Oxen looked surprised but happy to see us. He flipped the deadbolt to keep the door from slamming shut and stepped into the hallway, still butt naked. “Hey guys, what’s up?”
“Um, what’s up is you’re masturbating with the two girls we left the bar with,” Lennon said.
“Oh, shit. I’m sorry, man. After I left your room, these girls came running after me and tracked me down as I was opening my door.”
“I think maybe ‘running’ might be a bit of an exaggeration,” I said, feeling very insecure in that moment.
“Well, they were moving pretty fast.”
“Did they, like, want to fuck you?” Lennon asked. At this point, which one of us was more confused was a coin flip.
“I guess. It was super weird. They asked if they could come in and drink some beers. Then they wanted to watch some porn.”
“And you didn’t think that was strange?” I said.
“Not really. They said they wanted to hang for a bit, and they asked if they could have some cab money.”
It was all starting to make sense. When we said we were tapped out, we meant for drinking, but they thought we meant moneywise. “How much?” I asked.
“Aw, just a couple hundred dollars apiece. They live like two hours away.”
Cab money. Uh huh. Lennon and I smiled at each other.
“Prostitutes,” Lennon said.
“What? Come on, guys. No way.” Oxen seemed shocked. He looked back at them masturbating on the bed and hoped it wasn’t true, but deep in his heart he knew. After a few seconds of self-reflection, he nodded at us and slowly shut the door.
“Whose credit card do you think that porn is being charged to?” Lennon said.
Great question. We let Oxen have this moment with his prosties, to make peace with his life choices and let karma settle the accounts. Then, after extensive teeth-brushing and deep-throating a bottle of Scope, we went to bed.
* * *
—
The next morning we were up and at ’em by 7 A.M. for fight school. One by one, we slogged out of our hotel rooms and made our way to the van beneath the unforgiving light of a sun that, only a few hours earlier, I was hoping might melt my brain like Icarus’s wings. When we opened the van door, a beer bottle full of piss rolled out and smashed on the ground. Oh, that’s right, we turned this van into an R. Kelly video yesterday.
“Guys, we have to clean this fucking van,” I said. “If the instructors find out, we’re going to get fired from a job we haven’t even started.” The group nodded in agreement.
“We have to be there in fifteen minutes,” one of the guys said, “You got any suggestions?” In fact, as someone with extensive experience cleaning bodily fluids out of vehicles that don’t belong to me, I did.
“We park far away. When we break for lunch, we Google the nearest car wash and pay them whatever the fuck they want.”
When lunch hit, we drove to a nearby car wash and gave them extra for the best clean they could finish in the twenty minutes we had to spare. I’ve been less nervous for at-home pregnancy test results than I was sitting in their little reception area, waiting for the van to get pulled around. When the Mexican dude in charge handed the keys back to our driver, I opened the passenger door to inspect the results. The smell was still there. I looked over at el jefe like Sollozzo looked at Tom Hagan in The Godfather when he found out Vito Corleone had survived the assassination attempt. “He’s still alive. They hit him with five shots and he’s still alive!” I was beside myself. Then, out of the corner of my eye, I spotted a power washer leaning up against a wall.
“How much for that?” I said as I pointed at the power washer.
“You want that?”
“I need the big guns, man. You were in that van. Doesn’t it smell like a bunch of drunk guys pissed everywhere because the driver kept on swerving back and forth when he saw that they were trying to piss into the empty beer cans that were laying all over the floorboards?”
“Yes, my friend, I wasn’t going to say anything, but—”
“So how much for the power washer? I need it, man.”
The floor was Rhino-lined and the mats were rubber. If anything was going to get this stench out, it was going to be a piping-hot load of pressurized water. Basically, an industrial-strength colonic.
“Forty dollars. But I can’t do it for you, my friend. You have to do it yourselves. That thing could fuck up a vehicle if you’re not careful.”
“I appreciate the advice, but if we don’t get the smell out of that vehicle, we’re going to be the ones who get fucked up,” I said as I handed him the forty dollars.
“Okay, okay. Pinches gringos locos,” he said under his breath. “Drive it around back and do it, so my boss doesn’t see you.”
After years of combat deployments, you learn how to assess and assume calculated risks. If I go here, this guy might go there. If I do this, that might happen. It’s all part of the game, part of war, part of life. Unleashing a power washer inside a rented van was just another calculated risk, with a different set of assumptions and consequences.
Thankfully, it worked. The smell was gone and the van was spotless. We hopped back in, headed back to the fight school, and left the windows down so that the vehicle could air dry. The instructors never found out, and I was fortunate to finish and graduate. A few days later I got the call that I was cleared to deploy and the contracting gig was mine if I wanted it. For the first time in a couple years, I felt that I had purpose again, and I was thankful for that.
After a little more than two years away from active duty, there was something very satisfying about meeting and exceeding the selection criteria that the ████ used to vet its contractor candidates. It made me feel like I still had my mojo and wasn’t completely washed up. It was time to get after it again.
Chapter 15
The Hundred-Foot War
Contracting for the ████ wasn’t nearly as glamorous as it sounds. There were no J█████████████████. No surreptitious meetings over Turkish coffee at a Parisian sidewalk café with your counterpart from the other side, out in the open. You didn’t slide important documents across the table in a file folder with the agency label printed on top and CLASSIFIED stamped across the bottom.
Okay, I was half kidding. There is some cool shit you never get to hear about, like this one time when ███████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████ I’M ████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████ NOT ████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████ TELLING ██████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████ YOU ███████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████ ANY ███████████████████████