We called our band The Laziest Airmen in the Navy because we calculated that we four did the least amount of work than anyone else in our branch of the service. The planes that we worked on, P-3 Orion’s, were the only birds that were too big to fit on an aircraft carrier, so we never saw the ocean or went on overseas deployments. Of all the P-3 Orion bases, Brunswick NAS housed the fewest squadrons and only flew small sorties into the north Atlantic to make sure the Russians were still doing Russian things. Our building housed the intermediate maintenance department where only the toughest cases were sent, when the squadrons couldn’t just fix the issue by swapping out a non-working box for a working box. Within our department, our shop, number 660, received the fewest repair items. We spent our work days reading novels and playing old computer games on an ancient machine that Ski built with parts he found lying around the building.
Ski had a long Polish last name full of r’s and z’s that none of us could pronounce so we just called him Ski. He only talked when necessary and whatever he said was usually pretty damn insightful. His caterpillar mustache crinkled along with his eyes when he smiled, which was all the damn time. Ski was a hell of a guy is what you can take from this.
On the other end of the talkative and hell of a guy spectrum was Declan. Declan never shut up, not even in his sleep. He was from Atlanta, which meant the only topics that you could not discuss with him were the Braves futility in the postseason and William T. Sherman. He was a college graduate that enlisted when he couldn’t find gainful employment after graduation, even though this was the late nineties when the economy was strong and jobs for college boys were tossed out like parade candy. It was obvious after talking to him for a few minutes his lack of options had more to do with his personality than credentials. He spent hours trolling the main drag in Brunswick talking to every female, from high school girls to hockey moms, into coming back to his room.
On his first day in the shop, Declan saw me reading a Dostoevsky and asked me what the fuck was I doing in the Navy. We rented a run down three-bedroom apartment together between the Chinese and Italian restaurants downtown.
Our other room/band/shop mate was Kimono Larry, dubbed this by the Bowdoin girls that Declan managed to talk into coming back to our apartment to listen to us practice in the unfinished garage of our building. Larry had a habit of walking around the apartment, wearing nothing but a kimono and tighty whitey briefs, even when we had company over. Larry had few possessions besides a bonsai tree he kept in his window and an impressive collection of throwing stars. He had this weird Japanese culture obsession that seemed to be a holdover from his 1980’s childhood. He slept on a pile of clothes in the corner of his room and one of his eyebrows traveled the length of his head, but he managed to wear an expression of surprise at all times. Ten years older than the rest us and in love with a heroin addict named Debbie, he spent most of the work day next to the shop telephone waiting for her to call.
I was in charge of the shop the morning of the Defining Event of our Generation because I was the only one with chevrons on my arm. I was 42 days from receiving my long-awaited release and had been counting down the days I had left since C school three years earlier, having decided this was not a career path for me. Our real shop boss, Pete, had not yet arrived for the day.
Ski was on the computer he built from parts playing the Is This It? album on Napster at full blast. Declan, Ski and I had bought into the hype that The Strokes were going to save rock and roll and we could follow in their footsteps. We’d be the Rolling Stones to their Beatles or something.
“Will you turn that down please?” Larry asked. “I’m trying to hear the phone in case Debbie calls.”
Larry was convinced that hair bands like Ratt and Poison were the epitome of rock quality. He was easily the best musician out of all of us and played our lead so I’m not sure how this terrible opinion gelled with his obvious talent. We tried our best to keep his guitar solos to a minimum, but sometimes we just let him go for as long as he wanted, letting our own instruments drop to our sides and watch him in awe.
Ski of course played bass and Declan owned the only drum kit, an instrument that matched his manic energy. I wrote and sung our lyrics tried to be Robert Plant to Larry’s Jimmy Page. We practiced just about every afternoon in that garage and while our sound was raw, mostly just GnR or Zeppelin covers, but we were getting good at it. We had yet to play a paying gig, but we felt that something big was just around the corner for us.
“Oh Debbie! I haven’t talked to you in twenty minutes,” Declan said, grabbing a broom handle and cradling it in his arms. “I’m going to die if I don’t hear from you soon.”“Ooooh Deb-bie! Your rubbery skin and stringy hair set my loins a-fire, baby,” I sang. “Hey, Ski. Write this down. This could be our first original.”
Declan mock kissed the broom head while I sang a few more bars of Debbie Song. Larry turned a shade of red that would make his uniform non-compliant and Ski strummed an imaginary bass at the computer.
This is when Pete busts into the shop and says, “Those goddamn towel heads did it! They crashed a plane into one of the Twin Towers. We should nuke the whole fucking Middle East!”
We all looked blankly at Pete. He was known for these fits of dramatics. He’d yell and stomp around the shop, threatening Declan and I with Captain’s Mast because we sang chain gang spirituals when he made us mop the floor. Pete was angry that his first supervisory role of his career he had to be in charge of probably the most useless three people, not counting Ski, in all of the Navy.
