SCREAMING BATFISH BLUES #18

SCREAMING BATFISH BLUES #18

BATFISH

PEARL HARBOR

When the military transport landed in Hawaii and the doors opened up, the first thing that struck your mind was the smell.

It smelled of salt air and flowers. Tropical. The trip over not been uneventful. We flew out of Norton Air Force base. Up by Frisco.

We had to meet the military bus that would take us there at the downtown bus depot, in the heart of what had to be the shittiest part of San Francisco. I swear that every vagrant, pimp, drunk, dope addict, and pervert in the city was hanging out in that joint.

Our flight from San Diego had gotten in late and it was after midnight. Prime time for bottom feeders. While we waited for our ride an old homo had followed Zak into the latrine in hopes of either getting or giving a blow job. Didn’t really matter because Zak hit him so fucking hard the guy’s feet literally came right off the floor.

Thinking quickly, we went through his pockets and found forty bucks and a vial which held what looked like around twenty hits of windowpane acid. We then sat him on an empty stool and closed the stall door.

Then to make matters worse, this old woman who was wearing nothing but a yellowed Condor Club T-shirt, an adult diaper (which looked like it could use a changing), and flip flops for shoes, started screaming at us about how her son was dying of a brain tumor and it was all the government’s fault. She eerily reminded me of an aunt on my father’s side of the family.

I approached the old hag and calmly told her that I had something that would make her feel better and handed her about half of the bottle of windowpane, which she promptly washed down with a swig of a beer wrapped in a racing form that she had been holding in her gnarly hands. Couple minutes later our bus showed up and no one was the wiser.

The Condor Club is a famous San Francisco titty bar. I certainly hope that she hadn’t been one of the dancers there.

By the time we got to Norton AFB it was so late we had to sleep across some folding chairs and the flight over the next morning was a nightmare. The military had chartered a huge jumbo civilian airliner and there was no food, refreshments, or even stewardesses on the damn thing.

Officers and higher ranking enlisted had let their little bastard kids run up and down the aisles like it was a track meet.

Zak, who I was starting to think should been named Beelzebub instead, promptly met a young army gal who was straight out of boot camp, and screwed her standing up in the bathroom. Then of course, refused to talk to her the remainder of the flight.

The sound of her sobbing left me with zilch for sleep.

When we arrived in Pearl Harbor we were both running on empty and had to spend the night in the transient barracks. Everyone in the place was being discharged for other than honorable reasons and it showed. The air was blue with the haze of marijuana smoke and one guy in our dorm sat on his bunk and openly mainlined some horse. The needle that he was using didn’t look like it could pierce a rotten apple. The dude looked like skid row material. The grim reaper was close by to him.

The next morning we were awoken by a tall, skinny, white guy with an Afro. He was wearing this loud Hawaiian shirt with parrots and beer bottles on it. “Hey wake up motherfuckers, it’s time to roll. Sorry I didn’t meet you at the airport but I got sidetracked. Was at this Korean bar and met this little bitch that could suck a golf ball through a garden hose and shit I couldn’t leave that. I just couldn’t. Could you? Fucking A, this place smells like dope. Bunch fucking derelicts in here. Lucky you didn’t get butt fucked while you slept. You didn’t, did ya? You guys been getting high?

Well if you want a pick me up, let me know. Come on let’s go.”

We had just met Tom, our assistant section leader. Tom had been munching on government issued Bennies washed down with coffee and talked non stop while we checked into our permanent barracks and at headquarters.

I vaguely remembered Tom from Corry Station in Florida. He had graduated almost right after I arrived there. I went to New Orleans with a roommate of his and we had gotten severely wasted on Bourbon Street. Wound up getting a couple of black whores and spent the weekend with them snorting amyl nitrate. Tom had been pissed that I got the better looking one of the two. His had resembled a mule. I got the good looker on the grounds that I had set up the deal while he was off buying a hot dog.

Tom was also going to be our roommate. He was a graduate of the first class that merged the SEAL teams with communication technicians. It was a nice spacious barracks room that held only three men and had its own shower. Tom had even had a personal phone installed.

