CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Key West, Florida

Pinochle and screened in porches leap into mind when I think of Fleet Sonar School at Key West, Florida. My first experience with double deck Pinochle was in those Key West barracks. At first, being a purist, I resisted, but once I got hooked, I loved to play double deck when I didn’t have to study, and the Pinochle games were made special by the screened porches of those great barracks at Fleet Sonar School. The barracks were two story, white frame, green trimmed, H-shaped buildings almost like the ones at Great Lakes with speckled maroon, linoleum floors and light green bulkheads (as usual subdued shades of anything and everything), but, at Key West, screen porches, crammed with picnic tables, ran around the perimeter of the barracks. Lush grass and foliage everywhere we looked, great spreading oak trees and palms.

In this barracks, I was billeted on the 2nd deck, starboard side. Since it was almost always warm in Key West, we spent a lot of time out on those porches, reading, studying, talking and playing cards. During a week of one of the coldest winter Florida ever experienced, we did suffer 32 degree temperatures, and there was no heat for the barracks. I was pretty cold. Anyhow... we’d throw one of those beautiful, thick, gray military blankets we each owned over the picnic tables and, in the shade of those porches and tall palms and breezed by breezes, play whole weekend afternoons away with the flick and click of cards. Those blankets were wonderful to play cards on. Just the right amount of slide and you could pick up your tricks easily. Plastic decks were big then, and we had more decks of plastic cards than you could shake a stick at, worn nearly spotless with hours, days, months of steady play. Fresh decks came into circulation at payday when someone felt generous.

The pinochle games were intense and sometimes we played for a penny a point, but most of the time, I think we played for fun. We signaled a lot, an even bid for meld and an odd for power. The number of the even bid would clue in your partner as to how much meld you had. Fifty-six meant somewhere near 60 meld, etcetera. The bidding to name trump was very precise. I have no idea how many of hundreds of games of double deck Pinochle I played. We also played Poker, O Hell and Euchre.

Duty was light for students. We had to keep our own barracks swept up, a little bit of cleaning each day to keep things ship shape, a heavier cleaning every Saturday. We were there to study and learn how to drop depth charges accurately on enemy submarines. I think we were scheduled to be in Fleet Sonar School for six months. We attended class 8 hours a day. We walked down the center of a grass lined street to get to and from our classrooms every day.

Nearer our barracks were the chow hall and ship stores and the geedonk with a beer patio outside for drinking after the main building closed. I had an electrifying experience one night out on that patio. A couple of us had been drinking most of the evening, and the geedonk closed. I needed to take a leak and didn’t want to walk all the way back to the barracks to do it so I stumbled into the shadows by a wall that enclosed the patio and peed off the concrete pad into the shrubbery and flowers. Wow! What a shock shot into my penis and through my chest and into my elbows and forehead. I mean, a real jolt. Felt like my heart stopped. I peed right into a live socket where a bulb was supposed to be. I returned to the table to the laughter of my friends and continued drinking.

A lot of the layout of the base is lost in the dreams of time, but baseball diamonds were on it, tennis courts, a swimming pool. I spent a lot of time at the pool ogling and sometimes flirting with wives and daughters. Along the eastern edge of the base lay the shipyard with tall cranes on tracks for provisioning and unloading naval vessels. That’s where the harbor patrol boats lay at anchor, waiting to take us out for our two weeks of hands-on training at sub hunting. A movie theater serviced the base too, where sailors could watch first run movies for free, if they were willing to take their places behind the officers and their wives and ladies who always took the front rows. I was a front row sitter before I entered the Navy so I particularly disliked watching the bastard officers taking my seats in the theater. I was primed to hate authority and to look for reasons to feed my anger.

Sometimes I went into town to see movies I wanted to see. I clearly recall watching an Elvis movie in Key West and hating it for the reason I earlier stated, but I can’t remember one movie I watched at the base theater.

