I guess it makes sense: people tend to want what they can't have. If you were in the Red Army, staring everyday from East Berlin towards the glitter of the western side, you would probably want what the Yanks got freely: namely, Marbs and Playboys. The GI's, too, wanted that which was forbidden to them: in 1972, when David Burke was there, it was good Russian Vodka.
"Yeah," remembers Burke, who operated ground surveillance for the army, "we'd trade with the Russians. Quite a bit... They went crazy for those Playboys."
So Germany was smuggled liquor at an Edgar Winter concert in Frankfurt. There was "Shit Park," too, but I'll let Burke tell you about that himself. When Burke was honorably discharged, he kicked around his folks' house for a while, worked at construction, then spent some time on the streets.
Then came New Orleans and working offshore on an oil rig. That meant a lot of things: the first satellite dish on his block, for example. It meant having a crew under him. And it also meant staying on the rig, even when Hurricane Frederick hit.
"We felt it swinging back and forth," remembers Burke, one of five men who stayed behind. For a few days, it yawed in the Gulf of Mexico: "We thought it was going to snap... but it never did."
It strikes me, as he describes the sight of 90-foot waves breaking on the oilrig's heliport, how full his life has been. What it must have been like, five guys in an oil rig the size of a city block. Wind howling.
From Frankfurt to Sacto to New Orleans -- that's not to mention commercial fishing and 13 years under a Seattle bridge (you may also recognize the name: his poems run in the paper every few months).
"I've had a good life," says Burke. You can find him at First and Wall.