Things That Are Funny on a Submarine But Not Really, page 24
“No, who’s that? A guy from the boat?” my father says, not remembering Grenadier was my friend who died.
237 “Yeah. Did I tell you about the time he got his dick sucked by an anemic whore?” I say. My mother wakes up.
“I don’t want to hear this story,” she says, wiping some drool from her mouth. It wasn’t really Grenadier who this happened to, but I’m hoping by saying it was fucking Grenadier when it wasn’t that he’ll rear his fucking head and rebut the remark, letting me know he’s still here. The only sound, though, is my father turning up the radio, obviously ignoring me so I won’t tell the story.
Bob Dylan sounds worse with the volume turned up to the max.
It must be the countryside that’s keeping Grenadier at bay. We’re landlocked and hill-less here. I can feel it as well as see it. Something comes over me. I’m suddenly scared, like a rabbit in the open with nowhere to hide. Grenadier must have jumped ship miles back when we crossed the Ohio state line and entered the flat land of Indiana. It didn’t help that my mother started singing “Goin’ Back to Indiana” by the Jackson 5. Even I was ready to jump out of the U-Haul when she started singing it.
So this is goodbye then, I say in my head to Grenadier, while I look in the oversized side-view mirror at the miles of flat highway we’ve just driven past. Grenadier’s somewhere behind me, maybe looking for someone else to inhabit and fuck with their mind. If I had known that it was going to be this easy to get rid of him, I would have driven off to college weeks ago. Charlie was right, Grenadier just wanted to make sure I was really going to go through with it. Seeing how we’re more than halfway to my college, it’s not like we’re going to turn back now.
When we finally pull into the college town, I don’t know what to think of it and wonder what Grenadier would say. Maybe he’d tell me all the tree-lined streets and the river running through the town are nice, or maybe he’d make a remark like “You really are Joe College now.” But he doesn’t say anything, even though I’d like to hear what he thinks. Cocksucker, I say in my head to him as my parents are unloading the U-Haul, and cocksucker, I say to the fucker who built the apartment building because the stairwell’s so narrow my used 238couch won’t fit around the corners and my father, who’s helping me get it up the stairs, says, while taking a break on the first landing, that I may have to consider leaving it out on the street. It’s my mother who insists it can fit, and so my father and I try again. After much effort, we manage to hoist it around corners that we nick by mistake, and the white walls become smudged. I worry that, before I’ve even moved all the way in, the landlord, when I someday move out of the apartment, won’t give me back my security deposit because of the damage I’ve already done.
Pulling aside the curtains, I notice girls outside the brick building across the way. College girls, I assume. Their parents are helping them move into dorm rooms. The girls are wearing next to nothing. Maybe that’s how strippers start their careers, just small-town midwestern girls who take a year of college and then get lured by some idea of money and travel and move to shitholes like Guam and end up on the stripping stage to pay for their food and rent. And maybe it isn’t such a giant leap for stripper kind, wearing next to nothing in college, and then wearing next to nothing on stage. Right about now, I expect Grenadier to chime in and tell me I don’t fucking know shit about strippers and until I marry one like he did, I should just shut the hell up, but I just hear my mother’s voice.
“Let’s buy you some groceries,” my mother says.
We go to the market located in a strip mall. My mother and father load up the cart with things I probably will never use—flour, sugar, and baking soda. Do they think I’m really going to bake? I’ve bought a meal plan ticket for the dining commons (which I keep calling the mess hall by mistake), so I won’t have to cook. But I let my parents wheel the cart around and buy the groceries anyway. It gives me time to look around at the other students and parents doing the same thing. There’s a fuzznuts beside us. He looks like he’s fifteen. He’s angling off to shop in the beer and wine aisle, but his father pulls back on his arm and leads him away. Even the guys who enlisted at eighteen and joined our crew looked older than these students. It was as if those kids who enlisted were gearing up even in high school for the dark 239circles of sleep deprivation that would form under their eyes and the wrinkles like I have that come early from all the cigarettes we smoke.
