The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones (33 page)

I began to send poetry out to these magazines. And unerringly in a few days, rejection slips would come in. I wish I had saved these. For a time I did, but they disappeared somehow. I got rejection slips from all the quality magazines and
Accent
and some others I dug up.
The Saturday Review, The New Yorker, Harper's
, and
The Atlantic Monthly
. They all showed the good taste and consistency to turn me down flat and very quickly. And these rejections only served to fuel the deep sense of despair, so ultimate and irreversible with a twenty-two-year-old. None had any use for my deathless immortal words but I kept trying.

One afternoon I had gone to San Juan by myself. I had found some places in Old San Juan I could walk around. They had a tourist section, fairly arty. There was a painter there named Juan Botello (a funny name) and I would go in his shop and walk around that area trying to get close to some professional art. I had the
New York Times
under my arm. I was in civilian clothes and I remember I was reading
The New Yorker
. I'd stopped at a bench and sat down near a square. It was quiet and I could see a long way off toward the newer, more Americanized part of the city, the Condado Beach section, where I could only go if in uniform, so they would know I was an Americano and not a native. I had been reading one of the carefully put together exercises
The New Yorker
publishes constantly as high
poetic art, and gradually I could feel my eyes fill up with tears, and my cheeks were wet and I was crying, quietly, softly but like it was the end of the world. I had been moved by the writer's words, but in another, very personal way. A way that should have taught me even more than it did. Perhaps it would have saved me many more painful scenes and conflicts. But I was crying because I realized that I could never write like that writer. Not that I had any real desire to, but I knew even if I had had the desire I could not do it. I realized that there was something in me so out, so unconnected with what this writer was and what that magazine was that what was in me that wanted to come out as poetry would never come out like that and be
my
poetry.

The verse spoke of lawns and trees and dew and birds and some subtlety of feeling amidst the jingling rhymes that spoke of a world almost completely alien to me. Except in magazines or walking across some campus or in some house and neighborhood I hadn't been in. What was so terrifying to me was that when I looked through the magazine, I liked the clothes, the objects, the general ambience of the place — of the life being lived by the supposed readers and creators of the
New Yorker
world. But that verse threw me off, it had no feeling I could really use. I might carry the magazine as a tool of my own desired upward social mobility, such as I understood it. I might like some of the jokes, and absolutely dig the soft-curving button-down collars and well-tailored suits I saw. The restaurants and theater advertisements. The rich elegance and savoir faire of all I could see and touch. But the poem, the
inside
, of that life chilled me, repelled me, was impenetrable. And I hated myself because of it, yet at the same time knew somehow that it was correct that I be myself, whatever that meant. And myself could not deal with the real meanings of the life spelled out by those tidy words.

I made no dazzling proclamations as a result of this crying into the
New Yorker
experience. I still felt sad as I took a
publico
back. I still wrote the same kinds of deadly abstractions about love, death, tragic isolation. I still went on reading whatever I could get or find out about. Sartre, Camus, de Beauvoir, anthologies of poetry. I learned about Apollinaire and Rimbaud. I read every novel of Evelyn Waugh's I could find and wondered often how to pronounce his name. I thought Sebastian Flyte in
Brideshead Revisited
was marvelous! I still got the reviews and stiff magazines. I even subscribed to
Partisan Review
. And I went on scribbling nightly or whenever, but regularly, in my journal. Writing haughty reviews and deep analyses of what I read. I was aware of an intellectual world — it had existed all this time —
people were walking around knowing about it, knowing these various ideas, books, phrases, histories, relationships, and I didn't. Why hadn't I caught on in school? That there was an intellectual
life
that could be pursued. A life of ideas and, above all, Art.

I brought no great selectivity to my reading, though I began to understand after a while that some literature was more serious, more probing and thought-provoking than other, lighter stuff I might mash on myself as a result of reading
The New York Times Book Review
. But I found signposts and guides, references and printed directions. I might see a certain reference in a book or magazine — for instance, I saw the word “Kafka” in
Esquire
. What was a Kafka? I looked in dictionaries, no Kafka. Finally I stumbled on an article in some literary review about his work. The stiff abstruse language of the article only bade me rush harder after its sense. And all the sub- and counterreferences, the foreign words and jargon of the New Critics, I tracked down like Basil Rathbone, but it was not elementary.

