Yeah, that and more.
More? Fucking hot for more.
I was in a combat unit. I wanted to fight. You heard all the stuff going on and didn’t want to miss it. I had two big machine guns. A .50 cal and an M249. My first time out, we were just passing a village. I was in the lead gun truck. The hajis started firing at us. I turned the turret to seven, eight o’clock and unloaded on them. It was night. I couldn’t tell if I killed anybody. I felt like I had twenty cups of coffee.
I remember this one time, I tell Jay. Eastside at the gate. Sitting there, I had a .50 cal in the bunker. It was real quiet. Bunch of haji laborers waiting to come in. I heard a hiss right over our heads and then a whole wall blew to shit. Rocket or mortar, I don’t know which. A loud hiss, then boom! That was my first time, first taste. Where were you at?
F.O.B Concord.
That’s how I got all fucked up, I say. Going to Concord. Just outside Baghdad?
Yeah.
I look at Jay. Had I seen him in Iraq? I feel myself drifting, the memories crowding each other out. Jay’s voice slows and fades to a whisper, like I’d turned down the volume. I understand what he’s saying, but his words come to me in bits and pieces. I can no longer concentrate.
Maybe we have had this conversation before, I say.
One minute I’m in Iraq for nine months, the next I’m discharged and back home with Katherine and nothing in between. Our friends had this nonchalant attitude. They said, Hey, good to see you, what’s up? as if I’d never left. The closeness I’d felt over there, the you’re-in-Iraq, I’m-in-Iraq, we’re-in-this-shit-together-bitches, that was gone. I plastered Operation Iraqi Freedom bumper stickers on the back of my car. I wanted people to know, but I didn’t want to talk about it.
I couldn’t sleep. I felt dark, depressed. At night, I lay on my back without moving so as not to disturb Katherine and stared at the ceiling without blinking until my eyes watered. She’d get up in the morning, but I’d stay in bed and think about Iraq. Like this one patrol. We go into a building, barely make it through the door when we see grenades dinking down the stairs. Six of our guys try to get out the door and bottleneck themselves up. I see a little bathroom and get in the stall. Tink, tink, tink, boom! Those six guys, they didn’t make it.
Another time, funnier than shit, we were in Fallujah and an insurgent at the top of the stairs of this house shot an RPG and it hit the stair beneath Perez but nothing happened. It didn’t go off. Perez yelled, I can’t die! and charged up the stairs and blew that haji to shit. I laughed every time I thought of it, had to wipe tears away I was laughing so hard, and one morning Katherine heard me laughing, and she came into the bedroom and looked at me and started laughing too, like you do when you see someone laughing, and she wanted to know what’s so funny. So I told her about Perez, how pissed he got when that fucking haji tried to waste him, I can’t die! and how he sure the fuck did die on our way to F.O.B Concord, and she stopped laughing but I couldn’t. She didn’t get it. Then I stopped laughing. I wanted to grab and shake her, do you know what the real world is like? And then I started laughing again.
When I finished my alcohol program at the VA, I stuck pretty close to the house. I’d drop Katherine off at the supermarket and then drive away, forgetting about her. I took us to the movies, and when she asked me to buy her a Coke, I’d walk past the concession stand and wander outside and get lost in the parking lot and miss the movie. I’d go meet her for lunch at Buster’s in North Beach, where she waitressed, but then I’d turn down the wrong street and drive to the Mission. I’d stop at a Mexican joint and call her and ask where the hell she was.
After I botched our fifth attempt at a lunch date, she ripped into me. This time I’d gone all the way to Oakland and called her from a pizza joint. A coworker gave her a lift to come get me. One look and I knew she was in no mood for pizza.
She drove us back home to the Richmond. We didn’t say a word to each other. She pulled into the garage and I got out of the car and walked into the living room and turned on the TV. I wanted to be alone. Her anger crowded me, boxed me in. I saw things out of the corners of my eyes, turned, and they vanished. I heard her throw her purse on the kitchen counter and knock over something and my shoulders jerked at the noise, and then she stood in front of me blocking the TV. I was eye level to her waist. Her tan legs snaked out of this short summer dress. Her blouse rose up a bit and I could see her belly button. I didn’t feel so crowded then. I reached for her. She pushed my hands away.
Are you seeing someone? she said. Is that why you’re acting like this?
Hell no! I just forgot.
