“If I could have gotten stationed in Hawaii I would have been a fucking millionaire by the end of my enlistment. Dope that good, people are practically knocking your ass down on the street to get it.” Artimus had a dreamy, faraway look in his eyes.
“Excellent is the only word to really describe it.” I said. “Other than the fact that I love the ocean, that was main reason I wanted Hawaii. Those asskicking, THC enriched buds. So dewey sweet and what a buzz.” I was drooling like that cartoon character, Homer Simpson, just thinking about it. Watching that television show in Spanish on the local TV was a hoot when you’ve been getting loaded.
We had finished our meal at this little beach front restaurant right off the wharf that has the best lobster you could ever eat. Isla Mujures is a fishing village and almost all the seafood you ate there had been caught that morning. I preferred the Posada del Mar, but Artimus had decided at the last second he had to have lobster. After taking the speed I was surprised that I had any appetite at all but that’s the thing about real black beauties. It’s such a high quality go fast that you can actually eat while you’re buzzing along. Now we were spread out on a couple benches of the little town square watching the locals and their kids have their family time. Right in the middle of the square, two dogs were screwing like it was nobody’s business.
While in boot camp I had taken a series of classification tests and it was discovered that my aptitudes were mainly in the communications and administrative fields. So I volunteered for communication technician school in Petaluma, Florida. It was a lot of top secret and spy shit supposedly, but didn’t seem that way when I reported there after boot camp.
Located on a old airfield, the base which was called Corry Station, catered to all four of the services and was quite modern. It had nice barracks and an outstanding dining facility. Pensacola itself was a huge navy town and is also home of the Blue Angels, the navy acrobatic flight team.
Absolutely everyone attending school on the base was being screened for a top secret security clearance, but you would never have known it by the behavior of most of the students. Drugs, especially marijuana, were everywhere. Right outside the main gate there was large woods in which bike and motorcycle trails ran through. It was a huge dopers meeting area. Once your eyes got used to the dark you could see groups of people sitting around getting high. The air thick with the sweet pungent smell of ganja.
Paranoia seized me big time. I had several strikes already against me. My brother had been killed in prison and my parents were raving drunks. Two big items that I would imagine would for certain stand out on a background check. I decided that there was no finer time than then, to throw myself into a physical workout routine during the week nights and skip town on the weekends to do my partying. It was at the base gym while I was pumping iron that I met Zak.
The man was a total iron freak. But then again he seemed to be a total freak over everything and anything that he got into. Whether it was running, lifting weights, getting high, drinking beer, banging beaver, speeding in cars, fist fights, or whatever. It was like he had found out somehow exactly how much time he had left to live and he was going to pack as much fun into it as humanly possible. He actually wore his hair in a mohawk.
I think Zak had the old Napoleon complex. He was real short in stature and it really seemed to piss him off. No one was going to get in his way or tell him what to do.
Zak came from an intense military background. All the males on his fathers side of the family had served in the navy. Intense is actually not the right word to describe his Dad. “Fucking maniac” would be more appropriate. Retired and living the good life just down the road in Panama City, Captain Clint (as he liked to be called) had spent twenty years in some deep undercover, covert, top secret, military intelligence agency. Retiring as a Captain. He could pull a lot of strings and was planning on doing just that for his son. He had big plans for Zak.
I began to spend all my free weekends with Zak, Captain Clint and his fifth wife, Yolanda, down at their home on the beach. Zak’s real mother was long gone, reason never given, and I suspected that the Captain had met Yolanda in a Filipino whorehouse. She often wore T-shirts advertising “Mommas” a legendary whorehouse in the P. I. where you could buy baby ducks and feed them to an alligator that lived in the middle of the bar.
The mornings would be spent sitting around the back deck with the Captain, as he spun his tales of the sea and “slant eyed pussy,” while drinking a glass of whiskey at eight o’clock in the morning. Zak and I would then take off for the beach after the old man passed out in his lawn chair, spending our afternoons either scuba diving or working on our tans. Evenings were for putting a buzz on and chasing all the hot college tail that a tropical coastal town attracts.
It was the life I had always dreamed about and they always treated me like a member of their family. Yolanda even wrote to me on a regular basis after we were transferred out, just like I was her own son. Although I would find out later that she had an unusual way of treating her sons.
Zak would confess to me months later,that after a night of partying on microdot acid and tequila, he had fucked Yolanda in the family hot tub when the old man was out of town on one of his spy/right wing gun nut conventions in Las Vegas. He said it was all the fun of “sticking your dick in a dead fish” and never mentioned it again.
