Pete Hamill - Loving Women

And here was Boswell arriving, bouncing off the shuffleboard, hearing “Jambalaya,” and bursting into tears. While Waleski turned to me, saying he liked the way New York looked in the movies and he liked New Yorkers, but Chicago was the real place, the great place, the best city. Hey, New York couldn’t have anything like Pulaski Boulevard on the Near West Side or a bridge named after Kosciusko (and I said, Hey, no, man, we got a Kosciusko Bridge too, and Waleski said, No shit ?) and anyway, you couldn’t drive at night from New York to Calumet City, the way you could from Chicago, to see the guy named The Human Prick (“What’s that?” said Dixie), a guy they dressed up in a prick costume, who would then proceed to eat himself on the stage (“Did he look like Red Cannon?” I said) and in New York there wasn’t no place like Madison Street in Calumet, either. Five Bucks A Fuck. Black and White All Night (“You mean you fucked a colored girl?” I said, walking into it, and Waleski said, “I thought I fucked a colored girl until I saw a colored guy fuck a colored girl”) and slower now, staring at the beer, he told me how hard it was that year before he joined the Navy, getting up in the dark to drive to work at Inland Steel in Gary and his girl Sherry ragging his ass at night ’cause he could never get the black stuff out of his fingernails and so she would never let him play with her glory hole, and then I said: Where is this Sherry now? And Waleski said, as we all said, every last one of us: Gone .

We’d gone off first, of course. That was the worst thing. All of us knew it. We signed up for the messes we made of our lives. We went off to join the Navy because they needed us in Korea, or because we didn’t want to go in the infantry, or because our brothers were in the Navy in the last war, or because we heard Kate Smith sing “God Bless America” or we saw a movie called The Fighting Sullivans when we were kids, or They Were Expendable . Maybe we wanted a uniform. Maybe we just wanted to prove we were men. Whatever it was, we went, and the girls watched our backs, and they said to themselves, as we said later (watching their backs): Gone . There were going-away parties. There were feverish good-byes. Some of the guys got engaged to the girls. Some even got married, standing with the new wives while the photographers took their pictures in downtown studios, the guys in their rented tuxes, the girls in white gowns, the rented cars double-parked outside. They carried those pictures in their wallets and their sea bags, took them to boot camp, and to the training schools in Memphis and Jacksonville and Norman, Oklahoma, took them across oceans, looking at the pictures and trying to remember the feel of flesh, the sound of their woman’s laugh. And learned too late that all the girls were gone. They’d found other guys who were always around on a Saturday night, flesh-and-blood men of bone and cock, not addresses on envelopes; young men who could dance with them and drink with them and lie with them.

That’s what I heard in the smoke and noise and broken pieces of the night, in those murmured stories held together by the voice of a poor dead lonesome hillbilly singer. And I felt for the first time since leaving home that I was not alone. That I’d never been alone. That I too was part of this huge secret society of loss, and here in Dixie’s Dirt Bar I was attending a meeting of the Pensacola chapter.

Around ten, as they did every night, the whores arrived. “Look at em, God’s truest angels,” Sal said. Max shook his head and whispered about the clap, but Sal just laughed and grabbed a skinny girl and danced with her to “Cold, Cold Heart.” The other guys grabbed for female arms and waists and asses, and the girls were all weepy over Hank and buried their heads on Navy shoulders and some of them kicked off their shoes to feel the damp dirt of the Dirt Bar’s floor. “Go ahead, honey,” Dixie said, and I danced with a skinny gap-toothed girl from the bayous of what she called Luziana, washed up here in Pensacola four years before while trying to get to Miami. She called me “mate” and said she sure felt bad for Hank and asked me if I wanted to go out to the van and I said I was broke and she said it was only four dollars and I said maybe next time, and she said, Well, okay sailor, fair enough and when the tune ended, she went to Max and took him to the dance floor and after awhile they went outside.

Soon it was all sailors and whores, dancing on the hard-packed red dirt. There was a tattooed girl and a toothless girl and some rough girls with coarse skin and hillbilly accents. They called us “mate” or “sailor,” and I thought that must have been part of what they did. They couldn’t possibly remember the names of all the guys they fucked, so they called us mate or sailor or sport. Maybe they didn’t want to remember. I danced with some of them, but mostly I watched, trying to sort out the faces, thinking that I would like to draw them, that maybe I could make them more beautiful than they were and that would make them happy. For they were not happy, not one of them. And I realized then that I was at a wake. The corpse had been found in a Cadillac in West Virginia, but they were mourning other things: people forgotten and lost, lovers gone, broken promises, the past. Still, no matter what its object, it was a proper wake, like any other back home. And when the whores laughed when Sal yelled or grabbed their asses they were just doing that night what the Irish always did on other nights in Brooklyn. They’d even done it when my mother died. They started out weeping and mournful. Then got formal. And then drunk and singing the old songs. It was what the Irish had instead of the blues.

By midnight the place was a steady thumping roar, Hank Williams and beer and some white lightnin that Boswell brought in from outside, and then the door burst open and two jolly fat girls came waddling in, bellowing “yee-HAW” at the crowd. Sal yelled “Tons of Fun!” And went running at them, yelling “Hee-Fuckin-HAW!” And leaped, as the women, whose names were Betty and Freddie, made a cat’s cradle with their hands and caught him in the air, like a turn in a circus, like something they’d rehearsed. They began rubbing their breasts in Sal’s face, and Freddie grabbed his crotch and massaged it, while Sal screamed in mock panic: “Get me a priest! Get me a fuckin priest !”

I looked at Dixie and she shook her head at me. No . A sign. A message. No . Did they have the clap? No . And then Freddie and Betty let go of Sal and he fell to the dirt floor with his feet straight up in the air like the last panel in Mutt and Jeff and the whole bar cheered and more beers came slamming down on the bar and Sal grabbed my arm and said, “Come and meet my Fee-ahn-says … ”

… And the girls were beside us at the bar, rubbing, pressing, Boswell sticking a tongue in Betty’s ear, Sal faking exhaustion, Maher paralyzed. And Freddie swore that she once sucked Hank’s dick and Betty said that was the truth and Freddie said that Hank had a tiny little dick and was built like a weed and Betty said, No lie, and Freddie said that when she heard the news she wished it had been her instead of Hank Williams and how bad he musta felt all his life about that itty-bitty pecker and how he never did get to use it all that much, what with the drinkin and everything. She poured some cold Jax down her throat without ever touching the bottle to her lips, which made Sal holler in delight. While Betty played with me. And Dixie Shafer shook her head again, No, saying with her look, Don’t dare, saying, Absolutely not. Saying No .

Until they all were gone, sailors and whores, Sal leaving with Betty and Freddie, shouting “Hank would want it this way!” And the others paired off or left alone, while the floor rolled under me like an ocean swell and the walls advanced and receded and the jukebox went silent at last. Dixie Shafer looked at me across the bar and then glanced at the corridor leading to the back room. There were no lights down there. She took off the harlequin glasses and slid them between her breasts, then reached across the bar and took my hand in hers.