Birdy

him about what it is to be crazy.
    He’s got a great place. It’s a little squad room, walled off and independent. It’s like the platoon sergeant’s room at Jackson. He has it all to himself. Renaldi’s got this room fixed up almost like home. He has a record player on a table at the end of his bed and another table in the center of the room. He’s rigged a light with a lampshade hanging from the ceiling over the table. He even has a little hot plate and a tea kettle.
    One of the things I’ve never gotten used to in the army is bare light bulbs. At home, my mother has all the lamps covered with colored lampshades. It gives our house a good Italian look; a place to eat fettucini or zeppoli. The army has bare light bulbs high up in the ceilings. They flatten everything out and make it even more depressing than it is.
    Renaldi’s made his lampshade out of some orange paper. It gives the place a warm, civilian look. He brings down the fruitcake and it turns out his girlfriend, not his mother, sent it. He comes from a place called Steubenville, Ohio. His girl is there and writes him every day. He shows me bundles of letters, enoughto fill a mail bag. He has them stored in boxes under his bed. He shows me some pictures of her; Italian girl, going to get fat with the first baby.
    I don’t know how to bring up the idea of what it is that makes somebody crazy. I’m fishing around and somehow we get sidetracked on the whole CO business. I’m ready to listen. I tell him I joined the State Guard and then enlisted. I can hardly believe it myself, now. He’s curious about why. He’s not being hot-shit or anything, he’s just honest-to-God interested. Like I said, I’m ready to listen but this guy’s a champion listener. He’s really interested.
    Not many people are interested in what somebody else is thinking, or what they have to say. The best you can hope for is they’ll listen to you just so you’ll have to listen to them. Everybody’s loading shit on everybody else. Sometimes, somebody’ll act like they’re listening, but they’re only waiting back in their minds for you to say something, something they can jump on or kick off on themselves. For me, conversation’s usually a bore.
    Renaldi is truly listening. He wants to hear. You get the feeling you’re doing him a favor by telling him things. He listens as if what you’re saying is interesting to him and he asks the questions you want asked exactly when the right time comes. This Renaldi is some kind of mental enema. I come close to spilling it all. I manage to hold back at the last minute. Maybe he seems this way because I need somebody to talk to.
    Renaldi starts by telling me how hard it is for his parents. He’s their only son and the only one in his neighborhood who went CO. His mother doesn’t get to hang a blue star in her window. Some ladies in the neighborhood sent her a blue banner with a yellow star on it. This was yellow, not gold. If you’re lucky enough to have a son or husband or brother killed in the war, you get to hang a gold star in your window and you’re a ‘gold-star mother/sister/father/wife’. These ladies call Renaldi’s mother the ‘yellow-star mother’. She writes Renaldi about things like this or how she found shit on the porch or spread on the doorknob. Renaldi tells how, a couple times he’s almost given in. His girlfriend keeps itsecret that she writes to him and he writes her care of General Delivery.
    We agree the only crazy thing is wars. That’s where I should’ve gotten him off onto the crazy business but I missed it. Renaldi turns on the hot plate and pours some water in it from a jerry can. We talk some more.
    Renaldi’s twenty-five and was taking his master’s in philosophy at Columbia when they tried to draft him. He has the idea you can only stop things like wars one person at a time. He says, nobody’s going to outlaw them. He asks me if most of the guys in my outfit wanted to fight. I couldn’t think of one who was charging in there for the old war after the first artillery came in. He wants to know how it was back in the States before we went over. To be perfectly honest, the only person I could think of who wanted to get into combat was me.
    Then, we get on the atom bomb they’ve just dropped. This is something Renaldi’s all hung up on. To me, it’s what ended the Japanese war; probably one of the best things that ever happened. I couldn’t care less how many Japs got killed, or