The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones (30 page)

I went in and bought some books.
Portrait of the Artist
and Thomas's
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog
. In a couple of weeks I bought
Ulysses
. But I went home this first time in a daze, having leaped past myself, to myself. All kinds of new connections yammered in my head. My heart beat faster; my skin tingled. I could understand now a little better what was happening. I needed to learn. I wanted to study. But I wanted to learn and study stuff I wanted to learn and study. Serious, uncommon, weird stuff! At that moment my life was changed.

Another month or so and I was leaving Chanute. I was glad, even though I'd met some people, but I did not see myself remaining too long in the flatlands of Middle America. Sometimes I felt like there were witches and
devils out there. Plus every morning at about 4:30 the guy in charge of putting on the lights would throw them on and the switch was connected up with his own radio, which brought the “shitkickers,” as Strass called them, at us full burst. At that time of the morning most of the city boys were not interested in country and western.

But I had been elected class leader in weather training school because of the high marks I received consistently and one time Airman of the Month, for the academics, not the soldiering. I even began to look forward to tech school ending and being sent somewhere as a weatherman, with lots of time to myself to pursue my newfound cause of learning, something every day! However, they pulled a trick on me of sorts. As the highest-finishing airman in the class I was given first choice, along with a few others, of where I would be shipped, out of a group of bases that needed weathermen. The choices were right outside D.C., which I seriously considered. If I had done that, no doubt I would've gone back to Howard. Bermuda was also mentioned, plus Germany, Okinawa, and Greenland. But the one I wanted was Puerto Rico. Actually it was a tight choice between the D.C. base (Andrews AFB), Bermuda, and Puerto Rico. The enlisted man scam had it that “Puerto Rico was a country club — light duty and good weather, cheap prices and fine women.” Hey, dudes was saying, you need to take Puerto Rico. And that was that, my choice was Puerto Rico. “A country club.” But little did I know.

In choosing Puerto Rico I had then to sign up to go to gunnery school down there and become not just the normal weatherman but a
weather gunner
. That is, I had volunteered to fly in B-36 bombers as a rawinsonde operator as well as a “right rear gunner.” I hadn't wanted to fly when I came in, my early romance of flying had slipped by. At a certain point most boys want to soar through the sky, at least in my generation. So even after they dropped this “volunteering” on me (to pay you back for thinking you could actually
choose
) I was not drugged because I thought, Hey, I'll be flying after all. Even the gun shit was part of an old romantic image of tail gunners in the Second World War, chewing gum, cracking jokes, and firing at the enemy. But reality, my friends, is always something else again.

Plus, the “country club” that I'd signed for apparently
was
a country club. Or at least
had been
a country club until we got there. The gargoyles at Strategic Air Command had also heard the airman scuttlebutt about Ramey AFB and they were determined to do something about it. So they chose to start doing something about it the same time I got sent down there. Talk about some bad luck! (I wrote something about this in a play,
A
Recent Killing
.) The same time I arrived and a few other guys from Chanute, perhaps even the same day, the SAC commander sent his son-in-law (rumor had it) Bertram Harrison, a thirty-eight-year-old “insane” brigadier general, to clean the joint up. It seems that Ramey had the highest venereal disease rate in SAC, the lowest efficiency rating on the mock bombing raids that SAC stages pretending to bomb large cities in the U.S. and other places. So Harrison was sent down to “gung-ho” the base back in line and make us the efficient trained killers we were supposed to be.

Interestingly, since there was no world war when I was in the service, the general aura I encountered might be something found only in “peace” time, but I think not. At least it seems that way to me from other stories I've heard about the so-called esprit de corps in wartime. If anything, it's probably worse during wartime, when dudes think they might be getting killed for some bullshit they didn't have anything to do with.

I could see, once I got down there, how Ramey could and probably was being run on the casual side. The standard work uniform was white tee shirt and blue jeans and either the regular fatigue hat or, if you were in one of the flying squadrons, a baseball cap in your squadron's color. I was assigned to the 73rd Strategic Reconnaissance Squadron, which was later changed to the 73rd Bombardment Squadron. We wore blue baseball caps, though I never had one. I always wore my fatigue hat. (Except, strangely, there is a photo of me with the rest of my crew — the first crew I was on, N-45 — standing with the rest of the troops with a baseball cap. But I don't remember owning one. I always wore my fatigue cap. Maybe it was borrowed for the flick. Or maybe it's not even really a baseball cap?)

