After
liberty was called, we doused ourselves with a gallon of cologne, scraped off
the chin whiskers, and hauled out looking for flesh and fermentation. We headed
for places where blondes with big titties bought us beer and tried to bed a
sailor for the night. That was our game, in speculation on what a weekend of
sexual promiscuity with a variety of sexy Westpac widows would be like… to the unknowing, a Westpac widow is the kind
of wife vicariously shared with the rest of the fleet while her sailor was away
on Westpac or some other deployment.
Truth be
told, we didn’t always find what we were looking for. Nine times out of ten
we’d end up lonely until last call. That’s when we’d be drunk and desperate
enough to hook up with anything that had a pulse and a hole between her legs …
noticed I said her! But usually, we’d have to break out the ol’ booze compass to
lead us back to the ship blackout drunk … and we wondered why they kept sending
us to NADSAP for alcohol abuse and/or prevention.
Once
assigned to the USS Carl Vinson, Chucky “V,” the old El Camino was where we
made our home away from home. Yes, that was our regular stomping ground. The El
Camino was not a place to associate with the genteel type of ladies you find in
church. This was our meeting place ... the one place where we would
gather. The ship’s Dick Smiths or Pecker Checkers were quite familiar
with the name as it kept sick call busy for short-arm inspection on your
average morning. I suppose there are
quite a few medical records with “El Camino” listed as a place of question.
We’d sat
around on "nothing to do" nights spewing tongue-in-cheek nonsensical bullshit while playing
the five beer coupon merry-go-round the table of the communal Rainier Beer
pitcher! We discussed and compared the
merits and shortcomings of the various female anatomical features with every
lady in the joint including the barmaids.
We’d make a friendly competition out of chasing some of those skirts. We also learned to
never contribute to the inflation of a shipmate's head when he got lucky. We
were to raise hell and dish out as much banter as possible. If a shipmate left
with his beer glasses on, we wouldn’t let him forget it … and most of us had
been on both sides of that coin.
As we
used to say …
“Let’s go
out to drink and smoke so we can smoke and drink and maybe get laid!”
Personal
sensitivity, tact, and tolerance were in short supply when it came to
shipmates always hoot’n, hollering, and whistling at good-looking women while
bumming smokes from one another and arguing over whose turn it was to buy the
next round. We were just sailors searching for a cold beer and a one-night stand.
A bunch of good-for-nothing testosterone-charged young men looking for some
opposite-gender interaction.
Our group
generally consisted of myself, Mitchell, Schlup, Jones, and Cory Becker if I
spelled his name right. There were others who came and went like ‘Skippy’ but
these are the main characters of this here no-shitter. We would sit around the
table searching for anatomical features that presented angles of the female
anatomy only previously seen by gymnasts and yoga instructors. And if we went
back alone, we went back to our racks to count little fannies parading across
the backside of our eyeballs. Yes, the Camino was a 100% United States Navy
watering hole right up close and personal to the base we so lovingly called
Penis Anus Naval Shipyard.
There was
nothing like hanging out with shipmates whose intelligence levels or lack
thereof were comparable to your own …
There was
Schlup who could play the electric guitar like he was Eddie Van Halen but
couldn’t read a lick of music. Schlup was about a fathom tall with red hair and
a crooked front tooth. He wasn’t a bad-looking fella, but he fell in love too
easily. One taste of her flower and he was ready for marriage. So much was the
case, he flew all the way back up from San Diego once he left the ship just to
get back with a girl he hooked up with prior to his escape. He came back only
to find out she fed her taco to every swinging dick who walked into the bar
while he was away. Once he came to this realization he became soberly
challenged and ended up doing the roadside Olympic sobriety test in front of
the local constable after getting pulled over in Mitchell’s car. Those were the
days …
Then
there was Jones … the man, the myth, the legend. Jones couldn’t get laid with a
fist full of fifties in a whore house he was so shy around women.
“Jones,
how come you don’t have a girlfriend?”
He’d try
to talk to them and st-st-stutter every word just to say hello…
“C’mon
Jonesy … you gotta be hungrier than that!”
He was a
great guy, but he had some mental blockage in his left brain … or something.
And we’ve
talked about my old running mate, the six-foot cockatoo, with a six-inch Mohawk
he got away with for six months before riding around handcuffed to the seat in
a Shore Patrol paddy wagon to get his head shaved off. Mitchell was as slick as
they come … with the women as well as with the tongue. He was the king of
cumshaw and could get anything you wanted … for a small fee.
There was
a cigarette machine in the passageway of the bar at $1.25 a pack. You know the
kind where you picked the flavor of your choice and pulled the lever, then out
popped a pack of smokes to last you the night. Mitchell had a way to get those
smokes for free. He never divulged his secret, but I’ll be damned if he wasn’t
like the Fonze where he could slap the machine just right, and out came a pack
of smokes.
Then
there was Cory Becker. Becker was the most lecherous of the lewd and crude a
sailor could muster…
“I’m
horny as fuck. Perpetually, everlastingly horny. I’m gonna go over there and
pick up on that milf in the corner.”
“Dude,
she’s one of them Westpac widows. You’re liable to end up at Skippy’s Mast
messing with one of them.”
“Her
husband’s probably in Olongapo right now fucking a Filipina hooker so why
should I care.”
Then he’d
make his approach …
“How
would you like your eggs sweetheart, fertilized or unfertilized?”
… or …
“Do you
want to go halves on a bastard?”
Now, this
particular woman was the kind who could pound a few shots of whiskey and chase
them down with an ice-cold beer…
“Those
lines won’t get you laid tonight sailor.”
“Well
then maybe a blow job isn’t out of the question?”
"Are
you saying that to compensate for your abnormally small diseased sex organ?”
Becker
would always say …
“Why is
it me that always gets the shit end of the stick?”
“Does
your voice ever cause epilepsy?”
… I had
to hand it to him, he never was afraid to try, and he got lucky on a rare
occasion or two.
And after
each night, we would rinse and repeat the whole fun and games like a standard
operating procedure the following evening. It was like clockwork. It never
seemed to get old. It was all long ago.
We were young, but years passed and somewhere, somehow without realizing
it, we became fabled members of the 'Old School Navy.' We were young testosterone
loaded, crazy as hell, ten feet tall, bulletproof group of idiots. We barked at
the moon and took no prisoners. In those days we weren't confused with our male
fixtures and knew which head to pee in! Today’s Canoe Club Cabaret is too busy
repressing differences in performance, disguising differences between sexes,
and inflicting the pains of psychotherapy on the woke of society.
When I
spill my guts to a young sailor of today about how we managed to blow our money
on broads and beer and lived the caliber of life worthy of appearing in one’s
obituary, they just look at me like I’m speaking a foreign language.
We were
half-loaded idiots in search of adventure and some soft warm, sweet-smelling
lady with a firm behind and loving every minute of it. We really didn’t care
about much of anything else. Wasn’t life great?!?
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