by Mario Puzo
Frank didn’t give up. “You got no risk,” he said. “Those lists can be faked. There’s no master sheet. You don’t have to take money from the kids or make deals. I’ll do all that. You just enlist them when I say OK. Then the cash goes from my hand to yours.”
Well, if he was giving me a hundred, he had to be getting two hundred. And he had about fifteen slots of his own to enlist, and at the rate of two hundred each that was three grand a month. What I didn’t realize was that he couldn’t use the fifteen slots for himself. The commanding officers of his units had people to be taken care of. Political bosses, congressmen, United States senators sent kids in to beat the draft. They were taking the bread out of Frank’s mouth and he was properly pissed off. He could sell only five slots a month. But still, a grand a month tax-free? Still, I said no.
There are all kinds of excuses you can make for finally going crooked. I had a certain image of myself. That I was honorable and would never tell a lie or deceive my fellowman. That I would never do anything underhanded for the sake of money. I thought I was like my brother, Artie. But Artie was down-to-the-bone honest. There was no way for him ever to go crooked. He used to tell me stories about the pressures brought on him on his job. As a chemical engineer testing new drugs for the federal Food and Drug Administration he was in a position of power. He made fairly good money, but when he ran his tests, he disqualified a lot of the drugs that the other federal chemists passed. Then he was approached by the huge drug companies and made to understand that they had jobs which paid a lot more money than he could ever make. If he were a little more flexible, he could move up in the world. Attic brushed them off. Then finally one of the drugs he had vetoed was approved over his head. A year later the drug had to be recalled and banned because of the toxic effects on patients, some of whom died. The whole thing got into the papers, and Artie was a hero for a while. He was even promoted to the highest Civil Service grade. But he was made to understand that he could never go higher. That he would never become the head of the agency because of his lack of understanding of the political necessities of the job. He didn’t care and I was proud of him.
I wanted to live an honorable life, that was my big hang up. I prided myself on being a realist, so I didn’t expect myself to be perfect. But when I did something shitty, I didn’t approve of it or kid myself, and usually I did stop doing the same kind of shitty thing again. But I was often disappointed in myself since there was such a great variety of shifty things a person can do, and so I was always caught by surprise.
Now I had to sell myself the idea of turning crook. I wanted to be honorable became I felt more comfortable telling the truth than lying. I felt more at ease innocent than guilty. I had thought it out. It was a pragmatic desire, not a romantic one. If I had felt more comfortable being a liar and a thief, I would have done so. And therefore was tolerant of those who did so behave. It was, I thought, their metier, not necessarily a moral choice. I claimed that morals had nothing to do with it. But I did not really believe that. In essence I believed in good and evil as values.
And then if truth were told, I was always in competition with other men. And therefore, I wanted to be a better man, a better person. It gave me a satisfaction not to be greedy about money when other men abased themselves for it. To disdain glory, to be honest with women, to be an innocent by choice. It gave me pleasure not to be suspicious of the motives of others and to trust them in almost anything. The truth was I never trusted myself. It was one thing to be honorable, another to be foolhardy.
In short, I would rather be cheated than to cheat someone; I would rather be deceived than be a deceiver; I gladly accepted being hustled as long as I did not become a hustler. I would rather be faked out than be a fake-out artist. And I understood that this was an armor I sheathed myself in, that it was not really admirable. The world could not hurt me if it could not make me feel guilty. If I thought well of myself, what did it matter that others thought ill of me? Of course, it didn’t always work. The armor had chinks. And I made a few slips over the years.
And yet-and yet-I felt that even this, smugly upright as it sounded, was in a funny kind of way the lowest kind of cunning. That my morality rested on a foundation of cold stone. That quite simply there was nothing in life I desired so much that it could corrupt me. The only thing I wanted to do was create a great work of art. But not the fame or money or power, or so I thought. Quite simply to benefit humanity. Ah. Once as an adolescent, beset with guilt and feelings of unworthiness, hopelessly at odds with the world, I stumbled across the Dostoevsky novel The Brothers Karamazov. That book changed my life. It gave me strength. It made me see the vulnerable beauty of all people no matter how despicable they might outwardly seem. And I always remembered the day I finally gave up the book, took it back to the asylum library and then walked out into the lemony sunlight of an autumn day. I had a feeling of grace.
And so all I wished for was to write a book that would make people feel as I felt that day. It was to me the ultimate exercise of power. And the purest. And so when my first novel was published, one that I worked on for five years, one that I suffered great hardship to publish without any artistic compromise, the first review that I read called it dirty, degenerate, a book that should never have been written and once written should never have been published.
The book made very little money. It received some superlative reviews. It was agreed that I had created a genuine work of art, and indeed, I had to some extent fulfilled my ambition. Some people wrote letters to me that I might have written to Dostoevsky. I found that the consolation of these letters did not make up for the sense of rejection that commercial failure gave me.
