by Mendy Sobol
When the next war—my war—came in Indonesia, there weren’t enough volunteers. That’s why Harriman called for “temporary” reinstatement of the draft, the TRD. Congress debated for a couple of months, but in the end they gave him what he wanted. Like there’s anyone in Congress who’s got the balls to vote against keeping America safe.
Thanks to Selective Service every city in America already had an electronic draft board up and running with long lists of girls’ and boys’ names turned into ones and zeros. And thanks to IPI, the only paper you can find at Selective Service is toilet paper.
The TRD, IPI, and RITA keep the war going. That’s a whole lot of fucking initials for Murder Incorporated. The TRD serves up fresh young bodies, replacing ones burned and broken by Red Path mines and mortars in the countryside, IEDs and suicide bombers in the cities, and friendly fire everywhere. IPI’s software guides the missiles, navigates the ships and planes. RITA runs ops, ordering draftees where to go, who to kill, when to die. Together, IPI and RITA fight virtual war from the safety of an ivy-covered New England corporate campus, spilling real blood with virtual ones and zeros, confident no hacker can mess with their net.
Yeah, they’re confident. And dead wrong.
Chapter Fourteen: Melora
I should thank IPI. IPI and the U.S. Navy. If it weren’t for them I’d be just another e-virgin. Because when I was growing up, C-ASS was fucking strict. No exceptions. So how John Paul Jones Academy, a private naval high school, managed to wangle an old IPI 700 computer out of the Navy, I’ll never know. I don’t like thinking about how bad my life would have sucked if they hadn’t.
When I dropped out of St. Francis High—well shit, it was more like I stopped dropping in—my friend Coop started sneaking me into the academy library so I could hang out with him while he re-shelved books. He was taking a big risk, because the academy, an all-boys school, didn’t allow girls on campus. The retired navy and marine officers who ran the place figured there was only one reason a cadet would invite a girl in for a visit, and parents weren’t shelling out big bucks for their teenage sons to become baby daddies. But Coop didn’t sneak me in for sex. He snuck me in because he wanted me to meet the 700.
Coop showed me a few things a Navy CPO taught him about programming—mostly boring navigation shit—but the first time I touched the keyboard, I was hooked.
Coop felt bad because he thought it was his fault I dropped out. It wasn’t. The asshole surfers and skateboarders at St. Francis High targeted me long before I started hanging out with a seaweed sucker from John Paul Jones. Sure, they hated cadets because cadets were different, walking around St. Francis in their dress blue uniforms, not because they wanted to, but because the academy made them. And because civvies, as academy kids called the locals, thought cadets were rich. That’s pretty fucked up if you think about it—the locals hated me because I was poor.
The ocean. It dominates everything in Florida. The state’s west coast, the St. Francis side, borders the Gulf of Mexico. Shelter islands—St. Francis Key, Largo, Clearwater Beach—separate the mainland from the Gulf, creating an inland waterway of saltwater bays. The Gulf is my ocean. My mother, Tammy Jo Kennedy, even claims she bathed me in it when Pinellas Water and Electric cut her off for not paying her bills. She’s told the story a million times—
“The lowest I’ve ever been. No light, no water, no husband, no money. And me, all alone with two babies—well Joey wasn’t such a baby anymore, but little Melora? Still in diapers and crying all the time. Wouldn’t sleep, wouldn’t nurse, just cried and cried and cried. I thought there was something wrong with her. But with no money, how could I take her to the doctor? And how could I leave a sick baby to go look for work? And smell? I’ll tell you, that baby girl smelled like a pig in church! With no running water in the house, what could I do? So I took that child down to Palm Boulevard, stuck my thumb out—I swear three cars slowed down, then speeded back up when they got a whiff of Melora—hitched out to the beach at St. Francis Key, borrowed a little soap from the bathroom at the Arco station, put my baby in the ocean and scrubbed her down from Albania to Zanzibar! And sweet Jesus, the instant her little toes got in the surf she stopped crying. And by the time she made it in up to her chin, strike me dead if there wasn’t a big old grin spreading across her face like silage in a hog trough. I tell you it was a gift from God. So you know what I did? I baptized her right there on the spot. Did it myself—Melora Ocean Kennedy. The middle name? It just came to me. Tammy Jo’s thank you to God for making my little girl smile! And there must have been something to it, because from that day on, the only time she’s happy is when she’s in her ocean!”
