Gunny Beauregard

Living hard when sometimes you just want to live

"Gunny" is a storyboard I've had in mind from 'Macy's Choices" for a while now and he helps me to close a couple loose ends from "Macy". This is a journey of sorts of an everyday man from a world that has its share of mundane experiences. Bitches and bastards don't get burned here and the protagonist doesn't get a nut off swinging with any Joes. I know a hundred men like Gunny and I've had more than my own share of blueberry pancakes over the years. Other than that the similarities end...

Here's health to you and to our Corps

Which we are proud to serve;

In many a strife we've fought for life

And never lost our nerve.

If the Army and the Navy

Ever look on Heaven's scenes,

They will find the streets are guarded

By United States Marines.

"Danny, you are a fuck up who trips violent every time something doesn't go your way!"

She was nearly screaming at me now as I waited listening to her litany of complaints. You would think after sixteen years the fucking record would break.

"Besides, you've been gone her whole life."

That one hurt. Sandra stood there like a victorious warrior relishing the taking of the trophy scalp or ear, depending on which war she was fighting. In this case she was doing battle to keep me out of the graduation and losing.

I used to love her once upon a time. Hell, she used to love me at least that's what she said. I don't think I ever knew for sure but somewhere along the way the love turned into a blistering rivalry.

"You are the fucking one that tried to keep me away from her for the past sixteen years." I fired back.

"Bullshit, the judge and everybody else saw exactly what you were and still are as far as I'm concerned."

I didn't stand a chance. I remember the night I walked into the room after drinking half a fifth of something and finding the miserable son of a bitch with his god damn dick buried in my wife's pussy. My immediate response was to shove the business end of a .45 auto down his throat and watch him standing there pissing all over the carpet in fright.

It wasn't pretty. The fucker had a half a dick in my estimation and several inches of extra fat around his torso as piss dribbled out the deflated end of what had previously been giving my wife some sort of perverse pleasure. I looked him in the eye and made it clear that he was to leave which he did.

A lot of good it did; I ended up in the county lockup only to be bailed out by my Top and hustled onto Camp Pendleton. Two days later Sandra had me served with a restraining order and the locals dropped charges provided I shipped out within thirty days.

In hindsight I knew I had it coming. We had separated nearly six months earlier when she left me for the bastard she was fucking that night but in this crazy damn world called California she might has well have been fucking an entire recruit battalion for all that mattered. She ended up with everything not that it was much to start with but she got my daughter Jace with sole custody and I got an open ended order to stay a thousand yards from the two of them plus that bastard motherfucker, Cory Taylor.

What made it worse was she married the prick two months after our divorce was final and while I was shipped out she tried to have Jace adopted by Taylor. Fortunately, the court required at least my permission and I wasn't there to give it even if I wanted to which I didn't.

All and all, I was fucked over and what I had left was a Marine Corp career and a long distance between my daughter and me...

"All I want is to attend my daughter's graduation, Sandra, then I'll be out of your hair again and your fairy tale life will continue."

I thought I caught a glimpse of something on her face and it lingered for a moment longer before we were interrupted.

"I want him to go, Momma."

We both turned to the door and my heart dropped as I saw my daughter Jace for the first time in nearly five years. She walked over to us and reached out to give me a hug.

"Hello, Daddy."

"Hello, Jace - "

I couldn't speak anymore because of the tears and being choked up. Sandra attempted to say something but was shut off.

"No more, Momma."

---

Rhonda Breaux had one hell of a daughter named Sandra, hell being the proper descriptive. I met her in a dive in San Diego and swept her off her feet and into a cheap motel room just down the street. That was a Friday night and we came up for air on a Sunday and after a whirlwind courtship of beer bottles and motel rooms, we were married four months later.

I was twenty three and she was just past nineteen. Jace came along a couple years later and things started to come apart. I was doing short tour assignments with CVN-71 Theodore Roosevelt out of San Diego and was away from home for up to six month stints.

She knew what she was getting into when we married. Her mom, Rhonda, was married for twenty five years to a Marine Corp aviator who was killed in a training exercise off the island of Guam ten years earlier. Rhonda put me through the paces up one side and down the other before she would give her blessings to our marriage. In the end I had a longtime friend I didn't even know about until it was really important.

