Mail Call

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Mail Call

“You’re a disgusting fat slob. Sound off like you got a pair, you

useless, grabasstic pile of civilian dog shit.”--R. Lee Ermey.

In 1966, during Navy boot camp,

I stood at Mail Call

becoming a chunk of driftwood

that others stepped over & on,

not noticing my empty hands,       or mile-off stare;

                                            still seeing my mother

                                            baking bread & cinnamon rolls,

                                            cooking fiery chili slowly all day,

                                            waxing a thousand square feet

                                            of hardwood floors, & folding all

                                            of our laundry & putting it in our drawers

before she bathed,

            & dressed up like she was getting ready

                         for a date; make-up, jewelry, perfume,

                                      every afternoon, to please,

                                                                 to greet

                                                                 to genuflect for

                                        my asshole stepfather--a perfect 

                           conglomerate of Archie Bunker & Stanley Kowalski,

               who looked like Tony Curtis, dark & handsome--

her third husband,            another loser,

                                         another ignorant Lothario,

                                         another felon,

                                         another batterer, but

                she really was in love with this one,

                with his muscular body & tattoos,

                       his James Dean 1950 black Mercury fastback, &

                       his Brando leather motorcycle jacket & aviator sunglasses,

before, of course, she found out he had cheated on her regularly

& had been raping my little sister since she was twelve.

I did receive a few letters from my grandfather & my sister, & my girlfriend,

who was using my absence as a catalyst to break up with me during that

13 gut-wrenching weeks of boot training before Viet Nam, standing alone

& invisible midst the colorful chatter spilling out & clogging the room from

those lucky boys whose mothers had written them, & God help me, during

that dark time part of me became blind, had amnesia, standing as a statue

covered in bird shit with folded arms, with lowered gaze, with ridiculous

expectations, convincing my self that if I pretended hard enough, wished

with unbridled enthusiasm, & focused with all my soul on my mother’s face,

that somehow, maybe, miraculously a loving letter from her would actually

appear, but the troll on my right shoulder was eager to point out that

my pathetic pretense was 100 days deep in fallacious misplaced 

moronic bloody lying hope--because another part of me had watched

her die three months before I had spent my June birthday as a boot,

turning 22 silently, without detection, & I could no longer recall her

beautiful face--all I could visualize was the cancer, the watermelon-

sized tumor in her uterus, leaving her frail body emaciated, her mother-

bones poking out of her paper-thin skin, a beauty contestant in Dachau,

dead at 39, so riddled with tar-black carcinogens that my grieving

stepfather had no funeral, just had her cremated in private, he & her

urn & a case of beer.

I now use his name;

adopted as mother’s wish;

millstone & penance.   

Glenn Buttkus

Posted over on dVerse Poets Pub "Poetics"