Tibetan Peach Pie: A True Account of an Imaginative Life (12 page)

16

cry for funny

The evening of my twenty-first birthday found me not in a festive bar enjoying the first legal cocktail of my shiny new adulthood, but perched instead in saggy underwear atop an olive-green footlocker shining ill-fitting new black shoes to a gloss lustrous enough to satisfy the perverse demands of a uniformed sadist who’d be in my face berating me ere the cock crowed thrice on the morrow. No, a bar it surely was not, yet there was live musical entertainment of a sort, and in a peculiar sense it affected my life in ways beyond the reach of any lounge singer in any gin joint this side of Casablanca.

Two weeks earlier, I had enlisted in the United States Air Force. Why? -- one might fairly ask. Well, for precisely the same reason that 90 percent of all enlistees join the military, which is to say, I was at a point in my life when I didn’t know what else to do.

Professional patriots, religious demigods, and politicians of all stripes are wont to shine the shoes of their public image by periodic references to “the heroic men and women who sacrifice so much in order to keep America safe and preserve our freedom.” There may have been a few times in our nation’s history when such tribute was accurate and deserved (in the days and weeks following the attacks on Pearl Harbor and the World Trade Center, for example), but I have to say that during four years in the air force, including posting at an army base in Korea; and during numerous conversations with both veterans and those on active duty, I never once heard a serviceman or -woman claim that he or she had joined up in order to preserve American values and keep their countrymen free. By and large, young people have enlisted in order to escape boredom, financial difficulties, bad relationships, and general stagnation.

The travel and adventure promised (and, yes, often delivered) by the military is not a component of basic training. From the hour one lands in boot camp all thoughts of future fun and past attachments are pounded out of one’s consciousness; one is locked in a perpetual present designed to purge one of any trace of individuality and extract from one any erg of energy with which one might presume to resist. Talk about a makeover! It can leave the new recruit feeling exhausted, beaten down, lost, apprehensive, and that he’s probably made a terrible mistake. That, as a matter of fact, fairly accurately describes the state most of my platoon mates and I would be in when, slumped on our footlockers at Sampson Air Force Base, New York, buffing our ugly brogans and dreading the too-soon-upon-us dawn, we’d be treated to the aforementioned “musical entertainment.”

Almost to a man, the two dozen or so recruits in our platoon had lived their entire lives in the racially segregated South, only to find themselves now in a freshly integrated military, spending days and nights in close company and on equal footing with members of a familiar yet alien race. There were only three or four blacks in our unit and the attitude of the white guys seemed one of passive curiosity rather than hostility or resentment, although frankly we were all too tired and distracted to give racial differences much thought. There was at least one prominent difference, however, and it asserted itself in a manner whose benefits the Pentagon could not have foreseen.

We honkies would be sitting there by our bunks, shining and whining, enveloped in a forlorn funk, when down the center aisle would come one of the black guys on his way to the latrine, the water fountain, or the bulletin board; and he’d be all grinning and relaxed, just snapping his fingers, shaking his booty, and,
singing;
not showing off, mind you, or seeking attention, just unself-consciously lost in the music he was hearing in his head and his heart, a music that toil and trouble could not silence -- and perhaps made necessary. It never failed to lift our spirits or send us to bed in a rosier mood. I report this not to perpetuate the myth of racial specializations -- the musicality of African Americans doubtlessly owes far more to environment than to genetics -- but it’s impossible to recall those moments in my barracks without thinking of the Revue Nègre, Sidney Bechet, Josephine Baker et al, and how expatriate black American jazzmen put a smile back on the sad face of a Europe chronically depressed in the years after World War I.

Two centuries earlier, America itself began to be slowly uplifted by a people they had enslaved. Our nation was settled, remember, by emotionally constipated Puritans and purse-lipped prudes; expanded by brutish fortune hunters with a taste for hardtack and genocide. It would be insensitive to say in regard to something as evil as slavery that it’s an ill wind that blows no good, but it’s a fact that in addition to their other contributions, former African slaves managed over time to bring joy to a dour, priggish population which danced, when it deigned to dance at all, with heavy feet and a guilty conscience.

