Boat

by Michael Baughman

  We turned him down politely, and during most of the three-hour ride Conrad talked about Southern writers, mostly Thomas Wolfe and William Faulkner. He claimed to have been named after Joseph Conrad, and he spoke at length about Conrad’s work, mostly Heart of Darkness. I’d read some of what he talked about and agreed—or pretended to agree—with everything he said.

  We arrived in Gulfport late at night, and after Conrad had given us a fifty-dollar bill and said good-night and entered his hotel, we walked the empty streets, looking for a place to sleep. We had spent nights in bus stations, in farmers’ fields, under bridges, on park benches, in empty railroad cars, and slumped over cups of coffee in all-night diners, so we weren’t particular.

  While we were still walking, still searching, I saw the reflection of a police car approaching slowly from behind us in a plate-glass window.

  The cruiser stopped and two car doors slammed, not quite simultaneously.

  We were still walking when the voice, in what had become a dreaded Southern accent, told us to stop where we were.

  I stopped and turned around and there were two more hillbillies, this pair in tight tan uniforms, striding toward us with their nightsticks out.

  As they came near, Doug muttered a vulgar insult, suggesting that both of them go do something anatomically impossible. They stopped an arm’s length away. The cop standing in front of Doug was smiling thinly now. His teeth showed tobacco stains, his round face was white as dough, and his big ears stuck out from under his cap. With surprising speed, with a loud grunt, with the smile still on his face, he swung his nightstick sideways as hard as he could, like a man swinging a baseball bat, straight into Doug’s stomach.

  He had no way of knowing that he might just as well have hit a tree trunk. When the nightstick landed with a thwack, Doug didn’t budge an inch. I don’t think he blinked. Instead, he smiled back at the cop, who looked bewildered for a split second, and then looked afraid for another fraction, and then, after Doug hit him in the middle of the forehead with a straight left, he sailed backwards a yard or more with his feet off the ground. His ass thudded against the sidewalk first, and then his head, thrown back by his momentum, smacked the concrete. The nightstick clattered into the street and the cop lay there with his head tilted sideways, arms at his sides, like a man taking a peaceful nap.

  By the time the first one had landed Doug had nailed his partner with a vicious right cross. The second cop was out before he hit the sidewalk. He went limp in the air, landed on his back and rolled onto the street, then lay on his side in the headlight glare a few feet in front of their car.

  The motor was still purring in the quiet night, but we didn’t steal the car. Doug turned off the ignition and took the keys and tossed them down another sewer.

  We hurried out of the neighborhood and soon found a gas station. The attendant told us how to find the Greyhound station, only blocks away.

  We boarded the first departing bus, which was heading east into Alabama, back the way we’d come.

  A drunk on the bus gave us drinks from his bottle of bourbon.

  Early the next morning we hitchhiked west again, but this time took a route through Hattiesburg instead of Gulfport on our way to Texas.

  Doug and I spent three days with my aunt and uncle. For the first time in weeks we slept between clean sheets and ate well-prepared food at a table. Aunt Lil and Uncle Bob were very decent people. They had two adopted children, a boy and a girl, who were just young enough to imagine Doug and I as visiting heroes.

  Uncle Bob made arrangements for us to deliver a used Buick from a Dallas dealer to a car lot in Denver.

  We took turns at the wheel and drove through Texas, Oklahoma, and eastern Colorado without a break.

  During a bleak stretch of eastern Colorado country we passed a tall old cowboy alongside the road who was hanging a dead coyote on a barbed-wire fence. He strung the animal up at the end of a line of at least ten of the dead coyotes, and he waved, with a happy smile, as we sped by.

  Back in Denver Doug reunited with Carol.

  Once again she connected us with the chairman of the art department at her college, who again hired us to pose in jockstraps for figure-drawing classes.

  When we had enough money saved we hitchhiked to San Francisco.

  On our way we stopped at the Cal Neva Resort on the California-Nevada border, where Doug won several hundred dollars betting black and red and odd and even at roulette. That same night, in the casino cocktail lounge, we met two lovely blonde sisters from Sweden.

