A Cavalcade of Lesser Horrors

A Preinduction Reverie

118 A Preinduction Reverie Something about sitting in your underwear on a cold metal folding chair in the basement of the main post office in downtown Minneapolis before dawn in January, holding your preinduction physical paperwork, waiting for the clerks and doctors to start work, kind of deflates a guy. You’re cold and virtually naked. The guy next to you is sporting an interesting rash. The guy in front of you should have gotten new underwear for Christmas. There’s nothing to read, and if you pass the physical (why wouldn’t you? you’re twenty and in perfect health) the army will have your ass for two years. Not your day. It’s below zero outside, but what with the road salt and God-only-knows what else, the gutters run with a thick slurry of brown-black snow water. The doctors and clerks track it in and stomp their feet, leaving cold puddles where you and the rest of the day’s lucky bastards will be standing barefoot soon. Not that the doctors and clerks are eager to begin. Far from it. The clock says they have five minutes before the workday begins—five minutes to sit at their desks, drink coffee, smoke cigarettes, and talk about last night in their everyday lives. Somebody bowled a 193 at Nokomis Lanes. Somebody’s girlfriend was pissed off about boys’night out. Somebody’s wife wanted him to buy a house in Bloomington. Meanwhile, over here, in your underwear on the folding chairs, somebody is about to get drafted. You are their morning’s A PREINDUCTION REV ERIE 119 in-box, the subhuman speed bump between them and lunch, the predawn pain in the ass. They look you over and size you up. Just how much of a pain in the ass will you be? The second hand sweeps past twelve. Seven a.m. has arrived. The clerks stub out their cigarettes, take the dustcovers off their typewriters, and start pushing paper. An already bored young sergeant of some sort comes over, points to a grid of yellow tape beneath the slush puddles on the floor, and tells the group to line up along both sides of it and face the middle. C’mon, ladies. Let’s go, let’s go. A doctor appears. Not much of a doctor, but a doctor nonetheless . He seems to be hemorrhaging failure. All that time in med school, an internship, a residency, and this is the best he can do. He thought he would cure cancer, but here he is, starting another day of induction physicals in the basement of the main post office in Minneapolis at seven in the morning. He tells the group to turn away from the center of the grid, drop its shorts, bend over, and spread its cheeks. There is resentment and hostility in his voice—as if the group had a hand in his underachievement ; as if the group chose to get up before dawn, come down here, and inconvenience him by reporting as ordered; as if standing there in the cold, bent at the waist, underwear knotted around its slightly splayed knees, and spreading its cheeks made the group happy. Dr. Depressed dons a latex finger cot and peers, pokes, and prods his way along the line, eventually getting around to telling the group to stand up and pull up its shorts. The group stands up and salvages what little dignity and modesty it can by pulling up its shorts. He tells it to turn around and face the center. The group turns around and faces the center. One man at a time, he examines the group for hernias, then sends us off on an odyssey along a green line on the floor and through a door, as if he were sending us into the Tunnel of Love. Only there’s no love here. Bored, angry army medics await, staffing stations for blood 120 A PREINDUCTION REV ERIE pressure and hearing tests, demanding you pee in a cup. Eventually , the green line leads you to a clerk who is every bit as bored, angry, and hostile as the doctor and medics. The clerk takes your paperwork, mills it through his typewriter, stamps it a few times, and sends you back to sit on the cold folding chair in your underwear some more. You try to return to the folding...