FINDING JESUS, AND EB HOGUE'S KNIFE

Finding Jesus, and Eb Hogue's Knife

     We were living in a little rented house on Conklin Avenue in Grants Pass. Darrell and I met a kid named Eugene Wright, who was my age and lived a few houses up the street. He'd come around trying to sell Cloverine Brand Salve, some allpurpose ointment that magazine ads said you could sell door to door and make a lot of money. It came in tins the size of a snuff can. He didn't sell many. 

     Something had happened to Eugene's parents; there was some reason they couldn't raise him. He lived with his grandparents, the Hogues. He was an only child, a chubby kid who wasn't very strong. He'd been labeled a sissy, and took a lot of shit from other kids. He was very religious. 

     He and I became friends for a while. He didn't do much that I liked, like playing football or baseball, but he did read books, so we had that in common. He talked a lot about Jesus. I got bored with that, but everybody said it was the truth so I figured it must be so. He worked at converting Darrell and me. I remembered a time in Pasco when I'd asked, "Mom, is there a real God 'n' Jesus?" She'd just said, "Yes, dear," as if I'd asked if the sky were blue. I wanted more of an answer, but none came.

     Mom had been praying a lot more lately. It was pretty much in the air we breathed. In the small towns where we'd always lived, whenever somebody was born or died or got married, the seriousness of the occasion meant that it was a religious one. Heads would bow, some old man would pray out loud, and you had to be still. 

     Eugene kept after us to accept the Lord Jesus Christ as our personal savior. He warned that we'd go to Hell if we didn't, and we knew he was right because everybody else said the same thing. The difference was that most people only said that if you asked them, and Eugene said it without being asked. Darrell and I shrugged and said, Well, guess we better do it, sure don't want to go to Hell. (Back then, you always capitalized nouns like heaven and hell and any pronoun or adjective that referred to God or Jesus.) 

     So one time when Eugene was talking about Jesus we asked him how you went about doing this.

     "It's easy," he said. We'd need a special place, one that was sort of secret and private. We were at his house. He led us out back to a shed that had a partial attic and we all climbed up there and knelt down, which we'd have had to do anyway because there wasn't space under the roof to stand. This was perfect, Eugene said, because Jesus didn't care where you accepted Him as long as you did it, and He could see everywhere, so you didn't have to be in church. (Pretty good, seeing through walls. Wish I could do that.... I imagined myself walking down Conklin Avenue watching women bathe.) Darrell and I hoped Eugene was right; we didn't want to go around thinking we were saved and then end up in Hell because we'd gone about it wrong. 

     So we knelt on the boards in that shed's attic and Eugene Wright asked us if we accepted Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior, and we said we did, and we all bowed our heads and Eugene said a prayer and that was that. We were Christians. Eugene was excited. Lots of preachers don't do that good, he said, getting two in one week.

    Some time later Ebenezer Hogue, Eugene's grandfather, put a .22 rifle to his head and killed himself in their living room. Eugene and his grandmother couldn't bear to stay in that house, so they moved a short distance away. Mom rented their house. She let us see the bloodstain on the wooden floor once, then put a rug over it and we moved in. It was the best house we'd ever lived in, with a back yard big enough for a vegetable garden. We’d learned in school that Indians had taught the Pilgrims to plant corn and beans in the same hills so the beans climbed the cornstalks. I planted ours the same way, and sure enough I didn't have to put in poles for the beans to climb. 

     Eugene gave me a hunting knife that had been his grandfather's. He didn't want to keep it because it saddened him, and he wasn't a hunter anyway. It was pretty old, with a small brass hilt. It had had a handle of two pieces of some early plastic, one riveted to either side of the tang. One side had fallen off. It had a crude sheath that Eb had made. He'd told Eugene it was the Indian kind. (The old man had told Eugene about seeing real wild Indians as a boy. When Eugene retold the story to me, I was so thrilled I could see a file of dusky figures, moving among the trees like a warm breeze, disappearing over a ridge.) The sheath had leather covering the blade but also wrapping around most of the handle. That way you didn't need a keeper strap, which brush could unsnap anyway when you walked through it, plucking out the knife without your even knowing it. Plus you didn't have to unsnap anything to draw the knife; you just grabbed the top of the handle and pulled it out. The hunting knife I carry to this day has a sheath I made the same way. 

