How The Beneficiary And I Met And Had Nothing To Do With Tumblr

'Cause you just can't do this kind of shit on tumblr. 

It's that time of year during which friends, lesser friends, and total strangers start asking me how the beneficiary and I met. OK, here' s the story.  Well, more accurately, it's a story.  And it is 100% accurate, except in those small places where it isn't. And if it conflicts with any other version I've told, or doesn't match other stories, then the others are wrong, always. Except when they aren't. The bullshit factor on this story is pegging either 100% or near 0%. It's all a lie or near truth from the mountain, and I'm just putting it up so that nosy fuckers will have something to chew on.

To put it in context at the beginning, I was in what they'd call a "rebound" phase nowadays. A girl and I had treated each other badly, and were hurt, and in my case, my capacity to deal with annoyances in socially acceptable ways was heavily damaged.  

See, a lie already, right there. 

She did nothing. I treated her horribly, that's all, and in the cauterizing guilty backlash, I lost my capacity to deal with people much at all. Long painful story for another day. Just trust me that I was heavily into my "don't give a shit, keep your fucking distance" phase.At the beginning of our little tale,  I was fresh back from short-tour overseas jobs, having done a variety of more-or-less terrible things to random strangers instead of to women I loved. An improvement, but not much help in he way of reconnecting me with people.

Meg: He didn't keep his part of the bargain.

Jo: Which part?

Meg: To spend his life pining for you, and die miserable and alone.

Jo: Is that so much to ask?

Movie, "Twister," 1996 

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It couldn't last forever, of course. There was, at the proper time and place, another.

I'd patched myself together well enough to be presentable, an alien in masquerade among real humans. I had begun spending more time in the States, taking my military leaves back home.

Jackie was a willowy blonde, a high-school senior working part-time and weekends as a waitress in an all-night restaurant and spending time with her art whenever she could. She was an artist, a painter and sculptor. She was really good.

She found me one night after 2:00AM, in the run-down Chinese restaurant where she worked, sitting in a booth in her section with an old friend, if two kids our age could be called old-anything.

It was a tough little mining town, and it was a tough crowd. It was a bad time to be a nice girl working the only open cafe on the strip when the bars closed.

I heard her taking an order from the drunks in the booth behind me. There were crude jokes. One asked her if the tail matched the mane. She didn't know what that meant, and there was raucous laughter, and when she came to our table, she was flushed, and tears were just behind her blue eyes. We ordered coffee, and she poured, then went toward the kitchen to turn in the rest of her orders. More laughter from the booth.

"Back me," I told Randy. Randy was one of those guys one runs across now and again who is big enough that he doesn't have to advertise. At 6'3 and around 250 he was...imposing. He had chestnut brown hair, a well-kept beard, and startling blue eyes. This made him a very good guy to hang out with because when one finally got past his size, he was the very Sunday school image of Jesus in his "Sword of Truth" incarnation. Strange women would literally follow him around hoping to be noticed. Ever since we'd been in High School, we all knew that his trail of crumbs and cast-offs were a better full meal than most of us would be grateful to get on our own.

"Shit, man, what's the matter with you?" he rumbled. "I don't know what's up with you, but for a really long time now you've been acting like someone killed your fuckin' dog. And now you want to do this? It ain't got nothing to do with you. Leave it alone."

"Fuck you, then don't," I said without rancor. He was right. We didn't have a dog in this fight, and if he decided he wouldn't get into it, I couldn't hold it against him; it was my thing, not his.

I stood and swung around to the booth. Three men there stopped talking and looked up at me.

"Can I help you with something?" one of them said. He didn't even sound confrontational -- they were genuinely surprised to find me standing there.

I reached under my jacket and long shirt and pulled out the snub-nosed S&W Model 19. Polished blued steel glittered like a black mirror. I put it on the table, butt toward me, barrel pointing at the flip-page juke-box controller against the wall at the other end of the booth.

"Yeah," I said. "Just wondered whether anyone was interested in buying a gun tonight. It's loaded up with .357 mags and everything. Make you a helluva deal." They looked at it as if someone had dropped a rattlesnake on the table.

"It's a great little piece, really. Most people don't know that you can get something this small that will shoot a magnum. Freakin' thing will blow a hole through ya' that you could sling a garbage can cover through." Everyone was very still now, eyes wide. "No? Oh, well, I guess I can pawn it tomorrow."

I idly ran my fingernail down the weapon's grip. Rubber, not wood, oversized and with custom finger grooves for large hands to hold it steady through the vicious recoil common to the two inch barrel.

"Too bad, though," Randy said from behind me. God bless ya, man, you were gonna back me after all. "But really, what would they need something like that for?"

"Oh, I dunno," I said, never taking my eyes off them. Their eyes were jumping between me and the pistol and Randy. "Maybe they'd make a little girl cry tonight and someone would get pissed over it. Then they'd have to defend themselves. Either that or explain to all their wives tomorrow how they fucked around and got one of them killed hitting on a teenager they thought was helpless."

I paused for a moment, as if thinking it over.

"Wow. Tough choice."

"Yeah, it would be," said Randy, "if it ever came up."

"Probably wouldn't, though," I said. "These guys look like they've got some sense. If they got into something like that, they'd probably just feel bad about making asses out of themselves and drop a big tip on the table and leave and then they wouldn't have any problems. You're right, they probably don't need a gun. Stupid of me." I picked up the weapon and carefully stuffed it back into my waistband.

"Sorry to bother you boys," I said, and watched them for several extra beats, leaning in, both hands palm down on their table. Then we sat back down in our booth.

