The friends I've made have always been of a generous nature. And somehow or other, a bigger, tougher guy was always around as a buddy in case things went wrong, like Lew Rabinowitz and Sonny Bartolini, one of the bolder Italians in a family in Coney Island. And Lesko, the young coal miner from Pennsylvania, whom I'd met in gunnery school. And Yossarian in operational training in Carolina and later in Pianosa in combat, after the five of us, Yossarian, Appleby, Kraft, Schroeder, and I, had flown overseas as a crew.
The fear of being beaten up had always been with me, looming larger in my meditations than the fear of being shot down. In South Carolina one night, it began to come to pass. This was after another training flight into darkness in which Yossarian could not find his way around to places like Athens, Georgia, and Raleigh, North Carolina, and Appleby from Texas again had to bring us back with his radio compass. We had gone to our enlisted men's mess hall for a midnight meal, Schroeder and I and Yossarian. The officers' club was closed. Yossarian was always hungry. He had taken off his insignia to pose as an enlisted man, with a right to be there. People were always milling around outside at night. As we moved through them, I was jostled suddenly by a big, drunken lout, a private, bumped so hard as to leave no doubt the act had been deliberate. I whirled around with instinctive surprise. Before I could speak, he was at me, he shoved me furiously backward into a group of soldiers who had already turned to watch. It was happening almost too fast to understand. While I was still dumbfounded, staggering, he came charging after me with his arms raised and a fist cocked back to punch. He was taller than I and broad and heavier too, and there was no way I could fend him off. It was like that time I had tried to teach Lew how to box. I could not even run. I don't know why he picked me out and can only guess. But then, before he could strike, Yossarian was there between us to break it up, with his arms extended and his palms open, urging him to hold it, attempting to cajole him into calming down. And before he could even complete his first sentence, the man let go and hit him squarely on the side of the head and then hit him hard again with a punch from his other fist, and Yossarian went falling back in a helpless daze as the man followed up, hitting him about the head with both hands while Yossarian reeled with each blow, and before I knew what I was doing, I had flung myself forward to grab one of the man's thick arms and hang on. When that didn't work, I slid down to grasp him about the waist and dug my feet into the ground to strain with all my might to shove him off balance if I could. By that time Schroeder had also pounced on him, from the other side, and I heard Schroeder talking away. "You dumb fuck, he's an officer, you dumb fuck!" I could hear him rasping into the man's ear. "He's an officer!" Then Yossarian, who was pretty strong himself, was at him from in front and managed to tie up both his arms and propel him backward until he lost his footing and had to hold on. I felt all the fight go out of him as Schroeder's words sank in. He looked sick by the time we turned him loose.
"Better put your bars back on, Lieutenant," I reminded Yossarian softly, panting, and added as I saw him feeling his face:
"There's no blood. You'd better get away and put your bars back on, before somebody comes. We can pass up the meal."
From then on I was always on Yossarian's side in his frictions with Appleby, even at the time of what we both came to call the Splendid Atabrine Insurrection, although I would conscientiously take the antimalarial tablets as we flew through the equatorial climates when we traveled overseas, and he would not. The Atabrine would temper the effects of malaria, we'd been briefed before our first stop in Puerto Rico, while having no effect upon the disease itself. Regulations or not, Yossarian saw no sensible need for treating the symptoms before he suffered any. The disagreement between them crystallized into a controversy to save face. Kraft, the copilot, was as usual neutral. Kraft spoke little, smiled a lot, seemed unaware often of much that was going on. When he was killed in action over Ferrara not long afterward, I still thought of him as neutral.
"I'm the captain of this ship," Appleby made the mistake of telling Yossarian in front of us in Puerto Rico, our first stop after jumping off from Florida for the fourteen-day flight overseas. "And you'll have to follow my orders."
"Shit," said Yossarian. "It's a plane, Appleby, not a boat." They were of equal height and equal rank, second lieutenant then. "And we're on the ground, not at sea."
"I'm still the captain." Appleby spoke slowly. "As soon as we start flying again, I'm going to order you to take them."
"And I'm going to refuse."
"Then I'm going to report you," said Appleby. "I won't like doing it, but I'm going to report you to our commanding officer, as soon as we have one."
"Go ahead," Yossarian resisted stubbornly. "It's my body and my health, and I can do what I want with it."
"Not according to regulations."
"They're unconstitutional."
We were introduced to the aerosol bomb, the first time I saw one, now the spray can, and instructed to use it in the interior of the plane as soon as we climbed in, as a defense against mosquitoes and the diseases they might transmit as we headed down through the Caribbean into South America. On each leg of the trip to Natal in Brazil, we were asked to keep our eyes peeled for signs of the wreckage of a plane or two that had disappeared from the skies into the seas or jungle a day or so before. This should have been more sobering than it was. The same was true on the eight-hour flights over ocean from Brazil to Ascension Island in a plane designed to go no more than four, and from there, two days later, into Liberia in Africa and then up to Dakar in Senegal. All through these boring long flights over water we kept our eyes peeled for debris and yellow rafts, when we remembered to. In Florida we had time and evenings free, and there were dance floors there in saloons and cafes.
