CHAPTER TWENTY

More Whale’s Tale and the End of the Whale’s Tale

My Nantucket troubles with authority grew ever more serious. One day, it was my job to clean the bathroom of my duty station in the operations area, but we had no cleaning supplies, no rubber gloves and no cleaning brushes. I was ordered to use a large sponge and bare hands to wash the urinal. I refused the detail. The duty officer was called. He ordered me to do my duty by the urinal.

“No,” I resisted. “I ain’t sticking my fuckin’ hands in no urinal without gloves!”

I wasn’t kidding. I was bothered by the thought of it, and I felt justified in refusing. Finally, following old Navy tradition that “I won’t ask my men to do what I won’t do,” the officer cleaned the urinal with his own bare hand and sponge. I thought he made a fool of himself. I don’t think the tactic works except on idiots anyhow. I recall, here, my foolishness while cleaning the geedonk at boot camp when I tried to lead by example and kindness.

No one higher up the chain of command mentioned my refusal to clean the toilet, but I imagine I was becoming a topic of concern at the officer’s mess.

More things piled up in my dossier of derelictions of duty. One spring night, after partying I couldn’t make myself stop, I came on duty so drunk that I stumbled into a back room, threw up in the wastebasket, and curled myself on top of a desk to sleep. It wasn’t the first time I’d been drunk on duty, but it was the first time I upchucked and fell asleep. The officers didn’t catch me this time (a buddy, covering my ass, woke me up when the officer returned from a security spin around the small base), but they got wind of it, and I received a warning: drunk and asleep on duty wouldn’t be tolerated. In wartime, a violation like dereliction of duty can be punishable by death so I did recognize the seriousness of the offense.

I didn’t take the warning lightly, but three months from final discharge, my rebellion against authority reached a peak of rage one night, again, when I was out of my gourd drunk. I attended a barn dance in a dusty wooden structure with a scarred wooden floor and vaguely recall flirting around with a skinny broad that other guys joked about: “The nearer the bone, the sweeter the meat,” they said. I think she screwed many a sailor, but not me, even though I think she liked me. As usual, I still only knew how to come on to prostitutes. Every other opportunity was fumbling words and an inability to break free of my fear and to move to a laying on of hands.

All that happened for me this night with her was that I got horny and lonely as hell. In fact, I was celibate my entire tour of duty on Nantucket. Returning to the base, I went to the security area to get a cup of coffee. I couldn’t stand the thought of going to my cot and lying in the dark feeling the aloneness I felt at the moment.

For my entire tour of duty, I and other Operations personnel, no matter what duty station, had been permitted to stop for coffee at the Operations building on our way back from liberty. For some damn, stupid, unexplained reason, the duty officer that night decided that no sailors would be allowed to stop for that cup of coffee. Three months from the end of my tour of duty, I felt deeply that the decision was “motherfucking” arbitrary. I believe the officer was the same one who pulled down my pants during basketball play. Anyhow....

I rang the bell at the outside gate and waited in the dark outside for the watch to come let me in. When he did come, he told me that Officer Numbnuts was allowing Nobody access to the Operations area that night. I argued fruitlessly. The watch returned inside the building while I fumed, wondering what to do next. I rang the buzzer again and the watch came out with the watch’s 45 caliber on his hip to tell me to go away and to warn me that the next time Officer Numbnuts would answer the bell. Again, I argued, but the watch, one of the Operations personnel I knew very well, tried to give me fair warning about the situation before he went back inside.

That young I didn’t understand why I fretted at such control of my activities. Now I understand, but, then, I didn’t. Something inside me felt tied up and writhing to be free. It called for action. My sense of being treated unjustly and personally insulted just blew the lid off any control I had of myself. I leaned on the buzzer again until, sure enough, Officer Numbnuts appeared with the 45 strapped to his hip now. I demanded to be let in. He demanded that I obey his command and go away. In those days, I wouldn’t take “yes” for an answer, let alone “no”. There it stood before me, my powerlessness, my inability to be master of my own fate, my freedom to do as I pleased blocked, and this feeling of powerlessness drove me crazy. You couldn’t deny me, you couldn’t say, “No,” to me.

Screaming obscenities, out of my gourd, I scrambled to the top of the security fence and clung there, afraid to try and clamber over the barbed wire to get at the source of my powerful rage. From my perch, I called the watch officer a string of names and told him he couldn’t keep me from having “a motherfucking cup of coffee”, no one else had in all my years of duty. “Who the fuck you think you are?” “You can’t do this to me!” “Fuck you! Fuck you, you sonofabitch!” I rocked the chain link fence and roared.

My rant was choice stuff, delivered at a fine pitch, saved up from nearly four years of taking orders from nitwits I didn’t respect in the least. No, you didn’t want me in your highly organized combat unit in those days. Or you did if you had really spent your time trying to build up a hatred so repressed in me, it could be unleashed at an enemy you wanted me to kill.

In mid rant, I heard the sound of a shell being jacked into a weapon behind me, and a cold voice said, “Get down off that fence or I’ll put a bullet in your back.” I damn well knew that voice, and I feared he would kill me if I gave him half a chance.

It was Bob’s voice, one of my enemies on base, a Mechanics Mate who tended to many chores around the base. It was his alcohol coarsened voice, the voice of yet another of those career alcoholics I met in the military. He was a leftover from two wars, biding his time, and he hated us short timers. A short timer is someone soon to be discharged and, worse, in my case, who had done only one hitch. Someone else told me that he hated many of his young comrades on the base. Bob himself told me about being drafted from Miami Beach for the Second World War. After coming home from that war to start a cab company in Miami, he was called up to do a second hitch in Korea. His cab company folded while Bob was doing his duty to his country, and he lost heart. I put the two facts together myself. The way I understood it, Bob told himself, “What the hell, I might as well make a career of this shit.”

The only thing wrong with his decision is Bob hated the “shit”. By the time I met him on Nantucket, he was an embittered, snarling man, throwing up blood after many nights of hard drinking. I witnessed his bloody upchuck more than once during parties in Nantucket town. He wasn’t a Chief, like the calm dead sailor on Antigua. He’d been busted so many times he couldn’t remember all his Captain’s Masts.

Bob drove a beautifully maintained, fire engine red, Mercury convertible. He was extremely proud of it. One night at a party he told a buddy he was too drunk to drive his convertible home. His buddy said that he also was too drunk to drive his car home. “I’ll tell you what,” Mr. Bloody Vomit slurred. “I’m too drunk to drive. I’ll give you my keys and you give me yours.”

