Backing Into Forward

by Jules Feiffer

  A way out announced itself. Cadremen, as the noncoms who ruled our lives were called, those career army men who drilled us, marched us, inspected us, mocked and humiliated us (no special reason, just part of the game) had their own vanity and sense of company pride. They had found out, as a result of my exhaustive advance work, that I was an artist (of some kind or other), which meant that I might do them a favor. Would I be able to dress up their helmet liners (plastic lids commonly worn as headgear) by lettering on their rims in fancy script their names, rank, and company insignia?

  Could I? Would I? If they were to advance me a few dollars for brushes and paints and lacquer, I’d be thrilled to emblazon their names on their helmet liners. It would be my pleasure! Except that I didn’t know how to letter, on helmet liners or anything else. I asked Harry Hamburg in for a consultation. He had an idea: why waste time teaching me how to letter when he’d be more than happy to take over? We’d make it a two-man job, Harry doing the lettering, and I as the front man, the official boss of the operation. I’d handle the lacquering. Harry’s only request was that I get him excused from basic training.

  Work orders began to filter in: one helmet liner for a corporal, two or three corporals from other platoons, our drill sergeant, who was not going to allow corporals to parade around with their names brightening their helmet liners while he went without.

  I explained to the drill sergeant that I was oversubscribed and undermanned. I couldn’t handle this job alone. I knew of a Private Hamburg in the next barracks, an excellent lettering man. He could assist me, but time was the problem. If the cadremen wanted their decorated helmet liners in less than a week to show off on the parade ground, I didn’t see how Private Hamburg or I could fill all of our orders, you know, with our days consumed by basic training.

  Harry and I were excused from basic training—except for company formation and morning drills. Gym, I called it. Jumping up and down, hands together, feet apart. We did a minimum of drilling, and then when the punishing grind of the day kicked in, we were returned to our barracks to do our vanity helmets. We were soldier artisans glorifying the cause.

  Alone, taking turns in either of our empty barracks, I processed the order forms as Harry did the heavy lifting. Corporal Ames wanted his first initial included in his inscription, his twin-chevron corporal insignia embossed in gold, and the company emblem. Sergeant Earl wanted his name in gold leaf, his sergeant stripes in white outlined in blue. Corporal Lambert, who was black and liked jazz, wanted his name in white inside the silhouette of a black top hat, with his stripes Day-Glo yellow beneath the top hat.

  Harry worked away with his tiny brushes, dipping in and out of his tiny jars of color that we had been given a day pass to buy in nearby Wrightstown, which had a paint supply shop. Harry suggested that as long as we had a pass and we were in town, why didn’t we take in a movie? But I was too scared, and Wrightstown didn’t have any good movies. I was scared twenty-four hours a day.

  I did what I could to work against it. What I was learning about fear, on a trial-and-error basis, was that instead of backing away from it, in which case you might back up all the way to the womb (dear God, no!), if you turned and headed right for what most scared you, it would more than likely turn out to be not that big a deal. Or you could get killed. This was not an exact science.

  In the army I tended to alternately head in all directions. I did everything alternately, overscared, overimagining, overthinking. Whatever I was overthinking lost all coherence when exposed to the light of day. Part of the problem, and this is pure guesswork (I have no idea what the problem could have been to make me react so severely), was that I didn’t understand, and never got to understand, the rules of the country into which I had been shanghaied. Up until I was drafted, I had found that I could survive under any circumstance, no matter how unnerving, degrading, humiliating, or demoralizing, if I could understand the unwritten rules, i.e., the code of the culture that was beating up on me. Whether it was family, school, sports, friendship, work, sex, I was accustomed to getting knocked down, picking myself up, and starting all over again (in the words of my guru, the immortal Fred Astaire).

