Sunset in Long Beach, CA - 1989
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN: STANDING DOWN IN LOS ANGELES
The first week or so of stand down was a definite
feeling-out period for us new guys. We
spent our time exploring our new home, both on-base and off. We learned the city bus schedules, where the
movie theaters were, where the mall was, and most importantly, if there were any places we could buy liquor underage. We found out
that the Long Beach Naval Station was one of, if not the only, Naval Station in
the world that let the city bus run directly through the middle of the
base. The bus would take you to downtown
Long Beach, where you could catch another bus to anywhere in L.A. that you
cared to go. One of the first things
that we did was to go to Hollywood. The guys I hung out with for the most part
were Steve Haulin from Ohio and Bob Powell from New Jersey. None of us had ever been to L.A., and we were
the typical 18-year old kids in America wanting to see the place we’d heard so
much about. We set out one day to find our
way via city bus from the Naval Station to Hollywood and back. It was quite an experience, but somehow we
managed to get on all the right buses and we ended up at Hollywood and Vine.
Hollywood was not at all what we expected. I’m not sure what it was that we expected, we
just knew that this wasn’t it! The
sidewalks with the stars in it was cool, and we checked out a bunch of tourist
traps and souvenir shops. The biggest
surprise was the number of adult book stores, pawn shops and XXX movie theaters
there were on Hollywood Boulevard. We
had no idea that Hollywood had a seedy side!
The people on the strip actually stared at us like we were the
freaks! We were the only ones without
green hair, pierced noses or rats on our shoulders. Three guys in jeans with no holes with short
haircuts and good grooming stick out like a sore thumb on Hollywood
Boulevard!
SA Peterson ready for a night out on town - Long Beach, 1988
We found our way up to
Mann’s (Grauman's) Chinese Theater and checked out all of the footprints and autographs
in the cement. We then decided that
since we were there, we should go check out a movie. I’ll never forget that movie – it was
“Scrooged” with Bill Murray. It’s not
the quality of the movie that has forever emblazoned it in my mind, it’s the
fact that it cost us almost ten dollars to go see! I had never spent that much money to see a
movie in my life! We decided that we
probably should go see it, just to say that we had seen a movie in the Chinese
Theater, so we went. I guess that I can
now say that I have seen a movie there, but I’d hate to think how much it costs
nowadays!
The other memory that sticks with me from our trip to
Hollywood was our trip home. We were
sitting on a city bus, and in the seat next to us was a long-haired rock and
roll stoner type. Somehow we got to
talking to the guy, and he said that he had been going to the Guitar Institute
in Hollywood, and he played in a band on the strip. I told him that a kid I had gone to high
school with in Laramie had gone to GI as well.
We got to talking, and it turned out that the two of them were actually
pretty good friends! This would be the
first time of many that I found something in common with someone somewhere I
least expected it.
The next couple of days were more of the same exploration and
discovery. Christmas
was fast approaching and we were all kind
of depressed that we would be spending the Holidays so far away from home, but
it kind of went with the territory as members of the Armed Services. Imagine my surprise when I found out that my
parents would be coming to L.A. right before Christmas! It turned out that the University Of
Wyoming’s football team had been selected to play in the Holiday Bowl in San
Diego the day after Christmas, and my folks had decided to make the trip out
West to watch the game. The day they
told me the news over the phone, I could hardly contain myself! I wasn’t exactly homesick, but it had been a
long time since I’d seen my family. They
had decided to come out and visit me in Long Beach for day or two, then
head down to San Diego to spend Christmas with our relatives there, then go to
the game. I counted the days until they arrived.
The day they got there, I met them at the front gate of the
base and we headed out to explore L.A..
I don’t remember much of where we went or what we saw, but I just
remember how great it felt to spend time with my family again. We had never really been an extremely close
and affectionate family, but that day was one of the happiest I can remember,
as I basked in the togetherness of our family.
My folks had a hotel room out in Anaheim by Disneyland, so that’s where
we headed. We ended up not going to
Disneyland itself, and instead we spent a cold, rainy Christmas Eve day at Knott’s Berry
Farm.
