Corpus Christi Harbor Bridge, Texas Department of Transportation
"She is the manifestation of our collective will not only to survive, but to thrive as a nation of free people. On behalf of the United States, thank you to all the men and women who have touched this fine ship, who have designed her, built her, took care of her and sailed in her."
-Commander Travis Petzoldt, Commanding Officer, USS City of Corpus Christi (SSN 705), decommissioning ceremony
I left my motel room, drove further south on I-37, and took the exit to get to Ted's ranch. It was the summer of 2009. I had just finished grad school in Toronto and flown to Dallas to spend a weekend with my best friend from college. The following weekend, I would meet back up with him and the rest of my college friends for our unofficial five-year reunion at one of the guys’ family’s ranch, near the nowhere town of Frost. There, we would drink and eat like morons for 48 hours before going back to our jobs in finance and law. In between those two weekends, I visited other people in Texas. This included Blue Feather, my older Navajo shaman friend who, with his wife, had adopted me as their grandson of sorts when I was stationed in Texas. I had met Blue at the one alternative, hippie cafe--the sole demilitarized zone--in Corpus. It was the same place actually where Ted had met his wife, Heather.
At the end of this summer, I would head to Uganda for a year and a half with a volunteer-teaching program. In Uganda, sure, I might have done a little good, and I did without some luxuries, but all in all, it was a fairly privileged jaunt. In short, my post-navy life was adventurous and pretty carefree. With some savings (from having been overpaid vis-a-vis the social value I provided as a naval officer) and with no major attachments, I moved where I wanted to and when.
The no-man’s land between San Antonio and Corpus Christi had always struck me as ugly, when I was stationed down there. Now, though still very desolate, it struck me as almost pretty. And if not actually pretty, then gritty, with a sort of hidden beauty, in the way that non-gritty outsiders can pontificate about at least. Maybe it was my allegory for Ted.
The waning, late-afternoon Texas sun welcomed me into his driveway. I hadn’t seen my good friend in three years, after he left the USS Pelican. Some time after him, I too had bested Captain Ahab and the non-seagoing Pelican and got to leave Texas as well. Then, we completed our respective next tours--mine in Japan, Ted’s in San Diego--and thus survived the surface navy, intact. Oddly enough, this reunion was back in the Lone Star State, where we swore we would never return--me, “the gun-hatin’ liberal from the North” and Ted, “the wrong type of Mexican for Texas” (both Ahab-attributed epithets). Yet, my facial and unkempt hair and light-hearted smile gave all indications of civilian life. All was to be ok. This was a triumphal reunion.
I timidly stayed near my rental car on the clay and asphalt driveway, away from the two angry mastiffs yelling at me. I wasn’t sure I was at the right ranch, and I had read somewhere (a thousand times) that I shouldn’t mess with Texas. Heather came out of the trailer home, calmed the dogs, and greeted me. I didn’t know Heather too well, but it was good to see her. She had represented the non-navy Corpus Christi world for me--and certainly for Ted--and for that alone, I held her in high regard. We made small talk until Ted came home shortly thereafter. The mastiffs barked more warmly for him.
He and I walked around the ranch with bottles of cheap beer in hand. He had bought these thirty acres right after San Diego. The trailer was temporary until they could build something less mobile, he told me, but he didn’t need to apologize for any frugality. We caught up and recalled our non-war war stories from the Pelican. Mike putting a cold .38 special in Ted’s stomach as they drove to a movie just to show off his new toy and mess with Ted, who was the driver by the way. Ahab threatening to “step on Castro’s dick.” Supply and Engineering Departments’ loyal patronage of the Russian call girls at Seashells in Bahrain. The mutiny against Ahab--is it still technically a mutiny if the ship is tied to the pier? Mike pressing the alarm button on the walkie-talkies every time XO Kim tried to say something. Ted and I getting chased by the cops after the karaoke fight at the Chalet Lounge in Ingleside, now just ninety minutes south of this reunion.
