Frozen in Time

by Joseph Epstein

  None of these need have been pressing questions but for the fact that, when basic training was completed, I was sent to clerk-typist school at Fort Chaffee, in Arkansas, and so, too, was Jackson Gates. I was sitting on my bunk, unpacking and laying out my gear the morning we arrived, when Gates threw his duffel bag atop the bunk next to mine.

  “What’s happenin’, baby?”

  “Not a hell of a lot,” I said.

  “Arkansas! Daddy, this ain’t exactly my idea of a sweet place for a man with my suntan. Dig?”

  I replied that, since we apparently were not to be allowed to leave the base anyhow, it didn’t matter too much where we were. My own situation, I said, was really not so different from his.

  “Let’s face it, Gates, the army shows no favoritism. It treats everyone as if he were black.”

  “Hey, daddy,” he said, “you ain’t too bad, you know that?”

  As it turned out, Chaffee was a great improvement over Fort Leonard Wood. It wasn’t so cold; one wasn’t always biting down on coal dust. Clerk-typist school entailed less spit and polish, less overall harassment, than basic training. After morning chow we would line up in fatigues, boots, helmet liners, and field jackets, but instead of rifles on our shoulders we would tote typing manuals under our arms. (“Titless WACs” was the old army joke.) We would be marched off to spend the morning learning to type to music, usually to very upbeat stuff such as the theme from Bridge over the River Kwai or John Philip Sousa marches; return for lunch; then march back to afternoon sessions about how to fill out morning reports. Although we could not go into the nearby town of Fort Smith (not yet, at any rate), or even keep civilian clothes, our evenings were pretty much our own. Our regular army platoon sergeants not only didn’t mind poker games in the barracks but generally took a hand. Lights went out at nine, yet no one minded if you sat in the latrine and read. After not being allowed any books or magazines through all of basic training, I now went on a reading binge, gorging myself after lights-out on nineteenth-century Russian and English novels.

  One night around eleven o’clock I was sitting propped against the wall in the latrine, using my folded-up field jacket as a pillow, reading a Chekhov story entitled “An Anna Round His Neck,” when Jackson Gates walked in.

  “Hey, man,” he said from one of the urinals, his back to me, “you got it made, you know that?”

  I didn’t respond because I wasn’t quite sure exactly what he meant. Was he commenting on what must have been my evident pleasure in my book? Or was he, more significantly, talking about the fact that this was Arkansas, the South in the year 1959, and that I was white and he black, and that made all the difference in the world? Whichever it might have been, Gates was evidently not going to elaborate upon the point.

  “Sacktime,” he announced, zipping himself up as he walked out of the latrine.

  Odd: it was a Wednesday night and Gates was wearing not his fatigue but his dress green uniform. He appeared, moreover, to be coming in from off the post, something strictly forbidden. But if he hadn’t gone off the post, then why was he wearing his dress greens?

  The last man who told me that I had it made was also a black man, LeRoy Fortess, who worked for something like eleven years for my father as his shipping clerk, porter, mail clerk, and odd-jobs man. LeRoy was in his early forties, natty even in work clothes, and never without his hat, usually a fairly expensive gray fedora. LeRoy had an eye for the ladies; once, when I was sixteen and working on Saturday for my father, LeRoy asked me to fetch him some cigarettes out of the drawer of his workbench. The cigarettes were there, all right, but so were two decks of playing cards with porno pictures on them and a half-dozen or so of an item that used to be known as a French tickler. Because of this discovery of LeRoy’s penchant for the illicit, I one day asked him if he could arrange to get false identification for a friend and me, so that, though under age, we could be served in bars. Not a problem, said LeRoy, and one Sunday my friend and I traveled out to the West Side to pick up LeRoy. LeRoy wore a pearl-gray hat with a midnight-blue band and my father’s hand-me-down double-breasted camel’s hair overcoat, and, in this getup, looked oddly Jewish. He had us drive over to a black undertaker’s on Lake Street. In the basement, where the undertaker worked, corpses were strewn about on tables, the blood and other body fluid still being drained from one. LeRoy explained to the undertaker what it was that we wanted. The undertaker, a muscular man in an undershirt and wearing a stocking cap, took out two affidavits, filled in our names and false ages, and then signed and notarized them. We each paid him $5. Unfolded, the affidavits measured roughly three feet long and were, of course, absolutely useless; any bartender presented with a document of this kind would double over with raucous laughter. But we said nothing, lest we offend LeRoy, who had done the best he could. “You got it made now,” he said when we dropped him off at his apartment. A few years later, when I was at college, my father discovered that LeRoy, who for more than a decade had been taking off Tuesday afternoons (with pay) to get treatment for an advanced case of diabetes, never had diabetes at all. Although my father regretted doing so, there was nothing for it but to fire him.

