THE FEW TOO MANY

I was a high school no-body, did not date much, did not join in school activities, did not do my homework, and did absolutely nothing in class, except just attend, I attended well. I did not have many friends, my lunch hour was spent by myself, with books on physics that I never understood. The teachers were not aware of my existence, and to be fair I was not aware that they existed, with the exemption of my English teacher because I tried to kiss her. It is difficult to forget or deny rejection, I hope the world remembers me.

At home I did not suffer any discipline, my parents were known for their temper tantrums, but once the temper tantrum had come and gone there were no side effects, no judgement calls, no moral lessons that lasted, everything was momentary, instant, and forgotten. I grew up by myself, I thank them dearly for this; both mom and dad left us to grow up by ourselves, accordingly, our current miseries are largely the product of our own doings. I have seen a thousand other childhood’s, and I have observed countless parenting styles, I would never prefer any of them over the one my parents gave me, none! I was free, occasionally mother or father would go on a rampage, I was in a jungle, I was free, occasionally bad things happen in the jungle, but you are always free, freedom is worth freedom!

And so it was that other than reading fiction and science, I did not know anything, except that I wanted to be a fighter pilot. Not because I wanted to kill anyone, but because I wanted to fly that fancy hardware that went supersonic, that charged into the heavens, the breached the envelop, that broke the edge and perforated the sky, I wanted to blast myself as close to space as possible, to escape the bonds of earth and make love in weightlessness, to, as they say, to touch the face of god. I wanted to join the airforce.

How that was going to happen I had no idea, I never gave it any thought, all I did was say it to myself, I mastered plane trivia, I could tell you about velocity, range, how difficult it was to fly, the F-4 Phantom was a brick, the F-104 Starfighter, razor sharp but would not suffer fool pilots gladly. The SR-71 Blackbird, a breathing fuel menace, a heat storm, fastest jet alive, fly it, and you get your astronaut wings; and the damn thing is only a sonic camera. I was going to join the airforce.

There was that thing math, calculating coordinates, tracking your drift ration, mapping yourself by starlight, I counted on global positioning satellites, I did not need calculus, why at the time, and even today, the higher math of fractions had not been touched by me. I know algebra and calculus only by name, and I suspect that an isosceles triangle has something to do with trigonometry and that I only know because they both start with a “T”. I surmised that to figure anything out all I would have to do was push a button. Our generation was not into changing its own oil, we wanted to push a button for everything, the cold war was fought because a button could be pushed, we were trained that at the push of a button you could have anything, and it is because of that mind set that so many of today’s pushbutton devises have come into being. Our generation silently automated the world.

A friend joined the Marine Corps, I don’t remember his name, he wanted to be a policeman, so he joined because he thought that it would look good on his record. He wanted to be a particular kind of cop, a highway patrolman, the guys that pick dead people from their car wrecks if they did not have their registrations or rack us in the slammer for drinking bearableness into our lives. He wanted to be one of those guys because his older brother was one of them, and his father was proud of his cop son that was always trying to find the wrong in people. Unfortunately my friend was not good enough to be a cop, fact is, he was mentally unstable, sure he had indeed a massive inferiority complex which was a requirement, but he was not mentally stable enough so as not to cross examine himself, he would not qualify. One time I had the pleasure of talking to his father on the phone, he basically told me that his son was a complete disappointment, nurturing 101. The inadequate boy joined the few, the proud the Marines. Last time I heard from him, if I remember correctly, he was driving a delivery truck. I suspected that he would probably speed a lot so that he could chat with those highway patrolman of the sky.

One day he called me up from boot camp to tell me that I would never make it through that hell. I laughed at him, I thought he was insane, but I immediately went to the Air Force recruiting office and took the exam to join; I failed the test, as I knew I would, how can you pass a test when your teachers don’t even know that you exist. But to be fair to them, I am incapable of learning, I am untainted by knowledge, even if they had wanted to teach me something, it would not have mattered.

The Air Force, to their credit, would not have me. I walked over to the Marine Corps office, and took their same test. They were under their quota for the month, that much was evident, they loved me, this soldier thing would put his malicious arm around my back and pronounce that he would make a Marine out of me. Damn, I could be something, maybe they will have chocolate shakes too, I mean, they really like me. I took the test, I failed. No, no, no, soldier boy was not going to accept failure, he was a can make quota kind of guy, he told me to take the test again, I did. Match the square to the square, which of these items more closely resembles these items, if you take eight apples, and eight oranges, and eight artichokes; iron is to ore what shit is to pig farms, what is one fifth divided by three thirds, and multiplied by n, n being the whatever. The questions did not dance around my mind for long, I never really read them, to me multiple choice just means that you have to pick one of the letters, the answer will take care of itself. And a thousand hail Mary’s I passed. The principle of passing: On your first test the Marines give you the benefit of the doubt, on the second test they just pass you.

