“Graduation”

Perhaps Hayraker’s biggest failure in boot camp was in respect to communication. His interview with a personnel man was a complete disaster.\

Chief Small, Hayraker’s recruiter, had promised him Journalism school. The personnel man he was assigned when it came time to be assigned a school completely misinterpreted Hayraker’s records and was not going to give him any school at all.

A recruit should be able to speak openly with a counselor under those circumstances”

“Have you got the right file, moron?”

“Aren’t you Rosenberg?”

“It’s Hayraker, fuckhead!”

“Let’s see, GCT 63, ARI 68, Clerical 67, Mechanical 27. A little low in mechanical, aren’t we? Perhaps we’ll be able to get you into postal clerk school.”

“But I was guaranteed journalism school. Are you people in the habit of going back on your word?”

They had you fill out a dream sheet regarding where you wanted to be assigned and which schools you would like to go to. Instead of putting, guaranteed Journalism school, Hayraker put down Yeoman and postal clerk as second and third choices, never dreaming they’d actually give him one of them.

A real counselor would have or should have informed Hayraker that postal clerk was a closed rate, very little chance for advancement, virtually no chance for advancement. Later Hayraker became aware that there were schools for such rates as Data Systems (computers) Radioman, and Radarman, which would have better prepared him for a career on the outside. Eventually Hayraker would make third class Postal Clerk (E-4) and to insure that he would never advance beyond that rate the Canoe Club transferred him to a base where he worked as a teletype operator. Nothing to do with postal clerking.

Porter was easier in most respects, but there were new horror stories. One day the company got a rest break from their constant marching. The barracks was a three-decker. A kid named French went to sleep on the floor on the bottom level. A recruit on the third floor went to sleep with his piece next to him. In his sleep, he kicked his piece out over the ledge and it flew down the stairwell, the butt of the rifle hitting French in or near his eye. Must of just grazed him, though, because French went around for the remaining days of boot camp with a big patch of gauze over his eye. Of course, Long called him “Cyclops.”

There were stories circulating that a color company had been set back on 9-5 day because they had held a party in the barracks on their last day. Just about everybody believed this nonsense. Where would they get the ingredients for a party?

Finally the last day arrived. Everyone was worried about the final inspection which would never take place. They took their rifles back to the armory. Good bye, 7777. Oh, happy day. They took back their bedding. Nobody checked their numbers. All that worrying for nothing. If they took back your rifle and your bedding, they must really be going to let you go! But what about the five demerits Hayraker hadn’t pushed off because of the mix up between his blues and whites? He didn’t dare ask. Did BK really have a heart?

They had to wear their legging one more time, graduation. Some recruits’ parents actually came to watch this charade. 485 was color company and they got to “post the colors” at graduation review, marching by the reviewing stand displaying their flags. As they were marching in, the band missed a beat and Company 485 got out of step. Was this somebody’s idea of a joke?

Who really cared about graduation? It was all such a joke. Just about everybody just wanted to get the hell out of there. They got to go back to the barracks one more time to pick up their trusty seabags, and it was off to dispersal, where they would pick up their orders. Hayraker, Cunningham, and Wagner were going to Bainbridge, Maryland. WAVE boot camp they were informed.

They were bussed to a nearby naval air station where they were to meet their plane. This was more like civilian territory, but the boots didn’t dare risk not saluting petty officers. Hayraker would salute petty officers for two weeks after he arrived at his new duty station until one finally told him he didn’t have to.

There was a radio playing at the airport. It was playing, “Hey Paula.” It was only a few weeks since the “ Dear John” letter and Hayraker was heart sick. Then they played “Telstar” and Hayraker’s mood changed. It was a new world; they treated you like human beings at service school.

It was Hayraker’s first time on an airplane. And what an airplane. A B-52 converted bomber. He wasn’t sure whether he was afraid of flying or not. Once up there, though, it wasn’t much different from being on the ground, except for your ears constantly popping.

