Something About a Soldier - Charles Willeford

by Charles Willeford

  I figured this line would come in handy in the Philippines, and it did. Filipino women were always delighted when I rattled it off. They laughed and clapped their hands with glee, and I am positive that some of the pieces of ass I got in P.I. were directly attributable to that lone sentence. I learned a few other words, too, like Lalaki and Babai, because they stood for Men and Women and were painted on restroom doors. But I couldn't carry on a conversation in Tagalog, and I didn't have to. The Filipinos were quite formal in their use of English. I remember a cab driver in Manila telling me once, when I asked him to drive me to the Santa Ana Cabaret from downtown, "I am sorry, sir, but I do not have sufficient petrol to convey you to your destination. "

  The cab driver was probably a lawyer. Almost every Filipino who went to the University of Manila studied law, and there were as many unemployed lawyers in Manila as unemployed stevedores.

  There were a lot of caribaos in the Philippines, and they indicated the owner's wealth. Owning a water buffalo in P.I. was about the equivalent of owning a Chevy in Los Angeles. They were supposedly docile beasts, but they didn't like white men. They could smell us, I supposed, arrd they would charge for no reason at all. I was chased once, on my way to the barrio, and I had to climb a tree to save myself. A few minutes later a little Filipino kid with a stick came along and chased him away, rescuing me. Perhaps the caribao wouldn't have harmed me, but when a big black wet water buffalo comes lunging toward you through the pampas grass it gives you a panicky feeling, and I scrambled into the tree. He also hung around beneath the tree, snorting and pawing the mud, so I stayed there until the kid came along.

  One day I spotted one and stopped, thinking that if I didn't move he wouldn't come after me. He didn't see me—or smell me—because he kept on going. But I had stopped right next to an anthill. As I stood there watching the water buffalo about two thousand ants crept up my leg (I was wearing khaki shorts), and when they were all in a tight cluster on my right calf one of them gave a signal and all two thousand ants bit me simultaneously. The pain was excruciating; it was like being branded with a red-hot iron. I screamed in agony and beat them off with my campaign hat, running at the same time. I finally got them all off, but my leg swelled to twice the size of the other one. I felt sick and vomited. Then I went back to the barracks and showered, washing the burned patch on my leg with strong, brown G.I. soap. Even so I ran a fever, and I was too sick to eat any supper that evening. I was all right by the next morning. Jesus, those big red ants, all climbing my leg so quietly I couldn't feel them, and then all of them biting I my leg at the same moment. It was eerie, and I couldn't stop thinking about it.

  I was able to write about the ants, all right. I learned that when the subject has something to do with the poet the lines come tumbling out without any trouble at all. When it comes to the self, the poet can always find the right words, and he doesn't need a thesaurus or a rhyming

  dictionary.

  DASANT

  Simultaneously, eyeless,

  The ants climb, guileless,

  With indifferent stealth,

  Then: Is it a signal or

  Is it an undiuined sign?

  Their pincers close,

  Releasing formic acid,

  Inviting mass insecticide,

  Introducing a new and mad

  Jerky dance of insane pain.

  For this sudden pain

  There should be a plan,

  A purpose, or, perhaps

  A purge of some kind,

  In order to dance, a

  A man needs this pain,

  Without his measure of poison,

  Any man will flatly refuse

  His invitation to dance.

  SEVEN

  THE EAST INDIAN WHO HAD THE CONCESSION TO RUN a shop in the small room next to the bowling alley was a Sikh. He wore a braided beard, a white turban with his white linen suit, a white shirt, and a brocaded necktie. He slept in the back of the shop behind a curtain, and ate his meals at Charlie Com's. According to Canavin, Sikhs were a warrior class in India, not shopkeepers, but this skinny Indian didn't look like he could fight off a sick Baluga. I don't know how he survived with his small exotic store. The stuff he carried in his shop was not the sort of merchandise that many white people would want, but he must have sold enough items to officers' wives to get by. He sold a few Filipino wood carvings and some wrinkled cotton dresses and blouses to those soldiers who had families in the States. But he never sold any of the expensive copper and ivory items he had on display. Incense was always burning in the shop, and it smelled like a mixture of charcoal and cheap perfume."