In any event, that experience in air force boot camp stayed with me, doubtlessly affecting in some way my unpopular stance as an integrationist in 1950s Richmond.

By the way, I alone among the white recruits actually recognized those songs that the black recruits were singing. There was a catchy one whose refrain went, “Ain’t that crazy, crazy, crazy?” A question apropos to so many situations in life. And there was “Work with Me, Annie,” whose lyrics had almost as many lives as a cat. Etta James recorded a supposedly cleaned-up version called “Roll With Me, Henry,” but even that proved too risqué for white radio. Eventually, Georgia Gibbs scored one of the very first hits in the new genre of rock and roll with a further sanitized version entitled “Dance with Me, Henry.” Needless to say, the original song’s sequel, “Annie Had a Baby,” was too earthy -- and too scary -- to be even considered for Caucasian transliteration.

How did blue-eyed Tommy Rotten happen to know those songs? Why, I’d heard them back in Warsaw at that little black-friendly Texaco station where the radio on the counter was always tuned to minority broadcasts from D.C. and Baltimore. Kid pops into a gas station to play the pinball machine and is subliminally radicalized. Ain’t that crazy, crazy, crazy?

By 1953, the Korean War had wound down, but conscription remained in effect and I was about to be drafted into the army, a prospect that held a minimum of charm for me since I fancied neither shooting nor being shot. The air force seemed a more peaceable alternative, and I wasn’t strongly averse to enlisting for the reason I stated earlier: I was bereft of appealing options.

In the year after severing ties with W&L (I didn’t hate the place, it just wasn’t the best fit for someone with my funky orientations and anarchic aesthetic), I’d done a bit of pre-beatnik hitchhiking (even writing a few pre-beatnik poems), labored briefly in the mail room of the Life Insurance Company of Virginia; and worked construction helping build and maintain electrical power plants and substations. I actually enjoyed construction, primarily for the camaraderie.

My fellow workers, though uneducated and unsophisticated, were funnier than a ruptured pipeline of laughing gas, offering witty and often insightful commentary on nearly every misstep, local and national, in life’s passing parade. Not one of them gave a braised pig’s knuckle that I could read Rilke in German, but they were loyal, stand-up guys who respected the fact that I’d dabbled in higher education, and who, I knew, always had my back. Going to work each morning was akin to attending a staff meeting of the
Harvard Lampoon,
if there were Harvard men who could keep you in stitches while threading pipe expertly or digging a ditch.

Enjoyable it might have been, but as I possess less mechanical aptitude than a rheumatoid squirrel monkey, my future in the construction trade was limited at best. Oh, and lest I forget, there was one other sharp stick prodding me toward enlistment: I’d recently gotten married.

The summer I turned twenty, I’d lost my virginity to a fetching, likewise virginal, Warsaw girl three years my junior. It being the 1950s, and it being rural Virginia, and we, Peggy and I, being middle class; well, in that time and under those circumstances, the popping of the cherry more often than not led to the popping of the question. Granted, I’d been a nonconformist practically since birth, but in this case I don’t know if I was rebelling against convention or bowing to it; yet for whatever reason, the prospect of a teenage wedding (and this was years before Chuck Berry sang about one) struck me as kind of cool, kind of wild.

I definitely wasn’t driven by conscience, by the shameful feeling that my wonton lust had soiled an innocent flower. Peggy wasn’t pregnant, and the truth is, she craved sexual intercourse as fervently as I. I’d say she craved it even more, except that such a claim would likely annoy Terry Gross.

Ms. Gross, of course, is the host of
Fresh Air,
the fine interview program on National Public Radio. The time I was a guest on the show, she seemed incredulous if not outright indignant when she asked if I really believed that women are more interested in sex than men are, as I’d had a character say in my novel
Skinny Legs and All.
I replied, “I don’t know but that’s what my women friends tell me.”

It was an honest answer, if a trifle incomplete. I should have said, “. . . that’s what my
married
women friends tell me.” As we’ve established in these pages, the second his biological urge is satisfied, many a husband is mentally if not physically out the door, lugging his bag of clubs. Especially if a ray of daylight persists in the sky. And when he yells “Fore!” you can bet your bottom credit card he isn’t crying out for more foreplay.

