The young man told me that as a civilian he’d been a professional jazz saxophonist. I never did hear him play, but it was clear from his talk about life in Baltimore that he knew all the right people, that we shared many friends. From his manner I had no reason to doubt that he was involved with the music world.
He weighed whatever was the minimum required for someone to be drafted into the United States Army, and he told me how he’d starved himself in the weeks before his physical in an effort to become ineligible. He was also the shortest soldier I served with during my tour of duty, a service I approached just as reluctantly as he did. Through our six-week basic training course, Private Cvetkovich occupied the bunk next to mine in the dismal barracks at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, which, as any G.I. knew, was the American Siberia.
George and I got to know each other well. He needed me—not just to keep his morale up by talking of the delights of the jazz life, but also to help him to his feet when his eighty-plus pound field pack caused him to fall backward to the ground. We were required to wear these loads strapped to our backs for the ten-mile regulation saunters into the hustings. We shared a contempt for the unattractive terrain, the army, its institutions and customs. We were both against American involvement in World War II and had participated during our civilian days in active skirmishes with the law and against the Communists over the political issues involved.
Cvetkovich’s concerns were two. One was finding a way out of the army, and the second was discovering a source of supply for Cannabis Sativa, which was as illegal a substance then as it is now. My exclusive concern was getting out of the army, by fair means or foul. That I achieved this with an honorable discharge was pure happenstance. Certainly I wasn’t about to be picky about what kind of discharge I got.
Before we were shipped out of that legal concentration camp, we did manage to get one three-day pass with which we went to the nearest town, Jefferson City, where we set out in search of wine, women, and jazz. We found a form of the last being performed abominably in some establishment that was aspiring to be a dive. Somebody agreed to lend George a saxophone so he could participate. I didn’t hang around. Bad music hurts me, and in certain circles my antipathy to saxophones is well known. Besides, seeing George absorbed in the awful music we were hearing made me realize he had a long way to go before he could ever be a jazzman. So I left. We got back to camp separately on a Sunday night, and George displayed with some enthusiasm several packets of cigarette papers he’d managed to acquire against some anticipated windfall of marijuana.
One miserable morning as we headed out in trucks for the rifle range, I heard a sharp intake of breath from him and I turned to notice an unaccustomed gleam in his eye. “I found it, Jack!” he whispered excitedly.
My name, of course, isn’t Jack, but my diminutive Serbian colleague called everybody Jack, like you’d say, “Buddy” or “Kid.”
That night he sneaked out of the barracks and didn’t get back for a couple of hours. It was still dark. He whispered, “Hey, Jack! You awake?” I told him I was. “I found it, Jack!” he announced exultantly. “I got it hid in a safe place to cure. By Friday you and me can get high enough to forget we’re in the army.”
During the week he disappeared many times for short periods, sometimes barely making it back in time to answer the endless bugle calls. He wasn’t ready on Friday, but on Saturday night he announced that his magic carpet was ready to put in gear. I didn’t feel any compulsion to smoke any gage (as we sometimes called it then), but I suppose I was ready for anything to relieve, even briefly, the miseries of a conscript. And so as the rest of the platoon passed the time in what our officers called, with straight faces, the recreation hall or did the jock thing on the lighted athletic field, Cvetkovich and I went into a nearby wooded area for a smoke. He was breathless with anticipation, already high with the prospect of things to come. I, less zealous, was certainly interested. George produced a rolled-up parcel that contained cigar-sized cylinders of his processed weed. We lit up.
The taste and aroma proved intolerable. For a moment I assumed that my tolerance for this stuff was demonstrably lower than George’s. But then I noticed he had ceased to puff on this mini-haystack and was contemplating it with marked distaste.
“Shit!” he announced fervently. “This ain’t it, Jack.”
When we were shipped out of camp it was to different places. We wished each other early discharges. I told him I hoped he’d keep me posted about his musical career and that he’d find some proper marijuana before his stint was up. I did get one post card from him just before he went overseas. All it said was, “I got it, Jack.”