Army or Navy, in every company there is one such undisciplined spirit as Fishbinder; and it is testimony to the basic soundness of our defense system that the U.S.A. is able, nevertheless, to fight and win wars.
_____________
I was using Grand Central Station as a short cut the other day when I came upon a dozen young men, new draftees, all around nineteen or twenty years old, huddled together at the entrance to one of the tracks. They were carrying little paper packages or lunch boxes, and they stayed very close to one another, talking in low voices, and occasionally they laughed sheepishly.
But in the center of othe group was one young man who contrasted sharply with the rest. There was nothing sheepish about him, and there was certainly nothing very low about his voice. On the contrary, he was talking away as loudly as he could, waving his arms excitedly, strutting and telling jokes and showing off like mad. Naturally, I was reminded of Fishbinder.
_____________
Moe Fishbinder was his name, and he came from the Bronx into my life not so many years ago, when I was in the same position as those uneasy young men in Grand Central Station. I was nineteen years old, too, with a year of college behind me, and now I had been drafted into the Navy. I hated the idea of leaving school, I hated the ail-American boys, jazz lovers and baseball fans, with whom I found myself at Great Lakes Training Center. I hated Mr. Durkee, the chief petty officer in charge of our boot camp company, with his sour expression, his sharp way of barking out “fwd Ha-a-a-aarch!” and his “stinker list” of souls-to-bepurged. Most of all, I hated Fishbinder.
He was listed officially as a member of our company, but that was a lie. The idea of Fishbinder’s being a member of our company, of any company, of anything whatsoever, was a contradiction in terms. Fishbinder was the man who’s always got an objection, disobeys orders as a matter of principle, makes jokes on serious occasions, sleeps on watch, quarrels with anybody bigger than he is, and generally can be depended on for the worst possible blunder at the worst possible time.
Right from the start, Fishbinder didn’t leave anybody in any doubts about himself. The night we left New York the whole bunch of us, twenty draftees, were supposed to meet at Grand Central Station at eight o’clock. Everybody was there—except Fishbinder. Fifteen minutes later, the Navy recruiting officer in charge of the party received a phone call. “This is Fishbinder. I’m here at Penn Station! Where the hell is everybody else?” When he finally showed up, a full twenty minutes later, what we saw was a fat, dumpy, round-faced little fellow, but wearing a silly little black mustache and puffing blandly at a big cigar. The recruiting officer looked daggers at him, and Fishbinder just smiled and tapped the ashes off his cigar onto somebody’s suitcase.
The train was late, so our officer took us all into the Oyster Bar for a bite to eat. Since Fishbinder’s name happened to be first on the list of recruits, the officer handed him the packet of official papers that would go along with us to Great Lakes.
“Hold on to these while the rest of us eat,” he said. “When we’re finished, give these papers back to me, and you can get some food yourself. But be careful. Don’t let the papers out of your hands.”
Fishbinder nodded vigorously. “As good as done,” he said. “Just leave it to me.”
The officer looked worried, but he shrugged his shoulders and led us into the Oyster Bar. Ten minutes later he looked up from his plate, and who should he see sitting at a corner table, devouring a Sea Food Special, but Fishbinder. The oíficer rushed up to him. “My God! Where are the papers?”
“Hold your water, hold your water,” Fishbinder said. “Your papers are all right. I left them with a guy in the waiting room. He ain’t going to run away with them. Believe me, with the load he’s got on, he’s in no condition to move!”
The papers were rescued, and then the officer exploded. “What do you mean by doing a thing like that?” he shouted at Fishbinder furiously. But Fishbinder shouted back at him, just as furiously, “You want a guy to starve to death? You want to wipe us all out before we even get a look at a Jap?”
_____________
Less than two hours after we got to Great Lakes, Fishbinder was arguing with the tailor about his pants. “For God’s sake, give me a pair that don’t have so many buttons!”
Needless to say, Fishbinder was the first name on the Chief’s stinker list. The moment the Chief set eyes on Fishbinder, during our first morning inspection, he looked extra sour and said, “You’ll shave off that mustache, sailor, or I’ll know the reason why!” The next morning Fishbinder showed up for inspection with the mustache. The Chief expressed his annoyance in a few basic phrases, then told Fishbinder to go into the barracks right that minute and shave it off.
