dragonlady7

“I heard he hit you first,” I say into the phone.

K’s voice is indistinct, but his diction is clear; it’s the phone reception, and the fact that he’s probably holding it between his face and shoulder as he’s cooking. “Damn right,” he says. “Well, to be fair, he hit her first, and that’s what started it.”

“Wait, whoa, he hit the girl? I’m amazed you let him live.” I’d had a few scanty details secondhand via text and his slurred voice in the background the night before, but nothing detailed.

“There were probably four people in the place,” he says. “Me, the barmaid, the guy, and one other customer. Damn it this spatula isn’t big enough.” He trails off into muttering, then comes back clearer as he evidently shifts the phone closer to his mouth. “I was just there to… I wasn’t really there to get drunk, I just wanted to get out… get out of the house, really. I just needed a little space. So I had just got my drink. And the bartender was arguing with this guy, her ex-boyfriend. She was telling him he had to get out. So he backhands her, right across the face. Hang on.” He fades out, and something scuffles, and thumps.

“There.” He’s much clearer now.

“He really hit her,” I say.

“Yeah.” His voice rises, in remembered incredulity. “So I stood up and went over and said You’re gonna have to leave now, and he got up in my face and said It’s none of yours, and I said, again, clearer, You’re going to have to leave. So he says, You wanna fight about it? And calm as anything, I looked him up and down and said, Actually? Yeah.”

“Oh, perfect,” I say.

“So he hauls off and hits me. It was kind of a nothin’ hit, a drunk swing, though actually my jaw hurt pretty bad after. And I woke up this morning with a bloody nose but I think that was just the dry air, I don’t think he got me that good. So everything went into slow motion, like it does– he hits me, and then I see him looking at my right hand, ready for me to swing back. So I hit him with my left. Left to the face, then a right to the body. And he just dropped into a little heap. I kicked him, pretty hard, in the gut, cuz you know, I had kind of a lot of anger to work through. It’s been a while. Then I scooped him up and put him out the door.”

“Nice,” I say, and he laughs.

“I know I didn’t break his jaw because he mumbled something about calling the police. I said Sure, go ahead. He hit me first, and there were witnesses that saw it, so I wasn’t worried. I shut the door, came back inside, went back to my chair, sat down, took a breath, and time went back from slow motion to normal. And the bartender comes over, and says, calm and quiet, just like that, Thanks. Want a drink?”

“And you did,” I say.

“Fuck yes,” he said. “I’d already started in on a triple of Jameson– one of those rocks glasses, about three quarters full– and a tall Guinness, and she brought me another of each, and then I had another Jameson after that, and then we went down the street and I had another triple Jameson and a tall Guinness. And I felt better.”

“You sounded pretty damn cheerful on the phone last night,” I point out.

“Oh hell yes,” he says. “There’s nothing as satisfying as a good bar fight, you know?”

“I’m kind of surprised you’re this OK this morning,” I say. “Last night you took S’s phone and were telling me something involved about finishing your drink because of St. Patrick and your ancestors, but you pronounced it ansheshtors.”

“I don’t remember that,” he said. “But I’m guessing the giant glass of water I had, and then the tactical decision to go make myself throw up, between the last Jameson and the last Guinness, are probably why I woke up bright-eyed and ready to go, if a little bloody, at 7 am. I’ve been cookin’ ever since. Hey I gotta go, I’ll call you once the food’s been served.”

My family is all in Georgia at my sister’s house with her little boys. Both of my other sisters, the little sister’s husband, and my mom and dad. I am taking smug comfort in the fact that despite my being the aunt least good at sending packages and letters and calling, I am the one the boys remember since I saw them at Labor Day, so they are calling my two younger sisters by my name (since all three of us are big blond women, and the boys are two and almost four, the confusion is understandable). My middle-little sister (the designations of birth order in a group of four can be confusing; there’s middle-little and baby-little, and they’re about 30 and 27 respectively) sat the boys down with a photo album on her phone and showed them the difference between her and me, but it didn’t really take and they’re all still getting called my name.

Ha!

I’m being thankful that I have a family I miss, today. A lot of people seem to have been complaining about the stress of having to spend a day with family, or have been sharing truly shocking tales of the abuses families can perpetuate on one another. I have a minor complex about my weight and another about asking for things I need, but those all came out of a wonderfully loving environment that just wasn’t quite sure how to always be supportive. I know so many people aren’t that lucky. I love my family so much, and my parents worked so hard to give me a good upbringing, and spending time with them is the absolute opposite of a trial even though we have all these crazy in-laws now, heh heh.