“Okay,” his buddy said, and they exchanged keys. Fortunately, neither one wrecked his buddy’s car getting home.

For a time, this Bob guy tried to be friends with me. I think what clinched his hatred of me is the time we took a weekend leave in Boston together. He knew the town, but all I saw were a few taverns in working class Boston we got drunk in. We didn’t have a lot of money. Bob must have thought I had a lot more money than he did. He believed I had money, I think, because I had recently cashed a ton of government bonds, one after another, in order to take this tourist woman drinking in Nantucket town. In two weeks of drinking with her (she could drink me under the table), I’d almost depleted my stash of $25 dollar bonds which I’d been buying and sending home every month during my tour of duty. A young man will do almost anything to get laid.


The woman was a blond, well built knockout, supposedly an Assistant to the Comptroller of Syracuse University (supposedly). I was impressed and her credentials wetted my pimply ego, just like going out with models did. If people with such titles liked me, wow, I must be special, I thought. It was so sad—my only glory reflected in the eyes of the female of the species. Yet so natural too, so straight out of the facts of evolution when one is a young, horny, inexperienced animal of the species.

But, I didn’t get laid for all my expenditure. We’d sit in this plush, upstairs lounge whose name I can’t recall, in blond, cane furniture, and drink till closing. I bought all the drinks, and, of course, she didn’t object. It was the Fifties, you know, and I was just a middle class kid, doing as I’d been trained to do. Buy and humbly beg, dick in hand. We’d talk, laugh, neck and French kiss till my cock stood straight up to my chin. Man, what a tongue, soft lips, passionate kissing! That was some necking we did! But, meek and unassertive, at closing, not knowing where to go or what to do, I’d limply walk her home or share a car ride with others to the tourist place she was holed up in. I think she told us that visitors weren't allowed in the rooms. Yeah....

Yeah, right, but, hey, I was, as I’ve said a dozen times, naive, romantic and moral enough to take everything as unambivalent and at face value. Now hear this! After all my effort and cost, after I ran out of money and gave up the chase, another sailor nailed my Assistant Comptroller during the final days of her vacation. I didn’t learn of his conquest until much later, after she returned to the mainland. And this interloper didn’t spend a dime on her! He was a handsome dude, taller and more built than me, a Type-A jock male. So I gulped, embarrassed, and swallowed his tale too, thinking that, of course, a man, a real man like him, was always preferable to a woman over a human bean pole like myself. But, I now wonder what the truth was in his story too.

Another time, he (I think it was him) and I for some reason and with some woman (boy, I’m blank on this memory except for the payoff) drove out to the east end of the island on a sunny afternoon, near the end of the season. They both seemed so much more mature than me in my imagination. He asked me to take a stroll while he escorted the lady down to the beach for a little “conversation”. I got so hot thinking about the whole situation that I crept close in the dunes behind them and sprawled in the sparse beach grasses where I could watch them as they lay on her blanket. Nothing much was happening, and they suddenly stood and started returning toward me. I froze in deep embarrassment. They would obviously see me. I couldn’t stand and run. I couldn’t do anything that made any sense, so I put my head down and pretended to sleep while they walked past me and pretended, I guess, not to see me. Soon, I came up from the beach and met them at the car. It may have been hers. No one talked about the situation that I can recall, but my mortification plagued me while the three of us were together that afternoon.

Being a smaller male animal, I was always aware of physical distinctions and types and of my own physical limitations, even though the Type-A male had yet to be identified and described. That came later, but I always feared I was smaller and less physically attractive to the average female. Later, in college I accepted, immediately, the truth of the body type classifications when I came across them in a class: the sturdy mesomorph, the skinny ectomorph and the “fatty fatty two by four can’t get through the kitchen door” endomorph. I accepted the fact that taller men, on average, make more money than shorter men and are looked to for advice and tend to inseminate more women than shorter men. In the literature someplace, Genghis Khan’s offspring are supposed to make up a substantial percentage of the human race because of his conquests, having murdered so many males and inseminated so many females by rape.

I suffered a lot with my inferiority for the longest time. I don’t think I overcame the inadequacy I felt about my physical size until well into my Forties and Fifties. The detail in description of body types we shorter men have got to notice is the qualifying term “on the average”. No short man ought to think of himself as the “average man”. Now, of course (ain’t it always so), when I’m happily married and no longer needy and in the hunt, I know and value the qualities I have which women find attractive. Even in my Sixties, I feel that I can be attractive to some perceptive, intellectual and desirable women. Who woulda thunk it?

My wife and I recently saw, “The Human Stain”. I was crying a lot in that movie. I recognized much in the professor and his relation to the woman that I’ve experienced in my own journey to this time and place. I even knew in myself the truth of the jilted husband and in the writer trying to find out the truth so he can tell an honest story. Part of my tears came from my grateful appreciation for people who care enough to make a truthful movie about the human condition or at least about my condition as a human being or, at least, to make a movie about people trying to lives of integrity in the midst of the moral ambiguity life imposes on authentic people. Truth be told, the beauty of truth makes me cry a lot, and too few movies move me to tears.

Why weren’t there more movies like “The Human Stain” when I was younger?, I ask myself, but, then, I reply, Would I have appreciated what I was seeing until I’d suffered and struggled long enough with my own condition to want answers? Probably not.

Movies like “Rain”, like “Of Human Bondage” and “The Revolt of Mamie Stover”, did appear when I was young and superficial They dealt with the lusts a pompous, immature moralist like myself in those times (or a religious fundamentalist like so many of this current crop) feels for the “fallen” woman and which spring from deeply ambivalent responses to her. I didn’t see those movies clearly, then, so why should I regret that more movies weren’t made about real human psychology? I do have an out. Most movies in those days were so doctored and camouflaged in order to please the pale middle class tastes of the time that they were practically unrecognizable for what they were. Anyhow....

To return to my middle tale: the sailor’s success with the Assistant to the Comptroller of Syracuse University made me feel really stupid and foolish at the time, ashamed really. According to him, he just took her out on the beach in the dark with a blanket and gave it to her. Or so he told me. Anyhow....

