Landscape With Traveler

by Barry Gifford

  My grandmother sat by the radio, newspaper in hand. My mother crocheted on her afghan (which I still have). My father and grandfather played dominoes. And I dozed or daydreamed on the floor in front of the “fire” with the dog. Often it would be raining hard outside. I seem to remember the war as one long, stormy, cozy night.

  Sometimes on Sundays I was sent out to invite a soldier or two home to dinner. The town was always full of convoys in transit from somewhere to somewhere, both secret. I loved hanging around the soldiers. I always carefully chose the ones to bring home, but my hopes never came to anything. We all assumed, I suppose, that we would win the war, that “the boys” would come home, and that life would go back to the ’30s and be nice again, little dreaming that those selfsame ’30s were to be the last time of true peace any of us would ever know. Jim, for instance, cannot miss them, having been born after the war, and doubtless has a loved time of his own to remember. But I will be looking for those prewar years for the rest of my life.

  10

  I

  Would

  Get

  an

  Urge

  to

  Be

  Grown

  Up

  After the war, on hot summer nights (me sixteen or seventeen), one or another of my friends and I would get an urge to be grown up and devilish and would take a Grey-hound bus to New Orleans, which was a two-hour trip. We’d wander around trying to persuade bartenders that we were eighteen, usually unsuccessfully, generally ending up in some soda fountain for a malt and then back home.

  I’m amazed, thinking back on it, that my parents didn’t protest these outings. I even persuaded them to buy me a bottle of wine to have for my very own—California Tokay (ugh!)—and felt very suave indeed offering my friends alcoholic refreshment over our “intellectual” chatterings.

  School went on as usual in winter with nothing about it extraordinary enough for me to remember. It was something I went through with as good grace as anyone, but with no interest. It all came very easily to me, and I was thought a genius by most of my teachers, though my indifference caused persistent predictions that I would come to a bad end. And I guess that, according to the standards behind those predictions, it is true.

  Also at this time, I was caught with a friend robbing a Coke machine—of Cokes, not nickels. My father talked me back into every-one’s good graces and paid for the Cokes. That was my second visit to a police station.

  I wasn’t completely idle during my high-school days, however, I had a paper route early on, which I gave up to work as a soda-jerk in a drugstore. This was fun. I gained weight. Every Sunday morning a German lady, who I later learned taught German at the university, would come in and order the same breakfast—one of those small “individual” boxes of corn flakes (a novelty at the time) and a cup of coffee. She was exceedingly cold, rigid, and nasty, or so it seemed to me (the war was still fresh), and never left the least little tip. One morning, much to my pleasure and her horror, she opened her box of corn flakes and found a dead, desiccated mouse in it. She screamed and screamed, enraged most probably that she obviously could not blame it on us. I was delighted.

  But the job I enjoyed most during that period was as an usher in the Paramount movie theater, an old vaudeville-opera house type of theater with great rococco loges and lots of ornate columns and dusty draperies, cupids painted on the ceiling, and the like. Pete (a fellow usher) and I had great times poking around backstage in the dim light, looking into the dark dust-filled dressing rooms now used as junk rooms. Pete was at least as fond of mutual masturbation as I, so even if the movie was uninteresting (we saw each one seventeen times) there was no cause for boredom, and in any case we “helped each other out,” as Pete preferred to call it, at least once every evening. We were the envy of all our friends, as we saw all the movies free and were even paid some moderate, easily spent salary. We even got to wear rather tatty, brass-bebuttoned uniforms, which we considered very dashing.

  The climax of my ushering career came one cold Saturday night in mid-winter. Pete and I went downstairs as usual to escort the cashier from her little glass house to the entrance door, where we were met by the manager who then locked the door, and we all proceeded upstairs to the manager’s office. As we reached the office door, two masked men (black bandanas) jumped out of the darkness of the mezzanine with guns. Inevitably, one of them said, “Inside! This is a stickup!” Pete and I were thrilled to the marrow. The men instructed us to lie down on our stomachs and then tied us up, wrists to ankles, gagged us with our handkerchiefs (donating one of their own to gag the cashier), emptied the cash box and safe, ripped the phone out of the wall, and told us, “Stay where you are for ten minutes or we’ll kill you.” Then they fled down the fire escape stairs. Pete humped over to me and we untied each other, then untied the others. The manager and cashier didn’t think all this was half as much fun as Pete and I did. Pete went out to a pay phone and called the police, and we all got to tell our stories. Next day there was an article in the paper. The robbers had got away with six or eight hundred dollars. Pete and I had been envied before. Now we were positive heroes.

  11

  I

  Went

  to

  College

  I went to college with no idea that one was supposed to have chosen anything to study. I just thought you went to college as you’d gone to school. I asked a friend what he was going to study. Electrical engineering, he said. Okay, said I, I’ll study that too. It was a bust, of course. I flunked chemistry and realized that that line of work was not for me.

