Chapter 7. Upwardly Mobile

Earhart... there's a wall in Washington...
his name and thousands of other suicides
like his aren't on it.

 Ryan stayed in touch with me at Tripler Army Hospital in Hawaii. He didn’t re-up but managed a lateral transfer, landing a gig as a detective for the Santa Barbara Police Department. He suggested I come to Santa Barbara to join him there once I recovered. He said my military experience in the CIC would count something towards a lateral transfer too and that his recommendation ought to make it a shoo in. Once stateside, I found it difficult to adjust from the beginning. Ryan damned near held my hand to take me through the hoops registering at City College and filing the paper work for getting my G.I. Bill started. For reasons only the gods grasp, a lateral transfer of all of my military time qualified me for Public Service Purchase towards retirement bennies but it was required I take Criminal Justice courses and basic Police Officer Service Training taken off from requirements in the Academy. I took up cab driving at night to make ends meet. By then I knew in my heart I was no longer cop material. My head still rang… I had nightmares… I couldn’t concentrate… I could’ve had a good career but I walked out of class one morning and changed majors before transferring to UCSB. I studied studio arts and only eked out average grades were it not for in my favorites, history and philosophy.

I met Elaine in the library. I don’t have a thing for young chicks. I know it might look that way. I was in college and she was what was there. There was an age difference of about ten years, as it was with all the other women on campus except for a few professors and staff. Elaine was working part time there and in post-graduate studies… Philosophy…. I should’ve known better. I didn’t care. We used the excuse that we were like Ariel and Will Durant. After all He fell for her when she was fifteen and, well, at least Elaine was legal age.

I graduated with a BFA in Studio Arts. Elaine’s father, Calvin, hooked me up with a job inspecting homes for a Title Company. He did it for his daughter’s sake and he was an associate of Ryan. My performance was dismal at that job… always late for appointments and my boss said I had an attitude. I didn’t care. The job was beneath me because I thought of myself as an artist and any job was only there to support my habit. Thankfully, it didn’t require much of me and no one besides the boss seemed to care at the office. Otherwise, I tried do everything else right. I married Elaine and bought a home in the suburbs of Goleta on Cinderella Lane. We lived there five years after Adair was born. I appeared to be on my way to normal and upwardly mobile.

However, I spent most of my spare time at the easel in the garage splashing out my despair in violent and angry colors in our garage. I was damned near indifferent to anything else going on even though I could see Elaine wasn’t happy. I just figured that it was the natural progression in a relationship during pregnancy and after childbirth… that it would fix itself. I suspected all the Hallmark pictures of happy families were as big of a lie as all the others I’d bought into when it started to look like nothing was going to change. She spent her days moping around the house and complaining that she was living under my shadow. It was remarkable, however, that she did take care of Adair even though she made it clear the pregnancy was my fault and that her heart wasn’t in it from the beginning. She sank further into post-partum depression and had to be hospitalized after an overdose of sleeping pills. It could have been a suicide attempt. Postpartum depression was a disease the Medical profession hadn’t gotten a grip on yet and it was just beginning to be talked about publicly.

Elaine came back from the hospital a changed woman. She never bugged me about my drinking or the time I spent in the garage. Now that I think of it she hardly said anything at all to me about anything. Elaine took on a real estate license to break her out of the doldrums and one Christmas Eve, she sat me down for that talk, while Adair was opening presents, “I love you, David, but you have to do something about your drinking or I’ll have to go. We have a child to take care of.”

I made the usual promises and gave a half-assed attempt to quit drinking. We were divorced within three years of Adair’s birth. It really wasn’t Elaine’s fault. After all, she’d encouraged me to go to veterans’ groups at the VA in West LA when she got out of the hospital. I had no idea she was trying to save our marriage. I was actually taken by surprise when Elaine left with Adair, and more so that my Muse went with them. I’d lost my mojo and went back to cab driving thinking, now I’m free to do anything I want. The trouble was that I no longer wanted to do anything.