     It wasn't a pretty knife, but it was mine. I didn't like that it was missing part of the handle until one day when I was throwing it in the front yard. Most hunting knives are heavier on the handle end, making it harder to control how they turn in the air, thus harder to stick. Having half its handle missing gave Eb's knife a nice balance. 

     I practiced. There was a tree in our front yard that was big enough that I could hit it every time, and its bark was soft and even, so the knife would stick easily when I could make it hit point first. I became a kid zen knifethrower. I would spend hours a day standing back from that tree, throwing the knife, retrieving it from the tree or wherever it had bounced to, walking back, throwing it again. 

     It was a matter of grip, release, and distance. It worked best to grip the knife by the blade and throw it overhand so the knife made a half turn and arrived at the tree point first. Once I saw the principle involved, I chose a favorite grip, the one with most of the blade in my hand, and settled in at the distance from the tree where that grip would give me a nice half turn and stick in the bark. I threw and retrieved and threw and retrieved. After a few days I could stick it almost every time at my chosen distance. I began to throw harder, and that changed things for a while but when I found the right combination it became even more consistent. Then I chose a spot in the bark for a smaller target, and before long I could throw the knife hard, stick it most of the time, and often very near that spot. Then I no longer seemed to be throwing the knife; it just flowed out of me as I let it go. 

FOOD CHAIN (POEM)

                         Food Chain

or: The 52^nd Screaming Fish

of Thanksgiving Day, 1971

                              by Dean Metcalf

You, fish ‑

I, fisherman ‑

we are the Cain and Abel of muscle.

Your yellowfin tunabelly

full of lesser fish

that you have murdered,

you take my double hook

your yellow side thunders under water

slapping sunlight up through blue water

all the way back to the sun.

You fight for your life.

I fight for your life.

Braided nylon line

slices my hands with

the electromuscular force

of your fighting, then massages

sea water and diesel fuel and fish slime

into the cuts.

I, sunburned sinew, throw

silver, blue, and yellow

thrashing muscular you

screaming, bleeding

to the heaving bloody oily

     salt steel deck.

Your scream is tiny:

a squeak, like escapes the quick turn

of basketball shoe on maple floor

yet in my ear it makes the whole blue Pacific

resonate with your dying.

I reach into your slime‑slick,

     hard‑rubber jawed,

     finetoothed mouth

for the hook;

you bleeding screaming

staccato tail‑flap

sewing‑machine‑STITCH

the hook across my hand,

leaving perfect dots of blood.

My skipper's voice grapples with the voices of the wind

and the Jimmy 671 diesel engine:

"You got other fish on!

Get that hook

back in the water!"

My hand is trapped inside your mouth,

all wrenching teeth and hook‑points.

I raise the other hand,

shout into the wind,

make a fist,

hammer it down,

crush your skull.

Your eyeball,

the size of a small lemon,

scoots: does it transmit

the sight of triumphant bloody me

     aboard a dizzy deck

back to your squashed fishy synapses?

Your fifteen pounds of perfect muscle

shudders, lets go my hand.

Your blood and mine mix with diesel

and seawater, wash out the scuppers,

returning home.

I will unload your body

at the Star‑Kist Cannery.

I will walk to the hock shop in San Diego,

redeem my guitar, adding the fifty cents

your life means to me

to the dollar amounts of the lives

of your frozen kin

here in the hold of the Dora B.

Or I will fall overboard,

where sharks circle,

waiting.

                         

DRESS BLUES I

Dress Blues 1

     Bill took me to a gun shop in Klamath Falls. We couldn't afford anything, not even a used rifle. We went there to dream. Maybe they'll give me some overtime, Bill said. And we'll pick spuds together on weekends when they come ripe. Maybe we can get a good used .30-30, not this year, but in time for next deer season. We could sure use the meat, save on groceries. Gotta tell your ma that, or she won't let us spend money on a rifle. .30-30's not the best gun for this country, though. Good brush gun, but short range. Need somethin' that'll reach out farther in this open country, .300 Savage maybe. That's a real nice rifle, got a good long barrel, you get a peep sight on the back, with that long distance between sights, you can be real accurate. Bill liked peep sights. He'd gotten used to them during World War II, when he'd fired the Springfield 1903 .30-06, and later, the M-1 Garand. Ought six's a good caliber, he said. You could get a lot of different loads for it, and you could buy ammo anywhere. 

