Examined

Filled with the angst of uncertainty, shifting from foot to foot, consumed by the pregnant anticipation on that afternoon of a late 1966 spring day, I waited to be ingested by the old Greyhound bus parked at the old Walla Walla bus terminal. In the moments before boarding, four other motleys moseyed up, having exchanged their government issued vouchers for tickets like I had just done. Small talk was sparse. This trip could end in death. The Selective Service Board upstairs in the old Denny Building on 2nd and Alder had made their selections, at least for 4 of us. I was not drafted, yet, just trying to beat the rap by enlisting in a student program sponsored by the U.S. Army Medical Department.

At least I had the wherewithal to find a seat on the right side of the bus, that way, I wouldn't have to have the setting sun blind my eyes. The belching bus rolled out from the terminal, heading west and north on US 12 with stops at all the jerk-water-holes between Walla Walla and Clarkston. Pee stop at Lewiston, then up the old Lewiston Grade to roll out onto the Palouse Hills. We stop at GEN-e-SEE, or is it GE-NES-EE, or what the hell, then Moscow, what kind of an Un-American name of all places is Moscow for this country. When you ask somebody where it is at you get a smart-assed answer ‘it’s out in the field beside pa’s cow’. How in the hell was I ever to guess that someday I would live there. Back in reality of the present, we then cross back over the state-line from Idaho and head for Pullman. I had heard of Washington State University, but had never seen it. I got a glimpse or two on the approach, then again from the west side as we rounded that steep road-cut-cliff shielding the southwest corner of the campus. The idea was so absolutely incomprehensible and absurb that fourteen years later the U.S. Army would be sending me to WSU to earn a PhD in Nutrition that all I thought about on that trip was how to deal with stomach curdling present-tense uncertainty.

It was dark when we pulled in to the bus terminal in the seedy part of Spokane. Clear sky and a lingering nip in the air. Dirty, littered streets, rows of newspaper boxes sequestering their shadows from omniscient street lights, parking meters sprouted up between cracked sidewalks and curbs, creepy looking men crawling back into door jams. Whiffs of urine, muffled honking, somewhere in the distance the siren wail of something in trouble. We each had a voucher for lodging at the YMCA, and two more vouchers for some nearby restaurant for supper tonight and breakfast on the morrow. The four of them decided to go off and find a bar or at least a source of liquor. It would be easier to flunk a physical if they were plastered the next morning, at least that is what they surmised. I started my hunt for that restaurant.

I found it. The essence of dingy grunge enhanced by flickering neon sign on the outside, a disheveled dimness on the inside.

"You alone?" the harried waiter with filthy apron yells over his shoulder at me. "Sit wherever you want."

So I do. There is already a menu at the table, along with pressed glass salt and pepper shakers, rack of saltine crackers, tiny vase of toothpicks, bottles of requisite condiments and silverware wrapped in a paper napkin.

The menu is individually typewritten with its uneven mono-spaced serif font. A single page of meat-and-three selections ranked in price from cheapest to most expensive. I made my selection, from near the bottom. Roast beef with brown gravy, mashed potatoes, green beans, side salad and dinner roll with butter. Actually, it was margarine but truth-in-menu laws hadn't been invented yet. The meal was so typically stereotypical of institutional food as evidenced by that powdered fake brown gravy taste, but who in their clientele was cognizant enough to critique that.

At the end of the meal, I presented my voucher with the meal-check at the counter.

"Why the hell didn't you say you were one of them! There is a government meal for you. You don't order from the menu." I had to break my one and only bill, a five dollar bill, to make up the difference. I take it that most inductees arrive in squad formation and are not mistaken for a singular gentlemen seeking a quality dining experience. This, my first exposure with the nuances of government procurement.

The YMCA was boisterous. Apparently a whole bunch of them arrived on the east-bound train from Seattle earlier in the afternoon. Apparently it was common knowledge to get as drunk as possible for this rite of passage.

The AFEES facility (Armed Forces Examination and Entrance Station) was spread across the upstairs in some old downtown building. Signs inside everywhere identifying station numbers. Corpsman in hospital whites scurrying around. Some 120 of us corralled in a holding room. Hippies, preppies, geeks, goons, fems, fats, bean-poles, intelligent, bewildered, stoned, sober, nervous, docile, stupid, and to a man, apprehensive. One-by-one, we are checked in with the documents we had already been given, either by the Draft Board or a recruiter. My first exposure to hurry up and wait.