  I had grown up in the Bronx with an understanding of the code. I saw that it worked against me, but I considered that temporary, a detail. The Bronx would come around. I would somehow bring it around. Pure illusion, but what allowed for the comfort of that illusion was that I believed myself to understand the different codes. Communication was not limited to what was said. Communication might be the direct opposite of what was said. Understanding that when my mother said A, she might have actually meant it, unless she meant B or C or D, or their opposite. Whatever she meant, I learned intuitively to discern her true meaning without asking questions. Asking questions could be bad for you.

  If you didn’t understand, it was better to pretend and figure it out later. One did best by sliding under the radar. Though unacknowledged, the code was in place everywhere. School lived by a code, never to be brought out in the open but understood by students and teachers alike. It had to do with power and pecking orders and a system that claimed to be about education but was as much about hierarchies and indoctrination. In and out lists began in high school, but they were never part of the curriculum. Yet who didn’t understand?

  Getting out of school into the workplace—the real world, so-called—meant that one absorbed, and acclimated oneself to, a multiplicity of codes, not very different, just infinitely nuanced. And no one needed to have them explained. No one needed clarification. No one said, “That’s not what you mean, this is what you mean. That’s not what you’re telling me to do, this is what you’re telling me to do.”

  Reading between the lines was the only true approach to the text. Everybody knew how the game was played, but if you pointed that out they’d look at you as if they didn’t know what you were talking about. And by understanding and accepting the code that dared not speak its name, one found a sense of place in one’s surroundings. One belonged. As much of a mess as my civilian life may have been, I never doubted that it was where I belonged and where I would prosper.

  But in the army I was on unknown ground. And on my discharge in two years, I felt no less estranged than on the day I was inducted. The code that my fellow draftees had little trouble falling in line with remained a confusion to me. The more I learned, the less I understood. It was this confusion that led me in more directions than I could count at the same time, but ultimately in the direction of satire, based on the theory, I suppose, that if you can’t join them beat them.

  They were certainly a form of satiric statement, these sleek plastic helmet liners that Harry and I concocted. To be a soldier in the army while at the same time getting oneself out of the unpleasant, you-could-get-hurt part of soldiering—why, there was a whole body of literature on that subject. Harry and I were following in the fabled tradition of Marion Hargrove, Ensign Pulver, Max Shulman’s Feather Merchants, and, a little later on, Phil Silvers’s Sergeant Bilko. In my own world of comics, there was Mort Walker’s Beetle Bailey. One could go back to World War I and The Good Soldier Schweik. If memory serves, but it doesn’t, Schweik was not a good soldier but a shameless manipulator, which would put him right down there at the bottom of the barrel with Harry and me.

  Harry, who went on to have a brilliant career as a photographer and teacher and who is now retired, living in California on the outskirts of Carmel, drawing beautiful citiscapes, has faxed me this:

  I had worked for Grey Advertising in the art bull pen and remembered that when a client launched a new product they gave out samples. We thought this was the route to go. We got an extra helmet liner from the supply room and lettered the supply sergeant’s name on the front—using a Barnum and Bailey circus type for a little jazz—and gave it to the guy. Once he put it on and went into the mess hall, all the other noncommissioned officers asked where he got it. They came to us one at a time and Jules and I were in business. It took a week to complete all the noncom
missioned officers’ helmets, and then another week to paint the officers’.

  That was one week—we had six weeks of basic training to go. We asked for the supply sergeant’s helmet and painted a light blue stripe down the middle to designate infantry and sent him back to the mess hall. All the other helmets started coming back the next day, so another warm week was spent striping. The field first sergeant was a big black soldier who had just come back from Korea. He could read us like a three-page pamphlet. “You guys are a bunch of New York goldbricks trying to get out of training.” This called for an extraordinary measure. We saw a field first sergeant’s helmet from another company and it was painted bright red. We got another helmet from the supply room and sprayed it bright red with the guy’s name on the front and a baby blue stripe down the middle. We sat in awe of our creation. We sneaked into his private room in the barracks and left it on his footlocker. Nothing happened until the next morning. We all fell in for the morning roll call in the dark and out walked our sergeant wearing his newest fashion. Jules and I felt the pride in seeing our firstborn. The sergeant never said thanks or anything else—he just left us alone for the rest of the training and never took his helmet off—we thought he slept in it. We still had two weeks to go. The next thing we found were decals with the Forty-seventh Infantry Regiment at the PX. We bought two for each helmet and decorated our supply sergeant’s model hat. This time around, all the helmets came back at once. The officers got priority for theirs. We were running low on ideas for the last week of basic, but we did persevere. Jules found a can of high-gloss spray, and we ended the six weeks of basic by spraying all the helmets with a high sheen that made everyone look like General Patton.

