I'll show you, I'll show you, I'll show you what I've seen
Been writing a bit at work, and finally today finished what I've been working on. Draft in case anyone's curious/overly bored:
I used to think that this city was beautiful. It isn't anymore; I see the lights for what they are, just harsh and ugly voices in the night trying to convince themselves that they're not not afraid of the dark. The people are just... but you didn't ask me what I thought of the city, did you? But that is why I came.
I used to think that this city was beautiful. It was the only bright spot on this whole goddamn coast, I thought. You see, I used to live in the south, a little town in Georgia I'm sure you've never even heard of. Dad told me one time that mom won some beauty pageant there, “Miss Macon County” or something like that. The whole town talked about it for years afterwards; it was the biggest news to come out of that town in decades.
I was born in 1972. Mom and dad waited for years after they were married because they were afraid the Russians were going to attack and they didn't want to bring a child into that. I guess they didn't have second thoughts because my sister was born just a year after I was. Everyone was worried about the Soviets back then, dad said. Nixon sent Kissinger to China, but the Russians were still about to attack at any moment. It was really bad in a small town, cut off from any information but the local papers and the doctor, who had a television.
My parents moved to Washington in 1977, and that's where most of my memories of growing up are from. I remember Carter had just been inaugurated; my parents watched it on our new color TV. It was a monster of a thing, enormous, and dad had only been able to afford it because his new government job came with a huge raise, at least compared to what he made in Georgia. We lived well, all things considered.
I guess we didn't really live in D.C., as such.... Our house was in Maryland, about half an hour from the city. It was a pretty rural area, and the busiest thing nearby was a little airfield out in the middle of all the farms. It built up a lot as I grew up, but you never really notice that until afterwards, when you wonder where all the new stuff came from. But we were still in Washington, if not D.C. Dad still rooted for Atlanta, but the Redskins began to grow on him, too, and one year he even managed to get season tickets. I never asked him how he managed to afford it, and mom supported him, though I think she wasn't happy about it.
No matter how close to D.C. we lived, we were still out in the country. It didn't seem that way to mom and dad, since it was infinitely more developed than what they had grown up in and around. And the people fit too. They were the same kind of people mom and dad had grown up with, maybe a little more sophisticated from their trips into the city, but they still had the same country upbringing, mannerisms, and nasty little prejudices. Even when suburbs grew up around our house, the people who had lived there before, who were the only ones mom and dad associated with anyway, didn't change. Even dad's friends from work didn't impact this, and the only one who ever seemed to be invited over to dinner was Bill Sullivan, a good ol' boy from Virginia who seemed to empathize with dad a lot, and who mom could actually tolerate.
I didn't find out until much later that the real reason mom kept inviting Bill back for dinner was because she was carrying on an affair with him, seeing him on his lunch breaks while he was supposedly going our for “pizza” or whatever else. “Uncle Bill”, mom would call him. I saw a lot of him while I was growing up, and I guess he really was like an uncle to me; I never got to see many of my real aunts and uncles, since most of them were still living in that Georgia hellhole.
No, it didn't really raise any suspicions; dad said Bill had a history of eating lunch alone, and none of his coworkers really questioned it. Most of dad's friends had lunches packed for them by their wives, and would only go out to lunch on Fridays. It was natural to think that Bill, who wasn't married, would go to get something on his own. Besides, it wasn't as though he shied away from them at other times; he was far from antisocial.
Dad claimed he discovered the affair when I was 16, but I think he knew long before then, maybe even from the start of it. It was a couple of years after Bill began coming for dinner, and even though I was only 12 at the time I remember that dad's interactions with mom changed: he seemed a lot more distant and she was a lot colder to him than before. I didn't think much of it at first but at point I noticed that these reactions were exaggerated when Bill was over. I didn't know what to think, and it worried me.
Then one night mom just left. She woke me up, made me breakfast, and sent me off to school. When I got home, she was gone. I assumed she had gone out to the store, but when dad got home he was visibly angry, and in so many words informed me that mom would not be coming back. He later told me that she and Bill had run off to Tennessee; apparently he confronted her about the affair the week before, and they had fought, ending with her threatening to kill herself. Dad backed off, but they sniped at each other that whole week before she left.
