Weeds in Bloom (7 page)

Day after day, Joe taught me how to play his piano. We made up our own melodies. He had given names to many of the notes on the keyboard. Below, fathers and mothers, plus uncles and aunts and grandparents. Above, his brothers and sisters, nieces, nephews. Some of Joe’s notes were puppies and kittens. And away up top sounded the mice and sparrows.

I learned to play. By ear, the Joe Method. Today I can play anything I hear. Duke Ellington, Gershwin, Cole Porter, and my favorite, Scott Joplin’s century-old ragtime and blues.

What happened to Joe?

I don’t know. Returning home from the U.S. Army (an enlisted high-school dropout) after World War II, I scouted around for my former friends and located most of them. But no Joe. The old unused Opera House, originally built right after the Civil War, had been torn down and carted away to make space for a Piggly Wiggly. And now even that is no longer there.

Miss Noe was elderly, bless her heart, and
couldn’t remember either one of us. Or even her brother.

Well, wherever you are, Mr. Joe Galipo, I hope you have music, and a home where there are songs of laughter and kindness. Plus a whole bunch of kin. Lots of notes with names. On that day long ago when I learned about Joe’s talent and brains, I also discovered his true secret, what he longed for most of all.

It wasn’t a piano.

I
T WAS
1945.

I was a proud seventeen-year-old private in the United States Army. I’d enlisted but didn’t yet need a razor. About to be shipped overseas.

There was another soldier in our unit, a corporal, who had a cousin who knew Gene Autry. I mean really
knew
him. Mr. Autry, even though many times a millionaire, had also enlisted and soldiered a few years in Burma. He now had an Honorable Discharge and was about to resume his astounding career in Hollywood.

Corporal Smith told us that his cousin could persuade Gene to visit our camp.

Nobody believed him.

Until that unforgettable evening when we assembled, and guess who appeared. A gentleman who (before he retired) was a cowboy star in almost
one hundred movies. As a child, I recalled seeing Gene Autry’s records featured in full-page listings in every Sears Roebuck mail-order catalog. And now here he was, in person. With us.

Age seventeen, en route to WWII Italy.

Mr. Gene Autry.

He wore rather plain cowboy duds, nothing with fringe or spangles. Waving his guitar to a thousand cheering guys, he stood on some crates and
boxes, a makeshift stage, and charmed us. Mostly with songs about home.

He sang “Mexicali Rose.” It’s a waltz about returning to a pretty gal, a back-home somebody to love and miss, and maybe never to see again.

“You’re the Only Star in My Blue Heaven” was next. More of the same. One heart longing to be true to another, far away.

Gene told us that his raising was in a little old place called Tioga, in Texas. He liked baseball and attempted to play a saxophone, but switched to a guitar because he so enjoyed singing. His grandpa had been a Baptist minister. I’d lost my own pa when I was thirteen. You might understand how much I appreciated Gene’s song “That Silver-Haired Daddy of Mine.”

In honor of his grandfather, Gene asked us if we’d mind hearing one or two of his favorite hymns. Nobody objected. He sang “Amazing Grace” and “What a Friend We Have in Jesus.”

Plenty of big strong guys were sobbing.

There was a shine in Gene’s eyes too. No one yelled, or hooted out any smart-mouth remarks. A war has a way of bringing men closer to God, and closer to one another. I recall placing a hand on the shoulder of a buddy who sat beside me and was wiping his eyes.

Gene told us about Champion, his black horse. He called him Champ a lot. We listened as though it were a prayer meeting.

In the front row, a young, small-of-stature soldier relaxed, closed his eyes, and drifted off to dreamland. Gene noticed him and grinned, placing a finger on his lips, asking us not to disturb him. Then he sang the slumbering little soldier a special lullaby: “Go to Sleep, My Little Buckaroo.”

He told us that he couldn’t sing it near as well as another cowboy, Mr. Dick Foran.

Listening, we were no longer stationed at an army post. Instead, we were little boys again, going to sleep in a familiar bed, hearing our mothers hum. Gene Autry let us fondly remember the purity of childhood, though none of us could ever return. To you, it may sound corny. But I was there, my dears, and that evening was as genuine as the corn on my father’s farm.

Sweet corn.

If you’re inclined, you ought to refresh your spirit sometime and listen to the music of Mr. Gene Autry.

He was a lot more man than a war hero and a rodeo rider. For us, it was almost as good as a furlough. And it tasted better than any beer in a barroom.

Gene also had an easy way of making us all laugh, especially when telling us about how he was first learning to pluck a guitar. A pal came ambling along, winced, and said to him, “Gene, unless you quit pickin’ that thing, it’ll never heal.”

He told us about his comic sidekick and friend, Mr. Smiley Burnette, a chubby guy who was known on the screen as a character named Frog Mulhouse. One time, just for laughs, Smiley rode a white sway-back horse in a rodeo parade. Later he met up a pretty gal.

“Did you see me in the parade?” Smiley asked her.

“Yup,” she said, “I saw ya.”

“Well, did I make a big impression?”

“Yeah,” she replied. “On the
horse.”

Gene said it was all so amusing that they decided to include that bit in a movie, and did.

Years earlier, Gene told us, another famous cowboy was one of the people who encouraged him. The cowboy’s name? Mr. Will Rogers. Will, according to Gene, could really spin a rope and make it whistle.