Movies important to me, released in 1955 when I began my six months in Key West, were “Picnic”, “Blackboard Jungle”, “East of Eden”, “Rebel Without a Cause” and “The Rose Tattoo”. I may have watched any one of those but “Picnic” while I was at Fleet Sonar School. I watched “Picnic” and Roz Russell’s disconcerting portrayal of a sexually frustrated, embittered school marm and drifter William Holden’s torn shirt in a theater on Patrick Air Force Base near Cape Canaveral where we killed some time on our way to San Juan, Puerto Rico and eventually to Antigua in the British West Indies. It’s ironic to me that movies about rebellion and working class men and loner drifters should be pouring into the cultural mix at exactly the time I served in the authoritarian, whale belly of military life. Of course, leading up to those movies of drifting and rebellion and lone men against the mob, even while I was still a teen civilian, were “The Fountainhead” (1949), “Cyrano de Bergerac” (1950), “High Noon” (1952), “Shane” (1953), and “The Wild One” and “On the Waterfront” (both 1954), some of which I’ve mentioned before.

“The Rose Tattoo” was particularly interesting to me because Paramount filmed that movie in Key West just the year before I arrived there. I walked the streets one day, thinking I could find where the movie had been shot. I never discovered the exact location, but I strolled curbless, ancient streets between square, one story, frame houses in that city which reminded me of that hot movie, of plump sexpot Anna Magnani and skinny wild Marisa Pavan. Italian! Italian! O stepmom, threaded through my life!

Interesting too, how my intellectual sophistication trailed far behind my experience. “The Rose Tattoo” fascinated me, just like “East of Eden” had, but not until I entered college did I realize who wrote those works. The movies introduced me to Tennessee Williams and to John Steinbeck long before I knew their work had anything to do with the movies I loved. But, I must say I was aware of and did read Melville’s Moby Dick while I was stationed on Nantucket Island off the coast of Massachusetts. Neither did I have an inkling of Hemingway’s history in Key West when I was there. In those day, I was only interested in stars. After Fellini’s “8 1/2”, I got more interested in directors. Now I can balance stars, writers and directors. Still, with Indies, I think the director’s is the key influence to look for.

Married officers and enlisted men also lived on the base. Across the grass playing fields, their homes beckoned among the oaks like dim memories of my childhood neighborhoods. I could feel very lonely and forlorn, standing near the backstop of one of the baseball diamonds and thinking about a more normal life over there. Several times, I strolled the streets where the married men lived, feeling deep loneliness. It was during those times I imagined I wanted to be home, always forgetting how I wanted to get away in the first place. So the eternal wanderer feels.

School was kind of fun. First we built a superheterodyne radio to teach us the basics of electricity. We used ohmmeters. We learned about volts, ohms, watts and the formulas that figure the ebb and flow of currents. All of which I forget these now 40 years later. We learned Morse Code and had to get up to 12 words a minute in order to pass that course. I liked the rhythm of doing good Morse Code. I could imagine just how it might feel to fly through a coded message with the rhythm of the dots and dashes, but I never got that proficient. I passed my test easily however.

We learned how to chart and plot the movement of ships and planes in the command center of a destroyer. It was neat to walk into the red lit, darkened interior of the command center, filled with the glow of green screens and plotting stations. But most importantly, we learned to distinguish up Doppler from down Doppler, to tell whether a sub was approaching or going away from us. My ears used to be so good. I could listen to classical music and chills would course up and down my spine from the harmonies. Now, with tinnitus, its constant ringing in my ears and the loss of higher frequency sound, I am diminished from my youthful prowess as a sonarman.

During an attack run, the sonarman actually directed the ship into the target, probably like a bombardier guides in a bomber during a bomb run. There you would be, watching your screen and listening to the pinging of your sounding devices echoing off the steel hull of your target, and you’d be issuing course corrections, trying to cross the sub’s path so you could depth charge it. In the earliest days of training, the sub signal, artificially recreated on our screens, would make few attempts to escape, moving in a straight-line course. As our training lengthened, the sub would make evasive maneuvers, from gentle curves to hard rudder combined with engine speed changes. I hate to say it, but my memory is that we missed more often than we succeeded.

