CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Puerto Rico

My leave felt like the previous two felt. Restless and uneasy, I wanted to be gone almost as soon as I plunked my gray/green sea bag down on the gleaming hardwood floor in my old bedroom on Kenview Avenue which I still shared with my little brother. In my folk’s two bedroom home, no other option, except those basement, attic ones, existed.

I spent time with Sue; we necked and I panted, and I suffered hard ons endlessly, but I still didn’t know how to insert that hard drive into Sue’s vagina. We were both too shy and too afraid. I still didn’t know how to discuss the situation with her. It was those times, you know, when nothing of any importance was open to discussion? All our necking was silent, hot, wet groping uncomprehending desperation. My continual, macho bravado covered superficiality and fear. When the time came, I skedaddled gratefully out of town, dreaming my exotic dreams of palm trees and the far away places ahead of me, the 18 year old super spy, hero of heroes and man among men, the Joe Buck who hoped he might be John Wayne.

I flew from Dayton in a commercial, prop driven plane, tended by the shapely young stewardesses of those times, to the airport at Orlando, Florida where ground transport waited to take me to Patrick Air Force Base. From there, I would catch military air transport to Ramey Air Force Base on Puerto Rico a few days later.

Like on the Coast Guard cutter, we ate well on those two Air Force bases. Everyone agreed the ground pounders ate the worst of all services, but that was just rumor, the kind of rumors all the services are rife with. Theoretically, the ranking of service chow went Coast Guard first, Air Force second, Navy third, Army and Marines equally sucking hind tit, as the saying goes. But, since I never ate an Army or Marine meal, how would I really know? All that ranking of chow flows from the same spirit of interservice rivalry as every other problem. From what I can tell, the rivalry hasn’t changed much in all these years. “Dick bumping” flows out of the immaturity of males who never seem to grow beyond the kids they were at 12 years old when rivalry and competition first flourish in the male animal (just what evolution would predict for males coming into puberty). And the services are full of young males.

Even many of the older military boys don’t mature very much. Think of General Boykin, and his “my God is bigger than your God” pontifications. Emotionally, he’s stunted; he’s not grown out of elementary school when that kind of “my dad can beat up your dad” stuff thrives. I think many fundamentalist religious types, no matter what religion, suffer from stunted emotional growth. That’s why they’re drawn to hierarchical, authoritarian, religious structures where they feel safe and don’t have to exercise the freedom of thought that undergirds existentialism, the philosophy which frightens at first but, later, frees the mind of all sorts of religious cobwebs. Anyhow....

I spent a day or two in Air Force barracks at Patrick AFB where they had rooms to sleep in rather than racks in open spaces as we had in boot camp and Key West. The damn Air Force was years ahead of the Navy, but, thinking about it, I see that the Navy just doesn’t have the space aboard destroyers and smaller vessels to give each crew member separate quarters. Crews in smaller ships have to sleep in cramped spaces where rooms would be hard to carve out. Think of submarines, for one. Of course, I don’t know the modern Navy and what goes down now for sleeping quarters. Nuclear subs are vaster and roomier than diesel submarines, but I don’t think destroyers have changed much. Aircraft carriers are a different story altogether.

It was at the theater on Patrick, I saw “Picnic” with Kim Novak, William Holden and Roz Russell. I loved its theme song, “Moonglow”, for many months after I saw it. “Picnic”s a solid movie that revealed many American psychological traits just like “Rebel Without A Cause” did. Dissatisfaction with small town, middle-class life is right there in the heart of that flick. Of course I identified with the working class drifter Bill Holden played. What I didn’t know at the time is that a guy like that drifter might have a tendency, in real life, to drink too much and to beat up women when his insecurities were activated, but many women of those times, born into deadly boring middle-class American neighborhoods, were attracted to that sort of mysterious loner. Look at the naive and vulnerable middle-class and religious chicks that Charles Manson attracted to his cult only a few years later.

There’s a scene in “Picnic”, like the one with MacMurray in “Caine Mutiny”, which I haven’t forgotten. It’s when Holden’s character is shamed by his jealous friend and made to feel really small. That moment was so real that it penetrated me to be remembered to this day. How often I may have felt that myself without recognizing it I don’t know, but I do know that things in memory which stuck with me are there for a reason. Things forgotten are things not too important. Things squirreled away in memory are remembered for a reason. Also the moment when schoolmarm Russell tears Holden’s shirt had a strong impact on me.

