A Man Named Dave (7 page)

I swallowed my dreams and my dignity and focused on applying myself as best as I could. Because of my years of working in various fast-food chains, I found the training classes boring. I blazed through the study materials while maintaining a near perfect score, and my hands-on skills surpassed the entire class. Whereas some of my peers would haphazardly throw their meals together, I would analyze every measurement, every ingredient, then time each move of whatever I was assigned to prepare for that particular shift. No matter what I cooked – a fluffy omelet with cheese oozing from both ends, perfectly crisp vegetables, or BBQ ribs that melted in one’s mouth – I felt I had somehow prepared the perfect entree, and I surged with pride whenever my instructor, or anyone who came through the food line, especially an air crew member, threw me a compliment for my efforts.

During my off-duty hours, while most of my classmates partied at the Airman’s Club, I maintained my vow of pinching pennies and stayed in the barracks. I buried myself in books about the history of the air force or adventures of combat flying. I soon became addicted and began to build my own aeronautical library, one book at a time. Every payday I would retrieve my crumpled shopping list of specific planes that, to me, had changed the course of history. I soon became a walking encyclopedia, and I wished that someday I, too, could make a difference in my new world of flight.

No matter what time of day or night, whenever I thought my mind would explode from the constant studying, I’d take long walks around the base. I would go to my postal box with my eyes widened. I would utter a quick prayer before speed-dialing the combination. At times I would become so frantic that I would spin past my number, and have to clasp the fingers of my right hand together to keep them from shaking. But even before I flipped open the box, I knew the outcome. It got to the point that I’d shrug my shoulders as if I didn’t care. Just as I had years ago in Mother’s house, in order to protect myself I’d turn off my emotions and remain tough inside. So I’d simply take a few laps around the air base and return three or four more times, hoping that someone from the post office had made a mistake, found my misplaced letter on the floor, and stuffed it in that precious box. For the most part I’d become numb, for I’d know that tomorrow was another day.

One day during my lunch break, I decided not to check my box. I dared myself to stroll past without giving it a thought. The disappointment had become too much. I got only as far as five feet before I spun around and hurried back. Seconds later my fingers trembled as I pulled out a crumpled, soiled letter. With my mouth gaping open, I focused on the childish scribbling. My heart raced as I tore open the envelope. I impatiently scanned the length of the paper but lost my grip, then stood paralyzed as I watched it flutter to the floor. The distinctive penmanship belonged to Father.

From behind, a friend woke me from my trance when he bent down and picked up my letter. “What’s wrong?”

I took forever to form the words. “My … ah, my dad … he’s not doing too well.”

My friend shook his head. “Hey, man, don’t sweat it. Parents they get old, but hey, his old lady can take care of him. Come on … shit happens.”

No!
I wanted to scream.
You don’t understand…
But before I could justify my fears, my friend became lost in the crowd of other airmen retrieving their mail and letting out whoops of joy as they clutched their prizes over their heads. I lowered my head and disappeared in the opposite direction. I wished I had never received that letter.

I wandered outside, found a bench, and sat down. It took me more than half a dozen tries to comprehend the contents of the letter. The more I digested, the more my heart sank. Father had written that times were very tough for him. He could no longer find part-time work either washing dishes or filling in as a short-order cook. Feeling ashamed, Father gave up on asking friends to stay at their home for a few nights at a time. With no one to turn to and no money, society’s old hero was now alone with no place to live. I wanted to mail Father some money to ease some of his pain.

Rereading both the envelope and the letter, I frantically hunted for the return address, but there was none. Father’s handwriting had always been barely legible, but this letter was almost impossible to read. Nearly every sentence was incomplete or rambled on without any conclusion. Words were either misspelled, jumbled, or ran off the page altogether. I concentrated so hard on Father’s writing that my head began to throb with pain. Suddenly it struck me: he probably had been drunk when he scrawled out the letter. That had to be the only conclusion. That would explain the condition of the soiled envelope, his penmanship, and, more important, the reason he forgot a return address.