I see some college girls in the salad aisle. They wear crop tops and shorts so high you can see their cheeks. Grenadier, where the fuck are you? I think. He doesn’t answer. What’s worse, me fucking talking to Grenadier or me fucking talking to myself? My mother says, “Oh, these are good,” and puts some frozen Chinese dumplings into the cart. My father looks at the scantily clad college girls, then looks to see if I’m looking too. He smiles knowingly. I walk faster, afraid he’s going to nudge my elbow next and wink-wink.
The sooner my parents leave, the better, but they’re not gone yet. Now they’ve decided I should tour the fitness facility. Don’t they know the last place a fucking fat-ass wants to be seen is at a gym where everyone’s dressed like they live in LA and they’re on the set of an exercise show? I hang by the door, even though my parents are waving me over to come deeper inside the facility and see the thirty-foot rock wall and the twelve-lane Olympic-sized pool. I’m wearing my boat T-shirt with the name of our sub on it. The T-shirt’s a dark shitty brown with black lettering, and the shorts I’m wearing are also brown. I look like a muddy river trout in a sea full of neon tetras and paradise fish. I back out. On the street, I feel the wind on me. It’s different from the wind at home. Its force takes me by surprise. It’s a wind that’s been building for hundreds of miles and will keep building once it passes me by. There are no mountains in its path to get in its way. It feels like it could knock me down and keep me down. I didn’t expect that even the wind here would be something I’d have to get used to.
It’s pizza for dinner. We’re too tired to go to one of the many restaurants near campus, so we pick it up. We walk along the narrow tree-lined sidewalks where the concrete is uneven from getting pushed up by the roots of big trees. It feels like I’m in the sub again, and the waves are making us roll and making us sick so that we all wished we hadn’t eaten so many Atomic Fireballs and that we hadn’t decided to become one of the stealthy-red-tongue-bonded-blood-brothers-of-the-deep.
240 After dinner, we assemble my desk. It’s the one piece of furniture I bought new. The directions say it’s a three-hour job. It turns out to be four. My father and I lie on the carpet reading directions and passing the screwdriver back and forth. We sweat, and the sweat collects on our brows. My father’s smell is stronger than usual. He’s got a smell I equate with our house, inside and out. Inside, the smell of our woodstove, and outside, the smell of logs he’s just chain-sawed and split. I open the window wider. Out there, the intersection light turns from green to yellow to red. I hear the brakes of a city bus, then the hiss of its doors opening and the voices of college students talking excitedly to each other. Like a low-level buzz spread across the dormitory-lined streets, I can feel the excitement all these returning students have at seeing each other again.
I feel it the next day when I go to buy some school supplies. Other students call to one another as they’re spread out in the checkout line. “Hey, how’s it going?” “Good! You majoring in econ still?” “Yeah.” “Cool, me too.” I look down the checkout line. Of course, I don’t recognize anyone. I smile at some girl who catches my eye for a moment, but of course, she can’t see my smile because of my mask. Suddenly, she reaches up and waves, but the wave’s not for me. “Hey, Lucy!” she says. From behind me, a voice says, “Hey, Annabel, what’s up? You get here today?” “Yeah.” “Cool.”
I wonder how the parents of these kids feel spending so much money on their fucking college bills, and all the kids can think to do is say “Yeah” and “Cool.” Not that we said much more on the boat sometimes, but at least I don’t have college debt. I guess we can’t all be so lucky to spend five fucking years on a fast attack nuclear submarine, not sleeping and eating shit poor food, and then getting the chance to use the GI Bill.
I look down at the supplies I’m about to buy. It’s just some legal pads, but I notice everyone else is buying spiral bound notebooks with pocket flaps that cost way more. I almost get out of line to go pick one up to buy, but then I don’t. I don’t give a rat’s ass what everyone else is buying. I’m not one of them. I’m some old scurvy veteran dude with a 241bushy beard and mustache and amateur tats on my arms done in Guam parlors with one light bulb hanging from the ceiling and Guam eagles flying through the air.
