In the infantry, I soon humped my gut off and in the process I learned that there were officers that were such nitpickers they made Captain McQueen seem like a pure candy-ass. Mississippi said he had him a mind to join recon. It was bad there but it was fair. I was young with less than a year in the Corps and more than three to go. Time was dragging heavy on my ass. So when I ran into my old buddy Jorgeson, my mainline man from the Island, and he too said there were openings in recon, where they take awful to a whole new level, I introduced him to Mississippi. We all got good and drunk at the EN Club, talked about jumping out of airplanes and shit, and then as soon as we ran out of beer money, we went over to headquarters company and signed the transfer papers in a hot second. A hot second, bro.

I’m not stupid, and I’m not pleading drunk. I don’t like awful. But awful awful can sometimes be very interesting.

I Need a Man to Love Me

HER PHONE WAS one of those black, old-time heavy jobs with a Bakelite dial, the base made out of ceramic or something—granite maybe…lead. It was like, heavy-and-a-half, an anvil. Seemed like a moron’s phone if you don’t know her, since in her condition she could barely lift it and it was getting all but impossible to dial. The left hand was super bad. No fast-draw Billy the Kid hand; it had no strength whatever. When it worked, when all was optimal, it was a cold blue claw and she could hook things with it. Captain Hook. People saw her Mickey Mouse around with the old phone and there was no sympathy.

The right hand was a little stronger. Not a lot, but it was her bread-and-butter hand. As the years passed it also got weaker. She wasn’t Stephen Hawking yet, or like that guy with the left foot, Christy Brown, but close. That’s why she liked to keep everything about her the same—the environment the same. This house, this home, her all-her-life home, forty-seven years in a shotgun shack. Okay, don’t get morbid—the once cheerful, and still not such a bad…bungalow, was home. Period. The doors and windows were now secured with metal bars, a little crack action down on the corner but, hey!—that’s New Orleans for y’all. Two bedrooms, a full basement, the add-on front porch done when her father was still alive. Busy beaver with a paintbrush and flower gardens was he. Her dad, Corliss, had a mania for tidiness, and her mother, too, which made the latter hell on wheels when the diagnosis came through; when they learned that she would be crippled for life. Turned her mother into a pisser.