Today marks the day that I saw California in my rearview mirror for the last time. It also happened to be the very day that my buddy Ralph died.
I first posted this story on my old blog 4-5 years ago, but Ralph's been heavy on my mind this past week, so today's Ralph's Day instead of a Fuck California Day.
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Me and my buddy Tim were seniors in high school, and we were out cruising the backroads of Ft Benning in his father’s car, drinking rotgut whiskey and smoking dope and listening to music. Now, Ft Benning’s main post and admin area is in Georgia, but most of the drop zones and training areas were on the Alabama side. That’s where we were.
So here we are, way out in the middle of nowhere, and Tim’s lights land on a guy walking along the road, shoulders back and stepping out smartly, so naturally he pulls over and asks if everything’s okay. The guy comes up to the car and starts talking and whips out a monster joint of what he called “High-waiin”. So we’re passing around this joint and our bottle and Tim asks again just what in the fuck was he doing all the way out here, and the dude says he’s going to look at some dead Indians and would we be interested in seeing them too? Well hell yeah, who wouldn’t want to look at some dead Indians?
It turns out that the army was doing some work at one of the training areas and had uncovered some Indian remains. They knew they were Indians by the artifacts and shit in the grave, so they posted a guard until they could get somebody out there to excavate the site properly. There was a big write-up in the paper a few months later. Anyways, this guy had heard about it and decided to go take a look for himself so he set out walking and that’s when we hooked up.
We jumped in the car and found the grave, got the guards high and looked at some bones, then we drove back to Main Post and dropped the guy off at some out of the way barracks. It had been dark the entire time so I didn’t get a real good look at his face, but he was a good sized Texas boy, longer-than-regulation haircut and a bushy mustache. He had a big booming voice and sounded exactly like Sam Elliot who I had never heard of at the time.
Flash forward a couple years and I’m in the army. I’d been in the unit about two or three months but had been out in the field with them so the only people I knew were pretty much the guys that I shared a GP Medium with. Hell, I’d been on the company’s roster for 2 months before I ever got a chance to go to the kaserne’s snack bar which was about 100 yards thataway.
There’s a shitload of us sitting out in front of the barracks drinking beer and talking and this guy walks up and immediately steals the show. Everybody stops what they’re doing and hollers out their hellos to this guy and he’s laughing and smiling and working the crowd like a Chicago Democrat. We’re introduced to each other and the guy’s name is Ralph, and I instantly recognized the voice. I ask him if he’d ever been to Benning and he acknowledged yeah, a couple years back to attend some school. I asked him if he remembered going to the Indian grave and he said yeah, that kinda rings a bell, so I asked him if he remembered the kids that gave him a ride and he says no, he don’t remember that. Trying to prod his memory along, I told him that we had a jug of Imperial whiskey and he had some killer High-waiin weed.
AHA! He remembered scoring a quarter pound of the weed when he first got there – Maui Wowie. That’s all he remembered.
Ralph was a Vietnam era draftee that reenlisted and stayed in and worked as a radio technician and repairman over at EMS which probably stands for Electronics Maintenance Shop. Ralph was a Spec 6 which was the same pay grade as a Staff Sergeant but without the headache of herding cats, and had been at that kaserne longer than 99% of the rest of us. He’d been there so long he knew everybody and everybody knew him. Fuck, I remember one time me and Ralph were walking towards the motor pool and here comes the 26th Sig Bn Commander, a full bird colonel, with all of his attached staff walking right towards us. Colonels can be real dicks sometimes so I made sure all my pockets were buttoned, I was all tucked in and my gig line was straight, and when they got close enough I flipped up a nice regulation salute with the proper “Good Afternoon Sir!” greeting and ol’ Ralph kinda waves a salute in his general direction and goes “How ya doin’ Colonel?” and the Colonel grins and waves back “Hiya, Ralph!”
Ralph was one of those guys that had his fingers into a little bit of everything. He had his black market thing going on (as we all did) with tobacco, coffee and liquor, but he was also doing record albums, women's make-up, mogas and motor oil, and he was black marketing women’s Levis before he turned that over to me. If he could make a few quick bucks, he’d be all over it.
He was pretty generous about it too. If he saw an opportunity for somebody else to make money, he had no problem at all turning them on to it and introducing them to the right people. I’d gone in on several of his deals, all made in gasthauses and bars, and made a few bucks and after a while I gained his trust.
We always got along real well. I think it was because of the fact that I didn’t hang around the barracks much, preferring to spend most of my time in town or exploring the countryside. Most GIs were pretty much barracks rats because it’s easier to hang around other GIs than it is to actually go out and fucking learn something. I was perfectly comfortable in Germany having already spent 7 years over there, and Ralph had spent so much time there that when he got really fucked up about half the time he talk to you in German. I spoke German pretty good back then myself, so that made any business dealings a lot easier on Ralph – he didn’t have to interpret and he didn’t have to handle all the details himself anymore.
