About My Life and the Kept Woman

by John Rechy

  Everything settled into the same routine. I did not read in the ranks any more, realizing how foolishly I had put myself in peril by heckling Bailey. If any officer other than the lieutenant who called me in had been involved, I would now be awaiting a court-martial, perhaps waiting to be taken to an army prison.

  It was now the weekend after the incident. Since no one was granted a pass in a waiting company, most of the men rushed to the post exchange after the last reading of orders, trying to break the tense monotony.

  I was alone in the barracks, lying in my bunk, my eyes closed, trying to relax from the tension about pending orders. Europe or Korea? Korea, mounting deaths, burned villages, bloodied bodies.

  I opened my eyes.

  Standing by my cot was Acting Corporal Bailey.

  I sat up, apprehensive, certain he had come to extend the earlier conflict. “What the hell do you want, Corporal Bailey … sir?” I had added the last word to obviate a reason for his planned confrontation, hoping he would not interpret it as sarcasm.

  “At ease, Private Rechy.”

  Still tensely, I leaned back on the cot. He sat down near my feet.

  “You don’t have to call me sir,” he said. “I’m not a real corporal, just like you said out there. These stripes are pinned on.” He touched the stripes, loose.

  I didn’t relax. Would this passive mood shift into abrupt anger?

  “What I did out there, to you, it wasn’t right, it was—” He shook his head, baffled.

  “It’s over,” I said.

  “Not for me.”

  In siding with me, had the officer censured him? That wouldn’t have been fair. The lieutenant had allowed the scene to play out. Had he done so to humiliate Bailey?

  “Heck, I’m no one, no one at all.” He seemed to be speaking to himself. He placed his hand on the cot. He looked so sad, so tired, as if feeling the weight of his harsh judgment on himself.

  “That’s not true,” I said, “you’re—”

  “Private Rechy—”

  “Corporal Bailey?”

  Silence.

  I was tempted to touch his hand, so close to mine, to bring about some release from whatever he was feeling, trying to say.

  He stood up abruptly, looked down at me. He reached for the pinned stripes on his sleeve as if about to tear them off. Instead, his hand fell, unable to finish the gesture.

  “I just came to say good-bye. I’m leaving tomorrow,” he said. “I got orders for Korea.” He marched out of the barracks.

  I never saw Corporal Bailey again.

  My mother wrote to me every day, praying for me, blessing me with the familiar prayers. I cherished Wilford’s long letters. He was directing Brecht’s Mother Courage, back in Urbana—“Keep writing, you’re very talented, Johnny.”

  My sister Olga wrote, too, her letters full of love, memories we shared—and gossip. I welcomed the distraction of another world. I would sit on my bunk, propped up as comfortably as possible and read her long letters.

  “Alicia Gonzales is living in San Francisco!” My sister began today’s letter dramatically with that announcement.” Tina had given her daughter a long-distance farewell and blessing, she informed me. “She’s not my daughter any more,” she had told my sister, “I commit her to the hands of the Holy Mother.” My sister went on: “Maybe she’ll return for her mother’s funeral and regret being such a cruel daughter, watching her coffin proceed to the cemetery.”

  I couldn’t help laughing aloud in the barracks at my sister’s projection of Isabel’s regret when her mother would die. The scene clearly came from one of her favorite movies, Imitation of Life.

  Isabel Franklin had left New Orleans. What had she prepared for there before her move to San Francisco? What would she look like now? I tried to picture her as I had seen her last, in my uncle’s Cadillac. …

  Then the hand with the cigarette drifted away from her face, was lowered …

  My memories of Isabel had instead evoked Marisa Guzman.

  “Private Rechy! Report to the orderly room.”

  It was the booming voice of a sergeant entering the barracks. After all the time I had waited in formation sweating under the Kentucky heat, my orders had come in separately while I was in the barracks.

  I rushed to the orderly room. My pulse was beating with dreaded anticipation. Korea?

