Hey Mat, when you get back, why don’t you come live with us? We’re moving to Los Angeles, there’s like three of us who are going in on renting a house together. We’re going to fuck shit up. Miss you bro, we’d love to have you.
I remember sitting there, staring at the screen, unsure how to respond. After careful thought I typed back:
What are you guys going to do for jobs?
I checked my messages the next day and found this response:
What are you, a fucking dad? Dude, we’re 22. Who gives a shit? We’re going to party and fuck hot chicks all summer. We’ll figure it out when we get there. You in? Need to know soon so we can fill in your room if you don’t want to come.
The words “What are you, a fucking dad?” stung me, because it was true. Damn. Why did I care what they were doing for jobs? Forget about assimilating into the workforce, could I even be a normal kid and have fun again? Had I seen too much to live the life of a typical twenty-two-year-old? If his offer sounded appealing to me—and it did—my only concern should have been partying and hooking up all summer, not how we were going to keep the lights on while we did it. Was I going to age too rapidly and burn myself out over here and miss all of my twenties if I stayed? Probably. Would it be more rewarding to stay? Maybe. Would I regret not giving the carefree twenties a shot? I didn’t know.
After a grueling mental back and forth over the next forty-eight hours, I decided not to reenlist. After chasing my military dreams since I was sixteen years old, after fighting for my country through five deployments, through many narrow misses and several tragic deaths, I decided to go home and try to be a kid again. I quit war cold turkey. For now at least….
Chapter 12
Snowflakes in Los Angeles?
The day I got out of the Army, September 13, 2008, I stood there and watched as my platoon headed out on a training exercise. For four years, I’d joined them on exercises just like this, to places just like where they were going. It was old hat. No big deal. They didn’t do anything differently than they always did; it was me who was different. These men were readying themselves for the next deployment cycle, right as the conflict in Iraq was turning into a total slaughterhouse. I, on the other hand, was preparing to get in a cab and go to the airport, where I would hop on a plane and get shitfaced with Southwest drink coupons.
It was not an easy pill to swallow.
Still, the first couple months back in Southern California were great. Finally, I was living that MySpace feed. My friends and I partied, went to the beach, drank, and chased girls, just like we talked about. I had no one telling me what to do or where I had to be. I’d wake up at 0500 out of habit, look at my phone, realize I could sleep until 1700 if I wanted, then faceplant back into my pillow or the girl lying next to me—whichever was softer. I was a free man. A total fucking bum. You’d think the freshness and the newness of all that would be liberating, and for a while it was, but eventually I came to realize that there wasn’t actually anything fresh and new about it at all. Going home and getting annihilated every night was what I did after every deployment. The only thing that was remotely different about doing it in L.A. was the type of people I was doing it with.
The stereotype about L.A. people is that they’re all plastic, superficial phonies. Those people certainly exist in L.A., like they do in any big cosmopolitan city, but in my experience the young L.A. people I met out at restaurants and bars those first couple months were all genuinely, authentically…awful. My buddies and I would go out every night, we’d end up in conversations with different groups of people, and then, when they found out I was a veteran who’d just returned from Iraq, it was T-Minus Cocktails before one of them found a way to insult me without even realizing it. This was right around the 2008 presidential election, too, when The Daily Show was at its most popular, so everyone was now a foreign policy expert.
“Uggh, George Bush, I swear to Gawwd.”
“Yeah but he’s not running ag—”
“This fucking oil war…it’s sooo gross.”
“Well, it’s a little more complic—”
“And Halliburton, right? Dick Cheney shot someone in the face!”
Then they’d all laugh at their funny joke and basically wait for me to explain myself. What I wanted to explain was how easy it would be to kill all of them before any of them could reach the front door. Instead I took the mature route and engaged with their ideas, to the extent they had any. I talked to them about my experience. I explained the military family I came from and described the brotherhood that made all the hard work and sacrifice worth it. I talked as little about politics or policy as I could because, really, what did I know? I was the sharp end of the spear, not the guy aiming it. Most people, to their credit, were receptive to what I had to say and appreciated my perspective, but because they were also just so fucking stupid, the way they expressed their appreciation was where the insults happened.
“That’s really interesting, I never thought of it like that. You know, when you first said you were in Iraq…you’re totally not as brainwashed as I thought you’d be.”
“Brainwashed”?
Bitch, I will—
Deep breaths, Mat. Deeeeeeeep breaths.
I didn’t go out to get judged and psychoanalyzed by people like them. I went out to get drunk and laid…by people like them. This made me want to skip all aspects of conversation and just get right to the drunken sex part.
Ultimately, I couldn’t be too mad at these kids—and believe me, they were kids—because theirs was not the kind of stupidity that was learned. It was the kind that was baked in. Someone raised them to be this shitty. It’d be like Siegfried getting mad at the tiger when it nearly bit Roy’s head off. How could he? They were fucking with a tiger! Still, after enough trips around the carousel of ignorance, I decided to hop off and stay home more often. Jameson is cheaper when you buy it at Costco anyway, and playing video games is way more fun than listening to idiots, especially since you can turn off a video game whenever you want. Plus, within a couple of months I’d moved in with a girlfriend, which pretty much meant live-action insta-porn any time we wanted it.
It wasn’t long before I realized I was running out of money, however. I woke up one morning, went to the ATM to get some cash, looked at my bank balance, and noticed I had less than what I needed for next month’s rent. It only took four months of drinking in L.A. to burn through what little I was able to save from my pittance of a military salary. I had to do something, not just for my savings but for my sanity as well.
So I went to college.
* * *
—
That’s what you’re supposed to do, right? Serve your country, then use the GI Bill to get a free education. Be all you can be, then learn all you can learn. I felt fully capable of attending school and getting a degree. While I wouldn’t say that I was a consciously purpose-focused person at this point in my life (I had no idea what I should major in, for instance), I was certainly mission-focused, so if I approached studying and the course load from that perspective, I knew I’d be okay. Hell, half your job in the military is to sit there and listen to someone lecture you, so I was already 50 percent good to go.