In the blink of an eye I became furious. I was so ashamed of the life Father was living.
How,
I wondered,
could he be so foolish to keep drinking?
He had to realize his binges – his entire lifestyle – would be the death of him.
Why?
I yelled at myself.
Why couldn’t Father just quit once and for all?
He had been so courageous as a fireman; why couldn’t he muster the will-power to deal with something so relatively simple?
How hard was it to throw away the bottle?

I closed my eyes, replaying the countless times Father had nearly passed out, literally on top of me, with his eyes blood-shot and his clothes reeking from days-old perspiration and spilled drinks. Dad had always promised that he would someday, somehow, take me away from Mother’s evil clutches. But even back then I realized it was the booze talking. As brave as Father had been on the job, he had no intention of crossing Mother. Sitting outside the air force barracks, I felt utterly helpless. To me, Father wasn’t a bad man.
Maybe,
I justified,
Mother’s fury forced him to drink.
Maybe … his drinking was his only outlet to deal with… ? “Oh, my God!” I cried out. What if Father’s boozing began as his way to escape all the hell between Mother and me? What if I was the reason for Father’s drinking problem?

My body shuddered from humiliation. My thoughts swayed between the intense guilt of Father’s plight and wanting him to find the determination to help himself. I thought if I was the reason for Father’s alcoholic condition … then I was responsible for the family’s devastation, my parents’ separation, and for Father’s downfall at the fire station;
I was the reason for his current condition.
The sudden wave of shame was so overwhelming that I began to weep. In some sense, in the back of my mind I had always known this. As a child, I knew I was the bad seed. Somehow I had made everyone I had come into contact with miserable. As an adult, I had to make things right – buying a home for Father and me was not enough. Who knew what condition Father would be in by the time my enlistment was complete? I was the only one who could ease his pain, and I had to do it now.

I decided to wire Father some money. Even if he used the funds to buy booze, I didn’t care.
Who was I,
my conscience argued,
to judge a grown man when in so many ways I was still a pitiful child?
After all the hell I had put Father through, this was the least I could do for him. If the money helped to numb his loneliness and despair for a few hours, then so be it.

After I reached a definite decision, my fingers quit shaking. I wiped my tears away and stared at the crumpled envelope. Seconds later I shook my head in disgust after remembering that Father left no return address. “Goddammit!” I exploded. “Why?” I cried as I clutched the letter. “Why is my life constantly plagued with so much bullshit!” When my own mother tried, for twelve years, to kill me, I never fought back. I never ran away. I had just taken the abuse by adapting every moment of every single day to surviving. And foster care was no breeze, but I made the best of it. As a teenager I’d worked my tail off while normal kids were having the time of their lives. While scores of others waltzed into the recruiter’s office to enlist, it took me forever to join the air force. When my lifelong dream of becoming a fireman was shattered because of some foul-up in the paperwork, I bit my lip and pressed on. And now I couldn’t even help my father because he had no address or no phone number for me to call. I couldn’t even disturb Mother and beg her for information on Father because I have been excommunicated from
her precious family –
I was not worthy of the privilege of having her unlisted phone number. As I sat and stewed at my latest predicament, I so badly wanted to be anyone other than David James Pelzer. I covered my face with my hands as if to squeeze an answer from my brain.

The only alternative I could think of was if Father by some chance wrote me again. Maybe then he would scribble his address. Whenever I was faced with overwhelming, impossible odds, I always turned to God. As a child I always felt guilty, begging for His time to help me, but now I pleaded for God to keep my father safe and warm. Mostly I begged for God to somehow ease my father’s pain. “Please,” I whispered, “do what you can to protect my dad. And please, deliver him from all evil. Amen.” After pleading with God I discovered that a film of snow covered my fatigues, the bench I was sitting on, and the entire air base. Even though the tips of my fingers had turned purple and my ear lobes raged with pain, I somehow felt warm inside. As I stood up and walked back toward the barracks, a howling wind blew in my face. I didn’t blink an eye. “It’s up to God,” I said to myself. “Only He can save my father now.”

Days turned into weeks, which turned into months. As much as I waited, as much as I prayed, I never heard from Father.

