Beyond Nostalgia (20 page)

So badly I wanted to write Theresa, tell her how much I loved her, how sorry I was. But for a while there was never any time. I was more than two weeks into basic training before the opportunity finally came, one rainy Sunday in April. I still remember lying in my bunk that afternoon, staring dreamily out a fogged-up, rain-streaked barrack window, Bic in hand, struggling to compose one of the few letters I'd ever written. My mind roamed uncontrollably, like a writer's does when he tries to get down that all-important elusive first line of a novel. For the better part of that gray afternoon, my mind remained as blank as the sheet of Army stationery before me. Being enveloped in a barracks-raquet as I was, did nothing to promote my productivity. It was noisier than hell, no, twice as noisy since it all echoed off the walls of that outsized, cavernous single room. Fifty-odd GIs were letting off steam for the first time since coming to basic, playing grab ass, horsing around, snapping towels outside the latrine. Some of them bullshitted anybody who'd listen about all the women they'd never had. Some guys burn-shined shoes to mirror finishes, while others, the fortunate ones, wrote letters to their wives and sweethearts. Someone near my bunk had gotten a hold of a radio, and on it Barry Maguire was singing the hands-down greatest protest song of all time, 'The Eve of Destruction'. At the far end of the stripped and waxed floor, the brothers, as usual, were jiving the loudest, some of them singing and dancing to some James Brown stuff playing on a portable stereo.        

It was about this time, even though the wind had picked up outside pushing torrents of horizontal rain so hard at the windowpanes I thought they'd break on through, that I somehow tuned out all the commotion. I shut it all out completely the way only the young or the very old can. And then the words came. They poured out of me like I had cut an artery, my pumping heart forcing them through my veins, the words bled onto the paper: 

Dear Theresa,

Please, I beg you, if you get this letter, read it through. Just give me the few minutes it would take, and then if you don't want to answer, I promise I won't interfere with your life ever again.

First, I want to thank you for the time of my life. No matter what happens in the future, at least I'll always have wonderful memories of them. I can't tell you how special our time together was to me. I thought we'd go on like that forever. We probably would have if I didn't ruin it for both of us.

I am so sorry. I know saying that isn't nearly enough but, unfortunately, it's the best I can do. An apology is all I have to offer, but I mean it. I've never been sorrier for anything in my life.  I'd get on my knees, walk on them for a year, if it could make a difference. But, I don't honestly think it would because, if you still love me, you'll want to see me again. You'll answer this letter.

I'm not very good at writing or saying these kinds of things, Theresa. I haven't had much practice at it. The words in this letter can't no way express the sorrow that lives inside me.

Theresa, I would die for you. I love you more than my own sorry life. Please answer this letter. I pray you will. But even if you decide not to, I want you to know that you'll always stay in my heart and thoughts forever.

Loving you always,

Dean
                                                                         

Every afternoon at mail call my heart pounded a desperate cadence and my stomach tied itself into a tight, double-overhand. The other guys got letters from wives and sweethearts, but not me.  Every time Sergeant Killian called out my name, I'd try to appear calm and casual; totally incongruent with my feelings. I'd almost implode from the anticipation each time I stepped forward for my letter. But the envelopes with my name were almost always lilac colored, Ma's stationery. The stuff she'd mail ordered from a Franciscan monastery somewhere in upstate New York. Each time I got close enough to recognize the envelope, my heart would plummet like a blood-red brick. Then my hopes would sink deeper as the pile of mail shrunk in the lifer's black hands.

One day, about two weeks after I'd mailed the letter to Theresa, Sergeant Killian said "Cassidy!" for the second time that mail call. I had already gotten the letter from Ma. So, when sarge scaled the letter over all the shaved heads to where I was crouched in the back of our group, I about jumped out of my skin.The projectile coming my way was white. Hope, fear, shock, excitement crowded into my psych. But when I scrambled after the letter and picked it up from the barrack's spotless floor, devastation soon replaced all those emotions--pure, uncut, total devastation. For it was the letter I'd mailed to Theresa, returned, unopened, "MLNA" coldly stamped over her old address.

