Once The War and the Navy finished with me, after a couple weeks of scraping by in Chicago, I put in for a job as doorman, and after a queer little talk, the owner asked me if I was in the service. When I said I’d been in the Navy, his rodent eyes lit up.

“You mean you were a sailor?”

“Yes, sir,” I said. I’d enlisted under false pretenses to escape the boredom of Southern Indiana at fifteen—had just turned eighteen between VE-Day and my honorable discharge.

“Not a Marine?” he asked. Some guys think Marines are tougher or something, or that sailors are sissies.

“Oh no, sir. Not a Marine.” I was sirring him all over the place, like the Admiral himself. I was worried he wouldn’t want me if I hadn’t been a Marine, but he gave me the job and I started a couple of nights later. The next few weeks went by pretty quickly and uneventfully; in fact, the nights dragged as bad as the days and nights on sea patrol.

One night, as I stood hot as hell in the long dark green coat and cap in the hotel lobby, watching the black doorman, Jonesy, push the flaps of the revolving door round and round like it was his personal carousel, the other lazy bastard—a pasty, thin-lipped sniveler named Veems—tried to tell me how the bucks were made. I didn’t think there was any such thing as a male whore, and I said so.

“Why do you think a joint like this puts three doormen on duty?” asked Veems. Like my old sea buddy on the USS Invictus, Sterns, he seemed to have an angle. But Sterns’d been a hard worker, some times I could’ve sworn the Navy itself knit him from steel cables; instead, Veems was a limp bastard, and awfully damn shiftless. He slouched on a leather bench, leaning back sloppily against the wall so that it pushed the bill of his cap over his eyes. Despite it being August, we had to be in full uniform—including the overcoat with its half cape in the back—at all times. I can’t tell you how still you’ve got to be to keep from soaking your shirt. Veems barely moved his pale lips to sneer in my direction: “There ain’t that many old Jewesses coming in, wanting their bags dragged to hell and back.”

Though us doormen doubled as bellhops and bouncers, I had to admit I was pretty bored. At least one of us could have been sent home. I’d been standing in front of the elevators, trying to look snappy, just like general quarters on ship, but wilting under the stonedead traffic. With Jonesy at the front door, Veems on the north wall, and the owner shuffling papers behind the southhand desk, we formed a kind of diamond. The only other life in the lobby was some sun-starved rubber trees flanking the little benches where Veems sat. Jonesy had been slapping the door around and around for a half-hour straight, and wasn’t showing any sign of stopping soon.

“But there aren’t that many ladies coming in anyway,” I said, thinking on the topic of male whores. In Union, Indiana, men pronounced the word whore with a kind of who sound, dragging the o a little bit when they called after my mother who laughed hot and left them blistering. Whoore.

The owner—also the night manager, the short, apish squeak who’d hired me—usually engrossed in his books, looked up at me. I say “books” because there were two of them, one covered in red and the other black, and he ciphered in them faithfully every night. His eyes darted over to Veems, waiting to hear how he’d answer, but he himself never said a word or turned his black-stringy balding head back to see how I was taking it.

“No, not many ladies.” Veems raised a showman’s arm toward the elevators, whose gates had these classy, dull brass peacocks on them, and said, with a little razzmatazz, “But plenty of queens!”

Jonesy just kept smacking that door around. That fwup…fwup…fwup sound was as monotonous as three months at sea. I narrowed my eyes and pushed my jaw forward, wanting to punch him (though it was partially meant for Veems), and his eyes met mine, flat and uncaring, as if my worst couldn’t touch him. The biceps of his left arm—the one he used to push the door around—strained the fabric of his green overcoat. His other arm didn’t even stress the sleeve when he bent a hand up to lift his cap and wipe away the beads of sweat on his forehead. He reminded me of those fiddler crabs I’d seen once at the Shedd Aquarium.

When Veems said “queens,” I thought of that old fruit, John Thomas, and how he’d been so kind to me—at great expense, taking a strange sailor into his home those three nights—and how happy he’d been that I’d merely shown him common courtesy. I felt like defending an old auntie’s honor, what with the way Veems said it and all. I decided he wasn’t worth the hot and humid effort.

Still, honeymooning with a bunch of flits didn’t appeal to me, even if it meant a little cash.

