by Tobias Wolff
Command Presence
WHEN I was eighteen I worked on a ship, a Coast and Geodetic Survey ship out of Norfolk. As I sat on my bunk one night, reading a book, I became aware that one of my shipmates was staring at me. My face burned, the words started swimming on the page, the tranquillity in which I had been imagining the scenes of the novel was broken. For a time I blindly regarded the book and listened to the voices of the other men, the long shuddering surge of the engine. Finally I had no choice but to look back at him.
He was one of the ship’s mechanics. He had rabbity eyes and red hair cropped so close his scalp showed through. His skin was white. Not fair. White, the pallor of a life spent belowdecks. He hardly ever spoke. I had felt the weight of his scrutiny before, but never like this. I saw that he hated me.
Why did he hate me? He may have felt—I might have made him feel—that I was a tourist here, that my life would not be defined, as his had been, by years of hard labor at sea relieved now and then by a few days of stone drunkenness in the bars of Norfolk and Newport News. I’d been down to the engine room on errands and maybe he’d seen me there and seen the fastidiousness that overcame me in this dim, clanking, fetid basement where half-naked men with greasy faces loomed from the shadows, shouting and brandishing wrenches. He might have noted my distaste and taken it as an affront. Maybe my looks rubbed him wrong, or my manner of speech, or my habitual clowning and wising off, as if we were all out here on a lark. I was cheerful to a fault, no denying that; glib, breezy, heedless of the fact that for most of the men this cramped inglorious raft was the end of the line. It could have been that. Or it could have been the book I was reading, the escape the book represented at that moment and in time to come. Then again there might have been no particular reason for what he felt about me. Hatred sustains itself very well without benefit of cause.
Not knowing what to think of him, I thought nothing at all. I lived in a dream anyway, in which I featured then as a young Melville, my bleary alcoholic shipmates as bold, vivid characters with interesting histories they would one day lay bare to me. Most of what I looked at I didn’t really see, and this mechanic was part of what I didn’t see.
I worked on cleanup details in the morning, scraped and painted in the afternoon. One day I was scraping down the hull of a white runabout that was kept on davits for the captain’s pleasure and as a partial, insincere fulfillment of our lifeboat requirement. It was sultry. The sun beat down through a white haze that dazzled the eyes. I ducked under the boat and pretended to take an interest in the condition of the keel. It was cool there in the shadows. I leaned back, my head resting against one of the propeller blades, and closed my eyes.
I slept for a while. When I woke I felt heavy and dull, but I couldn’t go back to sleep. In this muzzy state I heard someone stop beside me, then walk to the stern. I opened my eyes and saw a pair of bell-bottom pant legs ascending the ladder. Boards creaked overhead. My nap was done.
I sat up and shook my head, waited for clarity, was still sitting there when a great roar went up behind me. I looked back and saw the propeller I’d just had my head on spinning in a silver blur. I scuttled out from under the boat, got to my feet, and looked up at the mechanic, who was watching me from the gunwale of the runabout. Neither of us said a word. I knew I should go after him, even if it meant taking a beating. But he was ready to kill me. This was a new consideration, and one that gave me pause, excessive pause. I stood there and let him face me down until he decided to turn away.
I didn’t know what to do. He’d given me no evidence for a complaint to the captain. If I accused him, the mechanic would say it was an accident, and then the captain would ask me what the hell I was doing down there anyway, lying against a propeller. It was pretty stupid. That’s what my shipmates told me, the two of them I trusted enough to talk things over with. But they believed me, they said, and promised to keep an eye on him. This sounded good, at first. Then I understood that it meant nothing. He would choose the time and place, not them. I was on my own.
