Excerpts from Chapter 9 “THE JOURNEY”

TO MY MOM, HAPPY MOTHER’S DAY  

Like most fourteen to eighteen-year-old boys today, my behavior could have easily been fashionably, but incorrectly, diagnosed as Attention Deficit Disorder or labeled juvenile delinquency. I would then be given daily doses of Adderall, which the pharmaceutical companies have afforded to the schools through the state and federal government administrators. I would then be placed in a special education class and sedated through my high school years. 

In reality, it was just teenage knucklehead stuff, testing boundaries and pushing the outer limits. One day an aggressive samurai championing his daimyo’s honor, the next day, a passive Franciscan monk sitting on a park bench feeding pigeons. One day, a confident youth, the life of the party. The next shindig, a wallflower unable to connect two sentences together when spoken to by a blonde babe. Hormonal neurosis was the Steve Jacklin my mother had to contend with.

As a teen, I would exhibit the usual obnoxious behavior, hiding a panoptic bundle of insecurity. Later I would discover this behavior was not unusual for adolescents. The insecurity, often, was imbued with angst that triggered the obnoxious behavior. “Wish I didn’t know now what I didn’t know then,” Bob Seger 1980. Or put another way, “I didn’t make the rules, I just made the rules work for me,” Steve Jacklin circa 1970.

Due to my frequent geographic family moves, my scholastic career was dogged with inconsistencies. From grade one through twelve, I attended ten different school systems. When most ninth-graders were building a foundation for further educational growth, it was all I could do to keep up with the correct page in the assigned textbooks. 

It seemed that I was always behind in the programmed studies, Geometry, English, Science. It got to the point that the classroom wasn’t doing anything for me, my educational journey was stymied, and I was bored shitless. So, I said screw it, skipped school, hung out on the beach surfing, playing guitars with other knuckleheads, and began self-tutoring.

My days in Libya were, at times, rough and confusing. A fourteen-year-old pubescent boy, traveling across the world, and now living with four younger siblings in an orange grove, isolated from my peer group. My life was anchored twenty miles from anyone my age, with an orchard homestead environment that seemed whacked out. 

So, what did I do, make lemonade out of lemons? Na, the saying I found threadbare, trite, and a lazy axiom. Instead, I lived by my original adage, solitude hones potentiality. What I did was spend the summer practicing the guitar and piano. I became a good musician. 

My days in Libya were something out of a Franz Kafka novel. Not a metamorphosis of a fourteen-year-old boy turning sixteen. More like The Castle, with ossified missteps and alienation, often requesting permission to live in the village. The years, post-fifteenth birthday, followed me with plenty of dysfunctionality and excitement. 

Living off base, I had full rein to hang out or do all kinds of dumbass stuff with my cohorts. Case in point; since I was in a band, I’d ride the bus on Friday and bring my axe (guitar) to school. Someone would have a gig that night, so I’d stay after school and get with the rest of the band. Remember, I lived isolated in Libya, 20 miles off base, in BFE (Bum Fucked Egypt). 

We’d play the gig, usually two hours, get our ten bucks apiece and decide where to crash. If on base, we’d stay at one of the band members’ houses. I’d prefer Jeff, our drummer, because he had an older sister who was hot, at least in the eyes of a fifteen-year-old gawker. Since we had no phone system available, there was no way to contact my mom and let her know my plans (fake or otherwise) for the weekend.

We experienced problems if we played in a Tripoli nightclub or cross-town at the American Oil compound. Being off base, we needed to find a place to crash and find transportation to haul our drums. We carried our guitars, and a few times, we crashed on the beach.

The other option was the go-to preferred option, crash on someone’s roof. The residential houses had an architectural design with a flat roof and a ladder on the house’s side to access the top. We randomly picked a place and scurried up the ladder to the roof and slept the night away.

We never had an issue with the many nocturnal quiescence slumbers we pulled off. The next day we hitched rides back to the club and picked up our drums. If all things worked out, we’d have a second gig that weekend. Then after “jamming” Friday and Saturday night, we found something to do on Sunday.

 Monday morning, we went to school and took the bus home Monday afternoon. Sounds like the perfect schema, huh? Not quite. Being a fifteen-year-old teenager in a foreign country and a mother having no idea where her son was for four days did prove problematic.

Leaving Friday morning and not showing up again till Monday afternoon. I wasn’t doing anything wrong in my teenage mind, not stealing cars or smoking dope or having sex with young Catholic girls (the beatas would come later). I could not figure out why Mom was so upset. I saw myself as the perfect idyllic son. 

Later in life, as a father of three daughters, I would come to appreciate the gravity of these dumb-ass moves and embody a special sympathy and love for my mother’s act of courage in raising me. Note, my mom has a special place in heaven for trying to raise me during those teenage years. As for me, because of my many shenanigans, I’m still trying to “good deed” myself out of purgatory. 

Another significant event in my Libyan travels was my early departure from the Middle East. The morning of June 5^th, 1967, was one of the craziest events, not only in my youth but in my life. 

I had missed the school bus and would catch a ride to the base school with my mom. My younger sister was also home due to her kindergarten teacher having an end-of-the-school-year workshop. The early morning was usually quiet on the orange grove homestead, but not today. 