It turns out they never divorced each other either. Bill didn't want a marriage, and mom was more than happy to go along with him. Dad just didn't care. Was too angry to care at first, and afterwards just had no real reason to. Besides, it avoided custody battles, which would have taken time and effort even though mom didn't care enough to bother wanting me.
I hated her for a long time after that. Hated her for what she'd done to dad, hated her for leaving. Hated her for not wanting me. And yet part of me wished, hoped she would come back so we could be happy again. I knew that it wouldn't happen, but part of me found comfort in indulging in that fantasy. It took me years to realize that it wasn't worth it to be angry at her, because it was a meaningless anger; it didn't drive me to change things or resolve to do things differently, only to wallow in self-pity and hate. I almost didn't survive that year....
One of the things that got me through was the idea that I needed to be there for my dad, who was taking it pretty hard too. That got me through the worst of it, but the irony is that he and I had our own falling out just a year later, about mom. I... don't really want to get into that, though. It's a miracle I spoke to him at all after that, and even that was just a couple of years ago.
That's one of the things that led me to go into the Army, actually. I felt like there wasn't anything left for me at home. So, I enlisted. Turned out Iraq invaded Kuwait about a month after I finished Basic, and I was one of the grunts they put out on the front lines. We just plain barreled through the Iraqis. I still feel sorry for those poor sons-of-bitches. 'Course half of them surrendered soon as they saw us. The ones who didn't... I still have nightmares about that. Not about what we did to them, but having to pick up the pieces afterward.
Well, no, we didn't get Saddam, but we put the fear of God into him. And we saved Kuwait and got our oil back, didn't we?
No, it wasn't about democracy, not really. And it never will be. It's always about money, always has been, always will be.
Look, I'm not a fan of politics and I don't like talking about it. Now do you want me to finish my story or not?
Alright, so as I was saying.... My time in the Army wasn't all bad. I made some friends I still talk to, and I met Amy. Amy Whittaker, was her name. She was a private in my company, when we were stationed in Germany after the war. We hit it off pretty much immediately, and spent a lot of our leave together, whenever we could.
We got married shortly after that. Not because we loved each other, mind you, although we did, or at least thought we did. See, the thing with the Army is, it's almost like they punish you for being single. You get a huge pay raise for being married, never mind housing allowments. And with two of us bringing in those paychecks....
The Army gives you a raise if you have children, too.... Amy and I tried for the next two years, and she finally got pregnant about a year before my four years were up. We named her Sarah, after Amy's mother.
It's funny.... Until Sarah was born she was just a number to us, an increase in pay. It sounds cold, and maybe it was, but that's just how it was done. We needed the money, or at least thought we did. But just seeing her there in Amy's arms, and the smile on Amy's face.... I'd never seen her smile like that, and that smile was how I felt just then.
I still hate myself for wishing this, but it doesn't stop me from wishing it constantly: I wish she had still been a number to me. It would have made the divorce easier when it happened three months later.
My four years were up, and I was about to muster out. When Amy and I had gotten married, we agreed that after our first terms we were done with the Army. Amy's would be up about four months after mine, and once we were put we'd head back stateside, find a nice place, and settle down. I was tired of moving, and wanted to stay put. And I was sick of Army life, all the bullshit rules and asshole officers.
A week before I was out, Amy changed her mind. She was happy in the Army, she said, and the pay and benefits were good now.
I lost it. We fought for the next two days and when I realized she wasn't going to change her mind I decided I had to leave. I think at that point it wasn't so much that she was staying in the Army as it was that she had thrown all of our plans right out the window. When we divorced I was still angry at her, and anything that had to do with her, and that included Sarah. I didn't fight Amy for custody or visitation, so Sarah stayed with her. I haven't seen or heard from Amy since we split up, and I don't know of any way to contact her.
Anyway, after the divorce I went to live with my father, back in Maryland. This was... four years ago now. It took another year for me to get myself back together, and during that year was when I decided that it was finally time for me to come here, so I did. But I think I'm going to get another drink before I get into that part. Care to join me?