  Our collective memory of seven weeks of basic training was sitting around a stove in the barracks doing Art Therapy. As the Jewish philosopher would say: “It wasn’t great, but it could have been worse.”

  Captain Green, our commanding officer, singled us out for praise. He couldn’t help but notice how his officers and cadre were so impressively decked out on the parade ground. It was the talk of Fort Dix. Captain Green was a vice president of an insurance company in civilian life, called back into service from the reserves. He was husky and pleasant-looking and conducted himself with an air of just-putting-in-his-time diffidence. I might have spent two years under his command without complaint (or a subsequent career), but beneath him was a staff of second lieutenants, first sergeants, drill sergeants, and corporals whose job it was to grind us into dust and reshape us into “men.”

  Harry and I stood at ease on the parade ground, moments following Captain Green’s flattering comments on our artwork. We were surrounded by noncoms and second and first lieutenants with their Harry-emblazoned helmet liners brightening the field, a triumph of Gothic and Olde English and P. T. Barnum. Gilded names next to ranks and attendant insignia displayed in a cornucopia of color, making of the commanding cadre and their marching, drilling troops a homoerotic musical of the military.

  Carried along by the sweetness of Harry’s nature and the aura of fun he brought to this game we were playing, I found his next move irresistible. Harry said to Captain Green, “Sir, Private Feiffer and I would consider it a privilege to design a very special liner for you. What would you like to see on it?”

  Captain Green was not at a loss for words in describing to us the liner of his dreams. I took notes. It seemed complicated but doable until we were given our deadline. “I rely on you to have it by Saturday morning for weekly parade and review by Division Command. We expect a colonel and possibly a general up from Washington.” This was Wednesday. What he was asking was impossible, but we knew we could do it. We had no choice. Our only other choice was to go back in the army.

  Division Command’s reviewing our weekly parade was a big deal. It meant that officers and cadre needed to look their best, and if Captain Green was setting the bar higher for Saturday’s event there was nothing to be done except sharpen up all the helmet liners we had already painted. By midday they had all come back for an upgrade and retouch. Harry and I, having started out with a nice small business that we could handle, were in danger of becoming victims of our own success.

  This job of not being in the army was harder labor than we imagined. All that week, preparing for Saturday’s parade, we worked around the clock, delegating the touchups and lacquering of helmets to two elves we recruited and managed to get excused from duty. We reserved for ourselves the headdress of the more serious VIPs, Captain Green and his officers.

  Friday night, the night before the dress parade, we ran out of lacquer. It was too late to go into Wrightstown. The stores were closed. I scoured around the paint shed and found cans of shellac. I wasn’t sure how that would work. Would Harry’s gilt stick or run or change color under the shellac? Can you induce shellac to dry in the eight hours we had before Captain Green was to don his helmet? If you read the small print on the can, it claimed to take twelve hours. Harry had been revising and refinishing Captain Green’s helmet liner for three days. We both knew that it had to be spectacular. As the rest of us knocked out the lower-echelon headgear, we had one eye on our artist in residence taking on his white whale, Captain Green’s headdress.

  In 1958, in a Village Voice cartoon, I drew my dancer cavorting in a field of flowers, carefully inspecting each one, announcing to the world, “I am a seeker after perfection.” This was Harry.

