Because now I found myself in crowds of people going nowhere. Or being rushed to someplace where you then had to wait for hours. For what? Nothing you would like or give a shit for. You were always standing with groups of boys your own age, black and white, not knowing what was going on. Having to do things thought of by what dumb motherfucker? (You might think that if you could raise up enough energy to put such an edge on!) Mostly you just dragged to the next place. Submitted to the next indignity, colorless and dull. You were herded and crowded and pushed and pulled and talked stupidly to and disregarded or harassed.
At first we were just run around and walked around and only a few deadass directions, “instructions,” were given to us. It was definitely a kind of
punishment. You got that early, if you were awake. It was a penalty â everything, walking, running, standing, waiting. The only humor provided those first days, except the jokes we began to make after we could feel at least our common lot, was the food. Eating was funny! I mean you sat and were confronted suddenly with this
stuff
. You would turn and look at some dude you didn't even know and he would be looking back at you, at first shyly, then after a few of these displays and performances, more casually, and grin. The grin got wider. In a week, there was laughter. Not gay, not grim, but a nervous release. An alternative to the banal pushing and standing and waiting and rushing to nowhere that went on otherwise.
“Like what is this shit?” we would whisper finally. “Have you tasted this shit? Wow!” I think this conversation went on initially among the most sensitive and intelligent. That's how we could tell each other. Some others would just keep their head down and ladle it in. But that was something else that was at least for me part of the penalty that the “army” is. You can find some motherfuckers in the service dumb as their surroundings, dumber than the chairs and tables. The table could get up and leave some of them there holding the food. Naturally, on the food trip, the blood relation was strongest because the food was also not only bad but the complete opposite of their national cuisine. Tasteless, bland, gravyless. You could pour a ton a salt on some of the shit and it would suck it in like the Blob. So they would grumble and talk shit about it first, rolling their eyes at each other.
After a couple weeks of being walked and run and dragged around we got to recognize a few faces among us (a few had come in together) and we'd venture some exploratory phrases. It is the same general process, I guess, in any structure of society at any level. How the herd gets sectioned off. How friends are made, acquaintances. Sometimes you can only get close to some people in situations like the one you meet them in. In any other situation, you might not have anything to say to that person at all. It was like that for me in Barringer, Central Ward, Howard, and now the process was unfolding again at Sampson Air Force Base, Geneva, New York.
In situations which are ostensibly mixed like the service, you can also see the national character define the various groups that form. And within those national forms, regional forms, the culture pinpointing itself. So for the most part the blacks hang out with the blacks, the whites with the whites, and northern and southern contingents of each larger group also tend to hang together.
In basic I found myself with bloods from South Jersey mostly, for some reason. Dudes from Camden and Trenton, mostly black dudes looking for a way off the streets. Trying to keep out from under the final bust. Seeing in that air force blue some trace of sky that they might get away in.
So the friend, acquaintance, “buddy” it's called in the service, thing gets hooked up like it always does. Around common experience (which might just be only the one you find yourself in then), common desires or understanding or even common misunderstanding. Certainly, most of us, after just a few weeks, knew we had made a terrible mistake to come in “this shit” and began the drawn-out mumbling and grumbling that goes on in the service as long as most of us are in.
In a couple of weeks whenever we were herded or whenever we would be run somewhere to wait (“Hurry up and wait,” we called it) I would be more and more with a specific group of dudes. I guess another collective formed basically for defense and commiseration. You had to have somebody (if you were at all well) to talk bad about the shit to and to hear them talk bad about the shit. So that you knew you were still alive in the world and not in some hell of your own imagination.
We were not nationalists but we thought white dudes mostly presented a problem. They were the ones in power, in authority, or that wanted to act like they were. They were the ones who would give you the most hassle even if they were just Airman Nostripe, Airman Basic like ourselves. Though some, obviously, were better than that. For the most part the black troops, while not looking for prejudice or racism or bias or any bullshit and not carrying an excessively large chip on their shoulders, would invariably come to face all that bad shit just by being somewhere alive.
