There are several things you must understand about THE DOOM PATROL. We were just ordinary guys, and we clung to each other because we ordinary...strange guys. you know, the kind of guys that everyone else thinks are weird, or strange. We weren't that different from anyone else. But since we were thought to be crazy, strange or just plain weird we formed our own little circle of friends. The best thing was ANYONE could join or clique. Our only requirement was to look out for one another. Well, we had a few other rules, but anyone cool could dig 'em.
RULE ONE: No Good Deed Goes Unpunished. Just don't be a dick about it.
RULE TWO: Life is a party, but its BYOB.
RULE THREE: Never forget the sacred words. Nee, Pang and Naywhong.
journey with me now to Germany in the early mid 1990's and experience the adventures of the Doom Patrol!
Hey, I changed the names (especially mine) To protect the innocent. (Especially me) any relationship to anyone living or dead is fictional, except that these were real people but names have been changed, blah, blah, blah.
CHAPTER ZWEI (2)
Meet the Cast....or THE Gathering...
Cox was only 19 when he got to the unit, fresh outta Basic Training. He was from California. Cox was a truck driver...that was his military specialty...but he ended being the Sergeant Majors driver. Meaning when the Sergeant Major and/or the Battalion Commander had to go somewhere he drove them, or delivered paperwork to other posts, etc. He was an okay roommate even though I preferred living alone. Now, everyone had their own room, that is until the barracks for another company had to be renovated. The other company moved into our barracks for awhile so we had to double up to make room. No big deal, really. The rooms were large enough to afford everyone some privacy. And Cox was a pretty cool guy, we ended up being really good buddies.
The problem with Cox was he liked to fight. He was like a barbarian sometimes. He acted like Marky Mark, was all into hip hop and Bon Jovi (what a combination) and he loved violence! I didn't realize he had a knack for it until one night when we were watching TV in the room and cracking jokes on each other. As guys will do, we began "play-threatening" each other, you know, "I'll kick your ass so hard you're ID card picture will have a black eye" etc. etc. Next thing you know, we're "play boxing", not really hitting each other, just messing around until he flipped out. Cox hit me with a beautiful kidney shot...but he hit me hard. Harder than you do when you're playing. I almost fell over from the pain. So I spun around, got behind him and got him in a full nelson. I tried to force him to his knees.
"Say 'uncle', man, say 'uncle'!" I was screaming at him. He pushed back on the balls of his feet and rammed my back into the wall really hard. It knocked the wind out of my body instantly. Then he turned around and rained blows on me. He was punching me so hard the spit flew out of my mouth and I began to realize he isn't playing any more! All I could do was throw my arms up to protect my head and upper body and he kept hitting me. I was screaming now "Cox, Stop! STOP! I QUIT, MAN, I QUIT!!!"
He stopped and I looked up at him. My head was spinning. Like in the cartoons there little birds circling my head, and Cox was just standing there. He pulled me up and said "Lets go get a pizza dude." like nothing just happened. So I knew then that he had a problem with controlling himself.
Gork found out about it too in the same situation, but at least Gork wrestled with him in the hallway, giving him the opportunity to run. That wasn't really good, because Cox began to realize that he pretty much could beat us all up if he wanted to, so he got kinda cocky about it. One night Gork and I decided to teach him a lesson. He had gone out somewhere so we waited in my room. We had the lights out and put duct tape over the switch so he couldn't turn them on when he got home. Cox opened the door and we could see his silhouette in the hallway light. He started hitting the switch and of course nothing happened because it was taped up. Gork and I leapt out of the darkness dragged him in the room and started to monkey stomp him. Then we threw him over the bed and ran out of the room. The plan was to run two doors down the hall into Gork's room and act like we had been in there watching movies all night. But it backfired. Cox came bursting out of the room right behind us! Damn, he was tough.
"Oh [unwrite]!" Gork yelled, "He sees us! RUN!"
