Thank You for My Service - Mat Best Page 0,5
closest we ever got to actual agriculture was bullshitting about how to cross-pollinate the marijuana strains we’d read about in High Times. At one point we managed to pull our green thumbs out of our asses long enough to try to build a greenhouse, but that didn’t get much past the planning stages.
Things weren’t much better in the band, which we called Blind Story, because of course we did. I’d gotten taller by the time we actually played some gigs, but I was still way too skinny, my teeth were a little too bucked for my mouth—I basically looked like a Christmas nutcracker—and if my jet-black Flock of Seagulls haircut wasn’t quite repellent enough, I decided to play bass, just to make sure all the girls knew that the last vagina I’d been inside of was the one I’d come out of.
There’s nothing particularly unique about that combination of physical characteristics or even my circumstances, but when you throw in the strong military pedigree—and the fact that things only got more awkward as I grew from adolescent boy to pubescent teenager—what you ended up with was not G.I. Joe but “Gee, I don’t think you’re ever going to have sex.”
Don’t misunderstand: I don’t regret a single second I spent in Blind Story or in botany club. Surprisingly, when you’re not fucking, you can actually learn stuff. In the band, I got experience with teamwork and finding my place as part of a larger unit. In botany club, I learned one of the most important lessons of all: how to hustle.
When we first tried to build that greenhouse, the school made us pay for our own supplies, so we needed to generate cash. The cheerleaders had the car wash. The marching band had the bake sale. The swim team had rich parents. We needed to find our own thing. Besides being complete cock pockets, the only marketable skill any of us had was my ability to grill hamburgers like a boss. So that’s what we did. Every day at lunchtime, I got behind an old Weber grill and we slung burgers in the courtyard like Avon Barksdale slinging crack in the low-rises. It wasn’t long before business was booming. All the kids were fiending for our shit. We were selling out regularly and making some decent coin, at least for high school kids.
As the burger business grew and grew, one of the vice principals finally asked me if we had authorization. I didn’t lie, but I also didn’t answer her question: I told her we were raising money for the botany club. She let it slide for a while, but eventually, the school realized they were losing lunch money to our little operation, and they shut us down. That’s what happens when a scrappy upstart with a better product carves out a niche for itself in a market previously dominated by a natural monopoly. They snuff it out. All these lessons would help me immensely when I started getting into for-real business a decade later, but in the moment it made me hate everything school-related.
It wasn’t until the second half of high school that the military started to have some appeal for me. It began when two of my older brothers, Alan and Davis, were preparing to graduate from Marine Corps boot camp together and my parents and I went down to Camp Pendleton to visit them for Family Day.
Family Day is supposed to be an awesome day—a celebration. Except for the last day of school, there aren’t many days that a fifteen-year-old kid looks forward to like, “Holy shit, I can’t wait for that day to come.” But when you grow up with a hardcore veteran as a father, and your older brothers, who are like heroes to you, are graduating from boot camp together, it is a big fucking deal. And it is no joke.
I’ll never forget that Family Day. It was September 11, 2001.
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The culminating event of boot camp takes place two weeks prior to graduation. It’s a fifty-four-hour suckfest called “The Crucible” that, like the play of the same name by Arthur Miller, is excruciating to get through if you’re not a total masochist. But the Crucible is a mandatory experience if you want to call yourself a Marine. It’s a never-ending parade of marching, obstacle course running, team-building, and other sweet mental challenges designed to test your endurance and your sanity, all on very little sleep and even less food.
Davis got through