Just One Catch

by Tracy Daugherty

  One day, one of the older fellows, a full-timer, twenty-one or twenty-two, returned to the office from a delivery he’d made to an apartment up near Gramercy Park. He swore that a man had let him into the apartment, where a beautiful and provocatively dressed woman languished on a couch. The man offered to pay him to make love to the woman. The messenger’s coworkers scoffed at this tale—hesitantly. Certainly nothing like that had ever happened to Joey. Not even close. He wondered if this guy was making up stories to take his mind off rumors they all heard about something called the Selective Service Act, which, if passed by Congress, could mean military conscription for boys his age.

  Soon, Joey was transferred uptown to a Western Union office in the General Motors Building between West Fifty-seventh and West Fifty-eighth streets, near Columbus Circle. Now, the subway ride was a little longer after school, but the job was easier: This office served only those businesses inside the GM complex. It was staffed by a pretty young woman, a Miss McCormack, who mused freely about her man troubles. Joey’s fellow messenger here was a friendly twenty-one-year-old named Tom Fitzgerald, who fretted mightily about Selective Service and whiled away his time practicing penmanship.

  Joey’s favorite office in the complex belonged to the Manhattan Mutual Automobile Casualty Company. The receptionist, a “Miss Peck or Miss Beck,” he recalled, smiled at him broadly each time he popped in with a telegram for the company. She was “dark, buxom, married, mature.” Each afternoon, he looked forward to her warmth.

  In another office nearby, two young men tinkered with the taste of ice cream dispensed by vending machines. When Joey brought the men a telegram, they’d ask him to stay for a moment and try their latest formula for chocolate or banana. He felt like a kid, cozy and safe, and took to dropping by the office even when he didn’t have a message for the guys.

  Each day, he overheard business chatter: deals, plans, concerns about advertising. He knew that many of the General Motors execs were sending telegrams to potential delegates to the Republican National Convention. Most of the GM men supported Wendell Willkie as the man to beat FDR.

  Talk of politics and the draft filled Automats, bakeries, and food stores in the immediate neighborhood. Joey listened closely to arguments, hopes, and fears as he wolfed down buttered rolls, baked beans, and chopped sirloin in Horn & Hardart, or lingered over a cream cheese sandwich in the Chock Full o’ Nuts on Fifty-seventh Street.

  * * *

  ARGUMENTS WOULD NOT HELP George Mandel. Or Henny Ehrenman. Or Abie Ehrenreich. Or many other boys from the neighborhood. On September 14, 1940, the United States Congress passed the Selective Training and Service Act, requiring men between the ages of twenty-one and thirty-five to register with local draft boards. It was the country’s first peacetime conscription. Draftees would serve for twelve months. Mandel, Ehrenman, and Ehrenreich rode down to Whitehall Street, in lower Manhattan, for the induction ritual, where they were tested, processed, and labeled. Soon, they left for military training. Club regulars mourned the loss of Mandel’s swanky car, which many of them had borrowed or ridden in.

  For the boys left behind, still awaiting high school graduation, it was hard to know how to plan. College was out of reach for them financially. Good jobs were scarce. The draft was the only certainty. In the evenings, Joey came home from his Western Union job, to find more and more boys smoking dope in the stairwells of his apartment building. No one ran them off.

  Western Union reassigned him to Brooklyn. Each day he rode up Kings Highway or Flatbush Avenue, sometimes all the way out to Gerritsen Beach, on his bike, which he had purchased the summer before, on the day Lou Gehrig gave his farewell speech at Yankee Stadium. “[Y]ou have been reading about the bad break I got,” Joey heard Gehrig say on the radio. “Yet today I consider myself the luckiest man on … this earth.… I have an awful lot to live for.” Joey couldn’t imagine what the man faced. Total paralysis? What would that be like? How could he be so cheerful about it? For the first time, Joey felt keenly grateful for his arms and legs. The bike flew him past Dubrow’s Cafeteria and Floyd Bennett Field, with the big silver planes on its runways. He delivered telegrams to Italian families, whose houses were pungent with the “fragrances of olive oil, garlic, and tomatoes … ingrained in [the] wallpaper, rugs, plaster, and upholstery,” he recalled.

