Waiting to Unpack

Enough time has passed, enough people have died--the right people, anyway--that I can begin to let go of some of this shit I have been carrying around all these years.

I remember hearing somewhere--TV probably--about a guy who said he got up every morning and the first thing he did was read the obituaries just to make sure his name wasn't listed.  Any day that you're not in the obits is a good day.

I read the same pages, but for different reasons:  I'm looking for other names, names of people who could hurt me.  They could hurt me because what I know could hurt them.

When I first went in, they had me take a lot of tests and sign a lot of papers.  I promised to be faithful, trustworthy and brave, to keep the law of the Wolf Cub pack, or whatever its equivalent for my line of work.  I promised never to tell my story under penalty of fines and imprisonment.

At the time, it seemed fair enough.  We were engaged with enemies both foreign and domestic and I was ready to do my part to keep the country safe.  Whatever it took and wherever it took me.

That was then....

Nowadays, the contestant agreement on Survivor is more binding.

It's a different world, a greyer world and the country I promised to defend is getting harder and harder to recognize.

My country right or wrong is a lovely sentiment:  primo Hallmark stuff.  But when it's more wrong than right?

People should know what's being done in their name.

Writing sentences like that make we want to look over my shoulder.  Nothing new about that:  I've been looking over my shoulder my whole life.

What's different is how quickly we have learned to adopt the principles and practices of those countries that we used to criticize.

I can remember watching the commie fear films that were so popular in the fifties and sixties.  They would point to things like national identity cards and robust domestic intelligence as hallmarks of the fascist state.  Not so funny after we have been living under these same systems, or their analogs, for the last decade.

Is that the same country I promised to defend?

The sad thing is that there is no going back, no way for the pendulum to find its natural center.  This is the new normal and we had better get used to it, or we will have some 'splaining to do.

As one of my acquaintances from the old days told me after too many Jager Bombs, "Rendition:  it's not just for combatants anymore."

I know from experience how much a difference it makes when you interrogate a suspect offshore and anyone who has ever done anything on a vacation that they would never do at home knows exactly what I am talking about.

It would have been easy to fall into the predetermined role of "disgruntled ex-spy," to drink myself into the early grave that claimed so many of the people I used to work with, but I spent a lot of time steering clear of easy choices.

I am not so stupid as to think that I will be received with open arms.  I will immediately be labeled as a quack, a nut-job and another brick in the wall of conspiracy theorists that "protect" large subsets of the population.  

That's a stratagem right out of the playbook I helped to write:  shoot the messenger.  But having shot one or two messengers of my own, I can tell you that there is nothing either satisfying or definitive about it.

I can't be concerned about how I will be received.  I have bigger fish to fry.  I would like to be able to sleep through the night like I did before I took up this work. To sleep the Sleep of the Just just once more before I take that big sleep is, as they say, a "consummation devoutly to be wished."

I need to be able to look at myself in the mirror and see something I can be proud of and know that the price I have been asked to pay has been worth it.

Cutting

After I got out, I had trouble finding work, a lot of trouble.

I had this seven-year-wide hole in my resume that I couldn't talk about.  The more I couldn't talk about it, the more frustrated I got as opportunity after opportunity slipped away.  

I'd often as not get the interview only to get tripped up on the questions about my work history.  I knew they were coming.  I'd even practice possible responses, but anything I could come up with sounded like exactly what it was, an evasion.

I'd have been better off having them think I was an ex-con, but my pride kept getting in the way. 

It's a hard turn to make: going from being the sharp end of the sword to being something scraped off people's shoes.  I had so many skills and so much experience and I couldn't talk about any of it, much less show it.  If I tipped my mitt just a little, there would be the questions, followed by the silence, followed by the door.

Every so often, when I was working, I'd catch an episode of "The Fugitive" on the tube.  You know, the one about the doctor accused of killing his wife?  Every week, he'd be in a different town, dealing with a different life and trying to stay one step ahead of the law.  

It was entertaining at the time; it was my life later on.

In those first years after the cake, I moved a lot. I needed a job and I didn't want to have to talk too much.

For a time, I ended up on a ranch in Idaho.  I know, but there are no beaten paths anywhere in that state.

I had no business doing that kind of work, but I needed the check and they knew enough not to challenge me about whether I could ride a horse.  I was a gym rat, not a barn owl, but they didn't need to know that.

I was there for a whole season and, by the end, I would almost have called myself a rider.  Thanks to equal parts luck and timing, I was given enough time to convince my mount that I could be trusted and she took good care of me whenever my luck turned and my timing was off.

For a time, I was paired up with this guy--swear to God, his name was "Dusty"--and we worked a cutting crew.