To return two jumps to the Boston booze party with Bob who hated me and who would later point a 45 caliber at my back as I hung from the fence, yelling at an officer: after one night of drinking and returning to the run down hotel room we shared in Boston, Bob and I got into an argument the next night in another Bean Town bar, and I’m pretty sure it was about my money. He wanted me to call home and get my folks to cash more bonds and wire the money, pronto. I didn’t want to. He insisted. I think he had a couple of cheap women in mind that he was going to get us if I’d come up with money. But I felt really broke after my cash binge with the Assistant Comptroller, and I vigorously resisted his attempts to cash into my money.

Well, if you know drunks, you know that nothing is more explosive than sex and booze with them. Bob got really furious with me because I wasn’t going to come up with more money. My thought, now, as I write this autobio, is that my money and these women were in his plan from the day Bob asked me to go to Boston with him, after he watched me go through money like it was water with the blond gal from Syracuse (if any of her story was true).

See how confused a young, naive man can be? I couldn’t figure out any of this, and when I tried to figure anything out, I was always ashamed that my thoughts about my fellow man could be so callous. It took a long time before I lost all faith in my fellow human animal and fell off the fence into a deep and abiding despair. It’s hard to grow up and achieve a healthy balance between reality, hope and cynicism. Many human monkeys get hung up to dry in some sort of tree or another long before they arrive at the truth. Most of us are hung up in the addiction trees which keep us from touching ground on the truth of our situations.

If you ask me, and it’s only an opinion, way too many human animals are stuck up in religion trees. Religion truly is an opiate of the people. Just because the communists came up with that idea, doesn’t mean it’s not a true observation. Religious addiction, or any addiction to escape mechanisms, does keep us from facing the real nature of our mortal condition, and, so, the religiously addicted keep repeating the same old answers to unanswerable questions, and the human animal remains locked in his superstitiously religiously instinctual and self-destructive patterns. Animal answers may work for animals, but they will not longer satisfy the human condition.


One thing must be said for Bob. He returned from a base movie one afternoon, praising to high heaven this movie he’d just seen. He said he loved the dialogue. He was enthusiastic and inspired. He told everyone they just had to go to this movie! I’d never seen Bob worked up about anything in my whole tour on Nantucket, and, now, he was praising a movie, of all things. That fact alone, that it was a movie he was praising, made the moment truly stand out. In my mind, Bob just wasn’t a movie type by any stretch of the imagination.

Imagine my surprise when I went to see the movie and discovered for myself “Cyrano de Bergerac” with Jose Ferrer, a movie that also spoke reams to me, a movie I somehow missed when I was a 9th grader in 1950, the year “Cyrano” first came out. Transfixed in the half gloom of black and white contrasts, I rose and fell with Cyrano’s every sweep of emotion until the bitter end when death came for him while he held his “white plume” unstained above the fray. Jeez, Louise, what a movie!

For years afterward, I made reference to that movie, spoke of my unblemished white plume, and imagined myself a Cyrano in many situations that called for dramatic gestures rather than real action. But I always fell short of being the courageous Cyrano. (I always fall short whenever I try to be anything but myself.) Nowadays, I recognize that Cyrano speaks a thousand messages to the alcoholic and repressed mind and the romantic nature that informs most drunks and super macho male. Drunks may sound like embittered nihilists, but most are just badly disappointed idealists and romantics who hate themselves for failing to live up to Cyrano’s impossibly idealistic, John Wayne (Gacy?) code.

While Bob drove me back to my quonset hut after he forced me from the bitter fence where I hung to attack authority, a strange thing passed between us. Of all the people I didn’t want to say this to, Bob was the guy I told. I broke down in tears, blurting out a ritualistic set of words which I was to repeat many times over, in one situation or another in one form or another, and specially forcefully thirty years later in a situation with Pamella, my third wife, but with her, it was to be its last utterance.

“Goddamn it, Bob,” I sobbed. “They say the Navy’ll either make you (a man) or break you, and it sure as fuck has broke me!” Bob didn’t reply.

That night’s assault on the fence brought me a Captain’s Mast, and my first use of the drunk’s first line of defense. They brought many witnesses against me. My friend who’d been on watch, the watch officer, the base patrol (Bob) and even the guard from the main gate who heard me screaming obscenities at the officer from his post a thousand some yards away.

What could I say in my defense? I had none, so I said, “I don’t remember anything. I was drunk.”

Somehow, I thought my made up blackout would take responsibility for my actions off my shoulders, but the mustang Captain frowned. Instead of accepting my excuse, he broke me down from Petty Officer Third Class back to Seaman 3rd Class. I think I was lightly fined also. This happened just three months from my final discharge from the service. As I say this, I also realize that my Captain’s Mast is another reason the Navy may not have wanted to let me back into the service in the reserves. Strange how I don’t see these things clearly, how memory is selfishly distorted to protect my ego. My FBI record aside, the Captain’s Mast was surely reason enough not to let me back into the Navy those many years later.


I may have come to hate authority in my final year, 1958, in the Navy, but I also sometimes felt proud to be in the service and to give service. Besides my athletic achievements, my ego got some additional strokes on the island of Nantucket. One high point in my time on Nantucket was the plane crash which put a letter of commendation in my service record for service “above and beyond the call of duty”. Of course, my high point was also the death of (was it?) 22 civilians and the injury of many more. One evening, a call came to the base for all off duty personnel to make themselves available to leave the base to go to a crash site at the Nantucket airport. Evening was coming on when we departed in vans.

At one end of the airport, from a stand of woods, smoke arose. The plane, descending through an evening mist, came in too low, clipped the tree tops and cartwheeled through the woods. Our vans took us near the smoke by a dirt back road and dropped us off. I recall entering the woods with night shadows dropping thickly and quickly all around us. Even before I got to the real carnage, someone told me to grab a rope which led up high into a tree a little farther ahead and to pull. Many men heaved on that rope. We knew not why. After lots of tugging, we were told to halt and waited. Then we were told to release the rope. Later, I learned we had lifted a prop-driven engine off the legs of a woman so that she could be ambulanced to the hospital.

Released from that duty, I stumbled on over roots until I came to a wide space in the trees torn out by the tumbling crash of a civilain airliner that had flown in from Boston. I want to say it was a United flight, but I’m not certain. I was later to learn that a woman from my home town had been killed on that flight while her infant daughter had survived in her arms, or so my memory tells me. The site was filled with debris. I saw no bodies right then, but many things hung in the trees and were strewn on the ground. Who could tell what he was seeing?

