The Scooter Chronicles: A Novel in Three Parts Part One

By Edward Beardsley

Will Scooter Sullivan allow the U.S. Navy to make a man of him or will he return to Chicago and his jazz haunts on Rush Street as a drummer?

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Mar 25, 2015
• ISBN: 9781491762073

Edward Beardsley

EDWARD BEARDSLEY is the product of the Rogers Park section of Chicago and of Sullivan High School there. He dropped out of school to join the U.S. Navy at the end of World War II. He didn’t see the world but did see most of the Pacific Ocean including Hawaii, Japan, American Samoa, New Zealand, Antarctica, California and some of the girls there.

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THE SCOOTER CHRONICLES

A NOVEL IN THREE PARTS

PART ONE

Copyright © 2015 Edward Beardsley.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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ISBN: 978-1-4917-6206-6 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4917-6208-0 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4917-6207-3 (e)

iUniverse rev. date: 03/03/2015

CONTENTS

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Acknowledgements

For All the Girls I’ve Loved Before, Especially

Nancy Lou; Catherine; Joanne; Connie; Lois T;

Ann; Lois C; Deborah; Laura; Susan; Patricia

ONE

Dear Bro’,

You wouldn’t believe this place! It’s just like in the movies except it’s worse when you’re actually here. Remember the one where Richard Jaeckel is in boot camp—I think it was Parris Island—and he had that neat, blond crew cut and the sun was always shining and everyone was tan and lean and muscular. The D.I. was a mean bastard, but we knew it was really just superficial and that he was really only that way because he wanted his men to hate the enemy at least as much as they hated him.

Well, as you know, the war is over and this is Great Lakes, not Parris Island, but I don’t think these noncom nincompoops are aware of either fact. Crew cut hell!! They shaved our damn heads, deloused us in a shower—all of us buckass naked—threw needles into our arms, and chucked a stack of gear at us. Amazingly, most of the stuff fit pretty well. I say amazingly because they don’t take sizes with a tape measure like that guy down at Bond’s on State St. They’ve got these blues and whites and fatigues all stacked in size groups. Two guys stand at the counter. One eyeballs you for about five seconds and shouts a size in a code like M-5-8, medium plus height. The other one turns around, grabs a pile and literally throws it at you. Luckily, the shoes are not on top. You get those at another counter and if you don’t know your size, tough dukey.

Bro’, you know what it’s like at our house. Pretty darn straight, right? Sure, Dad cusses once in awhile and would more often if Mom would let him. I guess we kinda got used to it. But these petty officers up here wrote the book on crude. You wouldn’t believe it. One of the petty officers in charge of our company stomps into the barracks at 5:00 A.M. There’s a long row of metal bunks on either side of the room. He’s got this stick like a billy club, and, as he clomps up one side and down the other, he’s hollering, Hit the deck, you swabbies! At the same time he’s whacking the metal posts (stanchions up here) of the bunks like a kid with a stick on a picket fence.

I took it as long as I could, Bro—which was about three weeks. Ninety percent of the guys in my company are from the South and ninety percent of them are farmers. Don’t get me wrong, they’re good guys, but they didn’t know one foot from the other when they got here. Half of ’em still don’t. I guess farm kids don’t cotton (as they say up here) much to R.O.T.C. Well, you know that old saw about a little learning being a dangerous thing. In my case it was a lot of learning.

Each company has what they call a boot commander. He’s a kind of aide-de-camp chosen from the company by the company commander to assist him in stuff like close-order drill and act as a leader for the other boots. You probably know where this is going, Bro’. Yep, with my three years of R.O.T.C. and two on the Crack Platoon, I figured I was a shoo-in for the job. I was wrong. I did know more about close-order drill, the Garand rifle, and the Bond Army Manual than anyone else, but—and this should come as no surprise to anyone—I’m not a leader. For one thing, I found out that, with a few exceptions like maybe Napoleon and Truman, leaders tend to be big. The guy who was picked is big. And he knows a fair amount about snap-to’s and obliques.

Anyhoo, to make a long story sad, I resented this guy. I challenged him to meet me in the laundry room and settle our differences with our dukes. Big mistake. I showed up. He went to the C/O. I guess I looked like a blind guide straining at a gnat and trying to swallow a camel. The C/O said anymore crap like that and I’d be looking at an extra two weeks.

