July 19, 2002

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  Summer, 1966

  
  

  I had considered my marriage essentially ended from that first weekend in Japan when my husband left his little family alone and went to keep a date with a bar hostess. Back in the states, he claimed to see no reason why we shouldn’t stay together. I think I was quoting a movie heroine or someone in a novel when I told him that too much had gone wrong between us, that we could never get back what we’d had before. I was thoroughly disillusioned. Not angry, just disenchanted. What I needed wasn’t there.

  
  

  I don’t know if his eventual agreement was genuine or just an attempt to end the discussion. It was capitulation most likely, an admission that he knew he wasn’t going to win this one. We would part, but though I wanted to part friends, he said he couldn’t do that. He and his mother, he said, would look after P-Nut until I was back on my feet again.

  
  

  I packed into the MGB and onto its luggage rack my two bags of clothes, a travel iron, some toiletries, a shoe box of pictures and papers (passport, certificates, awards, releases from two psychiatric wards, letters, mementos) and yet another of Japan’s greatest gifts to me: birth control pills. I’d bought a tin of 1,000 over there, enough for three years. I don’t think they were available yet in the states. I recall some anxiety going through Customs.

  
  

  The clothing in my bags included demure dresses and separates for job hunting, a couple of wash-and-wear nurse’s uniforms, and two pairs (one beige, one navy) of skin-tight-down-to-the-knee, wide-flared linen bell-bottoms cut high with a slit to flash ankle in front, sweeping the ground behind. I wore them with sandals and orange toenails–smashing. I could stop traffic in them, and in my miniskirts and white go-go boots, with a brilliant orange cap on my long coppery hair.

  
  

  I found an ideal job immediately. The months of OJT at Halstead Hospital more than qualified me to work as a nurse’s aide. Queen of the Valley Hospital in Napa hired me and I worked first in maternity and then on the surgical ward. Then I was suddenly too sick to work. The routine had been rough, stressful and exhausting, especially living in the car, but I’d made it through a payday and had enough money for food for a while if I just kept sleeping in the car. Suisun Slough, at the upper end of San Francisco Bay, has some beautiful backwaters and byways where, back then anyway, one could park undisturbed for the night at the end of a dirt road, then wake to birdsong and the sights and smells of the marsh.

  
  

  I didn’t have energy for much job hunting or any other sort of activity. I was mostly just passing time, a lot of it in libraries in Fairfield and on Travis. One afternoon, leaving the base, I decided to stop in for a drink at the NCO club.  It was airconditioned.  It was Happy Hour.  For half a buck I could be tipsy enough that I’d need to dance or walk it off for a few hours before I could drive. (I have always been essentially a one-drink drunk.  Two is overdoing it.)  It seemed like a good idea, best way I could think of to while away the evening before I drove back out of town and found a parking spot.

  
  

  I was in my demure daffodil yellow Japanese silk suit because I’d been to some interviews earlier in the day. I sat in the corner and nursed a Singapore sling and watched the place fill up with men, and a few women. A band was setting up onstage and I was idly watching. My mind was on my circumstances, calculating whether to put the suit into a dry cleaner or maybe just hand wash it and try to find a way to press it. During that homeless time and every homeless time after that, most of my energy went into keeping myself and my clothes presentable, an endless and fruitless task.

  
  

  The band started to play. The man who walked up to my table had to clear his throat to get my attention. He asked, “Do you swing?” Well, just about everyone I knew was into swinging or wife-swapping or even kinkier things, but that’s not something I was comfortable discussing with a total stranger in public like this. Then he gestured toward the band and the dance floor and I noticed it was an old-fashioned swing tune. Of course I could swing! My father had taught me. It was about the fourth style of dance he taught me, after the easier two-step, foxtrot, jitterbug… you bet I swing. The only dance I like better than that is flamenco.

  
  

  I wore out pretty fast, and we sat most of them out after I had to get the nebulizer out to get my lungs working again. We found a jillion things to talk about. His name was Jim Rose. He was senior NCO on a flight-line maintenance crew. Jim bought me a second Singapore sling. He said he had a place where I could sleep in a bed, a little room off a garage at a house where his buddy lived. We needed to keep the noise down, but other than that….

  
  

  Well, other than that, the bed was a narrow cot, so that when we finally did settle to sleep, it was in a pile. I had a moment’s hesitation right there at first when he said, “Sit on my face,” because I’d had some woefully inept cunnilingus in the past. But Jim was goood. That, there, was an unintentional typo, but I think it expresses my thought better than the correct spelling would. Let it stand.

  
  

  The amount of time that passed as we got to know each other, I haven’t a clue. It had to have been a few weeks at the least. He kept my car full of gas, and drove it when I got too high to drive safely. One weekend his  skinny friend Jim Root crammed himself sideways behind the bucket seats and we all went to Lake Berryessa in the MGB. I wore a new bikini Jim  had bought for me, and he introduced me to vodka gimlets. They were not quite as tasty as the Singapore slings, but refreshing in the heat. They were also not as sweet and packed more punch per liquid ounce, so I got drunk faster than I realized. We sat on a big rock by the lake and talked about Viet Nam and Japan, about philosophy and economics and politics. Then we lay back in the sun and fell asleep with his hand on my bare stomach. I carried his negative handprint in my sunburn for weeks afterwards.