     We were talking like that, and the store owner, who knew we didn't have any money, was letting me handle a used .300 Savage off the rack. He wasn't busy. "Boy handles a rifle real nice," he said, knowing that'd puff me up, which it did. Puffed Bill up a little too, because he'd taught me. 

     The little bell over the door jingled, and a man walked in. Instantly, the three of us were breathing different air. The man wore a striking blue uniform, topped by - of all things in a dusty logging and cattle town - an immaculate white cap with a brown leather brim and a shiny brass emblem. He removed the cap and tucked it under his left arm as he entered. The dark blue uniform tunic had brass buttons and a funny high collar that closed at the throat, and red piping at the sleeves and pockets. There were medals - some shiny silver, some multicolored cloth - on his left breast. The silver medals seemed to represent rifles and pistols. There was a broad crimson stripe down each leg of the blue trousers. 

     The man knew the gun shop owner; they greeted each other. I could sense a subtle change in Bill, even though he was behind me, looking over my shoulder at the man in the strange uniform. 

     The man in the uniform was watching me, seemingly with approval, handle the .300 Savage with all the aplomb a skinny kid with glasses could muster. He nodded over my shoulder at Bill. "There's a young man I'll be talkin' to one of these days," he said to all of us. Then, to me: "Ever hear of the Marines, son?" He smiled. I was thirteen or fourteen. I knew nothing of him or his world. 

     I did know that both Bill and the gun shop owner had changed when he walked in. 

     "No," I said.

     The man might have said something else. I don’t know. I just remember how he looked, and the feeling he brought into the room. And Bill saying with a testy voice, "He's a little young for that." 

     The man in the glittering blue, white and red uniform did his business and left. I could feel the air in the room return to something like it had been before he came in, though a part of his presence remained. 

     I looked at Bill's face with my question. Part of his answer was already in his face; it contained some mixture of awe and disapproval, with a hint of myth or mystery.

     "Marine recruiter, I guess," Bill said, looking at the gun shop owner, who nodded as he leaned on the counter. I asked who Marines were, lobbing the question for both of them to catch. The store owner said something that confirmed the awe in Bill's face, about Marines being the best fighters. There was more awe in his reply than I saw in Bill's face, with none of the disapproval. 

     I was surprised at the anger in Bill's voice. He said something like, Sure, Marines have a lot of guts, but they don't care, they do all this crazy stuff, just stand up and fix bayonets and walk right into it instead of trying to do the job with less casualties. They get a lot of guys slaughtered just to prove how brave they are. 

     As we walked back to the Studebaker Bill said, very pointedly, that when my time came, I should join any branch of service but the Marines.

     I never forgot Bill's admonition. But the man in blue had done his work.

OAKLAND

Oakland

     We were at Oakland Army Terminal, a detachment of about a dozen Marine radio and radar operators under Lieutenant John O’Neill. It was September, 1965. We were getting ready to ship out for Vietnam aboard the commercial freighter S.S. AMERICAN CHARGER, which the Defense Department had chartered to help make up the deficit in military shipping during the buildup.

     We’d had our last Stateside liberty in Oakland the night before, and a friend of mine, Martin Luther Ealy, took a couple of us white boys bar-hopping in a black section of Oakland that was, shall we say, nitty-gritty enough that we’d never have ventured there unescorted. I’d gone upstairs at one of the bars to a prostitute, who’d matter-of-factly and bemusedly received my unschooled motions as her man sat with his back to us a few feet away. When I complained that I hadn’t gotten very much time for that amount of money, she shrugged: "You came, baby. That’s what you paid for; that’s what you got." She began filing her nails. I went back downstairs to approval mingled with jokes about how quickly I’d returned.

     But this story isn’t about that. It’s about tossing Harris his rifle. He was a black PFC a good three years younger than I, an ancient 22-year-old corporal with three years in "The Crotch," headed for my second overseas tour. The only thing Harris took seriously was his reputation for refusing to take seriously anything to do with the Marine Corps, military discipline, or his job. It was all pretty funny to him, an alternately boring and amusing hiatus between parts of his civilian life.

     It was a glaring afternoon. We were hanging out in a paved open area in front of a warehouse, watching military and civilian vehicles pull up to and away from the warehouse’s loading dock, that nexus of commerce and war. Lieutenant O’Neill was off somewhere finding out what we were supposed to do.

