Chickenhawk: Back in the World - Life After Vietnam

I walked along the wooden fence, down the jogging trail. You could roll under this fence; it wasn’t for security, it was a privacy fence. There was a trailer park next door. Some guys did roll under the fence at night, to visit some enterprising girls at the trailer park who entertained sex-starved, and courageous, inmates.

When my watch showed that I had been walking for the forty-five minutes I allowed myself for exercise, I stopped. I walked into the small woods beside Dorm Five and did stretching exercises and cooled down.

I walked toward the side entrance of the dorm and saw Doodle Harris, the millionaire land developer who’d arrived at Eglin the day after John and I. They’d gotten Doodle for not paying taxes. He finally did. The local paper announced it on the front page. He’d paid the half million dollars the government wanted, thinking he’d made a deal, but the IRS threw him into jail anyway. His wife and his partners showed up every week in his Rolls-Royce, and they spent the whole visit going over Doodle’s plans. He claimed he’d be out in a few weeks, didn’t really unpack for a month. Now, a year later, his confidence had disappeared. Doodle looked very despondent sitting on the park bench beside Dorm Five. He nodded, but he was lost in worry. I’d heard him talking on the phone to his “people” and I knew he was trying to lock up a deal on a piece of beach property. The deal wasn’t going well, according to what I heard, and Harris wasn’t able to get out and kick some ass to make it work. I went inside to my cube.

Walton, my stockbroker neighbor, and Doug Norton, the inmate tennis pro, were in the aisle with a tennis racket. Norton was showing Walton the importance of a follow-through with the racket. Norton had a client list of about ten inmates he was teaching to play tennis. Like Walton had said, he wanted to improve his game. I watched them, interested, while I undressed. I’d tried playing a few times with Tony Abruzzo. He kept telling me, “No, Bob, the idea is to hit the fucking ball over the net.” I smiled. Tony, at sixty-five, could slaughter me in tennis. I watched Norton show Walton how to hold a racket for a backhand. I stripped down, wrapped myself in a towel, and went to the showers.

I always used the same shower stall, and I noticed that so did most people. Inmates would actually wait if “their” stall was busy. I think it must have been a small way to personalize our lives here. I liked my stall because it had a shower head that delivered a thick stream of water which felt like a massage. There was no worry about running out of hot water at the camp, and I spent at least fifteen minutes letting the water stream beat on my shoulders and neck. While I basked in the steam, I noticed plastered on the tile wall a new soggy fuck-book foldout page. There was a different one every day. Today it was Nancy. Nancy was wet and wrinkled on the tiles, but she was still smiling as she exposed herself to viewers who needed to see one again. I wondered if she knew where her picture would end up when she posed for the shot. Probably. She seemed to be thinking: Here it is, jerkoffs. I tried not to pay attention to Nancy. The pose was brazen, vulgar. Cheap titillation. I faced the shower and lathered my hair with Johnson’s Baby shampoo and things went normally until the shower stream hit low. I could feel myself stiffen. I looked down. I was standing out like a coat peg. It was really impressive to me that I could consciously be offended by pictures like Nancy while my body was clearly in love. I wanted to be home where I could give Patience some loving hints like: “Feel like fooling around?” But I wasn’t. I wouldn’t be home for a year. I felt myself getting stiffer. Apparently Nancy was plenty good enough for my dick. I rinsed off the shampoo and stood back and watched the stream of water hitting me. In two minutes, I went off like a gun. Well, that was sex for another three or four days. The average was three or four days, at the end of which time I must have had testosterone saturating every cell in my body. I had sexy dreams like I did in high school and sexual urges so strong I could think of nothing else until I did something about it. I would be a failure as a monk; or did monks take a lot of showers, too?

I soaked in the steam awhile longer and then turned the water off. I thought, Thanks, Nancy. I hope it was as good for you as it was for me, and stepped out to towel off.

I went back to my cube and put on a clean set of clothes. All my clothes were new—as you would expect of the guy who runs the clothing room. I put on a new pair of pants and a sweatshirt I’d bought at the commissary and stood for a minute, watching the section buzzing with inmates, deciding how I’d spend my evening. The section had a homey quality about it. I knew most of the twenty-five men there, and they all knew me. It was home.