The Dancing Camel Spider & The Foot by Colum Malec

            I always pick up the phone when it’s one of my Marine brothers.

            “Hey Greg my man! How the hell are ya?”  “Haven't talked to ya in a long time, bro. How are things?”  

            “Hey Muzz, I’m good. Hope you’re doin' good too.  Sorry to have to tell you this-Nick’s dead.”  The funeral will be on Friday in Chicago.  Me, Andy, Shaver and a few others are gonna try to make it out there.  Can you come?”

             “Yeah, I’ll be there…”

            Sometimes I hate answering the phone when its one of my Marine brothers.

            Gone so young.  My friend, my brother-in-arms, Nick Frasco, dead from an overdose.  I come to find out that Nick had an itsy bitsy habit of huffing Endust® to get high.  What internal pain he must have been struggling with to feel compelled to do such things, I’ll never know.  His friends tell me everything was great, they tell me how Nick was in school to become an EMT, how he was always happy and glad to be home, how much he “Fuckin loved Chi town.”

            That sounds about right, but it’s not the same Nick I remember.

            The Nick I remember was the loud, feisty, big-nosed and sweaty Italian who worked his ass off continually and lived ferociously.  See, Nick was a badass, a real, “take no shit from no one” kinda guy.  He always told me how if a guy gets outta line in a bar with a lady or a friend, you pop him -POW!-  quickly,right in the nose and then stare at the guy and dare him to try something, like Kurt Russell in Tombstone.  “You gonna do something mister, or just stand there and bleed?”  That line was Nick’s favorite.   

            However, if you were blessed enough to be his friend, you began to see and appreciate the world through Nick-colored lenses when you were with him.  Give you the shirt off his back, the last swig of his tequila, the last Marlboro Red in his pack if you asked for it.   

            Being Italian and from Chicago, our Marine unit naturally speculated that Nick might have some ties to the mafia.  Although he never denied it, he never confirmed it either.  If he was in the mafia, by god, we were gonna give him a Marine-inspired nickname. Since Nick had the stinkiest, most gnarliest feet in the airframes shop-(the work center we operated in)-the aptly thought out nickname, “The Foot” stuck.

            There’s nothing like serving together in a war with your fellow Marines.

            When you bleed and sweat together in the face of combat, you are never the same.

            The bonds of brotherhood are forged to such a high degree that they remain forever intact-time, distance, space, and lives might grow and change but we are always brothers.

            It wasn’t about Bush back in 2003, it wasn’t about Saddam.  It sure as fuck wasn’t about 9/11.  It was about the guy next to you, it was about defending each other, and it was about keeping each other laughing and motivated when times were their worst. 

            When you are working twelve to sixteen hour days in the blistering hot Northern Kuwaiti sun, sometimes you can get a little loopy.  Sand distorts your mind that way.  All that sand seems never-ending, like an ocean of brown dust and particles.  Ceaseless tides of brown, tan, and gold granules sting and pelt your skin like a million little bee stings when you are caught in a sandstorm on what has to be one of mother nature’s most testing environments.  You do whatever you can not to go loopy in that sand, you make up stupid games, you dare fellow Marines to do outrageous tasks in the hopes of getting a laugh. You’ll do anything to try to gain some solace from the brown ocean that awaits outside the comfort and safety of your squalid and overcrowded tent. 

            There is no distinguishing one day from the next in war.  Day turns to night turns to day. You eat, sleep, get up and go to work, come back to the tent, and do it all again.  Monday?  What the fuck is a Monday when everyday is the same?  The only, and I mean the ONLY, thing that breaks up the monotony are random acts of stupidity and senseless moments of comedy. 

