I slouched in my seat, breath heavy of alcohol, numb of the rest of the world. There would be a final exam in under twelve hours, but I cared none. I'm an overprivileged child of upper-middle-class suburbia. School was a formality, not a necessity. In a month, I'll be making that paper. The world was mine and ripe for the picking.
"D'you hear about Tank?" Chipmunk asked me, interrupting my moment of euphoria.
I chortled under my breath. In inebriety, everything seems worthy of a chuckle and a smile. "Tank? I haven't 'heard about' Tank in years."
"He passed away."
My eyebrows scrunched together, my cheeks came together like I'd popped a sour Warhead, "Shut the fuck up."
Chipmunk didn't say a word, just as I had told him to do. But that wasn't really what I wanted him to do.
"How?" I finally mustered up.
"Gunshot wound," Chipmunk spoke again, "Cripple just told me today. S'all I know."
"In combat?"
"Yeah."
"What was he, Army or Corp?"
"Army."
It'd been three and a half years since Thomas passed away. As insensitive as it sounds, other people's deaths stopped affecting me. There'd been three close deaths that I know of since Thomas's, and I never raised so much as an eyebrow to a one. Thomas was the "where" to my Brodsky's Almost an Elegy.
And in truth, Tank was no different. I never actually hung out with the guy -- didn't even know his last name. Played football and basketball with him and his brother a handful of times. Six-feet-something, two-something pounds, built like -- well, a tank. So thick-skinned, he once played basketball on the asphalt of my street bare-feet.
But it wasn't his passing that had upset me. It was the when and the where: in the deserts of Iraq, two days after Scout gave me the news.
Two days ago, Scout informed me that his squadron had received the word. They'd be deploying to Iraq in -- he's not allowed to say when -- what I assume will be the Fall of this year.
And I didn't take the oh-fuck kind of attitude toward the news. I approached it with the congratu-fucking-lations! attitude -- as if he were a man and a gun without a target, a hunter sighting his first deer, a child in search of validation finding the light of opportunity. All I said to him was, "Keep your ass clean," to which he responded, "Fo'sho'."
Three and a half years had been enough time to regain confidence; to again believe that we are an invincible youth, bred for life, and destined for fortune. Tank's name aroused only in the nick of time to remind us otherwise.
I'm not a hippie. I'm not the guy in the crowd with the sign that reads, "Bring our sons home from war." I love the U.S. of A. and I would cut and I would bleed if she asked it of me, unconditionally.
But no camel-jockey ass sand-nigger's going to stop my children (legitimate or otherwise) from playing in the backyard with those of my godbrother. Fact.
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