Continued from “The bank Czech”
Part 2
When recalling memories from 40 years ago, as I frequently do on david deconstructed, it can be difficult to nail down temporal procession. It’s easy for me to remember events and instances, scenes, but I find it virtually impossible to recall the specific timeline of the period in question. What happened before and after? The best I can do when building a timeline is to use extraneous events that are timestamped with precision, ie, birthdays, holidays, new jobs, leaving jobs, and car accidents. In this way, I use such calendar landmarks to triangulate when other, less vivid events took place.
For instance, when it comes to James, I am at a loss.
I know for a fact that he and Frank overlapped during the time I worked at my bank mailroom job, but I don’t remember if he started before or after Frank. I suspect he started before but I could be completely wrong about that. There’s a good chance he started after, but I do remember that once again our group was heading out for our morning break when we saw James sitting in the lobby, waiting to be brought up to the mailroom for his first day on the job.
He was the new employee that day, a tall and thin older (than us) Black man. He wore a dark leisure suit but it was 1983 or 1984 so even though such threads were not normal, they were not bizarre. He was a very dark shade of Black, and wore thick horn-rimmed glasses and very wide lapels that were a shade of yellow, if I remember correctly.
Whereas I thought Frank was a Mexican illegal alien when I first saw him in the lobby on his first day, I thought James was a swarthy African immigrant. He was like a foreign lifeform here, an alien substrate leaking into our young slacker crew. I don’t recall his introduction but he effortlessly blended into our group, the elder grouch.
At the time, I was not aware this dude had some serious emotional and mental baggage. He was maybe 40ish and had served two tours in Vietnam, the second being voluntary. I was astounded when he told us that. The horrors of Apocalypse Now were still freshly imprinted in my mind and I couldn’t comprehend that anyone would go back after surviving a tour.
That said everything you needed to know about James. He had grimy, shiny skin that, because of its color, seemed murky and swampy. His skin had a soiled glimmer. He smelled vaguely of shit but in such a vague, barely perceptible way that it wasn’t entirely offensive, but neither was it endearing. James was a simmering pool of PTSD and 1000-yard-stare slow boiling delirium. He was quiet and I didn’t think of it then so I never asked him how many people he killed in the war. That was not the world my mind inhabited in those days. In the mid-80s he was just a shuckin’ and jivin’ throwback, a Motown aficionado with stories to tell and repressed homicidal rage to dispel. James never talked about himself or his background. He didn’t speak about Vietnam much, even when pressed. He smoked a lot and in those days, he was free to smoke in the mailroom, and fuck yeah, he did. He smoked those thin Black man cigs and was prone to moodiness, or should I call it “silentness?”
I think James transferred to a full-time weekday shift later on and once I was working during the day for some reason and he lurched in at his clock-in time, grouchy and anguished as shit, a cigarette in his mouth. He very loudly told everybody in the mailroom to not say shit, to leave him the fuck alone, he didn’t feel like talking. Out of the blue, he just walked in and yelled that angrily at everyone, like a battlefront. We took it in silently while glancing timidly at each other. James went about his simmering way, and no one dared talk to him that day.
It was the killing fields, man. James didn’t leave the war behind, as I would find out one day.
Cont’d on Casual Casualty of War