Fred and me
A short story by
R. Bromfield
Copyright (c) 2011 R. Bromfield
Smashwords Edition
Author's note:
I'm not old enough to be passing my days on a park bench. Neither is Fred. Many of the things described here haven't happened yet. Probably never will. Fred is an old high school pal who I have spoken with many times on the phone, but have yet to be reunited with. I haven't seen him in over forty years. So this story is a fake auto-biography, a projection of something that could come to be in fifteen or twenty years. That's why there is no one sitting on the bench in the photo on the cover. Technically, though both characters portrayed here are real, neither of us exists, yet.
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Fred and me no longer met at exactly the same place in the same park to sit on the same bench together and discuss the troubles of the world. I put a stop to that. I didn't want us to become known to everyone in the neighbourhood as those two old guys who sit on the bench each morning at exactly the same time every day. This was only the second time we'd met in the park across from the armoury where the young men and women assemble from all over the country to prepare to go to war. Today we watched as two buses full of boys and girls in uniform disembarked from some place far to the west, hot to trot to get into a fight they barely understood, in a far off country that few of them could point to on a world map.
Neither Fred nor I have ever experienced war because we spent our teenage years in the sixties, in Canada, in quiet and peaceful isolation from such concerns. At that time lots of kids, just a few miles to the south were being rounded up and shipped off―many against their will―to Vietnam where too many of them would be shot and tortured or burned beyond recognition. The rest would come home all messed up in the head, unable to cope with regular family life in the suburbs. Huge numbers of them would wind up drug and alcohol addicted, abandoned, homeless, in the streets, in prison or killed by their own hand. Many of them would brutalize their wives and children. War is not nice and it has always been a mystery to me why we keep on thinking that it is a good way to resolve disputes over commodities.
A couple of decades ago, about the same time that America and Europe were beginning their long spiral down the debt drain, Canada did agreed to participate in a nasty little conflict in Afghanistan, a skirmish that ended in failure for both sides. This current war in North Africa was very much the same and all of the kids cavorting about in the parking lot before us seemed pretty eager to get into it. The conflict was said to be all about protecting innocent people. That's what they had the young recruits believe, but just about everyone knew it was all about food, money and regime change which, in turn, was caused by the fact that we had let deserts everywhere get too big.
When it comes to human nature, nothing much ever seems to change.
Anyway, we were sitting on the bench, Fred and me, watching these kids when, without taking his eyes off them, Fred asked, "How do you know if you're sick?"
I couldn't see how this connected with the scene before us so I figured he was implying that there was something wrong with his health. "You mean if you're sick, or someone else is sick?" I said.
"How do you know if you yourself are sick?" he said.
"Why do you ask that, have you got something wrong?"
"No, no, I'm just asking, how would you know if you do get sick?"
"Do you mean just sick, or do you mean like really sick?"
"What do you mean by really sick?"
"Well... have you, say, found worms in your underwear or something?"
"Jesus Christ, why would you ask me something like that?" He looked at his watch. "Especially this close to lunch."
"I don't know, I mean wouldn't worms in your underwear mean your pretty damned sick...?"
"Could you please not say it again?"
"What, about the worms...?"
"Do you have to keep on with that?"
"Isn't it too late? Haven't you already pretty well imagined it?"
"Why do you have to talk like that in civilized company?"
I looked around. "Civilized? Isn't it just you and me here?"
"You don't consider me civilized? Or yourself for that matter?
I laughed. "You think we're civilized?"
"You think it's proper, civilized to talk about worms in you... I mean hmmmms" and he made a wiggly, wormy motion in the air with his hand, "in your hmmmm?" and he gestured to where you would see his shorts if he didn't have any pants on. All of a sudden Fred couldn't bring himself to say the words worms and underwear.
"Does it really bother you that much?"
"What do you think? Why do I want to hear about something like that when I'm almost eighty-six?"
"What's your age got to do with it?' I pointed at the uniformed kids. "You think none of those kids can get worms in their underwear? In fact where they're going they very well could." I leaned closer to Fred as if to impart some deep secret. He moved closer into my trap. "You know in some of those jungles." I lowered my voice so no one else would hear, "they say there are tiny parasites that can swim up a urine stream right into your..."
"Will you stop that?"
I shrugged and looked away, back at the kids.
"Okay," he said "then, never mind whether you're sick or not, how do you know when you're getting old?" I guess he had decided it was best to change the subject.
"Old as in like feeble or old as in feeble minded?" I asked.
"What's the difference?"
"Well, if you don't know the difference aren't you feeble minded?"
"Jesus, why do you have to make everything so damned complicated?" Fred looked me in the eye, suspicious. "Are you implying that I'm feeble minded?" I noticed that his cataract wasn't getting any smaller.
"Is there something wrong with you? I mean physically?"
"Why do you keep asking me that?"
"What am I supposed to think when you keep bringing up worms in your underwear?"
"Wasn't it you that brought that up?"
"Did I ask anything?"
"Didn't you ask if I've got worms... uh, hmmms in my hhmmmm?"
"Wasn't it you who wanted to know if you're sick?"
