Maybe women should run the world. Men have had
their shot, and they are not showing any clear cut dominance or talent for it
just yet. After all, women have half the money now, and they have always had
all the pussy. If that is not the combination of the two most powerful things
on the planet, I do not know what is. The trouble with this line of thinking is
that there are many powerfully intelligent women in the world that think the
human race can survive without men. Man as a gender or sub-species, might not
last long if those women were in power.
What is questionable moral character (QMC)? Do all
Marines have it? Does everybody have it? Whose perspective
counts? If somebody questions you, does that make you questionable? The
individual in question will usually say they do not have QMC. Others may say
they do. I guarantee that most folks out there have had somebody question their
moral character at one time or another. Hell, folks even questioned Jesus
Christ’s moral character. That being the case, who does not have questionable
moral character?
My name is Hector Batiste. Daddy said it “Bat,”
like the flying mammal and “Teest,” long e in the middle, with the silent e on
the end. Friends call me Heck. You might guess from my name that I am of
Hispanic descent. You would be right. My father’s father was half Mexican, and
that makes me an eighth Hispanic. Do not ask me what the rest is, because I
have no fucking clue. I may be part Hispanic, but about the only Spanish I know
is Tengo un gato de vente cinco libras en me pantelones. If I said that
correctly, I have a 25-pound cat in my pants.
A friend in the Corps gave me my first valuable
Spanish lesson; He said to tell the waitress,
“Dos
Cervesas, por favor.”
I said, “Hey,
doesn’t dos mean two?”
He replied, “Yes, you’re buying me one for the lesson.” Above all
things, I am an Old Corps Marine, and I place tremendous value on honor,
integrity, and credibility, even though I sometimes struggle at maintaining
them. I was born on April 14th, the day the Titanic struck the iceberg, the same day President Lincoln
was shot, and Pete Rose’s birthday. It is not outside the realm of possibility
that I
have a dark shadow hanging over my life. I should not be surprised that
on the day of my birth, 14 April, 1954, the British Charts had Doris Day’s Secret Love listed as their number one
song. Perhaps this was a bad omen.
There are three things I have faith in that I can
not see: God, gravity, and electricity. I am a simple guy, and I can live with
that. I like money, but I do not want to work very hard for it. I love getting
drunk, but I do not like hangovers. I love pussy, but I do not like women. That
could be interpreted in a lot of ways. What I really mean is, I do not want
them to talk to me or have needs when I am finished. Do not lay with me, do not
cuddle, just go away. If you want, you can leave me your number; make me a
sandwich or a pot-pie before you go, but go. I have shit to do that does not
involve you.
It is unfortunate that this lifestyle is so hard to
accomplish. I am a realist. Experience has forced that down my throat. However,
in the last few years, despite some difficulties, I have inched a step or two
closer. That requires some explanation. Over the last few years, I have
experienced some life-changing events. I received a five-year suspension from
teaching, lost most of an eye in Iraq, and was run out of the local National
Guard for questionable moral character (mostly due to the teaching suspension).
At the age of 49-ish, I am starting a career in corrections and my
soon-to-be-ex-wife is no longer interested in sex. I would say my life is
sucking badly. Those of you with thinner skin are probably wondering why I do
not just end it all, and kill myself. Well, I might. I have come up from nothing a
couple times before, but I have not hit rock bottom yet. Besides, I have
attended Thick-Skin 101, and…I have a girlfriend who does not suck badly.
I started “working” in corrections. In reality, I
am a grossly overpaid babysitter with a benefit package. I sit on my rather
large and growing ass, teasing inmates with my bon-bons for 30K per year. When
I took this job, Dad told me I would be working with certifiable dullards. He
must have been wrong, because since I have been here, I have met some of the
smartest people. What’s that? Oh, maybe he was referring to the staff.
I have this theory about corrections and its
relation to how we name our children. If you name your child Shaniqua,
Sha-Cole-Slaw, or something else that makes your family tree look like the
McDonald’s value menu, you have given them a predisposition for unemployment. I
hope you are not named after the special sauce. Please, stop naming your kids
after hefty garbage sacks, household products, and tampons. Nobody will hire
your daughter if their name is Velveeta, Stay-free, Always, or Freedom. That
gives them a predisposition for doing crimes. Then they become single mothers,
and have sons who perpetuate the process.
If you are named after a season, a seasoning,
precipitation, or a confectionary product, you have a predisposition to be a
hooker or a stripper. That does not mean I will not like you, but it does mean
you will dance on tables and perhaps stand in line for cheese later in life.
