The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones (31 page)

So I had to go to White's room to hang out when I wasn't on the drinking bouts with Reilly and Burke and the others. White had collected a weird little group around him. They were mostly black though there was one white dude who hung around us, Vincent, a pudgy almost feminine Italian dude from the Bronx, with skin so white he looked like he never got in the sun even though we were in Puerto Rico. There was also an almost blond-haired Chicano dude named Lopa who looked like a white boy even to the close observer. It was only when he talked that you could hear the lilting syllabics of his accent and it still always amazed me when I thought that Lopa was a Mexican. This got Lopa in trouble before he got off that base too. Once in a bar some “farmers” were talking bad about “spies” and “greasers” in the charming official speech of the white American, and Lopa was leaning against the jukebox staring right into their mouths. I think there were three of these farmers. It was in Aguadilla, the closest town to Ramey, but in a bar frequented by a lot of airmen. Lopa let them know he was Chicano and that he didn't like what they said and that they were generally and unreconcilably full of shit. One guy went to throw on Lopa and Lopa cut him, across his face, sliced the shit out of him, leaving a scar, hideous and flaming, going from this farmer's ear down to the point of his chin. Lopa did almost a year in the stockade for this shit and when he got out he still had to do that year again in the regular service since that was looked at as “bad time”! But it was great when we walked across the base together and we would see this little knot of Southerners
approach us and we'd see the one Lopa had cut, marked this motherfucker up somethin' terrible. Lopa would cut his eyes at the dude and smirk with utter contempt and the agitators in our group would cut the fool.

The most way-out dude in this group was Yodo. His real name was something else. And people were always startling us by calling him that name, especially if they said Airman Lambert, because Yodo hadn't had any stripes (I think he might even have had three one time) in a very long time. Yodo's full name was Yodofus T. Syllieabla — “the high priest of Swahili, the czar of yap,” he'd add, “and Phersona Figues is my pal.” Phersona Figues was another one of the group whom Yodo had named. He named every one of us, some odd name or another. Some of us he simply turned our names around. Like he would call me Yorel Senoj. White was Mailliw Etihw. Though he always called Vincent, Vincent, and Lopa, Lopa.

Yodo was absolutely committed to jazz, African American improvised music. His whole imaginative and creative life revolved around the music. You never saw Yodo without albums in his hands. Even during work hours. (He worked in the base dispensary.) White uniform and blue “cunt” cap, long striding somewhere. Yodo usually carried a cane, or some stick he'd fastened a plastic top to with a red ball or some such inside the top. He called the stick his “all-purpose” stick and named it too. The stick's name was Anacronobienoid. He was great for holding dialogues with the stick whenever it suited him. Like he might say, after holding a conversation with one of us about something, “Well, Anacronobienoid, what do you think of that?” Or he might say, if he disagreed with something we'd said, “Anacronobienoid disagrees.” Or something. Once, a white noncom was giving Yodo a hard time about something and Yodo, without blinking, said, “Look, Anacronobienoid is laughing at you! Anacronobienoid thinks you're a joke.” And he would stretch his eyes and make weird gestures with the stick. The poor noncom, rather than go on with it, just got in the wind.

Yodo was one of the funniest dudes I'd ever met. By the time I met him he'd been in the service about nine years. And during that time he'd floated around going from one base to another and reenlisting simply because he didn't know what he'd be doing once he got out. Also, I think at one point he might have thought he could make some kind of career as a medical technician which he didn't think was possible in New Orleans where he'd come from, and so he thought the service would give him a career then he could retire relatively young and just cool it. But he'd run afoul of the service, gotten into some trouble and had his stripes removed, and this had crushed him, though he never admitted it.

Yodo's dialogue or sometimes monologue about the music was almost nonstop. He'd talk about Bud and Bird and Brownie and Monk. When he showed up at the door he'd swoop in with albums under his arm. On payday he'd buy whatever was in the BX, which wasn't much, and immediately come over to White's after work to play the side. He'd also write away for sides where possible. We'd play the sides and drink whatever was available to drink. Usually rum, since that was the cheapest in Puerto Rico.

