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it.
    “Being a cop,” I said, “is a lot like looking for something interesting to read in the newspaper. By the time you’ve found it, you can bet there’s a lot that’s rubbed off on your fingers. Before the war, the last war, I was a cop in Germany. An honest cop, too, although I guess that won’t mean much to apes like you. Plainclothes. A detective. But when we invaded Poland and Russia they put us in gray uniforms. Not green, not black, not brown, gray . Field Gray, they called it. The thing about gray is you can roll around in the dirt all day and still look smart enough to return a general’s salute. That’s one reason we wore it. Another reason we wore gray was maybe so that we could do what we did and still think we had standards—so that we could manage to look ourselves in the eye when we got up in the morning. That was the theory. I know, stupid, wasn’t it? But no Nazi was ever so stupid as to ask us to wear a white uniform. You know why? Because a white uniform is hard to keep clean, isn’t it? I mean, I admire your courage wearing white. Because let’s face it, gentlemen, white shows everything. Especially blood. And the way you conduct yourselves? That’s a big disadvantage.”
    Instinctively, each man looked down at the blank canvas that was his immaculate white uniform, as if checking his zipper; and that was when I collected a nose full of blood in my fingers and let them have it, like Jackson Pollock. You could say I wanted to express my feelings rather than just illustrate them; and that my crude technique of flinging my own blood through the air at them was simply a means of arriving at a statement. Either way, they seemed to understand exactly what I was trying to say. And when they finished working me over and tossed me in a cell, I had the small satisfaction of knowing that, at last, I was truly modern. I don’t know if their blood-spattered white uniforms were art or not. But I know what I like.

3

    CUBA AND NEW YORK, 1954
    T he drunk tank at Gitmo was a large wooden hut located on the beach, but for anyone who wasn’t drunk when he was locked up in there it was actually positioned somewhere between the first and second circles of hell. It was certainly hot enough.
    I’d been imprisoned before. I’d been a Soviet POW and that was not so good. But Gitmo was almost as bad. The three things that made the drunk tank nearly unendurable were the mosquitoes and the drunks—and the fact that I was ten years older now. Being ten years older is always bad. The mosquitoes were worse—the naval base was not much more than a swamp—but they were not as bad as the drunks. You can stand being locked up almost anywhere so long as you manage to establish some sort of a routine. But there was no routine at Gitmo, unless you could count the routine that was the regular dusk-to-dawn turnover of loudly intoxicated American sailors. Nearly all of them arrived in their underwear. Some were violent; some wanted to make friends with me; some tried to kick me around the cell; some wanted to sing; some wanted to cry; some wanted to batter the walls down with their skulls; nearly all of them were incontinent or threw up, and sometimes they threw up on me.
    In the beginning I had the quaint idea that I was locked up there because there was nowhere else to lock me up; but after a couple of weeks, I started to believe that there was some other purpose to my being kept there. I tried speaking to the guards and on several occasions asked them by what jurisdiction I was being held there, but it was no good. The guards just treated me like every other prisoner, which would have been fine if every other prisoner hadn’t been covered in beer and blood and vomit. Most of the time these other prisoners were released in the late afternoon, by which time they’d slept it off, and for a few hours at least I managed to forget the humidity and the hundred-degree heat and the stink of human feces and to get some