Something like Christina.
It wasn’t quite as crazy an idea as it seems. When I was in my Latin intensive workshop four years earlier one of my classmates, Ted, had told me of a program they called ‘cryptology’. He’d taken it himself in the beautiful setting of Monterey, a high-tech language lab, where he learned Hungarian in a very short time.
Languages were my passion and so I took a bus to a recruitment center in Oakland. On this bus ride I ran into Christina, the beautiful German girl who sat next to me on our three-day cross-country bus trip. She gave me her number and address, told me she was single again and when I told her my plans she said she would really like to spend an evening with me before I went off to boot camp. I agreed.
At the recruitment center the young officers were all smiles to see me. I explained my background and what I wanted. They gave me an aptitude test and after that one of them bought me lunch across the street, telling me how happy they were to get a university graduate to enlist. A few days later I was back for a physical. A very old doctor listened to my heart, asked a few questions, checked my eyesight and passed me. The recruit officers said they’d never seen such a high score on the aptitude test. All that was left was paperwork. I could sign a contract the next day and be on my way. Goodbye long hair. But I was off to Christina’s first.
What is it with women and ‘goodbye bangs’? I mention this because it's happened to me several times, with different women. You know them as friends for years, and nothing more than a handshake elapses. But as soon as you’re about to go far away or into some peril, boom, it’s pants down and bedroom time and out go the lights.
This one I almost missed. Christina was a lovely, curly blond-haired woman with a chest, as Samuel Johnson would put it: ‘of considerable protuberance’. She had the largest and softest breasts it was my pleasure to ever lay hands on. From my three days beside her on the bus almost a year earlier I could tell they were melon-sized. So my thoughts and expectations that evening as I approached her door were inebriating.
At her nice apartment in Oakland I found a fine dinner in preparation, wine on the table and candles lit. But there were three of us. She shared the apartment, platonically, with a tall, skinny, bearded German fellow, several years our senior, a graduate student at Berkeley in philosophy. This was a problematic scene of dangerously conflicting passions, and almost my undoing.
The conversation started well out with the wine and dinner, very pleasantly, each of us sharing vignettes of our lives and interests. We talked and talked through dinner and then through coffee, moving from the table to the living room couch. Beside this couch, the side I unluckily chose, was a small bookshelf against the wall, within hand’s reach. Our conversations continued as we sipped our coffees, but when Christina stepped away to clear the table I couldn’t help but notice her roommate’s collection of Philosophy standards, some of which I recognized. When she returned to sit between us it was too late. I had one in my hand and our talk was now purely academic, between me and him. Systems were debated more books produced and references cited.
Christina, sitting silent for a long time and pretending to take interest, stood up and went to bed alone. But from her bedroom, every few minutes she’d call me to come join her, in a sweet, begging tone. Have you ever had a debate so lively and enlightening that you think you’re onto some momentous insight or epiphany? Well this was where I stood with her equally excited roommate, Christina calling out ever more plaintively. I kept replying that I was on my way, but we still rambled on. Finally, on the fifth or sixth insistent plea, I broke off and rushed to her bed and her warm bosom and arms. One epiphany was lost, but another found.
The next morning I said my 'goodbye' to her, never to see her again, and proceeded to the enlistment center ready to sign away several years of free will and intellectual dignity for the assurance of three meals a day and a bed. I was off to boot camp. But the period of boot camp for cryptologists was less than all the other classifications, half in fact, five weeks, because it was all brains and no brawn.
I was sitting at the table pen in hand when they told me one little hitch had come up. I could get any classification I wanted except cryptology, because I and my family were not American citizens, in other words, a security risk. Since this was the only thing I wanted from them, the only classification that had anything to do with my talents and interests, I saw immediately that they had nothing for me. I had no interest in guns and killing foreigners.
I stood up and said: ‘Sorry for your time’ and walked out the door, my long hair blowing in the wind, safe and sound.
I took the slow bus ride back to my place wondering about the life I had just missed, and where it might have led. But I felt a sense of relief, of escape, because I knew it wasn’t the path my soul and character wanted. It was an ‘expedient’ for money only, and one should never sell out one’s true aspirations for that. It was probably the most miserable life I could choose, the most regulated, anathema to my rebellious spirit. At Eddy’s I called my mother, told her of this decision to join, and then of the debacle. My sister Paddy, hearing of it and thinking I must be in terrible distress, quickly sent me money for a bus ticket home. So, with no other options I bought one. Thus ended my second sojourn to the Bay Area.