Payday was only once a month, so that took on the character of a monthly bash, a big payday party. And much liquor and whatever else got bought. There was much going into town, usually Aguadilla, which was right down the road. Some would go further away to Ponce, Mayagüez, Arecibo, and the most ambitious would go all the way to the other end of the island to San Juan, usually by guagua (bus) unless you were a noncom or officer and had a car.

The music had always been a heavy part of my life, but Yodo raised it up in another way. Cut off as we were, and as he had been for so long, the music was a connection with black life. It was also a refuge, a way out of the agonizingly boring dreary white cracker-oriented service life, especially in Puerto Rico, where one felt even more cut off from the normal channels of American and African American life. One could not shoot up to Chicago on the weekends or Rochester. Airmen piled into the Puerto Rican cities whenever they could and there were places in Puerto Rico full of adventure, beauty, all kinds of pleasure, but despite all this you knew you were away from home, on the real side. And what's more, stuck in some intolerable madness you now had almost no understanding of how you'd got sucked into.

We talked about that all the time. How silly we were, how dumb, etc., we had been to get hooked up in this bullshit. For one reason or another. Some without other opportunity. Some looking for a way out of a dead end situation. A way into a career. Adventure and excitement. The claim of manhood. There were many reasons, but at this point, none of them were satisfactory.

There were some guys in the air force who did dig it. I have to believe they were a minority. Though there were a good number who'd signed up to do long stretches, some even to do a whole twenty, to retire. But these people were strange to us. They were among the “lames” we identified casually, squares and cornballs, gung-ho freaks and warcats who made us squirm for their simple-minded pleasure. We would always get on Yodo
about the fact that he'd re-upped and had been in so long. We called him the oldest airman basic in the service.

So White's room became a kind of haven. And once Yodo and some of the others started showing occasionally at my room, which would send Bodey and Cooper out right smart, then sometimes we'd all gather in there for our record and booze and nonstop rap sessions. That was our basic life in the air force. We'd drink rum and play music and talk — project our desires or reminisce about what we'd lost or wanted people to think we'd had. And we became a kind of defensive unit for ourselves, a kind of salon.

White, of course, was the most serious painter. And when I first met him he was painting in mainly realistic style but occasionally veering off into surrealism. Later, in New York, under the influence of the abstract expressionists he developed a kind of surreal-abstractionist style that was very much his own. It was, of course, his nationality that slowed him down in his ascent in the world of fine art.

Yodo drew too, and painted some outright surrealistic pieces that revolved around the music. Bird with a duckbill Yodo named “Klacktovedisteen.” Yodo said the duckbill made a sound “klack klack klack,” which is why Bird called his tune “Klacktovedisteen.” He had a painting called
In Walked Bud
, after Monk's tune. Yodo would enter the room sometimes, saying, “In Walked Bud,” and then dance in like Thelonious Monk danced next to his piano when the rest of the band was playing.

We met a couple of other guys in the air force who began to hang with us or hang with me. One was Jim Mitchum, from New York City, who walked around even then taking photographs. He was never anyplace without at least one camera. Jim Mitchum was kind of a snob and he talked in an exaggeratedly near “proper” style, which was funny if you thought about it. He'd been in the service a while and his speech was meant to impress you that he was not just your regular airman deuce (two stripes), that he was some kind of intellectual.

Phil Peakes was another photographer with the bunch. He was white, Jewish. Apparently from some pretty heavily endowed suburb of Boston. Phil also was kind of snobbish, though he was still young enough for that not to have completely got the best of him. He was the kind of guy who needed to be an intellectual to pull it off and at the time hadn't got it all sufficiently together, so he was a mixture of nose up (he had a large one too) and nose regular. Phil and Jim and I would have the most openly arty conversations (according to our standards at the time), though on the real
side Yodo and them were actually talking about some deeper questions, even casually.

