Loving Women

by Pete Hamill

  “Now, where in hell my spose to sit?” he said loudly. “Huh?” He turned to the driver. “Answer me that! There ain’t no seats back here!”

  “Jest a minute,” the driver said. The Negro woman was now in the aisle, like a giant plug. Her jaw was loose. She was mumbling. The driver lifted down two shopping bags from the rack.

  “I ain’t gonna stand all the way to no Atlanta!” the soldier shouted. “I jest ain’t gonna do it!”

  “Hold on,” the driver said. “Jest hold yer hosses.” He waited until the woman took the shopping bags, then he allowed her to lead the way down the aisle. The driver’s eyes squinted; his face seemed more yellow as he scanned the faces in the rear.

  “This is boolshit!” the soldier said. “Goddam one hunnid pissent boolshit!”

  The driver turned harder. “Take it easy, soldier. This ain’t my idea. It’s the law.”

  “The law …”

  The man next to me watched in silence. His hands clenched and unclenched. “We crossin’ the Mason-Dixon lahn,” he said to me. “Or like we calls it, the Smith and Wesson lahn.” He smiled in a bitter way. “Some country, ain’t it?”

  The driver told a thin, redheaded white woman to get up and sent her to the third-row seat vacated by the large Negro woman. Then he helped the redhead take down a cheap plastic suitcase, tied together with a stocking. The redhead took it from him quickly, shielding it with her body as if ashamed of its condition. The driver turned to me.

  “Okay, sailor,” he said. “You’re goin’ to the first row and this soldier’s takin’ your place.” I started to get up. The pomaded Negro shook his head. “Some shit,” he said. I reached up for my sea bag. I said to the driver: “What’s this all about, anyway?”

  “The South,” he said wearily.

  There was a white man sleeping against the window in the first row. He was an older man, maybe forty, with thinning blond hair, a long nose, a bony face. He was wearing a checked sport jacket. A black raincoat was drawn tightly up to his chin like a blanket. He had his shoes off and there was a flight bag at his feet. I sat down and the bus finally pulled out. Soon we were back in the rhythm of the road. Dark forests. Distant houses. I thought about Harry Sparrow and Fifi. In bed together.

  All I needed was another useless hard-on. So I shook Fifi out of my mind, and watched the road and the ease and skill of the driver as he moved the huge bus around slower-moving trucks. I didn’t know how to drive. I was from Brooklyn, where nobody I knew had a car. Including my father. We used the subway to go places. In boot camp, guys laughed when I told them this. You cain’t drahv? Shit, man, what’s yore p’oblem? I tried to explain, but they couldn’t believe it; most of them started driving when they were twelve, thirteen. I guess I admitted I couldn’t drive to avoid talking about the more terrible failure: The dark secret of my virginity.

  • • •

  Somewhere near Greeneville, the driver picked up a small microphone clamped to the dashboard. He glanced at his watch, then flicked a switch.

  In a hoarse voice, he said, “Ladies and gennulmen, in exactly ten seconds, it’ll be January the first, nineteen hunnid an fipty three.”

  I heard some applause, but when I glanced around most of the white people were asleep. It was hard to see the Negroes in the dark. Back home, everybody was celebrating, drinking and shouting while Guy Lombardo’s band played “Auld Lang Syne” on the radio. The worst band in the history of the world. The people were probably celebrating because they wouldn’t have to hear Guy Lombardo for another whole year. My father was probably down the block in Rattigan’s, somber and silent while the other men were singing loud and drinking hard; my brothers were banging pots on the fire escape and throwing snowballs at drunks.

  And somewhere tonight, I thought, right this second, while this bus takes me where I’ve never been, right now Maureen is with her accountant. She’s at a party with him. Sitting on a couch. Tony Bennett is singing “Because of You” on the phonograph. She’s wearing her blue dress. Or maybe the white one. The accountant is holding her left hand. Or maybe the right. He stands up and she follows. The room is dark, a small lamp on in a corner, maybe thirty watts, maybe red. He starts dancing with her. She moves close to him. In the dark, does she think her accountant is me?

  “Here, sailor,” the driver said, and passed me a pint bottle of whiskey without taking his eyes off the road. The dark-brown glass of the bottle was cool in my hand. There was no label.