The hardest stuff was the electronics repair work. We were supposed to learn how to repair our own equipment, and this was electronics repair, a bit harder than the formulas for resistance and current flows. In fact, one of our final tests was to diagnose and repair the trouble with a purposely disabled piece of sonar equipment. We were split into teams of three men to diagnose the problem. Different teams confronted different problems. I feared, as we entered that test, that we’d fail it. Well... we did a lot better than I thought we would. We found our problem pretty fast, and we passed. Later, in actual service, the ETs fixed all the sonar equipment; ET stands for Electronics Technician and not for the Extraterrestrial.

Speaking of extraterrestrials: during the previous couple of years, I’d been reading with great interest in Life about Dr./Colonel Stapp riding the rocket powered sled in the Arizona desert and was entranced by photos of his face distorted by the wind pulling his mouth open. I read about people circling in centrifuges to test the G force effect on the human animal. Wernher Von Braun was shooting rockets into the sky at the Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama from 1950 to 1970. Also, it seems to me that about this time someone rode a balloon to the edges of the atmosphere and bailed out a mile high. Maybe the parachuting was later, but I found that fascinating too.

These adventures caught my attention, and I became convinced that man would fly to the Moon in my lifetime. I was helped in my imaginative leap by the movie, “Destination Moon” which came out in 1950. During a visit to New York City while visiting the Connecticut folks, I got to see the towering five story rocket ship that advertised the movie on Times Square, but I believe I watched the movie at the Dabel Theater in Dayton before our Connecticut trip that year. Can you imagine what a George Bush would have done with the space race if he’d been president rather than the genius Kennedy? Bush would have bombed the Soviet Union rather than trying to beat it in a race to the Moon. Can you imagine him in the Cuban Missile Crisis? Anyhow....

I remember one day telling a couple of my barracks mates what I thought about Moon travel. Two guys from Kentucky laughed me to shame, but I stuck to my guns, and I wonder if they remember me as much as I remember them and their laughter? Many of my mates, born and educated in the American boonies, thought I was an egghead while I was in the service. I was a member of the Science Fiction Book of the Month Club during my stint, and I read most of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation and Empire series among many others. You might say my mind was in the stars while my body struggled on Earth. Strange that I went from being the loner, potential juvenile delinquent in Mr. Wilson’s eyes to being the egghead outsider in the eyes of many of my fellow sailors. Who I really was I didn’t know, and it was driving me crazy. Remember, these were the days leading into the period when everyone with any education at all would be having “identity crises”.

My record collection at the time might also have set me apart from my comrades. On a little portable player I carried around with me from duty station to duty station, I played a lot of big band and jazz sounds: Glen Miller, Harry James, Tommy Dorsey, Don Cherry, Peggy Lee, Benny Goodman and I had also one or two of Jackie Gleason’s soft mood albums. Was it “Music For Lovers”? My music was my parent’s music for the most part, the music of the wartime movies of “Stage Door Canteen”. I never could get enough of Goodman’s “When The Angels Sing” with Krupa’s drum solo. One beautiful sunny Florida morning, I remember putting on Don Cherry and listening to his voice fill the barracks with “When the sun comes up...,” and for a minute I was in heaven.

I also had a record of the bagpipes of the Scottish Highlands Blackwatch Brigade with which I could achieve great mischief. One time on Nantucket, I came back to base in the wee hours, a tiny bit drunk into the smallish quonset hut we Oceonagraphic Researchers (I’ll explain the rating change later) lived in. The crack of dawn, it was, mates, and for some reason I started to giggle at the thought of holding reveille for my barracks mates with the Blackwatch bagpipes. I thought my practical joke was pretty funny, but not too many of my fellow sailors did. Since I was not much into practical jokes, I thought I’d done pretty well by myself with that one. At least, no one threw a shoe at me.

