Thank You for My Service - Mat Best Page 0,70
of freedom, like we just walked out of the poster for Three Kings. Being an American is about celebrating diversity, so naturally we had everything from Natty Ice to Budweiser under our arms. For the fancy import lovers in our group, we even picked up some champagne of beers, Miller High Life. We were officially in business. When we were finally all back in the van, the driver slammed his door shut, turned, and looked at us hard.
“One, don’t offer me a beer. I gotta stay sober, because this is going to be a shit show. Two, I’m not stopping for piss breaks. You either hold it in or find another way. We good with those rules?”
“Easy day,” I said. Everyone either agreed or didn’t care.
The second we pulled out of the parking lot, all six of us cracked open cans of beer in unison. It was a symphony for alcoholics inside a van for crazy people. We spent the next hour or so laughing, talking about girls, and telling crazy fucked-up war stories. It was everything I loved about being in the Army and everything I missed while pretending to be furniture in Los Angeles. I finally felt like myself again…which is why I had no problem being the first one to pull his dick out and piss into one of the empty cans rolling around on the floor.
Once I broke the seal, every single other dude grabbed an empty can and followed suit. It was the quietest the van had been since we left the convenience store. The eerie silence caused the driver to look in his rearview mirror to see what was going on. What he saw was the fountains at Bellagio, in miniature and with urine. It was majestic and probably horrifying, which inspired him to jerk the wheel, fishtailing the van and making most of us piss on ourselves. Any piss we didn’t catch landed on the van’s rubber floor mats.
“Sorry about that, boys,” he said with a smile. “Armadillo. Didn’t want to hit it.”
When we finally got to the hotel, everyone wanted to continue the party. Fight school was kind of a joke. They don’t really do anything there that most of us haven’t already done. The worst that could happen is that we sloppily go through the motions, puke on ourselves, and get our hangovers punched out of our heads in the process. So why not enjoy ourselves? I walked up to the young female receptionist at the front desk to check in and tried to maintain whatever level of sobriety I had left.
“Excuse me, ma’am, after we get our keys, these lovely gentlemen and I are looking for your finest local watering hole.”
“There’s a bar next door,” she said, without even looking up from her keyboard, “but I would recommend showering first, because you guys smell like a urinal.”
“I’m sorry, in what sense?” I asked.
“In every possible sense imaginable,” she said in a monotone voice as she faked a smile and processed our room keys.
We took the keys, and we did not take her advice. There would be no showering. We had worked hard to smell this bad. Instead, we threw our bags in our rooms and headed straight for the bar, where our presence was felt immediately. Most of the guys knew we were trouble and wanted nothing to do with us, so they quietly left. One of them didn’t move an inch, however. His name was “Oxen.” He was a student in our selection class who had taken another van up to the hotel. Apparently, we were not the only genius operators in this outfit, because Oxen’s group had turned their van into a party bus as well. Oxen was already Irish-Catholic drunk, which says something because Oxen is, well, ox-sized. He was at least six-foot-four and had to clock in close to three hundred pounds, most of it that hard, lumpy man muscle you get from lifting heavy things and throwing them around a lot. He was as close to a real-life Paul Bunyan as you are going to get without an overactive pituitary gland. He was also the single most perfect representation of a Marine that I had ever met. Not the Marines from the television commercial, wearing dress blues in the middle of the desert catching lightning with their swords; I’m talking about actual jarhead, fuck-your-world-up Marines. Some might describe Oxen as the biggest knuckle-dragging dumbshit Marine you could possibly imagine, but I would quibble