When it was time for them to leave for San Diego, they drove
me back to Long Beach to drop me off at the base, but we decided to go to
dinner first. You’d have thought that it
would have been fairly easy to find an open restaurant at 8:00 on Christmas Eve
night in downtown Long Beach – you’d have thought it, but you’d have been
wrong! We drove around in circles until
we found the one open all-night diner in
Long Beach. I don’t remember the name of
it, but it was definitely not in the better section of town. This revelation was made almost immediate to us
as we pulled up into the parking lot and found an empty space. As Dad got out of the car, he looked over at
the car next to us and saw some guy getting a blow job from a hooker. Merry Christmas to him, I guess! Driven more by ravenous hunger than better
judgment, we went inside and sat down.
The food was surprisingly good, even if our dinner companions left a
little something to be desired. But you
know, that Christmas Eve dinner amongst the winos, hookers, punk rockers and
derelicts remains one of the best I can remember. Funny how things like that come to be, isn’t
it? After we had eaten, my folks drove
me back to the base, dropped me off and we said goodbye. It had been so nice to see them again, and I
started looking forward to my next trip home on leave when I could spend a
little more time. Since I had duty the
next day, which was Christmas Day, I wasn’t able to spend it with my
folks. It was my first true, hard lesson
about military life – National Security doesn’t care what day it is, or what
religion you are. Christmas is just
another day to the enemies of the United States.
The remainder of stand down was just a numbing succession of
boring days spent in search of new thrills, cheap booze and women. At the end of the second week, the half of
the crew that had been on leave returned, and the second half left. The booters all stayed. Lucky for us, some of the guys who had been
in Long Beach for awhile, or who lived in L.A., came back to the ship for this
last two weeks of stand down. Guys like
Jerry Ford and Daryl Cravens and Steve Quintana. These guys would occasionally go out with us
booters and they showed us places like Jack’s Liquors, who would sell booze to
anyone tall enough to reach the counter.
They showed us “The Island” behind the Long Beach Convention Center,
where we would go to drink our illegal, under-age booze, and they taught us
about the desperate need to own a car in L.A.
None of them had a car, but they had access to some of the guys who
did. It was always a treat to get to go
somewhere via car instead of bus, and you always made sure that you stayed on
the good side of the guys who had cars.
Despite my most profound efforts, I never was able to acquire a car
during my stay at the Long Beach Naval Station, but I made sure I was buddies
with the guys who did!
SN Darkbull in 1st Div. Berthing - the rack behind his head was my first rack aboard ship.
Once we were familiar with our new surroundings in Long
Beach, we began the search for a hang out spot.
We spent a lot of time at the mall in downtown Long Beach, but since you
couldn’t drink openly there, it got shot down pretty quickly. There was a kind of amphitheater in a small
park by the mall and we did spend some time there, but once we discovered The
Island, we knew that was it. The Island
was a small island in the middle of a big man-made pond behind the
Long Beach Convention Center. The main
reason this became our hang-out spot was because it was dark, off the main drag
of Ocean Boulevard, cops never came by, and most importantly, it was within
walking, or staggering, distance of both the bus stop and Jack’s
Liquors. We spent many a night sitting
on The Island and drinking our illegally-acquired liquor out of brown paper
bags until we were barely able to stand.
I can remember several of the underage drinkers on the Frez hanging out
with us on The Island. Guys like Jerry
Ford, Shawn Mumbley, Downtown Brown, Derik Steverson, Jim Luster and Phil
Darkbull joined myself, Steve Haulin and Bob Powell regularly. Even though The Island was surrounded by a
disgusting, algae-infested, urine-laced pond, we never had a problem with
anybody falling in. Until one fateful January afternoon.
It was a typical California winter afternoon – overcast and
about 60 degrees. I had gone out with
Ford, Haulin and Powell with the sole intent and purpose of going to Jack’s and
getting enough booze to get hammered. We
left the base and headed right for Jack’s.
We bought our bottles, then retired to the park to drink the first
round. After downing those, we went over
to the mall, where we drank the next round.
We soon found ourselves out of booze with plenty of sunlight left to
make another beer run. We headed back to
Jack’s and bought more booze, then decided to head over to The Island to drink
this batch. By the time we got there, I was
beginning to feel the effects of the first couple of bottles I had downed
already. After I had finished the
third bottle, I was pretty well wiped out.
