Tales of the Out & the Gone

by Imamu Amiri Baraka

  The park? The running, really. I miss that. Doesn’t time fly? No, I don’t run too much—I switched from Wake-wake awhile ago. Started running from my house, about four long blocks, to get the newspapers, then I even stopped that. I dunno. The guy we elected, Kent Winston. Yeh, you know him? Yeh, now you got it. Well, he never came out to the park too much until after he got elected. Then he’d come out often. One time, I remember seeing him running before the election and I zoomed past him, not maliciously, but he was running much slower than my pace. He said something to me as I passed, like “cross country.” He’d grown up in Noah too, and he knew why I could set such a hot pace. It was funny.

  But a couple of months after the election, I’m running around the lake. I’m still not up to the dead man’s hills, but I hear a horn honking like it’s right out on the road. And guess what, there’s Winston, running the opposite way. I mean, he’s running so the hills are reversed, running downhill most of it instead of that killer uphill climb the hills represent if you’re running those three miles the regular way.

  Winton’s running the wrong way, but it’s a little different. Just behind him was this big black Lincoln and inside are two cops—two plainclothes Negroes, Winston’s bodyguards. They’re all “jogging”—Winston, the two cops, and the Lincoln. I had to step off the side of the path and run in place while Winston waved and passed. I think I ran in place for a few seconds, think I just stopped. Flat out.

  But I don’t think that’s why I stopped going to Wake-wake to run. Maybe, but I don’t think so. What stopped me from running there, early in the morning by myself, was when those two Muslim brothers got killed, supposedly as payback for knocking off this minister of the Muslim temple in Noah. There were always rumors about that temple. It was even said that Malcolm X’s killers had come out of there. And there had also always been rumors about the various “renegade” Muslims who sold drugs and ran the numbers, who’d turn the money in at the Noah temple.

  Later, there’d been some breakaway movement. I think it was called Brothers of the New Age. Some folks said it all had to do with the pushers and gamblers not wanting to turn the money over anymore, so that a sharp conflict developed inside the temple. One afternoon, somebody’d blown the Imam of the Noah temple to kingdom come. He was shot up close, as he’d come out of his house on the way to the temple.

  Of course, the whole Muslim community was in an uproar and there were Muslim brothers supposedly searching Noah furiously for the assassins. Apparently they found them too, or at least some dudes who’d fit the description. Early one morning, the two guys’ heads were found by the lake, just off the running path. Yeh, the heads of the twin brothers were left there, blood still drying at the severed necks, right down by the lake. I think that’s what killed it for me. I never went jogging there again.

  August 15–September 5, 1982

  Correction Facility, New York City

  MONDONGO

  You never go anywhere, Ray. Believe me, I know where you go. And you don’t go anywhere. Not around here, I mean, where everybody can see.” Irv Laffawiss pushed his “cunt cap” back on his head so he looked like the posters of the sloppy airmen in the slides shown at Character Guidance lessons on Saturdays. He should have had a red X painted across him to resemble the classic well-advertised “Sad Sack” of U.S. military tradition. And it was the U.S. military, the Air Force, in which he and his good friend, Ray Johns, were now entrapped. Johns was reading, it looked like. But he had on dark glasses and the lights in the room were low, so how he was accomplishing this reading was vague. But Laffy knew from repeated encounters not to get involved in any conversation with Ray about how it was he could read in the near-dark with dark sunglasses.

  To the inquiry about “not going anywhere,” Ray Johns merely peeped up over the book and stared at Laffy, “Hey, man. Why I got to go off the base? I ain’t lost nothin’ out there.”

  “You’re too weird, Johns.” Laffawiss sounded mildly annoyed. “Don’t you believe in R&R?”

  Ray Johns turned over on the bed where he was half-sprawled. He knew Laffy was going on with the conversation, so he wanted to see how he looked when he said this shit. “R&R? Shit, man. I wanna go home. Naw, I wanna go to fuckin Greenwich Village. R&R?”

