While Toole reverts to his broad generalizations of the Puerto Rican disposition, he writes with interest, no longer snobbish disdain. Unlike his sharp jabs at Puerto Ricans in his July 5 letter, his descriptions take
on a caricature quality. Ortiz wields his authority, but simultaneously exhibits his insecurities through the lengths he takes to please his superiors. In the letters he becomes a clown, reacting to situations with elaborate absurdity. On September 14 Toole writes,
Sgt. Jose Ortiz, our ramrod-proud, swagger stick erect First Sergeant, whom I've described previously is intent upon beautifying our Co. A area. Huge urns filled with ferns and painted in the spectrum of colors line our road. Between the urns there is a heavy connecting chain painted yellow. Now there is a big blue sign in our parking lot that says “FIRST SARGEANT.” Last week Ortiz sprayed all the leaves in front of the office silver . . . and they fell off and died the next day.
In October Toole offers a similar Ortiz anecdote of ridiculousness. When Tennessee senator Estes Kefauver visited Fort Buchanan, there was rumor he would visit Co. A. Upon hearing this rumor, Sgt. Ortiz issued orders for a reception.
The closed mess hall was opened and our very confused mess sergeant cooked hundreds of doughnuts and cookies for Kefauver. The doughnuts would be taken to the orderly room for Sgt. Ortiz to sample them (“Thees doughnuts ahr too brown!”); then, when the perfect result was achieved they were set out on beautifully set tables on great trays. At noon it became clear that Kefauver was not going to show; Capt. Gil de la Madrid and Sgt. Ortiz sat disconsolately, viewing the piles of cookies and doughnuts as the mess Sgt. munched on the fruits of his labor. Finally Ortiz said to me, “Take thees to your people!”
Sgt. Ortiz captured Toole's interest as a uniquely conflicted character. Much like Ignatius Reilly with his plastic cutlass, Ortiz wields his swagger-stick authority to a futile end, where, despite his desperate attempts, he gains neither respect nor reward. In fact, Ortiz may be the
most unsung hero of Toole's advent as a novelist. After his dealings with Ortiz, Toole's letters spark with narrative sensibility. He begins to focus on character development and situational humor. And while he did not begin to draft
Confederacy
until 1963, he clearly reveled in describing his commanding officer. Like Bobby Byrne, Ortiz was a bold literary character in the flesh, providing Toole with much material.
Ortiz also provided the pathway for Toole's shift in perception of Puerto Rico. With his promotion and his entertaining interactions with Ortiz, Toole looks about Puerto Rico and finds it charged with eccentricity, much like New Orleans:
What a mad universe I am in at the moment. However, the politics and intrigue are fascinating in their wayâand I have intelligent and very witty friends with whom the evening can often be spent savoring all of this.
For the first time in his letters from Puerto Rico, he references his friends. The loneliness of midsummer had lifted. He had earned a promotion, taken on new responsibilities, and assumed a position of leadership. “This is all very wild and strange and dreamlike,” he writes.
Throughout September, he continued to document the hilarity of conflicts between Company A and the Puerto Rican officers:
Our immediate superiors, all of whom are Puerto Rican, are wild and excitable and unpredictable and the combination of English instructors and Puerto Rican cadre is an uneasy alliance full of sound and fury and improbably funny happenings. The incident of the missing lawn mower wheel was magnified so greatly that it almost split Co. A asunder.
Indeed, Company A seemed to actualize the farces found in sitcoms like
Hogan's Heroes
or
Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C
. The instructors followed peculiar orders from Puerto Rican officers concerned about the appearance of the base. They sanded the paint off the wood handles of trench tools and then repainted them light brown. They erected makeshift scaffolding to paint the ceilings of barracks. And when the instructors could
not find a place to hide their contraband during high-level inspections, they filled army trucks with their bottles of liquor and highball glasses and drove them around base. But perhaps the most ridiculous of moments came during the somber procession of burial detail, when four soldiers would escort the deceased to the grave. Upon command, they were to turn right and shoot their rifles into the air. As Anthony Moore tells, “We botched up these routines so badly.” On one occasion, one of the soldiers heard the command to turn right and, instead, turned left and knocked the rifle out of another soldier's hands. On another burial detail, an instructor from Company A accidentally knocked the helmet off the soldier next to him with his rifle as they turned. But these foibles pale in comparison to the time four soldiers, standing stoically over the fallen soldier, watched as a Puerto Rican wife, overcome with grief, jumped into her husband's grave and was then awkwardly pulled out from the earthen tomb.
