Non-Qualified Swimmer - Part III
“Were you violent with Seaman Recruit Gonzales?”
“The dizzy shit got hit for having a shoestring untied during personal inspection, sir.”
“Is that any reason to kick him?”
“No, sir. I should’ve given him fifty demerits and had him push the piece for the rest of his life.”
“You may only administer five demerits for only one infraction.”
“Yes, sir. Will there be anything else, sir?”
“No, just watch the rough stuff.”
USNR. Why do they let reserves run this place? Why do we even need officers? They just get in the way. Maybe he should retire. If he quit now there’d be no more bed wetters, no more suicide attempts.
The suicide attempts were really scary. Sometimes they just snapped and you hauled them off to 88C where they stayed awaiting a general or a psych discharge. SR John L. Mensinger was a grisly example. Fucker couldn’t do anything right. The highest number of demerits he’d ever seen or heard of, 185. It would’ve been more if he hadn’t been limited to five per infraction. Dirty white hat, five times. He had to show this kid how to scrub his clothes himself finally. He had to hold him out of inspection. Clothes improperly folded during seabag inspection. Disqualified firing the Mossberg .22. He had turned around with his rifle in the loaded position. The instructor was livid. He passed out while pushing the piece. He had finally sent him to Mickey Mouse, but they’d sent him back. There was nothing wrong with him. Just nerves they said. He knew how to fold his clothes; he took showers. He wasn’t stupid. He was definitely not Mickey Mouse material. But he was allergic to BK Russell. Psychologically, BK was a father figure to a lot of these kids. Their fathers had rejected them and now BK was rejecting them.
Mensinger cut his wrists with a broken jelly jar. Where he’d gotten a jelly jar was a big mystery. There was blood all over the shower stalls. Why hadn’t Mickey Mouse recommended sending him to a different company? It took so long to clean up the mess they had to close off the shower stalls. Eighty-nine smelly boots with no place to shower. They lost two days of training. Roberts put a hold on them. No smoke house. No fire fighting. These people would be really valuable shipmates. What the hell, at sea you had all those drills anyway.
Who needed this bull crap? No matter who you chose for RPOC there was jealousy. Sure Long was a dick. On board ship, he wouldn’t even talk to the guy. But you had to admit he was one gung ho motherfucker. His shoes shown like glass; he weeded out the poor marchers and he knew the 16 count manual better than BK did. He was a lousy human being but he was an ideal RPOC.
Maybe he should humanize this outfit. One haircut. Put in some washing machines. Without all the chickenshit, the company commanders could take the recruits out on the lake. Show them what shipboard like was really like. The terminology would make sense. On board ship a wall actually looks like a bulkhead and a door looks like a hatch.
Ninety human beings can get along without some martinet telling you how dumb you are. You can’t destroy individuality. Look at Schreder. BK loved that little clown. He was always asking him personal questions.
“So how come you never married, Mr. Russell? A handsome man like you. You could have your pick. You could have Kim Novak. A homely little mutt like me is lucky to get a woman who can cook, never mind her looks.”
How are you supposed to get mad at that? So Schreder became camp mascot. He made life more bearable in the company commander’s central office. With the Mensinger thing you needed some comic relief in your life.
So, he’d try “C” school. Why waste seventeen years of your life? You needed twenty for a pension, but most people went twenty-three for a better bump. Plus it gave him a better shot at chief. Any shore duty was NOT better than any sea duty. At least you got to see the world while at sea. He had been in the Pacific, the Atlantic, and the Indian Oceans. He’d even been on an icebreaker. He’d seen the Artic circle, which made him an honorary Polar Bear. He’d been over the equator which made him a Shellback. There was an initiation rite for both. During the Shellback ceremony, you were humiliated. You had to swim through garbage that they’d saved for weeks; you had to kiss the stomach of King Neptune, the fattest man on board, whose belly had been smeared with grease and hair. You had to drink King Neptune’s nectar, a mixture of Tabasco sauce and other garbage. In the end you were hosed off with a fire hose. Yes, sea duty was lousy, too.