After letting a few doctors touch my genitals as they philosophized on the demerits of being flat footed, I caught a flight to San Diego, a republican strong hold, a navy town where navy seals are trained to be superman by the sea. The sincerity of the nightmare unfolded on the bus from the Airport to the base. All the others were nervously chatting away, I remember rain though I may not be correct, I leaned my head against the window of the bus and thought myself a remake of “Father why has thee forsaken me?” more accurately historically and now, “What have I done!” Immediately I missed home, my family has always been warm, passionate and loving, I knew I was not going home, I knew I was not going to a place of mad passionate love, the fact that cockroaches reproduce does not mean that they are passionate. I remember saying goodbye to everything.

When the bus arrived at the base, late into the night we got our first shower of screams, “get out! get out! get out!” and shouts, “what are you laughing at boy, what are you laughing at boy!” All accompanied by our massive silence, we were warned that we would not be allowed to fire back, that we were to be captives, that there would be terror and that we would be its victims. The sergeants, lower class success stories to themselves, were in their sadistic heaven, they were going to make men out of us, but before they could accomplish that task they needed to make little girls and mama’s boys of us all, to dehumanize us into the vermin that we truly were. Ah nothing like a good brainwashing session. Thanks to my childhood I was able to recognize this for the psychological game that it was, I silently told myself, “non of this is real, they are faking everything.” After few screaming sessions magnified by sleep deprivation, they finally allowed us to find the mattresses that the roaches had not taken and we crashed into a slumber that would find the morning to soon in coming; its manifestation heavenly pronounced by a soldier scandalously banging acoustic garbage can lids . I think I hear the drums, I was instantly awaken, but I wasn’t awake. In the back of my mind, war is hell, I knew I was never going to war, I knew that I would abandon ship, that myth of retirement ruthlessly kept me on board.

It would require countless pages to describe the three moths that were to follow, but I think you can imagine how severe they were if I tell you that this masturbator did not play with himself for almost three months. Well, but relief was to be had, on one of the final phases I had to climb a rope, as I climbed I found myself incredibly stimulated, the drill instructor was yelling at me to climb faster, well his urging was unnecessary because I was feeling a rush of sexual pleasure ascending the length of my vertebrae, finally rising erectus maximums into a volcanic release of draconian proportions. With all of my energy drained from me I reached the top of the rope, and then slid down burning my hands from the frictional speed of my descent, but I did not matter. When I reached the sandpit my drill instructor, upon seeing my exhaustion, got the urge to tell me to climb the damn rope again. I looked towards the top of that rope and though exhausted thought that I might orgasm another load of seamen off my ship, so I eagerly begun my second climb, remembering that the Marquee De Sade had noted the extreme ecstasy that can be had by hanging from one’s limbs, I had also read that hanged men get erections, pick your pleasure. But the second time around ecstasy was not responding and the cumbersome pain of forcing my strained muscles to assist my ascending motion, was a ludicrous exercise which thoroughly devastated my earlier pleasure.

For three months, we were gassed, my lungs still cringe at the memory, we climbed Mt. Mother Fucker, we jumped, we kicked, we stabbed big puffy human dummies with our bayonets, while yelling kill, kill, kill! The water Buffalo emptied, we watched our dehydrated peers hauled off, in cinematographic perfection, by the truck load, one sweating body on top of the other and more. I watched people intentionally surrender into a ditch, I watched pride being built by foxhole digging and toothpaste, some of these guys learnt how to brush their teeth in the Marine Corps. The pride run deep, that we would be the first to fight, hurray! That congress did not have to declare war for the president to get us killed. Hurray! Did we want to climb Mt. Mother Fucker again? Hurray!

“From the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli, we would fight our countries battles on air and land and sea.” All the other services were nothing when compared to us; “if the army and the navy were to set their eyes on heaven they would find the streets are guarded by United States Marines.” Remember that I was raised a catholic, the idea that the Marines were God’s own must a had some appeal, you know, I was watching god’s back, sure I was an atheist then but for an atheist like me to make it as God’s body guard, that he was alive because I was watching his ass, was indeed no small accomplishment. And if you can save God from harm, well why not the entire country too.