Now and again, a call would come from one of the rooms, lighting up a little bulb on the switchboard panel at the elevator end, behind the desk. Usually Veems went, only to return fifteen or twenty minutes later with the buttons of his coat still undone. Occasionally, the boss would point at Jonesy, belt out a room number, and Jonesy would strut wordlessly to the elevator—in no big hurry, I might add—and go on up, leaving the lobby strangely and painfully still. When these fellows returned, it was with the cockiness of having gotten a handsome tip for nothing at all.

One night, the owner pointed at me and said, “Noise complaint about 212.”

Veems gloated, “You’ll get a fiver for that one.” Probably meaning five knuckles in the face. For some reason, the owner didn’t care about Veems’ shiftlessness. He rewarded the bastard for sitting on his keister all night by sending me on the shitty, slim-to-nothing tip jobs.

On the second floor, there was an awful racket you could hear all the way from the elevators. I strolled to the source and, sure enough, I landed at the door marked 212. From within came the pling, pling, pling of a ukulele and then a shrill woman’s voice singing in an operatic screech:

“Who’s that knocking at my door? Who’s that knocking at my door?
Who’s that knocking at my door, said the fair young mai-ai-aiden.”

When I knocked, it stopped abruptly and a man said, “Come on in.” Then the caterwauling started up again, this time with a man’s deep baritone:

“Why, it’s only me, I’m back from the sea. I’m Barnacle Bill the sai-ailor.
I’m back from the sea come marry me. I’m Barnacle Bill the sailor.”

When I opened the door, there was an awful sight of a drag queen—worse than any mop-wigged Carmen Miranda I saw on ship. He stood right square with the door, in the center of the room in a lemon-colored silk gown and white heels with a platinum blonde wig on top, making no attempt to hide his bushy mustache and jet black eyebrows. Between him and me, there was a flimsy metal music stand with two or three different sets of sheet music laying at its feet, and I felt that the sheet music had nothing whatever to do with his singing. The dark woodwork around the top and bottom of the walls only served to make the room look tinier than it actually was. His yellow meringue vibrated against the mint green walls, and the sight of him obliterated the solid confines of the room.

He curtsied and nodded at the ukulele player sitting on the foot of the bed. This white-shirted fellow, who’d raised his head during the intermission, now cramped back over his instrument. They started from the top, with the burly queen singing both parts.

A voice startled me. “What can we do for you, friend?” It came from a man sitting in a chair to my extreme right, beyond the open edge of the door, between the bed and the wall. He looked like he’d had a drink or two, like he’d smoked an extra couple cigarettes or something, and his smile made me want to deck him right off. Insolent jackass is what he was, sitting up with his head forward—like a clerk bent too long over his books. His tie was loose and his sleeves had been rolled to the elbow.

I glared at the singer and said, “Keep it down, why don’t ya? Other people are trying to sleep.”

They stopped their recital and looked at me as if I was the one out of place. The bent devil in the chair twisted the cap on his pint, then tossed it so that I had to catch it.

He waved a hand as if shooing a fairy into the sky, and said, “Have a swig, have a swig. Don’t be so uptight, friend.”

If he called me friend again, I planned to hit him.

He brought his hand down on his lap with a smacking sound. That was when I spied the anchor tattoo on his forearm.

“Navy?” I asked, feeling suddenly magnanimous as I unscrewed the pint cap, pointing the bottom of the bottle at his blue-inked flesh before taking an icy-hot swill. Gin. Awful, ghastly stuff. Perfect compliment to the mint green walls. After it went down, I pushed air through my teeth.

“Yeah, want to make something of that, too?” He pulled himself up to a slightly better posture—not much—propped up on his elbows.

“Nah,” I told him, passing the bottle back. “I was on the USS Invictus.”

He pushed out his lower lip before finally taking the bottle. “Never heard of it. Which ocean?”

“Atlantic.” I don’t know why but it always sounded colder and crueler than the Pacific. I never sailed in the west, but the name of the Pacific gave me over to visions of a hammock between two palm trees. The Atlantic’s reminded me of how icy-cold salt spray could smack your face like a steel plate. “She’s a destroyer,” I added, not without pride.

“Oh—a skimmer.” He sounded unimpressed, sticking the bottle into the chair next to his leg and settling back. As usual with everyone in the service, he was older than me.

“Puss assignment,” he said, finally, waving at me like I was a dismissable fairy, too. “Submarine—fighting Japs—now that’s a seaman’s job.”