The ship put in a few days later to take on supplies for a trip to the Azores. The weekend before our departure, I went to Virginia Beach with another man and ended up on the first dark hours of Monday morning propped against the seawall, trying to make myself get up and walk the half mile to the motel where my shipmate was waiting for me. In an hour or so he’d have to begin the drive back to Norfolk or risk having the ship weigh anchor without him. I sat there in the chilly blow, trembling with cold and sunburn, and hugged my knees and waited for the sun to rise. Everything was cloaked in uncongenial grayness, not only the sky but also the water and the beach, where gulls walked to and fro with their heads pulled down between their wings. A band of red light appeared on the horizon.
This was not the unfolding of any plan. I’d never intended to miss my ship, not once, not for a moment. It was the first cruise to foreign waters since I’d been on board, and I wanted to go. In the Azores, according to a book I’d read, they still harpooned whales from open boats. I had already made up my mind to get in on one of these hunts, no matter what. All my shipmates had the bug, even the old tars who should’ve known better. When they said “Azores” their voices cradled the word. They were still subject to magic, still able at the sound of a name—Recife, Dakar, Marseilles—to see themselves not as galley slaves but as adventurers to whom the world was longing to offer itself up.
I didn’t want to miss my ship. Forget about far-off places, the open sea; the ship was my job, and I had no prospects for another. I didn’t even have a high school diploma. The prep school I’d finagled my way into had tolerated my lousy grades and fatuous contempt for its rules until, in my senior year, having pissed away my second and third and fourth chances, I was stripped of my scholarship and launched upon the tide of affairs, to sink or swim. I appeared to be sinking.
Where to turn? My mother lived in one small room in Washington, D.C., where she worked as a secretary by day, by night as a restaurant hostess. She had just begun to accord me, with touching eagerness, the signs of respect due a man who pulled his own weight in the world. Unteachable optimist that she was, she drew hope from every glint of gravity in my nature, every possibility of dealing with me as an equal. I didn’t want to think about the look on her face when I turned up at her door with some tomfool story about the ship sailing without me. Where else, then? My brother Geoffrey and I were good friends. He might have been open to a visit except that he was in England, doing graduate work at Cambridge on a Fulbright fellowship. His good luck; my bad luck. My father was also unable to play host at just this moment, being in jail in California, this time for passing bad checks under the name Sam Colt.
I had to join my ship. But I stayed where I was. People with dogs began to appear on the beach. Old folks collecting driftwood. When there was no longer any chance of meeting my shipmate I got up stiffly and walked into town, where I ate a jumbo breakfast and pondered the army recruiting office across the street.
THIS WASN’T a new idea, the army. I’d always known I would wear the uniform. It was essential to my idea of legitimacy. The men I’d respected when I was growing up had all served, and most of the writers I looked up to—Norman Mailer, Irwin Shaw, James Jones, Erich Maria Remarque, and of course Hemingway, to whom I turned for guidance in all things. Military service was not an incidental part of their histories; they were unimaginable apart from it. I wanted to be a writer myself, had described myself as one to anybody who would listen since I was sixteen. It was laughable for a boy my age to call himself a writer on the evidence of two stories in a school lit mag, but improbable as this self-conception was, it nevertheless changed my way of looking at the world. The life around me began at last to take on form, to signify. No longer a powerless confusion of desires, I was now a protagonist, the hero of a novel to which I endlessly added from the stories I dreamed and saw everywhere. The problem was, I began to see stories even where I shouldn’t, where what was required of me was simple fellow feeling. I turn
ed into a predator, and one of the things I became predatory about was experience. I fetishized it, collected it, kept strict inventory. It seemed to me the radical source of authority in the writers whose company I wanted to join, in spite of their own coy deference to the ugly stepsisters honesty, knowledge, human sympathy, historical consciousness, and, ugliest of all, hard work. They were just being polite. Experience was the clapper in the bell, the money in the bank, and of all experiences the most bankable was military service.