It was like the Three Stooges...Gork and I were screaming "Aaaaaahhh! He's behind me! Run!" and Cox was chasing us screaming "I'm gonna kill you guys! I'm gonna kick both your asses!" We made it into Gork's room, Gork slammed the door shut and locked it and Cox began pounding on it like a wild animal. "Come outta there! You can't hide forever!"
"Gork", I said "lets open the door. There's two of us! He can't take us both!"
"Uh, I think he can, Dude..." Gork replied.
"Well, we'd better just stay in here until he calms down"
About three hours later, we unlocked the door. Cox came strolling in drinking a soda.
"That was pretty funny, you guys...you got me good." he says, laughing, "But I'm still gonna pound both of you one day!"
Yep, that's the way Cox was. He was a really good friend, but when he got mad, he was a bloodthirsty maniac.
CRAZY LIKE A FOX or JUST PLAIN CRAZY...
Bustos was insane from the start. When he arrived at the unit he began working as the supply room clerk, and then the unit armorer. Meaning he had access to all the weapons. He slowly went completely mad over the time that I knew him, but when first arrived he started doing crazy things.
In Germany the power is 220 volts. Here in the US its 110. That means if you have a TV or a microwave or anything else from the states you need a transformer to run it in Germany. They tell you that before you leave the states, they tell you that when you get to Germany about a dozen times. Don't plug anything in unless its dual voltage ( has a switch that will turn it from 110 to 220) or you buy a transformer. You can get a small transformer in Germany at ANY PX for about $75.00. Also the plugs are round not square so even if you have a device that's dual voltage you had to get an adapter to plug it in the wall socket.
Bustos, when he first got there moved into a room next to Gork. It was summer time and it was really hot and humid. Bustos was unpacking his bags in his new room and he came over to my room and asked if I had an adapter to plug his fan in. I had a box of them, so I gave him one. A few minutes later he comes back and says his fan is broken. Cox and I went over to his room. He had a medium size oscillating fan that was going crazy. It was spinning really fast and suddenly it just burst into flames! I grabbed the extinguisher from the hallway and put it out while Cox pulled the plug out of the wall. Bustos was pissed.
"Man, you?re adapter don?t work, man! You [unwrite]ed up my fan!" he was pointing at me.
"Bustos, you plugged a 110 fan into 220 power! Why didn't you buy a transformer?"
"I don't need one!" he exclaimed, "I was using the one you gave me!"
"That's an adapter, you moron!" I shouted at him. "You coulda burned the building down! Jeez, weren't you listening at the ten billion briefings you get when you come here!?"
That kind of irked me, especially since he blamed me for burning his fan up for weeks afterward, but he really got strange after that. The room next to him and directly across from me and Cox' room belonged to a female soldier named Bagley. She was really nice, and was actually rotating back to the states by the time Bustos got there. She was the unit supply clerk, the job that Bustos was taking over. Cox and I were cleaning up our room and moving furniture around one night and we had the door open so we could carry things in and out easily. We had Cox' favorite movie in the VCR "Young Guns"...I had never seen it so I was really trying to pay attention to it, when I heard Bustos talking to Bagley in her doorway. He hadn't picked up and signed for his TA-50, (field gear) and was asking if she had time to do it tomorrow. Bagley told him that since she was leaving he should just take hers. He could sign for it on her hand receipt and that would save her the trouble of turning it all in and him the trouble of having to go pick some up from supply. But she said he should try on her LBE to see if it fit. (an LBE, Load Bearing Equipment, is basically a belt and suspenders that soldiers carry their canteens, ammo pouches, first aid packs, etc. on. They're adjustable, but come in different sizes too.) Well, Bustos agrees to try hers on to see if it fit. Bagley hands it to him and says she'll be right back, she wants to go get a soda from the hall machine. At that point I told Cox to shut the door. I couldn't hear the movie. But a few minutes later we heard Bagley screaming. We both ran out of the door and there before us, standing in Bagley's room was Bustos, Butt naked with nothing on but the LBE. Bagley had come back from the soda machine and found him like that. Luckily Staff Sergeant Henderson was just coming upstairs and he ran over there.
