Charity and Pride
(ICly for She Who Knows Who She Is. OOCly for anyone who wants to read... but only OOCly.)
“I remember thinking that for a guy that had been through as much as him, he sure didn’t have a lot of meanness in him.” --Scarlett, G.I. Joe: ARAH #27
His movements were no longer his own. Tanner’s vision blurred, fading to black, and as he fought with the ephemeral thing latching onto him for control over his body, he felt himself rising up to do harm... and then his friend spoke up.
“What makes you who you are?” Her voice was small. Curious. It saved him.
The thing inside didn’t care. It raged, howling silently to sate its sadism... but there was too much of the man left inside. The spirit had no reason to question its existence. The man did, though, and the question stopped him in his tracks.
He sees himself in a classroom, fifteen years old. He works on a “current events” assignment, summarizing the story on President Reagan being shot the day before. Bored, bored, bored.
The principal comes into the room with a sad look on his face. It’s the worst part of his job. Tanner looks up as he hears his name and sees the principal beckon.
Mom asked the principal to tell me. She didn’t have it in her to tell me herself.
Days later Tanner is at a funeral. Firefighters and police make up many of the mourners. Forest Lawn Cemetery sprawls out all around them. There’s even a local news crew. The camera doesn’t leave Tanner in his nice, brand new black suit. His sobbing has stopped, but his tears haven’t.
His mother is next to him, but somehow not there with him. A couple dozen other adults try to comfort him, but he’s too numb to feel anything from it. Tanner is all alone in a crowd, his best friend in a pine box.
Dad’s crew thought there was still a kid inside the building. They kept telling me it was so quick it had to be painless. Like that made some difference.
Johnny O’Neil, 1940 - 1981. Husband, father, good friend.
It’s a beautiful headstone.
Same high school, early in the year. He walks a girl home, chatting inanely and trying not to look like a puppy (and failing). They have their first kiss out in front of her home before she has to shoo him away. The girl is Latina. Cheerful. Poor, but so beautiful.
Selena was the best thing that ever happened to me. Her family all but adopted me, filling the void left by my dad... by my mom. I left high school with C’s and D’s in English and straight A’s in Spanish. But I didn’t get to leave with her.
There’s a Christmas party at someone’s house. Teens drinking and smoking and laughing, someone blasting “Rio” on a boom box. Tanner is in the kitchen, and two girls come rushing in to get him. Selena smoked something a boy from another school gave her. She’s messed up, choking, shaking uncontrollably.
I just didn’t know what to do. I was seventeen, how could I have known?
He doesn’t panic. He cradles her in his arms, trying to do what the operator on the phone tells him. Kids around him are crying and yelling and some are rushing out of the house.
I kept thinking that Dad would’ve known what to do. And I didn’t.
The next year is a blur. Tanner fights with his guidance counselor over his classes. He gives up karate classes to volunteer at the hospital, and he reads first aid books on his own. Tanner all but re-takes biology on his own time. He sits in the front row of a wedding-it’s a small affair, but his mother is the bride and the groom is one of his teachers. You’ve got to be kidding, his face says.
He comes home with his graduation robes in hand. The dining room table is full of papers-passports and bank statements and travel books about Jamaica and the deed to the house. There are cardboard boxes everywhere, and furniture is missing.
Dad didn’t leave me on purpose. Neither did Selena. Mom was another story.
And then I had nowhere to go.
It’s the cliche picture of basic training: head shaved, down on his face, doing push-ups in the rain. An angry-looking cajun in a drill instructor’s uniform yells at the flagging recruit next to Tanner. “Ain’t ‘choo got any fight in ya, Kelly?”
He wasn’t going to say that to me. Nobody was ever going to say that to me.
In the Navy, he thrives. He volunteers for one school after another, one assignment after another. He gains the training he has sought since the night Selena died. He sticks his neck out for Fleet Marine Force duty, and then for more.
They told me something in corpsman school about never leaving people behind. The chaplain read us that poem about two sets of footprints in the sand becoming one set.
He jumps out of planes. He stands in chest-deep muddy water, holding a cinder block straight in front of him, trying to move without making ripples.
I wanted to be someplace where you didn’t leave anyone behind. Not for anything. The more I volunteered, the further I stuck my neck out... the more I belonged.
Tanner carries a Marine with a broken leg over snowy hills. He delivers a baby in the desert while a worried man with a turban holds a gun to his head. He runs. He stalks. He watches. He fights, and he kills. He is always with others doing the same.
In the really tight units, you know when you belong. You never see someone get left behind.
Tanner is married at a big, fanciful church. He is in uniform as he and his beautiful Southern belle bride walk out under the drawn swords of a dozen Marines.
Well... almost never.