We decided that we should walk back to the mall and get something to
eat, then head back to Jack’s, then back to the Island to finish the
evening. It sounded like a great idea to
me, and I headed towards the mall with the rest of the gang. For some odd reason, I decided to prove to them that I wasn’t as
drunk as they were, so I jumped up on the cement ledge that ran around the
outside of the nasty pond. I walked for
about ten feet along the ledge and when I turned to make sure that everyone was
watching, I lost my balance. It was a
slow-motion feeling, and they said it was one of the funniest things they’d
ever seen. I felt my center of balance
pitch, and I began to swing my arms in circles to catch myself. I was too slow, and my coordination was too
impaired to counteract my momentum, and one foot slipped off of the ledge. I
went knee-deep into the water with my right leg. The shock of what had just happened, coupled
with the immediate change in my center of gravity ended what was left of my
balancing act, and I fell over backwards into the green, stinky water,
completely immersing myself. I quickly
stood up, and completely soaked and smelling like swamp water, I began laughing
hysterically.
The other guys were laughing pretty hard as well, and I
decided that I wasn’t that bad, and that I’d just continue on to the mall with
them. By the time we had made it another
block, the cold water and the ocean breeze were working their magic. I was suddenly frozen, wet and
miserable. I told the guys that I would
meet them at the mall, and I split off and went to the bus stop. The bus ride to the base was wet, cold and
smelled really bad. No one would sit
next to me on the bus, and can you blame them?
Here I was, reeking of urine and swamp water, dripping wet and drunker
than a skunk. I was a prize for
sure. When the bus got back to the base,
I walked back to the Frez, went onboard, changed my clothes, then walked back
to the bus stop and caught the next one back to town. I walked back to the mall, and found the gang
in the bathroom, where one of them was puking their guts out in a stall. We got everyone gathered, left the mall,
headed to Jack’s, bought one last round of booze, then walked to the park and
drank it. We finally stumbled back to
the bus, rode to the base, staggered onboard the ship, and went to bed.
The next morning, as everyone woke up in our berthing area, the smell
was overpowering. The wet clothes I had
fallen into the pond in, had filled our berthing area with a disgusting rotten
smell. Everyone was complaining and
bitching at me, and I ended up having to put my wet clothes into a plastic
trash bag to keep the smell out of the berthing area. I put the bag on the deck behind the ladderback,
and promptly forgot about it. About two
weeks later, as I was cleaning the berthing area, I found them again. Only this time all of my clothes were covered
in a fine green fuzz and smelled like something had died inside them. I had no choice but to throw the whole bag
away. As far as I know I was the only
person who ever fell into that pond – it’s good to be unique. I guess.
SN Powell aboard a Long Beach city bus - 1989
On another of the days during stand down, we took a trek out
to Disneyland. We got a great discounted
price since we were active duty military, and most of us had never been
there. It was a blast! We spent the day being twelve again, running
around the park like little kids. By the
time we had to leave to catch the last buses home, we were exhausted and a
little sad that we had to leave early. I
became a frequent visitor to Disneyland while we were in Long Beach, and I’ll
bet I went there a half-dozen times, usually by myself. I found it a great place to be alone and just
lose myself and forget about the Navy for a day. The farther along into my active duty stint I
got, the more I looked for places to escape and try to forget the mind-numbing
drudgery of Navy life.
BM2 Danny O'Donnell in 2nd Division Berthing - 1989
Stand down soon ended, and the real day-to-day life of a
sailor took hold. The next several
months became an indistinguishable blur of painting, cleaning, and training
interspersed with going out to sea once a month or so for a couple of days’
worth of training and exercises. It’s at
this point that my chronology fails me, and I begin to remember my experiences
as a collection of people, places and stories – not necessarily in proper time
order. This is the part of the story I
like to call:
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT: A COLLECTION OF MEMORIES (1988-89)
LONG BEACH NAVAL STATION
As our stay at the Long Beach Naval Station began to stretch
from days into weeks into months, we learned how to get around the base, and
how to sidestep some of the regulations we found most disconcerting, namely the
drinking age at the base club. The base
club was the social center on base. It
was split into two sides, like the one at NTC San Diego had been. One side was a big dance club, and the other
was a smaller club. They tried to split
it up by rank – E-4 and under on one side and E-5 and over on the other, but no
one paid much attention to the designations.
There was also a big pool hall, bowling alley and video game arcade
attached to the back of the club.
After our first week or two of sitting in the club and watching
people drink, we began to pay attention to their procedures at the front
door. We noticed that if you walked in
and showed them your ID card, and you were underage, they didn’t put anything
on your hand. But if you were 21 or over,
they stamped the back of your hand with a black stamp that said the day of the
week. We soon discovered that a black
ballpoint pen could make a very similar mark to their stamp, and when you
smeared it a little bit, making it illegible, it became almost
indistinguishable from the real stamps.
