Sunny's Nights by Tim Sultan

Author:Tim Sultan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2016-02-22T16:00:00+00:00

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16

Two Roses

Somewhere in the National Archives there is a service record for one Airman Antonio Raffaele Balzano. I suspect it’s as deeply buried as that of Beetle Bailey, who enlisted in the army the year before him. Sunny may have been, by his own design, the most inept serviceman in all the branches of the military. That he ever served at all was an implausibility on par with the military careers of Private James M. Hendrix, 101st Airborne, and Staff Sergeant Leonard S. Nimoy. After all, the Sunny I knew was something of a latter-day Oscar Wilde—the embodiment of freethinking individualism and compliance to no other authority than one’s own conscience. The only movements in which he was a believer were Cubism and Abstract Expressionism. Whatever customs, discipline, or ideology the United States Air Force might have imprinted upon him, none of it remained.

Though it was the height of the Korean War, it was a sexual rather than a patriotic fervor that prompted Sunny to enlist in the first place. As a teenager, he attended George Westinghouse, a trade high school in downtown Brooklyn, where he studied silver- and gold-smithing while also apprenticing to a jeweler in lower Manhattan. In the afternoons, he boxed with the Red Hook Police Athletic League, where his stablemates shared their green-and-white shorts and their crabs. He was undecided whether he wanted to become a boxing jeweler or a jewelry-making boxer when he was surprised one day by his best friend, George Hunt, who showed up at his school. “I’m going to sign up for the Air Force and serve for four years instead of waiting to get drafted into the army for two and being sent to Korea and fuckin’ dying,” he had said. “Why don’t you come with me? If we’re lucky, we might get sent to Italy or Germany. Or the South Pacific. We’ll see the world together—or at least something else. You’ll lose your virginity to a Fräulein with big tits or to whatever they call the women in Okinawa. Anyway, we’ll get the fuck out of Red Hook, that’s for sure.”

Sunny had never given the idea of enlisting any thought before but he had given his virginity the near-constant consideration of any seventeen-year-old. George was a couple years older and he always seemed to know his vulnerabilities.

Sunny was not of enlistment age and needed a parent’s consent, so he had gone to his father. “I don’t want you to go,” his father had said. “You’re my oldest son. I always hoped you would stay and help Uncle John and me run the bar. And in time, it would be yours. Not Uncle John’s bar. Not Ralph’s bar. Sunny’s.”

By then Sunny had begun to hate the bar. When he had been younger, he had often come in after school for his lunch and his father used to put his arm around his shoulders and introduce him to customers by saying, “This is my thoroughbred.” Sunny hadn’t been sure what that meant, only that it made him feel good about himself.

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