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 vi
ctim 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.
When our unit would report to a noncommissioned officer in charge of a particular base beautification project, each of us, individually, would be required to sign his name on a duty roster. At noon, we’d break for lunch, after which there’d be a roll call to assure that every one of us had returned to work as ordered. At no point in this operation were IDs checked. So one morning I signed the roster not as Thomas E. Robbins but as “R. M. Rilke,” betting that not one of the authorities involved would have heard of the Austrian poet. After lunch, I slipped away to the base theater and watched a matinee.
The following day, at my unit’s early-morning formation, nobody noticed the twinkle in my eye when our own NCO ordered “Airman Rilke” to report to the orderly room, presumably to defend his unexcused absence from base beautification. Perfect! And the next time we future weathermen were assigned to a laborious beautification detail, I signed in as “Feodor Dostoyevsky.” After lunch, I traipsed over to the gym and shot baskets, knowing that I might have to bite my tongue to keep from snickering at the way our sergeant would pronounce “Dostoyevsky” the following morning. I only regretted that I couldn’t be privy to the consternation “Rilke” and “Dostoyevsky” surely must have caused in our orderly room.
Not wishing to arouse suspicion. I skipped a day or two now and then and returned to the shovel and the rake, but over the following weeks “Alexander Pope,” “Leo Tolstoy,” and “Oscar Wilde” were all cited for being AWOL from base beautification -- while I passed sweet afternoons seeing the latest Hollywood films and improving my jump shot. Who says a literary education doesn’t have practical applications?
Any American air force pilot, having been alerted in a weather briefing to the presence of a storm system in his flight path, would take pains to circumnavigate it. South Korean pilots, on the other hand, being fatalistic both by temperament and religious training, would just fly right into the storm.
At least that was the case in the 1950s. With that stoic approach to aviation prevalent in their officers, my students could be forgiven for caring no more about meteorology than kittens might care about string theory.
Nevertheless, we had to go through the motions, which we did in rotating eight-hour shifts: day, swing, and midnight (weather doesn’t sleep). The question soon became, “What to do,” my students and I, “to keep from boring each other to transcultural tears?” I’m unsure whose idea it was, but for a while -- in between recording and transmitting temperatures, dew points, and wind directions -- the locals amused themselves by teaching me to swear in Korean. More than a half century later, I still remember those naughty words, which is a trifle odd as I’ve had scant opportunity to put them into practice and have been known to criticize profanity as representing a paucity of vocabulary and destitution of wit.
Eventually, however, we discovered a diversion that was not only mutually satisfying but profitable. Moreover, it struck a symbolic blow against Cold War communism, being a working example of capitalistic principles on a democratically fundamental plane. We took up black marketing.
The PX at K-2 Air Force Base occupied a Quonset hut set on treeless, ever-brown land, presenting a rigidly militaristic demeanor to the world: no nonsense, no frills. Inside, though, it offered for sale at discount prices a fair number of the familiar items that average Americans considered essential to their pursuit of happiness if not their actual survival. These would include Camel, Pall Mall, Kool, and Marlboro cigarettes. Regulations permitted each airman on K-2 to purchase two cartons of cigarettes a month, a rule irrelevant in my case since I didn’t smoke. Well, one day a student named Kim (come to think of it, each and every one of my students was named Kim; in fact, I believe every man, woman, and child in Korea was named Kim in 1955, and that may still be the case for all I know); this particular Kim fellow came to me and very shyly suggested that were I to provide him with a carton of Marlboros, he would pay me more than twice the price charged by the PX.
Now, I’m not much of a businessman -- life is entirely too short to be used up in shallow pursuit of monetary favor -- but this transaction sounded easy enough and, hey, this Kim, though not uniquely christened, was a good-natured soul who’d giggled like a schoolgirl when instructing me how to say “motherfucker” in his native tongue.
Let’s not drag this out. Soon I was supplying Kim with not only my two monthly cartons but cigarettes I’d purchased at face value from other nonsmokers in my outfit. Before long, we were dealing in toilet articles as well. They, in fact, commanded a better price than the smokes. Bear in mind that South Korea at that time was an impoverished, war-torn country with nothing remotely resembling a modern manufacturing sector, and from its sheer volume, it was obvious that the stuff I sold to Kim was being resold to a third party or parties.
Conducting business at the weather station would have been risky for us both, so I’d conceal the merchandise in a laundry bag and schlep it to a rendezvous at a Korean civilian laundry located some twenty or thirty yards down the unpaved road that led in and out of K-2. Most of the airmen had their clothes washed there, and guards at the gate didn’t notice that I seemed to be soiling my duds at many times the rate of the average airman.
I suppose I should emphasize that this enterprise was wee potatoes. Bantam feed. A mafia don wouldn’t have wiped his wife’s poodle’s butt on it. But entertainment was cheap in those postwar years in Asia, and my illicit earnings, meager as they were, afforded me excellent sukiyak
i dinners, Kabuki performances, and lovely female companionship when I would travel to Japan on leave. It wasn’t until near the end of my tour of duty that I learned that most of our contraband, especially the toilet articles, was ending up behind the bamboo curtain in what was then Red China. Brand me a traitor if you must, but I figure that for eight or nine months I was supplying Mao Zedong with his Colgate toothpaste.
In the weather observers’ barracks at K-2, a poker game was almost always in progress. One of the most ardent poker players was an affable, roughhewn Southern lad named Jody. Between weather station duty and incessantly chasing a royal flush, Jody hadn’t time for much else, including writing to his girlfriend back in North Carolina, so he offered me five bucks (his luck had been good that week) if I’d write to Sue Ellen in his stead.
Since my interest in cards has been pretty much limited to wild cards (figuratively speaking), I rarely sat at the poker table, preferring to spend my leisure hours at the service club, flirting with bargirls and drinking beer; or, when in the barracks, pursuing my newfound interest in Japanese aesthetics, including trying to understand and assimilate such concepts as wabi-sabi (the art of finding beauty in things that are imperfect, incomplete, humble, or unconventional), a practice, with its undertones of “crazy wisdom,” that continues to absorb me today. However, a young American male can only wabi so much sabi, and my rinky-dink black-market ring wasn’t time-consuming, so I consented to write to the fair Sue Ellen on Jody’s behalf -- on one condition: he must sign and post the epistle without reading it. He agreed.
Refraining from waxing so poetic as to arouse her suspicion, I told Sue Ellen how much I (Jody) loved and missed her, but that I (Jody) was proud to be serving my country so that American values might endure. Skipping any reference to poker, I included a few lines about the base and work, but they struck me as dull. I felt that the letter could use a bit of color, some tidbit to intrigue and delight.