TheBanyanTree: Biloxi Part 1

Sun Aug 26 16:04:54 PDT 2012

It was hot and humid that summer, but what else would you expect for
Biloxi? We were there temporarily at the Air Force’s paralegal school, some
of us reserve, some of us active duty. I’d been told I’d be in proper
quarters, but when I arrived at the end of a long flight I was sent to,
instead of the newer NCO temporary quarters, basic airman barracks.

Barracks! I was an NCO, a staff sergeant! Not that there was anything wrong
with the barracks. But they were old, with group latrines, and they were
icky.

Icky is indeed a very descriptive term. The place had roaches. Probably
rats. Crumbling masonry. Defective plumbing. It was the sort of place one
would expect to find prisoners of war, except the Geneva Convention says we
must be nice.

My first day in Biloxi I cried. I got on the phone, the pay phone in the
day room, and called my husband-at-the-time, and I cried. I didn’t want to
be there. It had all been a horrible mistake, a horrible awful mistake.

Turns out they’d overbooked the good housing, which is typical for the
military. And it wasn’t as if I was the only one consigned to hell; other
classmates, also NCO’s, were in the barracks with me, one assigned to my
room. But that first night, I met no one. It was late when I got in, and I
passed an uncomfortable night in a place I didn’t want to be, and the fact
that I’d signed on for this willingly was no comfort.

Everyone has temporary insanity now and then, don’t they?

The next morning I traipsed around the base looking for my class. I’d flown
in, so I had no car. But once I found my class, and met some classmates, I
was no longer on my own. Some of them had driven in, so we had
transportation.

The first weekend a group of us took an excursion to the small island just
off the coast, where I fell asleep sunbathing and got a nice healthy
sunburn. It wasn’t all that healthy, in fact, and the next day I was stuck
in my icky barracks room all day because when I tried to get up I’d pass
out. My roommate wasn’t in much better shape. Fortunately it was Sunday,
and so there was no class.

By this time I’d met Sheila, the femme fatale of our group. She was blonde,
and beautiful, and she took a liking to me because of the contrast between
us. She was also married, though her husband was serving time on a
manslaughter charge for killing a drunk pedestrian. He’d been drunk at the
time too, and Sheila excused this by saying airily, “Well, that other guy
shouldn’t have been walking drunk . . .”

After a week or so in the barracks several of us formed a protest group,
and we’d heard that there were openings at the NCO temporary housing, which
was a big building where one could share a room with someone, and have a
connecting bathroom with the next room. Four people to one bathroom instead
of 20! We stormed the headquarters and demanded the rooms rightfully due
us, and were told we could move right in.

Sheila demanded to share a room with me, and we shared a bathroom with two
of our classmates in the next room. We were a jolly bunch. There was lots
of after-hours drinking at the club, and a lot of times a big group of us
would go off base at lunch to a local restaurant, and several times we were
late back to class, but somehow we got away with it all.

Ben was another of our classmates, and from the time he first met Sheila he
was awestruck. Here was the woman of his dreams! And so what if she was
married? It wasn’t as if she were really committed, after all, since her
husband was serving time and she was so pretty! He followed her around
embarrassingly so, and more than once I had to toss him out of our room
late at night because enough was enough, and he couldn’t hang out on her
bed mooning over her forever, could he?

(Well, he could, he said, but I insisted not.)

Another classmate was Tim, who had immediately struck up a relationship
with Hannah, another striking blonde. We were never sure how much of a
relationship it was since they tended to be circumspect.

One day Hannah and I were doing laundry (it couldn’t be all fun and games
all the time, could it?) and she turned to me and said, “You have a
beautiful smile,” and then indicated she would like to get to know me
better.

It was odd. I was surrounded by oddness. I was in an unfamiliar place, with
unfamiliar people, some of whom I found morally reprehensible, but the
morally reprehensible ones were the same ones I went out drinking with
because, well, I was in an unfamiliar place and happy to latch on to anyone
who could show me a good time. And they did. And the drinking. So much
drinking.

About four weeks into our sentence Tim disappeared one day, and our
instructor, a tiny brunette we’d once gotten drunk, told us he’d be back in
a day or so. This was highly irregular, and rumors went flying.

Turns out Tim had run off to get married. His girlfriend back home had
turned up pregnant, and so he could provide health insurance he’d run off
to get hitched, and was back at school in two days.

Hannah was out of sorts once Tim returned. She’d thought they’d had a
relationship! They argued, or she gave him the silent treatment, one or the
other, and she refused to see him again, other than with the rest of us, as
a group. That couldn’t be avoided. We were all stuck together for six
weeks, in the heat of the Biloxi summer, entertaining ourselves as best we
could.

Sheila was rather high maintenance, as it turned out. In our room we had a
sink with a mirror, and she spent hours in front of it each morning, making
sure she was as perfect as could be. Toward the end of our stay her sister
came to visit, which wasn’t allowed, but femme fatales don’t care about
rules. She slept in our room, and she was also a femme fatale, which meant
any hope I’d ever had of using our sink again was gone. Between the two of
them, the primping was nonstop.

I’m sure it was worth it. It became common for me to be stopped by random
men when I was out with Sheila. She would walk by, her fabulousness
overwhelming them (we WERE on a military base, so there were a lot of
them), and as they came to their senses they would stop me, and ask, “Who
is that? What’s her name?”

I found their desperation amusing, and when I’d tell Sheila she’d wave them
off as pesky nuisances. She would – she had Ben. What else did she need?
Ben would do anything she asked just for the chance to be with her.

Anything.

To be continued . . . (I think)

Monique Colver
An Uncommon Friendship: a memoir of love, mental illness, and friendship
Now available at
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at www.AnUncommonFriendship.com <http://anuncommonfriendship.com/>
www.ColverPress.com
monique.colver at gmail.com
(425) 772-6218