Like all Tammy Jo’s stories, this one’s filled with heroism and ingenuity in the face of great suffering, praise for God, reference to herself in the third person, and bad similes. Like most of her stories, it’s probably bullshit. I do remember times without water, times without heat and light, but I can never remember my mother without an expensive perm and tint, without makeup, without polished, shiny nails and a short skirt, without a boyfriend. I also can’t remember being happy except when I’m in the Gulf. The smell of salty air, the grit of hot, white sand between my toes, the way ocean water holds me, weightless and warm. I live for that shit.
No one taught me how to swim. I’ve always been able to breaststroke, backstroke, Australian crawl, doggy paddle. Always. My earliest memory? Swimming in the surf at my fourth birthday party while mom, mom’s latest boyfriend, and Joey eat cake on shore. At six, I was kicking twelve-year-old Joey’s butt in swim races. At ten, I swam out so far I couldn’t see St. Francis Key’s hotels, couldn’t hear the surf pounding into the beach, couldn’t understand why everyone was hysterical when I bodysurfed to shore near sunset. They thought I was trying to kill myself, though no one wanted to come right out and say it. And when I was fourteen my high school P.E. teacher, out for a day at the beach with his family, saw me churning through the surf, asked me to try out for the swim team, guaranteed me a spot. I never showed. What’s the point? I thought. They swim in pools.
We lived on the second floor of a run-down, clapboard tenement on a side street half a block off Palm Boulevard, St. Francis’s main east–west strip. Some days in spring and fall the sun rose up from one end of Palm and set at the other like it was tied to a string anchored in our living room. A month before my eleventh birthday, I woke to that sun shining in my eyes through the living room’s louvered Florida windows. Loud voices were coming from the kitchen, and though I couldn’t hear the words clearly, I knew I had to make myself smaller on the couch where I’d been sleeping, make myself disappear into its lumpy cushions. The voices kept getting louder until they were screaming. I covered my ears but heard the crash of the kitchen table overturning, dishes smashing against the wall and floor. Then mom came out to the living room screaming curses into the kitchen at Joey, dragging her jerk-off boyfriend behind her, his hands clutching his bleeding, busted nose. She pulled him out the front door still screaming, slamming it behind her.
Joey came out of the kitchen a moment later, shaking but under control. “Mel,” he said, managing a wink, “I guess we’re on our own.”
He was only sixteen, but Joey got a second shit job, and then a third, and kept us in our apartment, making enough money to pay the electric bill and put food on the table. Coming up the peeling, white outside stairway one day, pounding on the door because he forgot his keys, getting no response from me, Joey was the first to realize there was something wrong with my hearing. The savings from his shit jobs weren’t nearly enough to pay for a medical exam, so he hooked up with some gangster and hustled coke to the rich kids at St. Francis College until he made enough for the doctor and the pale, beige, plastic hearing aid the doctor said I needed because of the slap mom’s boyfriend gave me a week before they moved out. I’ve worn it ever since, even when I didn’t have the money for fresh batteries, even years later when I was wealthy and could afford to replace it with one that’s better, smal
ler, closer to the color of my skin.
My hearing was the first thing that got me bullied in school—She ain’t deaf, she’s fuckin’ dumb! Then it was my dark Latina looks, the only thing I inherited from my father—What’s another name for Cubans? Saltwater niggers! My cut-offs and tee shirts, hand-me-downs from Joey, didn’t help either—Hey Diesel Dyke, you lookin’ for the men’s room?
Joey always took care of me, but he was only sixteen and working three jobs. He didn’t have time to be my substitute dad, and soon he became a dad himself. At twelve, I was an aunt.
