel.
I was jolted fully awake by the right side wheels fully bottoming out with the car half off the road. I instinctively jerked the wheel to the left to escape, but this sudden over-correction swung the car up on its left side at a 30 degree angle, and then just as quickly sling-shotted back to the right and the car began to flip. What has been so often said about these situations, that time seems to stand still, was to be both true and untrue. The sense of time was all of a second, two at the most, but my mind seemed to operate at a speed never before experienced. I saw what was happening that the crash was inevitable, and I tried to brace myself, while feeling a sense of doom, that I had fucked things up beyond repair. The last image I saw before I felt the concussion of my head hitting the roof as I completely flipped for the first time (it was later estimated to be four) was a bowling ball I had bought in Fort Smith before leaving flying past my head. Then there was only the blackness.
It's hard to estimate how long I was out in the desert night. I had been thrown through the windshield (safety glass not being that good in those days) since when the car was towed in it was completely pancaked, and if I had not been so, I would have died in it. This was only possible because I was NOT wearing my seat belt, due to being scared from a sleep state at the rest stop before. I do remember coming to at some point, feeling unable to move for a few seconds, and then an indescribable wave of pain knocked me out again. The next thing I saw was a man leaning over me saying "hang on, they're on their way, tell them it was a deer."
"Deer?" I replied. "No, it was rabbits." In the snapshot I saw before the crash, jackrabbits had come scattering out of the brush the car was rolling into.
The ambulance ride seemed forever. The pain was so great that I considered maybe dying was so bad of an option. I didn't know at the time I was quite unstable, with significant bleeding internally. After the assessment with x-rays and lab they put me in intensive care, and thankfully by this point the morphine had dulled the pain. The inventory was staggering - I was in critical condition with a fractured skull, severe concussion, ruptured spleen, kidney damage, three vertebrae cracked with a giant hematoma on my back the size of a large backpack, a broken scapula and nerve damage all over my back. My dad flew in from New York and the concern he wore on his face as I drifted in and out of awareness told me how iffy things were those first few days. After 48 hours, doctors told us the worst was over and I was now stable. My dad flew back, and bits and pieces of what had happened both on the physical and spiritual level began to re-emerge, and these continued over the next several months until I was able to piece together the full import of the event. More on this in my extended postscript.
After four more days, the doctors in Arizona felt I was stable enough to travel, and so the Air Force sent an ambulance to transport me first to the base at Las Vegas, then a few days later I flew on the medical flight to Travis. My recovery was long and quite painful. They weaned me off the morphine after a week, and my pain management was then by pills, which would cut the top off the pain but not the misery. The lump due to the hematoma on my back was enormous, and was the topic of conversations as many doctors were paraded around to look at it. One told me he had seen pictures of such a tissue injury in books, but never in real life until my case. After another nine days of boredom in the hospital ward, making my total stay in care over two weeks, I was allowed to walk out a somewhat free man, and though I still moved somewhat creaky and tentatively, I managed to navigate around on foot to the several administrative destinations to process in to the base and be assigned my dorm room. My baggage that was left intact from the wreck was waiting for me there and irony of ironies inside one of the boxes was the bowling ball I had last seen flying through the air as the Subaru flipped over!
I was allowed one more week of convalescent leave before I was released to return to work, so my adventurous self decided a brief trip to San Francisco was in order. Now I was much more world-wise than I had been before I left Arkansas, but nothing prepared me for what was to happen there. As I exited the bus there was a guy standing at the bottom of the steps as if he were a greeting party, but he had other notions.
"Hash? Speed? Horse? Downers?" he polled me and the other passengers as we walked off the bus. The casualness of it all struck me as bizarre. Clearly, San Fran operated by a WHOLE different set of rules than did Fort Smith. Hungry, I walked a block and entered my first Jack-in-the-Box, ordered and received my food, and had barely sat down when a black man with crazy looking hair trudged up to my table and greeted me thusly:
"Hey, baby!"
"Hey" I replied, wary of his intentions, as I well should have been.
"I'm gonna get my gun and shoot yo ass!" he declared like it was a normal interaction with a stranger at at fast-food joint. Suddenly not hungry, I grabbed my bag and bolted out without taking a bite. Shaken from the encounter, I tried to get my bearings but found myself going against a tide of hundreds of people walking against my direction on the sidewalk. Two women were running, and with fists pumped shouted in my face "LESBIAN POWER!" The commotion everyone was headed to turned out to be a Gay Pride event at Union Square, I was to find out later on the news.