As you know, Bro’, there was some more crap like that—I can’t even remember what it was now—and I was transferred to a company that had come in two weeks after us. Two weeks on top of the basic nine up here is like an assignment to hell. You know, like the picture of the guy rolling that boulder up the mountain in The Divine Comedy.

I already knew a bunch of stuff before I came up here, like how to field strip a butt and to put tincture of benzoin on your hands so when you slap your rifle to make the frogs rattle your hands don’t hurt. But I’ve learned a lot of stuff, too, some of it really weird.

Speaking of leave, one more week of this shit and I’ll be home for ten days and you and I are going to have some fun, Bro’. Don’t forget to get me a fake ID so we can go down to Dave’s and drink a few Millers. Give Jean my love and tell her I miss her like hell.

Got to hit the sack, Bro’. Got furnace duty from four to eight in the morning. Love to Mom and Dad. See you soon.

Dear Bro’,

As far as fun goes, that was probably the best ten days of my life. The tennis was good even if you did beat me three days out of five. Sitting in the booth at Dave’s with you and Pete and Scratchy, sipping Millers and listening to Blue Rhythm Fantasy on the juke box afterwards is about as good as it gets. Krupa’s sticks were almost in sync with the clack of the El train roaring by overhead. A lot of the guys I spent the last couple of months with might not understand or appreciate that very much. They talk a lot about the front porch and iced tea.

The train ride down here to Jacksonville wasn’t much to write home about. There was some talk about a couple of our colored guys getting tossed off the train in Macon after they were caught in an upper bunk with a Negro cook from the train. I don’t know if it’s true. Frankly, I doubt it. Some of these Johnny Rebs are fond of such stories. And I noticed that, after we got here, there were at least five other guys who must have been dropped off at stations somewhere along the line, ’cause I never saw them again.

Jacksonville Naval Air Station sounds a lot more romantic than it is. I suppose there’s some sour grapes in that since I found out they wouldn’t take me at Lackland in the Air Corps with my glasses. My first palm tree through the train window was the best thing I’ve seen so far! The sight of all those Stearman trainers lined up can put a lump in the throat of anyone like me who dreamed of being a pilot since before he got his first two-wheeler, but, as Isaiah says, They that wait upon the Lord… There are other things, Bro’, maybe even better than flying.

By day I’m admiral of the pot sink (The classification is Mess Cooking, but after they saw the setback in boot training they apparently decided that I could reflect better on my future in the navy sweating over sinks of hot water in the temperatures of summer Florida).

At night, when I can get a shore pass, I take my pickled hands over to Jax Beach. There’s a bar over there where you can sit outside. I sit outside and sip scotch and listen to a trio with a singer who is Anita O’Day’s double. Man, she is good. The other night on her break I bought her a drink and we talked Anita and Gene and jazz in general. She knows her stuff. As you can guess, Old Buddy, at $90 a month, I can’t keep that up for long, even at fifty cents a drink.

Last night I took it on the chin, figuratively speaking. Everything in this damn navy is gray. That includes the buses we ride into town. It’s very depressing, Bro’, after the beautiful greens of Chicago’s parks and streets and the blues of Lake Michigan.

I had been in to see Anita and had a couple more than I should have. Anita made me think of Jean. I got real homesick. On the way back to the base, I got to talking to some swabbie I didn’t even know about how sorry the damn navy is and how nobody in their right mind would stay in a sorry-assed outfit like this. You know how, when I get going, I can’t shut my damned mouth. Finally, this Chief in the seat behind me taps me on the shoulder and says, Say, Sonny, did you enlist or were you drafted?

I turned around and said, I enlisted. Why?

Then, he says, I think you better shut your mouth. I had it coming.

Bro’, you should meet Carlisle Wofford. He’s from Georgia, tall and lanky, and hung (as they say here). I remember in high school how funny we all felt after gym class having to shower in front of everyone. Home was never like that. Remember? Well, maybe it was some sort of necessary preparation for life because once you get in the service you know more about the guys in your outfit than their mothers do.

