by Pete Hamill
Suddenly the door slammed hard. Everybody stopped and turned. Chief McDaid was standing there, with Red Cannon beside him. All we could hear was the radio.
“I’m free and ready
So we can go steady
How’s about time for me …”
“Shut that goddamned thing off,” McDaid said.
Harrelson switched off the radio. It was quiet, except for one of the customers, who was blowing his nose.
“What in the hell is going on here?” McDaid said. Cannon searched our faces and his eyes narrowed. Nobody answered. I noticed for the first time that Donnie Ray wasn’t with us. He was the senior man. He should have been there to answer Chief McDaid.
McDaid took a few steps closer to the center of the counter, still on the other side. The customers eased away to give him room.
“This some kind of a prayer meeting?” he said. His voice was round and deep, like the voice of a radio announcer. “Is this a circle jerk? What is this?”
Finally Harrelson said softly: “Hank Williams died, Chief.”
McDaid and Cannon exchanged a weary look that said: See what we have to put up with? Then McDaid pushed through the swinging door that separated our work area from the service area. One mechanic started to walk away, but Cannon blocked him.
“Mister Cannon, what would you do with a lot like this?” McDaid said.
“A little extra duty’d sure help, Chief,” Cannon said.
“How about a firing squad?”
“That’d probably help the most.”
McDaid stepped in among us, looking at our faces, uniforms, shoes. I hoped he wouldn’t go in the back and find Boswell. When he got to me, McDaid stopped.
“You’re new here, aren’t you, boy?”
“Yes, sir. Came on board yesterday.”
“You crying for Hank Williams too?”
“No, sir.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know his music, sir.”
“You don’t know his music.” McDaid paused. “Why not?”
“I’m not from the South, sir.”
“And where, pray tell, are you from?”
Cannon interrupted. “He’s from New York.”
“I see,” McDaid said. He looked at the stenciled name on my shirt pocket, then at me. The tan was perfect. I could smell aftershave lotion. “Are you a New York wise guy, Mister Devlin?”
“I’m a sailor in the United States Navy,” I said.
“You didn’t answer my question, boy.”
“No, sir. I’m not a wise guy.”
“Good,” McDaid said. “You’d better not be.”
Then he turned to the others.
“Where’s Donnie Ray Bradford?”
“Out at the hangars, Chief,” Jones said.
“You tell him to call me as soon as he gets back.”
“Yes, Chief,” Jones said.
McDaid separated himself from us and then coiled tightly and addressed us and the customers.
“Now all you sorry-ass son-of-bitches get back to work,” he said. “This is the United States Navy, not an amusement park. If the President of the United States dies, you still must perform your duties. You certainly don’t stop your work because some banjo player dies. I hope you understand me clearly.”
With that he strode ahead through the swinging door and out into the morning light, with Cannon behind him. Everybody at the counter breathed hard in disgust and started mumbling.
“Fuck you, pal,” I said.
“Forget it,” Becket said. “Dat’s da way he is.”
“Hey, the man’s right,” Jones said casually. “We don’t get paid to hang around and listen to the radio.”
Becket gave him a look. “You know, sometimes, Jonesie, you are a real sorry son of a bitch.”
He walked away and Jones shrugged. Away off, I could hear Bobby Bolden playing his horn.
“Cold, Cold Heart.”
A slow blues.
Chapter
14
Just before lunch that day, three more storekeepers returned from the Mainside run. One was a big, blond, muscle-bound guy named Larry Parsons, who always seemed to be two beats behind the rest of the world. He came in and shouted: “Did you hear about Hank Williams?” And didn’t understand why everyone laughed. The second was Charlie Dunbar. He was a small, precise man whose clothes were nattily tailored and perfectly faded to make him look more of an Old Salt. He had a quick smile, white teeth, a tanned face. He was the first man I’d ever met who’d actually gone to college and the only Republican. We didn’t see much of either breed in Brooklyn. Later, he told me that he only had one ambition: to become president of the United States.