It was our job to separate a cow from the herd and drive it off for whatever they needed.  Sometimes it was for shots, other times for branding and castration.

Dusty did the cutting.  

His horse, "Lefty," had uncanny cow sense.  It was like she knew what the cow was going to do before it did. The two of them would work a cow to the edge of the herd and then shear it off like a car taking a highway off-ramp.

It was my job to block the lines of retreat, stay in the cow's eyeline on the opposite side from where we wanted it to go.  With Dusty on its ass and me on its side, the cow couldn't help but go where we wanted it to go.

In the beginning, it was exhilarating:  like after the first time you work with C-4 and can still count to ten without taking off your shoes and socks.  The challenge for each of us--Dusty, Lefty, me, my horse and the cow--was to translate thought into action and to do it faster than the others.  It was a game.  Sometimes we'd win, sometimes the cow and, I hate to admit, sometimes I'd end up in the dirt having zigged while my horse zagged.

But we got better.  I got better.  And pretty soon, we were a real team.  We got to a point where could peel off cows like a Vegas dealer peels cards.

It was hard work: the kind that, by the end of the day, made your bed roll look like the Presidential Suite at the Ritz.  Equal parts mental and physical.

I didn't have any trouble with the physical, but the mental part of that work took its toll on me.  You think too much about the cattle you're cutting and what's going to happen to them and suddenly you can't do the job.  It becomes like trying to walk across the platform in a Tokyo train station without running into anyone:  not going to happen.

Cows are social creatures:  they eat together, sleep together and even run amok together.  You cut one out and suddenly the cow gets nervous, skittish, dangerous.

And what were we going to do to that already nervous cow?  Burn it, stick it, or cut its balls off.

It got so I was identifying more and more with the cows.  I would wake up some nights in a sweat.  I had one recurring nightmare where I would be running from Dusty and from some other person whose face I couldn't quite make out.  They were chasing me toward a group of guys who were standing around a campfire looking at me.

I know, sign me up for Doctor Phil.

And when I wasn't the one being cut, I would see faces from the past, from my work life.  Faces of people whose lives we had changed, ruined, ended.  All in the name of "truth, justice and the American way."

I got off the cutting crew.  I had to.  

I did manage to make it to the end of the season, like I said, but as part of the chuck wagon team.  

Turns out, everyone liked my coffee.  I didn't think it was that good, but they all raved about it--the whole crew. Nothing to it really:  boil water, insert beans, serve when ready.  

So easy to do, I could make it with one hand tied behind my back.

Coffee Shop Confessions

There's a bunch of us that gather every morning at the coffee shop near my house.

It's not one of those chains, it's one of those other chains that have defined themselves in opposition to the first chain.  There's still whip and foam and shots and scones, but with a more rustic feel.

We don't gather in the traditional sense of the word.  It's not a meeting.  Hell, we don't even talk to one another.  But every morning, it's the same crowd--each of us alone with our thoughts, trying to make sense of the crossword puzzle, or that day's news--whichever is less confusing.

I was never a big fan of coffee.  In my line of work it was more of a tool than a luxury.  After long hours on a sneak and peak, or a smash and grab, mole jobs or Trojan Horse work, breaking out the thermos was a chance to break the tension and talk about something else for a moment.

Usually, when I was on a job with Barney, we would talk about how shitty his coffee was.  I know everyone thinks he was this super-genius when it came to putting ten pounds of shit into a clear plastic box, but he made a shitty cup of coffee.

He liked flavored coffee.

I don't think I need to say anything more about that, do I?  Flavored coffee! 

And it's not like it was easy to come by in those days.  This was long before you had to look both ways before you approached the coffee pot.  On average--unless we were on a job together--coffee tasted like coffee.  And you judged its quality not by what side of the hill it was grown on, but by its texture--how close it came to tasting like dirt-flavored chalk.

Every time we went out of town, Barney had an extra tool box he carried just for the coffee.  It was packed with pounds and pounds of Chock full o'Nuts and lots of tiny bottles of flavoring extracts of one kind or another. 

Every pot was a science project and I was his test subject.  

I could have made the coffee, but then we would have had nothing to talk about.

He would get up about half-an-hour ahead of me and come up with that day's formula, we would go out and do whatever crazy shit Phelps had dreamed up and then, when we could, out would come the thermos and I would give Barney nothing but shit.

Truth is, the only thing I cared about was whether there was any caffeine left after he was finished screwing around.  But giving Mr. Super Genius shit for his coffee was our way of breaking the tension and staying frosty.

Almond and mint flavored, but frosty.

***

I come to this coffee shop every morning because I have to get out of the house.

