A kid came to the house the other day and tried to get me to take a yard sign for one of the local candidates.
Every year it's the same thing: vote for this, vote against that; say yes, say no; support the kids, protect our seniors; pray for our leaders and throw the bums out. Even when the economy is in the tank, there is always full employment for the guys making the yard signs.
I told the kid no and it bugs the shit out of me.
Seems ironic now that, while I once was the sharpest part of the sword used to fight for democracy and freedom around the world, I am now afraid to vote in my own country.
I spent too much time playing politicians of one kind or another and I learned from those moves was that the kind of ego it takes to put yourself forward as leader of your people is the same kind of ego that doesn't take kindly to being crossed.
Doesn't matter what the level, power is intoxicating and addictive. Why else would otherwise sensible people spend many times more to stay in power than the job could possibly pay?
I don't vote because I've got too much to lose.
Sure, it's a piece of shit pension and the health insurance covers less and less every year, but what other choice do I have?
In order for the Secretary to be able to "disavow" us if a project went sideways, they set things up so that we never officially existed.
Good for the Secretary, but it sucks when it comes to filling out a job application, or trying to get a medical claim paid.
"I'm sorry sir, but we have no record of your service."
Turns out, the last money they ever want to spend on you is for that fucking sheet cake.
I got positions. You can't be alive in this country and not have positions. We got positions on everything. I just keep them to myself is all. I also have a chronic disease called old age. Doesn't matter how many hours I spend in the gym, there's no getting away from this. It's getting so that I'm on first-name terms with the nurses at all of my doctors...and for all the wrong reasons.
I keep my opinions to myself, which is tough for someone my age. What else have we got to do except share the benefits of our thinking?
It's frustrating.
I watch TV and see the talking heads and the nominees and listen to the talk and I take note of how one day they are for things that they were against the day before. It must be a wonderful job trying to create coherence out of political expediency.
Look, I get it. We ran plenty of black hat/white hat operations back in the day. We would play one side against the other leaving both with the impression that we were their staunchest allies and also their worst enemies. In those situations, it made sense, we were doing a job. We were mucking around in somebody else's country.
I live here.
There are real problems, ones that have nothing to do with swing states and undecideds, but because they are largely confined to safely controlled "red" or "blue" states, they never get the attention they need. They never get addressed.
Instead, we are held hostage to the interests and moralities of a handful of states and a small subset of the population. This is wrong.
Somebody should do something about this.
I can't. I have a doctor's appointment.
We did a lot of jobs against the Mob.
In retrospect, it seemed as though we were always trying to stop soldiers, bosses and under-bosses of one kind or another.
Looking back, I'm not sure if it was because they were a real threat, or because they were the low-hanging fruit for a group like ours.
Figuring out what motivated a dictator was a real challenge: you could plan six ways from Sunday and it never seemed to matter because they were forever throwing out curves.
Mobsters were much easier to figure out: money and status were the pillars upon which they built their organizations and that made them easy to break open.
They may have been turkey shoots in terms of taking them down, but I never liked them. I found it demeaning.
All they would use me for was to be the big slab of beef standing behind one of the "real" agents. I was always holding the door for them. In the day, I could bench four hundred and I had to count myself busy if I got to hold the door.
Barney didn't even need me on most of those jobs.
They would clue me in--often, I thought--just to be polite but when we would get to the floor to do the thing, I would be in the cheapest suit and holding the door.
One time, we got a longer than normal lead time on some off-shore work. We were supposed to break up the slave trade in El Kabar in the Gulf.
Phelps came up with a twist on The Wire and the short of it is that they needed someone in the market to help with the set up.
I get tapped to play the part of a robe seller. I was going to have a stall and about a day to establish my cover. This was going to be my chance and I was going to make full use of it.
I hit the books and learned the idioms of the region. Hired a coach to get the West out of my accent and learned everything there was to know about the native robes.
Those Meisner classes were going to finally pay off. I had a character and a whole biography--one that even explained my larger than average size.
But, in the end, did any of that matter?
No. They changed the play and I was relegated to screening Rollin so he could get under a car to hang a sling.
That was it.
Once Rollin was done, and he certainly took his sweet time doing it, my character was wrapped.