The third man was Miles Rayfield, and he would become my closest friend, although I didn’t know it then. His face was blocky, with a long upper lip, thick, black-rimmed eyeglasses, deep lines around his mouth. His head was too large for his body and his fingers looked like tubes. He groaned, sweated, cursed as Becket and I helped him, Dunbar and Parsons move some heavy crates into the back room. We all stopped to looked down at the unconscious Boswell.
“Do you think we should take his pulse?” Miles said.
“Hell, no,” Becket said. “He might be alive.”
When we were finished, they scattered to the head, the gedunk, the barracks and I went to my desk. After a while, Miles came over. He told me his name and said he was twenty-three years old and from Marietta, Georgia and he didn’t know why he joined the Navy, so I shouldn’t ask.
“That’s the essential Navy intro, isn’t it?” he said. “I also have to say that I truly don’t give a flying fiddler’s fabulous fuck about Hank Williams either.” He smiled. “Welcome to Anus Mundi, the asshole of the earth.”
I laughed and told him my name and where I was from, saying New York instead of Brooklyn. His desk was directly in front of mine and he moved papers around in a busy way and opened his window to let in the breeze.
“They’re going absolutely completely apeshit over at Mainside about this Hank Williams,” he said. “Mencken is right. The South is the Sahara of the Bozart. You can see what passes for art down here: the cheapest, most maudlin, most sickeningly disgusting sentimental crap.”
I wasn’t sure what some of the words meant. I certainly didn’t know who Mencken was or even how to spell a Bozart. But I got the drift.
“You got in last night?” he said.
“Yesterday afternoon. I was on the midnight to four last night. Post three.”
“The dumpster!” Miles laughed. “So you must have met that great American intellectual, Wendell the Red Cannon. He sends everyone out to that dumpster the first night. I think he must have a former wife in there, chopped into bits.”
“What’s his problem, anyway?” I said.
“His problem is that he’s a reptile. A cretin. A disgusting red-necked toad. With the brains of an oyster. He’s a pig sticker and a turd, an arrogant simple-minded ignorant little lowlife despicable son of a bitch bastard.” He ran out of breath and paused. “In other words, he’s a Navy lifer.”
He sat down at his desk and gazed out the window. His large hands seemed to be operating on their own, lifting pencils, playing with paper clips.
“How do I handle him?” I said.
“Just tell yourself he’s got bubonic plague and act accordingly.” He rolled a sheet of blank blue paper into his Royal typewriter. He typed one word. Then turned to me. “But you know something? If Wendell Cannon ever did get bubonic plague, he’d probably thrive.” I rolled a sheet of paper into my Royal. Miles said: “Maybe we could turn him in to the McCarthy committee. If anybody on this base is converting people to the Communist cause, it’s Red Cannon.”
I’d never heard anyone talk like this, with all the sentences perfectly formed, and words rolling around in a rich crazy obscene way. Miles had a southern accent, too, a softness in the vowels that made the consonants sound even harder when he started firing his sentences like bullets. He
looked at me through the thick glasses. Deadpan all the way.
“You think I’m kidding, don’t you, Devlin?” he said. “Well, I’m not. I’m just stating a fact that’s as obvious as a tit on a cow.”
Harrelson switched on the radio again. Hank Williams began to sing. Miles turned to the music and then to me.
“Let’s get some lunch,” he said. “If that’s what you can call that vile slop at the mess hall …”
As we got up to leave, I glanced at the sheet of paper in his typewriter. The single word was Help.
“Let’s scrape this disgusting crap into a garbage can and go to the gedunk for some tea,” Miles said. He looked down at the gnawed remains of his hamburger steak and mashed potatoes. I had eaten most of mine. “Why not?” I said.
On the way out, I saw Bobby Bolden. He was just ahead of us, scraping his tray into a can and shoving it at the faceless sets of arms and hands on the other side of the slot. When we went outside, I called his name and he turned. His hands were jammed in his pockets. Miles kept walking. Bolden looked at me warily.