It was way later when I first met Coop, early in my senior year in high school. He was sitting at a booth opposite my table at Belasso’s Pizzeria working on a large pepperoni, reading the latest Avengers. I was taking my time before I ordered, enjoying the aroma of tomato paste, fresh-baked dough and garlic, letting it build my appetite. By that age I’d adjusted to the idea my skin color would get me served last almost everywhere in St. Francis. That wasn’t a problem at Belasso’s though, because I was their best customer. Mr. Belasso, the owner, even let me wait tables for tips and free pizza. He was at his usual place behind the flour-covered counter, soiled white apron cinched up under his armpits, black plastic glasses balanced at the end of his nose, reading the Daily Racing Form. He didn’t come over to take my order, but he wasn’t a racist. He never took anybody’s order. If you wanted pizza, you had to go to Mr. Belasso. I was about to do that when the door jingled. Three girls—blancas from my English class at St. Francis High—came in, and spotting Coop in his dress blues, slid over to his booth.
“Hey, seaweed sucker, when’s the last time you saw a real girl?”
Coop ignored them. Kept eating, kept reading.
“Maybe it’s true what I heard about you academy faggots? That you’d rather do it with each other?”
Still no reaction from Coop.
The middle one, the blonde puta who’d been doing the talking, went down to her knees across the table from him, putting herself at eye level with his dick, pulling out a cigarette, waving it in his face.
“Hey, queer bait, got a match?”
Coop looked up.
“Yeah. My farts and your breath.”
I had to admire his style. So before Blondie could react, I called out, “Hey, you can get off your knees.”
Blondie turned, looking at me, recognizing me from school.
“Oh yeah, island beaner,” she said. “Why’s that?”
“Because he knows when he’s licked.”
Coop laughed.
All three girls started toward my table.
Mr. Belasso looked up from his racing form.
“You girls buy some pizza or get the hell out!”
They must not have been hungry, because they hesitated, then headed for the door.
“Hey, thanks,” Coop said.
“No big deal.”
Coop laughed again, his head tilting left, half way to his shoulder. “What’s your name?”
“Melora Kennedy.”
“Hey, Melora, I’m Dave Cooperman. But everybody calls me Coop.”
I nodded. He looked down at his comic book but quickly looked up again.
“Uh, hey, Melora?”
“Yeah?”
“You want some of this pizza?”
“Pepperoni?”
“Uh-huh.”
“My favorite.”
And that was the beginning of our friendship.
We hung out together a lot. On weekends, when Coop got liberty, we went and did the only things St. Francis teenagers without much cash could do—movies, pinball, pizza, and Pepsi.
St. Francis isn’t like Miami, with its royal palms and rich retirees. It’s run down and always has been. The palm trees look like they’ve got cancer, and the only old people who wind up there are the ones whose Social Security checks are so small they can’t go anywhere else and still be warm in winter. I never cared that there was nothing much to do, because until I met the academy’s IPI 700, I wasn’t interested in much of anything other than the beach. Besides, sitting on the railroad tracks near the academy, sharing a pizza or half-a-dozen White Castle burgers, me and Coop always found plenty to talk about.
Coop told me how he’d grown up rich in a big old Victorian house on the corner of Napoleon and St. Charles in New Orleans. Then one fall day a couple of weeks after his fourteenth birthday, his father put him on a bus for St. Francis and John Paul Jones. There was no hug, no explanation, barely a goodbye. He stayed with his grandparents in Mobile for Thanksgiving. No one told him about his parent’s divorce until Christmas.
The first two years at the academy he’d been scared and homesick. He didn’t like talking about those times but told me enough, painting pictures of a lonely, violent campus where underclassmen might be treated to a toilet bowl swirly or midnight blanket party—a beating given under a blanket so the victim couldn’t I.D. his attackers.
“It was like Lord of the Flies,” Coop said, “only the grownups weren’t interested in rescuing us.”
His third year had been better, and now that he was a senior and a cadet officer, with graduation a few months away and college tuition guaranteed by his father’s court-ordered support payments, Coop finally felt safe.
Coop’s friends accepted me as one of the guys, once they got over their disappointment that I didn’t have any girlfriends to fix them up with. And while they were good company, for me, anything I did in winter just killed time until it was warm enough to get in the ocean. Tourists from up north hit the beach all winter, but I always waited until March, when wind and water temperatures climbed together into the 70s. In the meantime, I filled my winter nights with vivid ocean dreams of warm sun, hot sand, and gentle surf. In the mornings, I woke disappointed the dreams weren’t real but feeling excited that they soon would be.
