Vanity of Duluoz: An Adventurous Education, 1935-46

  And him copping out of the US defense service on grounds of homosexuality.

  X

  And it was also, of course, the ship that is now reverenced and made into monuments (at the Kingsbridge Veterans’ Hospital in Bronx NY for one) as the ship on which, or on board of which, the Four Chaplains gave up their lives and life belts to the soldiers: the Four Chaplains being two Protestants, a Catholic and a Jew. They just went down with the ship and with Glory in those icy waters, praying.

  Glory disappeared.

  The steward who hated me was seen having his neck cut off by a sliced off life raft, in the waves.

  The Negro gay baker I havent had exact details.

  Captain Kendrik, he went down.

  XI

  All those pots and pans, that kitchen deck, the linen room, the butcher room, the Army guns, the steel, the scuppers, the engine room, the left-handed monkey wrench room, the German Blond Boy Waste of This World . . . There oughta be a better way to die in this world than in the service of Ammunitioneers.

  XII

  So Sabbas and I having disembarked from the train in Lowell railroad station, me carrying my harpoon and seabag, and having walked up School Street and over the Moody Street Bridge to my house in Pawtucketville, greeted my father, kissed him, kissed my mother, my sister, and there’s that telegram from Lu Libble, I’m off in the morning.

  On the campus once again I’m entrapped with this bullshit now of having to read and understand Hamlet by Shakespeare inside of three days while washing the dishes in the cafeteria and scrimmaging all afternoon. Lu Libble greets me accidentally on Amsterdam Avenue and says ‘Well you’ve lost weight, them rolling waves really take the lard off you, hey? How much you weigh now?’

  ‘One fifty-five.’

  ‘Well I guess I cant make you a guard anymore. I think you’ll run faster now.’

  ‘My father’s coming next week to see if you can get him that job in Hackensack.’

  ‘Yeh.’

  Out on the field, the boys in light blue, Columbia, are all standing around in an early afternoon and here I come jogging out of the clubhouse for the first time, tightly cleated and ready. I stare at the new boys. All the good old boys are gone into the service. This is a bunch of weak-kneed punks, tall and disjointed and sorta decadent. First thing Lu Libble says is ‘We’ve got to teach you to do that KT-79 fake.’ As I said before I didnt play football for to fake. The lights go on in the scrimmage field on Baker Field at 215th and Broadway. Who’s standing watching the scrimmage? The coach of Army, Earl Blaik, and the coach of Brown, Tuss McLaughry. They say to Lu:

  ‘Who’s this Dulouse who’s supposed to run so good?’

  ‘There he is.’

  ‘Let’s see him go.’

  ‘Okay. Duluoz, boys, come here, huddle.’ Cliff Battles is there too. I have to do the little short fake steps from right wing and come around in back of the ball-receiver, fake as tho I didnt receive the ball from his handout, but actually do take it and then start winging around left end (my wrong side), have to evade old Turk Tadzic again, who curses again, reverse my field across the line, till I come up against would-be defensive tacklers on the side there, reverse again, dodge a bit, and am all alone in the open field heading for a 190-yard run for all I know with just nobody between me and the goalpost but Lu’s favorite Italian Mike Romanino, and just as Mike is getting ready to have to try to catch me and haul me down to the ground, Lu Libble blows the whistle to stop the play. Dont wanta overwork the Roman Hero too much.

  But the coach of Army has seen, and the other one too, and then four days later here comes Sabbas from Lowell with his droopy big idealistic eyes wondering why I cant go out with him and study the Brooklyn Bridge, which we do anyway tho b’now I’m supposed to write a big paper on King Lear and Macbeth too, and by this time here comes Pa, gets a room in the nearby college hotel, goes to Lu Libble’s office, is turned down from a job, I hear them yelling in there, Pa comes stomping out of his office and says to me ‘Come on home, these wops are just cheating you and me both.’

  ‘What’s the matter with Lu?’

  ‘Just because he wears two-hundred-dollar suits he thinks he’s Mister Banana Nose himself. The Army game is coming up Saturday, if he doesnt put you in that game then what the ’ell do you think it means?’

