Closing Time (28 page)

They got by. Joey wanted to be a writer too. It was from Joey I first heard that variation on the Pepsi-Cola radio commercial. I remember the first verse of another parody he did on a popular song that was up near the top of the Lucky Strike Hit Parade, one you can still hear today on records by some of the better singers we had at the time:

If there's a gleam in her eye
Each time she unzips your fly,
You know the lady's in love with you.

I wish I could remember the rest. He wanted to write comedy sketches for the radio, movies, and theater. I wanted to do these with him and also to write short stories someday good enough to be published in
The New Yorker
magazine, or anywhere else. Together we collaborated on skits for our Boy Scout troop, Troop 148, and later, older, for dance-night entertainments at our social club, when we charged ten cents or a quarter admission for people from a dozen of the other social clubs in Coney Island and Brighton Beach, girls free. One of our longer Boy Scout skits, "The Trials and Tribulations of Toby Tenderfoot," was so comical, I remember, that we were asked to put it on again at one of the regular assemblies that were conducted every Friday at our elementary public school, P.S. 188. Joey went into the air corps too and became an officer and a bombardier, and he also taught college in Pennsylvania. By then he was no longer "Joey" and I was no longer "Sammy." He was Joe and I was Sam. We were younger than we thought we were, but we were no longer kids. But Marvin Winkler still talks of him as Joey when he looks back, and thinks of me as Sammy.

"They laughed when I sat down at the piano."

That ad became the most successful direct-mail advertising campaign ever run, and possibly it still is. You filled out a coupon and received a packet of instructions that taught you, they said, to play the piano in ten or so easy lessons. It helped, of course, if, like Winkler, you had a piano, although he never cared to study it.

We had a Ford in our future, the manufacturer told us, and there was no-knock gasoline at Gulf or at the sign of the flying red horse at the filling stations for the automobiles with knee-action wheels we could not yet afford to buy. Lucky Strike meant fine tobacco in those days of the knee-action wheels, and people called for Philip Morris and would walk a mile for a Camel and for the other cigarettes and cigars that gave my father the lung cancer that spread to his liver and his brain and then very quickly killed him. He was on in years when he passed away, but Glenda was not old when stricken with her ovarian cancer and died exactly thirty days after the diagnosis. She began feeling ill with different things after Michael did away with himself and today we might guess her affliction resulted from stress. She was the one who found him. There was one stunted tree in the backyard of the house we'd rented for the summer on Fire Island, and he'd managed to hang himself from that. I cut him down, aware I ought not to, rather than leave him dangling to be stared at by us and the women and children from neighboring houses for the two hours it might take for the police and the medical examiner to come in their beach buggies.

A dollar an hour… a mile a minute… a hundred a week…
a hundred miles an hour, wow!

These were all possible. We knew there were cars that sped that fast, and all of us there in Coney Island had relatives living elsewhere who were better off than we were and had those cars that might go a mile a minute or more. Ours lived for the most part in New Jersey, in Paterson and Newark, and came in their automobiles on summer Sundays, to walk the boardwalk to the carousel or as far as Steeplechase, to use the beach or wade in the ocean. They would stay for the dinner that my mother liked to cook, my sister helping, to serve them the breaded veal cutlets with roasted fried potatoes she made deliciously, to "give them good eat." Civil service jobs were coveted, for the pay, the steady, white-collar work, and the vacation and pension benefits, and because they went to Jews too, and those who obtained them were looked up to as professionals. You could start as an apprentice in the U.S. Government Printing Office, my older brother read to me from a civil service newspaper, and then work as a printer at a starting salary of sixty dollars a week-there was that dollar an hour, almost in reach, and more-once the apprenticeship was over. But I would have to live and work in Washington, and none of us was sure I ought to leave home for that. A shorter stint at the Norfolk Navy Yard in Portsmouth, Virginia, as a blacksmith's helper, with a bunch of the other guys from Coney Island working in the navy yard too, seemed a more inspiring idea, while we waited to see if the war would be over before I reached nineteen and whether or not I was going to be drafted into the army or navy. At 30 Bank Street in the city of Norfolk, we'd been told, a ferry ride across from Portsmouth, was a cathouse, a brothel, but I never had nerve enough to go, and lacked the time. I lasted at hard physical labor there close to two months, working fifty-six consecutive days for the time and a half on Saturdays and Sundays, before I gave up in total exhaustion and came back home, and finally found a job as a file clerk with an automobile casualty insurance company for much less money, in the same building in Manhattan, coincidentally, the old General Motors building at 1775 Broadway, in which Joey Heller had worked in his uniform as a Western Union messenger, delivering and picking up telegram messages.

