CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Island Sailor in the British West Indies

Island Antigua, my first real duty station! Antigua was, I think, my third choice of three duty stations on the East Coast of the Americas. Antigua was an island. Key West was an island. Puerto Rico was an island and, my last duty station, Nantucket, would be an island. During my entire Navy career, I sailed islands. I was never assigned a ship, but I was surrounded by water every place I went. Hoff and J.C. were assigned to Antigua too, so I didn’t feel so lonely arriving on the island. Again, memory plays tricks with me. More than a year on this island and I remember so little of it.

Antigua was still part of the British Empire in the Fifties, an island in the British West Indies. Lord Nelson’s Bay was there. It had been a snug, well protected harbor from which Lord Nelson fought the Spanish Armada and raided their treasure galleons in the New World. A narrow harbor entrance right turns into a perfectly sheltered inlet with tall peaks all around. The harbor’s abandoned, stone fortifications on the heights still protect the entrance. Approaching ships could be bombarded from those heights while Nelson’s sheltered fleet was completely out of sight. I was told they winched a massive iron chain across the narrow harbor mouth to shut out any ship from entering to attack Nelson’s fleet.

Our naval facility was a new one and, in fact, not completely constructed when we were assigned to it. The Seabees were still hammering away at it in the warm Caribbean sun, and that’s how some of us gobs who were to man that base on Antigua got our layover in San Juan before our military flight dropped us onto the rock. The facility on Antigua was one of those 99 year leases that America received in exchange for giving Churchill 50 old destroyers in the early days of World War II before Japan brought America into the war. Britain desperately needed the destroyers to counter the German U-boat attacks on shipping in the Atlantic, and Roosevelt could find no other way to drag America into helping Britain because of laws which kept us from directly “giving” aid to the United Kingdom. So America made a trade. That was in 1941.


I don’t know where to begin my Antigua tales.... I got my first hemorrhoid there, from straining at stool when I was in a hurry one afternoon. The corpsman, our only medical man on the island, chewed me out royally for not coming to him right away with it. Nowadays it’s just a shrunken tag of its former self. I didn’t get my second hemorrhoid until this year (2003) when a woman doctor with a fat fickle finger of fate gave me one when she palpitated my prostate, looking for infection.

The nice thing about our barracks, two stories tall as usually, was the cubicles, two bunks to each. Ah, Air Force cushiness coming to the Navy! We all liked the arrangement. The cubicles opened at the end onto a central aisle with picnic tables strung down the center. At the end of the barracks, near the central stairway, a common area contained tables and recreation items. No TV, of course. We weren’t in range of any television.

For all the privacy these cubicles provided, they didn’t prevent two of our guys being caught in the rack together. I didn’t know they were homosexual until they disappeared, and I asked about them. I was pulling a graveyard shift when they were caught and came back to the barracks and fell immediately to sleep. The night watch had turned them in, and the very next day while I was sleeping they disappeared. It was as if they never existed. I don’t know the final disposition of their case. My guess is they were mustered out of service immediately in San Juan.

My cousin Edward must have experienced the same sort of jolt; he was mustered out of a monastery when he failed in his bid to follow his older brother into the Catholic brotherhood. He was just too adventurous and antiauthoritarian to fit. As I understand it, if you don’t make the grade in those monasteries, they disappear you in the middle of the night, like homosexuals from a naval station. Your fellow trainees wake up to find you missing, no explanations offered. I don’t recall all the details, but I have this picture of Edward, alone on a dark, dawn-stained, train station platform, waiting for his train to come in.

Until that time on Antigua, I was unaware of knowing any homosexuals personally except Bill, the guy on Kenview I played Kings and Princes with. Another guy at Stivers High I used to ride public transit with was so very effeminate I always wondered if he was gay, but I didn’t know. The Stivers girls who rode the bus in our bus group liked him, and I thought he was very funny, but I didn’t know what to make of him. His effeminacy seemed so much a part of him that I doubt he affected the mannerisms I witnessed.

