Leftovers

Back when Dinosaurs roamed the earth I used to sit on the bench seats of my dad’s 1986 F150 as we rolled around North Louisiana with the vent windows open, a cigarette in the ashtray, and good country music on the AM/FM radio. We’d listen to George Strait and George Jones on KWKH or KRMD or KRRV if we were visiting family down in Alexandria and over time we developed a mobile version of “guess that tune” where you had to guess the song before the first lyric. Over time I got pretty good at the game. Ten years later, (it seemed so much longer at the time) after I joined the Army and was stationed at Schofield Barracks I introduced the game to my beer drinking buddies. Evan had what was, at the time, a high tech, 100 disc, CD player filled with country music and on slow days or late nights we’d sit on his dumpster find barracks couch, press “shuffle” and try to guess the song before the singer sang. Loser had to drink.

I was, of course, the champion. After a few songs Evan and Daryl and any of our guests would be plastered, absolutely hammered, and I’d have to throw the game unless I wanted to go to bed stone sober. Over time though, Evan started cutting into my lead. Over time he began beating me, a little at first, but more and more consistently as the weeks went on until the game genuinely began to hurt. It didn’t make any damn sense. How? Only weeks before he couldn’t beat me but suddenly he was guessing the song in a matter of notes. I couldn’t figure it out. It was only at the end, in the days when his CD changer was packed up and his room was empty, while Evan waited for a flight off of Oahu and to his next duty station that he revealed the secret by way of parable.

“I had a room mate at Fort Campbell.” He told me. “Who broke up with his girlfriend because he thought he could do better.”

The breakup had the expected result. The new girl wasn’t as interesting or as charming or as interested in Evan’s buddy as his ex had been. The young soldier quickly realized his mistake and sought out his ex to make amends but she shot him down cold.

“You broke up with me”

So the young soldier did what Evan and I and young soldiers throughout history have done when faced with a bad breakup. He went back to the barracks and got shit faced with his buddies. This was in 1995. George Strait was the undisputed King of Country Music and had just released his boxed set and of course Evan had all four of those discs in his hundred CD changer. At some point during that drunken night disc two, track eleven popped up on shuffle and “Nobody in his Right Mind Would Have Left Her” began to play with the inevitable result.

That young soldier wasn’t a country music fan, but it was late, he was heartbroken, very drunk and sad country music did what it’s supposed to do. It made him feel. It made him feel so much he broke down sobbing. He spilled tears, poured out his heart and confessed his sins in front of God and his entire rifle squad and he did NOT enjoy the experience. But Evan, being a young soldier, thought it was funny. So the next Friday night and every Friday night after as soon as his room mate got good and drunk Evan would play the George Strait box set disc two track eleven. At first his room mate cried. Then he got mad.

Then he begged, “Play anything you won’t just don’t fucking play the George Strait box set disc 2 track 11! Please!”

He went so far as to memorize the track numbers so when they popped up on the screen of Evan’s 100 disc CD changer he knew to leave the room. Which gave Evan the idea to start memorizing the tracks in his CD changer until he could beat me at our drinking game.

I didn’t doubt Evan memorized some of the track numbers. I’d sat there drunk most weekends and far too many Wednesday nights watching him do it, but the story of the drunken, heart broke room mate seemed too on the nose, too perfect. Maybe there was some truth in it but no story is THE TRUTH (not even this one). Stories go through revisions. They get edited for time. They get punched up to make them land better. I didn’t quite believe that this heart broke soldier who hated George Strait disc 2 track 11 existed until I ran into Evan again at Fort Drum in the winter of 2000. The Army being the Army, and the leg light Infantry being a relatively small community, Evan’s old room mate from Fort Campbell was also at Fort Drum and I got to meet him one drunken night. He hadn’t learned to like country music but he still remembered those track numbers and avoided disc 2 track 11 like superstitious architects avoid the 13th floor.

One warm winter evening in 2004 I found myself sitting at the end of a bar in a roadhouse on the side of Highway 171 in Leesville, Louisiana. I was stationed at nearby Fort Polk, going through a medical board and awaiting discharge from the Army. On most weekends I drove home to my parents place in St Tammany Parish, or to Shreveport to visit my grandmothers but sometimes it was easier and cheaper to stay on post. But it was alway boring to do so. So I stumbled into this club one Friday night in the fall telling myself I was just gonna have two beers and check the place out and before I knew it I was a regular with “my” table and a waitress that didn’t know my name but knew my beer brand and when to switch to Diet Coke.

The name of the club was “The Sugar Shack” and I don’t know if it exists anymore. If it doesn’t then the world has lost something special. It was by far my favorite bar, more so than the now infamous Navy run cowboy bar on Pearl Harbor. It was a low, windowless building surrounded by a gravel parking lot. Inside were the essentials: a long wooden bar, tall tables and bar stools, buzzing neon signs, pool tables and a beer bar in the back corner by the bathrooms, a plywood dance floor and a band stand that on Friday and Saturday nights had a pretty good local country cover band that mixed swamp pop staples into their set. It was always full but never crowded with a mixed crowd of locals and soldiers. If there were fights people politely took them to the parking lot. The band was good. The beer was cold. The waitress was quick.

