No Ordinary Joes

by Larry Colton

The final straw that destroyed their marriage was when Gwen found out Chuck was having an affair. She picked up a pitcher of orange juice and dumped it on him, then tried to slap him. Chuck flew into a rage and grabbed her, he explained, partly because of all the times he’d been slapped as a POW and a vow that he’d never let anybody slap him ever again. Gwen called the police, who ordered Chuck to pack his suitcase and leave. He did as ordered, bringing his golf clubs as well. For the next two weeks he slept in the back of his car in the parking lot of the Humane Society, where he was working at the time. When he finally went to rent a room in a cheap motel, he discovered that she’d wiped out their joint checking account.

  When the topic changed to his career in the Navy, however, he talked with pride. “I was a real hard-ass, by-the-book kind of officer,” he said. “My men liked to call me ‘Big V,’ although not to my face. Looking back, I think the Navy and the government treated me fairly. They didn’t originally give me combat disability for the injuries I received as a POW, but overall, I can’t complain.”

  One tough time in his career was when he got home from Vietnam. He’d volunteered to go, and served in the Mekong Delta supplying riverboats. He injured his neck in a helicopter accident, and when he came home, the sight of hippies from Berkeley and San Francisco, with their long hair and protest signs, didn’t sit well with him. Neither did Jane Fonda.

  “But what was I going to do about it?” he said. “Tell them I was an ex-POW and convince them how much I sacrificed for this country?”

  It was during the mid-1960s that John started acting out. Chuck was trying to be a good father, even joining a father-son bowling league when they were stationed in Hawaii, but it was hard to make up for all the lost time. The low point came when Chuck slammed John against a wall for staying out all night. Later, when John married and had a child, Chuck did not have a good relationship with his daughter-in-law, which further limited the time he spent with his son.

  “I wouldn’t give her a nickel to blow her ass to hell,” he scowled.

  Eventually, John separated from his wife, and then a year after that, he died. According to Chuck, it was cancer. “It just spread through his whole body,” he said.

  Chuck left Marilyn’s house to run errands, and while he was out, Gwen stopped by to check on the progress the contractor was making. In her eighties now, it was easy to see the beauty that made Chuck fall in love all those years ago.

  Gwen wasted little time before complaining about her lot in life. “My whole life has been a wreck,” she claimed. “And it’s his fault. And now I have emphysema and he’s to blame. All those years he smoked and I had to breathe it all in. He knew I had asthma—I almost died from it—and yet it didn’t stop him from smoking two packs a day. He was inconsiderate. But at least he finally quit.

  “When I first met him during the war, he wasn’t that way. He looked like Gary Cooper, and was very gentlemanly and well behaved. I thought he carried himself well and looked great in his uniform. He took me to movies and skating. We’d go to Leighton Beach and just sit on the beautiful white sand and talk. I was proud to point to him and say he was with me. Because of the war there was rationing, and new clothes were hard to come by, so most of the time I’d wear my military uniform, and if I do say so myself, I looked quite good in it. I still have that uniform, and it still fits.”

  She struggled to recall her fondest memory of their marriage. “I don’t have any,” she finally said. “During our marriage he never took me out to dinner, or movies, or anywhere. He never got me anything for my birthdays or gave me a Mother’s Day card. I gave him a Saint Christopher’s medal just before that last patrol and he said he’d wear it forever. Well, he lost it and didn’t even care.

  “He didn’t know how to show affection. He was like his dad, gruff, a man’s man but not easy for me to be around. He was always bossing me. He still does.

  “We were married thirty-eight years and he was home maybe five of those years. He was married to the Navy. But I’ll say this about him, he never hit me. He still ruined my life, and it started right from our wedding night. He was rough. He didn’t know he was doing anything wrong, and he just didn’t care. Years later we were watching a video of the movie Ryan’s Daughter and there was a scene where a man was forcing himself on a woman. Chuck turned to me and said, ‘I did that to you.’ At least he admitted it.

  “Not even my family understands how hard it’s been for me. My sisters fall all over him and think he’s wonderful. I have to admit he’s very likable and has a fabulous personality, but he never saw me for who I was.

