The Magical Stranger (13 page)

He called me into his office one afternoon and told me he was farming me out to work on the campaign of a congressional challenger. I'm pretty sure this was illegal for a government employee and, more important, a violation of the Chicago code of conduct because the guy was running against an incumbent.

But that didn't stop me from falling in love with the guy. Mel Reynolds was black and eight years younger than Dad, but I worshipped him in the same way. The only problem was he was flesh and blood, not a man in a photograph. Reynolds was a buck-toothed Rhodes scholar running against the appropriately named Gus Savage, a racist black congressman on Chicago's far South Side. A few days a week, I took the commuter rail to 103rd Street and walked into a storefront campaign office that was a galaxy away from my own small world. Volunteers stamped letters and made signs while subsisting on day-old doughnuts and takeout chicken. Gunfire could be heard on occasion. I loved it.

Mel was the son of sharecroppers, and his travels from Mississippi to Oxford to Chicago were catnip to a newly minted white Chicago liberal like myself. I now realize that I saw Dad in his Horatio Alger story. The incumbent was an old-school creep best known for fondling a Peace Corps worker and giving his son a no-show job. He was easy to hate. I wrote press releases and op-eds late into the night and watched Reynolds draw close in the polls a few days before the primary.

People were already talking about me being his twenty-four-year-old press secretary. But then Savage took to the pulpit of a South Side church on the Sunday before the primary. He read off the Jewish-sounding names of the contributors to Reynolds' campaign. In Chicago, this was known as rallying the base. Reynolds lost by a few points and I was crushed. I didn't understand. Were people really that stupid? Reynolds swore he'd try again in two years and I swore I'd be there for him.

But in the interim, I got a rude education. I moved to Washington in 1991 to work as Dixon's deputy press secretary. A few months later, Dixon was one of eleven Democrats to vote for Clarence Thomas's confirmation. He was up for reelection the next year, and he thought the vote would protect him from a Republican challenger. I played a minor role in drafting his floor statement praising Thomas and I felt like a whore. In the end, Dixon was defeated from the left in the Democratic primary, and I secretly rejoiced.

I kept in touch with Reynolds. He called me one evening for a favor. He told me he'd done all the coursework for his master's at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government, but just needed some help with his thesis. Lots of help. Reynolds asked casually if I'd like to write the entire thing for $2,500. I stuttered a bit, half out of ethical outrage and half because Reynolds was already known as a debt dodger. A friend was still owed three months' back pay from the campaign. I knew I'd never see the cash. I begged off, blaming my own graduate classes, and got off the phone.

I saw Reynolds again a few months later when we shared a ride back from a speech at the Chicago Hilton. He elbowed me in the ribs as we drove down Michigan Avenue and pointed at two schoolgirls in plaid uniforms. He arched his eyebrows in the universal sign of creepiness.

“Steve, what do you think?”

My toes curled up in my loafers. True to his word, Reynolds won the next time out. The turning point was when Reynolds was assaulted while hanging campaign signs in his own neighborhood. This gained him great sympathy and favorable media coverage. My Spidey sense told me Reynolds faked the attack. After the election, he approached me about becoming his press secretary and I turned him down. It was a lucky choice since Reynolds was indicted for campaign embezzlement and statutory rape two years later. I watched Reynolds on
Larry King
trying to wriggle himself out of his corner, sweat beading on his forehead as he blamed his downfall on a conspiracy of white politicians. I clicked off the television. He was definitely not my father.

Chapter
Twenty

I
'd been
on board the USS
Nimitz
once before as a ten-year-old
holding my daddy's hand. He did his department head stint on the carrier's
maiden cruise in 1976 and gave our family a tour while the carrier was in port
in Norfolk, Virginia. I don't remember much about that day except the infinite
ladders going down, down into the bowels of the ship.

