This was a Cheech and Chong situation if I had ever seen one. The floor of the car I was sitting in, a Datsun 240Z, was absolutely littered with white cross. Speed. Uppers. Go-Fast. Whatever the hell the slang was for it then. The shit was everywhere. Must have been two hundreds hits spread all over the floor and the seats and between the spent bottles of Heineken. I was bent over in the passenger seat trying to pick the tabs out of the carpet, my eyes tearing up from the smoke from the lit Marlboro that was stuck in my mouth .
"Jesus Christ, Jay! If the fucking highway patrol pulls us over we're gonna wind up getting our asses reamed in the Los Angeles County Jail. If we even get that far. Doesn't that sound like fun?"
Jay belted out that loud laugh of his. "Denny and I did a little partying last night. I forgot about the mess."
Denny was Dennis Barry, a good buddy of ours. Bar none the wildest son of a bitch I would ever meet in my life. With a short squat hairy body and huge stevedore arms, Dennis would stroll down the decks of the ship like a lost silverback gorilla, swinging those tree trunk arms of his. Good natured and funny when sober, shit in your pants funny when stoned, and short tempered and dangerous when drinking, Dennis was one of a kind. The son of a Hollywood film lot worker, Dennis planned on getting on at Fox Studios as soon as his enlistment ran out. It was amazing that he had lasted almost four years in the service. But amongst the non-lifers to the Dixie, Dennis had achieved God-like status.
He had been assaulted by the Captain of our ship. And lived to tell the tale. Captain K. J. Roth was a blowhard of epic proportions. A former football playing washout who had tried out with and miserably failed with the Green Bay Packers, Roth was a huge lug of a man with a tiny head who favored wearing cowboy boots and carrying a silver six shooter in a monogrammed holster as he strutted around the ship like a deranged combination of George Patton and a fucking bandy rooster.
Equipped with the brain the size of a pea, he was the never ending target of practical jokes from the crew which included having his engraved bowling ball thrown over the side which divers were unable to locate in the murky waters of Sand Diego Bay, calling his stateroom late at night “Quit jacking off up there, Roth,“ his sheets on his bunk short-sheeted constantly, mess cooks pissing in his coffee pot, and the almost daily theft of his sports section from the newspaper delivered to the door of his stateroom.
Even though a football failure he lived vicariously through the box scores.
“Sons of bitches!” he would scream over the ships intercom as he stood on the bridge with spit flying out of his mouth. “Sons of bitch bastards! I want my fucking paper back right now or liberty is canceled for the crew for the next goddamn year.”
He would never get it back.
The ship was in dry-dock and was torn all to shit. It was like being stationed on Satan's private yacht. Smoke. Welding sparks flying everywhere. Flush one toilet it would back up two rows down on someone taking a crap - now that was funny.
Hammers banging. With all the needle guns and knuckle-busters going as deck hands chipped off years of coats of paint you couldn't hear yourself think.
Dennis and I were up on the O-2 level of the ship up by officer's country, shirking from our duties as we smoked, coked, and joked. With all the yard noise we were both wearing Mickey Mouse ears and were mostly just trying to read each other's lips. It was so fucking loud that we couldn't hear the ship's pipe, which is the Naval term for a loudspeaker announcement that Captain's Mast was about to begin. Captain's Mast being the equivalent to a civilian’s misdemeanor court appearance. Only in the civilian world you aren’t normally sentenced to 45 days restriction to a ship and you spend your nights scrubbing shit stains and cum tracks off of toilets.
Since we were wearing ear protection and you couldn’t hear the goddamn announcement anyway we weren’t expecting Captain Roth, trailed by his cast of flunky officers, to come charging around the corner like a fucking maniac and hit Dennis with a block that I can guarantee the dumb bastard never threw as hard in the Packer’s training camp. If he had he might have made the team.
Dennis never saw it coming and went flying into the bulkhead (wall), bounced off it and came back with a cocked fist that he most likely would have broken the nose of his assailant with in any other set of circumstances, until he stunningly saw the commissioned moron standing in front of him.
“Goddamn you! Don’t you know how to come to attention, asshole?” screamed Roth. The spit of course flying out of his mouth again, spattering the front of Dennis’s coveralls.
“I’ll have your ass court martialed! I’ll have you in the brig tonight sucking a Marine’s cock!” He turned and stormed off down the deck followed by his stunned henchman.
Roth had his timeline all wrong. By that night Dennis's parents had secured the services of a top notch attorney. Within a month, Captain Roth, who was in line for admiral had not only lost his command but was forced to retire. Fuck thinking about making admiral.
Dennis was rewarded with an early honorable discharge and we all kept in touch after he got out.. But he wouldn’t let the Roth incident go. For sort of a hobby he had taken to calling Roth late at night and tormenting him about the loss of his command and promotion. Dennis had a buddy at A T & T who kept getting Roth's phone number when he kept changing it. Within a year, Dennis would be dead of a morphine overdose. Roth eventually capped himself with his service revolver. In his typical fuckup style he wasn't successful and spent his remaining years in a veteran's nursing home.
***
"Fucking A! There's even some black beauties and a hit of ...shit this looks like a tab of blotter acid," I yelled out in glee. "This is gonna be a fun drive I can see." I popped the top on the only remaining full beer, warm, and washed down a white cross, a black beauty, and the tab of acid.
