Pearl diving we quickly learn is the practice of taking one's dog tags and throwing them in a 50 gallon slop barrel full of wet table scraps and then having to retrieve them. I consider asking the sailor who warned us how we could pearl dive if we hadn't even been issued our dog tags yet but decide to be prudent and keep my yap shut. After chow our heads our shaven right down to the bone. We look like we belong in Auschwitz. The barbers think they're fucking comedians and leave our sideburns on for comedic affect. Stripped to our underwear, we are issued a full sea bag and then we are marched over to stencil all our clothes. We will soon learn that the Navy is a den of thieves and if you as much as catch a case of the flu and shit in your pants and crawl into the bathroom (called the "head" in the Navy) leaving your stained underwear on the floor, within minutes someone will rip them off. And probably put them right on and wear them for the next week! So everything must be stenciled with your name.
THE MEANEST MOTHERFUCKER IN
THE WORLD (IF NOT THE NAVY) was the son
of a bitch who was in charge of us stenciling our
clothes in boot camp. Anyway, here I am in my
first day of boot camp, guts already churning like a
dog trying to shit a peach-pit, and this scary asshole
comes tearing in and starts screaming and ranting
and raving about what a bunch of scrotum heads we
are and how if we fuck up our clothes he's going to
hold us personally responsible and have our sorry
asses court martialed! Hell, I didn't even know what
a court martial was. Right away I screwed up
stenciling a t-shirt and this dude, I think he was a
first class petty officer, took one of these big
brushes we were using to stencil with, gets a bunch
of this India ink on it, and jams it right in my
motherfucking mouth. I had black teeth and lips for
the next four weeks. It takes a long goddamn time
to stencil all of those clothes since they give you a
whole sea bag full of them and I was shaking the
whole goddamn time and I about puked from that
ink.
The Navy had the biggest fucking
swimming pool in San Diego that I had ever seen.
They see if you can swim by throwing you in the
pool for about ten minutes and then wait and watch
to see if you'll drown. These guys walk around the
pool and shove you away from the sides with these
long cane poles. Some recruit shouted out "Hey
Chief! How long do we have to do this fucking dog
paddling?" and was rewarded by catching one of
those poles that was thrown spear-like across the
water, right in the middle of his goddamn forehead.
Now one recruit, me, walks around with India inked
stained teeth while another has a big red dot in the
middle of his forehead. Several fellows almost
drown and are immediately sent to some kind of
swimming school Hell which they must complete
successfully before actually starting boot camp.
Our company is christened #149 and we
meet our company commander - Boatswain's Mate
Chief Johnson, a short, burly black man, and a
world class jack-off.
He's also a fucking thief. He
immediately confiscates everybody's cigarettes and
informs us that only two cartons of cigarettes are
allowed in the barracks at one time. One carton of
menthol, the other regular. He proceeds to collect
two bucks a week from close to fifty people for
cigarette money, yet we don't get to smoke but a
day or two a week and only one cigarette per person
at that. This goes on for the entire nine weeks of
boot camp. The dirty son of a bitch is making a
small fortune off of us but since we are held captive
we are basically helpless.
I take my first shower in the Navy - the
comparisons to prison life are becoming frightening
realistic. My brother has told me about friends of
his who have done time at the reformatory in St.
Cloud, Minnesota, and how blacks love to rape
skinny white boys in the shower. Obviously this
doesn't happen much in military boot camp and I'm
goddamn relieved about that fact.
One black dude in
our company by the name of Bolds has a hunk of
pipe that damn near hangs to his knees. If he got a
hard-on while taking a shower there wouldn't be
room enough in the shower for all of us.
While in high school I had blown a knee out
while running from the cops after a pot sale had
gone down the shitter and later had surgery to
remove the torn cartilage. This old injury flares up
again in boot camp from all the marching and
running and at sick call they give me a jumbo jar of
Darvon. They hand the shit out like candy. It's my
first excursion into the world of prescription drug
abuse as my bunk mate and I begin to gobble down
three or four a night.