  He always opened his Store at six A.M., just as we came downstairs to stand on the front porch for roll call every I morning. He must have thought, in his strange Indian way, that someone would rush over after roll call to buy a hammered brass plate or a carved mahogany Moro head. I never saw anyone enter his shop before ten A.M., ever, but that's the way he operated. His margin of profit must have been very low, and he also gave jawbone. Jawbone is what soldiers call credit. The term dates back to the Indian wars in the West, when soldiers who could not pay had their names and the amount due at trading posts written on the jawbone of a buffalo. Those of us who had jawbone with him had our names on a private list, and if someone didn't pay him after a month or two, he told the first sergeant and the topkick would take the sum from the man's pay and give it to the Indian.

  The first sergeant was married to a Filipino woman, and he had six children. He had been at Clark Field for more than ten years, and he could never go back to the States because of this mixed marriage. He came from Sacramento originally, and it is against the state law for a white man to be married to a nonwhite in California. Also, the Asian Exclusion Act doesn't allow Filipino women to emigrate to the U.S.A. Asian men can emigrate, but not Asian women. So as much as I disliked the first sergeant, a dour, unhappy man, I felt pity for him. He was doomed by his marriage to stay in the Philippines until he died. There were two retired soldiers married to Filipino women, who lived like natives in Sloppy Bottom, and the first sergeant would end up like them someday, scrounging cigarettes or a glass of gin from soldiers when they came over to the barrio. If I hadn't felt sorry for the first sergeant, knowing that, my heart would have been made of stone.

  But thanks to the Indian and his little shop, I discovered Honeymoon Lotion.

  Honeymoon Lotion came in a green one-liter bottle. There was a cork in the neck that had to be removed with a corkscrew. The label was red, yellow, and green, printed with runny garish ink, and there was a drawing of a naked Filipino couple hugging and kissing between two palm trees. In the background of this crude picture a yellow moon above a green sea drifted in a red sky. The predominant ingredient in Honeymoon Lotion was coconut oil, but when you opened the bottle not only could you smell coconuts, you were also overwhelmed with what seemed like a mixture of a half dozen sweet perfumes that could only be found in a Woolworth's back in the States.

  Filipino women loved Honeymoon Lotion. When they had a bottle they would rub the oil all over their bodies after bathing (or instead of bathing), and their brown skins would glisten like highly polished coconut shells. Of course, they gave off a pungent odor of coconuts and a heady combination of cheap perfumes, and they were a little slippery to the touch, but a young man with a hard-on can get used to damned near anything. Once a man got used to the smell, it wasn't too bad; in fact, it probably covered up body odors that would have been much more unpleasant.

  Best of all, Honeymoon Lotion only cost one peso—or fifty cents—and I had established jawbone with the Indian.

  This was the beauty of being a fire truck driver. I was off every other day, and in the mornings when I was off duty, everyone else except for cooks and bakers or men who had been on guard duty the night before was working. After the men marched down to the hangars, I would charge a bottle of Honeymoon Lotion to my account and head for the barrio and the Air Corps settlement, as it was called, which wa
s a stretch of huts a couple of hundred yards away from Sloppy Bottom. There were nine, all in a single row, and this is where men with money in the squadron shacked up with their Filipino girlfriends. The men who had this kind of money were either sergeants or men with air mechanic ratings, because it was quite expensive to maintain a woman for your own personal use.

  The huts rented for fifteen pesos a month, and the average woman earned from twenty-five to thirty pesos a month in salary. In addition, there was an electricity bill and a rice allowance for each girl. Each woman had her own little house, completely free of relatives and children, The guys who shacked up didn't want any relatives around, naturally, and they saved some money by buying gin by the demijohn instead of getting it a grande at a time. The shack rats, as they were called, kept snacks around the hut, but they usually slept in the barracks from one to four P.M., during quiet hours, and then ate their supper in the mess hall before coming over to the settlement to spend the night. These guys became very fond of their women in time, and when they went back to the States they usually made an arrangement with another sergeant or rated A.M. to take over their woman and shack when they left. But this was only a short-term solution; none of these guys ever thought about what would become of these girls in another ten or fifteen years. Filipino women age quickly; a woman of thirty-five looks fifty-live, and very few of them live to become fifty-five.

