COMING TO CONCLUSIONS

The Autobiography of Peter Tristan Stuart

by

Gene C. McCoy

CHAPTER 1

Part Three

It was early February, 1946 when we steamed into the harbor at San Pedro, California. The bands were playing and the flags were flying. Families and friends were on the docks to meet the GIs who were home from the war, but there was no one to meet me. I had not let my family know that I was coming home; I simply walked off the dock, took the PE Red Car train to downtown L.A., and caught a bus to La Crescenta where I went back to high school. I had been gone on the trip to Japan about six months by the time I got back to high school, but after having been to sea I couldn't settle down. During the next summer of 1946 Dick Scharr, Larry Miller and I learned that if we joined the army before October we could still get full benefits under the G.I. Bill. In August of 1946, while still sixteen, I lied about my age to join the Army Air Corps. We were all worried that Dick wouldn't pass the physical because of his eyes, or that Larry would be underweight. On the day that we took our physicals I was stunned. I flunked because of a deviated septum in my nose. I was a mouth breather. The recruiters were undaunted, however. They packed us up and sent us out to Muroc Field, now Edwards AFB, for new physical exams. We all passed. We were inducted and late the next night we were loaded on a train in the desert town of Mojave and sent to the Army Induction Center at Camp Beal in Marysville, California.

At Camp Beal our heads were shaved, we were issued, uniforms, fatigues and underwear and told that it was a Federal Offense, punishable by fine and imprisonment, to lie about your age in order to join the service. I gulped but kept going forward. I was tested for my skills and given the Army General Classification Test to determine my AGCT Score. For what it is worth my score was 118, and I have no idea what that means.

When we enlisted the three of us wanted to become aircraft mechanics; our skills tests showed that we had the mechanical aptitude required for admission into the A&E Mechanics Tech School at Keesler Field, Biloxi, Mississippi, but first we would have to go through Basic Training at sad SAACC, the San Antonio Air Cadet Center in San Antonio, Texas. While it had been our intention to spend our Air Corp careers together, the army in its infinite wisdom shipped me out of Camp Beal ahead of Dick and Larry. I was loaded on an Army Troop Train, euphemistically referred to as cattle cars, and shipped across the desert to San Antonio in the heat of the summer. A week later Dick and Larry arrived, but by this time our stars were on different trajectories.

I was about three weeks into my six weeks of Basic Training when I learned that anyone who had been in the Merchant Marine and could pass a simple test could be relieved of Basic Training. I took the test, passed, and once again I was loaded on a train ahead of my pals for Biloxi.

By December I was eligible for my first furlough; the school closed down for the holidays, and it was announced that the top ten percent of the students from each class would receive free air transportation on an Air Corps plane to any point within a thousand mile radius of Keesler. I was given one of the awards and chose to go to Biggs Field in El Paso, Texas where I signed in with the local operations alert room to "hitchhike" a ride on to LA. Late that afternoon a VIP C-47 out of Andrews Field in Washington, D.C. came through. It was carrying the Chief of Staff of the Siamese Air Force, and he agreed that I could come along with him to Long Beach.

The plane was posh and fitted with luxury furnishings including a bar. I felt pretty important as I sipped drinks with the American Officers and the foreign dignitaries and decided that I might like a diplomatic life after I got out of the service.

I completed my training at Keesler and was selected to go on to advanced training in jet fighters at Chanute Field, Illinois. When I completed this school I was assigned to a B-29 outfit at Kirtland Field in Albuquerque, New Mexico. (More of the Army's infinite wisdom. A B-29 is as far removed from a jet fighter as you can get.)

Since I knew practically nothing about B-29s I was assigned to work on a little C-45 that was used by some of the top brass on the field to log their flying time. One of the officers who flew in this plane was the Base Air Inspector General. In the meantime I had heard that my pals Dick and Larry had been assigned to the Fourth Jet Fighter Group at Langly Field.

One day I was flying with the Air Inspector while he practiced shooting landings, and I told him how I had been trained for jets, and had ended up in this little nothing outfit in Mew Mexico. He told me to come see him in his office and to apply for a transfer on the basis of a "mal assignment."

