From The Brothers Under The Bridge Series -Soldier Johnson’s Girl With The Pale Blue Eyes-Take Six

From The Pen Of Joshua Lawrence Breslin:

In the first installment of this series of sketches space provided courtesy of my old 1960s yellow brick road magical mystery tour merry prankster fellow traveler, Peter Paul Markin, I mentioned, in grabbing an old Bruce Springsteen CD compilation from 1998 to download into my iPod, that I had come across a song that stopped me in my tracks, Brothers Under The Bridge. I had not listened to or thought about that song for a long time but it brought back many memories from the late 1970s when I did a series of articles for the now defunct East Bay Eye (Frisco town, California East Bay, naturally) on the fate of some troubled Vietnam veterans who, for one reason or another, could not come to grips with “going back to the real world” and took, like those a Great Depression generation or two before them, to the “jungle”-the hobo, bum, tramp camps located along the abandoned railroad sidings, the ravines and crevices, and under the bridges of California, mainly down in Los Angeles, and created their own “society.”

The editor of the East Bay Eye, Owen Anderson, gave me that long ago assignment after I had done a smaller series for the paper on the treatment, the poor treatment, of Vietnam veterans by the Veterans Administration in San Francisco and in the course of that series had found out about this band of brothers roaming the countryside trying to do the best they could, but mainly trying to keep themselves in one piece. My qualifications for the assignment other than empathy, since I had not been in the military during the Vietnam War period, were based simply on the fact that back East I had been involved, along with several other radicals, in running an anti-war GI coffeehouse near Fort Devens in Massachusetts and another down near Fort Dix in New Jersey. During that period I had run into many soldiers of my 1960s generation who had clued me in on the psychic cost of the war so I had a running start.

After making connections with some Vietnam Veterans Against The War (VVAW) guys down in L.A. who knew where to point me I was on my way. I gathered many stories, published some of them in the Eye, and put the rest in my helter-skelter files. A while back, after having no success in retrieving the old Eyearchives, I went up into my attic and rummaged through what was left of those early files. I could find no newsprint articles that I had written but I did find a batch of notes, specifically notes from stories that I didn’t file because the Eye went under before I could round them into shape.

The ground rules of those long ago stories was that I would basically let the guy I was talking to give his spiel, spill what he wanted the world to hear, and I would write it up without too much editing (mainly for foul language). I, like with the others in this current series, have reconstructed this story as best I can although at this far remove it is hard to get the feel of the voice and how things were said.

Not every guy I interviewed, came across, swapped lies with, or just snatched some midnight phrase out of the air from was from hunger. Most were, yes, in one way or another but some had no real desire to advertise their own hunger but just wanted to get something off their chest about some lost buddy, or some event they had witnessed. I have presented enough of these sketches both back in the day and here to not make a generalization about what a guy might be hiding in the deep recesses of his mind.

Some wanted to give a blow by blow description of every firefight (and every hut torched) they were involved in, others wanted to blank out ‘Nam completely and talk of before or after times, or talk about the fate of some buddy, some ‘Nam buddy, who maybe made it back the “real world” but got catch up with stuff he couldn’t handle, or got caught up in some stuff himself that he couldn’t handle, couldn’t handle because his whole blessed life pointed the other way. Soldier Johnson’s story is slightly different since it is not based on my Eye notes but on a story that Frank Jackman, a friend of my friend Peter Paul Markin related to him and that Peter then related to me when he heard that I was again putting together an occasional series on guys, Vietnam War guys, who found themselves under the “bridge.” Soldier spent time under the “bridge” in the ealry 1970s no question although the story that he related to Frank was from a period in the 1980s long after the interviews in the original series. Take this third-hand account with that in mind. I like to finish up these introductions by placing these sketches under a particular sign; no question Soldier Johnson’s sign was that of those pale blue eyes.
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He was getting ready to leave her again, leave her like he had so many times before, and like he would probably do again. Who knows what it was that triggered things this time. Maybe he got mad that she did not take, once he got his personal affairs into some order, his newly found passion for saving the world now that it was going to hell in a hand-basket seriously and was in desperate need of fixing and so was out on the streets with some fellow veterans, Vietnam War veterans if anybody was asking, who had also found “religion” on the war issue. Or maybe it was that he could not for the life of him understand why she wanted to stay cooped up in the little white house with picket fence and dog that they had been sharing in Old Lyme for the previous several years and let the world drift by while she, they, pursued their respective careers. She, a very, very competent lawyer who had started out in the beginning all starry-eyed enough but now looked to keep her head down and her chances for advancement in her Hartford firm up. And he, he had had done everything from washing dishes for eats and a place to stay to teaching school. Just then he was a better than middling free-lance copy editor for well-known local publishing houses, once he decided, or she decided him, to settle down a bit after he got the trauma of Vietnam under some kind of control .