He pops a tape into a VCR in a tent in the desert. There are other servicemen there, and they all hoot and holler as they see the action on the tape. Tanner’s wife is there, having less-than-romantic sex with another man. She looks to the camera, smiles, and says she wants a divorce.
Tanner tears the television off of its rack, carries it outside and smashes it on a rock.
There is fighting in a small town. Tanner carries one of his comrades to safety through a gunfight, then goes back for another, firing and engaging even with a man slung over his back. He carries and drags them through the streets in relays until he carjacks an Iraqi civilian. Tanner leaves the cabbie with his gold wedding band as he drives his buddies to safety.
Someone in command said I’d have won the only Navy Cross awarded in Desert Storm if it hadn’t been for the divorce. Something about a stuffed shirt in the Pentagon not wanting me going on Oprah when my domestic story was so bad for recruitment.
The service doesn’t last forever. He takes his G.I. Bill, his savings and his divorce settlement and goes to college in Southern California. Tanner works as a paramedic, drifting from one major to another, one relationship to another. He has all the focus of a sniper... but he doesn’t know what he wants.
It’s nighttime. He drops by an office building, waiting to pick up a friend. There is screaming and the sounds of violence from the parking garage. Tanner finds a woman, dressed in a business suit, trying to fight her way through a pack of three bikers. He leaps to her aid.
They aren’t just bikers. They have claws and fangs, and they seem to feel no pain. Tanner breaks jaws and noses and collarbones, and they just laugh and mock one another, and they mock him. He’s the better fighter, but there are three of them. They are stronger, and he can’t hurt them. The woman runs. She’s not really hurt. Tanner’s world goes black.
He hears an EKG. Something covers his eyes. There are arms around him, hoisting him up. “We’ve got to get out of here,” a woman’s voice says. She sounds different from the woman in the garage, the one who left him. His world goes black again...
...and then later, goes red. There is the faint memory of euphoria, followed by raging hunger, and then nothing. When Tanner awakens, he is clawing his way into a dumpster to hide from the sun. He spends the entire day huddled in the garbage. After the sun sets, he sates his hunger on a stray dog, and then another; mercifully, he is not so hungry when he finds his first bum that he can’t stop himself from killing.
I didn’t ask for this. I didn’t want it. I still don’t.
I am not brave or selfless or noble. I just know how it is to be abandoned. I don’t want to be alone. I don’t want to be abandoned again. Dad. Selena. Mom. The service. Amanda. They made me who I am. I know what it is to be abandoned and what it means to save someone.
I will not abandon myself to my fate.
“I remember thinking that for a guy that had been through as much as him, he sure didn’t have a lot of meanness in him.” --Scarlett, G.I. Joe: ARAH #27
His movements were no longer his own. Tanner’s vision blurred, fading to black, and as he fought with the ephemeral thing latching onto him for control over his body, he felt himself rising up to do harm... and then his friend spoke up.
“What makes you who you are?” Her voice was small. Curious. It saved him.
The thing inside didn’t care. It raged, howling silently to sate its sadism... but there was too much of the man left inside. The spirit had no reason to question its existence. The man did, though, and the question stopped him in his tracks.
He sees himself in a classroom, fifteen years old. He works on a “current events” assignment, summarizing the story on President Reagan being shot the day before. Bored, bored, bored.
The principal comes into the room with a sad look on his face. It’s the worst part of his job. Tanner looks up as he hears his name and sees the principal beckon.
Mom asked the principal to tell me. She didn’t have it in her to tell me herself.
Days later Tanner is at a funeral. Firefighters and police make up many of the mourners. Forest Lawn Cemetery sprawls out all around them. There’s even a local news crew. The camera doesn’t leave Tanner in his nice, brand new black suit. His sobbing has stopped, but his tears haven’t.
His mother is next to him, but somehow not there with him. A couple dozen other adults try to comfort him, but he’s too numb to feel anything from it. Tanner is all alone in a crowd, his best friend in a pine box.
Dad’s crew thought there was still a kid inside the building. They kept telling me it was so quick it had to be painless. Like that made some difference.
Johnny O’Neil, 1940 - 1981. Husband, father, good friend.
It’s a beautiful headstone.
Same high school, early in the year. He walks a girl home, chatting inanely and trying not to look like a puppy (and failing). They have their first kiss out in front of her home before she has to shoo him away. The girl is Latina. Cheerful. Poor, but so beautiful.
Selena was the best thing that ever happened to me. Her family all but adopted me, filling the void left by my dad... by my mom. I left high school with C’s and D’s in English and straight A’s in Spanish. But I didn’t get to leave with her.
There’s a Christmas party at someone’s house. Teens drinking and smoking and laughing, someone blasting “Rio” on a boom box. Tanner is in the kitchen, and two girls come rushing in to get him. Selena smoked something a boy from another school gave her. She’s messed up, choking, shaking uncontrollably.