  “Don’t you believe in girls, then?” Laffy was pressing it. He was leaning now against one of the walls, smoking a bent cigarette and flicking the ashes like Groucho Marx. Groucho was Laffy’s alter ego. He enraged the non-coms and officers by coming into their office or his own room when there might be an inspection or something, bent at the waist, holding his cigarette like Groucho’s cigar and striding in crazy-looking, rolling his eyes like a roulette wheel.

  “Yeh, Laffawiss, I believe in girls. Why, you got any?”

  Laffy pointed over his shoulder and imitated Groucho: “They went that-a-way!” Pointing in the general direction of the town—in this case, Aguadilla, a nasty little dot at the tip of Puerto Rico’s shore. Laffawiss and Johns, together with 5,000 other airmen, were stationed just outside Aguadilla at the SAC base, Ramey. They, along with the others, commanded by a thirty-eight-year-old nutty general who wanted to clean up venereal disease, were busy with the task of keeping the free world free and intimidating any sons-of-bitches who wanted to maybe make wise remarks, or rape frecklefaced girls, or live too close, or talk in funny languages, or smell or look funny, or communize the country—any of that stuff. They were doing this by means of the B-36 bomber. Laffawiss was a radio operator without a crew, and Johns a weather- gunner in the worst crew on the base.

  Every weekend and maybe more, Laffawiss would “roar into town,” as the airmen described, get drunk, pay for some pussy, then stagger back to the base with a head as big as a propeller. Johns and Laffawiss were pretty good friends, Johns from a large town in Jersey close to Manhattan and Laffawiss from the Lower East Side. Not the Lower East Side of boutiques and poetry readings, but the old East Side of Mike Gold’s heroes and heroines of herrings, kosher pickles, pushcarts, and poverty.

  Johns was a college boy, a dropout from a black school trying to find himself. Mostly by reading everything that would sit still long enough to be read, including gruesome adventures like reading the whole of the Times best-seller list in a month. The complete works of Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, &c. Hours and hours of guard duty pulled by Johns had turned reading from an informative pastime to a physical and psychological addiction. He got so he could read anything—no, not could, had to. The sight of words on paper inflamed him, turned him on in a way nothing else could. Sometimes when he slept uneasily under the Puerto Rican moon, he dreamed of reading, pages flowing effortlessly through his sleep.

  His barracks room, which he shared with a giant country boy from Long Island (now, thank god, on leave), had, despite the pressures of would-be military standard operating procedures, begun to take on the look of a second-hand bookstore.

  Every week, Johns had to hear something from one of the non-coms about the room and its unmilitary look. You were only supposed to have “pictures of loved ones,” and as many books as the dresser top would allow to sit “in a military manner.” But then he had to hear about the weak little fuzz he had sprouting out the edge of his chin, which the “war cats” insisted was a beard. Or the “boot salute,” which many of the black troops threw in lieu of the war one, viz, this was where the head was bent down to meet the reluctant right hand, producing a “blood salute.” Especially them Southern white officers didn’t dig this. Johns once had to stand and salute about forty times in the hot sun, “until he got it right.” And he did, “by god,” as the game started to tire him and the hot sun had got all in the young blond lieutenant’s uniform, wetting him to the skin.

  Between Laffawiss, the scrawny humpbacked Groucho “Jew bastard,” as some of the quainter Southern boys called him, and Johns, “a fuckin nigger snob,” many incorrect and backward dudes did they light up with their wild antics. Both were young men sufficiently turned arou
nd by their younger lives and what they were learning now in “this war shit” (although it was peacetime, between the Korean and Vietnam Wars). Both had the beginning of the stiff self-identification of themselves as intellectuals, whatever that meant to them. And it didn’t mean too much, except both liked to read, both were mostly quiet and inner-directed, and they both hated most of the assholes that passed for non-coms and officers in the error farce, plus a whole lot of them “farmer motherfuck-ers” who would batter at their sanity with endless hours of “In the Jailhouse Now,” which was the top country-and-western hit of the period. Either that or Patti Page singing, “We’ll Be Together Again.”