Well, as everyone in our company knows, Carlisle (they call him Georgia here) was not circumcised in infancy, possibly the result of a rural, midwife-attended birth. Even though Georgia was on the serving line and not in the pot sinks with me, mess cooking is widely regarded both as a shit detail and as something nobody would really blame you for goldbricking on.

So Georgia decided that this would be a good time to get himself circumcised. Mess cook tours usually last about three months, and he’d heard a circumcision was worth around a week in the hospital, being a more serious procedure as one gets older. As Georgia discovered, goldbricking in the service, even so-called justifiable goldbricking, can be very expensive.

He had surgery on Tuesday. I went to see him on Thursday. He was sitting up in bed, and I could tell he didn’t have tonsillitis because there’s a clearly distinguishable bulge under the covers. We shook hands and I asked him how’s it going. He gave me something between a grimace and a grin and jerked his thumb toward the coffee mug on the table next to his bed. These navy mugs are like most coffee mugs except they’re bigger and thicker and they have no handles because the way we throw them around in the dishwasher handles wouldn’t last a day.

See that? he says, as he picks up the mug. This crank of mine is so swolled up you couldn’t get it in there. You want to see? Bro’, I really didn’t want to see. They call salami horsecock here and having seen Carlisle before the surgery I had a pretty good idea what I’d be looking at. But, after all, he was a buddy, and I’d come to see him and ask him how’s it going. He wasn’t at all reticent about having anyone see his thing because he knew it was something just about anyone would like to have—under most circumstances. After I didn’t say anything, Georgia pulled down the sheet. Of course, the main part of this thing is bandaged up, but, Bro’, you never saw such a sight in your life! Eight inches or so is enough all by itself! Just imagine how it looked at 3-4 inches in diameter. It made him look taller and leaner than ever, and I actually felt sorry for him.

He must have seen the concern on my face. Doc says I’ll be okay in a couple weeks. Says peeing’s not going to be any fun for awhile, but the girls are gonna like it even better. We both laughed, neither of us genuinely. I gave him a paperback, chucked him on the shoulder, and left.

In your last letter you asked about Jean and me. First, let me say thanks a bunch for looking out for her while I’m gone—that’s a job only a brother can be trusted to do, right? I will pay you back one way or another. You can count on that! She said you all (that’s another thing they say here, only it’s y’all) had a swell time at the June Jump at the Shawnee. Sure wish I could have been there. Jean said they had that great Northwestern big band. They do the Dorsey and Miller books as well as anyone I’ve heard, especially Dorsey’s Swanee River and Sing, Sing, Sing. Do I envy that drummer, Gene Krupa? Is the pope Catholic?

As far as Jean and I are concerned, Bro’, I think someday that could get real serious—you know, go all the way. I don’t mean all the way like in sex. I think that’s one of the things we’ve got going for us, that we really respect each other. It’s not that we wouldn’t like to; we’ve come pretty close a couple of times. As you can tell, she’s got a great figure, and it’s obvious she wasn’t behind the door when they passed out the boobs. We’ll see what happens during this hitch, but right now I see this as a long-term situation, as in maybe even marriage. And I think she feels likewise.

That leads me to something else, Old Buddy. And this is strictly between us! I’m not real proud of this. Actually, I’m not proud of it at all; I’m kind of ashamed of it. I guess from what I’ve heard it had to happen sooner or later. I just thought it probably would be later. I’ve tried to rationalize it, even to think of it as something that could be good for Jean and me in the long run.

There’s this guy in my outfit from Alabama named Walter Styx. Walter’s a Negro and as black as the proverbial ace of spades. Someone in Walter’s line is surely responsible for the term spade. I wonder, also, if there might be some literati back there a few generations who were looking for a last name and hadn’t been given one by the Massah. If the Charon who ferried the deserving dead into Hell across the River Styx was charred by the flames he had to look like Walter.

Anyway, Walter and I are friends and, although I haven’t been called a nigger-lover yet, the day is probably not far off. Walter is short, like me, and solidly built. I think he’s intelligent, but he’s so quiet it’s hard to tell. He is a sailor’s sailor and his whites are white and his blues are speck-free. You can see your face as clearly in the sheen on his shoes as in the one on his forehead; Walter sweats a lot, but only on his forehead.