  ‘Now coach?’ I’m saying to Lu at the bench on the Army game on Saturday and he doesnt even look my way.

  So the following Monday, snow in my window and Beethoven in the radio, Fifth Symphony, I say to myself ‘Okay, I quit football.’ I go next door to Mort Mayor’s dormitory room, where he has a grand piano, and listen to him play Benny Goodman’s pianist type jazz. Mel Powell. I go to Jake Fitzpatrick’s room and drink whiskey while he sleeps over an unfinished short story. I go across the street to Edna Palmer’s grandmother’s house and lay Edna Palmer right there on the sofa. I tell the chemistry department to go tube it up. Big tackles and guards and ends of the Columbia football squad are outside my window in the snow yelling ‘Hey idiot come on out have a beer.’ Kurowsky is among them, Turk Tadzic, others, if they wont let me play I aint gonna hang around.

  Because in the Army game I coulda gone out there and scored at least two touchdowns and made it close and incidentally I would have smeared their best runner, from Lowell, Art Janur, right smack dead ahead like I done to Halmalo when I was thirteen. If you cant be allowed to play then how can you play anything?

  While Columbia varsity linemen were taking big leaks outside the West End Bar on 118th and Broadway, right in front of my little future wife Edna (‘Johnnie’) Palmer, who thought it was hilarious, I packed up my suitcase and my radio and went home to Lowell to wait for the Navy to call me. December 1942. (She was having an affair with another seaman who shoved her thru the subway turnstiles to save a nickel.) Chad Stone was now the captain of the team and seemed to look my way with regret. I got sick of Thackeray Carr pushing against me in scrimmage with his rocky head. It was just a great big bunch of horse-shit where they dont let you prove yourself. When the chips are down. Silver nails and sawdust.

  XIII

  But the one thing I forgot was, when Lu Libble called me back to Columbia I rode the NY NH and Hartford Railroad or whatever you call it, from Lowell north to Nashua and then west to Worcester, and then to Hartford, New Haven, etc., with my Pop in tow. Big old Pop had a book with him written by Willard Robertson, the old character actor in the movies, called High Tide or Low Tide or something, a story about a clam digger on the shore who saved a girl from drowning (Ida Lupino, Pop’s favorite actress gal) (with Jean Gabin of France), and while Pop snored in his old railroad seat I read the entire novel for twelve hours from Lowell to New York. Now people dont do that any more. Twelve hours on a dim train with old conductors and brakemen running round yelling ‘Meriden!’ and me reading an entire French movie novel. Very good it was, too. To think that we werent besieged by airline hostesses with smiles of mock teeth, invitations to some kind of invisible dance, but left alone to read an entire book . . . And in the morning we went to Lu Libble’s office and had that argument with Lu. But sometimes in my dreams I dream that I’m carrying too many burdens and other people are rushing along with me on the way to the terminal train station. I ask them to hold my coat, or umbrella, or cundrom, but they always politely decline and so it means that I am now going thru life carrying more burdens than I can carry. And that no one cares.

  But my Pa had already read that novel and wanted me to study it in the brown lights of that old coach as it rattled thru New England . . . think of that a second when you join the Brotherhood of Railroad Trainmen. BRT.

  Not UROC.

  XIV

  So me and Pa are quits with New York and I go back to Lowell to wait, as I say, for the Navy to call me, and when they do call me I’ve already got the German measles, I mean for real, pimples up and down my back and arms and
real sick. I write a note to the Navy and they say wait two weeks. I’m at home again with Ma and I start neatly handprinting a beautiful little novel called ‘The Sea Is My Brother’, which is a crock as literature but as handprinting beautiful. I’m alone in the house again with my handprint pencil and pure again but really sick from German measles. There was, in fact, an epidemic of it at that time. The Navy didnt doubt me. But the next week when I’m well again I entrain to Boston to the US Naval Air Force place and they roll me around in a chair and ask me if I’m dizzy. ‘I’m not daffy,’ says I. But they catch me on the altitude measurement shot. ‘If you’re flying at eighteen thousand feet and the altitude level is on the so and such, what would you do?’