I wish that I could tell you that they challenged my brain, but obviously that was not their intent, training and learning how to destroy and kill is the easiest thing to accomplish in the universe, young men, men in general have a natural propensity for this act, it is not an academic undertaking, it is merely a release of the masculine in us. But much to their instructional credit they managed to shut down any critical thinking processes. There I was to be trained to be a murderer for the American way. Surprisingly I did manage to score sharp shooter with the M-16 rifle, must a been the drifting wind playing with my bullets, I put a lot of bullets into the head of something 200 meters away. My machinegun run was not as successful, the damn thing jammed. Fact is that the M-16 rifle jams a lot, it was rare back then, for the thing to work properly, and a fear stricken boy can waste rounds without limitations which far exceed capacity. By good fortune, maybe the god thing again, our group was not allowed to throw real hand grenades, though I often lie to people and tell them that I did throw the real thing. We were told that a recruit in the platoon before ours never managed to pitch his grenade, it lit up nicely and kept him company for the rest of his foxhole nesting life, foxhole digging is so foretelling, anyway they restricted our group to dummy grenades until the incident was fully investigated. I assure you that the final report did not read, frightened boy got a grip of grenade with all of his fears and they would not let go. Corrective measures, make it look more like a rock and place a pseudo neighbor’s house full of windows next to it. Investigations are important in the military, everything gets investigated. That boy blowing himself up like that saved my life, I tend to get attached to destructive things.

So after they defecated all over us and told us what worthless ladies we were, then they made us march in procession and told us that we were not yellow, black, brown nor white but green, we were all green, and we would all fight together. And so all of us green men started to chant like a Baptist congregation about how wonderful Eskimo pussy was, even mighty cold, and how many goons we were capable of killing, and how we were going to kill, kill, kill, all the communists pigs in the universe. Who would have thought then that I would actually go forth to slaughter all the chickens in Hon Kong instead. After a few ladies dropped out of the race to be the best killers, they graduated the rest of us.

The most interesting part of the final week is that you are given your job title, a job is assigned to you based largely on how well you did on the initial IQ test; I suspected that I had outscored the proverbial wet rock, I was sure they would throw me to the grunts, infantry, the congregation ground for the lower classes. My number came up, I think it was 5051 or something like that, my drill instructor and I eagerly searched the code book, it was “Logistics.” My drill instructor gloriously laughed, I would have laughed too if I had known what the word meant, it sounded sophisticated, I repeated it to myself “logistics” it sounded like the ballistic trajectory to be followed by a projectile. My drill instructor hated me, he was laughing hard because he hated me, and he hated me because I had said that we would win the marching competition if another drill instructor, the chain smoker frantic fellow, would lead our troop instead of him, a wet potato. The wet potato led us and we won the competition. So when wet potato realized that I was going to be doing dirt work, he was thrilled, overjoyed, I watched his whale mouth open wide and his glittering gold fillings blinded me into an obscure silence.

I was not sure what the word meant, I knew that he was laughing because it could not be good, but I did not know what it meant; which goes back to the days when kids in school would ask me to repeat words that I did not comprehend, and then they would break a laugh, which nicely strings us forward to the day when standing on my foot locker, in boot camp, our officer in-charge asked me to “Pull your foreskin.” It was an order, you are to follow orders, “Pull your foreskin.” An order given and repeated in front of fifty, sixty or so of my peers, all standing stiff naked on their foot lockers prepared for the rectal and penile visual examination, these being performed by drill instructors and officers that had no medical expertise. And there I was, confused because I did not know what “foreskin” meant, and it was in front of all my peers that I learned the meaning of foreskin. At another’s foot locker, the duty bound officers and drill instructors: “pull those cheeks apart or do you want me to do it for you.” Ah the perks of being an officer in boot camp, all those assholes exposed to sunshine. I still remember the day when our chaplain, the man of the cloth, was giving a speech, and he went out of his way to note how fortunate we were to have such a handsome captain as our leader. Oh I don’t know if I was the only one that caught it, but that chaplain wasn’t just gently praising the He Man.

In the Mojave desert, they have a military base where the ground temperatures can melt the soles of your Italian shoes, fortunately no one in the military can afford Italian shoes. And it was there that I went to find out what “logistics” meant. Everything was always taught in relationship to grandness and bestness. “Privates listen to me, we operate the largest conveyors belt in the entire world, we own more warehouses, we have the largest logistics operation in this category, we can move an entire operation within 24 hours without…” I never saw the largest conveyor belt in the world move, which nicely made it also the largest idle conveyor belt; there is just not limit to the number of number one things the military is. Larger that the post office, most secretive, most misunderstood, most leathered footed, left foot first, largest government founded school for walking, left foot first. Everything they were responsible for was the most important thing in the whole wide world, and they were the best at doing it, none better. I was in awe. And come to think of it they were right, the military is certainly the largest employer in the world besides the government. For me it is impossible to see the differences between the two. These guys were not just bragging about their collective might, the only thing they could not brag about was their individuality, family life, affairs, though they were probably number one in the latter category too. And they, specially, could not brag about their paychecks, number one worst compensation package. All these number one’s made me a supply clerk. Rooming with three despicable people, training on how to inventory parts, “here is an invoice number, 234.77764646.989.99 now tell me what it means?” The distance from here to the moon? The matter anti matter misalignment ratio? Suzy’s phone number enumerated backwards to its lowest possible common denominator? I never paid attention there either, and no one cared, and no one noticed.