“Wait a minute!” Fishbinder said. “There ain’t nothing in regulations against mustaches. General Pershing had a mustache—”
“Get in there, sailor!” the Chief said. Fishbinder brought up a few more constitutional points in defense of his mustache, until finally the Chief looked real ugly and said, “Do you know what you get in this man’s Navy for disobeying orders, sailor?”
“Okay, okay,” Fishbinder said, “if you’re going to put it that way.” And he stamped off to the barracks, muttering.
The morning after the Chief told us we would have to keep a clean towel hanging from the end of our bunks at all times, Fishbinder was caught without a towel. “It slipped my mind,” he said. He hung one up and three hours later the Chief—by this time he was giving Fishbinder his personal attention—discovered the towel with a big black handprint all over the face of it. “So I wiped my hand! So what?” Fishbinder protested when he was assigned to extra guard duty. “What’s a towel for? Just answer me that!”
Discipline just seemed to bring out the genius in Fishbinder. The tougher the Navy got on him, the tougher he got on the Navy.
One day, during the exercise period, Fishbinder refused to bend over and touch his toes. “A guy with my build,” he said, “it ain’t human!” So the Chief made him stand up before the whole company and touch his toes fifty times. The punishment was a failure. Fishbinder volunteered to do it again the next day; he liked the publicity.
_____________
Meanwhile, Fishbinder managed to antagonize practically every member of the company. He got into quarrels at the drop of a hat. Any reason would do, anything from an insult against his mother to an item of erroneous information about some baseball player. If there hadn’t been strict laws against fist-fighting in the Navy, Fishbinder would have been black and blue after a week. And it didn’t help matters any that every night Fishbinder was the center of a friendly and absolutely illegal little poker game—in which he somehow managed to get most of the good hands.
Naturally, he had to pay for all this by taking an awful lot of kidding, not all of it so good-natured. One night, for instance, we were talking about professions and vocations, and what’s the best sort of work for a man to do in life. One boy from Boston, whose father was a prep school teacher, couldn’t see anything but being a prep school teacher. A boy from Iowa, who wasn’t much of a public speaker, put in a few slow painful words for the life of a fanner. And then Fishbinder said, “All that stuff, that’s a lot of bull! My old man’s got the greatest job you can get. If they ever let me loose from this Alcatraz, that’s what I’m going to be!” And he explained to us that his father was a waiter in a delicatessen.
Well, the horse laugh that went up was terrific. Everybody began to make cracks. And the New York boys came up with the usual jokes about delicatessen waiters—about putting their thumbs in the soup, reducing the meat in sandwiches to cigarette-paper thinness, and spilling coffee on the customers. “A real high-class job,” someone said. Fishbinder was right there with an answer. “It just goes to show what a bunch of birdbrains I’m living with! I’ll bet you think it’s more high-class to be one of the customers, and get the coffee spilled on you!”
“Say, Fishman,” said Calhoun, a big husky fellow from Louisiana who made a big pretense out of not being able to remember Fishbinder’s right name, “what is that, anyway, that delly-catessen? Never heard tell of any such thing down where I come from.”
“Down where you come from!” Fishbinder gave a laugh. “Listen, down where you come from they never heard tell of nothing except scratching for turnips! Down where you come from, they think Robert E. Lee is General of the Army!”
“Still, you must admit,” said the Boston boy, “that being a waiter isn’t a very dignified profession. Running around all day, taking orders from people.”
“Sure, sure. It’s a lot more dignified, ain’t it, to run around all day taking orders from school kids! Like a certain profession I can think of!”
It is not surprising that from the first moment I saw Fishbinder, I was overcome by revulsion. With that raucous voice, that sloppy appearance, that obscene leer, he struck me immediately as the incarnation of vulgarity, ignorance, brutishness, philistinism—everything, in short, that I hated most in the world. The reason why I never put in an insult or two of my own was simply that I could hardly bear to address a word to Fishbinder—or worse still, to have him answer me.
When he didn’t happen to be around, of course, I was perfectly willing to join in the general merriment at his expense.
_____________
That’s the way I felt about Fishbinder until one night about a week after I got to boot camp.
I was standing the twelve midnight to four in the morning watch, and standing it along with me was Fishbinder. Now this was certainly one of the roughest things we had to do in boot camp. After working hard all day, we were half asleep on our feet, and the barracks were dark and chilly, and no sound except for people breathing in their sleep.
Fishbinder and I didn’t say anything for a while. Just paced up and down. But finally he came out with a loud whisper, “My feet are killing me! I’m taking a load off!”
