'Sailors Still Shoot Horse Don't They'

Here is an excerpt from a book that I found to be quite humorous! The setting is from the early to mid 70’s so if it’s a bit rough around the edges, just ask yourself…  “Why did they come up with drug tests in the Ol’ Canoe Club in the first place?”

Here it goes…

Hotel Street in Honolulu was a street that had long catered to sailors.  During WWII it had over twenty brothels and hundreds of hookers. Now in the seventies, it didn’t have any advertised whorehouses but it still had plenty of hookers, bars, strip clubs, tattoo joints, and pawn shops.  Just the kind of street I had joined the Navy to hang out on.  So I had stopped at a couple of pubs for a few cocktails and then leisurely shopped for a tattoo – finally deciding on a tattoo of a pineapple to adorn my left bicep to commemorate my time in Hawaii, at a fine establishment called Rosie’s Tattoos – before I hit the pawn shops. 

Sailors have always gotten tatted up and always will, but of the thousands that I have seen – anchors, naked ladies, pot leafs, panthers, snakes, skulls, knives, flags, dice, ships, all the usual bullshit – only three really stand out in my memory: 

1) I once saw a sailor in the shower who had a mouse inked on his shoulder eating a block of cheese with tracks running up from the crack of his ass.

2) There was a great tattoo artist named Sailor Jerry who did an infamous tat of a monkey bent over spreading his cheeks with “ALOHA” inked around his bunghole that I saw on several old time salts.

3) I was boozing, smoking, and doing lines of blow one time with a strung out coke addict sailor named Larkey who had a black blob o fink tattooed all over the side of his little finger on his right hand.  When I inquired about it he told me that he had gotten shit faced while in the Philippines and had gotten “FUCK OFF” tattooed there for when he saluted officers. When I asked how long it had taken someone to notice he glumly replied…

“The very first fucking officer I saluted!”

The book is labeled as fiction but you know the author had done time in the ol’ Nav! No one with that much knowledge of our business got it from being a bystander!! The book is called “Sailors Still Shoot Horse Don’t They.” I’m sure like any no-shit Sea Story, there are some half-truths in this book!! It’s pretty funny so far as it is!! I love salty sea going shit like this!!!