  The job was done at two in the morning. The parade was at eight. Captain Green’s helmet stood out among the others, lined in formation on two shelves in a back room of the barracks. It glowed in the dark. Harry, a broken man, collapsed in his bunk after his painstaking hours of labor. I bundled myself into my heavy army overcoat and a couple of scarves. With my cap pulled so far down over my face that I could barely see, I stepped outside the barracks into the fierce February wind. Gingerly, with the tips of my gloved fingers, I held Captain Green’s sopping wet helmet. I rotated it in the wind slowly, in the desperate hope that the twelve-hour shellac would freeze, if not dry. I was numb with exhaustion and infinitely too stupid to figure out that wind blowing off an open field transmits an assemblage of Mother Nature’s flotsam—specks, flecks, and dreck zipping through the air and zeroing in on an irresistibly sticky target.

  I woke Harry up at 3:00 a.m. with the bad news. His gorgeous work of art was splattered with the Fort Dix pox. I took full responsibility. Harry’s job was to fix it. Harry did not say a word. He got out of bed. He went to his paints and brushes. He re-created line for line, color for color, the gilded letters of Captain Green’s name, styled in florid Gothic, suitable for a Caesar, surrounded by company insignia aglow in red, white, and yellow and, in the very middle, his captain’s bars, silvery and radiant, as if caught by moonlight.

  Village Voice, April 2, 1958

  It was now five in the morning. No time for shellac. No time for much of anything. So how were we to make this glorious but still damp artifact stand out among the two dozen or so lacquered helmet liners that had come out of our shop and that would be marching in formation across the parade ground in less than three hours?

  I knew that I had more to me than being a fuckup, and now was my chance to prove it. A half hour before Captain Green’s scheduled arrival for pickup, I polished Harry’s creation tenderly and rigorously with three coats of Vaseline. I didn’t know how long it would take for the Vaseline to be absorbed. All I needed was time for the troops to parade before the visiting brass and stun them with the radiant spectacle of Captain Green’s helmet liner, making him—dare I say it?—queen for a day.

  Captain Green arrived promptly in full dress regalia. He wore white gloves. I didn’t want him touching the helmet with his clean white gloves. I told him that the lacquer on the helmet was not quite dry, that he should try to avoid touching it—it had the consistency of, say, Vaseline—and, with his permission, Private Hamburg and I would place it on his head now and remove it (with your permission, sir) after the parade. Captain Green was only half listen
ing, so thrilled was he at the result of Harry’s labors.

  Gently, as if fitting the emperor for his new clothes, Harry and I lowered the helmet liner on Captain Green. Reflexively he lifted a gloved hand to adjust it. We shouted, “Don’t!” Our captain sheepishly withdrew his hand. “He takes orders well,” Harry whispered to me as Captain Green strode out, head and helmet held high.

  As exhausted as we were, we were not to be excused from the march, nor did we want to be. The pageantry of our artwork dominated the field, the single ray of light, pride, and celebration in a dull, forbidding winter sky. For that moment only, it made Harry and me more than two gold-bricks from New York trying to con our way out of basic training. It made us proud to be in the United States Army. And why not? We were in command.

  SOS

  Talk about screwups! They were assigning me to Camp Gordon, Georgia, to begin training as a radio operator. In Korea. This was wrong! A monumental misunderstanding of who and what I was meant to be.

  I had come out of Fort Dix free of basic training and the constant strategizing to avoid it, not marching, not drilling, not crawling or climbing or shooting or bayonet practicing. My kind of basic. I had graduated with high hopes. Well, midlevel hopes, which for the army was as good as it got. I was first assigned to a film unit in Astoria, Queens, a stone’s throw from the Bronx, a forty-minute subway ride from Stratford Avenue. This was more like it. The Signal Corps Photo Center was a country club, a post more befitting a young man of my aspirations. All well and good, but after a mere five months something went terribly wrong. They transferred me to Georgia to train me to operate and repair radios on the front line—in other words, to be killed.