by Gus Lee
“Let us say, crotheads, I am your acting squad leader.”
What to do? Time was running out. We had to be changing.
“SIR!” cried Stew Mersey. “Uh, NEW CADET MERSEY REPORTS HE HAS NOT BRUSHED HIS TEETH, HAS NOT—UH—MOVED HIS BOWELS, AND THAT HE HAS NOT SHOWERED, IN THE LAST—oh, maybe I did—”
“BANG THAT HEAD IN, MERSEY! THAT WAS GROSS! I DON’T WANT PUNY REPORTS FROM THIS DISREPUTABLE ROOM! REPORT YOUR SHOWER, TEETH, AND BOWELS IN THAT ORDER, WITHOUT THE BABBLE! GOT THAT, SMACKBEAN?!”
“YESSIR!” cried Stew.
“Your Care Factor as a room is low. Buck it up. Otherwise, Beast could become unpleasant. Do not let me catch you behind me on the next uniform. WORK!” he shouted. The door banged shut.
“God, he changed fast,” murmured Bestier.
Stew Mersey wandered, fingering his shirt, studying the carnage.
“Hurry, guys,” said Bestier. “We’re dead if we don’t try.”
After much stumbling and excavating, we fell in ranks in the curious attire. We grimaced as we heard a few new cadets fall down the stairs with their rifles in a terrible clashing of bodies, wood, and steel. One of us was carried out by a cadre member.
“GENTLEMEN. THE NEXT UNIFORM IS UNIFORM INDIA WITH PONCHO, COMBAT BOOTS, PROPERLY LACED AND UNBLOUSED, AND HELMET LINERS. YOU HAVE FOUR MINUTES. FIFTH FLOOR, POST!”
We had just entered the room when Mr. Fideli appeared in the new uniform, looking like a million bucks in coattails.
“ROOM, ATTEN-HUT!” I screamed.
“Too slow, knobs,” he said. “How can you succeed without clothes?” He exited, making us jump when he slammed the door.
This went on all night. Each time we ran like crazed men up the stairs and began to strip the former uniforms, Mr. Fideli would enter, impeccably in the next uniform, without a hint of effort.
“Asshole must be made outa zippers,” muttered Mersey.
After three hours we had become beaten galley slaves, gasping, sweating, wheezing, and coughing in ranks. Dizzy with effort, dazed from hazing, starving, we were near the end of our ability to function. I was done in from our attempt to imitate Vogue models on West Point’s fashion runway. We were like them: thin, underfed, exploited, overscrutinized, and clothed in outrageous taste.
“THIS WAS A SORRY EXPERIENCE,” called Mr. Arvin. “IF I AM TO BE RESPONSIBLE FOR YOU AS MEMBERS OF THE UNITED STATES ARMY, YOU MUST GET THIS EXERCISE RIGHT. WE WILL HAVE TO DO THIS AGAIN.”
A soft moan ran through ranks. Mr. Fideli, like the other upperclassmen, looked calm, as if Mr. Arvin had said tomorrow would bring sunlight, milk and cookies, iced tea with mint for the adults, and plenty for everyone.
“I WILL INFORM YOU WHEN. COMPANY COMMANDERS, TAKE COMMAND OF YOUR COMPANIES!”
“FIFTH FLOOR, POST! CLEAN UP YOUR ROOMS! FOURTH FLOOR, POST! DRINK WATER! THIRD FLOOR, POST! SECOND AND FIRST FLOORS, POST!”
We were in our room. I looked at my Timex. It was 3:34 A.M.; 12:34 in California. I kept drinking water from my green cup.
Bestier pointed at his cot. “Our pal here: the rack.” Flat, like our spirits; sallow, like our hopes; institutionally Spartan, like West Point, the International Center for Quick Dieting, Clothing Abuse, and Sleep Deprivation. I had slept in the rack for three hours, but felt none of its benefits.
“It’s a goddamned nightmare,” said Mersey.
I hadn’t experienced my normal, recurring nightmare about murder in the ’hood. I had dreamed about Ben-Hur’s mother and sister. The hazing was unbelievable, but I was enduring it with a thousand other guys. This wasn’t the result of an angry woman’s hate; Thayer and George Washington were testing me, seeing if I was fit, if I could change clothes, and other things, with sufficient skill to be allowed to stay. It was the test of my life.
“This nightmare only lasts a year,” said Bestier.
I could do that. I used to imagine running away on an S.P. freight, asking Toos where trains came from while he wondered where they were headed. I had made good my escape, believing that anywhere would be an improvement. Today had been a test of that proposition. “Man, I’m glad you’re here,” I said to Bestier.