I had another idea for a truly great novel, my Crime and Punishment novel. My publisher would not give me an advance. No publisher would. I stopped writing. Debts piled up. My family lived in poverty. My children had nothing that other children had. My wife, my responsibility, was deprived of all material joys of society, etc., etc. I had gone to Vegas. And so I couldn’t write. Now it became clear. To become the artist and good man I yearned to be, I had to take bribes for a little while. You can sell yourself anything.
Still, it took Frank Alcore six months to break me down, and then he had to get lucky. I was intrigued by Frank because he was the complete gambler. When he bought his wife a present, it was always something he could hock in the pawnshop if he ran short of cash. And what I loved was the way he used his checking account.
On Saturdays Frank would go out to do the family shopping. All the neighborhood merchants knew him and they cashed his checks. In the butcher’s he’d buy the finest cuts of veal and beef and spend a good forty dollars. He’d give the butcher a check for a hundred and pocket the sixty bucks’ change. The same story at the grocery and the vegetable man. Even the liquor store. By noon Saturday he’d have about two hundred bucks’ change from his shopping, and he would use that to make his bets on the baseball games. He didn’t have a penny in his checking account to cover. If he lost his cash on Saturday, he’d get credit at his bookmaker’s to bet the Sunday games, doubling up. If he won, he’d rush to the bank on Monday morning to cover his checks. If he lost, he’d let the checks bounce. Then during the week he would hustle bribes for recruiting young draft dodgers into the six months’ program to cover the checks when they came around the second time.
Frank would take me to the night ball games and he’d pay for everything, including the hot dogs. He was a naturally generous guy, and when I tried to pay, he’d push my hand aside and say something like: “Honest men can’t afford to be sports.” I always had a good time with him, even at work. During lunch hour we’d play gin and I would usually beat him for a few dollars, not because I played better cards but because his mind was on his sports action.
Everybody has an excuse for his breakdown in virtue. The truth is you break down when you are prepared to break down.
I came in to work one morning when the ball outside my office was crowded with young men to be
enlisted in the Army six months’ program. In fact, the whole armory was full. Au the units were busy enlisting on all eight floors. And the armory was one of those old buildings that had been built to house whole battalions to march around in. Only now half of each floor was for storerooms, classrooms and our administrative offices.
My first customer was a little old man who had brought in a young kid of about twenty-one to be enlisted. He was way down on my list.
“I’m sorry, we won’t be calling you for at least six months,” I said.
The old guy had startlingly blue eyes that radiated power and confidence. “You had better check with your superior,” he said.
At that moment I saw my boss, the Regular Army major signaling frantically to me through his glass partition. I got up and went into his office. The major had been in combat in the Korean War and WW II, with ribbons all over his chest. But he was sweating and nervous.
“Listen,” I said, “that old guy told me I should talk to you. He wants his kid ahead of everybody on the list. I told him I couldn’t do it.”
The major said angrily, “Give him anything he wants. That old guy is a congressman.”
“What about the list?” I said.
“Fuck the list,” the major said.
I went back to my desk where the congressman and his young protege were seated. I started making out the enlistment forms. I recognized the kid’s name now. He would be worth over a hundred million bucks someday. His family was one of the great success stories in American history. And here he was in my office enlisting in the six months’ program to avoid doing a full two years’ active duty.
The congressman behaved perfectly. He didn’t lord it over me, didn’t rub it in that his power made me subvert the rules. He talked quietly, friendly, hitting just the right note. You had to admire the way he handled me. He tried to make me feel I was doing him a favor and mentioned that if there was anything he could ever do for me, I should call his office. The kid kept his mouth shut except to answer my questions when I was typing out his enlistment form.
But I was a little pissed off. I don’t know why. I had no moral objection to the uses of power and its unfairness. It was just that they had sort of run me over and there was nothing I could do about it. Or just maybe the kid was so fucking rich, why couldn’t he do his two years in the Army for a country that had done so well by his family?
So I slipped in a little zinger that they couldn’t know about. I gave the kid a critical MOS recommendation. MOS stands for Military Occupational Specialty, the particular Army job he would be trained for. I recommended him for one of the few electronic specialties in our units. In effect I was making sure that this kid would be one of the first guys called up for active duty in case there was some sort of national emergency. It was a long shot, but what the hell.
The major came out and swore the kid in, making him repeat the oath which included the fact that he did not belong to the Communist party or one of its fronts. Then everybody shook hands all around. The kid controlled himself until he and his congressman started out of my office. Then the kid gave the congressman a little smile.
Now that smile was a child’s smile when he puts something over on his parents and other adults. It is disagreeable to see it on the faces of children. And was more so now. I understood that the smile didn’t really make him a bad kid, but that smile absolved me of any guilt for giving him the booby-trapped MOS.
Frank Alcore had been watching the whole thing from his desk on the other side of the room. He didn’t waste any time. “How long are you going to be a jerk?” Frank asked. “That congressman took a hundred bucks out of your pocket. And God knows what he got out of it. Thousands. If that kid had come in to us, I could have milked him for at least five hundred.” He was positively indignant. Which made me laugh.
“Ah, you don’t take things seriously enough,” Frank said. “You could get a big jump on money, you could take care of a lot of your problems if you’d just listen.”