Imagine the nerve of this guy! I imagined the ghost of Sterns standing between me and the yellow flit, that white sailor’s cap forward over his dark crewcut, his legs spreads and arms crossed with authority, his limbs ropy as ever under a shroud-white uniform. A worthy shellback if there ever was one. The ghost curtly nodded, and I heard his voice in my ears. Go ahead, you’re not a wog anymore.

“Wasn’t much to the Japs,” I said, getting a little hot. “You didn’t even have to kill ‘em, the suicidal bastards, you just watch ’em come dropping out of the sky. Hunting and killing U-boats—now that was a mission. Those canned Krauts wanted to live. An’ I wasn’t going to mention it, but it’s two to a room max, friend.” My mentor, my buddy, my fuck-buddy, my first—there weren’t words for what Sterns had meant to me—and he’d been swept off deck before my very eyes in a stormy battle. I felt his steel in my forearms—my hands making fists; I couldn’t let this son-of-a-bitch spit on the Invictus and her crew.

At that point, Pollyanna decided to pip, “Excuse me, if you don’t mind, could the two of you go to his room?”

He snatched up his bottle, rose out of the chair, and came straight at me, and just as I stepped back to let him pass, he came to a halt and squared up a bit. I say “a bit” because he had those stooped shoulders that bubbleheads—submariners, understand—get from ducking all the time. There was something embarrassing about the moment and the way he eyed me, but then he went on past and down the hall. I went to follow, turned back to discover that Sterns’s ghost had vanished, and squinted accusingly at the other two, pointing a finger at them, then shut the door behind me. I followed the submariner to 217, where he unlocked the door and went in, leaving it open for me.

His room was just like the other, only mirroring, with the bed and chair on the left and a wall with two small, dark-framed pictures to the right. A washbasin stood in the far corner, just to the right of the window, for show. The pictures in each room showed the same minute flowers splotched above the same blue vase, but the washbasins—I don’t think there was ever two exactly alike in the whole building.

I heard the twittering start up again five doors down, but decided it wasn’t really all that bad. At least it was on key. Sort of. The deep parts were.

“The Germans were cowards,” he said finally, giving the butt of the bottle a wave in my direction. “Once we got a fleet up, they didn’t want to fight so bad. Them Japs, though, were murder—they’d have sent their mothers if they had to, their first born sons. All of ’em willing to die for the emperor. Your German bastards didn’t have any spirit—if they did, you’d know just what a sissy you are.” On the word sissy, his empty hand shoved my shoulder, but I took off my overcoat and held my ground.

“Well, bubblehead,” I told him, shoving him in the middle of his chest, “we sank five subs just like your old tin can.” Insulting a sailor’s ship is right up there with insulting a man’s sister—he can call her anything he pleases, but everyone else has to fight for the privilege.

He screwed the cap on the bottle and threw it between the pillows up at the head of the bed. “I been underwater so long, I can fight you holding my breath.” This time he shoved with both hands against my shoulders. From his slightly stooped appearance, you wouldn’t think he was strong enough to push as hard as he did.

“You and your sub!” I spat, putting up fists. “You’re nothing but a hunchback!”

Instead of hitting me, he threw me off guard by coming at me with his arms wide open. He wrapped himself quickly around me like a squid, trapping my arms against my chest, then swept me off balance so I toppled over onto the foot of the bed. He pressed my left side into the mattress, bending me into it with all his weight, forcing me to turn facedown with my chest against the bed and my knees on the floor. If we hadn’t been fighting, he could as well have been Cousin Earl forcing me to kneel for bedtime prayers. He swung one of my arms up behind my back, pinning me in place. I had to hand it to him; he knew how to take a man down.

With one of his arms now freed, I expected a kidney shot, but instead he reached around my waist, fumbling for my belt. The surprise of it sent a thrill through me, reminded me again of Sterns and his massive hands. Sterns’d’ve whupped somebody this way—it was just his wiseguy style: wrestle a guy down without much hurt, but all the same, assert an incontestable victory. I struggled out of principle, but I knew it was pretty much a lost cause as my trousers fell down around my knees.

