It wasn’t until later on that morning that I saw the door inch open, ever so slightly. Having been ordered to report to the shipyard dispensary, I figured they (meaning the Navy) wanted to examine me, that is, my body, to see if I was physically fit to make a West Pac cruise after my fast. Little did I know they only wanted to examine my head, as I was actually being sent there to see a psychologist.
While I sat inside the dispensary, awaiting my debut with one of the Navy’s psychologists, I wondered if my real father had been sent here for psychiatric evaluations when he too began to display bizarre behavior in response to the beast that’d been unleashed with the bombing of Pearl Harbor. And I wondered if he too had been bombarded by the same barrage of fantasies I had experienced, to help me make sense of what I’d seen. It was then that I realized what a tragic mistake he had made when he stumbled upon that great abyss, which separates this world from the next. For it was in his inability to make any sense of either world that I saw him clasp his ears as the frenzied screaming of his soul filled his head, like the song of a Siren, and drove him over the edge of the abyss to his destruction below. As these perceptions about my real dad shot through my head, I shivered at the thought that I had stood on the same brink of insanity, he had stumbled over, twenty-five years ago.
Having gone into the interview hoping to find some answers, I instead left empty-handed. While the psychologist only seemed interested in probing into my past and the history of my family, I was eager to talk to him about the problems I was currently experiencing with my sexuality and the Navy. For I saw, within me, the struggle to give birth to a whole new way of life, the past as well as the present were impeding. Because he had not the foresight to look beyond the dirt in my past, I never gained any insight from him into the troubles of the present.