  One day, on Bedford Avenue, a desperate young man offered Joey a dollar to run into a house and sing “Happy Birthday” to a girl at a party inside. Before Joey left, the girl’s mother, or perhaps it was her aunt, tipped him an extra quarter. This was his biggest single payday as a Western Union boy. The flush times didn’t last. Western Union let him go just before his high school graduation. On the advice of some older colleagues, he applied for unemployment benefits; he received six dollars a week for thirteen weeks. This was more than he’d made while working. Clearly, money played by its own wacky rules.

  Meanwhile, graduation came and went for the class of ’41. To celebrate, Joey went to dinner with his mother, Sylvia, and Lee, then took a subway into the city to hear Billie Holiday perform at a jazz club on Fifty-second Street. The next day, after receiving his diploma, he perused the want ads in the paper. The following Monday morning, he went back to the city to canvass employment agencies.

  An outfit on Beaver Street, in Manhattan’s Financial District, sent him to the General Motors Building, which he knew so well from his Western Union days, to an interview with the Manhattan Mutual Automobile Casualty Company. He was crushed to discover that the lovely Miss Peck (or Beck) didn’t remember him. Another secretary, a Miss Sullivan, followed by her boss, talked to Joey for a few minutes, then offered him a job as a file clerk for sixty dollars a month. The company provided liability insurance to taxis, limousine services, and independent travel operators. Files proliferated whenever an accident occurred; Joey’s task was to shuttle them to and from the appropriate desks until they were no longer required, at which point they were banished to the basement storeroom or to the even more morguelike warehouse in midtown Manhattan for the deadest of dead records. Joey dreaded entering these shadowy catacombs, where people’s lives were piled up and discarded. On the other hand, he liked seeing how fragmented bits of information could be cataloged, cross-referenced, saved—the abstract made concrete, shuffled and reshuffled into manageable form, or mixed until surprising new information emerged.

  On most days, his mother packed him a lunch of seeded rolls, canned salmon and onion, and apples, oranges, or bananas. He discovered he could waste time easily while pretending to search for a file he’d already found. He also learned that stairwell landings between floors, as well as the dead-records storeroom, were trysting places for his slightly older colleagues. A young woman named Virginia, who had been to college, liked to flirt with him, and he developed a major crush on her. He would follow her into the storeroom, excited and a little frightened. Her first intimacies with him were verbal—titillating confessions: troubles with a lawyer and an adjustor in the company, both of whom she was dating, and both of whom wanted her to be more “accommodating.” She also said an elderly married man in an office upstairs always asked her out for drinks and dinner after work. He was sweet and polite, and merely enjoyed her attentions, but he seemed sad. Joey was astonished at the subterfuge, desperation, and shenanigans that underlay otherwise-decorous lives. Virginia’s amours with others made her all the more desirable—and a bit beyond him.

  Joey hated returning to Coney Island in the evenings after work. He delayed the subway ride as long as he could. One night, he asked his friend Lou Berkman to join him in the city for an opera. Joey had become enamored of classical music, listening to the radio, and he had gone to see Carmen at the Met one Saturday afternoon. The performance had involved live horses onstage, and he couldn’t stop regaling everyone he saw about the spectacle. With Berkman, he seriously miscalculated; his friend had no patience for the dancing or songs; the seats were cheap—high up and uncomfortable—and the score, Wagner’s Tannhäuser, wa
s hard for the boys to follow. Berkman swore off opera for the rest of his life. Joey found himself between worlds: longing for something more than Coney’s dead ends, yet unable to learn enough, fast enough, to run with the sophisticates he witnessed all around him in the city.

  At Casualty, two of his colleagues got drafted. One of the boys’ mothers threw a large dinner party in her son’s honor at her house in the Bronx. The family was Italian. Though Joey had known a lot of Italian kids in Coney Island, he had never been invited to eat in any of their homes. This was his first full Italian meal and he didn’t understand the concept of multiple courses. He stuffed himself on spaghetti and meatballs before watching chicken, vegetables, and dessert materialize in all their glory before him.

  When a third colleague received his draft notice, Joey began to wonder if a different sort of job might stave off induction. Some of his friends were seeking work in military shipyards, responding to rumors that such labor might exempt them from the draft. Even if the rumors proved untrue, the pay was a dollar an hour for an eight-hour day: scads of money. Joey resigned from the Casualty Company, regretting only his departure from Virginia.