As he packed his few belongings in a small backpack he had a recurring half-ironic vision that in forty or fifty years if he was still alive he would still be leaving her, or still be working his way back to her. That forty or fifty year thought didn’t faze him, didn’t cause him pain, and didn’t make him tremble. Didn’t make him tremble that maybe there would not be a forty or fifty years, that she would cut the “us” off, or he would before then. That idea, for better or worse, was outside the box of their relationship and always had been in the now numberless times they had danced this dance. That was just the way their love worked, or didn’t work. Yes, they both agreed, sometimes with a laugh, sometimes in maniacal rage, that was just the way it was between them and had been from about the first time they met a decade or so back in the mid-1970s.

Finished packing his belongings to head out for wherever he was heading this time he had a moment’s confusion. Like the other times, that numberless times, it was not clear where he would go, west to California, east on some tramp steamer to Morocco and some Kasbah hash den, north on the hitchhike trail before the snows set in and then south to the Baja, he didn’t know until he went out the door and walked some distance, maybe picked up a ride and that would decide it. All he knew was he was, she was, in a place neither of them wanted to be and so he would cast his fates to the wind. And he thought too, as he had thought so many times before when this damn interlude came upon them, about how he had met, or almost didn’t meet, his girl, his girl with the pale blue eyes.

Soldier Johnson had to laugh about that last fact, about how they had almost not met, or rather how he had almost not connected with his Jewel, Jewel Samson, the woman he was now about to leave again. Back then, back in the mid-1970s when his future had looked settled Soldier had thought that he had blown the dust of old North Adamsville off his shoes after he finished his military service and so his return, his painful return, back to his growing up hometown after he had busted out for the umpteenth time on the West Coast was quite a letdown. He had drifted back east, had not picked up much of anything in coming back, and had thus wound up, hat in hand, at his parents’ front door one night, defeated for the moment in life’s battles. The cost of that defeat, the immediate cost was a constant harping by his mother, taking up her vigil established since childhood, about his, uh, short-comings, short-comings against her expectation, and against the myriad neighbor children who had “made good.” After one such painful exchange with his distraught mother, on the fateful day he met Jewel, who continued to make it her personal responsibility to remind him constantly that at thirty- two he needed to get on with his life, needed to get a job, get married, get to whatever he had to do and in response to that also numberless tirade he had fled out the door and headed to Adamsville Beach to cool out a bit.

[Soldier (real name Lawrence) Johnson had gotten that name, that moniker, while in basic training down at Fort Dix in New Jersey from the other raw recruits who kidded him about his non-existent soldierly deportment. He had done more drill sergeant-inspired push-ups for unmade bunks, footloose foot lockers, misshapen uniforms than anyone thought possible. More extra- duty KP (kitchen patrol for the civilians), more confined to quarters, more night guard duty, well, more of everything that most common grunts (enlisted men) would go well out of their way to avoid. And more screw-ups at the firing range or out at maneuvers than anyone thought possible either.