  My father suggested business administration, the catchall course of the time, but a semester of that proved a failure, too. I had bought an album of Gladys Swarthout singing Carmen, and decided French was a lovely sounding language so became a French/Romance languages major.

  I was the jeune premier of the Romance Languages Department, and Maggie Crow, a serious, near-sighted, intelligent Texan, was my leading lady. We toyed at a “love affair,” meaning we were inseparable, enjoyed each other’s minds and company, and indulged in chaste kisses. We drank wine and rolled our own cigarettes with a cunning little machine, and were considered “characters, but nice.”

  French (and later Italian and Spanish) came so easily to Maggie and me that we had a lot of time to devote to our eccentricities—never studying but still making straight A’s being regarded as not the least of these. We shared most of our interests. The world at large read marriage, kids, and academe into our future.

  Years later, I married Maggie, lived with her for three years, at which point we both interestingly enough decided that our own sexes were, after all, more interesting than each other’s, and we split up. That’s when I went off to Europe on a little money my mother left me when she died—but all this later, in its proper place.

  12

  As

  I

  Write

  This

  Sentence

  As I write this sentence, I am forty-eight “going on forty-nine,” as it was put in the South of my childhood. If I don’t think hard about that from time to time, I am unconscious of my age. I smoke a pack a day, drink socially, eat junk food (usually) for my one daily meal, drink fifteen to twenty cups of coffee a day, go to bed too late, and feel fine, though I catch colds with the greatest of ease. When I was in college, nineteen or twenty, I was taken to a fortune teller of high repute, an ancient black lady who lived in a little dark cabin deep in the woods. The plain wood of the large chair she sat in was burnished with lifetimes of use. Her only name, that anyone knew about, was Mother, and she smelled of wood smoke. She would receive you if you were brought by someone she knew, then would hold your face between her hands and gaze into your eyes for as long as she needed to decide whether she would tell you your future. For her services she would accept nothing but a little tobacco, though if you wanted potions, charms
, or spells, you had to pay a moderate sum, and she told you flatly that she had no confidence in such things. Her grandmother had taught her how to concoct them, so she continued the tradition. There was the hiss of silence about her. She looked at me for a long time and said quickly: “Happiness till fifty-five. Then death from your lungs. Not much money. Not much love. Enough.” Then she let go of my face and smiled. I gave her the tobacco I’d brought, thanked her, and left. When I think about what she said, it’s the last word that holds my attention. It somehow seems the core of her insights, and though I share with my namesake a horror of interpretation, the word fascinates me. If she had been a simpler woman, I’d accept it at its face value as a dismissal. She was not a simple woman, however. Looking at her face was like seeing the Earth after all life had left it, and looking into her eyes was like looking back through the tunnel of time to the beginning. She was an embodiment with a slight rearrangement of the opening theme of the Quartets. Well anyhow, I have thought much about that word, and I believe she was right. It all is, or will be, enough. I have accepted her lesson and have not asked for more.

  13

  I

  Joined

  the

  Navy

  After I had had my four years of student draft deferment, I still had no degree (saw no reason to have one) and was about to be drafted, so I joined the Navy (largely because of my youthful affection for Treasure Island). This was in 1951, I was twenty-one and my own man.

  I was sent to San Diego for boot camp where I made the highest score on the GCT they’d ever had. (It was child’s play so I’m not boasting.) This fact, combined with my being the only one in the company who’d ever been to college, put our Chief into a terrible state of awe where I was concerned. It wasn’t exactly an advantage, but it turned out to have compensations, too, since uniquely, in my boot camp experience, he at least treated me as a human being, on a rather nice and warm man-to-man basis when he finally figured out that I was not going to hold my brains over his head all the time.

  Years later, when I saw the movie The Last Time I Saw Archie, a strange little film wherein Robert Mitchum portrays a kind of con-man corporal who somehow manages to inveigle the other soldiers in his company, including the sergeant, into suspecting that he is really a general in disguise spying on the troops, and so accepts the special favors and treatment they give him with a kind of tacit understanding—a perfect Mitchum role!—I saw how I too might have elicited a particular type of response owing to my unique position. However, when the poor scared kid the Chief had chosen as Recruit Company Commander—to show me who was boss!—turned out to be unable to count 1-2-3-4 in anything faintly resembling a marchable rhythm, I was given the honor of the post.

  The great advantage of this was that I didn’t have to go to bed early, could go down to headquarters and drink coffee and talk at night while my “boys” were all asleep, and I didn’t have to carry a gun (I didn’t object to its being a gun, but to its weight). Nor was I required to stand watch, except on the last night of training.

  They gave me a funny little wooden sword to carry instead of the gun, which was a mistake, since when at our first inspection I was given a real, old-fashioned heavy iron saber, I smartly saluted the Lieutenant with it and it flew out of my hand and over his head, landing on the asphalt drill field in a mighty clatter, disrupting the inspectional silence. None of us could keep from laughing, and it all ended in a great company-wide guffaw, the Lieutenant included. There and then I had the most violent blushing spell I ever had.

