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Show 138 I had numerous opportunities. To the more special girls I told the story of how I got my nickname, told it as a rueful joke, and they loved it, loved to cradle my boyish head in their arms, my face in their breasts. The more successful a cocksman I was, the more successful I was. I no longer needed to dream. In soberer moments I noticed the black women who made our seamy beds, wiped up our dust, washed away our grime. Among themselves they talked and laughed, but clammed up with me, with whitey, keeping their real lives back out of sight, as secret as dreams. In the Officer's Mess black men cooked and served our food, most of them silent too, responding silently when commanded: "Boy! Bring more bread!" Yet that is part of Paradise, of the ideal life we dream of in the tropics or on a tropical island: someone else is always there to do the work, a willing slave. A common dream we share, but what does the slave dream of? I was not fully aware of what I was seeing. But the speculation about the dishonesty and sexual prowess of black people reminded me of talk I had heard all my life in Escalante about Mexicans. I had heard it in Los Alamitos when the zoot suit wars were on, I had heard it in Texas, I would have heard it almost anywhere, especially in Germany, for it is part of the faith I was born into. I tried to go along, I tried to repeat such calumny and believe in it, but something within me caught, would not slide. And so I felt always uncomfortable with it, in limbo, unable to freely consent. Flying was clean and true. Borne by an engine with all those horses, a super horse to ride, mounted in a cockpit, I took all that speed and power into my hands and then I was Bellerophon all right, my Navy fighter was pegasus, untiring, swift as the wind, and up we went into the sky, on up to where other horses pulled the chariot of the sun, up toward Apollo himself, |