Vernon regularly thanked God for keeping up His part of the bargain and he dedicated himself to being the finest officer in the U.S. Navy. All of his fitness reports praised his dependability and thoroughness. His commanding officers openly told him that he was admiral material. Until Libya. Or more specifically, until he returned home after the Libyan action. For the entire world changed for Vernon Allen Winters during the few weeks after the American attack against Gaddafi.
7
Carol and Troy were sitting in deck chairs at the front of the Florida Queen. They were facing forward in the boat, toward the ocean and the warm afternoon sun. Carol had removed her purple blouse to reveal the top of a one-piece blue bathing suit, but she was still wearing her white cotton slacks. Troy was shirtless in a white surfing outfit that came quite a way down his beautiful black legs. His body was lean and sinewy, clearly fit but not overly muscled. They were talking casually and animatedly, laughing often in an easy way. Behind them underneath the canopy, Nick Williams was reading A Fan’s Notes by Fred Exley. Every now and then he would look up at the other two for a few moments and then return to his book.
“So why didn’t you ever go to college?” Carol was asking Troy. “You clearly had the ability. You would have made a fantastic engineer.”
Troy stood up, took off his sunglasses, and walked to the railing. “My brother, Jamie, said the same thing,” he said slowly, staring out at the quiet ocean. “But I was just too wild. When I finally did graduate from high school, I was hungry to know what the world was like. So I took off. I wandered all over the U.S. and Canada for a couple of years.”
“Was that when you learned about electronics?” Carol asked. She checked her watch to see what time it was.
“That was later, much later,” said Troy, remembering. “Those two years of wandering I didn’t learn anything except how to survive on my wits. Plus what it was like to be a black boy in a white man’s world.” He looked at Carol. There was no noticeable reaction.
“I must have had a hundred different jobs,” he continued, looking back at the ocean, “I was a cook, a copyboy, a bartender, a construction worker. I even taught swimming lessons in a private club. I was a bellman in a resort hotel, a greenskeeper for a country club…” Troy laughed and turned again to see if Carol was paying attention. “But I guess you’re not interested in all this…”
“Sure I am,” Carol said, “it’s fascinating to me. I’m trying to imagine what you looked like in a hotel uniform. And if Chief Nick is right, we still have another ten minutes to pass until we reach where we’re going.” She dropped her voice. “At least you talk. The professor is not exactly social.”
“Being a black bellhop at a southern Mississippi resort hotel was an amazing learning experience,” Troy began, a smile spreading across his face. Troy loved to tell stories about his life. It always placed him center stage. “Imagine, angel, I’m eighteen years old and I luck into a job at the grand old Gulfport Inn, right on the beach. Room and board plus tips. I’m on top of the world. At least until the chief bellman, an impossible little man named Fish, takes me out to the barracks where all the bellhops and kitchen staff live and introduces me to everybody as the ‘new nigger bellhop.’ From bits of discussion I can tell that the hotel is in some kind of trouble because of possible racial discrimination and hiring me is part of their response.
“My room in the barracks was right behind the twelfth green on the golf course. A small bunk bed, a dresser built into the wall, a desk or table with a portable lamp, a sink to brush my teeth and wash my face—that’s where I lived for six weeks. Down at the other end of the building was the great community bathroom that everyone left whenever I showed up.
“In my high school in Miami virtually the entire student body was Cuban or black or both. So I knew almost nothing about white people. From books and television I had this fantasy image of whites as handsome, competent, educated, and rich. Ha. My fantasy quickly vanished. You would not have believed the crew that worked in that hotel. The head bellman Fish smoked dope every night with his sixteen-year-old son Danny and dreamed of the day he would find a million dollars left in somebody’s room. His only other goal in life was to continue screwing the chef’s wife, Marie, in the supply closet every morning until he died.
“One of the other bellmen was a poor, lonely soul whose real name was Saint John because his brilliant parents thought that ‘Saint’ was a given name. He had only six teeth, wore thick glasses, and had a giant tumor underneath his left eye. Saint John knew that he was ugly and he worried all the time about losing his job because of his personal appearance. So Fish exploited him unmercifully by giving him all the shittiest assignments and forcing him to pay kickbacks with a portion of his tips. The other bellmen also ridiculed Saint John at every opportunity and made him the butt of their practical jokes.
“One night I was sitting quietly in my room reading a book when there was a soft knock on the door. When I answered it, Saint John was standing there. He looked confused and distracted. He was holding a small game box in one hand and a six-pack of beer in the other. I waited a few moments and then asked him what he wanted. He looked nervously in both directions and then asked me if I knew how to play chess. When I told him yes and added that I would enjoy a game, Saint John grinned from ear to ear and mumbled something about being glad that he had taken a chance. I invited him in and we played and talked and drank beer for almost two hours. He was one of nine children from a poor, rural Mississippi family. While we were playing, Saint John casually let slip that he had been a little reluctant to ask me to play because Fish and Miller had told him that niggers were too dumb to play chess.
Saint John and I became friends, at least sort of, for the few more weeks that I stayed there. We were united by the deepest of bonds, we were both outsiders in that strange social structure created by the employees of the Gulfport Inn. It was from Saint John that I learned about the many misconceptions that Southern whites have about blacks.” Troy laughed. “You know, one night Saint John actually followed me to the bath-room to verify with his own eyes that I was not significantly larger than he was.”
Troy returned to his deck chair and looked at Carol. She was smiling. It was hard not to enjoy Troy’s stories. He told them with such enthusiasm and self-involved charm. Under the canopy Nick also had put his book aside and was listening to the conversation.
“Then there was this giant Farrell, early twenties, who looked like Elvis Presley. He supplied liquor to the guests at cut rates, operated an escort service on call, and took excess hotel goods to sell at his sister’s market. He rented part of my room to store some of the liquor. What a character. After big convention breakfasts Farrell would pour the leftover orange juice in the pitchers into bottles and keep it for resale. One morning the hotel manager found a case of the juice temporarily sitting in a room off the lobby and demanded to know what was going on. Farrell grabbed me and took me out front. He told me that he wanted to make a deal. If I would acknowledge that I had taken the juice, Farrell would pay me twenty dollars. He explained that if I confessed, nothing would happen to me, because niggers were expected to steal. But if he Farrell were caught, he would lose his job…”