- end part one -
Thoughts/critiques (please be brutal, I want to make this one good)?
I used to think that this city was beautiful. It isn't anymore; I see the lights for what they are, just harsh and ugly voices in the night trying to convince themselves that they're not not afraid of the dark. The people are just... but you didn't ask me what I thought of the city, did you? But that is why I came.
I used to think that this city was beautiful. It was the only bright spot on this whole goddamn coast, I thought. You see, I used to live in the south, a little town in Georgia I'm sure you've never even heard of. Dad told me one time that mom won some beauty pageant there, “Miss Macon County” or something like that. The whole town talked about it for years afterwards; it was the biggest news to come out of that town in decades.
I was born in 1972. Mom and dad waited for years after they were married because they were afraid the Russians were going to attack and they didn't want to bring a child into that. I guess they didn't have second thoughts because my sister was born just a year after I was. Everyone was worried about the Soviets back then, dad said. Nixon sent Kissinger to China, but the Russians were still about to attack at any moment. It was really bad in a small town, cut off from any information but the local papers and the doctor, who had a television.
My parents moved to Washington in 1977, and that's where most of my memories of growing up are from. I remember Carter had just been inaugurated; my parents watched it on our new color TV. It was a monster of a thing, enormous, and dad had only been able to afford it because his new government job came with a huge raise, at least compared to what he made in Georgia. We lived well, all things considered.
I guess we didn't really live in D.C., as such.... Our house was in Maryland, about half an hour from the city. It was a pretty rural area, and the busiest thing nearby was a little airfield out in the middle of all the farms. It built up a lot as I grew up, but you never really notice that until afterwards, when you wonder where all the new stuff came from. But we were still in Washington, if not D.C. Dad still rooted for Atlanta, but the Redskins began to grow on him, too, and one year he even managed to get season tickets. I never asked him how he managed to afford it, and mom supported him, though I think she wasn't happy about it.
No matter how close to D.C. we lived, we were still out in the country. It didn't seem that way to mom and dad, since it was infinitely more developed than what they had grown up in and around. And the people fit too. They were the same kind of people mom and dad had grown up with, maybe a little more sophisticated from their trips into the city, but they still had the same country upbringing, mannerisms, and nasty little prejudices. Even when suburbs grew up around our house, the people who had lived there before, who were the only ones mom and dad associated with anyway, didn't change. Even dad's friends from work didn't impact this, and the only one who ever seemed to be invited over to dinner was Bill Sullivan, a good ol' boy from Virginia who seemed to empathize with dad a lot, and who mom could actually tolerate.
I didn't find out until much later that the real reason mom kept inviting Bill back for dinner was because she was carrying on an affair with him, seeing him on his lunch breaks while he was supposedly going our for “pizza” or whatever else. “Uncle Bill”, mom would call him. I saw a lot of him while I was growing up, and I guess he really was like an uncle to me; I never got to see many of my real aunts and uncles, since most of them were still living in that Georgia hellhole.
No, it didn't really raise any suspicions; dad said Bill had a history of eating lunch alone, and none of his coworkers really questioned it. Most of dad's friends had lunches packed for them by their wives, and would only go out to lunch on Fridays. It was natural to think that Bill, who wasn't married, would go to get something on his own. Besides, it wasn't as though he shied away from them at other times; he was far from antisocial.
Dad claimed he discovered the affair when I was 16, but I think he knew long before then, maybe even from the start of it. It was a couple of years after Bill began coming for dinner, and even though I was only 12 at the time I remember that dad's interactions with mom changed: he seemed a lot more distant and she was a lot colder to him than before. I didn't think much of it at first but at point I noticed that these reactions were exaggerated when Bill was over. I didn't know what to think, and it worried me.
Then one night mom just left. She woke me up, made me breakfast, and sent me off to school. When I got home, she was gone. I assumed she had gone out to the store, but when dad got home he was visibly angry, and in so many words informed me that mom would not be coming back. He later told me that she and Bill had run off to Tennessee; apparently he confronted her about the affair the week before, and they had fought, ending with her threatening to kill herself. Dad backed off, but they sniped at each other that whole week before she left.
