From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [218]
“You think you could find me one?” Prew said, hesitating, yet knowing all the time that he would go.
“Sure. Old Hal’ll find one for you. Whynt you come on and go?”
Prew was looking around the bar. “I already said I’d go, dint I? Shut up on it. Drop it, for Christ’s sake. Matter of fact, I meant to go all along. I was goin out to Waikiki to look you up, after I left here. What is this slop we drinkin anyway?”
“Gin and ginger.”
“A goddam woman’s drink. Whynt we get whisky? We got money.”
“You want whisky, you drink whisky. I’m drinkin this because I got to go to work. I get out to Waikiki I be drinkin champagne cocktails. Hell, thats all I drink out there. Champagne cocktails, buddy.”
They left Wu Fat’s at ten-thirty. Prew still had two dollars left, besides his cab fare home. They decided to take a taxi out. They dodged catty corner across Hotel to the GI taxi stand in front of the Japanese woman-barber shop and fell in at the end of the mob that was jamming the cab stand almost as badly as the other mob had jammed the bar. Everything was jammed, even the Japanee woman-barber shop had a waiting line.
“Its a lot of crap,” Angelo said drunkenly. “Pay fifty cents a head to ride three miles to Waikiki when you pay the same price to ride thirty-five miles to Schofield. But its better than them goddam buses. Especially Payday. But ever fuckin body robs the soljers.”
The cab they finally got already had the back seat and the two folding seats filled with Waikiki passengers. They climbed in front with the driver and slammed the door. The driver pulled away expertly quickly to let the cab behind pull in. He eased into the steady traffic, going over to Pauahi Street, moving slowly through the alternating light and dark patches that were bars and whorehouses, on around the block and back to Hotel.
Angelo sighed drunkenly. “I might as well brief you now. Its a good thing you aint in uniform,” he added.
“Oh, yeah? How goddam so? Whats wrong with the uniform? I like the uniform.”
“But they dont like it,” Angelo grinned. “They high-toned friends might get the wrong idea about them and think they was queer, runnin around with uniforms.”
“Hell, they never use to mind that in Washington or Baltimore.”
“But them are cities. Honolulu is really a small town. Everybody knows everybody else. I dint know you been out with them before?”
“A couple times is all. Me and another guy rolled some rich ones in Washington. They wont go to the law. We carried a GI Irish spud in a GI sock. It worked swell.”
“Thats sounds okay,” Angelo said, grudgingly admiringly. “Back home we used a sock full of sand, but trouble with that is the sock’s liable to bust first time you sap him.”
The cab was moving slowly in the traffic up Hotel Street that was lit up like a carnival. They passed the arcade two doors down from the Army-Navy Y, where a mob was shooting electric eye machineguns at lighted planes or waiting to get their picture taken with their arm drunkenly around the big titted Japanee hula girl against a canvas backdrop of Diamond Head and palms. Something to Send Home, the sign on the photograph booth said.
“But you cant roll them in this town,” Angelo said. “They never carry money. Too many dogfaces.”
“I know all that,” Prew said.
“You got to play them like a fish, see? Hell,” Angelo growled, “the cruisers dont even have to buy you drinks, because the market’s glutted. I use to play the cruisers, before I got experience. Its like everything else in this world, you got to pay for what you get. You can pay for it by learning, or you can pay for it with experience once you learnt it, or you can pay for it with friendship. But you got to pay. Thats my philosophy. I read it in some book once.”
The cab moved at a walking pace past the crowded hotdog stand next door to the Y where a bunch waited to use the dime automatic photograph machine, their mass overflowing onto the already jam-packed sidewalk. Then on past the dark palm studded lawn of the Y itself, with the Black Cat across the street and also overflowing. A number of drunks lay passed