Hayraker imagined being in a real bomber with flak constantly bombarding the plane, not knowing when you were going to buy the farm. Imagine buzzing some of these Midwesterners with one of these big babies. Imagine parachuting into the cornfields of Illinois and having a cornstalk shoved up your butt. Hayraker was making himself sick.

Another journey into the unknown, except this time there was no one waiting at home. She was a big senior now. He would see her perform in her high school musical (on leave after service school) but he had been too chicken to go back and try to talk to her. She had played the Virgin Mother in the play. Type casting if he‘d ever seen it.

When Hayraker, Wagner, and Cunningham arrived at Bainbridge, it was the YMCA all over again. Only this place was seedier. They got there too late to be assigned a barracks so they were issued “fart sacks” and assigned bunks in a barracks for transients. It must have been the mess cook barracks. But who could sleep among all these vagrants and baby-rapers? Mess cooks were rather low on the social scale.

Breakfast, next morning, was much more relaxed except for the WAVES being so near. They didn’t sit with the men, but you could see them in the next dining hall. Word was that the mess cooks really made out because they at least got to talk to them.

You marched here too, but you were dismissed when you got to the mess hall. They would be transferred to their service school barracks that day and they were more like it. The Yeoman school barracks was spotless. One of the drawbacks, however, was that there were no heavily bearded cleaning types to do the cleaning for you. You and your three cubical mates had to do it yourselves and be inspected once a week by some jerk wearing white gloves.

Hayraker’s cube mates were great guys. Kupstas, Smith, and Lemieux, all Yeoman school candidates. Kupstas and Smith had a love-hate relationship going. They had been in Banbridge for several months waiting for school, working as mess cooks. They knew some of the WAVES, but unfortunately they never introduced Hayraker to any of them.

They were in school now and they really had no chance to talk to the women either. About the only place you could talk to women was in the service club which was off limits to the lady boots and to Hayraker who wasn’t old enough to drink. He finally went there anyway on the night before he left Bainbridge during the Postal Clerk school farewell party.

Bill Smith had a Fred Allen personality. Tony Kupstas was your loveable kid brother type.

“Do you have any toothpaste, Kupstas?”

“What did you do with the tube I gave you last night?”

“You squeezed the tube in the middle. It was cursed and defiled. I had to throw it away.”

“Smith, it’s your turn to clean the cubicle.”

“It’s everybody’s turn to clean the cubicle. Besides, as senior man I defer to the boot.”

Kupstas would explain that Smith was just kidding, and that Hayraker’s cleaning partner was Lemieux. They would take turns every other week unless they were hit during inspection. Hayraker never did find out what would happen if you got hit, since most often the inspections were cancelled. You didn’t push the piece. That was for sure.

Wonder of all wonders! There was a lounge with a TV set in the Yeoman school barracks. Hayraker used to sit in there and watch American Bandstand. There were guys in there from Philadelphia who knew some of the kids on the show. One girl was missing. One of the Philly guys said she had used sugar water to set her hair and developed worms.

Senior Chief Jake Miller was the instructor for Postal Clerk school, which was in the same building as Yeoman school. He was skinny to say the least. Supposedly he had lost about a hundred pounds, due to dieting not sickness. It was hard to imagine.

Jake taught them all about money orders, and stamps and about all the forms you had to fill out as ship’s postal clerk. It was a lot more complicated than one might think. It took eight weeks to make it through the school. Two weeks were spent learning how to type. You had to get up to at least twenty words a minute.

Fellow postal clerk strikers Greenwell and Birdwell were barracks mates of Hayraker’s who lived across the hall from his cubicle. Birdwell had been on a ship and was from North Carolina some place. Greenwell, George, was from Florida. Birdwell was a fun-loving type who was always pulling practical jokes, like putting George’s hand in a bucket of water while he slept. He was always trying to short sheet people as well but he overdid it and most people usually checked before they got into bed. Later on George and Hayraker would be shipmates at Polaris Missile Facility outside Charleston, South Carolina.

Bainridge was not a bed of roses in all respects. There were lifers going to school there too.