A sailor on the Key West base had a business going that to this day makes my mouth water. His wife made submarine sandwiches, the likes of which I’ve never tasted since, oily sweet, crammed with salami and pastrami and ham and various cheeses and lettuce and, and and... on french bread. We’d call in orders whenever we felt rich. The gob would bring them to our barracks, and we’d eat like kings of Italy. They were so good.

For several weekends, a couple of guys and myself had a pretty good time up in Miami with some girls they’d met on a flight returning from leave. One of the girls had a boat and the other had access to her parent’s car. We’d crash at one of the girl’s home just north of Miami and then boat and go to movies, and drive around the rest of the time. My first sight of the Miami beach front lit at night was from the convertible back seat of one of those girls. My two mates for these adventures were Smitty and Hoff. Hoff was from Iowa, and he lost his virginity on the same night I did a few months later in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Smitty was an easy going guy with a gold tooth in the front of his mouth who was cursed with seasickness.

My dates rotated. The two girls fixed me up with a different woman every time we three gobs took a Greyhound up to Miami. I imagined I was pretty hot stuff, easily the most attractive of the three. My first date was a teen model who left for college the next weekend. Or maybe she just made that excuse so as not to have to go out with me again. Beautiful. Another date was with a dark haired Jewish girl, an intellectual with clearly the most interesting mind I’d run into to that time. Of course I tried to grope all my dates and did get some good kissing in, but I was still a virgin and just didn’t know how to make anything happen sexually. I pretended to be so worldly wise, but I was still a frustrated dork, juvy, intellectual. I think she was an atheist, or I was pretending to be an atheist, so we discussed deep philosophical ideas as most teens do at one time or another. She told me she thought I was pretty cool but she was looking for a Jewish guy. Anyhow....

We three sailors only went up to Miami two or three times and, then, the deal ended. The last time Smitty, Hoff and I went up to Miami, the shit hit the fan and that was the end of it. Jealousy and misunderstanding got in the way and ruined it for all of us, and I almost drowned because of jealousy. Here’s how that came down.

Smitty’s girl, the girl with the boat, was blond, a little heavy and very earthy, and, it was obvious to me that she liked my earthy qualities over Smitty’s. I could see that right off, the first time up to Miami. We made the kind of eye contact that spoke reams, but I wasn’t about to cut in on a buddy so nothing overt happened. One weekend we were speeding the power boat around in a bay or inlet created by a manmade jetty, and Smitty wanted to drive the boat, but his girl would only let me drive the boat. Smitty got the message hard and clear. When we stopped to swim, Smitty angrily dove in and started to swim his frustration out toward a concrete wall several football fields away. I dove in too, and he challenged me to swim with him. Under the circumstances, I had to keep up appearances in front of the girls and swam with him. I had no doubt I could swim that distance and back.

To our left a small bridge arched over the watery entrance to the inlet. The tide was going out. As we neared the wall, we found ourselves in swift water that was carrying us out to sea very quickly. The outgoing tide was so swift I didn’t think we’d be able to break out of it and make the wall. I expressed my fear to Smitty, but he grunted and said, “Keep swimming.” I definitely heard no sympathy in his tone, so I swam like a son of a bitch until my lungs burned and my arms grew tired. We were only a few yards from the open ocean when we reached the wall and found ground we could walk on along that wall. We knew we had to walk back along the wall against the heavy current before we dared try and swim back, and I was afraid I wouldn’t find the strength to get back. Smitty walked ahead of me. He was much stronger than me and his steps were anger driven.

