Growing Up (30 page)

“Smith just said you gave him the best check flight he’s ever had in his life,” he said. “What the hell did you do to him up there?”

“I guess I just suddenly learned to fly,” I said. I didn’t mention the hangover. I didn’t want him to know that bourbon was a better teacher than he was. After that I saw T. L. Smith coming and going frequently through the ready room and thought him the finest, most manly looking fellow in the entire corps of instructors, as well as the wisest.

Though I’d succeeded in sky and water by the time I was flying out of Whiting, I still had not triumphed with women. In a world where every man boasted of sexual conquest after every trip to town, my innocence was like a private shame. All my efforts to escape it, though, seemed doomed to failure. This wasn’t because I lacked a powerful lust. Once the Navy freed me from the sexually stifling atmosphere in which I’d been growing up, the madness of that mania clamped me in a terrible grip. This was inflamed to white heat by the tales told by the Casanovas who infested the barracks.

Listening to this talk, I was paralyzed with envy and desire.
There was scarcely a woman alive, it seemed, who could resist the urge to haul men down onto beds, car seats, kitchen floors, dining-room tables, park grass, parlor sofas, or packing crates, entwine warm thighs around them, and pant in ecstasy. There were many older men among us, Marines who had survived Guadalcanal, Navy petty officers from ships sunk in the Pacific, men who went to town with chests blazing with combat ribbons. I envied those ribbons. They had the power to turn women into groveling slaves subservient to their wearers’ vilest desires, or so I judged from the stories that came back on Sunday nights.

Burns, a handsome Marine sergeant of astonishing strength, boasted of having a local debutante so enchanted she would make love dangling from a parlor chandelier. Costello, a chief petty officer, never passed a weekend without having several officers’ wives beg him to slake his appetite for flesh in delightfully squalid hotels. Powers, a machinist’s mate who’d survived the sinking of the carrier
Wasp
, preferred to have three women bedded simultaneously to perform a variety of sexual services and, he said, seldom had trouble filling the quota.

I discounted a good deal of this talk but believed enough of it to give me pain. If the world was a sexual carnival, I wanted to be admitted, yet all my efforts failed. At first I spent liberty nights standing on street corners in towns packed with sailors, waiting for overheated women to claim my body. All I saw were thousands of other uniformed bodies standing on street corners waiting to be claimed. After midnight, when we all rode buses back to celibate barracks, I lay in my bunk angry and puzzled. If there were so many women out there with smoking armpits and steaming thighs, why did they not search me out? Wasn’t I handsome enough, suave enough, desirable enough? Where were all those hot-blooded women anyhow? All I ever saw were 5,000 sailors standing on street corners waiting for something exciting to happen, and nothing ever did. That was Pensacola in 1943.

In Miami there was promise. Lovely Miami, sexy Miami, the hot moon hanging over beautiful Biscayne Bay, the girls so juicy under their light summer dresses, the hot little beads of sweat
bedewing their upper lips in that tropical heat. A lush girl picked me up on the street in a Cadillac convertible. A car dealer’s daughter, she was game for lippy nuzzling on the front seat but timid about hands fumbling along her thighs, full of “Behave yourself now” and “Be a good boy.” I was sick of being a good boy. “It’s too public here” was always her final complaint. “Somebody will see us.”

I located a very private place south of Coral Gables. We passed it each day en route to the airfield. On a Saturday night I told her to drive that way. She seemed willing enough. We pulled off the highway into marshy ground overhung by great spreading limbs and vines. She switched off the headlights and we embraced in the blackness, hungry for sin. The mosquitoes arrived immediately. Not in squadrons or battalions, not in divisions—the mosquitoes came in flying armies. She was screaming that they were eating her legs. I could feel them tattooing the back of my neck.

She pushed me away, threw on the headlight beams, and crying, “They’ll eat us alive!” backed out and roared top-speed back to Miami cursing mosquitoes.

Anticlimax waited to mock me at the end of every encounter. In Atlanta a spare young woman with thick eyeglasses agreed to come to my hotel room after midnight, plopped on the side of the bed, and said, “If you touch me I’ll scream for help.” I’d heard in the barracks about such women. They wanted to be treated forcefully. I touched her. She screamed. I’d heard of men wrongfully hanged because nervous women cried, “Rape!” I wanted to get her out of the room as quietly as possible, but it wasn’t easy. She was determined to stay until I knew her life story. It was long and uneventful.

