'Seedy Sailors & Seedy Places'

Anyone remember the “Finding Waldo” books back in the day?!? That’s what it was like to be a sailing man way back when!! You could find a Crackerjack in just about every titty bar and whorehouse within a fifty mile radius of the pier!! You had to relegate yourself to a life of celibacy or fiddle with the professionals of commercial lovemaking … that’s just the way it was!!!

Many ports attract a seedy element… I mean, what’s sailoring without the frills and thrills of a ‘girl in every port!’  And Crackerjack Sailors are prone to gravitate to studies of nympho behavior and large scale depravity of ladies with abnormal bust dimensions!! The kind of places that smell like piss and stale beer!!  The stained velvet carpet usually looked like it hadn’t been changed out since the seventies!!!

If we made it far enough without falling down shitfaced drunk there were titty bars and dens of sins down every road! Crackerjacks love titty bars… go-go dancers… stripper poles… and anything with two boobies attached!! Because there’s nothing like a bunch of gauddamned sailors and marines sitting around a lap dance drinking cheap beer and acting like assholes to pass the night!!!

In an underway environment devoid of civilized feminine influence, restless men began to get vocal and as horniness escalated, vocabulary degenerated and the intent of us Ambassadors to shed peace and goodwill around the world was traded in for pay by the hour sex and plenty of drunkenness along with a pack of smokes!!!  

Rather it was Rosecrans, Santa Fe Avenue in Long Beach, OBT in Orlando or any Red Light District around the Globe, you found Crackerjack Sailors making their cameo debut just like in the movies … ‘cause there’s always a sailor or two in the background of all those old movies!!!

A veteran salt always knows how to make out the best exchange rate when it comes to the labors of the love trade! You’d find several of them in some seedy back alley pay by the hour motel operating no doubt as twenty-four hour whorehouses!!  And other than being a walking petri dish of gauddamned knows what, you could guarantee those ladies would give you your money’s worth!!!

You see, it’s not really love for sale but love for rent… or lease with no option to buy! An old Salt once told me…

“If it floats, flies or FUCKS… it’s cheaper to rent than to own!”

And if you were smart you’d carry a few condoms with the durability of a Goodyear tire! Because when leaving the liberty port, the clap line can seem a mile long…

"I can't understand the fascination you idiots have for those hookers. The bitches carry a million diseases."

"Doc, we're ordained by the Gods to do their work as dedicated emissaries of good faith and diplomacy."

"You’re a bunch of damned idiots who have no gauddamned idea how many shots I’m gonna have to give you in the ass once we get underway!"

There is nothing like standing in line waiting to drop your skivvies and take caliper readings on your manhood so the Doc can play with his petri dish!

I knew a sailor once who’d come back drunker than a skunk with his whites soiled all to hell, bragging about that piece of ass he just bought downtown! His uniform was so tattered and worn the OOD asked if he found it in the pier dumpster!! He went into the head to take a piss and started screaming he thought he caught the clap!!!

“You just got laid two hours ago, what the hell makes you think you caught the clap?”

“I’m trying to pee and it won’t come out!”

… The son-of-a-bitch was so drunk he forgot to take his rubber off and it dried and stuck to his stick! No Shit!! It really happened!!!

Sometimes these dwellings were one of those “mind your own fucking business” kind of places! You could roll up on some pimp looking bloke in the corner sucking on a Swisher Sweet wearing a polyester leisure suit acting as if he owns the place!! They would deal in hookers and other party favors!!!

I mean, I’ve seen some crazy shit in my day, and I’m not advocating this kind of behavior, but I’d went on liberty with some of the boys downtown Chicago on my maiden tour through Great Mistakes and it got pretty rough! A shipmate was enticed by a hooker to get a blowjob in one of them back allies somewhere in the neighborhood of Wrigley Field!! Two other shipmates and I were left on the sidewalk as lookouts while they scurried behind a dumpster to do their thing!!!

Ain’t nothing like standing watch over a shipmate getting head for twenty dineros when you’re young, dumb and full of impressionable stupidity! All he did was moan and groan and make a shout out about us missing out!! That was before he blew his load and came running out of the alley with his wang still hanging out, trying to put his uniform back together…

“Hurry the fuck up, it’s time to get the hell outta  here!”

He cold cocked the whore right between the eyes after launching a pint of goo down her throat, knocking her to the ground and running off!!!

Yes, it could be a shit show out there when there was nothing but horny Crackerjack Sailors grinding up on the nastiest hookers on the block! And every hooker from Hoboken to San Francisco knew when the fleet was in town and they were always willing and ready!! But hookers stateside never look like they do in Playboy or any of them other skin books!! They’re usually over the hill strippers who can’t earn a living wage anymore on the dance floor!!!

But the overseas hookers … now that’s a different story! Places like Subic, Thailand. Wan Chai in Hong Kong and Five Floors of Whores in Singapore are nothing but a supermarket of whores!! You could damn near smell the perfume from all those honeys before the ship set the Sea-n-Anchor Detail!!!

These were an absolute anchorage for Carnal Delight! A cherry boy could learn a thing or two about sex paid by the hour from skilled ladies whose profession depended on it!! If you had two or three hundred peso, “me love you long time, short time anytime no shit” girls were all over you!!!

There was no public relations problem because the only public we were having relations with were the bargirls and Honey Khoes! They advertised competitive prices for co-habitational recreation at highly negotiable rates!! And we were bulletproof when finding most hookers got real lonely when the last midnight liberty boat cleared the pier!!!

There's a lot of great stuff in our nautical sea going history… The ships, the men, the bars, the hookers, faraway ports and God knows what else!  It seems these days too many politically correct blowhards fail to see what used to be considered a young Crackerjack’s obligation to run the streets at any said liberty port and wear out their skivvies with no shame!! But that’s just the way it was I guess, glad I was around to say I’d been there and done that!!!