  If a woman got pregnant she was kicked out immediately, and the shack rat got another girl. The man who was paying her knew that he wasn't the father, because he mostly practiced anal intercourse to avoid becoming a father. Unlike white whores in the States, Filipino women were not inventive. They didn't give blow jobs, and the only sexual position they tolerated was the missionary position. They just sprawled on their backs, completely motionless, and waited patiently for it to be over. They were all Catholics, of course, and I think this had something to do with their attitude toward sex, but they didn't object to anal intercourse because they didn't consider it a sin. Perhaps when the priests gave them instructions as little girls, nothing about anal intercourse was mentioned. The professional whores in Angeles were all strictly missionary position girls in the ordinary way, but not the women the shack rats kept in the Air Corps settlement.

  At any rate, after I walked across the plains to the Air Corps settlement, about three miles, I would be dripping sweat. The shacks were all on stilts, with bamboo ladders leading up to split-bamboo porches. I would stroll casually down the dusty street, wiping my forehead with a handkerchief. The bottle of Honeymoon Lotion, in a brown piece of wrapping paper, was in plain view. Either the girls would be sitting in the shade of their porches, or else two or three of them would be sitting on a neighbor's porch, giggling and talking. They all knew me, and finally one of them would say, "Hey, Wirrafold, come up and have some lemonada."

  I would climb the ladder and accept a glass of lemonada, an acrid and overly sweet bottle of soda pop.

  "Hasn't your old man got a demijohn of gin?" I would ask.

  "You want too much, Wirrafold. I give you lemonada, you want gin in it. If I give you beer, you want egg in it;"

  They picked up this banter from their old men, I guessed, because I never saw a Filipino crack an egg into his beer, but the women almost always brought out the gin, unless the demijohn was too low or the label was marked with a pen. I would add two ounces of gin to my lemonada and finish my drink. After we talked a little, we would go inside the shack and I would get in some anal intercourse. I was seventeen, so the entire procedure, from the time I climbed the ladder until I left, rarely took more than fifteen minutes.

  When I departed, I left the bottle of Honeymoon Lotion. These women knew that I wouldn't say anything, and they were loyal to one another. The men who were paying the freight would have beaten me to a pulp if they ever found out that I was screwing their women while they were working on the line. But no one ever found out, and the only reason the system worked for me was because these guys hated the smell of Honeymoon Lotion. They wouldn't buy it for their women, and the women loved it.

  The main problem I had was avoiding bamboo "chancres." The woven rush floor mats, or sometimes just plain split bamboo, could cause big blisters on your knees as you slid back and forth. So you had to learn how to screw without touching your knees to the floor. You got up on your toes and held your knees and legs straight. It was awkward. Sores of any kind take a long time to heal in the tropics and they have a tendency to get infected. So a man had to be very careful about scraping his knees on the floor. Also, because you had to accomplish this anal intercourse with the woman in a supine position, not in a prone position, it was not a particularly satisfying sex act. But it was better than nothing, and a bottle of Honeymoon

  Lotion was only one peso, whereas the whores in Angeles charged two. I used to wonder sometimes how these girls explained the Honeymoon Lotion on their bodies, and where they got it, when their men came home at night.

  That was their problem, not mine. But these shack rats were fools. No matter how much money a man pays a woman, he cannot expect her to remain faithful if he denies her the one thing she truly wants. And these women wanted Honeymoon Lotion. I learned a few things about women in the Philippines. Women are very simple creatures. If you want a woman, any woman, probe around until you find out the one thing in life she truly wants. Then, when you give it to her, she's yours.

  It's that simple.

