| wanted more and more every night, and sometimes when we came back from patrol, we’d find him cocked (blind drunk) and passed out because he’d found whiskey all over the camp from the other guys’ tents. Because he was drunk all the time, he didn’t give a shit about snakes anymore, and even worse, when he had a hangover, he was meaner’n shit and started biting us and making noises and crapping all over the place.” I was laughing hard now, and so was Jack. “So, Jack, what’d you guys do with the drunken monkey?” “We shot him, the little fucker.” “You shot him?!” I had to slap the bar hard to absorb the wave of laughter rising up from my belly like a Pacific Rim volcano eruption. Jack’s shoulders were bobbing up and down also with laughter. He had probably told that story two hundred times at bars over the past thirty years, but I would have bet my paycheck that he’d never gotten a better reaction to it than the one he was getting from his grunt the expeditor. I noticed that his left hand was squeezing my right shoulder and that he’d removed his glasses and was wiping tears of laughter from his eyes with a small bar napkin with his other hand. My eyes too had welled up, and I felt damn good, happy, and half drunk. The time had crept past the end of the workday. Jack tipped the barkeep and then asked me to drop him off at another bar in Queens, but he didn’t invite me in. A Voice As the months wore on, things continued to repeat themselves at HQ. The routine of fetching rusty joe never changed. The Rat Pack came and went every Thursday, and Jack would have his occasional outbreak of war memories, which were always quenched by going AWOL (absent without leave) at any of a number of local dives near Woodside. I always listened zealously to his war stories and tales of his nighttime carousing with famous athletes of yesteryear and movie stars in Manhattan. I stopped expecting that Jack would show up with Whitey, Mickey, Jake, and Jack P. at the office one day instead of with the Camel Driver, Dickey Doo-Doo, Baldy, and the Asshole. Nevertheless, Jack’s stories were always entertaining and fed my young imagination with wonder—helping me better cope with the high pucker factor in the PD. One day Jack didn’t quick-step past my desk at precisely 8:45 a.m. All the grunts and boots in the office behaved like little chicks who couldn’t find their mothers in the henhouse to save their lives. Instead of getting Jack’s coffee, I wandered aimlessly for fifteen minutes around the factory. Eventually, I found myself in the shop workers’ washroom. After I splashed cold water on my face, I stared into the mirror and bit my lip. I was very worried that something bad might have happened to my CO. I realized at that moment that I loved that tough old jarhead in the way that a boy would love his grandfather who unconditionally returned his love and took him fishing and camping and told him that he was a winner and all that horseshit. I prayed into the mirror and then splashed my face again. When I returned to the PD, there was a big clusterfuck going on around my desk; all the clueless idiots were trying to figure out where Jack was and how to start the fucking day without the big swinging dick calling “Fire in the hole” to solve all the big fuckups. Gert appeared to be the most flustered and actually left her post for the first time ever before 10:00 a.m. Gert wouldn’t even dare to think about leaving her post to go to the latrine (toilet) to take a piss before 10:00 if Jack was in the office. With Gert temporarily out of commission, the rest of the grunts engaged in a world-record clusterfuck in front of my desk, I noticed that Jack’s phone was ringing in his office. |
| The Expeditor (continued) |