     We were engaged in the usual taunts and grab-ass when someone first glanced, then stared, at what a departing military six-by had left behind. We followed his stare and were struck quiet. We’d heard of body bags; even had an idea what they looked like, courtesy of the hyperactive rumor mill that was the source of most of our information and misinformation about what was going on in Vietnam.

     What we hadn’t heard anything about was aluminum caskets. But there they were, three jewels from the Grim Reaper’s trove, radiating sunlight from the loading dock. Our guys. We stood, mesmerized, staring at them wordlessly for I don’t know how long. It was long enough for the odor to reach us from the caskets. Our nostrils flared with it; each of us turned away quickly but as quickly turned back, baby warriors electrified and repelled by our first whiff of death. That was my first awareness that a dead human smells different from a dead animal. I still haven’t sorted out what the difference is, because I’ve never been able to decide how much is physical and how much is emotional.

     Lieutenant O’Neill came up huffing, in a hurry: "Let’s go!" He didn’t notice the caskets until our unwonted slowness in responding to his order jolted him into a barked repetition of it. If what was happening could be said to have a rhythm, O’Neill’s noticing of the caskets interrupted it. He skipped a beat, slowed, lowered his voice: "Get your rifles. Get on the bus." It was his turn to stare at the caskets as we snapped out of our shared reverie and moved to pick up our M14 rifles from where they leaned in a row against the building behind us. I took my rifle in my left hand and stood aside as the others grabbed theirs. That happened quickly, until one rifle leaned alone against the building. Harris was still standing where we’d all been, frozen, staring at the caskets.

     "Harris!" I shouted. He came to, spun around, jogged toward me with an adrenaline-induced bounce to his steps and a wild-eyed look on his face, part grin and part pre-game stage fright. I’d never seen him so alert, so alive. I picked up his rifle in my right hand, gripping it at the balance point just forward of the receiver. I tucked the rifle up under my armpit, threw it out hard, horizontally, in Harris’ direction, with no warning except what passed between our eyes.

     He didn’t break stride. Running straight at the flying rifle, his eyes followed it as a good infielder’s eyes will follow a line drive, reading its flight. Just before the rifle would have smacked him across the chest, he raised his left hand – languidly, it seemed – and snapped it around the rifle, at the same balance point by which I’d thrown it. Our eyes clicked together: here we go. He jogged past me, spun the rifle to vertical, and bounced up the steps into the bus.

BLUE IS (POEM)

              Blue Is

crystal deep

powder pale

edge of cloud

time of night

turn of smoke

birth of rain

noon of never

     blue is

saxophone

     filtered over

cobblestone

     blue is

half of black

     blue is

tongue of beast

     blue is

steel minus fire

     blue is

inside ice

     blue is

some kinds of motion,

some kinds of stillness.

Blue is woman's breath.

Blue is North,

hollow,

round.

       ©Dean Metcalf

       P.O. Box 548

       Joseph OR 97846

        3dmetcalf@gmail.com

CRATER LAKE

Crater Lake

       A few days after high school graduation in 1961, I got a summer job as busboy in the cafeteria at Crater Lake National Park. The concession company hired mostly college students to work in the cafeteria and lodge. Mr. and Mrs. Griffin, the owners, felt that all those bright young faces were good for business. And we were cheap labor, willing to work six or seven days a week. A majority of the students hired were girls, because most of the jobs had to do with waitressing, maid service, and operating souvenir stands. 

     So there were a lot of pretty, unattached females around. I was eighteen, but still hadn't had much experience with girls. I'd always been really shy around them. Scared might be more like it. But now I was going to college, I had scholarships, I had a job, I was out on my own. This would be my big chance.

     There were two sisters on the staff, so near in age that they often were mistaken for twins. I fell in love with the older sister. She would be a senior in the fall, which made her three years older than me, a huge gap. I didn't care. I thought she was beautiful, but in a relaxed sort of way, with a low, easy laugh that said she didn't take her looks as seriously as many women do, didn't want to taunt you with her beauty. 

     It wasn't hard to get acquainted, on an Ohhello, Iknowwhoyouare basis. All the staff ate in the cafeteria where I bused tables. Employees ate in our own section, and were supposed to bus their own dishes. But we would always cruise the section with our buscarts anyway, to banter with the others. Sometimes if we weren't too busy we'd do somebody a favor, if they were stuck at the end of one of the tables against the wall, and get them a dessert or whatever from the food counter. We had some stature because we controlled the music, and they'd have to ask us if they wanted to hear a certain song. The Ray Conniff Singers were big then, and we all had our favorites. "Harbor Lights" was one of mine. It spoke of parting, of a love more frustrated than realized. Maybe that's what attracted me, the longing to go down to the harbor and depart, in the dark amid strange sounds and smells, for unknown parts of the world, connected to, but not bound by, a love at home. And maybe, after some odyssey that left you scarred but whole, you'd come back and she'd still be there for you. 

