November 2nd, 1967

Call Jenny in Sausalito to see how Bart’s doing⎯he’s out of the Army. Flipped out in boot camp.

Jenny waited outside base in the ’55 Ford. Bart ran off base & jumped in trunk. Jenny took off.

Bart went AWOL for 3 days. Turned himself in & the shrink discharged him.

Jenny’s pregnant. Bart’s bought a sailboat.

I take the ferry to Sausalito. Pass Alcatraz, a fortress on the bay. Hospital ship comes into the harbor. Navy ship leaves. Tankers head for the Golden Gate Bridge. Sailboats glide around them.

Bart’s in the boat yard hunched over hull of trimaran. 3 hulls. He’s scraping paint with putty knife. Wearing shorts & sandals, a cowboy hat.

His hands are shaking.

“What happened?” I ask him.

“I started seeing the faces of women and children at the end of my bayonet,” he says. “Then the nightmares started. I saw the women and children I killed during the day dead in my dreams at night.”

“You need to move back to the city, Pinello.”

He turns on me.

“Fuck you, Vincent! I’m getting out of here!”

He’s not the same Bart.

“When?”

“As soon as this boat’s finished!”

The boat’s a mess.

“You don’t even sail,” I tell him.

He looks at me like he’s never even considered it.

“Jenny sails.”

I walk around the boat.

“Where could you go in this?”

“The South Seas, where else? I’ll become a painter and live on coconuts!”

“You don’t paint, Pinello.”

“We’ll have a flock of kids. Fish’ll drop out of the sky. We’ll harvest cannabis and mushrooms.”

“What are you going to name this heap?”

He starts scraping again.

“The Apocalypse.”

I’m sitting on a stump by the water watching the houseboats along the quay.

“Tom Firth’s dead,” he says.

“Tom Firth?”

“Da Nang. Shrapnel in the heart.”

“What was he doing in Vietnam?”

“He left Harvard & joined the Marines.”

Tom was the brightest kid in our class.

“He had the skin of a girl.”

Tom was a big kid, but all baby fat. Rowed on the crew team with Bart & I. Rowed in the last seat in the third eight. They didn’t know where else to put him.

“The price of being a man,” Bart says.

I tell him about Feeney McBride. He drops the putty knife, leans on the hull.

“Oh shit,” he says, “that Feeney was a good kid.”

“He says he’ll always remember those days at your place.”

“I’m glad he got a taste of it.”

“I’m glad you ran, Bart.”

“You’re still running.”

I beat the Draft with student deferments. Lyndon Johnson looked insane on TV apologizing to the mothers of America for needing more of their sons as we sat in the cafeteria at Villanova, waiting for the new number of call-ups.

“Darryl Ross got it too,” I tell him.

Darryl was the class clown.

“Funny guy,” he says.

He starts scraping again.

“You never liked him.”

“We were just boys then, Vincent.”

“And what are we now, Pinello?”

“Confused.”

» November 5th, 1967 : The Young Novelist