I’m not going to tell you I particularly wanted it, though I didn’t fight, maybe, as hard as I should have—it turned out harsher than I imagined. Once he’d got my pants down, and unzipped his fly, he let up, and I might have been able to get away—but it didn’t happen like that. I’m not going to say it didn’t hurt, either. It hurt all right, like being stabbed in your tenderest part with a knife that has been dipped in tar, then dropped in sand—an abrasive, punctured feeling. It’s a sensation that turns to panic if you don’t breathe just right. It hurt because this man wasn’t Sterns; he didn’t have Sterns’ knack for what he was doing. I don’t think it was comfortable for him, either—it couldn’t have been.

So I kept breathing and let it happen, wishing my favorite old salt were there—either stopping the scene, or easing it over into something good. Something almost a little fun. I mourned his long absence, and felt the grief of the second week, the third week after he’d gone overboard, when I was finally sure that he wasn’t ever coming back. The haunting image of his pale, grim face—lips pressed tightly shut against the churning salt waves—and the dark gray hopelessness of ever saving him seared into me. The raw burn revisited felt just like being forced to take it up the ass. I hadn’t realized how my grieving for him had dulled over time—I still carried it with me, sure, but it hadn’t bit into me like this in a long time.

In my manly effort not to cry I tried to imagine Sterns presiding over this with a grin, though I didn’t see him in the room and couldn’t have felt his absence more keenly. I relaxed, and twinges of pain smoothed away as I quit resisting. The submariner crushed me into the soft support of the bed, and I felt the plush of the quilted bedspread, which smelt of smoke and detergent, brush back and forth against my cheek as I heeded his rhythm. The harsh light from the bulb peeking out from under the lampshade did not bother me.

Relaxing sounds simple. It ain’t. If you struggle in your thoughts, your body follows—same for the other way around: if you let go in all your muscles, your mind’s got to let go, too. I felt the shifts in the submariner’s thoughts, whether he was thinking about someone he missed or a place he called home or sometime he’d been stepped on, too. Simultaneously, I went on my own little trip, and as the seam in me opened wider and wider, I felt more sorrow than I’d ever known.

Thinking about shitty, piss-ant Union, Indiana, and all that time they kept my mother and me, her insane sister, Nettie, and Cousin Earl shut out with words like whore and bastard and touched and quiet; about how Mama told this story (more than once and with great amusement) of tike-sized me calling Hades, my Labrador dog, “Daddy”; about how she’d whistle for Hades if I asked who my real daddy was and shatter all peace with her laughter; about being hungry all my life on account of the fear of my wild-eyed Aunt Nettie that Mother instilled in us boys. Like country dogs, trained against the likelihood of being poisoned by neighbors, me and Earl didn’t eat a thing unless my mother handed it to us. Nettie’s fitful fingers had poisoned their father and mother, she had got away with it in her madness, and I spent my boyhood afraid that the bite I just shoveled into my mouth was the one Aunt Nettie had poisoned to kill me. Long-lost memories crept back into the fold, bending back on themselves, blending in, rising and rising each time he punched into me. And like a thick mist around it all, there was my longing for Sterns. By the time he was done, I was crying like a boy.

I wasn’t embarrassed, either, and if he’d gotten wise-mouthed about it, I’d’ve done my best to kill him. I think he sensed this because he hauled himself up, retrieved the bottle, and flopped down in the chair, panting, as if he’d been alone the whole time and was resting from a compulsively executed set of push-ups. My tears had ceased when he loosened his grasp and pushed himself off my back. He didn’t look at me for a long time, and I sat on my heels, staring at him, dazed and barely together.

He smiled when I stood to pull up my trousers, making a mild gesture toward a wet, whitish stain smeared down one of the black legs. I looked at the quilt, and it was there, too, though not as noticeable against the light pattern, and I remembered distantly a sense of having come. It had washed through me without sticking in my consciousness, without becoming noisy or explosive, without feeling like life and death. He grinned at me, like he wanted me to admit I’d enjoyed myself, but my face stayed loosely closed—I saw now I’d been far too naked; the stabbing hurt would have been better than this.

Sullen, I pulled my coat back on, checking to be sure its length covered the bit of stain I could not wipe away.

He pulled his wallet from a raised hip, eyeing me sourly, as if I had spoiled his mood, pulled a couple mismatched bills from it, and threw them at me. They drifted and circled, gliding to the floor, and their landing left me numb. I kept my eyes on his, of some slight mind to leave that cold cash dead on the floor, but there didn’t seem any reason to it, so I picked those greenbacks up, and as I left our eyes met again in mutual hatred.

 

© 2006 Deb Lewis - Contributor's Bio