  We stayed with them for several days in two rented rooms at the lodge.

  When our money ran out, the sisters vanished.

  We saw them just before we left, in the cocktail lounge with two old men.

  Doug’s parents wired him money to return to Honolulu. We talked at the San Francisco airport before he boarded his flight. He seemed ill at ease, as if under intense emotional strain. I saw in him what Boat said he saw there—a deep pain, a frustration that either erupted in physical violence or simmered in self-contained rage.

  Doug claimed he was glad to be heading home, that he’d wanted to see the mainland and now he’d seen enough. More than enough. Much more than enough. Back home working on Waikiki Beach would be a possibility for him, or working in one of his parents’ stores. If he worked at a store he could make decent money and hit the beach every evening and all day on weekends. He could surf and spear, and there were always new wahines at the Royal and the other hotels. There were more hotels, more wahines all the time.

  We found an airport bar and ordered straight shots of Jack Daniel’s. Doug’s mood improved some when the bartender set the drinks in front of us.

  Half an hour later he made his way toward the gate to the plane among a long line of passengers. I watched until he disappeared, and he never looked back, and that was the last time I ever saw him.

  The King’s Pastrami

  In San Francisco I hung out with an old Punahou friend, John O’Connor, who later became a successful actor under another name, and with Frank, a college friend, a national champion 191-pound wrestler. O’Connor was working for the phone company, and Frank was training at the Olympic Club in preparation for international competition and eventually the Rome Olympics.

  I was also introduced to the respectable San Francisco social scene by my father, who took me to cocktail lounges like Paoli’s, the Iron Horse, and the Domino Club, which featured nude paintings, and to nightclubs like the Purple Onion and the hungry i. He was kind to include me, but I ended up spending most of my free time with John and Frank in North Beach, which was Beatnik headquarters, where Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” and Jack Kerouac’s On the Road had become the beginning and end of relevant life and literature. Could these people have the answers I needed?

  The Co-Existence Bagel Shop was the place to go on Grant Avenue, north of Broadway. Every night, the Bagel Shop was mobbed. Beer and wine were sloshed around while pale young men sat huddled over chessboards. Smoke hung in clouds and there was loud, strident conversation, spiced, of course, with many “I dig its” and “cools.” The sound of jazz throbbed through the room.

  One night Frank and I had a booth near the back of the place—such a small booth that the two of us had trouble squeezing in. We ordered a pitcher of beer and pastrami sandwiches on rye, and while we waited we enjoyed the local color.

  As usual, Frank attracted considerable attention. He was a very clean-cut young man, neatly dressed and studious-looking, with a crew cut and thick glasses. The dubious stares, raised eyebrows, and baleful looks he attracted in the Co-Existence Bagel Shop never offended him. By temperament he was remarkably peaceful, probably because his aggressions were worked out on the wrestling mat. Off the wrestling mat, I doubt if he had ever started a serious argument, much less a fight, in his life. In many ways he reminded me of Boat.

  Our beer and sandwiches arrived. As I was pouring our mugs full, Frank raised his sandwich toward his mouth, but it never got
there. A huge, hairy hand grabbed it away. We both looked up and there he was—the King, 260 pounds of him, I judged. I’d heard of the man and seen him around, and knew that everybody called him the King. Slowly, half grinning at us, he tore off at least half the sandwich in a single bite. I slowly set the beer pitcher down, keeping my grip on the handle.

  The King towered over us. Bearded and mustached, he wore baggy pants, a soiled sweatshirt, and a black beret. Staring at us, he slowly chewed.

  Frank tried hard to be nice. He politely suggested that the King buy him another sandwich. The King refused, saying, with his mouth still full, that he didn’t dig buying sandwiches for squares. Frank told him that if he didn’t buy another sandwich something was going to happen that he would dig a lot less. The King laughed and kept chewing. Frank asked him, still politely, to step outside.