A few days later I was again reassigned from the flight line to a Military Police Squadron to guard the B-29s that were especially equipped to carry atom bombs. I went to see the Air Inspector applied for my "mal assignment" transfer and was eventually assigned to the First Fighter Group in the 94th Jet Fighter Squadron, Eddie Rickenbacher's Hat-In-The-Ring outfit, that became famous during WW I.

When I joined the Squadron in the of summer of '47 it was at March Field in Riverside, California getting prepared to go on winter maneuvers in Alaska; in October of that year we were airlifted from March Field to Ladd Field in Fairbanks, Alaska. It was cold hard work on the flight line, but I loved it.

However, We were in Alaska just a few weeks when we lost one of our pilots due to a flame out while on his final approach. He smashed into the Chino Slough at the end of the runway, and after we had pulled the engine down for inspection we found that the filters in the flame tubes were all clogged. The jet fuel in Alaska was all contaminated, and we were grounded, so I spent the long winter nights in a Quonset hut studying for my GED, and in February of 1948 we returned to March Field.

I took the GED, passed and became a high school graduate rather than a drop out.

By the time the squadron returned to March Field I was a corporal, my highest grade ever, and I was able to get home almost anytime I wanted. During the last year that I was in the Air Force I began dating Marsha, a girl who was in my class in high school, and after I came out of the Air Force we dated quite regularly.

I was just nineteen that summer of '49 when I was discharged from the Air Force, and I was always horny. I had been with only one woman since that magic night in Tokyo in 1946. In the winter of 1948 I was flying back to March from Chanute Field Illinois when we got weathered in at Scott Field in East Saint Louis. A bunch of us went into St. Louis, dropped into a bar and began drinking. Even though I was shy with women, for the first time in my life I picked up a girl, spent the evening with her and took her home to her house to make love. I say to her house but what I actually mean is to her front yard. It was the middle of winter, and she spread out her coat on the snow while the taxi waited to take me back to town. Her name was Olie, and she wrote several letters to me. I think she had a crush on me.

Once back home in La Crescenta as a civilian again I joined the 52/20 club, bought myself a 39 Ford, started hanging out at the swimming pool at Indian Springs, and like everyone else looked for and at women.

It seems, though, that, except for Marsha, I picked women who were needy, or unavailable for marriage or even going steady.

Two of the women I saw off and on were married, but all I ever did with either of them was neck and pet, but the truth of the matter is that they were married and it didn't seem to matter to me in the least. It is also true that they both came after me before I made any move toward them.

Aside from the occasional dating with Marsha, and the two married women I mentioned above I had a brief but intense love affair with a girl named Marylin who was visiting from Canada with whom I thought I fell in love, and wanted to marry. She said she wanted to marry me, and she returned to Canada to initiate her immigration procedures. She was back in Canada about a month when she wrote to me that she had changed her mind, but that we could still be friends. This time my heart was broken and I cried on my sister's shoulder for a long time, maybe two weeks. (There was no sexual intercourse with any of these women)

In the fall I started college and continued to date Marsha. I had matured somewhat over the past few years and I worked hard in school; I was eager to learn and make something of myself. One of my classes was Spanish, and I did very well. The first time I was asked to read aloud a paragraph in Spanish, my teacher asked if I already spoke the language. I said no, and she said "Well. maybe you have a Latin ancestor in your background. You speak Spanish like a native." I smiled and remembered those early morning radio programs with my grandmother, Adie Stuart.

My ambition by this time was to work overseas or go into the Foreign Service, so from the money I received on the GI Bill, and from working in a gas station at night I saved up a good chunk of money. The following year, 1950, I decided to go down to Mexico to study.

I took a bus from L.A. to Laredo,Texas, and from there flew down to Mexico City to enroll in Mexico City College.

While I did get into college once again I was lonely; I missed Marsha, and after about three weeks, I dropped out of school, fooled around in Mexico for a couple of months travelling to Guadalajara and Matzatlan, then finally came home with a good case of Montezuma's revenge. Shortly after my return I asked Marsha to marry me, and she accepted. We set the date for January 1951.