When I say goodbye to my parents as they get into a taxi and head to the airport, I think how happy they are and how happy I am that they’re leaving. They wave through the back window at me, and I wave back. I go upstairs to my apartment and pass smudges on the wall that were made when we moved the sofa. Inside my apartment, I get a wet soapy sponge, then go back into the hallway and try to wipe the smudges off. They don’t come clean. I give up. Back inside my apartment, I throw the sponge back into the sink from where I’m standing by the door. It lands, hitting the metal sink basin with a thwap. One lone soap bubble rises in the air. It floats toward me like it wants to greet me, then in an instant, it bursts.
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I wake up in the morning and think I’m still on the sub. I’ve got this big queen-sized bed, but I’ve squeezed myself into the corner because I’m used to sleeping on a skinny-ass rack I could fall out of if I decided to roll over. I even smell the amine smell that always hit me high up in my nostrils every time I climbed into the boat. I’m not on the boat though, I tell myself. I’m in my apartment at college, and what I’ve just had is one of those memory smells that for a second seem just as real.
In the kitchen, I boil water for tea. I breathe deep to smell the Earl Grey just to smell something real, not some ghost smell from my past. I drink two sips of the fucking tea and then reach into the fridge and pull out a sixteen-ounce can of Monster instead. Who was I fooling thinking that I could transition from 160 mg of caffeine that’s in an energy drink to the paltry 30 mg that’s in a cup of tea? I may be out of the Navy, but the workings of my body still think I’m in it. I drank so many energy drinks as a sailor, I could have powered the fucking boat and put the nuclear reactor to shame.
After I finish with my first online class, I wish it were my last. The class is on teaching literature to teenagers. When asked by the teacher, everyone says their favorite book is Harry Potter. Except for me. My favorite book is War and Peace. The teacher says she doesn’t believe in teaching the classics. All the books she wants us to read are recent and are all about political correctness. There goes my chance 246of getting to read Huckleberry Finn and To Kill a Mockingbird again. I’m wondering if I made the right decision coming to college.
On a hunt downtown for some milk and bread, I stop by a florist and pick up an ivy in a blue ceramic pot. I name the ivy Herman. He sits on my desk. I open the shades for him when it’s sunny. I stick my finger in the dirt every few days to see if he needs watering or not. The smell reminds me of home, the woods behind our house, and the old trail on which we take walks. In the autumn, if it’s rained, the trail is a sodden flat mass of colored leaves, and if it’s dry, it’s a treat. The leaves crunching like potato chips, and the smell of the woods handing the proverbial baton over to winter.
I drop the politically correct class. Instead, I take classical music, so even though leaves are beginning to fall, I’m listening to Stravinksy’s The Rite of Spring. In my writing class, I have to write about someone who is a part of a group, but also separate. I write about Doc from the boat. How he kept to himself most of the time, eating in the crew’s mess by himself, but was still part of the crew. For all I know he’s out of the Navy, at least I hope he is. I’m tired of having to worry about him fucking up my life. For all I know, he’s turned into some Tibetan monk who’s happy in his robes and is busy collecting wisdom and perceiving emptiness. On the boat, spending endless hours on watch, I know I perceived a little emptiness and got lost in it. At least until some fucker wanted to bum a tin of chew off me, or an Atomic Fireball, and then I snapped the fuck out of it and was right there on the boat again, smelling some other sailor’s crusty socks, or mine, and amine, always the smell of amine. Emptiness can’t hold a candle to that stink of the boat.
People are yelling outside. It’s the middle of the night. I jump out of bed and look out the window. There must be two hundred people chanting “Black Lives Matter.” Some, the ones at the back of the line, are throwing bottles. I don’t turn on the light. I step back from the window. I read on the news earlier that out west a protest turned into a riot and then into a murder scene. The strip of light that comes in from the streetlight hits Herman across one of his shiny 247leaves, dissecting him in half. I move Herman away from the bright, artificial light. It can’t be good for him. The protesters keep chanting. They’re waving signs. They’re blocking traffic. Now people are honking their horns. Anyone who was sleeping is now certainly awake. I think if Grenadier were still talking to me, he’d be joking with me, saying, “Yo, Dead Man, why aren’t you down there marching for my people? Don’t you love me?” The honking is continuous, a stream of noise so loud I can feel it vibrating the little hairs inside my ears. “To the closet, for now,” I say to Herman because I’m worried the noise can’t be good for him either. I put him in the linen closet on a plush new towel my mother bought for me before she left. Herman’s longer vines trail across the terry cloth and hang over the shelf. I pick them up and place them farther back on the towel, so as not to catch them in the doorjamb and amputate a stem when I shut the door.
