CHAPTER NINETEEN

Nantucket, Mass.: A Whale of a Tale.

I won’t even talk about my leave home between Antigua and Nantucket. My time with Sue was evidently a waste; I don’t remember a thing about our time together. I know I would already be looking ahead, because I always did, to my next duty station with an anxiety I couldn’t name and conscious anticipation of yet another tourist island. Our relationship was weakening though she didn’t know it, and I think she still felt she had a strong connection with me. What’s sad is that I have no memory of having a relationship with her at any time or of talking with her about anything of any importance. Our love affair was, at least on my part, all show and surface, but what did I know then....

To me, nowadays, relationship is talking about feelings (that’s right, dude, feelings), about being honest and open with myself in relation to the other, about making decisions with give and take involved and about being vulnerable to the other rather than controlling and manipulative. In fact, a lot of the story of my book is a personal journey from naive denial through rigorous, judgmental conservatism to a more liberal and accepting view of life.

At the time all show and circumstance, I pretended to be many things and never looked “within” (bad, but only, metaphor that comes to mind) to find out what really made me tick. Being more conservative then, I was completely out of touch with my emotional self and searching outside myself for laws and rules to live by. It was too painful to live in the now, in the emotional world of grays, and I desperately looked for what religious conservatives might call “Bible truths”, maxims for directing behavior which I could use to limit my experience and suppress my feelings and to control others also.

Yep! In those days I was much more conservative, more about looking for the rules of behavior outside myself, in books like Bibles, my peers and movies, existing in a sort of fascist mentality which can condemn a whole religion (Jews) or group of persons (witches or homosexuals or Gypsies) to death because the Bible or Koran contains a line might be interpreted to say that they (i.e. the ones unlike myself) are evil. Only someone not in touch with his humanity can think in such black and white terms. In short, I thought with the same rigid mentality as many criminals and Christians do who clearly operate from a rigorous code of revenge toward the world, in an eye for an eye, revenge-minded consciousness.

It’s no accident that most everyday Nazi’s were Christians just like American fundamentalists. When I slip into thinking of Nazis as monstrous, inhuman people I miss the mark. For reality’s sake I must remember that the average Nazi was an average Joe caught up in the fears and prejudices of his time. They had an ethic of hard work. They toiled and saved. They loved their families. They believed in sacrifice for the good of their beliefs. They sought strong personalities (like their God?) who reflected their values for positions of leadership, and they did not spare the rod and spoil the child. It’s just my opinion, but I believe many American Christians are Nazis just waiting to get into power so their real selves can come out. Many fearful Israelis, for example, now operate from a Nazi mentality. They can’t see that. If they could see what they’ve become, they’d change, but fear shuts the portals of awareness. For Christians, their fear of hellfire (which will engulf them for eternity if they give into temptations which they imagine are all around them) makes them want to suppress and control the rest of us so they won’t be tempted. As Roosevelt said, “The only thing to fear is fear itself.”

Or as I my best buddy once told me, twisting Roosevelt’s maxim another notch, “You become what you fear.” Currently, it’s obvious ot me that the more I fear the conservative movement in America, the more rigid and conservative I become in my reaction to it. Like a Captain Ahab, by opposing conservatism, I let it take me down into the deeps with it. Now, the thing for conservatives to find out is what they fear which takes hold of them like a Moby Dick and pulls them under to an emotional death.

Wow! Hold on a minute. I’m being way too hard on Mr. Nobody for this period in my development. The conservatism I’ve just admitted to comes later. I grew into conservatism slowly and just as slowly grew out of it. Even when I was being liberal, I was being conservative, because I think conservatism is a sort of judgmental way of living, of trying to live by impossible principles of behavior based on faulty assumptions about the nature of the human animal. In my youth, in actuality, I was probably more naive and open than most rather than conservative or liberal, and I seemed to hurt a lot because I could never be the man I wanted to be. In my thoughts, I came up short all the time. I was always judging myself a failure and lived in a certain amount of psychic pain day in and day out.

Whoa! Here, come take away my soapbox before I say too much. I’ve gone too far too early in my tale. Anyhow....


