When I was stationed at Fort Benning, Georgia, I drove as the duty driver for the Central Confinement Facility (CCF) on a pretty regular basis. For example, I was driving for them ‘today’. ‘Today’ was your average every day Wednesday. I normally didn’t particularly like driving for the CCF on Wednesdays because Wednesday was Nichol Night at Nichols Alley in Columbus, Georgia. Nichol Night meant that I could get beers for five cents a beer all night long. I liked that price. You couldn’t beat that price with a stick. However, I wasn’t complaining too much today because I needed tomorrow off. A few weeks back, the motorcycle gang (I really hate to use the word gang because it seems like such a harsh term) that I hung out with every once in a while got arrested at a rally that turned into a riot. They were getting out of jail tomorrow. I went up to Marietta, Georgia a few weeks ago for their trial where they were sentenced to 30 days each for civil unrest and assault on public servants. The main witnesses against them were some professional wrestlers that lived in Marietta. If you ask me, and of course nobody did, the charges were all bullshit. Everybody knows that wrestling is fake and professional wrestlers lie. It’s all bullshit. And professional wrestling is an orchestrated media sideshow arranged just to sell tickets to the next show. This so-called riot was also orchestrated as a publicity stunt to help sell tickets to the next televised wrestling sideshow in Atlanta and Columbus. And these poor slob bikers got caught in the middle. The judge was in on it with everybody else, as shown by the fact that he wouldn’t even set bail. That was such chickenshit. Barring some super screwy shit going down or everything just basically going sideways, my biker friends were getting out of jail tomorrow. I was going to be there to offer them moral support. In the meantime, here I was at Fort Benning, Georgia, driving around the CCF soldiers while they were doing their extra duties. Today, their extra duties consisted of post police call. Everybody who’s been in the military as a private for more than a day or two knows what police call is. For those of you that don’t, police call is a glorified way of saying picking up the trash. That’s right. You heard correct. Oh wait. You’re reading this. You read correctly. It’s a fancy way of saying picking up the trash. See, the military loves to do dumb shit like paying $50,000-$100,000 per soldier or more for training, just so that they can have you walk around and pick up garbage. Yet, each day you could turn on the TV and listen to news reports about the unemployment picture in the United States. I have a solution to that unemployment problem. Why doesn’t the government offer all of those people that are out of work trying to draw an unemployment paycheck, a job to pick up trash along our highways. If you don’t think it’s a problem, Google it. Here is what I found. Americans throw out 51.2 billion (yes, that’s billion) pieces of trash on roadways in the United States each month. That equals 6,729 pieces of trash per mile. If you want trash by the pound, no problem. 1.2 million pounds of trash are thrown along the roads each year. That’s one helluva lot of trash. Now, everywhere you drive (well, not everywhere but quite a few places), you see signs that read, “Adopt a Highway, the next .5 miles (or one mile, etc.) sponsored by the Kiwanis Club (or some other organization). Those signs indicate that those organizations clean up those small stretches of road periodically voluntarily. They’re not getting paid anything to pick up other people’s trash. They do it as an act of charity. So, why not get people off unemployment and get them paid to pick up the trash? These were the daydreams of a soldier with too much time on his hands. Such were the idle thoughts of a soldier dreaming big while he was trying to pass the time. Wait. Those were my thoughts. I guess that means I had too much time on my hands. But not tomorrow. Tomorrow, I would be focused on something totally different. Tomorrow I would be focused on Chains and the rest of my biker friends. I could only hope that the fiasco in Marietta, Georgia would go okay. I could fit three, possibly four, people into my car, if three people squeezed into the back seat. But I didn’t know how likely that was going to be. I figured Chains and I would ride up front. Here was the plan. I was going to drive up to Marietta and give a few of my friends a ride back down to Columbus. Other members of the biker gang had shuttled the bikes down to Columbus from Marietta after the gang had been arrested in order to ensure that the bikes were safe while the gang was in jail. It would take too long to attempt to shuttle them back up to Marietta so that the gang could ride back down to Columbus. We figured that the best way to get everybody back was to have them ride the bus down to Columbus. I figured I would give Chains, the leader of the gang, and one or two others a ride in my car. I’m sure that they would appreciate the private ride after being released. The next day, when I arrived in Marietta, I had to wait about two hours before the gang was processed and released. When the cell holding Chains was finally unlocked, I could see her face visibly change. When they unlocked the holding cell for Chains, it was as if they unlocked Chains. It was sort of hard to explain. When she saw me, she came running and cried, “Oh baby cakes, I missed you so much!” Then, she started sobbing. I had never seen someone that I had imagined as strong and masculine as her cry. It sort of changed how I viewed her as a woman. I tried to comfort her as best as I could. I told the leader, “I have my car outside. I’ll give Chains and you and two others, maybe one or two, a ride back to Columbus.” The leader of the gang replied, “There will only be me and one other guy in the back of your car. The others are going to catch the bus.” “All right then. You’re the boss. I’ll just wait outside with Chains.” I took Chains out to my car and got her settled in. She had started to settle down. I could tell that Chains was unlocked. It would just be a matter of time before she finally started to talk. I told her that we would go somewhere quiet to get something to eat when we got back. On the way back, all three members of the bike gang shared their experiences being locked up for 30 days in what amounted to a professional wrestling stunt charade. I listened as they talked, and a plan started to form in the back of my mind. I would have to think about this plan for a while as I let my biker friends get back into their groove. They had certainly spent the last 30 days on an exercise in futility.
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