Except for “Picnic”, I recall little of my day or two on Patrick. I was aware I was near where rockets lifted up at Cape Canaveral and aware of vast concrete spaces around me that felt strangely modern to my senses, but those rocket launching pads were north of Patrick and, probably, not within my range of vision, so most of my imagination was only imagination. One or two mornings after arriving at Patrick, I reported to a hanger to see if space was available to fly out on military transport. It was, and off I flew in a cargo plane to Ramey Air Force Base in Puerto Rico where gambling and prostitution were legal and my imagination soared to new heights. I felt my body truly entering the intrigue and realm of Bogart Rick’s nightclub in “Casablanca”. Though not Casablanca’s imaginary Morocco, Puerto Rico offered gambling, booze, broads!

I spent several days at Ramey too and, there, experienced for the first time, how the mighty American dollar could buy luxury in foreign lands. For some pittance in dollars per month, I could put my shiny black shoes outside my room door at night, and unseen Puerto Ricans, working through the wee hours, spit-shined them and returned them in the morning to the identical spot outside my door equal to any inspection. Better than a mother! They cleaned our rooms for us and vacuumed hallways, and they washed our dirty skivvies too (underwear here equals laundry).

Just behind the barracks in a shack outside the security fence, a bar operated, and I bought bottles of iced Corona beer through that fence. I found myself thinking about Britain and its world wide empire upon which the sun never set as I enjoyed these American amenities in a postwar American world. Of course, I saw nothing wrong with the situation at the time. I just marveled in them and took pride in the growing might of post war America, the savior of the world!

Ramey was a heaven I only experienced for a couple of days. A slot was almost immediately readied for me on the naval station in San Juan, capital city of Puerto Rico and home of the huge naval facility for the Tenth Naval District. Surface transport moved me through green tunnels on roads from Ramey to the naval facility in San Juan.

Soon, I was billeted in the heart of the naval facility, in a huge, echoing concrete, two story barracks of many wings connected by screened corridors, and standing a regular watch along with my comrades waiting to fly on to Antigua. I stood in one of those connecting passageways one day, protected by the projecting barrack wings on either side of me, to watch my first hurricane, its boiling clouds above me, smelling the ozone in the air and feeling the electric cool excitement of a mighty storm. The hurricane eye passed right over us, so I experienced the calm of the eye and the reverse of the winds as the other side swept by. I recall, but not with certainty, winds of either 98 or 105 miles per hour. The storm killed natives in the hinterlands of Puerto Rico and on the coast, but safe in the lee of my concrete barracks, I enjoyed myself, watching garbage cans sail past and trees bend and split and branch arms whip in a crazy signalman’s semaphore. Some branches snapped and flew past and rain came down in sheets. My Navy travel paid off that day, to be in Puerto Rico in the eye of the storm.

Part of our watch duty was to plot the movement of all the commercial and military traffic on the Atlantic Ocean. We’d plot the tracks of ships as they crisscrossed the Atlantic sailing from port to port. I recall specially ships registered under Japanese names. Their names ended with “Maru”, such as the Igami Maru or the Kashiga Maru. They still stand out in my mind.

Poker games were a regular part of life in the barracks, but I could never stand the sight of greenbacks on those military blankets. Made me nervous. I just couldn’t play for large sums. On a Seaman Deuce's pay, the risk of ending up with nothing was too much for my nerve, or lack of it. For some reason, I couldn’t imagine winning and coming away with large sums. Most of my life I’ve felt poor and in need of money. Again, I see in those details, in retrospect, a loser’s mentality rather than a winner’s.

Finally, in Puerto Rico, I lost my virginity, a small victory I later turned into self torture. Some of the guys waiting to go to Antigua, not Oceanographers, found out that Hoff and I were virgins and planned an outing to Old San Juan where most of the prostitutes could be found to remedy the situation. The leader of the deflowering party was a beefy red head who had once had a try out in professional baseball as a catcher. “Red” and company took Hoff and me to a crowded bar that prostitutes frequented.