  They were dragged away from civilian life by their own confusion, Johns being tossed out of school for making his studies secondary to his social education, and Laffawiss because he didn’t realize (either) that school did have some merit—even though you couldn’t learn a hell of a lot around those people. But shit, Laffy found out he was learning a hell of a lot less around Curtis LeMay’s (SAC C.O.) relatives and friends.

  Both hung around a large group of full, semi, and closeted intellectuals, all now lamenting their being trapped and martyred in the Air Force, when, hell, all had joined voluntarily. They figured they were escaping the “malaise” of post-adolescence, but now they were in the real fucking malaise with not much white bread either.

  A few nights a week, Johns worked as the evening librarian; and the old career special-services librarian, seeing Ray was a book nut, let him have run of the place, including being in charge of ordering books and records. So a few nights a week, Ray, Laffy, and the rest of the crowd would ease into the library, draw the blinds, break out the cheap rum and vodka, and play music most of the night—in both luxury and captivity at the same time.

  But Johns almost never left the base. Only sometimes by himself would he catch the gua gua and end up in San Juan, preferably viejo San Juan, to wander around the wild and pretty streets, lamenting his fate. And Laffawiss, though not altogether gregarious, still occasionally wanted his on-base walking buddy to dare the wilds of the island with him. Shit, at least Aguadilla.

  But Ray, most times, just rolled over and flipped a page, or maybe he’d just turn up the box and check what Beethoven or Bird might have to say. Or maybe just wonder what Monk was thinking behind those weird blue glasses.

  “Johns, are you masturbating?” Laffy could get rude like that. Matter of fact, that was his standard tone.

  “Why, you bottling jerk-off come?” Neither laughed, though they were amused.

  “Naw, I just wanna find out how come you don’t have a go into town and release your tension.” Laffy made a lurid leer with the Groucho face on, swiveling his hips.

  “Why, you think my tension needs to be released? Shit, my tension can do anything it fuckin want to. Can’t you, tension?” He looked down at his fly, but there was no immediate answer.

  Laffy snickered at this, picking up a water glass as if it was a microscope. “Aha, now we are entering the area of microbiology,” he said, as he squinted in the same area Ray Johns made believe he was talking to. A perfect comedy team, though a trifle avant garde and abstruse for some of their buddies and anti-buddies.

  * * *

  Now they stalked the streets of Aguadilla, in which thousands of restless, sex-starved, largely ignorant troops were released during the evening. And there were always incidents, always unpleasantness (which included drunkenness, fighting, and sometimes cutting and shooting). And, of course, most of the people of Aguadilla just tried the best they could to do the shit they had to do to survive. But imagine being just outside the gate, and being invaded each evening by about 5,000 screaming crazed American airmen. Jeez, what about releasing them, this evening, into Darien? What about Scarsdale or Palo Alto or Basking Ridge? Yeh, yeh. I’d like to film that, boy. Or hire somebody to film that shit. Like a military-suburban Animal House, if you catch my sniff.

  This Friday evening it was already a little late, as it had taken Laffy an hour or so to convince Ray Johns to come on in and play cowboy. Assorted airmen of all shapes, sizes, and colors were staggering, dragging, heaving, and spinning past them, the number increasing each half-hour or so as that Friday wound its way out. Most of the troops were in little groups with their buddies, some stumbled alone, and the lucky ones were already with some local women.

  Laffawiss swiveled his head around on his neck, leering his Groucho leer. “That’s one, Johns. That’s one. A woman, ya see?”

  “Yeh, I see. Very interesting.”

  “There’s another one. You see, they got different features and all.”

  “Very interesting. So what happens now? My tension ain’t been released. Not a bit. Is this all you have to do, twist your head off at the neck? Somehow, I thought it was going to be more complicated than this.”

  “Wow, first you don’t even wanna leave the base and stop your meat-pulling, now you wanna turn into the original flesh fiend.”

  “Yeh, yeh.” Johns whooped a little weakly, in celebration of some of those “farmer motherfuckers” who could be heard, even now, up and down the street whooping cowboy and confederate war cries.

