by Pete Hamill
“Going over the hill?”
“Yeah.”
“No,” I said, and meant it. “I made a deal. I have to keep up my end, even if I don’t like it.”
He stared at his hands.
“What about you?” I said.
He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “I think about it all the time.”
One frigid afternoon, Miles showed me the base library, up one flight of wooden stairs to room 912, above the post office. “It’s actually not too bad,” he said, in an amazed way. “They’ve got some magazines and a few good books.” He was right. I remember the first time I went up those stairs. A middle-aged yeoman in a pea jacket was sleeping at a desk. He came suddenly awake, blinked at me with the sore eyes of a rummy, saw I was just a kid sailor and went back to sleep. The place was a kind of refuge from the Navy, with five aisles of books, a magazine rack, and a long table where you could write letters or just look out the three screened windows at the base.
I picked up Life magazine. On the cover, a model with blurry features peered through a beaded curtain. I remember that issue so clearly. It was the first Life I’d ever read, and it was full of marvels. I studied an advertisement for Philco television sets, equipped with the Golden Grid Tuner. A woman who looked like Joan Fontaine was turning the knob of a huge set. She was perfectly groomed, wearing earrings and a filmy dress.
We didn’t have TV at home yet, and in our neighborhood none of the women looked like Joan Fontaine. But that winter everybody I knew was buying television sets. They had already begun to change everything, something I noticed the summer before I went away. At night, there were just not as many people on the streets as there used to be. When you looked up, you could see a blue glow in more and more windows. They were in all the bars, too, and men now stood quietly, staring at the black-and-white images, while the bartenders made endless adjustments. I thought that when I sold my first cartoons, I’d get my father a set. Maybe he’d enjoy the Dodger games. The kids could look at cartoons and Westerns. But I just couldn’t picture myself sitting there with them.
I examined the magazine as if it were a papyrus discovered in some pharaoh’s tomb. There seemed to be a woman in every ad: standing cheek to cheek with a guy in the Chlorodent toothpaste ad, holding her head in the Anacin ad, dressed as a bride in the Kingston sewing machine ad, scrubbing the floor in the ad for Flor-Ever vinyl flooring and a smaller shot of a woman with a sheet wrapped around her, shoulders bare, as a nurse noted her weight on a scale. She was selling lemons as a diet aid. She didn’t look fat to me.
In the news part of the magazine, there were photographs of some quintuplets from Argentina and a lot of pictures of Republicans taking over the House of Representatives from the Democrats. Harry Truman was still president, and they showed him sitting with some senator named Johnson, who had big ears and was smoking a cigarette, his hair sleeked back. The pictures made me think of Tony Mercado’s camera, and I tried to imagine the photographers looking through their cameras at these events. How did they know where to go to take pictures? Did someone send them or call them? And did they take the film to a drugstore or develop it in some mysterious way themselves? Another story said that 1952 was the first year since 1882 without a lynching of a Negro in the United States, and that made me think of Bobby Bolden. How would he feel reading this news? Would he feel better? I didn’t think so. If I was colored, I’d want to go out and lynch someone back.
I stopped at a full-page ad for Kotex. There was a woman in a tailored suit the color of oatmeal, with dark brown shoes, reddish gloves, a hat and earrings. In her right hand she was holding a leather-trimmed bag. She touched her throat nervously with her gloved left hand. In the distance, a man in a business suit was waving to her with his hat; he had a briefcase and raincoat under his arm. Behind him was a small two-engine airplane. I wasn’t quite sure how Kotex worked, although I knew it had to do with a woman’s period. The ad didn’t exactly expand my knowledge. “Not A Shadow Of A Doubt With Kotex” said the headline. But the rest of the copy promised Protection, and Absorbency, and a Fresh, Dainty Feeling. What did all of this mean? And what did they mean by “no revealing outline”? Most of all I wondered about the nervous woman in the ad. Since this was a Kotex ad, she must have her period. But was this some secret she was keeping from the guy coming off the plane? If so, why? He looked like a husband, she looked like a wife. But she was wearing gloves, so I couldn’t check for a wedding ring. Was she somebody else’s wife? And had she made a date with this guy, only to discover that she had her period and wouldn’t be able to sleep with him? Life was full of mysteries.