They had moved. Just like her mother threatened and I'd figured. To where, I was clueless. Mrs. Wayman had taken good care of keeping me in the dark by not leaving a forwarding address. Surely I was at least the biggest part of the reason why she hadn't. She'd successfully severed the final tie between Theresa and I. I was now certain that as long as I lived, I'd never rest my eyes on Theresa again, never find out if she still loved me. Such a cruel fate seemed incredibly inhumane. Knowing there was a chance she might still love me, but that I'd never know one way or the other, was agonizing and would be for a long, long time. The day I got that letter back was the first time in my life (but not the last) that suicide--that most permanent of all solutions--lurked inside my brain.     

But somehow, I'm sure it had to do with youthful resilience, I pushed on and completed my basic training. Next stop was Quantico Virginia, for more training. Infantry training! That nagging fear of going to South-East Asia had, by now, evolved into a dreadful inevitability. 'Sam' was whipping me into shape, teaching me how to use his war tools, as well as my own hands, to kill people, human beings just like myself, people I'd never even met but was supposed to hate enough to kill. The way I saw it, we had absolutely no right even being in Nam, let alone killing its people. Whether they wanted to be, or not to be, communist, was their business. This was a century-old civil war going on in those jungles clear on the other side of the planet. I didn't want to fight anyone, communist or otherwise, unless they came marching up Sanford Avenue. But, what I thought or wanted meant squat. Corporate America and the politicians they owned had all the say. And they were at that point in time pushing hard once again to escalate their “conflict”, designing the grim fate of one heartbroken kid from Queens and hundreds of thousands of others they neither knew or gave a shit about. The profiticians were trying to do to Viet Nam the very same thing they do to every third-world they muscle in on today, make it safe for  capitalism in the guise of democracy.       

Nevertheless, on an absolutely-flawless Virginia spring morning at the rifle range in Quantico, something happened that would redirect my imposed destiny. While I finished firing my M-16 from the cross-legged position, about to go prone, an instructor tapped my shoulder and gestured for me to go with him. I pulled out of the line of soldiers who were blasting away at targets as if their lives depended on it, because they soon would. 

Leading me to a waiting jeep, the smell of burnt gunpowder still pervading my nostrils, the instructor told me I was wanted at the first sergeant's office. When I asked him why, all he did was shrug and point at a waiting GI jeep. I climbed into it and asked the driver the same thing. As he threw it into gear, he said he didn't know and that he only had orders to pick me up and deliver me to numero uno's office. The conversation ended there. I slouched back in the passenger's seat, fired up a Kool, and pondered what the hell could be going on.I knew it had to be something pretty serious, some kind of emergency for sure.

As we bounced away from the rifle range along a lumpy dirt road, despite the brilliant sunshine and balmy temperature, I had this cold hollow feeling and felt the goose bumps rise on my arms. Could it have something to do with Theresa, I speculated. Nooo. It had to be Ma. She must have tried for an early exit again. Christ, could she really be dead? I was beginning to well understand how after forty years of unhappiness, a human being just might resort to such desperate measures. Hell, I'd only recently turned nineteen and already I’d entertained such thoughts. Rocking and rolling along on that spine-jarring jeep ride, I thought about how my whole world was caving in, and wondered  if I myself would ever make it to forty like my mother had.

But the awful news that day wasn't about my mother, or Theresa, or my brother, Sylvester. It was my father. A few hours earlier his damaged heart had stuttered to a stop at Saint Vincent's Hospital in New York City. He'd been driving his cab in Greenwich Village when, out of the blue, his left arm started aching like hell. In just minutes the pain became so intense, so unbearable that he rushed himself to the emergency room. Forty-five minutes after they admitted him, he was gone. Ma had gotten two phone calls, the first when she was resting in 'the chair' between rosaries at home, drinking that disgusting concoction of apple cider vinegar and honey she hoped would cure the cancer she didn't have. The nurse had advised her that my father had been admitted. By the time she'd gotten out of her dingy, stained robe, showered and dressed for the subway ride into Manhattan, the second call came. Dad was dead. He was only forty-one years old.

