Devil at My Heels: The Story of Louis Zamperini (28 page)

Mr. Applewhite wasn’t that easy to convince. In fact, he reacted furiously to the plan, but it was too late. I’d met Cynthia in March
1946. In May she came west to visit and I met her at the airport. News of our engagement had already hit the papers. We’d set the date for August, but the
Los Angeles Times
ran a picture of her getting off the plane and another of us on a running track, with the caption, “Will they jump the gun?”

Why would they even care? They just did. Everywhere Cynthia and I drove in my convertible, people would stop and stare. While we waited at the stop sign at the intersection of Wilshire and Western Boulevards, the busiest in town at the time, people at all four corners waved and shouted, “Have a great marriage!”

Cynthia’s trip wasn’t all flashbulbs and fun, though. When she saw my family’s little house—a shack to her—and met my dad with his Italian accent, I could tell she had misgivings. Doubts. Questions. I tried to ignore it, but I couldn’t stop stewing. I got mad and said, “Maybe we better call the whole thing off.” Neither of us wanted that, so we talked it through and realized that our life together was pretty well clinched.

We decided not to put off the wedding any longer. I had accumulated about $10,000 in back pay and been allowed to keep almost $1,600 in life insurance payments, so we had no immediate financial worries. We got blood tests and a marriage license, sidestepped a few other technicalities, and on May 25, 1946, we were married in the Episcopal church Cynthia had attended as a child.

After the reception, at a friend’s house, we went to the Chatham Hotel. Everyone thought we were across the street at the world-famous Ambassador. I brought a magnum of champagne I’d borrowed from the party.

“I want to call my mother first,” Cynthia said as I popped the cork. Her parents had a fit at the news, and she stayed on the phone for over an hour, crying. I sat there, disgusted, saying, “Call her back in the morning,” to no avail. Instead, I drank all the champagne myself. I didn’t pass out, but I went to bed drunk. Heck of a marriage night.

BEFORE THE WEDDING
Victor McLaglen, the actor, and Jim Jeffries, the prizefighter, gave me some advice. They said that the sure
fire way to know whether or not my wife really loved me was to honeymoon in the wilderness for a couple weeks, alone. “You’ll really get to know each other,” McLaglen said. “If she loves you afterward, she always will.”

I gave Cynthia a choice of going to Hawaii or to a friend’s cabin forty miles past Red Bluff, near the Eel River. Cynthia said she knew enough about the ocean, so with a short stop in Reno to get supplies, we headed straight into the hills.

We swam, caught fish, rode horses. Cynthia got to be a crack shot hitting cans with the .22. When she almost stepped on a rattlesnake, she whipped out the pistol and plugged it in the head. We loved every minute, and Cynthia would have been happy to rough it for a year, but I had grown restless and missed my life in the city. I wanted to keep running and stay in the action. Also, the nightmares continued. Evidently, marriage would not be the cure-all. Cynthia had heard about many of my POW experiences from Harry Read, though never in great detail. I’d never told her about the nightmares, and during our courtship she asked me about my ordeal from time to time but never pressed, figuring I’d talk about it if I wanted to. I didn’t, really.

DUE TO A
severe housing shortage we had no place to live, so we stayed with Harry and his mother, which was far from ideal. The situation only made me more irritable, and I occasionally took it out on Cynthia. To make matters worse, we’d heard that Cynthia’s father, who had been in the hospital with bronchial asthma when we got married, had suffered a severe relapse when he heard the news of our union. Only my mother-in-law spoke to us, and she left no doubt about their feelings when she told us that our wedding day had been the worst Sunday of their lives and that they had simply closed the doors when the inevitable reporters came nosing around for a quote.

Finally, through a friend, we found a cheap apartment—more just a room—in Edgemont Manor, by Vermont Avenue and Hollywood Boulevard. It was not the best place to commence the responsibilities of marriage. I found it too depressing and went out as much as possi
ble, seeing friends, drinking, partying. I had officially separated from the army Air Corps that August, but the great and would-be great in Hollywood still invited me to their homes and postwar celebrations. I went, glad for the liquor and the company, yet frustrated by knowing I could never repay their hospitality. Little by little I slipped back into my old negative personality patterns.