It’s hard to fall back asleep. My heart is fucking going thump-de-dah, thump-de-dah, thump-de-dah in triplets from thinking how I could protect myself from someone who might not be a real protester, but just someone joining the protesters at the back of the line and looking for trouble, ready to break into people’s apartments or throw Molotov cocktails through windows. On the boat, we knew what to do in case of an emergency. We were all notified of an emergency before it became serious. Someone would get on the 1MC and tell us, like the captain with his Texan Matthew McConaughey drawl. But here, there’s no one coming over the speaker to tell me. I don’t even know anyone who I could just call in this town to say, “Hey, did you see the protesters going up the avenue?” let alone ask anyone to come help me if I was in trouble. It’s just you and me, Herman, I think.
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I get an A on the story I wrote about Doc. This is the first time Doc was ever good for me.
I meet a guy from class in the chow line at the mess hall—I mean dining hall (I might never get that right). His name’s Eliot. He plays video games and suggests we get a pizza together for dinner and play some games together. I’m happy to let it go, and not get together with the guy, but he suggests he come to my place, and he’ll pay for the pizza. I figure, why not, I’m never one to pass on something for free.
We eat at my kitchen table. Eliot asks for a knife and fork. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone actually eat a pizza like that before,” I say, while he slices through his pizza, perfectly through the middle of a pepperoni slice, leaving two equal sized halves. Eliot chews, swallows, then says, “Would you happen to have a napkin?” I get him some toilet paper from the bathroom, which he folds into a square before wiping his mouth. He sits up straight in his chair, which makes me sit up straight in my chair.
“Did you hear the protesters the other night?” I ask.
“I did. They were loud,” he says. I can’t tell if he was upset by it like I was.
“Yeah, I started thinking, what the hell would I defend myself with if they broke in,” I say.
“You were scared?” he says.
I shrug.
“That’s probably normal,” he says.
249 “Maybe it’s just smart. In the Navy, you learn to always be aware of a possible threat,” I say.
“What was your call sign on the boat?” Eliot asks.
“We don’t have call signs. That’s for pilots. We just have shitty-ass nicknames,” I say.
“What was your nickname?” he asks.
“Dead Man,” I say.
We move to my couch and play a video game. He grips the console hard. I can see the tendons in his hands pop out. He’s losing, but for me, the game is grape. I’ve played it twenty times so far, and I’m busting his ass. But when he does get a shot at me, I call him a fucking shitstain. He laughs. But I have to remember, I’m not on the boat. He’s not another sailor. I shouldn’t be calling him names.
He puts down the controller and stands up.
“Great game. Can we do this again sometime?” he says.
“Sure,” I say.
We say goodbye. He’s polite and thanks me before he leaves. When he’s gone, I gather up our empty containers of food into a bag. I take the trash downstairs, passing the doors of the other apartments from where inside I can hear a television going, someone running water in the sink, and what sounds like a woman crying. I hope she isn’t. I worry that, like on the boat, there’s a happiness quotient in my six-unit apartment building. You only have so much of it, and when this person crying gets happy again, her sadness will get passed onto someone else, and eventually me. I don’t want to be the fucking sad sack another tenant hears while they’re passing my doorway.
It’s a hazy night. Wildfires out west are affecting us. Our sunsets are noteworthy, oranges and red like on the early cover of Dune. Our town now Arrakis, and me Muad’Dib. I recite the line I recited so many times on the boat. “I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little death that brings total obliteration.” I go back up my apartment stairs. The crying woman has stopped. All I hear now is the drum in the dryer in the basement making a racket and tumbling around and around. It sounds like someone’s inside the drum, banging it so 250someone hears them and sets them free. I flop down on the couch and tilt my head back against the headrest. Fuck, I think. I miss the boat.