I flew onto Nantucket on United Airlines by way of Boston. I don’t recall whether I took a cab to the base or caught a base bus or whether or not the base sent transportation to get me, but the distance from the town of Nantucket to the base was a good ten miles, and so I know I didn’t make it by shank’s mare, toting a sea bag and record player. I quickly learned that the distance from base to town made going into town an ordeal. You had to cultivate friends with a car or get wheels of your own. I couldn’t afford a car, and so I made friends with a frugal, one beer man who could afford a car. Sometimes I rode the bus the base provided.

I arrived on Nantucket near the end of the summer tourist season, got my cot and a hot and my place in the watch rotation in the Operations Department. Safe and secure, fed, housed and clothed—bring on the booze and the broads, I said!

Nantucket is pretty much a sandy flatland not many feet above sea level. No snakes slither on Nantucket but plenty of rabbits hop. Broke sailors, living off base on the island, eased their cars along narrow roads between sandy flats and froze rabbits with flashlight beams so they could fill their larders. Carl from Kentucky, accustomed to a diet of rabbit and squirrel, kept freezers full of rabbit and when I ate at his off base house, I got my first taste of them. A white, mild meat, flowered and pan fried, rabbit tastes pretty durn good.

Also from Carl, I swigged my first taste of real, mountain made, 125 proof, moonshine corn liquor. That Christmas, my last in the service, several of us drove home for the holidays. We split gas expenses, drove straight through. It was much cheaper than flying. Carl and a buddy he was taking home for a visit dropped me and another guy off in Dayton. Two weeks later, when they picked me up at 4 am on an icy morn just after New Years, Carl came in from the cold for a minute and offered me one of those classic quart Mason jars half filled with a liquid so clear it looked deceptively like water. Tilting it to my lips, I smelled the smooth sweetness of corn liquor. I sipped and, wow, this stuff went down chilly, evaporating and cooling my palate until, pow, the stuff exploded in my stomach in a great hot ball of warmth. I never again drank anything that smooth and mysterious.

Me and another bunch of sailors made a similar dash one time from Key West on our way to our next duty stations, this time transporting a car for someone who left it in Florida to fly home. You could do that in those days. Probably still can. Car transporting was a legitimate business. People would pay a company to get their cars transported from one place to another. Sailors would look for a car in Miami or Key West which needed to be transported to a city in or near Dayton. We found one and headed north. When we passed through the Blue Ridge Mountains, we encountered sights which probably no longer exist but which will probably reappear when the conservatives manage to take us back, as they aim to do, to the days before the New Deal evened up the economic playing field.

We bought gas from ancient pumps and Cokes in classic bottles in creaky, wooden, barn-like, country stores with dark, dirty floorboards so ancient and weathered that they’d twisted apart to leave gaps open down into moldy earth beneath. Tall-roofed, their windows, way up there, shown light down through dusty particles to shadowy interiors. We stopped for dinner and drinks in mountain bars where men who didn’t trust strangers stared us into leaving sooner than we may have wanted to. No Interstates ran through “them thar parts in them days”, so it was twisty turning two lane tunnels between mountain oak and ash all the way once we got out of southern climates. Chilly, rainy, spring weather too, it was.

The biggest “snafu” (situation normal, all fucked up) about that trip was that we somehow lost the use of a piston (one of eight) a third of the way there. Power faded leaving Florida, specially on the mountain grades later, and gas usage soared. Finally, one of the guys who knew what he was doing disconnected the gas supply to that piston, so we weren’t just pouring gasoline into a... what?.. a rabbit hole? Limping all the way, we continued, discussing whether or not the dude would be pissed that we’d somehow damaged his car? It was running pretty rough and shaking at top speeds by the time we reached Dayton but nothing happened. The man who drove on another city to drop the car off and collect the deposit called to tell me that he didn’t have to meet the owner. He left the car at some designated place, collected the deposit and never met the owner. Besides, come to think of it, it wasn’t our fault the piston failed, but we, somehow, felt responsible.

But, to return to Nantucket. On this duty station, we were barracked in quonset huts. No nice cubicles for us, we even slept in bunk beds. A row of lockers placed the down middle of the floor separated the lines of bunks which were placed parallel to the side walls, head to foot, head to foot.... The john or head (toilet) was at the end, near the front door. Free standing oil heaters heated the whole base. Except, I think, our watch station may have been centrally heated from an oil driven boiler? Each rate lived in a separate quonset hut. The officers had one too. Another quonset hut contained a geedonk where movies were shown and beer cost twenty-five cents a bottle or can. Cigarettes went for twenty-five cents a pack too.

