The Tarnished Shooter

by Charles James

  Clem started a rumor that I owned an Uzi sub-machine gun, just to see what would happen. The cops hoped the rumor was true and came snooping around looking for the alleged weapon so they could bust me with a federal firearms rap. It seemed silly to me why the cops would even believe something so ridiculous. It was just like what is seen on TV these days with the police always harassing a suspect. They keep at it until they find something to bust the already down and outs for. Everything is a game a big game of ego, with the cops using the rules of law as a license to win the game. The cops would say, “This is my town and you punks aren’t going to get away with anything. Just go ahead and try it.” We couldn’t understand what made them think it was only their town.

  Clem, Jack and I started experimenting with pipe bombs by exploding them in the bomb shelter. The twenty by twenty block building shook every time we detonated one of our homemade bombs. We had Ma go down to the sport shop and buy cans of black powder. Sometimes we had her go to the drug store and buy stockpiles of saltpeter, charcoal, and sulfur so we could actually manufacture our own gunpowder. On one of her clandestine buys, a druggist actually asked her if she was gathering supplies to make gunpowder. We all laughed about that. We used fuses that were supposed to be used for model rockets purchased from the nearby hobby shop. I learned about explosives and self-protection techniques from a book I’d bought called The Poor Man’s James Bond, by Kurt Saxon. It was a fascinating book with all sorts of radical ideas for defending yourself when the big revolution came. It was interesting to learn about so many of those things.

  When the cops were always harassing us, it was easy to believe in the possibility of a revolution, especially during those radical times of anti-war and civil rights movements. Of course today all of that stuff we did would be illegal and probably get one sentenced to death or at least a very long prison term. Even mentioning those experiments could be risky business. I hope this is still a country with free speech. To us, it was all just tom-foolery. At the time we never meant any harm to anyone or anything. We were just a bunch of boys spreading our wings and playing with fire so to speak.

  Clem carried around a tough guy attitude and was never afraid to get into a fight to prove his point. His solid build, long black hair and black leather jacket added to the perception of someone not to mess with. To increase the tough guy image, we gave ourselves tattoos to look like they were done in a jailhouse. One Friday night, all pumped up on booze, we each wrapped some thread around the tip of a needle and dipped it into a bottle of black India ink, then stabbed ourselves a thousand times with the needle. Clem created a big pair of snake-eyes dice permanently inked into his upper arm. I emblazoned the word “Freedom” on my arm. From time to time we played chicken by laying cigarettes or cigars on our arms letting them burn into our skin until it couldn’t be tolerated any longer. Scars forever burned into our bodies serve as reminders of all the foolish things adolescent boys do to impress one another.

  We were always trying to get into bars. We wanted to do what adults did. We were sixteen going on twenty-one. One of the younger trucking business employees helped Clem and I get past the ID checkers at bars and restaurants numerous times so we could get drunk and act like fools. He was a Vietnam Veteran who took a liking to me when I was on everyone else’s shit list. He was really a decent guy who had some terrible experiences in Vietnam which made him quirky with noticeable nervous tics. I liked him because he taught me how to win snowmobile races and treated me with respect, almost as if he had been in the same boat once upon a time.

  On one occasion when we were out drinking trying to get into bars, I was driving an old beater Pontiac station wagon. I was making a left hand turn at an intersection when suddenly the left wheel came off and went rolling down the street. Once we saw sparks fly from the car’s underside we knew we weren’t going to get it to the bar. The car came to a grinding stop in the middle of the intersection, and before I knew it, there was a cop in my face asking to see my driver’s license. We all laughed when we realized what had happened. The scene was pure comedy with the cop worrying about our safety, asking all kinds of questions about how or why the wheel fell off the car. Clem sat in the front passenger seat half drunk and laughing.

