“The best thing you can do,” Bob said solemnly, “is have a girl in every port.” Bob is a sailor, living off a small boat moored for just a few hundred dollars a month in a Northwestern port city. Bob was best friends with my landlord, who I quickly became drinking buddies with upon moving in. They’d brought me down one day to the shop they shared down by the docks. My landlord introduced me to the older men there with the statement, “This is Tim, he’s in love.”
None of them openly laughed, but looking back I must have appeared absolutely ludicrous. Middle twenties kid with no money, head full of big ideas getting ready to run down to Northern California and join the circus. All over some dark-haired girl I found out later my roommates (an engaged couple with hearts of gold) couldn’t stand. I should have listened to them. I should always listen to my friends, the people who know me better than I know myself. I rarely do.
Maybe Bob was right. I’ve often wondered about this, moving around a lot, leaving a trail of crumbling romances and little broken off crusted flakes of my heart all over the place. It’s just, I give my heart away so easily. It’s the poet in me, or the idiot. One in the same, I fear. How to get around this? Maybe the old sailors know it better than me, the wild romances of the waves, the drunken nights spent alone or in the arms of whatever woman you come across in the local bar. I don’t want to end up like them though, so often alone and broken, failed marriages and sadness in their hearts and etched on the lines of their faces. Maybe that’s why none of them laughed, cause they were once like me – young and foolish – and it made them who they are today.
Although, who they are today is sort of a mixed bag, as far as I can tell. One of the men there at the shop by the docks, I remember, used to be a tunnel rat. I only knew what this was from old Marvel Vietnam War comics I inherited when my brother went away to college. Tunnel rats were the guys they sent down into the spider holes after the Viet Cong, killing face-to-face in the darkness. The shoulder-width holes were dug as supply lines and hiding places by the VC, criss-crossing the countryside. Having to crawl over on your belly the still-warm smiling corpse of a man you just murdered, well, I think that must do something to a man.
- END -
ASSOCIATED CONTENT @TMBCHR (Auto-Generated)
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