by Amiri Baraka
The most way-out dude in this group was Yodo. His real name was something else. And people were always startling us by calling him that name, especially if they said Airman Lambert, because Yodo hadn’t had any stripes (I think he might even have had three one time) in a very long time. Yodo’s full name was Yodofus T. Syllieabla — “the high priest of Swahili, the czar of yap,” he’d add, “and Phersona Figues is my pal.” Phersona Figues was another one of the group whom Yodo had named. He named every one of us, some odd name or another. Some of us he simply turned our names around. Like he would call me Yorel Senoj. White was Mailliw Etihw. Though he always called Vincent, Vincent, and Lopa, Lopa.
Yodo was absolutely committed to jazz, African American improvised music. His whole imaginative and creative life revolved around the music. You never saw Yodo without albums in his hands. Even during work hours. (He worked in the base dispensary.) White uniform and blue “cunt” cap, long striding somewhere. Yodo usually carried a cane, or some stick he’d fastened a plastic top to with a red ball or some such inside the top. He called the stick his “all-purpose” stick and named it too. The stick’s name was Anacronobienoid. He was great for holding dialogues with the stick whenever it suited him. Like he might say, after holding a conversation with one of us about something, “Well, Anacronobienoid, what do you think of that?” Or he might say, if he disagreed with something we’d said, “Anacronobienoid disagrees.” Or something. Once, a white noncom was giving Yodo a hard time about something and Yodo, without blinking, said, “Look, Anacronobienoid is laughing at you! Anacronobienoid thinks you’re a joke.” And he would stretch his eyes and make weird gestures with the stick. The poor noncom, rather than go on with it, just got in the wind.
Yodo was one of the funniest dudes I’d ever met. By the time I met him he’d been in the service about nine years. And during that time he’d floated around going from one base to another and reenlisting simply because he didn’t know what he’d be doing once he got out. Also, I think at one point he might have thought he could make some kind of career as a medical technician which he didn’t think was possible in New Orleans where he’d come from, and so he thought the service would give him a career then he could retire relatively young and just cool it. But he’d run afoul of the service, gotten into some trouble and had his stripes removed, and this had crushed him, though he never admitted it.
Yodo’s dialogue or sometimes monologue about the music was almost nonstop. He’d talk about Bud and Bird and Brownie and Monk. When he showed up at the door he’d swoop in with albums under his arm. On payday he’d buy whatever was in the BX, which wasn’t much, and immediately come over to White’s after work to play the side. He’d also write away for sides where possible. We’d play the sides and drink whatever was available to drink. Usually rum, since that was the cheapest in Puerto Rico.
Payday was only once a month, so that took on the character of a monthly bash, a big payday party. And much liquor and whatever else got bought. There was much going into town, usually Aguadilla, which was right down the road. Some would go further away to Ponce, Mayagüez, Arecibo, and the most ambitious would go all the way to the other end of the island to San Juan, usually by guagua (bus) unless you were a noncom or officer and had a car.
The music had always been a heavy part of my life, but Yodo raised it up in another way. Cut off as we were, and as he had been for so long, the music was a connection with black life. It was also a refuge, a way out of the agonizingly boring dreary white cracker-oriented service life, especially in Puerto Rico, where one felt even more cut off from the normal channels of American and African American life. One could not shoot up to Chicago on the weekends or Rochester. Airmen piled into the Puerto Rican cities whenever they could and there were places in Puerto Rico full of adventure, beauty, all kinds of pleasure, but despite all this you knew you were away from home, on the real side. And what’s more, stuck in some intolerable madness you now had almost no understanding of how you’d got sucked into.
We talked about that all the time. How silly we were, how dumb, etc., we had been to get hooked up in this bullshit. For one reason or another. Some without other opportunity. Some looking for a way out of a dead end situation. A way into a career. Adventure and excitement. The claim of manhood. There were many reasons, but at this point, none of them were satisfactory.
There were some guys in the air force who did dig it. I have to believe they were a minority. Though there were a good number who’d signed up to do long stretches, some even to do a whole twenty, to retire. But these people were strange to us. They were among the “lames” we identified casually, squares and cornballs, gung-ho freaks and warcats who made us squirm for their simple-minded pleasure. We would always get on Yodo about the fact that he’d re-upped and had been in so long. We called him the oldest airman basic in the service.
So White’s room became a kind of haven. And once Yodo and some of the others started showing occasionally at my room, which would send Bodey and Cooper out right smart, then sometimes we’d all gather in there for our record and booze and nonstop rap sessions. That was our basic life in the air force. We’d drink rum and play music and talk — project our desires or reminisce about what we’d lost or wanted people to think we’d had. And we became a kind of defensive unit for ourselves, a kind of salon.
White, of course, was the most serious painter. And when I first met him he was painting in mainly realistic style but occasionally veering off into surrealism. Later, in New York, under the influence of the abstract expressionists he developed a kind of surreal-abstractionist style that was very much his own. It was, of course, his nationality that slowed him down in his ascent in the world of fine art.
