One week later I was riding my Hog, loaded with siren and chrome, up the wide streets and down the cobbled alleyways of Napoli, a proud, full-fledged member of the motorcycle squad. A traffic cop. A bona fide Smokey. A genuine Pig.

How did I do it? Simple. On the day of the tryouts, after my disastrous debut, while Smitty was watching the others (he flunked them all), I crept back to the bench where he had left his clipboard and when he wasn’t looking wrote in “passed” after my name. Shit-faced and falling-down drunk, he never knew the difference. A few secret hours of practice and I was on the squad.

My eight months as a motorcycle cop in the balmy, crazy, sunny, utterly depraved city of Naples was the most educational time of my life, so far. Glorious days breezing along the bay and up the Via Roma toward Salerno, charging up and down marble stairways on our bikes into Mussolini’s Palazzo di Esporza where we made our barracks, weekend passes to Capri, Ischia, Amalfi, Vesuvius, Pompeii. Long siestas with my girl friend in her filthy villa high on Posillipo, the Harley hidden under the orange trees. Yes, I’d finally discovered sex. (I was a retarded child.) And the black market. And the pizza pie. And grand opera: Puccini! Rossini! Verdi! Ravioli! Claudio Monteverdi and His Green Mountain Boys! And good wine. Real cheese. Honest bread. Once stopped and cited an air corps colonel—and his dark-eyed sweetheart—for speeding (85 in a 15 mph zone) and driving one-handed. “Use both hands, sir,” I reminded him, leering at his girl. “I’d like to,” he replied, “but I need one hand to steer with.” I wish we could have another war like that one. Whatever happened to Hitler and Tojo anyhow?

There were little catches to the hitch. The weekly quota of traffic tickets, for instance. But I learned to solve that problem. Once a week I’d stop a military supply convoy outside the city, give the first thirty truck drivers citations for some violation or other—dust on the headlights, dirt on the bumper markings, worn windshield wipers, etc. The drivers didn’t give a damn; most of them didn’t speak English; they were Germans, POWs, Nazis. If I’d managed to catch Himmler or Hess or Bormann or Ehrlichman (excuse me, Eichmann) among them, I’d have written him up too, just like anybody else. I was a good cop.

But it couldn’t last. Something went wrong. Various things. Foolish mistakes, like giving Italy back to the Italians—once the Allied High Command had made certain the Italian working people would not be allowed to take over the country. And personal mistakes. Like getting caught once too often failing to salute an officer. You’re saluting the uniform not the man, they had taught us in basic. Really? I’ll salute a man anytime, but damned if I’ll salute a uniform.

The war ended for me much as it began, mopping floors and peeling potatoes in an army mess hall. From the military police back to the kitchen police. And then—discharge. Out. I never did get to be a corporal like Norman Mailer or James Jones. All I salvaged from my career as a military cop was one Colt automatic, chrome-plated by skilled Ginzo craftsmen in Naples, which I smuggled past the MPs at the exit gate of Fort Dix, New Jersey. Good thing I got it past; otherwise, I’d have been polishing mess gear with a needle myself.