As the dark became so thick no one could see at all, a bank of lights on a truck blasted on in the woods ahead of me. Drawn to that light and activity, I came to an awful sight. The shell of the fuselage was open like a baking dish. The whole top of the body had been burned away by a fire. We learned later that the fuselage had broken off just behind the wings and slid over so that its open end was right under a ruptured fuel tank. The blazing fuel poured into the body of the plane and created the conditions I came upon in the dark. A couple of sailors I knew climbed over the edge of the dish and approached a dark pile near the tail of the plane. Turns out eleven or so people had piled up back there trying to escape the burning fuel. As the smoke cleared, we could see a tall black form with outstretched arms leaning over the pile. Was he trying to protect the others or crawl over them?

Stretchers appeared. I grabbed a handle of one of them. We were four to a stretcher. The men within the plane began lifting the bodies over the side to other men who placed the black burned, stiff bodies onto our stretchers. Others covered the corpses with sheets, but not before I noticed that some of the seared skin, overdone, had split open, and I could see pink cooked flesh through the blackened skin. I made several trips, stumbling through the dark to the dirt road on which our vans had entered the forest. We laid the bodies in a row, under sheets, beside the road and went back for more.

I think my stretcher team made three trips, maybe only two. On one trip, one of our team stumbled, and the stretcher tipped so that a warm body rolled onto my hand. I nearly dropped my handle with revulsion, but, instead, I lifted my handle higher and the body moved off my hand. On my second trip back to the plane’s side, I noticed my Boston drinking friend, Bob, standing in the tree line, watching the rest of us working. He hadn’t been on the vans leaving the base. I remember thinking he’d driven out in his red Mercury to gawk at the carnage.

Later, when the last of the bodies were lifted out of the fuselage, one of the men who’d been in the shell of the plane, put his hand on my denim shoulder to steady himself as he jumped down from the edge. He left a hand print of body grease on the shoulder of that shirt which didn’t wash out for months. I wore the shirt in regular rotation and was curious to see how long it would take for the hand print of human grease to wash out. I admit I wore the shirt with a touch of pride. A gallows humor was reflected in my repeated observation after the crash, “I never lost my appetite after the wreck. Only I did lose my taste for barbecued ribs for awhile.”

That night a drizzle fell, and I remained with the wreckage, standing an all night watch at the crash site to protect it from souvenir seekers until the FAA inspectors got there next morning.

When we received our letters of commendation, later, which the Captain read at a parade of all base personnel, I remember thinking that this whole thing was stupid. I didn’t feel we’d done anything more than lug bodies, that we hadn’t saved anyone really. Except for tugging on the rope, I couldn’t see we’d done much else worthy of notice. When Bob’s name also appeared on the list of those who received commendations, I felt that my award was tainted with the names of men who had done nothing but show up on the site to watch. Very strange all my protectiveness of a commendation I felt was undeserved anyway. Very strange. I also tried to tell myself that, maybe, Bob had been working someplace else on the site so who was I to judge. But I was angry with him no matter what I said.

Another source of pride connected to my tour of duty on the island but which came later, after I departed the island, was an idea for my first short story since high school which went on to become another of my several near misses in life. I began the story in long hand while on Nantucket and finished it years later while at the University of Dayton. I began the tale at first as a horror story about a living house that killed its residents by suffocation. It became a story about a man who killed his wives for insurance money.

My protagonist thought he had a fool proof scheme. He built a house which shut down and became air tight when he threw a switch as he pulled out of his driveway to go out of town on long business trips. Being gone when his wives died, he had an airtight alibi. All the glass in the windows were absolutely unbreakable, the phone shut down, he’d have to search the house for notes the dead women might have written before he called the cops, etcetera. I recall I had to explain a lot of details in order to make his plan seem feasible.

Eventually, I sent the story off to the Clerky Queen Mystery Magazine (I think?), and when it came back with rejection slip attached, the editor had underlined several lines with red pencil in the rejection which complimented “an interesting idea” and also suggested that if I had anything else to send along, I should do so... but I never did. That story was the only thing I’d written to that time, and I was too busy in college to write another. Did my near miss make me an equal of Stephen King’s who was working to succeed at the same time? I’m not sure of the chronology of his writing career, and since I didn’t ever hit it big, I don’t know what my point would be, do you? Maybe I’m thinking we Nobodys together for a time on the same path before he branched off on Frost’s branching road to become a Somebody?

One night I was at the movie house in Nantucket town, watching, I think it was, “Me and the Colonel” with Danny Kaye. Near the movie’s finish, the movie projector went dark and the house lights came up. The manager walked to the front of the theater and told all Naval personnel to return to the base. There was an emergency of some sort, he announced.

Well, of course, I’ll never forget that moment of glory, to stand in the theater with a handful of fellow Navy personnel and march up the aisle to imaginary martial music in my head, imagining that all eyes were upon me, not a wit worried about what might be going on in the real world to cause such a stir—but, maybe, more honestly, just a little worried it might be WWIII heading my way and certain atomic destruction. I can’t recall everything, just my glorious march up the aisle.

Turns out, it was what came to be called, the Lebanon Crisis. Shades of Vietnam, of Iraq and America’s Moslem troubles: American marines had invaded Lebanon (July 14, 1958), near Beirut, to bolster an American pawn who ruled there. On the same day, leftist rebels staged a coup in Iraq, overthrowing yet another one of those dictators which American conservatives are so fond of supporting. That was the crisis. I got my heady march up the aisle, and it passed quickly. The military soon stood down, but I got a taste of marching off to war, or at least, imagining I was marching off to war. As usual, I failed again the chance to kill or be killed.

Speaking of a murderous ego (homicidal or the one indistinguishable for it, suicidal), mine nearly killed me and several of my friends during my hitch on Nantucket. Remember the trip to Ohio and back during which I sampled my first taste of moonshine? On the way down to Ohio and Kentucky, while still in the East, I took a turn driving through the darkness. I had taken to not wearing my glasses during those years because I thought I looked sissy in glasses. Something like that. I only wore them for reading....

So I was barreling along on one of the Eastern turnpikes. The other five men were sound asleep. Ahead, through fine mist, I glimpsed the distant taillights of a car. Very small, very dim, orange. I squinted and leaned forward to get a better look when the taillights metamorphosed into reflectors 20 yards ahead and attached to the back of a truck which I was rapidly overtaking. I froze for a second, hunched over the wheel. At the very last minute, I jerked the wheel left and right and just missed the corner of the truck.

