Chapter 40: Biloxi Blues

I felt like I had been punched in the stomach as I read my orders. I was to report in Keesler Air Force Base in Biloxi, Mississippi for fifty-six weeks of training as an aircraft electronic navigation specialist. Not exactly what I wanted after a lifetime in high school.

I stubbed out my cigarette and rested my forehead against the bus’s side window and looked out between the raindrops trickling down the glass. Outside, the September skies were as gray as the picture of the hound painted on the side of the vehicle. Rain, fog, and drizzle had been dogging my journey ever since I had left the New Orleans International Airport a few hours earlier.

Sometimes a muffled rumble followed the occasional streak of lightning flashing between clouds. Most of the time the drone of the diesel swallowed the call of thunder as we rolled past the swamps and bayous of the Mississippi countryside.

In deference to the supreme court rulings outlawing segregation in public transportation, a thin layer of white-wash pretended to hide the black letters assigning restrooms by race. The words “White Only” and for “Colored Patrons” were still visible on the walls of the Biloxi bus terminal.

I found out when I tried to enter a bathroom once reserved for black travelers that, while southern Apartheid was no longer the law of Mississippi, the custom and practice of segregation continued and strongly discouraged race mixing in public restrooms.

“Where are you going boy?” the short-chubby station manager asked as he stepped in front of me and blocked my entrance to the colored men’s room.

“I gotta take a piss,” I answered as I shifted the duffle bag slung over my shoulder.

“Unless you’re looking for trouble, stick to your own kind,” the manager pointed across the station’s lobby at the freshly painted white-only restroom.

“Thanks. I’ll keep that in mind. But when you’ve gotta go, you’ve gotta go. And I gotta go,” I brushed past the man and recycled some of the Coca-Cola I had been drinking for the last hour. The simple truth is we don’t buy Coke; we rent it.

The crowded bus smelled like the ass-end of an ashtray stuffed inside a pair of dirty gym socks. The thick brown-stinky smell of used nicotine mingled with the acrid stench of too many sweaty bodies. My mood was a foul as the atmosphere. I was uncertain, unhappy, and miserable.

The old thunderstorms which had been playing tag with us for the last few hours tackled us as we drove through the main gate of the base. A nightmare of boiling black clouds eclipsed the late afternoon light. Rain, like a waterfall, fell in glittering torrents as individual drops sparkled like diamonds in the brilliant flashes of thundering lightning. Welcome to hell.

Try as I might, I couldn’t wrap my mind around electronics. No one understood the theory of electricity. We knew what it is, but we didn’t know why it is. Our understanding of the science behind the sparks is still evolving.

I memorized the ‘official’ mnemonic for resistor color code: Biloxi booze rots our young guts, but vodka goes well. To drive home the point, I also memorized the R-rated version, ‘Bad boys rape our young girls but Violet gives willingly.’

The initial letter of each word matches one of the colors of the resistor spectrum (Black, Brown, Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Violet, Grey, and White). Black is zero and white in nine. Representing a numerical value from zero (black) to nine (white).

I thought too much about what I was thinking about.

“You just told us the real direction of electron flow in a circuit is from negative to positive,” I asked as I puzzled over the electrical diagram in our textbooks showing the flow of electric current as originating from the positive terminal and moving towards the negative terminal of the battery.

“That’s because when we first discovered electricity, we got it wrong. Back then we thought current flowed downhill like water from positive to negative, even though the negative charge is due to having more electrons,” Lt. Winston Drake explained as he drew a series of chalk illustrations on the blackboard while we took notes.

“Additional scientific research has proven otherwise. Since we associate “positive” with “surplus” and “negative” with “deficiency,” engineers decided to retain the old concept of electricity with “positive” referring to a surplus of charge, and label charge flow (current) accordingly,” he rolled his eyes.

“Don’t think about it. Just do the math,” Drake advised.