by Pete Hamill
We had arrived in Pensacola at last, the bright sun hurting my eyes. There was no bus station. The Greyhound pulled up at a curb and I saw signs telling me I was on the corner of Garden Street and North Palafox. “Pensacola, folks,” the driver said, and there was a wheeze of doors opening and then people were pulling luggage from racks. Turner went ahead. I stopped and talked to the driver.
“There was a woman sitting beside me,” I said. “Got on in Atlanta, got off somewhere between there and here.”
“White woman?”
“Yeah.”
“I remember. Yeah. Pretty woman. Got off with some cullid folks in, oh, hell, musta been Palatka.”
“Where’s that?”
“Oh, fipty mile back. She figget somethin?”
“No. Nothing. I was just …”
He smiled. “She was a looker, awright.”
“Yeah.”
That was all. I’d met her, felt her body against mine, was sure somehow that she had touched me in the night, felt all other women vanish from me, felt all things to be possible; and she was gone. In some place called Palatka. I got off and saw Turner drinking from a water fountain shoved against a wall in the shade. It was marked “White.” The water dribbled steadily into a white ceramic dish. A pipe ran five feet from the white fountain to the right, connecting to a smaller fountain labeled “Colored.” None of the Negroes used their fountain.
“Taste like seawater,” Turner said, pulling a face. “Maybe they’re tryin to get us feelin at home.”
“Should I try it?”
“Seawater drives you crazy, sailor.”
“I guess I’ll wait.”
“You can watch a while and see if I go crazy.”
“By then I’ll be dead of thirst.”
The local buses were around the corner of Palafox, engines idling in the sun. A group of sailors waited in single file to board a bus marked Mainside. The Greyhound driver came around the corner with a bundle of copies of the Atlanta Constitution and dropped them in the lobby of a movie theater called the Rex. The Glass Menagerie was on the marquee, but the doors were locked, the box office dark.
“Well, I’ll see you, Devlin,” Turner said. “There must be another bus goes to Ellyson. I gotta jump this one to Mainside.”
I told him I would see him around and we shook hands and said good-bye. I felt strange. I’d heard about the man’s wives on the long ride. I’d drunk his whiskey. Now he was vanishing. Just like that. And I thought that as I went around in the world more and more people were like characters in movies: You saw them on the screen, you got to know them, and then they were gone. Turner was like that. And the woman with the curly hair. All the guys from boot camp. The guys I knew in high school. Buddies to the death. And then gone. At the door of the Mainside bus, Turner shook my hand, nodded good-bye, then turned on the steps and said, “Happy New Year.”
I waved, and the Mainside bus pulled away from the curb and moved out of sight. I stood there alone for a long while. Tonight, arriving here for the first time in more than thirty years, I drove into the center of Pensacola again, to get my bearings, and found that exact spot. I was thrown instantly back into that first day-bright arrival when I was some other person. Neat careful rows of palm trees seemed to be at parade rest all the way up the broad sloping street. About four blocks up, I could see three churches plugging the avenue, staring down at the town in a gloomy stone-faced way. They gave me a chilly moment, pebbling my skin; in 1953, churches always seemed to be saying No. So I turned my back on them that morning and looked around the empty sunbaked corner. There was a hotel called the San Carlos across the street, and as I waited for the Ellyson bus I counted floors. I did the same thing again tonight, gazing up at the shuttered hotel, its boarded doors and begrimed windows. Nine stories, including the ground floor. Tonight a wino slept where a Negro doorman in a white uniform once stood on the steps. There was a bar and restaurant on either side of the entrance; the polished glass of both were now hidden behind sheets of plywood. A thick-bodied man in a sleeveless undershirt stared out a third-floor window that first day, and though back then there were few other signs of life, tonight there were none at all. That first day in Pensacola, I thought the usual guests must all be home for the holidays, sleeping off hangovers, getting laid. Tonight I thought they must all be dead.
To the right of the San Carlos there was (and is) a small red-brick building, and beside that a cream-colored church whose cross and steeple were level with the hotel’s sixth floor. The brick building must be the rectory, I thought. And the church bore a cross, so it must be Catholic. Looks Spanish, too, I thought. Or Mexican. Like pictures of churches in National Geographic in places where the sun was hot and clear and blinding. And I remembered the brief lines in the encyclopedia, about Pensacola being called “The City of Five Flags.” The book said it had changed hands thirteen times in twenty years. Obviously, the name itself must be Spanish. Pensa-cola. Cola-cola. Pepsi-Cola. Nickel-nickel, ta-rootie-da-dot-tah.…
I was sweating hard and could smell my own stink rising out of the thick wool winter uniform that I’d worn from the North. Thinking then (as I would later, with other women) that maybe that was why she’d left. The odor of my body, unwashed for two long days, glazed by other men’s cigarette smoke and farts and whiskey breaths: it must have driven her out of the seat and then out of the bus. Maybe she thought all sailors smelled like me. For all I knew, maybe they did. Maybe she had been nauseated by the possibility that Pensacola would be a whole town full of stinking sailors and she would rather get off in Palatka with a bunch of colored people than keep on going. Or perhaps there was some other reason. Something more mysterious, scary, female.