“What the fuck?” My passengers woke with screams and curses.

My wild maneuvers tossed them around the car like loose sacks of potatoes. Heads thumped against windows. I immediately put my mouth in gear and began making humorous excuses. Bullshit galore flew from my asshole. I tried to play down the whole situation and assuage their fears, but Carl, who owned the car, made me pull to the side of the pike and someone else took over driving. My memory tells me they wouldn’t let me drive any more on that trip or ever again, but who knows, really?


By the time I reached Nantucket, I would not let a Navy dentist touch my pearly whites, and, thereby, hangs another tale of courage. Periodic toothaches plagued me in service and ruined my happy hours. Eventually I went to a dentist in Nantucket town to get an exam which I paid for myself. He found something like 22 cavities. One tooth needed pulling and another a root canal. Experience told me it was more painful to suffer the sore gums after a Novocain shot than to live with the momentary pain of drilling and filling, so the dentist and I decided that 15 teeth could be filled without a shot of Novocain and that we’d use the analgesic for two (or three?) final visits when the heavy work would be done.

I took the Navy bus into town three times to get the fifteen easy teeth done first. The slow drills of those days burned me plenty of hot pain, but the pain was gone the minute I left the office. Nothing approached the lingering pain of that Canadian trainee’s shattering and prying out that one tooth in boot camp. Finally, during a couple more trips, I got the harder stuff done with Novocain, and the last trip the dentist yanked the really bad tooth. Pain killer or not, that final ride on a chill, overcast day back to the base on the rattling Navy van was filled with pain. My gum and jaw ached. I don’t know why it is, but no pulled teeth nowadays ever hurt like those when I was younger. I even had all four wisdom teeth pulled in one sitting many years after Nantucket and don’t remember the pain as being anything like half as bad as those early dental days.


This Nobody who now fancied that he looked a lot like Montgomery Clift (many young women told me so) was bound to fall in love on Nantucket. There were just way too many women around for me to remain above love, and I was a sucker for love all my life even in meaner later years when I claimed I didn’t believe that love existed. (I have often wondered whether I looked like Clift before or after the auto accident which permanently rearranged his face.) I can’t recall whether or not my love affair came before or after the Assistant Comptroller. All I know for sure is that my drinking weeks with the woman who could drink me under the table and my love affair with a visiting tourist doomed me when the tourist season ended, when the island girls deserted me because of my faithless behavior toward them my last summer in the Navy on the island of Nantucket.

I can tell you that my other affair with a tourist lady was “true love”, as I defined it then, because my yearning for her was absolutely lust free. Wasn’t that a sign of true love in the Fifties? A man knew he loved the love object because she lived on a pedestal above the kind of trafficking a man had with the dark ladies of the street, like those exotic women, the prostitutes of Puerto Rico, I had trafficked with? Further, my love had to be real love because I was attracted to her for the companionship we shared and not to her beauty, because she was not beautiful, not beautiful like my model dates, like the Assistant Comptroller, were beautiful. In fact, her head was sort of misshapen and strange in some way.

My girl (was it Carol?) was a young lady from Glastonbury, Connecticut on her high school graduation trip. She arrived with friends on the ferry to share a house, and we drank together at parties and became, quickly, nearly inseparable for two weeks on the island, and for a short time thereafter, before I returned to Dayton, free at last of the Navy, free at last. Carol was valedictorian of her high school class, I believe, and was scheduled to go, I think, to a prestigious Ivy League college. My future, as far as I could see, was cloudy, unplanned.

I recall the night Carol and I knew we were in love. We escaped from a party to sit in someone’s car in the driveway and stare at distant suns in the Milky Way sky, drinks in hand. Hers was a beer (I think) and mine (I know) was a quart of “Seven and Seven”, a half ’n half mixture of Seagram’s Seven and Seven Up in a Seven Up quart bottle. It was my favored party drink. I liked the heft of the quart in my hand and the tough appearance I imagined I made with a quart-sized highball dangling at my hip in the middle of party life. Real cool, man. And it was always enough booze to get me high as hell, and nobody could get at my stash because it was always in my hand, right under my nose at all times, save for the rest of the Seagram’s which was safely tucked away somewhere else.

Warm tummied and heads clouded, we talked like lovers are supposed to talk, reflecting out all our dream life into the hothouse car interior where our little seedlings strove to burst. We talked about our ideas and hopes and ambitions, about the content of her high school speech, about my certainty that man would soon be in space, about stars and movies and movie stars that moved us, about romance and wonder. We talked all around but not specifically about the loneliness young people often feel but don’t speak of, overwhelmed by the cruel headline world and the murky and treacherous paths they sense in their lives ahead through that treachery of screaming headlines and, for our time, it was an atomic fury waiting to burn us up and make our lives a crisp. O, it was dreamy! To imagine a friend to walk through the dreary dreaded atomic world with!

I talked about the Nobody family and she about hers. That’s how you know things are serious. You talk about your family of origin, parading out the trappings of serious family connections that reveal you as respectable marriage bait. We even made plans about Dayton, about seeing each other after I returned to Dayton. We already had marriage in mind because we were looking far ahead and talking about all sorts of couple stuff, about work, about college and babies, all that wonderful stuff people in love talk about—a combination of what they imagine they are supposed to say and what they dream ahead will be their lives... if they can only convince this one with them to share the path with them. Youth! Youth, thy name was innocence.

This quiet, alone talking is the mating call of human animals seeking each other in the dark world’s wood. And there were times in my life I was convinced that it meant little what the content of my speech actually was but that it was infinitely more important that the enticing sound of sincerity be in the words, as if lovers mouth an animal cooing that underlies the meaning of the words themselves.

Have you, my reader, experienced that moment? When the shared language is more a mating call than meaningful communication? Have you experienced the language of seduction which transcends the meaning of vocabulary? Experienced the cooing that softens the womb mouth and raises the hardening spelunker’s probe? Known the probing essence of the French kiss and commingled panting of aroused breathing so that the only meaning becomes the decisive action? (Yes, yes, yes, yes, O, yes, O, please, fuck me!) I have, and the dangerous thrill of that seductive moment is a pleasure in itself that has nothing to do with reason, with marriage or the children it orgasms to.

