by Pete Hamill
I was supposed to be guarding a dumpster, one of those metal bins that was filled over the course of a week with garbage and junk and then lifted onto a truck and taken away and emptied. It was big enough to hold a car. I’d seen them in boot camp, but even in that land of total chickenshit I was never asked to guard one. I walked around it, feeling foolish with my rifle that didn’t shoot.
There was a barbed-wire fence just past the dumpster and empty black fields beyond and away off lights moving on the highway. Obviously, I thought, feeling hipper than Cannon or the task before me, the Russians weren’t about to steal a giant garbage can. So this watch was really about staying awake. They called it Building Discipline. Usually that meant you did something useless just because someone commanded you to do it. You stayed up all night, watching for a patrol to come around in a jeep, and the patrol came around in the jeep just to make sure you stayed up all night. The Navy. The goddamned Navy.
But after a while I realized it took too much energy to stay pissed off. I started feeling good out there in the open, with the steady drone of insects coming from the fields and silvery clouds moving across the stars. The darkness smelled of the sea and was so humid I thought I could grab it and shape it, pack it like a snowball, throw it at the stars. There was no purpose to my being there, but in all the years since, as I’ve stayed up through the night working with purpose, developing film, making love, arranging tickets and passports and visas for my next stop, I’ve sometimes longed for those nights without meaning under the stars of Pensacola, when I was solitary and young.
I remember my eyes adjusting to the darkness and how I began to see the varieties of the color black. A green black beyond the barbed wire. The pale black of wild grass. The blacker black of tree trunks. I tried to imagine the way Roy Crane would draw it. All grays and blacks. He would probably add some palms to show it was Florida, even though there were no palms out here. Along the edge of the barracks, the trees were all pine. But I knew that an artist could change things to make them better or truer; in fact, it was probably his duty to make such changes. I was sure Crane always did. And so did Caniff: They made pictures that were truer than photographs. They made a lot of things neater than life. The world was a mess, and all the things they taught us in school were lies. But when an artist shaped the world, things always worked out better. An artist would have that curly-haired woman stay on the bus and take the young sailor home with her and make love to him and stay with him forever.
I opened the door to the dumpster. A foul odor rose from it. I stepped closer and objects began to reveal themselves: automobile tires, broken pieces of metal, a lot of paper torn in strips, dry palm fronds. But there was a wet jumble of other stuff that I couldn’t make out. The smells were suddenly more distinct: rusting iron, burnt paper, rubber, decay. Not city odors. But they didn’t make me feel I was in the country either. And I thought: It’s a Navy smell. I’ll only smell this in the Navy. I’ll remember this mixture of smells all my life. And I did.
Then I saw lights bobbing in the darkness on the far side of the field. They moved left, then stopped. I picked up the rifle. The lights moved again, stopped, then were moving again and getting larger. I could hear a car engine now, and then the lights were very bright and the jeep was fixing me with its high beams, stopping a dozen feet away. I held the rifle at the ready and tried to look tough.
“Who goes there?” I said. Like in a bad movie.
No answer. A man stepped out of the car on the passenger side, but I couldn’t see him clearly in the glare of the lights. He came forward. It was Cannon. Carrying a clipboard.
“You’d be dead by now, boy,” he said. He came very close, fixing me with those lashless eyes. “You sposed to ask for a password, boy, and if it ain’t forthcomin, you shoot.”
“Nobody gave me a password. Sir.”
“Then whyn hell didn’t you ask for one, boy?”
“I just got to this base. Sir. I don’t know the routine. Sir. I was—”
“Don’t explain, boy. Admit.”
“Admit what?”
“Admit you done fucked up, shitbird! You are tellin me you went to a United States military post, on duty, without askin anyone what you was sposed to do. You didn’t get a password. You didn’t do your duty, boy, cause you never did find out what it was.”
I said, “If you were a Russian, I couldn’t do my duty anyway. This goddamned rifle doesn’t shoot! So what’s the big deal?”
Cannon blinked. Then he turned to the driver of the jeep, still out of sight behind the glare of the headlights.
“You hear that, Infantino? You hear what this shitf’brains just said?”