To regain some sense of normalcy, I checked into the YMCA. The rooms were like small monk's cells with a shared shower room and the only television was in a community room in the basement. That night, I went down to watch the news then after there was a special event that apparently many of the residents were looking forward to: the first installment of the Frost-Nixon interviews. This didn't sit well with some of the ethnic boarders who wanted to watch an NBA playoff game instead. The verbal sparring turned to pushing turned to punches flying, and with no dog in that particular fight I escaped out of the building and found a pay phone. Dad had given me Uncle Harry's number in case I needed anything, and what I need then was an escape from the insanity of this big city that had overwhelmed me.
He invited me to come stay with him and I took him up, leaving on a three-hour bus ride the next morning and was able to continue my healing in a far less stressful manner. When I finally reported to my duty station at the hospital lab, I had to tell my story to virtually everybody as they had apparently been told that I may not have survived the wreck. That buzz died quickly and I was able to throw myself into the hands-on business of running lab tests. My birthday came quickly, and I bid a farewell to the most eventful year of my life with the hope that the next would at least be a safer one. Spoiler alert: it mostly was.
As with the description of what happened with my uncle Harry, this events makes a significant detour from what we collectively understand as consensual reality. In his case, I included the disclaimer that it was a third-person narrative shared with me. In this case, it happened TO me. I wasn't high, I wasn't drunk, I did not have a break from reality. More than this, I had a witness - Dad who was on my heels saw what happened. After being body slammed into the carpet, I felt an intense pressure holding me down. Dad was screaming "what's going on?" and then we both had a second paranormal intrusion - the lights flickered and a smell of sulfur assaulted both our nostrils. It was coming from Lori's room, and I could sense this terrible presence in the trailer. Dad correctly assessed we needed help, and thankfully was able to reach a woman by phone he knew who was extremely spiritually gifted. Her name was Anna Hazlewood; she had clear vision of the spirit world and as well could interact with it. She began praying for me, and within a few minutes I was able to move and the smell dissipated.
In time, a fuller explanation was developed. Joan prior to being with Dad was in a relationship with a woman who practiced witchcraft. According to other sources, she had placed a curse on him out of jealousy. The nexus of why that night I was attacked was this - Lori and Jodi had been playing around with some sort of witchery, such as a Ouija board or voodoo. This provided the portal for the negative energy from Joan's former lover to be expressed. Many things can be explained away, but what happened to me almost 47 years ago as I write this remains vivid proof to me that there are realities that transcend rationality.
Some real world negativity came into play when Joan's youngest child Eric came home from the military academy he attended full-time. The reason for him being there in the first place was that he was a hell raiser already at 13. Things never progressed for him in fact - he has been in prison several times for assault and robbery. But as soon as Eric came back I became invisible to Joan. This was understandable even to me at 18, but so many slights and outright shuns began to occur that I began to deeply resent my situation and long to be back with the rest of my family.
Now dad had lured me to come to Memphis with the promise that he would get me started in college. After I finished the classes and received my high school diploma, I asked for him to take me to the local college to register. He played dumb as if he had never promised this and said he didn't have the money. Okie-dokie, plan B. I would get a job and pay my own way. I had an interview scheduled that Joan had agreed to take me to, but the time came and went. Hours later, in traipses Joan and Eric who had been shopping. She apologized but then turned and left me again so the two of them could have "quality time."
I made my own quality time by packing the few things I had, walking to the highway and sticking my thumb up. 8 hours later, I was back in Fort Smith and walked to a new address on the north side where they were living after being kicked out of Allied Gardens for non-payment. This is an ongoing pattern in my life - it takes a long time for me to reach the breaking point, but when I do the wheels come off the bus.
The next day, I made a decision that has for better or worse defined much of my adult life. I went to the local military recruiting center, took the entrance test and qualified for the Air Force. Within a week, I took a bus to Little Rock to go through a day of physical and psych exams, and having passed those set my entry date for October 4th. Since I had scored quite high on the entrance exam, I had my choice of specialties I could train in, and I was excited to find that there was a radio/TV broadcaster slot open. I had held a wish to be a sports broadcaster for a long while before, so this seemed like a perfect fit. More on that to come.