I wanted to start getting laid. Older guys from Coney Island like Chicky Ehrenman and Mel Mandlebaum, who had gone into the army sooner, would come back on leave from far-off places like Kansas and Alabama with similar reports of women who were all too willing to lie down for our brave boys in the service, and now that I was a boy in the service, I wanted to get laid too.
But I still didn't know how. I was shy. I could make jokes, but I was bashful. I was too easily entranced by some quality in a face or figure I found pretty. I was too quickly aroused, and inhibited by the concern it might show. I could be premature, I knew, but that was better than nothing for most of us then. When I danced close with a girl, just about any girl, I always grew an erection almost immediately and, with great embarrassment, would back myself away. Now I know I should have pressed it in against them harder to leave no doubt it was there and begin making suggestive jokes about what I wanted and was going to get, and I would have made out better. When I moved into the back room with a girl to begin muzzling her or joined them in some apartment when they were baby-sitting, I usually got what I wanted quickly enough and felt pretty good about myself until I was forced to remember there was a lot more. I was short, I knew, and always thought I had a little cock and that most of the others had pretty big ones, until one summer day in the locker room of the Steeplechase swimming pool, I looked in the mirror intrepidly while standing alongside Lew as we were washing up and saw that mine was just as good.
But he was using his. And I was always coming too quickly, or not at all. The first time that Lew and his other friend Leo Weiner set me up with a girl they'd found who had come to the Island for the summer to work in a soda fountain and was not unwilling to put out for anyone who asked her to--they were both very good at talking that way to girls--I came in the rubber before I even got in. The first time I fixed myself up, with a girl in the clubroom who'd let me know while I was still using my hand that she wanted to go all the way, I lost my erection as soon as we bared ourselves, although I'd certainly been hard enough and ready before we both took down our pants. Glenda loved those stories.
I can't be positive, but I don't think I finally did get laid until I was already overseas. There, it was effortless, as one in a body of guys al
l doing the same things with youthful self-assurance and a general taste for rowdy good times, near bunches of local girls in the main city of Bastia close by who did not speak our language and then especially in Rome, where the women we met on the streets smiled to let us know what they were doing there and expected us to approach with solicitations and cash and cigarettes and chocolate bars and with careless gaiety and our flies already half open. We could not think of them as prostitutes or whores, only as streetwalkers. I can't be positive I'd not really done it before because of that incident with a sweet southern girl in the dance hall in West Palm Beach, Florida, where we'd been flown to check out the plane given us for the flight overseas and to calibrate the various instruments for faults and deviations.
I still don't know if that one counted or not. She was perky as could be, with very black hair and eyes almost lavender, an inch shorter than I, with dimples too, and very much dazzled by my sharp New York lindy hop routines, which she had never beheld and wanted to learn. Schroeder had not seen them either, or Lieutenant Kraft, who had requisitioned from the motor pool the jeep in which we had gone there. After a while we went outside for some air. I walked with my arm still around her waist and we drifted without talking about it to one of the darker areas of the parking lot. We passed couples embracing in different sheltered places. I gave her a helping hand up to a seat on the fender of a low sports car.
"Oh, no, Sammy honey, we are not going to do that thing tonight, not here, not now," she let me know very strictly, holding me off with her hands on my chest, and placed a quick friendly kiss on my nose.
I had eased myself in between her legs, close enough to keep kissing, and I had just slid my hands up under her dress along her thighs to the elastic band of her panties, with my thumbs rubbing on the insides. Until she spoke, that was almost as far as I hoped to get in that parking lot.
Staring into her eyes, I confessed with a smile, "I wouldn't even know how, I think. I've never done it before." We were leaving the following day for the hop to Puerto Rico, and I could risk being truthful.
She laughed at that one as though I were still making wisecracks. She could hardly believe that a sharpie like me was still a virgin.
"Oh, you poor boy," she commiserated with me mellifluously. "You've been greatly deprived, haven't you?"
"I taught you to dance," I hinted.
"Then I'll show you how we do it," she agreed. "But you mustn't put it in. You must promise me that. Now stand back a minute and let me twist myself a little. That's better. See? Oh, that's a very nice one you have, isn't it? And all ready to go like the best little boy, ain't he?"
"I was circumcised by a sculptor."
"Now, not so fast, Sammy honey. And not so quick. Not there, baby, not there. That's almost my belly button. You've got to learn to give me a chance to put my thing up there where you can get at it. That's why we call it putting out, honey, see? Now, I'm not going to do that for you tonight. Understood? Come back a little closer. That's more like it, right? But you mustn't put it in! Don't put it in! You're putting it in!"
This last was a cry that could have shaken the neighborhood. She bounced about under me wildly for about fifteen seconds or so, trying frantically to wriggle free, and all I was trying to do was raise my weight to help, and then the next thing I knew I was up and watching myself shoot in midair across the hood of the car. The stuff spurted a mile. Shoot is just the right word for a boy of nineteen or twenty. When a man is past sixty-eight, he comes. When he can. If he wants to.