Don't You Need Somebody To Love?

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"You were lucky, I guess. The VA finally expanded its services and I'm new so there weren't any ahead of you. Thought of anything?"

Jim was silent for a moment. How to explain his problem without looking weak was something he wasn't sure how to do. "I can't sleep, I'm nervous and there's this girl...."

"What do you want to talk about first?"

"There's this girl...."


It was late, later afternoon when he finally left the VA hospital and drove home, heading south on Sepulveda. He passed the store and then stopped at the light, looked back at the store and pulled across the street to park in front.

"Papa! I'm back!" Jim walked through the store, looking for his father and then found him near the back, talking to Angelina. She looked up and gave him a smile that brought warmth to his heart and heat to his body.

"Hello," she said, ratcheting up the fire in his soul.

"Hi. I, uh... would you like a sandwich? Today's special, free."


That evening, Jim dived into the Pacific, his body easily breaking through the waves coming in and as he rose to the surface within moments he broke into a practiced crawl. The nearby swimmers were familiar ones. Men, like him, who, for reasons of their own, swam on a regular basis in the chill.

He had gone there as soon as he was able and although he hadn't swum since he had been surfing in high school, he quickly got back into the discipline of his youth. He had forgotten how good the water could feel while he was 'in country'.

The tension in his life began to melt away as his arms plowed forward through the cold water of the California current. It had its healing effects on his body... if only he could get it to heal his soul.

The nightmares that had routinely plagued him since coming home were still there. After cheating death, he had struggled to live, to cope with his new fear of dying before finding someone to love. The dreams continued to torment him every night, forcing him to relive those horrifying days over and over, cruelly reminding him of the frustration and fear that kept him from a single night's peaceful sleep, from finding someone to love.

His actual fear took place in a rapid series of maddening events but in his dreams, the events were slow-motion horror. The roar of shells impacting his tank, skidding and spinning, jerking the vehicle around out of control, had all but deafened him for a long time.

He had to admit, though, that there had been a positive aspect to his experience... it had caused him to rethink his values, his life's goals. He wanted the forever kind of love that only a one-woman relationship could provide.


Two days later, Angelina came back to the store and purposely looked for him among the narrow aisles. She found him down on his knees, replacing an electrical outlet below the shelf kickpanel. He sensed her there and looked up.

"Hi," he said, glad to see her again but still shy. He stood up and wiped his hands on his apron. "Little electric problem," he said, knowing how stupid the obvious sounded.

She just nodded her head, looking down at the floor and the exposed wires lying there on the linoleum. "I was wondering," she asked, "if you'd like to come for dinner some night?"

He couldn't believe what he was hearing. "Sure... sometime."

"How about tomorrow night?"

"I could do that."

"Good. Here's my address," she replied, handing him a piece of paper. "Say, seven o'clock?"


Angelina's attention focused on her sauce bubbling in the pot. After stirring it, she lifted the wooden spoon and sipped the concoction and then decided to add a little more oregano.

She selected what she wanted and added a teaspoon to the sauce and then stirred with a clean spoon. She left it to simmer a while and turned to the oven where she'd begun a roast an hour earlier. Closing the oven, she returned to the spaghetti sauce. She needed to check the seasoning again. Just as she lifted the spoon to her lips, a shriek from her cousin startled her and a small animal ran through the kitchen. The sauce from her spoon flew into the air and then splattered against her pink blouse.

Her cousin, Maria, was next through the doorway. "Where did he go?" she asked, staring at the red stains spreading on Angelina's blouse.

"What? What was that?" Angelina responded, her fingers now on the splattered sauce.

"A dog! It came in when John opened the door. Just scooted past him before we could stop him," Maria explained. "Where did he go?"

"I don't know. He must have gone through there." She pointed to the door that led to the bedroom hallway.

"Your blouse is ruined," Maria sadly said. "Let me stir that and you go change."

"What about the dog?"

"Don't worry. Let John take care of it."

Angelina went into her bedroom to change her blouse. She was worried about the little puppy. "Can you get a hot dog out of the fridge and give it to him? I think he's more scared than anything else."

"All right, but he's got to belong to someone."