In fact, most prostitutes operated out of the bars in Old San Juan. They all worked for a syndicate that controlled prostitution there. The prostitutes were supposedly clean because Navy doctors inspected the girls regularly for STDs. When STDs appeared in a bar, the Navy closed it down until the infection cleared up. The only problem was that the syndicate would just move the diseased prostitute to another bar so that the bar with the outbreak would soon seem clear.

Most prostitutes forced sailors to wear condoms. If infections showed up, it was probably because of their boyfriend sailors who wanted sex without condoms. Prostitutes kept boyfriends they favored and sometimes fought over their men. I saw a knife pulled one night in a bar as two screeching women fought over a sailor. I believed the scuttlebutt that these girls with steady American boyfriends hoped to get to America. They started an affair with a naive sailor with marriage in mind and a free pass to America. On the sailor’s part, they’d lead one of the prostitutes on, and when their hitch was up, they’d leave for America without telling the girl. It’s an old story that never changes. Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq too, I’m sure.

This kind of information was slowly dampening my naive romantic view of the world. Underneath everything, I was an idealistic romantic who wanted a better world for every Nobody like myself. Horny young men populate all military organizations. In the ancient past, they just raped and plundered their conquests. Less professional armies still operate like that, don’t they? Nowadays, modern warriors with money attract poor natives into prostitution wherever they go.

I later got to know a prostitute named Blinky in a conversational way. My relationship with Blinky was modeled on the kindness I thought some Humphrey Bogart character might show to a favorite prostitute. I know I was aware of that very thought in regards to this girl prostitute. She had a facial tick that forced her to blink more frequently than most of us. Not unattractive at all. I never had sex with Blinky, but I did buy her an occasional drink and got to talk to her. She told me about her childhood poverty in her village, another old story, and of the money she was earning that she believed would let her retire eventually. She had a kid in a home up in the hills which the syndicate was taking care of for a modest fee.

My observations of the street life in Old San Juan told me a different story about retirement for prostitutes. Women who worked the streets on seedy corners were older and unattractive, fat. It showed me that the syndicate used these women until they were no longer attractive, then forced them out of the clubs where most of the best business was transacted and onto the streets. Anyhow... back to the matter at hand....

Hoff was the leadoff batter. Red and the guys with us propositioned a girl for Hoff and up he went. There was a doorway and stairway that led upstairs where the girls lived and where their cribs were. We all continued drinking. After awhile, Hoff came down with his prostitute. She waltzed into the bar and proclaimed in a loud voice that she had just deflowered a virgin. The bar broke out in laughter and cheers. For some reason that didn’t sit too well with me.

I determined to get my own prostitute and hide my secret from the bar patrons. A dark-haired prostitute (which woman wasn’t dark-haired among those Latin harlots?) was sitting alone at the bar, so I gathered courage, sped across the room and asked her if I could buy her a drink. Smooth, straight out of all my movie experience. We got drinks (hers probably watered or nonalcoholic) and went to a nearby table. After a couple of sips of my drink (I was terribly excited and full of nervousness), I just blurted out, “Look, I’m new at this. How much?”

“Twenty dolla, short time. Fifty dolla, long time,” she said.

That was a lot of money to me, a Seaman Deuce, but I had the sum in my pockets and wanted to get this done while I had the courage.

“Okay. Let’s go.”

I followed her to the stairs and up to a small landing where a man waited to collect the five dollar price for renting the room. I had that sum too, but I feared I’d soon be broke. Then I had to buy a condom for a dollar at the top of the stairs.

We entered through a curtain into a small, dark room painted red and dark green, I think, with a chest of drawers against one wall and religious reliquaries on top of it and a jewelry box and a brush and comb, a mirror above it, a window in another wall, and a closet in the third. I recall it as sort of jungle like and colorful in a subdued sort of way. You would think I could tell you more about this woman I was about to fuck, but I can’t. She was short, dark, with medium length hair, not particularly warm. I don’t even recall what kind of figure she had, the shape of her butt, the size of her waist, the turn of her calf. She was petite. I can say that much with certainty.

We stripped rapidly down to nakedness. She draped her clothing neatly on a chair while I hung mine on a handy hook. Of course she had on my stepmother’s black garter belt, and she struck the pose I was so familiar with to unhook the clasps at the top of her hose. She sat on the edge of her bed to roll the hose down her legs to remove them. We lay down and kissed. When she took my cock in her hand, it was already at the alert. Her hand and skin were very cool. That’s my memory of prostitutes, how cool their skin is, and how they smell sweetly of powder and perfume. Moaning and desperate, I entered her and shot my wad all in the same motion. Premature ejaculation, I didn’t know its name, but I was embarrassed.