When spring came, me and Coop began a new routine. Every Saturday at noon I caught the uptown Palm Boulevard bus. Ten minutes later Coop flagged the driver on the corner of Cyprus and Palm, climbing the stairs, paying his fair, dropping breathless into the seat next to me.
“Hey, Mel,” he’d say.
“Hey, Coop,” I’d answer.
John Paul Jones reserved Saturday mornings for special tortures—room inspections, personnel inspections, practice parades—and Coop couldn’t get out on liberty until twelve. But he ran the long blocks from the academy, officer’s cap pushed back on his crew-cut head, black tie flapping behind him. And he never missed the bus.
It sucked when civvies got on the bus and hassled Coop, or when Screwy Louie—a St. Francis crazy who looked and smelled like the Wolfman—joined us on one of his bus-tripping joy rides. At least Louie kept us entertained, shouting swear words and farting whenever the spirit moved him. His favorite expression was, “Blaaaaaaaah—PUSSY!” Coop’s roommate, Jim Goldfarb, declared March Screwy Louie Awareness Month, composing a song to the tune of Louie Louie in his honor—
Screwy Louie, oh baby, we’re aware of you
Screwy Louie, oh baby, you’ve got hair on you!
On the bus or at the park
No one’s safe after dark
Because of Screwy Louie
Oh baby, we’re aware of you
Screwy Louie, oh baby, you’ve got hair on you!
The Chamber of Commerce won’t take action
‘Cuz you’re their biggest tourist attraction
Well, Screwy Louie….
Most of our rides west over the toll bridge crossing Boca Grande Bay were quiet and uneventful, except for getting off the bus on St. Francis Key where Palm Boulevard ends and the Gulf of Mexico begins, blue-green, shimmering, endless. That view always got us stoked.
We changed into our swimsuits in the bathrooms at the Bonair Beach Hotel’s restaurant, hiding our clothes in steel cabinets where the hotel stored extra soap and paper towels. The rest of the day we spent in the Gulf, swimming, body surfing, and floating on our backs, faces turned up at the burning sun. After an hour or two i
n the water we’d take a break, walking the beach looking for shells, eating candy and potato chips from hotel vending machines, or lying in the hot sand. But we never stayed dry for long.
When the sun got low out over the Gulf, we’d sneak illegal dips in the Bonair’s Guests Only fresh water pool, rinsing salt from our bodies, changing back into the clothes we’d left in the restrooms, drying ourselves with paper towels. Whenever Coop’s grandparents mailed him a few extra bucks, he’d treat me to a steak or a chef’s salad in the restaurant. When they didn’t, I’d buy us hot dogs and sodas on the beach.
Liberty ended at 11:00, but we stayed on St. Francis Key every minute we could, catching the 10:30 bus so Coop wouldn’t get in trouble. When it was time to leave, Coop always got real quiet. He hated going back to the academy. By the time I’d get home, Joey was out working the night shift, cleaning floors and emptying trash at St. Francis Junior College. My six-year-old nephew, Darin, would be asleep in our one bedroom. But Joey’s wife, Diana, stayed up late, smoking cigarettes, ready to talk about the day. So I didn’t hate going home the way Coop did, but I did hate leaving the beach.
During the week I went to school. In the afternoons, I waitressed at Belasso’s. On nights when Joey and Diana both worked, I babysat Darin, making sure he was in bed by nine, getting him ready for school in the morning. Except for school, my weeks didn’t suck. But I lived for my weekends at the beach with Coop.
Chapter Fifteen: Melora
By the end of March, me and Coop had our Saturdays down to a science—bus, beach, Bonair—and soon, sun, wind and water made Coop’s skin almost as dark as mine.
On the first Saturday in April, I got up early so I could play with Darin for a while before catching the bus. By 8:00 the temperature was already in the high 70s, promising today we’d get a taste of the kind of heat and humidity that normally didn’t come until summer. Joey and Diana surprised me by not sleeping in. For once they were up before me, moving around the kitchen, smoking cigarettes, washing dishes. They were awfully quiet, like they were when they’d had a fight the night before.