“No, sir.”
“He said, ‘What’s the big deal?’ ”
I could see veins pulsing in Cannon’s neck.
“So it looks like we got us another wiseass punk from New York, don’t it, Infantino?”
Infantino didn’t answer.
“And when you scratch a New York wise guy, whatta you find trying to get out? You find a New York big shot. And all we need is some seaman deuce thinks he’s a big shot. Isn’t that right, Mister Infantino?” Then he got angry at Infantino’s silence. “Are you deaf, boy? Do you hear me, boy?”
“Yes, sir, I hear you.”
“Well, what should we do with this big shot, this Mister Wiseass Brooklyn New York?”
I’d never told him I was from Brooklyn, so I knew he’d examined my papers.
“That’s obviously up to you, sir,” Infantino said from behind the brights. His voice was raspy, familiar.
“I tell you what I’d like to do,” Cannon said. “I’d like to shitcan him right out of this man’s Navy. Couple years in the brig, a D.D., and gone.” He sighed. “But this new damned Navy, you can’t do it like that anymore.”
He handed me the clipboard and a ballpoint pen. “Sign here,” he said, and pointed to a box on a ruled sheet of paper. The form listed the various posts on the base and the times. Each of the other guys on duty had signed in a box on the right. I did the same. Cannon’s fingernails were neatly trimmed and polished.
“At ease,” he said. I relaxed. Then he squinted at me and changed his tone and barked: “Tain-SHUN!” I snapped to attention, the rifle on my shoulder. “Now you stay like that till yore relieved, wiseass,” he said. “You even dream about takin a rest, I’ll put you on report.”
He turned on his heel, walked quickly to the jeep and got in. They moved off quickly. Briefly, I glimpsed the other sailor: dark-haired and ruddy-faced. In dungarees.
It was much darker after the jeep left. I stood at attention until the lights of the jeep merged with the lights of the main gate, then I squatted beside the dumpster with the rifle on my lap. Fuck you, Cannon. I didn’t sleep, but I wasn’t awake either; my anger was like an extra pulse. I tried something I did back home when the furies got to me. I made my mind blank. Like a blackboard after it’s washed. I saw Cannon, the dumpster, even The Bluejackets’ Manual on the slate. Then I pulled a wet cloth across it. Twice. And they were gone. I stared at the empty slate. It was blank and pure, like peace.
Then I came suddenly awake. The lights of the jeep were moving again. I stood up and brushed off my dungarees. I snapped to attention, the rifle on my shoulder. My heart thumped. Maybe they had those field glasses that let you see in the dark. Maybe they had photographs of me goofing off. Then the jeep arrived with a squeal of brakes. Infantino jumped from behind the wheel without shutting off the engine. He came right up to me and handed me two doughnuts in a napkin and a cardboard cup of coffee.
“Fuck him,” he said, and then hurried back to the jeep without a word and drove away.
Chapter
11
It is morning on the Gulf and I’m at the window in a bathrobe I bought in Tokyo, staring out at the gray ocean. A storm is coming. There are some young people on the beach, spreading a blanket in defiance of the message from the sky. One is a girl in a flowery bikini, with long legs and beautif
ul breasts. A boy makes a fuss over her. I am sure he wants her to stay with him forever. But they each have a half century ahead of them now, full of perils and temptations. To survive at all is difficult enough. To run the course together will require a miracle. When they are my age I will be dead, and I wish I could go down there and tell them one sentence that they could carry as a talisman. Words so clean and perfect that they would protect those kids from all danger. But nothing comes. One couple runs into the surf. The girl in the bikini touches the boy’s face and he moves forward clumsily to kiss her cheek. It’s the morning of their lives. And then the sentence forms itself: Watch it.
I dress slowly, and move again into that first morning at Ellyson Field, when I awoke feeling drugged, my mouth sour, my bones rubbery after two hours sleep. I hear the sounds of all Navy mornings: shouts of reveille, reveille, groans of protest, and drop yore cocks and grab yore socks. And over and over, the slamming of those locker doors.