I suppose sometimes you can see it coming and in my case I should have seen it months earlier. I came in off rotation after a three month tour and she hit me right in the face with it.

"I'm getting a divorce, Danny."

"You're what?"

"A divorce, I'm getting a divorce. I'm sorry, I didn't plan it but I found somebody else."

She started giving me all the crap about my not being there and how she never meant for it to happen but all that did was piss me off.

"Jace is at my Momma's place for a few days. I want you to move out over the weekend. I left the papers for you to sign on the kitchen table."

With that she went out the door to wherever and my beer bottle hit the screen just after she pulled out the drive. From there it was downhill. Somehow through the fog I got all my stuff packed up and in storage before signing into the barracks. Because I was a Sergeant they gave me one of the pillars, the four corner rooms of the floor.

I wasn't alone; there were three other Sergeants on the floor and each one of them had been through at least one divorce. Their solution to my sorrows was found in a distillery and I stayed there for the next six months when I wasn't working.

The problem was the drinking wasn't working either and the rage kept building until one evening I had taken enough. I found myself outside my old home and there was somebody else's car in the drive. I took the old key out of the mailbox and let myself in. Now, I know today that I'm the bad guy in all of this. The woman had fucking left me and I should have moved on and everything might have turned out differently.

Unfortunately, I had half a fifth in me and an abundance of stupidity to go up against a woman who no longer gave a shit about me one way or the other. I stood in the doorway to the bedroom and watched that fat fuck screwing my wife or at least she should have been my wife. I watched his jiggling pasty white ass trying to put it to her for about ten seconds before I did anything.

I grabbed the short dick bastard by his golden locks and pulled him off Sandra, standing him up at the edge of the bed. Sheer stupidity ruled at that point when I pushed the end of a M-1911 into his mouth and it scared him so bad he immediately started pissing on the carpet at his feet while staring at me in sheer terror. To this day I think he believed I was going to execute him right there for fucking Sandra. With another half a fifth in me, I might have.

He knew enough to run like hell and he did, right out of the house. In all of that, Sandra just sat there calmly, naked as the day she was born, and dialed 911. She didn't say a word so I just went down to the kitchen and found a beer in the fridge, one of those expensive imported craft ales. The fucker must have money.

Maybe fifteen minutes later I was under arrest and in the back of a cruiser on my way to jail. Twenty two days after that I was at sea on a six month tour. It wasn't long after when I came to realize that I had really fucked up and I tried to make something of the bad situation.

I wrote letters. Hell, I wrote volumes of letters to no avail until I wrote one to Rhonda Breaux. I received a reply while we were in port at Yokosuka, Japan. Sandra had gone all out hate on me because of what I did that night preventing me from having any contact with them whatsoever. Rhonda was a lot more forgiving. She wrote me a long letter that included the following.

"Dear Danny Boy,

You are one serious fuckup if they are keeping you holed up in Sushi town, you know that don't you?

I know you are hurting from everything that happened but I want you to know that I will do what I can to help out. Little Jace spends a lot of time at my place and she's gonna know about her daddy regardless of what her mother intends. When the judge squashed her adoption attempt she should have seen the light on what she's doing.

When you are on base here, I'll see to it that you get to see your daughter. In the meantime, here are a few pictures of her.

I gotta go. Hey, stay away from all that strange stuff over there; you'll end up eating crap you can't even pronounce.

Love,

Mom Rhonda."

The pictures were precious and Rhonda became as close to me as my own departed Mom. Over the next few years, that's how we did it; I'd stop in when I was in port and spend time with Jace. Rhonda would write letters and send me pictures.

Then war visited my doorstep and everything changed. We had already been in Afghanistan since the end of 2001 and I had not shipped out. Instead I remained on sea duty with the carrier group. Early 2003 changed all that.

I shipped out of Pendleton in February 2003 and landed in Kuwait. A month and a half later I put my first .223 in the chest cavity of an Iraqi regular. Rhonda stayed in touch throughout that first tour and when I rotated back stateside in the middle of 2004 I spent as much time with Jace as possible.

