Pete Hamill - Loving Women

I was layin there when I saw the plane. Not too high. Maybe three, four thousand feet. Everybody else seen it too. And we start shoutin and yellin and beating on the oily ocean. But the plane just kept on goin. It never came back. And I thought: The SOS never left the ship. And I was scared. Never said a word to the others, never said that if the message got off, there’d be a dozen planes here, circlin in the sky. Never mentioned any of that. But knew it .

The day was scaldin. I sealed my mouth, afraid of the sea water. Held it so tight my muscles hurt. The sharks must of been full. They didn’t come back either. We all lolled there in the water, just taking it. That night, we heard another plane. Then I saw star flares fired from somewhere on the ocean. That was the first time I knew for sure that there were others out there. And if they had flares they had Very pistols and if they had Very pistols then somebody had found a raft. The pistols were part of the gear on every raft. And I thought, the planes had to see that. Durin the day, maybe the ocean was like some big mirror if you looked at it from the sky. But at night, the flares meant that people were down here. They couldn’t miss us. Now they’d come for us. I bobbed in the sea and heard someone start to sing .

Pardon me boy

Is this the Chattanooga choo-choo …

And someone else said, Track Twenty nine, and another, Well, can you give me a shine. They were happy. They’d seen the flare and heard the plane and they were sure now we’d be found. In the morning. As soon as it got light .

But the plane didn’t come back in the mornin, or the mornin after that. And then people started going crazy. They must have been drinkin the sea water. Or if they wunt, the sea water was gettin into their mouths anyway and down their throats .

The craziness came in waves. Some ensign said that there was an island only a mile away, with palm trees and freshwater streams and beautiful girls like Dorothy Lamour. He got a dozen guys to follow him and they all started swimmin away and we never saw them again. Another guy said that he could see the Indianapolis right below us, about thirty feet down, and there was fresh water down there, hundreds of gallons of it, and Betty Grable was on the deck and everything was beautiful. I told him that the bottom was 10,000 feet down. He said You’re crazy, man, said, Look, said, There it is, the ship! He stripped off the life jacket and started swimmin down and three other guys did the same and that was the end of them too .

A lot of guys started fightin each other, they’d be punchin and thrashin around and beatin at the ocean and each other and then this brown shit would start burblin up from their mouths, and they’d be dead. Some guys had knives. They used them to keep the food for themselves. They used them to get fresh life jackets. They threatened officers with them. There was no discipline, no rules, no Navy regs, no feeling of being in this thing together. It was every man for himself, for four fucking days and nights. You think human beings are decent? You think human beings love their neighbors? Go out in the ocean with them sometime. Eight hundred guys went in the water when the Indianapolis went down. At the end, only three hundred were left .

It went on and on. I ate the orange but was afraid of the salt water on the potato and threw it away. By the second night, the kapok lifejackets were gettin waterlogged. We were ridin lower and lower in the sea. I started playin mind games, trying not to go crazy, tryin to stay alive. What time was it? Yesterday today was tomorrow. Right this minute was yesterday’s future. Night will become dawn. But when does dawn become morning and what makes afternoon different from morning and when does it happen and why are we all here in this fuckin ocean which has no beginning and no end except when the fuckin sharks come to get us? I thought like that .

Finally I thought if I didn’t want anything then it wouldn’t matter if I died. So I said to myself over and over, I don’t want anything, I don’t care for anything, I don’t love anything or anyone or anyplace. I’m nothin. I’m just here on the ocean. A speck. Bein alive, that was nothin. Dead, I’m nothin .

And that way I was able to live .

We saw more planes high in the sky and they never came back and that was nothin. We saw a squall in the distance comin across the ocean and we thought we’d have fresh water in our mouths and then the squall turned and the rain went away to the west without coming near us and that was nothin. I saw guys keel over and die and that was nothin. I saw a guy with a knife cut another guy’s throat for his life jacket and that was nothin. Prayin was nothin and day was nothin and singin was nothin and night was nothin .

And then on Thursday, a PV–I flew over and circled and circled and finally landed on the water, bouncin, skiddin, hittin the tops of waves and settlin .

We were saved .

And even that was nothin .

I couldn’t cheer. Only my nose was above water. I couldn’t get excited .

I was saved .

I was alive .

Nothin .

Only later, after we were picked up and taken to a can named the Doyle, only then did I want to live. They took us to Peleliu and the hospital. I drank too much water and puked and ate too much food and puked. I slept for eighteen hours. And when I woke up I knew that if I stayed in this man’s Navy, I wouldn’t ever again be in a place where green snotnosed kids panicked and died and got other people dead .

You think I’m a shit, don’t you, Devlin?

Maybe I am .

Maybe I’ll always be a shit .

But I wunt born a shit. Maybe I left somethin out there in that fuckin ocean. Maybe I’ll never find it again. I know I sure ain’t gonna find it on land. Hey, git your ass up off the sand, sailor. We gotta git back to the base .

It was gray and chilly when we got back to the base. Sunday morning on the Gulf. The sky empty. Red Cannon left me without a word, as if he had no words left, or was vaguely ashamed that he had used words at all. My uniform was filthy. My body hurt. I showered for a long time. My mind was as blank as the sky.

Then, clean again and most of the aching gone, I climbed into the sack. Longing for sleep. I shoved my hand under the pillow and found the letter.

Dear Michael,

By the time you read this, I’ll be dead. They’ve taken everything away from me at last. My work — my pride — my need for love. There’ll be a court martial and they’ll say all sorts of filthy things about me and make filthy jokes in the corridors and write filthy things into my record. And all of that will follow me everywhere. Well, I don’t want any of that. I don’t want the shame or the tears or the cheap laughs. I want out of Anus Mundi. Forever.

All my life I had to hide what I was. When I was young, it didn’t matter. Nobody cared. But when I was twelve or thirteen, I started to think I was a woman in a man’s body. It wasn’t a sudden thing. I just looked at boys instead of girls. I wanted to dress in women’s clothes. I had urges — desires — they weren’t what boys were supposed to feel — weren’t what I saw in the movies — weren’t what I heard on the radio. I can’t explain it all. I die, not understanding it all.

But once when I was in art school I loved a boy and he loved me and I understood for the first time how hard my life was going to be. You see, we couldn’t ever do what other people did. Not in Atlanta. Not in the South. Maybe not anywhere. We couldn’t walk down the corridors at school, holding hands. We couldn’t kiss each other in the balcony at the movies. I couldn’t sit in the living room with him at his parents’ house, necking, while they slept upstairs. We had to hide and sneak around. Until there was a big school party out at a lake and we all got a little drunk and one of the advertising people — a designer — a real shithead — found us in the woods. Maybe that’s why I joined the Navy. To get away from that boy — to get away from the shame and the talk — to get away from Atlanta. But I loved that boy. He was my wife. That bitch. And it’s been a long long time since he loved me. Or since anybody loved me.