Free Tales of the Out & the Gone by Imamu Amiri Baraka

poetry readings, but the old East Side of Mike Gold’s heroes and heroines of herrings, kosher pickles, pushcarts, and poverty.
    Johns was a college boy, a dropout from a black school trying to find himself. Mostly by reading everything that would sit still long enough to be read, including gruesome adventures like reading the whole of the Times best-seller list in a month. The complete works of Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, &c. Hours and hours of guard duty pulled by Johns had turned reading from an informative pastime to a physical and psychological addiction. He got so he could read anything—no, not could, had to. The sight of words on paper inflamed him, turned him on in a way nothing else could. Sometimes when he slept uneasily under the Puerto Rican moon, he dreamed of reading, pages flowing effortlessly through his sleep.
    His barracks room, which he shared with a giant country boy from Long Island (now, thank god, on leave), had, despite the pressures of would-be military standard operating procedures, begun to take on the look of a second-hand bookstore.
    Every week, Johns had to hear something from one of the non-coms about the room and its unmilitary look. You were only supposed to have “pictures of loved ones,” and as many books as the dresser top would allow to sit “in a military manner.” But then he had to hear about the weak little fuzz he had sprouting out the edge of his chin, which the “war cats” insisted was a beard. Or the “boot salute,” which many of the black troops threw in lieu of the war one, viz, this was where the head was bent down to meet the reluctant right hand, producing a “blood salute.” Especially them Southern white officers didn’t dig this. Johns once had to stand and salute about forty times in the hot sun, “until he got it right.” And he did, “by god,” as the game started to tire him and the hot sun had got all in the young blond lieutenant’s uniform, wetting him to the skin.
    Between Laffawiss, the scrawny humpbacked Groucho “Jew bastard,” as some of the quainter Southern boys called him, and Johns, “a fuckin nigger snob,” many incorrect and backward dudes did they light up with their wild antics. Both were young men sufficiently turned around by their younger lives and what they were learning now in “this war shit” (although it was peacetime, between the Korean and Vietnam Wars). Both had the beginning of the stiff self-identification of themselves as intellectuals, whatever that meant to them. And it didn’t mean too much, except both liked to read, both were mostly quiet and inner-directed, and they both hated most of the assholes that passed for non-coms and officers in the error farce, plus a whole lot of them “farmer motherfuck-ers” who would batter at their sanity with endless hours of “In the Jailhouse Now,” which was the top country-and-western hit of the period. Either that or Patti Page singing, “We’ll Be Together Again.”
    They were dragged away from civilian life by their own confusion, Johns being tossed out of school for making his studies secondary to his social education, and Laffawiss because he didn’t realize (either) that school did have some merit—even though you couldn’t learn a hell of a lot around those people. But shit, Laffy found out he was learning a hell of a lot less around Curtis LeMay’s (SAC C.O.) relatives and friends.
    Both hung around a large group of full, semi, and closeted intellectuals, all now lamenting their being trapped and martyred in the Air Force, when, hell, all had joined voluntarily. They figured they were escaping the “malaise” of post-adolescence, but now they were in the real fucking malaise with not much white bread either.
    A few nights a week, Johns worked as the evening librarian; and the old career special-services librarian, seeing Ray was a book nut, let him have run of the place, including being in charge of ordering books and records. So a