Eventually we are moved into a huge room with rows of tables with the chairs lined up on each side. At the end of the tables, is a platform from which this big burly medic with both stripes and rockers on his rank insignia is making certain he is not there to take shit from anybody. He proceeds with the continuation of the paper work drill and it gets earnest. There is this long, folded DD Form some-number that is a medical history form. The usual identification stuff at the top, and then lists of question after question about diseases and injuries and deformities and abnormalities and coughs and colds and sore bung holes and pimples on the dinkus and what works and what doesn't and how you feel about all kinds of psychological stuff.

Burly sergeant medic yells out, "Look at question what-ever-the-number-it-was, it is near the bottom of the second page. If ANYBODY here checks YES on that box, by gawd, you're gonna havta come up here and PROVE it ta me!"

The question what-ever-the-number-it-was: Are you homosexual? Yes No

His implication was that if anyone did come forward to "prove it," and use that to beat the draft, he would beat the pulp out of them.

There were some gasps of horror, some snide snickers, and a 120 potential inductees furiously filling in the 'no' box.

I blanched. I had never been confronted before. Hell, I hardly knew what that was. This, for certain, was not the time or place to find out. I quickly checked 'No.' It would be years before I would concede that that was but the first lie about that that I told. It would be years before I realized that that blustery burly sergeant was typical of a deeply conflicted closet gay simply trying, in his overt homophobic way, to survive in a bigoted homophobic society.

A few more forms later, the group was split into two cohorts. The orders now were to go into this locker room, strip down to shorts and leave your socks on. Put your stuff in a locker, it would be safe. Then the lining up for blood draws, anthropometrics of height and weight measured, blood pressure taken, chests thumped, throats peered down, tongues depressed with awes expressed, ears looked into, and color vision ability ascertained. All this taking a couple of hours more of hurry-up and wait-your-turn to get the now 60 of us all processed.

There is something inherently efficient about 'processing' in the military. Especially when it comes to 'examining' the acceptability of the fitness of an individual to become a ward of the government. This initial physical examination served as a legal benchmark. Injuries or illness subsequent to this examination while enlisted (or commissioned) in the military could be deemed service-connected and thus treatment the responsibility of the government. To avoid these claims, it was imperative this benchmark legal document be as complete and as thorough as possible.

Thus, it was.

The sixty of us were herded into yet another room and lined up in four rows, fifteen guys in a row. Our medical forms placed on the floor by our left foot. Rows of butts. Tighty-whities taut on bubble butts. Blousing boxers on bloated butts. Jock straps flanking a few bare butts.

The burly sergeant making his presence known again with a Spec-4 at his side. The order was given to the first row and only to the first row to "drop your shorts". Rows two, three and four emitting the sounds of snickering. Sergeant starts at one end. Spec-4 bends down to pick up the first guy's records and the sergeant proceeds with the inguinal hernia check. "Stand up straight. Cough." Then "Cough" again as the sergeant gropes on the other side of the pendulous package. Since no abnormality is barked out by the sergeant, Spec-4 checks the "normal" box on that guy's medical history form, drops it to floor, and the process repeated with the next guy in line.

They get to the end of the line and another boisterous command given for the first row only.

"Bend over, reach back and pull your cheeks apart."

It was no longer just snickering from the peering gallery. It is overt hoots of laughter. Being hung over with a hang-over or not, the tension crackled for relief.

Fifteen pink arse holes squinting at the incandescent light of day. All of them exposing the south end pose of the Wall Street bull market bulls with their heads lowered into the feed trough.

A PFC has joined them and holds a tray containing a box of latex gloves and a paper sack for the disposables and a jar of Vaseline Petroleum Jelly. The Spec-4 reaches down again to pick up the medical record. The Sergeant jams his finger into a glove, then into the Vaseline jar, and proceeds to twist and thrust his digit bluntly into the resistant orifice with the intent of sensuously probing the assessment of the size of the owner's manhood. For a closeted homo, duty like this in the service of one's country simply doesn't get any better. One wonders of the wording of the Army Commendation Medal citation as it is read at his subsequent Awards Ceremony.

First row is completed.

The room is getting thick with the musty earthy dankness of pits and groins and sweaty feet, amalgamated with essence of Brylcreem and gawd awful Aqua-Velva, being overwhelmed by the all-ready expert skills of chemical warfare warriors with their secret, silent, but deadly dispersement of toxic intestinal gas.

