SCREAMING BATFISH BLUES #20

SCREAMING BATFISH BLUES #20

BATFISH

PEARL HARBOR

The President of the fucking United States is the one that started the enormous shit avalanche that was about to hit us. That’s not totally true.

His daughter was coming to visit. But since our head honcho, the Admiral of the Pacific Fleet, was going to be taking the little shit for a boat ride on his personal barge around Pearl Harbor, all the boats and the boathouse had to be checked for explosives about a week out before they arrived.

We were pulled out of our cozy little communications dope nest and sent to the CINCPACFLT boathouse on temporary orders. The first two days were spent diving under the boats and docks and the surrounding areas to check for explosives. The remaining days were spent at the boathouse with two advance party Secret Service agents who got high.

You heard that right! Those two crazy fuckers smoked dope and they were the ones who brought the subject up.

Late one evening, the four of us were sitting on the back dock enjoying a cold brew when one of the agents asked if we happened to have anything a little stronger. Shit, I thought the dude meant like a bottle of

rum.

But dumb-ass Zak pipes in with “Right fucking here” and fires up a pin joint of some excellent dope called Mango. I almost passed out right then and there.

Those two agents grinned like they had just received word that they were being transferred to a unit that guards the teenage daughters of politicians and started to toke away. To this day I’ve never seen two guys get as stoned as they did on one joint.

Mango, by the way, was the invention of this crazy asshole that lived up in the mountains somewhere on Maui. He had a degree in horticulture and cross bred this pot with a mango tree by growing the pot so that it somehow intertwined with the mango tree branches, giving it a delicious fruity flavor and a THC kick that would knock your dick in the dirt. Couple years ago I heard some locals shot him in the head.

Anyhow, the Prez’s daughter, along with her cat, came to visit and to go on her harbor tour. Took all of an hour and then we were free to go back to our normal duties. Our two new buddies had gotten a taste for the bud though, and wanted to take some back to the states.

But the problem was that it was between pay periods and we were waiting on our next shipment to come in and all we had in inventory was a couple of Thai sticks that a fleet sailor had given Zak for services rendered.

The guy liked to watch while other guys screwed his wife so Zak had volunteered for the chore. That was all great but the fact that the Thai stick had been treated with PCP was not.

We hadn’t sampled the product and didn’t know it, but Zak in his usual “what the fuck” manner gave the agents the sticks.

“What the fuck,” I’m sure was running through one of the agent’s mind, when safe at home back in Seattle, he had rolled up a big fat number and gotten so blasted that he took out his service weapon and fired off the entire clip into his garage, thinking that he was firing at a Sasquatch sitting in the back on a lawn chair.

I had only done angel dust one time my self. A sailor had stopped by our barracks room one evening and we had snorted a line of it and then on top of that he had produced a baseball size junk of hash. He filled up the bowl of a tobacco pipe and we had smoked the whole damn bowl. I got so high I tried to come down by taking a cold shower but jumped out of the shower stall when sparks like a welding machine had started flying out of the nozzle.

Zak crawled under his bunk, whimpering, and didn’t come out for the entire rest of the

night.

Never again!

The Sasquatch that the secret service agent saw turned out to be his daughter’s plastic swimming pool with a picture of Ronald McDonald on the bottom, which was sitting upright against the back wall. Both the

daughter and his wife had gone running screaming into the night.

The authorities were notified and the agent did what most people in his situation

would do (once they came down and got out of the hospital), he snitched us off to his bosses. Who in turn snitched us off to the office of the Naval Investigative Service located in Pearl Harbor

If the NIS agent who answered the phone in Pearl Harbor had been a regular Hawaii Five O kind of cop, things would have turned out one hell of a lot different. But he wasn’t.

The asshole who answered the phone was on the take and had been almost since the day he arrived on the island.

Leon had started off his career in undercover work as an enlisted man in the Navy. Just a lowly storekeeper who gathered brownie points with his superiors by informing on his crew members. He was given no actual authority to do this. It was just his sense of duty that brought forth his patriotic actions. Didn’t matter if they were selling or smoking pot, committing murder, throwing paint brushes overboard, or jacking off in their bunks reading Playboy. Leon would snitch them off.