I never did have any strong feelings about homosexuals one way or another though, like many stupid and callous youths, I joked about homosexuals without truly considering my words. One time when I was dating Sue without owning a car and thumbing back and forth from her house to mine, a Bible spouting man picked me up in the dark. He asked me some strange questions I didn’t understand and don’t recall and put his hand on my knee while his jalopy climbed the hill where Wesley crashed his bike. Very uneasy, I told him this was where I got off, and he stopped the car and let me out. Again, like in the case of Bill and his proffered circle jerk in grade school, I didn’t have a strong, angry reaction to this man, only a feeling of being in an uncomfortable situation I didn’t want to participate in. In fact, I believe the very natural and nonviolent reaction to these encounters evidences my own heterosexual leanings. It’s the guys who get violent about homosexuals who need to ask themselves about their sexuality, if you ask me.

In addition to standing watches as Oceanographers, we took our turns standing guard duty at the barracks. We only pulled this extra guard duty maybe once or twice a month. Four hours at a time through the night, we stood guard while others slept. We woke guys who needed to get up early and awoke, also, the man who was to relieve us at 4 am. Anyhow... one night when I went to wake my relief, I was jolted to my boots. My scalp tingled. Shining my flashlight in the face of the man I was to awaken, I saw that he was dead! He lay there, eyes wide open, perfectly still and unaware of the light in his eyes or of me who loomed above him.

I hurried to the officer in charge and reported my findings. The officer laughed gruffly, not too pleased. “Look,” he said, “that’s how he sleeps. He sleeps with his eyes open, so go back and wake him.”

When I think of the value of experience, that night is one of the moments I think of. Unless I knew someone personally with this trait of sleeping with his eyes open or I came across it in my reading, I would never have had this piece of knowledge about people who sleep that way. Night watch and duty led me to the experience, though let me tell you, I was jolted by fear when I looked into those wide open “dead” eyes in the dark.

Canadian Club Whiskey was very cheap so I bought and drank a lot of that on the island. I was still only 19 and 20, so buying and drinking my own whiskey was a pretty big deal after the States. From Puerto Rico forward, in the Caribbean, I also drank many a rum and Coke. Recall the song? “Rum and Coca... Cola! Rum and Coca... Cola! Rum and Coca... Cola! Working for the Yankee dolla’....”

I avoided giving in to the toothless black hag at the front gate who’d give you a blow job through the security fence for a buck. I kept my sexual urges in hand on Antigua.

I loved the steady breezes that blew off the ocean and cooled down the constant 90 degree temperatures on this boundary between the Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico, in the Caribbean. When the melodies of a steel drum band wafted in on those breezes, the effect was heavenly. One of the closest approaches to heaven on earth came to me one late afternoon while I was shooting snooker at the Antigua Beach Hotel, an old, beautiful stone hotel in St. John’s.

The snooker table rested on a stone parquet floor in a room that opened to the West. The wide doors were thrown open, and I drank orange juice and vodka, Screwdrivers. Cool breezes touched my cheeks. Glancing out during a pause, I caught the red glow of a sun setting into the Caribbean, high clouds orange-red, the low tumbling of a distant steel drum band. Transfixed, I raised my glass to a transcendental moment, touched with booze, which I’ve never forgotten. A goodly part of my life, I sought those highs, moments of transcendent insight, moments to grieve or to understand the human condition. One high like that evening at the Antigua Beach Hotel can keep a drunk looking for the next high for years.

Caribbean breezes relate to sports too. We played intramural sports on Antigua: radio versus oceanographers, versus officers, versus electronic technicians. All military bases do that. Young men love to compete and struggle. I did. Eventually, we were invited to play in the Tenth Naval District Basketball Tournament in San Juan. I was picked to be part of our nine man squad. Our team included several junior college ball players. I’d say I was the sixth man on the team, better on defense than offense.

The coach drilled us on our outdoor basketball court. He worked us on the fast break. Running in the hot Caribbean sun was a conditioning exercise too. I was a smoker, but I was able to quit long enough to get into shape for that fast breaking team we put together. The steady breezes kept the drills from being unbearable. At every moment, when we paused in our running, the breezes touched the sweat and cooled us, but we definitely got into shape.