  Walking in the direction the way they were headed brought them face to face with The American, the first of the near-base bars for mainly white soldiers. Harry Truman had already desegregated the Armed Forces alright, but just as in the rest of American life, the separation still existed. So there were white bars and colored bars and a few fairly mixed. But most, even there in Puerto Rico, were either one or the other.

  The American was notorious, anyway. Black and white soldiers had frequently locked asses inside its doors. And a few times, the place had been closed with Off-Limits signs put up. Laffy got to the door first and pushed it open, peering in.

  “Why you come to this joint, Laffawiss? You gotta meet some old Klan buddies in there? Jeez, Laffy, let’s not get into no abstract shit.”

  Laffawiss looked over his shoulder. “Hey, we’re stalking our prey, man. I thought you were trying to release your tension.”

  “In The American? Ain’t nothing in there but farmhouse motherfuckers. And they got all them bitches in there sick as them.” Johns meant that the more backward of the white soldiers would try as quickly as possible to infect the local women with their own anti-black views. First, because they themselves had been long-shaped by the sickness of racism, but also, more practically, they were trying to protect their choice pieces of chocha from getting “pulled” by the aggressive black troops. Hence, fights in and around The American and a lot of other places, in this “neutral zone” outside the U.S. mainland, where the “bitch pulling” competition was conducted by a slightly different set of rules.

  “I ain’t goin in that lousy joint.” Johns stepped back from the doorway as two obvious “farmer cats” stumbled by, tossing him a death look. They pushed past Laffawiss, who was still peeping in the door, seeing what he could see and talking to Ray over his shoulder.

  “Hey, they’re all dogs in here anyway.” Then, in response to being slightly shoved by the drunken duo, Laffy added, “Creeps, you’ll probably die with clap of the mouth.”

  “Laffawiss, let’s go. I ain’t in no goddamn boxing mood, man. You don’t want to release tension—you want to build the shit up.” Johns turned now as if he was going to leave Laffawiss in front of the bar.

  “Hey, Ray—shit! Shit, Ray. Look who’s in this joint.” The sight of whoever was cracking Laffy up. “Hey, look. Come on, it’ll do you good. Come on, look!”

  Reluctantly, Johns crept up toward the pushed-open bar door and peered in. There were two white airmen in uniform, or mostly in uniform, their “cunt caps” or other class-A visorless caps sliding all the way to the back of their heads. Or else there were those in what was supposed to be “civilian clothes,” which included “Hawaiian”-inspired obscenities as shirts, loud trousers, jeans, some pants high-styled with contrasting “pistol pockets” and seams. Bottles, mostly beer, being rais
ed. Loud profane talking and shouting, confederate whoops, and spaced appropriately throughout the joint, on the stools and at the tables, different sizes, shapes, and colors of Puerto Rican women—some prostitutes, some not. The soldiers in the bar didn’t care too much one way or the other, as long as they got over. (If they could still get it up after falling down and throwing up on each other.)

  But Laffawiss was pointing now, almost frantically, at a fat, stoop-shouldered, red-faced white Airman Second with his “cunt cap” cocked way over on the side of his head. But not far over enough to hide the screaming red knife scar dug into a white valley down his cheek. Laffawiss could not contain himself. He was laughing out loud and jiggling from one foot to the other.

  “What?” Ray Johns stared into the now fully lit bar. “Oh, it’s that goddamn farmer that Grego cut. Wowee, first time I seen that sucker since Jack the Ripper got his ass.”

  Grego was a Mexican-American airman who hung with Laffy and Ray and the others in their little lightweight intellectual gang. Grego was blond and you couldn’t tell he was Chicano until he opened his mouth. Or unless you spotted the tiny cross tattooed between his thumb and forefinger, which marked him pachuco and a member of one of the hardass Chicano youth gangs that littered the Southwest and L.A.

  The fat farmer had made the mistake of saying something about “spics,” and lickity-split, before you knew it, light caught for an instant in a blue blade passing through the air on the way to slash the man’s puss, and unless he got plastic surgery, it remains so slashed until this moment.