Now I was going back on my own. I flew onto the
carrier from Okinawa for the last month of the Black Ravens' deployment. CODs
usually land on a carrier from a straight-in approach, passing the boat at a
leisurely pace and then lining up eight to ten miles behind the boat. But the
pilots had heard from the Black Ravens about Dad and told me they wanted to
bring their COD in on a break and show me what it felt like.

I said sure. Ninety minutes later, I saw the
Nimitz
outside one of the plane's tiny windows, and
then the COD tilted downward and to the left, pressing me back against my seat
with a meager two Gs, about three less than a Prowler. We dropped our hook and
caught the number two wire, my head slamming back against the seat.

Tupper was flying, so he sent a posse of Black
Ravens to meet me: Beav, Shibaz, Chicken, and Jeff “Stoli” Stodola, a young
pilot. Beav was concerned.

“Did that COD come in on a break? I've never seen
that before. Didn't really look that safe.”

I told him I was glad that I didn't know that
twenty minutes ago. The guys grabbed my bag and led me back across the
Nimitz
through a dimly lit labyrinth of halls and then
down ladders past CAG's office and on to the Ravens' ready room.

Tupper had set me up in a four-man room with Stoli
and two ECMOs just down the hallway from the ready room. Stoli showed me where
the head was and then pushed open the door to our room. The space was a perfect
imitation of a shared cell at a minimum-security prison. There was a tiny living
area dominated by a giant television and lined with a gray metal locker for each
of the men. Playing Call of Duty with headphones on was Lieutenant Devon “the
Wolf” Benbow. Next to him sweating from the gym was Lieutenant Chris “Lil Chris”
Sutherland. Stoli started apologizing.

“It's small, but if you go see the enlisted men's
quarters, they'd have eight guys in this space.”

A blue sheet separated the living area from the
sleeping quarters, which were two rows of bunks and some more lockers. Stoli
pointed to my bunk and then dramatically pulled back the curtain that afforded a
modicum of privacy.

“Welcome!”

My bed was filled with a dozen red and yellow
balloons. A mint rested on my pillow. The guys started to laugh. Stoli
explained.

“I know it seems gay, but we just wanted to make
you welcome.”

I was touched, but a part of me thought they were
screwing with me. These were combat naval aviators, could they also be sensitive
metrosexuals? The other thing was, they'd been at sea for six months and they
were beyond bored. The arrival of a new guy—any new guy—was like three
six-year-old boys with chicken pox getting new Legos. It gave the guys something
new to talk about, someone new to prank. We spent the next few weeks hiding the
deflating balloons in each other's lockers and shaving kits.

I quickly got their backstories. Stoli was a sharp
new pilot from suburban Chicago. He was getting married in September and it was
hard to tell whom he loved more, his fiancée, Jodi, or Bears linebacker Brian
Urlacher. The Wolf was an academy grad and probably had twenty IQ points on most
of the rest of the guys in the squadron, not always an advantage as a junior
officer. His wife was a helo pilot flying in Afghanistan; they'd spent three
months together since getting married two years earlier.

And then there was Lil Chris. He'd completed the
Black Ravens' last cruise, but while everyone else was enjoying time back on
Whidbey he'd been shipped out to Iraq for one of the dreaded IAs. He made it
back to Whidbey last July, got two months at home, and rejoined the Black Ravens
in October, just in time to be in the backseat for Beav's emergency landing in
Oman.

The
Nimitz
was fifteen
stories deep, a block wide, and over a thousand feet long. It was as unknowable
to a newcomer as Manhattan to an immigrant. But like a great city it was broken
down into a series of self-sustaining neighborhoods, ones where the locals all
spoke the same language. A Black Raven could go weeks without leaving the block
except to go up top to fly and down below to get a shitty haircut in the
barbershop. The wardroom was spacious, but the squadron tended to eat together
at one round table, cramming in extras as they arrived, the middle of the table
becoming a compost of plates bearing half-eaten chicken fingers and a poor man's
imitation of lettuce.