Regardless, Pete was not as bad as our first shop supervisor who I got into a shouting match with one time over something minor. That guy had a sleep apnea issue and would fall asleep in a chair in the shop, then Declan and I would throw small wads of paper that would rest on the man’s large belly until he woke up and shook them off. He wanted me to go to an anger management class, some ridiculous ombudsman program called “Taming the Tiger” because he thought I had an anger management problem. What I had was a Navy problem.
One day I told that supervisor where to stick his Taming the Tiger brochure and decided I was not going to be in the Navy anymore. I was going to get some of this freedom we kept hearing about that we were protecting and loaded up my car with my few possessions.
Two MPs who showed up at my barracks room door had other plans for me and dragged me off to the restricted barracks, where I stayed for a month and met Larry.
“Come on. Follow me you dolts,” Pete said.
All of us, except for Larry who stood by the phone in case Debbie called and could not be pried from it even if the Four Horsemen were riding into town that day, followed Pete down to the snack room, or geedunk, to use the naval parlance. There, a small TV tuned to CNN sat on top of the jankiest coffee dispensing machine in all of the military. A second plane had already hit the other tower before we arrived and a small crowd of airmen had gathered there to watch the news unfold.
We stayed long enough to see the reports of a crash at the Pentagon and until our CO, a Lt. Commander with thick birth control glasses who I only laid eyes on once before during my Captain’s Mast for trying to get some freedom, came down personally to tell us to get into battle stations. Battle stations on our base meaning just casually walk back to your workspace and wait for orders.
Back at the shop, Larry was on the phone cooing to Debbie, who, for some reason was convinced the terrorists were going to strike us all in Maine next. Pete told him to hang up the fucking phone and find something productive to do. We swept and cleaned the shop and then gathered around the computer to catch snatches of news online.
With every clip we watched of the towers falling and frightened New Yorkers panicking, running from the smoke and debris, Pete became more agitated. He threatened war with everyone from Albania to Yemen. I told him that we were an anti-submarine base and unless the terrorists had submarines, we’d likely not see any real action. This reminder seemed to depress and then anger him.
“You don’t give a shit about anything but yourself, Knox. I can’t wait for you to stop sucking the teat of the Navy so you can go suck the teat of your momma and daddy.”
Pete knew I hated being called by my last name, forget the part about my mom and dad’s teats. Everyone here went around calling each other by their last name like we were on a damn football team and it didn’t help matters that they were stitched above our breast pockets. I tried covering mine with electrical tape once but I was given extra swabbing of the deck duty for doing so.
“The only teats I want to suck on are Rhonda’s,” I said, which was probably the wrong thing to say.
Rhonda being Pete’s wife, a schoolteacher with a master’s degree who was very sweet and not too hard on the eyes for a woman who had just turned forty, which was ancient to us back then. She was accommodating and gracious during the previous Thanksgiving dinner when she invited the entire shop over to their nice house in Topsham. Declan wondered why Rhonda was with Pete when it was obvious she could probably do better. She had a look about her that she seemed to always be asking herself the same thing.
Pete squared into my face with his hammy fists balled tight at his sides. Then he relaxed, smirked a little, and I knew he was about to say something he thought was funny. He always smirked when he thought he was about to say something funny.
“You couldn’t get a real woman, Knox. You best stick to those high school girls who can’t read through your bullshit.”
“That may be so, Pete,” I said.
I let it drop at that. The guy had at least eighty pounds on me and another Captain’s Mast meant I was probably heading for restricted barracks for another long stretch. 42 days, I reminded myself.
The building intercom squawked to life and the CO’s voice came over it all staticky.
All personnel report to the hangar in ten minutes. I repeat, All personnel report…
The Laziest Airmen in the Navy and Pete, who was also lazy but acted like he wasn’t, filed out of Shop 660 to go to the hangar adjacent to our building. A procession of other, less lazy naval personnel carried us along in a wave of denim dungarees.
Once in the hangar, we stood in formation until the CO appeared at a podium in full dress whites, which he wasn’t wearing earlier. He tapped the microphone to test if it was working and it gave him a little high-pitched feedback.
“Rookie mistake,” I whispered to Ski standing next to me.
Never in my four years in the service had I been a part of a formation like that. I’d seen them in movies and in recruiting commercials on TV. Rows and columns of enlisted men and officers all standing proud on the decks of aircraft carriers while some patriotic music played over a baritone narrator. Behind the CO, a newly washed P-3 sat behind him and an American flag was draped over a rolling bulletin board.
The CO went on to say some very patriotic words about the country being attacked today. I don’t remember exactly what he said, I just remember thinking that we were about to go to war with somebody and it probably didn’t matter much to anyone there who it was and whether or not they had anything to do with what happened in New York, DC, and the field in Pennsylvania.
That night, the four of us gathered together for what would be the last time in the bar in the basement of MacMillian’s, seafood restaurant just a few blocks from the apartment. The place was pretty empty except for us, which was normal for a Tuesday night. Everyone must have wanted to be home with their loved ones and talk about the day’s events. The bartender had Fox News on the TV at the bar and paid us little attention.
“You think they will extend enlistments?” I asked. “I have 42 more days.”
“We all know how many days you have, Knox. You start every damn morning telling us how many days you have left. Doubt they will extend enlistments to anyone on our base. I mean we would have to be necessary personnel. We are far from that,” Declan said.