Yodo drew too, and painted some outright surrealistic pieces that revolved around the music. Bird with a duckbill Yodo named “Klacktovedisteen.” Yodo said the duckbill made a sound “klack klack klack,” which is why Bird called his tune “Klacktovedisteen.” He had a painting called In Walked Bud, after Monk’s tune. Yodo would enter the room sometimes, saying, “In Walked Bud,” and then dance in like Thelonious Monk danced next to his piano when the rest of the band was playing.
We met a couple of other guys in the air force who began to hang with us or hang with me. One was Jim Mitchum, from New York City, who walked around even then taking photographs. He was never anyplace without at least one camera. Jim Mitchum was kind of a snob and he talked in an exaggeratedly near “proper” style, which was funny if you thought about it. He’d been in the service a while and his speech was meant to impress you that he was not just your regular airman deuce (two stripes), that he was some kind of intellectual.
Phil Peakes was another photographer with the bunch. He was white, Jewish. Apparently from some pretty heavily endowed suburb of Boston. Phil also was kind of snobbish, though he was still young enough for that not to have completely got the best of him. He was the kind of guy who needed to be an intellectual to pull it off and at the time hadn’t got it all sufficiently together, so he was a mixture of nose up (he had a large one too) and nose regular. Phil and Jim and I would have the most openly arty conversations (according to our standards at the time), though on the real side Yodo and them were actually talking about some deeper questions, even casually.
Jim and Phil always felt slightly perturbed when Yodo was on the scene. And Yodo, sensing this, would pick at them in his not-so-subtle way. Having Anacronobienoid speak haughtily to them or chide them for their lack of knowledge about African American improvised music. Phil could cop by waving his latest acquisition, Glenn Gould playing the Brandenburg Concerto or the Goldberg Variations or some such. But Phil didn’t have such a heavy knowledge about that stuff either, not really. Jim would haltingly try to scoff at what Yodo might be asking, like for instance did he, Jim, like “Glass Enclosure” or “Un Poco Loco” best? Or who was playing drums on “Ornithology”? Or was he a Blakey fan (Yodo called him by his Muslim name, Buhaina) or did he dig Max?
Still, we were an enlarged salon and the contradictions inside that entity brought out all kinds of conversations and conflicts that were usually at least funny. We thought of ourselves as the base cognoscenti, the real hipsters or the base intellectuals, depending on what part of the group would be together. We all were unified by our hatred of the air force. Phil and Jim acted as if they had been kidnapped from their intellectual pursuits and now had been forcibly surrounded by unwashed idiots. Yodo, like Strassbaugh, thought there were too many squares, lames he called them, around the joint. And though he had re-upped before crossing our paths (and him losing his stripes) he confirmed that he would be leaving for good as soon as he could.
We had nothing but contempt for the “old soldiers,” especially those who remained in the service for security, what they called “three hots and a flop.” The sergeants who would counsel us that there was nothing outside for us, no jobs, no future, that we had better stay inside where we knew we had something going.
Something going? What? The fool, Harrison, was fanatical about trying to get all of us soldiering, like his brother-in-law wanted. He’d roam the base and show up without warning. He even came into my room one morning when I should have already been down at the flight line and scared the holy shit outta me. I thought it was my man JWT and I looked up at the one star on this guy’s cap like the one-eyed Cyclops and babbled some shit trying to get outta there.
To check the VD Harrison even started passing out negative awards. To the squadron with the highest venereal disease rate on the base, he would announce this honor at the Saturday parade. (We started having weekly parades, Saturday morning, in full class A uniform!) This squadron then had the honor of marching to work every morning at 07:00, complete with the base band marching in front of them. The band members despised Harrison because before the VD marches, they had it mostly made. An occasional parade or officers’ affair. But now they had to march every morning and play a full parade on Saturdays. We hung around with some of the band members, naturally. And they were death on Harrison.
The 73rd got the VD award one month and I think it really did cause some of the borderline VD cases at least to question the cleanliness of the choche before plunging in. I don’t think it mattered too much to the wilder ones. When they got the little scratch each month they’d go charging off the base and lay down with the first puta they saw. “Hey, GI! Two dollars short time four dollars long time!”
But, God, could that shit make you feel sorry for yourself! Not even light out, line up, atten-hup!, then some jive march music and go poking through the darkness down to the flight line. If you wanted to eat those mornings (that month you had the marches) you had to rise up still earlier. Though the food was so bad I changed my eating habits. A couple Sundays they had chicken in the mess hall and the shit was bleeding. Rare chicken! Sunday evenings they had some thick wet baloney. I gave it up. Found out I could get people’s salads and desserts in exchange for that bleeding chicken. So I became a vegetarian. I was always walking around the base with nuts and raisins in my pockets. The wildest thing about the mess hall was when the maintenance dudes would come in. Some of ’em didn’t want to wash up. You could see it especially on the white dudes (at least that’s what we said) and the sight of somebody eating a slice of white bread with the black greasy fingerprints all over the bread could take your appetite. It helped reinforce the elitist tendency our salon took on.
