I Didn't Know

Great Lakes Naval Training Center, Great Lakes, Illinois, June 1990

The problem was that there just wasn't enough room in the barracks. It was so crowded, in fact, that when I arrived, there wasn't a room available for me. I had to live in a temporary room for two weeks, until someone graduated and moved out.

At that time, Naval Electronic Technician school was divided into four phases. The first phase was Basic Electronics and Electricity (which we called "B double E") and was located in Orlando, Florida. The second phase was Advanced Electronics, followed by Communications Equipment, and finally Radar Equipment. These last three phases were located in Great Lakes, Illinois.

The overcrowding problem was eventually solved by allowing females who had reached Radar Phase to move into the petty officer barracks, even though we weren't petty officers yet. The petty officer barracks were rather nicer than the ones we had moved out of. The outside door opened into a central lounge area. Opening off of this lounge were four 3-man rooms.

When school broke for lunch, we would usually sit around in the lounge together. One of the women in my quad, as we called them, had a small TV that she would bring out into the lounge while we ate. I don't remember which soap it was that we watched, but it was one of them...

One of my room mates was a girl I'll call--oh, let's call her Jana. Now, Jana and I had had a bit of a history. She claimed I stole her boyfriend. According to--uh, let's call him Randy--it was over between them long before I met him. It was one of those situations in which he'd had a bit too much to drink, and had said some things he didn't really mean, and they'd had a one night stand. According to Randy, that's all it was, and all it had ever been. According to Jana, they were practically engaged. To this day, I don't know what really happened.

Truth be told, my relationship with Randy didn't last much longer than Jana's had. He'd already had strike one, because of what he'd done to Jana. Strike two came when he said he was going to get me "knocked up" and I was going to give him a son. He would teach that son to smoke and drink, and cuss, and do drugs, and fight, and he would be the baddest little m---f--- in the school.

"And just who are you going to get to be the mother of this child?" I asked. "Why you, of course," he said. I don't think so. Strike two.

Just a couple of weeks after that, he finished B double E and went home on leave before going on up to Great Lakes. He gave me his phone number and told me to call him on a certain day at a certain time. It would be easier that way, he explained, than for him to try to catch me at the barracks. I called his house at the appointed time, and his brother answered. "Hold on, I'll get him," the brother said. I waited and waited a long time, and the brother finally came back.

"He's coming," he said. "He's out riding 4-wheelers, but he's on his way" And I waited and waited and waited. "I'm trying to get him in off these 4-wheelers to talk to you," said the brother. And I waited and waited some more. Finally the brother came back and said, "Maybe you should try to call back later."

"No," I said. "He told me to call him this day and this time. If I'm not important enough to him to get off the 4-wheeler and come talk to me, then he can call me." And I hung up. He never called back.

Strike three. Our relationship had lasted a month. I don't know why Jana would want someone like that. But want him she did.

Our first physical fitness test came just a couple of weeks after I'd gotten out of basic training. This was right at the beginning of my relationship with Randy. Jana had found out about us, and I had discovered who she was. When we got to the run part of our PRT, we all took off, and I noticed just off to my right, there was Jana. She got just a little ahead of me, threw out her chest, put her nose in the air, and gave me a smirk which plainly said, "I'm going to outrun you in this PRT, proving to Randy that I'm a better woman than you are and he will leave you and come back to me." Jana was a bit on the naive side.

Her smirk didn't last long, though. I was fresh out of boot camp, and was in good shape back in those days. I could run. Jana quickly fell behind, and as I lapped her on the last leg of the run, I just smiled at her. She was furious, but there was nothing she could do. Truth be told, she looked like she was going to collapse and die on the spot. She didn't win Randy back that day, and I didn't keep him long after that. He eventually got kicked out of the Navy for drug use. Once he was out of our lives, we moved on. While we were never really friends, we did develop an amicable relationship. Enough so that we were able to room together without incident.

Which brings us back to lunchtime in the lounge of our quad. Several of us were sitting around, eating and watching TV, including Jana. A commercial came on, and that's when, completely out of the blue, she said it--something that made us all stop and stare open mouthed in disbelief. I think I even heard a fork clatter to the floor.

"I didn't know guys don't use toilet paper when they go to the bathroom."

*