The service itself is such bullshit that the white noncoms and officers because they are the face of that authority, the “reasoning” behind that structure, are identified with it and are responsible for its stupidity and ugliness. What mitigates that somewhat is that there are white boys in there, too, catching hell and complaining just like us, and the louder they complained the closer we'd be to them. But the ones who thought the shit was good or correct or to be obeyed to the letter we thought of as simple-minded shitheads and said they better keep their ass over the fuck where they was and away from us.
Roy and Henry were two dudes that I got closest to. Two black dudes with conked heads (which the people made them cut out) straight out of the Camden ghetto. Roy never played nothing, no sports or anything, just cards. He was one of those dudes that wore a chain with his fatigues from
his belt into one pocket, looped like he had on a zoot suit. He rolled his fatigue pants tight on the bottom so the knees would droop and take on a draped look. The dude always carried a knife no matter what the activity. He was a nice smiling cat could talk shit with the best, but he was not to be played with.
His man Henry (they had known each other on the streets and agreed to come in together to escape a bust for something) was a tall straight athletic dude with a short fuse. When Roy went off, death was imminent. Henry was always going off and threatening people. Plus thay had a few dudes they walked with, actually we walked with, from down around that neck of the woods. A big fat dark dude who cracked jokes all the time and was always getting into trouble with the training instructors or somebody. I think his name was Humphrey. No, that wasn't his name. We called him Humphrey cause that was a big fat dude in Joe Palooka comics. Humphrey didn't like to be called Humphrey. Sometimes we called him Humph when we were in normal relationships; sometimes we called him Humph when we wanted to bruise his gigantic ego (Humphrey thought he was strong); or when we wanted him to go crazy, on anybody but Roy and Henry who he had the good sense not to mess with, we'd call him, very sweetly, Humph rey, Oh, Humph rey! and he would chase us.
But I think I was quieter and silenter than I had been on the outside. That's my recollection. I would joke and make fun and advance the sardonic perception I'd grown up with to punctuate our collective perception of the joint, but I was quieter, more internal now. I don't think I was quite as loose-lipped as at HU, though I still had an acid tongue. Maybe because it was a different crowd, with reality mashed down on us like an elephant big as the sky. Our illusions were different â they could not be the hysterical yellow-feather brand the Capstone gave out. They were more cautious, less advertised (by us). I cannot say we were illusion-free, otherwise we would not have been there in the fourth motherfucking place.
We were orphans in the storm, come from our various other illusions to this nowheresville way up in the north woods. They called it the Finger Lakes region. The closest big city was Rochester and we couldn't go there until much later in our basic training. It was very cool when we got there and in a couple of weeks it was cold as hell. Thanksgiving Day 1954 I sat huddled in front of a fake airplane in the middle of a storm, practicing guard duty. As I sat there, completely invisible under the blinding torrents of snow, I thought I had reached the absolute bottom, the nadir, of my life. I thought I was being tortured. In this freezing dismal place I stood freezing
for what reason? Why? It was a payback for my stupidity and lack of seriousness. I've never felt sorrier for myself.
We were out on bivouac during the storm, so when I was relieved of guard duty to eat I came back into the general bivouac area and hundreds of us squatted in the snowstorm and ate cold turkey under congealed gravy. Happy Thanksgiving, you dumb motherfuckers, everything seemed to be saying!
We lived in open-bay barracks and slept in double-decker bunks with our footlockers, in which we had all our earthly possessions, at either end of the bunks. Henry and I bunked together, Roy right next door and Humphrey on top of him. We had a little ghetto right in the barracks, though there were other bloods sprinkled around as well.
Those first weeks we rose at 03:27 when it was jet black outside and the wind raged. We staggered into the latrines to wash up â some dudes never changed their underwear â then made up our beds and lined up for the first quick inspection. Then marched off toward the mess hall (certainly an accurate name) to grin at the catastrophe of breakfast.
