Whatever mascot they wanted to attach to us, whatever they chose for our class colors and our class flower, OK. But that song? Absolutely not. Our fuckin’ graduation song should be one you can look back on in 20 years and reflect on where you came from and where you’re going. This is our song, not the convince-yourself-everything’s-OK song.
When mock elections were held that spring, his classmates voted him Most Pessimistic—not because he took a hopeless view of the future, but quite the opposite. He’d become known for his outspoken intolerance of complacency and the status quo, and instead of ostracizing him for his outlook, they’d honored him. They’d seen, too, his talents, and, in a rare mock-election hat-trick, also named him Class Artist and Most Talented.
And his four years in cross country, wrestling, and track meant an even more prestigious honor. In the spring, Jim became the first in the history of the school to earn 12 varsity letters. At the varsity dinner that spring, his achievement somehow went unmentioned.
The graduates stood about the sunny courtyard, toying with their betassled mortarboards and accepting the congratulations of relatives and friends. In keeping with Midwestern tradition, the afternoon would be an endless series of sliced-ham-and-potato-salad luncheons, gatherings of aunts and uncles who unfailingly traveled across the state to honor such triumphs.
All my relatives were in Ohio, so I planned my own open house and invited a bunch of people. Not a single fucking person came. A lot of them went out drinking instead, because you couldn’t drink at my dad’s house. Nope. Not a single person came.
Kjiirt escaped as quickly as he could from his family obligations, and he and Jim drove to the lake to hold a ceremony of their own. They walked to the lighthouse where Jim took from his pocket a tiny balsa-wood cross he’d carved with names of musicians recently gone, musicians who’d left voids no one would soon fill—AC/DC vocalist Bon Scott, Quiet Riot and Ozzy Osbourne guitarist Randy Rhoads, Led Zeppelin drummer John Bonham. Kjiirt stood beside him, and Jim tossed the cross into the dark, silent water, marking their passage.
Jim’s classmates graduated with their plans intact, with engagement rings from their high school sweethearts, offers to manage the family farm, scholarships and internships and pictures in the yearbook proclaiming them Most Likely to Succeed.
Even Kjiirt planned to leave his job as stock clerk at Farmer John’s supermarket to study architecture come fall, but Jim had never seriously thought about a career. He loved to draw and to write, to imagine what might be and to set about creating it. There wasn’t much economic value in such things, he realized, and Mike and Jan told him in no uncertain terms that if he expected to stay at home, he must earn his keep.
Jobs in the county had never been plentiful or especially lucrative, and in truth, Jim couldn’t imagine spending his days pumping gas or flipping burgers simply to turn his paycheck over to Mike for his room and board. Conforming to the corporate world felt equally distasteful.
He wanted to study art.
“I was worried about his future,” Jan would recall. “I remember thinking that he wasn’t grounded enough to have a career.” She and Mike were hesitant to finance four years of college in light of his dubious prospects, and they particularly balked at the idea of art school. They’d envisioned a stable career track for their son, perhaps a management curriculum, as so many of Jim’s Sugar Ridge friends had entered. Perhaps, they thought, he should become a teacher.
But Jim wanted to discover the practical application of his passion, to follow the inner voice telling him that sketching and writing and maybe even music were the things he was made to do.
The year before, he’d seen the movie Stripes—the tale of two friends weary of meaningless jobs and vapid love lives who join the Army in search of direction. He’d admired the snappy military uniforms and Bill Murray’s comedic timing. And since active combat was remote in the peaceful summer of 1982, three years of stateside service would be a tolerable enough existence. The real lure, of course, was the Army College Fund, which in those years provided tuition monies to those who satisfied a six-year military commitment—three years of active duty followed by three inactive—and just might be his ticket to art school.
In June, Jim completed the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery, the survey that determined enlistees’ suitability for service. The delayed entry program would mean two months of freedom before he must report for duty.
