Airman Gates asked me if I wanted to grab a six-pack of something and head down to the Meeman Shelby State Park.  Any chance to get off of base was like winning the lottery. Only a hand few of soldiers had a car and I was lucky enough to have befriended one of them. 

Millington, Tennessee was desolate and unexciting.  Memphis was too far to walk and a cab ride would cost a fortune.  The only things to do in Millington involved strip bars or jogging. And being that I was only 18, I jogged.

So when Gates said “lets go”, I was in my shoes and out of the door before he finished his sentence.  Gates had managed to procure some wine coolers and beer from a friend of his who was 21.  We stopped and grabbed some ice and we were off.

Once we got into the park we drove around for 15 minutes until we found a boat dock and the raging Mississippi behind it.  We grabbed some drinks and sat on the bumper admiring the view.  We weren’t there 3 minutes and a Park Ranger pulled up.  Underage, open container and all of in a state park – not a good move.  The Ranger cited Gates with an open container and told him that he needed to go to the courthouse and find out his court date.   I got off with nothing.

For the rest of that day, Gates was a wreck.  He had already received his orders for his next duty station, which was for the most part in the backyard where he grew up, Whidbey Island, Washington.  Any change to those orders could mean duty somewhere he didn’t want to go.  I felt bad for him and told him I would go with him when he went downtown to the Memphis courthouse.

The next day we found ourselves standing in front of the clerk asking about the court date for my friend.  She gave him a date that was three weeks after the time he was supposed to ship out.  He explained his situation to her, that he wouldn’t be in town on that date. She said that if he didn’t show up in court, a warrant for his arrest would be issued.  To change his court date he would need to talk to a lawyer and she pointed to a gentleman behind us who she said might be able to help.

Gates went through the story again.  The lawyer said that he might know someone that would be able to help us.  He told us to go get some lunch and to be back in an hour.  Over lunch, Gates chatted nervously about his future.  He had worked very hard to get stationed in his hometown and the last thing that he wanted was to be on some frigate in the friggin ocean.

We finished our lunch and headed back to the courthouse.  We waited in the clerks office and the lawyer returned with a short man with graying hair and suspenders. The lawyer said:

“Gentleman, I would like to introduce you to the first black Supreme Court Justice of the United States of America, Thurgood Marshall.”

I nearly fell on the floor. Gates couldn’t speak.

“Good afternoon”, he said and we shook hands.  “I want to thank you for your military service and wish you a safe journey.  We have taken care of your problem and there is nothing to worry about.”

I think we said ~thank you~ a million times.  He asked where our orders were and wished us well again.  And he was gone.  We had a brush with legend and he threw out the citation.

And I wonder how many people can say they had an open container violation thrown out by a Supreme Court Justice?

(Rumor has it, a blurb about this moment was told in a bio of Thurgood Marshall, but I have yet to find that book)

Quite early this morning – 3 am-ish – while writing a story about some wannabe pirates, something caught my attention outside.  I went to my bedroom window - a window that has a clear view of the entire block, three stories above the street.  A shady character is slowly pacing the sidewalk and looking into car windows.  (I have been known to chase a criminal or two while living on this street and I am proud to say that this is one of the safest streets in the entire city. )

I conclude that this guy is about to commit a crime.  I have seen it before.  He is paranoid, as he is looking in all directions.  He walks the length of the sidewalk and then back again.  He zips up his sweatshirt and then unzips it. 

I pull out my Daisy BB Caliber 4.5 mm Steel Air Gun.    It was a gift for my 12th birthday, and it has come in handy on many occasions.  To load you must shake a BB into the little window, slide the window closed and then provide one pump in order to ready the gun for discharge. 

I gently open the window and lie the barrel on a book (The Outlaw Bible of American Literature – for those that wondered)  just inside the window making sure the sound of the gun will be muffled by the bedroom.  The man stops and focuses on one car in particular.  At about 80 feet, I line him up in my sights, and fire.  The gun makes a ~fflopp~ sound and then, nothing.  It was a miss.  I didn’t even hear it hit anywhere.  Being that it was dark I thought maybe I didn’t shake the BB in properly, so I choose to reload by hand. 

The man is now standing in the grass right next to the car and he takes a look around while zipping up his sweatshirt, again.  I fire, ~fflopp~ the BB bounces off the top of the car and hits him in the chest.  He yelps and hops backward, startled.  He starts grabbing at his chest trying to figure out what had hit him. 

