Chapter 20 #4
“The rest of our team is already off the ship, and Andrew and I are about to join them.”
“Andrew—you were amazing. I can’t wait to tell your parents.”
“What will you say?”
“That you’ve got the most awesome friends ever.”
We smiled at each other. “You did great,” I told her. “If Brayden could see you, he’d kick himself. Or we could all kick him.”
Under such extraordinary circumstances, we’d both undergone the improbable exuberance of Tuxedo Society antics.
Jenn had mitigated her completely justifiable depression, and even my fainting had been pivotal.
We’d always loved each other, but our affection had blossomed, like the friendships forged during wartime in those streaming series devoted to the Greatest Generation.
I’d left my backpack in Jenn’s suite. At portside, it inflated into Edwin’s full-sized raft, which Reggie and I tossed into the waves, along with ourselves.
The other lifeboat was already out of sight, but we’d be close behind.
Reggie had grabbed oars, and we rowed to get distance between us and the Empress Olympia.
Within minutes the oceanliner was a line of barely blinking lights from the darkness, and we were surrounded by only the Atlantic, a clouded moon, and a hemisphere-wide sky.
I couldn’t name the opposite of claustrophobia, but there was a terror at being two tiny people alone on the boundless-seeming sea, as opposed to the monitored, zillion-gallons-of-water studio tank that had housed the lovers clinging to that shard of door in Titanic.
When you’re adrift, a camera crew just out of frame can be reassuring.
As always, I relied on Reggie’s forethought, so I had every confidence we’d be rescued soon. But my heart was racing over a less optimistic outcome, and the thin barrier of rubberized canvas between me and oblivion.
“It’s okay, Andrew,” said Reggie. “It’s just the ocean.”
I wanted to smile, but worried I’d start jabbering mindlessly. I would perservere, and counteract my latest feckless city-boy tremors.
“Reggie,” I asked, to fend off any memories of Jaws, or even Jaws 3-D, a sequel where the shark attacks the audience, “did you always want to be a Navy SEAL?”
“Well, from when I learned what a Navy SEAL was. It runs in the family. Both my parents were military, so we moved around a lot. But I was so proud of them, because they weren’t going to an office or muddling through. I was too proud, because I had to develop other resources.”
“What do you mean?”
“My mom was a pilot who got shot down in the Persian Gulf when I was twelve. My dad died a year later, during a firefight in Libya.”
“Jesus…”
“Yeah, not easy. For a while I hated them for leaving me alone, as if they’d just been gallivanting or out on a bender.
I didn’t behave very well. I acted out, skipping school, getting high, you name it.
I was living with an aunt and uncle in Topeka, who were saddled with an angry, stubborn teenager with way too much misplaced energy, which they kept trying to direct into football or bagging groceries or anything where they wouldn’t have to bail me out, again. ”
“You got arrested?”
“Small-time shit. Shoplifting, stealing a tractor and driving it into a swimming pool, blowing up a bus station.”
“Reggie?”
“It was empty, falling apart for years. But it was just sitting there, and I was so bored in Science class that I’d spend half the day in the library, studying firearms and homemade explosive devices. I hate to say it, but I would’ve made a spectacular psychopath.”
“What happened?”
“The judge gave me a choice: jail or the navy. I enlisted, and before I knew it I was on a destroyer in the Mediterranean with twelve hundred guys. I liked the discipline, and I couldn’t get enough of the weaponry and the engine rooms. I begged the captain to let me hang around the bridge, so I could see what kept the ship on course, and also how I could ram that many tons of steel into, say, a lighthouse or another ship.
I was still pissed off all the time because I was falling in love with the navy, but I’d seen what that life had done to my parents.
It was like being the kid of addicts, and I swore I’d never be anything like them, that I wouldn’t get cocky or too attached.
I was spiraling like you wouldn’t believe; I was like those guys who go rogue and they pick out an enemy combatant and it ends in a bloodbath, and they leave behind notebooks filled with sketches of guided missiles and screaming faces on fire. ”
“What saved you? How did you turn into—you?”
I hadn’t asked Reggie about any of this before, because I’d never had the right.
With people as self-controlled as Reggie, everyone assumes that the riddles of their personalities or their pasts are off-limits.