“Aw, crap,” said Mersey, “I’m not. This sucks!”
Bestier laughed, and so did McCloud, too loudly. Then Mersey.
“Still sucks,” he said. “These fuckin’ rituals eat it big.”
“The li, the rituals, Hausheng,” said Uncle Shim, “are to honor your gahng and lun, bonds and relationships. You must adhere to the teachings of the Master K’ung, who said, ‘k’e ji fu li.’ Subdue the self, and honor the rituals. Do the correct thing.”
Mr. Alsop had said, “the Honor Code. It is the way.”
To him, I had repeated, I owed all that I was, and all that I would ever be.
9
HOME
Second Detail, Beast Barracks, August 20, 1964
“Six goddamned weeks. Gotta get outa here!” cried Mersey.
I wanted to help. “What would your dad say?”
“Who gives a shit? What’d your dad say if you quit?”
I shook my head. It’d be easier to report my death.
“I don’t give a crap!” he cried. “It’s my life. He’s not here! ‘My son, West Point cadet’—bragging at the country club while we got guys trying to kill themselves by drinking Brasso. You thought that guy was nuts for attacking Sowerby. Shit! I know how he coulda done it! I could’ve killed him! Easy, see?”
Last week, the first class had taught us the Spirit of the Bayonet. We used the M-14 like a medieval multipurpose halberd, stabbing and slashing with the blade, clubbing and bashing with the rifle butt, lunging with the grace permitted by a twelve-pound pointed club in the horizontal butt-stroke series, the high parry, and the straight-armed thrust, none of which was useful without a throat-stripping roar as we dismembered the imaginary enemy. I did not feel like d’Artagnan. Then one of our classmates had gone nuts and attacked Mr. Sowerby with his bayonet. He had been butt-stroked, clubbed, hospitalized, arrested, and separated from Beast.
“WHAT’S THE SPIRIT OF THE BAYONET?” Sowerby had screamed.
“TO KILL, SIR!” we had cried back.
“And the jodies, singing while we march,” spat Mersey. “What crap. ‘Everywhere we go, people want to know, who we are, so we tell them, we are Fourth, Mighty Mighty Fourth,’ ” he mimicked in a high voice. “Bullshit!” Mersey paced, a POW in his own army. “That goddamned asshole O’Ware—he’s a goddamn sadist! If he orders another shower formation, I’ll kill him!”
Ferret-faced Mr. O’Ware had become Norman Bates in cadet gray, the psycho motel clerk authorized to carry knives and make raiding parties on the guests. He relished pain, found our hurting parts and spiked them with lye and malice. He was the only cadre who hazed from the side, screaming sour spittle into our cheeks. He was still not a candidate for dental hygiene poster boy. He was the sort who would chop off your foot and then write you up for limping at parade. He called Stew “Spazzed-Little-Girl-Emotional-Crap-Your-Pants-Douchebag Puke Mersey.” He required recitations of the Definitions of Leather and Concrete, the Days, MacArthur’s Message from the Far East, and Battalion Orders. Perhaps Einstein could have spouted errorless poop; we couldn’t. Mersey was being ground down. We tried helping, but he fought us instead.
O’Ware liked shower formations. They began on the top floor, in a bathrobe with a towel folded on the extended left forearm and a soap dish in the left hand. We looked like failed English butlers with bad haircuts, working for tyrannical lords. We sweated pennies to the wall with our backs. The more you sweated, the more floors you descended, until, drenched with your own sweat, you reached the sinks for a ten-second cold shower. Refreshed, you could retire for three hours’ sleep before reveille. I was beginning to have dreams about sleeping.
O’Ware called Clint Bestier “Gary Cooper” and called me “Mars-man.” He called Pee Wee McCloud “Goofy Gomer Pyle.” He ordered me to report to his room two hours
after taps on evenings not blessed with clothing or shower formations. Without an alarm clock, I fought narcotic sleepfulness, trying to stay awake.
His door was open and I stood in it while he wrote in a log at his desk. His roommate was Mr. Spillaney, whose snoring sounded like the bellows of hell. The desk lamp placed deep, haunting shadows on Mr. O’Ware’s face. It was like looking at Lucifer.
“Fishfaced douchebag hunchback,” he whispered, “your mother have any children who lived? Don’t like your looks.” I wondered if he had paid copyright fees to my mother for the last remark. I wondered what a “douchebag” was.
