Closing Time (29 page)

I liked the horsing around and I found myself friendly with more people I enjoyed than I'd had even in Coney Island. In the army I had personality advantages. I had read more and knew more. I found it practical to let people learn right off that I indeed was as Jewish as they might have guessed, and I would find some way of working that in and adding as well that I was from Coney Island in Brooklyn, New York. I had uncomplicated and close relationships with people with names like Bruce Suggs from High Point, North Carolina, and Hall A. Moody from Mississippi, with Jay Matthews and Bruce J. Palmer from different places in Georgia, who did not exactly like each other, with Art Schroeder, and with Tom Sloane from Philadelphia. In a barracks at Lowry Field, Colorado, where I was shipped for power-turret training, I saw hostility and threat from Bob Bowers, who also was from Brooklyn, from a rougher neighborhood of Norwegians and Irishmen that was known to us for its anti-Semites, and John Rupini, from somewhere upstate, and we were notably careful to keep out of each other's way. I knew how they felt and they knew that I knew, and they were almost equally unfriendly with just about everyone else. Lew would have had it out with them right off the bat, I suppose. In a poker game the second or third day on the troop train carrying me from Arizona to Colorado, I thought I heard one of the other players say something about a Jew, but wasn't sure. Then the one opposite me, who had already said he was from a small place down south, smirked and remarked, "We've got some too, that own a clothing store. You ought to see how they look." Now I
was
sure and knew I had to speak up.

"Just one moment, please, if you don't mind," I told him abruptly and somewhat pompously. Inwardly, I was rattled. It was not my voice. "But I happen to be Jewish and don't like to hear you talking that way. I'll leave the game right now if you want me to. But if you want me to keep playing, you have to stop saying things that hurt my feelings and make me feel bad. I don't know why you want to do that to me anyway."

The game had come to a stop, and we swayed and listened to the sound of the train. If I left the game, Lesko would leave with me, and if it came near anything violent, they knew that Lesko would be on my side. But the one I'd spoken to, Cooper, was stricken with guilt and mumbled his apology. "I'm sorry, Singer. I didn't know you were."

Lew would have broken his back, I guess, and gone to jail. I had made a temporary friend of someone who always wanted to atone. Lew is Lew, and I am not.

My name is Samuel Singer, no middle initial-Sammy NMI Singer-and I was born short and grew up smaller than most and physically unimpressive. Not like another good neighborhood friend, Ike Solomon, who was no taller but had burly biceps and a deeper chest and could lift weights and enjoy himself on a chinning bar. All my life I've been wary of fistfights, so I've done what I could not to get into any. I could be witty and sympathetic, and I have always managed to make friends. I've always been good at getting things going with needling questions and keeping a conversation lively with the clever revelations of iconoclasm.

"Do you think the country would have been better off if we'd
lost
the Revolutionary War against the British?" I would inquire searchingly, as though really mystified, and was ready with critical questions for whatever answer came.

"If Lincoln was so smart, why didn't he let the South secede? How would it hurt as much as the war did?"

"Is the Constitution constitutional?"

"Can democracy ever be created democratically?"

"Wasn't the Virgin Mary Jewish?"

I knew things other people didn't. I knew that if we walked into a floor of any barracks with no fewer than forty people, there would almost always be two with the same birthday, and half the time another two who shared a different birthday. I could make bets even with people from Nevada and California that Reno, Nevada, was farther west than Los Angeles, and almost make bets with them a second time after we'd looked it up, so determined were they to cling to an old concept. I've got one ready for the cardinal should I ever find myself sitting next to him and feel like fooling around.

"Whose genes did Jesus have?" And with a look of innocence I would remind, when given whatever response the poor figure could find, that he was born as a baby and grew to a man, and was circumcised on the eighth day.

In class in gunnery school I did come close to trouble with the decorated warrant officer instructing us when he remarked that the average life of an aerial gunner in combat was three minutes and later invited questions. He had completed his tour of duty in a B-17 with the battered Eighth Air Force in England, and I wasn't baiting him-I was curious.

"How could they tell, sir?" I asked, and I've never trusted surveys and estimates since.

"What do you mean?"