I changed out of my fatigues, threw a few things into my old peeling cardboard suitcase, and caught the first flight to Kennedy Airport. I'd never been on a plane before and, to be straight about it, I didn't much like it. Not being in control and all. I had already learned that some people are lucky and others are not, and knowing damn well what category I fell into, being twenty-nine thousand feet in the air seemed like no small risk. Even before we left the ground, my palms got all sweaty, staying that way the whole trip. But, once we were up there awhile, I did settle down somewhat. My allotted two free screwdrivers warming my insides, smoking heavily, I watched the gridded countryside drift beneath the zooming jet. My concentration all consumed by my thoughts, I watched the farmland down there, not really seeing it, just having a green daydream. Christ, what a year, what a life, I lamented as I recollected the recent unfortunate events in my life: Ma losing her sanity, me losing Theresa, now Dad losing his life. It was amidst this airborne-funk that I, for the first time, questioned my mortality. Jesus, I thought, his dad - my grandfather - died early too, when I was a baby. He was something like forty-eight. Terrific! Some freakin' wonderful gene pool I surfaced from. 

Struggling with this dark revelation, peering over a fiercely-vibrating (sure to break off) starboard wing, something emerged from the colossal vegetable patch below, telling me we were over New Jersey. It was a group of round holding tanks huddled together alongside a gray string of a highway, oil refineries committing their ecological carnage beneath a self-imposed noxious yellow atmosphere. A yellow gloom-cloud of toxic air had spread for miles. I'd seen this mess before from the ground when my father and I drove through it (holding our breaths the best we could) on the only over-night trip we'd ever taken together. 

It was early in the spring, three years before, when I was sixteen. Somehow I'd convinced Dad that a fishing trip together might be kind of neat. The news had reported that due to a stalled cold front, the spring migration of striped bass was holed up off Seaside Heights New Jersey. Local surf fishermen were making phenomenal catches. I'd worked and worked on Dad until finally, to my amazement, he actually agreed to go. That's when we drove through that poisonous fog. I remember how shocked I was to see obscure little homes scattered here and there, engulfed in this environmental holocaust. To think that any living thing, human or not, could survive in that contaminated air was brain-boggling. Looking down at it from the air, I wondered once again what the cancer rate must be for the poor souls destined to live there. I couldn't imagine how big business got away with such immorality. But then it all became crystal clear when I brought my eyes back inside the plane and looked at the very uniform I was wearing. I shook my head pensively and let out a long, troubled sigh.                       

A few minutes later, a dwarfed New York skyline rose from the horizon. As I watched it lift higher and higher from the edge of the earth, my thoughts returned to that fishing trip, to when we were leaving our house for Seaside Heights that morning. I remembered Ma telling Dad to be sure to get a nice motel room, Frank, and Dad promising we would. But that night, as darkness fell on Island Beach State Park, I had my doubts. After a long afternoon and early evening of fruitless fishing, hearing over and over from the fishermen, "You should have been here yesterday”, we trudged across the sand, father and son, side-by-side back to our fifty-seven Fairlane. Standing in the darkness, we silently broke down our two-piece rods. In order to engineer the poles inside our jam-packed trunk, Dad had to rearrange everything inside - a thermos, a foam cooler, half-empty bait containers, fishing rags, the two sand spikes he'd sprung for that very morning, a tackle box and the same battered suitcase that was riding with me now in the belly of the jet. He was quiet the whole time. I knew his mind was working on something and I was pretty sure what it was. "You know what," he finally said, slamming the trunk closed, "Whadda ya say we sleep right here in the car?" I just knew he'd been carrying that idea in the back of his mind all day. Early that morning two red flags had gone up inside my head when he'd promised Ma we'd get a room. Like most working stiffs in society's cellar, he always tried to figure a way to save a buck. Though I can't say I blamed him, I had to be honest when we ducked inside the Ford, and I told him it was getting pretty nippy out and that sleeping in the car might not be such a good idea. Scrunching prone in the front seat, wrestling his thick legs under the steering wheel, he just let my comment hang in the air until it dissipated and I laid down in back.