I always thought I would have been a great soldier. Then of course I was suspicious that I’d
get hit early in the game and die of little use. The game of Dodge Ball made me think you would
get put out, hit sooner or later. How it was that Hitler lasted all the way through the First World
War is some sort of impenetrable mystery. Germany is a democracy. They say it was one then. Freedoms
were voted away. Hate ruled the day.
Wars used to be smaller. The exciting professional wars for Romans and Greeks
against Persians were pretty big, but it wasn’t till we got to Napoleon times
with sailboats, sailing ships that went around anywhere in the world of the
sea that so many jobs opened up for the educated professional warriors and
soldiers of fortune.
Those ships where real achievements that could lead a man to big dreams.
Then on and bam we got to World War I.
There were the Napoleonic Wars, the American Civil War, and then bam, we had
World War I.
There are supposedly alive today some who fought in WWI. They say it was horrible. Nobody
is still alive who fought in the American Civil War.
I grew up with war all around me on my mind because of my father and the
fathers of my friends. Lewis Wilburn who owned the gas station would show us
the scar from the hole in his leg. The nice copper jacketed bullitt had passed right
through. He smiled awfully proud whenever he showed the scar of his war wound.
My father would talk a little about his experiences of the war if we were watching COMBAT, on
TV. I think it was going around that the brave and good didn’t talk too much about it.
They were maybe all supposed to go to a Veterans Club bar and tell each other only.
The Boy Scouts saved my life. The Boy Scouts was about learning how to camp and stay out in the
forest and shoot guns. The Boy Scouts was good preparation for going into the army from
everything I could and can tell to this day.
Now I notice in the advertisements for war and army service that is now all volunteer for the
US, they have appropriated the word “Warrior”.
I was fighting a good deal as a youth because it was known by some in the small town
that dad was gay, and all that. So I was fighting to keep them off of us.
They ran over the dog and kicked me in the head and threatened my sisters and brother all the time
to the point I told my younger brother it was okay to deny being related.
By the time I was 13 when mom divorced dad and the family was broken up and the house
was sold and we moved to Greensboro after dad was in the mental hospital and got out
and got to work at the Black University A&T, I didn’t have any friends there
that missed me or I missed, apparently.
Well I missed Arron and I saw him at the corner store across from where his dad’s
gas station had been.
He was drunk at about 1 in the afternoon. Some things had gone wrong for Arron
I had heard because I had asked after him somehow sometimes over the years.
Once from Rochester when the divorce was on which was a good big war for me I had
called the guy who was the most popular handsome guy from 8th grade.
Joel Brown?
The laws had changed and Joel had been able to build a bar in Elon so he was
likely rich from that being a small college town. There was a law that kept alcoholic
bars still 5 miles from town when we were children. There was a classic type
soda fountain place as a substitute where you could go dressed up and get a Cherry Smash,
kind of really like the TV show set of HAPPY DAYS.
Back in NC working on a house I was told by a sheet rocker that lived over there
that Aaron hung himself in jail. There was something about maybe he set fire to someone’s
house.
An attorney over there that way said that it wasn’t unusual for white guys to hang themselves
in jails over there because they typically got raped by the black gangs who
colluded with the guards who were also mostly black, so if a white guy got put in jail there
he got raped and it was pretty rough and humiliating and it was common for them to
react by hanging themselves.
So far that’s the last I heard. I mean I had heard Aaron and his family lost, sold, Lewis died, the gas
station got sold to the college and Aaron went to work for the Motor Pool.
Aaron had some red headed girl twins and had a drinking problem.
Joel said he was old and bald when I got him on the phone. Joel would have only been
in his early 30s when he said that.
Then I was going through my divorce and reaching out wondering what to do.
Back then I had been about trying to make Transcendia as a force for peace and
I had not long before made the Clown Corp Tee shirts which were a silk screen picture
of clowns throwing flowers out of a Balloon basket to the Iranians.
By the time the divorce was done, and I had been crushed, I decided using a balloon
and clowns to demonstrate for peace would be counter productive and that dropping
candy and flowers on a nation like bombs as a Pro Active Civil Demonstration would have
to be done with a plane like an SR-71, meaning something fast enough either way so as not
to create a counter productive war situation.
Clowns in a balloon would be shot down.