  
  

  It wasn’t the most comfortable arrangement in that little room off the garage, but it beat living in my car. Soon, Jim came up with an even better idea.. He said he and his buddy from Viet Nam, Jim Root, were going to get an apartment together, and I could live with them rent-free if I’d keep the place clean. That reinforced my belief in miracles.

  
  

  Even before we moved into the new place, I found a job. We stopped in for a beer at the Paradise Inn, a small bar on a back road by Gate Four of Travis Air Force Base. That evening, eight or ten Green Berets in transit swelled the usual crowd of Travis airmen, and the barmaid hadn’t shown up for her shift. The owner was tending bar and waiting tables and going nuts, so I offered to help. I worked with him a few nights after that, and then he asked me to start opening for him at 7 AM. A lot of guys stopped in for an eye-opener on their way to work, and after eight the midnight shift off the flight line showed up.

  
  

  Gate Four was nearest the flight line, but was unguarded and wasn’t officially used. One could get in, one just was not supposed to go that way unless ordered that way. The main gate was for ordinary travel. Like so many things in the military (and elsewhere, of course), it was okay as long as you didn’t get caught. One morning, we overslept and I was half asleep when he dragged me out of bed and tossed my navy trenchcoat at me. I belted it around my waist as we ran and jumped into my car. I rode shotgun and he sped through the back gate and across open fields and runways, and got to the flight line just as his subordinate had called the squad to attention for roll call.

  
  

  I had barely enough time to speed back over the runways and hills to open the Paradise about five minutes late. I worked the whole shift barefoot, in my trenchcoat and nothing else.  I found a comb in the lost and found box and groomed my hair.  I was honest with anyone who asked me why I was wearing that coat in that heat. Some, I think, didn’t believe me. Others dared me, and tried to bribe me, to show them what was under it. I did not flash anyone until that evening when I picked Jim up from work.

  
  

  I usually went in and out through the main gate when I took Jim to work in the morning and when I drove in around 4:55 PM to pick him up. I’d bring along a jelly jar about half full of scotch and a container with some ice cubes. When I saw Jim coming, I’d lean over to the footwell and put some ice into the scotch, for him to sip on the way home. He didn’t seem to mind drinking from a jelly jar. I was such a Pleaser then, always in need of making myself needed. Good at it, too.

  
  

  Always my long red hair had been a major asset. Jim said he didn’t like long hair, and he preferred blondes. I cut my hair and bought a blonde wig. That is as close as I’ve ever been to bleach or dye. Now, in the light of further developments, I question whether it was a matter of preference for him, or if it was a dominance game. He was a control freak.

  
  

  In a blonde wig, I looked like Doris Day. When someone on base saw me driving Jim home one night and told my ex, he called me at work and told me that my new boyfriend was letting his blonde girlfriend drive my car.

  
  

  After about the third day in our new, second floor, airconditioned, two bedroom apartment with a pool in the central courtyard, the two Jims conferred quietly, and then Jim Root walked into the kitchen where I was washing dinner dishes after one of my usual gourmet meals, and asked me not to clean the ashtrays every time one of them put out a smoke. It was burdensome to them looking around for the dirty ash tray so they wouldn’t be dirtying that clean one there. He said they would try to mess up only one ashtray if I would try not to empty it more than once a day. *Yecch!* I thought. “Okay” was what I said. Whatever you say, Boss. Yess, massah. That was my style. Homelessness didn’t suit me.

  
  

  Jim Rose and Jim Root said they were part owners of a bar in Saigon. A buddy of theirs was over there running it and they were going to retire to Southeast Asia as soon as their enlistments were up. They said I would be a great hostess for their bar in Saigon. Prostitution was optional, but if I did decide to go with the South Vietnamese officers, I could make a fortune. They, said the two Jims, favored round-eyed women. We were making plans to ship me to Saigon when I screwed up again.

  
  

  It was Labor Day, a couple of weeks before my 22nd birthday, and the whole apartment complex was partying around the pool. Around sunset everyone was flying high, and a girl from across the court was putting the make on Jim. When I saw him go to her apartment with her, I started paying attention to some of the other men around there. I ended up in bed–my bed–Jim Rose’s bed, with one of them when Jim walked in.

  
  

  He was livid, and according to him it would have been all right if it hadn’t been in his own bed. I dunno. Never made any sense to me. But it was his place and he said I had to be out of there in the morning. That night, drunk and desperate, I took every painkiller, tranquilizer, barbiturate–every pill in the medicine cabinet except the birth control pills. As the party was winding down, someone found me on the bed in a pool of vomit and called an ambulance.

  
  

  I woke up in restraints, my wrists and ankles shackled by thick padded leather belts to a bed in the psychiatric ward at the base hospital. I could feel a line of fire running from my right nostril all the way down my esophagus, abrasions from the tube they had used to pump my stomach. I lay there long enough to decide it was okay being alive. I’d probably figure out some way to get by. Then someone noticed I was awake and got me dressed for an interview with a shrink. He asked me a few questions, then started telling me about the rollercoaster I lived on, and mentioned things like manic-depression.

  
  

  As I talked to him about my recent experiences and my feelings, he commented, “You wake up in a new world every morning, don’t you?” Well, duh, Scarlett O’Hara, tomorrow is another day. I assured him that the night before had all been a drunken lapse in judgment and he signed my discharge. If you’ve been enjoying my stories about those trips to the loony bin, I’m sorry. This is the last one of them in this lifetime… so far.

  • 12:45 pm
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