I stepped on something that burned into the heel of my right foot. Now I was in pain and tired too, but I gamely kept up with Smitty. If he didn’t let me rest, I surely thought I wouldn’t have the strength to swim back to the boat, but that’s when Smitty’s girl came to our rescue. She knew the inlet and the currents and observed our rapid sideways motion as we swam toward the wall. I’d been keeping my eyes on Smitty’s muscular back, but when I looked off to my right, there she was, bringing her boat closer so that our swim back to the boat would be short and quick.

We never went back to Miami. Smitty never spoke openly to me about the situation that I can remember, but he silently seethed for a few weeks, and it was his contact that set up the situation in the first place. Since he no longer wanted to go up to Miami, Hoff and I had no strong motivation to continue. It was harmless fun, no sex and no violence, and sober. Teen stuff, on all sides.


J.C. was a wild, motorcycle riding friend all through my time in sonar training and for a year later on Antigua in the British West Indies. From North Dakota, he’d been run out of town by the sheriff. Join the Navy, leave town or go to prison, they told him. He related crazy tales of bar brawls and an Indian girl he made wild on Spanish fly and gotten pregnant. Rape maybe. He loved another Indian girl but his dad, an Indian hater, forbade the marriage. J.C. told about a serious drunken wreck, sending a car through a barbed wire fence and killing a friend who was riding on the hood, told about raging battles with his rancher dad, even fist fights. He was tall and rangy, Irish and western. J.C. taught me to say in a carny’s voice, “Step right up. Step right up, my friend. Do you feel run down after being hit by a freight train? Does everything go black when you turn out the lights? Well, I’ve got just the thing for you, my friend. Step right up and get your I.M. Nobody’s hot beef injection. Good for coughs, colds, dirty holes, fits farts and freckles....”

Four of us, Smitty was one, a mostly sober dude but funny drunk, J.C., Hoff and I decided to rent a motel room one night to drink and play poker. We bought a deck of cards, poker chips and bottles of booze and rented a motel room in Key West. The card game fell behind the drinking. The spots swam around on cards like little water bugs. I was having my first experience with slow gin and liking it. Yep, I drank for the effect, not for the taste. Might as well drink sweet to get drunk rather than to drink bitter was my thinking on the subject. Forget the macho image. Of course, when I was into bar drinking, into macho, for show drinking, boilermakers were my choice. Depth charge whiskey shot glasses into beer mugs. In Key West, where Fleet Sonar School was king, boilermakers were called depth charges. Whoopee!

One minute, J.C. was opposite me at the poker table; the next he wasn’t. I only looked away a moment and J.C. disappeared.

“Where’d’e’go?” I mumbled to Hoff and Smitty.

“Don’know,” my companions replied. We truly didn’t know.

A hand appeared above the far, glimmering table edge. It brandished an empty glass. “Fill’erup!”

Vomiting began soon after laughing. Standing outside the motel room, hands on knees, I paid my slop-shouldered tribute to demon rum.

Slow gin makes a wonderful red stain down the front of the white jumper of a sailor’s outfit. For some reason, I was now staggering through the streets of Key West alone, heading toward the base and talking to myself. Seems I left the party, and I was seriously worried the marine guarding the gate would throw me in the brig for wearing a filthy uniform. I think J.C. may have tried to talk me out of going back looking as I did. He was a cop shy guy.

Here’s another rumor like the one about “GI parties” in boot camp. We innocent Key West students, new to the Navy, believed that marines hated us and loved to get us in the brig where they’d torture us and beat us up and “I don’t know what all” as Andy Griffin used to say when he performed that standup routine about the rube who’d never seen a football game. Rumors like that could keep newbes in line. For our part, we sang, “Horse shit! It makes the grass grow green. Horse shit! It makes a good marine.” We’d call marines “seagoing bellhops” too. All that between services rivalry bullshit. So I was worried as I stumbled back to base, drunk as a skunk and stained from chin to waist with red vomit. I pictured all those wonderful brawls between marines and army and navy rivalries in all those war movies I’d watched, all that! As I approached the gate, lit with floods, I really felt exposed, but the marine waved me on with a chuckle. Tomorrow’s hangover would be terrific. I learned my lesson about drinking that night. I swore off slow gin.

