Among the performances that helped make the movie Casablanca immortal was that of Claude Rains as the French police captain Louis Renault. Rains played the part with astringent urbanity and created a lasting model of the tough cop attractively humanized, Monsieur Nice Guy lurking behind the domineering swaggerer. I belong to the first of several generations that have fallen under the film's febrile romantic spell. By the late autumn of 1944 I had seen the film three times, and Rains seemed to me only slightly less crucial to its hypnotic unfolding than Bogart and Bergman. You may well imagine my amazement, then, when, in that wartime autumn, a veritable replica—the spitting image—of Claude Rains sat behind a desk in a doctor's office on the urological ward of the naval hospital at Parris Island, South Carolina. I stood at attention, looking down at him. A sign on the desk identified the doctor as “B. Klotz, Lieutenant Commander, Chief of Urology.” I recall registering all sorts of impressions at once: the name Klotz, with its pathological overtone, and Klotz-Rains himself, duplicated—somewhat narcissistically, I thought—as he posed in prewar civvies in one of several framed photographs on the wall. The other photographs, completing a kind of triumvirate of authority, were of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Admiral Ernest J. King, chief of naval operations. There was one notable difference between Klotz and Rains, aside from the doctor's white blouse instead of the gendarmerie kepi and tunic. It was that the actor, even when he was trying to be threatening, had a twinkly charm, a barely repressed bonhomie, while Klotz appeared merely threatening. I knew that this was not the beginning of a beautiful friendship. That morning, Klotz sat silent for a moment, then came directly to the point. No elegant British vocables. In a flat, mid-Atlantic accent, he said, “Your blood tests have been checked out, and they indicate that you have syphilis.”
I remember my cheeks and the region around my mouth going numb, then beginning to tingle, as if my face had been dealt a brutal whack. Traumatic events powerfully focus the perceptions, leaving ancillary details embalmed forever in memory—in this case, the window just beyond Klotz's head, a frost-rimed pane through which I could see the vast asphalt parade ground swarming with platoon after platoon of Marine recruits like me (or like me until the day before, when I was sent to the hospital), performing the rigorous choreography of close-order drill. Dawn had not yet broken, and the men moved in and out of the light that fell in bright pools from the barracks. Most of the platoons were marching with rifles, a drill instructor tramping alongside and screaming orders that I couldn't hear but that, up close, would have sounded like those of a foul-mouthed and hysterical madman. Other platoons remained still, at ease, shrouded in cigarette smoke or exhaled breath or both; it was a bitterly cold November. Beyond the parade ground and its clumps of marines in green field jackets were rows of wooden barracks. And beyond the barracks lay the waters of Port Royal Sound, roiled by an icy wind. All these things registered in my mind clearly, but at the same time they seemed to coalesce around a single word, uttered by the voice of Klotz: syphilis.
“You will remain on this ward indefinitely for further observation,” Klotz continued. There was an unmistakably antagonistic tone in his voice. Most doctors in my past—the few I'd had contact with, anyway—had been chummy, avuncular, and genuinely if sometimes clumsily sweet-mannered. Klotz was of another breed, and he caused my stomach to go into spasm. I thought, What a prick. Before dismissing me, he ordered me to report to the duty pharmacist's mate, who would instruct me about the series of regulations I'd be subject to while on the ward, a regime Klotz referred to as “the venereal protocol.” He then told me to return to my bed, where I would wait until further notice. I was wearing a blue hospital robe, in the pocket of which I had thrust a copy of one of the first paperback anthologies ever published, a volume that had kept me company for at least two years—The Pocket Book of Verse, compiled by an academic named M. Edmund Speare. My legs had an aqueous, flimsy feeling. I lurched back down the ward, still numb around the mouth, gripping the book with feverish desire, like a condemned Christian clutching a Testament.
I should say a word about the great pox, so named, in the sixteenth century, to distinguish the illness from smallpox. Although syphilis had been regarded, since the late fifteenth century, as a plague that would never in any real sense yield to the strategies of medical science, it had been dealt a sudden and mortal blow only a year or so before my diagnosis. It was one of medicine's most dramatic victories, like Jenner's discovery of a smallpox vaccine or Pasteur's defeat of rabies. The breakthrough took place soon after American researchers—building on the work of Sir Alexander Fleming, who had discovered penicillin, in the twenties, and Sir Howard Florey, who had developed a technique for producing the drug—found that a one-week course of the miraculous mold could wipe out all traces of early syphilis, and even certain late-stage manifestations of the illness. (Penicillin also had a devastating effect on the other major venereal scourge, gonorrhea, a single injection usually being sufficient to put it to rout.) Since mid-1943, the medical authorities of the American armed forces had ordered doctors in military hospitals around the globe to discontinue a syphilis treatment called arsphenamine therapy and to commence using penicillin as it became available. Arsphenamine—better known, variously, as Salvarsan, 606, or the magic bullet—was an arsenic-based compound developed in 1909 by the German bacteriologist Paul Ehrlich. He discovered that his new drug (the six hundred and sixth version proved successful) could knock out syphilis without killing the patient; it was a remarkable advance after several hundred years during which the principal nostrum was mercury, a substance that worked capriciously, when it worked at all, and was for the most part as dangerous as the disease itself.
Because the disease sprang from the dark act of sex, syphilis was not a word uttered casually in the Protestant environment of my Virginia boyhood; the word raised eyebrows around America even when it was discreetly murmured in Dr. Ehrlich’s Magic Bullet, a 1940 movie starring Edward G. Robinson, who I thought was a pretty convincing healer after his parts as a ruthless mobster. Dr. Ehrlich’s Magic Bullet didn't make much of an impression on me; I doubtless was too young. But even if I had been older I would probably not have realized that the movie failed to tell an essential truth. While the doctor's magic bullet was a vast improvement over the forlorn remedy of the past, his treatment was shown to be sadly insufficient; the drug rendered patients noncontagious, but it wasn't a very reliable cure, and the treatment required dozens of painful and costly injections over such a long period of time—often many months—that a great number of patients became discouraged, and were consequently prone to relapses. So the epidemic suffered a setback but was not halted. It would take Alexander Fleming's surefire bactericidal fungus to produce the real magic. And I was in the vanguard of those victims upon whom this benison would descend. Or so it seemed, until, with a gradual dawning that was sickening in itself, I began to suspect that health was not so readily at hand.