I had another reason for considering this move. I wanted to be respectable, to take my place one day among respectable men. Partly this was out of appetite for the things respectable men enjoyed, things even the dimmest of my prep school classmates could look forward to as a matter of course. But that wasn’t all of it, or even most of it. My father’s career, such as it was—his unflinching devolution from ace airplane designer to welsher, grifter, convict—appalled me. I had no sense of humor about it. Nor, for all my bohemian posturing, did it occur to me to see him as some kind of hero or saint of defiance against bourgeois proprieties. He had ruined his good name, which happened to be my name as well. When people asked me about my father I sometimes told them he was dead. In saying this I did not feel altogether a liar. To be dishonored and at the end of your possibilities—was that life? He appalled me and frightened me, because I saw in myself the same tendencies that had brought him to grief.
The last time I’d lived with my father was the summer of my fifteenth year, before I went back east to school. We were taking a walk one night and stopped to admire a sports car in a used car lot. As if it were his sovereign right, my father reached inside and popped the hood open and began to explain the workings of the engine, which was similar to that of the Abarth-Allemagne he was then driving (unpaid for, never to be paid for). As he spoke he took a knife from his pocket and cut the gas line on either side of the filter, which he shook out and wrapped in a handkerchief, talking all the while. It was exactly the kind of thing I would have done, but I hated seeing him do it, as I hated seeing him lie about his past and bilk storekeepers and take advantage of his friends. He had crooked ways, the same kind I had, but after that summer I tried to change. I didn’t want to be like him. I wanted to be a man of honor.
Honor. The very word had a martial ring. My father had never served, though he sometimes claimed he had, and this incompleteness in his history somehow made his fate intelligible and offered a means to escape it myself. This was the way, the indisputable certificate of citizenship and probity.
But I didn’t join up that morning. Instead I went to Washington to bid my mother farewell, and let her persuade me to have another try at school, with results so dismal that in the end she personally escorted me to the recruiter.
I never made it to the Azores, and even now the word raises a faint sensation of longing and regret. But I was right not to go back to my ship that morning. So many things can happen at sea. You can go overboard at night. Something heavy can fall on you, or something sharp. You can have your hat size reduced by a propeller. A ship is a dangerous place at any time; but when one of your shipmates wishes you harm, then harm is certain to befall you. In that way a ship is like a trapeze act, or a family, or a company of soldiers.
I WENT through basic training at Fort Jackson, South Carolina, during a heat wave, “the worst on record,” we kept telling one another, on no authority but our opinion that it was pretty damned hot. And it was. The asphalt streets liquefied, sucking at our boots, burning our eyes and throats with acrid fumes. Sweat gleamed on every face. When they packed us into Quonset huts for lectures on “homoseshality” and “drug addition,” the smell got serious enough to put a man down, and many went down. Passing out came to be so common among us that we awarded points for the drama of the fall. The big winner was a boy from Puerto Rico who keeled over while marching, in full field equipment, along a ledge on a steep hillside. We heard him clanking all the way down.
The drill sergeants affected not to be aware of the rate at which we dropped. They let us understand that taking notice of the temperature was unsoldierly. When a recruit in another company died of heatstroke, our company commander called a formation and told us to be sure and take our salt pills every day. After he’d given his speech and gone back to the orderly room, our drill sergeant said, “Shitbirds, why did that troop croak?”
We had the answer ready. “Because he was a pussy, Sergeant.”
We were mostly volunteers. A lot of men regretted the impulse that had brought them to Fort Jackson, and all of us whined unceasingly, but I never heard of anyone writing to his congressman about the treatment we got, which was pretty much what a boy brought up on war movies would expect, and maybe a little better. The drill sergeants rode us hard, but they didn’t show up drunk at midnight and lead us into swamps to drown. The training seemed more or less purposeful, most of the time. The food was decent. And there were pleasures to be had.