  The King sauntered out first, swallowing the last bite of the pastrami sandwich, and as he passed through the front door he suddenly had a friend of his own in tow, a pale, stocky little man with a beard like a goat’s, also wearing a beret.

  The fight took place in a blind alley farther up Grant Avenue, in as perfect a setting as anyone in Hollywood has ever devised. Graffiti showed on the dirty brick walls. Cans, broken bottles, and soggy newspaper pages lay strewn about, and the dim light from the street shone dully off a line of overflowing garbage cans.

  Frank handed me his glasses. I stood against one wall of the alley, with the King’s friend against the opposite wall.

  The King saw himself as a boxer. He struck a pose from an old John L. Sullivan poster.

  Frank had told me more than once that he liked to box and was good at it, and had a powerful punch, so I wasn’t surprised when he cooperated. Right hand held low, left out front, giving away six inches and seventy pounds, he moved in.

  The King flicked an awkward left jab and missed with a wild right. Then there was a sharp crack, and the King’s head snapped back and out from under the beret, which floated to the pavement like a little black parachute. The King had dropped to a sitting position. After two or three seconds he blinked and shook his head, and had the presence of mind to reach for his beret and put it back on before he got up.

  It was like the fight I had seen on Waikiki Beach between Willie and the sailor. The King got up five or six more times, and Frank kept knocking him down. After the third knockdown, the King forgot his beret. As he lay in the alley amongst the cans and bottles after the last knockdown, his friend offered him some of the worst advice ever given to anybody: that he should quit boxing and wrestle.

  While the boxing had reminded me of Willy and the sailor, the wrestling was short-lived and harder to follow—something like a Popeye cartoon, when the hero, after a can of spinach, tosses Bluto around like a pinball. The King climbed to his feet and charged, and I did see the takedown—a single leg takedown—but after that everything became a blur. Whirled in one direction and spun the opposite way, the King bounced off one brick wall and then the other.

  Finally he lay on his side, supported by an elbow, dazed and panting.

  Frank helped him up, then guided him down the street, back to the Co-Existence Bagel Shop.

  Inside we were lucky to find a vacant booth, and Frank ordered pastrami sandwiches all around and two pitchers of beer. When they came, he paid for everything.

  It had ended as Boat had suggested fights should end. Frank had taken understandable offense at something, had proved his point quickly and efficiently, and then it was over.

  That was my last visit to North Beach. The beatniks had no answers for me. I had nothing against them except that they seemed to have become, as the hippies would a few years later, the antiestablishment establishment.

  Love and Death

  Not long after Frank’s fight with the King, I was inducted in San Francisco and sent south to Fort Ord for the standard eight weeks of basic infantry training.

  The draftees in my company were a very diverse group. Among them was a private named Ernie Zampese, a former USC tailback who went on to coach in the NFL, the only person I’ve ever known who could sleep soundly standing up. Then there was Private Blackmore, who had grown up on a northern California farm and often spoke without inhibition about the joys of sex with barnyard animals. The best way to make it work, he explained, was to secure the chosen creature’s hind legs in a knee-high rubber boot.

  After Fort Ord I was shipped to Fort Sill, Oklahoma, for advanced artillery training. In Lawton, the nearest town, there were seemingly limitless supplies of expensive bootleg whiskey and cheap whores. The sergeant of my platoon, a gross fat man named Sweeny, happened to come from Gulfport, Mississippi. During our training days, when he wasn’t explaining 105 Howitzers, he railed against Yankees, niggers, and Jews.

  I was issued a top-secret security clearance at Fort Sill, and then sent by train to Fort Dix, New Jersey, to attend Special Weapons School. Special weapons meant atomic weapons, and every day for a week, under the instructions of a West Point captain, I assembled atomic bombs, piece by piece, with a team of fellow privates.

  At the end of the week the six of us on the team were given orders for different towns in Germany.

  In early September we flew to Frankfurt, with stops in Newfoundland and Ireland.