In Athens, Georgia, a girl spoke to me in a drugstore on Sunday afternoon. “Like to walk?” We walked idly hand in hand. She was young, maybe sixteen or seventeen, and communicated a sense of moist heat. We walked to a ramshackle part of town. “Here’s where I live,” she said.

It was a small tumbledown frame house, not much more than a shack.

“Like to come in?”

We went into a small parlor. It was separated from an adjoining room only by a sheet hung on a rod. I sat on a sofa with ruined springs. She sat on my lap, closed her eyes, offered her lips, and placed my hand under her skirt. Here was paradise at last. In a moment she was making incoherent noises which I took to be the music of feminine ecstasy. She seemed to be entering a deep swoon. With her body shuddering on my lap, I was near swooning myself when her cries became, urgent. “Can’t you get out of those pants?” she asked.

I was struggling to loosen my belt buckle when I heard pots and pans clattering on the other side of the sheet.

“There’s somebody out there!”

“It’s just Mama getting ready to cook dinner,” she murmured and gave in to another onset of passion sounds. These had delighted me a moment earlier, but realizing that Mama was not eight feet away, handling pots on the other side of the sheet, took all the music out of them. Now they just sounded like very loud grunts and groans.

“Quiet! Your mother will hear you,” I whispered.

“She won’t bother us. She never does.”

Since I still had Mama’s daughter on my lap in a rosy condition, I could only imagine what would happen if Mama didn’t run true to form this time but decided to stroll through the sheet. At this point a terribly masculine voice on the other side of the sheet boomed out: “Where’d you put them shoes I left out on the back porch?”

“That’s just Pa,” the girl said. “He won’t bother us.”

I hurled her off my lap, stood up, and grabbed my cap. She replied by arranging herself flat on the sofa, opening her mouth wide, and running the tip of her tongue over her lips. She’d seen Lana Turner inflame men that way in the movies, but it didn’t work with me. The fire in my blood had turned to ice. Pa had one of those backwoods voices that usually came supported with a shotgun.

“Come on back here,” she said, raising her legs to let the skirt
fall back to her hips. That did it. I was two blocks away moving at a pace just short of a gallop before I looked back and saw that Pa wasn’t on my heels.

Fate seemed to have sentenced me to virginity. There had been the chance to overcome it that weekend in Memphis when the curtain parted briefly on my alcoholic haze and I’d seen the strange woman in a strange hotel room undressing and lying on the bed to initiate me. Where I had met her or where she’d acquired me I couldn’t even remember, but bourbon had obviously made me do something right—as it had in aviation—before it turned the tables and left me snoring helplessly on the floor. My sex life was a running joke.

Returning to Pensacola early in 1945 to fly the heavy planes and learn the mechanics of killing, I was resigned to chastity. From my 1943 tour there I knew the odds were hopeless: a thousand Navy men for every female on the streets. Waiting for the bus back to the base with my friends Nick and Carson one night, I was startled when a car pulled to the curb and a handsome woman asked if we wanted a ride. There were two other women in the car. None of the three looked like a casual pickup. Of course we wanted a ride.

The woman driving had a house in the fancier section of town. We ended up there. “For a drink,” everybody agreed. But it was soon clear there would be more than a drink. The three women shared the house. They were older women. Women of twenty-five, twenty-six, maybe even twenty-seven, and all married to Navy officers now in the Pacific. They didn’t talk much about their husbands. They’d been in the Pacific a long time. We made civilized talk, quiet ladies-and-gentlemen talk. By two
A.M.
the last bus to the base had left. “Why don’t we sleep here tonight?” suggested Nick. Matter-of-factly, the women thought that was the only sensible thing to do. Two of them led Nick and Carson toward the bedrooms and nobody returned. I sat with the woman who’d been driving and had another drink and she finally said, “I’ll make up a bed for you on the cot on the sun porch.”

When she did I told her good night and she left. I undressed and lay wide awake in the dark for a long time, wondering if she
was awake in her own bed expecting me to come to her room. Not likely, I told myself. These were women, real women, good women who missed their husbands and were being kind to three lonely boys who probably reminded them of the men they loved. She came through the sun-porch door and closed it quietly behind her while I was still musing on the nobility of good women.

