High Price

I wrong.
    I didn’t realize that my cousin had told me only the good things, hoping she’d be able to get me to join her church there so she could save my soul. I quickly made it clear that that was not on my agenda. And I rapidly learned as well that Okinawa had a reputation as being a hardship post for single men, known disparagingly as a prison island and dubbed “the Rock.”
    It was especially difficult for black folks. Racism in Japan felt more conspicuous than it had growing up in the American South, perhaps in part because I wasn’t expecting it. But the Japanese had seen all the American movies and they knew who the niggers were. On more than one occasion, shopkeepers off base actually used that word to refer to me to my face. Even when it wasn’t that overt, it was clear that I was being treated like a second-class person in many of my interactions with the locals.
    Still, the most disturbing thing to me about Japan was the lack of American servicewomen. So few American women were stationed there that I regretted my choice almost immediately. It was almost as bad as in boot camp, where the men and women were completely separated. Of course, outside the base on Gate 2 Street, everything from tennis shoes to sex was being sold, a plethora of cheap, ephemeral products and pleasures. I had too much pride for that. I wasn’t the kind of brother who had to pay for sex.
    Even stranger was living away from my family, and all its noise and bustle, for the first extended period in my life. Until we’d moved to the projects when I was in high school, my mother had never had more than a two-bedroom home, which meant that up to six of us siblings—girls and boys—shared one bedroom. My grandmothers’ and aunts’ homes hadn’t been any less crowded and the barracks during basics weren’t much different.
    Now, though, sharing a room with just one guy was eerily calm to me, especially since the roommate in question probably had what we’d now call Asperger’s syndrome. A white guy, he specialized in languages and knew five of them. But although he drank heavily like many airmen, he never wanted to go out. He didn’t want to hang out with anyone; he just drank in our room alone. For some reason known only to him, he’d sit there and watch the movie Trading Places over and over and over again.
    I thought my unease and difficulty sleeping was related to his peculiar behavior, so I got another roommate, a brother I dug a lot. But no, the deep silence of living in a place that wasn’t inhabited by a large family, that didn’t involve frequent social interruptions, remained mind-numbing to me. It drove me crazy.
    Kadena was like a small city, home to nearly twenty thousand American service members, with four thousand Japanese staff as well. Nine hundred miles from Tokyo, it was often as hot and humid as Miami and similarly subject to tropical storms. I’d trained briefly in Denver after completing basics and there I met a guy named Bobby. Bobby was also sent to Okinawa for his first duty station. When we met up in Japan, he, his roommate Keith, and another young airman named Billy were the people with whom I hung out most often initially.
    Almost immediately, Keith informed me that he had the hookup and we all began smoking weed together. It didn’t even occur to me not to smoke with them. Being cool still came first for me. I did worry, however, about getting caught by the random urine testing we had to undergo. You might think that this would have deterred me, especially since I wasn’t particularly into the high.
    But I did care about my social status a great deal. Though from the outside, it might have looked as though I was heedless of consequences, I wasn’t. Rather than declining to smoke, I took what seemed in my mind like a logical step to reduce the harm that might come from getting caught: I enrolled in my first college classes.
    Ironically, it was my weed smoking that prompted this, not my consciousness-raising friend Mark. My thought was that if I got caught and discharged, at least I’d have a good start on my education before that happened. And that way, I wouldn’t let Brenda and my other sisters down so much. Though that was obviously not the intended outcome of the military’s drug testing policy, it did turn out to have positive results for me, if only in this indirect way.
    So, although Mark influenced my thinking more, it was, oddly enough, the weed-smoking brothers who got me