I just didn’t know what to do. I was seventeen, how could I have known?
He doesn’t panic. He cradles her in his arms, trying to do what the operator on the phone tells him. Kids around him are crying and yelling and some are rushing out of the house.
I kept thinking that Dad would’ve known what to do. And I didn’t.
The next year is a blur. Tanner fights with his guidance counselor over his classes. He gives up karate classes to volunteer at the hospital, and he reads first aid books on his own. Tanner all but re-takes biology on his own time. He sits in the front row of a wedding-it’s a small affair, but his mother is the bride and the groom is one of his teachers. You’ve got to be kidding, his face says.
He comes home with his graduation robes in hand. The dining room table is full of papers-passports and bank statements and travel books about Jamaica and the deed to the house. There are cardboard boxes everywhere, and furniture is missing.
Dad didn’t leave me on purpose. Neither did Selena. Mom was another story.
And then I had nowhere to go.
It’s the cliche picture of basic training: head shaved, down on his face, doing push-ups in the rain. An angry-looking cajun in a drill instructor’s uniform yells at the flagging recruit next to Tanner. “Ain’t ‘choo got any fight in ya, Kelly?”
He wasn’t going to say that to me. Nobody was ever going to say that to me.
In the Navy, he thrives. He volunteers for one school after another, one assignment after another. He gains the training he has sought since the night Selena died. He sticks his neck out for Fleet Marine Force duty, and then for more.
They told me something in corpsman school about never leaving people behind. The chaplain read us that poem about two sets of footprints in the sand becoming one set.
He jumps out of planes. He stands in chest-deep muddy water, holding a cinder block straight in front of him, trying to move without making ripples.
I wanted to be someplace where you didn’t leave anyone behind. Not for anything. The more I volunteered, the further I stuck my neck out... the more I belonged.
Tanner carries a Marine with a broken leg over snowy hills. He delivers a baby in the desert while a worried man with a turban holds a gun to his head. He runs. He stalks. He watches. He fights, and he kills. He is always with others doing the same.
In the really tight units, you know when you belong. You never see someone get left behind.
Tanner is married at a big, fanciful church. He is in uniform as he and his beautiful Southern belle bride walk out under the drawn swords of a dozen Marines.
Well... almost never.
He pops a tape into a VCR in a tent in the desert. There are other servicemen there, and they all hoot and holler as they see the action on the tape. Tanner’s wife is there, having less-than-romantic sex with another man. She looks to the camera, smiles, and says she wants a divorce.
Tanner tears the television off of its rack, carries it outside and smashes it on a rock.
There is fighting in a small town. Tanner carries one of his comrades to safety through a gunfight, then goes back for another, firing and engaging even with a man slung over his back. He carries and drags them through the streets in relays until he carjacks an Iraqi civilian. Tanner leaves the cabbie with his gold wedding band as he drives his buddies to safety.
Someone in command said I’d have won the only Navy Cross awarded in Desert Storm if it hadn’t been for the divorce. Something about a stuffed shirt in the Pentagon not wanting me going on Oprah when my domestic story was so bad for recruitment.
The service doesn’t last forever. He takes his G.I. Bill, his savings and his divorce settlement and goes to college in Southern California. Tanner works as a paramedic, drifting from one major to another, one relationship to another. He has all the focus of a sniper... but he doesn’t know what he wants.
It’s nighttime. He drops by an office building, waiting to pick up a friend. There is screaming and the sounds of violence from the parking garage. Tanner finds a woman, dressed in a business suit, trying to fight her way through a pack of three bikers. He leaps to her aid.
They aren’t just bikers. They have claws and fangs, and they seem to feel no pain. Tanner breaks jaws and noses and collarbones, and they just laugh and mock one another, and they mock him. He’s the better fighter, but there are three of them. They are stronger, and he can’t hurt them. The woman runs. She’s not really hurt. Tanner’s world goes black.
He hears an EKG. Something covers his eyes. There are arms around him, hoisting him up. “We’ve got to get out of here,” a woman’s voice says. She sounds different from the woman in the garage, the one who left him. His world goes black again...
...and then later, goes red. There is the faint memory of euphoria, followed by raging hunger, and then nothing. When Tanner awakens, he is clawing his way into a dumpster to hide from the sun. He spends the entire day huddled in the garbage. After the sun sets, he sates his hunger on a stray dog, and then another; mercifully, he is not so hungry when he finds his first bum that he can’t stop himself from killing.
I didn’t ask for this. I didn’t want it. I still don’t.
I am not brave or selfless or noble. I just know how it is to be abandoned. I don’t want to be alone. I don’t want to be abandoned again. Dad. Selena. Mom. The service. Amanda. They made me who I am. I know what it is to be abandoned and what it means to save someone.
I will not abandon myself to my fate.