As a diagnosed syphilitic, I had good cause to think passionately about penicillin during the interminable hours and days I spent in the Clap Shack, as such wards were known throughout the Navy. But, from the first day following Dr. Klotz's announcement, I had the impression that I was a very special case. I was not an ordinary patient whose treatment would follow the uneventful trajectory toward cure, but one who had been hurled into an incomprehensible purgatory where neither treatment nor even the possibility of a cure was part of my ultimate destiny. And this hunch turned out to be correct. From the outset, I was convinced not only that I had acquired the most feared of sexually transmitted diseases but that I would at some point keel over from it, probably in an unspeakable cellular mud slide or convulsion of the nervous system. As an early-blooming hypochondriac, a reader besotted with The Merck Manual, I had a bit more medical savvy than most kids my age, and what my diagnosis actually portended made me clammy with dismay. I believed that I was beyond the reach of penicillin. I was sure that I was a goner, and that certainty never left me during the days that stretched into weeks of weirdly demoralizing confinement.
My bed was at the very end of the ward, and I had a view from two windows, at right angles to each other. From one window, I could see the sound, a shallow inlet of the Atlantic, on the edge of freezing; from the other, I had a glimpse of a row of barracks not far away and, between the barrack buildings, concrete laundry slabs, where marines bedeviled by the cold—I watched them shake and shiver—pounded at their near-frozen dungarees beneath sluiceways of water. What nasty little Schadenfreude I might have felt at their plight was dispelled by my own despair at having been separated from longtime buddies whom I'd gone to college with, officer candidates like me—or like the person I had been before the onset of an illness that, because of its carnal origin and the moral shame it entailed, would prevent me from even thinking of becoming a lieutenant in the United States Marine Corps.
Winkler, the hospital corpsman who had checked me onto the ward, returned to bring me these tidings. No way, he said, that you can get a marine commission if you've had VD. He had other awful news, too, most of it bearing on my health. After escorting me to my sack and telling me where to stow my seabag, he told me—in answer to my bewildered “Why the hell am I here?”—that my Kahn test was so high it had gone off the chart. “It looks to me,” he said with maddening whimsy, “like you've got a case of the great pox.” When I asked him what a Kahn test was, he replied with a counter-question: Had I ever heard of a Wassermann reaction? I replied, Of course, every schoolboy knew about a Wassermann. A Kahn, Winkler explained, was almost the same as a Wassermann, only an improvement. It was a simpler blood test. And then, as I recalled the endless trips I'd made in past days to the regimental dispensary to verify the first routine test, and the vial after vial of blood extracted from my arm, I had a foreshadowing of the stern warrant that Dr. Klotz would serve up to me the following morning. I must have radiated terror, for I sensed a conscious effort by Winkler to make me feel better; his tactic was to try to cast me as one of the elite. At the moment, he told me, I was the only syphilitic on the ward. Most of the patients were guys with the clap. And when, despondently, I asked him why he thought victims of syphilis, as opposed to those with gonorrhea, were such rarities, he came back with a theory that in my case was so richly inconceivable that it caused me to laugh one of the last spontaneous laughs I would laugh for a long time. “You can catch the clap a lot easier than syphilis,” he explained. “Syph you really have to work at to contract.” He added, with a hint of admiration, “You must have been getting a new piece of ass every day.”
After my interview with Klotz, which took place very early, before his regular morning rounds, I had a chance to sit next to my bed and take stock of my situation while the other patients slept. Winkler had explained the configuration of the ward. It was a warehouse of genitourinary complaints. On one side of the ward were a dozen beds occupied by clap patients. As a result of crowding in the clap section, I was lodged on the other side of the center aisle, at the end of a row of patients whose maladies were not venereal in origin. Most of these marines had kidney and bladder disorders, primarily infections; there was a boy who had suffered a serious blow to his kidney during one of the savage internecine boxing matches that the drill instructors, virtually all sadists, enjoyed promoting during morning exercises. There was an undescended testicle that Winkler said would never have got past the first medical screening in the robust volunteer days, before the draft allowed all sorts of misshapen characters into the Marine Corps. The marine in the sack next to me, breathing softly, his face expressionless in sleep's bland erasure, had just the day before been circumcised by Dr. Klotz; the fellow had suffered from a constrictive condition of the foreskin known as phimosis. Winkler's last task the previous night had been to swaddle the guy's groin in ice packs, lest nocturnal erections rip out the stitches—a mishap that obviously could never happen to a Jew, said Winkler, who was plainly New York Jewish, in a tone that was a touch self-satisfied. As for the marines with the clap, Winkler pointed out that in most cases this was not your standard garden-variety gonorrhea but an intractable chronic condition that usually came about as a result of the guys’ refusing, out of shame or fear—and often out of sheer indifference—to seek treatment, so that the invasive gonococci began after time to wreak havoc in the prostate, or became lodged in the joints as an exquisitely painful form of arthritis. Marines and sailors from up and down the Atlantic coast came to this ward for what was possibly last-ditch therapy, since Klotz was known as the best doctor in the Navy for handling such complications.
Later that first day, another hospital corpsman outlined to me the details of the venereal protocol. VD patients were in certain respects strictly segregated, both from their fellow sufferers on the ward and from the hospital population at large. Our robes were emblazoned with a large yellow V over the breast. When we went to the head, we were expected to use specially designated toilets and basins. Those of us who were ambulatory were to eat at mess-hall tables reserved for our use. When we attended the twice-weekly movies at the base recreation center, we would be escorted in a separate group and then seated together in a section marked off by a yellow ribbon. I remember absorbing this information with queasiness, and then asking the corpsman why we were subject to such extraordinary precautions. While I was not unaware of the perils of VD, I had no idea that we posed such a threat. But as soon as I began to express my puzzlement, the corpsman explained that syphilis and gonorrhea were contagious as hell. True, most people got them only from sex, but one of those little microorganisms could infect through a tiny scratch. BUMED (as the Bureau of Medicine was called) was taking no chances; furthermore, he added with a knowing look, Dr. Klotz “had a kind of personal fixation.” This was an enigmatic, faintly sinister statement that became less opaque as time passed and Klotz became the dominant presence in my life.
As the only patient with syphilis, I was spared the short-arm inspection that was the centerpiece of Dr. Klotz's early rounds that morning and every morning at the stroke of six. At that hour, a bell in the ward jangled and the overhead lights came on in an explosion. The bedridden on my side of the aisle remained in their sacks. But in the interval of a minute or so between the flood of light and the appearance of Dr. Klotz, the dozen clap patients in the opposite row all scrambled to their feet and stood at ragged attention. There was usually a certain amount of wisecracking among these guys, along with self-dramatizing groans and reciprocal “Fuck you's.” Most of them were regulars, not effete college-bred recruits like me, and were five or ten years older than me. Their accents were about equally divided between Southern cracker and Northeastern working class. I soon understood that many of these die-hard cases had one thing in common: they were obsessive Romeos, fornicators of serene dedication whose commitment to sexual bliss was so wholehearted that they could keep up a flow of jokes even as the disease that such pleasure had cost them gnawed away at the inmost mucous membranes of the genitalia and tortured the joints of their wrists and knees.
