Going the Distance Page 3

  When I fell asleep, we were in Europe. When I woke up, we were in Texas. That was how fast my life changed. We switched concourses and planes in Dallas, and I instantly knew I was back in the States. I had thought I’d known the difference when I was away, but as we walked through the crowded terminal, it was blatantly obvious to me. People were more insular, closed off, lost in their own little world. I understood now how foreigners could see us as rude in comparison. We waited in the USO lounge for our connecting flight, and I could tell my dad was feeling it too.

  It’s an odd sensation being a stranger in your own country. I noticed there were more than a few good-looking girls walking through the airport. My dad noticed more than a couple had stared at me. “You don’t look fifteen,” he said once we’d grabbed some food and settled in front of the TV.

  I was in midbite of a hot dog and looked over at him. “Is that a bad thing?” I asked, trying to swallow the mouthful whole.

  “Depends on who you ask,” he said with a smug smile.

  “I’m asking you.”

  He looked back and, though he was obviously having fun with me, as always there was a deadly serious tone in his voice. “Ask the guy who got a girl pregnant at seventeen and had to join the Marines to support her, and he’d say no. Ask the guy who is amazed at the man his son is becoming, and he’d say yes.” He took a drink as my mind tried to wrap itself around the compliment. “Ask your father, and he’d say you’re too young for sex.”

  He laughed when I blushed.

  We boarded a much smaller plane for the last leg of our flight. Unlike the massive jets used on international flyways, the plane we clambered into was a two-prop baby; I wondered if it could even take off. The flight from Germany had been packed; there were only five people including us on this flight. I was too tired to realize that the plane’s size and passenger load were the first warning signs about where we were headed. I adjusted my seat belt and looked over at my dad. “Where are we going again?”

  “Corpus Christi. They have a naval base there,” he explained.

  “Is it a big town?” I asked.

  “Define big.”

  “Like Norfolk?” I offered. He shook his head no. “Like K Bay?” Another no. “Like Jacksonville?” He thought for a moment and then said, “Yeah, like that.”

  “How big is the base?” I asked as we prepared for takeoff. And then I quickly asked the real question. “How many kids go to school there?”

  My dad didn’t even look over at me as he replied, “You aren’t going to school on base. I enrolled you in a civilian school.”

  As the plane accelerated, I felt my stomach drop, and it had nothing to do with the motion.

  If you’ve gone to public high school, I’m sure you have no idea where my reaction came from. After all, you were used to walking into a strange school with sometimes thousands of kids who didn’t know you. You thought it normal. You were raised to understand how to talk to new kids, get to know them, and then eventually make friends out of some of them. It had always been something of a mystery to me how other kids did it. On base we were all like prisoners of war and had no choice but to know each other. It didn’t matter what you wore or how you talked, because in the end we were all stuck there on base until our parents got transferred somewhere else. It made for socializing quickly, but at the same time you didn’t make very deep friendships, since we all knew it was just for now anyway. Joshua and his crew were the closest I had ever gotten to friends, and look how that turned out. I was the only base kid who played basketball at the gym, which meant I got to see the rest of the team every practice or game, but after that I headed back to base while they headed back to their homes in Stuttgart.

  I had never had friends, and that fact dawned on me while we were making the hop to Corpus Christi.

  I know it sounds stupid, but when everyone else you know is in the same boat, you don’t think about how deep the water is until you fall overboard. A new school, a new team, a new everything was just about as terrifying a thought as I could imagine. What if I dressed wrong? What if I talked wrong? What if I was a nerd? What if they could tell I’d once fooled around with a guy? As the plane chugged its way toward Corpus, I felt a very real panic start to well up in my body. What was already a small plane became microscopic, and though I was taller than anyone on it, I thought the seats were shrinking under me. This is what Alice must have felt like when she ate the cake, the entire world falling away as she sat completely still.

  “You okay?” my dad asked, noticing my hands were now claws holding fast to the armrests. I looked over at him, trying to keep my cool about me, but from the way his eyes got wide, it was pretty obvious I failed at that. “Danny, what’s wrong?”

  “Nothing,” I said in a very small voice.

  He continued to stare at me, which made me even more nauseous than the turbulence. My dad was a person who was constructed from different types of strength. If he had a weakness, I’d never seen it. So to me showing any fear in his presence was the equivalent of letting him down. But only a blind man could have missed how I had grown pale and was sitting there shivering in a cold sweat. He put one hand over mine and leaned in. “Are you scared about school?”

  My voice actually cracked as I responded with “Who’s scared?”

  His eyes grew concerned, and I knew I had failed. He could tell I was silently screaming. “Danny, why would you be scared of high school?” I didn’t have an answer to that, but after a few seconds he amended it with “Well, no, I can see why, but you have to know you’ll be fine, right?” I looked at him as if he had started babbling in Latin. He smiled and explained. “Danny, look at you. You are taller than me, for Christ’s sake. You are in fantastic shape. Hell, I had a friend ask me the other day what unit you were with. Trust me when I say that you’ll be beating girls off with a stick, and there is no way you don’t make the basketball team. And do you know what that means?” I shook my head. “It means that you’re a jock, and trust me, jocks do not get picked on.”