Gene sang “Tumbling Tumbleweeds” and “Carolina Moon.”

He said that Smiley Burnette could sing too, and doggone well. Smiley could do a real funny song entitled “Oh, I’m Going Back to the Backwoods.”
Gene wouldn’t sing it, though, because he claimed it was Frog’s highlight and he couldn’t do it justice. There was nothing uppity about Gene Autry. He admitted that he could ride and rope but couldn’t act worth a spit.

But we knew one truth about that gentleman. He was a star!

At the end of his presentation, Gene sang the song that most everybody remembers his doing: “Back in the Saddle Again.” If any cowboy tune could be a prayer for a bunch of homesick servicemen, and women as well, this was it. He sang it really slow. His benediction.

I was seventeen.

Now I am over seventy, but I can still hear the lyrics to the magnificent ballad, sung by the grandson of a Baptist preacher, and be baptized back into boyhood. A pity, but I never got to crowd forward and shake Gene’s hand on that special evening, to offer him my personal gratitude. Best I do it here and now, even though the star is in his Blue Heaven.

Thank you, Mr. Gene Autry, for being able to make a lot of men feel like back-home boys.

I
MET HIM AT THE TAIL END OF
W
ORLD
W
AR
II.

Elliot was eighteen. And I was seventeen.

He hailed from a hometown with a funny name. The Bronx. At first, I figured it had something to do with rodeo stock (broncs), until Elliot explained that it was mostly a zoo. His pa, Elliot told me, was a presser in the garment district. Mine had killed hogs.

Were you to take a charcoal and paper and sketch a 4-F (an Army reject), you’d have Private Elliot Leftowitz, a born civilian. Short, squat, behind fogged glasses with lenses thicker than the bottom of Coke bottles. His pupils were twin hockey pucks. Somehow, he’d been drafted and inducted. A military miracle.

Between the pair of us, he was the one who shaved, but only following a very convincing request from Sergeant Malliniak.

Elliot, I suspected, doubted my sanity and was forever asking me the same question: “You enlisted?”

We endured Basic Training at picturesque Fort McClellan in Alabama, both of us in olive drab, in keeping with the current fashion that season. Elliot was issued an Ml rifle. They never got along. Everyone else stood at attention with heels together, toes apart. Elliot placed his toes together, heels spread. An only child, he’d never before been away from home. When marching, always at the rear of our platoon, he looked around curiously, blinking, squinting, bumping into things and apologizing.

Sergeant Malliniak called him “the tourist.”

Elliot often received a letter from his mother. He shared all of her letters with me upon learning that my mother was illiterate and wouldn’t be writing.

Sergeant Emil Malliniak never fixed us snacks. He fixed bayonets. He was from a bayou in
Mississippi, and when he barked out a nasal order, neither Elliot nor I had a clue as to what he wanted us to perform. So we both jumped around like crazy, pretending we understood.

“Rob,” Elliot whispered to me in the barracks late one night, “I found us an interpreter.”

“Can we eat it?”

“No,” said Elliot. “I got us a guy from Mississippi, in the next bunk already.” (Elliot ended sentences with
already
, but don’t ask me why. He was rarely
all ready
for anything.) “He understands when Sergeant Malliniak snorts.”

Sergeant Malliniak had a lot to say. I did whatever he ordered willingly, as he had become (his term) our Mother Hen. It took a while, but eventually I realized that our sergeant was married to the U.S. Army, and we were his only children.

Side by side, Elliot and I crawled on our bellies beneath sagging loops of barbed wire, over field dirt, as live rounds of cadre-fired ammunition hissed and whined twenty inches above our steel-helmeted heads. It was here that Elliot met, head-on and face to face, his first Alabama scorpion. Elliot was the scorpion’s first Bronxite.

Both parties appeared unprepared for a social.

Elliot, who was a decent guy with all the practical intelligence of a crouton, decided that he’d best stand up and run. All I could think to do I did,
smashing the butt of my rifle into Elliot’s brainless helmet, knocking senseless the only buddy I had in the entire United States Army.

Somehow we survived.

“You enlisted?” he kept asking me.

Day after exhausting day, I managed to drag our unlikely warrior through swamps, up ropes, and over walls. On the rifle range I could be of little help. Elliot’s right cheek was bruised and discolored from the mule-kick recoil of his M1 Garand weapon. His feet were swollen from marching, soft pinky hands blistered by heat and close-order drill, his body purpled by bayonet practice. Butt strokes.

He took it on the chin.

Following our evening with Gene Autry, we shipped overseas. To where, we didn’t know.

“Maybe,” said Elliot, “we’ll get to shoot Japs.”
He paused. “I’d hate to shoot anybody like Mrs. Katayama. She’s on our block. Her name means Half Mountain.”

It wasn’t the
Queen Mary
. It was the U.S.A.T. (United States Army Transport)
Wilson Victory
, accommodating one thousand corn-fed and homesick lads who hadn’t ventured across a body of water larger than a duck pond … or Central Park Lake.

Belowdecks, in the bowels of the ship, our cots were tightly formed in units of two dozen each, four together stacked six bunks high. I drew a bottom bunk, underneath five of the most seasick G.I.’s in the Army. As our vessel rolled and tossed through the North Atlantic, we vomited into our steel helmets. But only when our aim was accurate.