“Rack your ugly, flat-face neck in, cretin,” he hissed. “Your type doesn’t have emotion. Gimme the Definition of Duty. I’ll kick your yellow ass out of the Academy if you wake up Mr. Spike.”
“Sir, the Definition of Duty,” I whispered. “ ‘Duty may be defined as the sense of obligation which motivates one to do, to the best of his ability, what is expected of him in a certain position or station. This, sir, is the Definition of Duty.”
“Your duty is to suffer, shithead.” He asked other questions, as the mood affected him, without looking at me. “Think you can muck it through West Point?” He laughed at me. “I don’t think so.”
“Gonna get him,” Mersey said. He was playing with his bayonet.
“Put it down,” said Bestier. “In the fall, you can call him out. Plebes can challenge upperclassmen to box. The problem is, when you beat him, you have to box his classmates.”
Mersey smiled, for the first time in Beast. “No shit? He’s mine. And I was starting to think there was nothing good here.”
Once, I had held my fists up to my mother. Uncle Shim would say that boxing an elder would be very jing ji, taboo, and violate the Wu-lun, the Five Personal Relationships. I fought when I had to; here, I only had to know the poop. As hungry as I was, this was better than home, for suffering had a purpose and hunger made me feel noble. I was with Washington’s ragtag army at Valley Forge, in the middle of summer, proving my patriotism as a measure of self. There was no honor in fighting your mother.
“Stew,” I said, “it’s like we’re trying to do what Kennedy asked—doing something for our country, something bigger than just … college. It’s home, now.” Bestier nodded.
“You stupid shit,” said Mersey. “You think this is home? Mother screw! You musta come from a fuckin’ prison to think that!”
I felt like arguing, but Beast was better than living with Edna. A cadet does not lie, cheat, or steal. “Yeah,” I said.
“You guys know what my best friend is doing this summer?” Mersey said, trying to make up.
“Yup,” Bestier said. “Getting laid. You already said that.”
“But think of it!” he exhorted. “He’s getting laid.”
“Don’t wanna think about it,” said Pee Wee McCloud, his nearly invisible eyebrows rising, then falling into a frown.
“Hey, guys,” I said. “In ten days the Corps returns, we join our regular companies, and we might get some food.”
“You’re havin’ a cow over food,” said Mersey, “while our pals are gettin’ nookie and havin’ a blast at Beach Boys concerts, seein’ Ann-Margret in Viva Las Vegas. We’re shinin’ shoes and yakkin’ about food! This crap started in July—while everyone we know is havin’ the best goddamned summer in their lives! Does this suck or not?”
“It sucks,” said Pee Wee slowly, nodding his big head.
Bestier smiled. “I eat this up,” he said. “I wanted to come here so bad, I don’t sweat this stuff.”
“Yeah, fine, eat it up,” said Stew. “You’re nuts. You look at each other? We’re disappearing. I couldn’t compete right now. You were big,” he said to me. “Now you’re a skinny Chinaman!”
I put down my shoeshine rag. “That’s not a good word.”
“So what the hell do I call you?” he asked.
“ ‘Kai’ is good. So’s ‘Ting,’ or ‘American.’ ‘Chinese’ is good. ‘Chinese-American,’ that’s okay. That other word, that’s not good.”
Silence. I had emphasized my difference to them.
“Hey,” said Pee Wee, grinning at me. “What about ‘crot’? Or ‘doo-willie’? Or ‘bean-head.’ Or ‘dumb john crot willie smackhead’?”
I had written Christine four exotically long letters, describing the flight across America, the skyscrapers and taxis in New York, and the trip up the Hudson. “I have a roommate who looks like Gary Cooper, another who resembles Ernest Borgnine but sounds like Goofy, and one who cackles while sharpening his bayonet as he considers murdering the upperclassmen.” In my last letter, I had said that I needed to hear from her, about anything.
I look out the window at Central Area at the stars. The only illumination comes from soft yellow streetlamps on Thayer Road, on the other side of tall granite fortress walls formed into a hollow square. A tall clock tower stands in the middle of the Area. I see the stars three hours earlier than you, knowing they are looking down at you, and I think of your face, and your laugh, and your thoughts, hoping that you are safe, and happy, and doing the things that you wanted to do.
I had pledged undying love, forever, to Christine Anne Carlson, the most beautiful girl in the world. I used to pine for her while we ate lunch together. Her blondness reminded me of every idealized actress in Hollywood. I knew her birthday, the name of her cat and her older brother, that her father worked for The San Francisco Chronicle, and that Mrs. Carlson was glamorous and was active in church and community.