Then a battered gray bus pulled around the corner from Garden Street and stopped in front of the Rex theater. A piece of cardboard was jammed between the windshield and the dashboard. Ellyson Field, it said, hand-lettered in a tight, awkward way. The door opened. A civilian driver got out and stretched.
“This go to Ellyson Field?” I said.
“What’s the sign say, sailor? Brownsville, Texas?”
I got on and sat in a front seat, feeling stupider than ever. Where was Brownsville, Texas, anyway? And why didn’t I say anything back to the man? I wished I could react like the bus driver did. Quickly. Sarcastically. And then thought I never learned her goddamned name. I shifted around, as if expecting her to step off some other bus, maybe the local from Palatka, and saw three sailors in soiled whites hurrying around the side of the San Carlos hotel. They were waving frantically at the bus, mouthing words I couldn’t hear. The driver was behind the wheel now, and looked at them in a blank disgusted way. Then two civilians came down the street, carrying lunch in paper bags. They all got on the bus. The sailors were in their late twenties. I could see from their shoulder patches that one of them was a gunner’s mate, another a second-class radioman, the third a machinist. They were cursing and laughing, bleary from a long night’s drinking. They went all the way to the rear and sat down hard. The civilians eased into a seat across the aisle from me. They said nothing, as if by their silence they were issuing a judgment of the drunk sailors in the rear. As for me, a hairless kid in dress blues, I didn’t exist. The driver came back and glanced at his watch and then looked at me.
“What’s the fare?” I said.
“No charge in uniform,” the driver said. “You jest comin aboard, boy?”
“Yeah.”
“Be careful when you get to Ellyson. The excitement’s libel to kill ya.”
Then he slid in behind the wheel, put the bus in gear, closed the door and moved up Palafox Street. This route was to become a permanent part of my life, one of those templates that are engraved on the mind forever. I’ve lost all traces of offices where I’ve worked, houses where I’ve lived with women, the terrain of battlefields where my life came close to ending. I’ve never forgotten the road to Ellyson Field. I saw a luncheonette, a clothing store, a jeweler’s; then a large United States Court
house, a restaurant called the Driftwood, a deli. The names were different when I cruised the block tonight, but the basic structures remained the same. There were the three churches, which on that day long ago revealed themselves to be Lutheran, Baptist, a Masonic temple. In the New Year’s Day sunlight, while snow choked the northern cities, people stood outside each of the churches, keeping to themselves. There were men in dark suits, looking hot and alien in the brightness, and a lot of what at the time I called older women, at least in their thirties, wearing long dresses and straw hats and white gloves and low-heeled sensible shoes. All were carrying Bibles. I looked at the women, searching for my lost night woman with the curly hair, thinking that her hair would be wild in the heat, that she might have exchanged her jeans and turtleneck for a yellow summer dress. But she wasn’t there; they were all strangers. Not one of them knew me. She called me child.
We moved into a rougher area. One-story buildings made of raw concrete blocks. Jumbled scrapyards full of rusting, anonymous iron. Auto-repair shops with greasy sidewalks out front. A few cheap luncheonettes, closed for New Year’s. There were telegraph poles everywhere. And still no people. The light here was less intense than it had been on Palafox. Across the aisle, the civilians sat like statues. But I could hear mumbling and sudden laughter from the sailors in the back, as if they were recalling what had happened during the night. I wished I could tell someone what had happened to me during the night. O curly-haired woman without a name.
Then we were out of the ugly district, moving into open country. The fields along the highway were ruled into neat rows of vegetables, and there were more Negroes walking along the edge of the road and more churches: smaller, made of wood or concrete blocks, with white steeples on the larger ones, signs calling to sinners: CHRIST IS RISEN NOW IT’S YOUR TURN and CHRIST IS ON THE WAY and WHAT DOTH IT PROFIT A MAN?
The bus slowed as we passed a row of honky-tonks on both sides of the road, flat-roofed one-story buildings with cars parked outside. The Circle O and Good Times and Jack’s Port ’o’ Call and The Palms Away and The Fleet’s Inn. Some had signs in the windows saying PACKAGE STORE or FISH FRY or BURGERS. The bus stopped at a red light. Cars darted out of the side street. Then a sailor in dress whites came hurrying from a place called The Anchor Inn. The driver opened the door. The man climbed in, a machinist’s mate, third class, breathing hard, his eyes runny and sore. He needed a shave. The sailors in the back all started applauding. One of them shouted: “You didn’t get the clap this time, Roscoe, you oughtta shoot yisself in the foot!”
“Fuck you bastards,” he said.
“You now got yisself the only discharge you’ll ever see!”
He laughed and went past me to join the others in the back. From the open door of The Anchor Inn I heard a fragment of music from the jukebox. Guitars. A woman’s sad and wounded voice. It could have been in another language. At home, when I heard pieces of music, the whole song would play through my head. But this was hillbilly music, music out of the South, and I didn’t know any of it. The tavern door closed. I realized it had been days since I’d heard any music at all. Just “Auld Lang Syne” on the Greyhound bus. Today, every time I hear it I remember that New Year’s night on the bus. And when I hear country music, I’m back in the South, moving along those roads.
