"Shipmate"

 

There's a term used by men who once made their living steaming the Seven Seas… SHIPMATE! In a time long, long ago in a world far, far away, we marinated in the life of the ol’ Canoe Club Navy where there was risk and danger that made our lives worth living. Within the confines of just a few years, the ol’ Canoe Club became smugger, more secure, and more binding all in the name of safety. Not to say that it’s wrong, only that it’s constricting. Break out the supervision… the life jackets… the inoculations… and take away the Fun! Every weekend was a 72-hour excursion into the heart of the civilian population. It’s safe to say that our playgrounds no longer exist. Like the days of Sodom and Gomorra, they only exist in the memories of old salty bastards telling no-shitters that nobody even believes anymore.

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?!?  

( Fin )