  The clerk in the orderly room handed me my orders, cluttered with army language that I skimmed, urgently wanting to find where I was being sent.

  Germany.

  Back in the barracks to prepare to leave the very next day for New York, from where those of us going to Germany would be transported overseas by ship, I looked around at other soldiers also packing. I could tell from their faces, dejected, which ones had received orders for Korea. How many would return?

  How many would not return?

  Corporal Bailey …

  Before, I had not felt political in a strict sense. I had detested the army for its dull routines and arbitrary strictures; now I detested it for its seizure of lives, the terrible power that could control individuals indifferently, with lives destroyed for a cause not their own, men executed.

  My mother wrote a saddened letter—we were going to be separated by a longer distance now. Still, despite my hatred of the army, my sense of freedom from El Paso grew as the USS Upshur, the ship that transferred my group to Germany, plowed through the ocean for five long days of weariness and nausea.

  Our group was sent to Frankfurt—we saw only fleeting glimpses of the city through windows blurred by foggy snow. At a camp that looked like all the others, we were processed again, with more humiliating physical examinations, more needles shot carelessly into our arms, more paperwork.

  On my first free day in the Frankfurt compound, I walked through dirty, icy slush to the USO club. A band was playing there that night. As I was about to enter, a Negro soldier ran out and smashed his fist into my face. There had been a race riot. I must have been the first white-looking face he saw after he fled.

  Still attached to the 101st Airborne Infantry Division, I was placed with others of my unit in another holding company. Here, we were organized into squads as we waited again for more permanent assignments. The barracks were sturdier, built for German soldiers, taken over now by American troops. Shabby German men and women cleaned the barracks and the other buildings in the camp. Some of the German workers fawned on us, hustling for American cigarettes that they would sell in the hot black market. Sometimes ragged children jumped over the wired enclosures around the camp, sneaking into the barracks, pleading to be allowed to shine shoes and boots in exchange for money or cigarettes.

  Although we did not fly or jump out of parachutes, we wore the uniform of the 101st Infantry Division, a uniform I liked: olive pants bloused over boots, Eisenhower jacket with the Screaming Eagle emblem, a sky-blue scarf, blue-bordered cap. I wore it the first day we were allowed off the base.

  In the city, I wandered the wintry cobbled streets, past old stone buildings that had survived the bombings, past new glassy structures going up alongside the Rhine River—arced bridges, barren trees speckled with frozen snow. Years after the bombings, there was a sense of unresolved defeat in this city that had not been attacked as fiercely as others. Reminders remained, buildings left to crumble in cascades of dusty bricks.

  Because of the cold, only a few people walked along the banks of the frozen river, isolating me and them. The scene was peaceful, the city humming with silence. As I lingered along, a man in a heavy overcoat stepped in front of me. I halted. He raised his chin, mumbled something in German, and walked away. I was jolted into the realization that I was in a country in which I was the enemy, in a country that had not long ago turned savage.

  In the camp, the tedium was the same—roll calls, waiting for orders, minor duties to be performed, redundant training exercises, and the most dreaded chore, especially in winter in a foreign country: guard duty.

  For twenty-four hours those assigned
to guard duty were driven by army trucks to outposts on the base, often an unused building, a lot for retired vehicles, desolate abandoned places chosen for added drudgery. There, each sentry would slow-march for two hours, back and forth. Every two hours all guards were relieved, driven to a barracks to sleep for four unsleepable hours on bare cots before being returned for another cycle until a cadre of new sentries were sent as replacements to begin their own isolated marches.

  I had begun my first cycle at two AM. It would extend until four AM. The cold night was illuminated only by the whiteness of yesterday’s snow turning into ice, graying steadily. In the moonless sky, a few scattered stars attempted to shine before being snuffed out by roiling clouds.

  I was assigned to walk about a vacant building, once perhaps a commissary. There was nothing nearby, just slushy gray ice on the ground piling against the base of the mesh wire fence that enclosed the entire base.

