"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 that it's 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 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.