Free Loving Women by Pete Hamill Page B

And then shuddered. The man had punked me out. Like that. With his sweat-less face and slushy eyes and the three hash marks on his sleeve. That was all it took. No punches. Just authority. And I was there because I asked to be there. I signed the papers. I joined the Navy. And this was the deal. For a moment I felt like crying, thinking of myself free on the streets of a city. And then I twisted and threw a punch at the locker door, slamming it one final time.

Chapter
    9
From The Blue Notebook
    ACQUILINE. AQUALINE .
    I love the sound of a pen on paper. I’m writing these words with a Sheaffer fountain pen. It leaks and stains my fingers, but I love the skoosh sound it makes. I know that professional cartoonists all use steel crow-quill nibs, but I can’t seem to make them work. The nibs always break. Maybe my hand is too heavy. Maybe I don’t hold them right. I tried a Parker 51 once in a department store. It was beautiful. So smooth, and the nib was flexible, so I could get the thicks and thins I need for drawing. But it cost $20. One of these days, maybe I’ll be able to afford one. But not now. Not soon, the way the Navy pays .
    I need to make some drawings, but I can’t right now. I don’t have my stuff, and anyway this guy C. would probably have me courtmartialed if he caught me drawing. I can just hear him saying it: Only a Gah-dam faggot would draw pictures like that .
    QUALITIES OF A GOOD NAVY MAN . Be loyal. Obey orders. Show initiative. Be a fighter. Be reliable. Keep a clean record. Be fair. Be honest. Be cheerful. Be neat .
    —The Bluejackets’ Manual
    Maybe we’re just something God dreamed. Or is still dreaming. If there even is a God. I used to believe in God, too. Like everybody else in the world. I prayed to him and worshiped him. Right up to the day my mother died. Then I said, What kind of God could this be who lets a good woman like that die?
    Once I started thinking that way, I couldn’t stop. What kind of God lets Hiroshima happen? What kind of God lets six million Jews die in the concentration camps? What kind of God lets people be poor? Back home in Brooklyn, there were crooked cops and murderers and sleazeball politicians. How could God let them live while my mother dies? How could he put up with a guy that throws an art book against a wall? If there’s a God, then he’s responsible for art, too. He must of said once, Okay, now let there be art. But if He did, why put guys like C. on the earth to hate art? It doesn’t make any sense. And it’s nothing new. There were all those vandals in history, the Visigoths and guys like that, always sacking Rome. They destroyed all sorts of beautiful things, while killing and raping thousands of people. How could they be part of God’s plan? Unless He’s having a bad dream .
    Or maybe it’s something else. Something simpler. Maybe God’s a mean bastard. Maybe that’s it. Maybe He’s just a mean bastard who likes to see people suffer .
    Agnostic . One who holds that the ultimate cause (God) and the essential nature of things are unknown and unknowable, or that human knowledge is limited to experience. (That’s me) .
    Aquiline .

Chapter
    10
    A t twenty to twelve that night I wandered out along a dirt road beside the fence and relieved a small Oriental kid named Freddie Harada at post three. He handed me a dummy Springfield rifle and an adjustable cartridge belt without bullets. In a thin singsong voice he told me to forget about sleeping on the post. Red Cannon or the goddamn Marines came around every half hour in a jeep. Then he hurried away into the darkness.
    I was supposed to be guarding a dumpster, one of those metal bins that was filled over the course of a week with garbage and junk and then lifted onto a truck and taken away and emptied. It was big enough to hold a car. I’d seen them in boot camp, but even in that land of total chickenshit I was never asked to guard one. I walked around it, feeling foolish with my rifle that didn’t