Monster Hunter Memoirs: Grunge - eARC (3 page)

My brother is probably in Hell and I’m sort of comfortable with that even if I’m still wrestling with how he got there. Maybe I should change my name to Cain.

Back to JROTC. I’d gotten the papers from the assistant JROTC instructor, Mr. Herman J. Brentwood. He also taught shop and, of all things, chemistry. I had his shop class (another thing to poke a sharp stick in my mother’s eye, just like as a kid I used to go around jumping up and down on every crack I could find in the sidewalk) and had picked them up there.

The next day he asked me about them.

“Did you get the papers signed?” he asked as I was trying not to cut my fingers off with a jigsaw.

“No, sir,” I said. I was polite just to piss off my mom. She hated it when I said “sir” and “ma’am” since they were “antiquated social constructs of the dominant patriarchy.” Besides, Mr. Brentwood was one of those people you just automatically tended to say “sir” to and if you didn’t you regretted it. “My mother does not approve of the military. I knew that. Truthfully, sir, I got them as much to infuriate her as to join.”

“The Good Book says that you should honor your father and mother, son,” Mr. Brentwood said. There might have been a Supreme Court ruling that prayer in school was banned. But that sort of statement wasn’t out of place in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1977.

“Sir, with respect, you don’t know my father and mother,” I said, carefully. “I cut my hair when I was twelve to get back at her. It was down to my butt.” I carefully did not say
ass
. “She was upset about that and thought it was great when my older brother started smoking dope. With her and her friends. She’s a member of the American Communist Party, an anti-war activist at least if it’s fighting commies, commies murdering people to support the downtrodden is all good. And my dad, who is a professor in Kansas, has never found a coed he wasn’t willing to…engage in carnal knowledge with, sir. He’s the kind of professor a cute girl can always get a good grade from for…sexual stuff, sir. Sir, I’m just counting the days until I can get out of hell.”

“Any idea what you’re going to do with your life, son?” Mr. Brentwood asked.

“So far, all I’ve got is what I’m
not
going to do with my life, sir. Which is anything that my parents approve of.”

Which was how I found new parents.

My mom and I were barely on speaking terms at that point and I had already found other places to be most of the time. I had friends, and their parents were often cool with couch-crashing. But the Brentwoods’ really became my new home and I finally found a mother and father I could relate to.

Mr. Brentwood looked like a straight-up stereotype. He’d joined the Marines in 1942, right after Pearl Harbor, gotten put in the infantry and proceeded to slog his way across the Pacific. When the War was over he went home, married his high school sweetheart, went to school on the GI bill and after spending some time working in the chemical industry he got a job as a teacher at Central High School and had been a fixture there ever since.

He still wore a high and tight and could still fit in his WWII uniforms.

Mrs. Martha Anne Brentwood had raised four children and had “empty nest syndrome” something fierce. From what I got from their kids, who still dropped by frequently, she’d always been the Kool-Aid mom, meaning theirs was the house all the neighborhood kids frequented. She cooked a full dinner every night. My mother considered cooking to be a relic of the evil patriarchy and also was a just
horrible
cook. My mother
not
cooking was probably the only thing she ever did to make the world a better place.

Not so Mrs. Brentwood. It was all “Southern Style,” heavy on fried, but she used more original herbs and spices than the Colonel could count. After long years of inedible health food and badly cooked Indian food or some similar…fecal matter, I just seriously pigged out. (Not that good Indian food is bad food. I’ve gotten to be pretty serious about good ethnic food. My mother burned water.)

I miss Mrs. Brentwood’s cooking. They’re still around but I’m just so fricking busy these days.

Violating virtually every rule in the book, Mr. Brentwood introduced me to shooting and gunsmithing without my mom’s consent or, fortunately, knowledge. He had a shop in his basement that we spent many an hour in working on molds, reloading and so on and so forth. The man is a virtual encyclopedia of guns and remains someone I call when I’m stuck on something. He introduced me to both the M1 Garand, his weapon of choice, and the Thompson, an unusable beast of a weapon in my opinion.

But he wasn’t just the stereotype former Marine. One incident during the battle of Tarawa had changed his view of the world. You see, he was smart and had a flexible mind. When something violated his world view, he didn’t simply dismiss it.

Given what this memoir is supposed to be about you may be thinking that’s monsters. As far as I know, and I’ve delicately sounded him out, Mr. Brentwood has never encountered any of the stuff I now kill for a living. What he did encounter on Tarawa was a banzai attack. Not his first, but the first where he came face to face, bayonet to sword, with a Jap officer. And lost.

Fortunately, his platoon leader shot the officer in the chest with his .45 before the backstroke would have ended my future foster father’s life. But it got Mr. Brentwood thinking. The platoon leader, correctly, collected the sword as a souvenir and sent it home. (His kill, his souvenir.) Later, Sergeant Brentwood managed to get his hand on one as well. And still later found someone who knew something about them. And slowly became something of an unrecognized expert on Japanese katanas.

“Anything lethal is worth paying attention to” was his reasoning.

He studied them, bought them, sold them, traded them and even had made a couple using more or less traditional techniques. In the 1950s, studying kendo was considered beyond odd, right up there with crazy. He didn’t care. “Anything lethal is worth paying attention to.” He learned Japanese specifically to understand bushido better. He didn’t buy into all of it, and seriously hated the Japanese themselves, but he was something of an American “sword saint.” He can, to this day, absolutely brutalize me at kendo and I’ve use kendo in real action against major monsters. I cut the head off a two-hundred-year-old Greater vampire in action. Not “Stake, chop” but “Slash, slash, slash, off with the head.” (And one leg and an arm.) And that old man can
still
kick my ass.