  I didn’t have a driver’s license so I gave the cop Jack’s name even though Jack didn’t have a license either just in case he radioed it in. If I had given the cop my name he would have arrested me on the spot. Lucky for me the cop was so busy keeping traffic cleared he forgot all about me. In the end, as a courtesy, the cop took us to the bar which was only a half a block away.

  Chapter 14

  I was a chain smoker and getting rotten grades in school. It wasn’t long before my probation officer suggested I join the Army. I thought it was a great idea; I had always wanted to join the Army, ever since I saw my Uncle Seth wearing his uniform. I went down to the recruiter’s office to check it out. The idea of being off probation and out of that city was feeling better and better. The Army recruiter said they couldn’t take me because I was on probation, but the Marine recruiter across the hall was listening in and before I could sing “great balls of fire” he had me sitting in his office looking at enlistment papers. After we talked for a half an hour the recruiter had four words to say, “The Marines want you!” Then he said, “Frank, guys like you make good combat Marines because you’re not afraid to take life-threatening chances.

  At the same time my cousin, one of my deceased Aunt Muriel’s sons, wanted me to join the Navy with him under the buddy plan. I couldn’t see myself as a sailor; I wanted to be a combat soldier. I wanted to shoot a fully automatic rifle at one of those Vietnamese over there in Vietnam. I had been watching the war on TV for the last seven years and always wondered what it would be like to actually be there. There was plenty of rage I had to dispel one way or another and Vietnam seemed like a good place to start. The Marine recruiter said the Navy would use my cousin as a paint chipper or something just as useless. As I sat in front of his desk asking lots of questions, the staff sergeant produced a switchblade knife from the top drawer of his desk. “Where’d you get that?” I asked. He said, “Got this in Spain.” In that moment I was hooked on the Marine Corps. I wanted to go places and travel around the world and maybe pick myself up one of those switchblades.

  I had my doubts about being able to make it through boot camp during the summer because I usually got headaches and bouts of nausea in hot weather. If I was going to make it, I would have to go through boot camp when the weather was cooler. A couple of weeks after I talked to the recruiter I enlisted in the delayed entry program. That meant I could begin training later in the fall.

  Many times while I watched TV, a recruiting commercial for the Marines came on with Lynn Anderson, singing, “I Never Promised You a Rose Garden.” The commercial depicted a recruit using a rope to cross a stream what looked like thirty or forty feet above ground. That commercial alone was enough to foster doubts of succeeding. I smoked nearly a pack of cigarettes a day and drank alcoholic drinks to the point of throwing up. I didn’t have much athletic ability except for occasional street-fighting.

  And it was a good thing I didn’t need a high school diploma. I quit high school in the middle of my junior year after a disagreement with the principal. On the day I quit, I was in his office trying to explain why I didn’t have a written excuse for being absent. I told him I was home with the flu and was actually still sick with a slight fever. He looked at me and said, “Oh, poor baby” with a box of Kleenex™ in his hand. That little incident was all it took for me to say “Kiss my ass and get the papers ready for me to quit.” I had had enough sarcastic remarks from big shot idiots like him. I was out of there, no ifs, ands, or buts, about it.

  I couldn’t figure out what it was about me that made people always want to throw me under the bus. It seemed like it began the day I was born. Sure I was young, angry, and full of rage, but I tried to keep all that shit to myself. I just tried to get along in the world the best way I
knew. One day I was talking to “Mr. Wonderful”, when he looked at a recent photo of me compared to when I was in grade school and then he said to me, “What happened?” I replied, “What do you mean?” “You look like shit!” he responded. I couldn’t believe he even said something as stupid as that to me. I was going through puberty and changing every twenty-four hours, besides what the hell did he care how I looked. Innocent or not on his part, it was those kinds of bullying comments that drove me to resent so many authority figures.

