Chapter 41: Home for the Holidays

About the only silver lining to be found in the Keesler fiasco was that I got to go home for Christmas leave. The Air Force gave me a travel voucher and two weeks to report to my new duty station.

While away in the Air Force my step-father’s church sold the parsonage on Weymouth Street and acquired a new parsonage on Prospect Street a few yards from the church building.Once the papers had been passed my family moved into the twenty-two room colonial mansion which had recently seen service as the town’s brothel.

The notorious house of sinful pleasure had entertained men, and a few women, for nearly fifty years until it fell on hard times. The former owner, a Turkish gentleman in his mid-fifties was a bit too fond of his opium to bother paying the mortgage.

The flourishing brothel business finally floundered under the Turk’s management when the semi-official wink-and-a-nod of acceptance evaporated. The police cruiser parked at the end of the driveway probably didn’t do much to improve business.

The church had a new parsonage and my mother became the new madam in the minister’s mansion.

Home no longer felt like home. My room was gone and I stayed in guest quarters which my mother told me had once been used by a working girl who specialized in golden showers and bondage.

Most of my friends had moved on with their lives and had either gone on to college or were working in one of the paper mills scattered along the banks of the Nashua River which meandered through the heart of the city like a lazy snake.

Times change and the river which had once powered the mills in the days before electricity became a stinking rainbow-stream of multi-colored sludge. Factories discharged untreated industrial waste directly into the water.

You could tell the day of the week by the color of the sluggish water flow, pink Tuesdays followed blue Mondays. Green Wednesdays were crowd pleasers as the river ran through the spectrum of Shamrock shades before turning hunter green.

On Turquoise Thursday I decided to do the ‘Warrior’s Walk’ and join the legions of young alumni who had entered the military and returned to school to strut their stuff when basic training was complete.

I paused at the front door and checked my reflection in the glass. Decked out in my dress blues, spit-shined shoes, and a new mustache, I took a second to check out the two ribbons pinned to my chest.

I was especially proud of the green, yellow, and pale blue Expert Marksman ribbon I had earned on the firing range. Next, to the shooting award, the National Defense Service ribbon with its bright red and gold bands of color stood in sharp contrast against the Air Force blue of my dress uniform. The ribbon itself was a reward of little value and was given to anyone in the military who still had a pulse.

Something had changed since I had been away from high school. The kids in the hallways and me in uniform, we were no longer in the same world, we lived on different sides of the aquarium’s glass.

Instead of smiles and warm greetings I saw a lot of worry, fear, and apprehension in the eyes of the boys who would be graduating at the end of the school year. I was the ghost of Christmas Future. As the war in southeast asia grew in intensity, the draft opened up like a black hole and in the center of our lives and sucked more than a half million kids into the swirling vortex of war. It was not so much that I was a stranger. I had become a sasstastic.

For old time’s sake I paid a visit to my old hang-out in the pizza place stuffed in between the public library and Recruiter’s Row. The brightly lighted eatery had the old world charm of formica, styrofoam, and a classic jukebox featuring the hit songs of day.

The slate gray skies crumbled into snowflakes.