by Sarah Bird
The steward holds up some index cards. “I prepared these for the commander to read.”
Bobby snatches, reads, tears up the cards, and hands the steward one he pulls from his pocket. “Tell him to use this and tell Knobby to play my signature.”
Backstage, waiting for Bobby to go on, the dread is worse than before, when I had no more hope of reprieve than I did that my father would refuse a new assignment. The steward disappears and I shrink as far from Bobby as I can, since he acts like I have made a pact with the devil to destroy his career. The instant, however, that Knobby strikes up “East Side, West Side,” which is, apparently, the Bobby Moses signature, some switch flips and Bobby is transformed, throwing his shoulders back, holding his ursine head high.
A swell of applause greets the base commander, who reads, “It is my great honor to introduce you to, directly from a six-week sold-out run at the Tropicana in Las Vegas, America, Mr. Bobby Moses!”
Where, a second before, Bobby’s tuxedo seemed to hang on him, he now fills it to bursting as he bounces onstage, leaving me alone in the dark.
“It’s great to be back here in Tachi. It’s been a couple years since I toured Japan. I decided I had to come back.” Pause. “I needed a bath.” The drummer hits the cymbals. “This country. I love this country. They don’t see many guys big as me outside a sumo ring here. Every time I sit down, they start burning incense, putting tangerines at my feet. I’m like a god to these people: the Happy Buddha.”
Bah-bing! The drummer hits a rim shot.
As the crowd laughs, Bobby grumbles, “They don’t get it. They just don’t get it at all.
“And the food. They’re killing me, I’m telling you, they’re killing me. It’s not easy for a guy my size to get enough to eat here. I spent a week in Kobe getting massaged and living on beer. Only time I wasn’t hungry. Then they found out I wasn’t a cow and chased me out of the barn.”
Bah-bing!
“They don’t get it. Just don’t get it at all.
“This is an island country. You know that, don’t you? All you can get is fish. I eat so much fish here I’m starting to breathe out of my cheeks. I came on-base early, I was really looking forward to getting some good old American grub. I stopped by your mess hall there, and I don’t want to say the cook’s bad but, we were all praying after we ate.”
Bah-bing!
“He thinks there’s only one flavor: charcoal. Must have trained in the army. Everything he made was olive drab. The biscuits were so hard you had to rivet on the butter! Then the cook comes out, sees no one’s eating the biscuits, says, ‘Ulysses S. Grant’s troops would have been grateful to have those biscuits.’ Private Jerkoff sitting next to me—yeah, Jerkoff, he’s Polish; family changed their name at Ellis Island, used to be Whackoff—Private Jerkoff says, ‘Yeah, Sarge, but they were fresh back then!’ ”
Bah-bing! Bah-bing! Bah-bing!
“This is the same recruit can’t understand why they call him private. He’s sleeping in a room with eighty other guys! Jerkoff don’t get it. Just don’t get it at all.”
Bobby and I wait for the drummer to punctuate the last joke, but he don’t get it. Just don’t get it at all. I creep closer to the curtain and almost pull it aside to peek at Bobby, but I don’t. I know that if I have even one glimpse of the audience waiting on the other side of the heavy velvet, I will never be able to step out from behind it.
“Not that Jerkoff wanted to get drafted. Tried like hell to dodge it. Draft board told him to come in for his physical and bring a urine sample. He figured he’d con them and got everyone he knew to pee in his bottle. At the physical the doctor came out, told him, ‘Your old man has diabetes, your girlfriend is pregnant, your dog is in heat, and you’re in the Air Force!’ He don’t get it. Just don’t get it at all.”
Bah-bing!
“Hey, great, the drummer woke up. Welcome back, pal. My buddy, Jerkoff, was in the barbershop, the captain was in the chair next to him. The barber tries to splash some aftershave on the captain. Captain won’t let him. ‘Don’t put that crap on me. My wife’ll think I’ve been in a whorehouse.’ Jerkoff looks at the barber, tells him, ‘Go ahead. Put it on me. My wife don’t know what a whorehouse smells like.’ ”
A wave of masculine laughter rolls back, giving me enough courage to peek out. I focus on the wives sitting beside grinning husbands. Their faces are like the faces of the wives back at Yokota, smiles tight, eyes searching out the gazes of other nearby wives, and when they meet they shake their heads in tolerant dismissal. The blood surges in my ears and Bobby’s voice is lost in the rushing sound. My brain snaps off until Dinkins’s face appears in front of mine.