"Did I? Then how did the worms.... uh, the hmmmms come into it?"
"Was it something to do with the kids over there getting off the bus?"
"Was it?" Fred looked at the uniformed kids kibitzing around in the parking lot and tried to play things back in his mind, trying, I suppose, to find the original train of thought.
Our conversations, if you could call them that, were always like this, usually punctuated with long periods of silence when we ran out of things to say or when one of us had to take some time to think about things. When we were teenagers, kicking around the city streets, Fred and I used to put each other through like this all the time. Now it was mostly me doing it to him. Still, I felt it was good exercise for the brain, his and mine both.
"How many of those kids do you think are going to die?" Fred said after a while.
"Eventually, all of them. And us too." I waved my arm in the air. "And everyone else on this planet..."
"I mean in this damned war, you idiot."
"Oh." I watched as three boys encouraged a fourth to go over and talk to one of the girls—a romance with very brief potential if ever there was one. "Hard to tell." I said. His question was something that I could hardly even guess at. Fred and I knew absolutely nothing about war. It was probably the only thing we had in common with the enthusiastic young warriors before us. I'd had some friends who had made it through the Vietnam war who told of squad mates being blown apart in front of them or going insane on adulterated heroin but the closest I ever came to war was when I did a stint in the Norwegian Merchant Marine in the late 60s.
In the summer of 1965 I was picking peaches on a New England farm to raise money to travel the world when the Government men in the grey Plymouths—the four-door ones with the very small hub caps—showed up to investigate the workers' eligibility for the U.S. draft. Anyone they found to be of age or working in the country without the proper visa, it was said, would be recruited into the military on the spot. Word spread through the orchard like wild fire. All of the fifteen or so young men currently employed on the farm ran to the bunk house to gather their meagre belongings and within the hour it was a pretty lonely peach grove. Foregoing three days pay, I hitchhiked, with two chums; a nervous African American and a very nervous Mexican, down the highway to a roadside bar. I should say we walked backwards all the way to the bar because no one in their right mind would look twice at this unlikely threesome, let alone give them a lift. The place was busy and we had to share a big round table with a pair of ambulance drivers who had just gotten off their shift. After several pitchers of beer and a few wildly exaggerated tales of personal adventure, I made a bet with them that if they escorted me to the airport and paid for the ticket, I would get on the very first flight displayed on the departures board, regardless of the destination. Apparently, though I remember nothing of it, I had boasted that I could go anywhere with no money.
With visions of exotic destinations like Bangkok, Madrid and Paris looming in my imagination, we stepped up to the ticket counter of the first airline right inside the main entrance.
The first flight was bound for Chicago.
My dreams of Hong Kong and Barcelona dissolved on the spot. But Chicago it was. That was the deal. The ambulance drivers were relieved that they didn't have to shell out for a ticket to somewhere half way around the world, and bought me yet another drink in the airport bar before my flight was available for boarding. I'm sure that they all enjoyed some considerable jest at my expense as I shuffled into line to enplane the 707 with eighteen dollars and change, the clothes on my back and an unused, passport, bound for god knows what in the windy city.
The flight wasn't at all busy and I had a chance to entertain two flight attendants—they were called stewardesses in those days—with an only slightly exaggerated story of how I'd arrived in their company. In return I got a couple of free drinks and some inside information: in Chicago, the plane was to be commandeered by the military in order to transport troops to the west coast. They suggested that I remain on board in one of those fold-down seats at the back and hitch a ride all the way to the end of the line.
Why not?
I slept through the landing and my sinus pain didn't go away until the place was crammed with rowdy young soldiers and we were back at altitude. Here I was, exactly where I didn't want to be; with about a hundred or so yammering young Marines, blissfully on their way off to war. I suspected I was going to wind up in my exotic destination after all, albeit The Hanoi Hilton.
It was nice to get my feet back on the ground in Seattle and at liberty at seven in the morning, on the streets of Seattle.
I had to face facts. With eighteen bucks there was only one rational thing to do. With my passport and a Greyhound ticket I retreated to Vancouver Canada. If I was going to travel the world I was going to have to have some money.
I got a minimum wage job through one of those temp labour agencies and went to work on a day-by-day basis for a moving company. But when the burly big Italian guy I was working with wanted me to put my hands under the antique wardrobe we were negotiating down a fire escape, I refused, citing the nine years of piano lessons my mother had invested in. This, and a deep gouge in the side of the antique furnishing, pissed off the bruiser so much he chased me twelve blocks before running out of breath.
As chance had it I wound up at the docks reading job listings on the wall of a customs shack. Some seamen coming ashore said "Hey kid, looking for a job? go aboard and ask for the boatswain." They pointed at the ship they'd just left. "He'll tell you what he can do."
I was lucky. I would replace a young deckhand who had fallen fifty feet into an empty hold and died. I skipped out on my room rent to stay aboard the ship overnight, now a signed foreign member of the Norwegian Merchant Marine. Jeez, they even gave me my own cabin. No one seemed to notice that I didn't have so much as a change of clothes. Exhausted, I fell asleep on the bunk and awoke as we were steaming past the southern tip of Vancouver Island. Didn't have any idea where we were going.