"BUSTOS! What the hell are you doing!" All of us pretty much said at the same time.
"I was trying it on, man, but I needed to know how it fit without clothes on!" He explained.
At this moment Cox and I burst into laughter. Bagley was really upset so we tried to hold it. Cox and I took her into our room for a minute to calm her down. I don't know what SSG Henderson said to Bustos. But he didn't get in any trouble for it. Of course that was a second clue to the fact that this guy was nuts.
SSG Henderson told me one morning he saw Bustos in the latrine sitting in a sink naked shaving his head. He said he just yelled at him "Bustos, don't put your ass in the sink!"
Bustos did a lot of weird things and he started to spook us. After work one day Gork and I were sitting in his room having a beer when the First Sergeant came in. He asked us what we knew about Bustos. He'd been hearing all of the crazy stuff about this guy and wanted to know if we'd write down all the things we knew so he could send Bustos in for a Psychological Evaluation. He wasn't ordering us to do it, just asking us if we'd think about it. After he left Gork and I kind of agreed that we didn't want to do that. We figured maybe he's just going through a phase so why make him look bad and possibly get kicked out of the army or locked in a hospital before we really get to know if he is crazy.
Gork and both are big Star Trek fans. So we were watching some old original Trek episodes on a tape I had in his room later that night when we kept hearing loud sounds from the hallway, like heavy furniture being moved. We didn't even react, we just kept watching TV and drinking beer. Finally Gork got up to go to the latrine. He came back a few minutes later and told me "Dude, you'd better go see this....in the day room."
I got up and went to the dayroom. Our day room was split into two different rooms actually. One room had a pool table and the other had a TV and few chairs and a sofa in it. In the TV half Bustos was sitting there watching a basketball game or something (it may have been baseball) folding his laundry and carefully putting it in his DRESSER!
Yes, I said dresser! Bustos had moved his entire room into the dayroom except for the bed. He even set up his pictures on the desk, etc. He had every piece of furniture from his barracks room except for the bed in the TV room, set up like he was home. Chairs, lamps, desk, you got it.
"Bustos!" I said in shock, "What are you doing?"
"Folding laundry man." He didn't even look at me when he spoke, just stared at the TV...
"Where's the Day room furniture?" I asked.
"In my room."
"Bustos, why didn't you just bring your clothes in here and fold then in your laundry basket instead of bringing the whole dresser and all this stuff in here?"
"I feel at home this way." he answered.
With that I went back to Gork?s room. I wasn?t about to try and reason with him, and frankly I didn?t care enough to go find SSG Henderson. After all, someone else was bound to tell Top (The first sergeant) about this. Gork just looked at me and said his signature line "The poor unsuspecting [unwrite]."
THE JACK DANIEL'S CREW or YOU CAN NEVER GET ENOUGH HUKE...Huke was still a little wary of me for awhile. after all, I'd thwarted his attempt to seduce Peggy. But we kind of became casual friends...meaning I didn't hate him and he didn't like me...
Huke was a loser, that much was a well known fact to me within a month of knowing him. He was the butt of everyone's jokes. Everybody picked on him. No one treated him with any respect. Part of this was Huke's complete inability to stick up for himself. He let people pick on him. He just went and took it and cried about it later to those who would listen, mostly Corporal Shaw or sometimes me. But Huke caused most of his own humiliation.
