He nodded. Smiled just a little. Shyly.
I finished my beer in a gulp and waved toward the bar for another. “Barney, look at this place. Your business is going great guns. Ever since you switched locations, seems like it’s doubled.”
“Ben’s going to take over for me.”
“Aw, but you yourself are such an important part of it-the celebrity greeting his customers and all. No offense to your brother, but it’ll flop without you.”
Again he shrugged. “Maybe so. But if Hitler comes riding down State Street, I’ll be out of business permanent.”
Such a child. Such a simple soul. God bless him.
“How far have you gone with this thing?”
“Well,” he said, smiling, embarrassed now, “they turned me down at first. Told me I was overage and should go run my cocktail lounge. Just like you did. But I kept swinging, and finally they sent a letter to Washington to see about getting me a waiver on the age rule. Took sixty days for it to come through. And today I got the word. All I got to do is sign on the dotted line, and pass the physical.”
I sat there shaking my head.
“The recruiting office is in the post office,” he said. That was just a few blocks away. “They’re open twenty-four hours, these days. I’m going down tonight. Why don’t you keep me company?”
“What, and join up with you? Not on your life.”
“Nate,” he said, reaching across to touch my hand. It wasn’t something I remembered him ever doing before. “I’m not trying to talk you into any such thing. You have every right to stay here, doing what you’re doing. You’re past draft age, now, you got my blessing. Really. All I want is yours.”
He didn’t know I’d already given it to him. I just sat there shaking my head again, but smiling now. He took his hand off mine. Then suddenly we were shaking hands.
That’s when we started to seriously drink.
It gets hazy after that. I know that my own mixed feelings-my own barely buried desire to get into this thing myself, my expectation of being drafted having turned to guilt-edged relief when the call-up missed me-came drifting to the surface, came tumbling out in confession to Barney, and, well, I remember walking him to the post office, singing, “Over There,” along the way and getting strange and occasionally amused looks from passersby.
I remember studying a poster boasting the great opportunities the Marine Corps offered a man. There were three Marines on the poster-one rode a rickshaw, one was cleaning the wings of an airplane, one was presenting arms on a battleship. I remember, albeit vaguely, studying this poster for the longest time and experiencing what must have been something akin to a religious conversion.
I’m sure it would have passed, given time.
Unfortunately, time for sober reflection wasn’t in the cards. The blur that follows includes a recruiting sergeant in pressed blue trousers, khaki shirt, necktie, and forest ranger hat (a “campaign” hat, I later learned). I remember looking down at his shoes and seeing my face looking up at me. I also remember saying, “What a shine!” Or words to that effect.
The conversation that followed is largely lost to me. I remember being asked my age and giving it as twenty-nine. That stuck with me because I had to concentrate hard, in my condition, to be able to lie that effectively.
I remember also one other question asked of me: “Any scars, birthmarks, or other unusual features?”
And I remember asking, “Why such a question?”
And I remember the matter-of-fact response: “So they can identify your body after you get your dog tags blown off.”
One would think that would have sobered me up (and perhaps that question was the recruiting officer’s attempt to do so, to not take undue advantage of my condition); but one would be wrong. It took the next morning to do that.
The next morning, by which time Barney Ross was in the Marines.
And so, when I woke up, was I.
We took a train at Union Station and left Chicago behind. Ahead, immediately ahead, was San Diego. Boot camp.
It was a three-day journey cross-country. Barney and I weren’t the only ones aboard over thirty, and a fair share of these recruits were in their twenties; but the bulk of ’em were kids. Goddamn kids-seventeen, eighteen years old. It made me feel sad to be so old; it made me feel sadder that they were so young.
But so was the war, and, judging from the high spirits of its passengers, this train might’ve been headed for a vacation camp. Oh, it’d be a camp, all right; but hardly vacation. Still, the trip-particularly the first day or so-was filled for them with childish fun, yelling and pranks and waving out the windows at cows and cars and particularly girls.
These kids had never been west before. Both Barney and I had, but just the same we sat like spellbound tourists and looked out the window at the passing scenery. As the farm country gradually gave way to a more barren landscape, it seemed fitting somehow. I was leaving America slowly behind.
The kids knew who Barney was, and some of them razzed him, but mostly they wanted autographs and to hear stories. He’d humor them, fight Canzoneri again and again (which he’d had to do in real life, as well), and occasionally get the heat off himself by trying to make me out as somebody.
“Talk to Nate, here,” he’d say, “if you want to hear about celebrities. He knows Capone.”
“No kiddin’?”
“Sure he does! Frank Nitti, too. Nate was there the night Dillinger got shot in front of the Biograph theater.”
“Is that so, Nate?”
“More or less, kid.”
So word got around about the boxer and the private eye and we got paid a certain gosh-wow respect because of it. And our ages, we were the oldest aboard by a yard; nobody since that recruiting officer seemed convinced I was twenty-nine. Including me.
I had plenty of time on the train to reflect on the nature of my enlistment. Even before we left Barney had said, “You might be able to get out of it, Nate.”
“I signed the papers.”
“You were drunk, and you lied about your age. I had to get a waiver to get in, and I’m younger than you. Maybe you should…”
“I’ll think it over.”
Yet somehow, here I was, on a train cutting across a desert, on my way to San Diego and points God-knows-where beyond.
On the second day of the trip, sitting in the dining car, at a table for two, Barney looked across at me and said, “Why didn’t you try, Nate?”
“Try what?” I asked. The meal before me was a hamburger steak and cottage fries and a little salad and milk and I was digging in, instinctively enjoying what I guessed would be one of the few decent meals of my foreseeable future.
“To get out of it,” he said.
“Of what?”
“Don’t play games, schmuck. Of the Marines.”
I shrugged, chewed my food. Answered: “I don’t know that I could.”
“You don’t know that you couldn’t.”
“I’m here. Let’s leave it at that.”