52.

This is now November of 1970. I have been in the army for sixteen months. For all these hours and days and weeks I have been able to kid myself—to believe that the boy who writes poetry and reads Ralph Waldo Emerson is still inside my soul. I brought a volume of Emerson with me to Germany and have a new notebook and I sit in the apartment at the used table I bought and try to read and write on one of my days off but I sit there staring up at the skylight and turgid gray sky beyond. I haven’t seen a blue sky for weeks. Jenny is coming in December, and I try to get excited about her arrival, but I just can’t. Instead I get more and more depressed thinking of the time I’m wasting in the army.

I pace around the apartment, trying to jog my brain out of its funk, but the floor is covered with a rubberized tile that keeps causing me to trip and fall. One night, by accident, I bring my .45 pistol home from work. I take it out of my holster, trying to think of a safe place to store it as I walk into my bedroom. I trip, and the gun goes spinning into the air, and I watch it in slow motion, thinking this might be the end of me if it hits the floor and fires. I close my eyes in terror, but it lands, and the clip of shells pops out, and I fall to the floor weeping.

I go to work and sit in the gray, blue light of the hangar and feel my creative juices leak away. It gets easier and easier to yell at the stupid GIs standing in front of me than write poetry.

“Your duffel bag,” I scream at a PFC in the middle of the night. “Empty your fucking duffel bag on the floor: that’s what I want you to do.”

I poke through his dirty clothes with my billy club and scatter them around.

“Now pick up this shit and get out of here. Now. I said. Now.”

I follow him as he walks away, toward the exit. I follow him and scream “Now” over and over at his back. He pulls the duffel bag along by the strap with one hand and holds batches of his clothes with the other hand. He keeps dropping shirts and socks and underwear.

“Get that crap out of my inspection area,” I yell as he walks out of the hangar.

“Be careful,” Halter says to me later. “You’re starting to sound like Leon. Relax, Ryan. This isn’t your show, buddy. You just want to get out of here alive with your soul intact.”

It seems like the sunshine went away forever that November. Day after day, low-hanging clouds give the world the look of hard iron. I get more depressed. Day after slow-moving day, night after slow-moving night I live in the gray of my work followed by the gray of the apartment, which now depresses me to no end. Gray despair hangs in the chambers of my head the way the smells of boiled cabbage and fried liver linger in the hallways of that Mörfelden apartment building. I keep tripping on the rubberized floor. When I come home from the air base, I sit in the one chair I’d bought and stare at the wall, watching the gray daylight come and go. I don’t go anywhere on my days off.

Corporal Leon Kravitz, though, is cheerful, and his good cheer rubs on my psyche like fingernails on a chalkboard.

Corporal Kravitz loves the army. When he isn’t threatening us, he tries to sell us on its many benefits. He even likes our nine-on-and-three-off schedule.

“The great thing about the army,” Corporal Kravitz explains, sitting with his shiny boots up on the desk in the Twenty-Second MP house, “is that we make your week nine days long. You go in the army, and you’ll live two days longer every week. Think about it. That’s a hundred days a year. Two thousand days over a twenty-year career. Shit, you get 2,000 extra days, a pension, and lifetime medical benefits. The army’s the greatest thing since sliced bread.”

“I never liked sliced bread all that much,” Halter says. “Sliced bread is way overrated if you ask me.”

“Nobody’s asking you Halter,” Corporal Kravitz says. “Even the army can’t save you from being an idiot.”

“Well, I might be an idiot, but I can do math. I’m afraid no one can add days to the calendar.”

Jenny arrived in early December. The air had turned chilly, and it was still gray.

As a joke, Halter suggested that we pick her up at the civilian airport in our MP uniforms. We’d pretend to take her into custody.

“Shit, man, we’re pretend cops, so we might as well do a pretend custody,” he said. “Come on, man, it’ll be funny. Two cute little cops like us.”

Yes, that’s right. Underneath it all I still thought it was some kind of joke. The sensitive poet, playing policeman. Yes, it would be funny, and there we were in the American Airlines waiting area with our white hats and Sam Browne belts, our billy clubs and our sidearms, waiting for Jenny to land.

Of course people were whispering and pointing at us, and they left a big circle around us.

And there was Jenny coming out of the airplane wearing a floppy leather hat and Italian-looking sunglasses with huge round lenses. She was carrying her guitar. She looked like a model, a model dressed up as a hippie.

“Pretty cool,” Halter said. “Pretty fucking cool, man.”

“You’ll have to come this way, ma’am,” I said, and slowly her whole moment of being a cool-looking hippie just evaporated. She stared in disbelief at this new person I’d become.

“Please, Steve, you’ve got to get me out of here.”

I called Goldberg in Mannheim.

“Maybe I can get you a job here. Give me a few days.”

“Steve,” I pleaded a week later.

And a week after that, a few days before Christmas, I was in my green sport coat driving the Volvo to Mannheim for my new job.

“Yes,” I said, pumping the air with my fist. Goldberg had rescued me.

“Just remember,” Corporal Kravitz told me at the end of my last Rhein-Main shift, “ ‘Filter, Flavor, Flip-Top Box.’ That’s what you’ll be protecting, Ryan. Keep those Marlboro cigarettes out of enemy hands. ‘Filter, Flavor, Flip-Top Box.’ ”