The driver turned right at a cross street, and there ahead of me was a long avenue, with unkempt fields on each side and small stunted palm trees planted along the shoulders. Eight-foot barbed-wire fences bordered the empty fields. Then I could see a brick building getting larger as we came closer and a sign that said HTU-1 ELLYSON FIELD and Marines with tan uniforms and white belts and pistols on their hips, watching the approach of the bus. And beyond them I could see this place where I was going to live for a long time: hangars, a lone helicopter the size of an insect rising from a hidden landing strip, and then barracks, white and silent, on green lawns off to the left. Ellyson Field. Where they trained helicopter pilots for the Navy and the Marines, men who went from here to Korea and picked fliers right out of the sea after they’d been shot down. I knew nobody. Nobody at all. I was very hungry and my stomach tingled and then turned uneasy and I wondered who was here to try to break me and who wished me harm. I took out my packet of orders and got my ID card ready and then wondered why I was there at all.
The bus made a slow half turn and stopped parallel to the gate. I was the only passenger with a sea bag, so I waited for the others to get off, then stepped out and saw the others presenting their ID cards to a Marine sergeant. The civilians nodded to the Marines, the sailors saluted. I went up to the sergeant.
“Airman apprentice Michael Devlin reporting for duty, sir,” I said and saluted. The Marine’s face was a formal grid. He looked at the papers and the ID card and then at me. He returned the salute.
“Welcome aboard, sailor,” he said.
Chapter
7
With the sea bag on my shoulder, I walked down the main street of the base, following the Marine’s directions to the barracks. I tried to walk in what I thought was a rolling, sea-duty gait, just in case anyone was watching, an affectation so heavily practiced then that it became in fact my adult walk. In the years that followed, women sometimes laughed at it, and so did I, but it is now too late to make a change. Sometimes you actually become what you want to become. But on the first day of 1953 I was not yet formed as a man, and was still anxiously trying on the various styles of the world. Perhaps that’s why I still see myself so clearly, walking for the first time into Ellyson Field. Anxiety sure does sharpen focus.
I know that I turned left into a street without sidewalks. And I remember how the grass came right down to the curbs, as precisely cut as my boot-camp crewcut, uniformly green and flat and perfect. A rich, creamy earth smell rose from the grass and little jewels of water sparkled among the blades. That odor is one of the memories I can never reclaim in the way buildings can be revisited, and streets; my senses have been blunted by too many cigarettes. Everywhere I go, the American air is now stained with the fumes of gasoline and chemicals. That day I inhaled the fresh wet air and thought: I’m in Florida, goddamnit, and nobody I ever knew has been here before me.
Three raked gravel paths were cut through the grass from the street to the barracks doors. I stood there for a moment, wondering which door to choose, hearing the chirring sound of insects in the close, drowsy air. The Bachelor’s Enlisted Men’s Quarters were in a wooden building almost a block long, painted a shiny white. Birds clung to the peak of the tar-papered roof. I couldn’t see through the screened windows. The entire building was three feet off the ground, on concrete blocks the color of mice.
I turned and looked around at my new slice of the world. Most of the base was blocked from my view by the low white building right across the street. My pulse quickened when I saw a sign saying Supply Department. That’s where I’d be working. And I felt as if I’d put something over on the Navy Department. I could sleep late and still make muster in less than a minute. Right across the street. Beautiful.
From where I stood, the building seemed to be divided in two. There was a door in the center, and through the windows on the left of it I could see the rough wood of packing crates. Nothing was clear through the screened windows on the right. That’s where they must work, I thought, and all the gear must be stored in the section on the left. I was standing there for what seemed a long moment, trying to imagine what might happen to me on the other side of those doors, when I heard from a great distance the sound of a saxophone.
He was playing the blues. A slow, mournful tune, drifting from somewhere on the empty base. Long sad lines. And then a pause. And then more long lines. A tenor, probably. Little phrases breaking and curling around themselves and then a longer line, and then a pause again. Sounding as lonesome as I was. Like a broken heart. Or hunger. Or jail.
Then it stopped. I waited and listened. But there was no other sound except the insects and the muffled engine of a lone helicopter: chump
chump chumpchump chumpchump.
I lifted the sea bag and started up the path to the barracks, my feet crunching on the gravel. I opened the screen door, and went through into a cool gray room with a picture of Harry Truman on the wall. He was still president; Eisenhower had been elected the previous November, but wouldn’t take office until January. To the right was a corkboard covered with Navy bulletins; a small wooden table and chair were shoved against the wall. Through an archway, I could see double-decker bunks divided down the center by a row of high metal lockers. The floor was scrubbed almost white. Sunlight knifed through the windows, making glaring patterns on the floor. I laid the sea bag down and stepped into the room. There wasn’t a single person in sight. I remember feeling like a burglar.