Remembering, or not

 

                                                                Remembering, or trying to

 

Seventeen years old and finding myself on a U.S. Navy destroyer, out to see the world or parts of it. Jail or four years was the choice I was given. Seals and Croft, Carol King and others keeping me from going insane and keeping the steel hull quiet from the constant sonar beeps and heavy seas. Baby powder sprinkled on the passageway floors as we slide on folded blankets like a kid’s amusement park ride but with guns and missiles. Sidewalk cafes in Paris and Pizza in Rome. A bull fight in Spain and Christmas on Gibraltar. Places every young man should have to go even if he doesn’t remember most of it. Grass huts in Africa and a beer brewery in Sierra Leon offering warm beer to a bus load of drunken teenagers puking all the way back to the steel monster waiting at the pier. Rebuilding an orphanage and bringing in fresh water through underground pipes built by young men bettering themselves in their own minds. Finding opium dens on the back streets of Pakistan and twenty dollars’ worth of numbness and visions of the ship leaving us there. Taxis with trunks full of hashish as your mind tricks you with every step on the cobblestone streets of a place you should have died but, somehow once again making it back to the safety of the steel walls. Out to sea again as warm summer breezes comfort you in only ways the oceans can. The smells of the ports remain with you for the rest of your life, surfacing when least expected. Twenty-one years old and saying goodbye to fellow sailors who were your family within the walls of steel, your friends in times of need and faces still seen with closed eyes when you want to remember. Four years of routine broken only by your last step off the ship, looking back trying to put it behind you but never will. Twenty-one and trying to fit back in with those you left at seventeen but those times now seem so distant with no agenda but where would I work tomorrow or if Id even look. Drinking before noon, wasted by five and out cold on somebody’s couch that smelled of urine. Waking up to zeppelin and the smell of weed coming from somewhere in the house shared with runaways and people like myself who were trying to find our way that was takin from us at such an early age. Outside into a hot summer day that made you flash back to a brick street and a vendor offering mystery meat on a stick that you were high enough to eat not caring. How many more days, months even years, would it take for you to find a balance and continue your journey with a sober mind? Fifty-one years have passed since the call of the sea beckoned and I’m sober now for  only ten .I still have visions of things and still stop in my tracks when I smell a certain smell or hear a certain song that will pull me back in time when sliding down a powdered passageway on a steel destroyer in heavy seas, still putting  a smile on my boyish face.

Mike 2022