Prime Green : Remembering the Sixties

by Robert Stone

  Later that night as the sun dipped to the tip of the nearest ice- bergs, the winds picked up, and by 0600 they were near the top of the Beaufort scale. The penguins stayed with us, sharing passages between the floes, porpoising on as though they had a chosen desti- nation in their collective birdy mind. We had slowed to let the sonar read us through the icebergs. The wind was on our starboard quar- ter, and the ship had a chronic port list. When I went below to crash, taking to my rack, which was the highest of a four-high tier, I lay back to read with my pocket flashlight. I had Ulysses out of the Norfolk, Virginia, public library and plenty of time to be patient with it. When we’d start sliding to port, I’d stay with Leopold Bloom as long as I could tough it out, waiting for the big lumbering ship to arrest its roll and come back to starboard. In rough weather, it seemed as though it would never make it back, that we were about to slide down through a crushing, sodden world and down the whole deep six. At such times I would set my book aside and turn off my light and ponder fortune. An old master-at-arms I knew had advice for sinking sailors: “Be grateful you’re not burning.” A little gratitude and a glance at the bright side might ease one’s passage, the old man thought. But we came back every time, lumbered back up to ride the next forward motion, as I stared at the red light over the watertight door and silently cheered the big canoe’s comeback. It occurred to me at one of those moments that I was happier than I had ever been before—with the penguins, the icebergs, the Beaufort scale, and the celestial nimbus clouds cruising above the wind. And happier, I suspected, than I would ever be again. Operation Deep Freeze III brought with it a variety of jobs for me. At one point I helped count penguins, which brought me a life- time of insomnia in black and white. I interviewed members of the ship’s crew ashore so that the jabbering creatures—the penguins 12 robert stone

  mainly—could play as background in the recruiting commercials on their hometown radio stations. I stamped letters for collectors with Antarctic postmarks, sorted the mail, put out a four-page daily newspaper, and spun a little jazz disc jockey show during dinner hour. I remember some of our featured platters: Kai Winding and J. J. Johnson at Ronnie Scott’s. We had Keely Smith with Louis Prima at the Cal-Neva Lodge. Before each number Prima would an- nounce a dedication to Sam Giancana, who owned the place and was apparently present for Keely’s performances. Things like this, like the copy of On the Road that was one of my other traveling books, now seem to have served as portents of the life and the world that lay ahead of us. From time to time I faced the mathematical mysteries of the five-inch gun’s sight. To justify my top-secret clearance, I did up a little intelligence report for the captain and the intelligence officer. This was basically the news of the day, beefed up with some inter- cepts that were encoded in blocks of five characters. I counted my one intelligence coup when, from our station at Cape Hallett, we visited the Soviet ice station at Mirny. Instructed to “have a look around,” I never focused beyond the first vodka. I don’t think my opposite number among the Russian party made it past the first gift copy of Playboy that we gave him. The Russians re- ceived their Playboys in an attitude that began with condescending chuckles, eased into superior smiles, and soon tightened in lascivi- ous concentration. They made no comments to us, or to each other. In fact they neglected to thank us. Nevertheless they seemed grate- ful, and when we started north they asked for more. Everyone was multitasking, but the Antarctic tasks were relieved by beach time. Our next liberty port was Durban, in the province of Natal, South Africa, and our beach time there came with another portent. prime green: remembering the sixties 13