Drinking was cheap but lonely on the base. My drinking grew more frequent on Nantucket. While married to my third wife in the Eighties, I would claim that the US Navy fostered my troubles with booze by the cheap and plentiful amount of liquor they supplied on all the naval stations I served on. I was attempting to get the rest of my GI Bill reinstated because I didn’t use it all up within the ten allotted years from the date it became available to me. I claimed that my drinking problems interfered with my ability to complete my three or four attempts at graduate school (and it did) but the military didn’t see they were to blame, and my appeal fell on deaf ears. In my current manifestation of consciousness I guess I can’t blame them.

My failed attempt to get my GI Bill reinstated may have come back to bite me twenty something years after that. In my mid-forties, I would try to get into the Navy Reserve under a special program the Navy began to beef up their reservist numbers. I passed all their tests and assumed I would soon get a journalist rating. I even managed the 32 words a minute typing speed the journalism rating called for. I’d self taught myself to type in order to write the several novels and many poems and short stories I’d created by that time. By then, too, I had my graduate degree, an MFA in Creative Writing. Further, I’d been a naval reservist for a few months while in high school before going full Navy after graduation. How could I miss?

When the Chief in charge of the special recruitment effort called me back to the reserve center to retake my typing test, he acted quite differently from our first contact. He was brusque and distant. The sailor who gave me the test smiled at me in a significant way when I asked him if he knew why I was being retested. In fact, no one ever explained why I was being retested. Later, when he told me I passed the typing test again, he still seemed to be smiling strangely. A few days later, a phone call told me I’d been turned down without explanation.

The whole situation, of course, smelled pretty fishy to me, and I was hurt, frankly, because I was really wanting to spend some time aboard ship on the high seas once in awhile. Adding to my suspicion, there had been another man who took the physical with me who had also wanted to be a journalist. In education, experience, intellect and skills, I far surpassed him. I asked if he’d been accepted to fill a journalism opening. I was told, yes. I responded sarcastically to the Chief’s replies to my questions, and I never got a satisfactory explanation.

At first I thought, well, perhaps me and the Chief didn’t hit it off as well as I imagined. Even though he was pleasant, I recognized that old military manner of his which finally ground me down on Nantucket, near the end of my tour of active duty. You know the kind: you tell some careerist about an emotional struggle you’re having, and he replies with the standard military reply, “Sounds like a personal problem to me.” Gruff, surly, off-putting, it means, “Bug off and leave me alone. You ain’t gonna get not an ounce of sympathy here.” The careerist’s reply functions similarly to military psychiatry which tries to drive you crazy, tries by hook or crook to turn your perfectly sane fear of dying into the insanity that sends you back into action where your fear comes true and you lose your life.

Why do we keep forgetting Catch 22? If Catch 22 were required reading worldwide, and, further, the readers were required to get the book’s central reality into their senses as a real description of wartime mentality, war would soon disappear. But few people read nowadays, and fewer still understand the nature of consciousness and how literature inspires and alters it and, thus, can change our understanding of reality. Just understanding the relativity of all consciousness and morality would undermine most reasons we use to kill one another over the individual fictions we call reality. We’re talking science, here, the real McCoy, not some made up religious view of the world. Anyhow....

A few years later, I suddenly realized that my appeal about the alcohol on base was certainly in my Navy records somewhere, and I began to think that that fact may have been why the Navy didn’t want to give me another shot at service. Or, perhaps, it was my FBI record, if it was still there, and that FBI story comes a little bit later in this Nobody’s autobio. Now, back to Nantucket....


I started on a bottom bunk in my little Nantucket quonset hut and graduated, with seniority and personnel departures, to an upper bunk later. Even the security area where we stood our watches was a quonset hut—bigger than the rest, but still a quonset hut. From the area within the chain link, barbwire topped fence where we stood our watches, we looked not too far down a gentle slope to the front gate. The road from the front gate led back beside our building to the rest of the base which was also lower than the security area.

