The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones (32 page)

Another dude I got close to was a very short shriveled-up Jewish dude named Laffowiss. We called him Laffy, though he had usually a sad and forlorn expression on his face but it didn't stop him from constantly making jokes. His favorite entrance was bent over pretending to have a cigar in his mouth or fingers like Groucho Marx. Sometimes Laffy would stand like that or slightly modified even in the presence of a noncom or officer. He was from the Lower East Side, old style. The Lower East Side that Mike Gold talked about in
Jews without Money
. He was the true mensch, son of the Jewish working class. Cynical, full of a crystal-clear sardonic humor that cut through the crass bullshit of the air force with ease. But like the rest of us he was always running into trouble because of it.

Laffy was always complaining about the air force cuisine. He missed the East European specialties that characterized the Lower East Side. He was always loudly wishing for smoked herring, or pickles, or pickled tomatoes, or whitefish. He was a nonstop questioner of everything. Slumped over, either pretending to be Groucho Marx or actually being Louie Laffowiss. He hung with us easily, laughing at us and with us and at himself. And the most common quality he had was an absolute and uncompromising hatred of the service, and the people who thought they were important because they had some kind of rank or status in it. Yodo and Laffy together would make a classic TV sitcom if TV was in the real people's hands instead of the few gimlet nitwits that run it now.

I guess the salon — I'm calling it the salon now, but actually it was a defensive unit, a sanity-maintaining collective of aspiring intellectuals — taught us all something. We had the jazz foundation mixed with concern for the graphic arts — painting and photography — a couple of academics ensconced among us for laughs, and a few of us interested in literature. Laffy was a nonstop reader, as I had developed into being. The rest of the guys liked to talk about books; Phil and Sid were always talking about what they read. Jim always carried a book along with his camera. White read what he thought was serious and Yodo read
Downbeat, Metronome
, and any book on the music.

The high point of our salon structure came when I took a part-time job evenings in the library. The money was negligible, but I spent quite a bit of time in there. And when this big WAF, a sister from Texas, who was the day clerk, let me know there was a part-time job at night, I leaped at it. Joyce was about six foot two and I guess had some kind of undefined crush on me, but she was a good friend and earnest sister who'd gotten in the WAF
to try to see the world. And she'd been to Europe and was now in Puerto Rico suffering under the shit like the rest of us.

The librarian was a little plump middle-aged career service librarian who saw that I not only knew how to run the library in the evening quickly enough but enjoyed being around the books, so she gave me the run of the place. In a month or so she actually let me order the books and see to the stocking of the entire library. We had a hurricane in '55 and it blew every wooden structure on Ramey down and destroyed the town of Aguadilla. The rebuilt library was modern and even had a brand-new hi-fi set in it. The music library was mostly European concert music, but we were into that too. And for me it was really a learning period about this music and I was buying Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Stravinsky, trying to fill in my knowledge, so that between our own collections and the library collection we were giving ourselves a collective education.

So that was smooth. In the evenings, a group of us from the salon would go into the library. This was after hours and we had the whole building to ourselves. And we would read and bullshit and drink and listen to music turned all the way up. It was the closest thing to paradise we ever encountered down there. Years later I met a guy who had also gone through Ramey and he said he'd seen my name in a bunch of the books there, A/2C E. L. Jones.

But in every way, like it or not, pleasant or not, the service was my graduate school or maybe it was undergraduate school. For one thing, I began to keep a journal, a diary, of what was going on. I can't find the thing now, though I guess it's still around somewhere. But it was the pain and frustration of this enforced isolation that began to make me scrawl my suffering, to seek some audience for my effusive self-pity. As the journal went on it became more and more a listing of the various books I was reading. Because now, so completely cut off, I read constantly, almost every waking hour I wasn't actively soldiering or bullshitting with the fellas. I began reading the
New York Times
— you could only get it Sundays — and at the time 75 cents was an exorbitant fee, but I paid it. And that in itself was an adventure because I had never had much knowledge of the
Times
and its presumptions.

