It was like being arrested.
He did his basic training at a camp in western Massachusetts. There he experienced the total collapse of civilization. To Dick the army made sense only if one considered the ultimate objectives of the war, but he waited in vain for his superiors to remind him of the Fascists or to outline the goals which he himself had so passionately endorsed in his own pleas to his listeners to buy bonds and save paper and conserve water.
He had brought his portable radio with him and it became his habit, now that he was in it himself, to listen to all the war news, taking particular comfort from Edward R. Murrow’s bravely resonant “This is London.”
One evening he had just settled back on his bunk to listen when Private Rohnspeece picked up the radio from the window sill.
“Hey, what do you think you’re doing?”
“I’m breaking your faggot radio,” Private Rohnspeece said, and threw it out the window.
“What’s wrong with you?” He grabbed Rohnspeece’s sleeve, but his comrade-in-arms pulled a switchblade knife out of his pocket and an enormous blade clicked brightly into position. Then the man calmly cut a piece out of Dick Gibson’s hand. Dick screamed and a sergeant came running into the barracks.
“Who the hell’s making that goddamn noise?” the sergeant demanded. Dick sucked blood, swallowing it back as fast as it came out of his wound, thinking in this way to preserve his life’s precious juices. (At that instant it somehow seemed related to the war effort, like turning off lights and saving tinfoil.) Between mouthfuls he continued to scream, and again the sergeant, apparently myopic, demanded to know who was making the noise.
Rohnspeece pointed to Dick Gibson. “He is,” Rohnspeece said.
“He cut me,” Dick said.
The sergeant looked without enthusiasm at Dick’s hand. It was as if he had been auditioning bloody hands all day and this was just one more in a pretty thin lot. “You’ll bleed worse than that once Jerry sticks his bayonet in your gut,” he said, but Gibson was scarcely relieved that someone in authority had at last mentioned Hitler’s forces.
Afterward he went outside to see if he could salvage his radio, but it was gone. He did not see it again for two days, when it suddenly turned up on top of Private Fedge’s locker.
“Where did you get that radio, Fedge?” Gibson asked.
“I found it.”
“It’s mine.”
“You saying I stole it, cocksucker?” Fedge reached for the M-l he had just finished cleaning.
“That’s not loaded.”
“The fuck it ain’t,” Fedge said.
“Are you going to listen to Charley McCarthy tonight?” Dick asked without hope.
“What’s Charley McCarthy?”
“Fedge, you asshole, Charley McCarthy’s the orphan. He lives with Mr. Bergen,” Private Laverne said.
“Eat my dick, Laverne.”
“Whip it out and I will,” Laverne said.
Fedge whipped it out and Laverne ate Fedge’s dick. While Fedge’s eyes were still closed Dick Gibson seized the opportunity to lift his radio off the top of Fedge’s locker and take it back to his bunk. Something had happened to it when Rohnspeece had thrown it out the window, and to hear it at all, Dick had to stick his right foot in his locker and let the radio rest on his neck, steadying it with his hand. He felt this made him look rather like the woman of Samaria toting her water jug back from the well, but he hoped no one would notice. There was a good chance no one would since a crowd had gathered to watch Private Laverne eat Private Fedge’s privates.
But Corporal Tuleremia came up to him.
“Who are you supposed to be?”
“Shh,” Dick Gibson said. “They just introduced W. C. Fields. He’s the guest star.”
Tuleremia smashed Dick Gibson in the stomach. “I’ll show you stars, you pansy.”
Dick decided he would have to listen in the dayroom from then on. There, with the radio page from the Sunday paper spread out before him, he carefully logged an entire week’s programs, checking them off with a pencil and starring those he was particularly interested in. On Monday he was listening to Lux Presents Hollywood, with Ginger Rogers as Kitty Foyle, when Blitz came into the dayroom. Blitz turned off the lights, walked over to the big console radio, fiddled with the dial and tuned in a yodeler. Then they listened to polkas for an hour in the dark.
Dick turned amiably to Blitz. “Why don’t we share?” he suggested.
“We can share your balls,” Blitz said neutrally.
We’re going to win this war, Dick Gibson thought. We’re going to whip the Axis powers, the cunning Japs and vicious Nazis, and then we’re going to conquer the world.
He had never known such men existed. For all the imagination that had enabled him to flesh out full-fledged accounts of ballgames from the flimsy data that came in over the wire, he could not have imagined men like Laspooney and Null. These two would wait until the men were seated on the boothless toilets and then come into the john, running amok, goosing and grab-assing.
“Hey, Null,” Laspooney would shout.
“What is it, Laspooney?” Null called back.
“Don’t you just love these horseshoe toilet seats? A man can just shove his hand down the opening and grab,” he’d say, shoving his hand down the opening and grabbing.
“Yeah, Laspooney,” Null answered, “there’s no place to hide.”
Dick thought it odd that the army would take homosexuals, but as it turned out they weren’t homosexuals; indeed, off post, they beat up homosexuals. They just thought that grabbing people’s cocks was a good joke, almost as good as farting. Laspooney could fart a strong unbroken string for twelve minutes. They were real stinkers too. The men just fanned the air in front of their noses and laughed. Only Private Rohnspeece did not fan the air. “I don’t know what’s wrong with you guys,” he’d say, “I like the way it smells.”
Late one night when Dick went into the crapper to polish his brass, Null was seated on the toilet. Though he was in the act of squeezing out a turd, Null grinned and waved. “Hey,” he called out. “Listen to this. Look. Look here.” He pointed toward the opening in the toilet seat, grunted and there was a splash. “Well, don’t you get it?” Null asked.
Gibson shook his head.
Null grinned and squeezed out a big one. “Now do you get it?”
“Get what?” Dick asked.
Null did it again. “There. That. Don’t you get it?”
“I don’t get it.”
“Null voids, you jerk,” Null said, exploding in laughter.
Dick Gibson looked at him.
Still smiling, Null got up off the pot. It was outside the range of possibility that he might flush the toilet, but he didn’t even wipe himself. He came over and wrapped his arm about Dick’s shoulder. “You know what’s wrong with you, soldier?” Null said. “You don’t get no fun out of life. Tomorrow me, you and Laspooney’ll go out for a night on the town. We’ll do things up brown.”
Dick gagged. “Will we have to beat up queers and roll drunks?” he asked weakly.
“Nah. Live and let live.”
Dick was terrified, but he went with them. Null kept his promise and they didn’t beat up any queers or roll any drunks. They found a willing high school girl named Sheila and took her to a motor lodge and gang-banged her, Dick holding back when it was his turn and he was alone with the girl. “It’s nothing against you personally, Sheila, but I’m married and anyway I have too much respect for you.” He did not tell her that it was the smell of Null’s underwear, which seemed to be everywhere in the room, that inhibited him. “Could you kind of moan a little for their benefit, Sheila? They think I’m a grind and don’t get much fun out of life.”