“You missed your cue.”
I give no indication that I understand the meaning of the word “cue.”
“You’re on. Go on.” He holds the curtain back. It is the wives’ hair that has undone me. Rolled, teased, bubbled, sprayed, most have clearly been to the base beauty salon in preparation for their big evening out. There is nothing I can do that is remotely worth anyone’s ratting their hair.
Bobby spots me. “And now, here she is, ladies and gentlemen, direct from her sellout tour of Itchy Pussy, Okinawa, the Amazing Zelda!”
The remembered smell of enchiladas fills my head and I clump out, my feet having turned to blocks of ice in the tight boots. I catch sight of a wife’s face and quickly rip my glasses off, tossing them behind me. It is only when I enter the radiated zone of the spotlight that I become aware of the song the band has chosen to play: “I Dig Rock and Roll Music.” For a frozen second, my limbs twitch about until I finally find the thready pulse of a beat that is all hands and feet, leaving my pelvis completely uninvolved. With nothing else to hang on to, I end up doing an imitation of Kit’s drill-team maneuvers, and the experience becomes no more, but certainly no less, horrible than any of several hundred new-girl meals I’ve eaten alone in school cafeterias around the world.
The band finishes with a Gypsy Rose Lee strip-show-style flourish that inspires the exact sort of bump-and-grind pantomime that I know Kit would have thrown in. It is all so sexless and pathetically amateurish that Bobby is able to milk a smattering of pity applause as I teeter off.
“Let’s hear it for the Amazing Zelda! You gotta remember, folks, this is her first time doing this go-go thing. She used to be a bubble dancer. Then, one night, her career blew up in her face.”
The laugh that echoes backstage sounds tinged with relief as Bobby incorporates the awfulness of my “performance” into his act.
“Zelda’d be a great dancer except for two things—her feet. When I hired her I asked her how much she expected to make a night. She says, ‘Fifty dollars.’ ‘Why, Zelda,’ I say, ‘I’ll give you that with pleasure.’ Zelda tells me, ‘With pleasure’ll be seventy-five.’
“For her first night’s pay, I gave her a gorgeous negligee. For her second night’s pay, I gave her some jewelry. For her third night’s pay, I tried to raise her first night’s pay.”
Bah-bing!
“She don’t get it. Zelda just don’t get it at all. Zelda’s a college girl. Yeah, you know, back in the States. They got the hippies and the happenings and the this and the that. I asked Zelda, ‘You into all that?’ She tells me, ‘Right on, man.’ I say, ‘How ’bout this free love?’ Zelda tells me, ‘Yeah, man, I believe in free love. But you, Bobby—you I’m puttin’ on the installment plan!’
“Great. The sexual revolution is in and I’m out of ammunition! Zelda thinks she’s too young for me. I ask her where she’s been all my life, she tells me, ‘Teething.’
“Zelda’s one of them women’s libbers. She was out there with her sign yelling, ‘Free women! Free women!’ This drunk comes by, asks her, ‘Do you deliver?’ Zelda bonked him with her sign. She don’t get it. Zelda just don’t get it at all.”
Bah-bah-bah-bing!
Bobby finishes up with some pokes at the band, a few jokes about wives, a few about husbands, a real crowd-pleaser involving squat
toilets and the constipating effects of a rice diet leading to the shape of the Japanese eyes. By the end of the act, Bobby has his jacket off, his tie loosened, he’s sweated down to his cummerbund, his Brylcreemed pompadour has melted onto his forehead, and the audience is eating out of his hand.
The applause rolls on. “Zelda? You back there? Come on out. Your public wants to see you. Zelda, blow up your bubbles. Get your tushie out here.” I totter into the spotlight. Bobby raises my hand, then lowers it, pulling me into a bow along with him. The audience applauds me for being a good sport. I smile, happy because the night is over.