Where were you?

When you heard about Pearl Harbor. When the atom bomb went off. When Kennedy was killed.

I know where I was when the radio gunner Snowden was killed on the second mission to Avignon, and that meant more to me then than the Kennedy assassination did later, and still does. I was in the tail section of my B-25 medium bomber in a dead faint, after coming around from the crack on the head that knocked me out for a while when the copilot lost control of himself and put the plane into a sheer drop and then wailed on the intercom for everyone in the plane to help everyone else in the plane who wasn't answering him. Each time I came to and heard Snowden moaning and saw Yossarian doing something else in his vain struggle to help him, I fainted again.

Before that mission, I had crash-landed once with a pilot we all called Hungry Joe, who had loud nightmares when he was not on combat duty, and I had ditched once with a pilot named Orr, who they said later wound up safe in Sweden somehow; but I was not injured either time, and I still could not make myself believe it was not honestly only like the movies. But then I saw Snowden with his insides out, and after that saw a skinny man frolicking on a raft at the beach cut in half by a propeller, and I believe now that if I'd thought earlier that either one of those things could occur in my presence, I might not have been able to make myself want to go. My mother and father both knew that war was a more dreadful thing than any of us kids in the neighborhood could picture. They were appalled later when I told them I had been accepted for flying duty as an aerial gunner. Neither had ever been up in a plane. Nor had I, or anyone else I knew.

Both walked with me to the trolley stop on Railroad Avenue, near the second candy store we had on our street. From there I would ride to Stillwell Avenue and, with the three others, take the Sea Beach subway line into Manhattan to Pennsylvania Station to report for duty on my first day in. I learned years later that after my mother hugged me good-bye with a gentle smile and a straight face and I'd gone away on the trolley, she collapsed in tears right there and wept inconsolably, and it was nearly a half hour before my father and my sister could get her back down the street into our apartment.

The day I went into the army my standard of living practically doubled. I was making sixty dollars a month as a file clerk in the insurance company and had to pay my carfare and buy my lunches, or bring them. In the army I was paid seventy-five dollars a month as a buck private from day one, and food and clothes and rent and doctors and dentists were all free. And before I was out, as a sergeant with flight pay, overseas pay, and combat pay, I was making more a month than a government printer and was already closer as a young man to that hundred dollars a week than I'd believed I ever would be able to get.

Where did all that money come from?

As my mother might say, in Yiddish: On Monday one third of the nation was ill-housed, ill-clothed, and ill-fed. And on Thursday there were ten million people in the military making more than most had been able to earn before, and two million civilian employees, and tanks, airplanes, ships, aircraft carriers, and hundreds of thousands of jeeps and trucks and other vehicles pouring out of the factories almost too rapidly to count. Suddenly there was enough for everything. Does all the credit belong to Hitler? Capitalism, my father probably would answer with a smile of resignation, as though for this humane socialist all of the evils of inequality could be clarified in that sinful single word. "For war there is always enough. It's peace that's too expensive."

From that first train ride out from Pennsylvania Station to the reception center on Long Island, I experienced in the army a loss of personal importance and individual identity that I found, to my amazement, I welcomed. I was part of a directed herd, and I found myself relieved to have everything mapped out for me, to be told what to do, and to be doing the same things as the rest. I felt unburdened, more free than as a civilian. I had more free time too, a sense of greater liberty, once the orientation phases were over.