One night Hayraker had the mid watch from midnight to 0400 at the school. They were WWII barracks similar to those at Camp Moffitt. Very susceptible to fire. Midwatch was extremely boring, except for the times he forgot about the full length mirror on the second floor and scared the living Jesus out of himself when he mistook himself for an intruder. It was overall a spooky and lonely experience. The quiet could get to you as much as anything. Some guys snuck in a radio.

Then there was the JOD, junior officer of the day. Hayraker wasn’t sure whether you were supposed to salute this sucker or not, but he wasn’t taking any chances. This one night the JOD showed up and asked Hayraker the $64 question. “What do you do if there’s a fire?”

He didn’t know.

Break the glass on the fire alarm, which was right next to the front door. No one had ever told him that, but he could have figured it out if it came to that, but not under the gun barrel gaze of the JOD, a second-class petty officer with a Lt. Commander complex. Thankfully the a-hole didn’t know what to do about an incompetent watch so there were no repercussions. But the JOD had been right. Those buildings were even older than the ones at Great Lakes. They would burn like paper Mache.

Wagner was still a fish out of water. He was gong to Radioman School, but all he wanted to talk about was New York City. The Big Apple was only 120 miles from Bainbridge and Al went there on just about every weekend. Another advantage of service school command was you had the weekends free. You could go to Baltimore or Washington DC. But you had to remember to be back before twelve midnight on Sunday or you would lose your liberty card.

Bainbridge even had a movie theater with popcorn and everything. Overall, despite the drizzly weather, Bainbridge was definitely a step up from boot camp. Hayraker made the mistake of going to the barber to try to get his buzz cut remodeled into a flattop. Not much of an improvement; it would take him an extra month or so for his hair to grow out.

Pimlico race track, Johns Hopkins University, Fort McHenry (the inspiration for Francis Scott Key’s Star Spangled Banner) were sites to see in Baltimore but The Block was where the sailors usually headed. The Block was much like State Street in Chicago with its strip shows, tattoo parlors, and illicit sex. It was also home to “The Murphy.” This was where young boys got the money up front for sex with their sister and then disappeared.

The time at Bainbridge was over before it began. Hayraker remembered the funny little “Roach” trucks that would come buzzing up to the barracks at practically all hours of the day, selling all sorts of junk food. Most of those sailors were right out of boot camp. They were deprived. The cleaners was also portable and again the former boots were good clients as they had been conditioned to fear punishment for improper care of their uniforms. Even your dungarees had to be ironed.

Hayraker also learned to cheat on his seamanship courses at Bainbridge. One of his fellow students at Postal Clerk School, Miller, had all the answers to the courses. The courses were independent study units which you filled in by looking up the answers in the Blue Jackets Manuel. There were seven or eight units, and you could take the Seaman’s test (E-3) after you had been in six months. Cheating was called gun decking. This practice would make it impossible for Hayraker to make E-5 as he gun decked all of his postal clerk courses for higher rank.

Yeoman school was a little longer than Postal Clerk school and Hayraker left earlier than Kupstas and Smith. Kupstas feigned grief over losing Hayraker. Kupstas was another Brown; just when you get to know somebody you get transferred. Smith was non-committal about Hayraker‘s leaving. He was a strange kid. When he was mad at Kupstas, he would stop talking to him except indirectly:

“Hayraker, would you tell Kupstas to change his socks, the fumes are wilting the plants.”

“What plants? We haven’t got any plants!”

“Lemieux, would you show Kupstas the green stuff growing in his laundry basket?”

Hayraker took a Greyhound bus all the way from Bainbridge to Barnesville, Minnesota. George Greenwell would take a Trailways all the way to Florida. They said goodbye to each other, never expecting to see each other again.

Hayraker’s orders were for Service School Command, Great Lakes, Illinois. He couldn’t get rid of the place.

“Long and Winding Road”

Join the Navy and see the world. On a Greyhound bus. See the outskirts of Buffalo, New York; Cleveland, Ohio. Switch buses in lovely off the main track bus stations. Contend with the homosexual predators who seem to gravitate toward bus station lavatories. Contend with unhappy, underpaid, impolite bus drivers who would just as soon be home in bed.

