Blake built himself his own little cubicle in the room we shared. By 'we', I mean he and I and about fifteen other guys, all of whom were part of the 1/503rd Infantry Regiment's headquarters company. We were assigned to a large room on the second floor of one of the buildings near the entrance to Fort Corregidor, just outside Ar Ramadi in Iraq.
The room had been partitioned off by various means, and I myself had used some wood panel, a bookcase, a bunk bed, and a hanging blanket to make my own private section. Blake had gone all out, though, well beyond anyone else. Along one wall, he used wood panel and two-by-fours, which he'd gotten from god knows where, to enclose a 6 by 15 foot area into his own little space. It even had it's own ceiling. The regular ceiling, about 14 feet high, was good enough for the rest of us, but not for Blake. I don't know, maybe he was worried about guys lobbing things over his wall.
He and I spent a lot of the nine months we occupied Fort Corregidor hanging out in his room, mostly talking about comedy. Sometimes, we'd compare religious views, which was always interesting, given that he's a committed Catholic and I'm just as devoutly atheist. But usually it was comedy.
We had, and have, a shared interest in making people laugh, and in what make good or bad comedy. For both of us, it was a way to get our minds off of the vagaries of being in the Army, and in a war-zone, and having to work closely with some guys who were, frankly, idiots. Blake had a worse time with that than I did, as he was a cook. The cooks in our unit weren't the best and the brightest. I most cases, they weren't very good or very bright at all, Blake being the notable exception. He's saw a lot of things that make good stories now, but that were aggravating as hell when they happened.
So, most nights, we'd end up chilling out in the hundred degree atmosphere of his room, watching Eddie Izzard or Jerry Seinfeld in Comedian, talking about doing comedy. We'd ping-pong ideas for sketches off of one another, using his computer to keep track of our genius, and we'd make plans for the day we were back in the States and out of the Army.
It kept both of us sane, or at least saner than we would have been otherwise. Occasionally, though, right at the start, one of us would look at the other and say, 'So... Caaaaaaaaaaaaahmedy!' This was the sign that we probably weren't gonna be writing anything that night, or even talking about performing except in the most abstract sense. It was our way of letting each other know that that night was just gonna be about hanging out, and feeling some kind of easygoing normalcy which comes along with spending time with a sympatico individual.
Iraq was a strange experience all around. It was made even stranger by somehow finding one of my best friends there.
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