He and Kjiirt would live that summer by their rules and their rules alone before the inevitable constraints of college and the military. Jim moved his Izod shirts and Members Only jacket to the back of his closet and replaced them with jeans skintight at the ankle and trimmed with a scatter of Sid Vicious–inspired safety pins. With a box cutter Kjiirt had borrowed from the market, he slashed to fashionable threads his T-shirts bearing the logos of the Smiths and Adam Ant.
Many of their classmates still indulged in Saturday night house parties, blowouts that had never held much appeal for Jim, who had no interest in alcohol or insipid small talk. But now, he and Kjiirt avoided them altogether, knowing they’d end as they always had—in chugging contests and slurred arguments and much retching in the bathroom—until the Blatz ran out and everyone dispersed until the next weekend.
On Kjiirt’s days off, they’d stake out a spot on the white sand beach, a supply of Mountain Dew and Snickers bars and strawberry Twizzlers in tow in case Kjiirt’s blood sugar levels fell. Theirs was a summer of drives along the dunes at the edge of the lake, matinees at the Lyric, music and dancing and late-night pizzas.
And there was Johnny’s, always Johnny’s, where no matter how much Jim and Kjiirt longed to escape the county, they always returned. Johnny’s, where at last the DJ spun the Plasmatics and the Romantics and Devo. The summer brought new dancers, a whole table of them—Kathy and Tracy and Kim—young Ludington girls who dared appear in public in the big hair and bright New Wave colors and strategically tied bandanas that typified the era. “They looked like they just fell out of MTV,” Kjiirt would later recall.
The girls arrived at Johnny’s ready to dance—and ready to accept Jim and Kjiirt into their cutting-edge circle. “We did our own thing, had our own style,” Kathy Larsen would later recall. “We purposely tried to be different. We were rockin’ the ’80s big-time.”
And the girls became a part of the beach-day afternoons. Jim and Kjiirt considered them more than companions, beyond girlfriends. They were trusted sisters who shared their laughter and their fears and their dreams.
I got to hang out with the hot, edgy girls from the big town, but we really weren’t on their radar.
They were probably thinking, “There’s no way this guy’s going to get a job at Dow Chemical and hang around here and help me raise my babies.” I wrote poems and wore a green fuckin’ top hat. If I wanted a girlfriend, I was probably going about it all wrong.
The Ludington girls were among the few in the county who believed the vow Jim made before he left for basic training, his pledge that when his stint was over, he’d return in a Mohawk and full punk regalia, a uniform of freedom following the restrictions of military life, a fitting costume for an art student.
The driver adjusted his mirrors and pulled the Greyhound slowly from the curb outside the bowling alley. Jim pressed his face against the streaked window, straining in vain to catch a final glimpse of the lake and the lighthouse. Then he settled back in his seat for the long ride to Detroit, wondering at the wisdom of the path he’d chosen.
1 George Wilson, “Central Captures Own Mat Invite,” Ludington Daily News (Michigan), January 8, 1979, 6.
Detroit’s Military Entrance Processing Station was a windowless barn of a building set 20 miles from the city in a no-man’s-land of wide boulevards and acres of parking lot. Inside, Jim joined the crowd of young people from throughout the state, the latest group of enlistees arrived for a day of endless paperwork, interview
s, and physical exams, their voices echoing from cinder-block walls and the high ceiling.
Lines formed and re-formed as recruits were directed from desk to cubicle to private office. Jim thought of the mazes he’d worked in the Highlights magazine in the dentist’s waiting room back home, the puzzles he’d never quite solved before the hygienist would call his name.
He moved from station to station, completed a questionnaire here, spoke with a uniformed counselor there, tallied childhood mumps and measles and chicken pox at the medical technician’s table, all the while imagining some logic to the chaos. Failing to discover a method to the bureaucratic madness, he resigned himself to following barked orders: Move to the background screening interview, report for the eye and ear exam, stand in this line until it is divided and rearranged, wait here.
