The Elephant and The Powder Keg

I am my father’s son. Most days that knowledge thrills me. I love my father. I have him to credit for my sense of humor, my pragmatism, and my diving-board nose trick. I can’t help but delight in seeing my heritage manifest itself physically. We both cross our arms the same way. I’m sure it’s just a matter of time before I start rubbing my hands together when I get excited.

Unfortunately, I also inherited some of his less desirable attributes, the most destructive of which is his penchant for repression. Our stunted emotional expression was on full display this past Wednesday when a devastating bit of news came our way. We have started counting the days. After five years of “Will he? Won’t he? What if he does?” the first two questions have been answered, leaving my family to contemplate the repercussions of the last.

In 44 days, my brother ships to Iraq.

A healthy family might have talked out the meaning of this news, but my father and I sat in opposing recliners in front of a television that might as well have been off. Both of us were too mindful of the two-ton, red, white, and blue elephant that had trudged its way into our home and left a monstrous shit in the foyer. God bless America.

My brother is a master of a special kind of doublespeak. The entirety of his dialogue is split fifty/fifty between his mouth and his ass. I’m compelled by what comes out of his mouth. Girls are compelled by what comes out of his ass. I understand the source is sometimes difficult to discern. I’ve been fooled more than once, and I’m a bright guy. So, I can’t fault some of the dim bulbs he’s snared.

But I digress.

My brother’s path to the Middle East has been one of fits and starts, uncertainties and contradictions, mouth-speak and ass-speak. At one point we expected him to be headed overseas this past March. Then for a while we thought he might actually avoid deployment. His immediate duties after West Point were very non-soldier. He taught calculus and coached girl’s basketball at Fort Monmouth, the West Point prep school, for six months before transferring to Fort Benning, Georgia for several months of mechanized training before Army Ranger School. But after several uneventful months, my brother had exhausted Ft. Benning’s curriculum and learned more than enough to dissuade him from pressing ahead with Ranger training.

So, he packed his bags and headed for Fort Carson, Colorado where he will be stationed until the end of his five year commitment to the Army. Unfortunately, he barely got his welcome mat out front of his new apartment before he learned that he was being transferred from his mechanized division (that would be returning from Iraq in October) to an armored division currently training for winter deployment. One slip of a pen and my brother went from a division that would be going on leave post haste to a division that would be vacating the states poster haste. The switch was so vicious it’s remarkable he didn’t snap his neck.

At home, the Rockwell family dealt with the news as they always handle bad news. My father tried to get as much information as possible, as if more information might somehow make our situation more tolerable. My mother became a ferocious busybody – working late, sewing like a flesh and blood Singer, and arranging to ease the practical issues of Andrew’s deployment. She made sure that every family member at my cousin Brian’s wedding this past weekend etched their vitals into an inappropriately playful notebook. That sparkly red pad haunted me throughout the ceremony. After making its way around the cousin’s dinner table, it sat at my elbow while Brian’s brother Lee made his toast as Best Man. I sacrificed a fair amount of enamel to keep from breaking down at the table.

Aside from that one moment, I’ve handled the news with my typical mixture of external stoicism and whirling gray matter, and for the first time I have the self-awareness to see what a powder keg that makes me. Unfortunately for my mental health (and again my poor enamel), there’s something about that state – the tightly-packed kinesis of anger and fear and uncertainty squeezing on each other – that has stirred my creative juices to an unprecedented degree. I don’t talk to my family about the machinations going on between my ears. I’d expect their minds are engaged in the same sort of deliberations and I dare not exacerbate their sensitivity with my prattling. I don’t much leave my workroom (aside from my actual job) now that I’ve finally got it feng shuied for maximum brooding. I just stand in front of the dry erase siding I’ve installed on my walls, spider-graphing character relationships and squeaking out chapter outlines like some neurotic mad scientist.

Mad, indeed.

If I break down my present emotional state to its purest form, anger owns all. God would be mighty useful right about now, but since I can’t be pissed at something I don’t believe in that leaves a lot of angst with nowhere to go. I get some out through my writing (I’m on my third case of dry-erase markers), but like a Crip at a Klan rally, a part of me just really wants somebody to start some shit. Please, somebody, give me a reason to break out my Al Pacino, scenery-chewing, asshole best. I got loads of material. Working a mindless warehouse job gives me plenty of time to stir up myriad priceless riffs, and not all of them can go in my stories. Please God, somebody, tell me now that if I don’t support the war then I don’t support the troops. That would thrill me in so many ways I well up at the thought.

After all that bile, it’s going to seem kind of silly for me to admit that I’m not all that worried about my brother’s safety. No, it’s the sanity of my family. Though we tried to keep the news a secret through Brian’s wedding, the secret was too big and my brother told too many people. So, I got to watch as my mother told my grandparents over bacon and eggs just hours before the ceremony. Watching my grandfather hide his grief with a thousand different iterations of “Fuck Bush” and watching my grandmother try to talk herself out of the truth, losing control of her fear as she lost her grip on denial, the sting of it still sticks me. My mother has been brave to this point, but she’ll eventually have to breathe and acknowledge what is happening. My father will probably feel the heaviest weight from this, but he’ll show it the least. As much as I’m riding this angst for the productiveness it’s afforded me, my father has no such outlet, and I worry about him more than just about anyone.

As for myself, I’m a pragmatist, and a pragmatist needs a plan. I’ve spent much of the past week trying to find a way that I could support my brother in some practical fashion – something better than yellow ribbons and rubber bracelets. My mom has the care-package market cornered. My father will spearhead the financial and real estate matters. Me? Well, I’m going to do what I do best: I’m going to write.

If one aspect of my brother’s personality feels most disparate from the rest, it’s his love of fantasy fiction. Terry Brooks, Robert Jordan, and the like have been filling his shelves for well over a decade now. Well, it’s time I added my own tale to his shelf. So, in the next forty days I’ll be preparing a weekly serial to entertain my baby brother in the desert. At a chapter a week, I should be able to churn out my first novel in the year he’s away. It’s not as much as I’d like to give him. Most of my continued frustration comes from my inability to do much of anything for him in the coming year. I’d like to give him a hundred grand for his West Point education, but I don’t have that kind of coin at my disposal. I’d like to supply him with a Batsuit to make him invincible. I can’t help but feel useless watching him head into a warzone. I’m humbled by what he is about to undertake, and humility doesn’t come naturally to intellectual elitists like myself.

It has just now passed midnight. Another day has been crossed off the calendar. Another day until we say good-bye to my brother. It’s 43 days now.

I’m exhausted.

Time to hit the whiteboard.