Then I was up, nodding at strangers, saying nothing, stretching and squatting to force some bone or muscle into my body. I showered and dried myself, the floor of the head wet and slippery and men at the sinks scraping at beards. They rubbed their faces, their skin, their bellies as if they were mad at their own flesh. Some hummed tunes, others grumbled in solitude. Some were tattooed. Many were matted with hair. I am sure I dressed in the uniform of the day: dungarees, black shoes, white hat. I am sure I made my bed, and felt ready for the challenge of the morning.
Then a short sunburnt muscle-bound man came over. His nose was peeling and he grinned in a crooked way.
“You’re from New York, I hear.”
“Yeah. Brooklyn.”
“I’m Max Pilsner. The East Side. You goin’ to chow?”
It was as easy as that. A hello in the morning and I had a friend. I don’t make new friends anymore. There have been too many fakers, too many disappointments, and too many real friends have died. Max Pilsner was my friend, and it is a measure of how far we’ve traveled that I no longer know if he is dead or alive. That morning, Max stepped out before me into the steamy Florida air. His arms hung straight from his shoulders. His waist was narrow. And he walked in a series of rolling movements, like gears shifting. He made walking seem like a brilliant performance. All around us, sailors hurried along in the half darkness, their cigarettes bobbing like fireflies. We walked beyond the Supply Shack to the chow hall, where the smell of toast and hash filled the air. Max told me he was a mechanic in Hangar Three, and had come here straight from mechanics school in Memphis and he was hoping for sea duty, anything, to get out of Ellyson Field.
“I’d even join the Fleet Marines,” he said. “And they’re fighting in Korea. The medics, anyway …”
The only good thing about Ellyson was that there were some decent guys here, he said, New Yorkers and shitkickers. “They’re all nuts.” He was telling me this as we waited on line under the eaves along the side of the chow hall. We passed a single piece of graffiti: Find it hard getting up in the morning? Slam a window on it. Through the window, I could see Waleski sitting with other sailors at one of the long wooden tables. Freddie Harada was with two other Orientals. The morning sounds were louder now: metal trays, silverware clattering against metal, cups clunking, coffee urns hissing, guys on KP yelling at one another in the steam, all mixed up with the sound of helicopters beating their way through the morning air.
“Who’s this Bobby Bolden?”
“The best,” Max said. “Greatest horn player in the Navy. Maybe in the whole friggin South. Now that’s a guy that was in the Fleet Marines. A medic. He got wounded, too, in Korea. Won a bunch of medals. Know what’s great about him? He doesn’t give a shit. Nobody can scare him. Nobody. So nobody bothers him. Bobby Bolden …”
He showed me the apartment above the mess hall, where Bobby Bolden lived with all the other Negro sailors, most of them mess cooks. And he pointed out a chief petty officer named Francis Xavier McDaid, standing near the door in starched suntans. Red Cannon was bad enough, Max said, one of those Old Salts who remembered when men were men and ships were wood, but McDaid was Red’s boss and infinitely worse. We had our trays full of scrambled eggs and bacon now. I looked at the chief. He had a broad flat face and a deep tan. He seemed to be staring right at me. I wondered whether Red Cannon had told him about me. Put me in some New York Wise Guy category. We sat down. I turned to look at the door. And saw a black man coming in, powerfully built, with coffee-colored skin. Even from the distance, I could see that he had green eyes. Max told me that this was Bobby Bolden.
“He’s only got one major problem,” he said. “Pussy.”
“Isn’t that everybody’s problem?”
“White pussy.”
I was eating quickly now. Max looked at me.
“That bother you?” Max said.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I never thought about it before.”
“Down here, they lynch colored guys for it. Maybe that’ll help you think about it.”
“Come on, they don’t lynch people anymore, do they?”
“Only when they catch them.”
Bobby Bolden passed through the line like some visiting prince. The black mess cooks cracked wise with him, heaped his tray with food. Then Bolden walked past us down the aisle, nodding at Max, and sat among a group of whites, without saying a word to any of them.
“See what I mean? There’s empty tables all over, but he sits with the worst rednecks on the base. Just to break their balls. Now watch.”