The results of his ASVAB test indicated that Jim was highly intelligent and would adapt easily to military life. His impressive scores had qualified him to select the Military Occupational Specialty he wished to choose—that of infantryman or electrician or military policeman—and he’d set his heart on MOS 82 Bravo. As a mapmaker, he’d merge his interests and his abilities and create surveys and charts, channeling his talents with pen and ink as he so loved to do. An understanding of spatial concepts had always come easily, and his grades in Mr. Ingraham’s drafting class were all the résumé he’d need.
The MOS coordinator glanced at Jim’s transcript, then at his spreadsheet of available positions. He frowned, then brightened. Plenty of enlistees had already been assigned as 82Bs, he informed Jim. But a related MOS—82 Charlie—was wide open. He turned then to Jim’s paperwork, clicked his ballpoint once or twice, and entered Jim’s assignment on the blank line: artillery surveyor.
Jim gleaned from the coordinator’s brief explanation that surveying had something to do with using the sun and stars and nearby trees to determine positions on the battlefield. He wouldn’t sit at a lamplit desk in the company office drawing maps after all. He’d plot diagrams and escape routes for his battery—in the midst of simulated warfare.
The noisy room, the stale air, the shifting groups of young people converged into one sinking realization: that this was only the first of many military moments when expectation would dissolve in the face of baffling reality.
The processing station was like the bargain basement in a department store. All this activity going on, and the same disappointment. Oh, look at that wonderful thing! Ah, they don’t have it in my size. Or if it is in my size, somebody grabs it right out of my hand. You want to be a mapmaker? Don’t we all! Here’s the artillery.
By the time Jim stepped from the final cubicle, the last box on the last form checked, he’d been reduced to the most vital of statistics. Differentiated from all the others, he was distilled to the essential Private James Herbert Keenan that would be his identity for the next three years.
It was easy enough to find one’s way through a maze, he reassured himself. Hadn’t he heard the secret once, the secret of always keeping the left hand against the labyrinth wall? No matter how many times one had to retrace one’s steps, no matter how much backtracking was involved, the method would always eventually lead to the way out. He wondered if the theory was true, and he wondered at the map he could devise that would include such touchpoints all the way to the exit.
That night, he had only to venture as far as the hotel across the street from the MEPS building. He lay awake and thought of the countless boys who’d spent sleepless nights on this thin mattress, wondered where they’d gone when they’d left Detroit, what their lives might be like now. Morning light filled the drab room, and he rose to dress for his flight to Oklahoma and Fort Sill.
Jim stepped into his barracks, his shirt collar already damp though it was barely noon. The room provided little relief from the heat and humidity that had plagued the area for days. The parched fields surrounding Fort Sill were broken by scattered groves of trees, their leaves drooping, and the gentle hills far in the distance shimmered in the heat.
Sixty-four identical beds lined the concrete bay, beds separated by back-to-back metal lockers at their heads offering only the slightest degree of privacy. Jim fit his black trunk into the bottom of his locker, changed into a fresh shirt, and made his way to the reception hall to report for his first Fort Sill assignment.
Fort Sill had been built during the Indian Wars as a stronghold to subvert tribal raids into neighboring states. Now it was the training ground for Army field artillery soldiers and Marines, the preparedness center that Jim would call home for nearly five months.
He didn’t know it yet, but the fort had also been for a time home to his literary hero, Geronimo. In 1894, the Indian leader had been captured along with 341 other Chiricahua Apache prisoners of war and had lived in a village on the post until his death in 1909.
One end of Jim’s bay opened into the dayroom, a sunny space furnished with tables and chairs and plastic M16s lined along one wall, one for each of the soldiers. In one corner of the dayroom stood a television for the enjoyment of the sergeants venturing from their offices on the floor below. A pleasant room, inviting, and a room the trainees must not enter without permission.
Jim understood the reason for such rules. The television was off-limits for the same reason his Adam Ant–logo T-shirt and his long hair were forbidden. He understood and appreciated that when he’d entered the military, he’d put on a uniform, and with it, a persona that, until the day of discharge, he would never entirely put off. He understood the need for the soldier to relinquish his individuality, to sacrifice personal desires, not through mindless conformity but a dedication to the one overriding goal: to be ready at a second’s notice to move and act with his battalion as one cohesive being.
