Pete Hamill - Loving Women

“It’s not his shit I worry about. It’s the Navy’s shit.”

“Don’t take that either.”

He was finished eating. Then he faced me, while the music pounded.

“How come you picked me up out there in the boondocks?”

“You were standing in the rain, man.”

“So what? You in a car drove by a woman and you pick up a black man … Could get yissef killed.”

“From what I hear, you could get yourself killed any night of the week.”

He was suddenly suspicious. “Who you hear that from?”

“You know, the general gouge around the base.”

“What they say, exactly?”

“I don’t know exactly. Just Bobby Bolden got himself a white woman …”

“You mean, that nigger Bobby Bolden got a white woman,” he said, his voice hardening.

“I didn’t hear it put that way.”

“Then you ain’t hearin’ too good, boy.”

“Let’s make a deal,” I said with some heat. “You don’t call me boy and I won’t call you boy.”

He looked at me as if he were going to strike me. And then he laughed.

“You got a mouth.”

“That’s what Red Cannon says.”

“Okay, man. I hear you.”

I ’m from Naptown, up north, Indianapolis, where we got all the seasons, includin winter. I grew up shoveling snow, sleighridin, slidin on trashcan covers down hills; just like a million other kids; just like you. But I love the South, spite of all the cracker bullshit, cause it’s hot. In the summer here, it’s so hot you can’t breathe. You see snow here every forty years, they say, and that’s all right with me. I don’t even like seein pictures of snow, I don’t even like ice in a drink anymore. I see snow now, I go to bed. When the snow’s gone, I rise from the dead. And that goes back to Korea. Everything goes back to Korea .

But shit, I’m gettin ahead of myself here. You want to know who I am and I talk about snow. Maybe Korea scrambled my brains. Maybe lots of things scramble your brains, though women do the best job of all .

Anyway, back home in Naptown we dint think much about color. Up to the war, the big war, we lived pretty integrated. They was white kids on my street. I played with them, they played with me. Played in the school band with white kids too. Trumpet then. The attitude was, you got red hair, I got black skin, so what? Then it start to change. Dune the war, lots more black people start comin up from the South, to work in the war jobs. They just wasn’t any new housin being built and black folks start doublin up in the black houses and then the whites start to move away. They never did say why, although my daddy said it was simple, that it was all right when they was more of them than they was of us, but when it started bein more of us than they was of them, they decided to move on outta there. And then the shit started. Little shit. Like we got our textbooks all marked up , used textbooks, while the white schools, they got them new. We cuddin get the streets fixed, the sewers, that kind of shit. Without even knowin how it happened, we ended up in a ghetto, except for a few real old white people that cuddin move .

So I start to thinkin about going away. I was the oldest of the kids, seventeen and a senior in high school, but I had a cousin, Charlie Neal his name was. And he was messcookin in the Navy and I liked the way he looked on leave, all sharp and shit, and one night at a party, I toked to him about joinin up. This was just after the war, ’47, ’48, and I was listenin to all the players on the radio and thinkin, Hey, man, I could go to New York and try and play at Minton’s with like, Bird and Dizzy, or I could go in the Navy and get the GI Bill and really learn the instrument, learn harmony and composition, become a great fuckin musician. I had to make up my mind. Just go for it, you know, go try to play with all these monsters in the Apple, which scairt me shitless. Or really prepare myself. Only way I could afford music school was the Bill. But when I thought about the Navy, I just dint like the idea of cookin for white folks for four fuckin years. Dint wanna be no messcook, no domestic in a uniform .

But there was another problem, you know what I’m sayin to you? At this same time, I got myself some trouble. A girl I knew got herself knocked up and her father and her brothers are lookin for me, comin around the block, lookin to shoot me or make me marry her. Either way, I’m dead. You see, I just dint love the girl. I felt sorry for her but I dint think that was too good a reason to marry a woman. So after Charlie Neal left and I had some more time to think (a couple of hours to tell the truth) I went downtown and walked around the block and then toked to the guy, the recruiter, and he says, you know, the Navy is different now, it’s integrated, you dont have to be a mess cook, you could be a musician.… So I joined up .

Trouble was when I get through boot camp, they tell me all the music rates are filled up, there’s like a waitin list all the way to 1958, but if I dint want to go messcookin, hell, I could be a corps man. Workin with doctors … I figure, Hey, why not? At least I’d learn something I could use on the outside, in case the music thing dint work out. And I could practice, keep listenin to the new music, keep readin my Down Beat and Metronome, maybe play with some bands wherever I ended up. Yeah .

So I go to corpsman school. I learn the job is the same as a nurse, but hey, what the hell, it’s a start. I mean, wasn’t Dexter Gordon’s father a doctor? And Miles Davis, his old man was a dentist. Maybe there was some connection.… I work in Jacksonville. A year goes by. I see a little of Gitmo and those fine Cuban women and some great mambo bands, great horn players. And then Korea happens .

Bam .

Like that .

They assign me to the First Marines, cause they’s a shortage of Marine corpsmen, they gettin the shit shot out of them, cause wherever there’s a medic there’s shooting and bleedin and dyin. By November, I’m the only sailor with this Marine company and we’re climbin through the snow and ice in X Corps. Up by the Chosin Reservoir. All of us freezin, strung out over forty fuckin miles. We couldn’t dig foxholes cause the ground was like iron. It was seventeen below zero in a place called Kato. And it got colder as we kept going, heading for the fuckin Yalu, heading for fuckin China for all we knew. I remember we come into a town called Yudan that the artillery wrecked, just blew the piss out of it. They was an old lady sitting there, cryin. Cryin and freezin and singing something in Korean, a gook blues, I reckon. And they was nothin we could do. We cuddin bring her with us, not where we were goin, and she cuddin go back. They was no back. So we just left her to die .

To fuckin die .

Alone in the cold .

We were wearin so much shit — long johns, hoods, parkas — that we’d sweat like hell, and when we stopped walkin the sweat froze. A few guys took they socks off and tore the skin away with them. In that cold, feet froze to boots. In that cold, if you touched the M-1 with your bare hands, the skin come off. Even the BARs froze. Some guys pissed on their guns to make them work and other guys started greasin them with Wildroot Cream Oil. Or Kreml. That fuckin Kreml was the best, all white and pearly and thick .

The night of the Big Cold, we’re in the dark on Hill 403 when we start hearin the voices, short quick voices, know what I mean? Not Korean voices, we knew them by now. Chinese voices. And somebody says, they can’t be Chinese, the Chinese ain’t in this thing and we ain’t in fuckin China. But a little after ten, they come at us. The Chinese. They lay down a mortar barrage and start blowing their fuckin bugles, all flat and out of tune, just blowing like crazy, and they was waves of them, all lumpy like, in their white clothes, comin through the fuckin snow. Comin over the ice. Comin at us .