My first tour of duty would be to Japan for a year. I got a little closer to airplanes, I sat in an A-6 Intruder, a plane capable of taking out skiers at low level altitudes. Even worked for the legendary Black-Sheep squadron, as all legends, until you get there. My first week with the air wing, I was told to get some “flight line,” I could not find the flight line, so I went to my Gunnery Sergeant for assistance and he got the joke, me. It was in the military that I educated myself on the fine art of sarcasm, communication by other means, vengeance.

It did not take them long to figure out that I was incompetent and incapable of learning logistics, so they gave me the job of delivery driver, got me a big delivery truck. I would ferry the nose radar and the eight day clocks of those A-6s, racing through the base like speedy Gonzales. I was even on stand-by for part deliveries, the air wing had to be kept flying, I was an instrumental part of the American Defense Strategic Puzzle. At night I would park my truck behind the barracks where the glue snifters would climb into it, and glue themselves into a poor man’s nirvana. The rest of the gang would consume more interesting drugs and rocked themselves to sleep in sweat and saliva pits.

The local whores and bar owners loved us, if you can call the desire for money love. Some of the general populace would nurture friendships so that we would buy them goods and cigarettes at our discount stores. They were always overly polite and overly indifferent, but their indifference was indiscernible. A couple of times a year some of the suspected non-whores and non bar owners would parade protest our presence within the sovereignty of their emperor. We did not retaliate by pointing out that their constitution was written by Americans simply because we did not know it. So we were locked in our base, we stayed put. Ah the Japanese are such xenophobic elitists that the whores that screwed American men are avoided by Japanese men. A base closure would certainly have a severe effect on such enterprising women and their entourage. I never did find out how Japanese men know that their whores have been tainted by American males, must a been the cigarette smell. I was a Colombian, they can’t detect that shit.

A guy a few beds from me, drunk enough to forget closing his mosquito net, drowned in his own vomit and slept the good sleep. There were always drugs, fights, within feet of my bed, farting, gurgling, swearing, and rock music rusting the humid air in my ear canals. It was a rioting gang, I once commented that a guys wedding tuxedo was old fashion and I was nearly strangled to death. To save the world from the menace that we presumably were some captain, accompanied by the military police, took the time to make a surprise visit upon our hut, and literally read us the Riot Act! We were accused of subordination and a proclivity to mutiny. News to me, I was not aware that we were such an errant gang, being the bubble boy that I am my ignorance is comprehensible, still I think that, that captain was actually overstepping into theory. Shoot the people in the village square and you get promoted, Napoleon 101.

The gang got quiet for a while, that is the sort of thing that happens when that happens, we slept, we ate, we worked drugs and alcohol. Nothing changed. We were read the Riot Act. Imagine that, I am sure that, that guy is a congressman by now. My friend Jerry has this theory that in order to make it big you have to accomplish a lot of insignificant things. Without knowing Jerry’s theory at the time, I got into an affair with a navy wife that had two children. He was a medic, that kept him in the hospital while I played racquetball with his wife. They had two adorable children, fortunately I was incapable of feeling empathy, fact be told, at the time, I did not even know the meaning of the word. Eventually she would leave him and follow me to America, of course I had never intended for it to get so serious, it ended badly. I had the pleasure of getting into a fight with him, a day that I was terribly ill, he was able to claim victory. The gossip on base the next day was that, a sailor had beaten up a marine. It was a sad day for the Marine Corps which is why all those guys in Iwo Jima fly the flag at half mast inclination.

I ought note funny that her sailor-husband was unable to satisfy her, which was of course part of the problem if not the whole problem; she seemed to do quite well in the racket ball court, though she sucked at the game. But much to the credit of our knowledge base society, the therapist, during family counseling, told them that the reason that she could not climax was due to her sailor’s foreskin. Please don’t ask me how they arrived at this brilliant conclusion, I am merely repeating verbatim what she told me. Of course at the time I was satisfying her despite of my foreskin; a word I now comprehended better than ever. You know the Latin factor can cause everything to work upside down. Anyway the hilarious part of this, as if it wasn’t all hilarious, was that she could not tell the therapist and her husband that she had substantial evidence that foreskin wasn’t the problem. It thus came to pass that sailor boy had his foreskin removed, got a nice dose of pain killers and erection prohibiting drugs, which of course only added to the demands placed on me by his wife, and despite his heroic sacrifice, they still got a divorce. Double ouch!