  “We were strangers when we wed—hadn’t seen each other in four years. We had no business getting married. We’re just too different: He likes to drink; I’ve never touched a drop. I’m a Republican; he’s a Democrat. I’m a strict Catholic; he never goes to church. About the only thing we had in common, other than our children, was that we both have bad tempers. It was the Irish in me that made me always yell at him.”

  She told the story of how she met and got engaged to Adolph Cornberg, after Chuck’s ship was reported lost at sea. “I probably made a mistake by not marrying Adolph,” she said. “Chuck was always jealous of him. He found a picture I had of him and tore it up. Adolph’s the reason he doesn’t like Jews.”

  Despite her age, she still wanted to return to Australia. “I’ve lived too long apart from my family,” she said. “In my heart, I’m Australian. I don’t want to die here. Nor do I want to die with it being on my soul that I was mean to Chuck. He told me many times that he survived prison camp because he was so determined to marry me.”

  Even when she talked about the death of her son, her anger and resentment were unmistakable. “Chuck likes to tell everyone that John died of cancer,” she said. “That’s not true. Our son died of AIDS and Chuck knows it. He’s just too ashamed to admit it.

  “It was so hard to watch John waste away,” said Gwen. “The nurse told me that he was afraid he wasn’t loved, so every time I came to see him I told him I loved him. Two hours before he died, he opened his eyes and looked at me and nobody else. I left to go home, and then after Marilyn called to tell me he had passed, I came back, and when I saw Chuck I put my arms around him and he just stood there like a statue. I didn’t get any comfort from Marilyn either. I’d just lost my son and nobody cared about me. It broke my heart. John was my life. Then I had to watch him die the way he did. He said to me at one point, ‘Mom, I’m dying in shame.’ After he died I was at bingo one night and told a woman there that my son died of AIDS and she said, ‘He deserved to die.’ Can you imagine saying that to the mother? But John didn’t get AIDS like people suspect. He was married and had a child. He told me he got it from a prostitute.”

  It was a scorching summer day in Concord in 2004. The surrounding hills were parched, as were most of the lawns on Chuck’s street in a working-class neighborhood of modest houses built in the 1960s. But his lawn was green and the sprinkler was beating out a rat-tat-tat, disturbing the stillness. Answering the door, he was shirtless, his breathing labored. A scar from his open-heart surgery ran down the middle of his chest from his neck to his belt line.

  “I feel like shit today,” he said.

  His doctor had him on a special liquid diet in preparation for an exam tomorrow for a new intestinal pain. He had to drink a phosphate-sodium solution and a bottle of water every hour. In the past twelve years he had endured a heart attack, stomach cancer, kidney stones, high blood pressure, open-heart surgery, bad knees, an operation to fuse two vertebrae, loss of feeling in a couple of fingers, and a pacemaker implant. When he was diagnosed with stomach cancer, his doctor told him he most likely had six months to live. That was seven years ago.

  “Thank heavens for the outstanding medical coverage I have through the Navy and VA,” he said.

  Over the years he’d also taken medication to help him cope with the nightmares and flashbacks from his POW experience. In the mid-1970s, he also took part in group therapy session
s at the VA with fifteen POWs from World War II and Vietnam. “It was a tough time for me,” he recalled. “I was still having nightmares, plus my marriage was falling apart and I didn’t want anyone to know. I was depressed. They put me on Valium, and I was chasing it with stiff bourbon and water. I’d wake up the next morning feeling funny. This went on for six or seven months.

  “The shrink was this Jewish guy. He classified me with post-traumatic stress, although I don’t think he called it that at the time. At one point these other guys in the group were all complaining that they’d been treated poorly and the doctor was reinforcing them. I went off. ‘Uncle Sam don’t owe you nothing,’ I told them. I almost hit that sonuvabitch of a doctor. They kicked me out of the group.”

  Chuck sat in a well-worn easy chair, watching the San Francisco Giants on TV, berating Barry Bonds. On the fridge in the kitchen was an Oakland Raiders magnet, his favorite team. The phone rang. It was Gwen calling to tell him that there was a piece on Fox News right then about World War II submarines. He thanked her, but by the time he switched to Fox, the story was over. He continued to watch the game. “At least I have to give her credit for trying,” he said.