Rest of the job I'm lifting and pushing, pushing and lifting.
I could have done more than they asked. They never asked except to say "Willy could you hand me down the--. I'd get it myself, but I can't quite reach it."
We did a prison job some place in the East, I forget now. Country isn't there anymore. It was another of those escape-proof-prison-holds-high-value-target gigs. There was a time when every backwater country had the ultimate escape-proof prison. We saw a lot of them and broke every one of them.
It wasn't really fair. Someone should have told them that planting the flag, any flag, the most this, the toughest that, the most dangerous something else, was just an open invitation for us to come and take it from them.
Anyway, on this particular job, they sent Barney and me in to open a door. That was it: just open a door so we could make the marks believe that their high value target was just feeding them what we wanted them to know. Phelps' plan was to get them to lose faith in their prisoner and then get them to hand him to us.
Sounded simple, but to make that happen Barney and me had to break out of a cell and make our way across an electrified floor. Some other shit I don't remember now.
We made it out of the cell, no problem and we set up this rig so that we could cross above the electrified floor. It was one of those deals where we had to pull ourselves along hand over hand and then transfer to the top of the cable and then swing back and forth building up momentum so that, when we pushed off, we would land outside of the electrified area.
No big deal, right? This was stuff we covered in Basic. Thing is, Barney was never in the Service.
We must have practiced a week or more just on getting on and off the wire.
Frustrated the hell out of me waiting for him to make it over just once without setting off the alarms.
It wasn't until I actually do it at the gig that I could relax. Up until then I was convinced he and I were going to be cellies until they could trade us out and he and I were relatively low-value assets that we might not ever get traded.
He made it across though. Had trouble sticking the landing almost doing a face-plant on the high voltage floor. Comes my turn, I make it across no problem, do the transfer to the top of the wire and then, just to rub his nose in it a little bit, I take an extra swing before springing off. Stuck the landing with ease and then I make a feint to make him think I am going to fall.
He rushes forward to catch me and I could see his eyes were as big as saucers.
Serves him right.
Later on, much later, after I'd had my sheet cake, I really missed even the pushing and lifting gigs. I found out what an escape-proof prison was really like. By then, there was no one going to come look for me.
I broke a guy's neck once.
More than anything I ever did while I was working there, or even since, that one moment has resulted in more sleepless nights and second thoughts.
I hadn't planned it. It was not part of the assignment, but I had to do it. The guy was in my way and there was not enough time to work my around him.
Like everyone of the plays we made, the schedule was impossibly tight and the difference it would have made was big enough, so through the guy I had to go.
It wasn't even close. I must have had a hundred pounds and a good six inches in height on him.
No sooner had he recognized that he didn't recognize me then he was in a submission hold and starting to black out.
If he went to sleep like a good little soldier I could get to the rendezvous right on schedule.
And then the elevator door behind me opened.
I turned quickly to assess the situation and I brought the top of the guy's spine with me.
I remember reading somewhere that the old radio shows used to use celery and iceberg lettuce to create the sounds of body parts breaking.
It's pretty close.
It's not the same, but it's pretty close.
That was it: in the blink of an eye, from the sound of a vegetable to actually being one. It was that quick.
Not a day goes by that I don't think about him.
He was just doing his job. We were both just doing our jobs and it worked out that I walked away and he...couldn't.
Every day is a reminder that I changed his life. Is that what he signed up for? Is that what I signed up for?
I talked to a bunch of the old-timers, the ones lucky enough to make it to the sheet cake round, and they all said the same thing: it's the questions that you ask yourself that take you out of the game.
When you start reliving the moments that could have gone either way, but didn't, the ones that everyone else put down to luck, but you know different; when you find yourself trapped in that echo chamber of second guessing, that's when you are better off putting in your papers, or stepping in front of a train because your life in the field has become a ticking clock.
Different times through the years I tried to find out what happened to that guy. Asking for trouble, I know, but it was either that or give up sleeping entirely.
I did manage to find the guy's daughter and I made sure she got her college. I don't sleep any better, but at least I did something.
Didn't I?