Larry jumped up from the table, saying he needed to make a phone call and would see us at the apartment.
“Jesus, that fucking guy. You sure you don’t want to move into his room, Ski?” Decland asked. “We can kick him out.”
Ski shook his head because was too smart to room with us. He had his own little neat studio in Bath near the shipyard.
“Well, the offer stands. His bogarting the landline at home is starting to wear on my last nerve.”
“The heart is a lonely hunter,” Ski said.
“You just stole from a classic, but I’ll allow it,” I said.
We didn’t have to ask Larry to move out because when we got back to the apartment later there was an absolute shitshow waiting for us. Two Brunswick PD officers stood on our porch, where a dark puddle of blood soaked into the wood at the top of the stairs. Inside, a steak knife lay in the middle of the slanted floor and blood ran in a small stream away from it, pooling on the other side of the room.
“What the hell happened here?” Declan asked.
The cops asked us a bunch of cop questions and after they were satisfied with our answers that we lived in the apartment, they informed us that Larry tried to commit seppuku with a steak knife. Upon realizing it probably wasn’t the best choice of a suicide weapon, he called an ambulance and sat on our porch to wait, where he passed out before the paramedics arrived. The conversation then turned to the events earlier that day and the officers wanted to know what we thought of it all and they thanked us for our service and whatnot. Not the typical exchange we had with Brunswick PD but nothing about that day was typical.
The officers had already called the base MPs, who showed a few minutes after we did. It was the same two MPs who took me away to restricted barracks that time I tried to get some freedom and one of they said he figured I had something to do with the call when it came in. Once they got a statement from the police, they all piled into their cruisers and drove to Midcoast Hospital ER where the ambulance had taken Larry.
“Now I guess we have to clean this shit up now,” I said, looking at the carnage in our kitchen.
“I’m not touching his blood. His girlfriend is a drug user and I’m not about to catch the bug.” Declan said.
“Just grab some rubber gloves and some towels. Unless you want to step around this until our lease is up next month.”
“You guys don’t own a mop?” Ski asked.
“I don’t like bringing my work home,” I said.
After telling him what had happened, Pete was kind enough to let the three of us off of work the next day so I drove to Midcoast to check on Larry. Declan declined and stayed in his room to pout, acting like what Larry did was done to him personally.
All of the televisions in the hospital were turned to cable news shows, which alternated showing the towers falling and talking heads who were making their prognostications about who we were about to go to war with and how soon it could happen.
I found Larry’s room and inside the two MP’s from the previous night were there getting their statement. Larry had just woken up an hour earlier and the MP’s were telling him not to leave the hospital, which seemed a ridiculous order giving the obvious state the guy was in at the time. He was propped up in the bed by a platoon of pillows, tubes and wires of ever sort running from his arms and stomach. A half dozen monitors keeping tracking of whatever those monitors keep track of with green blips and beeps. The two meatheads then left us alone.
“They seem to enjoy this,” Larry said once they left.
“If what they say about cops is true, then what do you think rent-a-cops have in place of a soul?”
Larry grimace smiled as if deep philosophical questions like this pained him to contemplate.
“So, what happened?” I asked.
In fits and starts, Larry told me the story. He had gone to look for Debbie at her house because she had not answered his million or so calls that afternoon. When she wasn’t home, he decided to return to our bar and found her messing around with another guy in the alley outside of MacMillian’s. He then walked home and found the sharpest thing he could find in our apartment and did his best disgraced samurai impression with the steak knife.
Leaving the hospital, I could not help but somewhat admire Larry’s laser focus on one thing in his life, whether it was love, lust, or obsession, while seemingly everything else in the world was on fire at the moment. Maybe that focus is what made him such a virtuoso on the six strings. How he could be driven to Dostoveskian heights of madness over a woman was baffling to me and I could not remember the last time I felt that way about anyone or anything.
He stayed in the hospital for a week for observation. The Navy couldn’t bother with him as it had other things to worry about at the time and had the two MPs deliver dishonorable discharge papers to this room. Once he left was free to leave the hospital, he stopped by a pawn shop on Maine Street where he bought a snub nose .38, then went directly to Debbie’s house and shot her and himself in the head.
Not long after the events of that September, Pete attacked Declan in the 660 shop while I was doing my exit interview with the CO. Pete had set up a hidden camera in his bedroom and found footage of Declan fucking Rhonda while Pete was on a night watch. This earned Declan a fast other than honorable discharge while Pete was just given a strong reprimand. The couple divorced and last I heard she and Declan were shacked up together in Atlanta.
I headed south towards home, Oxford, Mississippi, to start college on the GI Bill when I finished my remaining 42 days, the brass deciding that I was not necessary personnel for the wars to come. I played in a few bands while in college, but none came as close to whatever it was the Laziest Airmen had in those sessions in the garage.
And Ski, well Ski is Vice Admiral of the whole damn Navy now.
Kevin Baggett’s novella, “The Apologies” appeared in the Running Wild Press Novella Anthology Volume II. He lives in Moorhead, Minnesota and teaches at Concordia College.