After a year in the land of the rising sun, I got orders to move to 29 Palms California, a place about an hour or so from Palm Springs. Also in the Mojave desert, I gave up on the Italian shoes. You have to understand that being from Colombia I love greenery, I love lush green plants and vivid green trees, soothing jungles, California is a dry place, the draw back to its sunnyness, the hills here have yellow backs, and the plant life always has that feel of drying and dying, I am living cuddled within a famine, and of course the sort of plants that can survive our harsh environment don’t merit the attention of my visual cortex. Georgia O’Keefe paints the desert well, but in all of her paintings the overwhelming death of the land is despairingly omnipresent. Being from the tropics I don’t find cactus attractive, pricking menace, always telling you not to come near and yet seeming much like an average adult human, arms tirelessly flaunted into the air craving attention, but its pricking essence telling you to stay away. Tropical creature stuck in a desert, a desert of indecent perspiring. Your sweat evaporates, you are now a baking radiator.

This time I was to work supplying parts for an electronics school. Again it did dot take long for my supervisors to figure out that I was more of a problem than an asset so they would send me off to the most simple, distant and isolated jobs. This was just fine by me, I was a loner, this was precisely what I wanted. I got a desk in a cage, with parts in it, and the electronic gurus would come with an invoice and ask me to fill their orders.

But every now and then a good and kind act backfires. Here they were trying to keep me away from anything complicated thus beneficial to both parties, when they Colonel in charge of the electronic school, needed a driver and it was our troop’s turn to supply one. Obviously you always surrender your least desired asset, me. For six months I was to drive Colonel around, that is right from delivery driver to chauffeur. Soon enough the colonel, himself a fan of sport cars, would find that I had a lead foot. It was always a joy to watch him squirming in the back seat as my inconsiderate driving philosophy materialized with grand spectacle. On the way to the airport the colonel and I would argue about the shortest routes, and we never agreed but we always took my way. The undulating straight desert roads were made for speed. In the back seat the colonel was uttering macho expressions which would most closely translate to: “I want to live, I want to live.”

One day while on my way to Palm Springs to pick Colonel up, I made a gallant display of my driving abilities by passing the commanding officer of the Motor brigade, the pass was flawlessly reckless, and this after I had persuasively tail-gated his ass. It impressed me that this turtle, after my hasty pass, accelerated so as to catch me, I took it as fine challenge; only later I would learn who Mr. Mystery driver was, as he would suspend my license. Of course my beloved Colonel revoked his cancellation, which of course bonded us even more.

Later too, the Colonel would halt impeachment proceedings against me, the charge being that I had refused a direct order from a sergeant; and that I had called him an asshole. I pointed out to Lt. Colonel that I had not called him an asshole, I had merely asked my friend, standing next to me when the mundane order was given, I asked my friend, “Can he be an asshole and do that?” Hardly the same as calling him what he was. Further, I did not wait for my friend to wisely respond but instead, shouted my social security number aloud so that charges could be properly brought against me. I then left the base for a grand time in Los Angeles. I don’t know if it was the marvelous legal technicality, or the reality that I was an untouchable, but the charges were dropped. Incidentally they had also tried to remove my military license in Japan, for reckless endangerment of human life. I was driving a jeep with a trailer in tow occupied by my comrades in arms, and turning fast enough so that the wheels were able to acquire a slight degree of flight. That charge too was dropped, drivers are just irreplaceable assets.

I paint these scenes so you can see how deplorably mundane my existence had grown.

The driving assignment had its perks, I had three or four privates to manage in the delicate art of watering the grass and taking out the building trash. These boys would tell me their life stories combined with lots of lies, which some how always manifested themselves. One boy from Kentucky used to tell me how rich his father was, tale after tale of all the great things his father had accomplished, how the two had built roadsters that were equaled by none. His tales were always delicious, he had charisma, he sounded genuine. But then one day, I stumbled into a letter from his mother. As always when given the opportunity to snoop, I don’t pass it up, I tell myself it is my job to know the inner workings of our humanity, it would be a sin to deprive my curiosity. I read the letter, mother was telling him how father was still the town drunk, behaving like an total ass, and mother could not sustain the household for much longer. There was also something about a terrible uncle, the woman sounded like she wanted him to return home and rescue her. For sure after reading the letter he must have sent her money. It was so fascinating to listen to his stories after that, I enjoyed then even more, and to this day I think he was being sincere, I just did not know how, but he was.

