"What do you say we get out of here?" I said.

"Out of here where?" he asked.

"Out of here, out of here," I said.

My uncle owned part of a hotel in Miami Beach. If we could make it down there, I figured he would give us bellhop jobs. In Miami Beach, being a bellhop is like being an aristocrat-that's what I told Stuie. We would earn pockets of cash parking Cadillac cars.

"How are we going to get there?" asked Stuie.

"We'll hitchhike," I said.

"How do you hitchhike to Florida?" he asked.

"What do you mean," I said, "You stick out your thumb-that's how."

We left with four dollars. We were on the road all day, eating in diners, resting on the median, the traffic breaking around us like surf. We had spent all the money by the time we reached Pennsylvania.

"How far to Florida?" asked Stuie.

"A few more days," I told him.

We got scared when the sun went down. We slept hugging each other in a field, but continued at dawn. Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina. We were starving and broke. You know who fed us? Black people. In those days, the blacks were on one side of the street, the whites were on the other. On the white side, we were shooed away like rats, chased, cursed. On the black side, we were talked to, looked after, given plates piled with food. We would fill up and go on, skirting the wood shacks with dogs barking and the sun beating down.

Two drunk men in a red Oldsmobile convertible stopped for us outside Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. We climbed in back. Here is what I remember: one of the men asking me questions; the squeal of rubber; the things along the road-trees, houses, signs-spinning past us; the car sailing off the pavement; breaking glass; being thrown; being in the air; landing in a bed of soft, black dirt, dazed; something screaming toward me through the sky-HUMPH! It lands at my side. It's Stuie. We stare at each other, confused. We get up and run. Away from the road, the car and broken glass and the drunk men.

We went through the woods into Myrtle Beach. We were crying, heaving, little-kid sobs, all the way. We asked for the police station. A young cop with white teeth called our parents in the Bronx, then drove us to an airport on the edge of town. There was a big, silver plane on the runway-Capital Airlines. The propellers started with a cough and spun into a void. I sat at the window. We sped down the runway, lifted off-the town and the sea were soon far below us. It was the first time I had been on a plane.

We landed at LaGuardia. There was no terminal then. You parked in a field and walked. My mother and father were waiting. I could see my father's face. He was angry, pounding his fist into his palm, muttering, "Wait till I get my hands on him." My mother pushed down his fist, saying, "Don't you touch him. Don't you touch my boy."

Four days-that's how long we were gone, but those four days changed my life. Because I was scared but kept on going and managed to survive.

When we got home, my father sat me down and asked, "Why did you do it, Jerry?"

"Why? Because I wanted to see the world."

Everything but the Girl

I had no desire to go to college. I figured the world would be my classroom. Freshman year was the U.S. Air Force. I enlisted in the spring before high-school graduation. At seventeen, I was not old enough to sign the form, so I had to ask my parents for permission. My mother was distressed, but my father knew there was no holding me. "Sign it," he told her. "Just sign it."

Why the Air Force?

Because I did not think I could survive the Marine training, because I did not want to be an Army grunt, because I hated the Navy uniforms.

My basic training started at Sampson Air Force Base, in upstate New York, then continued at Kessler Air Force Base in Biloxi, Mississippi, where signs on the lawns near town said: "No niggers, no kikes, no dogs." What you learn in such a place is not just what they are teaching. I mean, yes, they taught me to work a radio, talk in code, sit in a bunker with earphones on my head, tracking jets across the sky, but what I learned was America, the South, people from other parts of the country, how to stand up and take care of myself.

I had a good old boy, son of a bitch sergeant named Harley. He used to mangle my name at mail call, really Jew it up: WHINE-traub! WHINE-traub! WHINE-traub! I got lots of letters from my high-school sweetheart-she became my first wife. She used to send cookies and candy. Harley would rip open the packages and throw the cookies all over the floor, yelling, WHINE-traub! WHINE-traub! So one day, we're in chow line, just him and me, and I go up and whisper, so he has to lean close to hear me, "I am going to kill you."

He shouts, "What did you say?"

I speak even softer the second time: "You heard me, Harley. One day, I am going to find you in town, when you're alone, and I am going to kill you."

He goes nuts. "Who the hell do you think you are, Jew boy? You can't talk to me like that." He hits me across the mouth. I wipe away the blood and look up smiling. "Now I've got you, you son of a bitch. You're screwed." I went to the colonel and filed a complaint. Harley was gone. There are all kinds of ways to deal with an adversary: fists, words, taunts, compromise, submission, complaint, and courts-martial.

On one occasion, a service buddy, knowing I was far from home, invited me to his house for the weekend. We got in late Friday and went right to sleep. When we came down to the kitchen Saturday morning, there, sitting at the table, eating his breakfast, was my friend's father dressed in a white robe with a Klan hood next to him in a chair. I kid you not, this actually happened. I sit down, nervous, smiling. He shakes my hand, asks my name, then says, "Weintraub? What kind of name is Weintraub?"

"It's a Jewish name, sir."

"You a Jew?" he says. "No, you no Jew. If you a Jew, where's your horns?"

"Oh, they're there," I tell him. "Just had to file 'em down to fit under the helmet."

I got one of the bleakest postings in the Air Force- Fairbanks, Alaska. It was the wild frontier: dirt streets, trading posts, a saloon with the sort of long wood bar you see in old westerns. Soldiers and contractors stopped in town on their way to the Aleutian Islands, where we had radar stations and listening posts. It was as close as you could get to the Soviet Union without leaving American soil. These men were stationed on the islands for long stretches, did not see a woman for months, did not see the sun for just as long. When they returned to Fairbanks, they picked up their pay in a lump sum, then went on a spree. Aside from soldiers, the town was just bartenders and hookers, both in pursuit of the same mission: separate the doughboys from their cash. I learned a lot in Alaska. In the control tower, I learned how to read coordinates and communicate in code, which, even now, as I'm trying to sleep, comes back in maddening bursts of dots and dashes. In the barracks, where I ran a floating craps game-it appeared and disappeared like the blips on the radar screen-I learned the tricks of procurement. In town, I learned how to move product.

One day, I spotted a beautiful coat in the window of the Sachs Men's Shop in Fairbanks. (Note the spelling: S-A-C-H-S.) It was called a Cricketer. (I always had a weakness for clothes.) It was different from the James Dean jacket. It was a sports coat, tweedy and sharp. I went in, stood in the showroom at top of the world, tried on the coat, looked in the mirror. The owner came over, gave me the pitch.

"Yes, I know, I know, but how much?"

"Twenty dollars."

"Sorry, out of my league. I'm an enlisted man."

"Well, how much have you got?"

"Three dollars."

"Okay, how about you give me your three dollars and we do the rest on modified consignment. Give me two dollars a week. That way, you can enjoy the jacket as you're paying for it."