During this period I also went home over another Christmas break. Again, I went to the Village and visited Steve Korret and his beautiful golden brown dancer wife. Their apartment on Bedford Street was stark white, except for the kitchen, which was orange. The books that ranged up and down one wall now pulled me to them and held me there. Steve laughed at me standing by his bookcase hungrily gobbling up titles. A lot of them Eastern and Buddhist. Steve had become a Zen Buddhist. I did not know how fashionable this was becoming in the Village and its counterparts elsewhere. It was still the middle '50s ('56) and the tremendous popularity of the East in bohemian circles had not yet reached its full peak. Steve was an early acolyte. He even worked in an Eastern bookshop called Orientalia, around 12th Street. I came to the bookstore before I went back to Puerto Rico and I was transported by the hundreds of scholarly books on various schools of Buddhism and Eastern thought in general. I bought two of R. H. Blythe's books on Zen, analyzing Western art for parallels with Zen consciousness. I was swept up.

Dylan Thomas was also very heavy in those days downtown. People passing through Korret's house talked of “Dylan.” One black poet there lilted some of Thomas' verses and then some of his own which were amazingly similar.

Korret was a writer! The idea of this made me drunk with wonder. A writer! What a thing to be — so weird — so outside of the ordinary parade of
grey hellos and goodbyes I could begin to measure my life with. A writer. In the mysterious jumble of Greenwich Village.

Steve and his friends treated me like a little boy, which I guess I was. A little boy off in the goofy hopeless world of the army? No, the air force. How comic. How tragic. How odd. How romantic. How petty. I thought the last myself. These painters, dancers, writers, thinkers, witty makers of brilliant statements, and here I am on the fringe again. Unconnected and without note once again, just like at Howard.

I think it was now that the duffelbag incident occurred. Yes, it was now, at the end of this leave.

But I did get back to Ramey on time. Even sadder and more hopeless. I still had almost two years to go on my four-year enlistment. And my new intellectual life made soldiering harder and harder.

I had been moved to another crew, R-32, a “Ready” crew, which meant we were among the actual strike force of any bombing mission. It meant I had to go regularly to gunnery schools on base and in Tampa, Florida; Mobile, Alabama; Shreveport, Louisiana. In Tampa I met the Howard officer. In Mobile I shot down the drone aircraft during the gunnery sessions, because an old gunner told me in Puerto Rico that the shit was fixed and that the sight was rigged so you couldn't hit the drone cause the drones cost $10,000 apiece. So you had to use “Kentucky windage” — just shoot a little ahead of the thing, like deer hunting. And I brought it down, which meant I was supposed to go to a “Select” crew or at least a “Lead,” but I didn't.

In Shreveport, Reilly, Burke, and I tried to go off the base together, but the locals discouraged it. I ended up two days AWOL. I had gotten lost and laid up with a sister down in the Bottom (one black community of Shreveport — see
The System of Dante's Hell
) and finally came back rumpled and hung over and absolutely broke.

Once we got downtown, Reilly got on the same bus. At first neither of us recognized the other. I couldn't recognize him because his face had been beaten till it was puffy and distorted. He couldn't recognize me because his eyes were all but closed. He'd run into some little guy with a cowboy hat and they'd had some words about the jukebox. Cowboy hat, it turned out, was a professional boxer.

The new crew I was put on had an AC (aircraft commander) named Major Smart — no shit. He was from Mississippi and had gone to the eighth grade. He'd been a master sergeant when the war started (World War Two), got made a temporary captain and most recently a temporary major. He
had a broad supernasal accent and looked at me with wicked twinkling eyes. I guess I was his cross — integration and all that shit.

He used to get to me by telling racist jokes over the intercom once we were upstairs. When he found out I would shut off the intercom, he'd put it on “command” so as to override all cutoffs and be heard simultaneously throughout the whole ship.

He would ask me how far in school I'd gone — it peeved him — and he would mock me, again on “command.” Jones is ed-ucated. He told a joke about a white man got on an airplane with a colored woman and the hostess brings them black coffee. The man says, “I didn't want my coffee like this.”

The hostess says, “I thought you liked your coffee like you like your women, strong and dark!” I cursed in the isolation of my lower right rear gunner's position but that was all. When the flight was over, Smart, with his narrow hooked nose and grey shit colored hair would stride past me, eyes twinkling.

