One of the
most satisfying things about writing harebrained Sea Stories is running into
old shipmates sharing & comparing notes! In the ol’ Canoe Club the rules of
common decency usually walked the plank once the ship got underway!! Our antics
were enough to make any Commodore want to blow is lid!!!
I ran into a
shipmate, Robin Woodbury, the other day and he revitalized parts of my brain
that had gone numb and rusted shut for a decade or two! We started talking
about this and that and the other and the next thing you know… we were reliving
a more youthful era in our lives!! Woodbury handed me back a few memories, a
very important part USS Rainier’s ‘Operational History!’
He walked me back through a passageway… back to those times some idiot… (ME)… would
turn on the white lights, yank open his curtains as I pulled down my shorts and
bent over while squeezing my ass cheeks back and forth…
“From
one asshole to another, it’s Reveille… time to wake your fat ass up!”
Hey, it’s
not queer if you can’t see the pier… that’s what I’d always say! It made you
appreciate the little things in life!! Yeah, I was still a little stupid… I
still stepped on my own dick occasionally, but I never looked back with
regret!!!
I also remember how I enjoyed Monday mornings
like a case of the clap! I remember many a times it was a typical hangover, unruly
beer farts and sometimes the inevitable shits!! The problem with beer farts and
hangover shits was wiping until the brown turned red!!!
One of the obvious remedies to a classic
hangover was plenty of coffee! You see, coffee has its virtues… it always has and always will!
Fact is, the ol’ Canoe Club wouldn't amount to much unless you gave it a little
amplification!! You have to encourage it, with plenty of Navy Joe!! Without it,
the plan of the day would stop like a two dollar watch!!!
Many would
head to the messdecks where they could get a cup of joe, a stale doughnut and plenty
of ‘this ain’t no shitters’ to last a deployment! The problem with that
scenario… there were plenty of fouled
anchors just looking for an ass or two to chew upon with plenty of takers
sitting around the mess table drink’n black tar and shoot’n the shit!!
“Jesus H. Christ, why can’t any of you fuckers get to work?”
… Yeah, we
Crackerjacks did manage to toss out all the adjectives in our lexicon and just
use the word 'fuck' a lot!!!
Now back to coffee…
We had the antics of our best young sailors at their finest causing straightjacket
insanity in the interim! Just before deployment it was typical to survey your
fellow shipmates in the divisional asylum to pitch in on a trip to the local Walmart
or Costco and pick up six months of canned coffee and plenty of cream &
sugar!! You know, the special kind with all the nifty flavors!!!
We all
agreed to bring in a fresh can of Folgers strongest to last us the whole
trip! Nothing like that generic shit
down on the messdecks that had been vacuum sealed since the dawn of the
dinosaurs!!
“Hey
Needham, what kind of coffee was served on the Titanic?”
“Hell,
I don’t know… what kind?”
“Sanka!
Exactly the kind we don’t want!”
You see real
coffee had to have hair, horns and brimstone... the kind that produced
testosterone straight out of caffeine!!!
Usually
coffee was made just before Quarters! That way we’d be half asleep when the
Chief would lay down a descriptive list of fun stuff he had in mind to fill
your day!! Then the animals would head to the vicinity of the Nato Seasparrow
Director Room!! This is where we drank our coffee, solved equations for world peace
and we’d shoot the shit before titivating the ship as they used to say!!!
We had a
coffee maker, or more like an urn! It was something akin to a pigmy water
heater that could scald your tongue, but the aroma of hot coffee… it was better when it tasted like it smells!! If
it was made right, the blood in your veins would be three parts tarred and the
rest made of salt water!!!
About three
months in to deployment, ol’ Woodbury pulls out a new can of coffee and gets
ready to open it…
“Some
FUCK’N idiot crammed this Folger’s can full of Navy Coffee off the messdecks!”
“What
The Fuck?!?”
Now it was
pretty easy to figure out who it was! All the cans were labeled as to who
brought what... including this one!!
