An Old Man Died Last Night - - Democratic Underground

Tangerine LaBamba

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Mon Jul-06-09 07:22 PM
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An Old Man Died Last Night -

An old man died in his sleep last night. Ninety-three years old, he made all the newspapers, all over the world. He lived to that fine old age in comfort and ease, with children and grandchildren, maybe even great-grandchildren. I don’t know. I didn’t read any of his obituaries. I don’t care what he had.

I only know that he had what Bobby never had.

Bobby and I grew up together, joined together by the fact that our mothers worked side-by-side at a dress factory. We weren’t rich, not at all, but we lived in a place where we were safe and we could go anywhere, play in the high hills surrounding our little town, romp in the parks that bracketed the place, walk unafraid on any of the streets, even after dark.

We learned to smoke cigarettes together, cadging Chesterfields and Pall Malls from any open pocketbook my aunts happened to leave within our reach. We lifted a couple of smokes and took off for the Injun Rock, an old concrete foundation on the west end of town, not far from our houses, but up in the hills, where no one could see us. We learned to hunker over to shield the matches as we lit up our newfound treasures.

At nine years of age.

We rode our bikes in the summer, and Bobby had the job of fastening baseball cards to our wheels, somehow enabling us to make what we thought were motorcycle sounds as we rode all over, stopping for lunch at my house or his, where our Moms always had something for us when they were at home on their break from work.

My family was better off that Bobby’s, because my Dad had a good job with the government, but Bobby’s Dad was a coal miner, and the mines had begun to die. His Mom was the breadwinner and they struggled. I remember stopping at his house once, after school, ravenous, and all we found in the kitchen was a half-empty box of Saltines. The refrigerator was empty. I’d never seen anything like that before.

We gobbled down the Saltines.

As we got older, we found other best friends, but we still bumped into and off of each other. Years later, after it was all over, I asked his mother why we hadn’t continued to be best friends after third or fourth grade, and her answer was simple and wise and sad.

“You turned into a boy and a girl,” she said.

We tried to sit near each other in class, whenever we could, and we’d giggle as we passed a piece of paper back and forth, writing silly notes, sometimes filthy notes – or what we thought was filthy. I recall using the word “blow” a whole lot more than was warranted.

Then I had a boyfriend, a college boy, and an after school job, and Bobby had a car and a job of his own. He smoked out in the open, while I still hid my habit, doing it only in the hangout near the high school, where my friends and I hung out. Bobby wasn’t a regular there, but he was always good for a big “hmmmm” among my girlfriends when he showed up. Blonde and blue-eyed, Bobby was cute, very, very cute, and he knew it.

He wore a black leather motorcycle jacket, although he didn’t ride a motorcycle. Jeans and a t-shirt and motorcycle boots. He had the “hood” look down cold, although he was anything but.

He found me one day and said we had to talk. We went for a ride in his car, AM radio playing the songs we loved, and then we parked in a pull-out that overlooked our town. He told me that he’d done it the night before. He didn’t say it with any braggadocio – it was just a flat statement.

I was surprised at my jealousy, but then I realized, This is Bobby. And I snapped out of it. When I asked who the girl was, he told me, and there was some relief for me, because she was a girl who went to the Catholic high school in our town – not one of my girlfriends.

Whew.

But, he felt awful about it. He wondered if she’d gotten pregnant and did he have to marry her. I knew as little about it as he did, my own virginity preciously defended against my frustrated college boyfriend, and I told him that I knew about a doctor in a nearby town who could take care of it.

Bobby nodded, and he looked as sad as I’ve ever seen anybody look.

When I asked him if they were gonna do it again, he smiled and said, Oh, yeah, they sure were, and I knew my old best buddy was all right.

As it turned out, she wasn’t pregnant, but she was the first of a slew of girls who fell prey to Bobby’s charms. He always told me about it, until one day, in a fit of adolescent pique, I told him I didn’t want to hear it any more. I wasn’t his priest, and this wasn’t confession.

After that, we didn’t see each other all that much.

Prom time came, and Bobby passed. He’d gotten himself caught up in a marathon necking session with the class lesbian one night in our hangout –both of them very, very drunk – and they had somehow become a strange, but obviously happy, couple. They were together through graduation, when I was scheduled to go off to college, and Bobby, with the draft hanging over him, went to work somewhere in Jersey, someplace where his uncle got him a job.