“You can’t sit down! That’s against the regulations.”
“Regulations, regulations. What does the regulations know about my feet?” And he lowered himself onto a bench with much puffing and gasping, took off his shoes, and began to rub his toes. After a while, he spoke up again. “Have a butt?”
I gazed in horror at the pack of cigarettes he was holding out to me. “But you can’t smoke on watch!”
“Who can’t?” he said, and he lighted up.
“But suppose they catch you?”
“Fat chance. You think any of these officers are going to get up in the middle of the night and spoil their beauty sleep, just to catch me smoking on watch? And so what if they did?” he added. “What’ll they do to me? Make me walk the plank?”
I didn’t answer him. I had a vague idea that if Fishbinder got sent to the brig, I would probably be sent there along with him for not doing my duty as a patriotic member of my country’s armed forces and making him put out his cigarette.
“So you won’t smoke, and you won’t sit down,” Fishbinder said, and he broke into a gay cackle which I was positive would wake everybody up and bring the Shore Patrol down on our heads. “What’s the idea? You letting these officers put a scare in you?”
“Listen to me,” Fishbinder went on, indignantly. “You want to know a secret about those bums? Take away all that garbage from their hats, and they’re no different from anybody else. They could have half a dozen stripes on their sleeves, and a chest full of fruit salad, but they still got to put their pants on one leg at a time, like us ordinary people. Listen, I got lots of experience with that type. Bosses, foremen, department heads, I been working for them since I was a kid. And there wasn’t one of them yet that could make me wiggle my nose if I didn’t feel like it. That lieutenant, for instance. He’s just like Mr. Spiegelberg, that owns the dump where my old man works. He likes to hop around, look busy, tell people what to do, make like a big wheel—but believe me, every time he gives you an order, he’s shivering in his drawers you might laugh in his face. You just keep that in mind.”
This advice didn’t seem especially practical to me at the time, but I found myself listening attentively.
“You don’t like it here, do you?” he asked suddenly. “You think you’re out of place with this bunch of morons. You’re used to a more refined type, ain’t you?” Fortunately, Fishbinder went right on talking. “Me too. I don’t like these morons no more than you do. I also am used to a more refined type.”
Then for the next three hours, Fishbinder entertained me with stories of his life in the Bronx. His stories were coarse, obscene, boastful, probably a pack of lies. But still, I got such pleasure out of them that it was all I could do to keep from laughing out loud. And what’s more, I even went so far as to tell Fishbinder some stories about my own life, and my ambitions, and my love of literature, and so on—all very apologetically, of course. And when four o’clock finally came around, I was actually feeling even sort of happy—for the first time since I got into the Navy.
This was a great puzzle to me, and I wondered about it all the next morning. I was slightly embarrassed about it, too, and went out of my way to avoid any contact with Fishbinder. At lunch somebody said to me, “How did you like your watch last night? Old Fishbinder didn’t bother you with his snoring, did he?” And I said, “No, he stayed awake all night. We had a very interesting talk. He taught me how to make a corned beef sandwich without corned beef.”
One split second after I said this I was ashamed of it. So I turned my attention quickly to the food, and tried to put Fishbinder out of my mind.
_____________
But it wasn’t so easy. That same afternoon something happened which put Fishbinder right back in my mind but good.
In order to make this incident clear, I will have to explain briefly the Navy’s policy about cleanliness. Ordinarily, a person is supposed to keep clean for purposes of health and comfort. But in boot camp, in order to keep as clean as they wanted us to, we had to give up all our comfort and ruin our health. The process of straightening out our bunks, for instance, was enough to give even the better-than-average mathematician a nervous breakdown. Everything had to be in exactly the right position, exactly the right number of inches from everything else, exactly at the right angle from the windows, the doors, the North Star, the inspector’s big toe. What’s more everything had to be spotless—otherwise the stinker list would claim a new victim.
All of this led us, of course, to only one possible state of mind—terror. Since the least ittle spot was an act of treason and the tiniest wrinkle was subject to capital punishment, the scared recruit defended himself the only way he could, by trickery. In less than a week I had already picked up a number of useful dodges, such as wearing my undershirt abnormally tight so it always looked cleaner than it really was, and volunteering for special sweeping details in order to avoid regimental inspection. In the Navy honesty was definitely not the best policy.