My heart started pounding like I was getting chewed by the LT for some dumb shit and my hands began shaking. She didn’t get how I could forget something like lunch again and again, and I didn’t either. I got it why she was so upset, but I didn’t like her shouting at me.
Do you remember how we even met? You forget that?
I remembered. I had stopped for breakfast at Buster’s a year before my enlistment. She took my order, two eggs easy, extra hash browns, two biscuits. We started talking. She had short, curly brown hair and a throaty voice I thought was kind of suggestive, and a smile that made me smile. I said we should see a movie. Maybe, she said.
It was love at first sight, I told her.
You’re such a character, she said and blushed. Then she got shitty again. I think you’re seeing someone.
Stop it, I said.
Don’t tell me to stop it? Who is she?
Stop it!
Tell me her name!
I’d had it with her shouting. I smacked the end table with my fist hard enough to make her jump and back away. I surprised myself, like a power surge had bolted up my ass without even a here-I-come. The word bullshit rolled around in my head like a marble getting louder and louder, faster and faster, and I pressed my hands against my forehead but I couldn’t stop it, and I screamed, Bullshit! Bullshit! Bullshit! and pounded the table again and again and the lamp fell and the bulb broke and I imagined all those pieces of glass rising in the air like shrapnel.
Katherine stood so still, eyes wide as plates, I thought she’d crack. I stared hard at her, balled my hands into fists, and laid a punch into the wall by the side of her head, willing myself just in time not to put it through her face. I held my hand and stared at it like it didn’t belong to me and ran into the garage. The air clung to me. I got in our car and spun out of the driveway, turned onto Lincoln Street and floored it for downtown with no idea what I’d do when I got there. I just wanted to go, get away, drive as fast as my heart was racing, but I hadn’t gone far, hadn’t even reached the Haight, when I rounded a curve and almost slammed into a line of stopped cars.
I stomped on the brakes and squealed to a stop, my heart a beating drum filling my head. What was the fucking holdup? I shifted into neutral, floored the accelerator to hear the engine whine, to hear noise, to hear it scream. I saw some flashing lights. I followed the car in front of me, riding its bumper with a desire to roll right over it, crushing it, and hear the metal break, beeping and pounding my hands on the steering wheel, keeping time to that marble still bouncing around inside my head, bullshitbullshitbullshitbullshit! A line of orange cones angled us into one lane and a cop waved us forward.
Sobriety checkpoint, he said. Keep moving.
I got sucked in, squeezed, cars on top of me front and back. One could explode at any moment. I cranked the radio. PSYOP would play Metallica to fuck with the hajis when we did house-to-house searches. Attention, attention, drop your weapons, someone would say through a bullhorn, and then they’d do this evil laugh. Then it was Metallica again on this big intercom thing. To keep the hajis from going to sleep and drive them crazy so they’d come out on their own and we could ripshit them to hell. I turned the radio louder until I couldn’t turn the knob.
I watched the cop in my rearview mirror while another cop checked on the guy in front of me. Then it was my turn. He leaned into my open window and made a face at all the noise. He yelled at me to turn it down. I didn’t touch it.
Having a good ol’ time, rock star? he said.
Yes, sir, I said.
He asked where I had come from.
Nowhere, sir.
My heart was hammering my chest into splinters. I needed to keep moving. The AC didn’t work. My window was down but sweat soaked my shirt. I opened the door to let more air in, my mouth dry as paste. The cop told me to close it.
Somewhere ahead of us I heard shouting. A squad car passed me on the shoulder of the road, stirring up small dust storms.
The cop shifted, moved his feet. I’m not going to tell you again.
More shouting up ahead and another squad car, going even faster, this one spitting stones from beneath its tires and hitting my car, tink, tink, tink. The dust exploded. Tink. I bolted from the car screaming and the cop grabbed me and we fell to the pavement and I clawed forward digging my fingers into the pavement. I knew what happened to prisoners. They got their heads cut off and shown on YouTube. I elbow-jabbed the cop and I heard him grunt. I rose to my knees and he knocked me flat with a punch to the back of the head and for a moment everything blazed white and then descended into deep black. He cuffed me. Another cop ran up and they both hauled me to my feet and the first cop shoved me against my car. I felt the hot metal burn my cheek, saw people leaning out their windows, the exhaust and wavering lines of heat making it look like their faces were under water.