In addition to my full-time work, I collect a nice
supplement to my state income from a National Guard unit across the state line
in Missouri, and an additional bonus from the Veterans’ Administration for
permanent partial disabilities suffered during a sandstorm in the war on
terrorism in January of 2004. It is not completely work-free, but it is an
arrangement with which I can live comfortably.
The hangover dilemma is not completely fixed yet,
but Captain Morgan followed by lots of water and aspirin is very close. If I
could just stay away from Anheuser-Busch products, I would have it made. They
seem to have the most negative impact on me. But who am I to turn down a free,
cold beer? It is, after all, a Marine’s favorite.
Now, if I could just keep supplied with constant “strange”
about four or five times a week, I would be Golden. Why, you might ask? Women
are interesting. They have more crevices. In fact, the only bad camel toe I
have seen was on a camel. For now, I watch a lot of Bang Brothers, wear out
penis-pumps, and collect women that settle for 20 to 30 minutes without needing
anything further. Needing more than that causes me to invoke the lemon law. You
are probably wondering how that is working for me. Not too good at this point.
Hey, I am hung like Einstein and smart as a horse. I wish it was the reverse,
but I have to live with what I have been given.
Between quaffing Captains, I have seven very
inconsistent “booty calls” I can make. Most of them are heavier than the norm,
but heavy girls like me, and I like them. You might say, “I’m down with the
thickness.”
One of them lives in New Orleans, and only works
out about four times a year when she is home visiting family. The last time I
was down there to see her was prior to Katrina
and the Waves coming to town (oh did
they bring the house down). She is so
hot if she had a dick I would suck it. Her specialty is head in the front seat.
I would get a hotel, but my Calvinist upbringing prohibits me from throwing
away money. She even has cute feet.
Another piece is local, but works out only about
once a month. She sucks like a Royals’ relief pitcher. I have concerns about
her because I am relatively certain that I am not the only one puttin’ the wood
to her. Let us just say that I know she could take a transplant, because her
body has not rejected an organ in ten years.
Two others work about once a week, but one of them
is really high maintenance. She makes incredible efforts to remain
attractive…going to the spa, the gym, and make-up/hair-removal artists
frequently. Like Ann Margaret in Grumpy
Old Men, they spackled her good. The other weekly could ruin a marriage…or
save it, depending on your perspective. She is so hot the Rice Krispies are
speechless. As Dr. Phil would say, “She was as handy as a pocket on a shirt.”
The fifth is head-over-heels in love, and
unfortunately I have verbally reciprocated. I would cut her loose, but, she has
DSLs and these giant titties, and I guess I love pussy more than I want to protect
anybody’s feelings. She is Irish, and awfully proud of it. You would think that
she is a direct descendant of St. Fucking Patrick. Any in depth conversation
with her includes the statement, “Freud said that the Irish are the only people
that are impervious to psychoanalysis.”
I always reply, “They can’t even rule their own
fucking island.” That probably makes me an asshole, but I can live with that.
Six and seven are my Missouri strange connection
when I attend my monthly Air National Guard drills in St. Joe. One of them,
Lori, is a funeral director from St. Joseph, and the other, Amber (I call her
Amber the Tight), is worth the drive to Chillicothe. Amber and I met in the
strangest way. I had just dropped off a guy from my shop that lived on the
outskirts of Chillicothe. On my way out of town, this young girl was sitting on
the side of the road on the hood of her car. I am not usually helpful, but she
was just as cute as a speckled pup. I pulled in behind her and started walking
toward her car. She saw the uniform and just started dripping. Do not ask me
how she did it. Amber claims she felt like she had a flat, so she pulled over
to check it. Much to her relief, the tires were all fine. Returning to her
driver’s side door, she found the car to be locked, with the keys inside. When
I got close to her, she almost whispered, “You get me out of this…I’ll suck
your dick for a week.” It does not take much more incentive than that. I took a
wire hangar out of my uniform bag, and in less than two minutes had manipulated
its old shape into a Slim Jim. Five minutes after that, well, it started off to
be a great week. Amber is so flexible, she can almost lick my nuts from the
reverse cowboy position. It does not hurt that she is barely twenty. We are not
going to the bar anyway. I know, I know. I might get herpes just from writing
this.
Back in the day when I had thoughts about marriage,
I had compared theories regarding what to look for in a marriage partner. The
Old School went something like this: Find somebody with conversation skills because when the desire or
ability to screw fades, you will need it. I call bullshit. Find someone who
likes to screw. If you do not, by the time you get to the point where your
erogenous zones are non-existent, you will not want to talk to them anyway.
