While I was stationed at Fort Benning, Georgia, I had been living a double life of sorts during my off-duty time. Let me explain that. I had a girlfriend of sorts that I was sweet on who came into town, occasionally from Montgomery, Alabama. Her name was Sara. I haven’t talked a whole lot in my posts about Sara. The other half of that double life was in the form of Chains, my lady friend who rode with a local motorcycle gang. Her given name was Mary, but she preferred to be called Chains. Chains kind of selected me as the object of her affection, rather than the other way around. Now here’s a shocker for you, Chains was more serious about me than I was about her. If truth be told, Sara was the girl that I could have made a more lasting relationship with. I was very painstaking in my efforts to ensure that neither woman found out about the other. Chains was not Nichols Alley material. Steering clear of Nichols Alley was a choice that Chains made. No intervention was required on my part to keep her away from Nichols Alley. Sara was a college girl. She came into town for the sole purpose of going to Nichols Alley on ladies night. She had no desire to bar hop or visit other watering holes such as Someplace Else. Thus, ensuring that the two girls never met was a relatively easy task for me to perform. Now, here is something that may also come as a shock to you. When I was young, I allowed my parents to dictate who was right and who was wrong for me in terms of relationships with women. Perhaps dictate is the wrong word. After all, dictate is a rather harsh word. Maybe guide is a better word? Nah. Dictate. That’s the ticket. I sent home pictures of my lady friend Sara and said, “This is my girlfriend Sara. She is a college girl, and I want to bring her home to meet you. What do you think?” All I heard in response was the sound of silence. It was deafening. I thought my eardrums would shatter from the roar. So, I decided to call them and ask, “What the hell is going on?” Have you ever had the unique experience of having your own parents hang up the phone on you? That right there speaks volumes to you. They were telling me to read between the lines. See, they were holding up the index finger, the middle finger, and the ring finger and telling me that I should read between the lines. Well, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that if I take away the index finger and the ring finger and look at what I have left, they were basically flipping me off. Yeah. Read between the goddamn lines. Okay. I got your number. Well, you can take a flying fiddler’s rolling dive through a swinging donut too. Okay. That was not going to fly. Just for shits and giggles, I decided to send a few pictures of Chains home to the folks as well. I never heard a word out of them after that. But guess what. They never heard another word out of me either. Not a word about my plan to exit Fort Benning. Nothing. I gave them the sound of silence as well. And another funny thing happened a while back when we were going through my mom’s old pictures. There was not a trace of the pictures I had sent home of Sara or Chains. All of the other pictures I had sent home were there. But not those pictures. Go figure. Well, when I got the sound of silence from the ‘snowed in North’, I started formulating a plan. My plan involved getting the hell out of Dodge. Dodge in this case was not Dodge city, Kansas. No. My name was not Wyatt Earp, and I was not a US Marshall. Dodge, in this case, was Fort Benning. I kept quiet about my plan to make an exodus from Fort Benning, mainly because I didn’t know how Chains and Sara would take it, either. I figured it might be better to wait to tell them until it was too late for them to do anything about it. Yeah. I know that’s pretty chickenshit. But that was the easy way out. It was also the painless way out. Well, how do you escape from a prison? No. I wasn’t in a prison, per se. But I might as well have been. I was at Fort Benning. And as far as I could tell, they were going to leave me at Benning until the cows came home. Word. There ain’t no cows at Fort Benning. Therefore, the cows weren’t ever coming home. I would’ve been waiting there until hell froze over. No. I wasn’t talking about Hell, Michigan. Yes. There is a ‘Hell,’ Michigan. Go ahead and Google it. Where was I? Oh yes. I was devising a plan. My plan consisted of talking to people that had successfully bailed out of Benning before. A plan was beginning to form out of the void. I still had a lot to do and a lot of information to gather at the time, but I knew this would not end up as just another exercise in futility.
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