Cynthia went to the parties, but she didn’t drink and drew the line at going from bar to bar. In some ways she fit perfectly into my lifestyle. We went to USC football games. She met my college buddies. We got along fine and were very much in love. But mostly she didn’t agree with my friends’ idea of a good time. As a result, she got fed up and withdrew more and more into herself. Soon the evening came when she told me I could go out by myself—if I had to.

Cynthia was better off staying home or going to a movie with her friends. One night, I had a couple of beers with some Olympic buddies at a restaurant called Nickodell’s. I left to see a pal but felt more woozy than two beers’ worth. I don’t remember leaving his place later, but apparently I was so drunk that I drove aimlessly through the Hollywood Hills not knowing where I was headed. Hours later I parked the car, got out, took a leak against a tree, and walked to what I thought was my apartment nearby. It wasn’t. Finally, at four in the morning, after walking for miles in circles and wearing down the heels of my new shoes, I stumbled onto the right street. The next morning I reported my car stolen. Two days later the police found it miles away.

I thought someone had spiked my beer and I never went back to Nickodell’s, but the truth was that I had begun to experience alcoholic blackouts and couldn’t remember what I’d done for hours at a time. For example, I remember sitting at a bar with a friend and a young couple one evening when the lights suddenly went out and the next I knew someone was helping me into a car.

“What’s the matter?” I asked nervously. “What happened?”

“You learned a little lesson,” my friend told me. “Someone walked by with a lady friend and you patted her in the wrong place. The guy she was with didn’t like the idea and patted you once—in the right place.”
My fighting also got worse. At a Newport Beach bar with buddies I got shoved accidentally by a guy who weighed about fifty pounds more than I did. I didn’t care. My blood boiled for revenge. I got him out on the sand and danced around him until he was winded. Then I attacked, punching him until he went down, then pushing his face in the sand for good measure. Suddenly I was like the kid who had beat the bakery-truck driver to a pulp and left him by the roadside, not knowing whether he was dead or alive.

Realizing that I needed help, Cynthia put aside her fears and anger and tried to calm me and to help me restore some measure of self-respect. But all that helped, though only temporarily, was another dose of recognition, like when Torrance held a ceremony dedicating Zamperini Field. Sitting there with my wife and family, listening to the mayor and some military bigwigs give me the most generous compliments imaginable, I wondered what they’d do if they knew the truth about my high life and my low life and all the demons in between.

DURING A SMALL
dinner party on Harry’s yacht I seriously lost control. Cynthia agreed to cook the steaks on a tiny, slow butane stove, and we joshed her mercilessly as she struggled. When dinner was served I made one more joking, disparaging comment. That did it. Cynthia told us off, left the boat, and went to the car. I followed. “Get back on board,” I ordered. “You’re spoiling the party.”

“I will not,” she said. “Either take me to your parents’ place or give me money for a bus ticket home.” She got in the car. I did, too, furious, and repeated my demand. She ignored me. Without realizing it, I grabbed her and…let’s just say she was coughing and choking when I let go of her. In shock, I ran back to the boat and the bottle. Cynthia went to my parents’ house.

That night, as I lay alone in bed, the nightmares returned with unusual ferocity. Just as my fingers clutched the Bird’s windpipe and crushed it, I woke with a start and sat up in bed shouting. Had Cynthia been there she’d have calmed me, but she wasn’t. Sweat poured off my body, and I remembered what had happened earlier in the car. I
froze. I couldn’t get even with the Bird or avenge my life in Japan, so I got even with everybody else. What if by mistake I reached out for Cynthia’s neck in the middle of a bad dream? I couldn’t go back to sleep. I sat up, staring out the window at the streetlights and then the dawn, then went running, pushing myself during my workout as if I were trying to get away from everything that had happened to me.

CYNTHIA AND I
made up, and I decided that a rededication to racing would help me get better. I bought some new running shoes and worked out at Los Angeles City College. Cynthia came and timed me.

I did it for the self-esteem. I wanted to win again, to fill the gaping hole in my life. And yet, though I approached my workouts with the best positive attitude I could muster, I resented them.
Why
must I run? Why did people insist I try again? Weren’t my previous achievements enough? Maybe if I hadn’t bragged to the clubs and organizations that had paid good money to hear the Great Zamperini speak that I’d be back for the next three Olympics, I’d have acted differently. In truth, no one had forced me to run but me; I still believed that my only true identity lay with the sport.