Jim and Phil always felt slightly perturbed when Yodo was on the scene. And Yodo, sensing this, would pick at them in his not-so-subtle way. Having Anacronobienoid speak haughtily to them or chide them for their lack of knowledge about African American improvised music. Phil could cop by waving his latest acquisition, Glenn Gould playing the Brandenburg Concerto or the Goldberg Variations or some such. But Phil didn't have such a heavy knowledge about that stuff either, not really. Jim would haltingly try to scoff at what Yodo might be asking, like for instance did he, Jim, like “Glass Enclosure” or “Un Poco Loco” best? Or who was playing drums on “Ornithology”? Or was he a Blakey fan (Yodo called him by his Muslim name, Buhaina) or did he dig Max?

Still, we were an enlarged salon and the contradictions inside that entity brought out all kinds of conversations and conflicts that were usually at least funny. We thought of ourselves as the base cognoscenti, the real hipsters or the base intellectuals, depending on what part of the group would be together. We all were unified by our hatred of the air force. Phil and Jim acted as if they had been kidnapped from their intellectual pursuits and now had been forcibly surrounded by unwashed idiots. Yodo, like Strassbaugh, thought there were too many squares, lames he called them, around the joint. And though he had re-upped before crossing our paths (and him losing his stripes) he confirmed that he would be leaving for good as soon as he could.

We had nothing but contempt for the “old soldiers,” especially those who remained in the service for security, what they called “three hots and a flop.” The sergeants who would counsel us that there was nothing outside for us, no jobs, no future, that we had better stay inside where we knew we had something going.

Something going? What? The fool, Harrison, was fanatical about trying to get all of us soldiering, like his brother-in-law wanted. He'd roam the base and show up without warning. He even came into my room one morning when I should have already been down at the flight line and scared the holy shit outta me. I thought it was my man JWT and I looked up at the one star on this guy's cap like the one-eyed Cyclops and babbled some shit trying to get outta there.

To check the VD Harrison even started passing out negative awards. To the squadron with the highest venereal disease rate on the base, he would announce this honor at the Saturday parade. (We started having weekly
parades, Saturday morning, in full class A uniform!) This squadron then had the honor of marching to work every morning at 07:00, complete with the base band marching in front of them. The band members despised Harrison because before the VD marches, they had it mostly made. An occasional parade or officers' affair. But now they had to march every morning and play a full parade on Saturdays. We hung around with some of the band members, naturally. And they were death on Harrison.

The 73rd got the VD award one month and I think it really did cause some of the borderline VD cases at least to question the cleanliness of the
choche
before plunging in. I don't think it mattered too much to the wilder ones. When they got the little scratch each month they'd go charging off the base and lay down with the first
puta
they saw. “Hey, GI! Two dollars short time four dollars long time!”

But, God, could that shit make you feel sorry for yourself! Not even light out, line up, atten-hup!, then some jive march music and go poking through the darkness down to the flight line. If you wanted to eat those mornings (that month you had the marches) you had to rise up still earlier. Though the food was so bad I changed my eating habits. A couple Sundays they had chicken in the mess hall and the shit was bleeding. Rare chicken! Sunday evenings they had some thick wet baloney. I gave it up. Found out I could get people's salads and desserts in exchange for that bleeding chicken. So I became a vegetarian. I was always walking around the base with nuts and raisins in my pockets. The wildest thing about the mess hall was when the maintenance dudes would come in. Some of 'em didn't want to wash up. You could see it especially on the white dudes (at least that's what we said) and the sight of somebody eating a slice of white bread with the black greasy fingerprints all over the bread could take your appetite. It helped reinforce the elitist tendency our salon took on.

There were a couple other members of the Ramey Air Force Base Intellectuals Salon. Sid, a guy from Syracuse, who had gone to the University of Rochester, pre-med. He later got out and became a doctor. I guess he was drawn to some of us because we came on like intellectuals and I had gone to college. Jim to CCNY. Phil to Brandeis. Though we'd all dropped out for one reason or another. Sid was the kind of dude who smoked a pipe. He had a job in base supply or some such paper-pushing gig. Jim was in a maintenance squadron, open bay barracks, with the plebeians, and this bugged the hell out of him. “They're ignorant of everything important,” he'd say. As stiff as an unused hardcover.