  * * *

  FROM THE FATHER of a friend at one of the social clubs, Marty Kapp, Joey got a letter of reference to work as a blacksmith’s helper at the Norfolk Navy Yard at Portsmouth, Virginia. Other boys from Coney Island had secured positions there. Mr. Kapp, an electrician, wrote that Joey had once worked for him (he hadn’t) and that he possessed impressive mechanical expertise (he didn’t). The man was happy to help Joey because FDR had signed an order, in the summer of 1941, extending draftees’ service beyond twelve months. Neighborhood boys were vanishing into the military at an alarming rate—and for good, it seemed. If working in the navy yard meant a possible reprieve from the draft, then Mr. Kapp was all for it. Who was going to remain at home to assist small businessmen? he wondered.

  Lee helped Joey with his paperwork and transportation arrangements. One day, in the summer of 1942, Joey boarded a train for Portsmouth. He was glad to be shut of Coney, and yet he had a foreboding he would never return. No one spoke to him on the train. He got off in Cape Charles, Virginia, and hopped a ferryboat across the Chesapeake Bay. On the other side, he checked into a cheap hotel for the night. Except for him, the hotel seemed empty. He ate alone in the restaurant. The desk clerk had a strange red birthmark on one side of his chin. Joey lay awake in his room, fearing sudden intrusion by a stranger who’d slit his throat and steal his suitcase.

  The following morning, relieved to be alive, he caught the ferry into Portsmouth. At the dock, a man pointed him toward a bus. Eventually, he arrived at the Norfolk Navy Yard, stowed his stuff in a bungalow, where he’d sleep in a small single room, and reported to the main office. The next day, he clocked in at the shop (above the entrance hung an E FOR EFFICIENCY banner). Joey wore the work shirt, trousers, thick gloves, and metal-lined hard hat Lee had picked out for him. Within minutes, sweat drenched his clothes. In his section of the factory, giant drop forges shaped rivets, bolts, and buckles. A man handed Joey a heavy set of tongs. His job was to carry burning metal rods from small wall furnaces to an anvil or a forge so the blacksmiths could work them however they needed. Sometimes he was asked to cut the rods using a shearing blade, or to roll a barrel of bolts to an electric grinding wheel on a hand truck and file extraneous metal fringes off the heads. On one occasion, the shearing blade nearly sliced his fingers (he had been distracted by a coworker). That night, he lay in his bunk, reliving the horror. He tuned his portable radio to WQXR, all the way from New York City, and soothed himself with the music of Tchaikovsky, Mozart, and Bach.

  He ate most of his meals in a nearby boardinghouse run by a middle-aged woman. Lena would have called her zaftig. Her twenty-year-old daughter made eyes at all the boys. Despite heavy bricks of corn bread emerging from the boardinghouse oven, Joey lost several pounds his first few days on the job. Inside the factory, to guard against heat exhaustion, the workers swallowed salt tablets all day long, dispensed from plastic cylinders attached to walls and wooden posts. Whenever government inspectors came through, the blacksmiths increased the levels of the furnace blasts, switched on all the grinding wheels, and got the drop forges pumping. The inspectors, in their well-pressed suits, nodded admiringly (often uncomprehendingly), trying to ignore the fact that their shirt collars were getting soggy and limp. Among the workers, on such occasions, the salt tablets disappeared more quickly than usual.

  In the evenings, when a factory whistle blew the end of the shift, a few of the boys claimed they were going to catch a ferry into Norfolk and go to a cathouse over on Bank Street. Joey never considered going with them, figuring the experience would be disappointing, and then he’d feel wretched about wasting his pay. An even more frightening prospect was that the visit would turn out to be glorious, and he’d never be able to resist returning, losing his money again and again.

  On the factory floor, the boys could not resist sexual innuendo and jokes at one another’s expense. In addition to the trousers, hat, and gloves Lee had bought him, Joey wore a huge pair of shoes his brother had recommended. They were padded, with steel caps on the front to protect the toes. Southerners in the shop insisted the size of a man’s feet predicted the length of his cock. Joey suffered constant ribbing until he got rid of the shoes. “Circumcised,” he explained the morning he showed up with more modest footwear. His coworkers didn’t know what he meant.

