If, as has been suggested, life is a box of chocolates, the following stories describe what I found in mine.
I do, however, warn any gleaner of these pages that my family usually admonishes the children to "not let Uncle Gordy tell his stories until after we've eaten," or in some circles, "until after we've prayed."
THE LIMO-SCENE
The Army gave me a vacation once, so my fiancée and I flew to Seattle. My brother had happily agreed to meet us at the airport and to drive us home.
The girl was a nurse I had met during the Vietnam War. She was fancy and from a sheltered upper-class Midwest home.
With high expectations of having a wonderful time, we emerged from the plane.
In a short while we found my brother waiting near the luggage claim door in a beat-up, smoke-belching Dodge station wagon.
Trying to cover my disappointment, I put on a smiling face and opened the car door for my future wife.
She hesitated, and then I looked inside the wreck.
The car had no seats.
Only unanchored apple boxes sat rattling on the floor.
My brother sat on his own crate behind the steering wheel and, smiling without malice, suggested we sit on the other two.
Sitting in the back of that cavernous can straddling skittering apple crates wasn't exactly the tunnel of love. The girl never openly complained, but then, we never married.
MALPRACTICE
I never quite completed the transition from being a part of a war one day, then an innocent civilian the next. The viciousness with which we can kill, hurt and hate each other still haunts me. And when I hear politicians rouse people for another war, their words become an emetic.
However, my first days post-uniform were truly wonderful. I had the love of my life at home. But the stench of human hypocrisy, including my own, soon found me.
I'd go to church with the girl and her friends and listen to golden words. Priests and preachers therein would plead, "Love One Another," while I steeped in requited hatred for my fiancée's nearby male friend.
Then the religious leaders would go into a yarn about people being the best thing God created.
If that was true, and I know it's not, I would sue Him for malpractice.
NO FLAG ON MY GRAVE
I have never understood how a war veteran can return from the killing fields, immediately jump into stuporous American consumerism, then go to a Veterans of Foreign Wars lodge and cry in a beer about how or why his foxhole buddy died.
Which of the two is dead?
If I was a war dead sitting in the Great Beyond, decorated, and full of holes, I would get off my lofty perch, come down and kick my old buddy's butt.
How dare he waste his life, and therefore my death, and not even try to experience the plethora of yet unseen, unfelt, unlearned wondrous things in life!
And if he came around on Memorial Day and put a flag on my grave, I'd jump out of my tomb and stick it up his ass.
A tear in a beer and a flag from Wal-Mart will never amend for the greatest of sins: a wasted life.
And it's a more grievous sin to waste two.
* * *
My fiancée and I broke off our engagement. Distraught, I bought a motorcycle and headed out of town. Three stories from that ride follow:
WHISTLE BRITCHES
In tiny towns you are scarred for life by any personal oddity.
I stopped once to buy some smokes in a little store along the road. The old man behind the counter, eyeballing my chopper, said "I ain't sellin' no goddamn hippie no cigarettes."
The owner of the shop came out of the back office and yelled, "Make the sale, Whistle Britches!"
I later asked the owner about the clerk's odd name.
"Oh," he said, "Clyde farted like a mule when he was a kid and the name stuck."
FRIED EGG SANDWICH
Getting hungry in the early afternoon one day, I pulled into a small café. I asked the dried-up waitress if I could have two eggs over easy with a side of wheat toast.
The wench snarled at my long hair and beard and said, "It's too late for breakfast but you can have a fried egg sandwich."
(I later saw the same scene in the film "Easy Rider," but I encountered the identical situation.)
THE FRUIT STAND
On a hot summer night, I was riding my Harley chopper near New Orleans so I could catch a boat to Africa. I was trying to outrun a sad romance and several ghosts.
As the bike roared through the Louisiana bayous in the early morning, a sudden rain poured down and soaked me. Up ahead on
the side of the road, an open fruit stand unveiled itself under the steady rain.
I decided to stop there and rest a while, so I applied my brakes to stop but flipped the bike instead.
Young and strong, I threw the bike off
and looked to see the damage.
My legs were torn but no bones were broken.