I wasn’t on the island long before I met the Nantucket girls and began an association that lasted until I was unfaithful to the code of the island people: if you mess with tourist girls, don’t expect the island girls to be there for you during the long, mildly cold, foggy, lonely winters. Their threat has bite. Nantucket’s year round population is about 1000 to 1500 people and things slow down drastically in winter. If you don’t have island people as friends in winter, you’ll mostly dine alone, but during the summer, you can expect to be jostling elbow to elbow on the cobblestone streets with 10000 people on any given day, many of them beautiful college girls taking a couple of weeks vacation or working summer jobs on the island or single career women on vacation with nothing to do but drink and screw. Okay! So I exaggerate the sex angle! It was the Fifties.

In summer, the movie theater is open every day. The restaurants and bars are too. Ferries ply in and out of Nantucket harbor on a steady basis, disgorging loads of tourists and ferrying back to the mainland the worn out ones and returning yet again with fresh supplies of bodies for the endless cycle of summer dance. The small communities around the periphery of Nantucket, which die completely in the winter, light up for a brief few months with restaurants and piano bar players under the summer stars.

Street musicians drew huge crowds. I still have a photograph of a large gathering under a streetlight, listening to a musician. It’s a newspaper photo, an 8x10 glossy print. I’m standing on the back of a park bench, leaning against the lamp post, looking over the heads of the crowd.

While I was there, Mike Todd and Elizabeth Taylor docked their huge yacht in Nantucket harbor and came ashore for dinner in old Nantucket town. The crowd around the restaurant where they ate was packed so tightly that I didn’t even try to stay to catch a glimpse. On occasion I saw other movie stars in town and on the beaches, but I was too proud (or scared) to go up and introduce myself. This entire scene was very heady for a Nobody from Dayton, Ohio.



At the end of my first summer and into the fall and winter, I had a sort of girlfriend, a companion, among the island girls. The people of Nantucket are descended from Portuguese stock. They are dark people with thick dark hair and roughhewn faces. Sally Coffin was short and Portuguese in coloring, and she had the most delightful hoarse giggle. It was infectious, and I felt quite honored to be chosen to be her friend. I’ve broken a rule of this book to tell you her complete name because she maintained her virginity in my company and has nothing to hide (she gave me the nickname “octopus” because of my many arms which tried unsuccessfully to encircle her) and because her familial name is illustrious in the history of whaling Nantucket. When you go into the whaling museum on Nantucket and glance over the crew lists of those who manned the whaling ships, many of whom disappeared under the sea with their ships, the name, Coffin, is prominent among them. Because of my friendship with Sally and because I’d recently been inspired by the movie “Moby Dick” which came out in 1956 with Gregory Peck as Captain Ahab, I even went to the trouble to try and read Melville’s book, but I don’t think I read it through until many years later when I was in college.

Sally’s encouragement finally released my spirit to the dance. Born into a time when all dancing required learning steps, you’ll recall I never really got into dancing unless it was with a girlfriend like Sue who I knew and could trust not to be put off by any awkwardness on my part. I just couldn’t loosen up. My asshole was clenched tighter than a drum head when it came to relaxing and letting go. I understood perfectly, years later, when blacks spoke of white men who walked around as if they had a ramrod up their clenched sphincter. You were called a tight ass motherfucker, or mothafucka. That was true of me for the longest time. Anyhow....

Sally, one night after a few drinks, threw open the door of her car in the almost empty parking lot of a local drive in restaurant (near the end of my first summer on the island), cranked up the radio music and invited me to dance. Just her and me.

“Relax,” she instructed. “Let it all hang out, go with the music and don’t worry about it.” Or words to that effect.

That night, higher than a kite, a dancer was born. The music got into my system and my body twisted to its rhythms. I had rhythm! Thanks to Sally, I’m still a freeform, freedom-loving dancer. Later, when disco dancing came into fashion, I feared we would soon be imprisoned in this new dance for robots, all preprogrammed ahead of time and forced to dance to someone else’s format, but disco came and went and rocking remained. Nowadays, I’m not so sure that rock will roll much longer since rock’s getting a bad rap. Okay! enough word play!

