#classic meta

[dodinaslesavage]

Dio - Hey Angel (1990)

[adriheavymetal]

A little late but happy birthday to The Legend Jimmy Page 🎸🎸🎸🎸🎸🎸🎸🎸🎸🎸🎸fucking good guitarrist ,👍🎸🎵🎤💙💞🎆🎍🎁🎊🎉🎇🎶🎆🎈🎂

[oracleofmefi]

My Dad The Vietnam Vet: "The HELL it did! This mother fucker will not STAND! Show me this machine!" He yelled.

Okay. My dad is a 'Nam vet. He was an officer in 5th and 7th Special Forces. Lt. Colonel. D. C. Christensen. When I was a kid the man was always bigger than life. But I suppose most kids feel that way about their dads. But in many ways he was really bigger. From a family of the west. A family of some real tough ranchers, farmers and hard scrabble Mormons used to scratching out a life in the wilderness. And he was in the Green Beret. So it's only now I realize my childhood was not typical.  I've told the story of eating iguana at Christmas when we were stationed in Panama. I've told the stories of how, when my family was stationed in Vietnam, I was conceived during a Vietcong mortar attack on the local theater thus predisposing me to behaving soft spot for agrarian Marxism and Ho Chi Min. But this story is after this larger than life man got back from the war. And he was broken. My father last tour in 'Nam the family got to spend living in Europe. In England.We were there before he got his last set of orders and he didn't want to uproot us. He knew the Army, and Nixon, was desperate. So he played them for all he was worth. Keeping us in the best off-base housing in a little village in England while he went and helped with the pullout of the Special Forces guys in 'Nam. When the war looked to be over the jig was up. He called us and told us the Army wanted us the hell out of there and back in the States. He would meet us in New Jersey and we would drive, another typical army family long cross continental drive, all the way to Denver. The Army wouldn't even pay for a through flight. We were used to this sort of thing. But I imagine my mother wasn't happy. Coordinating moving from over-seas three kids (two totally uncompromising teenagers and me, a little scrawny weirdo) and a dog and meeting up with the man she loved without so much as the guarantee of a roof over our heads. The man she had not seen in almost two years. But it was such a relief to know he was finally safe after dreaming , every single night while he was gone, that a bullet had found him. Or worse.  It's true. As a kid I dreamt about my dad nearly every single night while he was gone. Horrible dreams of death in the wet green places of the world. And sometimes I'd sleep with a picture becuase I couldn't remember his face sometimes. Anyway. When we finally got to the airport in the states my dad had been there for a couple weeks, actually. I've learned that was becuase he needed so much medical treatment. And he needed time to decompress. A thing they never told us until we were grown up. But my mom and us ids we hadn't seen him until that moment. It was weird. We had been so "typical" on the trip. Bickering. Petulant. But then you could feel the man presence at the gate. My sister, who'd dropped acid nearly every day of her senior year had become a serious problem child to point of even joining a cult briefly, was first to run to him and I couldn't see him. There were so many people. When you a kid all you see is legs. And then the crowd parted and clapped a little. My mom and my dad were kissing. A soldier and his wife. Kissing. Like high schoolers. But there was something. Something wrong. And when she let go and he bent down toward me I was a little afraid. The man I knew was so diminished. He was a skull set on top of stick placed inside a baggy dress uniform. His eyes were watery and so hollow. The pale blue of them glowed in the dark of the sockets. I could smell his Bay Rum aftershave over mildew. I could feel the rough sunburned skin of his face against me. His arms were iron. And my fear melted. "I got you a Robot in Hong Kong." He said. And out of his bad he pulled a the toy. And walked all five us to go get our dog out of quarantine. Two cars. The VW Van we shipped back from England and the American Motors Ambassador he bought from his "blood money." Two cars and a family of six. Inclusing Ralph, our spaniel. That was our caravan. There are many stories I could tell about that drive to Denver. (Like my dad liberating our dog himself— regardless of the official quarantine for shipping pets. And nobody stopped him going back to the pet shipping area. And he called "Ralph!" only twice before our dog's distinctive howl brought my dad right to him and he pulled open the crate bare handed and walked the dog out the door without a leash or so much as signing a form. Nobody was gonna fuck with him.) But I'm gonna skip ahead. He was not well. He would witch and jump and the slightest sound. He could only drive a few hours at a time and he'd get confused and would need to go into the back of the VW van and sleep. He had terrible fevers and would yell in his sleep. When we got to Denver my dad had a couple of months before he started his job and the Rocky Mountain Arsenal. His new less stressful job helping America prepare for thermonuclear war. It was big of the Army to give him a couple of months down time. We had standing orders. If dad leaves the house alert mom no matter where she was. But he never left the house. He spent most of is in the basement of our house on Hudson Street in Denver, sleeping int he cool dark. Occasionally we'd see him in his bathrobe, like a ghost, awake just long enough to grab some food out of the fridge. Or sometimes he would soak in the tub for a couple of hours. Until the water would get so cold he would be blue. He's sit in the freezing water. Staring. Until my mom would gently bring him round and help him back to bed. But he'd always get up in the middle of the night and pace the house. And then go to the basement to sleep during the day. Except one day. It was the fourth of July. My mother told us to look out for him. To remind him of what day it was and there was gonna be fireworks. She had warned the nieghbors. A couple of days previous a neighbor kid shot off a bottle rocket over our garage while we were watching TV. All I remember is my dad running in grabbing my mother over his shoulder and throwing her down on top of us and pulled the couch over on all five of us while dog barked. That was just a sample. My mom had gone and collected an array of tranquilizers. Which he took by the fist full. With whiskey. It made his eyes swim around in his head. And it made him deliriously happy.  