Chapter 7. Upwardly Mobile

PTSD: Christ in a
Straight-Jacket

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.

I took up cab driving at night to make ends meet where I met another Vet, Max, on the graveyard shift. We became buddies, talking shit and passing an occasional joint at 3 AM after the bars closed while waiting for a new batch of road dogs to arrive on the next Greyhound. Max was going to City College on the GI Bill and suggested I try it too. 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 knew in my heart I was no longer cop material by then. My head still rang… I had nightmares. Flashbacks. 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 eked out average grades were it not for my favorites, history and philosophy.

Max followed me to UCSB and considered me somewhat of a mentor. It was the other way around now that I think of it. He was married by then and his wife, Celeste, worked with a young girl at the library. Celeste was but seventeen and Penelope was eighteen. I don’t have a thing for young chicks. I know it might look that way. I was in college and Penelope was what was there. That there was an age difference of about ten years made no difference to me. 

After Saigon, I wasn't that interested in having a regular squeeze at all but I knew I should if I ever wanted to be what I thought was normal. Penelope was working part time with Celeste and, though at such a young age, she was already in post-graduate studies. Philosophy. I should’ve known better. I didn’t care. Libido and philosophy were our only interests. We used the excuse that we were like Ariel and Will Durant. After all, old Will was twenty six or seven when he fell for her. She was but a fifteen-year old-model and student at the Art Student League and, well, at least Penelope was legal age and I wasn't over thirty.

Max and I graduated with a BFAs in Studio Arts the same year, 1977. Celeste’s father, Calvin, hooked me up with a job inspecting homes for a Title Company. Calvin was also one of Ryan’s associates but did it for his daughter’s sake, as Penelope and I were good friends of the family by then. 

My performance was dismal at that job…however. I was always late for appointments and my boss said I had an attitude. It was true but 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. After all, I'd married Penelope and bought a home in the suburbs of Goleta on Cinderella Lane next door to Max. Penelope and Celeste were pregnant around the same time. They named their child, Ariel, after Ariel Durant, who was born a few months after our daughter, Chaya (Ariel Durant's real name) in the summer of 1979.

Max and I talked shop; philosophy, our wives and kids, and art, while downing beers and smoking lots of herb in each other’s garages. Ariel and Chaya were playmates and at the same day-school while Celeste and Penelope moaned and bitched about us and went to EST training to get in touch with themselves. Celeste began an affair with her EST trainer and Penelope decided to join them. All of this was going on right there in my face, but I was doing what I thought normal men did and Max was too. We were damned near indifferent to anything else going on even though we could see our wives weren’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 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 Chaya 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 once her EST trainer and Celeste eventually dumped her along with Max. 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.

Penelope came back from the hospital a changed woman. She only bugged me once more 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. Penelope 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 Chaya was opening presents, “I love you, David, but you haven't done anything about your drinking. I have a child to take care of and one of us will have to go otherwise.”

"Merry Christmas," I said.

I made the usual New Year’s promises that year and gave it a half-assed attempt to quit drinking. We were divorced within three years of Chaya’s birth. It really wasn’t Penelope’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 taken by surprise when Penelope packed my stuff and I found everything I owned in boxes on the driveway. She said she listed the house and was leaving for New York with Chaya.

It was okay with me except that my Muse went with them. I’d lost my mojo. Max had moved away and taken a job in Vacaville and Celeste was hooked up with her EST trainer stud. The Fairy Tale on Cinderella lane was one big cluster fuck of a pumpkin patch and I was thinking, now I’m free to do anything I want. The trouble was that I would never want to be normal again. In Fact, I no longer wanted to do anything at all.

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 a fellow EST student, Rodney, or Celeste and their trainer. I didn’t mind until I was informed Rodney and Penelope wanted to adopt Chaya so she wouldn’t have to live with the surname Kraszhinski. 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.

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

I have just described a few of the symptoms of long term combat related Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome.

The public saw us as psychopathic time bombs. The High-Priests of Medicine were just beginning to call it PTSD. It was commonly believed, in and out of the medical community, 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, followed by an alarming 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.