“You’ve been a great audience. Come on back and see me. Tomorrow I’ll be playing an early show at the Johnson Service Club, then later at the O Club. After that, catch me at Fuchu NCO Club. Thursday we do a matinee at Showa. Call the O Club for times. That night it’s back to Johnson for the NCO Club there. Tops Club, Falcon Service Club, O Club. We’ll even be playing the Airmen’s Club there. Club Zanzibar, Club Lamumba. Club Spearchucker, something like that. Whatever, just send help if they throw us in a big pot. We finish up the tour at the Yokota O Club. Call for dates and times.
“God bless you. Sayonara. Don’t let your meat loaf. Get out of here, they need the room. General’s coming to show stag films. Be careful, and if you can’t be careful, name it after me!”
Night Soil
On the drive back to Tokyo, the glow from each small paper-windowed house or shop is linked to the next with no intermittent darkness. Even the blackness above is lighted by the twinkle of a million fireflies. The land exhales the complicated odor of night soil being transformed back into life.
Bobby, silent since we left the club, presses against me both with his weight and the weight of his unspoken criticisms. I know I was horrible. Since I danced like Frankenstein, it takes me by surprise that his first comment is, “You missed your cue.”
“Oh. Yeah. I was—”
“You left me standing out there with my dick hanging out. Don’t do that again. You make me look like a yutz. Very unprofessional. Also, you never sit down until after the show. Your costume looked like you slept in it. You need more eyeliner and you always wear false eyelashes on my stage. Period. End of discussion. While you’re at it, you might as well get some falsies too.”
“What about the dancing?” Much as I try, I cannot control the wobble in my voice. I bite down hard on the inside of my mouth to keep from crying, a trick I learned after first grade with Miss Ransom.
“The dancing could be not so …” He puts his arms straight out in front of him. Apparently, Bobby thought I looked more like the Mummy than Frankenstein.
“I guess you wish you’d hired Kit instead of me.”
“Kit? The sister?”
I sniff out confirmation.
“Right, Kit. Kit I need like I need a hole in the head. That little chickie-boombah is a statutory count waiting to happen. Too sexy. Too pretty. Plus, she’s got worse rhythm than Mamie Eisenhower. You—you’re okay. The wives, you don’t make them jealous. The husbands, you make them think about shtupping the babysitter. Everyone’s happy. With your sister, suddenly I’d be Fatty Arbuckle. No, kid, you’re okay. You work a little on the entrance, the exit. A little less—” He does his Mummy imitation again.
“I could do better if I didn’t have to wear the boots and had some decent music.”
“The music!” Bobby pulls a roll of sheet music out of his pocket. “We got lucky. Knobby let me have the charts for that cockamamie song you requested. He bailed you out, kid.”
“ ‘I Dig Rock and Roll Music’? I hate that song.”
“Great. She hates that song. Listen, Zelda, unless you got the charts to something you don’t hate stuck up your ass, this is your song.” He thrusts the music into my hands. “You should come prepared. It’s the hallmark of the professional.”
“To say nothing of the Boy Scout.”
Bobby recoils. “So now you’re riffing on me? You got a schtick? Stick to dancing, kid, it stinks less than your jokes.”
Within minutes, Bobby goes from snorting, shaking his head in disgust, and cursing me, Joe, Japan, and the United States Air Force to buzzsaw snores.
They make an interesting counterpoint to the lyrics to the most hideous song in all the world, which now refuse to leave my head.
I DIG rock and roll music!
I wonder if Kit and Bobby would have killed each other by now and almost wish I had stepped aside to find out.
Toast
At four that morning, I am in Bobby’s palatial room watching five waiters set up three tables of food. When all the silver domes have been whisked away, revealing steak and eggs, waffles, pancakes, spaghetti, French toast, hamburgers, French fries, several pieces of a pie-looking confection, tempura, and sukiyaki, Bobby nods.
The waiters leave and Bobby applies himself with a ritualistic devotion, pausing only long enough to observe, “I only eat one meal a day. Wastes too much time otherwise.”
I glance around. A couple dozen of my rooms would fit into Bobby’s suite. Frank Lloyd seems to have modeled his hotel after one of the grand colonial British establishments. Much teak and brass gleam. A porcelain button next to the bed is labeled VALET. The open bathroom door, however, reveals a room of completely Japanese luxury, with a huge round tub next to an unenclosed shower for bathing before parboiling.