He would sometimes dance little jigs in the kitchen with the dog or who ever was handy. And sing randomly from musicals like Oliver or Paint Your Wagon. "Eyeeeeeee Wazzzz buh-orrrnnn under a wah-drenn Starrr!" At the top of his lungs and happy as a clam. He would give me my allowance. 10 times per day. We'd shoot baskets for hours on end. Him in his bathrobe and cowboy boots. But it was near the fourth of July. And then a firecracker would go off. And he rush through the house to find a bomb shelter. Or to look for his war kit. Some times when there was a couple of bangs he dive behind a couch and from behind it would bark orders at me and my friends,while we sat watching cartoons, to "quit fucking around and start returning fire!" Luckily my mom had had the for-thought to hide his ammo and clips. This sounds cruel. But honestly, just being a kid, I thought this was hilarious. So I'd bring friends over to watch. Unfortunately my our closest neighbor kid was Micheal Yim. An Asian kid. My dad would occasionally speak to him in Vietnamese. "I'm Korean." Micheal would say, annoyed. My dad would reply "Wrong war." One other thing we would do is just say "Nixon." And no matter what room in the house he was in he would yell "GOD DAMNED NIXON!" No matter how many times you did it, he would yell back, like an angry echo, "GOD DAMNED NIXON!" We'd do this until my mother would herd us out side. "Jesus Wept! Don't you have anything better to do." The fourth passed with only a couple more incidents. But through it I had amassed quite a war chest of ill-gotten allowance money. And I was living large. I go across the street to a little drug store, Oscars Drugs, and buy cokes and cookies for everybody in the neighbor hood (there is related story of years earlier of me finding a large sum of cash under my parent bed — my dad was acting paymaster for a few months— that I then treated all the neighborhood girls to ice cream from the ice cream man). The coke machine was a central gathering point on hot days. All the kids would lean their bikes next to it and we would drink our cokes while shot the shit or we dared each other to run across the lava-hot black top of the drugstore parking lot barefoot. This coke machine was kind that had bottles that you pulled out. Bottled coke was so much better. One day I put in my quarter. Nothing. The bottle would pull free. No biggie. I was LOADED. So I put in another. Wouldn't budge. So I put in another. Nada. I was out of quarters. This was common with this particular machine. We had complained to the drug store but he had ignored us. So I said let's go get some more money from my dad. So we rode back home. All the meds my dad had been on had run their course and at this point started to conflict with each other in his brain. It being the early seventies he compensated with more booze. My dad sat in the basement watching foot ball with the sound off. We came running down stairs and I worked up some tears. "Dad. The coke machine stole my money!" He looked at me and his face just began to vibrate. Vibrate red. "WHAT!"  "The c..coke machine at Oscars stole me quarter and..." "The HELL it did! This mother fucker will not STAND! Show me this machine!" He yelled. My friends started to back away and run up the stairs. You could almost hear the gaskets blowing in my dads noodle. "Uh... the one just across the street at Oscars!" "SON OF A BITCH!" And he was off. It was like all the injustice of the world was at that drug store and had to be confronted. He was out the door before I could get up the stairs. I heard it slam. We had standing orders to get mom. But there was dad. In his bathrobe and cowboy boots marching to war with the Coke Machine across the street. He had escort of neighborhood kids n bikes flanking him. My plan had backfired. "MOM!" She came out from the backyard where she had been hanging laundry or something. And I just pointed out the window to my dad had now just about to reach the corner by the drug store. "Oh dear" She said. I ran after him. But by the time I rounded the corner my father was already in middle of landing dozens of punches to the coke machine. While he swore at it and told it that one way or another he was gonna get his kids quarter back and why not make easy on everybody and just hand over the coke. Then he started with the drop kicks. He'd run at the machine and kick it with his whip thin skeletal white legs. Oddly my greatest fear was that the neighbor hood would catch a glimpse of his testicles through his robe and loose boxer shorts. Apparently they were more transfixed by the ever escalating violence he was perpetrating on the Cocoa Cola Company. Punch. Punch. Kick. Kick. And occasionally head butt. My mom got there. About the same time as the cops and the drug store owner. My mom spoke gently to him. The cops just stood back as one of the nieghbors informed them that my dad was a 'Nam Vet. They just stood back like " Hey. We're good." Waiting for my father to gas out. However the coke machine broke before that happened. And my dad started pulling out bottles and handing them to all the little kids who had gathered. "YAAAAAAAY! Mr. CHRISTENSEN! YAAAAYYYY!" They yelled. To them he was the coolest folk hero ever. Some change spilled out. My dad picked up a coin and gave it to me. "Buy them from some place else next time." And he walked home, a skeleton in a bathrobe and cowboy boots, with the entire neighborhood in awe. The cops just let him go. My mom had her checkbook already out.

posted by tkchrist at 6:10 on November 12, 2008