Spent Shell Casings Read online

  The patrons filed out in their upset march, Mariveles to San Fernando, draped in department store cuteness and sweating from summer heat and the full effects of ecstasy.

  All accounted for, our convoy got back to the condo. The next day I gleefully broke the news of causing the code-enforced exodus. Laughs and an “it’s cool, we were ready to go anyway, hell I didn’t have to pay for that last round because of it, fuck yeah” was about the extent of it. That was last night and we now had more pressing matters at hand. Apparently someone had made contact with a group of girls from UNC at the club and we were all getting together for a lunch.

  It was about what I expected, a crowded bench table overflowing with specials and buckets of beer. Chris and Lane landing future lays while I dozed off as one of the girls talked to me about something I couldn’t recall a moment after.

  After lunch we splintered into smaller groups, hoping to knock out our own wish lists, then meet up at the condo later. Four of us left the restaurant in the car that had followed the jeep up the day prior.

  We were at a red light, stuck at a congested midday intersection. Sitting in the backseat, my ears began to pick up a screeching, pummeling noise—ending before it had even fully registered.

  An SUV careened the rear of the car next to us, exploding the back half. This lethal weapon, come to an abrupt and violent halt, was being driven by the type of drunk woman one would expect to see commit a hit-and-run at a Walmart.

  “Yeah!” burst from my mouth as I punched the headrest in front of me a few times. All of us quickly got out of the car and surveyed the tangled metal chaos. It spit gasoline, had a stuck horn, and a left rear blinker that looked about ready to throw out a spark. The occupants were an old couple. They stirred about in their seats, staring out the windows without blinking. The old-timer pushed against his door like a feeble child, or a Recon Marine after drinking a case of beer the night before stalks at sniper school in Stone Bay in July. Pulling and pulling on the outside handle, its stubbornness must have been a result of the crash. The car was completely locked, with gas leaking and some accessories still churning. The old man then gave me a look, almost a nod, giving me some sort of impetus to act.

  A few years prior, at a Halloween party back home gone terribly awry, I discovered my knack for breaking car windows with a horizontal, hip-engined elbow strike. I got my footing. His look of bewilderment only intensified as the glass burst around his face.

  “Just get my wife out” he pled, as I leaned over him into the car, unbuckling his seatbelt, and ripped him out through the shattered window. The smell of gas and sparky noises was no minor detail lost on me. Leaning back inside the car, this time much farther, I couldn’t undue her seatbelt, nor convey the verbiage necessary for her to do it herself. I scurried out and ran around to her door. Approaching EMS sirens made their way through the rubbernecking.

  Her window had to of been made of something different. With my forearm cut from breaking her husband’s window, blood slung about as I beat against the glass in vain. It was a skinny black kid, equipped in the urban regalia of a wife-beater tank top and cornrows, who dove in and fished her out of the driver’s side window. He was gone before the first cop car arrived. Was he an angel? Late for an appointment perhaps? Did he know from experience that his altruistic act wouldn’t matter worth a shit if a cop ran his ID and discovered the warrant?

  “This guy, this guys the man, bustin’ through a window like that with a fist,” said one paramedic to another. The portly Hispanic man wrapped my left hand as the old folks were taken into an ambulance on stretchers. He looked up at me. “You’re gonna have to go to the hospital too, sir. We can’t do anything for that cut.” That cut was a two-angle avulsion, almost a perfect right angle, which somehow grabbed a piece of the breaking window as it was in the process of shattering. After a Comm plan was made with the rest of the guys, and a shoulder shrug later, I was in an ambulance of my own.

  Placed in a general ER waiting room, I saw another old couple. My hand started to sting and blood was showing through the white. The old man, through a thick set of glasses was scanning my arms. Nothing uncommon. It was usually the very young and the very old who looked at my ink, then the man wearing it, in the way I’d originally envisioned at sixteen when I got my first one. His expression suddenly changed to a person figuring out that troublesome row of the crossword puzzle. Our eyes met. He smiled—endearingly, proprietary. An instant connection melted away so many things right then, his extreme age included. How I’ve seen this, as have others; a meeting of American warriors melts away the paltry details given to us forcefully by time.

