Free My Life as a Man by Philip Roth

gift for my grade-school graduation), a Bulova watch (their gift for my bar mitzvah); I had still from my undergraduate days a favorite well-worn tweed jacket to teach my classes in, complete with leather elbow patches, my army khakis to wear while writing and drinking my beer, a new brown glen plaid suit for dressing up, a pair of tennis sneakers, a pair of cordovan shoes, a ten-year-old pair of slippers, a V-neck sweater, some shirts and socks, two striped ties, and the kind of jockey shorts and ribbed undershirts that I had been wearing since I had graduated from diapers, Fruit of the Loom. Why change brands? They made me happy enough. All I wanted to be happier still were more books to inscribe my name in. And to travel to Europe for two months to see the famous cultural monuments and literary landmarks. Two times each month I would be surprised to find in my mailbox a check from the university for one hundred and twenty-five dollars. Why on earth were they sending me money? It was I, surely, who should be paying them for the privilege of leading such a full, independent, and honorable life.
     
    In the midst of my contentment there was one difficulty: my headaches. While a soldier I had developed such severe migraines that I had finally to be separated with a medical discharge after serving only eleven months of my two-year term. Of course, I didn ’ t miss the tedium and boredom of peacetime army life; from the day I was drafted I had been marking off the time until I could return to a life no less regimented and disciplined than a soldier ’ s, but overseen by me and for the sake of serious literary studies. However, to have been released back into a studious vocation because of physical incapacity was disconcerting to one who had spent nearly ten years building himself, by way of exercise and diet, into a brawny young man who looked as though he could take care of himself out in the harsh world. How doggedly I had worked to bury the frail child who used to lie in his bed musing over his father ’ s puzzles, while the other little children were out on the streets learning to be agile and fearless! I had even been pleased, in a way, when I had found myself assigned by the army to military police school in Georgia: they did not make sissy invalids into MPs, that was for sure. I was to become a man with a pistol on his hip and starch in the knifelike creases of his khakis: a humanist with a swagger, an English teacher with a billy club. The collected stories of Isaac Babel had not appeared yet in the famous paperback edition, but when I read them five years later, I recognized in Babel ’ s experience as a bespectacled Jew with the Red cavalry something like a highly charged version of what I had experienced during my brief tour of duty as an MP in the state of Georgia. An MP, until those headaches knocked me off my spit-shined boots … and I lay mummified on my bed for twenty-four hours at a stretch, the most ordinary little sound outside the barracks window—a soldier scratching at the grass with a rake, some passerby whistling a tune between his teeth—as unbearable as a spike being driven in my brain; even a beam of sunlight, filtering through the worn spot in the drawn green shade back of my bunk, a sunbeam no larger than the head of a pin, would be, in those circumstances, intolerable.
    My “ buddies, ” most of them without a twelfth-grade education, assumed that the coll ege genius (and Jewboy) was ma lingering, especially when I discovered that I could tell the day before that one of my disabling headaches was on its way. It was my contention that if only I were allowed to retire to my bed prior to the onset of the headache, and to remain there in the dark and quiet for five hours or so, I could ward off an otherwise inevitable attack. “ Look, I think you could too, ” said the wise sergeant, while denying me permission to do so, “ I have often thought the same thing about myself. You can ’ t beat