I was amazed at this nonchalance, and also at their apparently incandescent libidos, especially since my own nineteen-year-old hormonal heat had plunged to absolute zero the instant Dr. Klotz confirmed the nature of my problem; the word syphilis had made the very notion of sex nauseating, as if I were beset by some erotic anorexia. But the members of the gonorrhea faction quieted down as soon as Winkler or one of the other corpsmen shouted, “Attention on deck!” and Klotz made his businesslike entrance through the swinging doors. It was important, Winkler had told me, that these bums be inspected as soon as they woke up, before heading to the urinals; from looking at the accumulated purulence called gleet, and checking the amount and consistency of the discharge, Klotz could determine how the treatment was proceeding. And so, accompanied by a litany—“Skin it back, squeeze it, milk it down”—intoned by the corpsman, Klotz would pass down the line of victims, making his evaluations. He didn't waste a word, and his manner was frostily judgmental, as if these rogues and whoremongers were unworthy of even so much as a casual “Good morning.” Nor was his manner with me any less reproachful. As I stood stiffly at attention, I was thankful only that I didn't have to submit my dick to such a degrading scrutiny at that hour of the morning. During each tour of the ward, Klotz would glare at me briefly, ask the corpsman about my daily Kahn test—it remained at the highest (and therefore the most alarming) level, day in and day out—and then pass on to the nonvenereal patients.
Early in the afternoon on that first day, however, Klotz did examine my penis. This was a procedure that I might ordinarily skip describing were it not for the monstrous effect that it had on my psychic balance, which had already been thrown badly out of whack. For it was Klotz's judgment regarding my penile history that helped crystallize my belief that I was doomed. I was summoned to his office, and, as I stood in front of him, he checked through my medical-record book and brusquely asked some routine questions. Any history of syphilis in my family? (What a question!) No, I lied. In the preceding weeks or months had I experienced any unusual rash or fever? I had not. Any swelling in the groin? No. Had I noticed any unusual growth on my penis? This would be a hard, painless ulcer, he said, called a chancre. I knew what a chancre was, everyone had heard about chancres (corpsmen were even known as “chancre mechanics”); but I had not seen one. During Klotz's interrogation, I held in view the eye-level portrait of a solemn, resolute Franklin D. Roosevelt, who kept looking back at me. I was grateful for the reassuring gaze of this surrogate father, my perennial president, the only one I had ever known, and I steadfastly stared back at him through most of Klotz's examination, which he carried out with cold, skeletal fingers.
He twisted my penis, not very gently, gave it an unnecessary squeeze or two, and turned it upside down. I recall thinking that, though it had known various attitudes, it had rarely been upside down. Then he bade me to look down, saying that he had discovered, on the underside, a scar. Chancres leave scars, he murmured, and this looked like a chancre scar. I glanced down and, indeed, discerned a scar. A tiny reddish outcropping. Since the chancre had been painless, he added, it had come and gone, without my ever noticing its presence, leaving only that small scar. He seemed to have put aside, at least for the moment, his customary distaste. He said that the chance of my having been infected by nonvenereal contact was astronomically remote. The toilet seat was a myth. Syphilis usually created distinct symptoms, he went on—first the chancre, then, later, the fever and the rash—but quite often these symptoms never appeared, or appeared so insubstantially that they went unnoticed. Klotz surprised me by saying something that, in the midst of his dispassionate exegesis, sounded almost poetic: “Syphilis is a cruel disease.” And then, after a brief silence, during which I became aware that he was constructing an answer to the question that sheer fright kept me from asking, he declared, “What happens in the end is that syphilis invades the rest of the body.” He paused and concluded, before dismissing me, “We're going to have to keep you here and figure out just how far it's advanced.”
I went back to my bed at the end of the ward and, in the cold midday light, lay down. You weren't supposed to lie on a bed in daytime, but I did anyway. The hospital was a venerable wooden structure, warm, even overheated, but I felt nearly frozen, listening to the windows creaking and banging in the bluster of an Atlantic gale. The sex maniacs with the clap across the aisle were noisily trading lewd adventures, and I gradually sank into a stupor of disbelief, beyond the consoling power of even The Pocket Book of Verse, which had saved me in many a lesser crisis but was plainly beyond the scope of this one.
Its history “is unique among great diseases,” the medical historian William Allen Pusey wrote, “in that it does not gradually emerge into the records of medicine as its character becomes recognized, but appears on the stage of history with a dramatic suddenness in keeping with the tragic reputation it has made; as a great plague sweeping within a few years over the known world.”
This observation, made in the early part of the century, has an all too painful resonance today, and it might be worthwhile to compare syphilis with our present pandemic. Unlike AIDS, syphilis was not invariably fatal, despite its extremely high rate of mortality. This may have been its only saving grace, depending on whether death is viewed as a blessing preferable to the terrible and irreversible damage the disease is capable of inflicting on the body and the mind. After the introduction of Dr. Ehrlich's not-so-magic bullet, and especially after penicillin's knockout blow, syphilis lost much of its capacity to evoke universal dread. Still, for various reasons, it remained a horror, aside from the fact that no one wants to be infested by millions of Treponema pallidum, the causative microbe, whose wriggling corkscrew can reach the bone marrow and spleen within forty-eight hours of infection, and produce a persistent malaise, rashes, ulcerous skin lesions, and other debilitating symptoms. For one thing, there was the stigma—and I mean the appalling stigma arising from anything at all suggesting misbehavior as we young people traversed the parched sexual landscape of the thirties and forties.
I've mentioned that the word itself was taboo. Among nice people, syphilis was uttered sotto voce if at all, and only occasionally found its way into print. Social disease and vice disease were the usual substitutes. When I was in grade school, the only time I recall the word's catching my eye was when I happened upon it in a medical pamphlet. I asked my teacher, a maiden lady of traditional reserve, what it meant. She instantly corrected my pronunciation, but her cheeks became flushed, and she didn't answer my question. Her silence made me guess at something wicked. And wicked it was in those prim years. For most of its existence in the Anglo-Saxon world, syphilis, as AIDS has often done, stained the people who contracted it with indelible disrepute.
