Stale Meat
I was halfway through my four-year contract in the US Navy when I was told I would have to switch barracks rooms. My old room’s sink had been leaking underneath it’s cabinet for weeks without my knowledge, and one day I opened the particle wood cupboard door to reveal a thick layer of black mold had accumulated mere feet from where I had been sleeping for months. I was told to grab what belongings I had accumulated in the last two years and take them across a short distance of grass to move into the Geo-Bach housing. I didn’t own much, and a few trips up and down three flights of stairs with a pair of full sea bags and I was done moving everything I had to my name in under two hours. The room was simple and was set up like a typical southwestern motel. An outdoor staircase led up to a walkway and each room’s front door opened directly into the outdoors and had a small window next to it that revealed a little bit about each person who lived inside. The harsh Texas heat meant the outdated air conditioning was almost always broken, people’s windows were almost always open, and we afforded each other privacy like prisoners in an open cell block; giving our neighbors courtesy by not peering into each other’s rooms.
Geo-Bach is short for “geographically displaced bachelor.” The building was used to house the older servicemembers with strained family relationships who wanted to save money by living in the barracks but hadn’t yet divorced from their spouses. It was also used by one of the Marine squadrons on base to house their maintenance crews while they weren’t on their typical twenty-four-hour work schedule. One of my neighbors was a Navy chief who I introduced myself to the first couple days after I moved in. He was the kind of classy African American chief you often encounter in the Navy. The kind who listened to nineties rap and old school R&B on a pair of early 2000s speakers as he got ready every morning. The smell of cologne emanated from his small window that was adorned with a variety of houseplants that flanked the pair of speakers that faced into his room.
He told me when we first met, “I’m living in the barracks because my family is staying in California while my daughters finish school. The schools are better there, and she’s close enough to graduating I don’t want to move my family to Texas. God knows, they’ve already had to move enough times ‘cuz of me.” He largely kept to himself; I don’t remember talking to him another time after that.
The neighbor to the other side of my door was an alcoholic Marine jet-engine mechanic who’s work schedule was seven days of nearly 24-hour shifts he spent at work, alternated with seven-day long breaks where he would destroy thirty-racks of Busch Heavy and scream at any passersby from the balcony until base police showed up. He was essentially the opposite of the chief. His window emanated the smell of stale piss, and he would blare country music late into the night. It was the kind of outlaw stuff you would expect a guy like that would listen to.
As irritating as Busch Heavy’s late-night rants were, or how strange it felt to share a wall with a chief who almost doubled my age, the most unsettling neighbor of all by far was the young man who I shared my third wall and my bathroom with, Heffner. He worked in the same building as me fixing electronic components for F-18s. I had known about him since he had been assigned to our base months ago, and I was plenty aware of his notorious reputation. Heffner was known for failing to adhere to the Navy’s weight standards, getting the lowest score in the squadron on all his PT tests, being lazy at work, malingering to get days off, and most infamously of all, smelling absolutely terrible. The first day I moved in, I smelled the stink. It didn’t smell like body odor, or stale food. It wasn’t the smell of mold or piss and shit. It was something else entirely. Something alien to my life until that point. When I went to use our shared bathroom, the stink seeped through the bottom of Heffner’s door and filled the cramped toilet/shower combo. I started leaving my door to the bathroom open when I went to relieve myself so that I wouldn’t be trapped in there with his stench.
Being assigned Heffner as my roommate felt like another chapter in the string of tragedies that were unfolding in my life. Only a year earlier, my brother had died from a fentanyl overdose and I was still deep in the throes of a nasty drinking habit when I moved in to be Heffner’s roommate. Besides just grieving for my brother, my Marine partner in the workshop and my best friend off duty had just been kicked out of the military for peeing hot on a drug test. All the other friends I’d made since moving to Texas had moved on to better places and after work I either went to karaoke bars on solo missions trying to hunt local “beaver”, or I stayed in my room and got drunk with people I gamed with online.
I had known about Heffner’s stink for months, but now that I was living with him, this was the first time I realized how horrible it was. I talked to Busch Heavy and asked him if he could smell it from his room. I wondered if it was so bad, other neighbors could smell it.
“Gawd damn! That’s your roommate? That’s fucked, man! You gotta try to sort that shit out, man!” he laughed at my pain, but I could also tell he was counting on me to try to do something. I’d be helping the guy out in a way, wouldn’t I? Nobody wants to smell bad. Especially not that bad.
From my earliest days in bootcamp, I had learned how good the Navy was at hiding their dirty laundry. They would do anything they could to hold on to their sailors once they had signed the dotted line. I saw sailors who would have been fired from any civilian job manage to cling on to the Navy despite their ever-growing attitudes of complacency, neglectfulness, and incompetence. These enlisted members would slowly but surely climb the ranks until they reached petty officer first class, the minimum rank to retire from the navy after twenty years with full benefits. They would go on to scam the disability system and live the rest of their small lives on a pension. None of them cared they were contributing to the fact that the retirement benefits of service members make up over half of the US military’s budget. In my time in the Navy, I saw so many sailors contribute absolutely nothing to the mission. It felt like ninety percent of the work was done by just ten percent of the people.