Without finishing their breakfasts, five men got up and left the table. Three of them moved to other tables. Two walked right out of the chow hall. Bobby Bolden showed no emotion. He just sat there eating.
“Does he have one white girl? Or a bunch of them?”
“I don’t know,” Max said, “I don’t follow him around. I’m allergic to gunshots.” He smiled. “But there’s a Wave who works out at Mainside, I know he’s got her. A real good broad, very funny. Not my type, understand? But truly tremendous tits.”
I laughed. “I guess you can’t blame him then.”
“I can blame him for being stupid,” Max said. “Down here, they kill colored guys for lookin’ at white broads.”
I sipped my coffee. It tasted brackish. I said, “You tell him that?”
“Hey, how you gonna tell him? What do I do? Go up to the guy and say, ‘Hey, Bobby, you’re a nigger, you know? And they have segregation down here. So it ain’t safe for you to be screwing a white broad.’ I mean, Bobby Bolden was a hero in Korea, two Purple Hearts, two Bronze Stars, a whole shitload of other medals. How am I gonna tell him what to do?” He glanced around the hall. “Besides, he just don’t give a shit.”
I looked down at Bobby Bolden again, remembering the sound of the horn. A human being playing the blues on a bright lonesome New Year’s afternoon. Telling everybody who’d listen about the boulevard of broken dreams. He ate slowly and deliberately, in what seemed to be permanent solitude.
Chapter
12
Somewhere in the South, the woman from the bus was walking along a street or driving a car or shopping in a market. She was naked in a shower. She was lighting a Lucky and smoking it quickly, holding the butt in her left hand. She didn’t know how desperately I wanted her. How I wanted her promise of female darkness and secret things in the night. How I wanted to know what she knew. But I was in the Navy. The Navy brought me South. Because of the Navy, I was on that bus. And before I could get to her, before I could start my search for her (locating mysterious Palatka on a map and going toward it the way desperate men once searched for El Dorado) I would have to deal with the Navy. And that turned out to be not very hard.
After breakfast, I walked into the Supply Shack and waiting for me at the counter was a first-class airman storekeeper named Donnie Ray Bradford. Not Donald. Or Don. Donnie Ray. He was a thin-lipped man in crisp tailor-made dungarees. His eyes were watery, with a wounded look in them. I told him who I was and he said “Welc
ome aboard” and then I joined a dozen other sailors at 0800 for the formal morning muster. This was to be the routine of every Pensacola morning, and it is built into me now; no matter where I am or who I sleep with, if I fall asleep at five A.M., I still rise to make the eight o’clock muster. On this first morning, Donnie Ray called each of our names, checked them off a muster sheet, then nodded in a generalized way at the group, dismissing us. It was very loose and casual and, I thought, grown up. A few shook my hand and welcomed me aboard, then quickly dispersed to various parts of the building. Some left to take a truck to Mainside. I remember all of them now, and will carry them with me to the grave, but that first morning, I still couldn’t match names to faces.
Donnie Ray took me on a tour of the Supply Shack. As I thought, the storeroom was in the rear, with crates stacked almost to the ceiling and narrow aisles running between them. A Hi-Lo was parked near the door. Inside the crates there were rotor blades, Donnie Ray told me, and engines and pontoons. They were all up on pallets to make it easier for the prongs of the Hi-Lo to lift them and also to guard against flooding. Sometimes the Gulf was hit with hurricanes. He explained the parts numbering system and told me twice that it was important to account for every piece. “If you forget something,” he said, “they go nuts in Washington.”
He showed me my desk, which was the last in a row of five desks set at right angles to the wall. There were neat trays of requisition forms, a dictionary, a telephone. “All yours,” Donnie Ray said. “The complete aviation storekeeper’s kit.” And then someone called his name and told him he had a phone call and he hurried away. I sat down at the desk. It wasn’t the same as operating twin .50s on a destroyer in the South China Sea. But it was mine. The place where I would work for a long time. I sat back, engulfed by the aroma of cut grass, the fronds of the palm trees clattering in the soft breeze, the sprinklers whirring. Even inside the Supply Shack, the air seemed thick and sensual. A picture of my lost woman scribbled across my mind, then vanished.