Recognizing the wealth of comical situations, Toole used his letters as a narrative workshop, refining his comic timing and style in short accounts of life at Fort Buchanan. In one such story, Toole tells of a dance party organized for visiting sailors and airmen. Earlier that day, Toole had led the visiting officers on a tour of the base and San Juan. In the evening they attended a dance. Much like the episodic events in
Confederacy
, Toole's rendition of the story focuses on situational humor and escalating tensions between social classes:
Friday night there was a dance for the guests at the pavilion of the Army-Navy beachâand toward the end of the dance a great wave crashed into the pavilion drenching everyone. Several people climbed trees when they saw the wave comingâand, as it washed back out to sea, it carried with it several shoes and caps. The girls for the dance were recruited from the San Juan YWCAâand a motley crowd they were. Several of the “girls” were near forty and some were extremely chocolate in “colour.” Needless to say, the airmen and sailors were somewhat dismayed and many of them stayed in the men's room throughout the “dance.” In addition to this, it seemed obvious that a few of the
YWCA girls were rather identifiably prostitutes. After the wave struck, the outraged YWCA girls began to scream volublyâand somewhat dangerously, I thoughtâin Spanish, calling down the wrath of God upon the Army for bringing them to this dance. It took almost 15 minutes for our Puerto Rican bus driver to get them quiet, but not before one of the YWCA girls had tried to strike him. The San Juan YWCA must be a very special branch of that organization. At any rate it was an evening that continually verged on the brink of hilarity.
Shades of this scene parallel the climax scene in
Confederacy
where Ignatius, a veritable tsunami of flesh, strikes the Night of Joy club. In the commotion the “fortyish latin” b-girl with halitosis demands payment for champagne. The tensions between her suggestive advances, her grotesque physicality, and her demands mimic the YWCA women on the beach.
Other glimmers of Ignatius also shine through some of his 1962 letters. When Toole informs his parents that he lost his Tulane ring, he confides that his attachment to this token of his past affects him both emotionally and physically. But instead of recognizing the lost ring as misfortune, he points an Ignatian finger at Puerto Rico as a place of violence and disease that threatens his bowels and his life. “Actually, it's a wonder I haven't been stabbed yet or paralyzed by intestinal diseases on this insane little geological mountain top protruding from the Caribbean.” Of course, Ignatius would have never ended a letter as Toole ended this one. “I love you both and miss you a great, great deal,” he wrote. Then again, Ignatius had never been so far away from New Orleans.
In the fall of 1962, Toole settled into his role as head of Company A and became content with his place in the army. Markedly distinct from his summer correspondence, in September he nonchalantly ends a letter with, “I have no complaints.” At the end of September, he writes to Fletcher, who had gone to Florence, Italy, to run an English language school. Toole still complains about the heat, but explains how the shared boredom he and the instructors suffer bonds them closer together. Like a band of fraternity brothers, they plotted to disrupt a production
of
Macbeth
at El Morro in San Juan, in which one of the instructors was performing. “We are to begin with cocktails early in the afternoon,” he writes, “and much later to proceed to the fort in a fleet of air-conditioned taxis. And so, with such plans, we pass the time. . . . ” He later reports to his parents that he rather enjoyed the play. And for the first time since he arrived in Puerto Rico, the end of his service was in view.