Pro-tip: Inside a certain distance, generally about twenty feet, a blade of some sort is generally better than a gun. There are arguments for a stubby at that range. But a blade is generally better. And there’s no better blade than a katana in my opinion. But they don’t call me Iron Hand (
) for no reason.

Since I finally had a father figure who wasn’t, in my opinion, bug-shit crazy, I naturally had to follow in his footsteps. When he realized that I’d learned kanji in about two months’ not particularly hard study, it sort of pissed him off.

“Chad,” as he called me. “Next year, you are taking my chemistry course. And if you get anything other than an A, you’re never coming over for dinner again.”

So next year I took high school chemistry and physics in the same semester. Perfect A in chemistry.

You guessed it. Perfect F in physics.

Gotta maintain that C average.

I mean, I
learned
the physics. I even liked it. I’ve applied it repeatedly over the years. Especially F=ma.

But gotta maintain that C average.

I dated a lot. I hardly ever studied. (Including chemistry.) I finally got permission to do track and field. That took up some time. I spent most of my evenings (and eventually nights) at the Brentwoods. It wasn’t like my mom cared. She’d repeatedly noted that she’d considered aborting me since I wasn’t “planned” and in retrospect had made the wrong decision. Getting me out of her life was as much her goal as mine. Feel the love.

I mowed lawns starting from about thirteen. I got slightly better jobs working mostly in construction when I turned sixteen. Generally day labor but it paid better than mowing lawns. I kept focusing on shop versus college prep. Through Mr. Brentwood, I got a part-time job as a mechanic when I turned seventeen and that was great. Good money and it gave me a chance to pick up a car cheap and get it fixed up the way I liked it. It was a 1976 Cutlass Supreme that was definitely a Monday car.

In those days, really bad vehicles were by hoary adage built on Mondays and Fridays. Monday ’cause all the workers were hung over and Friday ’cause all the senior people had called in sick or something and the assembly line was all fucked up.

Bottom line,
everything
was wrong with this car, which was why I got it cheap. Classic example of the height of American automotive manufacturing in the 1970s. The only thing that wasn’t badly put together was the Delta 88 engine which absolutely screamed. The tranny leaked like a sieve. The rear differential sounded like a rock crusher. The shocks were shot and it was barely three years old. The headliner was already sagging. The underbody was rusting and it had supposedly been rust-proofed at the factory. The ugly green paint job was flecking off.

I put sooo much work into Honeybear it was just silly. I don’t think, with the exception of the engine, at this point there is one original part. And I’ve rebuilt the engine twice. On the other hand, I’m still driving her.

Kendo, shooting, track and field, dating, fixing up Honeybear to better-than-new condition. There were quite a few girls in that school who were, in the parlance of the time, “easy.” It was just past the Sexual Revolution into the Sexual Evolution and pre-AIDs. Good times. And, yep, had at least a short fling with most of them. That was one area where the apple did not fall far from the tree.

Sing it with me: “Those were the best days of our lives…” I’m one of those people who fucking
loved
high school. Probably the only hard part was that most of my friends, and dates, really
were
dumb as a stump. I occasionally had to hang out with the nerds just to have something resembling intelligent conversation. Which in those days meant playing the occasional D&D game.

That came in surprisingly useful later in life. I’m pretty sure that Gary Gygax knew people, if you know what I mean.

I was born December 6th, 1962. Since celebrating birthdays, or any other similar holiday, was an antiquated notion of the social construct, the first real birthday party I had was when the Brentwoods threw one for me and my pals when I turned fifteen. On December 7th, 1980, one day after my eighteenth birthday, and the anniversary of those crafty Japs bombing Pearl Harbor, I went down to a strip mall by the old post office and entered the office of the Marine recruiter.

“Good afternoon, Staff Sergeant,” I said in my most polite voice. I was wearing a good, clean, carefully creased, button-down white shirt, carefully creased black dress slacks and a high and tight. “I would like to join the Marine Corps.”

There were things I knew about joining the Corps that most recruits didn’t really think about. One of them was the ASVAB, the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery. It is, still, one of the best vocational tests on the face of the planet. If you don’t try to futz with it, it will point you in the correct direction in terms of your usefulness in the military as well as a job you’re going to more or less enjoy. (In general.)

But the thing is, if I pushed it all the way, I’d end up doing signal intercept or some such shit. I wasn’t interested in listening to scritches, beeps and whistles that might be a signal for the rest of my life. That’s probably where I would have maximally supported the Marine force, yeah, but I was joining the Marines to kill commies…I wanted to be infantry.

So I got a perfect C.

Man, I studied for that fucker. There were books and books you could find about the ASVAB. I analyzed it, spindled it, folded it and mutilated it. I knew exactly the scores and answers that would make me perfect machine-gun fodder and just above perfect cook.

When I walked back into the recruiting office to talk to the staff sergeant, the first words out of his mouth were:

“Son. Have you ever thought about the infantry…?”

I kept from jumping for joy and shouting
“Yes! Fucking nailed it!”

I graduated June 6th, 1981, with a vo-tech diploma. My mother didn’t attend my graduation but the Brentwoods did. Mr. Brentwood drove me to the MEPS station on June 19th. I raised my right hand and swore to defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies foreign and domestic. They didn’t mention supernatural, oddly enough. I did half wonder if it gave me license to kill my mom. And I was in the Marines.

From the first night I spent at the Brentwoods, Mr. Brentwood had ensured that I understood the standards expected of me if I was going to stay at their house. I’d always been the neat freak in my parents’ house. Mr. and Mrs. Brentwood just dialed it in a bit. Then there was the shooting training and generally “Marineness” of the whole existence.

Bottom line, with a couple of exceptions, I more or less ghosted Basic.