On the afternoon I’m talking about, we were scheduled for a special inspection. Commander Michaels, the head of our division, was coming over to take a personal look at our barracks. After lunch, all during our free period, we scraped the tables, sandpapered the floors, and generally gave the place a high polish—which, of course, it couldn’t possibly keep for more than half an hour. Just long enough to amuse Commander Michaels.
Well, it happened that I finished my particular detail a little early, so I sat down at one of the tables and read a book, Shakespeare’s tragedy, Antony and Cleopatra. Pretty soon the signal came that Commander Michaels was on his way. We all scurried to our bunks and stood at attention.
Commander Michaels came in, followed by the Chief, who was smiling all over and looking practically good-humored—which didn’t suit him at all. Behind the Chief was the company clerk, with a sinister-looking notebook to take down the names of anybody who attracted the Commander’s attention. The Commander was a tall, lean, grayhaired man, with a slight stoop and sleepy eyes. He marched around the barracks slowly, followed by his party, peering here and there, at this and that, and occasionally making a brief comment which the clerk would scribble down frantically in his notebook. I wasn’t exactly the ideal of the cool, clear-headed, steely-nerved fighting man when the Commander got to me.
But·he passed by me without a word, and I was all set to breathe a sigh of relief, when tragedy struck. Commander Michaels came to a stop at a table in front of the barracks, and said in a quiet voice full of menace, “What’s this book doing here?”
I didn’t need to look up to know what book he was talking about. I had been in such a hurry to get to my bunk before inspection that I had left my Shakespeare behind, in plain sight.
“Shakespeare,” Commander Michaels said, with a grunt. He didn’t seem impressed. “Mr. Durkee, tell the man who left this lying around to step forward.”
“Right, sir,” said the Chief, all smiles while he was looking at the Commander. Then he turned to us and immediately became all frowns. “Okay, who’s responsible for this? Who does this book belong to?”
I couldn’t have stepped forward even if I’d wanted to. I was absolutely frozen with fright. The only idea going through my head was: keep your mouth shut, don’t say a word, the book doesn’t have your name in it, so how will they ever know?
The Chief was repeating his question in a louder voice, with a redder face. He repeated it three or four times, and then Commander Michaels spoke again, in that soft voice. “This is a serious matter, Mr. Durkee. You’ll have to question them one by one.”
“Okay,” the Chief said, “we’ll take them alphabetically.”
And just then help came.
Fishbinder stepped forward with his usual confident smile. “Say, wait a second, let me look at that book!” Before the Chief could say yes or no, Fishbinder had walked right up to the company clerk and was squinting at the book. “Just like I thought!” Fishbinder said. “That’s my book! Anthony and Cleopatter.”
The Chief gave a sigh that was mainly made up of disgust and anger, but also with a tiny bit of weariness; you see, already Fishbinder was beginning to wear him down. “Fishbinder,” he said. “I might’ve known you were mixed up in this.”
“Your book?” said Commander Michaels, giving Fishbinder a hard stare. “You go in for reading like this, son?”
“Who, me, sir? Listen, I been a big Shakespeare fan since I was a baby in my mother’s arms. Poetry, that’s what I was brought up on. I come from a very intellectual-type family.”
A few laughs broke out from various parts of the barracks, but they were choked off immediately by a look from Commander Michaels. Then he transferred that look to Fishbinder for a while and finally nodded his head. “Very well. See to it that this man suffers the proper disciplinary measures, Mr. Durkee.” And he turned and marched out.
All this happened so fast, and I was so stunned by it all, that I didn’t even open my mouth. I should have—I shouldn’t have let Fishbinder take the blame for what I did—but I kept quiet. Anyway, it was now too late. The Chief was already snapping at Fishbinder. “You! Get into your dungarees, double time! You’re going on garbage duty at the chow hall! Snap to it!”
“Yes sir, yes sir,” Fishbinder said, saluting a few more times than he needed to. Then he flashed a great big smile at the company, and closed his left eye in a broad wink.
I don’t think I’ve ever felt so miserable.
_____________
After dinner we were free until bedtime. Usually I spent these two precious hours by drinking a milk shake in the canteen, then relaxing in the library with a book, or writing letters. But I knew I wasn’t going to do that this time. I knew there was only one possible thing I could do on this particular night. Almost without any help from me, my feet started me off in the direction of the chow hall. It was against all the rules for a recruit to hang around the chow hall after meals, unless he happened to be on duty there. But I didn’t care at all. I walked straight towards my goal, and the stinker list didn’t enter my head even once.
