After Marine OCS, June 1972 to August 1973, The Eastern trip that failed

I left LAX on a United DC-8 bound for Detroit.  Daylin Butler met me at the airport with his wife.  (Her name escapes me--she was blond and perky and I attended their wedding in Southern California after they graduated from college in the early 1970's--but after a few years of marriage, they divorced.  I never really found out why, and Daylin never remarried.)  

I had met Daylin Jean Butler at East L.A. Junior College during a class we both shared in the fall of 1968.  Mike had wondered if he was Darryl Lynn Butler's brother, a classmate of ours at South Gate Junior High.  I would later learn that Daylin was three years older than we and had gone away to college on a scholarship, Occidental College if I am recalling it right, but flunked out his first semester, I believe, and returned home to South Gate, somewhat broken in spirit.  His dad got him a job at the Firestone tire factory, along with the GM Plant the lifeblood for local factory worker employment in the area.  The tire factory also provided a certain, recognizable stench in the air of South Gate.  Unfortunately, Daylin would become one of the first men drafted by the Marine Corps for service in Vietnam.  His basic training was in San Diego.   Fortunately, unlike Pat Byrne whom I would later meet at Cal State Dominguez Hills, Daylin would have an office job with the Marines and not see actual combat in Vietnam.  He did tell me a story of one experience when he was standing in a external doorway to a building where he worked.  An explosion nearby, possibly from a rocket attack, sent him sprawling backwards and, for a moment, he thought he might be dead.  He had sustained no injuries.

I gathered that in high school he was skinny and geeky, a bit like I was.  But when he returned from the Marines after his single tour, his parents bought him a full set of free weights, weight bar and bench, which his mother had to haul, struggling, into the house, wrap, and push under the Christmas tree.   He set it all up in his parents' garage.   After the first two semesters at East LA when we were required to take gym classes (I took volleyball and badminton, becoming a member of the badminton team after the first semester so that we competed with other junior colleges around LA in the Spring of 1968.  I was horrible in our first tournament, playing Santa Monica Junior College's second best player who beat me mercilessly and effortlessly, 15-0, 15-1--not even sure how I even got one point).

After becoming better acquainted, Daylin extended an invitation for me to work out with him and a buddy in his parent's garage.  I had used free weights in high school during our "corrective" gym class, conducted by Mr. Self, for all of us hopelessly skinny, unathletic students who at least got an "A" for effort.  You had to ask to be accepted into the corrective gym class.  So I stood, shirtless before Mr. Self, trying my damnedest to look pathetic and weak, weaker than I typically might have looked.  Mr. Self took pity and I got accepted, loving every minute of it with all the other unathletic freaks and geeks in our school.  That's where I met Richard Meyers, whom Mike and I now are certain was, like we, gay.

To say I was infatuated with Daylin Butler was putting it mildly.  He was blond, handsome, well-built from the free weights he pushed religiously in the garage, from the diet he followed that included protein supplements, and from a physical frame that seemed to absorb his efforts well and noticeably.  The fact that he had also been a Marine in Vietnam fascinated me.  The war appeared as if it would never end at that point when I met him in the fall of 1968.  Weekly casualty lists were devastating.  The images of conflict on TV every single night were disheartening, even disillusioning.   (The photo below was from a drive Daylin, Darryl, my sister and I took to San Francisco, staying with Aunt Jean and Uncle Lloyd.)

 

I am certain it was the summer of 1969, after we had graduated from East LA and Mike and I enrolled at the newly built, and slowly evolving, Cal State Dominguez Hills, that I fell into a long and debilitating depression.  I suspect that it occurred because of a couple of factors:  the Vietnam War and the guilt I felt that I was safely deferred in college while others in my age range were either serving in Vietnam or had returned from the war psychologically or physically damaged or dead.  And, of course, the fact that I was gay and not likely to ever meet anyone similarly inclined also contributed.  Even had I confessed during a draft physical that I was gay, that humiliation might not have spared me from being forced to serve.  

Almost since we got cars, Mike and I developed a pattern of driving to San Diego in my sexy convertible Mustang or, less frequently, in his stodgy, tan Dodge.  Soon, one of the places we would stop every time would be the Fort Rosecrans Military Cemetery at Point Loma.  It provided a great view of the city, but also a palpable reminder of the war's continuing toll.   (The photos below are from two different visits, but we stopped there every single time we drove down to San Diego on weekends after our first visit, which also included a stop at the Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet in San Juan Capistrano.  One other visit, we had chicken from a Chicken Delight joint in San Diego itself.)              

Every weekend we drove down there, more and more headstones had been added during the week.  More families had a place to spend time remembering a husband or son whom they had lost.  After Memorial Day weekend especially, the flowers at the several graves had multiplied. 

"...the old stone tabs we keep on our dead."

My own guilt must have multiplied considerably.  My friend Paul David Moore, who always went by Dave, kidnapped me and took me down one weekend to his sister and her husband's house inland from Oceanside, just to snap me out of my depression.  The escape only helped a bit.  I was even told by a doctor that while I did not yet have an ulcer, I was working on one.  

But returning to my obsession with Daylin, even before that troubled summer, if I had been at Mike's house, a few blocks over from the Butler residence, I would drive by and see the light on in the front bedroom, indicating that Daylin was hard at work studying for a history or philosophy class at East LAJC.  I even briefly got Daylin a job at the A.U. Morse warehouse with me.  Unfortunately, my obsession almost cost me my life.  One night in Daylin's room, somehow Daylin decided to criticize me, just cut me up over something or other.  I was devastated and left his house thoroughly destroyed because his opinion of me meant too much.  I got home and was nearly suicidal.  Fortunately, I called Rhonda Sewell, a good friend from high school, and she must have flown over from her house on the other side of town to rescue me.  She and her gal friend drove me around and around in her car, and we just talked.  Probably a hour or so later, they dropped me off at home and I began to recover.  From my obsession with Daylin and from my depression over so many things that had bothered me so that summer.