You Really Can’t Go Home Again
As I waited for the plane to depart, I decided to make a collect telephone call to see if I could rustle up a ride from the airport in Memphis to New Madrid. It was after my altercation with the hippies before 6 a.m., P.S.T., so I woke my father who answered the telephone.[1]I let him know I was in San Francisco and would be in Memphis at such and such a time. “Is there any way you could pick me up?” I asked. “Yes, we will be there to pick you up,” he replied. I remember thinking it was cool of him to accept my collect call. With Calvin, nothing was ever a given.
Finally, the four-engine propeller driven airplane took off. While my previous flights out seemed long, this one felt interminable, probably because I didn’t know what to expect when I got off the plane. I tried sleeping. I was exhausted since I’d hardly slept while I was on Okinawa, where it was eat, drink, repeat with maybe a couple of hours restless shut eye.
As soon as I stepped into the gate area at the Memphis airport, my mother pulled me into a hug that seemed to last forever. She hugged me the tightest she had ever hugged me. My father stood off to the side and looked genuinely happy to see ME. I don’t recall a time before or after when he regarded me with any kind of care. My sister, brother-in-law and niece stood to the other side. My father and sister finally convinced my mother to let me breathe, and she eased up on the hug. I was really surprised, actually quite pleasantly surprised, that everyone was there, and I felt genuinely happy that they came.
I couldn’t remember the last time I’d felt something akin to happiness (R&R in Manila aside, although I wouldn’t count that as happiness as much as the satisfaction that comes from blowing off steam). I sometimes reflect on that moment and how I would put happy or pleasant experiences into categories. This one counted as family happiness, however short-lived.
Instead of going to New Madrid, we went to visit with my brother-in-law’s sister who lived in some outskirt of Memphis. Typical. Make the most of the family’s time in Memphis why don’t we. After everything I’d been through and spending a year of my life in the jungle to get back to civilization, I couldn’t give a fuck about not wasting gas and seeing family I couldn’t remember. There I was, though, still in my uniform pulling up in front of a nice antebellum tract home in an upscale Memphis suburb. Even though I couldn’t reasonably expect my welcome to last very long, it would’ve been nice if they pretended to care about how I would’ve liked to spend my afternoon. A little, “Hey, let’s stop at a nice restaurant and have a celebratory repast.” Nope, let’s go visit someone Michael neither knows nor gives a shit about (that day anyway). While the outside world was changing at a rapid pace, family dynamics were clearly stuck in the past. After what seemed like hours, we finally crowded back into the car and headed north for the two-plus hour trip to New Madrid.
When we finally got back to New Madrid, my father headed to the local watering hole, Rosie’s, his home while he was home. He invited me to come with him. Despite feeling warm from our one affectionate moment at the airport, I declined, opting instead to stay at home with my mom and sister. My brother-in-law, David, however, tagged along with Calvin. About an hour or so later, David showed up at the house to relay that Calvin demands that I join him at Rosie’s. Obviously “no” wasn’t an acceptable response, so I went. While we were at the bar, Calvin leaned in, put his beefy hand on my shoulder and said to me, “I’m really proud of you, I didn’t think you could do it, but you did it.”
Fuck you, asshole, is what I wanted to say, but all that came out of my mouth was, “Thanks dad.” The asshole was kinda right though. I didn’t think I could do it either, BUT I FUCKING DID IT!!!!!
Rosie’s wouldn’t serve me. Doc Cowan, Rosie’s son, was the bartender. Not only did he know my father, but I had dated his daughter, Mary Beth, during part of our first year of high school, so he wasn’t going to get into any trouble with the law by serving an underage nimrod. There was another bar in town. I don’t recall the name, but it was in the building that used to house the Greyhound bus station when New Madrid was a real bus stop. I liked that bar. They didn’t ask for ID, they just asked me to pay for my drinks. One nice thing about it was that it wasn’t as popular as Rosie’s, so I really didn’t know the clientele. In the short time I’d been gone, New Madrid had changed. People were moving away.
Before heading to New Orleans, I received a troubling visit by a kid who was a year or two behind me in high school. I think his name was Hartwell, or something like that. I don’t remember his first name, but he had a sister by the name of Lynette. He’d joined the Navy and with the same god-awful luck as mine, they’d made him a Corpsman. He was on leave before heading to the Shithole and stopped by my parent’s house unannounced. None of us really knew him all that well. He was just a kid from New Madrid going off to do what someone from a small town did, just like me and so many others before him had done.
He explained that he was off to Vietnam and asked if there was any advice I could give him or if there was anything that he should take with him. I was stunned, taken aback, floored, and my mind went blank. All I could think was,
“What are you asking? I have no way to guarantee you will come back alive or not mutilated, don’t put that kind of shit on me.”
I remember standing there slack-jawed, mouth agape while a whole year of shit just ran though my head in just enough time for my Mother to say, “Michael, answer him, he just wants to know what he should take or do.” That shook me out of my shock. I let him know that we needed time to sit down and talk about what he was heading into. “Oh, I don’t have time for that, my sister is in the car, and my family has plans.” I told him that there was nothing I could say or suggest he take to prepare him for what is ahead. I don’t know what happened to him after he left my parent’s house on Mill Street.
That’s the thing about surviving war. There’s no preparing the next person for what lay ahead because his experience may be completely different. And the chances that he’d survive in the jungle long enough to see or go through what I had were slim at best. No matter the situation, no one can ever really know how difficult something is until they’re in it.
What I do wish I’d told him was to kiss what you know of yourself goodbye as you will be changed forever, good, bad or worse than you can possibly conceive, but change you will, if you survive.