We did well in the tournament, too, held in San Juan. We came in second and were awarded letters of commendation. We received our awards at a banquet. I just now got a warm rush from remembering that banquet. I don’t normally remember the “feelings” from moments of achievement in the past at all. For so many years, success of any kind was off my radar screen.

Second place was pretty good for us. Our small facility had only 110 men to choose from. Guantanamo, or Gitmo, as we called it, the eventual tournament winner, could select its team from something like 2000 to 3000 men. We beat other teams with larger pools of sailors to choose from, so we were pretty successful just to come in second, and we knew and relished that, but, still, the guys who played in that final game against Gitmo played their guts out. They wanted that tournament, but the Guantanamo sailors wore them down. We had a chance for much of the game, but Gitmo outshot us; they just had too many guns. I didn’t get into the final game.

I didn’t score any points in the tournament, but I did put on a defensive show in a game against the Army team. They had a shooter who scored 20 points a game. I got to go in for defensive purposes, and the Army shooter didn’t score a point with me on him, although on the inbound play I came in on, he cut past me for the basket so fast he left me flatfooted. Had the man inbounding the ball seen him, I’d have been scored against, no doubt, but my man didn’t get the ball, and I never let that happen again. I shut him down completely.

After a scramble for a loose ball in which my face was slammed into the floor and my lip swelled and bled, the coach praised me for coming on so strong and becoming a part of the team, but, eventually, the four playing with me called on the coach for more scoring potential, and I went off, victorious in my own mind, but hurt by the call to take me out by my teammates. We won that game, and I’d put a damper on their scorer for awhile and accomplished what I’d been sent in to do, but I don’t recall getting much credit for it from my teammates.

I was also a pitcher on the softball team that went to Puerto Rico to compete in the Tenth Naval District Softball Tournament. Our oceanographic softball team had won our facility’s intramural league. We were a fast pitch league, but none of us pitched fast at all. I had a body twisting, purely pendulum, back and forth, underhand motion that delivered medium speed. What was good about my delivery was that my knuckles nearly touched the ground at the bottom of my delivery sweep. I had good control. My pitches remained low and if they went high, they were rising at a steep angle as they crossed the plate. The radio section came in second and used a slow pitch man who could arc the ball in accurately, and he was the pitcher chosen to start our tournament game in Puerto Rico even though my team won the intramural league. I felt ripped off about that and didn’t understand the logic. Today, as I write this Nobody’s autobio., I believe the coach may have thought that my speed, which was only medium because I didn’t whip it roundhouse like fast ball pitchers do, would be hit harder than our slow pitch man with his lofted arc. Anyhow....

In our only game in the single loss elimination tournament, our opponents were hammering our slow pitch man, and we faced a true fast pitch pitcher who could roundhouse, whip the ball at us. When coach told me to warmup, I did a stupid thing. Throwing warmup pitches, I decided to try throwing a roundhouse fast pitch like all the really good pitchers throw. My decision was all about silly pride. I didn’t want to look pathetic before the fans.

It was a stupid decision because I lost my control and confidence. I don’t remember how long I lasted. Maybe only an inning or two. I walked batters, and they hit me. I didn’t stop the carnage, and we lost the game and were eliminated. A few of our guys returned to Antigua on the next flight. Most of us stayed another day in Puerto Rico and went out to play the Coast Guard team for the fun of it. I pitched and we beat them 11 to 7. I pitched in my normal way. To this day, I wonder what the result would have been if I’d thrown in my natural manner in the tournament game? It still rankles me to recall that silly decision on my part, based purely on wanting to “look” good.

While on Antigua, I became the sport’s writer for the Boondocker, our facility newspaper. I never counted it before, but the Boondocker was the first of four (rather than the three I usually think of) literary projects I had a hand in founding. We typed our stuff onto stencils and ran them on a drum printer, stapled the sheets together and delivered them around the base. I worked through winter and spring, 1956, but I got exasperated with the hunt and pecking I had to do, grew bored with the work and quit the paper a couple of months before I left the island. Of all the literary projects I’ve completed and lost on my life journey, I still have samples of my writing for the Boondocker.