A loud uproar was happening outside on the road to the entrance of our villa. The Arab workers, ordinarily docile, were engaged in angry chatter. Since neither Mom nor I could speak enough Arabic to understand what was happening, we turned on the local radio. As we scrolled through the local Arab stations, we could hear something big was going on. We finally were able to tune into the English-speaking Armed Forces Radio Station and hear the news. Crap! Shit had hit the fan!

After the Arab League massed troops along three fronts for an eventual attack on Israel, the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) initiated a preemptive attack. This would later be known as the Six-Day War. 

  So much for the tactics and geopolitics of the war, now what did we do? We did what we had to. We loaded up the car with all the personal items we could carry, knowing locals would loot the house once we left. 

I pulled out the two guns we had in the house, a shotgun and a pistol, loaded them, and strapped into our family sedan’s front passenger’s seat. My younger sister laid flat on the floor in the back of the car. I put the loaded pistol in the glove compartment and held the loaded shotgun on my lap. Mom got behind the wheel and drove aggressively through the local workers assembled on the orange grove’s exit. Our twenty-mile trip back to the Air Base was like a roller derby championship match. 

Once we were on the local road that took us to the base, angry mobs would try to intercept the family sedan and stop our car. Mom would swerve, attempt to avoid hitting anyone, and the rioters would dive clear of her speeding pugnacity. Nothing would stop this wolverine mother from getting her cubs to safety. 

On one stretch of the road, the mob was building a barrier across the street with burning tires and a donkey cart. Our vehicle veered to the left of the barricades, ran over some debris, settled back onto the road, and continued our Great Escape. As Mom accelerated, the pissed-off manic crowd would give way to the oncoming vehicle. It looked like a scene from the movie The Ten Commandments with Moses parting the Red Sea.

  It took us over an hour to transit the twenty miles and arrive safely on to the airbase. From the look of the car, Mom didn’t hit or run over anyone. I still had all the bullets I started with in the chamber of my gun. We were safe on Wheelus Air Force base with no harm, no foul. We picked up my other two brothers and sister at their school and began preparing for the evacuation process from what was now, a hostile country. End of story? Nope.  

Two days later, we were on a military transport aircraft, with other vomiting military dependents, headed to Torrejon Air Force Base near Madrid, Spain. Once we landed, we were moved to the American side of the airfield and put into the enlisted airmen’s housing. The accommodations were adequate, with expectations of only being there overnight. The U.S. State Department was arraigning commercial transportation back to the states.

The overnight turned into five days with the families confined to the housing area. Nothing to occupy five kids except kicking a soccer ball and grab-assing. 

Every morning at eight o’clock, a bus transported the families to base flight operation and herded us into a hangar area to hear if our names would be called for further transportation home. This process lasted an hour or two. If the officer in charge did not call your family’s name, you would be bused back to the housing area to continue your grab-assing and wait for the next day’s roll call. 

After the third dull day, I was becoming bat shit crazy. Having just experienced an insane adrenalin rush evacuating Libya, the seventy-two hours of nothingness presented problems for this fifteen-year-old dunderhead. On the fourth day, I opted to liven things up, at least for me. 

 I had never been to a bullfight, not a lot of matadors in Libya. Since they didn’t call our names for a return flight home at the morning roll call, I decided to experience my first bullfight extravaganza.

I heard from an airman on the base that the fights were a daily afternoon event in downtown Madrid. So, I hitched a ride into town, walked five blocks, and found the arena. I had just enough money for admission and slid into a fifth-row seat. 

Pretty cool, the whole pageantry, spectacle, and ritual inside the Plaza de Toros was a lavish Spanish cultural presentation. I wasn’t entirely sure what was going on or why the crowd cheered when they did, but the applause’s excitement caused me to throw my hands together with enthusiasm. It was like watching a hockey game, not knowing any of the rules, just waiting for the fight to break out. A couple of hours passed watching this spectacle. 

The banderillero worked with his decorated sticks stabbing the bull’s neck, pissing the bull off while the matador put on his choreographic ballet. He seemingly sentenced the bull to death, and then, with the estocada, he administered the death blow with his sword.

Sorry about that Mr. Bull. I Sincerely hoped his death had some sacrosanct meaning, like ending up on a beef taco. I would learn the bullfight dance had an old tradition that harkens back to ancient times with man’s deep fear of death and his ability to overcome it. The matador won, the bull lost, and the crowd when nuts.  

After the last bullfight, I made my way through the crowd and hitched a ride back to the base. I was gone slightly over four hours. Upon arriving at base housing, I checked in with Mom to find her outraged and ready to perform her an estocada, on me. Luckily, she didn’t have a sword in hand. 

It seemed base flight operations did an afternoon roll call adding additional names for passengers to leave on the next plane. They called the Jacklin family, but Mom told the colonel in charge that she could not take the flight due to my absence and not knowing my whereabouts. It looks like the bull won this one. 

The Jacklin family left in the morning on the next plane, and my price to get out of purgatory just kept adding up. For the next fifty years, I always sent flowers to Mom on Mothers Day, hoping for redemption and a ticket out of purgatory.