  However he may have intended it, there was a sense in which Gates was correct about my having it made. While I was committed to the draftee’s bleak view of army life, the truth was—though I should not have admitted it—that I rather liked my time at Fort Chaffee. The duty was light, except for pulling an occasional KP or guard duty. I played poker in the early part of most evenings and won fairly steadily at it, and I read myself nearly to sleep afterward in the latrine. I was even learning to type and taking a certain pleasure in becoming good at it. Of course, my situation was different from that of others. I had not had to leave a good job when I was drafted but instead dropped out of graduate school, which I had intended to do anyway. Nor did I leave a wife or even a regular girlfriend in Chicago. After the indolence of graduate school, the routine of the army was something of a relief. Things could have been a lot worse, especially if I had been married.

  I didn’t know that Jackson Gates had a wife in Detroit. Even though his bunk was next to mine, he never mentioned being married. Nor could I remember, at mail call, his named being yelled out for regular letters, as was the case with most married men among the trainees. I only first learned about Gates’s marriage when Otis Cook, a light-skinned and rather heavyset black man in our barracks, with whom Gates usually ate in the mess hall, told me that Gates had just received a Dear John letter from his wife and was getting emergency leave to return to Detroit to try to patch things up. The reason that Cook was telling me this was that he was collecting from everyone in the barracks to get up some money for Jackson to get home on. I gave him twenty bucks, out of my poker winnings. Gates was to leave for Detroit the next day, a Saturday, after inspection. He seemed defeated before he left—as who in his place would not have been—and not very optimistic about being able to hold his marriage together. Dressed in his greens and bulky army overcoat, he left amid our calls of good luck. If I thought it at all strange that he had bothered to take along on so dour a mission a recent PX acquisition, his portable hi-fi, I didn’t, in my sympathy for the poor guy, choose to dwell on it. As my mother’s Aunt Sophie used to say, “Go understand the shvartzers!”

  While Gates was in Detroit, I spent the worst day of my two years in the army. It was a day of KP, which started out like all such days, except that I did not get the job I had come to prefer on KP, that of scrubbing pots and pans. I preferred it because, while it involved the most drudgery, it also involved, so unrelievedly dreary was it recognized to be, the least harassment. Instead I had to take the job of dining-room orderly, which involved setting and cleaning off tables, mopping floors, filling salt and pepper shakers, cleaning the milk machines, replacing condiments. Under a tough mess sergeant it meant a number of additional chores. And our mess hall, a large one shared by four different companies, had a tough mess serg
eant: a short black man from New York of compact build and yellowish color with the misleadingly soft name of Larry Winslow.

  It looked to be the normal grueling fifteen-hour day on KP, but Sergeant Winslow had added a new twist to the usual torture. After our dining-room chores following lunch were finished, instead of allowing us a short break, he put the eight dining-room orderlies to the tedious and knuckle-busting job of rubbing down his huge black ovens with steel wool. To what purpose we did this was unclear, yet the job, because you could not determine if you were making any progress on it—you just kept rubbing those frigging ovens, which didn’t get any shinier or any duller—was impossible to concentrate on for long. Winslow caught us joking about the endlessness of the job. In an accentless voice, without a tremor of passion in it, he warned that if he caught us again we could expect to spend the entire night working in his kitchen. I doubt that there was anyone among us who did not believe in his ability to make good on the threat, but the tedium of the task simply proved too much. Half-an-hour later we were joking again. None of us noticed Sergeant Winslow approach from behind. “More grab-assin’, I see,” he said in that terrifyingly calm voice. “All right. You will all spend the night taking off the old wax from these floors and rewaxing them.” And so we did. We worked till 5:30 the next morning, a full twenty-four-hour shift, knocking off only when the next day’s KPs came on, leaving us bleary-eyed and with time enough only to shave and change into fresh fatigues for the day’s classes.