This went on for almost two years until two black enginemen caught Leon out on the fantail one balmy afternoon as the ship cruised the waters off of Norfolk, Virginia.

Leon had recently narced these two gentlemen off for bringing vodka on board to help them through the lonely, boring nights at sea.

They didn’t even ask for an explanation. One of them simply kicked Leon right in the balls; they hoisted him up, and proceeded to throw him overboard while the ship was over a mile off the coast.

Luckily for Leon, his only friend on the ship, an effeminate Filipino steward named Romy, had been hiding on the next deck up, and observing the whole fiasco. Thinking quickly, he pulled the quick release lever on one of the ship’s life rafts which catapulted it overboard and Leon was able to swim to it.

Then not thinking quickly, he hurdled the railing to land on his feet on the deck below, Bruce Lee style, in front of his friend’s assailants.

Who then kicked him in the gonads and threw him over the side. Poor Romy, who had grown up in the poor section of Manila, had never done well in boot camp during swimming classes, and he sank to the bottom like a bag of concrete. Never to be seen again. By human eyes that is. The air had no quite left Romy’s lungs for the last time when a fifteen foot great white shark, who was cruising along outside of her normal hunting grounds, spied Romy quivering in his death throes, and gobbled him up like he was a large tuna and later giving her a bad case of gas.

Leon and Romy were both discovered missing at formation the next morning. They were so universally hated by the crew that no one even noticed them gone for almost sixteen hours!

The life raft that Leon had crawled into had been caught in an out going rip tide and had been swept farther out to sea. Leon would be discovered a week later, hideously sunburned and hallucinating from dehydration, by a coke dealer out on a shakedown cruise with his new highpowered cigarette boat. All he had on board to drink was Heineken, which Leon drank four bottles of in about fifteen minutes.

The combination of dehydration and alcohol sent Leon into a psychotic rage when he arrived at the naval hospital in Norfolk and he had to be restrained after he tried to assault one of the nursing staff by biting her on her breast.

So he wound up spending three weeks in the hospital psych ward. It would not be what most people would consider a pleasant three weeks. Leon was roomed with a psychotic, two hundred pound Marine, who thought he was Dean Martin. He also thought Leon was his “bitch” and treated him so in the evenings. The night staff

being more interested in playing cards and catching a buzz than checking on the welfare of their patients.

After his “recovery” Leon decided it was time to go about his career in a more intelligent way. In other words he felt he needed a gun to back up his actions. He applied for the NIS training program in Georgia and

the Navy being so highly impressed by this young man, accepted his application. There is absolutely nothing more that the Navy loves than a snitch.

NIS school was a slice of heaven for him. Everyone in his class was cut from the same bolt of cloth. All had been terribly tormented by their peers while growing up and they all had the same goal. To pay back every one of those motherfuckers if it took the rest of their lives.

Leon was assigned to Pearl Harbor after graduation from training and began to spend his evenings on Hotel Street, the red light district of Honolulu. It was there he met a transsexual Korean named Pok who looked

remarkably like Romy. Romy as it turns out had been more than just a good friend.

Pok was high dollar all the way and the things he/she did to Leon with an ice cube, a little dab of cocaine, a twelve inch dildo, and a bottle of Boone’s Farm put Leon in places he had never been before.

But Pok liked his/her money and drugs.

A young NIS agent was not bringing in the jack that his fancy whore would require for maintenance, so Leon began to skim drugs and money from the sailors he was busting. He almost fell apart when he answered the phone call from the secret service office in Seattle. He knew exactly who we where. Someone facing a drug related court martial had already tipped him off about us to avoid being sent to the brig.

His last big bust had gone tits up when the suspect had beaten the officer to death before he could bust him. Damn the luck. Leon had already been using his cat like observation skills. We like typical drug dealing idiots, had let our guards down by sampling our own product and had gotten sloppy. Leon knew we could make him enough cash so that Pok could get her final operation done to make her complete.