  I arrived in Bamberg by train on a sunny afternoon.

  Technically I was assigned to a 280-millimeter artillery battalion. The 280, also known as the atomic cannon, was capable of firing nuclear rounds. Luckily, my service records contained the fact that I’d once been named to an AAU all-star basketball team. I ended up playing on an army team that competed throughout Germany and occasionally in other countries.

  During the off-season I recorded testimony at court-martials that tried cases ranging from sleeping on guard duty to rape. My boss, the only man I had to answer to besides the basketball coach, was a highly decorated sergeant major named Hester, known among soldiers as “the Bull.” I liked the Bull, and many of the other NCOs stationed in Bamberg. These were tough men who had fought long and hard in World War II and lived through it, and they deserved respect.

  The town of Bamberg, in northern Bavaria, was one thousand years old. I enjoyed walking the narrow cobblestone streets between the ancient buildings. I enjoyed the gasthauses that served what was reputed to be the best beer on earth. And I enjoyed the beautiful girls. In Hawaii they had been wahines, and here they became frauleins.

  There were any number of GI hangouts in Bamberg, cheap joints with high prices, places I learned to avoid after my first two or three nights in town.

  A basketball teammate took me with him to a place called the International Club, near Hain Park on the outskirts of town. The club, in a stately three-story mansion, had been established for international students by Countess Nina von Stauffenberg, widow of Claus von Stauffenberg, the colonel who had been executed after his failed attempt to assassinate Hitler.

  The club offered chess, a library, good food, beer and wine, and many lovely frauleins. It immediately became my favorite hangout, and that was where, on a Sunday night, I first saw Hilde. Sitting alone at a table in the club basement, which served as a combination restaurant, nightclub, and dance floor, I was eating a bowl of goulash soup and drinking a glass of Franken wine. Jukebox music played, and four or five couples were dancing at the middle of the floor.

  At first sight she made me remember a Richard Wilbur poem that describes a young woman descending a flight of stairs in Rome as “perfectly beautiful, perfectly ignorant of it.” That was it exactly. With no discernible makeup, without an elaborate hairstyle, wearing a simple green dress, she seemed not to know or care how utterly lovely she was.

  “We danced. We talked. Her English was excellent. Her smile was radiant. She had a sense of humor, rare in a young and beautiful woman.

  Most people never experience anything like what happened to Hilde and me that night, so most people choose to believe the possibility doesn’t exist. Some people, academics I’ve known promin
ent among them, deride any trace of romantic love they come across in literature, and are likely to ridicule anyone who claims to have experienced it in life.

  This, though, is the simple truth: everything changed for me. It was something like my first boyhood look at Waikiki Beach, but much more than that. I knew, instantly, that I wanted to marry Hilde. No. I knew I would marry her.

  We danced and talked for an hour or more, and we knew we loved each other.

  Hilde had her family car, and we parked in a lonely place for another hour or more.

  For the first time in my life I knew I could be truly happy.

  Near-miracles happen.

  Long-distance phone calls from Europe were always difficult. In the days after I met Hilde I tried and failed several times to connect with Boat and tell him he’d been right.

  Before I could get through to him our basketball team was sent to Grafenwoehr for a game. Graf, as GIs called it, was a forlorn artillery training area close to the Czechoslovakian border.

  Early on the morning of the game, which was scheduled for eight that night, I was sitting in a wooden shed drinking coffee with Johnny, the company clerk of an armored battalion bivouacked in a huge tent that had been pitched not far away on a grassy meadow.

  Johnny had been through artillery training with me at Fort Sill. We remembered Sergeant Sweeny, and we complained and joked about the army, and agreed we were lucky to be in Europe instead of Oklahoma. Through a clean glass window we could see the armored battalion bivouac tent just beyond a nearby stand of scrubby pines. The sky was cloudy with rain in the air.

  While we talked, artillery shells exploded in the distance. Both 105 howitzers and eight-inch guns were conducting their exercises, firing rounds at an impact area well short of our position.