Something deeper for the fans
The panoramic slider pictures on the HOME page are all from the actual discharge, and readers can have fun figuring out where the characters are. For the pics below, though, I’ll include a corresponding passage from DISCHARGE.
People continue to send photos in, so I’ll add as I get them.
“Well, Kai,” Band-Aid laughs, “I sure can’t imagine a better person to help me turn Ames into a civilian. I feel like you’re pushing the Army out of his blood every minute we’re with you.”
We’ve secured the Reveille painting at a 45-degree slant now to make use of one seat in the second row. I’m sitting in that spot, according Bob the shotgun respect position.There will be no quarter granted if we get caught at any point along the way, nor will we plead for any. We are what they say we are.
He starts laughing, and his laughter rolls down the autumn-leafy ravine and into the Hudson River. That Army smother we just ran from doesn’t touch me. Band-Aid Man broke us both out, because right now I’m feeling as free as I’ve ever been.
Band-Aid glares at McGinn. “What the f– was that, Mit?” he demands. Wow, that’s a memory. Mit was an Army lieutenant who invoked the wrath of The Band-Aid Man in a bar in Kaprun, Austria, two years ago. That bar had been full of women too, but Mit kept cornering Band-Aid and telling him Army stories, even though he knew Band-Aid had already been kicked out. Finally, Band-Aid Man exploded, ‘Listen, Mit! I don’t give a f– about your Army career! Shut your mouth unless you want to tell me about alcohol or b–, or trying to get either one!’ And for the first time since that freezing night in the Austrian Alps, Band-Aid Man believes that someone else is worthy of the Mit title. So be it.
This latest prize [above] I received is a doozy that readers of the time-jumping DISCHARGE will have to think to get their heads around. On the right, clenching bota bag, is the original Mit, whose name The Band-Aid Man [left] later assigned to my friend McGinn in Boston. The photograph is from that actual night in Kaprun.
For bonus perspective, the subsequent namesake Mit [McGinn], who steals two chapters of DISCHARGE, is pictured below at his 2015 Lowell High School reunion.
Soraya was a woman who sat with me at a balcony table at a glamorous restaurant on the Amalfi Coast, and, by her mere proximity, made me and everybody else know that I really belonged there. Soraya was my key to the world.
Here, next to these monstrous falls, I have no hope. If I fell off that perch, I wouldn’t even bother to draw a breath. I wouldn’t brace myself, try to land feet first, nothing. As soon as I started slipping, I would count myself gone.
Band-Aid’s cut a haphazard, jagged trail across the United States these nine days since Boston, jerking and fishtailing on interstates, city boulevards, and backroads all the way from the Atlantic to the Pacific, sometimes racing like a desert rocket, sometimes inching like a glacier. You can elude a team of crack detectives for decades with behavior like that, but, baby, you can never fight coincidence. And every decision The Band-Aid Man made this trip, however impulsive and random, has added up so that tonight he will see McGinn, the fiend of his nightmares, the man he knows as Mit.
With Kitten (in my Saints cap) on his right, The Band-Aid Man grins euphorically,
still unaware that the person on his left is Mit.
Jules is a veteran himself – of the Marine Corps – and he’s also an incredible artist with enough demons in his hard-knock past to inspire a million sketches.On left, Jules' coaster sketch of Mit, Mit's wife (then), and Mit's sister that night in Pat O'Shea's
I’m on the street side of the car and slowly she sashays toward me. There should be a slammin hip-hop soundtrack whenever she comes onto a scene like this, when I see her I imagine one anyway. She’s closing the distance, five-three, all brown, curvy and strong, her eyes deep like the Mississippi Delta.
“Another thing. When I see a big car with a big trunk, it makes me suspicious …”
Oh, God, exactly what I didn’t want to happen – the cop must have picked up my vibe. This stolen art will be our undoing.
“Why does a big trunk on a big car make you suspicious?” Band-Aid Man challenges, to my mounting unease. I swear I hear the painted dog howling for rescue behind us.”
