Necropolis

I step off the death flight still in a daze from the pills and boredom and immediately throw my kit into my rental minivan (I got a free upgrade so just shut the fuck up right now).  Power through a three hour drive from DC to VA Beach for the first Halloween I’ve spent stateside for as long as I can remember.  My brain is having trouble adjusting.  Maybe it’s the Ambiens, maybe culture shock, but everything starts to seem weird.  And not just Halloween weird, but I don’t think that’s really helping.  I’m getting used to things seeming weird and maybe that’s the biggest problem of them all.  I’m twitchy, nervous, and there’s a ball in my stomach.  Its foggy out, the air is cold and clean and smells like pine trees.  Its almost sweet smelling compared to the filthy garbage burn blastfurnace fuckfumes in Iraq.  I hate that fucking air.  It pollutes my soul as it pollutes my lungs.  The moon is a giant styrofoam ball pinned in the middle of orange and purple construction paper.  I finally make it down to Virginia Beach.  Forgotten parts of myself are reconnecting with this place.  The pain and the joy tied to street names and bars reverberate with long lost memories.  The whole place is dredged up, rising to the surface of a dark bay like sunken ship.  With the sunken destroyed ship rise up all the untold stories and tales of plunder that go along with it.  I make the final turn and a giant mass of blackbirds blow apart like leaves as I drive through their center.  Its safe to assume that I never thought I would return to this place but here I am all the same.

The time here swirls into a black whirlpool.  Not only was my mind not ready for the quick transition, but my body wasn’t either.  I had completely forgotten (maybe blacked out is the better expression) the Virginia Beach lifestyle.  Basically all activities are whittled down to one central core – get totally fucking shithouse drunk every single day.  Somewhere in the haze I reconnect with Colin, my bro from the New Orleans debacle, and he gets me up to speed on his life.  Apparently he has completely sworn off Iraq deployments and I can’t blame him.  He’s been working at what he calls “pig lab”.  Basically he is helping run a school for medical trainees where he shoots a pig and the trainees attempt to resuscitate the beast.  Aside from the gruesome nature of continually slaughtering pigs on a regular basis and standing witness as their screaming writhing bodies are stabbed and pulled apart by untrained hands there is an even darker side to his new job.  The logistical dilemma that arises when regularly killing and cutting open live pigs is what to do with their bodies after they’ve spurted out their last painful breath.  The answer is taking them to a place Colin jokingly referred to as “Pigschwitz”.  A ‘protein farm’ in northern Virginia where people can drop off dead animals to be processed into dogfood and hair wax and god knows what else.  1 cent per pound of pig is the price you have to pay, Colin’s last load cost him 75 dollars.  That’s right, 7,500 pounds of dead pigs.  The sickening thought is that his load was the smallest load coming in.  There were train cars loaded to the top with dead pigs and chickens.  Huge semi truck trailors filled to the brim with dead pigs.  He had to stuff his pigs into plastic bags so their epinefren soaked guts wouldn’t spill out all over the back of the truck.  According to Colin the place smelled like roadkill hell.  The ground was covered in the slime of a million dead pigs.  There he was, throwing dead pigs into this giant metal bin, thinking to himself that this had to be the worst place on earth.  He said that he would look at the ground and think to himself that maybe not now, but at some time a dead pig was laying right there.  Colin does not have a weak stomach by any means, this is a guy whose seen human intestines freshly blown out of fellow Americans sizzling away on the sidewalk and said to his buddies “hey look… tripe!” but it was apparent that his experiences at Pigschwitz were weighing heavily upon him.

We talked about the dog days of Jasper Texas and swapped stories of food poisoning in Iraq.  Even though I had food poisoning, strep throat, and a hangover all at once I think Colin has me beat.  On his last trip over there he got food poisoning so bad that he was puking and shitting simultaneously for a half hour.  He said he sat down and shot pure diarrhea into the toilet, then spun around sticking his face into the diarrhea and puked his guts out into the toilet, then spun around and shit, then spun around and puked and this continued like 20 times.

Colin – “Man, I was like BLEH, PFTPFT, BLEH, PFTPFT, BLEH, PFTPFT.  It sucked so bad it was almost funny.”

And so my time passed in Virginia Beach with me in a drunken trancelike stupor for most of the trip.  A half drunk phonecall and a half drunk drive and I hit up my old buddy Kronk (name has been changed to protect the innocent and the guilty).  Awake and aware with a sense of humor that sets him apart from the testosterone bloated masses.  He’s still rockin’ and rollin’ like no other.  Our midnight rendezvous culminated with a shithouse drunk paddleboat adventure into the icy lake behind Kronk’s new house.  We looked at the stars and wished on the ones that fell, drank cold daddies until our faces and fingers went numb while tactically deploying the empties into the briny deep like mini depth charges, and talked about life death, loves lost and loves found, and everything in between.  The night was cold and empty except for the beer and friendship.  Mist was rising off the water.  The moon looked like a boiled egg wrapped in gauze.  At some point we decided to see just how fast the paddle boat could go and with the Herculean effort that only 2 drunk navy seals could muster our speed maximized the vessel’s capacity and we nearly sank as the frozen lake waters rushed over the bow of our mighty craft.  We executed precision pisses while holding as still as a sniper, any movement, any momentary loss of concentration and the boat would shift and the man standing on the edge with his dick in his hand would be sent to davey jones’ locker.

Me “God man, we don’t do anything half ass, we just like go full power on every fucking thing.”
Kronk “Yeah bro, like a full power crap shoot every fucking time.”
Me laughing his ass off “Fully, like I’m all in and I don’t even know what the fuck we’re doing yet but its just like, fuck it man, all in!”
Kronk almost falling overboard laughing “Totally dude, you don’t even know what you’re betting on and you don’t care…  all in!”
Me “… and the house always wins!”

I smoked cigarettes, I drank beer, a took shots, I went crazy.  In all it was a great visit… It was almost like the old days.  Our greatness was measured out in empty shot glasses and cigarette butts.  Its guys like Kronk that made getting out of the teams the toughest decision of my life.  I don’t regret my decision but I do regret growing apart from my brothers.  Hanging out here in VA Beach again was like visiting with ghosts.  All the friends I once had, all the good times are gone gone gone.  The past is irretrievable and so were those times.  I spent a great part of this trip just talking about the ‘good old days’ with anybody around who could still remember.  This town has been witness to many such times and with its singular alcoholic focus its not surprising that the ghosts of those days still haunt me as I shuffle past the old meeting places.

Images from my visit wash over me like dry-heaves.  Sitting in a dirty nowhere divebar being hit on by a 400lb redneck who called himself “Big Mike” drinking Miller High Life with a face that looked like a fleshy manhole cover that had been beaten with a sledge.  Stuck in traffic on Independence Blvd. looking at the pale listless faces of the other drivers and wishing for nuclear holocaust.  Belly up at the bar at 1:00 in the afternoon just boozing as hard as possible while playing the crack machines (coin-op bar video games).

Buildings rise and fall, people come and go, but the soul of that place will never change.  Living in Virginia Beach had almost as much to do with my departure from the teams as the endless bullshit dumped upon you as a seal.  It is a lifeless town.  A Navy town.  And the only time you’re ever happy to see it is when its racing away in your rearview mirror or swirling away from you an instant before you pass out.

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