  I had almost six weeks before I had to leave for boot camp. Clem and I raised so much hell in those six weeks, it’s surprising to me that I even managed to get on a plane and fly out. The cops did everything in their power to push our buttons. And they knew how to do it well. One day I drove my little three and a half horsepower homemade mini-bike across the highway and got spotted by one of the cops bound and determined to lock me up. He cited me for five different moving traffic violations. Because of that incident I had my driver’s license revoked for a year and had to pay enormous fines for no lights, no helmet, non-registration, no driver’s license, and no motorcycle endorsement. It reminded me of the time I got busted for driving a go-cart with no driver’s license. Just think about all the taxpayer’s money being wasted on cops cruising around looking for juvenile delinquents to harass. Ten years from the bust it wouldn’t make the world any better of a place. It seemed like one big stupid game between the cops and the whole Barker family.

  For revenge, Clem and I got ahold of some M-80 firecrackers and went to the park. We threw a lit M-80 in one of the toilets in the restroom and blew it to smithereens. Water gushed out of the water supply pipe and little pieces of white toilet were everywhere. We ran out of the park restroom building laughing and hoping nobody heard the explosion. We threw full trashcans into the streets and empty ones through business windows. We lashed out at society like we were at war. We did some pretty dramatic things, but at seventeen, angry and frustrated we didn’t have the life experience to know or even care about any of that. On the other hand if it was acceptable for the cops to wage their own private little war on us, then it should have been obvious to anyone that sooner or later some form of retaliation on our part would occur. Today I know it was like fighting a losing battle—law enforcement has unlimited resources and they have the power to make anyone’s life a living nightmare.

  ****

  I remember by the time I reached my seventeenth birthday I figured it was me against the world because it seemed like the law was always trying to lock me up for any petty little thing. My dog, Buster, had run off and I never saw him again. To get a heads-up when the cops showed up at the house, I had gotten another dog. This time it was a mixed breed German Shepard and Collie mutt. She would serve as a watchdog. The dog had a grizzled ugly look about her, resembling a hungry wolf. She was the perfect watchdog. She was always patrolling the property—barking and growling at anyone who came around. She was there to greet visitors, barking as they drove down the driveway. Cosmo intimidated everyone who came to the house, especially the police. They were constantly threatening to shoot her if we didn’t put her on a leash. Once Cosmo got used to being our watchdog, strangers and sometimes even close friends, couldn’t get within five feet of any family member before that dog started growling.

  Sometimes I thought about all the little things that could get me locked up. Everything seemed to be about control. Most adult men were my worst enemies. Since my father’s death, I couldn’t stand to talk to an older man for more than a few minutes, especially when they started to brag or show they were just shallow egocentric buffoons. I turned a cold shoulder and refused to show them the respect they thought they should have gotten from me. I had had it with all forms of bullying. In my mind, grown men were some of the worst bullies, some beating on their wives and children and they were no better or any smarter than I was. What kind of a man beats on his own children?

  If I unleashed a destructive flurry of retaliation upon those who tried to control me through intimidation or physical abuse, I would have surely ended up entombed in a correctional institution for what would seem like an eternity, or I would possibly get killed for wanting to defend myself. I just went along and played the silly games until the pressure built up and I could no longer contain the humiliating experiences. Then I exploded and released all sorts of bottled up anger. All that anger and personality issues would get me into trouble time and time again, especially when I was drinking alcohol. It was almost like opening a door to the cage of a lion, or throwing gasoline on a fire.

  I thought all I needed to do to handle that was get out of town for a while; then maybe the cops would forget about me. It was getting to the point where if I even walked down the street the cops would pull up in their squad cars, stop me, and start asking me all sorts of stupid questions that were none of their business. If I got smart and told them to fuck-off they called for backup and arrested me. I found out what it was like to have another target on my back. More than anything it was my philosophical ideals coupled with my enthusiasm for speaking my mind that got me into trouble. After the old man was gone, I basically spoke my mind. In my younger years I could never talk back or express my opinion. I had a whole lot in me that needed to come out. And most didn’t want to hear what I had to say, especially the cops.

