SCREAMING BATFISH BLUES #10

SCREAMING BATFISH BLUES #10

BATFISH

SAN DIEGO

I staggered off the plane in San Diego smelling remarkably like my step-grandfather did in the terminal stages of alcoholism, only without the dying.

We were not greeted warmly by the swabby in the airport. “Putout those fucking cigarettes and give me your goddamn orders you dumb shits,” he shrieked at our little group. He didn’t seem to care that there were a lot of civilians walking around. The gray Navy bus awaited us at the curb and we were whisked away to what would be our new home for the next nine weeks.

Looking back now, the first day was the worst one, after that  itwasn’t so bad. But the first day truly sucked. Long before the sun came up, some asshole came running into the barracks and screamed “Get your pussies out of those racks and hit the deck running.” It was not the kind of awakening that I normally preferred.

The only thing we were allowed to do before marching over to the chow hall was either take a leak or a shit, couldn’t even brush your teeth.

Upon the arrival at the dining facility I sat down across from a fellow recruit who promptly barfed all over his tray. The day had just begun.

After our delicious meal, we were then taken over to have our heads shaven, outfitted for uniforms, and then to this huge hall where the biggest prick that I would ever meet in the military was waiting to greet us.

He was in charge of making sure our clothes were stenciled. All of your clothes that are issued to you in the Navy have to be stenciled so they can be returned back to you if you are on a ship that does your laundry for you.

I also think it’s because the Navy is nothing but a den of thieves. As I would find out in the coming years that some son of a bitch would steal your used rubber if you left it lying around.

This guy though was an absolute maniac. He ran around screaming “pussies, limp dicks, motherfuckers” and anything else at us that happened to pop up in his mind.

At the same time we were trying to stencil all this crap with this big round brush and permanent India ink. Of course, we were fucking up horribly and at one point he even jammed a guy’s brush into his mouth. I never did figure how that poor dude got that ink out of his teeth.

As this was all going on I noticed a rather heavy, older, black man observing us from the back of the room. I would shortly find out that this was our new company commander, Chief Petty Officer Johnson. We would be his last company prior to his retirement.

He wanted to go out with a bang so he physically tortured us and mentally mind fucked us until we were the number one company in the battalion at graduation. He also wound up with a tidy little nest egg upon retirement after he ran two scams on us.

The first being the cigarette scam. Johnson announced that you could not have your own cigarettes, so all smokes were rounded up and a collection was taken. If you smoked, every week you were required to put in two dollars towards the smoke kitty. BUT, only two cartons of cigarettes were to be in the possession of the company commander, base regulations of course. You were given one cigarette a day.

If you deserved it. Johnson ran things on the merit program. Normally no one deserved it. 

Yet, every week the yeoman(the recruit unit clerk) came around and took another two dollars from you. This went on week after week. Do the math. About sixty guys smoked. 120 bucks a week times 9 weeks gives you $1080. The old bastard maybe bought three cartons of smokes the whole time we were there. Cigarettes at that time cost about five dollars a carton on base.

Close to eighty guys bought into the next grift. Johnson announced that he would smuggle pizzas in for recruits who would chip in ten dollars a piece. When the big night came it looked like he had gone out and bought about fifty of those frozen pizzas that you get for a buck a shot at the grocery store and cooked ‘em himself. The boxes that they came in didn’t even match.

But we all had it better than Murphy, the recruit unit clerk. The day we left San Diego, the recruit company commander told me that one of Murphy’s many duties besides running the cigarette scam was also smoking Johnson’s big black cigar.

He knew this for a fact. Late one night he had got up to take a leak and heard a weird noise coming from the company commander’s office.

Risking great bodily harm to himself, he still couldn’t contain his curiosity and had gently opened the door, only to see Murphy on his hands and knees getting his ass blasted by Johnson.

The weirdest day in boot camp was the anti-drug lecture that they gave you. We had a chaplain give us our seminar. He actually showed an old episode of Dragnet. The one where at the beginning of the show some straight business man type comes into the station and informs Joe and Bill that his daughter and her husband are smoking reefer and he fears for the safety of his granddaughter. The acting is way over the top. All the heads are wearing love beads and granny glasses and call the cops “pig”.

In the end of course, the granddaughter drowns in the bathtub while the hippies are having a “pot” party. Bill Gannon has to run out to the driveway and get sick. At the end of the viewing we were all roaring with laughter and the chaplain was enraged. Shaking his fist and screaming about how his own daughter had become “addicted to reefer.”

The man of God then had us marched to our barracks where we were outfitted in our raincoats and forced to do push-ups and jumping jacks until four or five recruits passed out.

“He had to do the dude’s pole? Man, talk about nasty!” screamed out Artimus. He was laughing so hard I thought he was going to pass out.

“No shit like that ever went down in the Marines, man, that’s for goddamn sure. Fucking guy getting ass blasted by the company commander.” He shook his head in amazement.

“I’m starting to put on a serious buzz here what do you say we go over to the Posada del Mar and try to force some chow down before I get wasted?” I asked.

“Good idea. I could use a big plate of beans and rice. Let’s roll.”

Artimus lumbered to his feet and began to walk down the beach then suddenly stopped and started laughing again.

“Hey you never had to put out to the old company buck did you? Or did you wait to lose your ass at the nuthouse?”

Such a sensitive guy.