EDITOR’S PAGE

BECOMING SOMEONE ELSE



THE ASPHALT felt like the surface of the sun. Hot enough to penetrate the inch-thick soles of my newly issued, highly polished, high-top boots. Hot enough to radiate right through my thick cotton socks. Hot enough to help the man in the green-felt campaign hat communicate his message clearly: You are slime. You are scum. You have no rights. You had better give your soul to God, because your butt belongs to me. You are nobody.

Welcome to the U.S. Air Force.

Standing there at attention, my starkly shaved head sweating profusely under that sultry September sun, I first began to countenance a concept that had heretofore been totally alien: I wanted to be someone else. I did not want to be an Air Force recruit with six more weeks of basic training and four years of servitude ahead of me. With the Vietnam War raging and Richard Nixon in the White House, I found myself under the control of an ornately tattooed man with the intelligence of a Hamilton Beach blender and a real flair for sadism; a man who at the moment was standing within easy yelling distance of me and the other 30 young men over whom he exercised total dominance. No fun. Rather be somewhere else. Rather be someone else.

My eyes wandered across the street, where a man of a different uniform, Pepsi-Cola, was servicing a soft-drink machine. That’s the ticket, I thought. I’d like to be him. I don’t give a damn that he’s probably got a fat wife and an old Ford and a television set that loses the horizontal hold unless he keeps his hand on top of the console. I don’t care if he’s never spent a day in a college classroom or never heard of Keats or Shelley or Alex Comfort. I’ll take the Pepsi challenge, I thought, and fill those machines and count all those quarters while that poor slob stands there in the sun and serves as part of this captive audience for Napoleon in a Smokey the Bear hat. An even trade. That guy can be me. And I get to be someone else.

Needless to say, I didn’t get to swap places with the Pepsi man. I did not get to become someone else. Not then. But fortunately enough, I got to leave basic training two days early because I was subpoenaed to testify as a witness in an armed robbery trial. (I had been a police reporter before entering the military and had witnessed the confession of a Fort Worth robbery suspect.) One afternoon the sergeant called me out of formation, told me to pack my things and take a bus to the airport. Even though it was only for a brief respite, I was going home. As I was packing my duffle bag, the rest of the recruits came running into the barracks, then abruptly ran back out again. I knew old Sarge was up to one of his favorite pastimes, making the lads run up and down three flights of stairs for a while because the last man into the barracks had thoughtlessly allowed the door to slam behind him.

As my former peers began their little exercise, I was taken by the fact that what would have been my ordeal to snare a lew minutes before had absolutely no effect on me. I whistled while they sweated, catching glances of myself in the mirror in my locker, wondering how long it would take my hair to grow back. Meanwhile, my friends were wondering when the Sarge would let them stop running. But I didn’t have to worry about all that anymore. I had become someone else.

Doubtless we’ve all wanted to climb into someone else’s body, into someone else’s existence, from time to time. Since my first thoughts about the Pepsi man, I’ve found fleeting moments in which I’ve wanted to be Bob Lilly (the afternoon he chased Bob Griese all over the Orange Bowl and became MVP of the Super Bowl), Ted Turner (money, imagination and consummate audacity), Clint Eastwood, Rudolph Nureyev, Gay Talese, Sen. Sam Ervin, Carl Bernstein and some carefree, shirtless man I saw wandering a highway on Maui, picking up aluminum beer cans. And those are just a few. In times when publishing deadlines close in and manuscripts pile up on my desk, I have a recurring desire to be anybody who works in a car wash in Sausalito.

But the fact is, I never have become any of those people. Neither have most of you. Our fantasies come and go, totally unexperienced. But one person who has had another existence is associate editor Amy Cunningham. Just before Christmas, Amy crossed the line from her second-generation white-collar, “literary” life to hustle tips as an honest-to-goodness cocktail waitress in a bona fide beer joint: Billy Bob’s Texas in Fort Worth.

The essence of her mission, of course, involved remaining what she is – a writer – in order to report back on a world that most of our readers never experience: scraping for every dime in a position that is considered by many to be near the bottom of the American cultural caste system. To do that, Amy had to not only know her subject, but also to become her subject.

She was surprised to find the transition both easy and difficult. It was easy to walk into Cowtown’s cavernous barroom and, with patience and persistence, come away with a job as a cocktail waitress. She never had to lie to anyone. (She declined to tell anyone that she has an English degree from the University of Virginia, but then, no one ever asked.) They didn’t care if she had any previous waitressing experience. She found it easy to be accepted as someone else. She did it by just being herself. People, she found, essentially behave like people, whether they make their living with a scalpel or a bar towel.

What she found difficult, in addition to the subservient attitude that one must take to succeed at waiting tables, was the daily mind game she played with herself as she drove her BMW to Fort Worth, parked it and walked into another world. Her fellow waitresses assumed she was one of them, but she knew she wasn’t. The thought kept creeping into the back of her mind that she was a cross-cultural spy, a voyeur. Several times she almost told her fellow waitresses who she really was; several other times she went to great lengths to make sure no one found out.

She learned that waitressing is hardwork. And she also learned that she couldsucceed at it. Toward the end of her tenureat Billy Bob’s, she had been “promoted” toserve the tables where the high-tippers sit.She did it by showing her superiors and hercustomers that she was willing to take anyamount of guff and still keep smiling. Herpeers wondered what her secret to successwas. That secret, of course, was that shecould afford to take the guff and keepsmiling. She didn’t have to worry aboutwaiting on drunks and working for quarters the rest of her life. She didn’t have toworry about coping with the stresses of being a waitress. Because Amy Cunninghamwas someone else.