BOOK FOUR
11 Lew
Sammy and I enlisted the same day. Four of us set out together. All of us went overseas. All four of us came back, although I was captured and Sammy was shot down into the water and crash-landed another time with a forgetful pilot called Hungry Joe, who forgot to try the emergency handle for lowering the landing gear. No one was hurt, Sammy tells me, and that pilot Hungry Joe got a medal. It's a name that sticks. Milo Minderbinder was his mess officer then and not the big war hero he tries to pass himself off as now. Sammy had a squadron commander named Major Major, who was never around when anyone wanted to see him, and a bombardier he thought I would have liked named Yossarian, who took off his uniform after a guy in their plane bled to death, and he even went to the funeral naked, sitting in a tree, Sammy says.
We went up by subway to volunteer at the big army induction center at Grand Central Station in Manhattan. That was a part of the city most of us hardly ever went to. There was the physical examination we'd heard about from the older guys who were already gone. We turned our heads and coughed, we milked down our joints, we bent over and spread the cheeks of our buttocks, and kept wondering what they were looking for. We'd heard of piles from our uncles and aunts, but we didn't really know what they were. A psychiatrist interviewed me alone and asked if I liked girls. I liked them so much I fucked them, I answered.
He looked envious.
Sammy liked them too but didn't know how.
We were past eighteen, and if we'd waited until nineteen, we would have been drafted, said FDR, and that was the reason we gave to our parents, who were not so happy to see us go. We read about the war in the newspapers, heard about it on the radio, saw it done gorgeously in the Hollywood movies, and it looked and sounded better to us than being home in my father's junkshop, like I was, or in a file cage like Sammy in the insurance company he worked for, or, like Winkler, in a cigar store that was a front for the bookmaking operation his father ran in back. And in the long run it was better, for me and for most of the rest of us.
When we got back to Coney Island after enlisting, we ate some hot dogs to celebrate and went on the roller-coasters awhile, the Tornado, the Cyclone, and the Thunderbolt. We rode up on the big Wonder Wheel eating caramel popcorn and looked out over the ocean in one direction and out over Gravesend Bay in the other. We sank submarines and shot down planes on the game machines in the penny arcades and dashed into Steeplechase for a while and rolled around in the barrels and spun around on the Whirlpool and the Human Pool Table and caught rings on the big carousel, the biggest carousel in the island. We rode in a flat-bottomed boat in the Tunnel of Love and made loud dirty noises to give laughs to the other people there.
We knew there was anti-Semitism in Germany, but we didn't know what that was. We knew they were doing things to people, but we didn't know what they were.
We didn't know much of Manhattan then. When we went up into the city at all, it was mainly to the Paramount or Roxy theater, to hear the big bands and see the big new movies before they came into the neighborhood six months later, to the Loew's Coney Island or the RKO Tilyou. The big movie houses in Coney Island then were safe and profitable and comfortable. Now they're bankrupt and out of business. Some of the older fellows would sometimes take us along into Manhattan in their cars on Saturday night to the jazz clubs on Fifty-second Street or up into Harlem for the music at the colored ballroom or theater there or to buy marijuana, eat ribs cheap, and get sucked and fucked for a buck if they wanted to, but I didn't go in much for any of that, not even the music. Once the war came, a lot of people started making money, and we did too. Soon after the war you could get that same sucking and the rest right there in the Coney Island neighborhood from Jewish white girls hooked on heroin and married to other local junkies who had no money either, but the price was two bucks now, and they did their biggest business mostly with housepainters and plasterers and other laborers from outside the neighborhood, who hadn't gone to school with those girls and didn't care. Some in my own crowd, like Sammy and Marvelous Marvin Winkler, the bookie's little boy, began smoking marijuana even before the war, and you could find that country smell of pot in the smoking sections of the Coney Island movie houses once you got to recognize what the stuff smelled like. I didn't go for any of that either, and the guys who were my friends never lit up their reefers when I was around, even though I told them they could, if they wanted to.
"What's the use?" Winkler liked to groan, with his eyes red and half closed. "You bring me down."
A guy named Tilyou, who maybe was already dead, became a sort of guy to look up to once I found out about him. When everyone else was poor, he owned a movie house and he owned a big Steeplechase amusement park and a private house across the street from his Steeplechase Park, and I never even connected them all with the same name until Sammy pointed it out to me not long ago on one of his mercy visits up to my house, when all of them were already gone, and George C. Tilyou too. Sammy began coming up a lot to see us after his wife died of cancer of the ovary and he did not know what to do with himself weekends, and especially when I was out of the hospital again and had nothing much to do with myself either but hang around getting my strength back after another session of radiation or more chemotherapy. Between these hospitalizations I could feel like a million and be strong as an ox again. When things got bad here, I'd go into the city to a hospital in Manhattan and an oncologist named Dennis Teemer for treatments they had there. When I felt good, I was terrific. i By now it's out of the bag. And everyone knows I've been sick with something that sometimes puts other people away. We never speak of it by name, or even as something big enough to even have a name. Even with the doctors, Claire and I don't talk about it by name. I don't want to ask Sammy, but I'm not sure we fooled him for a minute in all of the years of my lying about it like I did-as I did, as he would want to correct me, like he does, when I let him. Sometimes I remember, but I talk to him like I want to anyway just to heckle him.
"Tiger, I know it," I will tell him with a laugh. "You still think I'm a greenhorn? I'm putting you on, like I like to do, and hopefully someday you'll get it."
Sammy is smart and picks up on small things, like the name Tilyou, and the scar on my mouth before I grew my big brush mustache to hide it or let what hair I had left grow long in back to cover the incisions there and the blue burn marks on the glands in the back of my neck. I missed a lot: maybe in my lifetime by not going to college, but I never wanted to go, and I don't think I missed anything that would have mattered to me. Except maybe college girls. But I always had girls. They'd never scared me, and I knew how to get them and talk to them and enjoy them, older ones too. I was always priapic, Sammy told me.
"You've got it, tiger," I answered him. "Now tell me what it means."
"You were all prick," he said, like he enjoyed insulting me, "and no conflicts."
"Conflicts?"
"You never had problems."
"I never had problems."
I never had doubt. My first was an older one on the next block named Blossom. My second was an older one we called Squeezy. Another one was a girl I picked up in the insurance office when Sammy was working there, and she was older too, and she knew I was younger, but she wanted more of me anyway and bought me two shirts for Christmas. Back then I think I made it with every girl I really wanted to. With girls, like everywhere else, even in the army, I found out that if you let people know what you want to do and seem sure of yourself about doing it, they're likely to let you. When I was still a corporal, my sergeant overseas was soon letting me do all the deciding for both of us. But I never had college girls, the kind you used to see in the movies. Before the war, nobody we knew went to college or thought about it. After the war, everybody began going. The girls I met through Sammy from his Time magazine before he was married, and after too, didn't always find me as popular as I thought they should, so I cut down on the personality with them instead of embarrassing him, and even his wife, Glenda, wasn't really as crazy about me and Claire at first as the people we were used to in Brooklyn and Orange Valley. Claire had the idea Glenda felt like a snob because she wasn't Jewish and was not from Brooklyn, but it turned out it wasn't that. When we began to get sick, first me, then her, we all got close, and even before that, when their boy, Michael, killed himself. We were the married couple they could turn to easiest and Claire was the girl she could confide in most.