I had difficulty swallowing.
I’m guessing my pack is fifty to sixty pounds before I add my film. My camera, I’ll wear around my neck. Cruz said, “If you can stand up with the pack on your back, you’re not carrying enough.”
I’ll also be carrying extra ammo for the M-60 machine gun and the LAWs （light anti-armor weapons）。
I turned and startled at the sight of someone standing beside me, surprised because I didn’t hear anybody come in the bunker. I looked again, more closely, and I realized I was looking at a mirror, only I didn’t recognize the person I was looking at. The face was gaunt and wrinkled. The hair was long and unkempt. But it was the eyes that made me walk closer to the reflection. My eyes have become like the eyes of other marines who have been here for a while—flat, gray, lifeless. I stepped still closer. The dirt on my face gives me crow’s feet, like stage makeup used to age a man. I have a nineteen-year-old body with thirty-five-year-old eyes.
I am like the pencil I constantly sharpen with a knife; I am just a dull nub of the person I was.
Chapter 13
July 12, 1979
I went home that afternoon shaken and embarrassed at my own stupidity. At a time when I felt like I was starting to fit in, I’d painted a scarlet A on my forehead. “Can’t be trusted. Do not befriend.”
We went out that night, the boys. We had no plans, as per usual. Four guys, each without a plan, made for a cohesive group. After half an hour of bickering and rejected suggestions, we stopped at a gas station so Mif could call Ed and Mickey. When he hung up, he told us they were at the Lanai bar at the Villa Hotel in San Mateo. Like My Brother’s Place, we chose the Lanai not for the décor or the ambiance, but because we could get in.
I was on the verge of bugging out, still shaken by the event that morning, and what it had done to William, how it had affected him. I knew that actions had consequences, but I’d never before thought that those consequences could be death, not until I worked on the remodel that summer. I never realized how fragile life could be. One day in the garage, as William talked to me about losing his foxhole partner the first time he was on guard duty, he said, “Growing old is a privilege, not a right.”
Those words kept going through my head, as if on a loop. I looked at my friends and thought of all the dumbass things we’d done, and I wondered how long we could continue to get away with them without something bad happening. Something that could disrupt the rest of our lives and the lives of those we loved.
“Summer’s almost over,” Mif said as I debated whether to go out. “And we both know we’re going our separate ways, and it’s not going to be the same.”
Mif had the courage to express what the rest of us would not. I wouldn’t see these guys, not after I went off to college. Some never again.
The Lanai bar had a mystique that might have been more legend than reality. It was rumored that the famous Las Vegas Rat Pack—the name given to performers Dean Martin, Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr., Peter Lawford, and Joey Bishop—stayed at the hotel and drank in the Lanai after performing at the Circle Star Theater in Redwood City. I thought it was an ingenious promotional campaign. None of us, in our collective visits, had ever encountered anyone even remotely that famous. I did once see Jim Nabors, a.k.a. Gomer Pyle, in the Lanai men’s room.
“Hey, you’re Gomer Pyle,” I’d said.
“Wrong guy, kid,” he’d said.
But it had been him. I found out later that he was performing at the Circle Star. I also read later that he didn’t answer to Gomer Pyle.
Each visit, we’d ask the Lanai waitresses, hardworking women not there to talk with boys who weren’t likely to tip, if Frank or Dean had been in. They’d either blow us off or perpetuate the mystique.
“You never know. Maybe.”
“I think it’s bullshit,” I said as Mif, Billy, Cap, and I drove the El Camino Real to the Lanai.
“Why would they make that up?” Billy asked.
“To get people to come to the bar thinking they’re going to see one of those guys. They spend money on food and drinks while waiting for something that is never going to happen,” I said.
“Good point,” Mif said.
“Who gives a shit?” Cap said.
I think we fancied ourselves as our own rat pack. We weren’t famous, had no real discernable talent, but we hung out together in bars making asinine comments and usually drank more than we should. It was hard for me to admit, but it was getting old. I didn’t want to be working just to have enough money to go drink beer and play softball when I was thirty. I looked at William, and to a lesser extent at Todd, some mornings, and I realized I had an opportunity they never had. I had an opportunity to do something with my life. Too many nights I just felt like my friends and I were wasting time until college.