  Truth be told, this phenomena is not limited to something finite as “American.” I am sure generations of military in other countries have similar if not exact sentiments as we have. Hell, and of course we can’t forget guerrilla fighters and terrorists. Some bearded Sunni, wounded in Ramadi in 2006, is undoubtedly adored by certain eighteen-year-old Iraqi males with the same palpable vigor and zeal that a private out of Marine Corps boot camp may have for the approaching commandant.

  He spoke with a calm southern accent, à la Andy Griffith. “How long you been in the Corps, son?”

  “About two years. Were you in?” I knew the answer.

  That’s what you were in.” his wife said to him.

  “I was a rifleman for the 2D Marine Division,” he said with a nod, crossing his arms.

  He’d fought in WWII. And once the conversation was opened, the flood gate of gold-painted memories poured. Country visited here. Buddy lost there. Got sick the day he picked up Corporal and had to be flown one hundred and fifty miles to remove his appendix. Eventually I drifted. I was on some decimated Western Pacific island, old rifle in my hands.

  “And then son I ended my time garrison on a flag-folding detail.” He said.

  “Oh, that is right.” His wife said.

  “It was an honor. The boys that died for that flag.” He said.

  It was more than acceptable for him to have done such a detail, the flag-folding—hell, it was almost cute. But somehow it rang true to me still, it was altogether proper for my generation of riflemen to scorn anyone doing such a job, and for no other reason than taking pride in something not on the front lines, or ahead of it.

  Listening to his virtuous stance on “duty,” my mind began to sink into my own moral conundrums.

  It’s a simple case of conflicting moral theory. The truth is I dashed out of our car and broke the window for the sheer excitement of doing so. Taking it all into consideration, was I a good person at all? Had I ever been? And how the more problematic when expanding the question to why I picked up the rifle for my nation.

  A crash course in some of the main features within moral philosophy:

  Deontology asserts that a moral agent is obliged by duty to others. This duty is a universal condition; therefore this theory aligns with the belief that right and wrong are objective. Deontologists will also generally argue that a moral agent’s intentions are what determine if an action is right or wrong.

  Utilitarianism asserts that a moral agent is obliged to act in a manner that does the greatest good and least harm. Proponents of utilitarianism generally argue that a moral agent’s intentions do not determine whether an action was a “good act” or a bad act” but rather the end state.

  Kant would have been so displeased with me, at least until I saw the fear in the man’s eyes. Before that moment, I was acting only to pleasure my own senses and lifelong love affair with the sound of breaking glass. I was amused by the accident, energized by it, in fact.

  But even if self-serving, it got me out of the car and into the one that looked to be ready to go up in a gown of flames. While a strict deontologist would say my intent was worthy of no moral praise, my actions did achieve the greater good. However, the utilitarian would have nothing for my delayed but eventual desire to help them, only the fact that they were helped. Interestingly enough, if somehow my elbow strike resulted in a
shard of glass cutting the carotid artery of the driver, killing him (and of course no fire occurred), then deontology would defend my actions via my good intentions, while utilitarianism would denounce the act as immoral.

  Years later I found out that if I’d reported the event to my unit, I would’ve been put in for some high-caliber award that is only given for “heroic” actions by Marines outside of combat zones. I never reported it, nor said a word to anyone, save the guys who watched me get hauled off in the ambulance.

  With all of us back at the condo, and on the eve of our return to Camp Lejeune, Adam decided to perform one of the most famous histrionics in all of Recon.

  Dick tricks: the act of manipulating penis and scrotum to resemble multiple persons, places, or things.

  The Sail Boat. The Fat Kid on a Trampoline. A few more and then it was time for the iconic Cobra. I had heard rumor of it before. Most of us had. He had a tattoo of the damn thing on his arm.