  EIGHT

  CORPORAL GUTWEILER, 0UR FIRE CHIEF, HAD BEEN a bank teller in York, Pennsylvania, but when the bank he worked for failed in 1934 he couldn't find another job. He was then thirty-four, and still under the age limit to enlist in the Army. With his banking experience he should have enlisted in the Finance Corps, not in the Air Corps. The Air Corps had no valid jobs for former bank tellers. He was promoted to corporal anyway, when he arrived at Clark Field, simply because he was thirty-six. The Air Corps had this practice of promoting older men to leadership positions rather than younger men with ability. Of course, not very much leadership was needed to draft a weekly schedule for four firemen who were on a day and off a day. After I mentioned a few times that a moron could do it, Corporal Gutweiler somehow got it into his head that I was calling him, Corporal Gutweiler, a moron. I never said that, nor did I imply it. All I ever said was that a moron could be a fire chief, that was all. But he began to resent me, and then, when one of the second cooks went crazy and had to be shipped back to Letterman General Hospital in San Francisco in a straitjacket, Corporal Gutweiler told the first sergeant that I would be a good man for the cook's job, even though he would have to drive the tire truck himself until they could find a replacement.

  As a consequence, the first sergeant sent me to the mess sergeant, SergeantTravig1iante, for an interview. Sergeant Travigliante was a greasy-haired Italian in his early forties, with a massive paunch that overlapped his belt for fully six inches or more. He had been a cook and baker for at least Hfteen years before he became a mess sergeant, and he fed us very well. There was little he didn't know about food and food service, or how to handle cooks. The first thing he did, for example, when he came to Clark Field was to build a cabinet and lock up the vanilla and lemon extract so the cooks couldn't drink it.

  When I reported to Sergeant Travigliante at ten A.M., he was sitting at his private table in the mess hall having a late breakfast. He was eating a butterflied tenderloin, three fried eggs, and a side dish of hash browns well laced with fried onions. As I sat across from him, it occurred to me that if I became a cook I could fix breakfasts like this for myself. That morning we had had cheese omelets, but a cheese omelet is not as satisfying as a fried steak with fried eggs.

  Sergeant Travigliante outlined the second cook's duties for me, explaining that I would be on one day and then off two. On my second day off I would sometimes have to come in that night and help Potter, the first cook, bake bread for the next day, but otherwise the schedule called for one day on and two days off.

  "I don'
t know how to bake bread," I said.

  "That can be learned. Can you read and write?"

  "I read and write very well." .

  "Then you'll have no problems. We have recipes for everything I put on the menu."

  There were huge wood-burning stoves in the kitchen. The Filipino K.P.'s kept the woodbox filled, but keeping the stoves going was the responsibility of the second cook. I would have to get to the kitchen at four A.M. It would be at least seven at night before I would be finished, but because the day was such a long one, cooks then got two days of rest.

  "Okay," I said, "I'll try it."

  "When do you want to start?" `

  "I'd like my two days off first, so I can get used to the new schedule." .

  He looked at me a little funny then. "Second cook carries a specialist four rating, which means an extra thirty pesos a month. Did you know that?"

  "No, I didn't."

  "Well, you don't sound like you're too eager to be a cook, wanting your two days off first, so you won't get the promotion until you've proved to my satisfaction that you're very enthusiastic about becoming a second cook."

  "Oh, I'm eager enough," I said, "but I need a little time to prepare myself mentally to change over from being a fireman to a cook. That's all."

  I didn't worry too much about the work because I would be second cook to Potter, and all I would have to do is what he told me. On my two days off I spent the mornings in the Air Corps settlement, disposing of two bottles of Honeymoon Lotion.

  I was awakened by the charge of quarters at four the next morning.

  When I got to the kitchen, wearing my new stiffly starched white pants and a clean white undershirt, the stoves were cold, and Potter, who had baked the bread the night before, was stretched out on the concrete floor behind the steam table, dead drunk, passed out, and groaning. Every now and then he would mutter something and kick out viciously in his sleep with his left leg, but I couldn't arouse him. I dragged his body over by the storeroom to get it out of the way and took a look at the menu. I knew that breakfast would be up to me.