The stairwells in the parking garage reeked. Part urine, part vomit, part stale beer: the wall of smell that billowed out of the there was as overpowering as a candle store or any Victoria's Secret.
The undeniable scent of Las Vegas Parking Garage permeated my new wardrobe and that suited me just fine. I was not going to be anyone that anyone else would look too closely at and in that space, I could do my recon.
I made my way to the Las Vegas Boulevard side of the hotel and joined the line of tourists waiting to board the bus that cruised the Strip from hotel to hotel while masquerading as a streetcar.
I nearly jumped out of my skin the first time the roller coaster thundered through the loop of track that was over our heads and hurtled into a vertical climb that topped out at about a hundred feet. This was a after-thought, an effort to offer something to compete with the roller coaster on top of the Stratosphere and the fun dome at Circus Circus. Like a clean bed and air conditioning wasn't enough.
This NASCAR-themed ride was so clearly an act of desperation that they only had enough money to suggest a thrill ride and, at that, it was over before it began. Once riders reached the top of the tower, which they did almost immediately, there was no place left to go and they had endure the indignity of riding backwards into the hotel over the path they had just followed. It was the unfinished sentence that told the complete story of a once-great hotel that was now counting the days until its inevitable date with the imploder.
After what seemed like an eternity in the dying light of a summer evening in the desert, a Streetcar Named Desperation pulled to a stop in front of the hotel and I joined the parade of its newest passengers in search of a seat.
Doesn't seem to matter where I go in the world, I am never more than a bus bench away from Albanians.
Our very first stop after leaving the Sahara was at the Stratosphere and an entire basketball team's worth of Albanians got on for what I learned was a field trip to practice their English nouns.
They powered through their language, as they all do, as if they got paid by the syllable and every sentence was punctuated with a noun in English. And once they had exhausted their knowledge, the tried to read random words off the many signs we passed on our route from hotel to hotel.
They were having a great time, oblivious to the fact that the rest of the passengers were laughing at them.
I didn't dare laugh at them. Tonight was not a night for drawing any unwelcome attention: I had too much to do.
I was stuck for a long time.
Long after the taste of that sheet cake had faded, I was still thinking like an operator, still trying to figure the angles on every situation.
After enough time on the job, threat assessment becomes second nature and while it can keep you alive it can be a real barrier to starting life as a civilian. In training, they make a big point of making sure you never walk into any situation without knowing how to escape and evade and, in the field, no doubt those skills helped save my life and the lives of my team, but they don't tell you that, out in the world, people want people they can connect to and not those who are looking for the nearest exit.
When I was drinking--and that was a lot and for a very long time--I used to laugh that because of the work I had done I could very easily get arrested not only here, but on just about every continent except Antarctica, I could not, however, get a job.
I had a cover job, but that went away when I did.
I liked that job and was damn good at it, but the contacts weren't mine and the security was only as real as my relationship with the Secretary.
We did a lot of things very well during my time inside, but one thing, perhaps the most important thing, that we should have done was get prepared for the time when we would be outside and on our own.
Outplacement consisted of a debrief and a sheet cake: that's it.
I remember my last day and how humiliated I felt as one of the uniformed guys had to walk me around the building. We went from office to office like I was his dog and we had to stop at every tree until I had done my business.
It was when we went down to the basement, to Physical Plant, so I could turn in my keys that it really got to me. Yesterday, I was Mr. Inside and today, just twenty-four hours later, I was Mr. Way Outside.
And it was because I was going out into the world that they all looked at me the same way I looked at the world: they were sizing me up, trying to determine whether I would be friend or foe and how quickly they could deal with me.
I wasn't an operator any more. At best, I was a potential asset and at worst, I was a threat.
I knew it was coming, but nothing prepares you for that moment when you recognize that people you trained with, worked with, bled for, were now figuring out how to kill you if they had to.
Trust had always been a precious commodity and, after that, it became invisible as well.
Nothing tasted right after that.
When I was a kid, I remember nosing around in my dad's room. He had a little china dish on the top of his dresser and, every night after he got home from his desk job, he would unload his pockets into that dish. There were coins and keys, one or two random bits of hardware and a partially-consumed roll of Tums with a trailing streamer of plastic-lined foil wrapping. His prized possession, a Cross pen and pencil set, would have a place of honor on top of his used handkerchief.