He walks back up on to the sidewalk – and I am laughing hysterically underneath a book shelf. 

I reload.  Aim, ~fflopp~ the man yelps again and grabs his neck.  I was aiming for his chest.  At 80 feet I might be pushing the limits of this gun.  The man crouches down into a catcher’s stance, looking in all directions.  A car turns the corner and is coming up the street.  The man stands up and begins walking slowly.

~fflopp~ It’s a hip shot.  He grabs his hip and picks up his pace.  By the time I reload he is at a distance of over a 100 feet and a tree partially blocks any chance at a clear shot.  I fire anyway.  It must have came close, because he took off running.

Daisy BB Guns are a great tool for thwarting criminals.  If you don’t have one, I highly suggest you pick one up.

It was supposed to be a mundane task. I was to wrap two boxes, put labels on them and deliver them to the locations addressed. One was going to the Public Affairs office, specifically, CNN. They had requested some directives and memos, nothing of any importance really. The other box was going to Army Intelligence, which was to be treated a little different as the contents were classified.

I made the delivery’s and returned to my desk to continue my work. A minute or so later, my boss appeared and said very sternly, “I just got a call from Army – you gave them a box full of junk.”

I had screwed up. I had inadvertently switched the labels on the boxes.

“I am not telling you to run down there, but you need to get that box back”, he said.

I believe the first words out of my mouth were, “Oh fuck.” And I was off.

With my uniform trailing behind me I sprinted through the halls headed for the Public Affairs office. When I got there I asked the girl that I had dropped off the box to, where it was. She said that she took it down the hall to CNN. I hauled ass to CNN.

Short of the office, I slowed and peaked inside. The box was sitting unopened on the floor next to a desk. A man with white hair and a white beard sat at a typewriter typing furiously. His back was to me. I tip-toed in, bent over and picked up the box. When I stood straight up, a medal on my uniform grabbed the cardboard and made a noise. He turned and saw me with the box and said, “Hey, that’s not yours. Put that down!”

And I was off and running again. He chased me about half the length of a corridor, but I was too fast for him.

That night I was sitting in the barracks tv room eating pop tarts and watching CNN. The anchorman says, “And now a special report from Wolf Blitzer at the Pentagon.” It was the same guy that had chased me down the hallway. (Of course this is only moderately entertaining if you know that Wolf Blitzer is the evening anchor of CNN now.)    

Over the next year I managed to avoid Wolf Blitzer like a bad disease. Anytime I saw him in the hallway, I walked in a different direction. I never went to the Public Affairs corridor if I couldn’t help it. And then one day, I was sitting in the cafeteria enjoying a bowl of soup and who comes walking by my table? Yes, Wolf Blitzer, and he was with another man. He says to that man while pointing at me, “Don’t challenge this guy to a race, he’s fast.”

And I never saw him in the hallways again.

                                                                                        up next, Sgt. Brick………

Of the many days I spent working in the Pentagon, one thing has always bothered me to no end -Why the hell do people tour that building?  Tourists by the dozens draped in overpriced gifts purchased from the Pentagon gift shop stomp through drab corridors to look at useless artifacts from the 50’s and 60’s.  They look at oil paintings of high ranking paper pushers who strategized previous wars.  They pass several of the 280 bathrooms on site, bathrooms that they are not allowed to use.

~And to your left, the Pentagon Library.  They have books there.  And thank you for your 15 dollars.~ Boring.

Fact: the Pentagon was built in a mere 16 months and houses 17 ½ miles of corridors, all of which I got to know intimately.

I imagine people come to this building because of what it represents and I am sure that they leave disappointed.  Unless you had some knowledge of the information flowing through the building, this tour is useless.  Unless I was performing theater that day (see previous post).

Fact: the first Secretary of Defense was James Forrestal.  

The tour guides were Air Force personnel who stood like cardboard cut-outs in neatly pressed uniforms, and their shoes clicked as they strutted in front of gawking tourists jonzing for a Kevin Costner ~No Way Out~ moment.  They lead the charge through Pentagon corridors barking out boring little tidbits that you will most likely forget the second you turn a corner.                    

Fact: the gross square footage of the building rings in at 6,500,000.