In the dim light of the bar, none of the bartenders ever looked close
enough to tell the difference, and they all trusted the stamps, and never asked
to see our ID’s. Thanks to this
discovery, we were all free to drink at the base club – rules be damned! The consequences for getting caught were
pretty severe, and most of the guys got caught eventually for things like
getting into fights and such, but somehow I never did get busted. I don’t know if this was a good thing or a
bad thing, but I drank, unconcerned with authority, at the base club for my
entire stay in Long Beach.
One of my favorite discoveries at the base club was right
between the two sides of the club. It
was a short-order grill that sold the standard burgers and fries – just the
type of thing that you needed at about midnight with a belly full of beer. The reason I remember this grill so well was
their specialty of the house. It was
something they called the “George”. The
George was an amazingly HUGE pile of nachos, smothered in chili, cheese,
jalapenos and beans. Come closing time, at the tail end of another drunken
night at the base club, NOTHING topped a George! And the best part was, you could get all of
this for around two bucks! I’d hate to
know the nutritional information on a George, but I know it had to be bad for
you. Heath risks non-withstanding, the
George was a truly amazing culinary creation for the stumbling drunk.
The other place we frequented on base was the base exchange,
where we could get anything from clothes to haircuts to groceries to eyeglasses
to shoes. There was also a uniform shop and a credit union. It was a great place to shop,
and usually cheaper than it was out on the town. There was also a smaller convenience store
where they sold soda, snacks and booze.
We didn’t try to buy there very often, because it was hard to fake a
military ID card, and if you got caught trying to buy booze underage, you’d
lose your exchange privileges, and that was a pretty big deal!
Inside the base PX - Long Beach Naval Station, 1989
The base had a gym, a weight room, racquetball courts, baseball
fields, a swimming pool, a movie
theater, library and laundry facilities.
We took advantage of the majority of these at one point or another
during our stay, and we found the Long Beach Naval Station a very comfortable
place to call home – somewhat of a safe haven in the midst of the craziness of
Long Beach and L.A.. Regardless of the
comfort we found on base, however, we tried to spend as much of our time as we
could off of it. One of our favorite
haunts was the mall in downtown Long Beach, and the mall in Lakewood, both of
which were easy trips via city bus.
MAIL CALL
Getting mail from home was always a treat. After we got back from West Pac, we began to
get mail on a daily basis again. It was
a nice change from waiting for a port visit or a helicopter delivery at
sea.
Right after we got back to Long Beach, I got a letter from
my old friend, Anna. Evidently, she had
received the last letter I sent her from the Philippines – the one in which I
apologized to her for compromising her morals and such. Well, evidently, her mother had also found and
read that letter, and immediately assumed the absolute worst! According to Anna, her parents had forbid her
to write to me, get letters from me or even think about me. Talk about your instant downers! I couldn’t believe it – I hadn’t done
anything to this girl, and her parents thought that I had corrupted their poor,
sweet, innocent little girl. If they’d
only known! Easy come, easy go, I guess,
and I let the memory of Anna fade out of my mind. For a while.
Not too long after that, I became the Postal Clerk’s worst
nightmare. My folks bought me a
subscription to my hometown newspaper, the Laramie Daily Boomerang, and
had it sent to me on the ship. While we
were in port, and had daily mail service, it wasn’t too bad, but when we went
out to sea for a week or so, there was always a HUGE pile of papers waiting for
me when we got back, and the poor PC had to carry them all onto the ship. I had my mail privileges threatened more than
once if I didn’t unsubscribe, but I kept having them sent. I was a nice bit of home to get to read your
hometown paper every day.
USS Fresno post office and PC3 Scotty Bale - 1989
FIELD DAY
Field days happened every Friday on the Fresno. We all learned to hate Fridays. A field day was nothing more than an attempt
to deep clean our spaces. We would
strip, wax, swab and buff the floors, scrub the bulkheads, re-stow all of the
gear and dust the overheads until the cows came home, but thirty years of grime
is pretty much impossible to clean. Even
on the days when I thought we had done an amazing job of cleaning her, the
Fresno was still the ugly stepsister of the fleet. I guess I never realized quite how filthy our
home was until I was doing my two weeks’ active duty when I was in the
Reserves and they sent me to the USS Valley Forge. The Valley Forge was a brand new Aegis-equipped
Guided Missile Cruiser and had only been commissioned about a year or so. It was absolutely spotless – you could eat
off the decks in the engine rooms! It
was then that I realized how bad things had been on the Fresno. While we were on her, though, the filth was
just a part of life, and the constant field days, while seemingly pointless, at
least gave us something to do with our time.