One day he invited me up to his off-post apartment for the first time to discuss one thing or another, I don’t remember what it was but we were both sitting there passing this big bowl of hash back and forth and working out the details of this deal and all of a sudden the front door flies open and this female MP comes walking into the room. Oh shit oh dear. I damned near had a heart attack right there on the spot until she walked over and planted a big ol' wet kiss on Ralph and then took a toke off the pipe.
“Ralph, you could’ve warned me that your old lady’s a cop, man.”
Ralph was a hard, hard drinker. His thing was when he opened a bottle of alcohol, he’d throw the cap away. He didn’t make a big deal about it, he just chucked it in the trash. When he opened a quart, you were gonna get a buzz. A half gallon and you were gonna be there all damned day and into the night. His fucking apartment looked like a liquor store. I knew he moved liquor on the side but damn, I don’t know how he got all that shit up there without a delivery truck and I’m not entirely sure that was his selling stock.
I remember one time I was supposed to meet my buddy Greg at Stube’s, the first gasthaus right outside the main gate, for a beer and then go downtown to meet some white wimmens. As soon as I walked into the place Mama, the owner, came up and told me that Ralph was too drunk and could I please take him home? She points over to his table and sure enough, there he is with his head on the table, eyes wide open. “What’s happenin’? You fucked up or what? Blink once for yes, twice for no.”
I got a “Fuck you, I can still talk.”
I looked over at Mama and said, “He’s still got a little ways to go. I’ll take him home after Greg shows up.” I turned back to Ralph. “Hey man, you want a beer or something to eat?”
“Why, thankee. I am hongry.”
I ordered 2 beers and a plate of pomme fritz for Ralph. He manages to raise his head high enough to drink his beer but he can’t keep it up, so he’s sitting there with his head on the table when Greg walks in. “Hey Lane, hey Ralph,” and then Greg reaches past Ralph and grabs one of his french fries. Ralph, in a blur, snatches a fork off the table and stabs Greg right in the back of the hand. Fuck me, I ain’t never seen Ralph move so fast, even sober. Greg drops the fry and Ralph snatches it up and shoves it in his mouth.
Greg holds his hand up and then jumps up and starts hollering. Now when I say that Ralph stabbed him, I don’t mean the fork was dangling from his hand. Nossir. That motherfucker was standing straight up and quivering. Everybody’s hollering. The french fry thief is hollering because he got stuck, Ralph’s hollering because when Greg jumped up he knocked over all our beers, Mama’s hollering because of the mess, I’m hollering because everybody else was.
Ralph’s big excuse? He was raised up with 4 brothers and 4 sisters and learned at an early age to protect his food. After seeing him in action, I believed it.
I ended up putting Ralph in my barracks rack while I took Greg to the dispensary to have his eating utensil removed. We never did make it downtown to meet them white wimmens.
Ralph’s last extension didn’t get approved, so he said fuck it and got out of the army in 1980. He took his sweet ass time hitch hiking across the states heading west, wanting to eventually hook back up with his old girlfriend the MP but somehow missed Arizona where she was stationed at Ft Huachuca. He says he got as far west as he possibly could and was standing at the end of a pier in Monterey California when he felt a tap on his shoulder and somebody saying “Ralph, what the fuck are you doing here?” It was one of his buddies, somebody that he worked with in Heilbronn for a few years. Talk about a small fucking world.
He eventually made it down to Arizona, got back together with the girl, married her, divorced her and then settled in the LA area, remarrying and getting into financing, telling other folks how to spend their money.
I was on my way home from work one night when my truck phone went off. It was the very first cell phone I ever owned, and it was still a novelty when I actually got a call, so I answered it and the first thing I heard was "LEAVE THE CAP IN THE DAMNED TRASH!"
I laughed. It could only be one person. "Ralph! How the hell ya doin', man?"
"I'm fine and pleasantly surprised to see you're still alive."
He had somehow ran me down, called my house and talked to my ex who passed my cell number on to him. I hadn’t heard from him since he got out 12 or 13 years earlier, so I pulled over into a parking lot and spent the next hour catching up.
Talk about a turnaround, back when I knew him he was wild as hell, now he’s a deacon in his church.
Ralph always had a fondness for fine cigars and it caught up to him. He had cancer in his tongue and they treated that. He made it a few more years before it finally caught up to him again, this time spreading to the rest of his body.
I hadn’t emailed or spoke to him for a few months during our move out to Tennessee, so I decided to drop him a line and see how he was. I never got an answer so I went to his FB page to shoot him a “Hey, are you still alive?” message and saw that no, in fact, he wasn’t. There was a Happy Birthday message from his sister on his page wishing him a happy birthday, his first one with the Lord.
I cried. Now I’ll never know if that was Ralph we met in Ft Benning that night.
You can read Ralph's Obituary HERE