The homosexuals and alcoholics made life really rough. BK had suspicions about some of his Company 485 recruits, but he couldn’t prove it. Some of those guys were really swishy. All he could do was make their lives miserable. Maybe they’d wet the bed, or worse, get caught in the act.
There were some potential fine sailors in Company 485. Generally regulars have contempt for reserves, but the three in this company were already shipshape. There were the two Catholics, Armstrong and Ward. They were really squared away. Armstrong would have made a good RPOC, but the job would probably have killed him. He cared too much about his fellow recruits. That Hayraker kid couldn’t keep his rifle straight while marching. Must’ve been some kind of inner ear problem. Armstrong was the guide on for the row behind and kept straightening the kid’s rifle for him. Both of these guys were from Hill High School in Minneapolis, a good school run by the Catholic church. Both of them were too quiet though. You had to really throw your weight around like Long to be an effective RPOC.
The other reserve, Larry Lang, had stood out immediately. He came on board like an old salt with ten years in. He had definitely been on a cruise at some time or another. BK had made him MAA as soon as possible, but he had a tendency to try to be one of the guys too much. BK knew that Long was to blame for the goof off sessions but he’d finally found his RPOC and he wasn’t going to let him get away.
It looked like they’d lost another one today. Sal Passalacqua’s old mother had had a heart attack and Sal was applying for a hardship discharge. Sal was a good clean-up committee type. He was a dark, skinny Wop, and BK had pitied him when he had his first real inspection. That beard was indelible. Well, Sal was out of it now.
It really killed the other guys when one of them got to go home. It was like everyone was getting a ride on the Titanic lifeboats except them.
They were in their eighth week now and the numbers were thinning. Quattlebaum, Hogan, Grace, Passalacqua.
Grace was the only black kid in the company. He didn’t help dispute the racial stereotype any. He was twenty-two years old; he was one of the few married men in the company and he couldn’t do anything right. At Camp Moffitt the recruits were required to wear leggings and Grace was the last to learn how to tie them. Grace also had low test scores. He had to go. Company 485 was now lily white.
In the year 1962 the navy appeared ahead in respect to integration. The RPOC of Company 484 was black. He was the only one who could outdo Long when it came to calling cadence and he lasted all the way through boot camp. Perhaps their company commander was acclimated to being second best.
#
One of the privileges that went with Camp Porter was that you lost those stupid leggings. You also got to wear your blues instead of the dungarees. Company 485 looked more like real sailors now. Of course, they still had to wear their pants knickers style with the bell bottoms held back with a trusty clothes stop, probably to prevent tripping while marching.
When bell bottoms became the fashion, Hayraker fought the trend to the end, until he couldn’t find pants that weren’t belled.
BK occasionally showed that he had a sense of humor. There was a recruit by the name of Gatlin. Like a gambler at the track, BK couldn’t resist. He’d made Gatlin gunner’s mate. Hayraker didn’t think anybody else got the joke, but it was funny that the gunner’s mate didn’t handle any guns. He couldn’t. Their guns were rifles, and they were locked in their own special case. Gatlin never touched them.
Hayraker’s first disillusionment about BK happened at Moffitt. He picked a guinea pig to show the recruits that this was the real deal. It was a picky thing the kid did wrong. He forgot to say “sir” when addressing BK. BK made him run around the grinder carrying his sea bag on his shoulders. The thing weighted about seventy pounds. The kid ran until he dropped.
Then he taught the company how to do exercises with the rifle. He could do them better than anybody. He was in good shape for an old guy. He would lead the exercises until he found his RPOC.
When Hayraker was assigned to his permanent duty station at Great Lakes, he would see BK again in the store right outside the main gate, but Hayraker didn’t have the guts to say hello. He wouldn’t be able to stand the rebuff if BK insulted him. After all the terrible shit he’d been through he did have a sneaking suspicion that maybe BK wasn’t all that bad. He remembered the quiet man at Camp Barry, the man who was so patient with the OCS candidates.