Second row, same story.

We in the fourth row are thanking the warriors of yore for our fortuitous placement.

Humiliation in the second row is complete. Repeat story for the third row.

Now the view is totally unimpeded! Some guy's Bernoulli-compliant pucker lets rip with the vibrating call of Gabrielle's trumpet on the resurrection morning. A couple sets of buns blushing to keep up with the color of their owner's bent over face. Some butts massively hairy. Some pale and smooth as the scotch whiskey the owner had guzzled down the night before. Analyzing the mean and standard deviation in the length of dangling participles is enough to make a statistically inclined grammarian blush.

Third row completed.

Then. So unexpectedly.

"ABOUT face!" An emphatic command. Now what was safely the fourth and back row is the new and humiliating front row. The already debased get their turn for lustful sneering revenge. At this point, there is no more personal dignity left to be lost.

There were still two parts of the examination to complete. The urinalysis and the one-on-one interview with the doctor.

We each are given a plastic cup for the urine catch and given instructions as to where to place it when it is filled.

Our group was now divided again with those with the greetings from the President lined up first for their doctor's visit. There were about 10 of us that were purposefully enlisting and we were held to the end.

I had quickly provided my urine sample, but in the process of the long wait, I needed to go again and so headed back toward the latrine.

A big guy trying to get into the Navy jumped up and followed me. When we got into the latrine with its long trough for shoulder-to-shoulder group water works, he thrust his cup toward me and begged me to fill it for him. Seems he was having an acute case of shy bladder and was terrified that he wasn't going to be able to give his sample. Of course I complied, and assured him that I did not have any known diseases. I wonder to this day if he ever became an admiral commanding some missile launching cruiser supporting Desert Storm and if it was my little cup of pee that is now responsible for winning that war effort.

My turn next for the young Captain, fresh out of medical school. The listener to hundreds of reasons why this patient should be classified F-4 and deemed unfit for military duty. And then to reasons why other patients wanted medical problems ignored so that they could be deemed fit. The doc listened to me opine about how my knees would swell up and have tubes of Mt Dew sucked out of them with big needles, but how that shouldn’t impede me in any way for the professional program I aspired to. He scanned over the forms, looking for the sentinel “no’s” and “yes’s” flagging abnormalities. With no other comment, he stamped the form, signed his name and wished me good luck.

I had been examined. My paper work stamped ACCEPTABLE.

It was a contemplative ride back to Walla Walla later that afternoon. I was filled, still, with the angst of uncertainty.

The Refectory Manager

Warmth of a Saturday Night

Air crackled with cold sucking my warmth out through jaw-pounding shivering. Snow squeaking from boot scrunch. Cloud of frozen breath hovering beyond ice-stiffened scarf. All of that before crawling into the back seat of the old black-green '49 Chev. My place is behind my father who is driving, who keeps his window down so he can make the requisite hand signals in turning traffic. Doesn't matter if you are English or French, 40 below is 40 below either way, and wind chill from open window is the bite of the hawk.

It is Saturday night. A bitterly cold night in January of 1952. Darkness comes early at 51° N latitude, so the Sabbath ended early on that day. The marked time of sacredness flipped to its reciprocal time of secular at the precise moment of sunset. Tonight, a church social in the rented old Odd Fellows Hall located somewhere down in the Bridgeland environ on the eastern side of Calgary. An eclectic neighborhood, presumably named after the big truss bridge spanning the Bow River, of rows and rows of Chinese-run greenhouses and the little post-WWII bungalows occupied by newly immigrated Germans. The Bow River, in the eventual spring breakup, will jam with boulders of ice and then flood. Hell to freeze over this working stiff neighborhood.

The wind from my father's open car window whips my face. Eyelashes freezing. Pain flashes across my forehead. My cheeks become paralyzed. My breath short, the burning cold in my chest. Before leaving the house, my father had placed the battery back into the car. It had been taken out and kept inside the backdoor of the house to keep it from freezing solid. He unplugged the flimsy extension cord emanating from the front-door light that powered the block-heater that was supposed to keep the anti-freeze solution in the engine block and radiator in a liquid state to avoid an ice-busting breakdown. There was no hope on earth that the car heater would ever warm up enough to take the chill out of the interior of that old car. Even with the piece of cardboard wired to the front of the radiator to impede the flow of frozen air.

