Biff…or Farkle If You Prefer

I recall a bizarre period of several weeks in my life, a non-romance of sorts, before I went off to serve in the army.

I began to visit the army recruiters in my hometown of Everett, Washington, in the autumn of 1983. That summer I had lived with a friend’s family in southern California. From their home I walked every day, or road a rickety bicycle, to work in Yorba Linda, seven miles away. My uncle and my cousin’s husband together opened a pizza place in a strip mall, and I worked all I could between semesters of college.

The restaurant was modeled after my cousin’s husband’s family restaurant in Buena Vista. His parents came to California directly from Italy, and his was a popular local place to get pizza, sandwiches, and pasta. The idea was to expand this successful business—Frank’s Other Place or something like that—relying on its already established popularity to ease the risk of opening a new business.

I had worked for a short time at the original Frank’s so that I could learn all the food prepping techniques. I worked with two women who were probably in their 40s or early 50s, matronly women she seemed older to me then. They showed me how to get everything ready, the way Frank had shown them. For snacks they shared pieces of pizza dough that they baked with salt and pepper and olive oil on them. And they handed me pictures of their youngest daughters, who turned out to be cute, indeed, but only 15- and 16-years old. They seemed interested in me maybe seeing their girls, maybe dating them, for they told me they thought I was a handsome young man, and decent. When they found out I was older than I looked, however, that I had turned 22 that May, they promptly changed their minds and stopped talking to me about their daughters.

At the new place, I came in early to start the day’s pizza dough, which required lots of rolling and stretching and time to rise, followed by more rolling and stretching and time to rise, and so on. There were also big pots of pasta—mostly spaghetti and ravioli—to cook, measure out into foil containers and then store in the refrigerator beneath a dollop of red sauce. It was my job to make sure everything was ready for the lunch rush, so there would be no obstacles to timely service.

For perhaps the last two months of summer, I worked between 70 and 75 hours a week. To work that much means you do very little outside of work. I can’t say I minded, however, because I enjoyed the other young people I worked with—we had flurries of minor romances and talked and joked and teased and flirted ceaselessly during our work. To this day, making pizzas is one of my favorite jobs ever, and I feel like every American kid ought at some point to work at a pizza place.

It became clear to me that I would not be able to earn enough money to go back to college, not even close, so I decided to return home at the end of the summer and seek work there. I was mostly a shy young person, and mostly all I’ve ever wanted was to be left alone to read and take long walks. I didn’t know what to do with myself otherwise. I had no idea how to advocate for myself, no idea how to network, know idea how to put in “the leg work,” as my uncle called it—and these were notions you seldom found expressed in that day. Consequently, I looked for work by looking in the want ads.

I got a job at a local slaughterhouse. I stayed for less than two weeks. The young men who actually butchered the beef cattle made, I was told, decent wages, and they worked rapidly, dressed in white lab coats, gloves and knit caps for warmth. Our large warehouse-style space was kept cold to keep the meat freshest. The butchers used small, handheld circular saws, like the kind medical examiners employ to open the sternum for an autopsy, and rapidly separated the hanging carcasses into cuts of beef. (I learned it was easy for a careless operator to lose a fingertip, or more even.) Apparently, if I aspired to such a coveted job, then I would need to work my way up to it.

Instead, I performed odd jobs. I brought in packing boxes from the large storage shed outside. I prepped the boxes with sheets of thick plastic. I vacuum-packed a few choice cuts for these boxes throughout the day. I swept the floor and wiped down stainless steel tabletops. I gathered iron drums of sloshing offal and moved them with a hand truck. I don’t remember what became of that stuff, although perhaps it went off to be made into pet food. I performed all the menial tasks that needed to be done.

During breaks, or for lunch, the break room was in the farthest corner of the building, away from everything else. To get to this room, you had to cross the room where the cattle, freshly killed, hung from the ceiling by their hind legs as the blood gushed from the opened arteries of their necks. The doors in and out of this room resembled the doors on naval vessels—the kind with high sills that required stepping over them, with doors that had wheels to turn to seal them tight against flooding in the event of a damaging strike. I’m not sure why such secure doors were necessary. Nevertheless, the blood often stood two or three inches deep and crossing it felt like splashing across a great dark puddle. When I got home at night, our two whippets loved to lick the shoes I took off as I entered the front door.

I didn’t leave this job, however, for its tedium, its big barrels of offal, the cold conditions, or the pool of blood I had to traipse through several times a day. No, the unstructured workday was my undoing. I showed up that first morning at 0730 and spent much of the day urging the big clock on the wall to move more swiftly to five o’clock. At five minutes of the hour, as I began to tidy up in preparation to clocking out, I learned that work didn’t end at five after all. On the contrary, work ended when the day’s orders were filled. Rarely was this completed by five, I learned. More typically, work concluded at six or six-thirty or even seven or seven-thirty. Well, frankly, that wasn’t going to work for me.