A few pages later, I saw a woman on skis, soaring through the air up in the mountains. She was wearing ski pants and boots but no shirt. “I dreamed I went skiing in my Maidenform Bra …” A blonde. Tinted glasses. Good teeth. I imagined her coming into a small dark room to meet me, the heavy boots making a clumping sound, her tits shoved up by the satiny bra. She ran the tip of her tongue over her lips, and sat down on the edge of my bed. I put my hand on her back, the flesh soft, and pulled her close. The hard breasts pushed up against my bare chest, the bra making a satiny noise as her tits touched me … Without working at it, I had another hopeless hard-on.
I looked over at the yeoman, who was still asleep. But I tried to distract myself from the loveliest sight on the dreamscape. Through the window, I could see Captain Pritchett and two other officers walking slowly down the paths. The captain was looking at the lawns. They were browned from the snow and the cold. He squatted and ran his hand across the top of the grass, then plunged his fingers into the dirt. He stood up and shook his head sadly, like a man about to cry. I closed Life, and watched Captain Pritchett walk away, his body sagging. At that moment I liked him very much. No matter what else he might be, he was a man who loved something.
Eisenhower was sworn in, but there was still no sign of my paycheck. “Maybe Truman stole it,” Dunbar said. “Put it in a deep freeze. Put a down payment on a vicuña coat.” The Journal said that more than 10,000 people crowded into two inaugural balls, paying $12 apiece, and they were so crowded nobody could dance. Back home, Republicans were a separate nationality. But at least now, for sure, the war would end. Eisenhower had gone to Korea between the election and the inauguration. He was a general. He would end it. One way or another. Maybe it wouldn’t be like the last war. No celebrations, no V-J Day, with everybody running wild in the streets and block parties everywhere in the neighborhood and sailors kissing girls in Times Square. Korea was different. Nobody knew what Korea was about. But at least, if it ended, the men would stop dying, would stop being wounded, would stop being lost behind enemy lines. And that meant that there would be no need to train any more helicopter pilots. The Navy could close Ellyson Field. I could go to sea.
The weather turned warmer, but it was still not the hot weather of the day I arrived. During those weeks, I took seven trips to Mainside. Becket promised to teach me to drive. Most days, Sal and Max came to the Supply Shack, telling me that Dixie Shafer was asking for me at the Dirt Bar. I told them again that I wasn’t going anywhere until I got paid. They offered to try to smuggle her onto the base some night, disguised as a case of pontoons. I donated a pint of blood to the Bloodmobile and later Captain Pritchett sent around a notice congratulating everybody on the eighty percent donation rate, adding up to 478 pints of blood. Walking back from the library one afternoon, I saw Bobby Bolden and nodded. He said hello.
“I miss hearing you,” I said. “Maybe you could play some night at the EM club.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Why not?”
“Too many crackers.”
“Ah, they won’t bother you.”
“They won’t serve a black man there. Why should a black man play for them?”
“You’d be playing for us, not for them.” I thought about the lynchings, and masked men from the Ku Klux Klan dragging Negroes out of their homes. “Most of us are from the North.”
“
Forget it.”
I wanted to keep talking to him, wanted to get to know him. I thought that maybe Navy small talk was the best way. I gazed off at the helicopters, trying to be casual.
“You give blood yesterday?” I said.
“Are you a fool or what?” he said. “They won’t take our blood.”
“You’re kidding me.”
“Wise up, chump. This is the Navy. You can’t integrate blood in the United States Navy. Spose one of them crackers learned he had a black man’s blood in him?”
“What would he care if it saved his life?”
“He’d rather fucking die.”
“I don’t believe it.”
“You better learn, chump. This is America. They got laws down here.”
I felt awkward, but also pleased. At least Bolden was talking to me. I mentioned musicians I’d heard on the radio, Max Roach and Kenny Clarke, Roy Eldridge and Milt Jackson. He liked them all, talked about their best work, then said, “You’re pretty hip for an ofay motherfucker.” And laughed. It was as if he’d pinned a medal on my chest. I said I’d like to come visit him and hear him play. He said he’d think about it.