Glenn was definitely the leader of the Jack Daniel's Crew. The JD crew as they called themselves mainly consisted of Glenn, Egbert the Detail Man, and the Lackey. I call him the Lackey because he was mainly Glenn's toady. I can't even remember his real name. He was a short, stocky emotionless sort of guy. He was also Huke's roommate. The Lackey despised Huke. He did everything he could to make Huke miserable...and Huke let him do it. That's why I was so suprised to discover that Huke had managed to convince these guys to let him hang out with them. There was a catch though....The JD crew had a little ritual they went through every weekend. They would get a giant bottle of Jack Daniel's whiskey and call it "The General". Then they would sit around in Glenn's room and drink it. When it was empty they would play taps and actually salute it as a fallen soldier before they went out to the clubs. They had other drinks, beer, gin, bacardi, etc...but they mainly drank JD. If they didn't like you very much they did what they did to Huke....
It was Friday night. I was leaving to the barracks to go to the Class Six (the military Liquor store) to get some beer for Cox and myself. As I was leaving I passed Glenn's room. The door was open so I popped in to say hi. There was Huke, with the JD crew drinking a shot of Jack Daniel's. The crew was chanting "Huke! Huke! Huke! Chug it!" When Huke saw me he was all aglow with pride. Someone cool finally had accepted him.
"Hey, Dante!" Huke said, and his voice was already slurred, "This is my fifth shot!"
"Only your fifth, Huke?" Glenn said. He was behind Huke, smiling. "Man, we've all had about 10 apiece...you need to catch up or you have to get out!"
"Yeah, Huke!" added the Lackey.
"Have another beer, Huke!" Egbert handed Huke a beer.
Of course I could see what was going on. Huke was doing shot after shot and guzzling beer and these three guys were having maybe 1 shot for every three that Huke had. They tried to do this to me when I first met them, but I hate whiskey. They did it to Cox once...got him really drunk so they could laugh at him. Fortunately for Cox, he was my roommate and my friend. So I stopped that. I went and got him before they got him completely messed up. But Huke should have known better. These guys NEVER treated him like a person, the Lackey in fact HATED him and that was no secret to anyone. Huke was about 23 or 24 years old...Cox in his defense was only 19, just a kid...(The legal drinking age in Germany is 16!) Glenn gave me the look that told me they planned on letting Huke hang himself. Unfortunately for Huke, I didn't care enough to say anything. He was still kind of mad at me about Peggy. I stayed for a few minutes, had a beer and left.
I didn't go right to the class six. I stopped at the NCO club, talked to a few people I knew there, had a drink, walked to the class 6, got my beer and walked back. When I got back, maybe an hour or so later, The Lackey and Detail Man were pushing Huke down the hall in a wheeled chair. Huke was out cold. They pushed him into his room, then just dumped him on the bed like a sack of potatoes. I stepped in the room, mildly amused that Huke let them talk him into this and how I knew it would end. But I felt a little sorry for him.
"Hey, roll him on his side, you guys, so if he vomits in his sleep he won't choke!" I said.
"[unwrite] him!" Said the Lackey. He usually said that about Huke. No surprise there.
I gave Detail Man a disgusted look. Detail Man and I were pretty cool so he knew what I meant. I was pissed at the Lackey's casual disregard for Huke's safety so he went over and rolled him on his side. Detail Man didn't like Huke, but he didn't hate him either.
I went about my business that night and went to bed. The next morning I was awakened by a constant rapping at my door. Cox was asleep and he was a deep sleeper. Plus he had been out until 3 or 4 so he wasn?t about to get out of bed and answer the door. I got up, threw a robe on and answered the door. It was Huke. He looked like a ghoul. His hair was all matted and icky looking, his face was death pale and his eyes were all red and sunken in. He smelled horrible. As soon as I opened the door the stench of something like [unwrite] and liquor invaded the room. It was coming from the laundry basket he was carrying. In it were a pile of neatly folded clothes that he had obviously washed the night before sometime, before he went drinking. But they were covered with a mountain of partially dried vomit.
"I threw up on my clothes", he said in a weak hangover voice, "Do you have some bleach? and some aspirin?"
I would have laughed if it wasn't so disgusting. The smell was vile and cloying. I stepped back from the door and got my aspirin bottle and the bleach from my counter. Huke stepped into the room.