  ‘How the screw should I know?’

  So I’m washed out of my college education and assigned to have my hair shaved with the boots at Newport.

  XV

  Which wasnt so bad except they were all eighteen years old and here I am twenty-one.

  What a bunch of bores all talking about their pimples, or girlfriends, one, as tho I hadnt ever had a girlfriend, and giving me these corny jokes. There’s a vast difference, the service officers should know, between eighteen and twenty-one. We had to sling up our hammocks on hooks in the Newport Rhode Island barracks and every minute some eighteen-year-old nut fell out, in mid of night, plunk on the deck, and me too, while trying to turn over for more comfortable positions. Meanwhile somebody kept waking me up in my flimsy and unconditional hammock in mid of night, like 3 A.M., for to walk up and down with a flashlight and carbine (well, gat) as ‘Guard’ of the watch. Then in the morning they wouldnt let you smoke. And you had to duck behind boots to light your butt, boys.

  The food wasnt bad. But when I had spent that month at home with German measles writing ‘The Sea Is My Brother’ I kept playing Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony and I was by now right spoiled. All them Cossacks riding ponies across the steppes. Instead, here I was with guys yelling in B companies ‘Hi a loop, hi a loop, hup hup’ and swinging by with wool caps and pea coats.

  What I have to tell you about the US Navy will knock your head clean off.

  Book Nine

  I

  Well, I didnt mind the eighteen-year-old kids too much but I did mind the idea that I should be disciplined to death, not to smoke before breakfast, not to do this, that, or thatta. I knew the kids were stupid war fodder, as we all know, but great kids they were, as you know too, but this business of I cant smoke before breakfast and this other business of the admiral and his Friggin Train walking around telling us that the deck should be so clean that we could fry an egg on it, if it was hot enough, just killed me. Who was this gentleman who had the nerve to tell me to wipe a speck off my foot?

  I am a descendant of very grand gentlemen who were in Court of King Arthur and werent told to be as clean as that, tho they were not sloppy at all, as we all know, just covered with gore (like the admiral’s deck).

  This antiseptic shot, and no smoking rules, and having to walk guard at night during phony air raids over Newport RI and with fussy lieutenants who were dentists telling you to shut up when you complained they were hurting your teeth . . . I told this Navy lieutenant, dentist, ‘Hey Doc, dont hurt me’ and he said ‘Do you realize you’re addressing a commanding officer!’ Commanding indeed. And then when we all came in the first day the doc says ‘Okay, pee in that tube over there’ this kid said, right next to me I tell you, ‘From here?’ and practically nobody got the joke. That was the funniest joke from here to Chelmsford Massachusetts. The funniest part of it, the kid was serious.

  That’s your Navy, good men all of course.

  But then these details where they get you to wash their own garbage pans, as if they couldnt hire shits to do that, or who’s any kind of shit in this world eligible for garbage pan duty? I was disgusted. Then in the field, marching Army style routines, hi a loop, hi a loop, one, two, three, four, five, carrying carbines but with peacaps and blacks o’ spring and the dust and the yelling drill instructors, suddenly I lay my gun down into the dust and just walked away from everybody forever more.

  I went to the Naval library to read some books and take notes.

  They came and got me with nets.

  They said ‘Are you nuts? What’d you do? You walked away from the drill field, threw your gun down, told everybody where to get off, who the devil do you think you are?’

  ‘I am John L. Duluoz, field marshal.’

  ‘Dont you want to go in the submarine service?’

  ‘I’ve got claustrophobia.’

  ‘They’ve really got you lined up for swimming ashore at night with a dagger in your teeth, Navy ranger, or commando.’

  ‘I dont care, I aint gonna swim ashore with no dagger in my teeth for nobody. I aint,’ I added, ‘a frogman, I’m just a frog.’

  ‘Your number’s up.’

  ‘Bo, go right ahead.’