In fact, I reread the Boondocker for pleasure (doing some research I said I wouldn’t do) and discovered yet more twists and turns in my faulty memory. As I continue to write this Nobody’s autobiography, I understand why men of influence in world history keep diaries and journals and appointment books of their activities for posterity. The Tenth Naval District’s basketball and softball tournaments are a case in point. What I’ve already written about them, above, is what my memory tells me. It’s what I’ve consistently told people in casual conversations over the years, the format for this book. What I next write is my memory of those tournaments refreshed by my rereading of the Boondocker.

In fact, we lost the basketball tournament to Fort Buchanon, a Puerto Rican Army post, not to Guantanamo which was not even in the tournament. We lost to Buchanon twice that tournament. After Buchanon beat us in the first round, Antigua played in the loser’s bracket to get back up to play Buchanon again in the final game. They beat us by three points that final game, and their victory was helped by a close decision on who got the ball in an out of bounds call. One of our players, Wolderak, was named most valuable player of the tournament. We also received praise for being a most sportsmanlike team. Ever since I can remember, I’ve told people that Guantanamo beat us. I don’t know when or how that fiction entered my Nobody’s narrative of life, but it did, and it was as firmly embedded in my memory as is my memory of what I drank at the Coffee House espresso place yesterday, a cup of regular coffee. Fort Buchanon, like Guantanamo, did have more people to select from than did Antigua, so that much reality still undergirds the basketball tale I told.

My memory of the softball tournament is even more fucked. I said the softball tournament was a single elimination tournament. It wasn’t. It was also double elimination, and we lost our first game but went on to win four games in the loser’s bracket before being eliminated. So the softball team did very well too, 4 and 2, though they didn’t reach the final game. Where my Nobody’s memory gets really screwed is that Radio won the base tournament on Antigua so the slow pitch man did deserve to start the games in Puerto Rico, not me. We, who were called the Operation’s team, came in second. That’s falsehood one about the Tenth Naval District’s Softball Tournament

Next, I only recall one softball game, the one we lost. Which means, I think, that I had to return to base on Antigua to stand watches, and since I didn’t add that much to the team my first outing, I was one of those sent home. Recall that I noted that some men had to go home early? Well, I was one of those, I THINK! I did pitch victoriously in a practice game the next day, but, then, flew home immediately with the other extras, and that’s why I don’t remember those four victories very well—I wasn’t there. I THINK!

I can see the old ego pushing in here to distort reality. I truly thought I was the better pitcher since I did have the best ERA of all the pitchers on Antigua, and I didn’t want to accept that this old guy with a slow pitch arc could win four games in that competition, but I brought much of this on myself by altering my pitching style at the last minute.

Another possibility asserts itself here. Since I was one of those who had already gone to the basketball tournament, I may have been permitted to go to San Juan only for the start of the tournament. My ERA granted me that much, but there were too many Oceanographic guys on the team to let us all go to San Juan at the same time. Someone had to stand watches back on Antigua. Maybe some of our team stayed behind to stand watches, then came up to Puerto Rico to relieve those of us in the tournament who returned home to take up the watch duties. Something rings true to my memory in my last presentation of the situation. I had to go back and was really upset I didn’t get a chance to pitch my own style and stay on for the length of the Tenth Naval District tournament. I maybe could have won a tournament game if I hadn’t been so worried about looking good.


On Antigua, I reached a peak of fitness I’ve rarely achieved since. I ate well and cut back on smoking for sports. I weighed 155 pounds, all trim and well proportioned, and running up and down the concrete court, practicing our fast break, gave me stamina I hadn’t had since high school track days. I recall practicing jump shots from the corner one afternoon on the parquet floor where the basketball tournament took place. I recall the feel of my legs pushing me high and being sustained and in control of the ball at the peak for my release. Strong in arm and leg, I could leap with the best of them for a guy my height. My whole body remembers these moments, and I can feel the difference in breath and limb when I try to play basketball now.