That was the pattern for the next couple years. I shipped out to Afghanistan and ended up being hit by fire on two separate occasions, the second one got me a star for lugging a Marine across a fire zone. I don't know what I was thinking; I was scared shitless doing it.

Coming back stateside I got to see Jace for a while before they convinced me to go to Parris Island to train recruits. Rhonda and I would hookup on a laptop so Jace and I could talk and see each other and all was good for a while.

Through all of this, Rhonda kept Sandra mostly in the dark. I don't know what she would have done about it other than disowning her mother. Rhonda never talked about it and Sandra never asked.

I did another tour in Iraq before returning stateside for good in 2006 and came back a Gunny. I was lucky to have that given the article 15 bumping me down to corporal following the dickhead incident that put me in jail.

The next four years were pretty noneventful. I just wanted to get my twenty so I could ETS and get back to the world. By the time that rolled around I had been in two, actually three conflicts, been wounded twice and decorated with a silver star. I didn't consider that bad for a thirty eight year old nobody from Beaumont, Texas.

About the time I retired I stopped hearing from Rhonda or Jace. For a while I didn't think anything of it but after a month I tried calling Rhonda and discovered her phone was no longer in service.

"Sandra, it's me, Danny. I'm trying to get a hold of Rhonda."

She hung up on me so I called her back and on the third try she picked up.

"Seriously, that's all I want."

"Momma died last month."

There was a long moment of silence before I dared ask the next question.

"Can I talk to Jace?"

"No, I want you to go away now. My mom let you in for whatever her reasons were but my husband and me are not going to let you close to us for a damn minute."

She ended the call and I sat there numb from the news. I loved Rhonda just like my own Mom and she was my lifeline into Jace's life. She was almost thirteen now but I had no way to reach out to her unless I just showed up.

I tried just that and all I got for the trouble was a county deputy telling me I needed to move on and hire a lawyer if I didn't like it. I don't know if Jace was there or not but I know the bastard and Sandra were. I turned the matter over to a lawyer at that point.

Being a free man I did what freedom entails; I hit the road. For the next twelve months I went all over the USA stopping to mail postcards to Jace whenever I got the chance. I drank too much, spent three days in a Reno, Nevada jail and fucked just about anything on two legs that I could put my rubber encased dick in. It all came to a halt when I found myself married to a casino worker near an Indian reservation in southern Oklahoma.

Winona was about the most uninhibited woman I had ever been with. She was the opposite of Sandra having a small tight body with just a hint of a b-cup breast and had half her body covered with sleeve tattoos. She liked her hair blue and really enjoyed riding a motorcycle with her naked pussy snuggled up onto the vibrating seat.

If there was one thing she was better than absolutely anybody I ever met was her ability to provide the out-and-out perfect blowjob. I don't mean to brag but I'm not a small guy; I've got the inches and girth that guys write about their wives leaving them for which I know is all bullshit because my own wife left me for a short dick piss ant. Size is definitely not it for most women but I know from experience it certainly helps.

Winona had a technique where she would tease the head while playing with my foreskin and blow hot kisses on the piss slit before pushing her very moist lips down the erect shaft. How she learned to apply the perfect pressure when sucking back up the shaft, I don't know, but she was the fucking best and she could take every bit of me without a second's hesitation.

As far as the sex went, it was a perfect marriage and stayed that way for a year until her actual husband showed up. Yes, she was already married and had committed bigamy when she married me. He had been doing a tour oversees with an oil company and was none too pleased to walk into what used to be his home and found me eating eggs and biscuits at his kitchen table dressed in nothing but boxers and cowboy boots. His wife and mine was at the sink washing coffee cups wearing nothing but a neatly trimmed bush.

"Who the fuck are you, motherfucker?"

I don't know if he really wanted an answer to the question or not but I was up and out of my chair before Winona could turn around. He clarified his inquiry.

"You been fucking my god damn wife?"

The scale of scenery needs to be explained here. Brent Gustophsen probably weighed close to 280, maybe more and stood 6'6" to my even 6" and 180 and he was decidedly not a fat boy.