After graduating from specialty training, I was transferred to my permanent base in the Florida panhandle. Just as my counselor in basic training had boasted, I expected to serve in a typical setting while overseeing civilians who ran the kitchen. But it was not meant to be. I was stationed with a combat engineering group, which entailed spending most of my time laboring under the cover of a tent rather than simply monitoring others in an air-conditioned building. I dreaded rolling out of bed in the early morning, before driving over an hour, in the middle of nowhere, to the field site, and work straight through without a break, then finish the day at eight that evening, only to repeat the cycle the next day. I detested the job, and I felt as worthless and degraded as I had when I lived with Mother.

As always, I swallowed my pride and rose to the challenge. However, as much as I tried, it seemed that I could do nothing right for my two hard-nosed supervisors, who berated me every minute of the day. I refused to cave in. Because I had a hard time getting the field burner units, which cooked the meals, up and running in time, I had to begin my day at three a.m. rather than four-thirty. By the time others showed up to begin their shift, I had almost everything cooked and on the serving line and ready to be dished out. But that was not good enough for the sergeants. When I accomplished that feat, I only found myself being chewed out for something else. Every week, it seemed to me, the harder that I’d focus on my tasks, the more I’d screw up. I seemed to be in the middle of a never ending cycle. It never failed: I always had everything under control, right up until the moment the sergeants peeked in on my progress, only to find me fighting off my latest blunder. A short time later I discovered I was the only cook preparing all the meals, while the sergeants and other airmen seemed content to watch me sweat away.

Then one afternoon, out of the blue, my supervisor, Technical Sergeant Campbell, a towering black man who always bellowed at me while his gleaming white teeth maintained a vise lock on one of his huge cigars, called me for what I thought was another lecture on my shortcomings. “I tell you, Airman Pelt-der, you a working fool,” he stated with a wide smile.

My eyes dodged down at my splattered boots. “I’m trying hard, Sergeant Campbell.”

“You need to understand, squadron’s job’s to build bases from nothin’ and fix runways in the event they’ve been damaged after an enemy attack. Runway’s not fixed, planes don’t take off. Mind can’t be on business of buildin’ and fixin’ if everyone’s hungry. It’s that simple. You get what I’m sayin’?” I nodded my head. “I get you to work hard, to see if you quit. That’s why I ride ya. Ride ya hard. Gets the job done, that’s all that matters to me. We’re in this together. You still needs to work on adjusting that attitude, though. Ain’t no shame being a cook. I know you want something else; you can do whatever you like in the future. But for now you stay with us,” Sergeant Campbell said. “You done good! No need to be ridin’ on your behind no more,” he stated with a grin as he slapped me on the back.

It was then that I understood why I had been constantly harassed and forced to carry the load more than others: I was being tested. I let out a sigh.
At least,
I told myself,
I tackled a job I detested and was willing to give it my best shot.
Above all, I knew that I would never give up and with my determination I would find honor.

A short time later I found myself on my first temporary duty assignment (TOY). Because of Sergeant Campbell’s faith in me, two peers and I were the sole cooks to feed a small group of pilots and support staff in a remote location. The two senior airmen and I worked from dusk to dawn, and our efforts were rewarded with praise. During my stay I began to feel a certain pride that I, in some small way, had contributed to a team effort.

That evening, while the other cooks cruised to the local bars, I stayed behind and studied one of my books. Part of the reason was that I felt enormously intimidated in front of other people. While others would tell wild stories of where they grew up and adventures in school or dating, I would become afraid, lock up like a statue and stutter. I couldn’t look at anyone in the face, let alone maintain eye contact long enough to tell a joke. So I had decided that I’d rather be alone than make myself out to be more of a fool than they already knew.

Hours later, after reading several chapters of my book, after filing away another written letter to Father that I would never mail, and after staring at the ceiling, I still could not fall asleep. For some reason something seemed to keep me from relaxing. I was wide awake even after my cohorts stumbled in and collapsed on their beds. As usual, whenever I’d become uptight about something, I’d doze off literally minutes before I had to begin another day.