But there was a far graver trouble: the sheer awfulness of the malady itself. Even after medical intervention, and treatment with penicillin, there could still be dire complications. No cure was absolutely foolproof. And my obsession—that syphilis had taken possession of my system and had commenced its inroads, penetrating tissues and organs, which thus had already suffered the first effects of dissolution—grew more fixed every day as I dragged myself through Dr. Klotz's venereal protocol. I wore my yellow V stoically, and soon got used to going to the mess hall and the movies in a segregated herd. I had plenty of time to brood about my condition, since there were no organized activities for patients on the ward. I kept wondering why I was not being treated. If penicillin could work its miracle, why was it not being used? It only aggravated my distress to think that the disease, for reasons beyond my understanding, had reached a stage where treatment was useless, and was merely waiting for some fatal resolution. I had to blot out thoughts like these. Mostly, I hung around the area near my bed, sitting on a camp stool and reading books and magazines from the small hospital library. I returned hesitantly to The Pocket Book of Verse, to Keats and A. E. Housman and Emily Dickinson and The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám.
Except during morning rounds, I never saw Dr. Klotz. My only actual duty was to bare my arm once a day for the Kahn test, which invariably showed the same results: “Off the chart,” as Winkler had said. I grew friendly with Winkler, who seemed drawn to me, most likely because I'd been to college and he'd had two years at CCNY before Pearl Harbor. One of his generosities was a loan of a little red Motorola portable radio, which I kept tuned to the Savannah station and its news about the war. The bulletins added weight to the black and anxious mood that each afternoon crept over me—a mood that I would recognize only years later as the onset of a serious depression.
Just before I entered the hospital, marines had stormed ashore on a remote Pacific island called Peleliu and had met with “heavy Japanese resistance”—a common Pentagon euphemism to describe our troops’ being slaughtered. What I heard on the radio was unsettling enough, but the news chiefly reminded me of the doubtfulness of my own future. For at least three years, I had lived with the bold and heady ambition of becoming a marine lieutenant; to lead troops into combat against the Japs had been an intoxicating dream. A sexually transmitted disease was not permissible for an officer candidate, Winkler had ruefully pointed out to me—not even if he was cured, so ugly was the moral blotch—and thus I began to realize that the microorganisms seething like termites within me were destroying my vision of honor and achievement as effectively as they were laying waste to my flesh. But this regret, wrenching as it was, I could somehow deal with. What was close to intolerable—beyond the disgrace, beyond the wreckage it would make of my military ambition—was the premonition, settling around me like a fog bank, of absolute physical ruin. A death-in-life, for example, like that of my Uncle Harold, whose case was a harrowing paradigm of the malady and the disaster it could inflict.
He was my mother's younger brother, and at twenty-seven, during the Great War, he had gone overseas as an infantry corporal in the Rainbow Division. During the Saint-Mihiel offensive, he had suffered a bad shrapnel wound in the leg and had been mustered out in 1918 to his hometown, in western Pennsylvania, where he married, had a son, and settled down to the life of a businessman. Sometime in the late twenties, he started to display odd behavioral symptoms: he woke at night in the grip of nightmares, and began to have terrifying hallucinations. He complained of anxiety and had almost daily episodes of feverish agitation, which caused him to speak of suicide. He told anyone who would listen that he was tormented by memories of the war, the agony of men and animals, the carnage. After he disappeared for a week and was finally found in a dingy Pittsburgh hotel room, fifty miles away, his wife made him seek medical help. At a veterans-aid clinic a diagnosis was made of extreme psychosis as a result of the violence of war. The syndrome in those years was generally known as “shell shock.” My uncle was sent to the mental unit of the veterans hospital in Perry Point, Maryland, and there he remained for the rest of his life.
I recall visiting Uncle Harold with my mother and father once when I was a young boy, before the war. We were going to New York, and the visit was planned as a side trip on our way from Virginia. I had never seen him, except as a figure in photographs taken years earlier: a cheery kid with prominent teeth, like my mother's, and flashing, exuberant eyes. I had been fascinated by Uncle Harold, the war hero, and he had taken on for me an almost mythic shape. My mother was devoted to him, and, as a sedulous eavesdropper, I couldn't help but absorb all the captivating details of his dramatic life: the flaming battle for Saint-Mihiel that killed more than four thousand Americans, his letters describing the savagery of combat, his painful recovery in a convalescent facility behind the front, the breakdown in Pennsylvania, his sad confinement. By the time we turned up at the veterans hospital on a luminous June day, I was looking forward excitedly, though with a touch of squirmy disquiet, to meeting my shell-shocked uncle. I don't remember whether my parents prepared me for the encounter, but it was certainly not like anything I might have imagined, and I think that they, too, may not have been ready for such an apparition.
The male attendant who brought him outside to greet us on the lawn seemed to feel the need to urge him along, as he tottered toward us in his army-issue robe and slippers, with gentle but persistent prods to the back. This probably made him look even more helpless and disoriented than he actually was, but he was plainly a soul without a mooring. I was alarmed by his shambling gait and his empty gaze; I couldn't reconcile the old face, so bony and desiccated, and the balding skull and trembling hands with the vivid boy of the pictures. Most awful to me was the moment when he mechanically embraced my mother and whispered, “Hello, Edith.” It was the name of their older sister.
We remained there on the hospital lawn for perhaps no more than an hour, amid the debris of a messy picnic. Uncle Harold said almost nothing as we sat on a bench, and the monosyllables my mother coaxed from him had a softly gargled incoherence. I knew that this was a scene I couldn't continue to witness, and I turned away in misery from my uncle and his drowned, sweetly musing brown eyes, and from the sight of my mother clutching his palsied hand, squeezing it over and over in some hopeless attempt at comfort or connection.
I later learned the truth about Uncle Harold. My father did not tell me until several years after my mother died, when I was eighteen or so, and presumably old enough to absorb the dread secret that our kinsman had been suffering not from shell shock but from syphilis. My father was a candid and sophisticated man, but even he had an awkward time telling me the truth. After the shock wore off, the knowledge that my uncle was still alive—that, as was so often the case, the microbes, rather than quickly murdering their host, held him hostage while they continued their leisurely depredations—made me ache inside. The great pox could dwell in a body for decades. By the time he was sent to the veterans hospital he was most likely afflicted by late syphilis; according to my father, the disease was acquired after his marriage and the birth of his only child. There was never a hint that either my aunt or my cousin, a boy whom I spent many summers with, had been tainted by the illness. But who knew exactly when he had got it? Somehow the plague had entered him. It had been a quiet case, but viciously malignant, beyond reach of the magic bullet or any other medical stratagem, and at the time of our visit he was succumbing to forms of neurosyphilis that devastate the brain and the spinal cord. The spirochetes had wrought a vegetative madness.