There were a couple other members of the Ramey Air Force Base Intellectuals Salon. Sid, a guy from Syracuse, who had gone to the University of Rochester, pre-med. He later got out and became a doctor. I guess he was drawn to some of us because we came on like intellectuals and I had gone to college. Jim to CCNY. Phil to Brandeis. Though we’d all dropped out for one reason or another. Sid was the kind of dude who smoked a pipe. He had a job in base supply or some such paper-pushing gig. Jim was in a maintenance squadron, open bay barracks, with the plebeians, and this bugged the hell out of him. “They’re ignorant of everything important,” he’d say. As stiff as an unused hardcover.
Another dude I got close to was a very short shriveled-up Jewish dude named Laffowiss. We called him Laffy, though he had usually a sad and forlorn expression on his face but it didn’t stop him from constantly making jokes. His favorite entrance was bent over pretending to have a cigar in his mouth or fingers like Groucho Marx. Sometimes Laffy would stand like that or slightly modified even in the presence of a noncom or officer. He was from the Lower East Side, old style. The Lower East Side that Mike Gold talked about in Jews without Money. He was the true mensch, son of the Jewish working class. Cynical, full of a crystal-clear sardonic humor that cut through the crass bullshit of the air force with ease. But like the rest of us he was always running into trouble because of it.
Laffy was always complaining about the air force cuisine. He missed the East European specialties that characterized the Lower East Side. He was always loudly wishing for smoked herring, or pickles, or pickled tomatoes, or whitefish. He was a nonstop questioner of everything. Slumped over, either pretending to be Groucho Marx or actually being Louie Laffowiss. He hung with us easily, laughing at us and with us and at himself. And the most common quality he had was an absolute and uncompromising hatred of the service, and the people who thought they were important because they had some kind of rank or status in it. Yodo and Laffy together would make a classic TV sitcom if TV was in the real people’s hands instead of the few gimlet nitwits that run it now.
I guess the salon — I’m calling it the salon now, but actually it was a defensive unit, a sanity-maintaining collective of aspiring intellectuals — taught us all something. We had the jazz foundation mixed with concern for the graphic arts — painting and photography — a couple of academics ensconced among us for laughs, and a few of us interested in literature. Laffy was a nonstop reader, as I had developed into being. The rest of the guys liked to talk about books; Phil and Sid were always talking about what they read. Jim always carried a book along with his camera. White read what he thought was serious and Yodo read Downbeat, Metronome, and any book on the music.
The high point of our salon structure came when I took a part-time job evenings in the library. The money was negligible, but I spent quite a bit of time in there. And when this big WAF, a sister from Texas, who was the day clerk, let me know there was a part-time job at night, I leaped at it. Joyce was about six foot two and I guess had some kind of undefined crush on me, but she was a good friend and earnest sister who’d gotten in the WAF to try to see the world. And she’d been to Europe and was now in Puerto Rico suffering under the shit like the rest of us.
The librarian was a little plump middle-aged career service librarian who saw that I not only knew how to run the library in the evening quickly enough but enjoyed being around the books, so she gave me the run of the place. In a month or so she actually let me order the books and see to the stocking of the entire library. We had a hurricane in ’55 and it blew every wooden structure on Ramey down and destroyed the town of Aguadilla. The rebuilt library was modern and even had a brand-new hi-fi set in it. The music library was mostly European concert music, but we were into that too. And for me it was really a learning period about this music and I was buying Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Stravinsky, trying to fill in my knowledge, so that between our own collections and the library collection we were giving ourselves a collective education.
So that was smooth. In the evenings, a group of us from the salon would go into the library. This was after hours and we had the whole building to ourselves. And we would read and bullshit and drink and listen to music turned all the way up. It was the closest thing to paradise we ever encountered down there. Years later I met a guy who had also gone through Ramey and he said he’d seen my name in a bunch of the books there, A/2C E. L. Jones.
But in every way, like it or not, pleasant or not, the service was my graduate school or maybe it was undergraduate school. For one thing, I began to keep a journal, a diary, of what was goi
ng on. I can’t find the thing now, though I guess it’s still around somewhere. But it was the pain and frustration of this enforced isolation that began to make me scrawl my suffering, to seek some audience for my effusive self-pity. As the journal went on it became more and more a listing of the various books I was reading. Because now, so completely cut off, I read constantly, almost every waking hour I wasn’t actively soldiering or bullshitting with the fellas. I began reading the New York Times — you could only get it Sundays — and at the time 75 cents was an exorbitant fee, but I paid it. And that in itself was an adventure because I had never had much knowledge of the Times and its presumptions.
The best-seller list became a kind of bible for me. I tried to read everything on it. I ordered through either the library or a book club, one of the “serious” ones, the Readers’ Subscription, which offered Joyce and Melville and James, etc. But I was in a very conscious and very agitated search for information, and it was focused more and more directly on literature. Later, I could see even how my handwriting changed in the journal. How it took on new shape and spoke of further comprehension and consideration of questions which before I could not have formed. I wanted to become an intellectual. It seemed, for some reason, that for me it was the only thing left.