“I’m waiting to get paid,” I said. “If the Navy ever finds the check, maybe we could go out and spend a day at the beach.”
He made a blubbering sound with his lips. “Don’t you understand nothin, man? This is Florida. These beaches are segregated.”
“You mean you can’t go to any beach in Florida?”
“I can swim with the other niggers. That’s all.”
“You won a bunch of medals. Doesn’t that matter?”
“Not a goddamned bit.” He turned his head. “See yuh.”
On the comics page, there was then a beautifully drawn sequence of Buz Sawyer’s dumb brother, Lucky, walking into a Latin American revolution. Crane at his best. One of the Latin officers looked like Mercado, and I wondered if Mercado was learning to fly helicopters to fight in some future revolution. If so, I envied him. At least a revolution would be clear, not some blurry mess like Korea. But if there were a new revolution in Mexico, which side would Mercado be on? He would have to choose. And he would probably choose the side of the people who owned Leicas. Here, we never had to choose. Or so I thought then, at seventeen, and ignorant of most things.
Then one morning, the winter was gone. The sun came closer to the earth. We didn’t need peajackets to go to the chow hall. Windows were opened all over the base. I heard Bobby Bolden playing “It Might As Well Be Spring” and started humming the words. Starry eyed … vaguely discontented … like a nightingale without a song to sing … I was picked for the Mainside run and stood in the back of the truck. Becket was driving and said we had to go to the waterfront first, to pick up a crate. We moved slowly into town through the morning traffic, heading down South Palafox to the piers.
Then, as we passed Trader Jon’s, I saw the woman.
She was walking quickly toward Garden Street, her head down, dressed in dark maroon slacks, penny loafers, and a starched white blouse. Her face was masked with sunglasses, but I knew it was her from the curly hair.
“Hey, miss!” I shouted, as we rolled by.
She looked up, but there was no expression on her face.
“Remember me?” I yelled, pointing at my chest.
She looked up for a moment as Becket drove me away from her. Then she lowered her head and hurried across the street. I waved at her, like a desperate signalman semaphoring for help. At the door of Woolworth’s she looked up again and saw me waving. She paused, waved back and then ducked into the store.
Chapter
21
From The Blue Notebook
Segregate: v. 1 To separate or set apart from others or from the main body or group. 2 Isolate. 3 To require, often with force, the separation of a specific racial, religious, or other group from the general body of society; to practice, require, or enforce segregation, esp. racial segregation. Also, maintaining separate facilities for members of different, esp. racially different groups. Segregated education, segregated buses.
Is this country nuts? A guy wins all kinds of medals in Korea and he can’t swim on a beach in Florida? A white draft dodger, a white murderer on parole, the head of the Mafia, a white hooker with the syph—they can all swim on the beach, but Bobby Bolden can’t? What is this all about? How can Eisenhower and these people make all those speeches about freedom and how important it is to fight the godless Communists and then tell Bobby Bolden he can’t swim on a beach with white people? They sure didn’t teach us any of this in school. The amazing thing is that any Negro would ever fight for this country at all. And the white people that pass these laws—what are they afraid of?
The goyim are everybody else in the world who is (are?) not Jewish. I know that from the old rabbi on 14th Street in Brooklyn, that year when I was the Shabbas goy. So I’m one of the goyim and so is Charlie Parker and Eisenhower and William Holden and June Allyson. Sal is always breaking Max’s balls about the power of the goyim, but Max doesn’t seem to mind. Max is the first Jew I ever met that is my own age, but he never talks about some of the things that must drive him crazy. Like Hitler and the concentration camps. It was only eight years ago when all that happened. I mean, back home my father’s friends still sing songs about the Irish Famine, and that was in the 1840s or something. It’s hard to imagine that the thing with the Jews really happened. When I was ten years old and reading Captain America. Hard to believe that people could put other people in ovens and burn them alive or gas them. Not just a couple of people. But millions of them. Just for being a Jew. The newspapers say that six million Jews died. The weird thing is that there are people who still say things like: Hitler didn’t kill enough of them. Boy, there are some sick bastards in this world. I don’t understand how any Jew could believe in God after what happened. Any more than I can believe Bobby Bolden could pledge allegiance to the flag when he can’t sit where he wants in a bus or swim on any beach in the country or eat in any restaurant or go to any school.