  “I don’t feel like a jock,” I said honestly, and I didn’t. Jocks seemed full of themselves and their abilities in a way I was never comfortable with. Sure, I was good at basketball, but there was always going to be someone better, which meant I needed to try harder. Just because I could dribble a ball didn’t mean I was better than anyone. I mean, who the hell would care? No one on base had seemed to, and if anyone was impressed in town, it had never gotten back to me. I suddenly realized I didn’t want to be a jock. I didn’t want people to like me for the sport I played or how tall I was. If people were going to like me, I wanted them to like me, not my abilities. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to beat girls off with a stick, but I do know I didn’t want them running toward me just because of basketball.

  “Danny, you’re a worrier; you always have been.” He smiled, and his eyes seemed to focus on something far away. “Your mother was like that. She could get herself worked into a frenzy over almost nothing.” He looked back at me. “And I’ll tell you the same thing I told her. Things work out the way they want to. We can push and pull and fight every second of our lives, but there will always be things that are out of our hands. All you can do is the best you can and let the chips fall where they fall.”

  “What did Mom say?” I asked, marveling at even this little bit of information. I tried to stay away from broaching the subject of Mom with him in fear I might open an old wound that would then refuse to close. For him to offer her up as an example was noteworthy in itself.

  “She’d say ‘fuck off, John,’ but she calmed down most of the time.”

  I burst out laughing. The thought of my mom telling my dad to fuck off made her seem that much more real to me for a moment. We sat there aching for the hole she had left in our lives, both of us happier than words could express that the other one was there with him. “You think it’ll be okay?” I asked.

  He nodded. “Trust me, you’ll be fine.”

  I didn’t believe him, but I did
feel better afterward.

  When we landed, I found myself more than underwhelmed by the airport.

  You have to understand when you move around as much as we did, the only first impression some places got to make was their airport. For example, O’Hare is a city unto itself. There is a mini mall in the center of it with a bookstore and a toy store, which had always entranced me as a kid. Because it’s so big, it’s ridiculously organized and has about fourteen different ways to get around in. San Diego International has a pace all its own. It’s clean, friendly, and overall a pleasure to visit, in my opinion. Even DFW is a nice place with about two dozen different little carts to buy magazines and munchies on the way to each terminal.

  Corpus’s airport looked like they were still building it.

  There was a main terminal that we entered through, and as we walked by to get our luggage, there was another side terminal that seemed to be just tacked on as an afterthought. The walls made the entire place look like a doctor’s office, and I found it just completely unappealing. And this came from a guy who grew up thinking military housing was okay. There were no people wandering around, making it look less like an airport and more like a bus stop. I could see by the expression on my dad’s face, the “whelm” he was feeling was less than he’d expected.

  “Maybe it’s an old airport,” he said as we watched ten bags come off the flight, six of them belonging to us.

  “Maybe we missed the Rapture while we were in the air,” I said quietly back.

  He let loose a sudden laugh before he realized, in the stark silence of the airport, that he sounded like he was shouting.

  We opted to take a taxi to the base instead of calling a military shuttle. We usually did this. It gave us a chance to put some eyes on the town we were never going to see once we were on base. Except things were different this time. I was going to be living there. Actually living there. Going to school, meeting people, making friends? I’d never looked at a city with those criteria in mind, so I sat up and looked out the window in eager anticipation.

  I had never been so let down in my life.

  The entire town seemed bisected by a main freeway that cut through what looked like a series of small stores on either side. This couldn’t be the main part of town. There is just no way this constituted the heart of a town. We passed five exits, and then the stores started to become sparser and sparser, until, by the seventh exit, there was nothing.

  That was it?

  I stared at my dad and tried not to look like I was freaking too much, but he just stared back at me for a few seconds and then shrugged, which was Dad for “Sorry.” I sank into the seat, suddenly missing Germany more than ever. There was a special exit for the naval base from the freeway, and as we made the slow turn, the area around the base was revealed, and that was the moment I knew.

  I was completely fucked.

  There was nothing even close to an actual place I’d want to live in lining the road that connected to the base entrance. It looked worse than you could imagine. There were parts that really looked like they were one strong wind from falling down. This was the part of town that parents would warn their kids about visiting, and the kids would actually listen. Now my dad wouldn’t meet my eyes, and it was confirmed.

  We were completely fucked.

  The base was nice. It was big, with not a lot of buildings around. My dad had explained to me that this was a training facility for pilots, and once upon a time it had been a military hospital. As I looked closer, I could see a lot of the buildings looked closed up, making me wonder exactly what was still working on the base.

  The next three days were incredibly boring.

  We got moved into base housing, and I was issued a new ID card that would let me on the base and able to shop at the Navy Exchange, or NEX for short. Most of our furniture had been stored when we went to Germany, so seeing our stuff was like buying it new all over again when we unpacked. I began emptying my stuff and ended up reading a ton of old comics I had stored away when my dad came in and bitched at me.

  “Seriously?” he said, standing in the doorway wiping the sweat off his forehead. I looked up, and he gestured for me to get off the bed. “It’s not ‘open a box and then read comics.’ It’s ‘unpack your damn room.’”