I thought a lot about Uncle Harold during my stay on the ward. Especially at night, in the dark, with Winkler's little radio pressed against my ear, trying to distract myself with the Artie Shaw or Glenn Miller tunes I could capture from the ether, I'd have a moment of sudden, heart-stopping panic and my uncle would draw ineluctably near. I could sense him in his hospital robe, silent, standing somewhere close by among the sleeping marines, a stooped figure whose presence portended a future I dared not think about.
While on a trip through Europe in 1760, Giovanni Casanova, that tireless gadabout, cocksman, and celebrity hound, stopped at Ferney to pay a visit to Voltaire. There seems to be no record of the two superstars’ talking about syphilis, but it would have been a fitting topic, given its perennial fashionableness, and if they had spoken of it their attitude, in all likelihood, would have had a mocking overtone. Voltaire never let the horrid nature of the illness obtrude upon his own lighthearted view of it—he wrote wittily about the great pox in Candide—and throughout Casanova's memoirs there are anecdotes about syphilis that the author plainly regards as excruciatingly funny. Making sport of it may have been the only way in which the offspring of the Enlightenment could come to grips with a pestilence that seemed as immutably fixed in history as war or famine. In a secular age, gags were appropriate for an inexplicable calamity that in olden times had been regarded as divine retribution. Previous centuries had seen people calling on God for help, and God had not answered.
The disease first swept like a hurricane over Europe during the period of Columbus's voyages (whether Columbus and his crew were responsible for importing syphilis from the West Indies is disputed by scholars, but it seems a strong possibility), and it took an exceptionally virulent form, often killing its victims in the secondary, or rash-and-fever, stage, which most people in later epochs (including me) weathered without harm. In its congenital mode, it was particularly disfiguring and malevolent, which increased the terror. No wonder that the Diet of Worms, the same assembly that condemned Martin Luther for heresy, issued a mandate declaring that the “evil pocks” was a scourge visited upon mankind for the sin of blasphemy.
But it was the doctrine of original sin, falling upon both Catholics and backslid Presbyterians like me, that made the sufferers of syphilis pay a special price in moral blame unknown to those who acquired other diseases. This was particularly true in the early Victorian era, when a return to faith, after a long time of frivolous impiety, was coupled with a return to the Pauline precept that the act of sex is an act of badness—absolute badness more often than not, exceeding all other abominations. This connection with sexuality gave syphilis, in a puritanical culture, its peculiar aura of degradation. As Susan Sontag has shown in Illness as Metaphor, her study of the mythology of disease, all the major illnesses have prompted a moralistic and punitive response, and have given rise to entire theoretical systems based on phony psychologizing. The bubonic plague implied widespread moral pollution; tuberculosis was the product of thwarted passion and blighted hopes, or sprang from “defective vitality, or vitality misspent”; out of emotional frustration or repression of feeling has come the curse of cancer, whose victims are also often demonically possessed. As I have discovered firsthand, mental disorders may be the worst, inviting suspicion of inborn feebleness. In such views, the disease itself expresses the character of the victim. Syphilis, however, has suffered a different stigma, one that has been of a singularly repellent sort. It has reflected neither feebleness nor misspent vitality nor repression of feeling—only moral squalor. In recent years, AIDS has been similarly stigmatized, despite extensive enlightenment. But in square, churchgoing America at the time of my diagnosis, a syphilitic was regarded not as a sexual hobbyist whose pastime had got out of hand—in other words, with the ribald tolerance Voltaire would have brought to the circumstance—but as a degenerate, and a dangerously infectious one at that. Doctors are, of course, supposed to be free of such proscriptive attitudes, but there are always some who are as easily bent as anyone else by religion or ideology. Klotz was one of these, and while I'm sure that he was only doing his duty in tracking my history, his temper was chillingly adversarial. Also, he was, in my case, guilty of an act of omission that unalterably stamped him as a doctor who hated not the disease but its victims.
As the wintry days and nights in the hospital wore on, and the Kahn tests continued to show my blood serum swarming with spirochetes, and I worried myself into a deeper and deeper feeling of hopelessness, I brooded over my past sex life, which seemed to me a paltry one, at least numerically speaking. By what improbable mischance had I sealed my doom? Even in those repressed years of the Bible Belt South, to have had at nineteen only three partners, two of whom I'd met in boozy mayfly matings already dimming in memory, scarcely made me feel like a red-hot lover, much less the randy alley cat generally associated with the disease. Still, as Winkler pointed out, even though syphilis was not as widespread as the clap, all it took was one quick poke in the wrong partner's hole and a man could be done for. Whose hole, then, and when? The actual encounters were all so recent, and together so few, that I could easily let my mind pounce on each one, trying to figure out which specific grappling had permitted the T. pallidum to begin its infestation.
On a bright morning, as I sat on my camp stool plunged into one of these self-lacerating reveries, Winkler came up with a mournful look to say that he was sorry but my Kahn remained “highly reactive.” Then he announced that Dr. Klotz—finally, after many days—wished to see me, to take my case history. Was I religious? Winkler asked. When I said that I wasn't but asked him why he wanted to know, the corpsman rolled his eyes, then declared, “He's got a kind of narrow-minded view of things.” He added, as he had once before, that it was all part of a “personal fixation.”
As I look back on that time, I can see that Klotz, whatever the complexities of his motivation, had a need to squeeze the most out of the vindictive rage against syphilis already prevailing in the armed forces—one that mirrored the broader abhorrence in American society. While Klotz was doubtless not typical of navy doctors, or the medical profession in general, he was working well within the pious and cold-blooded restraints regarding sexually transmitted diseases that had prevailed in the navy for many years. During the First World War, President Wilson's secretary of the navy, Josephus Daniels, a godly North Carolinian if there ever was one, made history in a small way by banishing alcohol from officers’ wardrooms and elsewhere on naval ships and bases, thereby bringing to an end an ancient and cherished custom. But at least this created no mortal danger. In his intolerance of carnality, Daniels ruled against a proposal that sailors and marines be given free access to condoms, and thus became responsible for unnumbered venereally related illnesses and deaths. Apart from his own belief, Klotz was obviously the inheritor of a tradition with a firm root in Southern Christian fundamentalism.