Jim knocked on the door, a pure white box of See's candy in one hand, a bouquet of flowers in the other, petals bouncing as he rapped a staccato beat.

The front door opened almost immediately, as if she had been waiting for him at the window. "Jim!" she exclaimed, opening the door wider and stepping back. "I'm so glad you came."

"Uh, these are for you," he responded, holding out the candy and flowers to her waiting hands. "I hope you like nuts and chews."

"Thank you. I made spaghetti and a roast. I hope you like it."

At that point, he thought, he would like anything she made, even mud pies full of dirt.

In the background, he could hear a small dog whining.


"...and so, I ended up in the Army and then the war. You can see it on TV now, at dinnertime, from the safety of your own home, like entertainment. Imagine that, eating dinner with your family and watching your neighbor's boy get killed halfway around the world and I still don't know for what."

Angelina listened, saddened by what he was saying and not really knowing what to do about it. For a moment, he had a distant, dark look in his eyes and then, like a light bulb turning on, it disappeared and he was a different person.

While Angelina's two cousins ate with them, it was obvious that they were just there to serve as chaperones in case the dinner did not go as planned. Angelina nodded her head toward the door, silently urging them to find an excuse to leave.

John looked at his watch. "Damn! Look at the time. C'mon, Maria, we're late. Nice to have met you, Jim, but we've got to be going."

"Uh, yes," Maria said. "Time to go. Jim," she continued, nodding her head in his direction.


Jim found himself sitting on the linoleum floor, holding a piece of hot dog toward the little stray dog while Angelina was on her knees next to him. He paused in his movements, admiring the young woman next to him.

She looked up, catching him staring and he hoped she didn't notice the heat in his cheeks. She took the hot dog from him and broke it into smaller pieces and then held out one to the puppy. "Here, sweetie, have a bite."

Her voice was soothing, lilting, hypnotizing. He figured she could cast a magic spell with that voice. The puppy must have agreed because he moved toward her on his belly, his tongue out slightly.

"That's right," she said. "I won't hurt you."

Jim glimpsed at the dog, obviously a mutt. The dog kept its brown eyes focused on the piece of meat in Angelina's hand.

While the dog concentrated on eating, Jim reached out and held it, quickly stroking it to reassure it of his friendliness. The puppy was so starved, he scarcely noticed Jim's touch.

"If you finish feeding it, I'll go warm up some milk. He'll need something to drink," Angelina said, rising and leaving him alone with the dog before he could protest.

As the dog gulped down the food, Jim looked around the laundry room. Not much to see, he noticed, just a washer and drier and an ironing board leaning against the wall.

She returned, carrying a cereal bowl and sat down on the floor beside him. "I think he is starved," she said softly, watching the puppy chew.

"Yeah." He moved the dog so it could drink the milk. The puppy began gulping the liquid so fast, Jim was afraid it might choke itself. "What are you going to do with him?" he asked.

"Take him to the pound, I guess."

"Oh, no! They'll put him to sleep," Jim replied. "You want to keep him?"

"Oh... I didn't think about that. Oh, my." She shifted on the floor, looking at the brown and white dog, now lying on the linoleum, its eyes closed.

"You could keep him. It would be fun. Everybody wants a puppy."

Saturday, October 11, 1969

The late Santa Ana winds blew through Los Angeles. Jim stood in the dry warmth outside Angelina's house, waiting for her puppy to finish its persistent inspection of the front yard plants. He put his hand to his freshly-shaven face. The beard was all gone, what little there was since his father had been adamant about it. "Scaring the customers," he had said. His hair was shorter, too, cut at the same time by the same barber he had been going to ever since he could remember, reading the same comic books even now.

He felt like yawning and put his hand to his mouth, to his chagrin accidentally pulling on the dog's leash, causing the dog to land on its bottom as it was pulled backwards.

He had been awake since two in the morning with a knot in his stomach, lying exhausted on a damp pillow. Finally, he got up and started pounding away on his old Smith-Corona in the nearly dark room. "In Country," by James Silvestri... whether it would ever be published or not, it deserved to be written, if only for himself. If he lived to be a hundred, he would never forget that insane, deadly year in Vietnam. Unwillingly, his mind drove him back over and over until he thought he could no longer withstand the dreams that plagued him.