  Everyone who has put in his time in the army has run into a man of quiet but quite earnest cruelty like Sergeant Winslow, and the only reason I bring him up here is because, two weeks after our twenty-four-hour KP shift, when we were given our first pass into the town of Fort Smith, I saw the fearsome Sergeant Winslow. He was driving through town in a current year’s white Buick convertible. The top was down and he was laughing and sharing a feeling of comfortable cordiality with a companion who turned out to be my old bunkmate, Private Jackson Gates.

  This glimpse of him on obviously chummy terms with Sergeant Winslow altered my opinion of Gates. But then, my opinion of Gates regularly underwent alterations. While we were at Chaffee, a Liston-Patterson title bout was scheduled, and near the day of the fight I stood a few men down from Gates in the chow line at lunch. He talked about the fight with great authority. Doing a bit of fancy footwork, feigning and snorting in a shadowboxing dance, he allowed as how, back in Detroit, he had had five professional fights as a middleweight. Bull, I said to myself. Then I heard him say that he had lost four of these fights, two by knockout, and after the last knew it was time to get out before he had his brains permanently scrambled. Artful bull, I thought, but still bull. Yet not long after Gates returned from his trip home to save his marriage—a trip whose outcome, along with my twenty bucks, was never mentioned—he began wearing a T-shirt across the front of which was printed “Detroit Golden Gloves 1957.” Could he have had those pro fights? Who, with Gates, knew?

  What was known was an extraordinary performance that Gates had put on in the company commander’s office. I myself learned about it from Marv Gradman, the company clerk, who had been a ZBT at the University of Illinois, as I had been at the University of Michigan. Gates, as Gradman told the story, had requested permission to speak with the “old man.” I put quotes around “old man” because he, our company commander, was a first lieutenant who had gone through the ROTC program at Auburn University in Alabama and who could not have been more than twenty-five, or two years older than most of us in clerk-typist school. He was blond, the old man, with perfect teeth and well turned-out in his tailored and starched fatigues. He had, as Gradman explained, less than ninety days to serve before returning to Mobile, Alabama, a fiancée, and a profitable family construction business. Never very wide-ranging in his interests to begin with, the old man, according to Marv Gradman, at this time had only one thing on his mind: getting the hell out of the army and back to Mobile with as little complication as possible.

  Since the old man had not a ghost of a clue who Jackson Gates was, one has to imagine his surprise when Gates, this strange-looking creature in thick black-framed glasses, shows up before his desk, pops him a salute that would have been overdone if offered to Benito Mussolini, and, after his salute was limply returned, began:

  “Sir, Private Jackson Gates reporting, sir! The reason I am here is to report acts of racial discrimination against myself in this company, sir! I do not want at this time to go into any detail about these acts, sir! I have considered reporting them to my uncle, Mr. Samuel Gates, attorney-at-law and executive secretary of the Greater Detroit Chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, sir! But I do not wish to be a snitcher, sir! No, sir! Instead, sir, knowing that you are a white man from Alabama and I am a black man from Detroit, sir, I thought I would show you some of the best damn soldiering you ever seen out of any draftee, white or black, sir!”

  And with this, Gates, still at rigor mortis attention, clicked his heels, popped another extravagant salute, executed an about-face of furious agility, and marched out of the old man’s office. The old man’s mouth had not yet closed when Gradman, having been rung on the intercom, appeared in his office.

  “Specialist Gradman,” the old man drawled, “what in the cotton-pickin’ hell was that all about?”