Hayraker could never sleep on a bus, so he was sitting there vegetating when the lady in the seat across the aisle fell asleep and dropped her baby on the floor. He just looked at it. Was it his responsibility to pick up the kid? It wasn’t crying. The bus driver yelled: “Pick up the damn kid!”

The mother woke up just as Hayraker had scooped the kid up. She said, “Thank you” when he handed it to her.

You’d think the driver would have enough to do just keeping his damn eyes on the road.

Hayraker knew a joke about a Greyhound bus. Hayraker usually hated jokes, especially when you’re having a conversation and some jerk starts telling one after another and won’t stop. This particular joke was about a beatnik hitchhiker. The driver came to an intersection and asked the beatnik if anything was coming from the other direction.

The beatnik said, “A big dog.”

The driver pulled out into the intersection and there was a violent crash.

The driver said to the beatnik, “I thought you said nothing was coming except a big dog.”

The beatnik said, “Yeah, a Greyhound.”

Jokes should be spontaneous like the repartee between Smith and Kupstas. Their conversations often souned like a Bud Abbot and Lou Costello routine.

“Kupstas, where’d you get that face?”

“From my mother.”

“You never told me your mother was a gargoyle.”

“She’s not; she’s from Hungary.”

“I didn’t ask you if she was hungry; I asked where you got that face. A gargoyle is a statue of a grotesque human or animal used as a rain spout on medieval architecture.”

“That would make me almost immortal, wouldn’t it? Do they have any Smiths on those old buildings? What did they call the bathroom?”

“If Smith were a derogatory surname, would it be held in common by so may members of our society?”

“It’s easy to spell. Lots of people use it when they don’t want to use their real names. You might as well be John doe.”

This one-upmanship could go on for hours and usually led to vulgarity and Smith going into his indirect insults through Lemieux and Hayraker.

Those damn busses would never show up on time and Hayraker always had to wait two to four hours in some depressing waiting room for the next one. It was then that Hayraker would turn to books. When the bus finally got to Minneapolis, he explored the area near the station and found a bookstore right down the block. It was huge. The University of Minnesota caters to some 50,000 students so this bookstore was a cut above what you might expect to find near a Greyhound bus terminal. He was first exposed to LOOK HOMEWARD ANGEL, CATCHER IN THE RYE, 1984, and BRAVE NEW WORLD in this book store. He also discovered minor classics such as ANATOMY OF A MURDER and THE NATURAL by Bernard Malamud. Some of these books were over his head but he read them all because he had paid for them and because there was nothing else to do in the navy, especially when you were trying to exist on nineteen dollars every two weeks. He had the rest sent to a bank account. Hayraker had not given up on college. He was saving for the time when he could become one of the 50,000 students going to the U of M. Just the thought of it took him back to that sad time during the summer before when he had still hoped he could somehow find the money to at least start college.

He went down to the campus and registered with his friends, hoping that he could find a job and somehow work his way through. Job services sent him to apply for work as a shoe clerk. But the man wanted somebody who had experience. How do you get experience if you have to have experience to get a job? Hayraker gave up looking for a job rather easily because he had to contend with metropolitan busses. He didn’t know the city and he got lost so often. The bus drivers would tell him to get on or off and would seldom answer his questions.

When he finally decided to join the Navy and was in the cities to enlist, his friend Jack stayed with him for several hours waiting for the train. It was like waiting for your own execution. Jack knew how much he had wanted to go to college. It was amazing how easy it suddenly became to get money to go to college once he was out. There were loan programs, ROTC scholarships and companies begging for students willing to work for them after graduation. Nobody mentioned this stuff before he enlisted. In 1962 the poor didn’t go to college unless they saved every penny they had earned from the time they were born and invested it in blue chip stocks.

If Hayraker could have gone back, he would have killed to get into college. Other people did it. They existed on a thread. They lived in a hole in the wall, and they worked two, sometimes three jobs.