The whole subject of physicality interests me. Many writers have a physical history as well as intellectual side. My memory of physical moments, the driving hook shot on the park playground in Belmont, the afternoon of jump shots in San Juan, the running catch from left field in the park softball league, amaze me with their grip on my memory. I can feel the muscles remembering the actions as I think about them. They’re bound to leak into poetry and fiction when describing actions, and if recalled with sufficient force, action itself takes on an air of the spiritual. There were times in my life when I was convinced that what humans call love is merely the sense of “well being in the body”. The more I study Evolutionary Psychology the more certain I become that that's all that love is and isn't that really enough?

Even the act of writing has a physical side. The discipline of sitting still and moving the arm and hand to express the flow of thought is an eye/hand coordination activity. That’s why the more one writes, the easier it is to write. The act of writing’s a physical habit almost as much as the act of swinging a bat.

Speaking of eating which I did a few paragraphs ago, I gotta mention in passing another of those rumors that circulate in military culture. I don’t remember when I first heard it, but several times I heard that our rations were laced with saltpeter to keep down our sex drives while in boot camp or isolated on islands. Though the saltpeter urban legend didn’t serve as a goad to good military behavior as some rumors did, still saltpeter was an interesting thing to consider. How did it become a part of military lore, I wonder? I wonder if, perhaps in the old days, in the early navy of sailing ships or on long cruises such as whaling ships embarked on, saltpeter was used to keep the sex drive down (if it even does that) as a protection against homosexual behavior? I don’t know, and I’m not going to do research on it. Anyhow....

To begin a listing of more random thoughts: bars on Antigua and near the base had interesting names like The Bloody Bucket. You couldn’t eat in many of the food joints which were off limits because the military feared food poisoning, but the natives ate there, and they were still alive. When you think about it, there’s a lot of fear and prejudice involved in such exclusionary policies. Serious world travelers and anthropologists eat and drink with the natives in lots of far away places, and they do just fine.

As I understand it, 50,000 black Antiguans were controlled on that island by 1,000 white Englishmen. The number of British includes their pale faced women. We sailors called them all BeeWees. I experienced the first segregation I was aware of on Antigua. The entire city of Dayton was segregated, but I wasn’t aware of it as a kid. Most blacks lived on one side of the Great Miami River and whites lived on the other. Downtown Dayton, everybody mixed. Separate but equal facilities weren’t a part of the scene, but Dunbar High School was the black school and, then, Roosevelt High School and, eventually, Kiser High School turned black as blacks populated new areas in Dayton. Anyhow....

On Antigua, whites sat in the theater balcony while the natives sat below us on benches, some without backs and some with. I saw the original “Lost In Space” at that theater in downtown St. Johns, but I didn’t go often. The natives would scream and hoot when people kissed on the screen, and when western shootouts came on, they’d holler and fire cap guns and get into the aisles and pretend to be riding horses, and... “I don’ know what all” they were up to. Before the start of each film, lighted pictures of white women in short skirts, usherettes, I guess, flanking the screen with shushing fingers to lips, flashed on and off, but I couldn’t hear the movie in that theater so I wasn’t interested in going. It was just too bizarre and frustrating for me, the movie buff far from home.

In the bars, I had some interesting conversations with BeeWees, but I also saw some mean looks coming my way from others. We weren’t universally liked. Our money upset the balance of things. BeeWees almost all claimed to want to go to “A mer ri ka” or to have been there to make enough money to retire for life. What I saw of them, they were simple and carefree folk who lived in great poverty and whose chief income was from working the sugar cane fields owned by the British.

I met my first steel drum bands on Antigua, steel drums made from abandoned 50 gallon drums the U.S. Navy had discarded over the years. Shacks out in the boonies near the cane fields were made with corrugated sheet metal, salvaged during the war years from the Americans. Some shacks were built from heavy gage cardboard, also salvage.

St. John’s, the island’s capitol city, featured a cricket field right smack in the center of the town with a wide red dirt street circling it. Commercial stalls ringed that dirt circle. In one tiny booth of a shop on that circle, I found and bought a British produced Glenn Miller album for 50 American dollars with ten or twelve 331/3 records in it.