I first saw Tupper at dinner. His cheeks had gone
concave and he was fifteen pounds lighter than last summer. The next day, he
stopped by my room with something green tucked under his arm.

“If you're going to hang with us, you have to dress
like us.”

He handed me a flight suit and flight boots. I told
him that men had worked years for the honor of wearing a Navy flight suit and I
hadn't earned it. I tried to hand it back, but Tupper refused.

“Believe me, you've earned this more than a lot of
us. Put it on.”

Tupper left and I closed the door. My roommates
were all out briefing flights or flying. I slipped off my khakis and shirt,
stepped into the flight suit, and zipped it up.

It took me to another time. I'm eight or nine. I've
just struck out to end a Little League game. My parents are not there. I'm
pissed off and wondering how I'm going to get home. Then a hand falls on my
shoulder. It is Dad in his flight suit. He is both kind and impatient.

“Don't worry. Everyone strikes out. Even Ted
Williams. We'll work on it. But don't be a crybaby.”

Stoli then burst through the door. I blushed,
embarrassed, feeling like he caught me playing dress up at fantasy camp.

“It looks good. The thing is, they are so damn
comfortable. They're like pajamas. By the time you leave, you're never going to
want to take it off.”

He was right. The flight suit had one giant zipper
running from crotch to neck, much like the jammies I wore as a kid watching Mom
and Dad play bridge. It was odd how one item of clothing could make me feel like
a man and a child at the same time.

I
wandered into the ready room after dinner one night early in my stay. The guys
had finally grown tired of watching
Beerfest
and
Vinnie was trying to rally them into watching an early season of
The Sopranos
. He was the XO, so no one was really
going to say no, but the images of violence and intrigue didn't attract much of
a crowd. I plopped down into a seat next to Lieutenant Commander Scott “Sherm”
Oliver, a Black Raven I hadn't really met yet. Sherm had blue eyes and
gray-blond hair, and one of the officers' wives had nicknamed him McSteamy after
a stud doctor on
Grey's Anatomy
. He was discreetly
spitting tobacco into a cup and staring right through Christopher and Paulie
trying to escape the Pine Barrens.

We didn't say anything for a half hour. But then we
started to talk. It was one of those Navy conversations that once it got rolling
went straight to the pain. He told me that he grew up outside Atlanta and his
father was a writer too, a speechwriter for Coca-Cola who had just retired. He
started asking me how I do what I do and I told him my job was much like his: 15
percent cool, 85 percent drudgery. We laughed about that. He told me he'd gone
to the Citadel in South Carolina. His call sign came from William Tecumseh
Sherman because of his Southern roots.

“I acted like I hated it, so it stuck,” said Sherm.
“That's the secret. Act like you hate it. But I actually think it's pretty
cool.”

He asked me if I was married. I told him I was
divorced. He perked up and gave a sad smile.

“My wife just left me. She's moving out of our
house this week.”

He unspooled the details. He had met her at the
Citadel his senior year. She worked at the college and came from a military
family. Her father was an Army paratrooper who was killed when she was a
teenager; his chute didn't open on a training mission.

They fell in love and got engaged. Sherm couldn't
believe his good fortune in meeting someone who already understood the hardship
of being a military wife. They got married in 2001 and eventually did tours of
duty in Whidbey and Pensacola. In 2006, they thought an instructor tour in
Pensacola was a good time to start a family, but when she was five months
pregnant Sherm was sent to Iraq on an IA to do anti-IED work. He learned he had
a son, Grayson, via satellite phone while he was camped near Baghdad. Another
son, Trent, was born in 2008 while he was doing a staff tour at Oceana Naval Air
Station in Virginia Beach. He was home for that one.

Sherm then made department head, which meant they
had to head back to Whidbey. But his wife hated it there, hated the damp, and
hated being so far away from her friends in South Carolina. Sherm fell back on
the old military trope that it wasn't forever. She knew differently. They'd be
there for three years and then another three if Sherm made command.

