TheBanyanTree: Biloxi Part 1

Mon Aug 27 14:48:08 PDT 2012

Oooooh I am enjoying this!  More please!

Sal 

Sent from my iPad 

On 27/08/2012, at 9:04, Monique Colver <monique.colver at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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
> Amazon<http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_1?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=Monique+Colver>
> and
> at www.AnUncommonFriendship.com <http://anuncommonfriendship.com/>
> www.ColverPress.com
> monique.colver at gmail.com
> (425) 772-6218