  The others in my company were a bit wary of me on the whole, until one night they wouldn’t stop talking after lights out and a monitor from headquarters caught them at it and made us all pile out and go down to the drill field to march for two hours while the rest of the base slept on.

  I was furious at the idiocy of it all and decided to settle the matter quickly. I counted and yelled commands at full volume, surprising even myself at the noise I was making, and the whole quadrangle fairly shook with the echoing racket.

  Inside of ten minutes a messenger came out telling me to quiet it down as the officers on duty were trying to sleep and I was waking up the entire base. I told him to explain to the officers that without the benefit of sight (we were drilling in total darkness), sound had to be double to keep the men doing the right things, and began to bellow even louder. Five minutes later we were told to go back to bed, and I was a hero on my second or third night of command.

  14

  On

  My

  First

  Night

  as

  Recruit

  Company

  Commander

  On my first night as Recruit Company Commander, a boy called Arthur Tarr—all the boys were from the Carolinas and Louisiana, all seventeen or eighteen except for me and Edgar Royale, who were both twenty-one—or “Tarr-baby,” as we called him, came and crawled into my bunk with me and hugged me and nuzzled into my neck. He made no attempt to sneak into my bed, but did it with everyone else’s full knowledge, the lights still on, and I, with my great sangfroid as I thought, treated it as though it was the most usual thing in the world.

  There was nothing at all sexual in what Tarr-baby did, he just lay there hugging me and talking about things in general and after a half hour kissed me sweetly on the cheek and got up and went to bed. He did this every night and no one paid the least attention to it. Turned out he always did this at home with his father, and I was his new father. It was nice, really. More than nice—it was lovely.

  Then there was a kid from South Carolina called Service, who was the sex maniac of the company. The showers were in a large room with tiled walls and ceiling and about six shower heads on each wall. With two at each shower, there would be a minimum of forty-eight men showering at once. Service liked to jack off in the shower room when we were all in it washing, and would try to shoot on one of us, mid much merriment and slipping and scrambling to get out of his way.

  Finally, inevitably, my turn came to be the target, but I coolly stood my ground and when the crucial moment came I just reached out and delicately pinched his long foreskin closed (he was most extraordinarily uncircumcised) so that nothing could come out of it. The look on his face!! The room burst into laughter.

  This was considered a most witty thing to do and has, I guess, long since passed into local legend, as they never tired of telling anybody and everybody how Reeves had outwitted the mad masturbator. It served further to enhance my reputation for cleverness, and had the positive result that he never tried to spray me again—or anybody else as I remember, though he continued his showery pleasures for us all to see.

  15

  Edgar

  Royale

  Was

  a

  Very

  Good

  Sort

  Edgar Royale was a very good sort, a Cajun who’d rather drink even than screw. As I said, he was, like me, older than the rest, and more a man of the world. He’d been screwing and drinking for at least five years, so didn’t have to talk about it like the others.

  In fact, he was a very practical fellow, and—since we had no such thing as liberty to go into town during the two months of basic training—began to pay me extravagant compliments on my ass. But I had given this a try long before with a high-school friend and the pain was such that it gave me a spasm in my colon and I beshat us both, so I wasn’t about to give it another go, much as I liked Royale. Actually, I had tried it even before that disastrous time, back in seventh grade with my best friend, and the only lubrication we could lay our hands on was a jar of Mentholatum, which instantly froze our desire.

  I believe he really was a bona fide sex maniac—he thought and talked of nothing but sex—he had, indeed, been given the choice between the Navy and prison for rape—and our watch together was no exception. He beat around no bushes, but as soon as we took u
p the watch he came right out and asked me to suck him off. I declined, of course (knowing whom and whom not to suck off), and he spent the next two hours cock-in-hand, trying to persuade me, offering finally to return the favor. He’d even do me first if I didn’t trust him to carry out his end of the bargain.

  Since I was so firm in my refusal, he allowed as how he’d settle for my just jerking him off, but I said since he did that perfectly well himself—as everyone in the area well knew—he didn’t need me. Another hour passed in a hassle over this. Finally he was begging me with actual tears in his eyes just to touch his cock, which, still hard and throbbing, he kept pumping with his hand. Well, I did, and at the first touch—pow! I had a handful. I thought that would finish it, but he spent the next hour thanking me and only wiped and put his cock back when our relief arrived at 8 a.m.

  16

  We

  Loaded

  into

  Greyhound

  Buses

  and

  Headed

  East

  Our basic training finished, we loaded into Greyhound buses and headed east for “boot leave,” and then to our new assignments. There was an hour layover in Tucson for supper, and Royale and I (being from Louisiana, we fancied ourselves gourmets) decided the bus station restaurant was a step down even from Navy food and set out in search of something more suitable to our palates and high spirits. We ended up in some really awful-looking ranch-style restaurant with wagon wheels and cow skulls all over the place, but the food was great. Of course, we missed the bus.