"Hey!" I shouted, "Don?t bring that funky [unwrite] in here!" Huke stepped back in the hall. I expected him to fall over. He could barely walk and was clearly having a monster hangover. I stuffed the aspirin bottle and bleach bottle in his laundry basket as he needed both hands to hold it. It made a sick squish as it touched the vomit. And there was a lot of vomit! "Keep it!" I told him.
Huke shuffled away sadly. Of course everyone in the entire company heard about this within hours. The Lackey made sure of this. Hell, Cox lived with me and he heard it from the Lackey first! People laughed at Huke for weeks about it. But this caused Gork and I to have the following conversation. I was talking to Gork about this occurrence, well, we were laughing about it...
"Poor Huke," said Gork, sipping a beer the next evening, Saturday night, "The poor unsuspecting [unwrite]. He is a moron, but he just wants to fit in!"
"Yeah, I know," I replied, "I feel sorry for him...I don?t fit in either, really, but at least no one [unwrite]s with me. You?re a weirdo too, Gork, but everyone likes you!"
"We should just have a club for weirdoes." Gork took another sip of his beer, "Our own little clique. All the people in the barracks that no one else really likes. Most of us are cooler than everyone else, too...we're just a little strange...well, you're really strange, Dante."
I thought about what Gork had just said and it struck me. "Yeah, we should just get all of the misfits here together....we're just like the Doom Patrol, that old comic book."
The name struck a chord with both me and Gork. The next day we bought "jolly rogers" (Skull and crossbones flags...like pirates) for ourselves and Cox.
...and so it began...We welcomed anyone who other people thought were weird or crazy. We hung out together, stood up for each other, and had fun together. Eventually, everyone wanted to be our friends. For that short time I spent in Germany, we were heroes....and everyone else knew us collectively as The Doom Patrol.
KAF AND REVEREND JONES or TWO SIDES OF THE SAME COIN....Kaf was an annoying self-righteous religious zealot. He was also a fool. Rev. Jones was the Chaplains Assistant, and he was just a plain nice guy...
Kaf really got under my skin. He had one year left in the army when I got to there and he couldn't make up his mind what he wanted to do. He was always asking everyone if they thought he should reenlist, go to college, get a job....and if he went to college he asked what we thought he should study....he really got on everyone's nerves with that. Sneaky Jones called him the "Duke of Doubt".
But Kaf was even more annoying than just that! Every single time he came around a group of us either in my room or Gork's he would bring his guitar...that he couldn't play. Then he would attempt to sing "Jeremy" by Pearl Jam or "Hunger Strike" by Temple of the Dog. He thought he was Eddie Vedder or something, but he could not sing at all. Then he would preach to us about how we were going to go to hell because we were all just sitting around drinking and smoking on a Saturday night or even worse...we would go out and have sex with german women! Man, he pissed me off. I was constantly telling him to shut up, threatening him or occasionally grabbing him by the shirt and tossing him out of rooms. Gork actually liked Kaf for some reason, even though he was annoyed by him too. I could only just barely tolerate his presence. Here's how confused this idiot was...he had an awesome CD collection...at least 2 0r 3 hundred CD's. I mean good CD's too...Cd's that any rock and roll fan would want to own. One day he just decided that rock and roll was the devils music. So he triumphantly told Gork and I that he had thrown away all of his CD's and advised us to do the same!
"WHAT!?" Gork hollered at him when he told us this, "Kaf! You had thousands of dollars worth of music! Why didn't you just give them to me? Or Dante? Why throw them away?"
"That would be wrong, Gork," Kaf said, "its evil music. I couldn't let it spread to you! You guys should throw your CD's away too. If you want God's forgiveness you will."
"Kaf!" I told him, "Shut up. You're an idiot. If you even talk to me again I'm going to kill you. I'm really going to kill you!" I was serious, too. It took a lot of self control to not beat the snot out of Kaf right then.
