Paradise and Dashboard Lights

2024 wasn't all bad, and eventually I found the words to talk about the pretty brunette in the ugly yellow dress.

One night sometime between 2002 and 2004, when Fort Cavaszos was still named after the Confederate traitor Hood, I was driving down a road that ran beside the First Cavalry Division motor pool, past row after row after row of tan painted Abrams tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles when I had something of a revelation.

It was late at night and I was driving my baby brother back to his barracks after a night out at a cowboy bar in Killeen. I think I was in town because my brother had just returned from a rotation to Guantanamo Bay and I’d driven with my parents out from Louisiana to welcome him home. I know I was driving because I was sober. I was sober because the year before I’d died in a vehicle accident in Southern Uzbekistan and was still only starting my recovery. There was country music on the stereo because if I’m driving there’s always country music on the stereo. By 2002 I’d already started to give up on Nashville and we were probably listening to something out of Texas, Pat Green or Jason Boland and the Stragglers.

We were talking about girls, specifically a pretty little blond with a g-string hanging out of the back of her low cut jeans that we’d seen at the club. Funny how memory works. I can’t remember the day or the time. I’m not a hundred percent sure if it was even after my brother’s deployment to Guantanamo. Maybe it was in 04 when he came back from Iraq. But I can remember that girl’s purple g-string and the ration of shit I gave one of my brothers buddies when he was too shy to approach her, mocking him like I wasn’t secretly a coward myself, picking on him like I would’ve walked right up and asked her to dance if I wanted, I just didn’t want to.

I guess that’s why as we were driving past that motor pool on a cool night that I thought back to another night years earlier and thousands of miles away and had a realization so vivid and clear that I blurted it out loud in front of a car load of inebriated Infantrymen.

“Holy shit I missed my shot!”

In 1998 I was a nineteen year old Infantryman, stationed in Hawaii, and desperately in love with an Army medic who for the purposes of this essay we’ll call Lorrie.

We’d met the way young folks meet, or used to meet in the dark ages before cell phones and Internet were common, her friends were sleeping with mine. I was a giant dork. Inexperienced and shy, I hadn’t dated in high school, so everything I knew about women and romance and relationships I’d learned in the toxic chaos of an Infantry barracks. When we met, my first real relationship had just ended spectacularly and badly and Lorrie had an unrequited crush on my roommate, so for months we were just buddies.

I’d like to believe we were close friends. She, and another young medic we’ll call Cathy, were probably my first ever girl, comma, friends. We bummed around. We went shopping. We watched movies and hung out and it was genuinely fun. I stayed in Hawaii during Christmas block leave and for the last two weeks of 1997 Cathy, Lorrie, and I basically had the island to ourselves as everyone else we knew went home. I worked half days and we spent our nights dancing at a Navy run cowboy bar on Pearl Harbor. I had two dates to New Years eve. Funny thing is, I don’t remember if I got a kiss from either of them that night, even on the cheek, but I remember it was cool and foggy and they were shooting so many fireworks on Oahu the smoke mixed with the fog and the world smelled like Sulfur and sea salt.

Cathy started dating a guy in my platoon. I don’t remember much about him except he was rock dumb and honestly, she deserved better, but that’s beside the point. One by one couples paired off and in the winter of 1998 Lorrie and I were the only two left standing and it felt like we were gravitating closer and closer. We sat together at the movies. We danced together at the club. We had breakfast together alone after closing time, either at the Dennys by the Pearl Ridge Center mall or the Marie Callenders on the other side of that same parking lot. Sometimes, when I’d been drinking, I’d pass out on her barracks room floor. It was surprisingly pleasant. I genuinely enjoyed Lorrie’s company.

I don’t know if I had a crush on Lorrie from the beginning or if it grew over time but by the winter of 1998 I found myself facing an age old dilemma. I had a painful crush on a friend and was afraid that acting on it ran the risk of destroying a friendship I genuinely cherished. I had to have been desperate because I gathered enough courage to go to Cathy for advice. We were sitting in the North stairwell of the medical company barracks at Tripler Army Medical Center when I laid out my problems. Cathy listened politely, smiled, and said “these things have a way of working themselves out.”

For the Infantrymen on Schofield Barracks Thursday was road march day. I’d always found it easier to ruck six miles tired and hungover than it was to run three, so Lorrie and I fell into a routine of doing things Wednesday night. It was a thirty minute drive from Schofield to Tripler but I didn’t mind. Nineteen year olds don’t need much sleep and it meant I got to spend more time alone with Lorrie. One night in February we drove almost an hour from Tripler to Waimea Bay because there were reports of twenty foot waves and neither of us had ever seen anything like that. I don’t even remember if we saw any big waves. I can’t recall the sight or the sound of them, but I can still remember Lorrie sitting in the passenger seat in the dark as we made the long drive.

Most of the time we just ran errands and grabbed a bite to eat. That was my understanding of the plan at least, on our last night.

I’d never seen her in a dress before. Lorrie wore BDUs or scrubs at work and blue jeans or shorts off duty, but on that last Wednesday night she opened the door in a yellow dress. It didn’t suit her. Yellow wasn’t her color and I thought she looked better, more natural, in jeans so when she told me it was “laundry day” I accepted the explanation. I don’t remember the errand we ran. It was probably as simple as driving her down to the Navy Exchange to pick up dry cleaning and personal items. We picked up fast food for supper because it was all we knew and all we could afford. Even Applebees would’ve been a special date night on the combined salaries of two teenage Pfcs. I don’t remember the excuse she made not to go back to the barracks, how she knew of the park, or how she talked me into driving there.