I developed a funny kind of reputation. I'm not sure what it was in toto but among the black troops I hung closest with, since I could always come up with some answer to the strangest phenomena which we encountered, they felt that was positive. I could understand certain terms and relationships, certain procedures, and would in turn translate the bureaucratese into direct black language. And the general obscurity, at a certain level, necessary to disguise the fact that the American Nightmare is what really exists, not no Dream, I could penetrate these dull surfaces because of my lightweight education and brown training up off the common streets. Roy said one day, “It's like having a goddam dictionary or encyclopedia with you.” And I took that as my greatest compliment.
The other half of that was problematic. I was cordial with most of the white troops around us. Basic was fairly transient, so some of the deeper conflicts I later experienced when I got to where I finally was going did not quite surface. But there was some square-head, bland-faced, sky-blue-eyed white boy from Mississippi who was describing something and said, “Nigger.” His name was Hall. But he apologized and said he was used to talking like that but was sorry. I didn't even answer and he put out his hand. I walked away. And whenever he saw me he would color, turn red, and try to grin.
One of the dudes who came up with us, a tall husky blond Polish dude, was made an assistant flight commander of our training flight and he took
it just the way he was supposed to. He became part of the structure and chugged along calling cadence when the TI's let him, like he was high up in the shit. We just looked at him and then at each other and grimaced. There was some kind of disorder around something, somebody going in other people's footlockers or a stinking white boy who was thrown in the shower with all his clothes on and scrubbed with scrub brushes and Octagon soap and Henry figured in it some way. In fact, the white boy, Stenkowski, had probably never liked the way Henry and Roy and I acted in the joint, we were so openly hostile to the system itself. From almost the moment we got in it we were trying to beat it any fucking way we could. And it was very obvious now that Stenkowski liked the shit, even more so now that he had been raised up in it.
So he said something to Henry and Henry told him he would cut his fucking head off and stuff it in the motherfucking toilet! He left Henry alone. He said something to Roy and Roy did not even answer, he cocked his eye up at him and slid his hand very slowly into his pocket. So the dude acted like he hadn't said shit to Roy neither. He walked away.
But the next day at the morning inspection he comes over to me and I'm standing half asleep as usual and he says to me out in front of everybody, “Jones, why don't you stand up and be a man?” He goes in my foot-locker next and uncovers from under the regulation bullshit Eliot's
Selected Poetry
, Dylan Thomas, some other stuff. He holds the stuff up, the TI and his assistant are walking with him this morning. He says, “You like this stuff?” Holding the books up like his own dirty drawers.
I said simply, “Yes.” The TIs, a long thin-nosed Polish sergeant named Konuz and a short blond drunk whose name I never remembered, stepped over to look, grin, then toss the books back. Stenkowski meant to embarrass me or show the flakiness of one of the hated little trio â maybe disrupting the little defense group we'd hooked up. But those dudes knew I read “way out” shit. That's all they had to say about it when I was reading it. But it was my business, and how otherwise could you be a dictionary or encyclopedia? Henry balled up his fist and showed it to Stenkowski and Stenkowski tried to let Konuz see it but Henry wasn't no fool. Stenkowski had to move up into the special part of the barracks where the TI's had their office. But I set a new base record for KP, pulling it some twenty times before we got out of there.
It was almost twenty-four hours of stinking labor. Report at two in the morning to the mess hall. Work till almost two the next morning. Throwing slop in the trays, washing the trays, moving the garbage cans, cleaning
out the grease pit (a particularly nasty task reserved for the troublemakers), mopping and sweeping the floor, stopping only to eat and drink the coffee or Kool-Aid. All the time in that mess hall the jukebox is playing. In those days the country and western tune “I'm in the Jailhouse Now” kept playing; I almost wept. Or what about Patty Paige singing “We'll Be Together Again”? It was deadly. And at the end of your day, completely covered with foul-smelling grease, dead tired, you'd wander back toward your barracks and fall out completely exhausted.