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Show 12. One night in a bar crowded with sailors, Ross and I ran into Pat Donahue, one of those coincidences which none of us ever forget. He had been on the battleship Oklahoma at Pearl Harbor when the Japanese came and there was something strange in his eyes. Since he was on an overnight liberty we took him back to our place to sleep. The next day, sober, his eyes were veiled and he was eerily subdued. We saw him often on liberties that spring, and when he was sober he didn't laugh, he didn't talk much or seem interested in girls. When he was drunk his eyes got that look, haunted and desperate, and he wasn't at all interested in girls. He was interested in things like explaining the thirteen buttons on sailors' blues and how a sailor carried money, cigarettes and rubbers with no more than one small breast pocket-- though he seemed to carry the condoms for form's sake alone. He would comb his black hair back from his widow's peak and a few minutes later it would fall curling forward on his forehead, he as handsome or more so than ever, and certainly the girls looked at him, but he never gave them a tumble. I had no real conception of what he had gone through in that bombing attack, he did not even try to tell us, but I could not imagine anything strong enough to turn off sex. That's how naive I was. Neither Pat nor I mentioned Kate Cannon Schoenhals; it was as if she did not exist. I don't know whether he thought of her or not. I didn't, I was too busy trying to get laid, pathetically eager, and the only ones who seemed to sympathize with me were homosexual. The first man who put the make on me, as soon as I got over my disbelief, I resisted much like Bess resisted me. I suppose we felt much the same. Afterwards I told her and Lily and Ross |