Communication Technicians work varied shifts so that’s one reason they are roomed together. The other reason is because of their high security clearances it’s better to keep them away from regular Navy where they may be exposed to harmful and illegal behavior. What bullshit!

It was Friday and there was a section party being thrown that night in honor of our arrival. When we pulled up to the curb I could smell the dope smoke out to the street. Rock and roll was blaring so fucking loud I thought the windows would break. Beer and liquor were flowing, and more importantly, weed was being openly smoked.

One good looking gal was dancing topless on top of a coffee table while guys were standing around and cheering. I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw this forty-ish looking dude standing off to the side with a bottle of Jack Daniels in one hand and his crank in the other. Obviously,he was beyond fucked up. 

He was watching the chick dancing and stroking his prong to the beat of The Trashmen’s Surfing Bird.

No one else seemed to notice him or care. When I pointed his rather rude behavior out to Tom, he just shrugged and said “Oh that’s just Red, he’s our section leader.”

Red I would find out, along with being a career Navy man, was also a boozer of epic proportions, and huge fan of deep sea fishing. He even owned his own boat. Jacking off at parties once he got tanked was nothing new for Red. Especially if Rose was around. She was the girl dancing topless. Red had a big thing for Rose and it was driving him crazy.

Quite often after Red had been rebuffed by Rose, he would take his crank out and begin to dry hump anyone who was bending over at the time. Male or female. This also would explain the black eyes and swollen noses that Red seemed to have after parties. There was nothing more in this life that Red wanted to do than to get Rose out on his fishing boat and pour the coals to her. But she would have nothing to do with him and this about put him over the edge.

He was about ready for a psych evaluation up at Tripler Army hospital.

You see even though Rose was in the Navy herself, she also earned extra income as a high dollar hooker down in Waikiki. She wouldn’t fuck Red even if he paid her triple her normal going rate.

The following Monday when we reported for work and we saw these same people, it was like night and day. You would never have even imagined that these were the folks who ended up their bash with a pissing for

distance contest (The bulls eye was a passed out seaman apprentice).

Except for Red, who had a terminal corn liquor smell about him at all times.

CINCPACFLT is located about a mile off of Pearl Harbor. It’s a huge, white, wooden structure, and houses the offices of a shit load of high ranking naval officers. It is also the communication outpost of the Pacific Fleet. Tom, Zak, and I were in a small center of our own on the third floor.

It was accessible only by coming through a door equipped with a combination lock and since we were the only members of the SEAL/CT program we were the only people allowed in besides Red.

There wasn’t much worry about there. On most evening watches Red showed up for work boiled as an owl on Mr. Daniel’s.

We also had a nice little outside deck which no one other that us had access to. This would come in handy for getting high while on watch.

There wasn’t close to enough SEAL/UDT generated intelligence coming through the channels to keep nine men busy on three rotating shifts, so we also handled intelligence concerning the private lives of Naval personnel and their dependents, along with the misbehaving adventures of sailors that the Navy was always doing their damnedest to keep out of eyes of the civilian reporters. It was great fun to go out on the deck and get high and then read about all the good times that other people were having in their lives.

Example:

The two Navy corpsman that went to pick up an officer’s wife in their ambulance that had fallen down the stairs at home and was knocked unconscious. They stopped on the way to the hospital and screwed her.

Another officer’s wife who was fucking a young seaman at a party and when caught in the act cried “rape”. The misguided seaman was sentenced to three years at hard labor.

The master chief petty officer who discovered that members of his division had been pissing in his coffee pot, but not until after they had dosed it with LSD. He had been found doing a lurid dance in his boxer shorts on the fantail of his ship.

The USS DIXIE out of San Diego received an unusual amount of reports. Must have been a rowdy crew. The Captain, who was a former Green Bay Packer, assaulted a sailor when he didn’t come to attention quick enough to suit his taste.

Someone had mailed a photograph of a huge pile of cocaine sitting on a mirror with the words “High from the USS DIXIE” under it, to High Times magazine.