The Korean war had started, and even though as a veteran I was exempted from the draft, I went to work as a civilian aircraft mechanic on planes that were airlifting supplies to Korea. It did not take me long to realize that working out in the real world was rough, and I knew that I definitely wanted to get my college degree. In December just before Christmas my pal Larry Miller was killed in a plane crash,and that convinced me that I did not want to spend my life around airplanes. At about the same time that Larry was killed I began getting cold feet about getting married. I recall sitting at the kitchen table with my mother (all issues if they were discussed at all were discussed at the kitchen table.) It may well have been on the same day that I got word about Larry. In any case, I said, "I'm not sure I want to go through with this marriage. I'm not sure I'm ready to get married. I'm not sure that I love Marsha."

"Pete, you can't back out now," mother said.

That's the only piece of advice that I can recall that I ever got from my mother, and it was as wrong and as bad as any advice I could have been given. Not only could I have backed out then, I should have backed out. My idea of a responsible parent is one who would have said, "Well, you better make up your mind before you get married, and not after." Or, "If you're not sure maybe it would be best to wait until you are sure." But like many times in my life I was not given good or any advice, and I had to figure things out for myself. I don't blame my mother for any of my mistakes, though. Like Marlon Brando in the film On the Waterfront I'm simply saying that someone "should'a told me. I could'a bin a contenda."

My mother had not objected when at fifteen years old I went to Yosemite, nor did she show any emotion when at sixteen I went to San Francisco to go to sea, and finally, while I was still sixteen, she signed a paper agreeing to my going into the Army Air Corps knowing that I had to lie about my age and say that I was seventeen. I had been gone from the home for most of the past five years, so there is also a good possibility that my mother simply wanted me out of the house, and marrying me off to Marsha was the best way to get me out. I'm not sure what my father thought during any of these turning points in my life. I remember he had a terrible hangover on the day I left for San Francisco to go to sea. In any case, in January of the next year, 1951, Marsha and I were married, and in February I returned to college in Glendale.

I have come to the conclusion that I married Marsha for all of the wrong reasons. For one thing I was too young, too insecure, too immature to even have a vague idea of what love is. It was just the way you did things in those days. We had never had sex, and I had gone home plenty of nights with "lover's nuts" after spending hours panting and petting in my car. The only way to get into bed with her was to get married, so that's what we did. In the fall of that year, 1951, we both went to Mexico together. I had had a taste of expatriate life and longed to go back to it. Marsha was not enthusiastic about life in Mexico though. She was bored and lonely, and eventually she returned to the States to work while I stayed in Mexico to study.

I did well in school, and by the second year of college I had made up my mind that I wanted to go into the Foreign Service.

I applied to the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University and was accepted for the semester beginning in the Fall of '52. I went home from Mexico and worked in a shoe store for the Summer; in the fall Marsha and I went together to Washington, D.C. where I enrolled in Georgetown University. If I felt inadequate when I started at Glendale High it was nothing compared to what I felt at Georgetown. I was way over my head because I was too immature for real, eastern university, major league study, and I was lazy. Within a month I cut back all of my classes to just studying Spanish; I went to school at night and worked in the daytime at an exclusive luggage shop on Connecticut Avenue in Washington, D.C. I decided that just as soon as the school term finished I would return to Mexico. Marsha went back to California to work and I moved into the YMCA.

Although I wanted to be a sophisticated, worldly, smooth and dashing diplomat, I didn't want to work, study and learn the things that I needed to qualify for a career in the diplomatic service. I took an "easier, softer way," the path of least resistance, a way that I have chosen frequently in my life, and in the summer of 1953 I returned to Mexico to finish my undergraduate studies and get my degree.

In March of 1954 I graduated Cum Laude from Mexico City College, but Cum Laude at MCC is probably about like a C average at Georgetown.

As my last adventure before going into the work world, I met up with a couple of men, one of whom had a Jeep and in order to travel home from Mexico to the States we drove up the West Coast of Mexico to Matzatlan, then shipped the Jeep to La Paz in Baja California and drove up the peninsula to Tijuana.

It was on the crossing from Matzatlan that I had my first marital infidelity with an attractive young Indian woman who was on her way to Tijuana to do what I don't know for sure but I can guess. Marsha and I had been married some three years.

