‘Naïve As A Dofelmire Weiner’

I was digg’n through a box of old stuff from my younger years the other day and found quite a bit of monumental recollection pact away in them ol’ boxes… mostly  from high school and my ol’ Canoe Club days! Some ol’ letters from a girl telling me she was true... loved me more than anything and would wait a million years just to feel my arms around her again... Boy I was dog-gone naïve in those days!!!

It didn't matter, because no nineteen-year-old in his right mind had any business knowing what was good for him… If he did, he’d never get to experience the kind’a shit I did in my day… when I didn’t have a care in the world and felt like I’d live forever with every beat of that young heart!!!

I remember back in Boot Camp not to use stall number four in the Mess Hall during service week cause you’ll catch a case of the crabs off the toilet if you go there… Anybody in their right mind should know that you’d been sanitized, immunized, deloused, scrubbed down and bleached over within the first three gaudamned days in that asylum… but what did we know at nineteen!!!

I keep thinking back in ‘A’ school learning about motors & generators and our instructor introducing himself with a speech about the ol’ days in the Mekong Delta… asked him if he’d ever killed anybody in Vietnam!!! At the time I didn’t realize what an ‘asshole’ question that was… It wasn’t crass or judgemental… just a dumb young fella’ who was a little too damned naïve to know any better…

Then there was the gal I had a few one night flings with down in San Diego… she led me to believe she was pregnant and having an abortion… if I didn’t give her Two-hundred and Fifty dollars she was gonna go to my Commanding Officer… growing up Catholic I spent seventeen years feel’n guilty about that whole abortion debacle… As the years flashed by, I became one of the Chiefs of the fella who set me up with that gal… He told me a story how an ol’ gal friend he used to have would fake ex-boyfriends in believing she was pregnant and needed money for abortions… son-of-a-bitch must’a forgot about me… Oooh, that son-of-a-bitch was Gene Blystone… if anyone wants to know… but he got his in the end… some of you out there know what I mean…

Soooo, it’s not any wonder a young whipper snapper gets to the fleet and they play all sorts of tricks and banter… like the mail buoy watch!!!

You stood there in the ice splitt’n wind in your trusty, worn out ol’ foul weather jacket donned with a weathered raggedy-ass watchcap, overlook’n God's great ocean for that golden buoy one-thousand nautical miles in the middle of nowhere…  

Come on now… who should’nt know any better… but it happens again and again with the BT punch, Bucket O’ Steam, Thousand yards of gig line, or a gallon of relative bearing grease…

But the worst lessons were the ones learned on liberty…

As you know from previous stories… I had my L-o-L-a moment… almost got pummeled in the PI… got suckered outta some beer money now and again…

But noth’n was ever quite like the ‘Doubled Down Dofelmire experience’!!!

We had this young Crackerjack named Dofelmire back on the ol’ Baglady… not many quite as naïve as this fella! He was short and two inches too round for your average Crackerjack Seaman… and smiled all the gaudamned time. Being short & dumpy with a name like Dofelmire to rhyme with Oscar Meyer… he naturally got the shitty end of the nickname scale…

♪♪“OOOh, I wish I were a Dofelmire Weiner… Then everyone would be in love with  me!!!”♪♪

One weekend liberty on the town in San Dog and poor Dofelmire ran into a so called ‘merchant seaman from Yakistan’ who was looking for Hotel San Diego so he could buy a big tittied hooker with the wad of cash he pulled outt’a his pocket!!!

He promised our young protagonist to let him hold on to his wad of cash while he went to the hotel so the young hooker could not steal his money… oh but in kind, the young Dofelmire would have to give him his shiny wrist watch to make sure  he didn’t run off…

About this time myself and a fellow shipmate showed up smell’n something fishy… as we investigated with a bit of good ol’ American Navy force… the so called wad of cash was nothing more than a few bills rolled up on top of a bunch’a bullshit newspaper clippings to look like a real load of mullah!!!

A few weeks went by and young Dofelmire didn’t fare so well on his next incident…

Sometime after liberty went down he headed off the ship to the base laundry connected to the McDonalds/NEX… after two or three hours the young Dofelmire headed back to the ship…

After a night on the town I got back to the boat to find Dofelmire in the Crews Lounge with a ‘Big ol’ Black Eye’…

“What the hell happened to you Dofelweiner???”

“I got pummeled and my clothes got stolen on the way back from doing laundry!”

“You got mugged doing your laundry on base??”

“Yeah, the guy asked for money and when I didn’t have any he punched me in the face and took my laundry!!”

That poor bastard… you know, we gave him a lot of shit as all loving shipmates do… but to get an eye full and your laundry taken too… poor bastard had to buy new skivvies and uniform items… if I remember, we all pitched in… cause that’s what shipmates do!!!

I’ll bet Dofelmire, where ever he’s at now, isn’t so gaudamned gullible nowadays… but I feel ya brother… we were all dumb and happy at one point in our silly lives!!!

Rest assured with what I know now… I’d want to forget it all and relive it again… NO REGRETTS!!!

♪♪“OOOh, I wish I were a Dofelmire Weiner… Then everyone would be in love with  me!!!”♪♪