Oh but I remember being parked there beside the ocean, mere inches from the water of Pearl Harbor. It was dark and cool. The old street lamps cast dark shadows and gave the parking lot a soft, yellow, glow. The sky was clear and even the lights of Honolulu and Waikiki couldn’t drown out the millions of stars. We sat in the darkness with the windows rolled down and the stereo softly playing, eating, and talking as the Pacific ocean lapped at the shore. My old truck had bench seats and there must’ve been three feet between us. She’d smile in the dim light and I wanted nothing more than to reach across that distance and touch her. Instead we sat on opposite sides of the cab, talking and smoking cigarettes once the food was all gone and God she was so pretty in that moment, even in that ugly yellow dress.

At some point Lorrie began flipping through the channels on the stereo. If you know me this is all the evidence you need to know that I was deeply and truly smitten. I let her touch my stereo. She flipped to a classic rock station and we talked about what little I knew about rock and roll music until Meatloaf’s “Paradise By The Dashboard Light” came on. I’m not a Meatloaf fan. “Paradise By The Dahsboard Light” is overly long, overly produced, juvenile and honestly, dumb. But Lorrie lit up when she heard it and immediately turned the volume up. Smiling at me she announced, “This is my FAVORITE song!” and she proceeded to sing the ladies verse to me along with the radio.

We’ll pause for a moment here because I’m betting that you’re seeing now what I didn’t then. Cathy’s cryptic comment that “these things have a way of working themselves out,” the Wednesday night “errands,” the laundry day dress, “Paradise By The Dashboard Light”… Without a confession from either Lorrie or Cathy we’ll never know exactly what was supposed to happen that night beside the waters of Pearl Harbor in the winter of 1998, but there is ample evidence to suggest my sudden realization, four years and four hundred thousand miles later in the fall of 2002 was correct. I’d missed my shot. My perspective was skewed to begin with and the memory has been warped by time and distance but I’ve never told this story without groans from my audience as they recognize all the signs I missed.

I’ll never know.

We’ll never know.

Because I didn’t make my move. Worse. I told her I thought the song was dumb. I drove her back to her barracks, then sped back to mine to try to grab a few precious hours of sleep before 0430 first call the next morning. Life happened. The Army happened. I remember one last conversation with Lorrie, sitting in a bare empty room in a friends enlisted housing unit in the hills above Tripler hospital. I remember she was wearing faded men’s Wrangler jeans she’d stolen from some skinny sailor months before we met. I don’t remember what we talked about. Shortly afterwards my unit went to the mainland for a month at the Joint Readiness Training Center in Louisiana and I did ten days at home on leave afterward. When I got back to our favorite cowboy bar on Pearl Harbor both Cathy and Lorrie were sitting at a table with some new guys I’d never met. And that was, mostly, that.

Somewhere along the line I heard a rumor that Lorrie got married. Somewhere else I heard that both she and Cathy left Hawaii for Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio.

I left Hawaii in 1999, eventually landing in Fort Drum, New York.

I was wounded in a vehicle accident in Southern Uzbekistan in 2001.

Waking from a medically induced coma is surreal enough to warrant it’s own series of essays, but I vividly remember the TV in my ICU room playing the morning news. It was raining. Heavy thunderstorms. I could hear the thunder outside and I could see the rain coming down in sheets on the traffic cam. It reminded me of the thunderstorms in Texas. It was football season. The newscasters were talking about a game between the Washington Redskins and the Dallas Cowboys. I got it in my head that this meant I was at Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio and for a brief moment I was excited at the chance of a reunion with either Lorrie or Cathy. I have to confess I was more than a little heartbroken to find out I was in Washington DC.

Heartbroken is better than dead, but when you're 22 it's not much better.

I’ve written four drafts of this tale, trying each time to find a way to frame it, to make this simple story of missed signals something more than what it is. I had one draft where I crossed out every failed introduction and left it as an example of how hard it is to start writing sometimes. I had another that focused on the music. I had a third that talked about the telling, how I had perfected this story for years around campfires, fishing docks and duck blinds and yet I failed to do it justice on the page. I considered maybe tying this whole thing into something to do with toxic masculinity or incel culture. I spent hours trying to make this story mean something, and I still don’t think I’ve done it. I’ve banged my head against this keyboard for hours and thousands of words looking for the hook to hang this story on and it’s still not right.

Beside my bed is a notebook where I jot ideas that come to me in the moments before sleep. On the last page I have written, “THE HOOK IS YOU DON’T HAVE THE FUCKING WORDS TODAY JUST LIKE YOU DIDN’T HAVE THE WORDS 26 YEARS AGO!” It’s true I guess. It might even be a better idea for an essay, but you see… The thing is… I don’t know that this story needs a hook. I don’t think it has to mean anything. In the grand scheme of things a crush I had for a few months a lifetime ago and thousands of miles away doesn’t matter much and you know…maybe it shouldn’t.

It’s just a story I like to share. A warm pleasant memory from a time and about a person I remember fondly. A snapshot of a happy moment when the world was soft and calm. I’ve probably fucked it all up. I’ve probably got it all wrong in the re-telling. I probably misread it at every step, but it doesn’t matter because the memory makes me smile, and the telling of it always makes my buddies groan and laugh. Who knows what would’ve happened if I’d had the words and been brave enough to shoot my shot and you know what? Who fucking cares? I still feel happy when I think about Lorrie sitting on the bench seats of that shitty truck in that ugly, yellow dress, smiling and singing along badly to that stupid song. I didn’t get the girl but I’ve got that memory and a good campfire story and that’s plenty enough.

I hope "Lorrie" and "Cathy" are happy wherever they landed.

Almost thirty years have passed and I still can't stand Meatloaf's "Paradise By The Dashboard Lights." If I was writing the story as fiction this is the song I'd use.