Arrival at the old run-down hall was a rush to warmth. From the outside it had the look of a place of the haunts. If one was inclined to care. So what. I jumped out the back door of the car, stumbled through piles of snow, made it through a frozen-stiff door to the inside, then to be slammed by a blast of hot air in my face. Ditching my coat, mitts, scarf and boots in the pile in the corner of the main room I survey the scene to see which of my friends are already here. The inside of the hall is enclosed with pasty chartreuse green walls and held up with square banged-up support columns. Tinged and cracked linoleum covered floor offset by a low-slung ceiling with stained fiber-board tiles. Even in its drabness it was a-buzz with social interaction. Tonight though, another highlight in a third-grade boy's sheltered existence and a scintillating experience of social development.

Tommy Mabley, Dalles Redgrove, Buddy Triebauser, Willy Siebal, Larry Fox, Freddy How, Bobby Miller, all boys from his world of church school and church were already making nuisances of themselves. We are accumulating in strength, yet all looking the part of orphans in our faded plaid flannel shirts and flannel-lined corduroy pants clinging to the long white underwear clinging to pale white skin beneath. We take off our shoes to better be able to run and slide. Linoleum floor tinges and cracks not impeding any coefficient of friction with hole-infused wool socks.

The fury of frenzy in the formation of festivities. The 'ladies' setting out the platters of sandwiches, dishes of olives, glazed crocks of macaroni and cheese, baskets of potato chips, bowls of macaroni salad, boxes of cookies, plates of pie, sheets of cake. A big bowl of punch. Piles of napkins. Little wooden flat forks and spoons. Plastic to show up a few years later.

Old men in drab shirts with pants held up by braces hovering in one corner, ruminating of the good old days. Young men decked out in a little splash of color hanging out together in another corner, yearning for better days to come. The old women sitting along the wall, covered mostly in plain black, or gray. The row of monotony broken by the two or three in tattered poke-a-doted dress . Each old soul encased within a tightly drawn shawl. Each sitting manly, with knees apart, hose rolled down to ankles, gout swollen joints forced into scruffed-up old granny shoes. The little girls. They simply didn't exist.

Some of us boys had heard a good one in church earlier in the day, and we were simply dying to try it out on one of the elders of the church. You know, those guys who were omniscient with all things Holy Book. Tommy Mabley's father was cornered and the inquisition begun.

"How come Moses didn't take any bees into the ark?" I excitedly challenged him. We had him circled, and we were all dancing back and forth from one foot to the other like we all had to pee or something.

"Well, I'm certain Moses did take bees into the ark," Tommy's father explained patiently to this obviously misguided bunch of prepubescents.

"No, no. He didn't. He really, really didn't," another piped in.

"Well, of course he did. We wouldn't have any bees today if he hadn't taken them into the ark to keep them from being destroyed in the flood." His patience was enduring. He had so much to teach. He had 5 kids.

The giggling. "No he didn't! It was Noah that took the bees into the ark." More giggling.

And Mr. Mabley, with his short hair and wire-rim glasses knew that he had just been had. And giggled too.

Somebody would be roped into being the master of ceremonies. The cold bitterness of January was rebuffed with the warmth of shared fellowship in a congregation of peculiar people. The self-made entertainment commenced. Action games. A blindfolded woman with a heavy stuffed pillow trying to knock off the man straddling the saw horse. Crowd yelling to her where and when to swing. Then the musical chairs with Tom Smith pounding out old melodies from "Everybody's Favorites" on the honky-tonk piano . The parlor game Jacob and Rachel where everybody but blindfolded "Jacob" and his object of desire "Rachel" form a circle, and poor Jacob repeatedly calls out "Rachel, where art thou?" and in ventriloquist disguise she answers back "Here I am Jacob" and he then gropes to find her. A few rounds of that is followed by the pseudo sinning. That being, of course, the marching. Lots and lots of marching. The lines and columns, the weaving back and forth, the arches, the uniformity interspersed with individuality. The singularity of form and pattern punctuated with the abrupt perpendicular. Dancing, even though done in the Bible, was but the vertical manifestation of horizontal evil and so was totally forbidden. Marching was the sanitized surrogate for sin. One wonders how any of us were conceived.