  The South African police appeared at the pier to enforce a segre- gated liberty policy. Maybe they didn’t behave like storm troopers, but that’s how I remember them. I really do remember the humilia- tion I felt, that many of us felt, at being subjected to inspection by these sneering, sunburned headbreakers. Over the week we spent in Durban we heard continually that the police delighted in enforcing the sexual segregation law, whatever it was called, on foreigners— that the first offense for a foreigner was four or five decades breaking rocks in the Kalahari. It was a story worked up to terrorize sailors over the years. The authorities seemed obsessed. In Cape Town the year before, after the last Operation Deep Freeze, Filipinos had counted as “Europeans” and were sent on their way toward the pier exit signs that read “Europeans Only.” But here in Durban, an English-speaking city, with a British colonial vibe, Filipinos were considered nonwhites. They were consigned to the class of humankind for which the South African police and some people in the U.S. Navy reserved short, spitty, ugly words that come straight from the amygdala. White South Africa had about the ugli- est and most degrading versions of that wounding utterance: they called a victim of their racism munt. Measure the word’s weight and intensity by remembering that a man who calls you a “munt” will kill you. Memory manipulated can clean up our act and help us feel better about ourselves than we deserve. Though I remember with some pride my outrage at my shipmates, American sailors, being sub- jected to this insolence, I cannot remember saying or doing any- thing about it in public. I might not have gone ashore. However, I did. That it never occurred to me to refuse a liberty in the name of decency, to deny myself the chance of seeing South Africa, troubles my recollections, colors everything that I recall about South Africa. 14 robert stone

  I do remember thinking: How can the American government let this happen? And sure enough, the next day black and Filipino sailors who had not previously experienced one of the Navy’s good- will visits to South Africa returned from the locations to which they had been bused for entertainment variously knifed, shot, and scalded with acid, and to a man robbed. They spent the rest of our week in port safely aboard. I had the option of staying aboard too in solidarity. I didn’t. I saw myself as a sympathetic outsider in the business, a man of progressive instincts ready to observe South African racism with disapproval. The second day of liberty in Dur- ban the American diplomatic community decided to make a policy of entertaining visiting American sailors at their homes. So my sym- pathy, my progressive instincts and readiness to act upon them, proved to be one day behind those of President Eisenhower’s State Department. We had fun, we who went ashore. We had long thoughtful con- versations with Indian functionaries and servants who made it plain that they expected the present regime to last no more than twenty years. Some of them told us that Indians would no doubt be driven out of the country at the time of African liberation. We called up the women’s dorm at the University of Natal and made a blind date with three young women. Two were South Africans, and one was an American from Portuguese East Africa whose father was a nomadic oil executive and who lived a life a little like an Army brat’s. Being in the presence of a great crime always manages to arouse competing moral perspectives from the sentient witnesses. Apartheid made me and my shipmates superior to the Natal college students because they seemed to us to be defending it. Of course they were, summoning as many ironies and contradictions from prime green: remembering the sixties 15

  their experiences as they could in support of the intellectually and morally vacuous apartheid system, citing exceptionalist and anec- dotal mitigating circumstances connected with their friends and family. These stories from the cozy, cheery side of apartheid—which they denied defending—were of great significance to the young women. White South Africans, addressing the outside world, ad- dressing each other, clung to small contrarian myths that would be swept away by history. I had a strange feeling in Natal that the English South Africans of- ten assumed they were accepted as opponents of apartheid, while everything they said seemed to prove they preferred it to any imagi- nable alternative. They, and to some extent Indians and Zulus as well, saw their relationship to the system as jury-rigged and temporary. After a few days of scrutiny, of being told by every street tout and bartender that the police were hard on our trail and watching our every move, we underwent an attack of lawlessness. The street along the beachfront, called the Marine Parad
e, offered a feature unique to the beaches of Natal. Zulu men in full regalia, with leopard robes and lion-tooth necklaces, arrows and assegais, pulled brightly colored rickshaws, conducting tourists past the grand old-fashioned porches of the seaside hotels. On all the porches elderly white couples sat rocking, gentlemen with imperial mus- taches, ladies in white hats with green shaded crowns, all watching the traffic on the Marine Parade with general disapproval. Walking past them in our dress whites we were made to feel we had failed to win their approval. Hotel staff stood at the gates in case we decided to enter where we weren’t wanted, ready to suggest a different estab- lishment, a different parade. Stopping one of the Zulu rickshaw men, we talked him into tak- ing a seat in the back. Then my friend Galen and I each picked up a 16 robert stone