"Fuck this," I heard. Then there was a sudden scramble of activity, and the three men headed out the front door, dropping a couple of twenties at the cash register to pay for the food they hadn't yet gotten and not waiting for change.

She walked back to our booth, and refilled our coffee.

"I saw you talking to them," she said. "I don't know what you said, but thank you."

"I don't know what you're talking about," I said, "but if I did, you're welcome."

If it hadn't been for the three strangers brushing up against a very raw place in me by treating her badly and making her cry, I doubt we'd have spoken at all that night.

There was no sudden illumination, no blazing visceral reaction. There probably should have been, I suppose, and would have but for circumstance and history that had so badly scarred my ability to respond. It would be nice to say that I recognized in her what she saw in me. In truth, I barely saw her at all. She, as with everyone, simply reflected away from me off the dark mirror behind my eyes.

But SHE saw something. For reasons to this day still unclear to me, she reached down into the quicksand and grabbed me by the hair and pulled me gasping and flailing against her up into the light, or at least as close to the light as dark glass allows.

I never knew why, of all the damaged flotsam drifting through that place in the howling hours of the morning she picked me. When I would later insist on asking, she would only speak of it once, and never again. She said that she knew me the instant she saw me, and she had no choice. She has never since expanded on the matter, and will not discuss it, and even now I don't fully understand what she meant.

I told myself I didn't care.

But I did.

For the first time in nearly two years I felt the vague stirring of...something...in the ashes. I found I genuinely LIKED this girl, and I simply would not allow it again. So, I opened a small crack in the glass to show her the molten core of pain, and to warn her to not trust me, and certainly to not believe; for I knew I was capable of terrible things, and I would not have her harmed, and please God, never by my hand.

Jackie quietly absorbed my warning without question or comment. Then she walked away from me, and was gone. I found later that she'd walked and driven and wandered aimlessly, and thought, and performed whatever rituals seemed right to divine the future, mentally casting talismans and charms again and again and again.

Another day passed, and she was still gone. For all I wanted her, I thanked God she had listened to me, and I resumed my grey life.

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Randy was my best friend on earth in those days. He worked in a low-throw AM radio station as a night-shift DJ. Often When I'd go home on leave I'd find myself out at the small building with the big antenna and call letters painted fifteen feet high on the roof.

In this modest, residential-sized space in the desert a couple of miles outside of town, we'd sit in front of turntables and switches and dials and racks of cassette tapes, and get genteelly drunk and discuss the secrets of the universe while he spun disks and ran ads. Sometimes he'd put on an album, or the long version of MClean's "American Pie" and let them run while we sat on the front porch and drank whiskey straight from the bottle, and shot target practice with large-bore pistols in the dark, gigantic rolling fireballs from our weapons lighting the area like lightning-flash daylight, then dark so thick we could almost chew it.

He never questioned my somber mood, presuming that when I wanted to talk about it I would. But it would sometimes infect him, and he'd play pre-deathrock metal for hours on end on what was putatively a country-western/easy listening station.

Oddly enough, we never got a single complaint. Perhaps cowboys and steel workers and miners felt the occasional need to blast down a few shots or suck on a pipe while Alice Cooper or the Stones or Black Sabbath ate their heads. Perhaps no one was listening at all.

At midnight, he'd shut the station down, and we'd go out and begin serious hell-raising.

No one else was ever anywhere in the building unless we brought them in with us; in fact it was fair to say it would never occur to anyone in the small town the station served that an actual person was there. This particular night as we drank, the front door opened and closed, ringing a bell in the control room. I figured that we were about to go to jail -- we were still considerably short of 21, and we'd frankly always assumed that sooner or later someone would call the police to check out our more blatant on-air weirdness.

"Naw," said Randy, "don't sweat it. I told Patty to come out." Patty was his girlfriend. At seventeen, she was wild and dangerous as a free-range mustang, a woman of great tempers and a disposition tailor made for a night of bad whiskey and vicious rock and roll. She was the only woman I knew who could lay any claim to being able to occasionally control Randy. She often hung out with us when she could get away from her parents and out of the house. She came into the control room...

Followed by Jackie.

"She said she knew you," Patty said to me, "so I invited her along."

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That night we roared down the two-lane road in Randy's fire-engine red Fairlaine, top down, 95 miles an hour, the road in front of us disappearing into the night straight as a ruled line through the desert. The moon and stars paced us, pouring liquid silver out of the flawless black sky. The ghostly sea of sand and sagebrush rushed by and mountains rose up, almost subliminally, a torn, dark strip on the horizon. I was with her in the back seat, and I leaned close to her ear to be heard over the rushing wind.

"I thought you were gone," I said.

I could sense the laughter behind her blue eyes. She leaned to my ear.

"You assume too much about things beyond your control," she said matter-of-factly, reaching up to brush her blowing blonde hair out of our faces.

"I don't know what you mean," I said. God, she was a pretty girl. I hadn't really noticed before.

"You don't get to decide who I love," she said, "or who I don't for that matter."

Then she reached down through the fracture in the glass I'd opened for her in warning and grabbed the shards of my broken heart with her bare hands -- even she could not bring it out of its prison into the light, but she would not let it go.

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We married, and I went to war. When I came back to her and my son, things were better. Time really does heal practically anything. But always, always in the back of my mind, the fear that I would hurt her like I'd hurt Jonnie, that I'd again damage something I loved more than my life, and always, always, always the guilt, a dull ache, a grey thread running through every moment of my life.

She knew nothing of all this, of course. She only knew that she loved me. And she believed; that was enough. The weight of her belief and that love were, and are now, the most terrifying things I have ever faced.

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