Without a routine that gets me out of the house every morning, I find it too easy to stay in bed and turn the pages in the atlas of roads not taken that is my life.

I found this place after I was laid-up from a surgery.  I knew I was recovered when I recognized I was looking forward to the manufactured drama that is Jerry Springer. I didn't care how much it hurt, I had to get out of the house--even if just for that hour.

I took a drive south and hadn't gone more than about five minutes when I saw this little set of shops and, on the corner, the coffee shop.  

I wasn't so much looking for coffee as responding to the side effects of one of the medications I had to take, but once I got in the place, there was something about it that just felt right, familiar, comfortable. 

I think it's supposed to look like the inside of a log cabin.

They have a fireplace and lots of pine-ish looking furniture so it kind of feels like the north woods, if the north woods had a place that served a mochachino.

In one corner of the store there's a big dining room size table and this is where the Bible group meets every morning.  Every time I come in, there are about a half-dozen men studying the Bible with the intensity of lawyers parsing a contract, or politicians a sentence.  

It would seem to me that, by this time, that book has been well and truly picked over, but there they are, every morning, savoring the nuances like after-notes in a bottle of wine.

Around the walls are a series of high-top tables and stools that are the perches of the retirees and the unemployed.  Their faces buried in their tablets and laptops, these guys all have the same desperate look on their faces.  They are trying to connect, trying to close the deal, trying to get off the bench and back in the game.

That time we were in Berlin for all those months, there was a little cafe around the corner from our safe house.  Every morning, I would find some excuse to go in there just so I could get the taste of Barney's latest experiment out of my mouth.

I'd walk in and I could immediately feel every eye in the place on me.  The place was full of operators.  They might as well have been wearing Homburgs and leather trench coats.

Spies and private school kids don't have casual clothes:  they don't know what to do with them.

No question in my mind they knew if not who I was, certainly what I was.  We weren't playing them so it didn't matter, but I would fuck with them anyway.  I'd order a very particular brand of Russian tea...,and a Coke.

If you're careful, the combination isn't really that bad.  No worse than anything Barney came up with.

I think of that place every time I go in to my new place.  Mostly because I get the same kind of looks.

There's something comforting in those looks.  

They remind me of a different time:  a time when I knew things that everybody else didn't.  They help me forget that those tables were turned a long time ago.

Disclosure

The coffee wasn't that good, but we were permitted a break for a cup and so we tended to linger over it in order to avoid having to go back to work.

There was a tendency to swap stories over coffee because stories take time and you can't both talk and drink your coffee.  

The stories we told on ourselves and on people we knew were lifesavers.  They reconnected us with the world and reminded us that there was a life before we got to this place and, with any luck, we might get back to it.

We burned through the stories about kids, wives and girlfriends right away.  If you spent too much time thinking about that stuff then you'd never get out.  Those are the stories that are easiest to tell and the ones that can do the most damage.

Third party stories are best, that way you can all laugh at somebody else.  Our situation might be for shit, but at least we're not THAT guy.

We also told jokes, all the jokes we knew.  It's surprising how little it takes for ordinary, decent people to get to some pretty disgusting jokes.  It's like they've been saving them up, perfecting them.  They get hung up on the precision of a one-liner, but immerse themselves in the gratuitous details of the dirty joke.

Ramirez passed the Talking Stick to me and I froze.

The room fell silent and I could feel all eyes on me.

If I didn't say something then there was no reason not to go back to work.

Staff had noticed the lull in conversation and were stirring from their perimeter positions.  In a moment, they would be rousting us out of our chairs and forming us up to head back down to our workstations.

I had to say something, but what?

They told us at the briefing there were undercovers in our group who were just waiting for a bit of marketable intel so they could report us out.

I knew enough to know that by transferring me here, they knew more about me than my cover legend.  This was where they brought serious people.

Anything that came out of my mouth was going to be checked against what they knew, or thought they knew, about me.

I played for time by swirling the contents of my cup and watching the fine grounds climb up the inner walls.

What could I say?

What had I already said?

I had asked for this assignment and right then I couldn't remember why.  I couldn't remember how long I'd been there.  It's surprising how big a difference a little thing like a window can make.

I tried to console myself with the idea that the cavalry was coming, but I didn't know when.

And then I couldn't remember how.  How were they going to come?  Was I supposed to get word to them when it was time?  I didn't remember any signal.

This was the kind of thing that Phelps was good at.  He would know what to do and when to do it.

Wait.

The staff member over there..., isn't it...?  It can't be....  Has he been here all along?

I put down the Talking Stick, picked up my coffee and drained it.

It wasn't very good.