“Are you still awake?”

She sat on the cot peering down at me in the darkness. I smelled perfume in her nightgown. I was scared. I believed in the distinction between good women and bad women. Good women were to be respected and loved purely. That’s what they expected of a man. It was all right to wallow in lust with bad women but not with a good woman, not with a woman who was married to a man, possibly a Navy hero facing death for his country, for his wife, for me, in the faraway Pacific. I didn’t want my belief in the good woman shattered. Now, as she sat in her gown on the edge of the cot, saying she couldn’t sleep and did I mind if she stayed long enough to smoke a cigarette, I was scared of what she might do. I wanted her only to go away and continue being a good woman.

“Tell me about your husband,” I said.

She touched my forehead lightly with her fingertips. “Not right now,” she said.

“You must miss him.”

Her fingertips brushed my cheek and neck. “It gets lonely sometimes.”

“How long were you married before he went overseas?”

“Are you nervous about something?” she replied.

“Why?”

“Do I make you nervous?”

“Not a chance.”

“I’m not much older than you are,” she said. Her fingertips were now like feathers under my Navy-issue T-shirt.

“How old’s your husband?”

“Doesn’t matter,” she murmured, fingertips still busy.

“Your husband must be quite a guy,” I said.

She removed her hand and straightened her back. There was a silence. Finally, “You’re really just a kid, aren’t you?” she said.

It was very gentle, almost reflective, as though she were talking to herself.

“I guess so,” I confessed.

“Don’t worry about it,” she said, standing up. “You’ll grow up soon enough.”

“I guess so.”

She leaned over and pressed her lips lightly on my forehead. “You’re sweet,” she said. “I’m glad I brought you home. Sleep well.” And she was gone, taking with her my golden opportunity. For weeks afterwards I was torn between feelings of nobility and suspicion that I had acted like a childish idiot.

It was a relief to meet Karen that summer at the nursing school. She was so obviously a good girl. There could be no possibility of anything carnal with her. I happily seized the chance to find peace from the torments of the sexual hunt. Karen was the kind of girl you married and remained faithful to all your life. She was the kind of girl who wanted decent, good things of life—to nurse the ailing, to have many children, to own a horse farm. She was the kind of girl my mother would have approved of. I even wrote my mother about her. “I’ve met a wonderful girl down here this summer. …” I’d met very few girls I dared tell my mother about. “She’s the kind of girl I’d like to marry someday.”

My mother didn’t have too much trouble with the horse farm, but the mention of marriage set off alarms in Baltimore. I’d worked on the campus newspaper at Hopkins before the Navy years, and my mother had persuaded herself this meant I intended to go into journalism after the war. “I hardly see how you could get started in newspaper work if you had a wife to support,” she wrote back. “They don’t pay that much to beginners, do they?”

It wasn’t marriage that occupied my mind that summer, however. It was the forthcoming invasion of the Japanese home islands, said to be scheduled for 1946. I wanted to be in on it. Navy rumor
had it that casualties might run as high as a million men if, as seemed likely, the Japanese defended their homeland to the last man. This didn’t cool my enthusiasm. I was nineteen and expected to live forever. I wanted glory. Although we would be ready for combat in time for the Japanese invasion, I had begun to worry about missing it.

Germany had surrendered that spring, and what scant news filtered into the backwoods of Florida that summer told of a Japan so devastated that its only effective resistance was the suicide of kamikaze pilots. Movie newsreels of Tokyo burning under B-29 fire-bomb raids depressed me, not because of so much agonizing death but because I suspected Japan might collapse before I could get into the slaughter. Now approaching twenty, I’d lost childhood’s common sense and longed desperately to become a death-dealing hero. I wanted the war to go on and on.

On July 16 a group of men whose existence was unknown at Whiting Field tested a new weapon at Los Alamos, New Mexico. It worked. For those of us in Florida awaiting our chance at glory, the age of our childhood ended that morning in the premature dawn exploding over the desert. We didn’t know about the test, of course. Doors were closing forever on our past, but we could not hear them slam. Soon the world we had known and the values we had lived by in that world would become so obsolete that we would seem to Americans of the new age as quaint as travelers from an antique land.