Life on the island that first fall and winter of my tour of duty was like that parking lot experience, all freeform and partying except during the times I was confined to the base to serve my country by standing endless, boring watches. Parties and drinking on the beaches and going to movies at the theater and eating in the restaurants and lots more drinking and more drinking, and lonely nights in town, walking with a pint of peach brandy on my hip to warm me.

Almost all island people are an insular lot and Nantucket islanders were no different. They always hung around together. There was even a hotel in Boston, I was told, where all Nantucket folk stayed when they were off island. They wanted to be able to run into other Nantucket folk in the big city. So, with any one sailor, you’d find two or more islanders. Ever-shifting groups of sailors and townies formed up to go drink on the beaches and to steam clams. Sometimes, Sally and I and a handful of others would end up parked in random spots around Nantucket to drink beer and talk and dance on packed sand under the stars. We’d take in a movie as a group. We’d sit in the Quahog, a restaurant named after that edible Atlantic Coast clam, and eat sandwiches or chowder as a group. Sailors and town girls with apartments would throw parties with booze flowing and our little group of sailors and townies would drift in and out in a group. Some sailors would go to high school dances or to other social dances put on by various social groups and drink. It was laughter and joking and drinking and fun all the time on the island of Nantucket.

Did I say there was lots of drinking? The drinking was endless. When I wasn’t drinking with town groups on the beaches or walking the streets with pints in my hip pocket, I drank alone at the bars when I could afford it. I drank alone many fall and winter nights. I can recall very cleary several nights when I bought me a pint of brandy, shoved it in my hip pocket and strolled the streets of Nantucket town all alone, taking a sip when it hit me to. One night I walked through the thickest fog I’ve ever seen, then or since, drinking alone. The glow of street lamps spread through the fog, but the actual rounded form of the lanterns never came clear—just their glow, dispersed by fog.

I learned many fine drinking tricks on the island of Nantucket. I learned to chug a whole bottle of beer without taking the bottle from my lips, a straight slide down the gullet without contracting my throat for a swallow. I occasionally amazed and surprised my driving friends by throwing up on the back seats of their cars when I passed out and they left me there overnight to sleep it off. I learned to fall asleep on watch and insult my “superiors” (always hated that military term), and, eventually, I got to experience a Captain’s Mast as a result of booze not too long before I was mustered out of the Navy. I learned how to line up a line of whiskey shots when I really wanted to get shit faced and toss them back one after another, no messing around. I learned to drink so much on lost weekends that by Sunday morning, I’d have the shakes. For even more excitement, I learned to insult and make enemies at parties around the island while in my cups.

It’s a good thing I had my pal, Whitey, to step between me and people I insulted at parties. To this day, I don’t know why Whitey and I became friends on Nantucket or why he took it upon himself to become my protector. He stood 6’6” tall. He was broad shouldered with blond, almost white, hair, a New Yorker. Time and again, I got shit faced, blacked out, insulted someone, and Whitey would step between me and the insulted. I learned about his defenses of me by accident when a third party, angry at my mouth, dressed me down about what happened the night before at a drunken party in Nantucket town. He told me I was damn lucky to have a bud like Whitey sticking up for me when I was drinking and that I should watch my mouth. I made people angry enough to kill, he warned me.

There was one sailor on the island whose rage at me was so deep and abiding that I feared him when our paths crossed while we were on our party rounds. He was a tall, muscular Boatswain. I think our problem began with a woman I cut him out of one night without meaning to. My charm and ability with words far exceeded his. Truthfully, he was a brooding oaf. I vaguely, through an alcohol fog, recall shutting him down with my wordplay in a car in which we were riding together with the lady in question. She asked me to walk her to her door even though she began the night in his corner of the Rope Walk bar. I kissed her at the door while he waited in the car.

I soon forgot about that contest (weren’t all interactions between any two men and one woman a “contest” in those prehensile days). Then one night I showed up at a party in an apartment that I didn’t know he shared with two other sailors. I was there no more than a minute or two when I spied him across the room pointing at me and heatedly talking to his roomies. One of his roomies who knew me came over to say that I had to leave, that the three had an agreement that if any one of them wanted someone to leave, the other two must give in to that wish, no questions asked.