Still, the Navy didn’t care. All they wanted was a warm body to fill a quota. Recruitment is always a challenge for the military and it’s exponentially easier for them to hold on to a subpar sailor than to try to convince another highschooler to sign the dotted line. Heffner had failed so many PT tests and inspections, he should have been kicked out years ago. Still, the Navy clung on to him as best they could, putting him places where he couldn’t cause too many problems and looking past his ineptitudes, hoping the problem would eventually disappear on its own.
One of the duties of my workshop supervisor was to conduct room inspections every couple of weeks. Living on government property – and being government property yourself – meant that you had no real right to privacy while living in the barracks. The inspections were a way to maintain discipline, keep the lower ranks in their place, and ensure that their rooms weren’t so dirty as to cause permanent damage. They mainly looked for dirty toilets, gear adrift (shit not where it belongs,) and high dust. For the Navy, if your room smelled decent and gave a good first impression you would normally pass the inspection no problem. It was a lot more work for them to fail you than just to give you a thumbs up. Nobody wanted to have to fill out the paperwork and return to your room to do a reinspection. Heffner hadn’t gotten a thumbs up in months. You could routinely find him standing outside his front door in his dress whites ready to suffer a second, much more intense scrutinization that he would need to pass or suffer further consequences. Heffner made it a habit to fail all of these re-inspections.
I asked my supervisor if he had ever suffered the sight of Heffner’s room.
“No, I haven’t had to do your guys’ building yet. They get assigned randomly, but if there’s something suspicious, we’re allowed to investigate it.”
“I’m sure you’ve heard of the smell . . .”
“Of course. I think like five of your neighbors have already complained about it.”
“Why hasn’t anyone done anything about it?”
“You know how lazy the people who run the barracks are. It takes them weeks to fix your guys’ air conditioning in the middle of the summer.”
“It was over ninety degrees in my room last night when I went to bed.”
“Exactly. You think they’re really going to do anything about a smell?”
“Next time you’re on duty, can you do me a favor and look into it for me?”
“Sure, but I can’t promise too much. I’m also not scheduled to do inspections until next month.”
“Thanks, just do what you can.”
I had always tried to be nice to Heffner. The guy seemed like he had fucked up everything else in his life and he was on the edge of finally getting kicked out of the Navy. I had been depressed before, and I could see that same hopeless look on his doughy, greasy, pockmarked face. There was something more than just depression going on behind those dead, expressionless eyes, though. When he walked down the hallway, he would walk with his forehead pushed forward and his eyes gazing up at you from below a raised brow. Sometimes he would accompany this unnerving stare with a drooling smile that made you want to look away. If you said, “good afternoon” or “good morning,” Heffner would respond only with a grunt. He wore that Minotaur mask in the smoke pit, through the halls, and whenever else he was upset about something someone had done to him.
That Minotaur mask scared me. I think it scared everyone else who noticed it. Maybe that’s why Heffner wore it whenever he was upset with someone. Scaring people might have been the only power he really had.
That look was what kept me from confronting him about the bloody rag. I’d been living in that room for three weeks, and the first time I ever heard Heffner take a shower, he left this disgusting, bloody rag balled up in the corner next to the drain. I’d already been taking precautions by wearing flip flops when I washed to avoid any fungal diseases, but this was a step too far. After a couple days of the rag sneering at me as a I tried to clean myself in the tainted shower, I sacrificed a coat hanger and secured it in a double trash bag before disposing of it in the dumpster. I tried to shake it out of my memory, but why was there a bloody rag? Was it Heffner’s blood? I hoped so.
On one of these drunken nights playing online PC games in front of my ever-open window, I went to take a monumental piss to empty my gut of the some fifteen-odd PBRs I’d drank. It was one of those long pisses that’s hard to describe how good it feels to someone who doesn’t drink. The satisfaction of my relief was spoiled by the stench, though. Heffner’s stench.
I zipped up the front of my pants, flushed the toilet, and decided enough was enough. I was going to give Heffner a piece of my mind no matter whether he was wearing the Minotaur mask or not. I banged on his door to our bathroom with a ferocity that reminded myself of an abusive husband. I banged and banged; I wasn’t going to let him ignore me.
“Open this fucking door right now, Heffner!”
“What?” A sheepish, whiney voice answered.
“We need to talk!”
“What is it?”
“Open your fucking door, or I’ll knock it down myself!” By this point I was embodying the character of an abusive husband completely. I had no intention of hurting Heffner, but I wanted a chance for myself to see what his room looked like beyond that door, even if that meant being a frightening, drunk, son of a bitch for one night.
“Okay, okay. Chill!”
