JamesSavik

July 26, 2019

1991

As the Systems Administrator for a small state agency before the Internet, I was required to do quarterly backup of all of our computer systems. I always chose to do them on the last Friday of the quarter because it would take until past one in the morning or even later if one of the tapes failed to test good after the backup had been made.

As it happened the June 28, 1991 backup was a shit show. Three tapes failed so after dealing with all that crap and boxing the tapes up for off site storage, I was finally done a little past two-thirty in the morning. I was not loving it.

There was a little twink bar called Kyle's on the same block as our building. Even at this hour, the thumping of the bass was difficult to miss. I had gone there a few times for a beer but the crowd was cute little college boys and under-aged kids got in somehow so at the grand old age of twenty-eight, I was a fossil in that place. If you weren't nineteen, it just wasn't your venue.

I was never, ever a twink. Oh, I liked them. Still do. They're fun to look at but, they swim in their own circles. Someone big enough to play college linebacker like me was the sort they would be scared of. I didn't chase them. Something had happened to me. I was in a job that went from 8 am Friday to two-thirty in the fucking Saturday morning. I felt like I skipped my twenties and went right to forty.

That night all I wanted to do was to go home, smoke a bowl and pass out but that was not to be.

When I went out to my truck to go home, I heard something behind the dumpster. I looked to see what it was and it was a boy laying face down and naked on bails of cardboard. Clothes were scattered in a heap beside him.

I guess a lot of people would have said oh well and drove on. I wasn't raised that way. That was somebody's baby boy and in this part of town, nothing good was going to happen to him. In fact it looked like something bad might have already happened to him.

He wasn't dead and I didn't see a mark on him- at least on his back side. It was an extremely nice back side. I looked through the stuff in a heap. There was a wallet with a Mississippi College ID and a set of keys. Shit. If the MC people found out he was gay, bi or curious, they would throw him out in a heartbeat.

I looked at the ID and it was a really cute kid: Andrew Wilder. A nineteen year old sophomore who had apparently stepped into something bad. Being found in this condition in this place wouldn't be good for a student at a notoriously homophobic Baptist College.

I tried to talk to him but whoever had done this too him had slipped him something. There was the strong smell of alcohol on him but this wasn't drunk. I'd seen drunk. I'd been drunk. This wasn't it.

Thankfully we were concealed behind a dumpster so I managed to get his boxers on him. I collected all of his stuff and put it in my truck. Then I picked him up, put him in the passenger seat of my truck and put the seat belt on him.

I took him home and put him in my guest bedroom with all of his clothes and belongings I collected.

Then I worried about him. Did he need a doctor? Would he be OK? From what I understood about the most common "Mickey" at the time, he just needed to sleep it off but the last thing I needed was to explain a dead body in my house if he happened to forget to breathe.

I got a comfortable chair and put it beside the bed and watched him. I checked his pulse and his breathing every now and then until I fell asleep.

I woke up and the sun was up. I hadn't been able to tell just how stunning he was until the morning light showed his pale skin and golden curls. He was a little guy. maybe a hundred and thirty pounds soaking wet. He was still asleep but occasionally he would laugh, talk in his sleep and play with himself.

He started to come out of it but he was still talking and acting drunk. He told me I was a hunk and asked me to fuck him. I told him to ask me again later. Then he would go back to sleep for a while.

He only really started to come out of it about noon.

At first he thought gotten really drunk and I'd picked him up and this was the awkward aftermath of a one night stand,

Then I told him how I had found him. He was shocked, horrified and a little suspicious of me until I told him why I'd taken care of him.

I was honest with him. He was a cute kid and I wasn't going to leave him there incapacitated for God knows what to happen to him.

I told him I had graduated from Mississippi College in '86 and knew what would have happened to him if the police had picked him up in the same block as Kyle's in that condition. I told him that I worked very late on the last Friday of every quarter and he was damned lucky that it was me that found him.

Neither of us could figure out why someone had done that to him. If it was a prank it was one of the meanest ones I'd ever heard of. He showed no signs of sexual abuse so we ruled out rape. We eventually came up with the theory that he had turned down someone vengeful.

I put his clothes in to wash and let him get a shower. I let him use my housecoat while his clothes were drying. I cooked us lunch and we took bong hits waiting for his clothes to dry.

We made love for the first time that afternoon and spent the rest of the weekend together.