I was running around at that time with Sally and her many friends. When I left, many people, loyal to her, left with us. I didn’t take the whole party with me, but our departure left a goodly hole in the hull of that boatswain’s party vessel, and, of course, I gloated. Now he had even another reason to hate me, but that’s the last I remember of him. He lived in town and me on the base. Our paths never had to cross from that point on.

I’m certain it was difficult to be my friend most of my Nobody life. I see myself, in reflection, as naive, very sensitive, quick to insert my ill-formed and partly uninformed opinions into everything, with an instinctive impulse to recognize and to push other’s buttons. Insisting that I was almost always right in any situation and about any topic, I usually doubted myself only upon reflection, in the stillness of isolated moments when I was alone with myself in the dark of my bunk or just before the dawn. I carried around a romantic view of myself, an exalted view of my potential for success in the world and of the figure I cut in the world around me. At the same time, like a troublesome Cyrano, I squirmed with a sensitivity to imagined insults that revealed an alternative opinion of myself. These contradictory traits made me a very difficult character to be around, let alone to befriend.

As I was just telling a friend (November, 2003) who owns the coffeehouse where I drink espresso and write this book, “I’ve always been shellfish. When I’m not cowering in the shell of myself, I’m out there in the world like a fish out of water, making a naked fool of myself.”

Whitey’s and my friendship was probably based on good communication. I remember an off season evening, sitting on one of the docks in town, smoking and philosophizing with Whitey, as only ambitious young men with full lives ahead of them can do. I don’t recall any specific thing we shared, but we were kindred spirits, talking while our cigarettes glowed in the dark, talking about dreams, ambitions, the stars, memories and the Moon. I shared about my belief we’d go to the Moon—that kind of sharing. I think I told him about my lonely days at my grandmother’s house as a child, about having to fight my way into every school I ever attended, and he reflected back equal glimpses of his vulnerable history. I don’t know about him, but I probably shared more feelings with him than with any male animal to that time. I was Whitey’s friend as much as I was capable of being anybody’s friend in those days.

Moments like that evening of boozy reminiscences and shooting pool built our friendship. Plus, we shared a strange and remarkable moment in my life like no other I’d had before. We were drinking one winter evening at the base geedonk. We weren’t drunk but just at that level of pleasant daze when the world and all its creature seem as friendly as cubs. Whitey, me and another guy went to the recreation room to shoot some pool. The oil stove was out and we couldn’t get it lit. We were cold. Eventually, we shoved torn out pages of wadded up magazines and newspapers into the stove and lit them. The mess in the belly of the oil stove gave off a lot of smoke.

Soon, the smoke collected in the round ceiling of the quonset, and it descended lower and lower as we shot pool. We got to joking about levels of visibility and about blind shots through the smoke as we bent ever lower to the green felt surface to shoot under the smoke. Then, for the first time in my memory, the situation grew so perilous (we worried about getting caught) and the jokes so hilarious that I experienced my first ever belly laugh. Side splitting laughter, helpless laughter, real laughter. We three dropped to the floor or onto couches, and we couldn’t shoot another stick of pool or get our words out for laughter convulsing our guts. It was my first time to laugh like that and so memorably that I always knew from that moment on what real laughter felt like, as compared to false laughter. It surprises me that I was already 20 years old that night and, as far as I new, I had never experienced laugher, really and truly, until that moment.

When we could take the eye burning smoke no longer, we burst through the door out into the cold air and vibrant star shine, still laughing and happy. Splitting up, we went to our different quonsets, and I slept wonderfully deep and woke next morning without a hangover.

Describing all that Navy drinking and partying and driving around in the boonies with Nantucket people makes me “church key” conscious. Now that’s a small historical item many younger Americans may not remember. In those days of steel cans and tall, tightly capped bottles, a man (or woman) needed to carry around a beer can/bottle opener when on party rounds. Most guys who drove kept a couple in the trunk, on the floor or in the glove compartment. Some men carried one around on their key chains. It was the paraphernalia of booze heads. Without a church key, you couldn’t get to the juice. One end of a church key would hook under the steel rim to puncture a triangle in the top of a beer can. The other end would leverage up the edge of a cap to flip it off the bottle. Of course, the sharp edge of the table under the cap, with a stiff heel of hand whack could dislodge a cap too, but for the cap, you had to have a church key—all right, you could use a knife point to pry with or a screwdriver too.

