On top of the boarding house, there was a roof with a deck where you could sit and look at downtown San Diego.
Fatima used to sit up there with us a lot.
She would tell us about her life before she was a Muslim.
She used to date a guy from Colombia who was involved in the drug trade, her mother was a Baptist preacher, she never knew her father and she used to do coke.
She was homeless when she was fifteen years old.
Sometimes she would do her prayers in front of us.
She would wash her arms, feet, legs, hands, and then pray to Allah.
Tom and I would stare at her, wondering what the hell she was doing.
It was obvious that she became Islamic because the world had taken too many shits on her head and Islam gave her a perfect escape from that.
The Muslims consistently gave her money, a place to stay, food, and filled her mind full of campy fantasies about heaven and some antichrist character with one eye.
As far as Tom and I could see, it was all one giant act to escape reality.
She had no interest in heaven; her main interest was shelter, food, and escape from the misery of her life.
There were two more strange characters living in the boarding house.
One was a thirty-something black guy and the other was a forty-something woman.
I don’t recall their names.
All I remember about them is that the woman would give Tom and I food that tasted like shit.
She would give us refried beans that were three days old and leftover fried chicken. It was all disgusting.
Well, this is what happened one time with them.
I was alone in the kitchen making some Ramen noodles.
I was standing there waiting for them to be done.
They came into the kitchen and faced me like they were going to talk to me.
I looked at them, waiting to hear what absurd shit they were going to say to me.
“We would like to know if you would have sex with both of us at the same time,” said the woman.
I looked at them and thought of that famous Hunter S. Thompson quote: “When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.”
“I’ll do it for five hundred dollars apiece,” I said.
“We don’t got five hundred dollars apiece,” said the woman.
“That’s my offer.”
“Come on man, just some sex,” said the black guy.
“You obviously don’t have money. I’m gonna get my Ramen, go upstairs, and eat it.”
I got my Ramen and walked past them.
The black guy looked heartbroken.
I was very flattered.
THE MARINE CORPS
After I got home from San Diego, I got some money and went to see a childhood friend graduate from the Marines.
I went with another friend who knew him.
His name was Carl.
A nice guy. Short, stocky, very friendly, very nervous.
We got to the base and went to the graduation ceremony.
We sat in the stands with all the proud parents in hot-and-humid-as-fuck South Carolina in August.
It was hot, muggy, and just fucking ugly there.
We sat in the stands for a long time.
Then about a thousand Marines started marching out.
They marched perfectly.
All in a straight line.
All taking synchronized steps.
It was fucking insane.
Then some man yelled and they all stopped perfectly at the same time.
Then the man yelled several more times.
They made several fancy movements and finally, all at the same time, lined up their bodies in perfect precision, facing us with their legs apart and hands on their sides.
Carl and I were terrified.
There were a thousand young men just like me and him standing there on the hot concrete.
The thing that terrified me the most was that the ceremony was at least an hour long.
For the whole hour the young men just like me and Carl were standing there without moving, for an hour.
No fidgeting.
No scratching of the crotch.
Nothing.
No movement.
They stood in the exact same position for one hour straight without moving.
They were like robots.
The only time they moved was when the drill instructor gave a command, and then they would all move like perfectly synchronized robots.
It was terrifying!
That night my childhood friend who I grew up with.
Who enjoyed literature, music, and was very sensitive, told Carl and I about how the drill instructors would hit him, how fighting amongst each other if one didn’t do their work right was encouraged.
How the drill instructors would make them guzzle water till they vomited.
That the drill instructors wouldn’t let them piss, so they would piss themselves.
How every recruit, no matter how big they were, was driven to tears at least once.
How young men constantly tried to kill themselves.
But he said it like it was normal. You could see the terror in his face when describing boot camp, but there was no concrete realization of the horror of it.
Carl and I sat there terrified, listening to him speak of Marine boot camp.
The shit they demanded of them was humiliating and painful.
We both wondered why any human would put themselves into that situation and why they would not leave that situation if they made the mistake of getting into it.
My childhood friend came out of boot camp a completely new person.
First his body was turned into pure muscle, which he was very proud of.
He used to be proud of his paintings and the songs he made up, but now he was proud of his muscles.
His brain took a turn for the worse. He became very nervous, high strung, in a constant state of tension.
If things were not exact, he would freak out.
For example:
Carl and I drove him back to Ohio, and at a gas station I pumped like $22.64 of gas into the tank. I didn’t mind not hitting an even number because I knew I was gonna buy some snacks and something to drink while I was in there.
But my childhood friend had a freak-out. “You’re supposed to hit an even number when getting gas. Why didn’t you just stop at twenty-two dollars?”
He looked at me and sounded like he wanted to punch my face in for that.
There were other little incidents but I don’t remember them.
He was so used to sameness and everybody doing the same thing.
If someone didn’t do something exactly the way he did, he freaked out.
Marine boot camp doesn’t break a person down and rebuild them as a Marine.
No, it breaks them down and teaches them to keep themselves down.
It makes them terrified of those different from them, and makes them terrified to make their own choices.
Some of the most terrified and broken people I’ve ever met in my whole life are Marines.
They usually are separated into those two groups.
The broken.
The terrified.
There are the terrified ones who spend their whole lives placing everyone they meet into neat little categories.
Beating up people in bars and their family members and usually being racist and just a dick.
The broken Marines are different though.
They grew to hate the Marine Corps.
All the sameness and the turning of humans into objects pissed them off.
A lot entered combat and realized what humans are capable of doing to other humans.
A lot of them still call themselves Marines, but it is only to give some definition to their identity and to get the free breakfasts at the local veterans club.
I’ve met a good amount of broken ex-Marines and most of them are pleasant and fun to be around.
There are a good amount who are really broken though. My childhood friend is now a schizophrenic, cuts his own hair, is a drug addict, carries an umbrella around with him when there is no chance of rain, and has told people that he is the messiah, and he eats raw ground chuck because he thinks it is good for him.