  With my M-1 rifle slung on my shoulder, I paced back and forth, willing time to move, not crawl, second by second.

  “GI, over here, GI!”

  Automatically, I took the required alert position with my rifle. Although no one truly expected any trouble in these outposts, officers often roamed to ensure that soldiers on guard duty performed exactly as demanded. I pronounced words drilled into us—words we had to speak or risk company punishment, words that I found ridiculous and that I now spoke by rote.

  “Halt! Who goes there?”

  “Over here!” Again the whispered voice came out of the foggy darkness. An officer checking up on me? I tried to tell myself that this was the source of the urgent voice. But, no, the voice had come from the frozen darkness beyond the compound, along the wired boundary, outside it.

  “Over here, GI, by the fence, GI!” It was the voice of a woman with a German accent. It came from the chilled darkness beyond the wire-fenced enclosure.

  I approached the smothered darkness, my rifle now truly ready for whatever would occur.

  “Over here!” the voice persisted, a loud whisper. Glimmering flakes of snow were stirred by rustling feet crunching ice.

  “GI, over here, over here!”

  The words were echoing unevenly, as if spoken by other voices, more voices, more distant.

  “Over here!”

  Not echoes, no—there were other voices, whispers, outside the fence, a hissed chorus of the same words, some coming faintly from where the soldier on guard duty in the post next to me would be, a distance away.

  The shuffling of feet grinding the icy snow grew more urgent, shifting from one place to another beyond the fence, then returning, running in place,

  I neared the fence.

  Behind the mesh of wire was a dark silhouette. Now I could see the outline of a face. Whoever was there was kneeling or squatting—the face was situated low.

  The voice from the outpost next to mine faded, was throttled with a loud gasp by what seemed the night itself.

  “You want same, like that, GI?”

  I could now make out the crouching form against the frozen night.

  “Blow job, GI. I give a good blow job to GI. Cost very little.”

  A woman was kneeling on the other side of the fence, on the blanket of ice, knees shuffling for some warmth. Her voice might have been disembodied except for the puff of chilled breath that rose with it.

  “Open your pants, GI, come on, through here, through the hole in the wire—get a good blow job. Keep you warm, GI. Only few marks. Whatever you got.”

  My eyes adjusted to the deeper darkness, and I saw the source of the other smothered footsteps. Shadowy forms were spreading about the periphery of the fence, seeking other soldiers on duty along the rim of the compound, moving away from one’ rushing to another.

  “GI, GI! Push your cock through here. Pay me few marks for blow job. OK, OK, GI?”

  Fingers reached out through an opening in the wire widening a hole there.

  I strapped my rifle about my shoulders. I dug into my back pocket for money already converted into German marks. I took out whatever I could grasp. Through the hole in the wire, I held out the money to the ghostly presence, and quickly pulled away from the bleak form. I heard rustling feet on the frozen ground scurrying away in the darkness to another site.

  My guard session ended, an eternity of stopped time. The officer on duty that night pulled up in a truck to pick me up and take me back to the waiting barracks for a sleep break, four hours before another guard session would occur.

  Echoes of the persistent whispers, the rustling of feet crushing ice—the image of the hand pushed through the fence—persisted, mouths open breathing out the frozen cold.

  I jumped into the back of the truck swiftly, wanting to leave this nightmarish incident behind if only in distance. The truck had already picked up two other soldiers from their posts. They were both laughing.

  “My fräulein hardly had any fuckin’ teeth left,” one of them said. He was a pimply young man, perhaps nineteen years old, with a Southern accent. “Man, that fräulein blew me right up to my balls.”

  “Fuck, I wish she’d’a blew me,” said the other soldier, a gangly black young man, rubbing his groin as the truck moved on to pick up another sentry. “My fraulein was all teeth.”

  “Did you pay her?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You shouldna,” said the redneck. “I didn’t pay my fraulein. When I came, I pulled back and left the kraut bitch to freeze.”