Fog was thick some nights in town and fog blankets sound too. Fog rose with fall and spring darkness so that foggy nights are associated with tourist free Nantucket times, like a blessing on the island sand, silently mysterious, and so lonely those nights I walked through the fog, a pint on my hip, brooding my way to a Kerouac future. Fog, “on little cat’s feet”... fog, literally and metaphorically in a fog as my fate began to descend on me through the triangle and through the circle.

That fall of 1957 I finally broke up with Sue for good and all. I was running around with Sally and, one weekend, I was drunk the whole weekend and spent it out at a summer cottage, trying to figure out how to get into the pants of yet another young woman. As usual, unsuccessful with any woman other than a whore, sexually unsophisticated, I went bust. But my intentions were always good, that is, dishonorable.

Women of the Fifties seemed to choose the Type-A male every time over the dreamy philosophical muse I was beginning to sense I represented. My philandering was so obvious to me I had to admit to myself that Sue was no longer in my thoughts. I knew I needed to end it, specially if I continued to be so pussy-conscious for the rest of my tour. I went into a nearly empty, oak paneled bar on a side street in Nantucket town and lined up six shots of Seagram 7 and drank them down one after the other, chasing with beer. Warmed and fortified with the booze buzz, I dropped the required amount of quarters in the pay phone hung on the wall in the oak paneled hallway outside the bathrooms. In severe pain and uncertainty, I manfully told Sue I just wasn’t the faithful type. She cried and my pain crackled higher on fuels of guilt, but I made the break. Soon the booze, spreading through my system, soothed everything into a pleasant buzz.

That winter I flew home for Xmas and met my future wife. My old buddy, Bob, my high school car guy, set me up with his girlfriend’s girlfriend for a blind date. Only, it wasn’t so blind. We arranged to meet at her Mom’s rented house first so that we’d both feel okay about a date for the formal Snowball dance which was a city wide, high school senior dance. I think Bob’s girlfriend was a high school senior. Bev., Bob and I were all 20 and his girlfriend was 18 or 19, I think. I think that’s how all of this fell together.

Let me tell you, Bev. was a knockout, a looker, much superior to most of the women available to me up to that time. For dress up occasions, she wore this beautiful black sheathe, a dress that stopped a few inches above her knees and accentuated her hip bones. I realize, only now, as I write this, what it was about that dress which was so sexy—the hip bones. Her proportions were almost perfect for that day and age. I want to say 34-22-33? She wore, and continues to this day (2003) to wear her hair in what was then a fashionable beehive hairdo. I was later to learn that she had taken ballet and modeling lessons and knew how to walk gracefully and to stand, posed charmingly, and to move in the dance with grace. She no longer pursued ballet as her toes couldn’t take the strain. She told me painful stories about bleeding toes that wouldn’t heal. She was, at the time, a secretary working for the National Cash Register Company.

I was bowled over. Bev. reminded me of the blond North Miami Beach model I had that one date with. All my ego was afire with the thought, “This beautiful woman could love me?” Of course, I was leaping far ahead of ourselves. We were only going on a date, and I already had us married. All my sexual and movie fantasies came alive in dark-haired Beverly. Her looks, her artistic and modeling history fitted my fantasies about myself and my future. As usual, I can’t say that I was aware of what attracted me to her until later. And even above and beyond those more superficial attractions were the psychological attractions that I didn’t learn about until my third divorce forced me to finally do something about the mental/emotional forces that had been driving me almost since birth.

So Bob, his girl and I picked up Beverly the night of the Snowball Dance. I had my handy hip flask now in my jacket pocket. I was buzzing when we picked her up and I got continually more smashed as the dance wore on. I was real cool. I was smooth and funny and charming and dangerous. Booze doubled my fire and ice. My drinking had to be attractive to Beverly too. All the unconscious motivations were activated on both our parts. Her father was an alcoholic who was known to knock around his wives and to slug his son when he was in his cups. Later, I witnessed both. Whether or not he molested his two daughters, I don’t know. My history with love would suggest that he did, but I was naive at the time and those kinds of thoughts were far from my awareness.