We sometimes swam in a small cove on the other side of the island from the “navfac” called Half Moon Bay. White sand surrounded with palm trees, water so clear you could see to the bottom at fifty feet deep as clear as looking through air. Snorkeling was not in fashion yet. All that water fun was yet to come, thanks to Lloyd Bridges. We’d load up a truck with iced beer and set off for a day on the beach. No one anywhere in sight. Now I understand, from people I’ve met along the way, that Half Moon Bay lies under the shadows of huge tourist hotels, the whole island developed and cut up for profit.

Half Moon Bay was very near a mysterious end of the island which was a self-governing haven for the very rich. Peons like us sailors couldn’t get into it. They had their own police and fire departments. Howard Hughes supposedly kept a place there, and Gary Moore flew down to visit the place while I was stationed on the island. I’m trying to remember its name. I believe it was called the Mill Reef Club, or something like it.

Sitting in the center of my mind is one of the drunken chiefs I encountered in the Navy at this time. A living monument of World War Two and Korea, he sits on the concrete patio outside the geedonk in a folding lawn chair, dangling a Bud in his right hand. No one joins him or interrupts his reverie. He wears khaki shorts and shirt, one skinny leg crossed crossed over a knobby knee. A brilliant white tee-shirt gleams through his open collar. His eyes are bloodshot and distant. He stares endlessly out to sea, and when you speak to him, he smiles and mumbles. He’s serving out his time as if he were in a prison cell, unmoving. Later, I come to understand that men like the Chief are already dead and just waiting to fall over and quit moving for good.

On Antigua I got to see a sight most people will never see in their lives. A huge, deep sea turtle crawled up on the beach to lay eggs. Natives caught it by putting boards under it and flipping it onto its back. When I saw the monster, she was right side up again, flippers tied back so she couldn’t crawl. I always thought of turtles as being silent. This one grunted and snorted, almost like a bull. Neck 60” around, the top of her shell reached to my waist. She weighed, we guessed, 800 to a 1000 lbs and might have been 500 years old. I think those guestimates are recalled correctly?

Somehow, the skipper of our base got involved in the matter and assumed control of the beast from the bottom of the sea. Even though the natives intended it for turtle soup, the skipper made a call to Florida, describing the find. He thought the aquarium in Sarasota (Sarasota?) might want it. They wired back they didn’t have water deep enough to keep such a turtle alive. At that point, the Captain released the turtle to the natives. I didn’t stay to see the ending of its land saga. Later, when I read Matthiessen's Far Tortuga with the turtle slaughter in it, I thought of that magnificent, rare turtle chopped into chops and soups.

One time, we had a party with the British. Can’t remember whether they were our guests or we were theirs. Don’t recall how we enlisted swabs got to go along either, because the British in attendance all seemed to be upper crust types. The women, even in that sunny place, all had that pale British skin. I may be exaggerating when I say “all” but that’s my honest recollection. I think current genetic information supports the British and Irish skin’s inability to do anything but burn.

It’s my recollection we swabbies attended in uniform, one and all. The party was on a deck out in the boonies, set in the midst of jungle on the side of a slope up in the high ground of the island. We could stand at the deck railing and look straight into tree tops. We may have been on a sugar cane plantation or something like it. The music was big band stuff, Glenn Miller and the like. I believe I unsuccessfully flirted with one British woman. I recall only a single really good looking woman in the whole lot, and I was young and stupid so conversation was beyond me. I and J.C. got drunk quickly. J.C. and I left early, me on the back of his motorcycle. He drove a BMW. The sailors who bought motorcycles on Antigua bought BMWs and several of them did.

J.C. drove like an idiot, but this night he stayed on the road. Another time, when he was up in that high ground alone, drunk as usual, he missed a curve and flew pretty far down a slope, hitting trees along the way. I think he only broke one arm and a few ribs. Recall all those funny drunk scenes in wartime comedies? J.C. worked pretty hard to be equal to the movies in my head.