I went home for Christmas that year. I felt, as usual, out of place there now. My feelings of displacement weren’t helped by coming from warm, breezy semitropical weather to snow and icy cold winds. I shivered as Sue and my family approached the gate to meet me, but I imagined I looked spiffy in my peacoat. I think on the drive home, I said something about mustard and referred to it as “baby shit” which is what we called it in the Navy. “Pass the baby shit,” we’d say. I also let that horrible “fuck” word slip into the conversation. My stepmom, of course, had not heard that word pass my lips since I’d told her the “Johnny Fuckerfaster” story in grade school.

“Excuse me,” I gulped hurriedly.

It reminds me of one of those near slips of vulgarity into home life I’d had earlier, in high school. I’d learned another dirty song from somewhere. Maybe I made it up. To this day, I play with song lyrics to change meanings and make funnys. A poet’s curse, even if I am a Nobody. Anyhow....

One day I was singing this dirty song alternative at the top of my lungs while I was getting some clothes out of the closet to put on after school. “My bonny lies over the ocean; my bonny lies over the sea; my father....” That’s when I heard what I was singing and stopped. The house swelled with silence. I could hear my mother leaning into the air toward my room, her ears perked like a dog’s for the remainder of the line. In my head, I finished the song, “...lies over my mother, and that’s how I came to be.” I could also feel my stepmom’s ears perked up in the front seat of the car as we drove home from the airport that winter day on my return from my duty station in Key West. To the day of her death, she believed the Navy changed me for the worse.


The best weeks of training were the two weeks we went out on harbor patrol craft to practice with live submarines. One day we even went down in a sub to experience the other end of the hunt and chase. The sub experience disappointed. When we boarded we were ordered to go to the aft torpedo room where we crowded into bunks to wait until we reached the practice area. In subs as well as in all ships of the line, a sailor is surrounded by pipes and steel bulkheads. Noises echo and clang, pipes burble, joints creak. I had the feel that all around me, steel condensed with moisture and drip, drop, dripped. That doesn’t necessarily happen, but I had that sense of damp and cold, hard things. Fortunately, I’m not claustrophobic.

Submerging created less tummy sensation than lift oft while flying. After we submerged, we were allowed to hang around in the mess area, and we got to go in small groups to the command station, and we took turns looking through the periscope. Then we observed the crew as they went through the exercises of evading the patrol craft above them and as they released the air bubbles so that depth charge runs could be checked for accuracy.

Each time a patrol craft made a depth charge run on the submerged submarine, the sonarman would fire a five count pattern just as if it were a real depth charge run. Only, of course, we didn’t drop depth charges. At the approximate center of what would be the pattern of charges, the sonarman would say “mark center” and a crewman on the fantail would drop a bucket of dye marker over the rail. At the same time, the submarine, listening in, would release a bubble of air. The patrol craft skipper could see by the proximity of the dye marker to the bubble how closely we’d bracketed the submarine with the depth charge patterns. As in computer simulations at school, the sub would commence with simple straight line runs, and, then, increase the violence of his avoidance maneuvers. This game playing was fun and the challenge intrigued me.

During one of our exercises at sea, a sub got to fire a practice torpedo at us. His torpedo, set deep enough to pass beneath our keel, would have hit us almost amidship and would have broken our little patrol craft in half. We could see the torpedo coming, a bubble wake rising up and turning the sea white in it’s wake. It sizzled like a frying tortoise as it passed beneath us. Boom! I was dead.

My favorite part of these practice patrols, out beyond sight of shore, were the long trips back. More than once I went aft to the fantail and climbed up on the railing and leaned back against the jack staff and rolled with the pitch and roll of the patrol boat through the warm Atlantic currents as our craft flew through the gray waters. The sun set before me, the breezes blew my hair, and it was heavenly.

