A MEMOIR

Why Would Two Best Friends Concoct Such a Hare-brained Idea?

One for love, one for art — two souls bound for San Antonio

Feb. 6, 1962

I wish I could remember how it all came about that Howie and I concocted such a harebrained idea to begin with.

You see, we had been taking a creative writing class at Allen Hancock College in Santa Maria, California.

The professor was an Irishman, transplanted to California. I’m sure his countryman, James Joyce, had ignited some kind of fire in his soul. Professor O’Gwynn had his own abstruse, obscurantist novel secreted away in his closet. Teaching this class probably helped keep the cinders alive until his own “Finnegan’s Rebirth” was, well, birthed.

We’d been over to Professor O’Gwynn’s apartment a couple of times during the semester. There, we swilled bitter European coffee and chastised the popular writers of the day, using every platitude we had at our command. It was college, after all!

Professor O’Gwynn alluded to a novel in his closet that he was working on. I think he was disappointed that we never encouraged him to show it to us.

I had always wanted to be a writer — Howie, not so much. We’d gone through high school together. He was a year behind me.

Howie was not a stranger to harebrained ideas. When I graduated high school, for example, and decided to join the Air Force, he thought it was a grand idea. He somehow got his parents’ signed approval allowing him to drop out of high school in his junior year. He recruited another friend of his by the name of Jesse, and the three of us joined the Air Force on July fourth, 1957.

Because we chose such a momentous day in the history of our nation to join the military, we were sworn in by a famous general of the day. Afterward, he marched down every row, snapped to heel-clicking attention before each new recruit, looked him straight in his eyes (and it appeared right into his soul), and shook his hand, vigorously.

You’d think the general’s name would be forever etched in my mind. It was a great honor at the time to shake his hand. But I confess, over the two days it took me to write this introduction to my memoir, I racked my brain to remember his name. Only today, after I decided to post it leaving out that entire segment, the famous general’s name popped into my head.

It was James Harold “Jimmy” Doolittle. I had to go to Google to make sure I was right.

The three of us, Howie, Jesse and I, fancied ourselves as the Three Musketeers. We figured that since we’d joined together, we’d go to tech schools together and then travel the whole world, as tight as the Three Musketeers. (No one said we were mature or even possessed a particle of good sense back then!)

Came the aptitude tests! Howie became a medical records keeper. Jesse went to food management. They whisked me off to the Security Service where they cleared me for a top secret and cryptographic classification. I learned Morse code and the art of reading coded message strips that shot out like thin, white, tongues from the mouths of gigantic machines.

Four years later (without our giving each other as much as a “howdy, Musketeer” during the interim), they discharged Howie and me and dumped us back into Santa Maria. I have no idea where Jesse ended up, but, as I told you, Howie and I enrolled in a creative writing class.

I don’t remember whose idea it was. It might have begun as simply as this: “Jay,” he could have said to me, or “Howie,” I could have said to him, “how much money you got?” And after whichever one of us was being asked rooted around in his wallet and came up with an amount, the other would have done the same. We’d have added both amounts together. Then, the one or the other of us who initiated the conversation would have announced, “Let’s go to San Antonio.” Which is in Texas.

Sweet Jesus! How funny memory is!

The whole idea of this retrospective was to get back to the roots of the history before I arrived with Howie in San Antonio, Texas, February 6th, 1962. Its singular purpose was to uncover the reason why we left the well-cushioned security of our homes in the first place.

I wanted to isolate and understand the roots of that place and time before we launched out into the unknown where no one knew, cared or even believed that we weren’t immortal. If our parents had an inkling we weren’t the stuff of the gods, they didn’t have the words to tell us that the world would do everything in its collective power to disprove it.

That is the world’s job, after all! We were to discover it, Howie and I, each in his own singular soul.

Like all, singularly, must.

Anyway, in the searching, in the unwinding of the skein of the past, I reacquainted my mind with a fact that was so obvious it was like Sherlock Holmes’ description of a clue as being “so overt it’s covert.” Air Force basic training was at Lackland Air Force Base, which was on the outskirts of San Antonio, Texas. That geographical fact connected with its historical counterpart. It dawned on me that Howie’s military career never took him beyond Lackland Air Force Base. He finished out his four-year enlistment on that base and spent a lot of off-duty time in the city of San Antonio.

And, now its full impact came flooding back to me!

While I had been shuttled off to Mississippi for schooling in Security Service and then was sent to Libya, North Africa, to finish my tour of duty, San Antonio had become Howie’s off-base haunt.

In fairytale fashion, a beautiful young lady, the name of June, lived in San Antonio. When Howie was not on base, he was visiting her home which she shared with her parents and two younger sisters.

So … now all this wandering around the prehistory has brought me full circle. I’m back to where Howie and I had taken the creative writing course At Allen Hancock College.

And I am left with the unassailable memory of Howie asking me, or me asking Howie

“So … how much money you got?”

I want to thank Debra G. Harman, MEd. for her dedicated and essential editing of my story.

JS