There are much better ways of finding a boy friend but Andrew learned a valuable lesson: the guys you can trust to take care of you when you are at your most vulnerable are the ones you want to keep.

We saw each other until he graduated and moved to the west coast.

I hated to see him go but those were the days when we didn't think in terms of marriage and decades together but, I wish we had.

I loved Andrew and still do wherever he is.

July 26, 2019

Lordy mercy!

April 21, 2019

India Hotel is Down

Wherever he stepped the sandy beach burned and left glass imprints of his footsteps like a bizarre pathway out of hell.

The sun blazed on the island and the constant roar of the surf and the call of the gulls filled the air.

Like most of the small islands in this part of the South China Sea, it was flat and sandy with thick, scruffy would be jungle. It would be jungle if typhoons didn't blow these sandbars in and out of existence with great regularity.

He wanted shade but that wasn't going to happen.

He took a drink from his canteen. He washed it around his mouth and swallowed.

He pulled his survival radio out of his pocket and keyed the mike, "The is India Hotel four-four. I am down. I can not receive. I'm not sure I'm transmitting but, I'm feet dry on a small island an estimated thirty miles East-South-East of Dong Hoi. I got separated from my B/N when we punched out. Will transmit on this freq every two hours until the batteries are gone."

He walked into the scruffy vegetation in hopes of finding some... What? Shade? Food? Water? None of that was here. What was here were those God awful little green snakes with red eyes.

He wondered what had happened to his bombardier/navigator Ray Howard.

As he wandered the small island, his mind wandered back to the first time he had met Ray at Pensacola Naval Air Station.

Over beers as a shitty little off base bar, his instructor had introduced Ray as the one craziest pilot in the Navy.

He had to know. He asked: what made Ray so crazy?

Ray was a new kind of air warrior called Iron Hand.

Oh crap! He really must be nuts. Iron Hand actually hunts SAMs when every other sane pilot runs like hell from them.

OK, now he was curious. How does that work? SAMs and pilots are natural enemies. Aren't pilots that hunt them like a mouse gunning for a cat?

Ray had explained that the bombardier/navigator had to know what they were doing but if you flew low and fast, hunting the search radars, you could pop up, fire a homing missile and go low again.

The next day he talked to his CO and started training for Iron Hand missions.

Learning to fly Iron Hand was, as the hippies say, a trip. You take the book, throw it away and write a new book. It's a brand new game that equal parts electronic warfare, nervous tension and brass balls.

To kill a SAM, you have to give it a shot at you. At least a good sniff, enough for his radar to go from search to track.

Then you, no shit, close your eyes and fire the missile. If you don't close your eyes, when the rocket lights off, it will flash blind you.

Once the missile is away, you get to dance with a SAM. That's loads of fun if you like screaming terror as a rocket the size of a telephone pole tries to nail your plane.

He had fifteen Iron Hand missions. Every single time he brought his bird back to the carrier, his A-6 Intruder spent time in the body and fender shop.

As he walked around the island, he came to a place where there had been a fire. It had been some time ago but, people had been here.

He walked on and covered the whole island. It was shaped a bit like a crescent about a mile long and a quarter wide. He finally did find some palms and got out of the sun but he couldn't get out of the heat.

In these waters it could get very still and hot quickly dehydrating anyone without access to water.

He could feel himself getting loopy and collapsed against the trunk of the palm.

He tried to space out the water but there wasn't much of it and the heat and humidity just sweated it out of him.

He tried to sleep but unconscious delirium was more like it.

As he lay against the palm, he felt a presence. He looked up and saw his B/N Ray.

He wasn't wet, muddy and bedraggled.

He said, "I was afraid you didn't get out."

Ray said, "I didn't."

"So I guess I'm dead now?"

"No. You aren't dead. You'll be rotating back stateside soon and you'll be asked to be an instructor at Pensacola NAS. I'm here to tell you to do it."

"Why?"

"So that others may live."

Ray seemed to vanish like smoke.

Soon afterwards strong hands were loading him on a search and rescue chopper.

He did go back to Pensacola where he was an instructor for many years.

There is no better reason.

So that others may live.

April 2, 2019

February 5, 2019

The sooner that we accept the fact that man is a dangerous, unpredictable predator and move on with that knowledge, the less disappointed in the race we will be.

January 25, 2019

I knew that my days on the help desk were going to be rough when one of the managers sent me a floppy disk with this note *stapled* to it: "Please check out this program. It won't load on my pc".