I keep hearing the word gone. Over and over. My girl is gone. The guy’s wife is gone. But it isn’t just ordinary people that are gone. It’s everybody. They show up and you get to know them and then they’re gone. Roosevelt is gone. His picture was on the kitchen wall because my mother tore it out of the Daily News magazine. Then he died, and then she died, and after she died, my father took it down. I guess it reminded him of her. Or maybe he never did like Roosevelt. Anyway they’re gone. There was that Henry Wallace, who was vice president and then after the war—1948—he started his own party and ran for president against Truman and Dewey and some guy from the South, the shitkicker that started the Dixiecrats. Everybody was against Wallace. They said he was a Communist, even if he did use to be vice president of the United States, and he’s gone now, too. And so is La Guardia and Pete Reiser and DiMaggio and Dixie Walker. Gone. How does that happen? Why can’t these people just stay there? Why do things always change?
Sometimes I think about America (after looking at Life or The Saturday Evening Post) and it’s like a foreign country. I never went to any of these American things: sock hops, drive-in movies, homecoming games, pajama parties. I might as well be reading National Geographic about Brazil. I never saw a cheerleader with pompons on her ass. I never got laid in a car. I used to look at Archie comics like they were science fiction. Archie and Jughead, Betty and Veronica, with those oxford shoes and school letters on short-sleeved sweaters: Where did all those kind of people live? Not where I lived. Not even where I live now, at HTU-1 Ellyson Field.
Becket told me that the word Dixie came from New Orleans. The French word for ten was dix. And they had a ten-dollar (or franc?) bill with the word dix written on it and all those crazy men who worked on the Mississippi river would get drunk and say, “Got to get down to New Awlins and get me some of them Dixies.” I wonder if Dixie Shafer knows she’s named after money? I think it would make her happy.
Sal’s greatest ambition wh
en he goes to town: to get screwed, blued, and tattooed.
Words for Jew: kike, yid, hebe. Hitler probably used them all.
Chapter
22
One morning, Maher called me at the Supply Shack and told me my check had finally arrived. All these years later I remember the great bright lightness of the moment, a kind of fierce exuberance, the sense that I’d just been released from jail. Donnie Ray told me to go cash it and take the rest of the day off, since I’d suffered enough for my country. Coming back from the yeoman’s office with the money in my pocket, I ran into Sal.
“For Chrissakes, get decent clothes,” he said. “And we’ll meet you tonight in the Dirt Bar.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Maybe.”
And went back to the barracks with a signed Liberty Pass in my hands and got dressed in a hurry.
All the way into town on the bus, I tried to recover the image of the woman. For three weeks, I’d deliberately shoved her out of my mind; what I couldn’t have, I didn’t want to imagine. Now I wanted her back, the true goal beyond the pursuit of civilian clothes or a cold beer. But as I gazed out at the passing streets, the drowsing bars and forbidding churches, I found the process of recovery harder than it should have been. The woman had become like an out-of-focus snapshot. This alone confused me; how could I have a grand passion for a woman I could barely remember? So I looked for the woman as if seeing her would be the only way I could remember her clearly, or prove that she had existed at all. And I thought that maybe all I wanted was the feeling she aroused in me, and not the woman herself. The words of a song drifted through me: “Falling in love with love, is falling for make believe …”
I saw women of all sizes, shapes and ages, but not the woman of the New Year’s Eve bus. I knew she was in Pensacola; I’d seen her on South Palafox Street, walking into a store. She had waved at me as the truck rolled to the piers. But I started to erode that vision with doubt. Maybe I only thought I’d seen the woman that day. The woman I’d seen wore different clothes, hair tied up in a different way, eyes masked with sunglasses. Maybe my longing had created a mirage, a promise of lush green in a harsh desert. Maybe I’d waved to a total stranger. I wouldn’t know until I saw her. And there was some chance I’d never see her again.