Meeting House, 1

Ever since K__ left, Mace__ has been hanging out more.
Once, in the chow, he almost didn’t see me, and turned around to come sit with me. I think we might be friends.
I think he thought I would fall apart with out K__. I wanted to remind him I have my own qualities, and would be fine.
I can’t be myself around Mace___. It’s because he allows me to not be myself, while K__ wouldn’t. K__’d naturally shut down.
One night, a few days after K__ left, Mace__ said to me, soberly: _You’ve come a long way, Chuck._
Every since I was about seventeen, whenever I would know someone for about a year, they always say that to me at some point: You’ve really come along way.
It’s been almost ten years of that now; exactly how far away was I?

__________

　
The sex dreams can be strong. Like they’re insisting something. Innocent sex -- I went through all the trouble of learning about sex, when really the secret lay in its innocence, in the uninhibited-ness.
You’re not gonna grow up to be a child molester, b, I think to myself, rolling over onto my back with a sigh.
Innocent enough to feel Raw.

__________

　
Postal arrived at our FOB, and was only there for three days. It had been a lot of work, packing up K__‘s stuff, figuring out the logistics of it. The first day I waited four hours to mail off two boxes.
I mailed them according to priority. The first was K__‘s guitar. Mace__ had looked at me mournfully, back in the room, the night before, watching me stuff the crumpled paper into the corners of the box, putting the address on it.
_No more guitar,_ he said, mostly to himself.
The next morning I waited three hours, and beside me was Specialist House, who I worked with a lot but who wasn’t in my company, so I didn’t really know him.
To me he was one of the few Real ones. He seemed effortless at it, same as W___ and K___.
He was a skinny guy with average height. Twenty three years of age but looked eighteen, nineteen, because of his build. He had green eyes, short dark hair, dimples, and a lot of tattoos.
I swear he had something in him, but Mace___ insisted he was totally Caucasian. He used to be in a line platoon, but started a fight, and broke a guy’s arm, and was taken out of the platoon.
I’d look for him whenever the convoys would come in late at night, dreary eyed, seemingly glad to see me. There aren’t a lot of cool people in our brigade.
Without provocation he told me his life story.
Over the three hours he took breaks, maybe saying something to someone else, but he always came back to sit beside me, to tell me more.
I wondered about that later, why did he do that? He’s not friends with a whole lot of people, it’s part of the story he told me. Maybe it was because we clicked, hence it was natural for him. Maybe he thought I was a cool guy.
He told about how his group of friends throughout adolescence were basically a bunch of street fighters, looking for trouble -- to him friendships like mine and K__’s and mine and W___’s are normal, no big deal.
He knows he deserves friends, same as anybody, he doesn’t experience it as some miraculous thing.
House told me about how his friends kept dying on him. A stabbing there, a intoxicated car accident here, another drug overdose. Back in the States he’d lost one of his closest friends during the deployment, and hadn’t even known it until well after the funeral.
He treated dating as something you did on purpose. Not sex, but dating. You looked for a girl friend on purpose. _When I found out I was deploying,_ he said, _I had recently broken up with my girlfriend, so I didn’t get another, you know, when we get home, then I’ll start looking for a girl._
He found out about where I worked, and how they hired soldiers as temporaries each summer. Perfect for him when we got back to the States. He even invited himself into my life, the fun we‘d have over the summer. One of the Real ones was acting like I was one of them. Maybe.
He told me about how during high school, etc, people would try to join their social group. _But they were posers,_ he said.
Like me, I thought.
I asked him to explain. _They were trying to be one of us, you know, but weren’t really, you know? We ended up beating them up._

_______