  Time was running out and I was getting the jitters about heading to boot camp. Two weeks before my scheduled departure, Clem, Jack, and I drove out to South Dakota in a beat up old car we had been working on. The junky car started showing signs of engine trouble somewhere in Minnesota, but we pushed on and made it as far as Custer. We found an old two-story western style hotel and rented a room on the second floor. When we moved the curtains aside and peered out the hotel window we could see down Main Street and view darn near the whole town. Clem was planning some sort of caper and the room would be perfect for keeping an eye out for the cops. We acted like desperadoes and thought about what it must have been like to be cowboys back in the late 1800s, on the run from the law, hiding out, going from town to town. Clem and I wished we had been born a hundred years earlier so we could have been gunslingers or at least carried a gun everywhere we went.

  A couple of days later Clem decided to forget about his planned caper and we got bored with the whole scene. With just enough money left for gas, we drove home. We knew it would be the last time we would all be together just bouncing around. Clem laughed about the prospect of breaking down somewhere in the middle of the Bad Lands.

  PART 4

  The Marines

  Chapter 15

  Over hill over dale. I was on my way to boot camp. Flying high on a 747 jet, seated next to a couple of other guys who had also enlisted in the Marines. It was the first time I was ever on a jet thirty thousand feet above the earth. The flight was estimated to arrive at San Diego four hours later. For some reason I didn’t like to fly. I felt claustrophobic and feared death from a plane crash. I had been in a plane once before when I was twelve years old. My old man had a buddy who owned a small single engine plane. The day we went up in that little flying coffin it was freezing cold with gusty winds and I feared the plane would crash and we would all be killed. I guess that paranoia never left me.

  While on the jet, I also remembered when I was between twelve and thirteen years old I watched a man drowning in the lake where my buddies and I went swimming. The man was screaming and flailing around in the water in total terror. It was an eye opening experience for me and it sunk into my subconscious. After watching the man drown the thought of dying terrified me, especially death by drowning. I couldn’t get that image of going under water and not being able to breathe out of my mind. When I thought about what that man went thru, I imagined my own father out there in the water losing hope, with nothing left to hang on to except the invisible hand of Jesus. I had hoped my father saw the light and was finally at peace. I believed everyone deserves to have their slate wiped clean. Maybe he did the best he knew how to do. Maybe h
e never really meant to be mean to me. I didn’t know, so I decided to give him the benefit of the doubt and forgave him since he was dead and could no longer hurt me—even if some of my memories of him were not good.

  I thought with Marine Corps training I might lose my irrational fears of dying young. Maybe I could become the ultimate warrior with no fear like my old man had wanted me to be. I thought about boot camp and wondered what it was going to be like as I gazed out the porthole window. Then I pictured myself back home sitting around the bar with Clem and Jack, the three of us talking shit. In that moment I realized those days of hanging out would be gone forever. I hoped I was doing the right thing. I also hoped I wouldn’t end up like my Uncle Seth if in fact I had got sent to Vietnam. The horrors of some of the things he said he had to do over there still haunted him with nightmares and anxiety.

  It was dark by the time a bus load of us raw new recruits arrived at Marine Corps Recruit Depot (MCRD) and started processing in. As soon as the bus came to a stop at the base, some big, bad-ass Marine with a sleeve full of stripes and a chest of ribbons, jumped on board and bellowed out at us “The first thing out of your filthy sewers, will be the word sir, and the last thing out of your filthy sewers, will be the word sir do you girls understand?” “Sir, Yes, Sir!” “I didn’t fuck’n hear you!” “SIR, YES, SIR!” “You pussies have three minutes to get the fuck off of my bus and stand at attention outside on those yellow footprints.” Those damned yellow footprints that had been painted on the blacktop at a forty-five degree angle. A recruit stands at attention for the very first time in his or her life on those yellow foot prints. Even without knowing how to stand at attention all eighty of us managed to stiffen up the best we knew how—mostly out of fear.