For our pal, Smitty, the sea trips were a hell on water. He suffered with seasickness the whole two weeks. I had a touch of seasickness my first day out, many of us did, but once we got our sea legs, the nausea disappeared. Nausea on a rolling ship is hell piled on hell. For Smitty, seasickness never ended. That first day, since he wasn’t part of my four man team, I didn’t see much of him. But on our return, I went amidships, just below the pilothouse, and found Smitty surrounded by friends, his face burned red and lying on the deck, looking gray under the burn. Next day, he was peeling skin from head, neck and shoulders and still on his back. He was tough and kept coming out, but he never got over the seasickness. It happens to some people. I don’t know what happened to Smitty in the long run. He was assigned a different duty station than J.C., Hoff and me, but I can’t see him being assigned destroyer duty as sick as he was.

On one of our training days at sea, I got into some serious trouble for not heeding signs. We went out on a Coast Guard Cutter that day. We ate well. The Coast Guard bought their stores daily fresh from civilian establishments at the time. It had a civilian connection different from us swabbies. The cutter we were assigned to didn’t have modern sonar gear, like the patrol boats and like the gear we were learning on at school. It only had sounding gear which meant it didn’t have a scope, like radar, on which you could actually follow a sub’s blip across a screen. You had to make all your course corrections just by following the sound of the sub as your pinging struck its hull and returned to your ears. I think it may have been on that Coast Guard cutter we were “torpedoed” by the sub. Anyhow....

During a morning tour around the ship, while the cutter steamed into position for our exercises, some of us trainees were left alone in the sonar room for a few minutes. I stepped up to the battered equipment, joking at its antiquity and, probably, making fun of the poor Coast Guard cousins of the real Navy. A hand printed sign warned us not to touch the gear, but, ever dismissive and adventurous, I touched and moved a dial on one of the panels. Later I was lounging on deck, waiting for the cutter to get into position for our exercises to start, when the intercom summoned Seaman Recruit Nobody to the sonar room where I received a royal ass chewing from the Petty Officer, First Class Sonarman. He was about as furious a man as I ever faced to that time. For a minute I feared court martial or worse for disobeying his written command. Evidently, he’d spent the entire previous day degaussing and tuning his equipment, wanting to do well on our training exercise that day. Later, after we were “torpedoed”, I felt really bad about fucking up that poor Coast Guard sonarman in his quest to be as good as the Navy. I felt sorry for his poor equipment and about the effort he’d put into making his equipment as good as it could be for the exercise. For all my “bad” ways, I could muster empathetic feelings for whoever I deemed to be playing the underdog role in life’s grand pageant. I projected a lot of myself into others in those days.

I graduated Fleet Sonar School with one of the top three grades in our class. Not too bad for a high school student who graduated about two-thirds of the way down in his class. For that reason, just like at boot camp, J.C. and I and another guy were summoned into a conference and offered “secret work” and six more weeks of schooling if we wanted it. I guess I must have liked Key West pretty much because I quickly told them I wanted to stay on for more schooling, but the truth is that I was intrigued by the idea of “secret work”. My movie past entered in again; thoughts of being a spy and doing secret work influenced me, I’m sure. I know that was my chief motivation to go on to more schooling. Secret work! Yessiree, secret agent Nobody, at your service! My new rating was to be Oceanographic Research and Survey Specialist.

I barely recall the classes which made me into an Oceanographic “you know what”. My grades were good, I passed, and I was assigned my first duty station on Antigua in the British West Indies. My rating was in new technology for the time, and that’s why it was secret. In the past 20 years, I’ve come across news about the kind of work I did, but we were told that we could get in trouble if we ever revealed our work even after it became public. So mum’s the word, mate, and let’s shove off for another leave home before I report to my new duty station, carrying my sea bag over my shoulder.

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.

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.