"The Big Bonito"

by Michael Finley
(c) 2001 by Michael Finley

Besides sanctuary, I had a hankering to play the theology card with my draft board back in Elyria, Ohio. I filed an application to be reclassified as 4-D, deferred for reasons of divinity, along with a cover letter written on stationery I created using a black-and-white linocut of two praying hands with radiating grace lines emanating from them.

Surely, I thought, no reasonable board member could fail to see the sincerity in the application. Or if they did miss the sincerity, they would be unable to articulate why it was insincere. In either case I was home free, along with all the legitimate ministers of the United States, who were exempted by Congress for reasons of national security that I have never understood.

I remembered reading (again, from Paul Krassner's Realist) that a ploy of ultra-tricky draft evaders was to take advantage of some Selective Service regulation requiring the local draft board to hold onto all correspondence with individuals -- that local draft boards hold onto all correspondence with individuals -- they were not allowed to pick and choose which items they might put in the permanent file, and which they might toss out. The rule was promulgated to protect draft-eligible young men from the filing caprices of their local draft boards. But it constituted a loophole for persons like myself who thought they were put on earth not to kill for their country but to amuse other draft dodgers.

So I walked the 20 blocks from Vendome Street to El Centro in downtown Los Angeles. It's a fabulous indoor bazaar of several hundred shops, from every nationality -- fish, vegetables, meats, spices -- muy autentico, like you never see in the Midwest.

I went up to the fish vendor and purchased the biggest, reddest bonito fish he had on ice -- an 8 pounder costing me almost six dollars. I carried it dripping in paper the 20 blocks to the church, attached a letter asking my local board to file this with my other materials, rewrapped it, plastered the butcher paper with stamps and dropped it in the corner mailbox.

I can't say how it played with my draft board, in Elyria, Ohio. They never sent me any statements to sign about my divinity status. My guess is that they had a bulletin board somewhere, with an article about Rev. Hensley's church thumb-tacked up where everyone could see it, and a note -- BE ON THE LOOKOUT FOR THIS!

That would have been the sensible thing, but there was nothing sensible about the draft. Their job was to winnow out the good kids who deserved to live from the black and brown and poor white trash kids, who deserved to come back from their tour in hefty bags, wheelchairs, and straightjackets.

Of course, none of any of this mattered. Two months after I sent in my deferment statement, and one month after I sent in my fish, I was drafted. The people on the board must have looked at the stuff I sent and decided I, perhaps especially of the many thousands of local boys they sent off to suffer, could benefit from the experience. They surely did not keep the bonito in the file cabinet for perpetuity, as had been my expressed wish.

But I didn't learn my lesson because I had already hit the road again, leaving no forwarding address. By the time I got my draft notice, I missed my physical and my induction, and was, for all intents and purposes, AWOL.

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