Jim thought about Nixon's secret plan to bring everyone home yet everyone was still there... still fighting... still dying... and as far as he was concerned, still wondering what the hell was going on. The pile of scrunched-up paper had littered the corner of his room, threatening an avalanche on his bed. He had taken another sip of his watered down Southern Comfort, the ice all melted, the alcohol diluted, the drink warm to his lips. Just like being there; he remembered the liquor bottle under the parachute cloth ceiling beneath the corrugated roof of the hootch, heated by the sun till one sip burned all the way down.

He heard the front screen door slam and, turning, saw her smiling face as she stood in the doorway. "Thanks," she said, taking the leash from his hand. "C'mon, boy," she called to the dog, still unable to give the puppy a name that she was satisfied with, "time to come in, now." Pulling the dog away from the shrubs, she walked back onto the front porch and went inside, taking the squirming puppy with her, his paws making scratching noises against the living room's hardwood floor as she dragged him into the laundry room.

Jim slowly walked to his Dodge and ran his hand over the Challenger's bright red finish. He had waited all day for this dinner, the anticipation tightening his mind while he was at the store, causing him to work slower than he normally did, not wanting to cut himself absentmindedly on the meat slicer, something that still frightened him every time he approached the machine with its whirling blade.

His father still was pushing him to work at the store, even more so since he had discussed working at Hyperion after earning his Masters' in Engineering. It wasn't fair, he thought. Why shouldn't he have the right to work where he wanted? Why should his father expect him to be a grocer just because he had chosen to be one? He had to admit, though, that working at the sewage plant wasn't the most glamorous occupation to have and wondered what Angelina thought about it. He was almost afraid to ask her directly. What if she had the same attitude his father did? Maybe it wasn't such a good idea, after all. He shook his head, wondering what to do.

Jim heard the front screen harshly slam again and saw Angelina's cousins approaching. "John, Maria," Jim said, nodding his head to the two. He opened the passenger door for Maria and pulled the seat forward so she could get into the back, followed by John. When he bought the magnificent car, he had not planned on having riders and the back seat left much to be desired.

After Angelina sat down, sliding her hands down over her dress, he carefully closed her door and, finally getting in, turned the key, listening to the Hemi rev up, the car twisting with the torque. He backed the car onto the street and headed down toward the beach on Culver. The car filled with her perfume, the jasmine scent going to his mind, his heart, his soul.

"This is some car you got here, Jim," John said, still trying to get his seat belt on as the car accelerated quickly toward the beach.

"Thanks." Most of the time, when he drove, Jim was silent, listening to the engine battle for supremacy with the radio and tapping his fingers on the wheel to the beat, but he realized that this personal quirk, picked up during the war, could cause a misunderstanding. He turned down the radio, forcing down John Fogarty and the strident, heavy beat of his "Green River" until it was drowned out by the horsepower under the hood. "I needed something when I got back and this seemed to fit the bill. After everything else..." As he spoke, though, he was looking at Angelina, wondering if she appreciated how much she was something he needed.

"You find it changed much?" John asked, his question sincere, wanting to know the man that his cousin seemed so infatuated with. He looked up into the car's mirror, hoping to glimpse the man's eyes in its reflection.

Jim shrugged, looking back. "It seems more crowded since I left... I remember...." He slowed down, not wanting to shout over the low rumble of the Hemi and felt the change in the seat back as the car decelerated.

Angelina pushed a wayward strand of hair from her face and smiled as the wind from her open window continued to blow into the car, bringing more of her perfume toward him. For a quick moment, he compared her to the small-breasted Asian women that sometimes haunted his dreams at night... when they weren't full of death and despair. Thinking about them made him irritable and he tried quickly to remove them from his mind, wondering what it would be like to make love to Angelina. His face reddened, flushed with his X-rated thoughts about her. He glanced in her direction, half of his attention still on the road as the car quickly sped west down Culver toward the Pacific.

"There's this antique store I'd like to see, if that's all right?" she asked. "It's in El Segundo, a couple blocks off Main." She looked carefully, hoping he did not mind the last minute imposition.

"Oh?" he asked. "What are you looking for?" He tried to concentrate on the road but his eyes kept glancing toward her, drinking in everything she had to offer.