            You might not think funny things can happen when someone is just returning from the bathroom, but they can.  Two hundred yards behind our maintenance tent, down an asphalt road, were the portashitters (as we un-affectionately called them) for the maintenance Marines. On either side of the road, there exists nothing but the oceans of sand.  The sand forms crests, berms, and ripples, and if one could hang around for millennia, it might very well move, shift, and look just like its watery cousin.  One must make the trek out into the abyss in order to find relief.  On a day like any other, which this of course was, I would be out having a cigarette and chatting with my brothers in front of our tent.  Discussions about upcoming maintenance, who got a care package with some booze, who found out their girlfriend was a cheating whore, and when the hell we were leaving the presently occupied shithole called Kuwait were all common and frequently covered subjects.  Having just completed the trek from the portashitters, Nick was lackadaisically walking up to where the rest of us were smoking and joking.  Suddenly he burst out, “Holy shit, do you guys see the size of this thing?”  Being some twenty feet away from us still, we didn’t have the foggiest of clues as to what he was talking about.  Nick’s unenthusiastic pace from the road transformed instantaneously into a leap up and away of some four feet.  Now we were all curious to say the least. 

            “Would you look at the size of that fucker!?!?”

            “It must be the size of a dinner plate!”

             “Goddamn, that thing is UGLY!”

             A small crowd was growing around the commotion as Nick jumped and made rings in the sand with something obviously heinous and intimidating.  As we drew closer, it became obvious as to the cause of the ruckus.  The provocateur was the legend incarnate,  it was the notorious camel spider. 

            When Nick moved, it moved.  Where Nick went, so did it.  Never wanting to turn his back on the beast, Nick quickly backpedalled, being careful not to fall, lest the cretin jump on his chest and rip his heart out with its gargantuan chelicerae.  It was fast too, and wherever Nick attempted evasive action, the spider followed.  However, following the initial shock, he began toying with the beast.  Removing his camouflage boony hat, Nick began an intricate dance with the spider similar to that of a bull and a matador.  He taunted the spider the same way a flamboyant bullfighter eggs on a bull, and we even formed a circle and started clapping and cheering for our hero.  Back and forth, they drove and advanced upon each other. This went on for less than five minutes, and eventually Nick conceded to the spider and stopped the dance.  We left the spider to its own devices, went back to smoking and laughing about the whole incident, and made another deposit in the bank of memory of all the silly and dumb stuff that happens when Marines stay on the ocean of sand for far too long.

            Solifugae is an order of arachnid primarily found in North Africa and the Middle East. If you understand Latin, you would know that its name is related to its behavior.  Camel spiders hide from the sun and are primarily nocturnal.  What we thought was a vicious attacking beast of lore was really just a nocturnal creature attempting to restore some sense of natural order to itself.  It wanted Nick’s shadow.  It wanted a rest.  It wanted some relief.  It wanted a break from the harsh Kuwaiti sun that beat down upon us all for over nine months. 

            Reflecting on that memory makes me ponder what was troubling my friend so.  Sometimes I can still see the two of them dancing about in the hot Kuwaiti sun. Nick’s exaggerated taunts, the camel spider hissing and posturing in angry defiance, the two of them interlocked in a dance only they knew the purpose to.  When I think deeper about Nick and life, meaning and purpose, the spider vanishes, Nick becomes the spider, and life becomes the sun.  We all want reprieve and rest.  Life beats down on us continually from above, and is unrelenting in its quest to bleach our existence to the same tone, color, and finality as those endless oceans of sand.  Whatever demons haunted and thrashed at Nick, he found solace in the fleeting shade that Endust® provided.  The shade doesn’t last forever though, and eventually we must lumber back out into the sun.  Perhaps sometimes the sun is just too much for some to take.

            I wish not to remember Nick the last way I saw him-the way he looked before he went into the ground-because that was not really Nick.  The Nick I knew found some permanent shade in a place far away from this existence.  The Nick I knew was somewhere else; laughing, happy, and smiling.  Maybe even Nick was back, if only for a second, dancing with his partner of a camel spider again.  Wherever Nick is, he will forever reside in my memory.  I will always keep him alive and safe there.  Because that is what Marines do for each other.  We never die as long as we exist in someone’s memory. 

            I miss my friend and think about him every day.  

  

Colum Malec landed on this physical realm a little over 30 years ago in Fresno, CA.  He was an Air Force brat until age15.  As an only child moving around the country he was quick to learn and make friends.  Colum currently tries to balance a classroom full of pretentious 9th graders while spinning platefuls of graduate classes at The University of California, Davis.  He's a fanatical Tottenham footie (soccer) fan, so come on you Spurs!! Most importantly, Colum agrees with Carl Sagan's ideal of being a better human by helping others with this monumental task of being alive on this little blue dot.