So there’s that. I also have thinky thoughts on the origins of Thanksgiving but it’s a point I made before in the depths of the Internet and I don’t know that I’m up to re-doing the research to make it coherent again.

Called the two veterans in my immediate family yesterday. Sister has no accent until she has to holler at her kids, then she’s all Southern. (She’s a Major in the GA Nat'l Guard now; she went to college on ROTC and was stationed in Germany, then served two tours in Iraq; she was most recently posted at Ft. Stewart in GA so she owns a house near Savannah and her husband works as a civilian for the Army while she does National Guard and stays home with the kids, who are 2 and 4.)

Dad can’t hear me on the car’s Bluetooth thing; his hearing is not great, and actually was damaged during his service in Vietnam. So I made that a brief call, and he was glad I’d called. When my sister was in Iraq, Dad was openly jealous at the popular support of the troops; he came home from Vietnam to a great deal of popular contempt and has never forgiven US popular culture for that. He served in the 1st Gulf War as well, but from near home, as an intelligence analyst in the National Guard, and his unit was deployed to Iraq in 2003 but he was left home since he was at the mandatory retirement age (60); they let him stay in an extra year, but made him stay behind in the US to take care of the honor guards for the remains of unit members killed in Iraq.

I called both from the car while I was driving from work to pick Z up. We left straight from his work to drive to visit K and his wife, about a 4-hr drive.

I wished K a happy Veteran’s Day– he served in the Navy during the 1st Gulf War, and in Somalia. Then I plied him with beers and petted his dog, and he told stories, ironically enough, about being a Confederate Civil War re-enactor.

“I was trying to give someone a business card I had in my coat,” he says, texting me at work. “I kept pulling out dog cookies instead. Finally he asks if I have a dog. I answer, ‘Naw, I just like these things,’ and eat one.”

They call, both of them on speakerphone, K and his wife S. Both of them randomly keep yelling “No!” at their puppy, and I keep thinking they’re reacting to something I’m saying. It adds a surreal dimension to the conversation. We’re talking about dogs.

“When my parents babysat my sister’s dog for her while she was in Iraq,” I say, “they were worried that since it was a whole year, and she was so young, she might forget about her ‘real’ parents. But one day Dad came down dressed in his BDUs for National Guard, and Scout got extremely excited and confused.”

Neither K nor S seem to know what BDUs are and I remember belatedly that the Army and Navy aren’t the same thing. “The Battle Dress Uniform– the camoflage dealie they wear most of the time? Dad’s uniform was identical to my sister’s, and brother-in-law’s. Actually when she got married she gave Dad some of her shirts and all her old name tapes with her maiden name on them, since she changed to her husband’s name.”

K laughs suddenly. “So one day I was walking down the streets of [city], and this guy goes by me, wearing Navy dungarees– they’re pretty distinctive, the trousers that go with the work uniform– and the dungarees have my last name written on the ass."

"Written… on the ass…” I’m trying to picture this. I’m thinking like the Juicy Couture logo velour pants that are so disturbingly ubiquitous.

“Just above the left pocket,” he says. “He’s this hippie lookin’ dude, all shaggy and unkempt, and he’s got flowers embroidered on the dungarees. So I say, 'hey, man, where’d you get those pants?’ and he’s all defensive about it. Finally he says they were a gift, someone had given them to him. I managed to pry out who had given them to him, and it was a coworker of mine at the lab in college, a few years back; I’d given her two pairs of mine. So they were my pants after all.”

I’m still a few minutes back. “Wait, the Navy writes your name on your ass?”

“It’s pretty small,” he says. “Just above the left pocket. So you get your clothes back from the ship laundry. Everything’s labeled.” He thinks about that. “Wait, the Army doesn’t write your name on all the pieces of your uniform?”

“No,” I say. “At least, not anywhere visible."

"So you just get whoever’s underwear back from the laundry, huh?"

I hadn’t ever thought about it. "I don’t actually know how it works,” I confess. My dad was National Guard the whole time I was growing up so he just always did his own laundry.

K laughs again. “One time I was changing at the gym, a little while after I got out of the service, and these old guys were staring at me, and after getting really creeped out I realized they were discussing whether my underwear was Navy-issue or not. Which it was. But I still was a little creeped out."

