<Begin Segment 22>

TI: Okay, so Hank, we're gonna start the third hour, and right now we're inside Manzanar and you've been sharing some stories about sort of the day to day life, things like school, activities, teachers. So I'm gonna get into some of the, maybe some of the more mischievous stuff. Like I read one of your stories about, I think the first time you got drunk, and it was in Manzanar. So can you, can you tell me that story?

HU: Oh yeah, that's... yeah. [Addressing videographer] You want to hear it? You want to go out of the room here?

TI: [Laughs] No, she's fine.

HU: Well anyway, okay. Anyway, it snowed in Manzanar and this, this, that time the whole place was covered, just like covered with cotton, roll of cotton or something, Alabama Hills, the Sierras, Inyos. It was absolutely a perfect day, with only one glitch that it was school day, and my friend and I said school's gonna be here forever, but this snow, it's gonna melt, so why not make use of it? So we started playing in the snow. And we had regular oxfords and bare hands, no gloves and we start making, trying to make snowman or something like that, but right away our hands start getting numb, our toes got numb, and so we went into the recreation room on this block and we fired up a stove. Stove is only so big, so high and it didn't do much good. We took our shoes off and socks, but it didn't do much good and my friend's saying, "Hey, we just got to warm ourselves up from the inside." And he said, "There's a guy named Gandhi next barrack," and Gandhi was a Issei guy, he was black, short, skinny. He squatted like Gandhi of India, and he says, "Well, Gandhi always has a couple bottles of shochu," and shochu is a liquor like whiskey, vodka. Today they make it out of barley, rice, wheat and the good stuff. In those days, in the old days they made it out of, out of anything they could get hold of, and in camp they had a lot of potatoes. We ate a lot of potatoes, and so they had a lot of potato peels; they saved that and turned it into shochu. And my mother used to warn me, said, "Don't ever drink shochu," because she knows people that got blind. So anyway, my friend went to Gandhi and asked for bottle of shochu, and Gandhi says, "Well, it's gonna cost you five dollars and who has five dollars?" My friend was a good talker, he was very persistent, and finally Gandhi says, "If you want it so much, why don't you masturbate in front of me and you can have the bottle?" Well, to make the long story short, we started sipping on the shochu, it felt good, and later we started getting woozy and then we started vomiting. And my friend, he kept saying, "Jeez, this is hell. I know what hell is like because this is hell. Hell on earth." And, and he kept saying that and then finally he lost his bowel movement, and then, then he, then only thing I could remember because I was kind of woozy myself and only thing I could think of was, "I know this is hell because only in hell will I be wiping fuckin' ass." So that was the first time I got exposed to drinking.

TI: But I guess just want to make sure I understand this. But your, your payment was this man had both of you masturbate in front of him?

HU: Not me. The other guy. Yeah.

TI: Okay. So that was sorta --

HU: No, I wouldn't have that kind of courage. [Laughs]

TI: Okay, so that, that was the payment. So you didn't have to pay money, and so he did that.

HU: Right.

TI: Which brings up a question, were you ever aware of, was there any situations where as a, a teenage boy, there were maybe homosexual activities or anything like that that you were aware of, that you had to, to be on the lookout for?

HU: No, we never, in those days, well, we just, we had very different attitude toward gay people. We used to call them fairies and queers and that kind of thing, and so it was something that we just shunned and I, I guess we never talked about it and we didn't know of anybody who were gay.

TI: So you weren't aware of any of that kind of activity during camp. Okay. So, so yeah, getting drunk and getting sick was, was one story.

<End Segment 22> - Copyright © 2010 Densho. All Rights Reserved.