These are facts that you could easily pull from a fact book or the internet, but what they won’t tell you is that entire building could be built in 16 months because they used the cheapest materials imaginable.  And of those cheap materials, they used something called Asbestos. The building was covered in it.  It was in the plaster, the roofing tar, the ceiling tiles, paneling and it even covered the pipes.  They were insuring that the place didn’t catch fire as asbestos is great fire retardant.  They also insured that many people would get cancer from working in this building.

During my tenure in this building I knew, no less than, 30 people who ended up with some form of cancer.  And that number would be significantly higher if I counted the people I heard about having cancer.

Fact they won’t tell you: The first Secretary of Defense went insane and jumped out of the 16th floor window at Bethesda Naval Hospital with a bathrobe sash tied around his neck.

And while you are walking through this massive building thinking about the air you are breathing and wondering what kind of cancer is growing in your body, a giant rat as big as a small dog runs across your feet.  Or a giant cockroach, minding his own business, walks down the hallway beside you. You hesitate to kill these creatures because they are so damn big, beating it over the head with a shoe is not going to do the job.  Most people wouldn’t kill a dog because it’s loose, and this is the way you feel when you see one of these enormous creatures.

Fact they won’t tell you: A prostitution ring was broken up in the mid 80’s. The secretary’s pool hired beautiful women who could not type, but were experts in dick-tation.

Every department was given a “company credit card” which could be used at any one of the many Pentagon Supply Stores.  When the new Defense Budget was announced, and the money officially up for grabs, you would see long lines of employees waiting to buy leather briefcases, oak picture frames, batteries of all sizes, computer equipment and anything else they could get their hands on.  And most of the time you would see these people at the end of the day carting this stuff to their cars.  This is where your tax paying dollars go.

Fact they won’t tell you: The frequency of bombs imploded or disarmed by Pentagon security is so high, the DOD created on site facilities to combat the epidemic.

It’s not uncommon to see “celebrities” from different walks of fame.  One day, while on my way to the concourse for some lunch, I saw Janet Jackson.  Another day, I saw Tom Petty.  I met Muhammad Ali, and got an autograph.  Gene Hackman.  Martha Stewart.  There were Senators, congressman and former Presidents.  Everyday I saw someone new, someone famous and I wonder if they had to pay 15 bucks?

Probably not.

Fact they won’t tell you:  The Pentagon Tour is a ripoff.

                                                                                      …up next, Wolf Blitzer chased me

My friend Bill and I, who was also military, used to take daily walks through the hallways just to get out of the stress of our offices.  One day a tour stopped ahead of us and an Air Force guide began peeling off bits of useless info about the building.  I looked at Bill and asked him if he wanted in on what I was about to do.  Bill was up for anything.

I said, “run, and keep up with me!”

Bill and I quickly shot into an all-out-sprint, right for the tour.  As we got close I began yelling, “Make a hole! Make a hole!”  The Air Force Sergeant guiding the tourists began yelling at them to move to one side of the hallway and they parted, opening a lane for us to get through.  Bill and I had looks of horror plastered on our faces and our uniforms barely clinged to our bodies as we raced by.  The reactions of those people in the tour told the entire story, they thought the world was coming to an end.

After we were out of sight we ducked into a stairwell and laughed our ass’s off for half an hour.  I have no doubt that those people went home and scoured the news for anything that could be attributed to two Navy idiots sprinting by them in a Pentagon hallway.  But one thing was for sure, when those people walked out of the Pentagon that day, they thought that was the best tour they had ever taken.  It was 3 seconds of theater that left people wanting more.

We ended up doing this a couple of times a week.  And sometimes we would do it on our own.  We would call each other up and trade stories about the tourists reactions and how they were just soaking it in.  

After several of these manic moments we realized that the Air Force tours guides were catching on, but they found it entertaining and never said a word.

Sometimes we would run through with a hand full of papers, other times one of us would tell the other, making sure that the tour could hear, “We need to hurry, there’s not much time!” 

Bill wasn’t good about saying anything because he would lose it. He would be in tears the second we started running and by the time we reached the tour, his hand was over his mouth, his face was bright red and he was running like a penguin in his feeble attempt to suppress laughter.  I am sure there were moments where people thought he was running to a bathroom more than anything else.

