MEMORIES OF WHITE TRASH TOWNS
ALONG WITH PROMISES OF ASIAN SEX
AND BRYLCREEM HANDJOBS
"You'll get all the slant eyed pussy you can
shake a stick at," leered my recruiter with a tobacco
juiced grin as he groped himself through his
polyester trousers and mimed what I imagined by
the grease on his pumpkin shaped head was a
Vitalis lubed hand job. Fuck the good training and
travel! Obviously sex with hot, young Asian women
was this recruiter's top recruiting tool.
"Fuck yes!" I had screamed out as I got
caught up in the moment.
My recruiter, Don, was oily and unpleasant,
with beady little pig-like eyes, an alcohol flush to
his face, gin blossomed nose, and seriously
overweight - like a hundred fucking pounds. He
leaned back into his chair which groaned under the
pressure and lit up an unfiltered KOOL while letting
out a thundering fart at the same time. The entire
room immediately stunk of rotten eggs.
"Just wait until you get to the P. I., that's the
Philippine Islands to you landlubbers," he coughed
out, "the whores down there will jack you off and
use Brylcreem for lubricant. Much better than
Vaseline."
Brylcreem and not Vitalis for lubricant!
Well, some sort of old man hair tonic, so I had been
close.
The recruiter lifted his hands and looked up
to the nicotine stained tile ceiling as if he was
welcoming little baby Jesus down from Heaven.
"Nothing finer than a Brylcreem hand-job. And you
won't catch the black clap going that way either."
That would be the first of countless times
that I would hear about the dreaded "Black Clap."
Usually you would hear it after you bragged or lied
to one of your shipmates about some broad you had
banged the night before. The shipmate would be
jealous that you had gotten some pussy and he
hadn't so he would throw this fairy tale your way.
The story was almost always the same. Some sailor
in Thailand or San Francisco, the location doesn't
matter, picks himself up a whore and catches a case
of the dose. Only when the corpsman diagnoses it,
he gives the sailor the bad news, but not before he
calls the Shore Patrol who slap the cuffs on him
because of what he's about to hear. They have to
handcuff him you see because they news he is about
to hear is going to drive him apeshit and he'll try to
kill everybody in his general vicinity. He has the
Black Clap and it can't be cured. All the penicillin
and tetracycline in the world won't help him so he's
like fucking Typhoid Mary but more like Gonorrhea
Gary. He's contagious as a son of a bitch so they
ship him off to some mysterious island never to be
heard from again - I would imagine that there's a lot
of cornholing going down on that island with all
those infected horny sailors running around - no
women to hump and they're all gonna die anyway.
He would be reported to be lost at sea, killed in
action, or some other line of crap to his parents and
they would get paid off with his military life
insurance (SGLI) so they wouldn't ask any nosy
questions. Before I had walked into the recruiter's
office the only thing I knew about the Navy came
from two things: I had seen the movie The Last
Detail with Jack Nicholson last winter. Jack is a
sailor's sailor in that flick. Boozing, brawling,
banging chicks, smoking reefer, and Jack even tells
a jarhead officer who runs the brig to go fuck
himself. So that was cool.
And the second thing was this comic fuck book that my brother got from an uncle of ours who had been on a trip down to
Juarez, Mexico. My brother had kept it hidden
under his socks in his dresser drawer but I found it
when I was looking for some loose change and
cigarettes. The comic book had these drawings of
Popeye the sailor man and his slut Olive Oyl
fucking in all these wild positions. Popeye had this
huge crank and Olive's beaver was real hairy, not
like that shaved shit that's all the rage in the porno
industry these days. I know it was just a comic book
but goddamn! If that's what sailors get to do - bring
it the hell on!
Don had been so excited that I wanted to
sign and ship out that day that he had blown off the
standard police check with a conspiring wink. Three
hours and a ass-load of signed papers later I was on
a bus headed for Minneapolis and the armed forces
enlistment center. Unfortunately for me the first
stop on the bus route (I had dumped the Vega in the
parking lot of a roller rink) was just where I had run
from. As the Greyhound pulled into the station I slid
down low in my seat.
Albert Lea, Minnesota. My hometown and
scene of the crime. At that time home to the
Wilson's meat packing plant, the town of 20,000
had a constant funk about it, courtesy of Wilson's,
that smelled like a bathroom right after someone
had taken a huge crap while smoking a White Owl
cigar. You literally could not open the bedroom
windows on many summer evenings because of the
stench.
