"Beautiful streamer,
Open for me,
The sky is above me,
But no canopy.
Counted ten thousand,
Pulled on the cord.
My chute didn't open,
I shouted, "Dear Lord."
Beautiful streamer,
This looks like the end,
The earth is below me,
My body won't end.
Just like a mother
Watching o'er me,
Beautiful streamer,
Ohhhhh, open for me."
Rooney and Cokes have entered the barracks drunk and begin to describe their war experiences to a song about losing your parachute while making a jump. This is where the play Streamers gets its title from.
"All right. Okay. But I've just done what I wanted all of my life. If I wanted to do something, I just did it. Honestly. I've never had to work or anything like that and I've always had nice clothing and money for cab fare. Money for whatever I wanted. Always. I'm not like you are."
Richie says this to Roger in the midst of Roger attempting to understand Richie's tendencies towards men rather than women. Richie is doing his best to explain--possibly more to himself than to Roger--why he is the way he is compared to the rest of the guys in the bunk.
"He was just all of a sudden dead, man: just all of a sudden dead. You ever seen anything like that, Billy? Any crap like that?"
Roger ends his monologue to Richie and Billy with these sentences. He is speaking about his experiences growing up where he is from. It reveals that he has had more extreme encounters in his life than Billy or Richie could have guessed as he's watched a man die before his eyes.