One of my pleasures was to learn that I was hardy and capable. I’d played team sports in school, and played them doggedly, but never very well. Military training agreed with me. My body was right for it—trim and stringy. Guys who would have pulverized me on the football field were still on their third push-up when I’d finished my tenth. The same bruisers had trouble on our runs and suffered operatically on the horizontal bar, where we had to do pull-ups before every meal. Their beefy bodies, all bulked up for bumping and bashing, swayed like carcasses under their white-knuckled hands. Their necks turned red, their arms quivered, they grunted piteously as they tried to raise their chins to the bar. They managed to pull themselves up once or twice and then just hung there, sweating and swearing. Now and then they kicked feebly. Their pants slipped down, exposing pimply white butts. Those of us who’d already done our pull-ups gathered around to watch them, under the pretense of boosting their morale (“Come on, Moose! You can do it! One more, Moose! One more for the platoon!”) but really to enjoy their misery, and perhaps to reflect, as I did, on the sometimes perfect justice turned out by fortune’s wheel.
Instead of growing weaker through the long days I felt myself taking on strength. Part of this strength came from contempt for weakness. Before now I’d always felt sorry for people who had trouble making the grade. But here a soft heart was an insupportable luxury, and I learned that lesson in smart time.
We had a boy named Sands in our squad, one of several recruits from rural Georgia. He had a keen, determined look about him that he used to good advantage for a couple of weeks, but it wasn’t enough to get him by. He was always lagging behind somewhere. Last to get up. Last to formation. Last to finish eating. Our drill sergeant was from Brooklyn, and he came down hard on this cracker who didn’t take his army seriously.
Sands seemed not to care. He was genial and sunny even in the face of hostility, which I took to be a sign of grit. I liked him and tried to help. When he fell out on runs I hung back with him a few times to carry his rifle and urge him on. But I began to realize that he wasn’t really trying to keep up. When a man is on his last legs you can hear it in the tearing hoarseness of every breath. It’s there in his rolling eyes, in his spastically jerking hands, in the way he keeps himself going by falling forward and making his feet hurry to stay under him. But Sands grinned at me and wagged his head comically: Jeez Louise, where’s the fire? He wasn’t in pain. He was coasting. It came as a surprise to me that Sands would let someone else pull his weight before he was all used up.
There were others like him. I learned to spot them, and to stay clear of them, and finally to mark my progress by their humiliations. It was a satisfaction that took some getting used to, because I was soft and because it contradicted my values, or what I’d thought my values to be. Every man my brother: that was the idea, if you could call it an idea. It was more a kind of attitude that I’d picked up, without struggle or decision, from the movies I saw, the books I read. I’d paid nothing for it and didn’t know what it cost.
It cost too much. If eve
ry man was my brother we’d have to hold our lovefest some other time. I let go of that notion, and the harshness that took its place gave me a certain power. I was recognized as having “command presence”—arrogance, an erect posture, a loud, barky voice. They gave me an armband with sergeant’s stripes and put me in charge of the other recruits in my platoon. It was like being a trusty.
I began to think I could do anything. At the end of boot camp I volunteered for the airborne. They trained me as a radio operator, then sent me on to jump school at Fort Benning, Georgia. When I arrived, my company was marched onto the parade ground in a cold rain and drilled and dropped for push-ups over the course of the evening until we were covered with mud and hardly able to stand, at which time they sent us back inside and ordered us to be ready for inspection in thirty minutes. We thought we were, but they didn’t agree. They dumped our footlockers onto the floor, knocked our wall lockers down, tore up our bunks, and ordered us outside again for another motivational seminar. This went on all night. Toward morning, wet, filthy, weaving on my feet as two drill sergeants took turns yelling in my face, I looked across the platoon bay at the morose rank of men waiting their ration of abuse, and saw in one mud-caked face a sudden lunatic flash of teeth. The guy was grinning. At me. In complicity, as if he knew me, had always known me, and knew exactly how to throw the switch that turned the most miserable luck, the worst degradations and prospects, into my choicest amusements. Like this endless night, this insane, ghastly scene. Wonderful! A scream! I grinned back at him. We were friends before we ever knew each other’s names.