Beware, O, cautionary parents—you may stack up your reasons into a mighty fortress against the sexual urgency of a youthful moment, but the subterranean language of seduction will ever find a way beneath reason, an undermining ecstasy that topples all language and reason in a rush of weltering emotion that must have outlet, must find orgasm because the very nature of sex is animal irrationality, dangerous and undermining and wild as the wood we live in but do know not. Without the terrible urgency of this drive, the human animal would die. Cruel, separating reason always comes later, in cool retrospect or from threatening, heated parental authority.

Eventually, I made two trips to Glastonbury, Connecticut to meet Carol’s very Catholic family and to see her. They put me up in a nice frilly, friendly room on the second story of their very nice, upper middle-class home. They fed me delicious meals at their comfy kitchen table, and they acted friendly and welcoming, and encouraged me to talk so they could get to know me.

One trip Carol and I took in a movie, and another time we went out on one helluva memorable triple date with her friends to big time New Haven to listen to Count Basie with Joe Williams in the round. That was exciting. I was in a groove. On the way back, we stopped at a diner to eat, and, wow, in came Basie and some of his band to eat there too. As usual, just like on Nantucket with movie stars, I was too shy to approach the mighty jazzmen, but the girls took their programs over and got autographs.

You know, I don’t know how many times I felt the coolness of black in those days nor how unreliable those feelings or my memory of my feelings were which separated us even as I admired them, but as I sat, watching those cool black dudes and our white dates giggling over to talk to them, I felt the power of cool in blackness, and I was jealous. I heard the vibrant tones of their deep, black voices, as if their very voices smiled, and saw the relaxed, observant camaraderie between those jazz giants, and I knew nothing of such coolness myself, born of a suffering history I knew I would not have the courage to endure, which they lavished on our dates. I was from Ohio, southern Ohio at that and carried lots of prejudice in my head which these New England girls didn’t have. While black cool attracted me (I wanted to be that cool), I came to think of blacks as competition for women, and a pretty formidable competition too. I saw so much of life as competition between males for women, blacks naturally fell into that category too. See what confusion I felt? Who knows the real truth about any of this in my 1958 America, but I know what I felt as I felt it, and I simultaneously felt the power of coolness and the discomfort of jealousy too.

But I was soon to be out of competition for Carol, anyway, and in a brief world of hurt. Though I didn’t realize it at the time (my family had little religious bias) Carol’s folks couldn’t abide my non-Catholicism, and worse, as they drew me out, of course, my dangerous, naive, half-believed and uninformed atheism came out which they could display before their daughter’s eyes as a danger to any worthy and substantial Christian marital consummation worthy of the name. I also believe I made fun of the curfew system they put on their daughters.

Eventually, on my last night there, before they drove me to the ferry landing next morning, Carol came to my room and gave me the bad news. She cared for me, she said, but we couldn’t be together. It wouldn’t work between us. All that good stuff. In those days, I was still a little tougher than I later became, so I pretended not to care. I put on a good, Humphrey Bogart “Casablanca” show and knew what I was doing even as I did it. It’s all I knew to do, play a borrowed role. I pretended her rejection didn’t matter at all. I let her think the whole affair was a lark on my part, and she went away from me deeply hurt, in tears. In retrospect, I see that Carol really did care for me and wanted to be with me, but she was only 18, still living at home, still in the thrall of parental power, in the thrall of her middle class values, like almost any Fifties, middle class kid was, and she couldn’t find the power to oppose their wishes.

As I rode the ferry back to island Nantucket, I consoled myself with my display of emotional toughness. Now, after my three divorces and much suffering, I can see what she avoided by following her parents’ wishes. Although, if she never risked anything in her whole life, maybe she might wish, now, that she’d gone down the path of suffering and trouble with me which eventually encourages or discourages a more deeply founded personality.

Mary Pipher who wrote Reviving Ophelia which I listened to as audio book at work—back when I used to work—briefly describes the histories of two young women who took separate paths. One stayed within her religious family boundaries and never chose for herself much outside what she’d learned at home, never experimented much. She grew into happy adulthood. The second girl, allowed more freedom to choose, followed a less structured path, suffered deeper pains, but she also grew into a happy enough adulthood. The singular difference between the two adult women according to the author of Ophelia is that the more adventurous one was aware of having more choices in her life, whereas her shyer cousin accepted the status quo without question. I don’t know about happiness, but, from my point of view, a person who’s unaware that she has choices and who is unaccepting of the wider world that choice gives us would also be less attuned to or supportive of the pluralistic, secular democracy she lives in. The first woman is a threat to freedom; the second probably is not.

One of the men in the Operations department was a slender, wisecracking, red-faced, dark haired Bostonian I’ll call Herb. He was probably Irish too. Many times over the months I knew him, he’d say with a smile, “I’m an alcoholic. My whole family’s alcoholic.” He had a goofy appealing grin.

All of us in the quonset hut took his claim with a grain of salt, then, one time I flew into Boston, returning from a leave, and my flight was snowed in. I called Herb up, and he came out in a car with an uncle to rescue me and to give me a place to stay overnight. He was snowed in too, and we planned on flying out in the morning together.

We had a great spaghetti dinner that night with his very large family, his younger teen sisters, his older sisters, his brothers, mother, dad and uncles, maybe even a neighbor boy or two. We drank gallons of wine during and after dinner and, then, began on the beer. We drank so much beer that we had to make a wild dash out into the snow to get more. Everyone seemed afraid we wouldn’t find a place open, but we did. His mother knew tons of places to get beer in emergencies. I swear she pounded on the door of a darkened neighborhood store which let her in after hours to buy more booze. On this beer run, I became aware that I was in the midst of a rollicking, laughing, booze-happy crowd, from youngest sister to oldest brother. I also felt that this was an almost nightly occurrence. Herb had been telling the truth all the time.

Thoroughly soused, I lost track of time, but, eventually, the family ran out of booze, and we all stumbled merrily up to bed. Mine pitched under me like a fishing boat in the “Great Storm”. I swear I made some sort of fumbling attempt at a teen sister of Herb’s in a second story hallway, but I was too drunk then to remember it now. When they awakened me a minute later, my head throbbed, and I was doubled around a gut ache the size of Alaska.

“Come on, le’s go,” Herb blearily told me. “Ain’t we havin’ fun!” He shot me his goofy, lopsided grin.

To the subway someone drove in the morning dark. Dropped off, Herb and I went down to wait for a train in a completely empty station. We both curled up on benches to get some shuteye.

Something rapped hard on the bottom of my shoe. “Come on, buddy. No sleepin’ on da benches.”