The main hotel in Jacksonville is the George Washington. The locals pronounce it Jardge Warshintin. Word around the barracks is that when you get a room there if you tell the elevator operator you’d like some company he’ll send some up. Now Walter is a Southern Baptist and basically a religious guy who’s been known to go ashore specifically for the purpose of going to church, which, in our company at least, is definitely not common. So, I really don’t know why he took up with this idea except that maybe it was because I’d told him I was an Episcopalian (the Baptists call it Whiskeypalian because they know we don’t mind tossing down a few now and then) and we were friends.

At any rate, Walter and I found ourselves in room 405 of the George Washington Hotel, me with a half-pint of Old Thompson and Walter with a sheepish look on his face. We were sitting side by side on one of the beds when the company knocked on the door. I was smoking a cigarette and sipping a little whiskey and tap water. Walter opened the door and I could tell by his expression that we were both glad we hadn’t paid the elevator man (we learned later that the girls did that). It was like adjacent water fountains, one marked Colored, the other White. The women looked liked sisters (I say women because neither of them had seen a girl in the mirror in a coon’s age) except that one was brown and the other white. It never occurred to me that they would be fat and at least forty; I guess I expected them to look like Jean, in a straight skirt and white blouse with a hint of lace bra beckoning. Bro’, these ladies weren’t even dressed!

And they weren’t there for conversation. The window was open, begging for some breeze off the St. Johns River in the summer heat. Walter pulled the shade down—there were rooms across the way—but the brown one raised it. Before I could put out my cigarette, they had both come out of their robes and were on the beds. The robes were all they wore, so they had plenty of time to watch us skin our whites off. I was about halfway up, but Walter was inhibited into flaccidness by the whole rather unsavory situation. We matched colors with the females as we crawled onto the beds. There was nothing to crawl under as they hadn’t pulled the spreads down.

I had never savored the sight of a fat nude woman before in my whole life and was totally unprepared to accommodate a vision of so much soft flesh. I was thinking maybe Varga or Petty to avoid lusting for Jean. These ladies were big, Bro’. There was a lack of definition in their bodies that made the parts seem unimportant by themselves. The act itself could have been accomplished by a number of similar-appearing folds that made the whole thing a disappointment, especially for a first time. The idea of seeing it, of getting into it, the idea of savoring the several revered parts in relationship to the complete body, was lost in a kind of sea of flesh that was accentuated by the fact that she was on her back. Don’t confuse this with Rubens, Dear Brother. Ample women have never turned me on, but Rubens would have been sheer delight in this situation. Later I thought that the situation might have been improved with her astride, but I doubted it. The view perhaps but certainly not the motion.

I finished first and reached for my cigarettes. It was then I saw the real reason for the open window: across the way, in a window one floor up, were three other girls watching us. Their window was open, too, and I could see that I’d have been much happier with one of them. I suddenly felt very immature. These younger, leaner ones were obviously waiting for older, more experienced men, I thought; perhaps (and this was really naïve) men who could last longer, as if a whore cared. We had been properly assessed as virgins, assigned apprentice status, and told to start at the bottom—no pun intended. I was glad, at least, that I hadn’t seen the trio across the way before I climbed on to the bed. It might not have been worth the ten dollars she put in her robe pocket before we started, but she was a real woman and I was no longer a virgin.

We left them in the room and walked down the hall. Walter was still tying his neckerchief and staring at the floor as we walked. I handed him the half-pint of Old Thompson without looking at him. He barred the bottle with his hand. At the elevator we stood silently watching the arrow arc toward 4. We stepped inside the empty box and waited for the door to close behind us. As soon as we felt the downward motion in our groins, Walter grabbed the bottle, tipped it up, swallowed half of the burning juice, and sprayed the rest out in a fit of laughter, his perfect teeth making him the spit and image of Dippermouth Louis.

Speaking of Satchmo, Ol’ Buddy, I don’t think anyone has decreed it yet (you might keep an eye on Downbeat for me regarding this), but I sense some kind of major change in the music business in the air. Bands of one size or another have been king now for about forty years—hell, we might not have won the war without the likes