“Hey, I loved the way you played ‘Cold, Cold Heart,’ ” I said. “This morning …”
“Do I know you?” he said.
“No, I just got here.” I told him my name and offered my hand, but he ignored it. “I heard you playing all day yesterday. ‘Jumping with Symphony Sid,’ that was great. I used to listen to Sid every night back home in New York. WEVD. Is that an alto or tenor you’re playing?”
“Tenor.”
“I thought so. You dig Charlie Parker?”
“He’s an alto player.”
“I know, but—”
“Whatta you want, man?”
“Hey, don’t get pissed, pal. I was trying to tell you I liked what you do. I thought maybe I could come over and talk to you about music. I wasn’t trying to ruin your day. So why don’t you go fuck yourself?”
I started to leave. He grabbed my arm. I turned, ready to slip a punch. Those green eyes narrowed, then he released his grip.
“Thanks,” he said. And walked away.
Chapter
15
From The Blue Notebook
Lonesome. Adj. 1 Depressed or sad because of the lack of friends, companionship, etc.; lonely; to feel lonesome. 2 Attended with or causing such a state of feeling. 3 Lonely in situation; remote, desolate, or isolated; a lonesome road.
One thing that separates me from most of the other guys here is music. They grew up with Hank Williams and I didn’t. As simple as that. And music is one of the ways I think we figure out time. Not with watches and calendars. With music. Music is time. They talk about 4/4 time and three-quarter time (a waltz). But also music freezes the time in the world, puts a given period of time into your head so you can’t ever get it out. So I remember the war whenever I hear the big bands. And it works the other way around too: I think of a year, and I remember the songs. If you say “1950” to me, I hear the Andrews Sisters singing “I Can Dream, Can’t I?” Or junk by Theresa Brewer, Eileen Barton, and Phil Harris. While guys were getting killed in Korea that summer, we were standing on corners trying to sound like Frankie Laine singing “Mule Train” and “That Lucky Old Sun.” I sometimes wonder what they were singing in Korea.
I hear the music, and I think of myself in the kitchen trying to draw and the young kids yelling and how much we all missed my mother that first summer after she died. The junk is stuck in my head. Patti Page. The Weavers. Joni James. Mario Lanza. The Four Aces. Les Paul and Mary Ford, Nat Cole and Rosemary Clooney. All lies with music, and I’m carrying them around. In the fall of ’51, Tony Bennett showed up with “Because of You.” We heard it everywhere—in all the bars, at parties. The older guys were going to Korea then, and there were a lot of going-away parties and it was always “Because of You.” And right after that, “Cold, Cold Heart.” That’s what I shared with these guys in Pensacola. That song.
When I went to boot camp, the big song was “You Belong to Me.” Jo Stafford. All the guys knew it, guys from all over the country. We sang it in the barracks late at night. Maybe it was junk too, but I thought it was written exactly for me. So did everybody else. To me, that’s a great song, if it says what you feel. “See the ocean when it’s wet with rain …”
I sure did listen to a lot of junk (not even choosing to hear it, just being there in bars and other places when it was playing). But I also listened to Symphony Sid, Charlie Parker, Dizzy, Max, Horace Silver, Ben Webster—I know they are better musicians than the hokey mellow crap on WNEW. They seem to know they are doing something important, trying to make the music sound like something nobody ever did before. But they are never on the jukeboxes. They weren’t even on the radio in New York, except for Sid. Maybe if they were, I wouldn’t feel so bad now when I hear those other songs. Maybe I’d have all the notes of “A Night in Tunisia” (by Diz) in my head, instead of “You Belong to Me.” It didn’t work that way. And now I hear all the crap and I’m afraid I’ll never get rid of it. Because I hear those lousy songs now. All the time.
“Fly the ocean in a silver plane,
See the jungle when it’s wet with rain
Just remember when you’re home again …”
Who is Menkin? What’s a Bozart? (Listening to Miles Rayfield.)
Palatka is 46 miles away.
Steve Canyon is back home, working at some university. I like him better when he’s in the Himalayas with Princess Snowflower.