There was one huge loose end to tie up before I left Fort Smith for, it would turn out, forever. The financial situation was as always dire for the family. Mom finally broke down and called her sister Judy, begged for help, and for once she responded, flying to Fort Smith to meet us and help them get set up in a nice apartment complex, paying for several months rent. It would be the first and only time I ever met my aunt, but I was always appreciative of that. When the day came for me to leave, it was surprisingly unemotional as the move I was making felt right.
Before we were sent to basic training in San Antonio, we had to make a one-day stop at Little Rock for final processing. I was brought to a cubicle where an airman was waiting with bad news: my slot at broadcasting school had been pushed back six months. If I wanted to do it, I would have to return to Fort Smith and delay my entry by that amount of time. It wasn't an option for me to do that; I was ready to be free and live my life. I asked for options and was presented several, one of them being medical lab technician. It sounded better than the alternatives, so I chose that. And yet again, a significant part of my adult life was heavily influenced by one decision made in seconds, as I will later expand.
My first airplane flight was from Little Rock to Dallas, then a transfer for a second flight to San Antonio. The next six weeks were a blur of the insanity that has been well-described by so many others, so I won't go into extensive detail, but there are a few incidents that still stand out 42 years later. One major positive change for me was getting three nutritious meals a day of what to me seemed to be an unlimited menu of quality and quantity. I laughed at people who criticized "mess hall" food; they had obviously never had to starve before like my family had far too often. I put on extra pounds quickly even though every day was full of marching and physical exertion.
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| My official 1st year portrait |
Other episodes were funny or shocking. One of our TI's as they were called for short was a 30-something black man, Sgt. Stiggers, who had a fairly bushy mustache which seemed to press the USAF grooming standards because of its bulk. He was apparently very proud of it at any rate, as constantly twirled the ends while berating us for some imagined shortcoming (Note: Military basic training is 95% that - playing mind games with young people to see if they will break. The physical part is not nearly as difficult). Sgt. Stiggers had the habit of barging into our dorm and demanding "Fire!" at which someone was supposed to produce a lighter to fire up his cigarette (Yes, imagine a world when authority figures could fire up tobacco products indoors at a whim. Kinda makes me nostalgic). On this one day, he barked out his usual request, and a guy leaped to satisfy. What he had forgotten was he had turned his Bic to full flame, so when he struck it it torched a good foot into the air, and with a vaporous cloud of burnt hair the sarge's mustache was reduced in half. We were shocked, but not as much as the Sgt. who froze in place for 5 seconds from the shock. If only video had existed then, one taken of that moment would have been viral. Needless to say, that airman's life was a hard pull after that until the end of training
There was a bulky muscular guy in our flight named Ian who was from New York City and certainly carried himself with the stereotypical cocky attitude one would expect. He became a particular target of the TI's who seemed to delight in trying to provoke a reaction from him. To give some context to what would happen with him, just prior to our arrival at Lackland AFB for training, the CBS TV news magazine "60 Minutes" had done an expose of physical abuses recruits had suffered there in the past. Apparently there were no rules before to limit aggressive contact, and there were many who had suffered disabling conditions because of it. There had been strict limits imposed going forward in response to this; however, the instructors were allowed to defend themselves IF attacked first. This one day, we were standing at inspection of our lockers, which involved four assholes with God complexes hovering like peregrine falcons ready to attack prey, each of us being challenged verbally with scathing aspersions to our discipline and manhood. The point was to see if any of us would break from the rigid stance of attention from letting our emotions over come us. At my locker, they accused me of various rule violations, two TI's screaming in each ear, but I kept to the script: "Yes sir! No sir!"
When they moved to Ian, the intensity was amped. He made the mistake of arguing with one of them. This particular short TI had what seemed to me to be a Napoleon complex, as he took the resistance to be a direct throw down against him.
"SO YOU WANT TO FIGHT ME YOU FUCKING PUSSY?. HERE I AM, DO IT, FUCKING HIT ME!"
That was one order Ian should have never obeyed. As I and I'm sure everyone else watched out of the corner of our eyes, he hit the TI with a powerful short jab and he went down. This was like blood in the water for sharks who had been confined to cages, but were now suddenly freed. Billy clubs appeared in the other TI's hands and Ian's screams filled the dorm as they began to destroy him him with heavy blows. When the grim event was done, he was a bloody mess, moaning incoherently until medical attendants came to pull him onto a stretcher and take him to the hospital. After the TI's departed, none of us wanted to talk about what we had seen as though if we denied it we wouldn't have to deal with the implications.