The four of us who'd enlisted together came back unharmed, although I had a pretty bad time of it on both missions to Avignon, and Lew was taken prisoner and kept in a prison camp in Germany for half a year before he was set free by the Russians. He knows what a long shot it was that he survived at all after Dresden was bombed while he was there. But Irving Kaiser, who had been our Toby Tenderfoot in the skit by Joey Heller and me, was blown apart in Italy by artillery fire and I never saw him again, and Sonny Ball was killed there too.

By the time of Vietnam I did know what war was like, and White House wickedness, and I swore to Glenda I would do everything conceivable, legal and illegal, to keep the boy Michael from going if he came even close to passing his physical and being called up. I had doubts that could happen. Even before he was old enough to be on drugs or medication he showed signs of behaving like someone who was. He was good at facts and figures but was lost with things like maps and floor plans. His memory for things statistical was phenomenal. But he was not much good at algebra or geometry, at anything abstract. I let Glenda continue to think he'd been affected that way by the divorce. I outlined heroic plans to move to Canada if the draft board called him. I would even go to Sweden with him if that looked safer. I gave her my word but did not have to keep it.

Lew wanted the paratroops or a tank with a cannon in front to roll over Germans who were persecuting Jews, but wound up in the infantry after training in the field artillery. Overseas, he made it to sergeant when his own sergeant was killed. Even earlier, in Holland, he had taken that position of command when his sergeant grew unsure of himself and began relying on Lew for orders to give. I wanted to be a fighter pilot and fly the P-38, because it looked so fast and flashy. But I had no depth perception, so I became an aerial gunner instead. I saw the posters stressing the need for gunners and volunteered. It was the most dangerous game of all, rumor had it, and it was going to be a cinch. And for me, as it turned out, it pretty much was.

I was small enough to be a ball-turret gunner on a Flying Fortress in England, but luckily nobody noticed, and I wound up as a tail gunner in the sunnier Mediterranean on the easier, safer B-25 instead.

In training, I always liked very much the feel of the grip on the .50 caliber machine gun. I liked being aloft and firing away with real live bullets at tow targets in the air and at stationary targets on the ground, walking the tracer bullets with their white streamers up to them from in front. I learned quickly about inertia and relative movement, that a bomb or bullet from a plane going three hundred miles an hour starts out moving in that same direction at that identical speed, and that gravity is at work from the first instant, and I was put to work at a blackboard occasionally by our first gunnery officer, helping some with difficulties try to understand. I learned electrifying things about Isaac Newton's laws of motion: if you were in motion or the target was, you would never hit it by aiming right at it. I have one that still surprises me: if a bullet is fired from a horizontal weapon at the same moment an identical bullet is dropped at the spot from the same height, they will strike the ground at the same time, even though the first one may land half a mile away. I liked the combat-simulation trainers less, because the guns were not real, although they were almost as diverting as the gun games in the boardwalk penny arcades. You sat in an enclosed contraption and fighter planes of different makes flew at you on a screen from different directions and heights for a fraction of a second, and it was realistically impossible to distinguish friend from foe that quickly and bring your sights to bear and depress the trigger. No one scored impressively on these; on the other hand, no one washed out. Two guys I knew of were reassigned because of fear. From these trainers I grew skeptical: if that was the way it was going to be, the only thing to do was to let go in a general direction as quickly as possible with as many rounds as you could in the few seconds you had. And that is the way it turned out to be, just about everywhere. The side that could bring the most firepower into play was the side that always won.

People don't want to know that the ancient battle of Thermopylae and the heroic Spartan stand to the last man there was not a Greek triumph but a crushing defeat. All that valor was wasted. It's the kind of fact I like to throw out at people to shake them up a little and get them going.

I had faith in my machine gun, but it never crossed my mind that I would always be firing away at someone who would be flying in to fire at me.