Finding someone cute, who likes to shag will keep you happy now, and allow you
time to learn to love your partner. By the time you are in your 50s or 60s, you
will have loved and gained a relationship you can talk about. You will also
know where the elusive G-spot is located. Why Ernst Grafenberg did not just
tell us all a long friggin’ time ago is the biggest mystery. I fell for the
marriage thing once, and as soon as she crossed the threshold as Mrs. Batiste,
the campaign started for me to change.
Ambitious thoughts are gravitating toward how easy
and enjoyable I can make this life, and no, I am not assuming there is another.
Achievement and accomplishment are great. I have achieved, and I have
accomplished. Now I want to do something else. I want to think, or not. I want
to sleep a lot. I want to watch TV (Mostly sports). What I do not want is to be
bothered. Call me lazy, I do not care. Waste your life criticizing mine. Do
what you have to do. I am not sure there is anything left to accomplish before
settling in for the big dirt nap.
Everybody that has ever wanted me to do or be
something did so for their own agenda. Bless their hearts, my folks wanted
somebody to brag about. The soon-to-be-ex-wife wanted a breadwinner (I am
talking about a great deal of bread here). Maybe I learned something from my kids. Just be happy. Try
to keep happy those for whom you are responsible, and then do what you have to
in order to be happy yourself. Do not care who it impresses or does not
impress.
Other than permanently earning the title, “United
States Marine” back in 1972, my greatest accomplishment was being the 99th Knight to be knighted in the
Lords and Ladies Pub in Kailua, Hawaii. It would take me 13 weeks to describe
boot camp, and there are multiple movies produced and books written about it
already, so you will get no boot camp history lesson from me (I recommend the
movie, Full Metal Jacket, and any book by W.E.B. Griffin.).
Briefly, to be knighted in the Lords and Ladies
Pub, you needed to pass the test, or the rites of Knighthood. This task was
considerably more difficult than what Sir Paul McCartney or Sir Tom Jones might
have gone through. The sole criterion was that you consumed 99 different
alcoholic beverages on the premises, in a period of one week, and you would be
timed to the minute. Not too tough, some of you might say, after the quick
public math tells you it is a little over 14 beers a day. Now consider that
they were all of the imported variety. Remember, domestic means tame. If that
still does not appear too daunting a task, I am worried about you.
It was not that I wanted to upstage my Knighthood.
I did not even set out to accomplish anything. I just had an interest in being
a Private Investigator. The version of PI that I had previously seen on the tube intrigued me. Magnum was
cool, and he got a ton of strange cooze. It was a sexy occupation. After
completing the 15-week, on-line training, and license application through the
state, I sent off for the badge, via FedEx overnight. It was actually a bi-fold
wallet with a built-in badge that you could flip open to really impress the
chicks. Too bad I could not afford the red Ferrari (not even the rental).
I knew there was not much demand for Private
Investigators in Lincoln, Nebraska, so I continued to serve my country in an
Air National Guard unit across the line in Mo. St. Jo, and I kept the state job
as a security guard at the State Penitentiary. In the beginning, I took a few
jobs helping out some insurance company. They had a hunch that some of their
clients had lied about disability claims, and they wanted me to catch them
scooping snow, or carrying a piano. Many things in life are indelible; becoming
a priest, for example. You are a priest forever, because of the holy orders.
When you are baptized, you are forever a Christian. When you graduate MCRD, you
are forever a Marine. Perhaps the best example is this: People are cheaters,
and they will cheat the system.
Surveillance became pretty boring stuff. Spending
hours peering through the end of a video camera lens was not what I had
imagined. It was not adding to my collection of strange either.
Enough about me. This story is not about me. It is
about my friend…uh…acquaintance, Charlie Mount. I guess it would not be so bad to continue calling Charlie my friend, but the idea
of distancing myself from him is better for now.
We started calling him Count years ago, and I can
not remember exactly why. It might have had something to do with counting
inmates at the correctional facility, or it might have been a Dracula-like
costume he wore for a Halloween party. Those choices would be too clever. More
than likely, somebody fat-fingered his last name while typing, or mispronounced
it in roll-call and the moniker stuck.