  “Thanks,” I said, unscrewing the cap and taking a belt. “Happy New Year.” I didn’t much like whiskey, the way it burned when it went down, the way it stayed in you so that you reeked of it for days after you’d drunk it. In that, at least, I was like my father. We both preferred beer. But I drank from the unmarked bottle anyway. It was a New Year’s gift. A long way from home. I felt it open like a warm blossom in my belly.

  “Yeah, happy New Year,” the driver said. “An’ gib some to the gent nex’ to you, swabbie.”

  The man next to me was now awake. He nodded in greeting as I handed him the pint. His hands were very thin, with veins standing up like blue ropes.

  “Thanks, buddy,” the man said.

  “Thank the driver. It’s his whiskey.”

  “Maybe we oughtta git off this thing. All we need is a drunk bus driver.”

  “He doesn’t look the type,” I said.

  “They never do.”

  The man took a second belt of the whiskey, then gave it back to me and I passed it on to the driver, thanking him.

  “Hi,” the man beside me said. “I’m Jack Turner.” I told him my name and we shook hands in a cramped way.

  “Where you headin’, sailor?”

  “Pensacola.”

  “Why, hell’s bells, so’m I.”

  “You Navy?”

  “Yeah, bo’,” he said. “Seventeen years, man an’ boy.” He dug into the bag at his feet, found another pint bottle and cracked the seal. “Three more years and I’m done. The Big Two-Oh. Twenty years in this man’s Navy. Then it’s back to the world.”

  I waited; this was the first Old Salt I’d talked to man-to-man. In boot camp, the salts were all ball-breakers: yelling, shouting, marching us around the grinder till we dropped. Maybe it was because Turner wasn’t wearing a uniform. I don’t know. But he seemed okay.

  “You must’ve seen a lot of the world,” I said. “In seventeen years, I mean.”

  He handed me the bottle. Four Roses. I took a swig, but held it in my mouth for a while before letting it go down.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I been some places. Seen some shit. But places ain’t the world. Not the real world.”

  The whiskey was spreading out of the core of my stomach now.

  “What is?”

  Turner glanced out the window into the darkness. “A woman. Kids. A house. A car … All that boring shit. That’s the world … Pass that bottle on to the driver. He’s a good ole boy.”

  I tapped the driver’s elbow and offered him the Four Roses. But he shook his head no and smiled. I handed the bottle back to Turner.

  “You don’t travel in uniform?” I said.

  Turner laughed. “Hell, no. Not if I got money to pay my way. Maybe hitchhikin’, the uniform’s an advantage. But you got the money, peel that sucker off,” he said, pinching the sleeve of my blue jumper. “I’ll tell you why. People see a sailor, they always laugh. They think sailors are crazy and crazy people strike most people as funny. And you know sumpin? They’re right. Sailors are crazy. You’re out on some leaky tub, with all that goddamned ocean around you. For weeks, months, years, like we was in the war. I mean years. Nothin to see all around you but ocean and sailors. Crazy goddamn bad-ass sailors. All goin crazy. Some goin queer. Until finely, they come home to port, crazy and horny, and they go ape shit. Truly fucking crazy-ass apeshit. You ever see a sailor walking along sober on a Saturday night? You ever see one in church? Or in a lib’ry? Fuck no. You see sailors fallin down in the street, you see them laughin and
pukin and rollin in piss and sawdust. You see them gettin locked up. And you know somethin? Nobody ever gets mad. They see jarheads doin this shit, they get pissed off. They see some army guy grab a girl by the ass, they want t’ lynch him, even if he aint a nigger. They see some flyboy gettin fucked up in public, they write to the gahdamned newspaper.” He took a belt from the bottle. “But they see a sailor with blood all over his whites, fallin on his ass in the gutter, with a hooker on his shoulders and puke on his fuckin shoes, and they laugh.”

  I laughed too. “I see what you mean.”

  But Turner wasn’t laughing. “You see, I don’t like people to laugh. Because sailors aint funny. Sailors are the saddest, most fucked-up, most lonely-ass people on God’s pore lonesome fuckin earth.”

  He look a longer swig this time, swallowing it slowly.

  “So I travel in civvies,” he said. “Wherever I end up stationed, I get me a locker club first thing, and when I go ashore, I change into civvies. I don’t want anyone laughin at me.”