The year was 1979 and our ship, the USS Dixie, was home-ported out of San Diego. The ship had been in a major overhaul at Todd Shipyard in San Pedro when Jay and I had met. Since then, the ship had finished up it's overhaul early - which is another epic story in itself and had cruised back on down to San Diego. Jay and I drove back to LA almost every weekend together. He owned and lived in a apartment complex in Hollywood. I had kept my apartment in Long Beach when the ship returned to San Diego and commuted on weekends and days off. I planned on living in Los Angeles when my enlistment ran out. It had been slightly over a year since I had left Hawaii. It had been the only year of my time in the Navy that had been relatively calm. Although I still worried about Brewer talking about the NIS incident, it was filed farther back in my mind. The briefcase rested comfortably in a safe deposit box in Long Beach.
The Dixie hadn't been a bad ship to finish up my tour of the Navy on. It was a destroyer tender. A huge floating hulk with dozens if not hundreds of shops on it. Any Navy ship, destroyer class or smaller, could tie up alongside of her and get damn near any problems it had taken care of. It rarely got underway so the many of the crew lived off of the ship. It was a den of thieves, drug dealers, drunks, and Navy castoffs - a typical post Viet Nam Navy vessel. I had laid low my year onboard the ship but had witnessed hundreds of drug deals, busts, assaults, and even an attempted male on male rape. Recently four crewman had been arrested for hanging out along the Mexico border, which was just a few miles away, and robbing illegal aliens as they crossed the border.
"Hey man! Check it out, dude. That new guy is Beaver from that television show." There was new meat laying a fresh coast of paint on the anchor. I had walked over and taken a look at him. Negative. I walked back over to the guy spreading the scuttlebutt. "You're full of shit, Jimmy. That's definitely not Jerry Mathers." Jimmy was Jimmy Carnahan, a pasty skinned little fart that liked to paste a sign up in the bus windows every night when the lifers bussed us back to the barracks.
Same goddamn message every night. "Girls - show us your tits!!" The little bastard drove me nuts.
"Hey new guy," I shouted. "What's your name?"
"Jay North," Jay had shouted back like he hadn't given a shit who he was and had turned back to his coat of battleship gray.
I looked back to Jimmy. "Dennis The Menace, not Leave It To Beaver, dumbass. Two different shows and two different people." Jimmy tore off towards the stern of the ship to spread his hot new gossip, probably stopping off at a head to wax his cane as he was a well known and notorious shipboard masturbator.
***
Jay started up the car and pulled out of the parking lot like he was late for a date with a five hundred dollar prostitute with a purse full of Bolivian blow and I banged the top of my head on the glove box in the process. "You're sure getting short, aren't you? Shit, man. That's fucking great."
"Couple more days, man. I'm short. Short as a motherfucker." Short was short for short-timer.
Military slang that meant my enlistment was soon to expire. My time ran out the following week and I had enough leave to burn out the rest of my enlistment. My shipboard days were done. This would be the last time Jay and I would be making the LA run together. I rubbed the bump already growing on the top of my head.
"Stop at a liquor store before you get on the highway so we can score some beer for our long journey. I think we'll need some with all this speed in the car. We might wind up with a bit of the proverbial cottonmouth."
Jay pulled over at a package store and I ran in. Throwing two twelve packs of Holland's finest and a couple of packs of Swisher Sweet cigars onto the counter, I perused the stack of skin magazines, always looking for lesbians pictorials, while I waited for the clerk to ring out the customer ahead of me.
"Would you like to share that beer with me? We could have a party, you and me." I looked up to see a black wino leering at me. He had a big booger hanging out of his nose and bleeding chapped lips that he was smacking at me. Bathing also didn't appear to be a high priority on his list. “I’ll blow you for a beer," he whispered. The dirty old degenerate looked eerily familiar.
Just in case in might need it, I reached into my back pocket and felt for my folding Buck knife which was standard issue for sailors in those days.
"Get the fuck out of here you old rummy," hollered the clerk who was obviously retired Navy by the faded tattoos on his forearms. "Fucking class of people we get around here these days," he muttered as he shoved two jugs of Thunderbird into a paper bag and handed them to the drunk. "Now get the hell out of here you smelly old bastard."
The wino followed me out the door staying about five feet back. I turned around and faced him. "What in the hell is your problem, asshole?"
He had an evil grin on his face. "I know you.
You was in my last company. Your ass is in hot water. boy. Hot motherfucking water! I've had people who came to talk to me about you. Bad motherfuckers, too. Been looking for your ass. Gonna put a cap in your ass someday, that's for motherfucking sure."
"What the hell are you talking about? What company? What bad motherfuckers?" Who the hell was this guy? Looked just like another San Diego alky to me but still eerily familiar.
"Less than a goddamn year and they kick my ass out. I lose my pension, Everything. Just cause some boot can't keep his mouth shut. Could have been you. Maybe you was the one that talked."
I stood there silently looking at the wreck in front of me. Then it registered! My boot camp commander. Only four years had passed since I had seen him. Laying back in his chair with a recruit named Murphy kneeled in front of him. The passing of time had not been kind to this wretch. I tossed a five dollar bill down on the sidewalk and walked quickly to the car.
"I don't need your charity you prick! Look at me! This could be you! This may be your future!"
I jumped in the car and threw the beer onto the floorboard.
Jay looked at me oddly. "What in the hell was that all about?"
"Did I ever tell you about that time in boot camp when I saw that recruit blowing the...."
Jay's laugh echoed out the windows as he headed on to the on ramp.
I turned around in my seat and looked back at the liquor store. Former Navy Chief Johnson was standing in the middle of the street. Giving me the finger. I uneasily settled back into the passenger seat. What did he mean? Bad motherfuckers? Who was looking for me? I once more felt the need to disappear. Disappear into the mist.