He ends his letter to Fletcher expressing his hopes of leaving the army by the summer of 1963. But he also acknowledges that Fidel Castro, quite literally, loomed in the distance. Having recently toured the missile facilities armed with nuclear warheads at Ramey Air Force Base, Toole found the “terrifying” weapons and the “disquietingly spirited manner of the proprietors of the missiles and jet bombers gave him pause,” even to his “desensitized tropical psyche.” Assuming the country would not be throttled into nuclear war and “barring a complete paranoid breakdown on the part of Fidel Castro,” he would be home in one year.
With his thoughts turned toward home he requested that his parents write him more frequently. He wrote letters to friends in Lafayette and New York. And as he felt the pangs of longing for New Orleans, he received word that his father was ill with shingles. In another rare moment of sentimentality, he writes home,
Dear Dad,
Â
Mother wrote me that you are suffering from shingles, an infection which I know is extremely painful. Because you always enjoy such good health, I was especially surprised to hear of this. The illness is obviously the result of too much work, anxiety, and too little food and rest. Please take care of yourself for the sake of mother and me.
Â
Mother, I know, will nurse you excellently. She seems quite distressed over the illnessâas well she should be. I am only sorry that I am separated from you at so great a distance.
Â
Please rest. In your next letter I will hope to hear of some recovery.
Â
I love you very much, Dad, and I hope and pray that this painful infection passes. You have always been so good, so kind to me that it hurts me to know that you are in pain.
Most of his letters from Puerto Rico are addressed to both of his parents. This is the only letter in the Toole Papers addressed solely to his father. He clearly pitied him to the point of his own pain, as he states. The letter is touching and sincere but remarkably incongruent with the impressions he gave of his family and what others observed of them. He imagines a breadwinning father tragically fallen ill with his devoted wife tenderly caring for his every need. Thelma took care of her husband for many years. But Toole's heartwarming domestic image shares a closer semblance to the family dynamic of his friends from Lafayette, the Rickelses. Distance and longing has a strange ability to reconstruct the real into an ideal. In late October 1962, Toole decided he wanted to go home for Christmas.
In November his leave request was approved. And by then his parents had gained financial stability, whereas Toole lacked enough money for airfare. He repeatedly requested that they send money for the plane ticket, which after some delay, they eventually did. Once his tickets were booked, the cool weather approached, and he frequented the beach. This time he viewed his surroundings in a positive light, enjoying the clear water and interacting with fellow beach-goers. Perhaps calmed by the ideas of returning to New Orleans or the comforts of his home, he patiently waited for his leave.
In good spirits he writes to Fletcher on November 29, 1962, humorously depicting himself in the way that he so often characterized Sgt. Ortiz:
Over my private telephone I contact headquarters, switching people here and there, waiting, listening, planning. I'm sure I will leave my duty here a
completely mad tyrant whose niche in civilian life will be non-existant. In its own lunatic way, this is very entertaining. I also enjoy posting edicts on bulletin boards; the last paragraph of my most recent proclamation reads:
Â
“Further action will be taken against habitual violators of these regulations.”
But joking aside, he ends his letter with a sincere assessment of his accomplishments in the army:
After a year in Puerto Rico (as of 25 Nov), I find that the positive aspects of that year outweigh the negative. Although this seems a great cliché, I can say that I have learned a vast amount about humans and their natureâinformation which I would have enjoyed having earlier. In my own curious way I have risen “meteorically” in the Army without having ever been a decent prospect for the military life; but I feel that my very peculiar assignment has been responsible. The insanity and unreality of Puerto Rico itself has been interesting at all times that it was not overwhelming.
He would soon be back in New Orleans. It had been one year since he arrived at Fort Buchanan. Within that time he continually grappled with the “madness” of Puerto Rico. In the summer he found the island loathsome, as he endured pangs of loneliness and reports of his parents' financial woes. By the end of the year, he was confident in his place within the army. He observed and commented on Puerto Rico with less deplorable damnation, appreciating the characters and stories unfolding every day at Fort Buchanan. And at the end of 1962, he beamed with pride as he returned home. He had left New Orleans a draftee, unknown to anyone at Fort Buchanan. He returned, twelve months later, Sergeant John Toole, U.S. Army.