Eddie Cochran, the fifties rock and roll star,
had grown up in Albert Lea and I can goddamn
guarantee you that he was not thinking about the
city when he wrote Summertime Blues. Marion
Ross, of Happy Days fame, had also spent some
time there. But they were the far and few between
of the town.
The majority of the population were
employed by the packing plant until they would
eventually be run out of their jobs by vicious labor
strikes, carpal tunnel syndrome, the red meat high
cholesterol hysteria, and cheap Mexican labor. It
didn't help that only twenty miles away was the
town of Austin, the home of Hormel which is the
birthplace of Spam - the all time leading seller in
the canned crap food aisle of your local grocer. It's
the meal made up of pig and cattle intestines, lips,
assholes, and scrap meat the janitor shovels up off
the floor, all packed in a tidy little brick and shoved
in a tin can with a glob of gelatin to preserve it.
Traitors in Albert Lea bought the shit up and fried it
in the pan for Sunday morning breakfast adding to
the overall stench of the town.
Humid and as hot as the gates of Hell in the
summer with mosquitoes buzzing in your face
constantly, it then got down to freeze your nuts off
cold in the winter, the place was no picnic to live in.
With weather conditions like that, the main source
of entertainment was alcohol, and lots of it (along
with suicide since Nordic blooded people just seem
to love to shove a shotgun in their mouth in the
winter - Finland has nothing on Minnesota in that
department). Beer for hot summer days, vodka and
whiskey for the cold and dark winter nights. The
folks of Minnesota are known for their hardy stock
and love of liquor. A relative of mine had been
known to crawl under Model-T Fords back in the
day and drink the alcohol used for anti-freeze
straight out of the radiator.
Savvy Minnesotans who didn't relish the
taste of gun oil in their mouths to hasten their quest
for the big sleep had many other fun options.
Snowmobiles became popular and along with the
booze came high speed accidents involving barbed
wire fences and decapitations, a sort of polar Jayne
Mansfield accident if you will. Drunks drove their
cars on to the frozen lakes to ice fish and wound up
falling through open holes in the ice, some not seen
again until spring found their bodies bobbing to the
surface. A lunatic decided to blow a car through the
ice with dynamite when the local country club put
the junked auto out there for a lottery - a Minnesota
tradition, the person who picks the day and time
wins a prize! The dumb shit didn't know how to
handle explosives and blew his ass all over Fountain
Lake. The owner of the ambulance service, a four
hundred pound mouth breather, uttered the quote -
most likely bullshit - retold around the town for
years when he scooped the man's brains up off the
ice and asked "Does anybody want a set of brains?
Never been used."
It was then and still is, a dead end town. The
typical southern Minnesota town half full of
churches, the other half bars and strip joints. Sneak
in to the Aragon Bar or The Name of the Game - a
filthy beyond belief bar with the biggest
cockroaches I had ever seen until I got to Hawaii -
on a Saturday night to watch sad eyed and coked up
strippers wearing g-strings and pasties as they
humped the fire-pole and then you could
conveniently go listen to the reverend the next
morning and forget all about how your old lady
screamed so fucking loud the glass in the windows
almost busted out in the trailer and you had to sleep
on the Sears not paid for couch when she
discovered you had shot your wad in your pants
after you had gotten so worked up and had blown
half or all of your paycheck that you earned
slaughtering hogs and calves on some cheap sluts
from Minneapolis shaking their asses. Sins
absolved! Just like that.
You know that kind of town if you're from
that godforsaken part of the country. The kind of
town freezes its ass for eight months of the
years just waiting for (hopefully) four months of
spring and summer. Summer brings on fishing, long
walks, movies at the drive in, root beer at the A &
W, and the county fair with it's dangerously unsafe
rides, rip-off games, demolition derbies, and
suicidal sprint car drivers racing on the old beat up
old horse track while the fans bombed on 3.2 beer
watch intently just hoping that tonight might be
their night to witness a fatal crash.
Afterwards they stagger out to the midway, pausing only to barf their beer and foot longs behind the Tilt a Whirl (built
locally just down the road over in Faribault), to
catch the "exotic" Chez Paree strip show imported to the
town by the tattooed covered carnies. Just like the
burned out whores uptown in the bars only these
gals is different. They come from Iowa or
Arkansas! Foreign gals. Ten bucks for a blow job
after the show. If you don't get your head bashed in
for your wallet first by her carnie pimp.
Goddamn! I was sure going to miss the
place.
To be continued....