"How could they measure something like that? Sir, you must have been in combat for at least an hour."

"Much more than one hour."

"Then for every hour you lasted, nineteen others had to die in even less than the first second to average out to three minutes. And why is it more dangerous for gunners than for pilots and bombardiers? Sir, they're shooting at the whole plane, aren't they?"

"Singer, you're a wiseass, aren't you? You hang on a bit when the others go."

He let me know that I must never contradict him in the classroom again and introduced me to what I later came, with Yossarian, to call the Korn Laws, after Lieutenant Colonel Korn in Pianosa: under Korn's laws, the only ones ever permitted to question ainything were those who never did. But he put me to work tutoring others with simple examples from algebra and geometry in the reasons one must always shoot well ahead of a target moving in relation to you-and in order to shoot ahead of a plane you had to shoot behind. If a plane is so many yards away and a cartridge travels at so many yards a second, how many seconds will it take for your cartridge to reach it? If the plane is traveling at so many feet per second, how many feet will it travel by the time the bullet reaches it? They saw it in practice in the hours we spent skeet shooting and firing on the gunnery range from a moving truck. But though I taught it and knew it, even I had trouble with the principle that you fired ahead of a plane coming in on attack by always aiming behind it, between the target and your tail, because of the forward airspeed of the bullets from your own plane land the swerving path that plane would have to follow to fire in front of you.

The friends I've made have always been of a generous nature. And somehow or other, a bigger, tougher guy was always around as a buddy in case things went wrong, like Lew Rabinowitz and Sonny Bartolini, one of the bolder Italians in a family in Coney Island. And Lesko, the young coal miner from Pennsylvania, whom I'd met in gunnery school. And Yossarian in operational training in Carolina and later in Pianosa in combat, after the five of us, Yossarian, Appleby, Kraft, Schroeder, and I, had flown overseas as a crew.

The fear of being beaten up had always been with me, looming larger in my meditations than the fear of being shot down. In South Carolina one night, it began to come to pass. This was after another training flight into darkness in which Yossarian could not find his way around to places like Athens, Georgia, and Raleigh, North Carolina, and Appleby from Texas again had to bring us back with his radio compass. We had gone to our enlisted men's mess hall for a midnight meal, Schroeder and I and Yossarian. The officers' club was closed. Yossarian was always hungry. He had taken off his insignia to pose as an enlisted man, with a right to be there. People were always milling around outside at night. As we moved through them, I was jostled suddenly by a big, drunken lout, a private, bumped so hard as to leave no doubt the act had been deliberate. I whirled around with instinctive surprise. Before I could speak, he was at me, he shoved me furiously backward into a group of soldiers who had already turned to watch. It was happening almost too fast to understand. While I was still dumbfounded, staggering, he came charging after me with his arms raised and a fist cocked back to punch. He was taller than I and broad and heavier too, and there was no way I could fend him off. It was like that time I had tried to teach Lew how to box. I could not even run. I don't know why he picked me out and can only guess. But then, before he could strike, Yossarian was there between us to break it up, with his arms extended and his palms open, urging him to hold it, attempting to cajole him into calming down. And before he could even complete his first sentence, the man let go and hit him squarely on the side of the head and then hit him hard again with a punch from his other fist, and Yossarian went falling back in a helpless daze as the man followed up, hitting him about the head with both hands while Yossarian reeled with each blow, and before I knew what
I
was doing, I had flung myself forward to grab one of the man's thick arms and hang on. When that didn't work, I slid down to grasp him about the waist and dug my feet into the ground to strain with all my might to shove him off balance if I could. By that time Schroeder had also pounced on him, from the other side, and I heard Schroeder talking away. "You dumb fuck, he's an officer, you dumb fuck!" I could hear him rasping into the man's ear. "He's an officer!" Then Yossarian, who was pretty strong himself, was at him from in front and managed to tie up both his arms and propel him backward until he lost his footing and had to hold on. I felt all the fight go out of him as Schroeder's words sank in. He looked sick by the time we turned him loose.

"Better put your bars back on, Lieutenant," I reminded Yossarian softly, panting, and added as I saw him feeling his face:

"There's no blood. You'd better get away and put your bars back on, before somebody comes. We can pass up the meal."

