Mitla Pass - Leon Uris [30]
I stroked her hair later and kissed her a lot and found myself looking out of the window down on Forty-fourth street. It was hysterical down there. “Getting the first book accepted is like getting shot out of a cannon. I guess water has to find its own level.”
She sat up in the bed. I never got tired of looking at her. “You’ll be okay,” she said. “You’re really a nice guy.”
“There’s a pile of good plays on here. I want to see them all.”
I settled down and enjoyed all those things I thought I was ready for: the interview with Variety, the 50,000-watt clear-channel station, the bow on “The Ed Sullivan Show,” the blurb in Winchell’s column. Be graceful, be decent. Remember, buddy, none of it means a damn if anything is wrong with Val or Penny or Roxy.
The war had been over for nearly a decade and I hadn’t returned to Baltimore. Now I was ready. Kid’s stuff, I know, but I rented the biggest, blackest Caddy convertible and drove down for the long-delayed family reunion. When I parked it in front of my sister Molly’s house, it took up half the street. All the kids gathered around it and gawked and the neighbors tried to steal a glimpse of me. I went up to them and gave them hugs and they blushed and stammered. Yeah, it was nice and everyone enjoyed it. The champ was home! The American dream lives!
In Look magazine there was a photo of Radio City’s Rockettes in their dressing room reading Of Men in Battle all in a pretty row.
And an A.P. wirephoto of the heiress Barbara Hutton getting off the plane in Vegas to get another divorce, with a copy under her arm, and one of Floyd Patterson reading it on the night before he creamed Hurricane Jackson.
There was my first autographing party at Stationers Book Store in San Diego. San Diego. Of the early moments of the early days of the victory tour, this was the answer to my wildest dream.
I’d done my boot camp in Dago. Back then I was a kid, seventeen, and war had just broken out. I had enlisted in the Corps. It was in Dago that the writer’s dream took on first reality and life. I now had something to say to the world. I’d walk Broadway past the Y and the sleaze joints and get pissed on a fake I.D. card. And in Dago I had my first lay by a whore.
I’d get on the ferry to Coronado and find a place off by myself and ride until liberty was about up and I’d dream of the story I’d tell someday.
The El Cortez Hotel crowned a small hill near Broadway. I’d look up to it, a symbol of rank and affluence, and I’d say to myself, “someday.” Dago was a war-hardened town that had sent off hundreds of thousands of boys to do battle in the Pacific. Now, over a decade later, it stopped for a moment and bowed to Gideon Zadok, Private, USMC.
The day before the autographing party, I entered the Marine Corps base and was whisked to the commanding general’s office and I stood next to him while the graduating recruit battalion passed in review.
“We’re proud of you, Marine,” he said to me.
Sounds like the old boys’ club stuff, I know. Schlocky. Corny as hell. But I’d written a new and different kind of war book. Most of the war novels had expressed deep hatred for America and the services. God knows I hated the war, but I didn’t hate the men I fought it with. I loved them and I respected my officers and I knew why I was fighting. I was glad the Corps was proud of me.
Val and I had left the girls in Coronado with their grandmother and we took a suite at the El Cortez. We had dinner in the Skyroom restaurant with all of Dago and all of her ships and planes and lights spread below ... and for the moment, I was king of the hill.
“You look so pensive, honey,” Val said.
“Lot of things running through my head,” I answered.
Later that night, we made some of the randiest love of our marriage. It started in the cocktail lounge. Val came in first and took a table by herself. In a service town like Dago, drinks start appearing like magic when a single lady enters a bar. She rejected them with thanks.
Enter great new American novelist looking for a pickup. I befriended