“I’m sorry. This’s my first time,” I blurted out an explanation.

“Aha’?” she said.

“My first time. It’s my first time.”

“You first time?” she laughed. She became very playful with me, giggling. “You cherry, mon.”

I slapped her stepmother butt as she stood to look at herself in the mirror and then to get dressed. As she dabbed more perfume on her neck, she purposely doused some on me, seeming very happy about having first sex with the American sailor.

Down the stairs we went, twenty minutes later, tops, and from the bottom of the stairs, my little whore danced into the bar, shouting, “I gotta cherry! I gotta cherry!”

Applause and laughter from the patrons and whores, and embarrassment for me. My plan not to expose myself had been ruined by my own mouth. My shame at coming so quickly translated into my shame about having been a virgin until I was 19 years old, but I was in love. I loved her right away. In those days, in those American times, if you fucked me, then I imagined I was in love with you, prostitute or shop girl.

But love or not for that woman, I wanted to experience more whores. The very thought of all those women available to me, all those lips and cunts and shapes and sizes, those exotic dark skins, the dark rooms, climbing exotic stairs, the exotic bars’ decor, the danger of guards at the tops of the stairs, literally drove me wild. Unfortunately, I was too poor to afford all these women and to drink too. On my pay, I barely had enough to buy a drink, let alone, buy twenty dollar hookers, but I sure was tantalized by the nearness of all that flesh, and all of it available to me with little chance of rejection. That’s a big consideration for a boy with a deep fear of abandonment and rejection—prostitutes can’t turn you down. Or so I thought.

The way I tortured myself with this encounter with prostitution was strange and, I believe, presaged many troubles to come later. Within a few days of losing my cherry, I recall feeling horribly guilty one night. I couldn’t sit still and paced the evening barracks quiet. I couldn’t understand what was going on with me. Here I was, the perfect Bogart character or Marine before combat sort of guy, living and doing as they did, but I hated myself. The barracks seemed dirty and ugly and lonely. My shame connected to Sue, and while I tried to do my laundry, I wrote a letter to her. I told her she ought to leave me, to have nothing more to do with me. I told her I was no good, that I was a guy who frequented prostitutes, that I was foul and evil. You can see why I related to James Dean’s character in “East of Eden”. He felt he was no good also, just like me. I didn’t make the connection until many years later with that movie and how it related to my life.

Poor Sue. My guilt-ridden letter frightened her so much she took it to my stepmother to talk about it; in tears. She couldn’t recognize her poor, little Mister Nobody in it. The next day, I felt better, but my letter was launched and would bomb her sweet little Catholic heart when it landed in her letter box. But, crazy as it might seem now, we never talked about the letter when I got home on leave the next time. It was water under the bridge. The silent Fifties! They sure sucked.

I was to return to Puerto Rico two more times while I was stationed on Antigua, as I said earlier, to play with the Antigua softball and basketball teams in Tenth Naval District Tournaments. I got more experience with prostitutes and discovered more things about myself and them. The two trips and the prostitutes and the original posting to San Juan are all mixed up, so I might as well just lump the whores together all in a pile in this chapter.

On both my returns to San Juan from Antigua, I experienced rejection from prostitutes. Of course, my first time back to San Juan, for the basketball tournament, I went straight to the bar where the prostitute worked who broke my cherry. I’d only been able to buy her sex one more time that first stay in Puerto Rico. I ran out of money. She was all dressed up, and her hair was piled atop her hair. She was waiting for her special man, but I insisted that she go upstairs with me. She acted like she didn’t even know me, and, given the nature of her work, she probably didn’t. I believe she couldn’t turn me down, so she fumed at me, was short and unfriendly, and when she lay down, she put her head over the edge of the bed and commanded, “Don’ mess my hair!” I was hurt and that was the end of my seeking her out, but we fucked and it was like fucking a blowup doll.