  Adam pissed up into his own mouth. The UNC girls stood motionless with their slight, nervous smiles. Personally, I think they were more taken aback by how entertaining all the rest of us thought it was. Usually the pop-collared, upwardly mobile college boys would do stuff like fallback on a pickup forum and express hyper-disdain for such provincial and gruff actions. But this was not the case. The same guys who’d wooed them at the club had since abandoned the status quo of identity-crucifixion, the sexual political correctness, abandoned the subtleties, and were applauding Adam as if not one vagina was in site.

  Adam spewed the piss from his mouth, an explosive stream right at us. . . like a cobra.

  10

  HOSPITALS, WARDS, AND JAIL CELLS

  “Men have called me mad; but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence—whether much that is glorious—whether all that is profound—does not spring from disease of thought—from moods of mind exalted at the expense of the general intellect.”

  —Edgar Allen Poe, Eleonora

  SUMMER 2011

  My sojourn in a VA psych ward occurred during a period in my life that was as formidable in its pallid malaise as the hospital itself. Told that the ward was located under the Alzheimer’s wing, I envisioned lunatics clawing and moaning at the ceiling while demented types clawed and moaned at the floor, talking in some terrible found language, wrought from their agreeable abnormalities.

  Upon reaching the mopped floors of its entrance, I was no longer in control of my own destiny, and in fact hadn’t been for some time. The claustrophobia of “custody” shook me a little, as a passed under its shadowy arch.

  That period in time, twisted and queer, became all the more so due to my need for numbness. I had always possessed a keen ability to turn so drastically inward in times of duress that I felt little, pain included. Occasionally referred to as “hard” or the possessor of great mental strength; for good or ill, this ability was what carried me so far. This time, however, I had completely sunk in my inversion. I wandered into oblivion and was perhaps rewarded at times for the dark trek. I needed to be numb. The realization, powder-burned into my face; my own shortcomings assisted in a swift crumble. I went from Warrior to that of emotional unavailability, vicious irritability, and bouts of an unparalleled restlessness that would bend the very space and time around me. These unpleasant attributes had laid my former self into its tomb, and I had become the most senseless of wanderers after.

  When suicide inevitably places itself on the workbench, it is up to the individual. Some take it, some don’t. For me, and to my best estimation some others, a term that I am apparently the original source for has served as a motivator to stay in the land of the living. Antaganomorphism: assigning adversarial agency or behavior to phenomena with emphasis on obstacles and conflict. This gets so many through the bullshit. That Hemingway’s pride of beating the odds, fighting the “it,” sticking it to the impersonal “thems” of the world. The sensation of personally battling, outwitting, or convincing an opposing agent is a powerful internal mechanism to prove oneself, not to themselves but to an outside entity.

  Bu what happens when that motivator dies, that pride pushing your corpse through the ringer finally fades?

  Beyond the incessant buzzing of my GPS monitor and the lack of sleep, the only real annoyance with the ward was that the place had no sharp edges. It was some fun house of horrors designed to prevent suicide via hanging from the horizontal top of a door or apparently running into the corner of a wall. It wasn’t long before I got in some nurse’s face. My proclamation of discontent was soon followed by the administering of a mysterious and monstrous green pill. Thorazine maybe. Swallowing this pill and the subsequent swaying gait back to my room was the last moment of coherence for the next twelve hours or so.

  In my room, alone and temporarily unmolested by the hourly well-being checks, I discovered there was door in a far corner behind a small, rounded desk. Somehow it had eluded me the first few times I’d stormed in to sit on a rounded chair and clench my fists. Coming here had done nothing but make me realize how bad I wanted to leave. Perhaps the only feeling stronger just then was my curiosity.

  Flinging open this door, I was standing at the entrance to an odd, long corridor, lighted by dull candelabras. Desire to leave the ward was replaced by a stiffening paranoia. Stepping inside and fighting an instant urge to turn and run, wanting to go only as far to discern the end; yet it was impossible. The farthest lights showed nothing of the passage; they could have been stars suspended in a void, and I became certain they were exactly that. The passage led beyond the psych ward, beyond the hospital, beyond the city surrounding it, beyond the entirety of the earth itself—to the land of Beyond—and of the dead.