It’s still peculiar to me that, even though I’d been a counter intelligence agent in the Army, I didn’t see it coming. Not the divorce; her affair with Rodney. I was too busy living the dream to see it. Our lives were compartmentalized. She went about her business and I spent every extra hour in the garage. I didn’t mind until I was informed they wanted to adopt Adair so she wouldn’t have to live with the surname Crazhinski. After that they moved to the East coast… I didn’t know where and they weren’t sayin’. I could have used connection with Ryan to find them but I’d given up. Slammed with that, the thin thread of sanity I’d been holding on to was cut. I knew I’d fucked my only chance at normal.

Adair, yes Adair. She was where this flashback started.

*****

The public saw us as psychopathic time bombs. Like Postpartum Depression, the High-Priests of Medicine were just beginning to call it PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome). Does anyone remember when we were diagnosed without all these initials? I.e., hyperactive kids are suddenly diagnosed with ADHD and given Ritalin. As for PTSD, it was believed that it could be treated with anti-depressants and group therapy. Truckloads of Benzos, Librium and Valium, were dumped on the VA and that let loose a near pandemic of addiction, outbursts of psychotic rage, or followed by an uptake in suicides.

I get it though. The Veterans Administration was only trying to make-up for several years of neglect. It was easier, and more cost effective, to dispense a pill than to take on the long term alternatives. I listened to the stuff the others were going through. I’d listened to the others tell of coming home. I knew my marriage was blown already and that these groups were my one chance to uncover the true uncorrupted nature of a life turned to shit under this dog pile of missed opportunities.

It happened in PTSD group therapy. Nothing unusual… a swift boat gunner told a story, “I mean, one day you’re punchin’ out rounds at anything that moves in the Mekong Delta and the next thing ya know you’re home, enjoying a few drinks at a bar… a longhaired piece of shit sits next to me and we get in a conversation about the war. I didn’t tell him I was a Vet. He knew… I know he knew, and he said something about how Vietnam Vets are whiners… how they all get what’s coming to ‘em. I didn’t want any trouble so I took a deep breath, finished my drink, and left. What was I to do? I was arrested a block away from home. I guess I was makin’ some noise and punching out a chain-link fence.”

“Yeah, I know what you mean. They think Charlie was a fuckin’ angel,” a Marine chimed in.

“No cross talk,” admonished the group facilitator, “You’ll get your turn. Go ahead Gunner, you can proceed.”

“I’m done.”

The Marine’s turn was next, “It was the coldest I’d ever been on the streets in San Francisco. Lines of stinkin’ winos were at all the shelters so I busted out a storefront window on Grant Street for a cot and a hot. I got arrested, got off the streets a month or two in jail. It was better to be locked up with drug dealers and hippies than to line up and be degraded by mission stiffs at Saint Anthony’s.”

I still couldn’t choke out my pain… mine was in my head… nothing by comparison. I kept my mouth shut but was about to say something when a sailor named Earhart shared, “It’s hard for me… hard to give… ta share… open up here… ‘cause my sufferin’ was nothin’ compared to y’all’s.”

I knew Earhart’s pain. He asked me, “Say, Crash, you wanna go for coffee after this circle-jerk??”

He was trying to cope with wounds deeper than those that took off flesh and limbs. We had that in common.

“Not today, pal. I have to be somewhere else this afternoon. Maybe next time.”

That night his car was found parked at the apex of the Bridge in San Pedro. It took a few days to find him washed out past the breakwaters at sea.

Any Combat Vet will say that it wasn’t flag or country they fought for, our loyalty was to the grunt on the right and the one on the left of us. It didn’t matter by then… Marine, Army, Navy. It was for our team… each other first. In my case, I worked alone, but it was the individual whose survival I took on as my personal charge that I would’ve given life and limb for and I failed Earhart.

Earhart… there’s a wall in Washington… his name and thousands of other suicides like his aren’t on it.

*****

Dusk darkened the garden, the bottle of beer was still half-full and warmer than the field rations in Nam. I lifted the can ceremoniously, “Earhart, here’s to ya.” I emptied it on the ground and crushed it underfoot. I might have finished it off had I known but it would be my last beer.