I needed the relaxation on the weekends. Not that the training was hard. Shit, anyone with half a brain could have passed that course. What’s the old saying? Military intelligence is a contradiction in terms, or something like that. Hell yea! No, what I needed was a break from the hard core workouts that Zak had us doing five nights a week. Every night was two hours of intense iron pumping followed by either an additional half an hour of either wind sprints or distance running. We gobbled down vitamins, drank three protein shakes a day, and we were the first ones at the chow hall when the doors opened. We were starting to pack on some size!
The intelligence training was broken into two halves. The first was the basics, almost all of it unclassified. Good share of it was teletype operation. The reason behind that was everyone was waiting for their clearance to come through and they had to be teaching you something and teletypes where still a major component of naval intelligence. And I don’t know how it did, but my clearance came through slicker than shit. I would have loved to have heard some of the things those investigators heard from our neighbors. The navy must have really needed bodies.
Both Zak and I were half way through the second part of the course which entailed learning how to use the antiquated cryptological equipment the navy still used, when we were summoned to the office of a commander over at the headquarters building. Deep shit was what I thought we were about to fall into. Although we had given up doing drugs while on the base, our weekends were fucking barn burners and who knew what chick could have popped up pregnant. Naval Intelligence could very well have eyes in the Panama City, Florida area.
Our worries were soon put to rest. With the commander was a chief petty officer who wore the insignia of the navy SEALS. There was a new program being started where select communication technicians would be assigned training with the Underwater Demolition Team (UDT) and the SEALS in Coronado, California. Generally, SEAL/UDT members are not highly trained in the transmitting or routing of intelligence as they are subject to capture and torture when out on missions. This is where the special program would come in. These members after completion of training, would then be stationed in select areas and be responsible for the handling of all intelligence gathered from their area SEAL/UDT teams, leaving everything in house, so to speak.
A good share of information that SEAL teams gathered was not shared with even normal intelligence agencies. We would be the go between with the intelligence that our area units gathered and would decide who would have the necessary “eyes” to view this information.
Both of us had volunteered for the program months ago when it had been announced. The qualifications hadn’t been much. A shitload of volunteers showed up on a Saturday morning and went through a round of pushups, pull ups, sit-ups, and a three mile run. That was it. Never even gave it a thought after we were done.
The commander told us that both of us had scored very well in the physical qualification portion of the test and we also had a very strong recommendation from a source that he was not at liberty to disclose.
It would entail an additional nine months of training that there was a 75% chance that we would not be able to physically complete because of the extreme nature of the training. What the fuck, we thought. Let’s give it a shot.
Captain Clint was well into his personal happy hour when we arrived on our next visit. The old fucker had just sat there with a shit eating grin as we excitedly told me him all about the offer. When we were done, he stood up and poured a us each a glass of Jim Beam on the rocks, his only drink, and yours when you drank with him.
“You boys are going to learn that there are things going on this world that most of the population has no idea about. You two are going to become members of a very select society and you should be goddamn proud of it. I know I was and still am. You know there still a lot of things that I still can’t talk about that I was a part of when I was on active duty. Just keep your mouth shout and do your job and everything will be fine.” He then walked over over and proceeded to puke off the side of the deck.
“Yes sir” we reported solemnly to this sage old navy salt. And then celebrated on the way downtown by burning a big fat joint.
Sneaking back into the Captain’s house at three o’clock in the morning we found the old man sitting at the kitchen with a glass of whiskey in front of him and a splattering of vomit on his shoes. He looked real bad and smelled worse.
“You son of a bitches got out of here before I could show you this. Took me five fucking times to get the safe open.” He slurred. Reaching under the kitchen table he pulled up what looked liked a pickle jar with a bluish colored liquid in it. The light was bad in the kitchen and I had to sit down and pull the jar over towards me to see what was inside. It took all I could do to not power puke across the room right then. It was a head! A motherfucking head! The head of some oriental man. The only way I could tell that it was a man was because floating next to his head was his dick. I guess it was his dick anyway.
The Captain had his own head resting on the table and was muttering “He was my first. My first one.”
I realized then, that the drunk old bastard that was laying in his own vomit in front of me, was our anonymous recommendation for our UDT training
I wouldn’t smoke a doobie for six months after arriving in Coronado, California. Steroids would become the drug of choice while under going Basic Underwater Demolition training. Recreational drugs were of no use there. With the amount of physical punishment that you had to put your body through day after day, you needed something to aid your recovery process. We gobbled down Dianabol like candy.