  Clearly, his grit helped him survive prison camp. “I took what they dished out and accepted it the best way I knew how,” he explained. “I try not to think about it too much because I’d go nuts if I do, but there probably hasn’t been a day that’s gone by since then that I don’t revisit it. Gwen said to me once that it was like being married to a guy with a mistress, only worse because I took the POW thing with me everywhere I went, even to bed. But you know, when I was in prison I always believed that one day we’d get to go home. If you didn’t believe that, you wouldn’t make it.”

  The doorbell rang; it was a couple of Jehovah’s Witnesses. Chuck told them no thanks, but they persisted. He politely but firmly interrupted their spiel. “I spent three years in prison camp to give you the right to preach whatever you want,” he said. “But that doesn’t mean I have to listen to you. Good-bye.” And then he closed the door.

  Chuck was busy helping Marilyn get ready for a car trip the next day; she was taking Gwen, Jonathon, and Paige to Disneyland and then on a cruise to Mexico. His list of tasks was long: fix the weird noise in Marilyn’s van; help Paige count her nickels and dimes for the trip; coerce Jonathon into cutting the lawn. He also had no shortage of tasks for when they’d be gone: take care of the dog and cat; water the plants; feed the gecko; wash and fold the laundry.

  “I don’t mind doing it,” he said. “Anything to get Gwen out of town.”

  Nothing in his life brought him more joy than his grandkids. Almost every day, he chauffeured Paige, a cute quintessentially California sixth grader with blond hair, blue eyes, and freckled cheeks, to ballet or other after-school activities. Jonathon, a middle- schooler, regularly tested him. Today, Jonathon, wearing a Metallica T-shirt, was refusing to clean his room, including the gecko’s cage, or pick up his skateboard off the kitchen floor.

  “His dad’s death has been hard on him,” said Chuck. “John was his Little League coach, and since he died Jonathon hasn’t picked up a baseball. Gwen claims I spend so much time with the grandkids because I’m trying to relieve my guilt for not being around as a father. Maybe there’s some truth to that.

  “I worked my ass off for all those years trying to support Gwen and the kids,” he continued. “But it’s like none of that mattered to her. She’d rather whine, and that makes it hard for Marilyn to want to be around her. I just hope Marilyn and the kids don’t want to kill her by the end of this trip.”

  * * *

  Despite his guilt for being a less-than-perfect father and husband, Chuck took great pride in other endeavors. “For a guy who didn’t finish high school, I think I’ve done all right for myself,” he said.

  He talked about the handyman projects he’d done at his house, as well as Marilyn’s, and described his role in getting the Contra Costa Humane Society to provide a more humane form of euthanasia for its animals. He could recall the exact cards he’d held sixty years ago when he won the big pot in the poker game on the trip home from Guam, and he puffed out his chest when he told of bumping into Commander Barney Siegal in 1965 and repaying him the $20 Siegal had given to him and Tim when they were leaving Japan after the war. He honored the promise he made to himself in prison camp to apologize to his teachers for causing so much trouble, and laughed when he told how finally, twenty-five years later, Tim paid him back the $300 he’d loaned him after he was robbed at Sweets Ballroom.

  He even took pride in the one time he had smoked pot. He had promised his son that when he retired from the Navy he would give it a try, so when John invited him to join a couple of friends on a boat trip up the California coast to a cove near Mendocino, Chuck agreed to go. After anchoring, the young men fired up a joint and passed it to Chuck. He took only a couple of hits.

  “I saw the way the other guys were twisting and scrunching up their faces when they took a drag, and I thought, ‘That doesn’t look like fun,’ ” he said. “But at least I kept my word and tried it.”

  Standing in his garage, he showed off a model submarine that John had made for him and pulled down from a shelf a bowling trophy John had won as a boy when they participated in the father-son league in Hawaii. He paused, trying to stay composed.

  “You really never get over losing a child,” he acknowledged.