Count and I have a lot in common, and perhaps that
is the reason we began to hang out together. There is considerable difference
in our ages, almost 10 years, but not in our collective experiences. We are
both prior service Marines, and we both currently serve in the National Guard,
albeit in different states. In addition, we both work for the Department of
Corrections. The odds against that would appear pretty high to an outsider, but
they are not if you consider a few things. Count’s local Army National Guard
unit is a Huey-helicopter maintenance outfit composed of about 15% prior
service Marines. My previously mentioned unit in the Air National Guard is also
close, with an equally high percentage of Marines. This may be because former
Marines in the Lincoln area do not have many reserve options when they leave
active duty. The closest Marine reserve unit is in Omaha, and it would seem
from insiders that their primary mission is running the state’s Toys For Tots
Campaign. Do not misunderstand me, Toys For Tots is a worthy idea, but it should not be the primary responsibility of a
Marine Corps unit that should be preparing for war. In addition to that, the
Omaha unit has nothing to do with aviation. Marine Air-Wingers that return to
Lincoln typically change branches, if and when they enter the reserves.
The Department of Corrections nation-wide employs a
large percentage of prior service military people because the nature of the
business is security and managing prisoners. Hell, the most important part of
the interview is when they ask, “Can you shoot a person?” Perhaps that is why
the department attracts a large percentage of Marines and soldiers. In spite of
my answer, “Where do you want him shot?” they hired me anyway.
Other than our Marine Corps backgrounds, Count and
I are very different individuals, and have no grounds on which to base our
friendship. We were tight during the first several years, but ironically, Count’s
inability to grow out of the juvenile behavior that humored him, caused me to
lose respect. We kept in touch, but drifted apart. Our correspondence dwindled to
an annual Marine Corps reunion during the second week of November and a handful
of forwarded email jokes.
This story reveals how I realized that there is a
huge difference between real friends and drinking buddies, even if they are my
Marine brothers.
Count served in the United States Marine Corps as
an Avionics Technician on the CH-46E Sea Knight helicopter. That much I know to
be true. What follows is neither true nor false, but what I have been told. He claims to have been trained as
a door-gunner, and to have invaded the small country of Grenada in late October
of 1983, shortly after his 19th birthday. I have caught him claiming many things that he had no
involvement with over the past few years of “bar stories” so I would not bet my
paycheck on any of his proclamations. In fact, on occasion, I have heard him
tell stories that sounded remarkably like stories I had previously told him.
Most of the stories were lies when they came out of my mouth, so I can not be
terribly critical.
Count has more problems in his life than normal. He
has made some shady investment deals, and I have dipped into some conversations
he has had at work. After sharing some of his financial woes with the inmates,
they have quietly offered some money-making opportunities to him. I suspect
that he may be trafficking tobacco to the inmates. I am not too sure that Count
will not be an inmate soon, but for now, he just works there with me.
Count’s worst problem came up just recently, and he
does not even know about it yet. I was contacted a few months ago by a Mrs.
Claire Mount, Count’s wife. Claire is an oxymoron. I should say her appearance
represents one. If you do not know what an oxymoron is, the best way I can
describe it is a term where words are used to describe something contradictory
or just the opposite of the root word. I am not even sure my definition helps.
Perhaps the best way to explain it since I do not have a Webster handy is to provide you with examples. For example: jumbo-shrimp, military
intelligence, or she’s pretty ugly.
Claire Mount’s oxymoronic nomenclature: Petite
Bohemian. Claire was about 5’ 110 lbs. You could not tell by looking at her,
but she worked her ass off (literally) to keep the weight off. If anybody had a
genetic predisposition to be heavy, she did.
More than anything, Claire wanted her husband’s
love. The trouble was, she had no earthly idea how to show him that. For now,
Claire wanted her husband investigated, and she was not aware that I knew her
husband. For all she knew, I was a full-time Private Investigator. Had she
known I was an employee of the Department of Corrections, and a prior service
Marine, she would have definitely shied away from using my services. You have
learned enough about me to know that cash is King. Claire paid me nicely, and I
think if I play my cards right, I may be able to add her to the list of
20-minute shags in the future if I prove her theory.
There is no “going-rate” for investigative services
in Lincoln, Nebraska, so I could charge just about any reasonable amount. Mrs.
Mount suspected that her husband was cheating on her. I could have told Claire
that Charlie was cheating prior to being hired, but that might be detrimental
to my financial outcome, and I was not sure just yet if I could be a snitch. My
first real case as a private investigator would be easy. The difficulty would
be deciding who to tell, and what to tell, and when or if I could tell at all.
“Do you know
why I’m here? Do you?”
“Did a flare gun go off in your locker, or did you
tape someone’s butt cheeks together?”
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