Chapter
16
That evening I waited for Max Pilsner and Sal Infantino outside the locker club on the corner of Washington Avenue and Jefferson Davis Highway. We were going into town, and they were inside, changing into civvies. I was in dress whites, wearing the two green stripes of the lowly airman deuce. I’d have to wait until payday to buy civvies or until my father could figure out how to send me a box of clothes in the mail. The line of palms leading to the base looked stately in the fading late-afternoon light. The weeds, pines and palmettos in the fields seemed more lush. Across the highway there was a place called Billy’s, with a sign in the window offering a Happy Hour From Five to Seven Ladies Welcome. There was a flag outside at half-mast (mourning Hank Williams, I supposed) and about a dozen cars nuzzled against the front wall. The town was down the highway to the left. About a hundred yards away, back in the pine trees, I could see the white spire of a church.
I watched the traffic. A few cars. A big truck. And then I saw a woman in a yellow T-shirt and dungaree shorts pedaling a blue bicycle. Her legs were lean and cabled with muscle and I thought vaguely about drawing them. She had a baseball cap pulled tight on her head and she was wearing sunglasses.
And I realized it was her.
The woman from the bus.
Here.
In Pensacola.
I was frozen for a few seconds and then started toward the highway. A garbage truck roared past me.
“Hey!” I yelled. “Hey, miss …”
But almost as quickly as I’d seen her, she was gone. Around the bend of the highway, past the church and out of sight.
And then Max and Sal were there, Max in a tight-fitting T-shirt and starched jeans, Sal in a flowered rayon shirt, busy with palm trees and surf and beaches. I glanced at the highway again, tense and anxious but somehow feeling better. I wanted to chase after the woman in the yellow T-shirt, call a taxi, get on a bus. Too late. But at least now I knew she wasn’t in far-off Palatka. She was here. In Pensacola. Where I could find her.
“You must of gone for a pump, Max,” Sal said. He hit Max on the shoulder with the heel of his hand. “Your muscles got a hard-on.”
“Up yours, Sal.”
“Max works out,” Sal said to me, as we started across the highway, waiting for a break in traffic. I wanted to move fast, to get on a bus, to catch a glimpse of the woman, my woman. They moved too casually. “They got a gym on the base so small you can’t get three pairs of sneakers in it at the same time. Somehow Max gets in there and lifts dumbbells. Wh
en he wears a T-shirt, like tonight, he always goes for an extra pump.”
“Pump this,” Max said.
“Hey, Max, I know a girl that wants to suck your lats.”
Max growled as we hurried behind a slow truck to the far side of the highway, then said, “Hey, I’m so horny, I’d pay a dog to lick my hand.”
Sal and Max told me to stay out of Billy’s. It was the Old Salt’s bar, the headquarters for Red Cannon and his friends. We walked past the joint to a bus stop just short of the Baptist church. A painted billboard said: WHAT IS MISSING FROM JES S? U R. A smaller sign under the billboard advertised square dances every Friday night. I couldn’t remember what day it was. Thrown off by the holiday. I didn’t ask, afraid of their laughter. Devlin: So hip he doesn’t know what day it is. I looked at another sign, above a small white cross: GOD BLESS YOU HANK.
Sal pointed at the sign.
“You know what’s missing in Jesus, Max? You are.”
Max turned to me and shook his head. “It’s the water they got up in The Bronx.”
Sal said, “Now these are the real goyim.” He saw the notice for the square dance. “I gotta take you there some Friday night …”
“Not me,” Max said. “I hear they commit ritual murder in there.”
“Absolutely true,” Sal said. “But only on Jews and spades. They take you in back, tie you up, and check to see if you’re, one, circumcised or, two, can balance a basketball on your dick. You can do either, that’s enough, a sign from God. Then they beat you to death with Bibles wrapped in argyle socks. Whatever’s left, they sell as bait out in the Gulf.… So we’d have to disguise you as an Irishman. Teach you the words to ‘Danny Boy.’ Get you a plastic foreskin …”