USNTC got to be pretty funny once you got the proper perspective, once you stopped being so scared. For instance the names of the officers were hilarious. The regimental commander was LCDR WA Cockell, Jr. USNR. The commanding officer of Recruit Training Command was Captain IM King.
Those events that had been so scary when they were happening were now funny. Hayraker’s pole climbing incident; the time they were taught to stencil their clothes and Sal Passalacqua couldn’t keep up. His white hat looked like a Jackson Pollack painting. The stencil was too long for one side of the hat. It was impossible not to smear your hat. Everything was hurry up and wait. Everything was do it wrong and get in trouble later.
Maybe they should have had the recruits stencil their sheets. There were rooms where you dried your sheets during the winter, and somebody was always stealing your them because they couldn’t find their own. Hayraker was terrified of the time they’d find out he had the wrong sheets. But they never checked. Everybody had the wrong sheets.
Sometimes BK made them hang their clothes outside. The clothes stops would freeze and you couldn’t get your clothes off the line unless you had a jack knife or some other implement to pry them loose. Why no clothes pins? Clothes pins took up more space than clothes stops. Besides, you couldn’t tie a clothes pin into a square knot.
Another humorous incident that wasn’t so funny at the time was when Hayraker lost his breakfast. They’d had a good breakfast that day: pancakes, ham and eggs, toast, grits, cold cereal. You couldn’t eat between meals and Hayraker was starving. Anyway, he found a place, went to get some orange juice and couldn’t find his place when he went back. He couldn’t go back through the line; it was too long. He just couldn’t find his place. Someone from the line must have just sat down where he‘d put his tray. So he went without breakfast.
Then there was the hemorrhoid incident. Hayraker thought the had some terrible disease. Fear caused him to be constipated most of the time and the toilets with no privacy caused him to hold it. Hence, it always took him forever to go to the toilet and he developed a bloody stool. “Good,” he thought. “Now I’ll get out of this hell hole.” but the pecker checkers had him sit in a bowl of hot water and soak his posterior. He didn’t even get a whirlpool treatment. The end result was getting hit for a dirty white hat. If you were going to sick bay, you brought your ditty bag with you to inspection. The inspector had no sympathy for people going to sick baby and that usually meant another five demerits. Twice he went to sick bay and twice he got hit at morning inspection. That was enough of that. Hayraker still had hemorrhoids.
There were also rumors about the brig. The brig was supposedly run by the marines. You were usually sent there for going over the hill. Hayraker never thought to ask Nelson about that. According to rumor, the brig was like the Gulag Archipelago. They beat the hell out of you. You were on bread and water. You didn’t get any letters from home. They wouldn’t let you sleep.
Occasionally Hayraker got other people in trouble as well as himself. Recruits were required to qualify on the .45, the M1, and the Mossberg .22. When Hayraker’s turn came he couldn’t get the rifle chamber open, so his loader could put a bullet in. The loader had been told not to touch the rifle. Hayraker’s loader tried to help him get the chamber open and was disqualified.
Hayraker had never liked guns. He’d fired a .22 once or twice and an air rifle, but that was it. Once he’d shot a barn swallow and felt so guilty that he’d buried the bird and gave it a full scale funeral.
Once after he had been discharged a man brought a rifle into this bar where Hayraker was drinking and began talking about it and handling it back and forth with the bartender. Hayraker broke out in a sweat and had to leave. Bashful kidney, acrophobia, hydrophobia, fear of knots, and fear of guns. Was there some kind of all inclusive phobia. If so, Hayraker probably had it.
The Mossberg .22 incident was similar to the scene in 1984 where the man with no chin tries to help the skull-faced man and is brutally punished for showing compassion for another human being. USNTC and the 1984 world were a lot alike.