A week went by and Kaf came and told Gork and I that he missed his CD collection and that he had spent a few hundred dollars that afternoon RE-BUYING CD's trying to build his collection again.
"Kaf!" Gork hollered at him, "You really are a [unwrite]ing idiot!" Gork was laughing so hard he started crying. I wasn't even amused. Kaf just stood there looking stupid. When he glanced at me I just said "Don't talk to me Kaf. I still want to kill you."
But Reverend Jones was different....
When the Reverend, as we called him, first arrived to the unit we could have easily become enemies. But as I got to know him he was a cool guy. Religious, yes...he was the Chaplain's assistant. But not zealous. He'd drink with you, listen to music with you and talk to you like a normal person. He never preached to you. (admittedly, Rev. Jones did give me spiritual guidance when I did come to him with a problem. He never preached though. He was a really good guy) But the night he moved in he did something REALLY dumb.
Rev. Jones had got all of his stuff into his room and then he met Glenn and the Jack Daniel's crew! They invited him to drink with them. He was in Glenn's room drinking and I was watching TV with Gork and SSG Henderson in my room. Cox came in and asked for SSG Henderson. He found a wallet in the latrine and it had $400.00 cash in it! It belonged to the new guy, Rev. Jones. Cox wanted SSG Henderson to go with him when he gave it back so there would be question about theft. So they went to Glenn's room and gave it to Rev. Jones. He was grateful! He thanked Cox for being so honest. Cox and SSG Henderson came back to my room and we kept watching TV. SSG Henderson eventually got tired and went to bed. Rev. Jones put his wallet in his room on top of his desk and then left it with the lights on, and the door unlocked and open!
A few hours later Rev. Jones came into the room. He was pissed. He started accusing Cox of stealing his wallet. He had left it in his room and now it was gone! He admitted his door was open too, which is a big no no in the barracks anyway. Cox, in an uncharacteristic moment did not instantly hit him, but denied it.
"Dude, I've been in here all night with Dante and Gork!" He said, "Besides, I gave you your wallet back! I could have taken your money then and told you I just found an empty wallet, but I didn't!"
"But you knew I had money in it!" Rev. Jones accused, "You knew it and you went and took my money!"
"[unwrite] you!" I interjected. "Cox didn?t rob you! Besides if you?re stupid enough to leave your door open with $400.00 in your room, you deserve to be robbed, you [unwrite]ing moron!"
"Hey, kiss my ass!" Rev. Jones got in my face. He was kind of tipsy from drinking with the JD crew.
"Okay," I stood nose to nose with him and folded my arms. Now I was pissed. Who the hell did this guy think he was? "What are you going to do? Tell the first sergeant? You'll get in trouble for leaving your room unsecured and breaking regulations...You can't have more than $100.00 cash in the barracks!"
Rev. Jones was taken aback. He was a pudgy kind of guy and I wasn't afraid of him. Yeah had about more weight than I did, but I was (and still am) fast. I knew a good shot on his jaw would take him down.
"What else can you do?" I went on. "Kick my ass? I don?t think so. You?re drunk, I?m not and I guarantee I?m faster than you are. Get the [unwrite] outta my room before I cave your head in you stupid son of a bitch."
Gork was once again laughing his ass of. For some reason seeing me get angry always cracked him up. Rev. Jones hung his head and left. We all just started laughing as he shuffled away. But the next day he came back and apologized. He was drunk, he said and angry and he admitted he was wrong to accuse Cox and to get in my face. I wasn't angry at him and neither was Cox. Gork was just amused. He was still out $400.00. We all shook hands and became friends...and he was a really good guy, as it turns out.
To be honest, I admired Rev. Jones for the guts it took to apologize. His ability to admit he was wrong and not hold a grudge is one of the reasons I liked him so much. I liked him a lot....and to this day I really miss him.
Next up Sooner or later: CHAPTER DREI. Or Go back to Chapter Ein. Or The Infernal Homepage. Its your call.
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