Article by Sophia Murphy Art by Kristopher Ligtenberg
He has sharp blue eyes, dark eyebrows, a missing tooth, and, when I first met him, I thought he was 20 years old. He has the energy of a middle school boy in a neon Nike outfit. He’s 5'10 and wears a baseball cap, carries two huge iced coffee cups from Dunkin Donuts, and is usually gripping a vape. He’ll quickly tell you that he knows vaping is bad, but that it’s much better than his previous alcohol addiction. I’ve only known him within the walls of the J & S Mobil Gas Station, on our Saturday six-hour shifts in the sweaty station booth in front of the cigarette packs. The smell of lingering gasoline and the sounds of shots from the mechanics next door provided the perfect ambience to tell obscure stories, to share all we knew. People often mistook us for a couple, or siblings, or father and daughter. Whatever it was, our comfortability with each other was distinct. It was obvious how fascinated I was by him, even though he was a random 40-year-old man I met at work. Half of the time, I was interested in what he had to say because I had a desire to disagree and fight back. In retrospect, besides our perspectives on guns, I actually don’t think we’re too different. He’s the most eclectic person I know, isn’t afraid of change, and isn’t scared to confront his past. He approaches life with wisdom and growth, something I work to live by.
Neil grew up in Newton, MA — a town known for its esteemed education, but he knew from a young age that schooling wasn’t for him. He couldn’t focus and thought most of what he did was dumb — his school projects, his afternoon job. He worked at the same Mobil gas station, with our same boss, John, but he got fired due to skipping most of his shifts. He graduated the year of 9/11, and felt it was his patriotic duty to fight for our country. He went to Iraq and was the man at the front of the line, the one who stepped on bombs if they were there, the one who called a halt or attack, and the one who would first be shot. He never told me why he was okay with this, but it never came across as a suicide mission to me.
At the Mobil, it would be 8AM — maybe I’d be hungover, maybe I’d be heartbroken, it didn’t matter. I’d be in for casual stories of bombs and death. One day, he was walking alongside a large truck that rolled over a bomb. Shot up in the air and fallen onto rocks and soot, he survived. This conversation casually moved into banter about the Red Sox game that Neil got tickets for with his brother, also a mechanic at the gas station.
I also spent a lot of time working with Isaiah. He had a one-year-old daughter and a new puppy named Capone that would pee on the gas station’s broken tile floors. Isaiah would disconnect our security cameras to play Call of Duty on the monitor. Paying me $20 to keep quiet, at times I paid attention to the game. Shooting, animated voices dying, animated bodies falling, blood, death, all that stuff. Once, I asked Neil about the ethics of Call of Duty replicating war. He told me it was scary how accurately they depicted the bunkers and scenery. He’s glad that people see the truth but doesn’t understand why anyone would want that trauma, which was real for him.
After the war, Neil tried to stay with his high school girlfriend and moved to Texas with her. They split up. She didn’t understand. How could she? How can someone ever understand the horrors of waking up every day and wondering if this is the day you die, this could be the last. And maybe eventually you don’t feel that way anymore because it’s normal, war is your life now. And maybe that’s worse?
He moved to Las Vegas. Afghanistan was recruiting, and he felt like he needed to go back. The way he tells it, it sounds like he wanted to go back. But in Afghanistan his role was different. This time, he was teaching the locals how to fight. I realized how little I knew about this war. How many actual lives were lost, how much trauma still exists in our country, and how little I knew about the reality that shapes the nation we live in.
In Afghanistan, he told me, the children ran up to soldiers in their military outfits because they knew they had candy in their pocket. I have no idea how Jolly Ranchers, snipers, and assault rifles could all coexist on the same body, in the same pockets.
After Afghanistan, he came back with more trauma, but he doesn’t talk about it like I should pity him. He talks about it like his life could not have turned out any other way, that it was just something that happened, like breaking your foot, falling in love, or making the game-winning shot. But I think he knows the pain he felt wasn’t normal. He turned to drugs and alcohol, which became a life-altering, brain-killing addiction. He started to drink his trauma away while simultaneously digging himself into a hole of regret. He had support, but nothing, no one, could erase what he had endured the past ten years. If he couldn’t erase it, at least he could numb it.
He’s never gone into depth about getting out of rehab and becoming clean. I only know he’s proud because he smiles when he talks about it now. He’s in such a better place that he can casually drink a beer now. I think that’s awesome.
On Sunday’s Neil is a part of a veteran golf league at Granite Links in Quincy, MA. He explains to me all of the different strokes in golf, the different clubs you use, the scoring system, and sometimes he even teaches me when work is slow. He brings in all his clubs, and we use a cardboard box he marks with a sharpie to show where my club should skid against the ground for the perfect hit. He says I’m a natural.
He gave me a book once that laid beneath our cigarette shelves. It is a book about philosophy and a Buddha. It is a book I never had time to read. He tells me that after he came back from Afghanistan and after he became clean, he was trained as a yoga and meditation instructor. In Afghanistan, when he was teaching people to fight and kill, he wanted to teach peace. I think a lot about him telling me that. I think it’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever heard in my life besides “I love you.”
Neil and I had a lot of other conversations. He explained to me how my ex-boyfriend’s best friend had a crush on me. He could just tell, man-to-man. We filled up a random old couple's coffee pot with a creamer they bought from the Walgreens across the street. He told me if I ever wanted to smoke weed for the first time, he was the expert. He showed me pictures of the weed growing in his house. He told me his spirit animals are sharks and owls. He loves tracking sharks on the Cape Cod Shore. He told me if I ever get in a tussle with a shark to punch them in the nose, but he tells me that that strategy wouldn't work on him; they’re just spiritually connected. We gawked over the cuteness of his pitbull. We watched the Red Sox. He watched my college orientation videos with me and joked about the alcoholism one, and gave me words of advice about the sexual assault prevention videos. He told me he’ll always be the first to beat someone up if they hurt me and points to the bat below our register. We laughed, but I know he wouldn’t hesitate to protect me. He always had so much to say and, while at times I honestly just wanted to bask in my sweat in front of my cigarettes, I was never bored around him. And I could say anything around him.
My hardest goodbyes before college were at the J&S Mobil gas station, a ten minute walk from my house. A little confusing, as I only spent three months here in comparison to most of my fifteen years worth of farewells. But I knew why. This bubble of blue-collared conservative workers where the walls were lined with Blue Lives Matter flags, Second Amendment quotes, and Trump memorabilia, was surprisingly where I grew the most. I want to remember the awkward moments when Neil starts ranting about how important guns are for our country or when the 80 year old man wobbles in and asks if he’s my husband, or when the smell of weed he reeks of causes me to get dizzy and I have to surplus the air with Febreze.
Neil makes me patriotic, not for war, or killing, or fighting other places to put us on top, but patriotic for the voices and the stories our country holds. For the opportunity for an underage girl who knows nothing about automobiles to sit in a sweaty booth and sell cigarettes to the moms she grew up with (who make her keep the secret about their addiction), and talk to people about their lives for six hours every Saturday. Neil lived: he felt and he lost and he loved. And he loves a lot now. His story is far from beautiful. It’s full of hatred, but his ability to tell it somehow brought much more beauty into my life. He inspires me to be a little deranged, and maybe not be on the frontline, but let myself get blown up and laugh about it and then mend it and forgive myself and go back to the wobbly stool I sat on twenty years before.