Training started with forty sailors and we lost six the first day. That first night laying in my bunk in the open bay barracks I listened to grown men cry themselves to sleep. I was too fucking tired and sore to cry.
Every morning began with a ten mile run through the surf while wearing your combat boots. Then two hours of push ups, sit ups, squat thrusts, and jumping jacks. Afternoons we would be taken out several miles into the harbor in small boats, dropped off, and would swim in while the boats would shadow us. No free time. People dropped out it seemed on a hourly basis. The final humiliation of this was having to stand in front of the platoon and ring a little brass bell signifying that you had given it up.
Hell week was the grand finale of the initial training. It was a week straight of this bullshit only with only minimal sleep and that was only in rations of minutes at a time, wherever you could just drop your beaten body and try to catch a few precious moments of rest. 168 hours later, seventeen sailors stood at something that might be called attention and received the news that it was over and after a few days of rest, we would be advancing on to Basic Underwater Demolition. Zak and I were two of the seventeen.
When we got back to the barracks I had to take my shower with my underwear on because I couldn’t peel it off with out it being wet.
Although now the training was just as ass busting as before, now we were treated as equals with the instructors, so it was much more enjoyable as well as interesting. Pumped into into your brain on a twelve hour daily basis was all the information you could ever know about diving, demolition, covert operations, martial arts, knife fighting, nutrition, physical work out routines, weapons both domestic and foreign, airborne training, hostage taking, and interrogation. Everyday was something different and we ate it up. The platoon only lost three men in this phase and all three were due to injury.
There was a first class hull technician named Barry that had become our steroid contact during our training. He smuggled bottles of the little birth control sized pills on to the base and sold them at a tidy profit to his shipmates.
The majority of the platoon spent a good share of their off hours in the gym and along with added benefit of the recovery that Dianabol gives you, it also makes you have massive gains in size, strength, and aggression. The navy didn’t give a shit. We were in the animal factory.
After six months the platoon began to get more free time and we began to roam the San Diego and Tijuana areas on our free weekends. You can do and see shit in Tijuana that isn’t acceptable two miles north of the border, and that was just what we were looking for. At first it was just for the whores, the booze, and the freedom. But one Sunday morning we had staggered into a Mexican drug store to find something to cure our massive margarita generated hangovers when Zak noticed a bottle behind the counter that looked remarkably like the same bottle that our steroids came in.
It really all started at that moment.
Do you ever look back on life and say if I could get in a time machine, without the morlocks, and go back to just one spot in your life so I could change it, where would it be? Well, that’s the time for me. If I had walked out of that pharmacy and not made that deal with that pharmacist, who knows how differently things might have turned out?
We quietly began to sell our juice at half the price that Barry was, and began to make some nice additions to our bank accounts. It wasn’t long before our pharmacist had turned us on to his younger brother who also was a pharmacist, but he carried the kind of drugs that you put in a pipe or rolled in a Zig Zag paper and smoked.
Sailors are always selling cars on navy bases at rock bottom prices, due to the fact that they are always shipping out or going home and need to get rid of their wrecks. An old Volkswagen bug was purchased from a seaman who was leaving on a West Pac cruise for a hundred dollars and an ounce of Mexican ditch weed.
We had an old genius at a Tijuana chop shop remove the gas tank and replace it with another one that he designed. It only held half the gas but the other half was used to pack several pounds of pot in. All you had to do was open the front end of the bug, grab the gas tank by the spout (remember those old bugs had the gas tank in the front) and pull. The top part of the tank was a false top. We drove it across the border almost on a weekly basis and were never given a single glance, much less a search from the Border Patrol.
Lots of young sailors running around San Diego and most of them are dying for a taste of some killer weed. We had more customers than we did product.
Wasn’t long before Barry noticed a lack of business on his end and an appearance of more cash on our end. He became suspicious and began to check around. He got stupid and started to shoot his mouth off around the base.
A week before we were due to graduate, we were at a hardcore strip joint and biker bar called “The Hitching Post”. Our orders had come in assigning us to CINCPACFLT (Chief in Charge of the Pacific Fleet) in Pearl Harbor. Captain Clint had come through again and we were celebrating. If you’re going to be involved in the drug trade, especially pot, there is no finer place to be than Hawaii.
Zak was dating this incredible looking blonde who was a cocktail waitress/exotic dancer at the club and she was up on the stage swinging around her massive jugs. “I think we may have to deal with Barry before we leave”. he told me. His gaze not once leaving the stage where his bimbo was now gyrating to the always popular sounds of Starland Vocal Band. Afternoon Delight. I’ve always hated that song. Where did these broads get their ideas about music? She had tassels on her nipples and was trying to do the old circle trick, to no avail.
