Pete Hamill - Loving Women

“You mean you can’t go to any beach in Florida?”

“I can swim with the other niggers. That’s all.”

“You won a bunch of medals. Doesn’t that matter?”

“Not a goddamned bit.” He turned his head. “See yuh.”

On the comics page, there was then a beautifully drawn sequence of Buz Sawyer’s dumb brother, Lucky, walking into a Latin American revolution. Crane at his best. One of the Latin officers looked like Mercado, and I wondered if Mercado was learning to fly helicopters to fight in some future revolution. If so, I envied him. At least a revolution would be clear, not some blurry mess like Korea. But if there were a new revolution in Mexico, which side would Mercado be on? He would have to choose. And he would probably choose the side of the people who owned Leicas. Here, we never had to choose. Or so I thought then, at seventeen, and ignorant of most things.

Then one morning, the winter was gone. The sun came closer to the earth. We didn’t need peajackets to go to the chow hall. Windows were opened all over the base. I heard Bobby Bolden playing “It Might As Well Be Spring” and started humming the words. Starry eyed … vaguely discontented … like a nightingale without a song to sing … I was picked for the Mainside run and stood in the back of the truck. Becket was driving and said we had to go to the waterfront first, to pick up a crate. We moved slowly into town through the morning traffic, heading down South Palafox to the piers.

Then, as we passed Trader Jon’s, I saw the woman.

She was walking quickly toward Garden Street, her head down, dressed in dark maroon slacks, penny loafers, and a starched white blouse. Her face was masked with sunglasses, but I knew it was her from the curly hair.

“Hey, miss !” I shouted, as we rolled by.

She looked up, but there was no expression on her face.

“Remember me?” I yelled, pointing at my chest.

She looked up for a moment as Becket drove me away from her. Then she lowered her head and hurried across the street. I waved at her, like a desperate signalman semaphoring for help. At the door of Woolworth’s she looked up again and saw me waving. She paused, waved back and then ducked into the store.

Segregate: v . 1 To separate or set apart from others or from the main body or group. 2 Isolate. 3 To require, often with force, the separation of a specific racial, religious, or other group from the general body of society; to practice, require, or enforce segregation, esp. racial segregation. Also, maintaining separate facilities for members of different, esp. racially different groups. Segregated education, segregated buses.

Is this country nuts? A guy wins all kinds of medals in Korea and he can’t swim on a beach in Florida? A white draft dodger, a white murderer on parole, the head of the Mafia, a white hooker with the syph — they can all swim on the beach, but Bobby Bolden can’t? What is this all about? How can Eisenhower and these people make all those speeches about freedom and how important it is to fight the godless Communists and then tell Bobby Bolden he can’t swim on a beach with white people? They sure didn’t teach us any of this in school. The amazing thing is that any Negro would ever fight for this country at all. And the white people that pass these laws — what are they afraid of?

The goyim are everybody else in the world who is (are?) not Jewish. I know that from the old rabbi on 14th Street in Brooklyn, that year when I was the Shabbas goy. So I’m one of the goyim and so is Charlie Parker and Eisenhower and William Holden and June Allyson. Sal is always breaking Max’s balls about the power of the goyim, but Max doesn’t seem to mind. Max is the first Jew I ever met that is my own age, but he never talks about some of the things that must drive him crazy. Like Hitler and the concentration camps. It was only eight years ago when all that happened. I mean, back home my father’s friends still sing songs about the Irish Famine, and that was in the 1840s or something. It’s hard to imagine that the thing with the Jews really happened. When I was ten years old and reading Captain America. Hard to believe that people could put other people in ovens and burn them alive or gas them. Not just a couple of people. But millions of them. Just for being a Jew. The newspapers say that six million Jews died. The weird thing is that there are people who still say things like: Hitler didn’t kill enough of them. Boy, there are some sick bastards in this world. I don’t understand how any Jew could believe in God after what happened. Any more than I can believe Bobby Bolden could pledge allegiance to the flag when he can’t sit where he wants in a bus or swim on any beach in the country or eat in any restaurant or go to any school .

I keep hearing the word gone. Over and over. My girl is gone. The guy’s wife is gone. But it isn’t just ordinary people that are gone. It’s everybody. They show up and you get to know them and then they’re gone. Roosevelt is gone. His picture was on the kitchen wall because my mother tore it out of the Daily News magazine. Then he died, and then she died, and after she died, my father took it down. I guess it reminded him of her. Or maybe he never did like Roosevelt. Anyway they’re gone. There was that Henry Wallace, who was vice president and then after the war—1948—he started his own party and ran for president against Truman and Dewey and some guy from the South, the shitkicker that started the Dixiecrats. Everybody was against Wallace. They said he was a Communist, even if he did use to be vice president of the United States, and he’s gone now, too. And so is La Guardia and Pete Reiser and DiMaggio and Dixie Walker . Gone. How does that happen? Why can’t these people just stay there? Why do things always change?

Sometimes I think about America (after looking at Life or The Saturday Evening Post) and it’s like a foreign country. I never went to any of these American things: sock hops, drive-in movies, homecoming games, pajama parties. I might as well be reading National Geographic about Brazil. I never saw a cheerleader with pompons on her ass. I never got laid in a car. I used to look at Archie comics like they were science fiction. Archie and Jughead, Betty and Veronica, with those oxford shoes and school letters on short-sleeved sweaters: Where did all those kind of people live? Not where I lived. Not even where I live now, at HTU-1 Ellyson Field .

Becket told me that the word Dixie came from New Orleans. The French word for ten was dix. And they had a ten-dollar (or franc?) bill with the word dix written on it and all those crazy men who worked on the Mississippi river would get drunk and say, “Got to get down to New Awlins and get me some of them Dixies.” I wonder if Dixie Shafer knows she’s named after money? I think it would make her happy .

Sal’s greatest ambition when he goes to town: to get screwed, blued, and tattooed .

Words for Jew: kike, yid, hebe. Hitler probably used them all .

One morning, Maher called me at the Supply Shack and told me my check had finally arrived. All these years later I remember the great bright lightness of the moment, a kind of fierce exuberance, the sense that I’d just been released from jail. Donnie Ray told me to go cash it and take the rest of the day off, since I’d suffered enough for my country. Coming back from the yeoman’s office with the money in my pocket, I ran into Sal.