Christine was a National Merit Scholar who was accepted at Stanford but picked Cal. Indifferent to cliques, she preferred girlfriends to boyfriends. She turned hallways dark with smoke when she burned cookies in home economics, worked on the school paper, loved literature and drama, starred in school plays, and sang.
I breathed her name, a sound that scraped at the roof of heaven and conjured mystic powers of creation and storm. If I said her name for two minutes, I would hyperventilate, and the constellations would come out at high noon.
“ ’At’s a lotta crap,” said Tony Barraza. “Yur mind quits before that. Ya get giddy thinkin’ ’bout her. It’s stoopid.”
“But Tony, I told you—she’s like Grace Kelly. Beautiful! She’s beyond beautiful. You oughta see her with the sun on her hair and her eyes. And she’s smart. You’re always saying I’m smart. She’s a hundred times smarter’n I am.”
“Kid, that’s obvious. Friggin’ spit bucket knows ya got no brains. Take it back, sayin’ yur smart. Yur punch-drunk. Rattle on like yur shacked up an’ she’s already been givin’ ya—”
“Antonio Barraza, don’t you dare complete that sentence,” said Barney Lewis, chief of instruction.
“Right—sorry, Barney. Look, kid. Do me a big friggin’ favor. Lemme give youse the good word: let off on this dame crap. Trust me. Ya ain’t built fer it. Ya got a face like mine.” He winced, his craggy, boulderlike head, reshaped with blows and laced with ring scars, cracked open as he laughed. His false teeth, yellowed over the years, slipped a bit.
Tony was the perennial favorite of the Y secretaries. Built like a tall Rocky Marciano and armed with a Burt Lancaster smile, he was dark and brooding, square jawed, broad shouldered, and uncured, a challenge for any single woman interested in the impossible. Tony gave me hope; he had neither wife nor family, riches nor gold, and somehow he was loved and well fed.
“Ladies like your looks. Your wife was beautiful,” I said.
Barney was writing ring grades. He stopped without looking up, his breath condensed. Talk about Clara was strictly off-limits.
Eleven years ago, Clara had tired of Tony’s dalliances: she had scooped up Tony Jr. and his teddy bear, her rosary, extensive wardrobe, and cosmetics, and walked out, forever.
Tony was at his desk, aimlessly sorting glove laces, Ace hand wraps, old keys, chits, busted mouthpieces, carpenters’ pencils, fossilized pieces of chewed gum and old food, back and forth, his huge, hamlike hands moving with an agel
ess speed, an inborn dexterity. Tony could thread a needle with those hands, throw a wad of bills into the collection plate at St. Boniface’s from two pews back, and punch two-by-fours into toothpicks; but he had trouble writing and shaking hands. Big piles of desk junk became small piles, then changed back into big ones. Whenever he thought he ought to clean out his desk—which usually followed a hundredth attempt to find the liniment closet key—he made piles. It was the same scarred metal desk he had when I met him, ten years before.
He stopped and looked up at me. “Jeezus, kid. Sometimes yur legs shake. But yur mouth has no friggin’ fear, none.”
Barney resumed writing. Sweat was on my brow. I smiled thinly.
“Clara,” continued Tony, “an’ dames, chased me cuz I had a name, I could cook. Had a footlocker fulla cash. I had press. I had front seats at Bimbo’s 365 an’ Ernie’s an’ Tarantino’s. Arthur Constance and Herb Caen, they wrote about me in the paper. The afternoon dailies used ta interview me when I belched.
“Ya got a name? No, ya ain’t got a name. Any money? No, Master Kai Ting, ya ain’t got one thin dime. So ferget the fancy dames. Grace Kelly? Who ya tryin’ to kid?” He opened the desk drawer and with his trunklike arm swept the piles on the desktop into it, and with a ferocious flick of his wrist, he closed it with a metallic screech and a resounding boom that sounded like a bad car crash.
“Nah, nah. Don’ show me her freakin’ pitture again!”
“Tony! At least admit she’s beautiful,” I urged.
“It’s a freakin’ pitture. How can youse tell anythin’? Ya pull ’at dam’ thing out like it was the one good clippin’ fer yur only good fight. I saw it. You oughta read it. It says ‘Yur good fren’.’ I ain’t educated, but I get it. Means youse ain’t gonna be Mr. Grace Kelly. Means the atomic bomb goes off an’ kayos the world ta full count an’ it’s a two a ya left under a desk, ya still ain’t gonna be Mr. Whoosis. Ya still gonna be ‘good fren’.”