We’d see each other on some weekends, when we were both home at the same time. Christmas, my first year in college, he came to my house, bringing me a small gift, a pretty jade pendant on a gold chain. I had by then ditched my college boyfriend for all the new boys I was meeting in a big-city university, and the gift made me wonder. Bobby and I went out that night, going to a bar where all the kids went, where being underage didn’t matter, and he told me about his life, his place in the rooming house, the Jersey girls who did things he’d never even dreamed of, how he’d joined the union, and he was making good money.

His hands now looked like I remembered his father’s hands, big and rough. Bobby had grown up, become a man, while I was still a flighty wisp of a girl, with no responsibilities beyond getting to class on time. I was the kind of girl who decided to wash her long hair when it was announced that her date had arrived to pick her up. He was a man who belonged to a union and who had sex with lots of girls. In his bed.

I was not surprised when I got a letter from my Mom and she told me that Bobby had been drafted. He knew it was only a matter of time, but still, his Mother was upset. He was her only son, her baby, and she was so worried about him.

The next time I saw him, he was in uniform, thinner, but somehow bulkier, and he seemed taller. Everything about him was shiny. I couldn’t get over it. His hands, though, were still rough. And he was tanned, with a crewcut the likes of which I’d never seen. Bobby had a nice head, I discovered, as I teased him and wore his cap while we had dinner, an invitation he’d extended, which had surprised me, because it was so grown-up. We’d never had dinner together, in a restaurant, when people deferred to him, and where I finally felt like a woman with a man.

We had grown up together, I decided.

We were not quite twenty years old.

I asked him about the class lesbian, and he laughed and said he didn’t know where she was. He said he didn’t drink like that any more, but the way he put away the beer with dinner belied his words, and he chain-smoked.

We talked about his being shipped overseas. He was infantry, he told me, but that didn’t mean much to me. He said he was ready to go He said he liked the Army, and he thought he might re-enlist when his tour was over. He could imagine making it his career, he said.

I still didn’t know what I wanted to be, but I knew wife and mother was in my future. That was about all I could see. I told Bobby I wanted him to be godfather to my first baby, and he smiled at that. He said he’d be honored, and we were very serious about that, because, you see, we were grownups.

When my Mom called me that sunny Spring day and told me Bobby was dead, I didn’t quite understand. He had been sent to a country we’d read about in Geography class in eighth grade, but I hadn’t really paid much attention to it. Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia – they were all lumped together. And Bobby had died in Vietnam.

His third day there, he’d stepped on a land mine.

Come home, my Mom told me. He’s being buried from home.

In his coffin, with the military men standing there, Bobby didn’t look as big as he had the last time I’d seen him. He looked shiny, though, and calm, like death was all right for him, nothing to furrow his brow or make him scowl. No smiles, either. He was smooth, sort of flattened. When I looked at him, at all of him, lying there, I realized there wasn’t much of Bobby left, that landmines are terrible things.

Black gloves covered what had once been his hands. The soft small hands of the little boy who passed me that cigarette as we squatted in the Injun Rock, the gawky hands of a boy who was learning how to work on cars, the rough, rugged hands of a man, the man he had become.

Now, his hands were gone.

An old man died last night in Washington. He lived to be ninety-three, and he was the man who sent my best childhood friend to his useless death in a country thousands of miles away, dying for a false belief that drove the old man when he was still a young man.

Robert McNamara lived seventy-three years longer than Bobby. I wonder if he ever stopped to look at Bobby’s name on the Vietnam Wall, the place I still go to when I miss him, where his name is something I can touch, something to which I can whisper “I love you,” a place where McNamara can no longer hurt him.

When a friend told me this morning that McNamara had died, my first thought was, “Good. He won’t kill any more young men any more.” An irrational thought, for he was gone, so was the Vietnam War, for so long. But, for some of us, it never went on, we never got older, nothing ever changed, I am still looking down at Bobby’s hands in those black gloves, and tonight I am thinking of my oldest best friend who never got to be old, who is forever young, forever twenty years old, and I am glad that McNamara is finally dead.