     When my secret love would come in I'd think of something to get her to notice me, like making sure the place she wanted to sit was clean. Without crowding her, I'd eavesdrop if she and her friends got to talking about music they liked, and I'd go over and play something I'd heard her mention. If she noticed and smiled in my direction, I'd clean tables like a whirlwind the rest of the day.          

     Sometimes we'd have to stay after closing, clear the cafeteria, and scrub and wax the floor. We’d be lucky if we got done by midnight. Mr. Griffin would give each of us a chit for a meal in the main lodge's dining room for that chore, since it was extra work. Those meals were pretty snazzy - tablecloths, real silverware, wineglasses, the works - and expensive. And there weren't a lot of the chits around. So any guy with a couple of them in his pocket was considered pretty good date material. 

     I saved up two chits and gathered my courage. Normally I wouldn't have had the nerve. She was so beautiful, so grownup - so... well, womanly. But I was feeling like pretty hot stuff. The way that happened was I'd gotten a day off, and since I liked to run, I'd jogged the ten miles around the rim to where the trail went down to the boat docks, and got a ride around the lake on one of the launches operated by a Coast Guard vet for the park concession owners. It was a great day, and when I got back up to the rim it was still before noon. What the hell, I thought, and took a right turn instead of a left. That would take me the rest of the way around the rim, instead of the short way back: a day's run/walk of roughly thirty-six miles instead of twenty. 

     It was wonderful for a while. I'd had lunch and water down at the lake. I was on top of the world, jogging along at 7,000 feet, on a bright day, topping a ridge where the road was a bridge leading right up into the lone white cumulus cloud anointing the blue of the rest of the sky. That lasted a few more miles, then reality set in. 

     Several kids from the staff were hanging out in the lobby of the lodge when I stumbled in, well after dark - feet blistered, badly sunburned, woozy from dehydration and electrolyte depletion. They just gawked at how fried I was. There was quite a buzz about it for a while, about how it was a crazy thing to do, but great that I could pull it off. I was a temporary star in our galaxy.

     I wrapped my newly bolstered confidence around me and went up and asked that dream woman if she'd like to have dinner with me in the lodge dining room. I had two chits. Got 'em for waxing the cafeteria floor, I told her as I proudly offered her the fruits of my hard work. 

     She looked at me for a moment - rather a longer moment for me than for her, I think. I will never forget her look. She smiled. It was, as always with her, a genuine smile. She seemed pleased, and a little surprised, that I had asked. She even seemed to like me, but, I began to sense, in a kid brother sort of way. To this day, I think of the word "bemused" when I recall her look. 

     "No thanks, Dean," she said. "But really, thanks for asking." Damn. The usual class: no phony excuses, just... No, thanks.

     Harold Lawrence, the boat crew chief, had a special presence among us. He was older, all of twenty-six or so. He'd been in the Coast Guard; he'd been around. He drove boats for a living, entrusted with people's lives out on waters that could get dangerously rough, while the rest of us drove buscarts and sold souvenirs. Ashore, he loved his fun, and could kick-start a party by walking into a room. He also carried a certain edge; there was a detectable aura of danger about him at times.

     Women especially seemed to notice him. He wore sunglasses with lenses that curved around to the side to protect the eyes from sunlight glancing off the water, but he still had faint crow's feet at the corners of his eyes, enough to make him look salty but not old. He was always sunburned, and his dark blond hair was bleached and blown about by the wind whenever he came in off the lake.

     I had a pretty serious run-in with Harold. He was sitting in the employee section of the cafeteria, regaling younger workers with some story. He had a few beers aboard; he was feeling his oats and enjoying his status as star of the current show. 

     I came by with my buscart. Harold turned and told me to go get him something from the kitchen. Didn't ask me. Told me. 

     "I'm a busboy, not a waiter, Harold," I said. "Get it yourself." 

     The party was over in an instant. Harold sat and looked at me a long moment. He let that dangerous part of him that we'd only seen hints of come right out through his face. He lifted his chin at me. 