The end of basic couldn't come fast enough for me, and I was thrilled to move on via bus ride to my training base at Wichita Falls, some 400 miles to the north. Sheppard AFB was a garden of delights for me compared to Lackland. The first shocking blast of freedom came when I ventured outside my dorm room {two to a room instead of a 40 man open bay) and saw a vending machine just around the corner that dispensed cold cans of beer for 25 cents! Since our school didn't start for a week, we were given light duty details that only took four hours and the rest of the day was free. The airman's club was just across the street from the dorm, and it was exhilarating to walk up, order a cocktail and listen to music without worrying about strict adherence to military procedure.
When classes began, the nineteen week-long academic part of training - first chemistry, then microbiology and hematology, then finally blood banking - was very easy for me, and I would eventually rank 3rd out of our class of 21. (This ranking came into play with a pivotal decision a few months later with yet another confirmation that our destinies are indeed ruled by the "Butterfly effect" - the broader outcomes of our lives are more often than not dictated by the smallest decisions).
I quickly found a comfortable niche in the pecking order and made several friends. I decided to switch dorm rooms and room with a charismatic guy named Jim who was selected to be the student leader of our 2nd shift classes for the entire medical squadron, which numbered over 120. This gave us a few privileges not available to others, because I was also the flag bearer for our marching formation, and as such we were excused from morning detail the others had to perform and we could go back to sleep after eating breakfast since our formation didn't fall in until 11:30. Girls, though probably only 20% of the student population, were now freely talking to me and I to them so that was a welcome change from high school and I began to slowly climb out of my regressive shyness.
I made a quick trip for Christmas to Fort Smith where I played Santa for my brothers and sisters, and had to get back before the New Year commenced. On the 31st, bored and more than a little curious, I went to a massage parlor, as they were called then, just past the front gate of the base. I didn't really know what to expect - maybe a hand job at the utmost - but the sensations of the first female hands on my body, having never had a massage before - were more than worth the $25 I paid for the hour. Nearing the end, the girl who was in her mid-20's, cute if not beautiful, asked if I wanted "something more." Expecting the handy I agreed. I was shocked when she stripped her clothes off and for the first time I saw a live female in the nude.
The next 30 minutes were a blur. Yes, protection was used (provided by her since I had no clue this could possibly happen); yes, it was full consummation; yes, there was a quid pro quo for her "extra" services; yes, I was happy to lift the yoke of virginity off of me; no, I don't remember her name. As I walked back to my dorm, I tried to digest the experience. It wouldn't be the last time I had passionless relations with a woman, but even then I found the entire experience lacking ... something. Guess that's why I have always pursued relationships instead of brief encounters because sex just isn't satisfying enough as a strictly physical act devoid of emotion.
Now this little bit of TMI is done, I had multiple chances with other girls at Sheppard despite the M/F ratio being against me. Part of it was I was genuinely a nice guy and I think girls sensed that; another was I had physically became a bit attractive after shedding the pounds and developing more mature features. One who actively pursued me for awhile was Debbie, a waif under 5 feet who was very experienced and had burned through several guys even in our brief time at school. I was attracted to her, but was scared that I wouldn't be able to measure up in performance and would end up feeling inadequate. One weekend, a group was going to a cabin at nearby Lake Texoma and she specifically invited me to come with her. Once again, I was 15 year old Bob on the bus becoming scared when a girl came onto him. I told her I had other plans. She looked at me and said "really?" since there was an unlimited string of guys who would have jumped at the chance to bed her, and surely enough that weekend one did. I spent the days psychically kicking myself for being such a wimp, wondering if I would ever man up.
