The World Played Chess (6)

When the sun rose, so did the temperature. Sweltering heat and humidity. Sweat dripped down my face and my arms. Guys passed out from the heat, the disorientation, the lack of food and water. The number on my hand quickly smeared. Not good. I’ve spoken to marines who’ve made it home, so I know that number is who I am. I’m no longer a person. No longer an individual. I’m a number in a team of numbers.

More marching, my right hand on the right shoulder of the marine in front of me. I was told he is my brother. These recruits are all my brothers. We marched to our platoon and were turned over to our permanent drill instructor for the remainder of boot camp.

“Your mamas and your daddies are not here,” he said. “For the next nine weeks, I am God.”

I remember thinking, Man, this should have been my first day of college.

This is my life. I am eighteen years old.





Chapter 2


June 3, 1979

I braked, stopping my red Pinto, the one with 157,000 miles on the odometer and the threat of an exploding gas tank, at the top of the steep grade descending to an oval-shaped island my siblings and I called “the track.” Immature trees and shrubs filled the center of the track, with houses built around the perimeter. My home, my parents’ home, was three houses down on the left. Though a sign directed drivers to keep to the right, none of my driving-age siblings or my parents ever complied.

This night, I was seriously late. I had sobered up enough to drive after a six-pack night at a high school graduation party. I wasn’t big, just five foot ten and 156 pounds dripping wet—which I had been earlier that evening after accepting a ten-dollar dare to jump into a swimming pool fully dressed. My friends pooled the money to laugh at my stupidity. I didn’t disappoint. The rest of the crowd, including graduates from the Catholic girls’ schools, looked at me like I was crazy or drunk. The latter had certainly been true. The former debatable.

After my plunge, I hurried inside my friend Ed Grove’s bedroom in a detached bungalow in his parents’ backyard. He scrounged up a towel, gray sweatpants, and a gray Serra Padres sweatshirt, which was too big, and threw my clothes in the dryer, telling his mother that I had “fallen” into the pool.

“Our esteemed valedictorian,” Lenny Mifton, who we called Mif, said as I toweled off and changed. “I’m so proud.”

“You’re an idiot,” Ed said. Never one to mince words, he shook a mane of brown curls Hercules would have admired. “Why’d you do that?” His question was apparently rhetorical since he did not pause long enough for me to answer.

Everyone laughed, including me, though as the water sobered me, I, too, realized the idiocy of my actions.

“We should have switched awards,” Ed continued. A golden gloves boxer, Ed had received the Joe Serra award from our classmates, an esteemed title bestowed upon the toughest senior. I had been awarded Most Likely to Succeed, which was a distant consolation prize at a school with a student body that venerated sports, fighting, and weekend drinking. Ed wasn’t continuing on to college. In a few days he’d start work for his father.

If Ed had given me the chance, I would have told him the plunge was a simple way to pocket two tanks of gasoline, which, at fifty-nine cents a gallon, was suddenly at a premium. My parents wouldn’t pay for my gas since I was no longer driving myself and my younger brother to school, and I didn’t have a summer job or any prospects. I had been let go from the gas station on the El Camino Real, where I had worked my junior year, when the owner could no longer pay his bills. Seemed he had dipped into the company till like it was a personal trust fund.

“Ten bucks is ten bucks,” I said to Ed, Mif, and the others drinking beer in the room, though it had sounded like a lot more money before the water sobered me. I wondered what the girls thought of me. Girls were both a central thought and an afterthought. The annual proms were uncomfortable ordeals for those of us without girlfriends. My buddies and I did not want to miss out on a night together; on those nights, we believed history could be made, stories could become legends, and young men could become legendary.

That’s what we told ourselves anyway. It rarely happened. Our nights together were usually a lot of beer, a lot of ripping on each other, a careful drive home, and a wicked hangover the following morning. If I’m being honest, maybe I saw jumping in the pool as a chance to stand out for something other than academics, to get a little attention and send a message that I could do the same crazy stuff as my friends. If so, I had not thought through my actions very well. If I had, I might have considered jumping in the pool at the start of the school year instead of the end, when everyone was leaving. So maybe it was just the beer.

I pulled my wallet from my back pocket before handing Ed my clothes and noticed it wasn’t wet. “It’s dry.” I held up the wallet like a prop in a magic act. I didn’t know the physics behind it, but I assumed it had something to do with jumping into the shallow end like a pencil, springing off the bottom and leaping back onto the pool’s edge, beating most of the displaced water.

My friends shook their heads, unimpressed, and went back to the party.

A half hour later, my clothes dry, I drove home. Now, atop the hill, I faced a bigger challenge. It was two a.m. on a Sunday night. I didn’t have a curfew; by the time I had reached my senior year my parents had either mellowed or been worn out by my four older siblings. Still, a Sunday night meant both my parents had to be awake early for work. I was looking at a world of hurt if I got caught, class valedictorian or not.