The closer they got to graduation the hornier the recruits got. There were women at the camp but they worked as secretaries for the officers. Hayraker only saw two the whole time he was there. Curiously one of hem sashayed through the kitchen area during service week. She didn’t have to walk like that. Those recruits working in the kitchen area must have thought she was a mirage because there was no yelling or hooting.
What was outside that gate behind The Sink? Were there real women out there? There was an area right outside the gate called The Strip. The Sink was a figment of Nelson’s imagination, or it could’ve been Hayraker imagination and Nelson may not have existed. Hayraker was in a stupor most of the time he was in boot camp.
A sort of general store called Stack’s was the central business on The Strip. When stationed at Service School Command Hayraker frequented Stack’s quite a bit, usually playing Skill Pool with his buddies. It passed the time. There was also a Greek restaurant which served Rancho burgers and greasy French fries. Rancho burgers were an early version of the Whopper and they were better than prime rib.
Diane, a skinny blonde with bad teeth worked at the Greek restaurant. She was kind of young and she was definitely available, but she really should have done something about her teeth. She had a cute sister, a brunette who was more Hayraker’s type, but Hayraker was too shy to do anything about it. Bashfulness kidney, bashful personality. Should’ve been a dwarf.
On the other side of the barbed wire was plastic. Ordinary, sub-ordinary America catering to the simple needs of the sailor. Even in Chicago the only place a sailor was welcome was State Street: tattoo parlors, strip joints, bars with watered-down drinks.
While stationed at Service School Command, Hayraker and Lang, who was going to Fire Control School, went to a USO and Hayraker danced with a nice girl type who apparently already had a boyfriend someplace but it was good to hold a girl in his arms again.
Waukegan was down the road about three miles, and Hayraker remembered flirting with a beautiful dark-haired Puerto Rican girl who worked at a drug store. His friend Zeke and he spent an hour pretending to look for a Mother’s Day present. She was the West Side Story type and Zeke did most of the flirting. Zeke and Hayraker might still be there if her boyfriend hadn’t shown up.
Generally, liberty for sailors meant “dogs and sailors keep off the grass.” The civilian perspective came alive for Hayraker when he was stationed in Charleston, South Carolina. Hayraker’s buddies and he were on their way to a Duke-South Carolina football game, and they had to pass through downtown Columbia. The place was wall-to-wall skinheads from Fort Jackson just outside the city. It was like an alien invasion. Columbia is a beautiful city and these recruits were muddying the waters. It was like releasing the residents of Attica on Niagara Falls. The Newlyweds would not be happy.
Hayraker’s best advice to a sailor looking for a girl would be to pretend you’re sick and go to the hospital. Nurses are the nicest girls you can find. The best blind date of Hayraker’s life was with Christy, a student nurse. Hayraker was his old shy self, but Christy drew him out and they spent almost the whole evening making out in Christy’s car. Hayraker and Christy wrote to each other for several months until Hayraker got too possessive. They stopped writing to each other before they got a chance to get to know each other.
Irene was a nurse, too, probably even nicer than Christy. She was a missed opportunity. He’d sold his car and had no way to take her out. Good night Irene. She married a cop.
After Company 485 had been at Camp Moffitt for three weeks, they prepared for the most difficult part of training, service week. They had to get up at two in the morning and were not allowed to go to bed until nine at night. Service week meant exactly that. Service. Someone had to peel potatoes, someone had to work on the serving line, someone had to wash dishes. then there were the privileged jobs that usually went to the recruit petty officers: chaplain’s assistant, messenger, battalion aide, regimental aide etc.
Hayraker avoided the scullery. These recruits scraped and washed the pots and pans. Wagner, Passalacqua and the clean-up committee were type cast for this duty. Hayraker, at first, had the next worst job: helping prepare the giant pots (resembling giant mixing bowls) which were used to cook the meals at Moffitt. The most difficult part of this job was cleaning the damn thing when the meal was over. You couldn’t reach the bottom and they didn’t give you adequate tools to do it. You had to literally dive in head first to scrub the bottom with your feet hanging of the edge. You also had to contend with the vicious cooks. These guys were really overworked for regular sailors. They had to be there when the boots got there at three AM. They rotated on a three breakfast, three dinner, three supper, three day off schedule. Sometimes their off days came on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday when there was nothing going on. They were a surly bunch and they hated boots.