SR Downtown Braun in 1st Div. Berthing - 1989
JON HICKERSHAM
As we made our way through stand down, and in the months
following, a light stream of new recruits came aboard the Fresno. Guys like Jim Lusher and Donny “Downtown”
Braun were a couple of our new additions.
But the one I will remember the most was the day Seaman Recruit Jon
Hickersham came on board. The reason I
remember it so vividly, was because I was standing watch at the time with Jon’s
brother, Jed. Jed and I didn’t get along
very well – he was the Ohio “Cowboy” I’d made fun of that first night in the
Philippines, and he just didn’t have too much to say to me after that. This particular night was no different – Jed
and I were standing the eight to midnight on the quarterdeck, and neither of us
was saying much. I happened to look out
onto the pier, and saw an airport shuttle van pull up, and watched a new booter
climb out and retrieve his seabag, then make his way down the pier.
Jed laughed –
“Man, another booter!
Just what we need!”
As the sailor got closer to the ship, then finally made his
way to the bottom of our gangplank, I watched Jed get very quiet as he studied
the figure. All of a sudden, Jed yelled,
“Jon! What in the
FUCK are you doing here?”
I was confused for a minute, until the new guy got to the
top of the gangplank. As soon as he stepped
into the light I could see the resemblance.
It was Jed’s brother – the one he always bragged to us about. The one who was a stud college baseball
pitcher, and was going to be a major leaguer.
This same brother was now standing on our quarterdeck in full uniform,
orders in hand. Jed just looked at him
and said
“Why are you here, man?”
“I joined the Navy, and asked to get sent to your ship”
“Oh my God – You are stupid!! What the Hell….”.
Before he could get too far into his rant, Jed realized I
was listening, and he asked me to get lost for a while. I was happy to oblige, and I went off to walk
the ship. When I got back to the
quarterdeck, Jed told me to take Jon down to First Division berthing and get
him settled for the night. I agreed,
introduced myself to Jon, then showed him the way downstairs.
In the days that followed I got the full story. Jon had been a star pitcher at the University
of Toledo, and was a semester away from graduation with a degree in Physical
Education. He once showed me his baseball
scrapbook with all of the stories about his nearly 100 mph fastball, and his
letters of invitation to training camp with the Royals, the Red Sox and the
Astros. According to the story I got,
Jon had been dating a girl pretty seriously, and she just up and dumped
him. Distraught, he dropped out of
school and decided to join the Navy without telling anybody. For some reason, he asked the Navy to send
him to his brother’s ship, and they agreed.
Jon just threw his future away and came to the Fresno to be with his
brother who had no idea that he was coming.
The funny thing was, his brother only had a couple of months left until
he got out of the Navy, so they didn’t spend much time together on the
Frez. Regardless of what brought him
there, or why he decided to join, Jon was a great guy and I enjoyed hanging out
with him. He was one of the few guys on
the Fresno that I trusted, and I respected his honesty. I don’t know if Jed ever got over being mad
at Jon, but we were sure glad to have Jon around.
LOSING CAPTAIN WILBUR
We hadn’t been back from stand down very long, when the
Fresno got a new skipper. Captain
Peppard’s tour was done, and it was time for the next C.O. to take
command. We would all miss “Captain Wilbur”,
as his successor was a completely different type of C.O.. Commander Worrell came aboard the Fresno with
the express duty of taking her through her last West Pac, and ushering her into
the Reserve Fleet as she made her way out of the active duty fleet. The Fresno was an old lady by now, having
served over 20 years of faithful duty.
Her time was coming to an end, and Commander Worrell was the man
assigned to see her off into the sunset.
He was a good skipper but there just wasn't the connection with the crew
that Captain Wilbur had. Which was probably a good thing, honestly. He was
respected, but not revered the way Captain Wilbur had been. Part of that
was due to being the new guy, but a bigger part was just not being Captain
Wilbur. The Fresno now had her last
active duty skipper, and we all learned to adjust to our new chain of command.