I woke to see Herb standing on the platform a few feet away while a cop thumped on my shoe bottom to get me up. “What? I can’t get me a little sleep while I wait fer a train?”

“Nope, you can’t,” the officer told me.

“All right. All right,” I groaned and rolled to me ass, my first encounter with civil law over booze quickly behind me.

Eventually, Herb and I got to the airport, caught our plane, the mystery of Herb and his alcoholic family claims cleared up.


Even before I officially tried to kill myself, I made some halfhearted, subconscious attempts. On the same leave that ended in being snowbound in Boston, I went on a wild night drive in Dayton that ended with a bang.

As I’ve reported earlier, my folks didn’t trust me to drive so they wouldn’t sign for my license and, thus, I spent all my high school years, riding the bus, thumbing, or riding shotgun with good friends like Bob. But while on Nantucket, I got my own driver’s license. That’s why I was able to drive on that Xmas drive home that almost ended in the back of a semi. Anyhow....

Vince and I went out driving in my dad’s chocolate brown, four door 1950-something Chevy, a rounded sort of styling, without the sharpish fins that came later. Immediately, I went for beer and got some at Harry’s old Arrow Bar where they still just didn’t check IDs too carefully. We drove around, talking and sipping beer. I got it into my head to go see Sue. Don’t know why. Was I lonely? Did I want to survey the damage?

Anyhow, I knocked, her dad answered, and I watched from outside, through windows that lined her house, Sue’s dash from the living room into her folk’s bedroom at the front of the house where she put a fist to her mouth and tried to choke back tears. She succeeded.

Her dad told Vince and me to come in. While we stood there, stupidly, waiting for Sue to leave the bedroom, I bragged about my being a “drinker” now and showed Sue’s dad one of the cans of beer I carried around in my jacket pocket, putting in something like, “I’m fine. I got plenty of this to keep me warm.”

Don’t know why I was doing all this foolishness. I know I felt ill at ease being in Sue’s house. Eventually, she came out of the bedroom where she’d been choking back tears.

“Hello, stranger,” she said, using the familiar phrase between us.

“Hi,” I said.

Everything came out small talk, nothing to remember. That’s all I recall about the visit to Sue’s. I wasn’t drunk, just a bit high, and I don’t think I made any promises to see her or anything. She still lived at home. She had to be about 19 or 20 at the time, I’m thinking, but Vince and I didn’t stay long, and I didn’t make my intentions for the visit clear to her or to myself. Then Vince and I left.

So now I’m feeling really unsettled, wild, unable to land, to come down and find calm. Vince and I cruise around in the dark in my dad’s Chevy drinking our couple of remaining beers. It starts to drizzle a spring rain. We end up in Oakwood, on some twisty, wooded roads through the very richest part of Dayton at the time. For some reason, I speed up as we wind through the dark, liking the pitch and roll of the car around corners, like the feel of me, leaning steeply back and forth in the car. It’s like I’m part of the car. I start to imagine I’m an Indianapolis driver. Vince is getting nervous. He suggests I should slow down. I tell him not to worry, I’m a great driver. Now we’re driving down a steep incline, with hillside climbing up from the road on our right and a steep down slope on our left.

“Hey, man,” Vince tells me. “Slow down. There’s a hair pin at the bottom of this hill.”

I feel wild, an urge hits me. “Let’s see how fast we can make it,” I crow and accelerate.

I don’t know how fast I’m going when I hit the curve, but we don’t make it. We climb up the dirt hillside on our right and bump over what I think is a driveway rising into the darkness. I force the car back onto the road, but now we’re sliding across it on the wet pavement into the gravel on the opposite side of the road. I’m such a great driver that I freeze at the wheel with my foot pressing the accelerator to the floor. Next thing, we’re heading downhill into the trees off the other side of the road. Frozen acceleration! There’s no recovery from this slide. We hit a tree head on, the Chevy’s tail whips to the left and a tree smacks into the car over the left rear wheel, then the front end of the car whips left and another tree smacks the car just over the left front wheel.

A crash bends perception in odd ways. The entire wreck goes slow motion, all that quick motion slowed, then, next you’re sitting absolutely, stock still. The door flies open, the interior light comes on, and the engine dies. You lived! You’re okay! You’re not hurt! I’m sitting still, gripping the wheel. The radio blares in the car, but I don’t know what tune is playing. The headlights glare ahead into the trees, seeing nothing.

“You okay,” I ask Vince.

“Yeah,” he says. “Just banged my knee a little.”

“Let’s get out of here,” I say. “Walk home.”

So we run away after turning off the radio and the headlights and the interior lights. We climb the few feet up the slope onto the narrow road and set off the five or ten miles home in a drizzling darkness.

Cops! Again!

We get stopped about a mile from my house by a cop, wondering why two guys are wandering around in the early morning rainy dark. He asks us to sit in the back seat while he questions us. I can’t recall what we tell him. I’m certain we don’t tell him about the crash. I show him my leave papers to assure him I’m just a good guy sailor who’s been out on the town, visiting friends. I’m sure he could smell the booze, but we weren’t wildly drunk. Nothing like that. He lets us go. A few blocks from my house, Vince and I split, and he trudges off to his house a few blocks past my street.

The next big moment of crash night comes when I step into my sleeping parent’s bedroom and flip on the lights with the switch by the door.

My dad lies nearest me on the bed and awakes, shielding his eyes. “Whaa...?”

“Hey you guys. I wrecked the car?”

“What?”

“I wrecked the car. I slid off the road.”

The phone begins to ring in the kitchen.

“Anybody hurt,” he asks.

“No.”

Dad goes off to the phone. Of course, it’s the cops to report his wrecked car. He tells them what happened. The car gets towed away.

Days later, he’s shaken when he gets a look at the smashed auto in the garage where it was towed. A lot of disapproval in his voice after he sees it and comes home to dinner that night.

“You know you could have been killed,” he admonishes. “You’re damn lucky you’re alive.”

But for me, having survived the wreck, his worry is overblown, like the commendation for the airplane wreck, none of it seems like no big deal to me.

When I go downtown to a garage to see the wreck, out of curiosity at what Nobody hath wrought, I am amazed at the damage. There’s a V driven into the front all the way to the engine, and the engine is inched toward the passenger compartment. The rear axle is snapped. The car’s totaled, nothing to save.