From then on I was always on Yossarian's side in his frictions with Appleby, even at the time of what we both came to call the Splendid Atabrine Insurrection, although I would conscientiously take the antimalarial tablets as we flew through the equatorial climates when we traveled overseas, and he would not. The Atabrine would temper the effects of malaria, we'd been briefed before our first stop in Puerto Rico, while having no effect upon the disease itself. Regulations or not, Yossarian saw no sensible need for treating the symptoms before he suffered any. The disagreement between them crystallized into a controversy to save face. Kraft, the copilot, was as usual neutral. Kraft spoke little, smiled a lot, seemed unaware often of much that was going on. When he was killed in action over Ferrara not long afterward, I still thought of him as neutral.

"I'm the captain of this ship," Appleby made the mistake of telling Yossarian in front of us in Puerto Rico, our first stop after jumping off from Florida for the fourteen-day flight overseas. "And you'll have to follow my orders."

"Shit," said Yossarian. "It's a plane, Appleby, not a boat." They were of equal height and equal rank, second lieutenant then. "And we're on the ground, not at sea."

"I'm still the captain." Appleby spoke slowly. "As soon as we start flying again, I'm going to order you to take them."

"And I'm going to refuse."

"Then I'm going to report you," said Appleby. "I won't like doing it, but I'm going to report you to our commanding officer, as soon as we have one."

"Go ahead," Yossarian resisted stubbornly. "It's my body and my health, and I can do what I want with it."

"Not according to regulations."

"They're unconstitutional."

We were introduced to the aerosol bomb, the first time I saw one, now the spray can, and instructed to use it in the interior of the plane as soon as we climbed in, as a defense against mosquitoes and the diseases they might transmit as we headed down through the Caribbean into South America. On each leg of the trip to Natal in Brazil, we were asked to keep our eyes peeled for signs of the wreckage of a plane or two that had disappeared from the skies into the seas or jungle a day or so before. This should have been more sobering than it was. The same was true on the eight-hour nights over ocean from Brazil to Ascension Island in a plane designed to go no more than four, and from there, two days later, into Liberia in Africa and then up to Dakar in Senegal. All through these boring long flights over water we kept our eyes peeled for debris and yellow rafts, when we remembered to. In Florida we had time and evenings free, and there were dance floors there in saloons and cafes.

I wanted to start getting laid. Older guys from Coney Island like Chicky Ehrenman and Mel Mandlebaum, who had gone into the army sooner, would come back on leave from far-off places like Kansas and Alabama with similar reports of women who were all too willing to lie down for our brave boys in the service, and now that I was a boy in the service, I wanted to get laid too.

But I still didn't know how. I was shy. I could make jokes, but I was bashful. I was too easily entranced by some quality in a face or figure I found pretty. I was too quickly aroused, and inhibited by the concern it might show. I could be premature, I knew, but that was better than nothing for most of us then. When I danced close with a girl, just about any girl, I always grew an erection almost immediately and, with great embarrassment, would back myself away. Now I know I should have pressed it in against them harder to leave no doubt it was there and begin making suggestive jokes about what I wanted and was going to get, and I would have made out better. When I moved into the back room with a girl to begin muzzling her or joined them in some apartment when they were baby-sitting, I usually got what I wanted quickly enough and felt pretty good about myself until I was forced to remember there was a lot more. I was short, I knew, and always thought I had a little cock and that most of the others had pretty big ones, until one summer day in the locker room of the Steeplechase swimming pool, I looked in the mirror intrepidly while standing alongside Lew as we were washing up and saw that mine was just as good.

But he was using his. And I was always coming too quickly, or not at all. The first time that Lew and his other friend Leo Weiner set me up with a girl they'd found who had come to the Island for the summer to work in a soda fountain and was not unwilling to put out for anyone who asked her to-they were both very good at talking that way to girls-I came in the rubber before I even got in. The first time I fixed myself up, with a girl in the clubroom who'd let me know while I was still using my hand that she wanted to go all the way, I lost my erection as soon as we bared ourselves, although I'd certainly been hard enough and ready before we both took down our pants. Glenda loved those stories.