Maturity Before And After The Navy

I hate to sound like I'm toot'n my own horn here, but I've picked up a small following over the past couple a years writing some of these ol' salty tales of a Navy no one recognizes anymore!! An ol' shipmate told me the other day,

"Dennis, you were a great LPO, but you must've been a lousy Chief cause you enjoyed yourself way too much... and Chiefs aren't allowed to enjoy themselves!"

I gotta tell you that pissed me right the hell off without a second thought... but then I contemplated about what he said and one thing rang pretty damn clear. As a Chief... everybody expects you to be so gaudamned serious and stoic look'n all the damned time!  To be honest, I hated that shit!!!  I've always been the kinda guy to look at the lighter side of things and make the best of a situation. And when it came to cutt'n up and goof'n off, I was a true master... Try to one-up the magnificent one and nine times out of ten I'd handed you back your silly ass on a silver platter.  Cause you see, there was an art to skylark'n and good ol' fashion ass grabb'n!  It was similar to lion taming... 'Drop your whip and the animals ate you!!'

But I'm pretty damned sure my shenanigans started well before my days in the Navy!! As my good friend Allie Dickson Wright would have you believing,  I was runn'n around with my pants down about 80% of the time!! Not sure how accurate that is, but If God and St. Peter sat down and picked out all the best stupid stuff we did, I'd probably be digg'n ditches in heaven... just say'n!

Be it wiggl'n my butt across the Food World parking lot during the midnight hours at seventeen years old or mooning the cops while cruis'n down Havendale Boulevard (Still don't know how we got outta that ticket, but that's another story).... we were always gett'n ourselves in some type of unforgettable mayhem!

I still remember our DECA outing at Daytona Beach in November 86' when Brian Johnson and I decided to take a late night dip in the hotel pool! For some reason at this point in time I had lost my guadamned mind and all rules of common decency were throne out the window... As I went out into the night with my Brut 33 bikini underwear and took the plunge!! Little did I know that when I came outta the water my tan colored underpants were see through and the whole guadamned Florida State High School DECA faculty were in the auditorium adjacent to the pool watching the whole fiasco!!!

At this point I'm pretty sure I was beyond redemption and salvation when it came to the "I don't believe that little son-of-a-bitch actually did that" kinda tribulation. at that moment I figured when I die I'd surely get the express bus to Hell. This was when our good ol' teach' Mr. Bruner dropped the anvil on my scrawny little ass. One minute we were having the time of our lives with a couple of young gals we met and the next ol' Bruner was actually considering the options for ending our earthly existence.

"You sorry sons-a-bitches could'a got our whole damned school disqualified from every state sanctioned event for the rest of the gaudamned century with your little shithead prank!"

I thought he was about to have a cardiac arrest after that little session broke out. We were restricted to our rooms for the rest of the night and never heard of it again!  But I gotta say, it was that kind of silly nonsense that made growing up in sunny Florida a hell-of-a lot of fun. Sounds stupid now, but at the time it was a blast. It provided memories governed by party, beer, girls, dames, and gals... dictated by the sheer madness of high school level gynecology.  When your testosterone is raging at 110% and your a guadamned walking hard-on... well noth'n else really matters now... does it.

So yeah, that kinda of prank pulling crazy ass shenanigan carried right on perfectly into the Navy life.  It could'a been ty'n up Doris in a nasty wrestling move in the middle of berthing with a full nelson, or a dirty sanchez.... hell who remembers, lock'n Heupal up into the overhead life preserver KPOK lockers, then gett'n caught draw'n dirty pictures of Goffinet and his sheep excursions in Combat while feeding the frenzy of the DRT snake during ship tours. Then  giving the full body naked pose in the middle of berthing while start'n a gaudamned flesh shredding towel fight... I think I still have scars on my backside... to doing the 'When Harry met Sally' orgasm gig during heads-n-beds while the XO walked in to enjoy the theatrics, or I'm sure several of them silly crackerjacks can remember drunk nights in "The House" taking pictures of cat brains.... hell we could go on and on and on an on!!!!

Even as a Chief I remember sending a juicy sexual love letter to the whole Chief's Mess while on the Momsen through Heath Ryan's e'mail account... somehow one of them e'mails went to some ol' lady in the shipyard and she threatened to call the Captain if he pulled another one of them love letters... something about slowly stroking fingertips down the backside of @#%!! while gradually pulling your pants down, kinda thing.... Yeah, Heath never let me live that one down!!

Hell, these were some of the best times of our short lives and we were just too busy spreading our good will as American Ambassadors to every ugly mug and pretty dame in every Seaport around the World!! Some might say,

"Dennis, are you ever gonna mature and grow up?"

Well, I saw one of them motivational postures the other day about maturity with an ol' grandpa in the background on his knees try'n to figure out why the gaudamned vacuum cleaner won't work... in the forefront of the poster is another old grandpa lay'n on the floor belly laugh'n with the chord in his hand that he kept pull'n out of the wall.... pranks, pranks, pranks!!! And I knew without a doubt at eighty or ninety years old, that's me all the way to the guadamned grave!!! If I gotta be all serious and stoic all the time to be mature then I sure the hell don't want nothing to do with it!!!

Rather it was hump'n someones leg like a sex starved hound dog or some other guadamned prank, I was always at the forefront... and if I wasn't the one pull'n your leg then I was show'n someone else how it was done!!!