‘The Lucky Bag’



If you weren’t around in the Ol’ Canoe club before all the latest fashion changes, this is going to sound silly and make absolutely no damn sense to you. If you did, you’ll surely remember the ‘Lucky Bag!’ On Lucky N°.7, or the Good Ship Rainier…  I had the opportunity to get Goat Roped & chartered out to the Master-At-Arms Office for a three month tour!! As an acting member of the seagoing Sheriff’s Department there were many menial tasks to be performed such as handing out linen and blankets to rookie recruits check’n aboard, mustering restrictoids, following the XO around for heads-n-beds, standing idly by for Captain’s Mast, looking out for the imprudence of problem children, Penis Gawking during Urinalysis… and acting as the great protector of the Lucky Bag Issue & Sea Bag Locker!!!

You might ask…

“Lucky Bag… What the hell’s he talking about?!?

You see, the Lucky Bag was the black hole where all the unclaimed Gear Adrift & junk left behind by wayward sailors given less than an honorable boot out the door was kept for reissue to those who lacked a complete Sea Bag or just too gauddamned cheap to buy new items… I should know, I must’ve procured quite a collection from the ship’s Goodwill Store!! Matter of fact… I think I ended up with Seaman Grant’s Jumper top & several good pair of Bates Corfams!!!

This corner of our rather spacious Sea Bag Locker was jumbled with ratty T-shirts that could’ve attracted buzzards from three counties away never finding their way to the shit can, Johnny Cash uniforms with more ties than you could shake a stick at, Summer Whites, Crackerjacks, DC’d dungarees with the names crossed out, shoes, Dixie cups, boots, nudie mags, zippo lighters, web belts, flashy belt buckles, ribbon holders… and more nudie mags!! If a fella went AWOL we could end up with all his Earthly possessions in the Lucky Bag Issue… and if you wanted your stuff back then a bit of EMI might be required for your service!!!

Yes Sir… I remember during Heads-n-Beds the XO might check the unused lockers for Gear Adrift, and if you had anything out other than your ratty Navy blanket used for producing the finest Ghost Turds in the world and a ditty bag of moldy funk & laundry, and the average yellow stained pillow… we’d scoop up said contents to register in the Lucky Bag Issue!  We were like the ship’s REPO pick’n up the stuff nobody cared to keep secure!! Many onboard looked at us as a bunch’a rotten sons-a-bitches going around legally stealing shit to get our rocks off!! But not me… on duty nights when I’d be down in the shack manning the phones and it was time to open up the ol’ Sea Bag Locker, some of them fellas would get an invite to come down and pick up their Gear Adrift!! Most assigned EMI was divied out to E-5 and above on duty from various Divisions!! It didn’t take much to get a fella to come down and grab a lucky shipmate assigned three hours of community service to administer his EMI skating out in the Bos’n Locker or an Engine Room until his time was up!!! 

But there was this one fella… can’t for the life of me remember his name! He’d gone AWOL and we’d been sent up to clear his rack and his locker of all things and send it down to the Lucky Bag!! Once MA1 popped the lock… there was this nauseating odiferous aroma of a bad case of advanced athletes foot mixed with Brut 33 foo foo juice with a moldy cherry on top… it was sooo gauddamned nauseating you could only smile and open all the hatches to get some air in the damned space!! We had a Senior Chief MA who’s androgynous looks reminded everyone of Pat O’Neil Riley from Saturday Night Live!! She got a whiff and thanked the MA Gods we didn’t bring in the canines that stuff was so strong…

“Someone needs to douse there feet in Desenex… instead of cologne!”

Poor fella must’ve had some sort of Jungle Rot the Naval Research Lab just couldn’t figure out how to heal… needless to say his junk found its way to the dumpster and never made it to the Lucky Bag!!!

And I don’t know how many times we’d found a set of Summer Whites that looked like they’d been run through a Mexican Shoeshine… dirty socks that looked like they’d been used for sex toys at a leper colony or various pieces of clothing right outta the Victoria Secret Catalog… and I ain’t talk’n about the Female Berthing neither!!! 

Speaking of Female Berthing… I think the ultimate was the time we had to inventory some Gear Adrift from the only split tail berthing on the ship! After unwrapping what appeared to be an old fashioned cloth diaper of some sort… we found a greasy dildo with sparkles & speckles all about… don’t know if the grease was some sort of Vaseline or Astro Lube!! We called it the Pixie Peter!!! You just don’t forget stuff like that… and you can’t make shit like that up either!!!

Between the dandruff harvesting ball caps, toe nail clipping collections and fungus spore assemblages cohabitat’n with different species of exotic mold and mildew found from Deck Berthing all the way aft to the Airdale Compartments with flies circling all about, it’s a wonder we’d collected anything worth a hoot in the long neglected contributions of the Lucky Bag… but there were some gems… that’s if us Duty MAs didn’t get ahold of it first!!!