The Winter of 71
Glen had become accustomed to being held a lot. I believe you might call that being spoiled. As long as somebody was holding him, he was delighted. As soon as you laid him down, he would scream. He didn't want to sleep in his bed at all. He would sleep in his swing, but it wasn't good for him to have his legs hanging down all of the time. I was trying to break him of his habit of crying. His doctor had told me to put him in bed and let him cry himself to sleep. After a few days, he would stop crying and sleep in his bed. I tried doing this at night. I would bathe him, give him a bottle, and then lay him down in bed in the darkened room and partially close the door. As soon as he would start crying, my mom would start screaming at me that I was mean to him. Then she would go and pick him up. Well, that just wasn't going to work. When she got ready to go to bed, she would hand him to me. It was late, and I was tired, too, so I would lay him down, and he would start crying. Then she would wake up and tell me how awful I was to let him cry. I wasn't getting much sleep. Then she lectured me and told me that a baby should never be left in a darkened room to sleep. I was fighting a losing battle.
When Mike would come home from Camp David, it would be awful. Glen would cry and cry. My mom would pick him up. I was ready to pull my hair, or her's out. Finally, Mike had enough of her interfering and told her to stop. Then bossy Ronnie made the mistake of getting in Mike's face, and they almost came to blows; lucky for Ronnie, he decided he should keep his mouth shut after Mike backed him up across the room. So we were the bad guys, and the next day we went and found an apartment back in Oxon Hill. Two days after the incident, we were gone. No apologies. We had toughed it out for four long months; enough was enough.
Mike was gone most of the time because he was still stationed at Camp David. I loved it. I was finally alone, except for Glen, and I got him straightened out with the crying routine in just a couple of days. Now it was peaceful and quiet, something that I wasn't used to. I think that set the pace for my preference in life; I like my alone time. Occasionally I would take Mike back to Camp David and keep the car. That was especially nice. I would put Glen in the car, and we would ride around. My schedule was Glen's schedule. Once I got him to sleep in his bed, he slept like he had never slept before. He wasn't one of those babies that woke up at the crack of dawn. He would sleep until 9:00 on most days. That was right up my alley.
The only shortcoming of our being in our own place was that I didn't know how to cook. My mom was a great cook, but I never had any desire to learn, and when I became an active teenager, I wasn't home most of the time. I ate mayo and tomato sandwiches, cheese sandwiches, chips, mostly junk whenever Mike wasn't around. But when he came home, he wanted a decent meal. I didn't have any cookbooks, and there weren't any cooking shows on back then. I just had to wing it. Usually, he was only there for two days, so I just had to have a couple of good meals for him. I did pretty well with fried
Pork chops and roast, I was proud of myself. And then one weekend, Mike decided he wanted to have a bunch of people over for a real spaghetti dinner. Chef Boy Ar Dee in a box? I could do that. No, he wanted it made from scratch.
I didn't know how to make spaghetti sauce; I would have just dumped tomato sauce on it and given them a can of parmesan cheese. I called Judy and asked her if she knew how to make it; she didn't; she cooked about as much as I did. She was one of the invited guests. so I went to her house, and we asked her mom how to make it. Oh my gosh, I had a gigantic list of spices that I had never used before, never heard of them, to be quite honest. And then I had to borrow two huge pans to make it in. The only problem was that Judy's mom told me that the sauce had to cook for two or three hours. Great! We would just have to socialize for a while. Shelley would be there; that would be one of the last times that I would actually see her. I don't remember who she was with; she and Jim had broken up back in the summer. I remember the only thing that the guy she was with, a Marine, called her Marilyn Monroe, but not to her face. I asked him why, and he said that was what everyone called her because she was in love with love. I never told her that her feelings would have been hurt. After what seemed like it took days to make, the spaghetti was finally ready. It turned out to be very tasty, but I never made it that way again for years. It was just too much trouble to go through all of that work for 2 people. But I did retain how to make it, and every time I did, I got many compliments on it. Thank you, Mrs. P.
Our circle of friends had shifted. Some of the original guys that we knew had either been discharged or stationed elsewhere. Some of the new friends were from Camp David, some were friends of The Marine Corps Color Guard Sergeant named Tim, who was from Ohio. I really liked him, he was a big guy, handsome and so funny, he would just make me crack up laughing. If I had been a single girl, I would have been knocking on his door. I think he was fond of me too. He would act like a butt around his girlfriend, who was rarely ever with him, but he was very polite and considerate when he was around me. He told Mike that he needed to grow up and act like a man more than once when he was drinking and on the verge of being an ass. And thinking about him reminds me of one of the most violent evenings that I had been a party to with good old Mke.
Good old Mike had started drinking again. When they were off duty at Camp David, one of the few things to do was go to the club there at Camp David and drink. Apparently, Mike had been drinking a lot during those times with his friends. And he had been drinking hard liquor again, his good friend Southern Comfort and Calvert's. After we moved into the apartment, he began bringing home bottles of liquor within a few weeks. At first, he would bring one bottle, and it would last him through 2 episodes of being home four to five days. By January, he was drinking two bottles within two days. Two-fifths that is a lot of alcohol. I would keep my distance, hoping he would pass out and leave me alone, and it seemed to be working for a while.
In February, we went to a party in the Southview party room. It was a party for one of the guys, a going-away party, I believe. It was pretty crowded, with lots of jarheads, lots of females. As soon as we got there, Mike got with some of his friends and decided he would outdrink everyone. Again I kept my distance; I didn't want to become a target if one of the guys started talking to me. I just hung around people that I knew were not a threat in any way to him. Mike got mad and mouthy at some point, and some of the guys decided to take him outside and hope that the cold air would sober him up. I wasn't aware of what was going on. At some point, I noticed that he was gone. I went over and asked the guys where he was, and they told me. They said he had been gone for about an hour. That worried me, knowing how belligerent he could be, plus he had the car keys. I said I was going to go upstairs and see if he was outside. Tim, the nice guy, told me that he would go with me because of the way Mike had been acting when he left. We got in the elevator and rode up to the first floor. When the door opened, Mike was standing on the other side; he took one step in, grabbed me by the hair, and threw me against the wall, and started punching me. Tim jumped out and grabbed him, and then some of the other guys who had been with him grabbed him and held him. Tim came over and picked me up off the carpeted floor. Mike started screaming at me that I was a whore and asking where I had been with Tim. He was so drunk that he thought that he was on the basement level coming up from the party room and that Tim and I were coming back from being somewhere together and that we were getting on the elevator to go back to the party. Pretty drunk, no, out of his mind, drunk. My lip was bleeding, and my head was pounding from hitting the wall. I asked the guys to get his car keys away from him, which they did. They then took him away in somebody's car to get him coffee and get him sobered up. Tim took me back downstairs to get some ice for my lip. I still had to go home with the drunk, and I was dreading it.
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