He understood, but he bristled.
His days began at 0400 hours with a regimen of push-ups and sit-ups and pull-ups and runs. Under the demanding Staff Sergeant Lawrence Brew, he learned of triage and CPR and the use of tourniquets on the battlefield. Brew stood over him while he took apart his M16 and tried his best to maintain his focus while he reassembled it. “Just as you’re getting good at this,” he would explain, “they come up and start yelling at you. It’s not about speed. It’s about putting it together under stress.”
Brew shouted his orders, and Jim and his battalion marched and turned, marched and turned again at his command, until they learned to move as one across the training field, not a footstep out of place, not an arm out of sync.
In the afternoon, they loaded their backpacks and set out on ten-mile marches to the edges of the compound. Exhausted and thirsty, they pitched their tents, longing for rest under the canvas shade. Invariably, a smoke grenade lobbed from some unseen position would interrupt their work, and they’d drop their ropes and bedrolls to defend their position—having received little training in exactly how such a thing was to be done.
By 2000 hours, after eating dinner at record speed in the mess hall, they were back in their bunks, only to wake in the morning to repeat the grueling routine.
More than two weeks after arriving at Fort Sill, Jim at last had a short respite, a few hours he was allowed to call his own. He lay on his bunk and tried to ignore the 100-degree heat, the cicadas buzzing incessantly in the trees outside, and wrote a letter to Kjiirt.
He was honest with his friend about his unhappiness and vague sense of depression, but in true Jim fashion, he sprinkled the letter with his signature humor. Along one side of the page, he drew a stick-figure character who demonstrated the two swift motions required in digging a hole and tossing the soil over one’s shoulder, a job Jim had done every morning that week. Then his character morphed into a two-step diagram of the choreography involved in performing Devo’s “Jerkin’ Back and Forth”—a dance he and Kjiirt had not so long ago perfected at Johnny’s.
Aug. 19, 1982
Hello Kurtis Jensensis.
Things have been jerkin�
� right along here. I don’t really like it, but what can I do about it? I’m goin crazy with no music and I haven’t had a Dew* + Snickers* for ages, or so it seems. I miss Johnny’s a whole bunch.
The beds suck as do the uniforms. Basically I don’t like it but I’m not really sure yet. I must give it a chance. I miss the beach with all my heart and tan. Only 3 more years and I’ll be home for good but until then I’m counting the days.
Be good.
James H.K.
* Mountain Dew + Snickers are®
The summer of chocolate bars on the beach and late-night dance marathons at Johnny’s had left Jim in less than prime physical condition. Nevertheless, he approached the two-mile footrace with the same confidence he’d brought to every cross country and track event, determined to give it his all.
Held during the first weeks of basic training, the race was yet another test of enlistees’ abilities, one more way to ascertain the individual training they might require. They changed into running shoes, the commotion and voices and Sergeant Brew’s orders echoing from tile and metal, amplified across the indoor course.
Jim ran, the sound of footsteps hard at his heels. No matter how great the surge of energy he summoned, no matter how intently he concentrated, he could not outdistance the sound. His own speed whistling in his ears, he evoked every pointer Coach Bishop had suggested freshman year, determined to stay ahead of whatever it was that pursued him.
At the finish, he looked back. Far behind him, the nearest runner sprinted breathlessly. The steps he’d heard had been his own.
Geronimo, Jim had learned, had at least once tried to escape Fort Sill and run through the night toward his home in Arizona, only to be captured the next morning and brought back to the prison. As much as Jim dreamed of freedom, he’d meant what he’d written to Kjiirt. He’d give Army life an honest chance, knowing the discipline and the skills he’d learn there would only serve him well, knowing a full term of service would mean tuition and art school.
A Perfect Union of Contrary Things Page 6