But the name stuck, stuck through hell-hole Vietnam where he was not the worst soldier, not at all, taking a little shrapnel to save a buddy, taking point out in that bloody Mekong Delta, swampy, fly-infested night and, mainly against all odds surviving the experience. Physically surviving it and when he got home his old corner boys from in front of Salducci’s Pizza Parlor kept the name on him and kept it on even more on him after they had heard his exploits for about the ten thousandth time. And it also stuck through his post -soldier internal war that he waged within himself, his personal civil war, which he hid from his parents, his corner boys, and his hastily-married first wife. His post-Vietnam trauma as it was described at the time before the condition got a more scientific name, included a stint at the VA hospital out in Frisco and another vagabond stint with fellow trance-walkers from ‘Nam under the lost soul bridges of Southern California. That is a story for another time though.]

Soldier walked that day the two miles to the beach from the family house so by the time that he got to the his favored boyhood spot near the North Adamsville Yacht Club and sat on the seawall to catch a cool breeze it was getting a little late. That spot always evoked deep feelings, mainly of frustration but also of some inner calm brought on by the splash of waves aimlessly reaching the waiting shoreline. He had no sooner settled in for a serious think about the cast of his fates than Jewel came walking by with her girlfriend, Laura.

Came walking by like something out of the mist of time, like maybe a 1940s pin-up model all the guys overseas would cherish inside their lockers or on the inner lid of their trunks in some forlorn barracks in some forlorn outpost of civilization, maybe some rock of land surrounded by infinite Pacific seas or under Normandy fogs. Or maybe a 1940s movie star, maybe Lana Turner, all in white when she sizzled up the screen and sizzled up poor clueless John Garfield in The Postman Always Rings Twice. Twisted up dear John so bad he went to the big step off with a smile, or half-smile on his face, just for the thought of having been with her, having smelled that gardenia perfume she threw off even long after she left the room. Jewel came that day all dressed in white, white blouse, white shorts, short showing long well-thought out legs and well-turned ankles, white socks hugging white tennis shoes, and even from a distance of ten feet he could see, set off by her well-developed summer tan, those pale blue eyes that would haunt his dreams forever after.

And those eyes would cause him more hell and anguish than he ever imaged, and more happiness. Funny though because it didn’t have to have happened that way, didn’t have to have happened at all. Soldier still caught up in his mother-inflamed big think about the contours of his future had let her pass by, had let her go in his thoughts without comment. But as she moved a little distance away he switched from thoughts of getting a job, or whatever else of the twenty-one demands his mother insisted he pursue to thoughts of how this young passing woman, or rather one with her look, her sultry virginal look had always eluded him, had always been outside his grasp. Yeah, he knew that sultry virginal thing was a contradiction but it was all tied up with his Catholic upbringing and those Sunday morning novena –driven girls he watched from behind from the neighborhood in church. And by his teenage boy thoughts, corner boy-driven thoughts, of hot women inflamed by magazines, television, the movies and later when he knew the score with such girls, knew they were inflamed too, so make of it what you will.

In high school, maybe starting in freshman year, he and his friends, his corner boys then stationed against the wall in front of Salducci’s Pizza Parlor having moved up a step from Harry’s Variety Store in the normal progression of corner boy-hood, would hit Adamsville Beach right where he was sitting at that moment and watch, no, more than watch, leer, as the girls went by, the girls who would be dressed very much like Jewel, would sway in the sun very much like Jewel, would fill the very air with their presence, with that subtle fresh from a bath-like fragrance that swirled around them as they passed by. While other guys, particularly guys like Frankie Riley and Timmy Kelly, would have those swaying girls all in white by the dozens he had no such luck as much as they inflamed his schoolboy heart.

At night, summer nights, when the girls turned from white shorts to white dresses he also struck out. He seemed to get either the black-etched arty types who wanted to save the world or save him, or just be friends, or something like that, or the bookworms, especially the bookworms of indeterminate dress, say plaid and stripes or some such combination who endlessly wanted to speak of books, and not much else. He was okay with the books part, although the not much else drove him to distraction. And his dream white-dressed girls, wearing shorts or dresses, were not bookworms, were not even concerned about books for all he knew.