  Whatever it was, it was decidedly not something that was going to keep the old man from getting back to Mobile in eighty-odd days. Suddenly, at morning lineups and elsewhere, Private Jackson Gates emerged from obscurity.

  “Okay, Gates,” the first sergeant announced, “march the men off to class.”

  “Gates,” the sergeant in charge of Saturday morning P.E. called out, “help me demonstrate to these young troopers how a push-up ought to be done. Watch Gates, men.”

  “All right, Gates, you take over as sergeant of the guard. Assign the shifts. But you’re not to walk any guard yourself.”

  To pick up an extra $20 or $25 Gates would every so often contract to do guard duty for someone else in the barracks. Easy money for him, since he never actually had to walk shifts himself—he could count on being picked as sergeant of the guard—but merely had to dress for it. One weekend, when he had taken on someone else’s guard duty under these terms, he found he had no clean dress shirt and asked if he could borrow one of mine, which he promised to have laundered and back to me before the week was out.

  I handed him a shirt from out of my footlocker.

  “Thanks, baby,” he said. “I won’t forget it.”

  Although our bunks were next to each other, Gates and I could scarcely be said to be friends. He for the most part hung around with the seven or eight black men in the company—and, on weekends, or so I gathered, with Sergeant Winslow. What conversation we had was the usual common grousing, complaints about the food, or the weather, or army life in general. When he came in late—where from, I still had no idea—he would greet me in the latrine with a perfunctory “How ya makin’ it?” or “What’s happenin’?” That, though, was about the extent of it. But with my loaning Gates a shirt for guard duty, I sensed a slight change in him toward me; if not precisely a new friendliness, then a recognition that I wasn’t just another white face. One Saturday morning, when I was running late for inspection, I was hurriedly straightening out my footlocker and looked up to find that Gates, without being asked, was making my bed. I was touched.

  Not that any real friendship between us was likely to develop. Less than four of our sixteen weeks of clerk-typist school remained, at which time we would all be shipped out of Fort Chaffee to work as company clerks or in headquarters companies on other posts. In 1959 there was no war, and no serious threat of war. The only question was where each of us would be assigned: some dreary hole like Fort Bliss, Texas, or Fort Polk, Louisiana, or Fort Benning, Georgia; or Korea, which sounded grim but at least offered the prospect of some leave-time in Japan; or, plum of plums, Europe, anywhere
in Europe.

  Early one Saturday afternoon Gates and I were alone in the barracks. An Erroll Garner record was playing on his hi-fi. I was writing a letter home and Gates was sitting on the edge of his bunk shining a pair of boots when he asked me where I hoped to be transferred to after clerk-typist school.

  “Anywhere in Europe would be great,” I said. “What about you?”

  “I’m heading back home to Detroit,” he said. He said this with absolute confidence.

  “How can you be sure?”

  “Cause it already been taken care of.” Gates admired the shined boot, put it down, picked up its mate. “No sweat, daddy.”

  When I pressed him, Gates told me that through his friend Larry Winslow he had got to know another sergeant at G-1, personnel, where all the transfer orders were cut. “He a good cat,” said Gates, “my man at G-l.”

  “Jackson, do you think your man could find a way to get me to Europe? If he can swing it, tell him there’s three hundred in it for him. And, by the way, there’s another two hundred in it for you.”

  I had blurted it out, said it without thinking about it, almost as if by instinct. But now that I had said it, I did not wish to withdraw what I had said. The quality of the next eighteen months of my life hinged on where I would be sent. Would they be lively or dead months? Eighteen months in Germany or France as opposed to eighteen months in Texas or Missouri made all the difference in the world. As for the money I had promised Gates, well, I had poker winnings stowed away of more than $250; and the remainder I could get from friends in Chicago, or if need be from my parents. Of course, Gates could be lying, in which case it would come to nothing anyway. But then again he might not be, in which case I would have been foolish to have said nothing. As long as no money passed hands, it was worth a try.

  “No harm my asking the cat,” Gates said. “We’ll get back to you on it, hear?”