One morning I warmed up with some short sprints, then jogged over to Cynthia. She told me I had a “pretty stride” in my new shoes. I snapped, “Cut the remarks and just time me.”

Her face wrinkled up and she began to cry, but my heart remained cold. I’d given her money, a place to live, good times, and soon I’d be a famous runner again. What more could she want? After all, the past few months hadn’t been easy for me either, with the dreams and the drinking and the blackouts. Plus, I’d quit booze to starting training. Couldn’t she see I was trying?

“Set the watch like I told you and call out the times whenever I pass you. And speak up. You have to holler so I can hear you.”

I dropped into starting position, thinking, Well, here goes nothing. I looked down the long straightaway. Time to prove I could to it. I gazed at Cynthia, and when she yelled “Go!” I sprang forward. For a moment my mind was empty, at peace, as my body automatically remembered what to do. I took the first turn and settled in for the
long haul. I’d trained for six weeks in heavy tennis shoes, running and hiking in Griffith Park, and taken whirlpool treatments and had my legs massaged. The preparation seemed to be working. My shoes seemed light, and I felt clean in the brisk fall air. Pretty stride, indeed. I stretched out, reaching for the extra inch that meant a better time. But when I passed Cynthia after the first lap, I heard her yell out, “Sixty-eight!”

Sixty-eight? Obviously she’d read the watch wrong. I’d always finished the first quarter faster than that. I pushed harder on the second lap, imagining the stopwatch relentlessly ticking. Then a sudden tug at my chest and a tightening in the back of my legs told me I’d overdone it. I eased up a bit and let my momentum carry me, but my focus had shattered. I thought suddenly of the guard at Naoetsu who knocked me off the plank with a hundred pounds of coal on my back.

“Two-seventeen!” Cynthia called out.

A second slower than my first lap. She must be wrong. I panicked. What if I couldn’t run anymore? What if whatever I had was no longer there? I forgot about pacing and stride and just started sprinting like I had in college when the chips were down.

Immediately a sharp pain tore through my calf and ankle. Too bad, I thought, and pushed ahead. Maybe it just needs a good stretching. Either way, I’ll find out. I ignored the pain and ran another lap, then went all out in the final quarter. I didn’t even hear Cynthia mark the time. I just knew that no matter how bad the pain, I had to keep going.

I should have known better. My leg tightened and throbbed, and I closed my eyes against the agony. As I rounded the final turn I knew my quest was hopeless. I had no kick, no spring, nothing.

I crossed the finish line and collapsed on the grass. Cynthia rushed to my side. “Your time was four twenty-eight,” she said, upbeat. “Pretty good.” I could see in her eyes that she knew better.

I rolled over and sat up. A bad ankle, a sprained knee, a ripped muscle that never healed. All I could do now was give up my dream. Running had been my whole life, and now it was gone. Chalk up another victory for the Japanese. I dropped my head on my folded arms. “It’s all right, honey,” I said. “Just help me over to the car.”

I left the stadium as a runner for the last time, leaning on the shoul
der of a 110-pound woman, with no cheers ringing from the stands and only a few curious children watching.

HUMILIATION FOLLOWED MY
panic. Because I’d bragged so often in speeches, radio broadcasts, and newspaper articles that my new running career had just begun, I had too much to retract or ignore. Would my fast-moving friends, always ready for a laugh at someone else’s expense, consider me a big joke? Or, even worse, would they smother me with compassionate inquiries and reassuring platitudes? I didn’t really want to find out, and I avoided the parties and functions at which I’d have to admit failure.

When my depression finally dissolved, a fearsome rage replaced it. The nightmares, the headaches, a well-planned career stolen from me. What more could the Japanese have done? “God,” I said aloud, staring out the window of my apartment one afternoon when Cynthia was away, “what more will you let them do to me? What more will
you
do to me?”

I waited for an answer, but none came. Why should it? This was the first time God had crossed my mind in over a year, and again only in my moment of absolute hopelessness. I’d done the same on the raft and in the prison camps when I’d promised God my life should he let me survive. Had I kept my promise? No. And this time, instead of promises, I had only anger and complaints and blame. But I didn’t blame myself; I blamed God. Maybe he was listening, maybe not, but even if, as I sometimes suspected, God watched over me, I couldn’t blame him for cutting me loose this time.