Her husband tried to turn her around, finding a
beautiful house in the hills above Anacortes. He tried to make it a home in the
three months before he had to meet the Black Ravens midcruise, but he could feel
things falling apart.

Sherm went to see his mentor, Captain Tom Slais,
his first Prowler skipper. Slais had moved up the ranks and was now commodore of
NAS Whidbey, overseeing all the Whidbey Prowler squadrons. Sherm told him his
domestic situation. Slais wanted to help. The commodore called Tupper on the
Nimitz
and asked if he could spare Sherm and
have him join the Black Ravens back in Whidbey after their deployment. But their
conversation was classic militarese, both speaking in a code the other didn't
understand. Slais didn't tell Tupper why he wanted to keep Sherm home and Tupper
didn't ask. Instead, Tupper told Slais that if Sherm didn't make part of the
deployment he'd have a hard time bonding with the guys once they made it back to
Whidbey. He wouldn't have shared experiences with them, either in the air or in
the ready room. Slais said he understood.

Sherm shipped out to the
Nimitz
in February, meeting the Black Ravens in Hong Kong. His wife
left him a month later. When Tupper found out, he felt unwittingly responsible.
He would have left Sherm at home if he had known.

“She told me ‘I still love you, but I just don't
want to be married to you anymore,' ” Sherm told me. “What does that mean?”

I told Sherm I didn't know and that I was really
sorry. My own feelings were confused. I tried to sympathize with his wife—I knew
losing a father at such a vulnerable age can cause incalculable damage—but
ditching a husband on deployment and moving his kids 3,000 miles away made me
equally furious. I asked him, dumbly, how he was doing.

“I'm fine.”

The ready room had filled with a few more officers
grab-assing and waiting for “midrats,” a fourth meal served on a carrier around
midnight. He pointed at the other men dressed in the same green flight
suits.

“These guys are my family.”

Sherm had known most of them for less than a
month.

S
herm
took me up on deck for afternoon recoveries the next day. We stood at the front
of the boat with the landing signal officers as they talked to the pilots
approaching the
Nimitz
. There was a rhythm to the
chaos. A sailor shouted “foul deck, foul deck” in a singsong voice until the
previous jet was cleared off the landing strip and then sang “clear deck, clear
deck.” I could catch snippets of the one-way conversations between the LSOs and
the pilots. If the LSO was soothing it meant the pilot was on track; an urgent
repeat of “power, power” at escalating volume meant hit the throttle hard so you
don't strike the ramp and die. We stood maybe thirty feet away as Tupper brought
his Prowler in on a smooth break and caught the number two wire. Sherm tapped me
on the shoulder.

“You've got a pretty damn big smile on your
face.”

He was right. I was ecstatic, bouncing up on the
toes of my flight boots looking for the next plane to emerge out of the clouds.
For the next hour, I watched as planes emerged out of the darkness and, somehow,
returned home to a tiny speck of America in the Pacific Ocean.

But then I went to a dark place. The idea that I
never had and never would have a conversation with Dad about what it's like to
land a jet on a carrier was unbearable. I thought back to how close I came to
spending a week at sea with him. A week on board as a thirteen-year-old and
maybe I would have followed in his flight boots, somehow triumphing over my lack
of coordination. Would that have made him proud?

After the last plane landed, Sherm and I made our
way back down to the Ravens' ready room. I told him I had a headache from the
noise, but that was a lie. I went back to my room and slid into my bunk and
closed my eyes. Mom always said after the accident that Dad was about to be
rotated off flying to a staff position within a year. “God took him doing
something he loved,” she said. “Maybe God knew he wouldn't be able to live
without it.”

I always thought that was bullshit. Now I wasn't so
sure.

I
was
playing backgammon in the ready room when Tupper told me he had a surprise for
me.