The Right Time, The Right Place

By Rory McClannahan

People drift in and out of lives all the time. Some stay for a while, some don’t. Most times once these folks drift away, you may not talk to them ever again.

Furthermore, sometimes the wrong people appear in your life at completely the wrong time. Those are the ones you think of in the quiet moments and say to yourself, “What was I thinking getting wrapped up with so-and-so?” In those same quiet moments, you tend to also think about those right people who arrived at just the right time and place. Usually, they become friends and it’s easy to lament they are no longer part of your life. What truly sucks, though, is that when you are young you tend to think that every bright part of your life will remain the same.

The first time I met Al Miller my very existence set off a red-hot anger in him. I had not done anything to set off this anger other to show up in his room as his roommate.

A little background is called for. In February 1984 I had just completed Air Force technical school in Texas and I had orders to present myself to the Heating Shop, which was part of the 554 CEOS squadron, at Nellis Air Force Base on the north side of Las Vegas, Nevada.

I had been picked up at the airport by a sergeant in my shop, given a quick tour of the base and the shop where I would work for the next two years. Then I was dropped at the dormitory where I was given a key to a room. My new home, such as it was.

The dorm was typical for the times, I suppose. There were probably close to 300 airman who lived in the building that had been constructed sometime in the 1960s. Those types of dorms were constructed with a long hallway running down the middle of each floor. The restrooms and showers were usually a large room somewhere around the mid-point of the hallway, with the laundry across the hall.

Taking a shower was reminiscent of the locker rooms in high school. While there were stall walls when you had to No. 2, the rest of the facility had a lack of privacy and it was not unheard of to shower in a large room with a dozen or so shower heads, and other people.

Most of the dorm buildings at Nellis were of this design, except for the one in which I had arrived. A recent renovation had converted the center hallway to individual restrooms and showers and exit doors for the rooms were put on the outside of the building. While an improvement in privacy, you still had to share your shower and toilet with the two people in the other room. There were locks in the bathroom so you could keep anyone from barging in. The trouble with this was if someone in the other room locked your access and forgot to unlock when they were done. (Something that happened way too many times.)

The rooms themselves weren’t bad, if a little small for two people. There was a pair of floor to ceiling wall lockers – one for each occupant – and a small fridge between them. There were a pair of lounge chairs, a pair of dressers and a pair of beds that could either be set separately or stacked on top of each other.

When I unlocked the door and walked in, I found that the wall locker, dresser, chair and bed that was to be mine were being used by dirty and clean clothes, books, albums and just about any thing else. This presented a quandary for me. Having lived with older brothers my whole life, I was hesitant to touch or move someone else’s stuff for fear of getting pummeled. However, there was no place for me to put my stuff other than the middle of the floor.

I compromised with myself. I moved what I hoped was clean clothes from one of the chairs and the stuff that was on “my” bed. All the stuff I had was stuffed into a single duffle bag. I had just come from basic training and tech school where personal property was kept to a minimum.

Looking around the room, I could infer at least one thing about my roommate – he liked music. There was a stereo system that was much, much better than the little Radio Shack set up I thought had been living in my father’s basement. (Turns out, he had absconded with it to listen to his Ventures and Gordon Lightfoot albums.) In addition to the expensive stereo system, my new roommate had a lot of albums.

Obviously, he was a bit of a slob, not unlike lots of guys rebelling against the cleanliness rules the Air Force enforced during basic training and tech school. I didn’t care, as long as there weren’t weird smells I wasn’t bothered.

I sat in the cleared chair and cracked open the book I was reading. I think it was one of the “Dune” books, but I don’t know that for sure. I had wanted to walk around the base a little bit to get a feel for my surroundings, but I figured I should wait until I met my new roommate first.

It wasn’t long before I heard the key in the door and Al Miller walked in. Physically, his surname fit him. He looked like the son of a German miller, short and stout. His features were dark – black hair, black eyes, a 5 o’clock shadow, and a single, thick, black eyebrow. As I got to know him, he would always claim that he was a proto-human. The scowl on his face when he saw me indicted his displeasure.

“Who are you?” were the first words Al said to me.

“I’m Rory,” I said. I didn’t stick out my hand to be shook, his disposition told me that any move of friendliness would not be returned in kind. Although I wasn’t surprised at his demeanor, I had kind of hoped for a friendlier welcome. “I guess I’m your roommate. This is the room they gave me.”

“This is bullshit!” Al said, turning immediately and leaving, slamming the door.

He was gone about 15 minutes, leaving me with my thoughts. Obviously, no one had told him to expect a roommate. It was the Air Force, though, so situations like that were not unexpected. I wasn’t sure what was going to happen, but I was figuring that I’d be moved to another room. Why not? I wasn’t anybody.

When Al returned he was still in a foul mood, but he had explained that he had been assured by the orderly that he would not get a roommate. That was ideal because the room that shared the bathroom was occupied by a staff sergeant, who by the nature of his rank would not be required to be assigned a roommate. However, there was no other spaces in the dorm and I had to be somewhere.