The next weekend, Jim and I had planned to go camping. I was all set, had rented a tent and sleeping bag, and then at the last minute he cancelled. For a girl. Ordinarily, I would have played it off this affront to the "bros before hoes" ethos, but after my previous stupidity I felt betrayed. As mentioned my class rank gave priority for me to select which second-phase training base I would choose to go to for nine months of hands-on lab experience. Jim wanted to go to Ohio since it was closest to his home in Iowa, and since he was my closest friend I was convinced to join him. I had already filled out my preference for that base, but on this Friday as I saw Jim take off with the girl, I knew I had an hour left before the deadline. I walked to the base office and changed my destination to Travis AFB in northern California. After returning on Sunday, Jim was shocked when I told him; everyone else was shocked on Monday when the official assignments were released since my being higher on the priority list knocked people out of their spots and sent them places they didn't want to go to. Needless to say I was the AntiChrist for a few days, and a few guys threatened to beat my ass although nothing came of it.
That one impulsive, emotion-driven decision had consequences I could never have comprehended at the time. My immediate and distant futures were shaped by it, since my following assignments after training were based upon where I was currently at. So, from Ohio, I possibly could have been sent to Florida; from California there were other exclusive possibilities. The lives of others as well: relationships, careers, etc., were to some degree significantly different than if they had gone to their original choice before I upended the apple cart. I will refer to this in later chapters to solidify this point, but I remain as convinced of the Butterfly Effect as I am of the presence of oxygen.
One quite funny event, though we couldn't laugh at the moment it happened, went down just a week before graduation. We assembled in our hallway for weekly dorm inspection as per usual on Friday, wherein our rooms, our grooming and uniforms would all come under scrutiny of the squadron commander Captain Poe. When the Cap walked around the corner, his second-in-command yelled out "DORM ATTEN-HUT!" We responded as always by clicking our boots together in the rigid attention stance. The vibration of 40 pairs of combat boots laying it in to the floor created a vibration wave, one that in this instance was powerful enough to vibrate the apparently-loosened front cover of the water fountain and cause it to fall with a "CLANG!" onto the floor.
All eyes turned to it, but the cover was no longer the subject of interest. It was instead the three baggies full of weed that some paranoid airman had squirreled away in the fountain's underbelly that had us bugging out. Captain Poe homed in, grabbed the bags and made an on-the-spot highly skilled deduction: "Marijuana!"
"Miller! Schlimmer!" We came rushing up at his behest. "Take this to Lieutenant Pennington in his office!"
We complied quickly, trying to suppress giggles as we flew down the stairwell. In Pennington's office, we presented him with the find. Now he was an unusual officer, as he always wore his hair beyond the boundaries of regulation and generally seemed to have an ironic attitude toward military life. It was rumored that he had been busted from first to second looie because of his own flirtation with the green goddess. His response was to open all three bags, take a deep inhale of each, and then calmly assess the situation thusly: "Looks like third floor is coming up with some good shit this year. Dismissed!"
We spun around after saluting, dove back into the stairwell, and lost it with laughter. We often wondered after that how much of the evidence DIDN'T make it to the police.
Having been car-less for a long time, I decided to buy a vehicle at the tote-the-note lot off base, and purchased a 1968 Subaru, which looked as though the maker had taken a VW Bug, reverse engineered it, then added some room at the back to avoid patent infringement.
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| Strange looking vehicle I chose to almost die in |
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| Me and the Fam, April 1977. Only surviving pic of all 5 of us from younger years |
I was jolted fully awake by the right side wheels fully bottoming out with the car half off the road. I instinctively jerked the wheel to the left to escape, but this sudden over-correction swung the car up on its left side at a 30 degree angle, and then just as quickly sling-shotted back to the right and the car began to flip. What has been so often said about these situations, that time seems to stand still, was to be both true and untrue. The sense of time was all of a second, two at the most, but my mind seemed to operate at a speed never before experienced. I saw what was happening that the crash was inevitable, and I tried to brace myself, while feeling a sense of doom, that I had fucked things up beyond repair. The last image I saw before I felt the concussion of my head hitting the roof as I completely flipped for the first time (it was later estimated to be four) was a bowling ball I had bought in Fort Smith before leaving flying past my head. Then there was only the blackness.
It's hard to estimate how long I was out in the desert night. I had been thrown through the windshield (safety glass not being that good in those days) since when the car was towed in it was completely pancaked, and if I had not been so, I would have died in it. This was only possible because I was NOT wearing my seat belt, due to being scared from a sleep state at the rest stop before. I do remember coming to at some point, feeling unable to move for a few seconds, and then an indescribable wave of pain knocked me out again. The next thing I saw was a man leaning over me saying "hang on, they're on their way, tell them it was a deer."