**Author's Note** In the many years that have passed since this happened, I've heard stories about Captain Wilbur from former officers that have opened my eyes a bit. I've also come to know Commander Worrell from a personal standpoint, and I have to say that my views on the two at the time I wrote this were pretty much opposite of they way they should have been. I guess its true what they say, "Time will reveal all".
A VISIT FROM LAURA
A couple of weeks after New Years of 1989, my sister Laura,
her husband Andy, and their kids spent a couple of weeks in Long Beach. Andy was a Staff Sergeant in the Marine Corps
and had just been assigned to a duty station on the East Coast. The Corps was moving them from Hawaii where I
had just visited them, to Virginia, and they had to wait in Long Beach for
their car to arrive so they could drive cross-country. When their car finally got to California, and
they got ready to leave, their transmission went out. They had to spend another week waiting for it
to get fixed. I spent all of my time off
duty with them, and it was a lot of fun.
I hadn’t spent much time with my sister growing up, and I got along with
Andy well. The kids were a lot of fun
too, and we did lots of sightseeing – Hollywood, the beach, all of that. It was kind of nice to have family to spend
time with in town.
Laura, Andy and kids - Long Beach Naval Station - January, 1989
As much fun as we had, there is one night that I would like
to forget altogether. Laura and Andy had
a hotel room in an extended-stay hotel, and I would spend a lot of time there
with them. One night, Andy and I decided
to go get a bottle and have a couple of drinks.
Well, the fifth of Segram’s Seven soon turned into another, and we
floated them both. I was anxious to prove
that I could drink as much as any Marine, and I did my damndest to make the
Navy proud. After we finished the
bottles, we both were ready to go to sleep/pass out. I fell asleep in one bed, while Andy and
Laura slept on the other. The kids were
sleeping in their sleeping bags on the floor.
About an hour or so after we had all gone to sleep, I felt the room
begin to spin. I knew that things were
about to get ugly, so I sat up in bed with the intention of making it into the
bathroom before it hit. I was too
slow. Next thing I knew, I was puking
all over the wall of their room, and onto the carpet between my bed and the
wall. I hadn't puked that hard since the
night in the head in the bar in Olongapo City.
Hotel room drinks with my sister and brother-in-law - Long Beach, 1989
Laura, bless her heart, got out of bed and came over to help
take care of her little brother. She
went and got some towels and cleaned me up.
Just when I thought she was being awfully sweet, she went and pulled a
big sister trick. We had eaten a big
meal from McDonald’s earlier that evening, and I had deposited most of my
dinner on the floor. As she was cleaning
up my mess, Laura found a French fry in the pile, and waved it in my face, then
again, and again and again. Soon, I was
as green as ever, and it started all over again. I made it into the bathroom this time and I
puked until it hurt. Every time I thought
I was done, Laura came at me with that damn French fry. Nothing like a little sisterly love to make
you feel better. I let the Marines have
their victory that day, and I’d like to say that I never tried to prove that
the Navy could drink more than the Marines could, but I’d be wrong. A little more than a year later, I would take
on another Marine, and the results were much the same – we’ll get to that story
in a bit.
My sister and I - Long Beach Naval Station, January 1989
TAKING LEAVE
Sometime during February of ’89, I decided to take a few
days’ leave and head back home. I hadn’t
been in Wyoming since October of ’88, and I was getting a little homesick. We found ourselves between training cycles,
so I took advantage of a little respite in our schedule to fly home again. It was a great visit – I hung out with my
friends and told them all about the things I’d seen and done in the
Philippines. I went skiing and basically
just soaked up being at home. It was
great to see my friends and family once again, even if it was for just a few
days. Leave was over much too quickly,
and I headed back to the Fresno. This
would be the last time I would be home for another seven months.
GREATSHOUSE
I told you a little bit about Willy Joe Greatshouse a
earlier, and promised to tell you more – well, this is it. From the day he came on board, Greatshouse
never did fit in. His odd voice set him
immediately apart as different, but his personality and actions did the rest to
ensure his complete ostricization from the rest of the crew. He said things all the time about other guys
that made us nervous. I guess that when
you live in such close quarters with that many other men, you become homophobic
as a defense mechanism. We could never
quite figure out whether or not he was serious about his little comments, or if
he was just trying to get us all riled up.
Greatshouse was also a pathological liar, and we caught him in many of
them. Regardless of how many times we
called his bluff, he continued to make up stories and lies about everything.