At least once a month we'd have an “alert.” The sirens would rage and we'd have to get up in the middle of the night and dress and fly off to “bomb” some city, usually American, and then return. It was a recurring nightmare to me. The siren, after midnight, was like hell's actual voice. You'd throw on your flight suit, the grey slick coveralls, check out a parachute, get your weapon, load your cannon, wait for orders, and take off. Sometimes we took off and came right back. Sometimes we'd go and land somewhere else and stay a few days. Sometimes we'd go right back to the barracks. And I was the only guy on my crew with the big awkward .45 automatic and a shoulder holster. Putting a parachute on over that getup was painful and dangerous. The rest of the crew had .38s, small and compact and buckled on at the waist. I was the only one that looked like Smilin' Jack. And try as I might to get a .38, I never did.

When we weren't flying we had to guard the plane. I was low man (stripewise and castewise), so I spent the most time. Like twelve hours a day. Everyday, except when we were flying. The sun breaking your head, white and scorching. Trying to read and having to keep something covering the book for fear of detection. And unerringly, whenever I flew, I'd catch cold! Those planes (B-36s) were not comfortable like commercial airliners. They were cold and drafty. Colder than air conditioning! An hour or so out, my nose would start running. I'd have on my flight jacket, but the whole flight I'd be freezing to death. My feet felt like ice cubes.

The K-rations we'd have to eat were always cold though there was some johnson in the plane that was supposed to heat up the food like a hot plate. But it wasn't near my station so I forgot it. We'd have, like, cold canned spaghetti that would slide out of the can in a single solid blob. Or canned pound cake, or how about the hard tack, the round cement crackers, also canned, which were your bread? I couldn't use any of it.

When we came back from flying, I'd feel like I'd been tortured. But, even then, I'd try to get on with my reading — being bothered by the AC's instructions, the crackling radio, the racist jokes, the freezing airplane. But the next day we'd have off and I'd lay in bed and read or wander down to the BX and buy something if I had the dough or go to the library.

I'd have to wait most times till after duty hours to hook up with the salon, except those who were off or “sick.” But you had to notify the first sergeant the day before you went on “sick call,” i.e., the day before you got sick. So that put a crimp in that malingerer's device. Sometimes when we got together to bullshit we'd have to have “music wars” to quiet out the hillbillies across the hall. They'd be playing something like “I'm in the Jailhouse Now,” which was standard, but if they got aggressive and turned it up to drown us out, we'd counter, turn up Diz or Bird or else we'd blow 'em off the map with Beethoven's Seventh or Ninth!

One time a guy named Muck — no shit, a big thick terrible white mechanic from Chicago who was always covered with grease — came roaring down the hall cursing. He shouted he was gonna kill these nigger bastards and came rushing down toward my room. The room had one louvered wall, so you could hear clearly. I got my .45 and climbed up into the top bunk. Muck slammed open the door, slamming it against the bed, and rushed in. I was crouched on the top bunk and shoved the big gun down in his face as he turned. His eyes rolled up under the grease. He was drunk and sure enough he had a .38 like the crewmen had, snapped on his belt. But I had the .45 in his face and started cussing him, “You fat ugly stupid motherfucker, I'll blow your fuckin' brains out!”

He gasped. He stood still, his head wobbling from side to side in a circle of dead drunkenness. He took a step back, turned, and split.

Muck was sufficiently pacified, but a couple days later a friend of his, a guy from upper New York State, exhilarated by the open displays of racism he must have seen on the base, wakes me up and he's standing over me, a fist cocked, daring me to rise up. I said nothing. There was nothing to say. He spat out his threats, though none were specifically racial. He hated me, he said, for playing that fuckin' classical music when I had CQ (change of
quarters, like a nighttime security guard) in the hallway and we had clashed on this before. I looked warily up at his face as he kept talking and daring me to get up. I relaxed a little hoping some of my friends would come in. I wondered did this slob have a piece. But it was only his nasty fist. After a while he got tired and turned and left. I jumped up and got my .45 and stood by the door listening. Then I went out in the hall. No one there. Then I heard the motorcycle racing out by my window. Muck and this guy Martin were standing near it laughing. I rolled the louvered window open and stuck the big gun through the slats. “Hey Martin, Martin,” I called. “Come here, you bastard!” He laughed and threw me a finger. He got on the back of Muck's cycle and they jetted. I never got revenge!