  * * *

  JOEY LASTED fifty-six days at the navy yard and then wore out, both physically and spiritually. By now, it was clear the work offered no deferments from the draft, and no chance for further advancements. He gave notice. On his way back to Coney Island, he stopped in Washington, D.C., where his friend Marty Kapp held a civil service job. Kapp had to work, so Joey spent most of the weekend on his own. He attended an outdoor concert, his first live symphonic performance: a Tchaikovsky violin concerto. He toured the usual monuments and felt no inklings of wartime worry.

  Back home, he joined a smattering of his old buddies, wandering the streets aimlessly or watching the parachutes drop from the big new ride at Steeplechase Park. Beansy Winkler had a part-time job stringing pearls in a factory. Danny the Count was peddling costume jewelry on the beach and occasionally in Manhattan, at the subway entrances near Union Square. Lou Berkman had joined his father’s junk trade, selling scrap metal from neighborhood demolitions and abandoned amusement rides. Joey took temp jobs, working briefly as a shipping clerk at the U.S. Hatband Company, helping Sylvia count inventory at Macy’s, following Lee (who’d had enough of Wall Street) to a small factory in Manhattan that did drill-press work for the defense industry. But mostly, he bided his time. Surely the war in Europe would end soon, and the United States would manage to stay out of it.…

  Then the government announced it was lowering the draft age from twenty-one to nineteen. That settled it. He was going anyway, so he decided he might as well go on his terms and choose his branch of the service. Patriotism had nothing to do with it. Patriotism was so much nonsense on the radio. “[At the time,] we did not know about the concentration camps.… I don’t think most of us knew what the war was about,” he said at a literary symposium at the University of South Carolina in 1995. “One thing I do know is, we didn’t go to war to save the Jews.… If that had ever come up as a goal, Roosevelt never could have gotten a declaration of war.” For most boys, the decision to enlist was pragmatic. They had nothing better to do. “[B]y the end of 1942, the beginning of 1943, everybody, everybody, was in uniform,” the writer Paul Fussell said at the USC symposium. “The whole culture of the country was benign military.”

  “The day I enlisted”—October 19, 1942—“was like going off to watch a baseball game.… I went with great good spirits, went with a few friends.… Had no idea what we were doing except that what we were going to do was more exciting, more romantic, more adventurous than what we were doing at home,” Heller told the symposium crowd.


  Heller, he was—Heller this, Heller that—to the various doctors and psychiatrists he stood in line to see at the induction center at Grand Central Station. “Somebody said something, and you nodded, and you took a step forward—and you were in the Army,” he said. The place was like a palace. When a shrink asked if he liked girls, he took it not as a test of his sexual orientation, but as a promise the gift of a uniform might help him fulfill.

  A good American, he spread his butt cheeks, turned his head, and coughed.

  * * *

  IN THE HOURS following the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the editors of Time magazine scotched the cover they had planned for that week—a story about Walt Disney’s new cartoon fantasy, Dumbo. Instead, the magazine focused (with as much detail as it could) on the Japanese assault. Dimouts were ordered for Coney Island, to help protect U.S. coastlines. Only two thousand shrouded lightbulbs burned at Steeplechase Park each night, instead of the usual ten thousand. “[T]he feeling after Pearl Harbor was nationwide,” Heller recalled at USC. “[The] whole country was in support of [military action] after the attack.” And then Germany declared war on the United States.

  “[S]ociety in America [during that period] was rigidly hierarchical,” Fussell recalled. The fact that “almost everybody on the street between the age of eighteen and forty was in uniform made [us] rank conscious, so you knew exactly who everybody was, at least externally, at any time. Everybody was identifiable … which made it a very special universe. The result of this … was I think to shrivel the interior life a bit. Everybody became his or her public self.… Wit was out; irony was out—you were what you pretended to be.”

  But what was the right pretense? Uniform or no, Heller wrote, he and his pals had entered the “‘moratorium’ that emerges in the lives of most Western young people between the end of adolescence and the onset of maturity, during which the individual doesn’t truly know what he or she is or where he wants to go,… or what he should decide to become. It is a season of baffled uncertainty … and can lead to grave mistakes.” Because of the timing, the war—for better or worse—“took most powers of decision out of our hands, and swept us into a national endeavor considered admirable and just.” In that sense, there was no pretense, no questioning, no thought at all, in fact.