  “I’m resting,” I said, hiding my smile behind the comic.

  “You do know I will take you over a knee, taller or not,” he threatened.

  “Big talk,” I said, faking a yawn. “From a short man.”

  I looked over, and I saw the one eyebrow arch too late. I threw the comic at him as he lunged, both hands beginning to tickle me. Let me tell you, if you ever feel you can talk smack to your dad, make sure you are in no way ticklish. My dad had hands that should have been registered as deadly weapons so any and all kids would know how dangerous he was. You’d think being skinny as a rail would not make me that sensitive, but you’d be so wrong it’s sick. My dad would just look at me and make me laugh because I knew what was coming next. It was a humbling moment that made me remember no matter how tall I might get, my dad would always kick my ass.

  He had me begging him to stop almost instantly. At the thirty-second mark, I would have told him nuclear secrets if I possessed them. At forty-five seconds, I might have agreed to kill someone if I didn’t know them personally. “You going to unpack your room?” he asked with real glee in his voice. I nodded quickly, though at this point, I would have agreed to paint the house and detail his Jeep to get free. “And no fucking around reading comics?” I agreed to that and was pretty sure I would have burned them in the center of my room if he would stop. “Hurry up, because we need to get to the mall to buy you some new clothes for school.” Again I agreed, not sure what I was agreeing to until his words penetrated.

  “W-what?” I cried, trying not to laugh hysterically.

  He stopped. The smile on his face made it clear he was more than satisfied he had this power over me. “You heard me. New clothes if you can get this crap unpacked.”

  There was an afterimage of me on my bed as I was already running around my room unpacking boxes like The Flash. I didn’t even notice he had walked out of the room. I was too busy working. Within twenty minutes the boxes were empty, and my room was… well, it was my room. When I walked out, he was sitting in the living room flipping through the comic I had thrown at him, ignoring me in a pretty bad way. “You ready?” I asked, putting my shoes on.

  “Yeah, when I’m done with this,” he said holding up the comic.

  I saw him laugh when I sighed and sat on the couch waiting.

  “Dad!” I complained after an hour, which was probably in actuality two minutes. He put the comic down, and we walked outside.

  I had forgotten my dad’s Jeep and how much I wanted it when he eventually bought another car. It was a black ragtop that just screamed coolness in a way I will never be able to explain to someone else. I always felt the Jeep was like the brother I never had, because I know we were both fighting for my dad’s love.

  There were days I’m pretty sure the Jeep won.

  We headed past the line of crack houses on the way to the freeway, and again we didn’t say a word about them. This was not the place we’d thought it would be, but as with everything that had come before in our lives, we had little choice over it. You have to understand that I was as much under the military’s whim as my dad was, and complaining about it did nothing but make me miserable. This was my life. My very first memories were on a military base. I’d never known any other way of living. I knew on the edge of my thoughts that this time our move was more about me than my dad, but that didn’t make being stuck here any better.

  I wondered idly if my dad resented me for getting us dumped here.

  If I was sure this town was not what we were expecting from the freeway, it was solidified when we got to the mall. There’s a mall in Waukegan, Illinois that is so big you can fit two normal-sized malls inside it, easy. During Christmas, it’s so packed that the population of
the mall is larger than most small cities. In San Diego there were three different malls I’d loved to go to when I was a kid even if I wasn’t going to get to buy something. From the outside, this mall looked more like two big stores with a couple of smaller stores connecting them. When we got inside, it was exactly what it looked like from the outside.

  There were more people than I expected, which was a start.

  The stores were a little different, though I saw a Spencer’s and a Hot Topic as well, which was cool, I guess. I was so busy taking everything in that I missed the two girls passing by us who checked me out and giggled as I walked by. My dad elbowed me and gestured to them once they were past. I craned my head behind me so quickly that I tripped over my own feet, almost eating it right then and there. The girls laughed again while I blushed and tried not to kill myself walking.

  “Yeah, you’re a hideous beast,” my dad said under his breath. I elbowed him as I tried not to look back again.

  When we’d walked into the center of the mall, I looked around, trying to take it all in. It wasn’t much, but I had to admit I kind of liked it. There was a carousel in the middle with a few kids crawling over it, which I thought was sort of cool. I saw a bookstore next to an Abercrombie, and I knew everything was going to be okay.

  The next day he took me to the school to sign me up for classes. The semester had been in session for a month, so I was already behind the curve a little, but my dad didn’t think it was going to affect me. People stared at us as we walked through the halls. It was obvious this was a pretty small town, which meant a lot of these people had known each other for a long time. No doubt that was going to make a difficult situation a thousand times harder. I had opted for faded jeans with a hoodie over a black T-shirt—casual garb, I had thought, but from looking around, I could tell I was overdressed. It wasn’t what I was wearing as much as where I had bought them.

  I didn’t see anyone else decked out in A&F like me, and I wondered if I had made the first mistake of what no doubt would be many to come. My dad was filling out forms when I tugged on his sleeve. “I don’t feel well,” I whined as another couple of people walked by, staring into the office at me.