“It’s not for me,” I said.
“OK, OK,” Frank said. “But you gotta do me a favor. I need an open spot bad. You notice that red-headed kid at my desk? He’ll go five hundred. He’s expecting his draft notice any day. Once he gets the notice he can’t be enlisted in the six months’ program. Against regulations. So I have to enlist him today. And I haven’t got a spot in my units. I want you to enlist him in yours and I’ll split the dough with you. Just this one time.”
He sounded desperate so I said, “OK, send the guy in to see me. But you keep the money. I don’t want it.”
Frank nodded. “Thanks. I’ll hold your share. Just in case you change your mind.”
That night, when T went home, Value gave me supper and I played with the kids before they went to bed. Later Vallie said she would need a hundred dollars for the kids’ Easter clothes and shoes. She didn’t say anything about clothes for herself, though like all Catholics, for her buying a new outfit for Easter was almost a religious obligation.
The following morning I went into the office and said to Frank, “Listen, I changed my mind. I’ll take my half.”
Frank patted me on the shoulder. “That a boy,” he said. He took me into the privacy of the men’s room and counted out five fifty-dollar bills from his wallet and handed them over. “I’ll have another customer before the end of the week.” I didn’t answer him.
It was the only time in my life I had done anything really dishonest. And I didn’t feel so terrible. To my surprise I actually felt great. I was cheerful as hell, and on the way home I bought Value and the kids presents. When I got there and gave Vallie the hundred dollars for the kids’ clothes, I could see she was relieved that she wouldn’t have to ask her father for the money. That night I slept better than I had for years.
I went into business for myself, without Frank. My whole personality began to change. It was fascinating being a crook. It brought out the best in me. I gave up gambling and even gave up writing; in fact, I lost all interest in the new novel I was working on. I concentrated on my government job for the first time in my life.
I started studying the thick volumes of Army regulations, looking for all the legal loopholes through which draft victims could escape the Army. One of the first things I learned was that medical standards were lowered and raised arbitrarily. A kid who couldn’t pass the physical one month and was rejected for the draft might easily pass six months later. It all depended on what draft quotas were established by Washington. It might even depend on budget allocations. There were clauses that anyone who had had shock treatments for mental disorders was physically ineligible to be drafted. Also homosexuals. Also if he was in some sort of technical job in private industry that made him too valuable to be used as a soldier.
Then I studied my customers. They ranged in age from eighteen to twenty-five, and the hot items were usually about twenty-two or twenty-three, just out of college and panicked at wasting two years in the United States Army. They were frantic to enlist in the Reserve and just do six months’ active duty.
These kids all had money or came from families with money. They all had trained to enter a profession. Someday they would be the upper middle class, the rich, the leaders in many different walks of American life. In wartime they would have fought to get into Officers Candidate School. Now they were willing to settle for being bakers and uniform repair specialists or truck maintenance crewmen. One of them at age twenty-five had a seat on the New York Stock Exchange; another was a securities specialist. At that time Wall Street was alive with new stocks that went up ten points as soon as they were issued, and these kids were getting rich. Money rolled in. They paid me, and I paid my brother, Artie, the few grand I owed him. He was surprised and a little curious. I told him that I had gotten lucky gambling. I was too ashamed to tell him the truth, and it was one of the few times I ever lied to him.
Frank became my adviser. “Watch out for these kids,” he said. “They are real hustlers. Stick it to them and they’ll res
pect you more.”
I shrugged. I didn’t understand his fine moral distinctions.
“They’re all a fuckin’ bunch of crybabies,” Frank said. “Why can’t they go and do their two years for their country instead of tucking off with this six months bullshit? You and me, we fought in the war, we fought for our country and we don’t own shit. We’re poor. These guys, the country did good by them. Their families are all well-off. They have good jobs, big futures. And the pricks won’t even do their service.”
I was surprised at his anger, he was usually such an easygoing guy, not a bad word for anybody. And I knew his patriotism was genuine. He was fiercely conscientious as a Reserve master sergeant, he was only crooked as a civil servant
In the following months I had no trouble building up a clientele. I made up two lists: One was the official waiting roster; the other was my private list of bribers. I was careful not to be greedy. I used ten slots for pay and ten slots from the official lists. And I made my thousand a month like clockwork. In fact, my clients began to bid, and soon my going price was three hundred dollars. I felt guilty when a poor kid came in and I knew he would never work his way up the official list before he got drafted. That bothered me so much that finally I disregarded the official list entirely. I made ten guys a month pay, and ten lucky guys got in free. In short, I exercised power, something I had always thought I would never do. It wasn’t bad.
I didn’t know it, but I was building up a corps of friends in my units that would help save my skin later on. Also, I made another rule. Anybody who was an artist, a writer, an actor or a fledgling theater director got in for nothing. That was my tithe because I was no longer writing, had no urge to write, and felt guilty about that too. In fact, I was piling up guilt as fast as I was piling up money. And trying to expiate my guilts in a classical American way, doing good deeds.