Falling asleep in the Greyhound waiting rooms, Hayraker would have nightmares about reenlisting when he neared the end of his enlistment. Sometimes desperation would set in, as it did during the early days of Vietnam. Hayraker had been transferred to Polaris Missile Facility outside Charleston, South Carolina, more arm-pit shore duty. As a teletype operator he got the message asking for volunteers, and he and his buddies were among the first to sign up. Luckily most did not have enough time left in the service to be chosen, but one of the new guys was actually sent to ‘Nam. Hayraker also volunteered for duty in Antarctica. The chief at the Pomflant radio shack had been stationed there. It was supposed to be really sluff duty and not as cold as it sounded. It was choice duty. You really had to know somebody to get it. Hayraker wasn’t picked. He would have volunteered for sub school, but that meant extending his enlistment two years. No way, Jose.

Lots of sailors made the best of it. They forgot they were in the Canoe Club. They chased girls. They went to the beach. Folly Beach, South Carolina, was a popular sailor hang-out. They would take cheap Supermarket wine with them and hope to attract beach bunnies. They did occasionally, but the girls were mostly jail bait. Hayraker got sick on Falstaff beer. As the saying goes, “If there’s anything worse than a case of the clap it’s a case of Falstaff.” It must have been psychological because once he got out of the Navy, Hayraker never got sick on beer. He was sick of the Navy, of Navy prison.

Hayraker had other recurring dreams, some of which he actually looked forward to, like the flying dream. He was in his old high school and was running down the stairs. The school had three stories. Soon he is taking the steps three at a time and then all at once. The next moment he is zooming around banisters, then flying down the stairs. Eventually he is outside the building flying high in the sky. The only problem with the flying dream was getting down. Sometimes he would get caught up in the electrical wires. Hayraker found out what the dream meant when he read THE GREAT GATSY:

“Then wear the gold hat, if that will move her;

If you can bounce high, bounce for her too,

Till she cry, “lover, gold-hated, high-bouncing lover,

I must have you!”

Like Jay Gatsby, Hayraker was trying to impress someone, most likely of the feminine persuasion, but he must not have a lot of confidence or he wouldn’t get hung up in the electrical wires. Actually the flying dream is quite common. He looked it up once in a dream book. It meant that Hayraker had a driving ambition, which is represented by the flying. The wires would be whatever drawback that ambition would represent, like a airline pilot losing an engine.

One of his girlfriends suggested he was being too analytical. She said that some people ride motorcycles or race cars; Hayraker flies in his dreams where it’s safe. They didn’t last very long together.

The same thing happened when he quit smoking. He’d have these dreams about starting again. Early on in the process he wasn’t sure if he had smoked or not. These were his heavy drinking days. Smoking was important to Hayraker. Without cigarettes he had not place to hide. The first time he quit smoking he was still in the navy. He lasted six months. Then he lost fifty dollars in a poker game and that was all the reason he needed to start again. Soon he was back up to a pack a day.

Hayraker’s dream had come true. No, not the flying dream. He got his final choice on his dream sheet when he requested a duty station. He had asked for Naval Air Station, Minneapolis, Minnesota, but they gave him Service School Command, Great Lakes, Illinois, which was close enough for him to go home on weekends if you didn’t mind driving for twelve hours with a bunch of drunken sailors.

Meanwhile he went home to Barnesville after the long harrowing bus ride. His best friend’s girl was a nurse and she arranged a blind date for Hayraker. She was slightly overweight and not very good-looking. They went bowling and Hayraker avoided her as much as possible.

The poor girl had to sit there and take it. It was especially bad when his friend took his girl home and they made out in the front seat for what seemed like an hour.

His old girlfriend had accused him of being conceited. It was the way he walked. Shoulders squared, head up. He walked like his older brother. He walked like a sailor.

He also had this ambition. As in the dream, he wanted to be the only one in the school who could fly. And here was this rather ordinary looking girl who had dared to accept a blind date with the Narcissus of Barnesville High School.