  blade of the rickshaw and ran headlong down the Marine Parade, giving the geezers another chance to love us. There were bells and whistles and police Klaxons. We found that the rickshaw was capa- ble of great speed, and having thrown our shoulders into the takeoff, we were hauling the Zulu down the street at a velocity beyond our control. We had created a dreadful spectacle that unleashed chaos on the once pleasant street. The pensioners at the hotels were not happy with the awfulness unfolding, nor were Galen and I, who had totally lost control of the conveyance, which threatened to outrun us and carry our passenger off the adjoining cliffs and into the shark- infested breakers below. And by far, it was the Zulu bearer himself who was least amused by this reversal; he clung to the side of the rickshaw and shouted things like “Bollocks!” and “Piss off!” and “Stop!” Finally we succeeded in stopping the awful thing and assisted our victim onto the sidewalk. “Oh me,” he said. “Bollocks you.” We gave him money. If no one had stopped us we would have given money to the geezers on the porch and to the black auxiliary policemen who arrived to philosophize about events. Overtipping the rickshaw man made me think of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s bitter line about Americans buying their way in and out of various antics with their money. “If you wanted real snow,” he wrote, “you gave some- one some money.” My friend Galen was a literary type with no more than one grand theft auto behind him in the street and one anchor tattoo on his fore- arm. One of the sort of guys I hung out with. Types like Galen and me were the Navy’s foreign legionnaires: high school dropouts with- out much family, a history of petty crimes, and a lot of autodidact lore. When our time got short, as mine and Galen’s was, the Navy prime green: remembering the sixties 17

  got nervous about us. We were hard to bully and quite taken with what might be called the Navy’s funny side. There we were in Africa. “The horror,” Galen said to remind us. “The horror.” There were legendary fuckups by visiting American sailors in foreign ports which made their impact on history. Maybe a couple of wise guys blew up the Maine, screwing with flares. In any case, wandering sailors have often been the trigger of unfortunate incidents. A liberty section of a ship I was aboard decided to attend evening prayers at one of Izmir’s principal mosques. It was terrifying to watch. The sailors, overcome with bogus piety, kept trying to get their suppli- cant bows in step with those of the Turkish worshippers, and failing. One guy passed out; another yelled for Jesus. Today, I suppose, these guys would be decorating a traffic signal in some godly town. But in those days the young Turks laughed. Crowded against the ironwork windows, watching the drunk American sailors attempt devotion, kids and teenagers and passing Turkish sailors laughed themselves sick. Izmir, Turkey, 1956. Such events boded ill for the future, but at that time people seemed amused and tolerant. And I don’t think the sailors in the mosque were hostile to Islam. For my own part I once pissed on the temple of the Olympian Zeus. Funny how often profanation by urine comes into it. Street stuff. But this was in Athens, mind you, and the Olympian Zeus’s temple was a Roman construction meant to demonstrate the natu- ralization and subordination of the Greek pantheon to the Roman; the seated Zeus was Jupiter. I felt no filial guilt. Cold war troops, we were not impressed by the non-American world. I once asked a veteran boatswain’s mate what the Mediter- ranean ports were like. 18 robert stone

  “Like everything over there,” he said. “Crummy. Fucked up.” That wasn’t my view, though mine was equally meretricious. I pulled all the strings I could find to get leave to go to a bullfight in Málaga. I was ecstatic over every instant; not one of Hemingway’s recommended emotions did I leave unexperienced. Olé. Some committed Navy philistines cheered for the bull, but mainly the liberty party behaved itself. I had seen the things I’d read about. Crossing the Atlantic for the first time, I was on radio watch, carrying the message board around the ship. From the bridge I saw the sun come up over the Rock of Gibraltar. In the Strait of Malacca, I saw the thousand little ringed lights of the fishing-pirate junks of the Malay sea people. Picking past their craft we heard their flutes and bells. It was a faraway ocean but was what I’d come for. Passing the Lipari Islands headed for Beirut we passed between Scylla and Charybdis. From the peak of Stromboli great rich salvos of flaming molten rock were tossed in the smoky air. The ocean smelled of the Malvasia grapes that grew on the slope. Once, at Ismailia, I nearly got to fire the five-inch in anger. It was October 1956 and we were evacuating American civilians from the Suez Canal Zone. Mystère jets from the French carrier Lafayette were bombing the harbor areas, sending donkeys and baskets of figs and women wrapped in folds of cloth high in the air. Coming in, the planes would seem to be touching our radar masts. We had a huge American flag with spotlights on it. Our position was helpless, tied up at what they call Med Mole, a system of docking used in many Mediterranean ports, where the fantail of the ship is up against the pierside and a boat runs to the landing station. Each time a plane came over we would awkwardly track it with our five-inch and our prime green: remembering the sixties 19