With a silent rage, Al moved all his stuff out my wall locker and dresser. Then he changed into civilian clothes and left without a word. I put my stuff away and went down to the common room to call my folks.

Over the next couple of weeks, I got to know Al a little more. He was still angry about my existence in his space, but he was friendly enough. Plus, his music collection was awesome, even if it relied to a little to heavily on the Rolling Stones.

He had told me that he was a painter and was from Iowa. That was about it at the beginning. A few weeks after I had moved in, Al had gone out with a friend and came in late. Of course, his entrance into the room woke me, but I didn’t say anything – I still felt like a guest there. After a bit, he climbed into bed and went to sleep.

Sometime in the middle of the night, I was awakened by Al talking. At first, I thought he was speaking to me, but when I woke enough to listen to what he was saying, I realized that he wasn’t talking in English. What he was saying sounded an awful lot like Russian.

I didn’t know what was going on, but this was at the height of the Cold War. Ronald Reagan, on a hot mic, had recently talked about bombing the Soviet Union. I grew up in Los Alamos, so communist paranoia was ingrained in my psyche. Did I have a Russian spy for a roommate? If so, what kind of intelligence would he pick up being embedded in the paint shop in the civil engineering squadron? Should I tell someone about this?

The next day, which probably was a Saturday or Sunday, Al must have sensed I was acting a little weird.

“Was I talking in my sleep last night?” he asked. I nodded. “Was I speaking Russian?”

I agreed again and he laughed and explained. Al didn’t join the Air Force to become a painter, in fact, the paint shop was staffed with civilians and Al was the only military member there. His initial job had been as a Russian linguist. He said that Russian linguist school lasted 18 months in which the Air Force crammed four years of learning. If you couldn’t keep up, you washed out.

Al had made it about a year before the Air Force decided he wasn’t cut out to be a linguist. The school, he said, was so stressful that most students ended up dreaming in Russian and he was no exception. This was of great relief to me and I told him I thought I was rooming with a spy.

Turns out, when you washed out of linguist school, you have to be assigned to a different job. Al got a job in target intelligence, but he had to wait several months before he could go to school. So Uncle Sam made him a painter. Go figure.

After that, Al became a lot friendlier toward me. I’m not sure if it was because I bought a TV and VCR or whether he had determined that I wasn’t all that bad. By that time I was able to go home and get my books, a collection that impressed Al.

I have dozens of Al stories because that’s just the kind of friend he was. Like there was the time – after he had gone to target intelligence school and came back to live in another dorm – that he talked me into selling my roommate’s Barry Manilow records so we could buy beer. There was the time we drank too much beer at a beer festival at Ceasar’s Palace. Or the time that I split my lip open when the shopping cart I was pushing him toppled over.

More importantly, though, was that Al was the exact friend I needed at the time. He was much smarter than me and much wiser. He taught me about music and introduced me to bands that I had never heard of. He introduced me to the writing of Harlan Ellison and lent me his copy of “Dangerous Visions.” And even though he would chide me constantly over my taste in music and for my naivety, he did respect me and my opinions.

Al was the type of friend I needed at that time in my life. In that February of 1984, I was less than a year removed from high school graduation, I broke up with my girlfriend and my parents were going through a nasty divorce. I was lost. I didn’t have any friends and it felt as though everyone I loved had abandoned me.

Then Al Miller shows up in my life, with his affection for Hogan’s Heros and Green Acres and his understanding of Kafka and Vonnegut. There were evenings of drinking beer and watching Caddyshack over and over again. For the first time in my life no one knew anything about my past except for what I told them. They didn’t know my parents, they didn’t know my brothers. It was just me they had to deal with and Al Miller was there to tell me that that was just fine.

I left Las Vegas after two years, but Al got orders to another base before I had left. He didn’t write letters and I didn’t push it. I knew he was in Charleston, South Carolina. When I separated from the Air Force after a couple years in Germany, my outprocessing was in Charleston and I saw Al for the last time.

He had said that he had gotten in some trouble and that there were consequences he had to face. I’m not sure if he was serious or not. After we parted, I never talked to him again. Since 1988, it has become a lot easier to track down people you once knew, but finding Al has been nearly impossible. Do you know how many people there are in this country named Al Miller? Me neither, but it’s a lot.

Plus, Al is a lot like the kind of people who I tend to strike up friendships in that they don’t participate in any sort of social media and keep their digital footprint pretty light. I’m not what kind of life Al has had. I hope it has been good, but I fear it hasn’t.

I’m not a big believer in fate. I tend to lean more toward a freewill outlook toward life. But every now and then, it feels like fate has guided me toward situations and people.

Al isn’t the only person who arrived in my life when I needed him the most. And even though he is probably unaware of his impact, I’ve used it as an example. I don’t know if you can make it happen, but I try to be the kind of person who arrives in someone’s life at the right time and right place.

That’s better that being at the wrong place and wrong time, but fate tells us that we can’t control that. Good thing I’m more of a free will kind of guy

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