Here I should mention that I always had, what I characterize as a "Hemingway Hangup." Not only did I think that I would like to be writer, I was crazy about Spain and Spanish things. (Notice that I said be a writer, not that I wanted to w rite.) I was a bullfight aficionado; I loved paella, flamenco music and dancing; and I was an idealist who always said that if I had been of the right age I would have gone off to fight in the Span ish Civil War. (More Hemingway For Whom the Bell Tolls,Ingrid Bergman fantasy bravado.) I used to love to drink red wine and read the last chapter of Hemingway's "Death in the Afternoon." I was captivated by the whole mosaic of expatriate life in Europe with intellectuals, artists, writers and eccentrics of every persuasion. At that stage of my life, after graduating from college, I was more suited to existentialist life in Europe than I was to suburban, middle class, corporate life in America, but I was married, Marsha wanted that vine covered cottage.

Through my friend Larry Miller's father I got an entre into Shell Oil Company for a job interview. My overseas work and Foreign Service ambitions were abandoned. I was hired by Shell and assigned to a small office in Ventura, California. It was a good job and I loved Ventura. We lived on the beach, made a lot of new friends, and I bought myself a little British Racing Green MG-TD. I got involved in sports car rallying and went to a lot of road races. Marsha was not particularly interested in sports cars; she hated the car and complained everytime I put the top down.

Even though we had been using a diaphragm as a birth control method, Marsha had her own agenda. She was ready to have children so without my knowledge she punched holes in the diaphragm. A year later, in March 1955,Marsha gave birth to our first child, Laurie. While today I can say that this was not exactly my idea of planned parenthood, at the time I totally accepted becoming a father. I did not find out about her deception until many years later.

Shortly after Laurie was born I was promoted and transferred to Shell's Los Angeles office. We packed and shipped our meager household furnishings, and put the baby, our personal things and two Siamese cats in the MG and left Ventura for Los Angeles; we bought our first home for no money down on a GI loan in La Mirada east of downtown LA where I worked in the Shell Building. Whereas in Ventura I used to drive to work in fifteen minutes, it now took me an hour and fifteen minutes on the Santa Ana Freeway. Eventually the MG was traded in on a VW which eventually was traded in on a new 1957 Ford Station wagon

. Over the next couple of years my work periodically took me back to Ventura, and I had my next infidelity when I started a brief but intense love affair with Phyllis who was a bright, caring woman who had been our next door neighbor while we lived in Ventura. I was so immature, inexperienced, narcissistic and guilt ridden that one night, after we had made love, I told Phyllis, "You're my shame." (It was a line I remembered from the film Outcast.) As I walked out the door in the middle of the night she said, "Pete, you're not a coward." I never have figured out what Phyllis meant, but I have regretted what I said to her. She was a great woman and did not deserve my abusive remark.

My corporate career was taking off. I had been chosen as one of the up and coming bright young men in the company. I was selected for special management training and given jobs of increasing responsibility.

In 1958 I was attending a management training program when our second child, Kevin Andrew, was born. Within a year I was again transferred,this time to the Head Office in New York to do economic research on the staff of the Executive Vice President for Exploration and Production.

Once back in the East I was cut off from all of my friends in Ventura, and my old high school ties in Southern California. My colleagues at Shell in New York lived far away in Westchester County, North Jersey and Manhattan, so once in a while, in order to fill time, I would set up my typewriter on the dining room table and write little vignettes or short stories. I started several novels and got about fifty pages into them before placing the pages in a drawer. However,much of my spare time was taken up with drinking since over the years I had become a daily drinker; at first a couple of beers in the evenings, later it was whiskey, and after the transfer to New York I drank martinis in the bar car of the New Haven Railroad train up to Connecticut where for our first year we lived. Later we bought a house in Old Bridge, New Jersey, and I was a regular "man in the grey flannel suit" with a split level house, a wife, two children and a new station wagon. I had many two martini lunches and frequently stayed in town pub crawling.

My commuting time was now some two hours each way by bus; From Old Bridge I travelled to the Port Authority Terminal on the West Side of Manhattan, then in good weather walked to Rockefeller Center at 50th Street and Fifth Avenue where I worked in the RCA Building. In bad weather I could fight the crowds and take a subway. I received a modest raise in salary when I transferred from LA to NY, but the increased cost of living and commuting more than ate it up. We barely scraped by from payday to payday.

