The "lost" Spent Shell Casings story
Down & the USMC
My first book — what is now No Joy — was originally titled Spent Shell Casings. Its subtitle ran 25 (and 5) Stories, and the reason was two-fold. For one, from the start, I knew the stories were going to have a lot to do with Marine Recon. 25 and 5 is a ritual in the Recon community. Before a Marine earns the title “Reconnaissance Man” they go through a grueling indoctrination phase. Usually at the end of some training evolution, when you’re already good and sugar-cookied or have just run ten miles with boots on, “25 and 5!” an instructor will demand. 30 simple pushups, and as the last 5 are being pushed, a hopeful yells out, “Wannabe, Wannabe, Wannabe, Wannabe, Wannabe Recon!”
I also, and wouldn’t you know it, ended up with 31 stories. What follows is the one that didn’t make the cut, though I’m happy it now gets to see the light of day.
Note that a light rewrite was given due to the draft having come out (wrapped in cobwebs) from a folder crypt. Nothing big: I just cut off the love handles, and honed in on a few things that didn’t deserve to be so hidden. Plus, in the decade that has passed since its creation, its creator has learned a thing or two about Microsoft Word.
To wit:
Down & the USMC
Right before I shipped off for boot camp in 2002, I bought Down II: A Bustle in Your Hedgerow. Down was and is one of my favorite bands. Their mix of all that is Southern with all that is Metal, the crashing drums, Phil’s iconic howls, the slow and trudging riffs; Down stands among the greatest acts to emerge from the Rock world, ever.
It was a blessing that I got to keep moments in that album as I went through basic training. Any music lover will tell you; be without songs for long enough and the world goes gray. But be without music while in boot camp—you will, as I did, experience rapturous joy when a government vehicle passes; jazz escaping from a cracked window. I remember being on a working party in some supply shed in Camp Pendleton once. A clerk had a radio on. Twangy country was playing. When no Marines were in sight, the Eminem of our group whispered to the rest of us recruits, “I don’t even like country…and dat shits soundin’ so good right now.”
Music is so often a landmark onto which we plant our memories. What song was playing at a certain moment. What shrill, hilarious lyric was sung by friends who have long since departed. Music. Memories. The band Down and the almighty Marine Corps, in the early 2000s, they had a way of coming at me as a package deal.
I kept fragments of Down with me while in boot camp, yes, and chief among them was their song “Dog Tired,” always playing in my head whenever I was starting to get good and smoked. Not just tired—but real tired—that home stretch of a PFT when you may have pneumonia but your DIs made your “malingering ass” run anyways. Dog tired!
Phil’s yell—that near but distant “Dog tired in the fast lane!!”
It pushed me.
I was never a jock. By boot camp, I never developed the same inner mechanisms that propelled a lot of my Recon brethren; men whom I was yet to meet. It remains a mystery what motivated some of my closest friends, guys whose outlooks and dispositions were very different than my own. For me at least, some form of masochism was there. Perhaps it still is. Back then, a song admitting to be “dog tired” was devoid of all machismo, that too-tough-to-feel-pain attitude I never really synced with. I had my own tactic; a sheer and utter admission of feeling miserable, of being vulnerable; then giving all anyway. This worked running past other recruits or humping the hills of Pendleton.
I need to go back a track, though. Before enlisting, I was living in Imperial Beach with my roommate; a punk rocker who’d come with me from Florida and looked a lot like a skinhead John Candy. When I set off for MCRD San Diego, he was in charge of all my possessions. The evening my recruiter picked me up, I had nothing but the clothes I was wearing, my wallet, and a toothbrush in a plastic bag.
My roommate sold my van (apparently with two bullet holes in its side door due to a night in Tijuana where he briefly deviated off Revolution Blvd). He was also cool enough to pack my stuff in a storage unit, thus mailing my mom the address.
When the day came, my family was there for graduation and they rented a car. Standing in my Charlies, fire-watch ribbon blazing, and no stripes on my sleeves, hours after receiving my Eagle, Globe, and Anchor, I opened the unit’s door to see my stuff boxed up, and a proud can of Steel Reserve atop a handwritten letter.
My former roommate congratulated me on becoming a Marine. When I’d finished reading I cracked open the beer, warmed thirteen weeks by Southern California, and chugged it down. I grabbed a gym bag next and picked some things I deemed mission-essential for boot leave. Among them: my CD player; Down II still inside.
***
Once back in Orlando, interestingly enough, my older cousin informed me that Down was playing at the House of Blues.
The House of Blues in Downtown Disney had long been where concerts went off. The first I saw was Slayer, where I clung to a rail at 116 pounds and at some point was choked by a girl dressed like a vampire. I recall how I would turn around and see the hellishness transpiring: a horde of men, all about 6’2’’ and 250 pounds, violently head-banging, and not helping up those who had fallen. And Tom Araya screamed, “Chemical Warfare!”