One time Hayraker couldn’t get the milk carton open. It was heavy, weighing something like fifty pounds, and it came in a plastic container which you were supposed to break over the edge of the giant mixing bowl. It wouldn’t break.
“Get out of the way, shithead. You maggots are more trouble than you’re worth,” the cook said.
Then he pushed Hayraker up against the giant mixing bowl before bursting the plastic bag over the edge, splashing milk every which way.
The cook was a third class commissary man. His chances of advancement were practically nil. This had been one of the rates open to blacks, Puerto Ricans and Pilipinos. So, no wonder they were in ill humor. This was the worst shore duty you could get. When Hayraker got permanent shore duty, there were often scandals about the cooks taking food home with them for their families. Navy food, especially the meat, was the best available. That was before the cooks got a hold of it. Hayraker had tasted lobster, filet mignon and other delicacies for the first time in the navy.
After a few days on the mixing bowl, Hayraker found himself assigned to the bakery. There were three bakers whom Nelson and Hayraker worked for. One of them was actually a human being. He let Nelson and Hayraker listen to the radio while they worked.
One day the Minnesota footbal Gophers were playing the Wisconsin Badgers. The game was really close. Wisconsin scored a touchdown, a safety and a field goal to win 11-7. Dale Hackbart was the Wisconsin quarterback. Hackbart would later switch to defensive back in the pros and play many years for the Minnesota Vikings.
The football game made the bakery much more palatable. Hayraker remembered the times at home listening to the console radio when he “lugged the ball” on every play with the Gophers. Bob and Pinky McNamara had been his heroes. In 1961 the Gophers had won the Rose Bowl 21-3 against UCLA. But Sandy Stephens and Bill Munsey had graduated and the Gophers became the also rans they are today.
Some of the boots seemed to like USNTC. This one kid, Rosenberg got to fry eggs for breakfast during service week. He really got into it developing proficiency in cracking eggs without chipping them and in flipping the eggs for those who preferred them over easy. It was all in how you looked at it. Rosenberg’s glass was half full, Hayraker’s half empty.
You had about an hour before lights out when you returned from the commissary. Most of the boots wrote a quick letter. But BK had to have something to do, so he called a seabag inspection. When you got up in the morning at those ungodly hours, it was not enough that you had to shave, shower and brush your teeth; you also had to lay out your stupid sea bag on your bunk. When you got back from work, you had to put the damn thing back in your seabag since there were no lockers. In Hayraker’s case BK wasn‘t satisfied with the dinginess of Hayraker‘s clothers and he had to wash the whole thing.
In actually BK was doing him a favor. The uniforms had not been washed since they had been issued. The whites especially could yellow easily. The big seabag inspection was coming up at Porter and the extra washing would help Hayraker pass with flying colors.
After washing the seabag, more of a rinse than anything, Hayraker hit the rack and slept like a dead man.
In the dream he was in New York City with Wagenr and Passalacqua. Al introduce him to the crowd. There was Darla Minetti, a pretty little dark-haired rascal. She was only fifteen, kind of tomboyish. She played catcher on the boys’ Little League team. Al said she had hit .350 with four home runs. This was before the Little League controversies about girls being allowed to play. When they finally let girls play some managers made them wear jockstraps. Darla was a tease. She went after Hayraker right away. She wanted to know about the farm. She wanted to know about animals and sex. Hayraker told her what he knew about the matter, which wasn’t much since he was a virgin. He’d seen bulls ride cows and dogs doing it but he didn’t really transfer that to humans. There had been discussions in school with the guys about which end you entered from. His friend Whitey said, “Both, either way.” That didn’t make sense to Hayraker as he had danced with girls and if their equipment was up front, wouldn’t that be dangerous? Maybe that’s why the Southern Baptists got so excited about dancing.
