Volunteers for America

I woke up when they came on board at Providence, all five making noise and grabbing seats in the observation car. It had been quiet and dull until they got there and rather than see every dirty back yard and factory from Boston to New York, I had slept. There were five, as I said, and only Tom was over twenty. He sat in front of me and I saw the manila envelope and mimeographed sheet in his hand.

"You just enlist?"

"No, this is the second time for me. Them guys," indicating the rest with a wave of his hand, "they just joined."

Tom, it turned out, was 24 years old. He was developing a little paunch, stood about 5' 10", wore sideburns and a moustache. He looked Italian, with big dark brown eyes, and one of his bicuspids was gone so that when he grinned you could see the hole. It was becoming somehow: frank, as if he no more would have gotten a false tooth than lied to you for no good reason. He spoke Massachusetts-city-boy and we liked each other right away. We compared notes on dates and places in the Army; we had overlapped in Vietnam but were never in the same places. He had hated it, he said; but he was just a kid, like them, he said, with another wave of his hand.

"Loud and ignorant, man, you know? Seventeen years old, just running away from the judge and cops. I liked it OK for a while, but it got old. I came back from Vietnam and they made me an M.P. because they didn't need any more helicopter crew chiefs. I was pissed off; screwed around the rest of the time; you know, marked time until I got out. I liked flying though; never had to kill anybody, just brought ammunition to people who did and took out our dead ones," he said, breaking into a grin. "Anyway, I been hassling for a few months now, one factory after another, never save any money, too many bills; it got so my old lady and I were skimping on food, man. That's fucking crazy, you know? So I just said fuck it; went out and bought steaks, everything; stocked up on stuff and said fuck the bills. I had a friend who went back in before me, wrote me and said it wasn't as bad as before; they pay you a lot better and I should get back my old rank pretty quick, and then I'll be making more money and have less expenses; you got a wife and kid you got to take care of them, you know?"

I said I did and we said nothing for a little while so I started looking at the others in the car. Chuck caught my attention first: He was 17 years old, a chunky kid, inclined to fat so that his features seemed to melt back into his flesh. But his nose stuck out a little, his thick lower lip was giving him a permanent pout, and his eyes were slits. The rest of his face was flat and square, like his body. He had curly black hair, close to his head, and wore a striped T-shirt. His face was smooth, except for a few blackheads, and entirely hairless. He and another guy, David, had run back to the bar car and bought three six packs of beer. They were complaining about how much it cost to buy beer on the train; they could have got two cases for the same price in a liquor store. Tom got up and went back to buy himself a drink.

"You look familiar," Chuck said, narrowing his eyes further, which I would have thought impossible. "Don't he look familiar?" This to David across the aisle. David turned to regard me. He looked like Joan Baez, a pretty boy, only he had black cavities in his front teeth so the effect was ruined when he smiled.

"Yeah," said David, "You do look like somebody, only I don't know who--maybe it's your hair. Maybe some rock singer."

"Jimi Hendrix" I suggested.

"No, man," David said, and Chuck laughed.

Tom came back just as Chuck began talking about doubts about going into the Army. He was afraid that the people at the Reception Station at Fort Dix would find out he was a user. He turned his arms up to show the black and blue marks around the veins. Tom didn't want to hear it.

"You got to show up, man; look, they'll put you in jail if you don't and I'll have to explain why you didn't make it." Tom turned to me. "Why do I get stuck with shit like this? I'm in the Army before so I have to make sure all these guys show up. So what happens? I get stuck with some little junkie who's not even a junkie. He just watches too much fucking television. My cousin, now there's a junkie, and he's in jail where they all end up."

Chuck heard this and said that he was, indeed, a junkie. He wanted to know if Tom had ever been strung out. No. Then Tom couldn't know what it was like. He told me that he had one brother who was in jail for dealing heroin and another in jail for attempted murder; that one got into a shootout in a bank robbery and nearly got killed but looked like he would live to stand trial. Then he told me that he had fixed ten cc's of heroin one time and David said it was a lie--nobody could do up ten cc's and live. They started arguing. Tom turned to me.

"It's weird, man. His old man got killed this fall in a car accident; he was in the Army fourteen years himself and got thrown out for doing goofers. Fucked up family, you know. Every one of them had something grotesque happen."

Chuck turned around and said to Tom that if you started out bad you didn't have any chance of doing better. "You're full of shit, man," Tom said.

"No, I'm not. It may not be coming out right, but I know what I'm talking about. I know, just my head is fucked up."