"Deer?" I replied. "No, it was rabbits." In the snapshot I saw before the crash, jackrabbits had come scattering out of the brush the car was rolling into.
The ambulance ride seemed forever. The pain was so great that I considered maybe dying was so bad of an option. I didn't know at the time I was quite unstable, with significant bleeding internally. After the assessment with x-rays and lab they put me in intensive care, and thankfully by this point the morphine had dulled the pain. The inventory was staggering - I was in critical condition with a fractured skull, severe concussion, ruptured spleen, kidney damage, three vertebrae cracked with a giant hematoma on my back the size of a large backpack, a broken scapula and nerve damage all over my back. My dad flew in from New York and the concern he wore on his face as I drifted in and out of awareness told me how iffy things were those first few days. After 48 hours, doctors told us the worst was over and I was now stable. My dad flew back, and bits and pieces of what had happened both on the physical and spiritual level began to re-emerge, and these continued over the next several months until I was able to piece together the full import of the event. More on this in my extended postscript.
After four more days, the doctors in Arizona felt I was stable enough to travel, and so the Air Force sent an ambulance to transport me first to the base at Las Vegas, then a few days later I flew on the medical flight to Travis. My recovery was long and quite painful. They weaned me off the morphine after a week, and my pain management was then by pills, which would cut the top off the pain but not the misery. The lump due to the hematoma on my back was enormous, and was the topic of conversations as many doctors were paraded around to look at it. One told me he had seen pictures of such a tissue injury in books, but never in real life until my case. After another nine days of boredom in the hospital ward, making my total stay in care over two weeks, I was allowed to walk out a somewhat free man, and though I still moved somewhat creaky and tentatively, I managed to navigate around on foot to the several administrative destinations to process in to the base and be assigned my dorm room. My baggage that was left intact from the wreck was waiting for me there and irony of ironies inside one of the boxes was the bowling ball I had last seen flying through the air as the Subaru flipped over!
I was allowed one more week of convalescent leave before I was released to return to work, so my adventurous self decided a brief trip to San Francisco was in order. Now I was much more world-wise than I had been before I left Arkansas, but nothing prepared me for what was to happen there. As I exited the bus there was a guy standing at the bottom of the steps as if he were a greeting party, but he had other notions.
"Hash? Speed? Horse? Downers?" he polled me and the other passengers as we walked off the bus. The casualness of it all struck me as bizarre. Clearly, San Fran operated by a WHOLE different set of rules than did Fort Smith. Hungry, I walked a block and entered my first Jack-in-the-Box, ordered and received my food, and had barely sat down when a black man with crazy looking hair trudged up to my table and greeted me thusly:
"Hey, baby!"
"Hey" I replied, wary of his intentions, as I well should have been.
"I'm gonna get my gun and shoot yo ass!" he declared like it was a normal interaction with a stranger at at fast-food joint. Suddenly not hungry, I grabbed my bag and bolted out without taking a bite. Shaken from the encounter, I tried to get my bearings but found myself going against a tide of hundreds of people walking against my direction on the sidewalk. Two women were running, and with fists pumped shouted in my face "LESBIAN POWER!" The commotion everyone was headed to turned out to be a Gay Pride event at Union Square, I was to find out later on the news.
To regain some sense of normalcy, I checked into the YMCA. The rooms were like small monk's cells with a shared shower room and the only television was in a community room in the basement. That night, I went down to watch the news then after there was a special event that apparently many of the residents were looking forward to: the first installment of the Frost-Nixon interviews. This didn't sit well with some of the ethnic boarders who wanted to watch an NBA playoff game instead. The verbal sparring turned to pushing turned to punches flying, and with no dog in that particular fight I escaped out of the building and found a pay phone. Dad had given me Uncle Harry's number in case I needed anything, and what I need then was an escape from the insanity of this big city that had overwhelmed me.
He invited me to come stay with him and I took him up, leaving on a three-hour bus ride the next morning and was able to continue my healing in a far less stressful manner. When I finally reported to my duty station at the hospital lab, I had to tell my story to virtually everybody as they had apparently been told that I may not have survived the wreck. That buzz died quickly and I was able to throw myself into the hands-on business of running lab tests. My birthday came quickly, and I bid a farewell to the most eventful year of my life with the hope that the next would at least be a safer one. Spoiler alert: it mostly was.
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