Sal and Remi steal food from the barracks

Sal and Remi’s thefts from the California barracks cafeteria are a recurring act of improvised survival that turns a guard’s routine into a private partnership. The raids begin as small, furtive pleasures—chocolate ice cream, syrup, strawberries, roast beef—and grow into a cumbersome grocery haul that Remi insists they carry together. The episode’s comedy does not erase its material conditions: Sal earns fifty-five dollars a week and sends an average of forty to his aunt, while the two men’s lives are organized around the shack, the barracks, and the conflict between Remi and Lee Ann. Their stolen provisions become both a way to stretch their means and an emblem of the solidarity Remi claims between them.

Work, surveillance, and the barracks

Sal and Remi are special guards at a temporary barracks for overseas construction workers, many of whom are waiting for ships bound for Okinawa. The residents drink heavily, and the guards are expected to prevent damage to the buildings. Sal dislikes the prospect of making arrests; he describes himself and Remi as trying to earn a living, unlike colleagues who seek arrests and praise from the town’s police chief. That distinction places the thefts inside a workplace already shaped by surveillance, discipline, and precarious employment.

The cafeteria raids reverse the guards’ assigned role. On their evening rounds, Remi tests doors, hoping to find one unlocked; when he locates one, it belongs to the barracks supervisor, whom he mockingly calls Dostioffski. The joke, and the failed attempt at entering the supervisor’s room, establish the pair’s taste for small acts of transgression. The later cafeteria entry is more practical: Remi leaves a window unlocked, climbs through onto a flour table, and Sal follows. They go straight to the soda fountain, where Sal fulfills a childhood dream by plunging his hand wrist-deep into chocolate ice cream and licking what he has drawn out.

From treats to a burden of groceries

After the ice cream, they fill boxes, pour on chocolate syrup, sometimes add strawberries, and search the kitchens and iceboxes for food they can take home in their pockets. Sal often wraps a piece of roast beef in a napkin. Remi frames their conduct with a joke about President Truman and the cost of living, turning theft into a mock household economy. The line recurs as a shared explanation, but the effort required to obtain the food makes the need behind the joke tangible.

One night Remi fills a huge box with groceries, only to find that it will not fit through the window. He has to unpack it and put everything back. Later, after his shift ends, Sal is walking the old canyon trail alone when he hears heavy huffing and puffing in the dark. Thinking something enormous is coming toward him, he grabs his gun; the looming figure proves to be Remi, carrying the groceries on his shoulder. Remi has found a key to the cafeteria and taken the box out through the front door. The cumbersome haul turns their caper into a test of cooperation: Remi hides the groceries in the grass, returns, and asks Sal to help divide and carry them because he cannot manage the load alone.

Fellowship and a shared necessity

Sal is still on duty and questions how they can leave the grounds to move the food. Remi offers to watch the place in his absence and insists that they are buddies and are in the situation together. His appeal casts the theft as more than a private joke: in his view, the two must protect one another from the people and forces he sees as against them. The scene gives concrete form to their bond, which is sustained not by a formal promise or common plan but by the practical act of sharing risk and carrying weight.

The scale of their dependence appears in Sal’s account of the ten weeks they have been doing these things. He earns fifty-five dollars weekly and sends an average of forty dollars to his aunt; in all that time, he has spent only one evening in San Francisco. His life has narrowed to the shack, Remi’s struggles with Lee Ann, and the barracks after dark. The groceries are therefore not an isolated prank detached from work and money. They belong to a life of limited wages, long stretches away from the city, and improvised means of getting by.

When Remi and Sal finally move the provisions, they pile them high on Lee Ann’s kitchen table. She wakes, rubs her eyes, and is delighted by Remi’s familiar Truman refrain. The scene shifts the goods from the hidden cafeteria to a domestic space, where their arrival is received as welcome abundance. It also shows that the raid’s outcome is shared with Lee Ann, even as conflict between her and Remi remains part of the cramped life surrounding the pair.

The theft’s wider reach and its limits

The repeated raids change Sal as well as their pantry. He says he begins to think of Americans as natural-born thieves and finds himself trying doors to see whether they are locked. The other guards grow suspicious; they recognize in the pair’s eyes the intentions their experience has taught them to expect. The thefts thus create a small, self-reinforcing cycle: the men’s need and mischief sharpen their awareness of opportunity, while the workplace’s watchfulness makes their behavior legible to those around them.

The food also becomes part of Remi’s generosity. Before a trip to the Golden Gate racetrack near Richmond, he takes half of their stolen groceries in a large brown paper bag to a poor widow he knows, the sister of a seaman he vaguely remembers. Sal and Lee Ann go with him; the widow’s ragged children are there, and Remi politely assures her that there is plenty more. The gesture complicates any simple portrait of the theft as selfish gain: the provisions acquired through their raids are partly redistributed to someone poorer still.

That generosity does not make their finances secure. Remi spends about a hundred dollars he has saved on the outing, makes large bets, and loses; after his final wager consumes their last two dollars for food, they have to hitchhike back to San Francisco. The stolen groceries, the gift to the widow, and the lost betting money belong to the same precarious economy, where provisions can be gathered, shared, and spent but do not provide lasting stability. Later, after leaving San Francisco with Terry, Sal takes a cotton-picking job offered at three dollars per hundred pounds. He earns only a dollar fifty for fifty pounds on his first day, despite Terry and Johnny helping him in the field. That contrast makes the barracks thefts part of a broader pattern in Sal’s life: work, hunger, mobility, and companionship repeatedly meet in makeshift arrangements, with the material cost of survival never far from the camaraderie that makes it bearable.