It was Vietnam.
Well, not exactly Vietnam, but close enough for my liking; we were carrying thousands of tons of coal dust bound for the open harbour at Moji in the south of Japan. Here, some of the guys told me, the cargo would be offloaded then transferred to a Chinese ship that would take it to North Vietnam where it would be used in the manufacture of artillery shells. I didn't know whether to believe this or not.
The night skies in the mid Pacific are unbelievably clear. It's almost exactly the same view as you would have from the International Space Station—only without the acrid stench.
As we entered the war zone I was introduced to the fact that both the Russian and American pilots loved to routinely buzz ships, seventy feet above the wheelhouse, at just under mach one with no other purpose than to simply scare the shit out of whomever had the misfortune to be on deck at the time. That was usually me, painting, swabbing. At night I would take turns with another deck hand on the bridge standing lookout and steering the ship.
I was paid about nineteen cents an hour. Doesn't sound like much but that's twenty-four hours a day, and it took about a month to cross the Pacific. Since there was no opportunity to spend the money along the way, I had almost $150 when I set foot ashore in Japan. We spent almost another paid month moored in the harbour while the shipping company negotiated for cargo. In the meanwhile I went everywhere and did everything.
The Japanese are great people. One time, when I ordered a steak in a restaurant, they brought me a steak knife and a fork and everyone in the place watched to see how I could eat without cutting or stabbing my face. I learned about twenty-five words in Japanese. I made friends. I learned thirty more words in Japanese. I made girlfriends. I was eighteen.
On our return to Vancouver, the ship's hold full of Datsuns, the pilot came aboard to help guide the 15,000 ton bulk carrier through the tricky narrows into Vancouver harbour, and because it was my country, according to some tradition, they let me take the wheel.
After I left the ship Gerhardt, a shipmate, would recruit me to go with him to Germany and help get his brother out of from behind the Berlin Wall, but that's another story. And there was the time I worked as a sound recordist on a Swedish news crew out of New York City and had am M1 assault rifle shoved in my face for about five minutes by a nervous young National Guardsman during the tense aftermath of the Kent State killings in May of 1970.
These were all good adventures during what was probably the last era when a young person could leave home with a few bucks to seek their destiny in a world that would, at least, tolerate, and to some extent, accommodate them. Now, it seems, the only way for someone without means to see the world is to join the military. The experiences people in war have are nothing like the free-wheeling meanderings of my youth. War, as far as I understand it, is a persistent state of antagonized confusion with a liberal mix of fear masquerading as mind-numbing boredom, usually brought on by the inability of old guys to come to some agreement about some stupid dispute that never warrants the deliberate loss of life. I guess to have lived a life relatively free of that sad situation is a blessing.
And as much as Fred and I had no idea where those kids in the parking lot in front of us were headed or what was to become of them, I felt a great sympathy for them. Pushing and shoving each other about playfully, very much like eleven-year-olds in a schoolyard, each clearly experiencing the last wisp of childhood.
I don't know what Fred was thinking about this scene as we sat on the bench that day. Fred seemed to be concerned a lot more with house and home, family and ex-family—mainly ex-wives. But maybe he was dwelling on the same thing that I was because right then he said, without looking my way, "So how do you know when you're getting old?"
"I don't know," I said. "Could it be when you start thinking that red pants go well with yellow and blue argyle socks?"
Fred thought about this for a moment then laughed. "Could it be when you choose Velcro over shoe laces?"
I looked at his shoes. No laces. "How about when your mechanic offers to buy your twelve year old Hyundai for his daughter?" I suggested.
Fred laughed at that, then said, "How about when you've looked for your hat everywhere before your grandson tells you you don't own a hat?"
We both laughed. I suspected the incident regarding the hat had actually happened to Fred. I know the thing about the car had certainly happened to me.
Now the kids were being lined up by a drill sergeant or corporal or whatever they're called. It seemed that these recruits had received some previous training because as soon as their new commander yelled his incomprehensible command, they all congealed into two lines of ramrod stiff, silent patriots. Another command, that sounded more like someone had spilled scalding coffee in the officer's lap, and they all turned and moved as one across the parking lot and disappeared into the armoury, some few of them, I knew, never to be seen on these shores again. I thought of the families who would have to receive the heartbreaking news, of the very young ones who would only know their brothers or sisters as never-ageing images in old photos and videos. Again I thought of the strange predilection we humans have for solving our differences over religious beliefs or real estate through contests of violence. To me it was like having a basketball game to determine who is the best chemical biologist.
Suddenly Fred turned to me. "Ever notice that people are getting a whole lot uglier than they used to be?"
"Are you changing the subject now?"
"Not really." Now Fred waved his arm at the world. "Don't you think that the world has become an uglier place?"
"What's that got to do with the people in it?" I asked.
"Isn't that what we mean when we say the world?"
"Without the people wouldn't there still be the world?"
"Are you implying that people are irrelevant?"
And so it went.
***