  18

  I was sent to Fulda, an hour away from Frankfurt by train. In the new camp, again dreary time stretched into drills and marches without a goal; again we awaited company assignments supposedly based on qualifications; again these were bad meals in the mess hall, and forced camaraderie among the soldiers, a camaraderie I tried to share but could not. Again, endless days would elapse before we would be allowed to go into the town itself. On the base, I spent most of my off time in the library, reading.

  An older soldier, a sergeant of about thirty-five, followed me out.

  “How’re ya doing?”

  “OK. You?” I answered.

  “Hard to find anything to do when you first get here, isn’t it?”

  “Sure is.”

  “Wanna come over? I got a barracks room of my own. I got some booze.”

  “No, thanks, I’m kind of tired,” I said.

  He looked at me, smiling, but not in a friendly way; it was a nasty smile.

  * * *

  There were in the army small groups of soldiers who after hours became eVeminate, exaggerating their gestures, pitching their voices high into mirthless shrieks.

  I was not a sound sleeper. At night, when the lights were out, I would hear footsteps moving toward the showers. The footsteps would not resume, coming back, for some time. Here, too, I waited to shower; if I was not alone, then I would shower when there were few others, and so we were separated.

  After hours one afternoon, I saw the man who had followed me out of the library. He was in a group of soldiers outside the barracks. When he saw me, he said something to the others. They all tittered. I heard the word “cute.”

  I turned back, paused, smiled, then hurried on. After that, I avoided them entirely.

  The day arrived when we were allowed to leave the camp and go into the city. Pretty, quaint, archaic, Fulda was a small town of steepled churches—mostly Catholic—and crooked stone streets. It had been spared the bombings of World War II that pocked other German cities. There was about it a sense of a city abandoned from another time, intact.

  Impulsively I went to Mass in the largest church in the city. The church was old-fashioned, with several steeples, and a statue of Christ on the lawn in the center of a fountain, now idle, icicles clinging to the spouts. Inside, the church reminded me of the churches of my childhood, although it was not as gaudy. Still, there were painted saints, confessionals of carved wood, candles glittering in squat red glasses, alcoves dedicated to various saints on decorated altars.

  As I was knee
ling to light a candle before the Holy Mother in honor of my mother—I did this whenever I entered a church—I saw a pretty girl next to me smile, then look away.

  After Mass, I waited outside. I saw the girl hurrying out, alone, although inside the church she had joined a group that I assumed to be her family.

  “Hello,” I said as she passed by, slowing.

  “Hello,” she said. Then she pointed to the blue scarf of my uniform. “Pretty,” she said.

  To show off the good-looking uniform, I had not worn the allowed cumbersome overcoat. I pointed to her sweater. “Pretty,” I said, enunciating carefully.

  “I understand English,” she said, with an accent.

  “That’s great.”

  “Cold, yes?” she said, rubbing her gloved hands.

  “Very cold. … Uh, would you—?” I was about to ask whether she would like to have coffee with me in one of the nearby pastry shops, but a stolid man and a square-shaped woman, both dressed in gray suits, emerged out of the church. They said something in German, sharply, to the girl. The man stood before me and her.

  “Sir?” I said.

  “Keep away from us, filthy American scum!” the man said.

  Was it possible that he felt his faction had been right in its lost cause? Not itself filthy?

  Without turning, the girl walked along with them.

  On the front in Korea, more soldiers died daily; among them would be some of those I had bunked with during basic training. All we had to cope with here was boredom, broken by an occasional sortie into the placid town. I was haunted by the memory of Corporal Bailey, so forlorn that day, bidding me good-bye. Through the happenstance of assignments, I was here, and he was there.

  I now had even less money to spend. After months of paying dual allotments, for my mother and father, and months before my farther’s death was taken into consideration, I learned that I owed the army for all those months of extra pay. A sum was deducted monthly; I retained fifteen dollars a month.