“Dig in. Here, here’s a plate.”
“I’m not really that—”
“Better get your stomach on the night shift. Show people always eat late.” He lifts the lid on a tub of strawberry jam. “Shit! They always forget the extra jam. You like jam? They import this from England. Here.” He piles several heaping spoonfuls on a piece of toast already limp with butter and hands it to me.
It is the best piece of toast I have ever eaten.
“Get you some of these.” He spears a quartet of sausages and passes me the fork.
We munch in companionable silence. With Bobby absorbed in shoveling in spaghetti topped with fried egg, I take a moment to study him. I search his face, trying to find the handsome man I’d seen in the photograph at Luigi’s. Bobby feels my attention and looks up.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothin’, shit. You’re wondering if I got a blowhole under my shirt. You know, Zelda, I made a choice in this life. Either my mouth’s gonna be happy or my dick is. So which one do you think I listened to?”
When it becomes apparent that Bobby actually wants me to answer, I shrug.
Bobby wags a melon ball on the end of his fork at me for emphasis. “Let me give you a hint. My dick don’t talk.” Satisfied that he’s made his point, he pops the melon ball into his mouth.
“Well, I guess I’d better …” I wave vaguely in the direction of my room.
“You’re not gonna stick around?”
“No, I think I’ll …” Again the vague wave.
“You can stay here if you want. Plenty of room.” He pats the bed.
“Thanks, but I’d better …” The wave.
“Aw, stick around. We don’t have to screw if you don’t want to.”
“Uh. Okay. That’s good to know.”
“Jesus, Zelda, you look like your ovaries just dropped or something. You can’t blame a guy for trying. Lot of the big comedy acts—” He pumps his right index finger in and out of the closed fist of his left hand. “You know, Burns and Allen. Stiller and—what’s the horsy-faced broad’s name?”
“They’re married.”
“Oh, right. But Hope. Your idol Bob Hope, he puts the boots to every dame he tours with. It’s in their contract. Okay, forget it. Quit looking at me like I’m that lech in that crazy movie about the baby boinker, Humdinger Humdinger or whoever.”
“Lolita.”
“Yeah, what a load of crap that one was. Hey, don’t give me that face. I gave it a shot, you shut me down. Case closed. You give a little, you get a little. Life goes on. Right? No harm done.”
�
�No. No harm done.”
“Okay, then, if you’re gonna leave, leave already. I’m thinking of getting a little paid companionship in here before it gets too late.”
Bobby is on the phone before I close the door behind me.
Vitamins
After Tachikawa, we play a succession of service clubs: Showa, Fuchu, Washington Heights, the Navy bases at Yokohama and Yokosuka, a couple of Marine and Army bases, but mostly the Air Force clubs. I learn to read the insignia on the men’s shoulders that distinguish a chief sergeant from a master, a technical sergeant from a staff. I count the stripes. Anything below three is an airman. At the first club after Tachikawa, Johnson Air Base, we leave early and Bobby sends me into the BX with a hundred dollars and orders to spend every cent of it on cosmetics.
Before each performance, Bobby insists that I trowel on the makeup. Pretty soon I look like a blond Priscilla Presley, with my bleached hair ratted up into a hydrocephalic bubble, my face and lips whited out, my eyes slashes of black liner and llama sweeps of false lashes. I hobble out night after night, an American geisha in my foot-binding boots. Bobby adjusts his act for what he perceives as my new heightened level of sexiness.
I chased Zelda all around the hotel room last night. Problem is, when I caught her I couldn’t remember what I’d been chasing her for. I ain’t gettin’ any, just ain’t gettin’ any at all.
At the enlisted men’s clubs the airmen who also aren’t getting any they don’t pay for roar their approval for this line. At their clubs, the audience is almost entirely young men, young men who mostly would blend into any shop class in America. Individually, they are heartbreakingly sweet, sneaking up to reveal a desperate homesickness and to tell me I remind them of a sister back home. Together, however, they are a snarling pack of testosterone-maddened dogs, grinding their crotches and making jerk-off motions in my direction. The only females I ever see at an airmen’s club are paid professionals, locals working as waitresses or B-girls. The more raucous the club, the higher my father’s rank is when Bobby tells them to back off.