Later in the week, the insurance people call to ask questions. Stepmom sits at the table while I stand at the counter, talking on the phone. Then, a big question curves out of the phone wire at me.

“Was there alcohol involved?”

My surprised senses jar my entire body and voice into trembling. “No,” I say, not imagining that he can’t hear the lie that whole body is calling a lie. “No,” I tell him.

Unbelievably, I get away with it. Later still, the City of Oakwood considers charging my dad for the cost of the three trees that I knocked over in the wreck. So he gets upset again, but nothing gets through to me in those days of youthful immortality. For years after the wreck, it’s my joke how funny it was, the joke on my dad, that he kept me from driving all those years in high school and one of the few times I get into his car to drive, I wreck it. Ain’t that just funny as hell? Like all he managed to do, with all his caution, was delay the day of reckoning?

But that ain’t all my reckless ways on that leave near the end of my tour of duty. A few days before the Oakwood wreck, I was tooling dad’s chocolate brown Chevy, full of friends, along one of the wide, busy boulevards which parallel the Great Miami River. I’m cutting in and out of rush hour traffic like a mad man, and one guy pissed me off for some reason, so I zip around him and cut back in front of him, really with no clear view of what I’m doing, not enough experience with distances or handling to make good judgments. My friends in the rear seat inform me with fearful yelps that I just missed locking into his front bumper by inches. I believe it. I knew I was really close to an accident, (I really wanted to scare the guy I was cutting off and damn the consequences) but the closeness to an accident, the excitement in the moment, gave me a thrill of power that was heady. Wahoo!

My Oakwood wreck and Great Miami River near miss weren’t the last of my automobile misadventures. Close calls multiplied during those final months of 1958. Remember that I almost parked Carl’s car in the back of a semi shortly after Christmas.

Now my tour on Nantucket was drawing to a real close, my Navy hitch was finished. I was to muster out on October 20th, 1958 from Newport, Rhode Island, but, first, several of us who waited to muster out there wanted to take a weekend trip up into Canada to see Montreal. Not my idea, but they asked me along. We made a deal with the Boatswain who ran our barracks and who kept us busy on cleaning details. He had a job he really wanted to get done. We told him we’d get it done in four days if he’d give us a three day pass for the coming weekend so we could drive up into Canada and visit Montreal. Done!

Off we shot to Canada, driving all night, drinking and smoking all the way. I don’t know whose car we had. We were a ragtag, four man detail of short time sailors, thrown together for a moment in time and space to make up the characters of a one time adventure. So after our mad, straight-through drive, we arrived in Montreal only to discover that the Queen Mother of England had died, and everything, I mean everything, was closed down tighter than a fundamentalist’s ass. Sitting around in a bus station cafe, something that had to be open, we got the raw details of our situation from the lonely counter man. Nothing all weekend. Nothing. Might as well go home, mates.

After a sandwich, we shot off again, back into America. That night we found ourselves in the boonies near their shared border at the bottom of New Hampshire/Vermont and thirsty for more booze. We found out about a barn dance in a small town. That adventure definitely called for booze. One state was dry and the other wet, and we had to go back across the border of the dry state where the dance was to buy booze in the other. Fortified, we four, in uniform, burst into the country dance and found ourselves with women to love galore. I mean it. We were an exciting sight to the locals, and the uniforms really helped. We danced, did a little fast talking and slipped out to the car for nips on the bottle. Finally, one of my comrades whispered we better get out of there. The local males were getting restless and pissed at our cutting in on their women. I think one of the girls, probably the incested one, was even talking of leaving with the sailor who was hitting on her. We slipped out the door and, as young men piled from the dance onto the gravel and grass parking lot to find us, we roared out, pitching grass and gravel at them in a tire spinning escape.

Still driving and drinking, through a drizzle now, we sped into Massachusetts and ended up at Harvard, my only visit to that stately college. They missed me, sadly for them. I remember wet cobblestone gleaming in the rain-snowy dark there as we sped through....

Now wait a minute...!

I’ve been thinking about it, and I checked a road atlas, (okay, so I can’t be telling this Nobody tale like I’m sitting in a bar, talking to my friends, if I’m doing research, but...) I’ve concluded that no way could we drive down to Newport, Rhode Island from a spot on the Massachusetts’s border, where the New Hampshire, Vermont border meets it and pass anyway near Harvard. That was way too far out of our way to the east. Maybe, it’s Amherst we passed through.

In fact, I’m certain, my Harvard memory is a false memory, born from my infatuation with the movie, “Love Story”, which took place at Harvard, I think, and with the Ivy League early novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald and J.D. Salinger’s novels and stories. Sad to say, I was never at Harvard, yet it’s cobblestone streets (if they exist) in a mist are as clear to me as if I saw them only yesterday. I swear I’ve had coffee there in a coffee shop and looked out at kids walking by, with long, brightly colored scarfs reaching to their knees, but it’s all a fiction, my false memory.

Leaving Harvard or was it Amherst on secondary roads, we raced along a country road, heading for home, and straight across a road that our road Tee’d into which our drunk driver failed to notice. Slamming on the brakes, fishtailing, he brought us to a stop in the grass, nose nearly touching the stone wall of a graveyard our headlights illuminated. Thoroughly chastened, it was damn close, we exchanged one drunk driver for another and continued.

Ah, yes, drinking, driving, plowing madly through the darkness into adventure—it was a course I was to pursue repeatedly in the years to come. Others would seek their adventure in foreign countries, in war, in education and the Peace Corps, in the voter registration drives in the murderous South, but I was a true son of the Bogart/Wayne movie. I would seek my adventure down the throat of a beer bottle. That’s what a real movie hero did. Got a woman problem, pal? Let’s go have a drink. Going to war tomorrow morning? Better have a drunken brawl in the local tavern the night before embarkation. Make the MPs show up so the Captain can shake his head at madcap hijinks of his troopers.

We got back to the base safe, almost broke, almost out of gas. That week, we got our papers and our mustering out pay. First thing I did after mustering out, after leaving the base gate behind me for the last time on a lukewarm, October sunny afternoon, was find a store and buy a nice padded, waist-length jacket. It was gray and black stripped with a zipper. I hadn’t thought of it until this moment as I write about that shopping trip.

How I got back to Dayton, I don’t remember either. I think I visited my stepmom’s Connecticut people on the way home. It no longer seemed the warm, wonderful place it seemed to me as a child. Four years of Navy adventure had changed me.