We imagined Ahab at the edge of the ranch that night, with one of his sic semper tyrannis, NRA-sponsored semi-automatic rifles, hiding in the bushes, looking to avenge his mutineers. He had, off the record, promised to “get every single one of [us] motherfuckers back.” Ted and I laughed triumphantly, as we recalled the Pelican. We had lived through that ship and that shit.
When I first met him in Bahrain in 2004, Ted was 30 going on 55. He seemed to already have lived three lifetimes, and as a byproduct, he developed a beautiful gallows humor, of which both Vonnegut and Joseph Heller would be proud. A humor that had been incubated, birthed, and sharpened by a lifetime of visits to the gallows, both before I ever him and during his tour on the Pelican. He possessed the heartiest of laughs, so hearty that it rattled in his interlocutor’s ears and soul. His laugh still reverberates with me.
Bakersfield, Ted's home, sits at the bottom of the San Joaquin Valley and is surrounded by a three-sided mountain range. It was a country town when he was a kid, he described to me, with the economy being driven by oil and agriculture. Ted’s mom’s father was, generations back, of Welsh descent. He was an Okie, who left the Dust Bowl for California, along with Steinbeck’s Joads and the thousands of other families. Ted’s mom, Linda, grew up in Bakersfield. Ted’s father, Ted Senior, was from Bakersfield too, mostly Mexican but part Greek.
Ted Senior was stationed at Fort Bragg with the army. He was on duty one evening when Linda was raped in their trailer park. They already had one boy, and Linda was eight months pregnant carrying Ted. The family moved back to Bakersfield, and Ted was born prematurely due to the rape. Ted Senior was discharged from the army due to “hardship,” and then he left Linda because he was embarrassed by the rape, by the hardship, as Ted tells it. Linda and her two boys stayed with her parents for a short time until they were asked to leave. Linda’s father, the Okie, hated the fact that the boys were mixed blood and the fact that his daughter had been raped by a man who happened to be black. “The doctors thought I would die due to complications in birth, and I lost weight,” Ted told me. They lived on the streets and later found shelter in Linda’s friend’s shed. “Well, I made it anyway,” he proclaimed and followed with his signature laugh.
By the time we met then, Ted’s life held wisdom and heartbreak that I couldn’t fully appreciate. I was a snarky yet sheltered kid from Notre Dame and, before that, from white suburbia prep school-dom. On the face of it, he probably should have hated me. But, he took a liking to me. Or, in such close quarters on our little minesweeper, he had no choice but to spend time with me. He looked out for me. He shielded me from senior officers on-ship and buy-me-drinky girls off-ship, and, as he was prior enlisted, he gave me advice about the sailors in my division. I thought I knew music, but he introduced me to the Killers--their first album, Hot Fuss, had just been released--Tom Waits, Merle Haggard, and Okkervil River. I thought I knew books, but he introduced me to Kazantzakis and re-introduced me to Steinbeck, both explicitly by book suggestions and implicitly by his own life, whose topography in the San Joaquin Valley was akin to Steinbeck’s characters’ in the neighboring Salinas Valley. At least it seemed so, to an easterner who had been to neither. I thought I might become a priest in my future, post-navy, still-prude-and-pious life, but he talked about women and love like he was one of Garcia-Marquez’s magical, holy fools-in-love. That love might not have been the most realistic love. It’s what got Florentino Ariza in trouble so often and maybe what would eventually trip up Ted, but it sounded lovely enough to rule out celibacy. On every other person, I would have said that the orange-gold 1976 Cadillac would have been a waste of money in Texas--a bad, junior-enlisted-sailor-type financial decision--but Ted made it work and drove that boat like the goddamn naval officer he was. He had joined the navy for “the romance of the sea” after all, as he told his recruiter.
After the Pelican, we didn’t stay in great touch, and I probably would not have considered him my closest friend. But because of that uniquely Orwellian-Mel Brooksian experience together at Naval Station Ingleside, his friendship was one of the most special in my short life. That’s why it was so good to see him and to hear his laugh at this Texas reunion in 2009. Ted was flipping burgers at some fast-food joint, which was not the ideal job, but he had a couple leads for good steady work in the area. He and Heather had land. And they were on land. That is, they were not out at sea, which experience had taught us was a good start. They had dogs, and I saw the baby books in their home. They were working on something.