But the boys did not always limit themselves to tales, sometimes they did not want to do the job of watering the grass. I would force them, “turn the sprinklers on,” I would say, and the smarter than me private would say “but it isn’t necessary,” I did not like his cross-examination of my orders, so I commanded him to water the grass, which he did, but then he told an officer that I was making him water the grass during a mid summer desert sun. The officer who was carrying a cross with my name on it for reasons that are better left unsaid, entered my office and asked me, why I was having the grass watered when grass does not grow in the summer, and specially not in desert summer. Damn, you see why I hate knowledge it is such a powerful tool and it can wreck havoc on a good power struggle, which was really what all us boys were really doing. I immediately walked outside and called private whatever off his futile watering assignment. Grass does not grow in the summer, what an epiphany, paint something black and then paint it white and it looks whiter because of it, such an incredible learning experience.

Colonel had an assistant Lt. Colonel that was sleeping with all the secretaries or, and female recruits. He had that Lt. Colonel badge and he was a very handsome fellow; I would watch as the women would crawl into his office and fall gently into his charm. Of course for an officer to be dating the enlisted was taboo, but everyone was aware of it, they just kept quiet. But women that join the military, mostly virgins back then, and mostly ugly, and mostly ridden with a complex array of mental problems, were, shall we say, easy. All those men.

Lt. Colonel and I both got involved with volatile women at about the same time. The one that I was involved with bragged about reading encyclopedias for fun, and one of the two that he was dating was just Calamity. Calamity was going insane in the military complex so she asked Lt. Colonel to help her escape, which he was obliged to do, and so they staged her insanity, less difficult to accomplish than it seemed, she got a medical discharge.

My own Insanity was expressing her emotional inability to cope with the Marine way of life, which to me meant then, that she would move out of my life, and this would be a good thing, she had an addictive personality; these young girls all thought that sex meant that they were going to be with that soldier for the remainder of a their lives on earth, while us males were philosophically applying diversity theory to relationships. Obviously it was a diametrically opposed association, bound to failure and birthing many spectacular tearing sessions, some one was always comforting someone, the girls would try to band together, the healthier few would become lesbians. In the final analysis we were all in the Marines because we were weak of character!

Anyway, I went to Lt. Colonel and asked him to help my beloved out of her tour of duty. He objected gently pointing out the impropriety of a senior officer participating in such a scheme. I persisted a little. Finally he just said there was nothing that he could do. I then boldly suggested that he might help her out as he had helped out my other friend, secretly his lover. He took my diplomatic suggestion to heart and gave me the outline for a medical discharge based on psychological disability. I was rather fortunate in that Insanity qualified. Of course she thought that we were staging the whole thing, we weren’t, she was nuts, got discharged accordingly, went home, a place that she had never been qualified to leave.

The colonel, for reasons that I can only guess at, often preferred to drive himself so I had plenty of spare time in my hands. Made a lot of friends chatting away my philosophical nastiness, often lecturing to the naive young men the horrors of military life, of training to kill something. I watched with dismay how often they would respond, “But Corporal don’t you think that we could learn something here that will better prepare us for civilian life?” I pointed out that the military was merely a welfare institution for losers, that everyone that stayed in the military, and thus became a manager of sorts, was unusually incapable of surviving in civilian life, they were just there collecting the easiest check to pick up in the world. I noted that there had to be nothing more horrific than the idea of being led by the most incompetent beings in society, and more atrocious, you could not cross examine their orders. But much to their benefit, they were immune to all of my pacifist preaching, this was because they were all able to pass IQ test that placed them far above the average Marine menace and Tolstoy. They were after all technology students, a bunch of 120 plus IQ’s which could reason away my grievances. Regardless of my ineffectiveness, I had just a grand time in the undesirable job of chauffeur. I think I was there for six months. Chatting with the Colonel must have given him the impression that I was more intelligent than most people suspected, so he master minded a career change for me.

At the time the Colonel was working on a huge project which would move all the students that were studying electronics, from the lock step system of teaching, that is, everyone at the same time and disciplined; to a self pace system of learning, meaning, as needed teacher assistance, progress at your own random pace. To me a fantastic idea, I was after all later to become an admirer of Ivan Ilych and Paulo Freire, both which admire the self learning skills inherent within all beings, but unduly obfuscated by the, learn what I teach you establishment. I was told by the colonel in charge of the project that the Airforce had tried and failed. The Navy had also tried and failed. But the Marines, The Marines pride themselves in succeeding where the other services fail, which translates to don’t learn from the experiences of others.

The Marines, are actually a part of the Navy, and when the Navy retires its planes the Marines inherit them as hand me downs. The Marine Corp is proud of its ability to patch up and fly what decent and intelligent Air Force pilots would refuse to fly because they are not idiots. The needed efficiency as mandated by the Salvation Marine Corps acquires a ludicrous humor, every year, at least while I was with them, it was tradition to give back a portion of the Marine Corps budget. It is a way of saying to the commander and chief, “We managed with less, we are saving you money and we are doing a great job.” Personally I would fire the accountant that keeps on ever projecting budgets.