David interjected that Chuck could quit if he wanted to, that he, David, had been strung out and quit. Tom turned to me. "He knows it all, that kid," he said, pointing to David arguing with Chuck up in the front of the car.

"He doesn't know shit, none of them do, they're all kids. Like me when I first went in: Judge said two years the hard way or three the easy way. What the hell? I was a hard case. When I was fourteen, five of us stole a big power boat and went out to sea for three days. I was along for the ride--didn't know shit about the boat, I mean, though it was my idea to steal it. Anyway, we came back into the harbor and went right by this police boat. He kept right on going the other way. Fine, we figure, the guy never even came down to miss the fucking thing. Next thing, I turn around and there's the police boat and two Coast Guard cutters with those blue lights turning; so we turn the boat on full blast and head for shore and somebody finally yells jump; well, I was pretty drunk and jumped over the side holding on to another bottle and a portable television set; I lost the TV right away and came up by an old building next to the water; meanwhile, everybody has jumped off the fucking boat and it's hauling ass for the dock all by itself when it stalls; so help me Christ, if that thing had hit that dock we would have been in jail for a hundred years, or something; I get out of the water and run up on this catwalk at the back of this building, and I run around the corner, bang!, no more goddamn catwalk and I take a thirty foot drop into two feet of water; and then there were more cops than I had ever seen in my life. So we go to court and everybody says guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty; they let me go and said don't do anything like that again. But I did, got kicked out of school and shit, until finally it was either the Army or jail. Seemed like I was always getting caught, you know? I still think it was my cousin, the junkie, you know? Everytime he got into trouble, somebody else would get into trouble. I don't know though, man; one time I choked him until he turned blue when I thought he was the one who told on me--but he never admitted it, the mother fucker.

"Anyway," he continued, that's these kids; "They don't know shit, they don't have anybody to think about, they're just loud and stupid."

David interrupted then and wanted to know what happened after they got to New York. Tom explained that there was an hour between trains; they would eat dinner and continue on another train for Trenton, then take the bus to Fort Dix. Trenton, New York? David' wanted to know; Trenton, New Jersey, Tom said. Chuck said that he was thinking about going to Fort Dix now, maybe he wouldn't go AWOL after all. Everyone said they thought that would be a good idea; David especially thought so and told Chuck about it. "Knows everything, that fucking kid," Tom said.

David asked if his drill sergeant would be at the Reception Station when he got there; he didn't want him to see all that hair; David's hair was about as long as Joan Baez's. I said he wouldn't care anyway, probably 10,000 kids a year showed up with hair that long.

"If it was the Marines, they would care," he said.

"Yeah, the Marines would probably bother you."

Tom asked me about OCS then and how hard or easy that was and I told him. He said that he knew a lot of officers who were all right and told me about this lieutenant he had in Vietnam. Tom ran the Company Club toward the end of his tour, and everyone kept coming down with the clap. So the lieutenant told Tom to go into the village and get four whores.

"I had a girl friend and I got her and her family jobs on post--not fucking, you know, but housework and stuff. Anyway, we drove into the village together and picked up four whores and explained the deal to them and they said OK and I brought them back to the post. The lieutenant had friends at the base hospital and they kept the whores there two weeks, shooting them full of penicillin, and cleaned them up. Then we took them back to the company and built four rooms for them right next to the Club, with their names over the door like movie stars; just a bed and a bucket for douches and they got five dollars a shot--the Army got nothing. That lieutenant thought of it--he was all right."

I said to Tom that I thought Basic Training in the Army had been easy; he agreed. I said that I had always wondered what I would have done if I had gone through Marine Boot Camp, with people hitting me, you know. He shrugged. "You would have gone through it like everybody else did," he said.

I said yeah he was right and then David asked again if I was sure his sergeant wouldn't be there. I said I was almost positive. Then Chuck started talking about the last time he came to New York City on the train, in the summertime, and there was this girl sunbathing on the roof without any clothes on, and he could see everything; you could see her ass hole and everything. Even the ass hole, Tom wanted to know, and started to laugh, rolling his eyes at me. Chuck said yes.

Chris, who was Greek and had been sitting next to me reading perked up and showed me in Playboy where this 68-year-old lady had written in to say that she had a boy friend and they screwed once a month and had orgasms.

"Imagine that, a 68-year-old lady, and she still gets her nut. They say it's all in your mind and that you can go till 90 if you want to--Jesus, I know I will. I'd like to die in the saddle; old people have to have something to do besides play bridge and watch TV--you know what I mean, man?"