The best-seller list became a kind of bible for me. I tried to read everything on it. I ordered through either the library or a book club, one of the “serious” ones, the Readers' Subscription, which offered Joyce and Melville and James, etc. But I was in a very conscious and very agitated search for information, and it was focused more and more directly on literature. Later,
I could see even how my handwriting changed in the journal. How it took on new shape and spoke of further comprehension and consideration of questions which before I could not have formed. I wanted to become an intellectual. It seemed, for some reason, that for me it was the only thing left.

The world of Howard University and its brown and yellow fantasy promise had faded, leaving a terrible frustration and sense of deprivation. That I had, through my own irresponsible acts, deprived myself of something valuable. I thought the sharp and relentless striving to become intellectual was the answer to this void. At some point I wanted to be back at Howard, at another point, and more and more consistently now, I was almost contemptuous of it and the people there, children. Though the constant self-pity I felt being there “among heathens” was an endless rebuke.

And then, on top of all this, I would actually, every once in a while, see some Howard people. Officers now. We were completely removed and separated from each other now. And the class realization I got from that, the class consciousness, was stunning to me. I could see that we were in different spheres. Of course I could not verbalize it as class, etc., but my perception of it as class, as a separation upheld by the society itself, was keen and staggering. Most of those Howard dudes who were officers in the air force simply avoided me. One I did meet at a base in the South and we talked in his room, and it was cold and frustrating. Our speech had been separated by reality. We no longer linked up. Our interests were different. I could hear the simplistic careerism. The prepared sheepdom of the readied-for-the-slaughter Negro pursuing his “good job” into hell itself. And “Who was I?” was going though my head. Who was I? Where did I fit in? Standing now on the side of the road as the select browns and yellows marched by heroically, triumphantly, toward that shaft of gold leaned out the sky to call them home to yalla jesus. Some calendar shit! I mean it reminded me of the somber glories of the calendars one got in funeral parlors right across the street from the yalla folks' church.

There were a few black officers at Ramey. One was even on the same crew with me. N-45 “Not ready” was what the N meant. It meant we were a bunch of trainees, or ne'er-do-wells, or misfits. Gadsen, the Negro officer on that crew, was classic, I guess, though I never knew many of them well. He was dark brown but absolutely yellow in his aspirations and kind of brownish despite it all. He was a link with the past, in some sense, for me. I think he'd gone to Lincoln. He had a big blue car with a plaid top, a convertible, and was considered, by whomever, the most eligible black
bachelor on the base. He was young, not much older than me, a second lieutenant, so he fit into the power structure in a commendable way, plus he was single and independent and could fly back and forth up the island pursuing what limited pleasures the island might offer to someone in the service. Though, for sure, we all surmised that those pleasures were much more than we would ever be exposed to. It was rumored that Gadsen always had one woman leaving the room as one was entering. And he enjoyed a kind of prestige among some of the base's blacks, a mixed love-and-hate thing emotionally. But the white boys, ever cognizant of the caste-class structure of the real America, constantly made Gadsen the butt of their jokes, so he could not be too uppity, at least in their heads.

That was probably a weird position to be in, like the yellow/brown situation generally in the context of working for white America and somehow relating in some way to the rest of it, including black America. One fat first lieutenant, a yellow Negro straight out, got caught up in some weird stuff that socked it home to me, the sheepish quality expected of the careerist Negro. A fat white master sergeant got into a “game” being played by some of the younger officers near the flight line. They were tossing each other's hats around, which was questionable in the first place, what with the Articles of War, the so-called RHIP (Rank Has Its Privileges, the motto in the service that spells out the class structure of that society and U.S. society in general clearer than I've ever seen it elsewhere). But they're tossing hats and fat Sergeant Mullarcy gets in it. Catches this black lieutenant's hat and tosses it, but too far for one of the other officers to catch. The black officer tells him to pick up the hat and the fat sergeant refuses!

