"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.