Anyway the new self learning project needed programmers, and the Colonel decided that I could be one of the three, or four, Cobol programmers, for the new seven million dollar computer that we had purchased. Ah lady fortune shining on me. And all those logistics folks had to have a nice laugh when they heard that I would not be their problem anymore, and of course they must a thought the Colonel had lost his mind, but then they had suspected that much earlier. I ought to have been scared at the offer, but I wasn’t, and you know why I wasn’t scared? Because I did not know what a computer was, I did not know what programming meant, I did not know Boolean nor the difference between analog and digital. As is often the case my ignorance spares me many fears.

I got to my new job and before me was this small computer, with no pretty graphics that I could understand, an it would only accept words that meant nothing to me, format, delete, format, etc… but it had something that I could understand immediately, a word processor, WordStar. When the seven million dollar computer arrived with its 200 or so terminals, I knew that I had me a great a word processor, it never occurred to me that a word processor did not need that much computing power. Later in life I would work for Lanier’s copier division, a job that I would get fired from; completely their fault, during the hiring phase they gave me a test which I failed; the manager that interviewed me, a rich looking Gorgon with more confidence than his abilities could assume; this Gorgon, refused to believe that my charming self had failed the test, so he requested that I immediately take it again, only this time he locked me in a private office with a magnificent window. Taking my cue, I placed the test against the window, and the sunlight outlined all of the correct answers that were waxed sealed from me, I passed with flying colors. But it was at Lanier that I saw how little computing power a word processor or a Gorgon required.

That seven million dollar thing, was beautiful in an ugly way, she was a row of blue and black boxes about nine feet tall, a creature of somber silence, with diodes lighting up her panels like earrings light a woman’s face, she stood inside of a clean room that was temperature controlled with alert buttons everywhere should her ideal climate not be met, fans whisked away her heating elegance. She did not like to make sense, everything that came from her was cryptic and more immense with meaning because of it; all of us labored to understand her, when she did not accomplish the task that we had wished for, she would spit out errors in our code, she was never wrong, it was instead that we did not know her, we did comprehend fully how to communicate with her, she demanded absolute knowledge of her essence before she would concede us her analytical Siberian agility. So often we were wrong, so often we felt incompetent before her, so often we failed to know what she wanted, and no greater pain can be felt than our knowledge that she could accomplish no wrong without our assistance. We would feed her twelve hundred lines of code, she would spit back our errors in triplicate. And worst of all we could not talk to her directly, she would not allow it, she would not dare speak our language, we wrote Cobol a structured tower of Babel, a keypunch machine would translate it into holes on cardboard and this cardboard cards would be translated into one of her languages, which would then compile and recompile itself into her souls language, and it was the compiling into her soul’s language that created the bounty of errors we had to decipher. I had, till her, never met anyone so many times removed from my world, so complex in construction, so demanding of our attention, and her gifts to us so few.

Someone surely, we suspected, knew her well, perhaps her designers, perhaps those big men that brought her to us, and put her body’s essence together; circuits, circuits, red green lights, clamps to contain her, grills of metallic fury, magnetically disking her memory with spherical spinsters, memories that would not allow a spec of distance between themselves and their image of her, surely the master minds that composed her, could ask anything of her and she would not deny her creators. But she did. They all knew only parts of her, and not her whole being, and the portions of her essence that they were aware about were not enough to know her well, nor did they seem to be truly aware of the nature of each body part that tested and failed their expertise. She was as savage in action as she was sophisticated in being.

But of all those of us concerned with her well being, and with harvesting the fruits that she would not willingly bare, I was the most fortunate, the most privileged to be in her presence, and this because, of us all, I understood her least, I did not even understand what it was that we really wanted her to do.

The Colonel placed me in the Cobol programming training program, and I quickly realized that I was not going to be able to learn Cobol. That was not a language that I could understand, too strict, too unforgiving, to willing to refuse my advances, too absolutist, too set in its ways as I was in mine. There was nothing insane enough in it for me to relate to, it lacked paradox and labyrinth, she was difficult to talk to because she did not like Cobol any more than we did, she in fact hated Cobol so much that only the compiler knew Cobol, and it was the compiler that would translate things into her language, and that is what she loved and understood, and I could not love a language which did not grant me core level access to her digital personality; I wanted to talk to her in sentences, and with my heart, the compiler would not allow it, and so it was that my many attempts at learning how to program were thwarted by my incessant and insurmountable desires to kiss her technological ass, to keep her company while she was ruthlessly crunching numbers, blazing with her aphrodisiac formulae, dizzying my calumnious heart with her error proceedings.