Another time, in a small bar near the gate to the naval facility, I was horny and lonely, and I got a yen for this prostitute who was drinking there, but she didn’t work there. I was trying to get her to have sex with me, and kept blocking her path out of the bar as I wheedled away at her resolve. She blew up and began screaming at me till one of the bouncers showed up, and I was suddenly pretty scared and ashamed and left. I was so stupid. She may have been on her own time or, maybe, she had the clap or was on the rag. All I could make out of it was that she was rejecting me. The more she resisted, the more I pressured her. I just was too naive to imagine the possible reasons she wouldn’t fuck me.

In another case, I had a movie moment, a great success in another club, a low-ceilinged place, almost deserted and quiet. My momentary success caused me, for many years, to see clearly two ways of being, the forceful, confident way and the shy, unassertive way. Unfortunately, I couldn’t call my assertiveness up at will so what good was my awareness except to taunt me with its illusiveness? I was mostly, unless tanked up, always too afraid and timid. Anyhow....

I entered the shadowy club and this little dark-skinned Puerto Rican approached me and made herself available, and I immediately wanted her. You have to see the connection between my skinny, olive-skinned Italian stepmother and these dark, thin Latin women, and why my lust would flair up like mad in some of these encounters. I really wanted her, but I only had a few buck over ten dollars, and twenty dollars was the going rate all over town.

We sparred verbally. Finally, I offered ten dollars. She teased, “Who would go with you for ten dollars?”

Putting on my best movie Marine manner, I said, “You would. It’s all I got, and you like me.” I thought I detected that she would have me and kind of liked me. I exuded confidence and charm, and she said, “OK, I go.”

We had to take a cab to get to her place. My couple of dollars leftover were almost used up. She worked from a one story house, it looked like. We passed through a living room full of people, watching TV in the dark, and down a long hall with many small rooms opening off it. When we got into her room, and she removed her clothing, my hard on raged. A lamp with a small shade dangled in the middle of her room and made her skin glow. She was so beautiful, and I told her so, already in love. She seemed delighted, laughed, stripped down to pink panties which stood out against her dark skin. I’m sure I had some fantasy about this woman being my woman, the one I’d take to America with me, the domestic woman who’d fuck me to death, and all the guys would be jealous of my great find.

This encounter was the real stuff, the real movie stuff, the suave man who knew his way around prostitutes, the kind of man prostitutes with hearts of gold loved, a Butch Cassidy, Sundance Kid sort of guy. I know, I know! That movie hadn’t been made yet, but their prostitute adventures feel like I felt in that crib with that beautiful whore.

But again, I came very quickly, not as quick as my first time, but way too fast, and, this time, I had no excuse, and I felt, I think, ashamed. I wasn’t living up to my fancy, to the movie dream. My shame turned into anger with the beautiful whore. I couldn’t find anything to say to her during the cab ride home. I remember the city lights of many colors rushing by the cab windows and wanting to say something but feeling only awkwardness and my swelling anger. She sat as silently beside me as I sat silently beside her. If my memory’s right, she did try to start a conversation, but I was so gruff that she sat without talking the rest of the way back to her club. She got out there, I think, and I took the cab back to the base. I even think I was hypocritical in being angry that my last few dollars was wasted on so dissatisfying an experience.

I was broke the rest of time in San Juan for that tournament. If I’d had hundreds of dollars on the trip, I’d have spent it all on prostitutes and booze. The adventure was just too compelling to turn away from, the lust created by knowing all this was verboten in American culture. Sailors, of course, had the chow hall to eat at, and, so, unlike a hobo on the loose, I could be broke, but still have a roof over my head, warmth, and food in the belly. The Big Momma is always there for the lost child in the Navy.

I should say, in passing, that during my sitting and conversing with Blinky some of those nights, I got to observe more closely the nightlife around me, and I became aware of many older American women who came in with dark, slick-haired Latin lovers. My first encounter with the gigolos.

Another movie moment night, I recall taking a taxi ride, trusting a driver to take four of us sailors out to the boonies where prostitutes were available. For some reason there were no prostitutes available in San Juan. Either it was too late or Sunday. I can’t think why a wide open town like San Juan would close down. I recall thinking in the taxi that we had no idea where we were going or what we might find out there in the hinterlands surrounding San Juan. I was very drunk, but it occurred to me we might be in danger, but I had no power to resist the pull of the adventure.