I lay in the ditch, caught my breath and wiped the blood from my face. The clamshells, instead of gravel, used on Gulf State roads
had ripped me up pretty good.
After a while, I crawled over to the fruit stand.
Over the counter, staring into the night, slumped a fat man half-asleep.
From my prone position in front of him, I asked to use the phone.
I heard a snort and saw his massive head poke over me.
He saw me covered with blood and clamshells, and he paled a bit.
I repeated, "I need to use the phone to call the meat wagon."
After a long pause and speaking so very slowly, he said, "Wwwweeelll ... that's not authorized."
I was hurting and getting angry, so I yelled, "I just had a wreck out here."
Again, after a very long pause, he said, "Oh ... that must have been the noise I heard a while ago."
"Now can I use the phone?"
"Wwwweeeellllllll, I'll be right back."
He waddled off and I started going into shock. Then, an eon later, I heard him say, "I reckon you can use the phone now."
A cabin stood behind the stand. Into it I crawled where it felt like 30 below. Four air conditioners were going full blast and I saw my breath fog up.
I grabbed the frozen phone but then I reconsidered. I called an uncle who lived nearby instead of calling the medics.
The hospitality of my extended family patched me up again, but the guy who ran the fruit stand is probably only halfway through telling this story to an equally slow-talking friend.
I picked clamshells out of my behind for about six weeks at my uncle's house in Baton Rouge. Then I wandered over to a Mercedes dealer, traded my Harley for a new car and drove back to Seattle.
I had a variety of hospital jobs during my early college years....
'TIL DEATH DO US PART
One day in the pathology lab I answered the phone and the woman on the other end said, "My husband died yesterday and you're supposed to do an autopsy on him today.
Can I come and watch?"
THE PATIENT IN ROOM 112
The graveyard shift on hospital wards
was always the most disagreeable.
Primarily, people weren't made to work at night, so moods were mostly sour. Secondly, some of the patients would lie awake and ponder pains.
One old man in Room 112 had been a constant pest. For weeks he had been hitting the nurses' call button every 15 minutes throughout the 11-7 shift.
One night, the nurses, all female, were exasperated. They told me to have a man-to-man talk with the guy. I was to tell 'em to buck up and not cry so often for help.
Well, I went to his room, ranted the rules and he was quiet for almost three hours. Then the old man's frantic calls restarted.
Slow to respond, I went to his door and said, "Mr. ----, remember our little talk?"
He didn't.
He was dead.
The same fate, I'm sure, awaits me.
A year after the New Orleans wreck, I bought another motorcycle and took off for Africa again. But this trip was short. I stopped in the Queets Indian village, 60 miles north of Aberdeen, Wash., had a cup of coffee and stayed five years....
OPEN SEASON
My best friend in the village was the late Chet Pulsifer, an older Indian who had fought in Europe during World War II.
One day I walked passed his house and saw two elderly white men leave in a hurry.
Chet was in his front yard, so I asked, "What happened?"
"I made 'em mad."
"How?"
"We were talking about the war and they asked me why, since Indians couldn't be drafted, I had joined the Army and fought in the War. I told 'em I couldn't pass up theopportunity. It was open season' on white guys."
LOVE ONE ANOTHER
John Shale was a big Queets Indian. One day the Jehovah Witnesses swarmed through the village during their semiannual sweep through the Quinault Indian Reservation.
A pert little female Witness pounded on John's door. John answered, took the initial evangelistic blast, then calmly asked, "You Christians believe in loving one another?"
"Of course," said the smiling little pixie.
Hearing the positive reply, John scooped her up in his arms and gave her a big kiss.
Her shriek could be heard in two counties and she ran from the village, leaving her Bible spinning on John's porch.
The villagers laughed about John's "conversion" for weeks.
NEAR LETHAL COMPASSION
One day I sat in a boat in the Queets River with an Indian while he gathered salmon from his net.
The salmon were beautiful, like 50-pound diamonds, and they flopped on the floor of the boat for a long time.
Not wanting to see such exquisite things suffer, I picked up a big club and started to knock them in the head.
Well, my aim was off.
I busted out the bottom of the boat instead.
That was the only time I saw an Indian get extremely excited.
We barely made it to shore.
Copyright by Gordon Peck