A guy stood me up in front of the barracks one day, a white first looie, and made me salute over and over because he didn't dig the black salute (though Laffy saluted the same way). Black troops had a tendency to bend their heads sideways down to their hand when saluting rather than bringing the hand all the way up military style. This guy made me salute maybe twenty-five times until he was satisfied. I was determined in my sly way not to understand what he was talking about and went on saluting in the hot goddam sun and he stood there over me, the gung-ho sonafabitch! And it went on and on.

I knew what would have happened if I had just nutted out and refused to go through the saluting game. And at the end, I don't think I'd really changed my salute, but he was satisfied that he got me some extra duty or extra harassment for taking such liberties. But the fat sergeant refused to pick up the hat. I was squatting in the corner with some other airmen
watching. And there finally was some compromise, like somebody else picked up the hat. But why? Why hadn't the officer just given the fat master an Article 15 or got one of his stripes? The fat sergeant was an old soldier, the yellow lieutenant, a short-timer, and probably in transition to his dentist's office in a few years. But still, to me and the others that watched and heard of this, this was a clear display of the dickless stance such yellow status predicted.

But I never felt really part of all that. In it, I was, for sure, and it pained me like the great tragedies of my reading. And I began to scrawl my agonies into my journal regularly. My findings. The ideas that came out of the books. Proust and
Auntie Mame
. Hemingway and
The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit
. And Joyce, Faulkner, Melville, Dostoyevsky, Hesse, Flaubert, Cummings, Lawrence, Pound, Patchen, Hardy, James, Balzac, Stendhal. I would read
Bonjour Tristesse
and Robert Graves in the same day. A book on Buddhism and
The Communist Manifesto
in the same afternoon. I enjoyed plunging into long books that I'd read were difficult to get through. The Proust and Dostoyevsky were glad tasks for me. I'd find an author and read everything of his or hers I'd find. Puerto Rico made that difficult, but being the night librarian aided this quest. And when I was given guard duty, which was always, I would squat out in the hot sun twelve hours trying to read clandestinely, because reading was not permitted during guard duty. Plus Harrison said we were to have nothing on display on our dressers or windowsills, so that after a while the books I began to amass had to be put inside my closet or otherwise stashed, though at times I got sloppy and put them on the dresser with a bookend like normal people.

I also began writing poetry more regularly. I'd written some light verse and some Elizabethan doggerel during my HU days, mostly hooked up with the doctor's lady, Liz. But now I was more serious (though still not altogether) with what I was doing. I was at least trying to put down what I knew or everything I thought I felt. Straining for big words and deep emotional registration, as abstract as my understanding of my life.

At the Green Door, I'd also stumbled into the literary magazine.
Accent
, a small magazine from somewhere in Illinois, impressed me most. With the strange abstruseness of doctrinaire modernism heretofore unknown to me. “Pity Poor Axel the Spinhead” was the name of one story, author now unknown. I tried to penetrate its murky symbolism. The poetry also swept past me. I had since been getting the
Partisan, Hudson, Kenyon Reviews
, even
Sewanee
from time to time. I was getting beat over the head with the New Criticism and didn't know it. I strained to understand, to find something
for myself in those words. I read Empson's
Seven Types of Ambiguity
and plowed into all the fashionable literary McCarthyism coming out then, as my entrance and baptism into the world of serious letters. All the time a radio would be screaming in hillbilly at the top of its voice and drunken airmen would be clattering through the hall goosing each other in memory of the most recent
puta
they'd banged.

I'd say the irony of all this is what someone far removed might think of as “delicious.” The reality of my day-to-day air force life fairly terrified me — despite the collective resistance of our salon elitism. The daily grind of guard duty, or fortnightly “alerts,” fake missions announced by the screaming of hellish sirens which sent us scrambling down to the flight line and up into the very wild black yonder, were driving me up the wall, or at least to drink. Yet the reality from which I wanted to escape was replaced by my reading, which often was the most backward forces in American literature, teaching me the world upside down and backwards. But despite the New Criticism and the word freaks and the Southern Agrarians and Fugitive propaganda that I imbibed as often as I could as a supposed antidote to the air force, it gave me enough solid reflection on real life so that it had to change me. That and the service.