Even though I enjoyed my children, spent weekends playing with them, took them to the beach, to New York to ride the Staten Island Ferry and to the Bronx Zoo, I was drifting away from Marsha, or better said we were drifting away from each other. I liked to watch the mother of all talk shows, David Suskind's "Open End," she went to bed. I liked to read before going to sleep; she would complain, "Are you going to read again tonight?" I started an on again off again love affair with Janet, a woman computer programer who worked for Shell. It was on again for my part and off again on hers. She did not want to be involved with a married man, and Janet's reluctance and wavering were to me a rejection, which when coupled with my guilt about the affair caused me to seek relief from my psychic pain with alcohol. My behavior was taking on the characteristics of an alcoholic, but in the psychological and 12-step jargon of recovery I was deep in denial. I never considered that I might be an alcoholic, nor did I ever consider stopping drinking.

I was snowed in over in New Jersey sipping a Bloody Mary that January Day in 1961 when Jack Kennedy's clear young voice carried from the steps of the Capitol across the nation. A snow storm the night before had paralyzed the Atlantic seaboard. Snowplows had worked all night to clear the streets of Washington, D.C. for the President's inauguration, but the plows had not yet reached our split level ranch house in Old Bridge by the time the television cameras focused on John F. Kennedy holding his right hand on the Bible while Jackie looked on. Our family room was cluttered with toys; a fire was burning in the fireplace. Laurie, our five year old daughter, still dressed in her sleepers, was playing on the floor. Marsha was sitting in front of a high chair pushing food into the mouth of Drew, our three year old son. I, bent over a portable typewriter set up on the dining table, was trying to write a paper to explain why the rate of return from buying oil in the ground was more profitable than exploration and drilling. I looked up from my typewriter to listen to the inaugural speech, and I had the feeling that life had passed me by.

"Somewhere I took a wrong turn," I said, meaning that I though tmy life was headed down the wrong path.

"I know," Marsha said, "but with all of that road repair going on the town is confusing."

She was talking about how we had lost our way in the snow storm the previous night.

I made no effort to set her straight. Marsha was snug and cozy in her world, and I did not know the source of my discontent. I did not understand, indeed,I was not even conscious of the conflicts between love and work,instinct and reason that gnawed at my soul.

I picked up my Bloody Mary looked out the window. The snow was fresh and clean,and the countryside had a pristine, virginal beauty in the cold, still morning air. I thought about what the new President had just asked of his fellow Americans, to "ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country,"

At just thirty-one years old I was already an old man. I had lost my perennial optimism, but like every old man I had fantasies that I kept nestled away, down deep in my innermost being. I supposed that Jack Kennedy's fantasy had been to become President of the United States, and I hoped it would be all that Jack expected. I recalled what G.B. Shaw said about having a dream come true: "There are two tragedies in life. One is not to get your heart's desire. The other is to get it." Aside from daydreaming about living as an expatriate writer on the south coast of Spain, my oldest and most reality oriented dream was a boyhood ambition of becoming a Foreign Service officer. In this fantasy, which had its roots in the Hemingway novels I read as a boy, I saw myself operating out of the American Embassy in some European capital, usually Madrid, negotiating international agreements and treaties, attending cocktail parties and receptions and meeting exciting interesting people.

There was a time in my youth when my noble idealism led me to think that there was something that I could do for my country, that I could make a contribution. I had the illusion that I could make a difference in the course of human history. I decided that I could no longer endure not fulfilling my dream, and that I would apply for the Foreign Service.

Some two months after my trip to Washington I received a telephone call in my office inquiring if I would be interested in an assignment in Costa Rica. "Yes," I replied, barely able to contain my excitement. Several months passed; I heard no more. In the summer I received another phone call. The assignment in Costa Rica had not come through, but would I be interested in Madrid? I nearly fainted.

Spain was the country with which I had had a long imaginary love affair. Spain was the backdrop for all of my fantasies. There were more interviews, friends called to say that the FBI had been around to talk to them about me. The FBI was doing a security investigation. The entire family took physical examinations. There was more waiting, then in late summer of 1961 I was appointed to the Foreign Service.

I submitted my resignation to Shell. They couldn't believe it. Nobody ever quit Shell. We packed up our furniture, and I put our house on the market for sale. Marsha took the children to California to visit with her family before we left for overseas,

Gene McCoy © July 1998

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