After the dance, we may or may not have gone out to get a bite to eat. My final memory of that date was Beverly running from the car, after freeing herself from my attempts to smooch her in the back seat of Bob’s car.

“I’m not that kind of girl,” was her exact cliché response to my awkward attempts to take her in my arms. As we backed out of her drive, embarrassed, I laughed and let her go. I told Bob and his girlfriend that I guessed that was the end of that.

I continued to be active in sports on Nantucket. My first fall on the island, our Navfac decided to challenge a pickup team of ex-Nantucket High footballers to a game on their field. I believe charity of some sort was part of the deal. From somewhere, we sailors borrowed shoulder pads and helmets. I played defensive and offensive end. I played about half a game, I think. I was in and out a lot. We lost the game I’m pretty sure because our opponents had a history of playing together and could patch together more coordinated plays than our team could.

My big memory in this game was totally personal. On a kickoff reception, I headed down field to block. For some silly reason (the same sort of reason that made me turn back in that fight against four men) I picked out one of the largest behemoths lumbering toward us and set myself the goal of bringing him down. I knew nothing about serious blocking and tackling. I threw myself low into his legs, below the knees, I think, and I accomplished my goal. He toppled like a chain sawed tree, but the only problem was that he fell on me, all 250 plus pounds onto my 155 pound body and back. I think I felt a knee go into my back between the shoulder blades while my chin dug a trench into the muddy turf (it was rainy and overcast). Slow getting up, I took myself out of the game. That’s all I remember about that game.

Basketball was more to my taste. My game was improving. On the Operations team, I think I averaged 11 points a game. My highest score was 17 points. I usually played most of every game. I could rebound pretty well too. At 5”9” tall, I was a forward believe it or not. Of course, the whole world was shorter when I was a youth. My legs were strong from having been in track in high school and the fast break regime down in the warm Caribbean. Our team did pretty well in Intramural play. First or second... well, maybe, third.

The officers fielded a team too, and our games with them were fun and tumble. Several of their men had played junior college ball. The base CO was a tall mustang (came up through the ranks into the officer corps), and he played center for them. I think they beat the Operations team both our games. One time, the officer guarding me, grabbed my gym trunks by their elastic waistband, and I came out of them as I tried to leap. These were his college tricks, none of which I knew anything about. My growing resentment of authority came out in these games against the officers. I wanted to beat them bad. They had one snot of a Lieutenant JG (junior grade) who had certainly played college ball. Blond, regulation buzz cut, he scored in the 20s almost every game. He played some serious, to win, basketball. You could read the intensity in his face.

Anyhow, I got into him pretty good one game. I usually defended him when Operations played the Officers. This particular game, we were alone at one end of the court. He was bringing the ball up, and all the rest of the men were heading down court when I knocked the ball loose. We fell to the court in a scramble and were lying on our backs side by side. I lay between him and the ball. I saw a man from my team coming up court ahead of everyone else. He’d get to the ball first if I could maintain the situation my man and I were in, so, pretending to get up, I put my hand on the floor between his knees and locked his right knee against my left side. He tried to roll free, but I held him fast and my man got the ball. I thought my maneuver was just the same kind of hijinks that the basketball shorts grabbing JG had given me earlier in the game, no more and no less, but my JG went lunatic on me!

When I released his knee to get up, he rolled up on top of me, straddled me and, with hatred in his eyes, gripped my throat with his hands as if to choke me, but he never applied any pressure. To my left, I saw officers and men running up, shouting, to break it up. That’s when I got brilliant. I seized his wrists in my hands and began to make loud gurgling sounds, thrashing my legs and throwing my head from side to side, as if I were being choked to within an inch of my life. I glanced smirking into his shocked eyes as he tried to pull free and found himself locked into a choking position. I writhed and gurgled until the Captain pulled his junior officer from my body and read him the riot act.

Then, the officer had the nerve to throw me out of Intramural basketball play. I couldn’t imagine how he let himself look so stupid and wrongheaded as to do that. Loud protests arose; I mean, after all, who choked whom? My suspension lasted a week till forces from above, I think, forced him let me play. I went on to play for the all-star team against the Nantucket High School basketball graduates.