Pete Hamill - Loving Women

“Whatta you want , man?”

“Hey, don’t get pissed , pal. I was trying to tell you I liked what you do. I thought maybe I could come over and talk to you about music . I wasn’t trying to ruin your day. So why don’t you go fuck yourself?”

I started to leave. He grabbed my arm. I turned, ready to slip a punch. Those green eyes narrowed, then he released his grip.

“Thanks,” he said. And walked away.

Lonesome. Adj . 1 Depressed or sad because of the lack of friends, companionship, etc.; lonely; to feel lonesome. 2 Attended with or causing such a state of feeling. 3 Lonely in situation; remote, desolate, or isolated; a lonesome road.

One thing that separates me from most of the other guys here is music. They grew up with Hank Williams and I didn’t. As simple as that. And music is one of the ways I think we figure out time. Not with watches and calendars. With music. Music is time. They talk about 4/4 time and three-quarter time (a waltz). But also music freezes the time in the world, puts a given period of time into your head so you can’t ever get it out. So I remember the war whenever I hear the big bands. And it works the other way around too: I think of a year, and I remember the songs. If you say “1950” to me, I hear the Andrews Sisters singing “I Can Dream, Can’t I?” Or junk by Theresa Brewer, Eileen Barton, and Phil Harris. While guys were getting killed in Korea that summer, we were standing on corners trying to sound like Frankie Laine singing “Mule Train” and “That Lucky Old Sun.” I sometimes wonder what they were singing in Korea .

I hear the music, and I think of myself in the kitchen trying to draw and the young kids yelling and how much we all missed my mother that first summer after she died. The junk is stuck in my head. Patti Page. The Weavers. Joni James. Mario Lanza. The Four Aces. Les Paul and Mary Ford, Nat Cole and Rosemary Clooney. All lies with music, and I’m carrying them around. In the fall of ’51, Tony Bennett showed up with “Because of You.” We heard it everywhere — in all the bars, at parties. The older guys were going to Korea then, and there were a lot of going-away parties and it was always “Because of You.” And right after that, “Cold, Cold Heart.” That’s what I shared with these guys in Pensacola. That song .

When I went to boot camp, the big song was “You Belong to Me.” Jo Stafford. All the guys knew it, guys from all over the country. We sang it in the barracks late at night. Maybe it was junk too, but I thought it was written exactly for me. So did everybody else. To me, that’s a great song, if it says what you feel. “See the ocean when it’s wet with rain …”

I sure did listen to a lot of junk (not even choosing to hear it, just being there in bars and other places when it was playing). But I also listened to Symphony Sid, Charlie Parker, Dizzy, Max, Horace Silver, Ben Webster — I know they are better musicians than the hokey mellow crap on WNEW. They seem to know they are doing something important, trying to make the music sound like something nobody ever did before. But they are never on the jukeboxes. They weren’t even on the radio in New York, except for Sid. Maybe if they were, I wouldn’t feel so bad now when I hear those other songs. Maybe I’d have all the notes of “A Night in Tunisia” (by Diz) in my head, instead of “You Belong to Me.” It didn’t work that way. And now I hear all the crap and I’m afraid I’ll never get rid of it. Because I hear those lousy songs now. All the time .

Who is Menkin? What’s a Bozart? (Listening to Miles Rayfield.)

Palatka is 46 miles away .

Steve Canyon is back home, working at some university. I like him better when he’s in the Himalayas with Princess Snowflower .

That evening I waited for Max Pilsner and Sal Infantino outside the locker club on the corner of Washington Avenue and Jefferson Davis Highway. We were going into town, and they were inside, changing into civvies. I was in dress whites, wearing the two green stripes of the lowly airman deuce. I’d have to wait until payday to buy civvies or until my father could figure out how to send me a box of clothes in the mail. The line of palms leading to the base looked stately in the fading late-afternoon light. The weeds, pines and palmettos in the fields seemed more lush. Across the highway there was a place called Billy’s, with a sign in the window offering a Happy Hour From Five to Seven Ladies Welcome . There was a flag outside at half-mast (mourning Hank Williams, I supposed) and about a dozen cars nuzzled against the front wall. The town was down the highway to the left. About a hundred yards away, back in the pine trees, I could see the white spire of a church.

I watched the traffic. A few cars. A big truck. And then I saw a woman in a yellow T-shirt and dungaree shorts pedaling a blue bicycle. Her legs were lean and cabled with muscle and I thought vaguely about drawing them. She had a baseball cap pulled tight on her head and she was wearing sunglasses.

And I realized it was her.

The woman from the bus.

Here.

In Pensacola.

I was frozen for a few seconds and then started toward the highway. A garbage truck roared past me.

“Hey!” I yelled. “Hey, miss …”

But almost as quickly as I’d seen her, she was gone. Around the bend of the highway, past the church and out of sight.

And then Max and Sal were there, Max in a tight-fitting T-shirt and starched jeans, Sal in a flowered rayon shirt, busy with palm trees and surf and beaches. I glanced at the highway again, tense and anxious but somehow feeling better. I wanted to chase after the woman in the yellow T-shirt, call a taxi, get on a bus. Too late. But at least now I knew she wasn’t in far-off Palatka. She was here. In Pensacola. Where I could find her.

“You must of gone for a pump, Max,” Sal said. He hit Max on the shoulder with the heel of his hand. “Your muscles got a hard-on.”

“Up yours, Sal.”

“Max works out,” Sal said to me, as we started across the highway, waiting for a break in traffic. I wanted to move fast, to get on a bus, to catch a glimpse of the woman, my woman. They moved too casually. “They got a gym on the base so small you can’t get three pairs of sneakers in it at the same time. Somehow Max gets in there and lifts dumbbells. When he wears a T-shirt, like tonight, he always goes for an extra pump.”

“Pump this,” Max said.

“Hey, Max, I know a girl that wants to suck your lats.”

Max growled as we hurried behind a slow truck to the far side of the highway, then said, “Hey, I’m so horny, I’d pay a dog to lick my hand.”

Sal and Max told me to stay out of Billy’s. It was the Old Salt’s bar, the headquarters for Red Cannon and his friends. We walked past the joint to a bus stop just short of the Baptist church. A painted billboard said: WHAT IS MISSING FROM JES S? U R. A smaller sign under the billboard advertised square dances every Friday night. I couldn’t remember what day it was. Thrown off by the holiday. I didn’t ask, afraid of their laughter. Devlin: So hip he doesn’t know what day it is. I looked at another sign, above a small white cross: GOD BLESS YOU HANK.

Sal pointed at the sign.

“You know what’s missing in Jesus, Max? You are.”

Max turned to me and shook his head. “It’s the water they got up in The Bronx.”