J.C. reminds me of my cousin Edward who also drank and drove motorcycles and who nearly killed himself. One night, my cousin who entered the Navy shortly after I got out was tearing through the night on wet pavement somewhere on the East Coast when he came up quickly behind a parked 18 wheeler. He laid it down and slid under the trailer, bouncing and tumbling all the way. Since he was almost back to the base anyway, he crawled out from under the truck and staggered home. In the morning, when he came to, hung over and hurt, he was stuck to his sheets with blood and gore. Something like 200 plus stitches to close up all his wounds, he said.

Boston Blackie came to our base at Christmas time to entertain the troops. What was the actor’s name? Drummond? Richard Diamond? Or was Richard Diamond the name of another radio detective? Maybe it was Richard Diamond who brought the USO show. Who knows? None of us got leave for the holidays that year. We just didn’t have enough men to take the watches if personnel took leave so a show came down for us. The officers, their wives and children, also attended that holiday show. Blackie let us in on a little secret that frosted our enlisted balls and titillated our imaginations. He must have pissed off a few officers too for spilling the beans.

The show we saw featured several long legged, beautiful show girls. Seems the show would have been a lot more spicy, Boston Blackie said, except the officer’s wives and children came so the show had to be tempered. Boy, did that piss me off. Not only did the officers have the company of their families all year round and for the holidays, but they screwed up what might have been a great strip show by bringing their damn families to a show meant for those of us who couldn't go home to their own families.

One day a shout from the barrack’s central stairway called those of us lounging around in the barracks to come see something. We found a huge tarantula laboriously ascending the stairs. I mean, almost as big, counting its leg spread, as a pot holder. The sailor who called us shoveled the hairy arachnid into a shoe box. Then we went down to the rocky beach within the base perimeter and got a land crab of about equal size to the tarantula and dumped that into the box....

Nothing! A big fat nothing happened between them. Each of the creatures retreated to a neutral corner, so to speak, and each raised arms or legs respectively toward one another, but they wouldn’t fight, even when the joker with the box tried to push them together. Later, he killed the spider and put the crab back on the beach. So much for entertainment on an island paradise.

We played lots of cards, lots of sports, lots of pool and lots of ping pong to pass the time on Antigua. I got a crush on a hero while I was on the island. From somewhere in New York, this well-built handsome, dark-haired, Spanish looking guy joined the Oceanographers. There’s that New York influence coming in here again. He and I liked to compete at ping pong. He almost always won, but I could beat him from time to time. We kidded around, but competed fiercely. He lorded it over me. I believe he was also on the basketball team which went to San Juan. I really liked him. He was smart and handsome too and a pretty serious dude. I can’t recall his name.

One fall day, a gang of us gathered in a barren room in the building where we Oceanographers stood our watches to listen to the, I think, final World Series game on short wave. The series pitted Milwaukee against the Yankees and Milwaukee won in seven games. (I researched that and the following: Lew Burdette pitched and won three complete games against the Yanks and two of them were shutouts.)

Some of the guys had chairs, some scrunched down against the wall, and I was one of those stretched out in the middle of the gang on my back on the cool concrete floor. My friend from his chair offered me his tee-shirt to put under my head. I recoiled from taking his shirt as if it were a handful of hot coals. I was simultaneously honored and somehow humbled but, mostly, confused, embarrassed. I guess until that moment I didn’t realize the nature of my feelings for this friend of mine. I think I might have felt “unworthy” (is that it) to accept his shirt for my head. Consider, too, that I was not too confident in my sexual orientation. Scary. I didn’t understand my feelings, but I eventually did accept his offer. I don’t recall ever experiencing anything quite like that to this day.

Many years later when a counselor asked me if I had ever experienced any homosexual feelings, I brought this moment up for discussion, but I could also seriously say that I’d never been aroused by the thought or sight of a male for as far back as I can remember. To me, that has to be the bottom line—sexual arousal. My humbled feeling about my friend was probably something that other men have felt toward one another from time to time in the pecking order of our animal society. It has to do with camaraderie and fellowship rather than the sexual love homosexuals feel for one another. This friend may also have represented to me a kind father figure for he was pretty mature for his age and nonjudgmental.

