He Misses World War II

Within the chandelier heights and gilt-cathedral depths of the Corporation’s lobby, it’s easy to miss the three-room Museum of World War II Newsreels stuck in a corner. The Corporation maintains the museum free for a public that has no idea it exists. As the Corporation’s employees trudge to their desks in the morning, the very ones they flee at night, a few wave to the elderly man in the guard uniform behind the glass doors of the museum. He stands under one of the monitors that plays the newsreels.

“Ahhh, France, 1944. Yeah, I was there. Just a gangly kid in a man’s uniform when the army sent me. But I learned the important things quick: I kept my helmet on, even when I had yesterday’s dinner in it; I stayed out of the tank traffic; most important of all, I learned that a Hershey bar and a pack of smokes bought any French working babe for the night.  Those Frogettes would wrap themselves around me like Coney Island pretzels; I supplied the mustard. Sometimes they’d do things I wouldn’t have known how to ask.  They always made me feel like I’d won something, though I couldn’t say what, as my whole body flopped around in spasms of ecstasy. That’s how I earned my nickname, Floppy. The Frogettes would call down to me from the blown out windows of their chateau of horizontal maneuvers, ‘Ce soir, Floppy. Ce soir.’ I’d come running. I’d never known such sublimity in my whole stink-ball life.

“Then my luck went rotten: we won the war, and I had to come home. When I was back, I tried my hands up and down the job ladder, nothing stuck. I was an elevator operator, third floor a specialty. I was a car jockey over at Bongo Parking. Once, when the money was really tight, I was so desperate, I drank myself blind, full of the memories of those Frogettes. When I woke up, I was by the entrance to the Lincoln Tunnel, dressed up like Marie Antoinette. My lipstick was smeared and somehow I’d made a little money. The crazy things a guy’ll do. 

“Those days are long gone. This museum gig is the last stop. The Corporation wanted someone who could elaborate on the days of Spam, slaughter and muck. Not too many people come in. Once in a blue moon a war buff to look at the newsreels and some of the memorabilia, like that frogman helmet or that pile of boots. That’s someone’s toe over there, I don’t know how it came in, maybe it walked in. Most the time though, I’m alone here, standing still, looking like a mannequin. People don’t see too many sixty-nine year old mannequins, so I receive a few waves. You know, a man can stand so still in silence, he makes the whole world stop. Then he can be anywhere. Anywhere he wants. France for instance. 1944. In a windowless chateau. Flopping around under the moon.”