It was not easy sleeping in that slave galley of a dorm. There were always interruptions. Clean up in the middle of the night. Banging buckets, laughter among the retards pushing mops, playing with the mops, getting off on the noise they made. And of course the sounds universal to any such dorm: snoring, coughing, moaning, shouting though most were so old and lost from the traumas of youth, there wasn't a whole lot of screaming nightmares. All the screaming was inside by then.
In the kitchen, where I wound up a time or two, there was a vet, some kid, a Marine, spry little chap, but his nightmares were relatively mild. The source wasn't combat but standing sentry for the twitching bodies of the dead awaiting return to the home country. Eerie enough for me but not for him apparently. He joked about it and I never heard him scream out in decompression behind it. And he was two cots over.
That was in the south wing. Once, sleeping in the north wing, I was waked one night by laughter from way in the back. The hinterland. I lay there absorbing and wondering when it would stop when a fella came over to my cot and started dancing around it, taunting. It was like a sort of ritual. I paid him no mind, waiting to see how close he got. But he just continued carrying on, his voice a low taunt, then after several minutes he left. I glanced to see where he went and next morning we stood in line together.
“Next time, save some of that juice for me,” I said to him. But he never did. Though we did share a few laughs together after that. Never saw him on the outside though, which was curious.
The maintenance shack was where the regulars hung out. These were fellas, oldsters, who had found their place of retirement and they sat around drinking coffee grinds or going to get more and jawboning, same stuff they'd been spooning out for years. The booze had bent ’em early and they had nowhere to go past Key Road and so would stay a year then leave for a week, literally; get falling down drunk, get messed up on whatever. Lysol, extract (be wary of those extract-drinking fools, they're like no other fools) sleep in their stuff in, wherever, and wait to be picked up. They were under the watchful eye of cops, homeboys themselves, who knew where the old ones congregated, gravitated and fell out, and when thoroughly wrung out which took precious little time, they'd be scooped up and redeposited for another year to spend around the coffee urn, keeping warm in winter and out of the sun in summer out in the maintenance shack. A fella short and to the point was always referred to as “King of the Hoboes.” He was sheepish and quiet out on the farm, but known as a hellion when in his cups on the outside. He had ears as tall as he was. And a smile as guileless as the booze. Looked like a dwarfish Neal Cassady. Same face open to everything around him, or at least you could see that at one time he had been full of “pep” and ready to try anything.
Out Key Road he just sat around the coffee urn in the maintenance shack, occupying the same hard straight-backed chair, nodding and grinning in vague recognition of what the others sitting there would reminisce about. For the millionth time. He was one of the grinners when the band played that Sunday afternoon in the dining hall.