I said I did and then Chuck broke in and said that he was thinking about going AWOL again and Chris rolled his eyes and said just when they had a conversation going Chuck had to fuck it up again. Chris said that he used to use a lot of dope and that he quit and started getting into shape; he had been practicing karate for seven months now and he had enlisted for Korea, because there was a lot of karate there and did I know if that was true. I said I had heard that too and then he said that he thought Korea would be OK and so would the Army; his Dad had been in during World War II and liked it OK; then he told me about how he hoped he would get a good job but he was disqualified from a lot of them because he couldn't discriminate colors very well; they had these charts where numbers were hidden in a field of different colors and if you couldn't tell colors apart you couldn't find the numbers, did I understand? I said I did and then Chuck interrupted and said he definitely wasn't going to Fort Dix and asked if I wanted to buy his suitcase and all his clothes for ten dollars so he could get back to Providence because he had spent all his money on beer. Nobody wanted the suitcase. Tom said that he was tired of listening to Chuck's shit and then everyone said that and then Chris asked Chuck if that girl, the naked one he meant, had any hair in her ass hole and everybody laughed at that and Chuck got mad. Tom said, OK let's see the suitcase and they opened it up and there were six pairs of socks, a toothbrush, three sets of underwear brand new, a carton of Kools, another pair of jeans and some deodorant and shaving cream. Tom said he had a suitcase and there wasn't anything in this one that he wanted.

"I was in Bein Hoa one time, man," Tom said turning to me. "You ever been in Bien Hoa?" I said yeah.

"Yeah, well I was waiting to go home and I had to take a shit and walked out to the shitter and a rocket hit the hootch I was staying in and killed four guys; imagine that man? I mean, it was a six seater, or something, and I laid down on the floor and then walked back and there were all these fuckers screaming and four of them dead and my suitcase, the one right back there, had holes in it and it still won't close right. Imagine that, man? I have a friend who's very religious, you know, and he says God had to have been with me."

Then he told me how he and this other guy had tried to start a restaurant in Nashua, New Hampshire, and lost all their money because there was another guy in the town who didn't want the competition and lowered his prices until he drove them out of business, lowered the prices until he was practically giving the food away, did I understand? I said I thought so and that God hadn't been with him that time, in the restaurant that is, and we both laughed.

Chuck said he just didn't know if he could handle going to Fort Dix, he was afraid they would find out about his habit and put him in jail, and everybody told him to shut the fuck up and Chris asked him to point out the girl with the ass hole because we were pulling into New York now.

Tom turned to me after talking to Chuck quietly for a few more moments and asked what he should do, huh? You were the Captain, he said, you should know what to say to the kid. "All I want to do is to get to Dix, process back into the Army and get my ass to a permanent duty station so I can see my wife and daughter. And I gotta put up with this bullshit. Jesus."

Tom said that Chuck had told him about going into the recruiting sergeant's office wasted on heroin and the sergeant knew it and told Chuck not to say anything when he took the physical, and also when he got to Fort Dix. Tom said that he knew about another guy who had high blood pressure and couldn't pass the test and the sergeant gave him pills to take so that he could pass it. Then Tom said again how he was mad at being stuck with these guys and started swearing to himself.

Then Chuck said he was sorry and hoped he wouldn't cause Tom any trouble and would Tom give him time enough to get away. Tom wouldn't answer him, only sat there shaking his head and looking out the window. We were in the tunnel under the East River now, pulling into Penn Station and the train stopped. It was dark in the tunnel and the fumes from all the trains lingered there so it smelled very bad inside the train and David kept asking what the smell was and the electricity from the subway trains kept flickering in the dark and David wanted to know what that was too. Tom told them all to pick up 'the garbage they had left around and put it someplace--all the beer cans and sandwich wrappers. Then he turned to me and asked me what I was in New York for, he had forgotten to ask me before, he said. To write my thesis, just to hole up and write it, I said. I told him it was about the way people reacted to the French Revolution and he asked me who. I said Jefferson and Adams and those guys and he said oh. Then we got out on the platform and picked up our baggage and I saw the holes in the suitcase for myself. Tom and I shook hands and I wished him luck and he said the same to you. I asked Chuck what he was going to do and he said he didn't know that his head was too fucked up; I told Chris' good luck in Korea and David said he was going to Frankfurt, Germany and wanted to learn to ski. I never found out anything about the last guy, he was very quiet.