In presenting my case history to Klotz that morning, I had to describe my relations with a girl and two older women. Klotz referred to these as “exposures.” While the doctor took notes, I told him that, almost exactly two years before, I had lost my virginity for two dollars in a walk-up hotel room in Charlotte, North Carolina. I was a college freshman, and the woman was about thirty-five. In answer to his question about whether I had used protection, I replied that I thought so but could not be sure, since I had drunk too much beer for clear memory. I then went on to the next exposure. (What I did not describe to Klotz was the interminable anxiousness of waiting in the dismal little hotel lobby while my anesthetized classmate, a raunchy dude from Mississippi, who had initiated our debauch, preceded me for what seemed hours with Verna Mae, which was what she called herself. Nor did I tell the doctor that my memory of Verna Mae was of an immensely sad and washed-out towhead in a stained slip and dirty pink slippers who raised a skinny arm and took my two dollars with such lassitude that I thought she might be ill; nor did I recount being nearly ill myself, from apprehension and a stomach-churning disbelief at the idea that what I'd awaited with anxious joy since the age of twelve was about to happen, something so unbearably momentous that I barely registered the words when, sliding the two bucks into her brassiere, she said in a countrified voice, “I sure hope you don't have to take as long as that friend of yours.”)
The second exposure was a girl, age eighteen, a college sophomore I'll call Lisa Friedlaender. (It is a reflection on the aridity of sexual life in the forties—even, or, I should say, especially, on college campuses—that there was a gap of nearly a year and a half between Verna Mae and Lisa.) I told Klotz that I had met Lisa, who was from Kew Gardens, New York, at a college in Danville, Virginia, the previous spring. I was by then enrolled in the Marine V-12 program at Duke and had traveled up to Danville for a weekend. That weekend, we had had intercourse (a word that made me writhe but that Klotz encouraged), and we had had it many times after that, both protected and unprotected, on my weekend leaves in April and May. She went home to Kew Gardens for summer vacation, and when she returned to Danville we resumed intercourse, having weekend sex until I was sent here, to Parris Island. I was certain that Lisa was not the source of the disease, I went on, since I was only her second partner and she was from a proper middle-class Jewish background, where the acquiring of such an illness was unlikely. (I had often wondered how a proper middle-class Southern lad like me had come to deserve anyone as angelic as my ripe and lively Lisa, with her incontinent desires, which matched mine and were the real reason, though I didn't tell Klotz, for our frequent lack of protection: we were fucking so continuously and furiously that I ran out of condoms. My native WASP folklore, which tended to idealize asthenic, inaccessible blondes, had not prepared me for this dark and lusty creature; we began rolling around on a moonlit golf green within two hours of our first meeting. I didn't tell this to Klotz, either, though Klotz the moral inquisitor at one point tipped his hand by demanding, “Were you in love?” To this I had no reply, having a sense that such a question really implied a policy decision. What of course was impossible to make Klotz understand about love was that if you were not yet twenty, and were a marine eventually headed for the Pacific who shared with your brothers the conviction that you would never see twenty-one, or a girl, ever again, and if the delirium of joy you felt the first time Lisa Friedlaender's nipples sprang up beneath your fingertips was love, then you were probably in love.)
My last exposure was a woman named Jeanette. Age about forty. I told Klotz that I was with a fellow marine in Durham when we picked up old Jeanette and a female friend at a barbecue joint one night during the past August. They were both employees of the Liggett & Myers factory, where they worked on an assembly line making cigarettes. I had intercourse with Jeanette only once, unprotected. (The subtext in the case was largely anaphrodisiac amnesia. As with Verna Mae, the beer I had consumed made memory a slide show of incoherent instants: a wobbling ramble through the dark, collapsing together on the cold ground of a Baptist churchyard, hard by a tombstone, and inhaling the sweet raw smell of tobacco in the frizzy hair of Jeanette, who had just come off the night shift. I remembered nothing of the act itself, but for some obscure reason, as my confession spilled forth, the recollection of the carton of Chesterfields she had given me left a taste of sadness.)
When I finished, Klotz fiddled with his notes for a moment, then said, “You betrayed the girl, didn't you?”
I nodded my miserable agreement but made no reply.
“Has it occurred to you that you might have infected her?”
Again I nodded, for the possibility of having passed on the contagion had lingered in my mind for days, jabbing me with fierce self-reproach.
“You probably were infected by the prostitute in Charlotte or the woman in Durham,” the doctor said. “Syphilis is prevalent among lower-class Southern white women. That's why it's dangerous to go roaming around in the wrong places if you can't practice abstinence.”
I couldn't respond to this. Although I was smothered with regret, I felt no remorse and was not about to say that I was sorry.
“There's no way now of knowing which woman infected you. Suppose you just write a letter to that girl and tell her that she may have been exposed to syphilis. You should also tell her to get tested right away and have appropriate treatment.”
I recall trying to retrieve, at that moment, some serene boyhood memory, a foolish escapade, any innocent event that might let me float above this anguish, but Klotz was too quick to permit me the solace.
“Nature has a way of compensating for nearly every reckless thing we do,” he said.
A day or two after my interview with Klotz, the hospital corpsmen began to place tacky Christmas ornaments up around the ward; they painted a silver NOEL on the glass of the door and hung a hideous plastic trumpet-tooting angel from the central light fixture. The same day, I noticed that my gums were beginning to bleed. There had been some irritation before, but I had ignored the tenderness. This was serious bleeding. It was not “pink toothbrush,” a symptom employed to help advertise Ipana, the hot toothpaste of the day. It was a slight but constant seepage of blood into my mouth, one that made me aware of the sweetish taste throughout the day and left a red stain on my handkerchief whenever I blotted it away. I could tell it was aggravated by smoking—but I kept steadily puffing. My gums had become raw and spongy, and that night the act of toothbrushing created a crimson cataract. I developed a feverish, cruddy feeling. I was terrified, but I kept my alarm to myself. The spirochetes were on the attack. There were countless ways the disease could make itself known, and I calculated that this was just one of them. When I told Winkler about my new trouble, he seemed puzzled, but said I should pay a visit to the hospital dentist, who might at least be able to relieve some of my distress. The dental officer was a dour man, trapped in routine, who offered neither comfort nor explanation; he did, however, swab out my mouth with a florid and repulsive lotion called gentian violet, a vial of which he gave me for daily application. It was an absurdity, a flimsy barrier against the onrushing ruin.
Days passed in a kind of suspended monotony of fear. Meanwhile, the weight of hopelessness, bearing down on my shoulders with almost tactile gravity—I thought of a yoke in the animal, burdened-down sense—had become a daily presence; I felt a suffocating discomfort in my brain. Sitting on a camp stool next to my bed, remote from the other marines, I began to withdraw into the cocoon of myself. The sex-demented clap patients, jabbering about cunt and pussy, magnified my despair. I lost my appetite. Outside my window, marines marched in the distance on the asphalt drill field, exhaling clouds of frigid breath. The glittering white inlet of the ocean rolled endlessly eastward like Arctic tundra. At night, after lights-out, I began to prowl the ward, padding about in anxiety until, returning to the stool, I would sit and stare at the expanse of water, dim in the starlight, and seemingly frozen solid. What a blessed relief it would be, I thought, to lie down and be encased in that overcoat of ice, motionless, without sensation and, finally, without care, gazing up at the indifferent stars.