"She's my wife and has been for the past year now. Who in hell are you?" was my hesitant reply.

He looked over at Winona standing naked next to the sink and back to me before turning and walking back into the living room; strangest damn scene I've ever been in.

"Winona, I'm going out for a beer. You take the trash out and have a god damn explanation when I return or I'll rip his fucking head off."

With that the big fellow walked out.

She had a worried look on her face and took a seat at the table. When she was done all I could do was shake my head and get dressed. I had my things packed and in my truck in about an hour. I was going to miss her but I knew I'd get over her quick enough...

---

I grew up in Beaumont, Texas and scrapped my way through school and into the Marines right out of high school just in time to come in on the end of G.H.W.B' Desert Storm. It was short-lived and I was soon stateside with all the events I described above. Now I was back on my home turf.

One of the plants along the Neches River picked me up as a roughneck on their shutdowns and it worked out fine for me; they kept me on as a contract employee and I'd work eighty plus hours a week when they were down for maintenance and take the next three weeks off. That netted more than my Marine pay did each month and gave me something to do on a regular basis.

My experience with Winona had pretty much closed the door on future marriage attempts at least for the time being. Instead I settled into a semi-exclusive relationship that met the needs of everybody involved.

Laney Johnson had two kids, an ex-husband who still lived with her for money reasons and would believe any line of shit a swinging dick would throw at her. Gullibility was her middle name. However, and this made up for all of it; that woman would make the most delicious love you've ever had. She didn't fuck; she turned her whole body and the full experience into a world-class erotic trip.

For all her gullibility she was quick to shut down anybody looking for just a piece of ass. I'm not sure what she saw in me but I appreciated her approval.

"You know how to fish, Danny?" She asked me out of the blue one evening.

"Some."

"Can you teach my two little ones how to fish for catfish? They've been asking and their daddy thinks fish grow in a grocery store."

So I ended up being a fishing buddy for her eight year old boy and six year old girl, Jimmy and Lucy. When I was a kid we used to fish some of the far reach tributaries of the Neches River for catfish. You had to go past the tidal reaches to stay in fresh water but we always pulled our share on 2-3 lb. channel cats. That's where I took the kids.

They took to it real good and we built up a good rapport. Kids aren't like adults as far as holding back what's on their mind.

"Daddy's real mad at you, Mr. Danny." Jimmy said one morning while we were wetting lines along a grassy bank.

"Why is that?"

"Cuz Momma and you is friends."

"Well, folks need friends, you know. I'm sorry your daddy is mad at me. I'll talk to your momma about it, if that's OK?"

Life is pretty simple to most kids. Jimmy's momma had a friend. His daddy was mad about it and I'd take care of it; real simple. The problem was it wasn't simple. The ex-husband wasn't living in the old marital home just for economic reasons; he wanted a shot at getting his old lady back and I was in the way. I don't know what precipitated their divorce but I'm funny about some things. One of them is having a part in fucking up somebody else's family situations.

"Jimmy told you that?" she exclaimed. "Jesus H. Christ!"

I couldn't help but laugh thinking that little Jimmy was in some shit now.

"Yeah, but that's not the point, is it, Laney? His daddy is looking to try to hook back up with his momma is what it sounded like. Am I right?"

She fidgeted with the buttons on her blouse for a bit before replying.

"He keeps trying."

I knew from her voice that the fellow stood a chance of succeeding and I didn't want to be in the way of it. I knew I needed to put a bit of distance in there but I also wasn't going to pass up tapping that beautiful woman at least one more time. When we finished for the evening I asked her to work out what she was going to do with her ex. It wasn't healthy relationship wise and the kids needed a fair shake since he was their daddy and all.

Laney did get back together with him although as far as I know they never re-married...

"I never seen a good looking man like you eat so many blueberry pancakes in my life. Looky here, Cassie Mae, I'm gonna call Gunny here my blueberry boy." Carole's smile flashed white against her dark skin and eyes.

She was the proprietor of Rose's Diner and probably the best short order plate specialist in all of east Texas. Rose's served breakfast all day and for me there was little I liked more than Carole's stack of blueberry pancakes and grilled sausages.