His ambition was to write the great Ameridcan novel. He knew enough about popular literature to understand that it had to be entertaining. It had to sell. He already had a title for his book. ALFALFA. It would be based on Carl “Alfalfa” Sweitzer’s life. Alfalfa was the crooner in the Our Gang comedies, the one with the greasy cowlick. Hayraker had read about how Alfalfa was killed in a barroom brawl, arguing over a five dollar debt. It seemed so sad to go from such heights to such depths, to have all that love from his fans and then to be lost with nowhere to turn.

After two weeks dorking around Barnesville, hoping he’d run into his old girlfriend, Hayraker reported for duty at Great Lakes. He reported to Ensign Mancini in the Administration building who sent him to Electronics Technician School to straighten out their mail problems. It was huge. There were ten students working in the mail room who were waiting to get into ET School. They were on hold; there was mail on hold, too, for sailors who sometimes never showed up. It was all over the place. After clean-up one day they found some old letters behind the file cabinets. They were over six months old. No one had responsibility here.

The problem was that the program at ET School was set up in two week units. If you flunked a unit test, you had to take the two weeks over again. If you started in 1A, for instance, you became part of class 2A. Sometimes the changes wouldn’t get recorded, and the kid’s mail would keep going to 1A. It was a clerical problem, but clerical wouldn’t admit it, neither would the instructors claim responsibility. Then there was 308, as in Building 308. That’s where the flunkies went who were waiting to be reassigned. Some of them never made it there or if they did, they had left and left no forwarding address. There was no telephone in the mailroom so it was almost impossible to track these people down. The solution seemed to be to send the mail to the barracks and billet (bunk) of that particular student the entire time he was at Great Lakes. The problem with that is that if the student failed a unit, he would be a week behind his bunk mates with no one to study with. A little ingenuity might solve that problem, but the higher ups would rather move the kid around instead. Teach him to flunk that unit.

The real problem was that nobody cared about anybody else’s mail. Hayraker had a student helper, Fred Wilmot, who worked for him prior to starting ET School who was so worried about his mail that he took the key to the mail room with him when he was assigned to school. Rather than turn him in, Hayraker had the other guys negotiate with (and threaten) Fred to get the key back.

Once he got the place organized there wasn’t much to do. It took about fifteen minutes to directorize the returned mail in the morning. There were people who always had the wrong address and Hayraker knew from memory where their mail went. No matter how many change-of-address cards he sent these letter writers never got the hint. Then there was the transfer file. You had to forward mail for the graduates to their ship, sub school, or other new duty station. This went back to the main post office. Drops went to 308. It would take Hayraker another half hour to track down people who weren’t where they were supposed to be. Some of them were never found. Nobody knew where they were. Hayraker would then try to send their mail back to the main post office as he didn’t have a “return to sender” stamp. The next day the post office would send the same mail back again because their records said the student was still at ET School. It was so frustrating that one day one of Hayraker’s workers got carried away with the “Not at ET School” stamp and obliterated the face of the letter with ink. This solicited a visit from the chief postal clerk at the main post office who chewed Hayraker’s ass for what seemed like an hour. The chief was probably a little jealous, too, to see a postal clerk seaman running his own mail room.

This place wasn’t helping Hayraker make rate though because you didn’t sell stamps or money orders in a mail room. You didn’t have to contend with the dozens of forms a postal clerk in a real post office would have to fill out.

The morning’s work only took an hour or so and then Hayraker and one or two of his helpers would go have breakfast at the canteen. Breakfast consisted of a roll and coffee. They were goofing off. They goofed off for most of the day until the mail came from the main post office around three P.M.

Sometimes they would have rubber band fights, hiding behind the mail bags, other times they would clean the place, using the buffer and wax. This was to make sure there weren’t any more letters hiding behind the cabinets.

When the mail came in, it only took about thirty minutes to sort since Hayraker knew where everyone was by heart. It was then bundled and the mail petty officers would come and get it. If they had any to return it would be deposited in the mail box outside the mail room.

Continued . . . Hayraker’s first duty station