He opened the door and the first thing I noticed was all he was wearing was a pair of gym shorts. I could tell he wasn’t wearing underwear, because under Heffner’s chubby, white tummy, Heffner had a semi-hardon under the damp crotch of his grey shorts. Heffner was enjoying his private time and I’d interrupted it. I gagged a little and noticed behind him an image I will never forget. Heffner’s closet wasn’t just locked shut, no. Heffner had chained the doors of his closet shut so that nobody, not even the most determined room inspector would get into those closet doors.
I stepped in, uninvited, to get a better look at his room.
“Hey!” Heffner protested with a whine. Thank God, he wasn’t in Minotaur mode.
I took a quick look around. Heffner had constructed a nest of filth around his gaming chair and his small TV his Xbox was plugged into. Piles of dirty clothes, fast food waste, empty soda cans, and whatever else he didn’t have the time to throw in the trash. I gagged again. The mess on the floor stood in stark contrast to the bareness of Heffner’s walls. He hadn’t taken any time to personalize his room at all. Not a single Monster Energy poster, or Grand Theft Auto paper map, not even the token “Don’t Tread on Me” flag every sailor inevitably has in their room. Every one of Heffner’s walls was completely bare of art or emotion.
“Heffner, you need to clean this place up a little.” I tried to sound nice. I felt too much sympathy for him now to keep being mean, even if I was drunk.
“I know . . .”
“C’mon, dude. Just start with the trash first. Tomorrow, get all of your dirty laundry together.”
“Okay. I’ll try.”
“There’s no trying, Heffner. You have plenty of time to clean up a little bit. The only person stopping you is yourself.”
“It’s . . . It’s just . . .”
“What?”
“Never mind. I’ll get it clean.”
“It smells horrible, man. Other neighbors are complaining, not just me.”
“I know.” He looked like he might cry.
I didn’t have enough morbid curiosity to ask Heffner about the dirty rag or the chained-up closet. I knew whatever the answer was, I would be disgusted if not terrified by the answer.
Weeks passed, the stench persisted, and my supervisor told me about Heffner’s room inspection. What he told me, I will never forget.
“You’ll never believe what I found in Heffner’s room.”
“What?”
“I walked in to do the inspection, and a wall of his stink hit me in the face. I tried to air out the room a little before stepping in, but I noticed someone under his sheets.”
“Laying in his bed?”
“Yeah, I thought maybe he had slept through work, so I called his name. No response, but it looked exactly like a person under the covers. I walked closer to see maybe it was a girlfriend or something.”
“Heffner, a girlfriend?”
“I thought the same thing. Poor girl. But no, I pulled back the covers and . . . God, it’s hard just to say it. . . “
“Say it!”
“Under the covers was a bunch of bloody rags. Like, a lot. Like I said, enough to make me think it was a person. Some were black and dried with what looked like mold, but others were seeping pus and blood straight into the mattress.”
“What the fuck?”
“Yeah, I know. Plus, his closet door was still chained shut just like you’d said.”
“Does he have open sores or something from never bathing?”
“God, I don’t know. I don’t want to know.”
“I just hope it doesn’t have anything to do with what he keeps locked behind those chains.”
“Me too. Jesus, me too.”
Within a couple of months Heffner was kicked out of the Navy. “Failure to adjust to military lifestyle” was the official reason, but he had just failed too many room inspections and leadership didn’t know what to do with him. The week after he was kicked out a team of professional cleaners in painter’s suits and gas masks took everything out of his room. I made sure not to watch as they did it. I wanted Heffner’s mess of a life as far away from me as soon as possible and wanted to forget that horrible stench forever.
I believe the Navy wanted to forget about Heffner, too. If they had found something truly unholy in that chained up locker, would they tell anyone? Of course, it would be the moral thing to do. Who could sleep at night knowing they had released a monster into the world? But the Navy isn’t moral, they’re pragmatists. Heffner would be hundreds of miles away from the nearest military base after he was sent back to his tiny hometown in Minnesota. If he truly was a danger to the people around him, those people wouldn’t be sailors. There would be no need to pursue him with lawyers and pay expensive legal fees. The most practical thing for them to do was to kick the can down the road and let Heffner be somebody else’s problem.
Years later, I was out of the Navy and was living in Columbus using my GI-Bill. One night I was talking to a forensic science student at an Ohio State bar, and he was telling me about studying decaying bodies and how it’s weird you get used to the smell eventually. The story of a horrible smell reminded me of Heffner, and I told him my old room mate smelled like stale meat. That was the first time I put an accurate description on the stench. Not rotting meat, but stale meat.
The forensic student’s eyebrows went up at the mention of stale meat. “You know, I’ve heard of something like that before.”
“What?”
“One of the main side effects of cannibalism is a terrible body odor. Some scientists theorize it’s a survival mechanism of sorts. A warning sign to other humans to ‘stay away.’ Other side effects of cannibalism are open sores on the skin, gingivitis, and lethargy.”
“Holy fuck.” I said before taking another cheap shot of whisky and trying to forget everything I’d just been told. God bless a college education.