  Chuck reluctantly admitted the truth when told that Gwen and Marilyn had both said John died of AIDS. It was not an easy admission, but once the burden of secrecy was removed, he spoke candidly about his son’s final year.

  In 1995, Chuck accompanied John to a farmers’ market in Stockton to help him set up a table to sell Dungeness crabs that he’d caught. At the time, John was making a living catching and selling abalone and crab. As they were setting up, John turned to his father and, with tears rolling down his cheeks, said there was something he had to tell him.

  “I’ve got AIDS,” he revealed.

  John was certain he’d gotten it when he and two friends spent the night with three prostitutes in San Francisco. He was still married at the time. His two friends were lucky and didn’t get it. Neither did his wife.

  Eventually, as John’s condition deteriorated, Chuck volunteered to provide hospice care in his own house, buying a hospital bed, hiring a part-time nurse, and fixing all John’s meals. John spent the last six months of his life at his dad’s, except for one three-day period at Christmas when he insisted on going to Half Moon Bay for one last abalone dive before he died.

  “He could barely walk,” recalled Chuck. “He loved the ocean, and I figured he was going to just dive down and never come back up. But he came back home.”

  One of the hardest parts of the final weeks of John’s life was the tension in the house when Gwen came to visit. At one point, John had gotten so frustrated at his mom that he ordered her to leave.

  “He couldn’t take her constant whining,” said Chuck. “He just wanted to die in peace.”

  Shortly after returning from Half Moon Bay, John started going downhill fast, getting out of bed only to eat. To help ease the constant pain, he’d grown a small crop of marijuana in Chuck’s backyard, and smoked a couple of joints each day for relief. Chuck learned to roll the joints for him.

  During his last month, John’s cat spent most of each day sleeping on his chest. “It was weird,” Chuck mused. “That cat slept on John’s chest every day, but in the two days before he died, the cat wouldn’t go into his room. It knew.”

  48

  Gordy Cox

  Culver, Oregon

  It was 2003 and another Submarine Vets Reunion, this one held at the Hilton in Reno. Gordy Cox leaned against his walker, taking in the scene. The place was swimming in octogenarians, underwater heroes filling the lobby, lounges, and elevators with their camaraderie and liver spots. There must have been over a thousand men, many with canes, walkers, and a slap on the back for a long-lost crewmate. Many of them
proudly wore a blue vest embroidered with patches and insignia denoting the ships served on and hometown. It was a gathering of the tribe, a confirmation of belonging to a special fraternity. The crew of the Grenadier, or what was left of it, was just one part of the gathering. Since the previous reunion in Las Vegas, two more survivors had died.

  Gordy pulled a pack of Pall Malls from the pocket of his blue vest and lit a cigarette. He flicked the ash into an ashtray he’d customized into his walker, and blew the smoke into the stale air of the hotel.

  “Little bit late to try to quit now,” he observed.

  Indeed. He’d been smoking two packs a day since he’d first started during the war. The previous week his doctor had discovered a growth the size of a baseball on one of his lungs. He was scheduled for more tests the following week, but now he was enjoying the reunion and the idea of being one of the dozen Grenadier survivors. His frail, sallow appearance belied his feisty demeanor.

  Standing next to him, his wife Janice, equally feisty, lit up her own cigarette. Twenty-two years younger than he, they were married in 1968, not too long after she interviewed for a job as a bartender/waitress at the tavern Gordy owned in a working-class neighborhood on the east side of Portland, Oregon. He gave her the job, and now, almost forty years later, they were rarely out of each other’s sight.

  The view from Highway 97 approaching Gordy and Janice’s house just outside of Culver, in central Oregon, is spectacular. To the west sits Mount Jefferson and the Three Sisters, and to the east are rolling hills, alfalfa fields, red barns, and giant stacks of hay. The irrigation sprinklers work hard to keep it lush.

  Gordy’s blue prefab house sits alone on the ten-acre parcel of land he owns, a former mint farm. Eight of those acres are rented out to a local farmer to grow alfalfa. He and Janice moved here in 1982 and were now both retired. A sign greets visitors: TWO PEOPLE LIVE HERE—ONE NICE PERSON AND ONE OLD GROUCH.