Loving Women (18 page)

“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 when he goes to town: to get screwed, blued, and tattooed
.

Words for Jew: kike, yid, hebe. Hitler probably used them all
.

Chapter

22

O
ne 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.

I got off at Garden and Palafox. The sun was high and not very hot and a salty breeze was blowing in from the waterfront. I stared into the window of a men’s store on the ground floor of the Blount Building, across the street from the San Carlos Hotel. The clothes there were too expensive. I looked across the street at the hotel, thinking I’d like to walk around the lobby. Then, like a scene in some old movie, Tony Mercado, the Mexican pilot, came out on the steps. He had a blonde woman with him. He kissed her on the cheek and she disappeared in a taxi. The tall colored doorman in his white uniform said something; Mercado smiled and then another colored man drove up in a shiny blue convertible. He got out and backed up a step. Mercado handed him what must have been a tip, slipped behind the wheel and drove away. It was all done with ease and command and I envied him. I wondered what it would be like to spend a night with a woman in a big hotel. On silk sheets. With drinks in a bucket beside the bed. And enough money to order food brought to the room. Just like in the movies.

“Hey, sailor.”

Two Shore Patrol were standing there, each holding a club, each with a pistol strapped to his hip. One was tall, with square shoulders, dark sideburns. The other was short and compact.

“Let’s see your Liberty Pass, sailor,” the tall one said.

I gave it to him, and he studied it in a suspicious way, making me nervous. I knew what it said. I’d practically memorized it. Armed Forces Liberty Pass. With the name of the service, the date, my name, my service number, the card number, my rate and the name of the organization. Signed by Donnie Ray. I was here legally. But still, the SPs made me nervous. The tall one nodded to the shorter one and then handed me back the pass.

“Just checkin,” he said.

I asked them where I could buy civvies at a decent price and they directed me to Sears, down on South Palafox. I saluted and walked away. When I glanced back, they were strolling into the lobby of the San Carlos. Maybe they had some women stashed there too.

Sears was a long, narrow, badly lit store with signs everywhere advertising bargains. The men’s department was just inside the door. I bought a ghastly green Hawaiian shirt that wasn’t as loud as Sal’s but still made me feel as if I were in Florida. It cost $2.50. A pair of chinos went for six bucks. I told the man at the counter that I wanted to wear them out of the store and he showed me a dressing room. I took off the uniform and folded it neatly. Then, dressed in civvies at last, I brought the uniform back and asked the salesman to wrap it for me. The man nodded silently; his face looked permanently unhappy.