On Antigua too, one black Petty Officer 2nd Class had come to serve. He was an Electronics Technician, I believe. Recently reading, No Ordinary Time, I came across Eleanor Roosevelt’s work to get blacks in the service into jobs other than as messmen and orderlies to the officers’ mess. You can’t believe the battle she and other liberals had to achieve this basic fair play for men who were serving their country. By the end of the War, blacks were serving in jobs which had been closed to them before.

Though I wasn’t a history buff at the time, this black man’s service as an ET now stands out in my mind as an example of the new Navy after the War, and he serves for me as a marker of how far America and I have come under the liberal influence of the last half century. But, another thought also strikes me—wouldn’t it be a terrible irony if after my little essay here, that that black serviceman was actually a messman to the officer’s mess? But he was in our barrack wing, along with the Electronics guys and the Radiomen and we Operations personnel, once upon a time Sonarmen, so I believe I’m right in my recollection that he was an electronics technician.

I recall him as a solitary, handsome figure. He would, because of the time frame, be one of the few men pioneering the new Navy. I had no feelings one way or another about him. I talked to him, but I didn’t buddy around with him. He was a photography buff and went all over the island to take pictures. He showed some of them to me one time. His solitariness stands out in my mind, now, in retrospect. He was a good sailor, military in bearing and dress, in fact, a little above the rest of us in grooming and appearance. Just what you’d expect from a black man surrounded by whitey and needing to go that extra mile, like Jackie Robinson entering baseball. He was friendly and mostly smiling. And, you know, he may have been pretty at home on Antigua in the very places white sailors felt uncomfortable. After all, the island was permanently inhabited by 50,000 black Beewees and only 1000 white British. Now, I wonder just what he did while off the base. I’d like to ask him.

On that island I first watched what happens when dogs mate and get hung up. Being a city boy during a time when pets weren’t so prevalent, I’d never seen that before. The island and base were full of mongrel dogs, big and small, and some of them looked like experiments from the Island of Doctor Marlon Moreau. Eventually one male dog, too big, hooked up with a bitch we’ll call Too Small. Their yaps and whimpering filled the base one late afternoon in paradise. Lots of us with nothing else to do (it took so much to entertain us), poured into the street in front of the barrack. The bitch was being dragged all over the street by the suffering male, but both dogs were miserable; their pleasure transubstantiated into pain. At first, a couple of guys tried to help them pull apart, but more pain ensued, and yelping and snapping at their helpers, the dogs resisted. Finally, one of the boatswain mates, under the influence of a really big idea, ran into the barracks and came out with a fire extinguisher. While all of us hooted and offered advice, he sprayed the dogs’ genitalia until they cooled down enough to separate.

We didn’t really need that hot show the USO brought down to us with all the excitement we made for ourselves. What with the tarantulas, land crabs, dogs, and the time a Mechanics mate found a cockroach crawling in his spaghetti and sailed his tin tray against the wall and had to be restrained from physically assaulting the cook, we sailors had all we needed to entertain ourselves in paradise.

In my reading of the Boondocker, I recalled one last memory to share about Antigua—Bat’s Cave. I made an attempt to be a spelunker one afternoon. Four of us went down into this locally famous cave which was inhabited by bats. It wasn’t hard. We walked down a gentle slope on crunchy bat dung into the cave which was like a partially open mouth, but once inside, we couldn’t find a way out of the entrance cave. I wasn’t about to get down on my stomach in bat dung and crawl into blind, dark passages to find out where the cave led to. We stumbled down several passages to dead ends. When we did finally give up and come out, it was near evening, and we stood to watch the bats fly from the cave. They came out like a rustling, black sheet, shaken out to cover a fading sky.

Needless to say, I was sobered by the thought my time was up on Antigua and that my next and last duty station was to be on Nantucket off the coast of Massachusetts, a real summer tourist place, a place full of women in the summertime. My last memories of my tour in the Caribbean was the commercial airport in San Juan. Whereas I’d come in by military flight, I left Puerto Rico by United, or was it American, Airlines. The day was warm as all days in paradise are. The airport was lush, window filled, with exotic plants, shrubbery and trees. The waning afternoon light lighted everything with gold. So my departure from paradise carried the look and tinge of paradise over everything.