I had kept up a busy correspondence during my early Marine Corps days. Fat envelopes, lots of them with addresses in familiar handwriting, envelopes of various colors and lengths (some with a not-yet-stale hint of perfume), were gifts that guys in the service awaited with greedy suspense, like children at Christmastime. I kept my seabag stuffed with reread letters, and Lisa Friedlaender had written to me often at Parris Island. In that buttoned-up age, it was probably not all that common for letter-writing lovers to express their craziness in steamy strophes, but Lisa had a gifted hand. Her remembrances to me were generally graphic and sometimes astonishing; she was way ahead of her time. But those were letters I could not read any longer; the very packet, which I kept tied up with string, was cursed with a vile pathology. Nor, despite Klotz's order, could I bring myself to write to Lisa.
Instead, I addressed myself to another problem: that of maintaining my composure in the face of a final, insupportable outrage. One morning, Winkler brought me two letters—one from Lisa (I put it away, unread) and one from my stepmother. Only two years before, my father had married, for reasons I was never able to fathom, an ungainly, humorless, pleasure-shunning middle-aged spinster, and the antipathy we felt for each other had been almost as immediate as our differences were irreconcilable. She was an observant Christian, curiously illiberal for an Episcopalian, while I had proudly begun to announce my skepticism and my fealty to Camus, whose Le Mythe de Sisyphe I'd read laboriously but with happiness in French at Duke, and whose principles, when I outlined them to her, she deemed “diabolical.” I thought her a prig; she considered me a libertine. She was a teetotaler; I drank—a lot. Once, frankly baiting her while a little crocked, I praised masturbation as a universal delight, and she denounced me to my father as a “pervert.” (I had gone too far.) She was educated, intelligent, and that made her bigotry the more maddening. I preserved a chill truce with the woman because of my love for my misguided father. She was a teacher of nursing, actually quite a good one—even, in a way, distinguished (onetime district president of the Graduate Nurses Association)—and therein lay another contradiction: nurses, like doctors, were supposed to be free of the moral ism that drove her to write a pious letter meant to make me writhe on the rack of my dereliction.
How appalled she and my father were, she wrote, at the terrible news. (I had sent them a letter in which I was disingenuous enough to say that I had been sidelined with “a little blood problem,” an evasion she immediately scented.) The only serious blood problem I could have was one of the malignant diseases like leukemia, and I plainly didn't have that, given my remarks about feeling in such good health. She went on to predict, in her chilly, professional way, that in all likelihood I could be cured by the new antibiotics, provided the disease had not progressed too far into the CNS (central nervous system, she explained helpfully, adding that the damage could be fearful and irreversible). Shifting into the spiritual mode, she informed me that one could only pray that the illness had not yet been invasive. She had no intention of judging me, she announced (pointing out that there was, of course, a Higher Judge), but then she asked me to look back on my recent way of life and ponder whether my self-indulgent behavior had not led to this—the words remain ineffaceable to this day—“awful moment of truth.” Finally, she hoped I would be reassured that, in spite of her disapproval of the conduct that had brought me to this condition, she cared for me very, very much.
In pondering these events of fifty years ago, I've never felt seriously betrayed by memory—most of the moments I've re-created are so fresh in my mind that they have the quality of instant replay—but I know that I’ve been slightly tricked from time to time, and I’ve had to adjust my account of these events. That memory could be a clever deceiver was neatly demonstrated, when I began finishing this chronicle, by my “Medical History”—a little manual, faintly mildewed, with pages the color of a faded jonquil—which surfaced among my Marine Corps mementos while I was searching for something else. This is the standard medical record that accompanies every marine throughout his career. While my lapses were minor, the “Medical History” showed me to be quite off the mark about certain matters of chronology. I could have sworn, for example, that I was still in the hospital until a few days before Christmas, when in fact I had been returned to duty by then; the awful Yuletide decorations I recalled must have adorned not the ward but my barracks, considerably later. Also, I have written of those apparently unceasing Kahn tests, a ritual that kept me tense with fear. It seems impossible to me now that I was not bled daily—as I awaited the results, I recall, I was nearly devoured by anxiety—but the “Medical History” shows that there were only five of these procedures in the course of a month. I'm fascinated by the fact that my tendentious memory lured me into exaggerating the number of times I experienced this torture.
But Dr. Klotz and his behavior have remained mysterious. The “Medical History” reveals only his routine notations and a final, meticulously clear signature. I think Klotz has compelled my attention (slightly this side of obsession) all these years because, to put it simply, he was frightening. He represented, in his bloodless and remote way, the authority figure that most people dread encountering but so often do meet face-to-face: the dehumanized doctor. In later years, I would come to know many exemplary physicians, but also more than one for whom my memory of Klotz provided a creepy prototype. I never fathomed Klotz's need to chasten those whom he conceived to be sexual hoodlums among all the miserable, unwell marines who showed up for his help. I wasn't alone among these miscreants. Was it religion (as Winkler had hinted) that gave him his hang-up, some narrow faith that had provided him with a view of sex that was as fastidious as it was harsh? Perhaps, as Winkler also suggested without contradiction, it wasn't religion so much as that “personal fixation.” If that was true, it was a fixation animated by cruelty. Nothing else would account for his failure to tell me from the outset that there was a possibility that I didn't have syphilis at all.
Several days after I received the letter from my stepmother, I was summoned to the end of the ward by Winkler, who led me into the tiny office of Klotz's second-in-command. Everyone called him Chief. He was a chief pharmacist's mate named Moss, a sandy-haired, overweight Georgian with a smoker's hack, good-heartedness written all over him. As in the past, he put me quickly at ease. He was an old man by my standards, probably thirty-five or older. I had come to trust and respect most of the medical corpsmen, like Moss and Winkler, who held out to sick marines a kind of spontaneous sympathy beyond the capacity of the doctors, or at least of the doctors I knew. And the feeling I had for Moss was not so tepid as mere respect; it was more like awe, for the year before he had taken part in the bloody landing at Tarawa, that slaughterhouse beyond compare, and there he had risked his big ass to save the lives of more than one marine, winning a commendation in the process. Marines and sailors were traditionally hostile to each other, but one could only regard someone like Moss with admiration, or even love, as I think I did that day. A couple of times before, he'd come by my sack to chat, always cheery and plainly eager to calm my fear, a good ol’ boy from Valdosta, a bearlike, rather untidy guy who plainly conceived medicine to be a tender enterprise not entirely bound by technology. He told me that Lieutenant Commander Klotz had departed on Christmas leave but had left him instructions about my case. My case, in fact, was contained in a file on Moss's desk, and he said he wanted to talk to me about it.