He made it, like he had done as a premature baby. Together, we were triumphant: Andy Dufresne and Red on the beach at the end of Shawshank with the rest of our lives before us. The hardest parts presumably behind us. That evening, we embraced, I said goodbye to him and Heather, and I continued my tour around Texas. I made it back up to Frost to play beer pong and drive ATVs, and eventually to Uganda and the rest of my life, which not without small hiccups, has been relatively carefree.
Over the course of those eight years, Ted and I lost touch again, as things tend to go. Three summers ago, I tried to look him up before I headed back down to Texas for another trip, but I had no luck. But then just two Thanksgivings ago, he tracked me down. We started with the navy references and jokes, and his laugh rattled once again, this time through the telephone.
“How the hell have you been?” he asked.
We were picking up right where we left off at that Texas ranch in 2009. I told him about him about the two things kicking my rear that fall, like I told all people I knew well enough: my new teaching job at the charter school and the abscess-fistula on my ass. It seemed like a good war story, and I had gotten practice in telling it.
“And what about you?” It was my turn to ask.
“Well, the short of it is: After I saw you last, I couldn’t find good work. Heather was going to leave me if I didn’t. So, I joined the army. I wanted to be a combat medic, but it took me a long time for them to let me enlist, instead of go officer. Then I had a long, unintended stay at artillery school. Over the course of these years, I’ve deployed three times to Iraq. The third time there, I came across an IED, and from what I remember or am told, the back of my Kevlar helmet hit the back of my heels. I had all types of injuries, especially back and spine, and I was laid up for months in army hospitals. In one of those hospitals, I received orders to Afghanistan, but as I was confined to an army bed, I couldn’t go [laugh]. The young, gung-ho guy who went in my place got his legs blown off, by the way. Still, I have all types of pain. I was discharged from the army with 100% disability from the VA, and Heather was my VA-designated caretaker. But in the meantime, she divorced me. I think she was skimming off the top of those payments. She has my two boys, only one I know is mine for sure. I have a restraining order against me now because I beat up one of her boyfriends. I didn’t want some dude half my age telling my son what to do [laugh]. Oh yeah, my mom died from the cancer that came back, from years ago. Then, I was back with my dad before he kicked me out. We got into an argument that was deep-seated, of course, but was set off by Fox News. I was in touch with my brother, but now he’s out of the picture. I’m 5’7”, 300 pounds. It’s hard to sleep because of my back. I drink too much. And, yesterday, I got this truck for $600 off Craigslist from some guy who was willing to sell it to a disabled vet. Well, the wheel came off, and I woke up in a ditch with a cracked rib. But other than that, I’m fine!”
And that hearty laugh as his exclamation point. I laughed, too, and I might have cried.
“Holy shit...what the hell?...the army?...enlisted?...I thought we were done with the…..”
“Yeah...fuckin’ A.” And then another raucous laugh.
After that call, Ted and I were in touch here and there for six months, but I’ve since lost track of him again. I’ve checked the Texas obituaries and police blotters to make sure he’s not dead or in jail. I do hope our paths will cross again soon, in person and on land. In the meantime, from my friend, I’ve garnered some life lessons, life lessons that fall somewhere between the personal and the political.
Like a Steinbeck story or a Springsteen ballad, or heck even one or two Old Testament stories, we learn that our lives are beholden by both our individual decisions and the stations we were born into. Both the individual choices we sort of have control over and the larger structures we don’t. For some, it’s hard to escape one or the other or both.
Maybe the Cadillac wasn’t the best choice. Less trivially, there were some warning signs with his relationship with Heather, pre-marriage. Probably the army wasn’t the best option. Or even the navy the first time, with its promised romance of the sea.
These were the decisions and stations that broke his heart and broke his body. And yet at the same time, he entered into each in good faith and with great love.