I got to the place behind the chow hall where the garbage detail was stationed. An awful smell, and lots of guys lifting pails, squirting hoses, and generally occupying themselves in filthy work. But no sign of Fishbinder. I went up to a group of fellows and asked about him. They didn’t recognize the name, but as soon as I said, “A fat little guy, with sort of a loud voice,” they all started nodding in unison.
“Oh, him!”
“Loud voice! Listen, a fire siren could rock you to sleep in comparison.”
“Right around the corner! But you better not disturb him—he’s very busy.”
I went around the corner, and there I found Fishbinder. He was on the ground, with his legs stretched out, his back propped up against the side of the chow hall, and his pudgy little hands folded over his stomach. His eyes were shut, an angelic smile was on his lips, and he was snoring.
For a few seconds I stared at this astonishing sight. Then I wet my lips and said, “Fishbinder—oh, Fishbinder.”
He opened his eyes slowly and smiled up at me. “Well, what do you know! I got a visitor. Sit down, sit down, make yourself at home.”
I squatted down on the ground, feeling very uneasy. But it was better to speak than just to stare at him in silence, so I said, “I don’t understand. Everybody else seems to be so busy, but you’re not doing a thing.”
“That’s why they’re all so busy,” he said. When I still looked puzzled, he laughed. “Very simple proposition. I match them.”
“Match them—?”
“Match them, match them! Don’t you know English? I match them for my share of the detail. Every hour on the hour, we match quarters. If I win, I don’t work. If I don’t win, I work my elbows off. Also, winner keeps the quarters. So far I been doing pretty good. I’m five bucks ahead, and I ain’t had such a nice rest in years, which I certainly deserve, the way that Chiefs been running the wind out of me lately.”
I expressed my amazement that Fishbinder was so lucky at matching quarters.
Fishbinder waved this away modestly. “Nothing to it, nothing at all. Just clean living. I was always head of my class at Sunday school.” And he gave a laugh which would have seemed a little out of place in any Sunday school that I ever heard of.
We sank into silence. Fishbinder watched me calmly, and I looked down at the ground. I knew that the tough part was coming, and I couldn’t put it off any longer. I took a breath, lifted my chin, and tried to meet his gaze as steadily as possible. “Listen, Fishbinder,” I began. “I don’t know exactly how to say this—but I’m sorry. Honestly, I’m sorry as I can be—that this happened.”
“Sorry! Sorry!” Fishbinder cried. “Why, this is the best thing that happened to me yet, since they shanghaied me into this organization!”
“The best thing—?” I said weakly.
“Why, positively! First of all, it’s the first chance I got all week to get away from that sewer we’re living in—and those sewer rats! And second of all, I never ate so good till I came down to this chow hall. It’s practically like the Bronx again. Like Sunday morning breakfast, which in our family is as big as most people’s Thanksgiving dinner. And third of all, this whole business has finally straightened out a big mistake that should’ve been straightened out a long time ago. You see, I been getting the idea lately that those meatheads in our company thought I was just a common ignoramus, without no education or culture or nothing. But now that this has happened, they don’t have no more doubts about what a highbrow type they got for a shipmate.”
I nodded my head. “Yes, that’s right. No more doubts.”
“Say, wait a minute!” Fishbinder said, the smile fading off his face. “Don’t tell me you’re just like those meatheads! Don’t tell me you don’t believe that Shakespeare book was my personal property, neither!”
I looked at Fishbinder a long time with a feeling which I can’t describe, but which was completely different from any feeling I’d been having about him up to then. And finally I said, “I believe you. Honestly I do.” Then I got too embarrassed to face him another moment, so I turned and started walking away.
But he shouted after me, “Hey Junior!” I wasn’t his junior at all, but from that moment on—and all through the friendship that we enjoyed together during boot camp—that’s the name he called me by. “Hey Junior, you know it’s strictly illegal for you to come down here and talk to me.”
“Yes, I know that,” I said.
“Well, that’s more like it!” he said, rubbing his hands together. “You know, I was beginning to worry about you, Junior. But now it turns out there’s some hope for you yet. I mean, maybe your head ain’t absolutely full of rocks!”
I blushed a little and my self-esteem soared—because after all, coming from Fishbinder this was a real compliment!