It turns out they never divorced each other either. Bill didn't want a marriage, and mom was more than happy to go along with him. Dad just didn't care. Was too angry to care at first, and afterwards just had no real reason to. Besides, it avoided custody battles, which would have taken time and effort even though mom didn't care enough to bother wanting me.
I hated her for a long time after that. Hated her for what she'd done to dad, hated her for leaving. Hated her for not wanting me. And yet part of me wished, hoped she would come back so we could be happy again. I knew that it wouldn't happen, but part of me found comfort in indulging in that fantasy. It took me years to realize that it wasn't worth it to be angry at her, because it was a meaningless anger; it didn't drive me to change things or resolve to do things differently, only to wallow in self-pity and hate. I almost didn't survive that year....
One of the things that got me through was the idea that I needed to be there for my dad, who was taking it pretty hard too. That got me through the worst of it, but the irony is that he and I had our own falling out just a year later, about mom. I... don't really want to get into that, though. It's a miracle I spoke to him at all after that, and even that was just a couple of years ago.
That's one of the things that led me to go into the Army, actually. I felt like there wasn't anything left for me at home. So, I enlisted. Turned out Iraq invaded Kuwait about a month after I finished Basic, and I was one of the grunts they put out on the front lines. We just plain barreled through the Iraqis. I still feel sorry for those poor sons-of-bitches. 'Course half of them surrendered soon as they saw us. The ones who didn't... I still have nightmares about that. Not about what we did to them, but having to pick up the pieces afterward.
Well, no, we didn't get Saddam, but we put the fear of God into him. And we saved Kuwait and got our oil back, didn't we?
No, it wasn't about democracy, not really. And it never will be. It's always about money, always has been, always will be.
Look, I'm not a fan of politics and I don't like talking about it. Now do you want me to finish my story or not?
Alright, so as I was saying.... My time in the Army wasn't all bad. I made some friends I still talk to, and I met Amy. Amy Whittaker, was her name. She was a private in my company, when we were stationed in Germany after the war. We hit it off pretty much immediately, and spent a lot of our leave together, whenever we could.
We got married shortly after that. Not because we loved each other, mind you, although we did, or at least thought we did. See, the thing with the Army is, it's almost like they punish you for being single. You get a huge pay raise for being married, never mind housing allowments. And with two of us bringing in those paychecks....
The Army gives you a raise if you have children, too.... Amy and I tried for the next two years, and she finally got pregnant about a year before my four years were up. We named her Sarah, after Amy's mother.
It's funny.... Until Sarah was born she was just a number to us, an increase in pay. It sounds cold, and maybe it was, but that's just how it was done. We needed the money, or at least thought we did. But just seeing her there in Amy's arms, and the smile on Amy's face.... I'd never seen her smile like that, and that smile was how I felt just then.
I still hate myself for wishing this, but it doesn't stop me from wishing it constantly: I wish she had still been a number to me. It would have made the divorce easier when it happened three months later.
My four years were up, and I was about to muster out. When Amy and I had gotten married, we agreed that after our first terms we were done with the Army. Amy's would be up about four months after mine, and once we were put we'd head back stateside, find a nice place, and settle down. I was tired of moving, and wanted to stay put. And I was sick of Army life, all the bullshit rules and asshole officers.
A week before I was out, Amy changed her mind. She was happy in the Army, she said, and the pay and benefits were good now.
I lost it. We fought for the next two days and when I realized she wasn't going to change her mind I decided I had to leave. I think at that point it wasn't so much that she was staying in the Army as it was that she had thrown all of our plans right out the window. When we divorced I was still angry at her, and anything that had to do with her, and that included Sarah. I didn't fight Amy for custody or visitation, so Sarah stayed with her. I haven't seen or heard from Amy since we split up, and I don't know of any way to contact her.
Anyway, after the divorce I went to live with my father, back in Maryland. This was... four years ago now. It took another year for me to get myself back together, and during that year was when I decided that it was finally time for me to come here, so I did. But I think I'm going to get another drink before I get into that part. Care to join me?
- end part one -
Thoughts/critiques (please be brutal, I want to make this one good)?