Puerto Rico was the first permanent base I was assigned to. My first permanent assignment (it turned out to be my last). Before I went down I was given a short leave and I went home. I remember going to Steve Korret's house in the Village. He had a new wife now, Charlene, a beautiful dancer — she's now a slightly older but still beautiful novelist. We talked and he introduced me to various people, white and black, streaming through his house. (Or maybe this was after I had already gone to Puerto Rico for a time and then come back on leave. I'm not quite clear.) But I remember talking to a white painter named Norman who painted strange unconnected quasi figures that had mystical significance. A tall black woman painter, Virginia. A short dark man, a poet whose name was Karl. At any rate the visit I remember, Steve and his wife had to leave and left me there. I was reading something. I was leaving from his house directly for the airport and thence to Puerto Rico. I was sitting alone reading and musing,
then I looked at the time and I had to go, if I was going to catch my plane. I put the book down. My duffelbag, packed full, was standing in the corner. I made ready to leave. I grabbed the bag and went to heave it up onto my shoulder as I had done many times before. But this time I couldn't move it! The duffelbag would not budge! You'll say, it was psychological. You didn't want to leave. Your mind was playing tricks on you. Be that as it may, I couldn't move the bag. I strained to get it up onto my shoulder and it would not move.

I panicked for a minute, then sat down. My hands were shaking! I said, out loud, I've got to pick up this bag. I've got to get back to the base or I'll be AWOL. I went on cajoling myself, pleading with myself, and finally I tried again and the bag came up easily. I hefted it up to my shoulder and went out the door, down the stairs, and got a cab to Idlewild Airport.

Because Ramey was a permanent base and a big SAC base, I met a buncha people. And they were from the various classes and sectors of the base. One thing, if you are at all serious about understanding this country, arrogantly called “this society,” you'll see after any close investigation how absolutely structured according to class and caste it is in all areas. Nothing, no piece, of U.S. life escapes! It is a class society in every nook and cranny of its total existence. Its material base and its ideas. Its economic foundation and its institutional and ideological superstructure. And this was clearer to me in practice than it ever was in theory until very recently. I always dealt with it as it came up, as I had to or was able to deal with it (just like you!) but I didn't always call it anything. But as I got older I recognized it more and more clearly for what it was, class and caste divisions. The rich the middle the poor. The white the light the brown the black. Everywhere in you, America!

At Ramey, since I was in a flying squadron, I was again with mostly whites. The flying squadrons were the “high-class” groups on the base. Certainly the service makes all these things more obvious than ever before. There were officers and noncoms then enlisted men. That was the basic class structure, the fundamental hierarchy of the joint. And these were in all the squadrons, but the flying squadrons were tops, the upper class. Then came the maintenance squadrons and within that division there were divisions. Then underneath the maintenance squadrons the air police, then motor pool, then cooks or food service. Most of the blacks and other nonwhites were in food service, the motor pool, or maintenance. Only a few were in the flying squadrons. And this made some of the ones
who were in them mad as all outdoors. Like the yellow madness of my childhood grew up and gone to college — now gone and joined the air force! I remember one Negro who never spoke to or was ever seen with any blood the whole time I was on that base. All he did was ride his motorcycle and sometimes ride his motorcycle with some white boys who rode motorcycles. I met the dude and he wasn't a bad dude, he was just crazy. He even talked like a white boy. But not the pursed lip stiff jaw of the academic white imitator. This guy “towked” like a working-class white boy from the Northeast. It amazed me. And even when the other bloods on the base would say funny things about this dude I would tell them (though I hadn't penetrated it down to theory level) that the dude was a nice cat, he was just out of his mind! I guess he talked to me because I was in a flying squadron too.

So again the relationships I developed were somewhat complex. I had friends, a lot of them white, in the flying squadron I was in as well as in the 60th Bomb and 301st Bomb. The 73rd, as I said, had blue baseball caps, the 60th red baseball caps, and the 301st yellow baseball caps. Dudes in other bomb squadrons I knew because we would go to gunnery school together or target study (studying Russian cities from aerial photos so you would get familiar with the cities you were going to bomb from high up in the air). We sometimes went to embarrassing harassings like so-called Character Guidance. Where they would march us down to the theater and teach us how to be good airmen and stop getting venereal disease, etc.