First off, I didn't have syphilis.
I recall thinking, despite my apostasy, of Revelation: “He that over-cometh shall inherit all things…”
“I had a talk on the phone with the chief dental officer,” Moss said. “He told me what he told Dr. Klotz. Your Vincent's disease cleared up almost immediately. Just a couple of old-fashioned applications of gentian violet. Smile for me, boy.”
I smiled widely, a big, shit-eating grin, and Moss heaved with laughter. “Damned if you don't look like a Ubangi. Gentian violet. That old standby. The man who could find a way to get the violet out of gentian violet would make him some money.”
“Tell me something, Chief,” I said as Moss motioned for me to sit down. “If I get the situation correctly, my Kahn test has gone to negative. Zero. If this is true, and I guess it is, what's the connection?”
“Let me ask you a question,” said Moss. “Did you ever have this condition—it's also called trench mouth—anytime before?”
I reflected for an instant, then said, “Yes, I believe I did, come to think about it. Up at Duke. There were these marines for a while—I was one of them—complaining about this inflammation in the mouth, and bleeding. I had it badly for some time, then it seemed to go away. I didn't think about it anymore. There was talk about it being spread by the unclean water we used to wash our trays in the mess hall. So tell me, Chief, what's the connection?”
Moss patiently explained to me what appeared to be the reason for Klotz's misdiagnosis, and what in fact had been behind the entire fiasco. He said that Klotz, after receiving the dental report, had written in my record book, “Dentist discharged patient for his Vincent's.” That morning, Moss, out of curiosity, had followed up on this notation, checking out various venereal-disease manuals and textbooks for further enlightenment, and had discovered that the principal causes for false serological positives in the Kahn test were leprosy and yaws. (Jesus, I thought, leprosy and yaws!) There was no chance of my having acquired either of those exotic, largely hot-climate diseases, Moss went on. Klotz must have ruled them out all along, convinced (or, I thought, wanting to be convinced) that I had syphilis in a more or less advanced form. Moss said that Vincent's disease was mentioned as a possible cause, but a rare one—so rare that Klotz must have discounted it. I learned from Moss that despite Vincent's preposterously gruesome official name—acute necrotizing ulcerative gingivitis—the inflammation of the mouth itself was relatively mild and easy to treat, often with a single application to the gums of the powerful bactericide gentian violet. One of the causative organisms in Vincent's was another busy little spirochete (Moss spelled it out: Treponema vincentii), and it had shown up in my blood tests. With me there had been a recurrence of symptoms. “It's a good thing you finally went to the dentist,” Moss concluded, “or you might have been here forever.”
As much as I felt a friend and ally in the Chief, I still hesitated to state my case against Klotz, upon whom my rage and loathing grew more grimly focused, if that was possible, at every item Moss disclosed. I didn't want to strain the rapport I had with Moss by attacking his superior—for all I knew, though only God would know why, he might hold Klotz in high esteem. At the same time, the evil suspicions that sprang to mind as Moss murmured his litany of details had actually begun to make me a little nauseated, taking the glow off my euphoria, and there was no way I could let the suspicions rest. I said, “You know, Chief, he wanted to find the worst things. I guess I was too intimidated to tell him I've had that little scar on my dick all my life.” Then I said, “Anyway, what this means is that Dr. Klotz could have told me there was a possibility of a false positive. A possibility.” I paused. “But he didn't do that.”
“That's really right.” Moss didn't wait an extra beat, uttering the words with a soft, rising inflection that had a distinct edge of contempt and carried its own conviction of wrongdoing. I knew then that he was on my side.
“He's read what you've read,” I persisted. “He knew about Vincent's disease. He could have run me through that drill, couldn't he? But he didn't do that, either. He could have spared me a lot of misery. He could have given me some hope—”
“That's really right.”
“What is this jerk's problem, Chief?”
Klotz was on leave. Within a few hours I would return to the barracks and the drill field, just another healthy recruit thrust back into the maw of the war machine. I would never see the Chief again. Under the circumstances, it would be safe for Moss to give voice to whatever innermost feelings he had toward Klotz. But Moss was too much the wise old salt, too professional, and, doubtless, too loyal to an honorable code to go that far. Still, I sensed a comradely affinity, and it was denunciation enough, a spiritual handclasp, when he squinted at me and said, “He was punishin’ you, boy, punishin’ you.”
As I left the hospital that day, I looked forward to the ordeal that my phantom illness had interrupted. Mean corporals with taut shiny scalps and bulging eyes would be at me again, poking their swagger sticks into my solar plexus, ramming their knees up my butt, calling me a cocksucker and a motherfucking sack of shit, terrorizing me with threats and drenching me with spittle and hatred, making my quotidian world such a miasma of fright that each night I would crawl into my bed like an invalid seeking death, praying for resurrection in another life. After that, there was the bloody Pacific, where I would murder and perhaps be murdered. But those were horrors I could deal with; in that gray ward I'd nearly been broken by fears that were beyond imagining.
Late that afternoon, I trudged past the drill field in the waning light, packing my seabag on my shoulder, hefting a load that seemed pounds lighter than it had a month before. At the far end of the field, a platoon of marines was tramping across the asphalt, counting in cadence, a chorus of young voices over which one voice, the drill instructor's, soared in a high maniacal wail. In some undiscoverable distance, faint yet clear, a band played the “Colonel Bogey March,” that jauntily sad evocation of warfare, its brassy harmonies mingling triumph and grief. The music made me walk along with a brisk step, and I felt it hurrying me toward a future where though suffering was a certainty, it wore a recognizable face.
I had just enough time for a stop at the PX, to stock up on cigarettes and candy bars. The candy was a clandestine indulgence I felt I owed myself, and couldn't resist. Nor could I resist, along with the Baby Ruths, buying a postcard showing a photograph of marines grinning insincerely as they performed calisthenics, and the caption “Greetings from Parris Island.” Toward Christmas I addressed it to my stepmother, and scribbled:
Dear Old Girl,
My frantic, obsessive copulations produced not syphilis but trench mouth. (Escaped from the Clap Shack in time to celebrate the birth of our Lord and Savior.)
Much love, Bill
[New Yorker, September 18, 1995.]