And one evening while in port in Los Angeles, the ship had taken a busload of sailors to the taping of a TV show called The Liar’s Club. Everyone on the bus had gotten incredibly fucked up on mescaline and cheap wine during the drive and were so obnoxious at the taping that the MC had began to actually weep and had stormed into the audience and told the crew that they were “fucking up” the taping.

A local sailor had been caught screwing the mascot of his department; a dog named “Brownie,” and had defended his actions by telling investigators that they were in love.

People lost their security clearances on occasion and this information also circulated across our desk. One young lady had some tasteful nude photos taken of herself to present to her husband when he returned from his rather lengthy cruise. Her supervisor, a typically drunken old sot of a chief petty officer had stumbled on to the photos and told her that he would tell her husband that she had the photos taken for the chief unless she fucked him. She had screwed the old bastard, had understandably felt degraded, and had turned him in. She promptly lost her clearance and was facing discharge from the service, while the chief had

been reassigned to the motor pool, which had lots of young Navy WAVES working there, to await his retirement.

But drugs were the main topic of a good share of these reports. In those reports we had a very professional interest.

Pearl Harbor was an absolute supermarket for the connoisseur of fine marijuana and other fun recreational drugs. With ships coming in daily from all parts of the world it was a buyer’s market. MDA, LSD, THC, hash, cocaine, heroin, uppers, downers, all a rounders. And the pot. Oh my stars, the pot. If you weren’t smoking some of the asskicking shit that was grown locally on the island, you were smoking Thai stick that just came in off a fast frigate returning from a cruise to the Orient. Or some Cambodian Gold smuggled in by a sailor just off a West Pac.

Right out of the box we met two Communications Technicians who had an active interest in the marijuana trade and wanted to expand their business on Pearl Harbor itself. Matt and Rick were both married and lived on the north shore of the island and had a ton of good contacts out there, since the majority of the population in that area were locals. And it was the locals that could turn you on to the really good smoke.

Our business took off like gangbusters. Matt and Rick supplied the pot to us and named their price per pound. If we agreed on the price, the dope was fronted to us and we smuggled it on to the base. Which entailed throwing it into a grocery bag and putting it in the front seat of our car and driving past the Marine gate guard.

We would accept only the finest quality ganga. No shit with all the leaf, stems, and seeds. Hell no! Only pot with the beautiful buds that were glistening with resin on their tips. Then we would break the pound down by sorting the buds out on a newspaper and would then weigh the buds out on a scale and seal them individually in plastic with a food sealer, like you buy at Sears. To really make our product stand out, we would quite often seal up a pack of Zig Zag rolling papers along with the bud. Made a nice extra little touch.

I bought an old used Plymouth Valiant from a sailor who was rotating back to the mainland. I had noticed that the plates had a good ten months left on them before it had to be registered again and that sealed the deal. I left the vehicle in his name and we parked it in the barracks parking lot amongst the hundred or so other cars. The dope was stored in the trunk inside of several zip lock containers bought at a base Tupperware party, which were stashed under the spare tire. Every five days or so, one of us moved the car to avoid suspicion by the Shore Patrol.

There were only two time periods that our product was available. Pay day and the following two days following it because that’s when everyone was flush with cash. And then three days before payday, we would front our product to our good and trusted customers at a 25% mark up, because everyone was broke and out of dope and were desperate to get high.

It was a lovely system. After we sold each pound, we paid off Matt and Rick, and split the remaining cash. I brought in almost a thousand bucks a month on average. Every month I would send my sister in Minneapolis a manila envelope, which held one hundred dollars and another envelope which she was not to open. That held an additional five hundred dollars for her to hold for me. The extra hundred was for her troubles. The extra four hundred that I kept was stashed in an old shoe box in my locker for a rainy day.

It was a great life for almost a year. Time just seems to fly past you while living in the tropics. Every day we’d get up and start the day by washing down our steroids with a big joint of Hawaii’s finest and a glass of

orange juice. Hit the gym and blast our bodies. Spend a couple of hours training with our team. Hit the beach and try to bang some beauties. Go to work. Party hard that night. Go to bed. Get up the next morning and do it

all over again.

Then it all fell apart in what was really a shitty series of events for all concerned.