The next job I found was working at an AM-PM Minimart, a variation on the 7/11 theme, and I was hired for the dreaded third shift, from eleven o’clock at night until 0700 in the morning. Once I missed sleep altogether to join my friends for a fun day. I was already spent when I started work that night and struggled to get through my shift. Probably I managed to stay awake all night because I had nowhere to sit but had to stand. I remember going out several times in the wee early morning to hose down the area between the gas pumps. It helped me stay awake. The next day, my day off, I slept 16 hours, and when I woke I was as disoriented as I’ve probably ever been. I didn’t know where I was. I didn’t know what day it was. I didn’t know whether it was day or night. Fortunately, I did manage to remember who I was.

Working the third shift through the night and realizing I might need to stick at it for a decade before I could save enough money to go back to school prompted me in a fit of despair to begin to visit the recruiters in town. I didn’t want the Navy because I didn’t want to be stuck in the cramped quarters of a ship for long stretches. I like to move around—the whole long walks thing. I didn’t want the Air Force because it seemed too cushy, too much like country club living. And everyone I knew who had gone into the Marines seemed to be compensating for significant ego deficiencies. And so I chose to put my fate in the hands of the Army, the Big Green Machine, what seemed to me then like a kind of comfortable middle path.

The first stop, of course, was to take the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery, or ASVAB. The recruiters didn’t want to discuss opportunities and options with me too much because ASVAB scores might determine which fields were open to me and which were not. In fact, I scored very well on the test, in the top one percent, and had my choice of options. My aim, of course, was the GI Bill and money for college, so I figured, much to my chagrin, that a four-year enlistment would be better than a two-year.

I’ve always been fascinated with languages, so I inquired about that. Well, I would have to take another test—this time, the Defense Language Aptitude Battery or DLAB—which meant yet another drive to downtown Seattle to attend the military’s testing center. I didn’t mind too much because they gave me vouchers for food and a night at a hotel. It felt reminiscent of an adventure, and at the very least it provided a brief, overnight getaway.

The DLAB is still to this day the oddest examination I have ever taken. In the course of approximately three hours, test takers are introduced to an invented language. It begins with nouns, introduces verbs and conjugations, moves to pronouns and adjectives and so on. At this time in my young life, I struggled to remember, for example, what pronouns were, or things like definite and indefinite articles. Grammatical terminology meant little to me. Consequently, as new information was added in the exam, or when new directions were given, I felt like I might not be able to keep up. Indeed, the test felt demanding, daunting. We were, in essence, learning a new language as a test. When it concluded, I could not, to save my life, have given an accurate assessment of my performance. I felt so out of my depth that I assumed I must have done terribly and began to wonder what other opportunities might interest me.

When I returned to the recruiters the following week, they informed me that my score on the DLAB—137—was the highest they had seen in their office. Indeed, few people even took it (I may have been the only one to do so in their experience) because of the ASVAB score that was required to qualify to take the test. Honestly, I was astounded. I went in expecting bad news and instead discovered that for a week or two I would be a living legend in the recruitment office.

The head recruiter, a sergeant first class whose name I no longer remember, claimed that he knew I would “ace it,” referring to the language test. I brought the book I was reading then into the office with me on every visit. (I always go places with the books I’m reading, even today I prefer books to my so-called smart phone). I remember he announced aloud, so that everyone might appreciate his fine humor, “I knew he’d smoke that test. Look at his fucking book. He’s reading a book, and I can’t even pronounce the title or the author’s name.” It was The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Clearly, it didn’t take much to impress those guys.

Later, I learned that recruiters get points of some kind (or they did then) for funneling new recruits into particular occupations or fields of service, those hardest to fill. My decision to take the route of a linguist—technically, I was a cryptographer—proved to be a bonus and therefore a boon to someone. All the recruiters in the office treated me kindly, almost collegially. In fact, the head recruiter, the sergeant first class, attempted to return the favor with a different kind of bonus. He gave my name and phone number to a female recruit who had been in the office one day that I visited, and who evidently found me attractive. “This is very unorthodox,” the sergeant first class told me, “And frankly against protocol, but I figured you deserved it.” What kind of soldier objects to having his name and number given to an available and interested young woman, even if the act breaks rules, and perhaps even laws, around prickly things like privacy.

I don’t remember this young woman’s name anymore. (It proves remarkable to me how much we forget over the course of our lives.) She did call me, and I did agree to meet her. She had been in the office at the same time as me on some occasion, she said, and yet I could not place her, could not recollect her at all, which made me feel like a bit of a clod. I don’t remember where we met or any of the other circumstances surrounding our initial meeting. I only remember that she was average-looking, neither attractive nor unattractive. She wasn’t short, had brown hair and brownish hazel eyes, and possessed, I thought, a tolerable figure.