I liked the place. So I stopped in one evening early and was sitting, sipping a Shiner Bach long neck and talking with the waitress and the bar back as they stocked for the coming evening. I don’t remember the conversation. Something about men, women, and sex. Maybe the waitress had just been through a break up. Maybe the bar back had a side piece. It was pleasant banter about fucking but when it was my turn to tell a tale all I could do is shrug and say, “I got a girlfriend back home.”

They wanted details I wouldn’t give, but I told them the truth about what I could divulge. We’d been together for two years. She was smarter than me and prettier than I deserved and her only real flaw was going to school fifteen hours away.

“That must be hard.” The bar back said. “Staying faithful.”

“Nah.” I answered truthfully. “Not really.”

I’ve never been secretive about my injuries, so I explained my accident and told them how that girl back home had stood by me during the worst of it and how that meant I owed her my utmost loyalty. “Besides.” I added as a joke. “Who else would fuck a guy who shits in a colostomy bag?”

The waitress looked me up and down and smiled. “I would” she said.

She was roughly my age and best described as buxom, the kind of small town dye blond who’s attractive and fun in her twenties but doomed to look like her mother after a couple of kids though she wouldn’t hold the fact that you were doomed to end up fat and bald like your father against you. A fling with her would be fun. It could potentially blow your mind. She was the kind of girl that could teach a young man interesting lessons, but any future with her inevitably ended in a prefabricated home with more than a few half dressed kids playing in the yard. 50/50 chance that future would be described as “happy.”

That moment stuck with me because for the first time I realized that a women, a stranger, found me attractive. I believed it when she said she’d fuck me. I think she really, truly, would. It was embarrassing. It was flattering. It hit like a narcotic. Deep down in the no longer hidden dirt bag parts of my soul I wished I could give in to the lustful urges. If only I could pause time. If only no one would get hurt. If only I didn’t have a girlfriend. If only I was the type of guy who could take advantage.

But I’m not that guy, so I blushed and stammered “I’m flattered but…” and turned my attention back to my beer bottle where it belonged.

At the time I wrote the incident off with the old misogynist cliche of “women only want what they can’t have.” What else could explain it? In the months I spent at Fort Polk I turned down almost as many women as I’d dated in the previous twenty-four years. For the first time in my life I was doing the rejection instead of being rejected and at the time the only thing I could think of that had changed was my relationship status. The only difference I saw in myself was that I was “taken.”

What I didn’t realize at the time, what I only saw looking back with an old man’s eyes, is how different I’d become. Before, when I was single, a night on the town was a hunt. It was a game. The goal was to meet girls and dance and get laid and in the attempt I pulled out all the stops. I shined up my boots and picked out my best hat. I ironed my clothes and put on cologne but inside I was a nervous goddamned wreck. So I’d have a few drinks just to take the edge off. I’d use canned pickup lines and try to hide my disappointment and hurt when a girl said “no” and then I’d have another round just to take the sting out of their rejection. It never stopped at just one more round. I never got drunk enough to get over being uncomfortable in my own skin, so I ended most nights blind drunk and alone.

But that waitress and the other women in that Leesville, Louisiana roadhouse hadn’t met that guy. They didn’t know that insecure, desperate, drunk little boy. Because I was “taken” I was as close to comfortable in my own skin as I’d ever been and I had nothing to prove. A night out was just a night out. I’d drink two beers and lose a game of pool. I’d dance with the friends of the girl my buddy was hitting on. I’d tell a joke. I smiled a lot, tipped well, didn’t hit on anyone and probably most importantly never got blind drunk and that guy, that cheerful, polite, mostly sober, guy who just wanted to have a good time, proved attractive to women.

There’s a small part of me that wishes I could’ve taken that waitress up on it but as is now well established, I’ve never been capable of that kind of treachery. I could never intentionally betray that pretty brunette who went to school fifteen hours away. Though there is a small and steadily shrinking part of me that could easily find himself living with a waitress from western Louisiana in a mobile home with a gaggle of half dressed kids playing in the front yard. There’s an equal part of me that wishes I could back in time and tell that childish version of myself to calm the fuck down, quit trying so hard, quit drinking so hard, just be yourself. But no young man has ever listened to old men who give that kind of advice so we all have to learn the hard way.

I dated the girl who would become my wife for a matter of weeks before she left Louisiana for college 15 hours away by car. This was back in the stone age when people still wrote letters and video conference calls were reserved for wealthy elites. We had to wait until 9pm to call when our cell phone minutes were free and we never, ever texted. Occasionally we could chat via AOL Instant Messenger, though that was more her thing than mine. Up to that point I’d only used the internet for porn and illicit music downloads. (I still have an unreleased Jason Boland track called “Nymphomaniac” burned onto a dusty CD around here somewhere.)