On a humid, blustery day (it was typhoon season) in the autumn of 1954, I landed in Japan. Two nights later, I landed again -- this time without benefit of aircraft. The second landing, though unaffected by storm winds, was rougher, more perilous than the first. Let me explain.

While awaiting transport to various assigned installations in Korea, hundreds of us airmen were temporarily quartered in what amounted to a tent city, although the structures weren’t tents in the usual sense in that their bottom halves were wooden and seemingly permanent. From a height of about six feet upward, they were canvas, a heavy olive-drab tarpaulin material. Each unit slept twenty airmen, the cots lined up in two rows of ten with an aisle down the center. There were scores, maybe hundreds, of these half tents, and they all looked exactly alike. Only an identification number at each entrance distinguished one from all the others, but the numbers could be difficult to read in the dark.

Somewhere in the midst of Tent City, next to the huge mess hall, there was a canteen, the Pentagon being ever thoughtful when it comes to providing its troops with easy access to beer. By my second night in Japan, I was already so in love with the country (despite having thus far experienced precious little of it) that I downed an imprudent amount of suds, toasting my good fortune in finding myself in such an ancient and fascinating culture. At closing time, I went weaving back to my tent, where I quickly fell asleep, dreaming no doubt of geishas and Mount Fuji, in scenes resembling wood-block prints.

At some point during the night, a full bladder awakened me. I arose, located the latrine building, and proceeded to off-load my cargo. Now, my cot was immediately inside the entrance of my assigned tent, very first bunk on the right. Upon my return, I threw myself down on what I believed to be my mattress -- only to land right on top of a sleeping man. The man screamed. Literally screamed. He believed, I’m sure, that he was being attacked by a Communist, or worse, was the victim of an attempted homosexual rape.

I pulled myself off him as quickly as I could manage it, being somewhat entangled in the man’s flailing arms and legs. Once free, I raced in a panic to the tent next door, which, luckily, proved to be the correct one, and dived into bed with my shoes on. There was some commotion outside, but it soon died down, and once my heart quit pounding and my breathing slowed, I quietly laughed myself to sleep.

At breakfast the next morning, I turned my head and discreetly chuckled again when I heard airmen asking, “Did you hear what happened to Sergeant Johansson last night?”

Later that day, just outside his tent, I came upon Sergeant Johansson himself. A gruff, tough-looking fellow in his thirties, he outranked me by three stripes and outweighed me by at least thirty pounds of what looked to be more muscle than fat. Walking ever so nonchalantly past him, I had no trouble suppressing even the faintest sign of amusement, though there definitely was a big red Japanese sun of a smile on the face behind my face.

In Korea, my assignment was to teach members of the South Korean air force the techniques of weather observation, including registering prevailing atmospheric conditions and encrypting, decoding, and plotting on maps meteorological data transmitted via shortwave radio from various observation sites around western Asia. To prepare me for this duty, the U.S. Air Force had sent me to its school near Chicago, where my classmates and I took two years of college meteorology in four months, attending classes eight hours a day, six days a week. This saturation process is called a “crash program,” and I can testify that it is a highly effective way to learn a subject.

I had arrived in Illinois in the middle of a program, so my future weather classmates and I had to wait eight weeks for the next program to begin. To keep us occupied, useful, and out of mischief in the interval, our commanding officer made certain we were available daily for either mess hall duty (KP) or something called “base beautification,” this latter consisting of tasks ranging from scouring every inch of the sprawling base for cigarette butts and other litter to raking leaves, heaving sacks of compost, and planting shrubbery. Base beautification could be sweaty physical labor or it could be a piddly existential bore. And while in both cases it was preferable to KP (The horror! The horror!), it was hardly the sort of mindless grunt work we’d envisioned we’d be performing when we eschewed the army for the air force. Guys were always faking toothaches or upset stomachs, or inventing other lame excuses to get out of it. To that end I hit upon a novel tactic that in certain circles might be regarded as brilliant.