“He’s been bumping his gums around the base and I think he may snitch us off after we leave.”
“Shit! Any suggestions?” I asked.
“Yea, let’s give him the bug and have our contact in Tijuana take care of him.”
I wonder what kind of karma Barry had coming that his future was decided in a slimy strip bar in San Diego. He jumped at the chance to take ownership of our smuggling vehicle once we showed him the gas tank. On his first run to Tijuana he was pulled over by the Federales three blocks after he left our contacts house. They pulled open the hood and jerked off the false top of the fuel tank and found two and a half pounds of Mexican Gold, three vials of crystal meth, and a 8 mm reel of kiddie porn hidden inside one of the packets of pot. Last I heard, he was doing hard time at some Mexican prison.
That wouldn’t be the only time I would witness just how vicious Zak could get when crossed. Zak had also conveniently forgot to tell me that he had been laying the wood to Barry's wife ever since we had started to get liberty. He told me all about it one night after we had smoked a joint of some exotic Vietnamese dope while driving to a bar. We both had gotten so high that we couldn’t get out of the car for over an hour. We had sat in the car and chatted.
Barry’s wife weighed over two hundred pounds and Zak said screwing her was like fucking a pile of warm bread dough. He couldn’t get enough of it. Said she was better than the stripper. He had met her at the base exchange. He was buying rubbers. She was buying a case of Budweiser and box of Snickers bars.
The graduating class threw an awesome party. Booked a hall at the local VFW, had a kick ass meal catered in, and four kegs of beer. The absolute topper was the two strippers that were hired. Both of them were drop dead gorgeous, looked like college girls. They put on a wild live sex show that brought the house down. Zak had to leave after the show for one last fling with his white trash momma (although at the time he said he has the shits from the catered shrimp). Poor Zak didn’t know that both strippers would take on all hands at the party in a massive gang bang, including two world war II veterans that had somehow wandered in from the bar to see what all the hubbub was about.
When I told Zak about it the next morning, between dry heaves over the bowl, I think it was the closest I ever came to seeing him cry. It somehow made it all worthwhile.
We flew out to Honolulu four days later. I’d tell you more about our training but some much of it is classified that I’d have to kill you.
“That’s about as funny as a turd in a punch bowl. If I had a dollar for every time I heard that fucking line I’d own a whorehouse over in Juarez.” Artimus snorted.
“Actually, I think that a turd in a punch bowl would be pretty funny.” I laughed. The speed was starting to make my thoughts fire off in my head at random.
“Did you guys really set that dude up to take a fall that hard?”
“I never meant for it to go that bad.” I replied. “But Zak hated the mans guts and he wanted him taken out. The original plan was just to have him get stopped with just an ounce or so and have the local cops just rough him up and hold him for a few days. Zak went overboard like he always did .”
“But I’m not bullshitting you about the top secret crap. Day before we shipped out for Hawaii, Captain Clint and Yolanda flew in from Pensacola for a little going away celebration and we went to meet them at their hotel room. The Captain took Zak over to the Officers Club to introduce him to some old navy buddies and I took Yolanda over to this mall. On the way over, driving down the freeway she takes my prong out and gives me this world class blow job. Said it was her going away present.”
“Well, that night we’re having dinner with them and the Captain looks at my real dead serious and tells me that he wants to talk to me after we’re done eating. I about shit. I figure he’s found about the blow job. What he does is lead me into the bar, buys me a beer and hands me this card. He tells me that he already gave one to Zak and wanted me to have one too. It’s just a plain white business card with just a telephone number with an extension. That’s it, no name or address or anything. And he tells me that if anything bad is going down and we can’t handle it and can’t get hold of him, to call this number. Tell the person who answers at the extension the Captain’s name, tell them who I am and what’s going on, and hopefully everything can be taken care of.”
“Clint is all fucked up as usual. But he looks me in the eye and tells me he knows that people think he’s just an old drunk and that most of his talk is all bullshit. Says that he can guarantee he’s killed more men than women that I’ve screwed and most of them never saw it coming. It just scared the holy crap out me.”
“Then he just slaps me on the back and buys me another beer. Starts telling me about all the pussy I’ll get in Honolulu. Said when he was stationed there he tag teamed two high school teachers on vacation.”
“That night when we got back to the base I went down to the phone booths and called the operator. I asked where the area code was that was on the card. Do you know where she said, man? Fucking Langley, Virginia. That’s where the CIA is.”