No one at the white temple understood that my inability to program her was because I knew that we had gotten it wrong, and gotten the wrong her, and approached the wrong problem, I knew above all those orthodox preachers, I knew that we needed an emotional computing platform, a quantum computer that would be willing at least to consider that we, though wrong, could in fact be right, in some dimension, in some heart, in some manner, we needed her to try to understand us, to understand our demands and hungers and wants, and to sometimes, not so often, but just some times, for her to acknowledge that we were right in following our path. But her passions were not from the cosmic gas that formulates the universe, she was really cold to the touch and liked it cold, to see her we had to wear jackets so as not to freeze to death, so that our blood would not frost, so that our nostrils would instantly icicle, she was too dead, she liked the cold, everything that is alive is hot, and the more alive the hotter, and she liked to think in the coldness, that is why she did not deserve to work with us, to be a part of our solution. But I was the only one that understood that only a soul that would love quantum energy frying through her veins would make raging absolutions, what we were truly seeking possible. I gave up on her, I gave up on the white coats, I gave up thinking that I needed to understand her.

The guardians took notice of my absentia induced inability to relate to her, the sun was not brighter; they, being unable to disappoint the Colonel meant that they would keep me, so I was relegated to designing some screens, I don’t think any done by me ever worked, at some point the white coats were able to arrive at the same conclusion, but they were patient with me, kind even, pathetic for sure! had I been in their shoes, faced with a non believer like me, I would have ordered an execution, but they were cowards. Finally as a sort of exile from the group, and to intensify my suffering to equal their anxieties, they made me her night watchman. There she was, nourishing her instructions as she mandated. The console would beep for my attention, I would hear her blinking and thinking, the screen would say, insert me tape 19181818, change me disk 88443947, you see she was not self contained, a library of data was constantly being exchanged in her bowels, long nights with her, endlessly feeding her routine which only proved more that I had been right about her, only now I was stuck with her, in the “white” room, for entire nights, freezing in her adoring coldness. I eventually learned how to sleep behind her, away from prying eyes, I would run her reports, set her data feeds, she would take hours to think up errors, and so in between I would lay on the cold tile floor, and treat her to my snores. It was during those cold nights, pacing her monolithic indifference, that I started to type into her what would eventually become my words.

It was also during those long nights of depravity, that I learned her chess moves and repeated them to her, mirroring her until every new move followed the path which cost her to err in my favor. Her consistency was gruesome, a horror to my magnificence, a terror to my chaotic soul, but it brought her death, and more death, I could precision kill her, my check mates were guaranteed, my pleasure was not.

And it was during one of those days, when playing another pre-calculated victory against her, that our in-house master chess player came up to me, reviewed her doomed battle strategy, and decided to challenge me: “Why don’t you play a human being if you want a real challenge!” The human being was he, which I can assure you he was not, he was an emotional recluse, a semi bright programmer if measured against my incompetence; he thought himself educated because he religiously read newspapers and boasted trivial accomplishments. But that aside he was an astute chess player. Paint your opponent big before you destroy him and it doubles your victory. But he was really good. During lunch, we would gather around the board, winner stayed in place, and he was the one to beat. I always abstain from the games, for fear of being discovered as the worthless chess player that I am. But now he had challenged me and there was no way out. I sat in front of the board, feeling that Wellington had just asked me to my Waterloo.

But, there was fortune to be had, I don’t know what it is, but there are times that I can quantum dance on the chess board, I was also going through a celibate phase, all that energy was going somewhere, and so my fated defeat did not surrender. He threw everything at me, some how always I was able to save my men, and with that conflict avoidance strategy, I suddenly found myself without alternative but to check him, and mate him. His consternation flaunting itself, he could not believe that I was beating him, he demanded a second game, check mate, as much a surprise to me as it was to him, and a third game, check mate. I was so surprised to see all those check mates, but perhaps my sexual abstinence had brought me alertness. That day was a victory for quantum thinking. We were in her cold room, with her diodes acting sleepy, but I know the frigid thing felt my triumph!

Time dilated four years within the confines of a uniformed life, a life lacking the discipline it advertises, we were drug addicts, whore lovers, magnanimous curses, and naive about history, about politics, about our humanity. And all those things were what bonded us together into a fighting machine. Void of our characters and personalities we were the Corps. Some of us wanted war, and we wanted war because we suspected at the periphery of consciousness that our definition depended on war. The military is not at home in peace time, it is dying for a war, and it is dying without one, conflict unites and rises to murder the philosophical and spiritual conflicts of youth; but there was no war, more, for us there would be no war, we lived with the glory of those who sacrificed before us, we would not merit medals of action or monuments to our patriotic sacrifices.

My last day I was a bottle of joy, I drank to my freedom, I threw my uniform into the garbage, swearing never to wear such a hideous denouncement of my being, and drove out that base killing all the roadrunners that got in my way.