Later, before ‘Nam, while he was in college, those two years, he settled for the bookish types and left it at that. After ‘Nam he took whatever came his way, mainly fast and loose women, women like that wife that he married in far too much haste, who would not dream of wearing white, or be accused of dreaming about much of anything. But he never in the back of his mind really ever stopped thinking that someday he might snatch one, snatch that girl in white of his fevered boyhood dreams. And he never missed an opportunity to stare at them, younger or older, when they passed by ignoring him.

That summer day he could see that she, Jewel, was younger, maybe too much younger than he was although it was always tough to figure women’s ages when they looked that good. He and Jewel would laugh, laugh about how he was closer to her father’s age than hers, cry, cry when she could not understand having been a mere child at the time what ‘Nam had taken from his soul and what he could not give due to that clot, make fun about that difference, would say that when she was forty he would be an old man of fifty-two and stuff like that, about that twelve year difference as it turned out since she was only twenty, a sophomore in college, at the time. Still he let the thought go by as just another fantasy and that was that. Then, as fate would have it, the pair of young women walked back up past the yacht club again near the place where he was sitting and from out of nowhere, or maybe out of that boyhood angst, he called out to them, called out to the girl with the pale blue eyes that her eyes were pretty. That her eyes reminded him of the sun-drenched seas behind them (or some such thing for he was so nervous to get it out that he was not sure he remembered his exact words correctly but that was close enough).

Jewel looked at him, startled, like nobody had ever made that comment to her before. Being, as he found out later, a gentile young woman, she came over and asked him if he was speaking to her and when he responded that he was she said “thank you” with a slightly blushed face under her tan and in a hushed voice that spoke to him of adventures, and desire. That was all the opening he needed, well, almost the only opening, once he asked her name and what she did. It turned out that she was a student at Boston University a place where he had gone to school for a couple of years before he busted out about a decade before and wound up getting drafted into the damn army. She was visiting her friend and fellow classmate Laura who lived in Adamsville, and they were taking a little sea-side break from the summer course they were taking at BU. Something in Jewel’s manner gave him the impression she was looking for something, or maybe it was something in his kindly manner that stopped her (that kindly thing, along with what she called his wisdom of the ages prophet long hair and beard, as she told him later, was what kept her talking to him as he sat on that seawall).

Laura had to go, or had made some other excuse to leave them, but Jewel decided to sit on the seawall with him. They sat for hours talking, talking about this and that, about the travails of school life, about how he wanted to go back to school since he could do it on the G.I Bill and maybe teach, something like that, about busted dreams, hers too, since she had wanted, desperately wanted to be a scientist, wanted to be like Madame Curie who she had read about as a child, but was then knee- deep in a pre-law school program that he parents had pushed on her, pushed on her kicking and screaming. About her troubles adjusting to the hectic city life and obliquely about her failed love-life. She would tell him later that she felt comfortable talking about such things, sensing that he was not judgmental and that he was not above actually listening to her like most guys.

Jewel asked him then how he got that name Soldier and later she too called him that moniker except she called him, in good moments, with affection, her soldier boy. Soldier spoke about Vietnam and his lost decade, about a time that she back in Greenwich, Connecticut where she grew up, had no real recollection of except of protests that would drive her conservative parents crazy, and watching fearful childhood television snippets of war scenes. (He avoided speaking of his internal wars, his sometimes tough nights just then although that subject would emerge with a vengeance over time.) They kid boy and girl-like spoke about musical likes (many shared, like The Door, the Stones, Bob Dylan), movies (they both loved film noir, especially Bogie and Bacall), lots of things almost making stuff up in order not to leave that wall. He spoke vaguely of his busted married and she of a couple of guys who it didn’t work out with, not for her not trying she said.

As Jewel and Soldier talked into the dusk they both got just slightly flirty along the way, feeling things out, feeling whether this moment had any future (as they both were quick to point out later in recapping that first meeting they were both hoping that it did). All they knew was that they almost simultaneously asked for each other’s telephone numbers, and laughed. There was a lot more of that, that flirty then hesitation feeling, before they became a couple. And while whether they might be star-crossed lovers or have an eternal love still was being played out even as Soldier closed that white picket- fenced house door behind him that sweet summer day strangely enough started it, started their rocky road. Started with those pale blue eyes.