A year or so later I was seeing Suicidal Tendencies, then Rollins Band, then Danzig where, that night, a distant cousin got kicked out and went to jail, my closer cousin drank and I found him wobbling in a brand-new Satan’s Child t-shirt, and I’m pretty sure I got attacked by another chick for reasons that remain unclear. Our designated driver was one of “Satan’s child’s” friends; a 300-pound redneck with a penchant for late 70s punk, who tossed my zonked-out cousin into the passenger side of his S10 and told me to climb into the back. We had about an hour's ride. I crawled into the bed, rearranged trash and toolboxes, curled up, and eventually fell asleep.
Turned out, I was not the only one.
On some old road in deep orange country, I awoke to the feeling of cold wind. I’d wrapped myself in a hoodie, though enough time has passed that I can’t recall if I’d brought it with me or pulled one up out of the flotsam of the S10 truck bed. Either way, wind licked my face, and a semi truck’s horn was blaring. Still blaring. That was what had woken me!—not the wind, but a semi laying on its horn, and once it did it did not stop. Uuuuughnnnk! came out of a long and dim tunnel, or so it seemed as I was seeing that our truck had drifted into the other lane. A blinding wall of light was approaching. Awash in those oncoming high beams, our driver was asleep at the wheel. My cousin, an inert silhouette in the passenger seat, was no help. If I didn’t do something fast we were all dead. The windows were down, and because of that alone, I can write that next I reached around the driver’s side and punched the massive redneck in the side of his head. We veered right. The semi passed. And I was afraid for a time, regardless of having saved our almost-too-Florida lives, that I was going to be beaten for my left hook.
But that was a few years in the past by the time Down rolled around. And I was a man now, a Marine, a certified lifetaker and heartbreaker. No more was there such things as fear.
Tickets to the House of Blues were bought, for my favorite band beckoned.
Standing in line, looking back now, I can’t help but laugh and wish someone would have kicked my ass. I was wearing black jeans and Magnum boots: standard. However, I was also wearing a green skivvy shirt. I was standing at parade rest…too. At any given moment, it seemed, I was waiting for the doors to swing open and past security would walk the base sergeant major.
My cousin, no longer in a satanic shirt and not drunk yet, said in his lovable southern drawl, “Boy, you sure have been ta boot camp, haven’t ya.”
Affirmative.
Once inside, it was time to get beer. I was 19, but I would be god damned if I wasn’t going to have a brew, back in my hometown, with family, about to listen to the almighty Down. Plus, I was going to be in the jungle at night—looking for a fight, or under six feet of snow, putting on a show—I think I rated.
My cousin and I found a dark corner, and here we planted our flag. Down’s opening act was, of all things, a short movie. I don’t remember much about it, only that some stuff had to do with KISS. It didn’t take long for me to start feeling weird. One would have thought I may have started to feel out of place while out in that line, but for some reason, outside it had escaped me. Inside, looking around at all the fat, mop-head stoners who idolized a few guys with guitars; I felt a million miles away. This wasn’t a dig on the band. Who I was distancing myself from, with no conscious say in the matter, were the “fat bodies,” the “hippies,” all the other things my DIs had called us; those who slept late and had no “mind-body discipline.” I took a swig of a beer my cousin had bought me, and a bouncer instantly appeared.
I was yanked from our corner, where a veritable team of security scrutinized my arm for the missing 21+ wristband. Down had just come on. As I was being escorted out, I heard Phil growl “It is sooo damn good to finally be back in the Southhh.” As I was being shown the exit, I remember thinking, For you maybe.
Once outside, I found some bouncers who hadn’t participated in giving me the boot. I showed them my ticket stub and said I was looking for my cousin who was still in there, and that we needed to leave for a family emergency. Once back in I saw no one had missed a beat, not Down, not my cousin. It was like I’d never left. As my memory sees it, my cousin is rocking out, just now with a beer in each hand.
I slid back into our corner, this time behind him, hoping the shadows would conceal. I remember he handed me back my beer and he smiled. The second sip tasted even better than the first. I’d broken back in! A little self-confidence Jedi Mind Tricked door security. I’d been reunited as Down dug into “Ghosts of the Mississippi.” But right around the part where Phil goes “and more—and more—and more” I was bum-rushed and I remember clearly by who. It was three huge black bouncers this time, and one small Disney exec. The executive was Asian, I recall, and though he tried to scowl hard, on his chest was pinned a cartoonish Mickey-ears name tag. The second he opened his mouth I spit in his face.
I was to be arrested, but that went nowhere when the cops on sight happened to be former Marines. They told me I was to be making great sacrifices soon, and they let me off with a warning.
As I nestled up in a dank jacket, in the bed of my cousin’s truck, using an empty 2-liter as a pillow, I began to fall asleep. I thought about how my glob of spit just missed that guy’s head, and how much that had turned out to be a good thing. The concert raged on, but my night was through. Two bikers ended up parking next to the truck at some point. Seeing me pop up, they laughed and asked me what I was doing. I told them all that I’ve told you, and when I got to why I’d been spared a trip to jail, one biker grinned. He showed me his USMC tattoo, and said, “I was Semper Fi for a little while.”
Before too long the show would let out and my cousin would come back, and we would leave. Until then it was just me and the songs in my head. I don’t know if “Dog Tired” was among them, but I do know what lay ahead would bring that song, many times more.