     "Go get it," he said. 

     "No," I said. 

     Everyone just stared at us, staying clear of the sparks. I stood there in front of him, as resolute as I was scared. Still skewering me with his eyes, he finally understood that, however badly I might come out of it, I was ready to go the distance rather than have him order me about like that. He let it drop. Sometime later, he apologized to me, in front of some of the same people who'd been there when it happened. I thought that showed real class.

     Some time after that, and after I had asked the woman for a date to the lodge dining room, I was walking along the hall in the first floor of the lodge, and happened to look in through the door of the cocktail lounge, that exotic place forbidden to eighteen-year-olds like me. She and Harold were sitting opposite each other at a small table, their elbows almost touching. They didn't see me stop for a moment. They didn't see anyone but each other. They weren't all moony and romantic; they were just two intense adults interested in each other. In fact, I thought that she took Harold with a grain of salt, that though she found him interesting, she seemed to have a boundary in place that wouldn't let him too close for too long. Still, I would have given anything, or done anything, to have her look at me the way she looked at him.

     That fall, I entered Oregon State University as a freshman in engineering. I got good grades, my scholarships were renewed, and I was re-hired the following summer, 1962, for my old job at Crater Lake.

     By midsummer I was restless. Crater Lake was a beautiful place, but busing tables wasn't the most adventuresome way to spend a summer. And Oregon State began to seem a less attractive place to go back to. I liked the engineering classes, but there were no women in them, just a bunch of guys like me with glasses and 24-scale loglog split bamboo slide rules. Besides, I had a yen to study foreign languages, or poetry; something that had less to do with things and more with humans. I decided to collect my pay, buy a good bicycle, ride around the Western states with the most beautiful mountains and rivers, and find a new college.     

     The kids on the staff threw a party for me, with a cake that said "Happy Bicycling Dean". I rode down into northern California to visit a buddy in Yreka, then headed back across Oregon to visit my mother in Pasco, just across the line in Washington. My older brother Lance had settled back there after his Army hitch; Mom had taken Darrell and moved back there to be near Lance and his wife and the grandkids, after I graduated from high school.

     South of Lapine, Oregon, the railroad tracks crossed the highway at a sharp angle. My front tire caught in the groove beside one rail; the bike and I went down hard. One crank was bent so badly the bike was unrideable. I went to the library in Bend while I was waiting for a Greyhound to take me and my busted bike to Spokane, up in Washington near the Idaho line. I found a reference book of colleges and universities, and went through all the listings in mountain states, and culled out the ones with strong liberal arts programs. Colorado College sounded best.

     When my bike was fixed, I pedaled east out of Spokane, crossing the Idaho panhandle in a day. That night, I slept in a campground at the base of the long climb to the summit, which was the Montana state line. The next morning I started the long grind, switchback after switchback of steep mountain highway, all in the lowest gears of the 10-speed Raleigh. A freight train was making the same climb, and often the tracks came close to the highway. The engineer and I began to wave to each other; got to be pretty good buddies, in fact. It turned out that the mechanics of his engine and the mechanics of my engine yielded the same average speed all the way up that mountain. So we developed a sign language, encouraging one another, then making fun of the one who momentarily fell behind. This went on for half a day. 

     Finally that freight train and I rolled onto the summit, crossing the Idaho/Montana line together. The engineer leaned out and gave a halfwave, halfsalute, and I was gone. Mileposts, the second hand on my watch, and a brain that was still number-happy from engineering classes, said I was making fifty miles an hour down into the St. Regis River valley. I made it beyond Kalispell, where I got so many flat tires that I couldn't keep moving. Money was running low, and at this rate I'd never make it to Colorado College in time to start school in the fall. I got on a train for Colorado Springs.

     The college was just what I was looking for. The campus was beautiful, the Rockies behind it were beautiful. They studied English and poetry and philosophy and all that good stuff. And there were girls all over the place. But it was a private college, and much more expensive than I could afford. Transfer students couldn't get scholarships in their first year. You had to pay your own way for that year, and if you did well enough, you could apply for scholarships.

     I'd been thinking about getting my military obligation out of the way anyway. I'd rather have gone to college, but didn't have the money to do it the way I wanted to. I told the admissions officer I'd just get the service out of the way, and see him in three or four years. "Fine," he said. I could almost hear "yeah, right" under his breath.