"No, I'm not. It may not be coming out right, but I know what I'm talking about. I know, just my head is fucked up."

David interjected that Chuck could quit if he wanted to, that he, David, had been strung out and quit. Tom turned to me. "He knows it all, that kid," he said, pointing to David arguing with Chuck up in the front of the car.

"He doesn't know shit, none of them do, they're all kids. Like me when I first went in: Judge said two years the hard way or three the easy way. What the hell? I was a hard case. When I was fourteen, five of us stole a big power boat and went out to sea for three days. I was along for the ride--didn't know shit about the boat, I mean, though it was my idea to steal it. Anyway, we came back into the harbor and went right by this police boat. He kept right on going the other way. Fine, we figure, the guy never even came down to miss the fucking thing. Next thing, I turn around and there's the police boat and two Coast Guard cutters with those blue lights turning; so we turn the boat on full blast and head for shore and somebody finally yells jump; well, I was pretty drunk and jumped over the side holding on to another bottle and a portable television set; I lost the TV right away and came up by an old building next to the water; meanwhile, everybody has jumped off the fucking boat and it's hauling ass for the dock all by itself when it stalls; so help me Christ, if that thing had hit that dock we would have been in jail for a hundred years, or something; I get out of the water and run up on this catwalk at the back of this building, and I run around the corner, bang!, no more goddamn catwalk and I take a thirty foot drop into two feet of water; and then there were more cops than I had ever seen in my life. So we go to court and everybody says guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty; they let me go and said don't do anything like that again. But I did, got kicked out of school and shit, until finally it was either the Army or jail. Seemed like I was always getting caught, you know? I still think it was my cousin, the junkie, you know? Everytime he got into trouble, somebody else would get into trouble. I don't know though, man; one time I choked him until he turned blue when I thought he was the one who told on me--but he never admitted it, the mother fucker.

"Anyway," he continued, that's these kids; "They don't know shit, they don't have anybody to think about, they're just loud and stupid."

David interrupted then and wanted to know what happened after they got to New York. Tom explained that there was an hour between trains; they would eat dinner and continue on another train for Trenton, then take the bus to Fort Dix. Trenton, New York? David' wanted to know; Trenton, New Jersey, Tom said. Chuck said that he was thinking about going to Fort Dix now, maybe he wouldn't go AWOL after all. Everyone said they thought that would be a good idea; David especially thought so and told Chuck about it. "Knows everything, that fucking kid," Tom said.

David asked if his drill sergeant would be at the Reception Station when he got there; he didn't want him to see all that hair; David's hair was about as long as Joan Baez's. I said he wouldn't care anyway, probably 10,000 kids a year showed up with hair that long.

"If it was the Marines, they would care," he said.

"Yeah, the Marines would probably bother you."

Tom asked me about OCS then and how hard or easy that was and I told him. He said that he knew a lot of officers who were all right and told me about this lieutenant he had in Vietnam. Tom ran the Company Club toward the end of his tour, and everyone kept coming down with the clap. So the lieutenant told Tom to go into the village and get four whores.

"I had a girl friend and I got her and her family jobs on post--not fucking, you know, but housework and stuff. Anyway, we drove into the village together and picked up four whores and explained the deal to them and they said OK and I brought them back to the post. The lieutenant had friends at the base hospital and they kept the whores there two weeks, shooting them full of penicillin, and cleaned them up. Then we took them back to the company and built four rooms for them right next to the Club, with their names over the door like movie stars; just a bed and a bucket for douches and they got five dollars a shot--the Army got nothing. That lieutenant thought of it--he was all right."

I said to Tom that I thought Basic Training in the Army had been easy; he agreed. I said that I had always wondered what I would have done if I had gone through Marine Boot Camp, with people hitting me, you know. He shrugged. "You would have gone through it like everybody else did," he said.

I said yeah he was right and then David asked again if I was sure his sergeant wouldn't be there. I said I was almost positive. Then Chuck started talking about the last time he came to New York City on the train, in the summertime, and there was this girl sunbathing on the roof without any clothes on, and he could see everything; you could see her ass hole and everything. Even the ass hole, Tom wanted to know, and started to laugh, rolling his eyes at me. Chuck said yes.

Chris, who was Greek and had been sitting next to me reading perked up and showed me in Playboy where this 68-year-old lady had written in to say that she had a boy friend and they screwed once a month and had orgasms.

"Imagine that, a 68-year-old lady, and she still gets her nut. They say it's all in your mind and that you can go till 90 if you want to--Jesus, I know I will. I'd like to die in the saddle; old people have to have something to do besides play bridge and watch TV--you know what I mean, man?"

I said I did and then Chuck broke in and said that he was thinking about going AWOL again and Chris rolled his eyes and said just when they had a conversation going Chuck had to fuck it up again. Chris said that he used to use a lot of dope and that he quit and started getting into shape; he had been practicing karate for seven months now and he had enlisted for Korea, because there was a lot of karate there and did I know if that was true. I said I had heard that too and then he said that he thought Korea would be OK and so would the Army; his Dad had been in during World War II and liked it OK; then he told me about how he hoped he would get a good job but he was disqualified from a lot of them because he couldn't discriminate colors very well; they had these charts where numbers were hidden in a field of different colors and if you couldn't tell colors apart you couldn't find the numbers, did I understand? I said I did and then Chuck interrupted and said he definitely wasn't going to Fort Dix and asked if I wanted to buy his suitcase and all his clothes for ten dollars so he could get back to Providence because he had spent all his money on beer. Nobody wanted the suitcase. Tom said that he was tired of listening to Chuck's shit and then everyone said that and then Chris asked Chuck if that girl, the naked one he meant, had any hair in her ass hole and everybody laughed at that and Chuck got mad. Tom said, OK let's see the suitcase and they opened it up and there were six pairs of socks, a toothbrush, three sets of underwear brand new, a carton of Kools, another pair of jeans and some deodorant and shaving cream. Tom said he had a suitcase and there wasn't anything in this one that he wanted.