Darla and he were on the couch making out and Hayraker made his move. When the tried to get her bra off he didn’t know the combination. He was so ineffectual he couldn’t even do anything right in a dream. He couldn’t see how she could stand him. Every young man on the make knew enough to check out his mother’s underclothes before he went out on a date. Darla was his first real feel. He’d put his girlfriend at home on a pedestal. He had always had a hard-on a foot long when he made out with her, but she didn’t seem to notice. She must have though. Did she want to have sex as much as he did? He was so respectful he hadn’t even thought about trying to get some when home on Christmas leave.
Wagner and Schreder took Hayraker along to a synagogue. What a heavy trip. There were these old guys all doing their own thing. And the signing was eerie. There was this guy called a cantor who reminded Hayraker of Eddie Cantor. Probably where his stage name came from. It seemed like all those early entertainers were Jewish: Henny Youngman, George Burns, Jack Benny, Al Jolson etc. Women were not allowed in this particular synagogue, and everybody wore these little beanies. Hayraker got in a discussion with this old man about Jesus Christ.
“Why don’t you accept Christ as the Messiah?”
“Because when the Messiah comes the world will be perfect. No sin. No disease.”
“Wouldn’t that be kind of dull?”
“Obviously you are a meshuggener.”
Then the old man spit on Hayraker.
Wagner promised to take him to see a prostitute. The streets of New York were wet. They smelled of urine and garbage. Potato peelings.”
What would his first piece of ass be like? Masturbation had been his thing ever since he’d turned fifteen. And then he had to go and confess it to the priest. “Forgive me father for I have sinned, my last confession was four years ago. I have masturbated at least three times a week for those four years. I am not sorry. Well, maybe in a psychological sense. I realize that it’s the easy way out. I just might go looking for girls instead if it wasn’t for masturbation. But then I also just might be a sex maniac if it hadn’t been for masturbation. I probably would have married a woman I didn’t love just for the every day sex. Being the kind of person I am I would have convinced myself that I loved her. I have tried to abstain but then I was afraid I’d hurt myself if I did. The love muscle would atrophy or something. The last time I abstained I went almost two weeks and I wasn’t having any nocturnal emissions. I don’t think masturbation is a sin. It’s only a sin if you think it’s a sin and do it anyway. I don’t think missing mass on Sunday is a sin either. I have tried to pray there but if there is a good-looking chick anywhere near, forget about it. I start sending mind signals. “Hey, baby, you are looking fine today in that nice white dress. I’d like to put my hand up there and tickle your fancy.”
But then Hayraker never talked like that unless he was really drunk and only then because all the other guys were. “The language of men” Norman Mailer called it. You were a pussy if you didn’t use bad language
Church, or rather religion, should be a private thing. The Seekers had the right idea in the 1600s. Go out in nature and experience God. If there is a God that’s where he is. Nature is as close to God as we’re going to get. The Seekers didn’t last though because they weren’t organized. You have to have some head dummy saying, “Thou shalt not,” or everyone will do their own thing and pretty soon you have 16,000 Lutheran synods.
Wouldn’t it be better to have a list of “Thou shoulds”?
1. Thou should be kind to animals.
2. Thou should call Mom on Mother’s Day.
3. Thou should give money to Jerry’s kids.
Thou Shalt Nots antagonized free thinkers, rather people who think they’re free thinkers.
Oh, for the good old days when St. Francis Girls School was still in operation and you could tool by in your 1952 Mercury and ogle the dollies. It’s known as “scoping out the babes” these days. And there was a nursing school, too, St. Gabriel’s. All you had to do was call up and ask if there were any girls who wanted to go out. In those days they weren’t really worried about getting raped for some reason. Or they just thought everybody in town was a nice Catholic boy.
