Sally and Sue don't be Blue

No women cried for me on the day I packed my bags and got ready to ship out to the navy. Except my mother - who suddenly for the first time seemed so much smaller than me despite my having outgrown her in stature several years earlier.

This was twenty years ago yesterday.

An hour before dawn and dad knocked gently on the door to my room. I had spent the proceeding night without sleep and rose up already dressed. My parents were already awake. Mom was in the kitchen. Dad sat on the couch not really watching the basic cable news. We barely spoke to one another. What was there to say really?

In less than an hour my Recruiter would show up and drive me down to the processing center in Miami. From there I would go through some preliminary paperwork before being hustled unto a bus with fifty other sleep-deprived teens and be drove down to Orlando for ten weeks of basic training.

My dad tried to frame the scenario for me. He quoted Joseph Campbell. He talked about the Hero's Adventure. The Passage of Initiation I was about to go through promised to offer an experience that was both individually unique and simultaneously timeless on a collective level.

I nodded and uh-huhed him. On one level I knew exactly what he was saying was true. On another I was zombified with fatiuge and fear thinking that a 'heroic adventure' sounded all well and good on paper but that this was me were talking about. All I could do is run excuses, cop-outs and escape routes through my head. All I wanted to do was go back to my room, back to the womb-warmth of that familiar dark, where the coming dawn would illuminate the outlines of posters and comic book stacks.

With every fiber of my being I wanted to beg the folks to hide me. To let me slip through the back screen when the recruiter came.

But then it was too late.

A car horn honked. My recruiter arrived ten minutes early.

I gulped. I stood up slowly with my parents.

It wasn't too late. I could run and run now and run far to one of my friends' houses and crash there until things worked themselves out.

But then what?

Peddle weed? Get a job with the boys working at the pizza parlor. Go to the shows. Meet some girl finally. Fall in love. Have a family. Spend the rest of my life in the Great South Florida Nowhere, living in the suburbs and wondering where my life drained to one day when I was forty. Outside a man was waiting to take me somewhere. Somewhere scary and far from anyone I ever knew. The whole world was out there, wide and terrifying and patient... all that was needed was one last yes from the boy before he could become a man.

So I stepped outside with my parents. Embraced an openly weeping mom and almost joined her. Hugged my dad for strength. Made the dogs promise to be good while I was gone. Breathed deep and stepped into the recruiter's car.

My dad yells - "Don't forget your Zen!" - referencing my nascent interest in Alan Watts and Suzuki. I nod affirmative. I wave.

The Recruiter asks - "Are you ready?"

"No" I answer frankly, "But don't let that stop you."

We pull out and turn and head down the block. Around me, in a slow burn of turqoise and bubble gum pink the first light of what will be a long day begins.

Then I begin to wonder what will happen next. What I'll see and who'll I do. Images of prurient women in mysterious temples of bedroom and bloodied opponents swaying in back alleys run through my imagination. While not enough to negate the terror it does give me enough courage to ride out.

I crane my neck around and catch my old neighborhood receeding in the background. The place park where I used to meet my first girlfriend after slipping out of my room, the roof where my best friend once lived when he was homeless at seventeen, the alley behind the Circle K where I hid from the cops for three hours inside a dumpster. It is then I cast the question and yes, while knowing full well I would be if not here then somewhere to catch it -

"Where will I be in twenty years?"