  Neither did I. I liked Turner for that and I wished he was going all the way to Ellyson Field with me. I’d have someone to talk to, to show me the ropes. He was an ordnance man, first class, going to Mainside to show young pilots what guns looked like. He was happy about the billet too. It could’ve been Shit City. Norfolk. Or it could’ve been another aircraft carrier and he hated aircraft carriers. There’s four ways of doing things in this man’s Navy, Turner said: The easy way, the hard way, the Navy way, and the Midway. The Midway was his last aircraft carrier.

  He was quiet for a while and then he asked me if I had a girl. I said no, and he looked at my face and saw something there, I guess, and said, “That bad, huh?” I told him that the truth was I got a Dear John letter while I was in Bainbridge and he passed me the bottle and I sipped and my stomach burned and I was very hungry and he said, well, it was better to get a Dear John early than late and I shouldn’t feel so damned bad because everybody gets one, sooner or later, every sailor gets one, and he took a sip and so did I, and he told me he had gotten five Dear Johns in his life and three of them were from wives. I said that was terrible and he said Nah, wasn’t so terrible, they were right, probably, I was no bargain, no sailor is. But I loved them all. Right up to the minute it was over. Tell me about them, I said. And he did.

  Chapter

  3

  What Turner Told Me

  Judy, she was the first, sixteen and red-haired and saucy and hot. Damn she was hot. Rub that gal’s elbow and she’d come. Hot, brother. I married her in 1938 in San Diego, just before they shipped me to the Far East. She was from Shreveport, down Luziana way, staying in Dago with her sister, who was married to a bosuns mate. The bosuns mate was out at sea and I met Judy in a sailor joint with her sister and we went home together, the three of us, and we woke up together too. But Judy was mine from the gitgo and I had some leave for a week and we got married. I was on a cruiser passing Guam when I got a letter saying she was knocked up and I should start picking out baby names. I shoulda known better, I guess. Because she tole me she was too damn lonely there in San Diego and she wanted to go home to this little place near Shreveport where her folks sharecropped, go home there and have the baby there, and I wrote back, Sure, okay, that sounds fine. Well, that Pacific tour was eighteen months. This was before the war and we just went all over the damned place, and when I got home and took the bus from Dago to Shreveport, the little boy was crawlin and Judy was sleepin with the sheriff. Everybody knew it too. They knew it in the town. Her folks knew it. And when I went into that little shitass town, six miles from Shreveport, everybody looked at me, like theyuz wonderin what I was gonna do, and they had this look on the face, pity, hell, tell it true, contempt. And when I went to Judy with what I saw, with what I felt from everybody, when I said Hey, woman what is this shit? She looked at me and turned her back and said, I want the sheriff. I want him, she said, not no long-gone forty-dollar-a-month sailor boy. She wanted the damned sheriff and the damned sheriff wanted her, and if I didn’t like it why didden I go down there to the courthouse and tell the sheriff what was on my mind? So I drove around all night in her Pa’s car, with a shotgun in my lap and drinkin white lightnin. And I stopped in some honky-tonks and listened to the damned jukebox. And I watched the goddamned courthouse. All the time thinkin, I’ll just drive over to that whorehouse halfway to Shreveport and get me a piece of ass and then I’ll go shoot the goddamned sheriff. And that’s what I started in doing. But after I got laid I went out to the car and fell asleep with the shotgun in my lap and when I woke up I left the car there and the shotgun and I hitchhiked into Shreveport and got me a bus and went all the way back to San Diego. I only heard from her one last time. She sent me a letter, saying, Here’s your copy of the dee-vorce, Sincerely, Judy. I always loved that word. Sin-cerely. Everytime I hear that goddamned word I think of Judy. She had the roundest sweetest ass in Shreveport, boy.