  ‘You’re going to the nuthouse.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘And what’s this you’ve been reporting to the Navy medical man that you have persistent headaches?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Is that true?’

  ‘Sho, who wouldnt have persistent headaches hanging around here?’

  ‘Dont you know that your country’s gotta be defended and that any national nation is not to be denied the right to defend themselves?’

  ‘Yen, but let me do it in the Merchant Marine as a civilian seaman.’

  ‘What you talkin about? You’re a draftee in this Navy.’

  ‘Just put me away with all the other nuts in this here Navy. When the time comes and you have a real sea war, dont call on civilian sailors . . .’

  ‘You’re off to the nuthouse, kid.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘You’re going to lose all those young buddies.’

  ‘And they write letters home to West Virginia every night.’

  ‘All right, here you go’ so they ambulance me to the nut hatch.

  Where I’m greeted by a colloquial questionnaire in which is recorded the fact that I’ve had the highest IQ intelligence rating in the history of frigging Newport RI Naval Base and therefore I’m suspect. As being, mind you, an ‘officer in the American Communist Party’.

  Naval Intelligence comes with a briefcase questioning me about that. Squads of Van Dyked bearded doctors studying my eyes while stroking their chins over my handprinted novel ‘The Sea Is My Brother’. What else do you want a Navy man to write?

  II

  The first guy they introduce me to is a psychopathic maniac with long black hair on his lips. How the Navy Induction Board ever let that guy in I’ll never know. His hair grows over his eyes, hips, legs, and madman feet. He is the hairy madman of Heaven. He stares at me thru a wired cage googling and glibbling. I say ‘What the shuck is this, a nuthouse?’

  ‘You asked for it, you said you had perpetual headaches.’

  ‘Yeh that’s true, but what’s HE got?’

  ‘He’s Roncho the Modmo.’

  ‘Well what do I do now?’

  ‘You go right in there with him soon as we check out your papers . . . what’s the name again, John Louis Duluoz?’

  ‘That’s right . . . Louis for Lousy and Lout and Lug and John L.’

  ‘Go right in.’

  ‘I goes right now, Pap.’ I goes in. The madman just stares at me as they assign me a bunk next to a manic depressive from West Virginia called Farty Fartington or whoever can ever remember his name, but in the bed on the other side is Andrew Jackson Holmes, which is a name everybody can remember forever from this moment on.

  It’s about 2 A.M. and Andrew Jackson Holmes is asleep and the other nuts (not all nuts) are snoring but the next day I go to the toilet and I’m being watched by guards, I’m wearing a bathrobe, and they say ‘Okay sit
there.’ So I sit there. On the next bowl is sitting Andrew Jackson Holmes smoking a big cigar and looking at me bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. He says: ‘I am Andrew Jackson Holmes from Ruston Louisiana, who are you boy?’

  ‘I am John Louis Duluoz from Lowell Massachusetts.’

  ‘I played varsity football for Louisiana State University in the line.’

  ‘I played varsity football for Columbia in the backfield.’

  ‘I am six foot five and weigh one hundred and ninety-nine pounds and I am a good puncher.’ And he showed me his fist. Big as a nine-pound steak.

  I said ‘Dont ever hit that with me, what’s your nickname?’

  ‘He asks me what’s my nickname, it’s Big Slim from Louisiana.’

  ‘Well Slim, what now?’

  ‘Soon as I finish my potty I’m going back to my bed, which is next to yours, and I’m gonna show you how to cheat at cards.’

  So we went back to the ward and he showed me how to mark the backs of cards with your fingernail and then showed me how that works in blackjack. Then he said ‘Boy, when I was layin around in a haystack in Baltimore Maryland ’bout a year ago drinkin gin of a bottle some old boy gave me, I was thinkin of nothing . . . I was always a merchant seaman and then one day we’re sailin out of Portland Maine and here comes a Coast Guard cutter with FBI men aboard and drag me off telling me I’m dodgin the draft. I dont even have a mailin address. I’m big Old Slim from Louisiana and I dont know what hype they’re puttin down from here to Chinatown.’