Or maybe, in order for Reggie to open up, it had to be just the two of us, miles from anything or anyone, with the water, at least for the moment, gently lapping and no visible fins circling.
This intimacy was solving my jitters, although Reggie wasn’t looking at me but leaning against the side of the raft and watching the plentiful stars, perhaps as a means of navigation.
“What saved me, pretty much, was being gay.”
“Really?”
“Calm down. I’d known who I was since I was a kid, although back in Topeka I was careful, because my aunt and uncle were churchgoers, nothing too loony, but there were rules, so I kept my mouth shut.
Then during my second tour of duty there was a guy, and I fell hard.
Because I was twenty-two and he was tall and rangy and kissed like a demon.
A lieutenant. That first night, we’d gone ashore in San Diego and had a few drinks at some singles hangout.
We were on leave and out of uniform, and once we were outside in the parking lot, he grabbed me and that was that.
I’d had sex before, but it was nothing like it was with Chet.
He was a few years older and we didn’t leave our motel for forty-eight hours.
“And afterward, once we were back on board, I couldn’t stop grinning like a fucking idiot.
He’d unlocked something, all my rage at my parents and the world and Topeka, which is a perfectly nice place if you’re a farmer or an insurance salesman who goes to bed at seven p.m. and gets off on weed-whacking the lawn.
But when I was with him, with Chet, I just…
I thought, Man, this is right where I want to be. You know?”
I did, or I wanted to. My parents had all but told me I was gay when I was five years old and had begun comparing the original cast album and the movie soundtrack of Grease (I’d liked the added title song).
My being gay wasn’t a tough call, and I’d never questioned it.
In a certain sense, my true sexual preference is show business.
I thought of acting, and the arts, the way Reggie was talking about the navy, as a true home and an identity.
My aunt Libby hadn’t just confirmed this, she’d been like the very best drug dealer, plying me with Golden Girls reruns and a discussion of Barbra’s role as a high-priced call girl in a movie rightfully called Nuts (Libby and I agreed that her clients would pay extra if Barbra sang).
“Chet pointed me toward the SEALs. He could see how restless I was, and he said the SEALs would take everything I had. The training was crazy, the drills, the hikes, the underwater stuff, and not just the physical side. By the end of eight months I was a medic, a mechanic, and I could take an AK-47 apart blindfolded and reassemble it—basically, I could sneak up on you behind enemy lines, shoot you, extract the bullet, bandage your wounds, and deliver you to justice across five hundred miles of sand and rocks. I couldn’t get enough; I was shipped out to Somalia and Fallujah, you name it.
I thrived, until there was this complete asshole, a sergeant who got court-martialed after running hard drugs for a cartel.
After I testified against him, he outed me and Chet. Tit for tat.
“There was a tribunal, and every guy in our unit was on our side, even the colonel in charge of the hearing said it was a travesty but he had no choice. We were gone, shipped back home, and things got bad. Chet and I split up—he was dealing with the fallout with his family. I was furious and lost, it was like when my folks died all over again. I couldn’t hold a job because I’d get bored after the first day, so I drank and did blow and fucked around, but none of it felt good.
I didn’t have benefits or a pension, because I’d been dishonorably discharged. ”
Just hearing about this, I was massively outraged on Reggie’s behalf. His innate strength and avidity must’ve turned in on itself—he wasn’t suited for civilian life, or even a few hours without a logistical challenge and a mission that could get him captured and killed.
“And after they got rid of that fucking ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ crap everybody acted like, Gee, isn’t that peachy, are you going to re-enlist?
Like all was forgiven. Like I should be grateful.
I was obstinate, and I was working as a bouncer in New Orleans and doing some bodyguard shifts, but then I got that fucking email, from the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Acknowledging, what the hell did they call it, ‘past errors and oversights,’ and offering to ‘restore and reinstate’ my Purple Hearts and my rank, as if that was all I cared about.
Because I was still thinking, Fuck you, I love my country but I’m not acting like I have amnesia, until I got a phone call from Admiral Matthew Dennington, who I’d served under, and who’d always been a halfway decent guy.
He wanted to see me, in person, at the Pentagon. He sent me a bus ticket.”