Blown for Good - Marc Morgan Headley [39]
We rolled up to Devonshire and the bus stopped in the middle of the parking lot. Everyone piled out and scattered like roaches. I walked with Tom to my new apartment.
We walked in and there were two guys already in the apartment, Paul and another guy. It was a two-bedroom place and there were four guys in each bedroom and two more guys who stayed in the living room. The place was not that great. It was almost identical to the place I had been at in LA, in terms of size and roommates. The outside grounds were a bit nicer, but any apartment you cram 10 guys into is going to suck about the same.
As I got acquainted with the guys already there, a few more walked in. Jesse was one of them.
We talked for a bit and then he showed me where I was supposed to sleep. It’s 1:00 a.m. I really should have gotten to bed. I brushed my teeth and had a quick shower. When I got out of the bathroom, the place was dark and everybody was out cold.
I climbed into my bunk and as I lay there staring at the ceiling, I wondered to myself if I was going to last very long at this place.
At 7 a.m., Tom shook my bed and said, “Get up, dude. You don’t have much time before the bus leaves.”
I shaved and dressed quickly and we were out waiting for the bus at 7:40. Tom told me that it would come any minute.
Now that it was light outside, I could see the smelly turkey farm as we drove by. It was located on Sanderson Street. I could see that the entire area surrounding the Devonshire apartments was a mix between new tract houses and spread out farming community. Most houses had at least two or three cars or trucks parked in the yard and at least one looked like it had not been driven in years.
As we got near the base, the list was passed around; Tom wrote his and my names on the list and gave it to the people seated behind us.
We pulled into the base, the list was handed off to the guard in the booth and we pulled up along a pathway that led to a large building with people streaming in both entrances from the buses being unloaded.
“This is the dining hall – or Massacre Canyon Inn,” Tom told me as we walked through the double doors that led into the huge hall.
The dining hall was huge. There were buffet style lines on both sides of the dining hall. Tom and I headed over to the “crew side.” As we waited in line for eggs and toast, Tom explained to me that there were two sides of the dining hall. One was the crew side and the other was the officer side. The officer side had a few stewards that served the executives. For the head honcho tables, there is a dedicated steward just for them.
“What do we have on the crew side?” I asked him looking around.
“We have ourselves, if you want something, go get it,” he said.
On the officer side, everybody was sitting down eating, while on the crew side, most people were dashing around trying to get some food and crawling over each other as the “hot boxes” came out with trays of eggs and toast inside.
By the time we got to the table and set it up with plates and silverware and started eating, it was time to clean up and line up for roll call. I was not a big breakfast person anyway, so I was not that concerned with the 10 minute eating slot. I grabbed a few things off the table under direction from Tom and headed towards the trash bins and dish racks. The dining hall was a mix between a cattle drive and an assembly line. It was a science to unload the dishes into the trash, quickly file your dirty silverware into their respective bins, neatly stack your plates on the piles of dishes on the