An interlude for eating. Someone pontificated with the blessing. Little boys scrambling to be first in line. A smorgasbord of foods he would never get at home. Foods from other little boy's mothers. Like Tommy Mabley and the simple awesomeness of his mother's salmon sandwiches. On white bread no less. I never would get white bread at home. Only brown bread, which years later he would discover was "wheat" bread as if white bread was made from methyl-cellulose or something . . . aka wood fiber, an additive to Wonderbread to boost its fiber content that simply swelled into a public relations nightmare for the baking company. And of course, that salmon being the only "flesh" there, a mother who dared to defy the hypocrisy of the vegetarian dogma of the church. Eating salmon meant that one had to die before Jesus would come. Only those who had never tasted flesh could be translated at the second coming. No one in that room that night was in any danger of being translated. Roasted flesh of turkey and vulcanized flesh of beef graced the tables of at least the ceremonial feasts of the annual cycle of seasons.

Potato salad, hot baked beans, cottage cheese, some of which was homemade and damn good, deviled eggs. Oh! The deviled eggs. And olives. Pitted olives. One for each digit of a little boy's hands. Cup cakes, apple cobbler, crumbly cookies. Punch with ice cream and gingerale. Hot chocolate made with real Fry's cocoa and sugar and canned milk and hot water. With luck, some little marshmallows, although it was firmly believed that they contained pig fat. Forbidden.

Chairs were now scooted out from the periphery and the focus now on the little stage. The regulars of local talent succumbing to the begging and pleading for their pitiful renditions. Buddy Triebauser and Willy Siebal with their trombone duet. A trumpet trio with Lloyd Fisher and his gang. Melvena Hill interrupting the festivities with her version of "Rock of Ages." then followed by, with horrors for everyone, my father, crooning , "The Strawberry Roan." Some old lady recited a reading about a soldier lost in love. Henry Welch, who was at least 7 feet tall, pantomimed a man with fleas at the bus stop. A half-dozen little boys sitting on the floor in front of the first row of chairs started to itch.

Jim Dalke always played his home-made Hawaiian electric guitar, the preacher's wife her marimba. Mr. Selslie his cello, Glenn Anderson the saw, to be joined by Harry Rembolt with his wash-tub bass to add a sense of rhythm.

When he had had enough, old Tom Smith, the head elder of the church and a lawyer of some dubious repute for an oil company, would mount the platform, swirl the seat of the piano stool that was supported by four greenish-glass eagle claws , so as to get the height just right. He perched himself on it, raised his arms, and then crashed into "God Save the King." Where upon we all rose to attention and rendered our loyalty to the head of our secular government, but not of our church. The evening was now officially over.

Tired little boys, stumbling through a pile of coats and hats and muffins and mittens and shoes and boots and scarves. Mothers bundling up babies. Old ladies struggling with tattered coats. Middle-aged ladies packing away the refuse from the victual table. Young men out in the parking lot trying to coax frozen batteries back into life and thereby infuse the inky frozen night with exhausted particles of frozen internal-combusted metabolic water.

I was back into the back seat of the car. Now, it was very late on a Saturday night. Streets nearly deserted. No need to keep the window down to allow for hand signals. Sitting there, staring through the little oval glued to the outside of the car window to supposedly keep Jack Frost from painting those gorgeous patterns across the entire window, my teeth chattering like a battery of compressed-air hammers.

The drive home was silent. Mother is mad about the Strawberry Roan. The outside was crisp and still. The sky punctuated as a pin cushion peeping into a brilliant vastness beyond the dome covering the earth. Some place up there beyond Orion, he would go to heaven. That is, if he had no sin. But he could hardly even find Orion, or the Big Dipper, or Cassiopeia, or the Pleiades, all things he learned about in 3rd grade science. Couldn't find them because they were hiding in plain sight. That was the problem. There was so many billions of other things strutting their brilliance out there that those ancient formations were simply obscured. Then to say nothing of the intermittent waves of green and purple and blue of the Northern Lights, dancing clear across the panorama of the northern sky ahead, as they headed northward back home.

The house was frigid. Even when the old gas-fired furnace worked, all of the heat vents were at ceiling height. The floor was glacial. My bed was frozen. Long-johns exchanged for flannel pajamas. No bed-time story tonight. I force myself to crack apart the flannel sheets. I know in time, I will produce a small pocket of heat. For now, my feet throb with cold. The warmth in my heart, eventually, will change that.

The Refectory Manager