“Needham…
you piece of shit! Why didn’t you chip in instead of using the messdeck coffee?”
“It’s
called making do… 'make-do' is just a part of life!”
Ship’s coffee came in 20lb. cans and Needham went down and comshawed
his share and filled an empty Folgers can think’n nobody would know the
difference! If you knew Keith Needham,
it was easy to discern his corn bread wasn't quite done in the middle!! He was
a great guy in many ways, but sorely lacking in others!!!
“Needham, You’re so low you’d steal the
nickels off a dead man’s eyes!”
“Aaaah… Come on guys! It’s just a little
coffee!?! I’ll make it up to you!?!”
Yeah, he
thought he was slicker than two eels fuckin’ in a bucket of snot!
“That’s
as crooked as kite string in a ceiling fan Needham, that coffee tastes like C.H.T... Shit!”
“That’s
because Needham likes his coffee like he likes his men… strong & black!”
“Fuck
You Swing… Motherfucker… Fuck you again!”
Then the
LPO, Christiansen came in and gave him his spiel…
“Now, Now…! Needham, I see you've set
aside this special time to humiliate yourself in public… just don’t let it
happen again!”
After that, weird
and exotic things began to periodically show up in the joe…! Hell, it reminds
me of when I put on me fouled anchors!! So it was written as one of my charges…
“Don’t sweat the little things in life! Someone
will Dirty Dick your Coffee Cup a time or two… it’s gonna happen! Just get used
to it!”
But there
was nothing like watching ‘FC2 Henry’
tilt back his head and take a huge swig of Saucier’s Coppenhagen surprise…
You see back
in the day we had those white paper cups! When you finished your coffee, you
put the empty cup in the angle iron! Sometimes people would chew their tobacky
and leave sputum in the cups!! Well, this gave our resident smartass, Neil ‘The
Sauceman’ Saucier an idea!!!
Now there
was this fella named FC2 Henry who worked up in the Director Room! Henry was
the resident ‘Shitbird’ of the Division!! He was so backward he couldn't manage
a fart on a diet of baked beans!! I firmly believe that in some zoo… somewhere
in middle America, two sibling chimpanzees did the horizontal mambo and by a
sporadic integration of recessive genes, Petty Officer Henry was born!! Watching
Henry go to work was like watching a dentist trying to drill
teeth with an oscillating dildo!!!
One morning ‘Sauceman’
gathered up all the black sputum outta those paper cups he could muster and
mixed it in good with some fresh coffee so it still had that ‘Good Morning’ aroma!
Right after Morning Quarters those euphoric idiots came in hauling their open
mugs!! Everyone was in on the joke except for a couple of few!!!
FC2 Henry
was the first and probably the only to dive into the pot right away! Soon everyone
was in on the gig!! We all watched as Henry just tilted his head back and took a
swig only to turn red in the face as he exclaimed…
“I
have no idea what you guys put in this coffee but it could reverse the effects of
embalming fluid!”
… and he
turned away smiling like he had good sense!!!
Now Henry
never realized he just took in a can and a half of Copenhagen and genuine
sputum! If the statute of limitations hasn’t run out… well, we were just
waiting for the next moment when he’d be considering ending someone’s life!!
But it never happened… and he was never the wiser!!!
I think
after all those years and all those shenanigans; it’s fair to say we were full
of more shit than a West Texas Stockyard! And it only made it more endemic after
a couple of cups!! We were all doing triple flips, full gainers and chasing our
own tails like a pack of wild dogs!! The
good ol’ Canoe Club operated on coffee, and we’d get so wired our ears would
pick up HF signals from radio!!!
By the time
I’d become LPO I had two third classes in the Director Room I called cream and
sugar! Sharing coffee and trading Sea Stories… that’s what it was all about!! It
was a great life doing a thankless job, and somebody had to live it!! I’m just
glad I got to be a part of it all!!!