  My second wife’s name was Ginger, and right off I shoulda known better. You fuck girls named Ginger. You don’t marry ’em. She was a hostess in a dancehall in Honolulu when I met her. A long-legged high-hipped woman in a flowered dress like they all wear out there, and small titties and a big ass and skin that glowed like gold. I think maybe there was a little Jap in her, the way she had them high goddamned cheekbones and small little titties, but if that was so, well, her ass sure wasn’t Jap. No sir. She tole me she was nineteen and I believed her and she sure looked great in that dim light in the hall with the smoke and everything and Glenn Miller playin and all of us sailors drinkin hard and the weather so damned hot that her dress with the flowers on it stuck to her ass like a tattoo. Oh I was in love, boy. Right there. Took me about nineteen minutes and I wanted that woman for the rest of my life. Later on, I learned she was really twenty-seven (I was twenty). Later on, I learned she’d been married once before and had two kids she never tole me about. Later on, I learned she had the goddamned clap, too—this while I was two months out at sea and married for three, and I knew this because she gave it to me. I had some dose, boy. I was dripping with it during the battle of Midway and after I talked to the medics in sick bay I went to the yeoman’s office and told him I wanted to stop sendin checks to dear wife Ginger and I filled out all the forms and sent her a letter with one damned sentence it. Dear Ginger, I said. I got yore clap, bitch. Sincerely. I put that in. Sincerely, and signed my name. The next time I was in Pearl was 1943 and she was workin in a whorehouse and I had her blow me for three dollars before talkin about the de-vorce. A real sincere woman, Ginger.

  There was a lot of other women too. Yeah. Young girls and old girls, and colored and Chink. But the third wife was the one. I thought she’d make the whole damn thing come together. Her name was Susan and I met her in San Francisco after the war. Small dark-haired girl who worked in a bank and lived alone and wore glasses cause she was nearsighted. Lived in this small house on Mission Street. She didn’t want to have nothin to do with me, me bein a goddamned sailor. She just give me the brush. Right off. When I went into the bank to get change for a twenty-dollar bill. I aint no Errol Flynn but I had my share and so when she gave me the brush naturally I wanted her so bad I hurt. So I stayed on her, every day, sometimes twice a day, while the ship was in drydock, and I plain wore her down. I married her, I guess, just to prove to her I was serious, not some horny damned swabbie. Why not? Hell, she didn’t have no sheriff, she didn’t have the clap. So I tried one las’ time to live the life of a married man.

  Right off I seen she was a nut about neatness. She had a million rules for everything, all that shit about a place for everything and everything in its place. At first this didn’t bother me. Hell, I was Navy. I’d lived a long time in little tight spaces and I obeyed the rules cause sometimes the rules saved your life. So at first I thought it was terrific. She was kinda military, you know? But then I found out she was a Christian too. A Godfearin Bible-readin black-hearted Christian. And that type of a Christian is all rules, boy. She wouldnt let me smoke
cigarettes in the house cause it stunk up the wallpaper. She wouldn’t drink whiskey with me. She got mad if I didden go to church with her and if I was late for dinner. If I got stuck at the ship or stuck in traffic or stopped for a few whiskeys with a couple of sailors, she’d go nuts. In the closets in the house in Mission Street, she put everything in little cellophane bags and gave them all labels, like panties or slips or bras. The inside of the refrigerator looked like something in a supermarket with everything in rows. And if I put a milk bottle on the vegetable shelf, she’d scream at me. She wouldn’t have sex during her period, of course, and for four or five days before her period she was nutty and pissed off and I wasn’t interested. Naturally, she thought a blow job was a sin. Naturally, using a rubber was a sin too. She would only fuck me in the bedroom, with the light out, between nine and eleven at night. She wouldn’t fuck any later than that cause she needed her rest to get up on time for the bank. I said to her, You don’t work at the bank on Saturday or Sunday, baby! But on Friday night she was too tired from the whole week of workin and on Saturday night she was restin to get up for church on Sunday.

  Well, after a while I started coming home late. And some nights I didn’t come home at all. Then I was there one Friday night and after dinner I was sittin in this big chair beside the fireplace, just like I always saw men do in pictures in magazines, and the fire was burnin cause it gets cold there in San Francisco. And she started screaming at me for leavin the newspaper on the floor. You always make a mess, she yelled. You can’t do anything without makin a mess. Yellin at me, the top of her lungs.

  So after a bit, I stood up. I lit me a cigarette and blew the smoke on the wallpaper and she yelled What are you doin and I put the butt out on the rug, mashin it in real good. Then I lit another and walked past her smokin and opened the refrigerator and messed everything up and then I pissed in it. Right into the goddamned fridge. I remember the butter meltin in the butter dish. Then I got a pint of whiskey from my coat and chug-a-lugged it and got sick and puked on the doormat. Never said a word all the time. Well, little Susan ran right outta there.