We ended up in a large, light green building with screened porches and a lot of smaller, green outlying buildings which were the prostitutes’ cribs. The striking thing about this experience was based in movies, because the girls swarmed us. It was a slow night for them. We sailors sat around a table, drinking and talking. The girls sat on our laps and lighted our cigarettes and joked with us. Two girls to every man. I had a voluptuous light-skinned black girl on my lap, with lovely legs and a big booty, and the way she squirmed on my lap made my penis itch to go to work. I felt I was in my element. This was the bar where the marines spent their last night before heading to the Pacific to meet their individual fates. This was the dive where the call girl, Donna Reed, later the quintessential housewife in “Leave It To Beaver”, worked in “From Here To Eternity”. We were the swabbies on the last night of leave before our shipped sailed to the Battle of Midway. The diving, strafing torpedo bombers and Zeros awaited us. Actually, I do believe we only had this last night before we returned to Antigua and that added to the fantasy.

One time, I excused myself to take a whiz and walked in on a whore, sitting on the crapper. Tough guy that I was, I couldn’t get out of there fast enough.

“Excuse me,” I stammered.

“Come here, mon,” she teased. “Don’ be shy.”

But I was already on my way to the next stall. Later, I took my whore out to the green shack and did a little better with stamina that time, but still I was no longevity Lothario. Then I blacked out and don’t recall returning to the base in San Juan.

Prostitutes aside, I remember myself again, as in all my times and places during all these years, mostly as a loner and loser in Puerto Rico, given to solitary walks around the base and trips to see old fortifications at the harbor. No real comradeship comes to mind, but another part of me says I must have had friends. People did go to visit old fortifications with me. I know they did. My quibbling inner voice says, See, this is the falsehood of memory. You can never trust it. You learn this by watching the foibles of others. Why can’t you see it in yourself?

Also based on my inability to remember friendships in detail, I accuse myself of selfishness, of not paying enough attention to friends to even remember our time together at all, let alone accurately. I would love to hear what J.C. or Hoff recalls of our waiting time on Puerto Rico, what they recall of me and our relationships there and on Antigua. I can see Smitty’s, Hoff’s, J.C.’s and a few other faces from that time, but not many. But, then, how many friends does a man have in a lifetime? How many really good friends? I’ve heard it said that a man is lucky to have two or three really true friends in a lifetime. I’m always amazed by men and women who can remember faces or details of moments and whole conversations with ease. Or are they just making things up as they go along? Or do they crib everything from copious notes they took shortly after their daily encounters?

Later, in college, I begin to keep journals. Not religiously, but from time to time, I’d go on kicks and keep journals of lesser or greater detail. I intend to use them as I get into those times. We’ll see if it changes the fullness of my memory very much.

Finally, I can’t help but see some of my sensed isolation as flowing from a narcissism which is not all my fault, which flows from the wounds to my psyche I’ve always had to deal with, wounds that keep me just a little aloof, a little more observing than participating. Saul Bellow’s Dangling Man comes in here, a book that really moved me in my college years. I felt I was that dangling man, just as I felt the role of the protagonist in Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man. Or think of the perspective of the world which a literature major participates in when she reads a story by Kafka or think of sharing Leopold Bloom’s vision, walking around Dublin, trapped in his mind, observing, just as we are trapped in his mind and in our own minds? This aloofness of self is a natural result of extreme literacy, of a life observed in books, so that a literate person develops the habit of always observing life rather than fully immersing himself in it. It’s how reading conditions the mind to operate.

Like all things, my time in Puerto Rico came to an end, though I will make two more return trips to participate in the Tenth Naval District’s softball and basketball tournaments. We lifted off and, after riding till our butts ached on steel, cargo plane, bucket seats and after a landing or two along the way, we arrived in Antigua. I wasn’t kidding earlier when I said we were “dropped” onto Antigua. The approaches to the tiny airfield was surrounded by high hills. Just what you’d expect on an island that was probably built by volcanoes. So the pilot had to bank sharply and skim over the hill tops and drop steeply to bounce into a landing. In that rattletrap cargo plane, one of those workhorse DC-7s, the shaking and jolting of that landing frightened me pretty severely, but we made it. Someone told us as we came in that this particular pilot was noted for his wonderfully abrupt landings and not to worry. But I did worry. It was a hair raising experience.