'Too busy thinking about my baby...' filled the car, Marvin Gaye's smooth voice bringing him back to his driving, the road suddenly turning bumpy the nearer they got to El Segundo.

"Vaseline glass..." she said, shyly smiling, knowing it sounded strange. Vaseline glass... it sounded funny, but what else could you call it? 'Yellow-green glass'?

"Vaseline glass?" Jim laughed. "Can't you go to the drugstore?"

There was a chuckle from the back seat, probably Maria.

"Don't laugh. It's just called that because of the color. You know, glass has color because of the minerals they mix into it, iron for red, copper for blue and green... to get the color for this glass, they mix in uranium."

"Uranium? You've got to be kidding. Isn't it dangerous?" Visions of radioactive glow completed his thoughts, making him feel unsettled.

"It does set off a Geiger counter but it's not dangerous. It's been around since the Depression. My grandmother gave me some. It's fun, you'll see."

He nodded his head, his dark eyes trying to give a hint of understanding.

"You and your glass," Maria said. "I'm hungry." She shifted on her seat to emphasize her feelings.

Angelina looked toward the back seat. "We'll get there when we get there," she said, embarrassed at her cousin's outburst. She stared down at the floor of the car, wondering if inviting her cousins for dinner was such a good idea after all. But, she considered, they had insisted, saying she didn't really know Jim, after all, and who knew what he might expect afterwards; after all, he had been to Vietnam....

As hard as it was parking on Main Street, the antique store two blocks over had plenty of room and Jim soon found an open space for the Challenger near a tall palm tree that reached for the sky. Inside the store, he wrinkled his nose, the smell of old and forgotten furniture and slightly moldy books overwhelming him. Even the open spaces of Southeast Asia had a mellower odor than the store. Suddenly he sneezed, the furnishings triggering an allergy he was unaware of, his head pushing forward in reaction, his hand moving to his mouth.

He walked over to the window and looked out onto the street, watching his car sitting there, so different from the staid and dull looking automobiles surrounding it. Behind him, he could hear the two girls excitedly speaking about an old china doll resting on a Victorian sofa.

"Want a smoke?" John asked, tapping and offering his pack.

"No, thanks, I don't smoke anymore." He had thought about it. Cigarettes were common enough over there, grass, too. But, he soon realized, if he was going to survive hell, he needed to keep a clear mind.

Angelina and Maria approached from behind them. "Look," Angelina said, holding out a small mostly transparent yellow-greenish glass plate. "See, Vaseline glass."

Jim tentatively held the dish, amazed that someone would have used uranium to color dishware but then thought about the time it was made. He handed the dish back and after she put it back into the paper bag, they got back into the car.

"So," he declared, "who's hungry, now?" He looked at his hand, wondering if it would glow in the dark like the numbers on his watch.


"The Velvet Turtle? I've never been here," said Maria as she got out of the car.

"I think you'll like it. It has a piano bar and the food is quite good." Jim checked the lock on the car's door and then took Angelina by the arm, leading the way into the restaurant. "The roast beef is very good."


Jim looked up from his salad, the Green Goddess dressing glistening on the lettuce. "I'm glad you could come, tonight. It's been a long time since I've gone out to a restaurant."

"You're welcome. This is nice. I haven't been out since...." She stopped talking, not wanting to bring up ghosts from the past and yet, she wondered, would she ever be comfortable thinking about her husband, now gone for five years. "This is nice," she continued, looking for a way to change the thoughts in her mind. "I'm glad you asked."

He swirled the garlic sauce around his plate. He wanted to take their relationship to the 'next level'. The 'next level'... he heard someone say that, once. He wanted to go so much higher than the 'next level'.


Sunday, October 12, 1969

The Knights of Columbus were lined up in front of the church, their swords out and at attention, while the priest walked up the main aisle and toward the sacristy, blessing the people with holy water. The first altar boy, carrying the tall cross, walked ahead and eventually put it into its stand and Columbus Day Mass started. Jim sat three rows back with Angelina and his mother, watching his father in his tuxedo and cape holding his own sword high and then, as one, all the men sheathed their swords and returned to the front pews, kneeling together.