So I got to know guys from the different flying squadrons, but especially gunners and other weather gunners. There was a little group of white weather gunners I hung with, and other crew members. They were mostly good guys, young like I was, some younger, naive about life and brash enough not to give a shit too much about our racial and national distinctions. They were the kinda guys who talked about “roaring into town.” They'd go steaming off the base and get staggering, falling-down, singing drunk and not even know where they'd been the next day. That was one group and sometimes I'd be with them puttin' away watered-down beer like there was no tomorrow and cracking stupid jokes. These were the kinda guys they mighta shown in the war movies but not corny like that. Burke, a French Canadian from up in New England. Reilly, a big redfaced Irish lad from Boston. Goodsen, a freckled-faced all-American Jew. Burset, a short, funny-grinning, perpetually joking and staggering Welsh American who aspired, he said, to the heaven of perpetual drunkenness. We greeted each other with shouts and there was always pushing and patting
and horsing around. These guys were all good soldiers, good airmen, but they liked to have a good time and many times that's not possible playing war.

Another group was formed really around the painter, William White, a black dude from North Carolina. He was a weather gunner in the 301st and always wore the yellow baseball cap. Tall, introspective, and serious, White had a barracks room full of paintings when I first met him. He later went to New York to continue painting after first going to Howard, even though I warned him continually not to go to that sorry joint. Except my protestations must have seemed to him like a simple case of unrequited love. White became one of my best and closest friends in life. He died, still trying to paint, in New York, mixing methadone and whiskey.

But somehow one time I got to White's room. Oh, yeh, I'd met him in gunnery class not long after I came to Ramey. He'd come a little earlier. And the incident that brought us together was when some dude, a fat young white farm boy from Colorado I had known at Chanute (in fact it was he, Bodey, Clifton Bodey, who was in charge of snapping on the lights and hence the shitkicking sounds there in Illinois), pulled my chair out from under me one day in tech school, apparently thinking to make an impractical joke. I wheeled on his ass and fired right into his face (not a gun but my bony brown fist). He staggered backward, a big question mark on his face. I said, “You didn't think I could hit that hard, did you?” Really, at a loss for words myself and half expecting him to make a sudden counterattack. For sure he hadn't gone down and one of the old bits of folk wisdom I remember has always said, if you throw your best and they don't go down it's time to get in the wind. But Bodey only pulled himself up straight, other dudes in the class laughed, and White was among them laughing his ass off into his hands.

I guess Bodey was too surprised to do anything. He said some things designed to give battle but since he just didn't charge and start throwing me on my ass (he must've outweighed me by about a hundred pounds) nothing happened and as it turned out Bodey and I never really became enemies, in fact he was closer to me than a lot of people. Because in a few months he had married a Puerto Rican prostitute about ten years older than he was (he was eighteen) and a lot of the dudes made fun of him for it, especially the white Southerners.

After that I would go to White's room a lot, since I had weird roommates. We bunked three in a room, if you were lucky two, and all of that was considered luxury. The luxury of the flying squadrons since all the
other squadrons still lived in open bay barracks. I think my first roommates were Bodey and a white guy looked like Steve McQueen, named Cooper, from somewhere in Tennessee. Cooper was a buck sergeant (three stripes), Bodey and I two stripes (airman second class). Cooper was the classic taciturn Southerner, probably filled with all the prejudice of that particular specimen but with the quiet dignity that made acting nasty about it impossible. Bodey was loud and wrong, naive and corny as the little Colorado farm he'd come from. He was every stereotype you could think up and more. He collected gun magazines and motorcycle magazines and girlie magazines (Cooper read these last ones too on occasion) but had nothing to do with guns, motorcycles, or women. He claimed to know all about cars and eventually he did get one, he got a motorcycle too (so did Cooper), and when Cooper finally shipped out going to another base I left Bodey there with a wife who spoke very little American and no English at all and two kids, one on the runway and one in the hangar (in airman talk), a stranger in a strange land, completely ignorant of reality.