At that time, which is to say in my youth, I was idealistic or unrealistic in my views and kept stupid standards regarding the women I might willingly pursue beyond mere friendship. She did not meet those standards. In retrospect, I don’t know even what the point of such standards was, or what they were. I think of myself in my later years, not so much as less discerning, but as more accepting, more welcoming. With the wisdom of several additional decades, I would seldom spurn the advances of a woman (were I available), for most women, I understand now, are remarkable and gifted and deserve high regard, kindness, and compassion. Even then, I may have been smart, but I was without question also unwise.

This young woman hoped to make a connection with me, and yet I was unwilling. Probably, I felt like she sought too much from me. Probably, I was an idiot who overthought everything and perhaps even panicked when there was no cause for it. Our dance then became a nuanced thing of her gentle advances and my barely discernable retreats. It’s difficult to reconstruct anymore what my thinking was then, but I feel like that bizarre transitional void I was existing in—between one life and the next, separated only by a month or so of waiting—discouraged me from taking any definitive steps. Rather than leap into this ring of opportunity, or whatever it may have been, I simply circled it, hesitating until I reached a point beyond my ability to commit at all, when I would be leaving for boot camp and then a year of language training. This brief chapter in my young life has always felt like, and still feels like, a dream rather than a slim portion of my actual life.

In addition, this whole thing—this escapade or whatever it was—was also complicated by the fact that I really enjoyed this young woman’s family. Together in a small house, perhaps a mile east of Silver Lake, lived this young woman, her two younger brothers, her parents, and her grandmother. They had moved to their house from Arkansas less than a year previously. Probably, I met her family because that was the proper thing to do from their point of view.

I remember eating fried chicken and mashed potatoes and gravy and drinking tall glasses of cold milk. I’m certain there were also sides and dessert, but I don’t recall anymore what they were. Mostly Ma and Grandma made all the food, which was delicious on a heavenly scale, and yet they kept intimating that this young woman helped. It felt like they were hoping to sell me on the idea of her desirability as a potential mate, which added to my discomfort. I always got the vibe that she would make a serviceable wife and that I would make a welcome addition to the clan. I didn’t mind the idea of being part of the family necessarily, but I had no inclination to marry anyone or to settle down just yet to that kind of domesticity.

The two brothers were a couple of lovable bubbas. And I mean that in the best sense. One of them may even have been called “Bubba.” These two were chubby, spoke with Ozark drawls, wore blue jeans and cowboy boots and shirts with the sleeves ripped off. They also openly admired me for being already as good as a soldier. They wrestled at school, and yet they frequently remarked with envy on my leaner, meaner physique. I feel like they idolized me, and, frankly, I didn’t mind the attention. I chummed it up with them and happily posed as something like an older, caring brother.

I feel like I visited the home on a weekly basis. This was a fine balancing act because I liked the family atmosphere, while she was always hinting and coaxing that we go for a drive. She wanted to park somewhere to speak privately, to kiss and grow heated and see what came of it. I knew she wished for this from experience. For my part, I simply felt no chemistry, no real connection, no desire to find my way to intimacy with her. I kept her at bay, in a sense, by amplifying my enjoyment of the entire family, of the good times we all had together. If I possessed an appetite in relation to this young woman, then it wasn’t directly for her, but for her Ma and Grandma’s cooking.

At the conclusion of every meal, the boys cleared the table, and we all sat down with a bunch of dice to play a game they called “biff.” As it turns out, this was the same game I played with my grandma, which, being originally from Minnesota, she called “farkle.” Grandma and I would also sit at a table after eating. We would roll our dice, and she would keep score on a scrap of paper, drawing a line through our previous scores after each round and calculating the new running total. With Grandma, the game was always secondary, as much as she loved playing games, to the talk that flowed freely between us.

My briefly adoptive family maintained the same sensibilities as my grandma. Win or lose, the real fun resided in the play of words and sentences, the stories and teasing, the prevailing good humor. In the few weeks that remained before I left Seattle for Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, my favorite pastime included this family, their home and victuals, and the times we spent together. And yet it troubled me that I was unable also to meet the wishes of this young woman. It is in fact difficult to deny someone when they regard you so highly, or it is for me, in any case.

More than anything else, I feel perplexed by this experience in my life. It amazes me how little of it I remember. The experience constitutes an interval in my life, to be sure, a small interlude of sorts between leaving behind one chapter of life and embarking on another, a new and possibly adventurous chapter, which also served as an interval in my life, but a longer one. This short interval, however, intrigues me still, as it did then, for its oddness. I wonder sometimes what became of all the other people involved.

In the meantime, I’ve played Yahtzee with my kids, just as my dad liked to play the game. Sometimes, when my dad and I lived alone together, we played Yahtzee just between the two of us. My dad used to blow air into his fist, where the dice rattled together as he shook them before he tossed them into the box, just as he also ate his peanuts, shaking them and blowing on them prior to popping some into his mouth. However, I haven’t yet played Farkle with them, as my grandma played the game with me, or Biff if you prefer.