Someone running in the Pentagon definitely catches your attention, even pre-9/11, even if you worked there.  It’s a building that just wreaks excitement sometimes.  Tearing through a tour had an effect as you could hear it in their comments like, “Oh dear”, or “Wow”, or “Holy shit”, or the obvious, “Something is going on!”  

Sometimes you would feel the flashbulb of a camera on your cornea and realize that you are probably going to be framed on a wall somewhere to enhance someone’s story about the time they visited the Pentagon.

And then one day, by myself, I launched into my run towards the tour. I noticed the tour was abnormal.  Taller than most.  All men.  They were all wearing blue.  And after I screamed, “Move, Move, Move”, the crowd parted except for one of the smaller guys who stood confused in the middle of the lane.  To miss him I had to contort my body sideways and off balance.  As I passed within inches of him I realized that this was point guard Bobby Hurley and that the people of the tour were the newly crowned NCAA National Champions, the Duke University Basketball Team.  And before I could further process this information, I smacked into a wall with my right shoulder, knocked over a display of pamphlets and fell on top of a dirty mail cart.  This was quickly followed by a chorus of sympathetic moans from everyone witnessing my horrific spill of destruction.  I limped away, slumping in a stairwell wondering if my shoulder was broken.

When I got back to my office my boss asked me why there was giant scuff mark on my nice white uniform which I had failed to notice. “I ran into a wall”, I told him with no further explanation.

“They will getcha sometimes”, he said. 

As it turned out this was one of my last performances.   

Shortly after I smacked the wall I got a promotion and was unable to continue what Bill and I had started.  But I never passed a tour where I didn’t want to break into a mad sprint while screaming out, “Move, move, move, there’s not much time!”

                                                               ….up next What they don’t tell you 

Some years back, while I was serving in the U.S. Navy, I had a cushy little job at one of the biggest and most powerful buildings in the world.  It was shaped like a Pentagon. 

On one unusually mild afternoon in February I was tasked to take some documents over to Capital Hill for some signatures.  To entertain myself on the shuttle ride over, I stuck 3 pieces of bubble gum in my mouth and admired the architecture of the Washington skyline through exploding pink bubbles. 

For those that are not aware, chewing gum in a military uniform is a no-no.  And because I am a gum junky I had my share of ass-reamings from senior officers who reminded me of this fact. 

After I finished my business, I was standing on the street corner waiting for the shuttle to reappear, still chomping on my gum.  Realizing that I was headed back to military central, I decided to dispose of it.  With no trashcan in sight I launched the wad of gum from my mouth with a shot-putter’s might towards the gutter, but it fell short bouncing on the curb and back to the sidewalk. 

No sooner than the gum came to rest, two gentleman appeared and checked their watches, no doubt in anticipation of the shuttle.  One nearly stepped in my gum which by now had flattened and was in a mortal oozing spread due to a nearby steam grate that was emitting heat.  Thoughts of going over and attempting to move it flashed in my mind. 

Out of my peripheral, a black limousine comes to a stop in front of me, in front of my gum.  The door opens and a rather large Ted Kennedy climbs out and steps right into the pink blob.  He walks a few steps and starts dragging his foot.  And then he pounds it on the pavement.  Sticky pink strands of Bubblicious are trailing behind him. 

Ted Kennedy drags the heel of his shoe over one of the steps of the building and blurts out in that thick New England accent that conjours an ~Ask not, what your country can do for you~ moment, “There’s gawd damn gum on the battom of my shooooe.”

I am not sure who he was talking to – he was alone. 

He climbed the rest of the steps dragging his left foot and flailing his arms about in effort to keep his bloated body balanced. 

Out of sight, I could still hear the faint sounds of Ted Kennedy, although unintelligible, he was clearly pissed and no doubt complaining to security about my gum on the bottom of his shoe. 

After returning to the Pentagon shaped building, I sat at my desk sifting through phone messages.  In a coworker’s cubicle I could hear a radio broadcasting G. Gordon Liddy who was talking about the Bill Clinton and health care.  Just before G. Gordon went to commercial break he said, “A Happy Birthday to Ted Kennedy today…” 

I wonder if the biographers who will write Ted Kennedy’s life story will mention this Bubblicious moment……..probably not.  Which is why it is here. 

                                                         …….Up next Pentagon Kabuki Theater