  fifty-caliber, waiting for the order to fire, really wanting to hear it. American sailors have been known to die by mistake in the Middle East, usually victims of Israeli fire forgetting its friendliness for a few hours. But we in the amphib Navy were ready to start our own little naval war with France. It would, I think, have been the second. But fortunately none of our civilians were hurt and the French were bluffing. Egyptians died, though, begging us for protection, and we were moored close enough to them to take it personally. A general rage spread among all hands, a rage of battle I had never seen before. I had to be grateful for all that. I was. I was not going to forget the migrating birds in the Indian Ocean or Mount Erebus smoking. Or the human factors: my fatuousness, as I reflected more and more on it. More than anything I was to remember the people, the Australians and New Zealanders as they were fifty years ago, the va- riety of young Americans to be found in the Navy, recruited from pretelevision America, a place more varied than younger people to- day imagine. On July 14, 1958, I walked toward the main gate of the Naval Operations Base at Norfolk, Virginia. I had a manila envelope with my discharge in my hand. I turned a corner and saw a huge carrier tied up at the berth clos- est to the pier. It was the French carrier Lafayette, the ship with which we had come close to exchanging fire in November 1956. The French sailors at attention on deck were elegantly squared away, the ship and the aircraft spotless. A band on the flight deck was playing “La Marseillaise”; my heart rose in my breast. That day I had no beef with the French. I had seen some sights and even learned a few things in the Navy. The import of most of the lessons would take years to dawn clear for me. I felt very worldly, but in fact my inter- national sophistication was severely limited. 20 robert stone

  TWO I had missed New York with a passion during my time in the Navy. During our global voyage on the Arneb I’d kept two pho- tographs over my desk: one of the Manhattan skyline as it looked just after World War II and one of Brigitte Bardot. These were the poles of my desire. I had been on a minority enlistment in the service, which meant that, joining before my eighteenth birthday, I would get out—or at least into the reserves—on or about my twenty-first birthday. Around the time of my release I was only beginning to unders
tand how time worked, and how lives registered their

  passage. Things seemed to happen faster; changes came more and more quickly. The Navy I’d joined contained many young men who had never seen a television set in a private home. I was one of them. I was also a New York boy; I had never owned a car and couldn’t drive. Amer- ican regions and their cultures had come out of isolation during the Second World War, but there were only radio and movies to further homogenization. Or sometimes to resist it. In 1955, authentic coun- try music, pitched to the white South, rarely employed a drum. Rock and roll was coming. It would change everything. One Sunday in the summer of 1955, a cook at the Naval Training Station, Bain- bridge, Maryland, had the idea to serve his recruits pizza as a treat. He advertised it as pizza pie. Back where most of these men came from, pie was festively served with ice cream. Predictably, more than half of them put their ice cream on it. It wouldn’t have happened three and a half years later, by which time America had been sold various versions of what was supposed to be pizza, coast to coast. Regional accents were stronger; diction varied more. People from Appalachia had a dismissive challenge for antagonists: “You and what army? Coxey’s?” Coxey’s Army was a populist gathering that marched on Washington in William Jennings Bryan’s time. Ameri- can speech carried whispers and echoes of the century before. There was no old homestead for me to reclaim, just the city. My mother and I had shared a single furnished double room between the time I was eight and the time I joined the Navy at seventeen. When I left for boot camp she moved into one of the pigeon-splattered ho- tels off Madison Square, a soot-blackened invocation of the Mitteleuropean Beaux-Arts. It looked, under its stained brick, like the only Baedecker-recommended hotel in some Trans-Carpathian provincial capital the Hapsburgs had thoughtlessly annexed. 22 robert stone