This one isn’t as interesting as the others, I think, but I want to stay in the habit, and all the really cool stories, he won’t let me share– the Special Forces ones with burnt bodies and sniper rifles and so on– so I’m filling space while I work on the Sea World series. Oh yes. Sea World. Brace yourselves.

So this K Stories tag… I love his stories, and I’m damn fond of the man himself, but some of the things he tells me, I can’t repeat. And some of the other things he tells me, I just can’t make into a cutesy clever thing with a punchline. Like how his wife lost her job two months after they bought a house five years ago, and even though he works all the overtime he can get, they’re barely scraping by, and yesterday, he didn’t eat, because there wasn’t money to buy food. Why is life so goddamn hard. I wished I could have sent him half my dinner through the phone. I had extra. Instead, today I bought breakfast for a teammate who’s in the same position; her husband finally started his new job today, but it’ll be a while until she can afford things like a plate of eggs at the diner. I told her it was a mini-fundraiser just for her. (Her breakfast cost $5.04. Which she didn’t have. I did. I’m lucky.)

Life is hard. I’m not being political or nothing, I just really sympathize with all the protestors down on Wall Street. I don’t want a handout; none of my friends do. But a combat veteran in his forties, college-educated, working full-time can’t eat? A woman who has worked hard her entire life can be laid off at the drop of a hat, and a pre-existing medical condition that costs her over a quarter of her income every month to treat keeps her poor.

That shit is fucked up, people. I don’t have any answers. But I know that most poor people don’t “deserve” to be poor, and just working hard isn’t enough anymore.

Dang it I downloaded the pics and they’re not on this phone anymore. :( went to a salon for the first time since 2003ish, got 11 inches cut off my hair. I can’t sit on it anymore but it’s low waist-length, just skims the top of my ass: that means ican wear it down for the first time in most of s decade. Whoa. Got my roller derby team pic taken mid-hair-flip; it’s pretty epic. I promise I’ll post it.

If I am on enough antidepressants that I can’t have an orgasm I should goddamn well not feel so fucking worthless, eh??!?!?!

ETA: That’s it, I’m cutting those fucking pills in half and drinking more bourbon.

I miss when my mom was fat because she gave the best hugs. I’m not even saying that to be a jerk. But then, I’ve lived hundreds of miles away from her since before the mega-diet.

We have no fire, so we sit in camp chairs illuminated by the glow of a distant electric light, drinking corn whiskey from pewter mugs. It’s cold out, really cold, and the night is dark even though the clouds have cleared. I’m wearing almost all the clothes I brought, including the fur-lined hat he made for me, years ago. The cold doesn’t seem to bother him, but I know he’s lived rougher than this.

“She still has depression,” he says. “It’s pretty bad, but it’s nothing to what it was.” We digress, the conversation going off in a different direction for a while, as ours do, but he returns to it.

“For a period of about five years,” he says, “every day, every day I would come home from work and not know, as I opened the door, whether she’d be there to greet me, or if she’d have killed herself."

I say something softly horrified, something sympathetic. He shrugs. "It got to me,” he says. "It was hard. But I couldn’t be mad. People kept asking me why I stayed with her. And I didn’t know how to even answer that. If I left, I knew there was no goddamn way she’d live through that. And I couldn’t do that to her. I love her. And people don’t seem to understand what that means.“

We sit for a while, digressing again, refilling cups. The bottle’s nearly gone.

"I think the worst part was when it was getting better,” he said. “She brought me these journals she’d written. Really intimate, soul-searching stuff, and it was hard for her to share it, but she made herself do it. Because she wanted to show me she was better.” He drinks. “She was writing about how she’d finally fallen in love with her husband again. And I thought, ‘how sweet,’ and then I stopped and thought about it for a second.” He is leaning, elbows on knees, cup in one hand, staring past me in the dark, the light coming through his hair.

“She didn’t even have enough of herself left to love me, all that time.” He shakes his head, and sighs. “It wasn’t like I could say anything, or be mad, but it makes it even harder for me to think back on those years. And now I think I’m on almost as much medication as she is. But God damn it, I love her. I couldn’t do anything else. Can’t do anything else.” He shakes his head, then laughs, a little bitterly. “But that’s why I had to get out of [state redacted] for the weekend. She does, actually, literally drive me crazy sometimes.”

mostly true, paraphrased, details removed