  A face appeared in the wall. My only reaction was to punch it. My hand sank into viscous substance that felt nothing like drywall and particle board. Under a smothering mess of noise that sounded like engines whining, I heard a cry from the struck wall.

  Looking back the way I had come, less than the number of steps to get from the nurses desk to the game room, my mind howled. A terrible distance stretched to the door I had entered from. Uniformly, and with cadence, the lights in the intervening spaces went out in turn. Trying to run back, the floor nauseously gave way to the pounding of my mired feet. I toiled as if in a fen. The walls emitted pitiful sighs, as their corners that joined the ceiling melted to become a tunnel, or maybe a tube.

  Pops and gurgles, followed by smacking sounds, yanked my sight behind me. Protrusions in the wall writhed and undulated, occasionally separating from the original corpus, and flopped to the floor. Vague in shape, they crawled gawkily after me.

  I fought these images with the desperate belief that it was all a superbly bizarre reaction to conflicting medication. Surprisingly it helped, but the black figure that stalked behind the wall’s fetid spawn destroyed any remaining defensive tools of rationale. I averted my eyes, sure that if I gazed just a moment longer I would recognize it.

  I uprooted my legs from the slimy base and dragged myself out of the tunnel’s end. Fumbling from the prone to standing, I slammed the door, dry heaving at the thumps and soft hisses against the other side.

  I awoke on my back. On the narrow hard bed assigned to me, my blouse was torn wide and wet chest exposed; breathing the way a man does when rustled from a nightmare. I took in my surroundings, collected all the pieces, and then laid them out; scrutinizing the credulity of my senses. Looking over to my right I saw that in my unconsciousness they had bequeathed me a roommate.

  Word had bounced back and forward, from nurse to patient alike, that a suicidal criminal with an ankle bracelet was to be housed on site. Considering the place, which housed generations of combat veterans with a stunning brigade of mental health issues, one would think my presence would mean little. However, both the young doctor who referred to me as a “spent shell casing,” and the Midwestern-pederast-looking social worker with all the pitiful acronyms, informed me of my celebrity status within the fa
cility.

  There for being a retard, or a fucking pussy, I can’t remember which, this Baker Act was on the other bed in the room. Laying on his stomach and fighting an internal war—“keep looking at him because he already caught me staring, or look away now as a sign of courtesy, which improves my odds of not getting my neck bit”—etched itself into his face as his mouth hung wide. Blond, soft, and owning a ripe zit indicative of his young age, he froze in his nervousness.

  “Are you going back to jail when you leave here?” He asked looking at my ankle.

  Looking at the sweat still beading on my skin, I replied, “You mean prison.” It was hard not to smile. The pharmacological warp had run its course, returning me to the world where dark forces weren’t found lurking in gooey tunnels but rather in state-sanctioned paper trails. Fucking with this timid kid was the first enjoyable experience I had had thus far. He nodded absentmindedly, closed his mouth, turned his head away from me, and laid it down on his pillow.

  The next day I would be let out, soon after experiencing the screeching halt that comes with instantaneously breaking away from high-dosage, mandatory antidepressants.

  My last night in the ward was much different than the other. No green pill. No lurid, metaphysical wayfaring. I watched a group of veterans in psych ward scrubs play Monopoly into the wee hours of windowless morning. I heard a country song from the game rooms high-bolted, box television that made me miss, all at once, a childhood I’d known and a woman who I’d never. But before all of that, before Whitechapel Road got a hotel, Community Chest, or a Southern belle with traffic-light eyes sang about death, a barrel-chested Army vet, who’d gloated how he’d been surrounded in a movie theatre by a SWAT team just two nights prior, took control of the snack cart line. He didn’t fuck with the ankle bracelet man. I would receive the first PB&J, ensured my Beta-male roomie got his, and used the scenario to practice custodial politics for the real thing—in the big house—a fate that would not come to pass.