These were the artifacts of his day and as unique to him as a fingerprint and what I think about when I think of him.
When I was going through "orientation" this was one of the first things they drilled into us. "The things you carry in your pocket can get you killed." Six months I was there and every day they found a new way to make that clear to us. You do field work, you take nothing you can't walk away from and you leave everything when you're done.
What they didn't make clear at the time was that marks have memories and when you play a mark they have a bad habit of coming back on you.
We'd build our jobs so that the mark would get dealt with by his own people, but that was no protection against one of theirs figuring out what we'd done and coming after us.
Every time we came off a job, we'd first go to a safe house and dispose of our work cover IDs, destroy our equipment, burn the work cars and pick up whatever travel documents we would need in order to head home. Often, we would pass the time until ex-fil by quizzing one another on our new names and other key biographical information.
It got so it would be a little jarring when we reached the final safe house where we would transition back into our lives. I got so accustomed to seeing my face over unfamiliar names that when it would be my actual life, I almost didn't know what to do.
Returning home was almost as complex a process as the jobs themselves and one of the reasons that when we began spending more and more time on domestics, I really wasn't all that upset. It didn't make the process any easier, but there were fewer names to keep track of.
I remember one time when Barney and I got picked up. We had just "borrowed" a phone company truck in some country, I don't remember where.
Luck would have it that the truck's licence tag had expired and some wet-behind-the-ears cadet, eager to make his bones at the local detachment, pulled us over. It was a routine stop and the kind of thing that Barney and I should have been able to bluff our way out of like we had a hundred times before. Only this time, Cadet Bones wasn't buying our shit.
He didn't buy our "A" story, nor our "B" and he wasn't convinced when we produced our State Security credentials and tried to bully him off the scent.
He pulled his weapon and marched us into the town. I don't know how far it was, but it was a long fucking walk.
We got to the detachment offices and Barney was pissed. He demanded that the lieutenant--just a kid, not much older than Barney's oldest--call the capitol.
If I weren't so pissed at having to walk into town, I would have laughed as the kid watched his entire career and the futures of his children pass in front of his eyes.
Barney gave the junior looey the legit number and, just before he dialed the last digit, I chimed in and told him that he should bypass the switchboard and call our superior on his private line. The number I gave was for our superior, only not one who was in any way connected to state security.
I remember hearing the lieutenant reading the information from our identity cards into the phone and after he was done with Barney's he began reading mine and I could feel myself wanting to challenge him on every detail.
"That's not my name.... Not my address.... My birthday is in a completely different time of year...."
I was not in the moment and I didn't recognize my cover details. In those days, that was a prescription for a permanent vacation behind the Curtain. And, at my pay grade, nobody was going to trade me out.
Staying alive in that business means learning to navigate between the watertight compartments of your lives. You want your sheet cake moment and the sorry excuse for a pension that comes with it, then you learn to stay beneath the surface, off the radar, in permanent stealth mode.
A couple of hours later, Phelps and that bitch Cinnamon were in the building and we were back on the street almost immediately.
That was a real wake-up moment for me. I had gotten so used to moving between the different compartments in the submarine of my life that I was no longer paying close attention. I was taking closed doors as being sealed doors and, as anyone in the boats will tell you, they are not the same thing. When you've got a ten storey building worth of water between you and your next breath, there is no such thing as a little leak.
When you're a kid, lying is a game. Most of the time, you aren't even really sure why you're doing it. You lie to your friends to seem more important, you lie to adults to stay out of trouble. And, while the stakes of being caught in a lie may seem horrible, they do not compare to the potential downside of getting caught lying as an adult. How easy my job would have been if all I had to worry about if I got caught was being sent to my room?
We lied to everyone in each of our lives.
We lied to some to keep them safe and we lied to others to get them in trouble. We even lied to ourselves in order to make it to the end of a job.
And just like in the boats, the deeper under the lies, the greater the pressure.
In the end, it's not your conscience that gets you, it's your memory. Every name you've ever used has a real-time biography that goes with it and making sure all the stories match can kill you.