At the time I didn’t believe a long distance relationship could work. Every relationship I’d had before had fallen apart after a field problem or two. Some hadn’t even lasted a range week. But somehow me and that pretty brunette managed. I was too hurt to be too jealous, though there’s this prick who love baseball who I’d still love to meet in a dark alley, and I guess she was just too loyal. We fell into a workable rhythm. In the fall she’d leave for school and for a few months I’d throw out my razor and spend my time drinking beer and shooting guns with my redneck buddies. I’d shave and get a haircut and play dutiful boyfriend for Christmas break. Then she’d go off again at the New Year and I’d throw out my razor again in time for Mardi Gras, the Sac Au Lait spawn and late spring fishing trips to Grand Isle. Then I’d be waiting, freshly shaved and showered, when she got off the plane in May for summer break.

Somehow it worked for us. I guess because we were never around each other long enough to get truly bored and neither of us were ever capable of being that guy. Somehow we were both loyal.

In the first semester of her Junior year the Army recalled me off of convalescent leave and sent me to the medical company at Baynes Jones Community Hospital in Fort Polk to await the conclusion of a medical board that would inevitably find me disabled and medically retire me. I worked as a supernumery sergeant, handling any job that required stripes but no medical knowledge. Most days I filed papers or escorted enlisted soldiers to appointments. Once I had to observe every male service member in the medical company as they conducted a drug urinalysis. In the spring of 2005 they instituted a security position in the waiting room of the ER and I was put in charge of coordinating the shifts and I worked one every other night 2100-0600.

It was during that time that the pretty brunette invited me to visit for spring break. I had money and leave to burn so in April of 2005 I took the week. I had an overnight guard shift, then a comp day, and my leave would start at midnight Friday morning and run until midnight the next Friday. The only thing that stood between me and that pretty brunette was a good nights sleep and a fifteen hour drive.

Except I couldn’t sleep. I wasn’t used to night shift and hadn’t been working it long enough to adjust. The morning sunlight was too bright. The barracks too loud. The Army mattress too hard and the AC too weak. I tossed and I turned and I thought about that trip and I didn’t sleep a wink. The sun set and I was still laying in my Army twin bed, anxious and wide awake. With a young man’s optimism, nowhere to go and nothing to do to kill the remaining hours I said to hell with it. I packed my bags as the sun set and started my trip early.

I drove rural highways from Fort Polk to Nachitoches where I picked up I-49 North. In those days I-49 ended at the intersection with I-20 in Shreveport so it was back to rural highways North to Texarkana where I hopped on I-30 East to I-40. Those were the easy miles. I-40 East was wall to wall tractor trailers and orange cones from Little Rock to West Memphis. From there I turned North on I-55 paralleling the Mississippi through some of the straightest, flattest, dullest stretches of Eastern Arkansas and Southern Missouri, all the way through St Louis and on to Springfield. It was there, in Southern Illinois that the long, straight road and longer night began to wear on me and my eyelids grew heavy. I stopped at a rest area somewhere North of Springfield and fell asleep in the front seat as the sun started to rise. Two hours nap and two truck stop cups of coffee were enough to see me safely to my destination and I met that pretty brunette at her place in time for breakfast.

It was cold in the Midwest that week. It snowed one night and we took a walk together around campus in the dark. Somewhere there’s a picture of her standing in an empty, snow covered, walkway under a canopy of dark oak trees. We took a train into Chicago and went to the Metropolitan Music of art where we posed for a picture under the statue lions and I saw American Gothic in person. The week was too short, and I waited until the last minute to head for home. The sun was setting as I turned South again on I-55.

Without anticipation carrying me forward the return trip was grim. No amount of truck stop coffee could make up for those long, dark, boring, miles. I gave up in Texarkana and got a room at a motel I probably would’ve never stopped at if I hadn’t been dangerously exhausted. I was so tired the noise and the light from the parking lot didn’t even register and I fell fast asleep on top of the bedspread still fully dressed and barely woke in time for checkout. I stopped in Shreveport to visit my grandmothers on a whim, figuring I couldn’t pass by without stopping in. It proved to be a mistake. My Memaw insisted on taking me out for lunch, and Granny had supper on the stove when I arrived, already full, at her place. I ate two meals back to back and drove the rest of the way to Fort Polk feeling like I was going to explode at any second.

Like any good Infantry sergeant I signed in from leave at 11:59:59, the literal last second of the last day. Within weeks I’d sign out again on terminal leave and head home, never to sign back into the Army again. In May I’d once again make the long trip North to help that pretty brunette move out of her dorm. I’ve discussed that trip before. The argument over her mini-fridge. The tornado in southern Illinois. The night we spent in Memphis to break up the trip. We had BBQ that night and saw Graceland before we left the next day. I’d make the trip again in May when she graduated, but that particular “adventure” is a story for another day, one I might need to get permission for before hand.

I don’t miss I-55. From beginning to end it is probably the dullest stretch of road in this country. But I’d be lying if I said I didn’t miss those 15 hour drives, directions printed out on printer paper, CDs in the visor to keep me entertained, stopping for nothing but bathrooms and gas, eating as I drove. There’s something freeing about being alone in the car on a long road at night. There’s something special in those dark highway miles. Or maybe it was just the anticipation, not so much of the destination but of that pretty brunette’s company. I miss that youthful exuberance, that biological drive, that would make a twenty-something young man pack his bags and take off as the sunset and drive all night to see a girl in the morning.