One of the oddest things that he did was when he started to
go out on liberty in his “salt and peppers”.
Your salt and peppers were what you called your uniform when you wore
your working blue pants and your trop white shirt. You would wear salt and peppers when you were
in a service function like Greatshouse, who was a mess crank in Officer’s
Country at the time. We all thought it
was odd that he would change into his S&P’s to go on liberty, and we soon
found out that he was spending all of his liberty time in Hollywood. A few months earlier, we wouldn’t have
thought twice about this, but after our little trip to Hollywood after we got
back from West Pac, we knew what was going on up there. We began to seriously question his sexual
orientation. Soon Greatshouse started
talking about this “friend” of his, and how he was going to get an apartment
off-base with this guy. It was well
within the norm for guys to get off-base apartments, but the majority of us who
were below E-4 couldn’t afford them, so we all lived on the ship. The more Greatshouse talked about this
friend, the more we began to seriously wonder about him. It finally came to the point that he decided
he wanted out of the Navy. He and his
friend had found an apartment, and Greatshouse decided that the Navy just wasn’t
the place for him anymore. He began to
ask the older guys what the easiest way to get out of the Navy was. This was before the “don’t ask, don’t tell”
policy was in effect, and if they thought you were gay, they would drum you out
of the Navy so fast your head would spin.
Somebody told Greatshouse about that, and he formed a plan so shocking
that many of us still have a hard time believing he actually did it.
When the time came for him to put his plan into effect,
Greatshouse showed a courage that I doubt any of us would have shown. He wanted out of the Navy so bad, that he
would do anything to get kicked out. In
his mind, he thought that even a dishonorable discharge was worth his freedom,
so he did the most shocking thing he could think of. He walked up to the Chief’s Mess, and found
Master Chief Cooksey. Master Chief was a
scary old guy, and most of us were afraid to talk to him, other than to say
“yes” or “no”. Greatshouse walked
directly up to Master Chief, looked him in the eye, and said,
“Master Chief – I want to suck your dick!”.
Master Chief choked on his coffee, looked right back at him
and said,
“WHAT ?!?”
Greatshouse told him again.
It was at this point that the versions of the story I heard
differed. Some say that Master Chief
punched him, and others say that the other Chiefs in the Mess held him back. Regardless of what exactly happened, the
result was the same. Master Chief went
up to the Captain and told him to get Greatshouse off of his ship before he got
killed, and the CO was only too happy to oblige. Greatshouse was gone the next day. It happened so quickly, that many of us
didn’t hear the story for weeks afterward.
I was still a bit hesitant to believe that he had actually done it, and
I still wasn’t sure that he was gay. But
a few weeks later we saw Greatshouse walking into a porno bookstore across from
Jack’s Liquor. We hollered at him, and
he stopped. He told us he worked at the
store, and that he was living with his friend in an apartment nearby. A couple of weeks later, one of the other
guys in Deck Department started dating a girl who lived across the hall from
Greatshouse and his friend. He told us
that he had seen the two kissing, and holding hands, and wearing shorts with
each other’s names written on their back pockets surrounded by hearts. I guess the reason this story sticks with me
is that Greatshouse was the first openly gay guy I had ever met. Wyoming is a bit sheltered – I just had no
idea how much!
SHAINA AND KAREN
As I mentioned earlier, there weren’t many of us that had
much luck with the civilian girls in Long Beach, but one of the guys who did
was Steve Haulin. Steve was from Ohio,
the son of a milk truck company owner. He
wasn’t a Rhodes Scholar, but he was a good looking guy, and kept himself in
shape. The girls seemed to like him – a
lot more than the rest of us anyway.
Steve was also one of the guys I hung out with on a regular basis. One night, we went to see a movie at the one
of the theaters we could get to on the bus.
I don’t remember what we went and saw, but after the movie, we were
walking across the parking lot towards the bus stop debating as to whether or
not to stop by Jack’s on the way home and get some booze, when we saw
them. There were two girls standing by a
car, talking. Steve was a lot braver
than I was when it came to women, so he walked over and said
“Hi”.
I tailed along looking dumb, and managed a muffled “Hi” of
my own.
The girls perked up and began talking to us, and actually
seemed interested. Their names were
Karen and Shaina, and they were both from Long Beach. We introduced ourselves, and when they didn’t
run after we told them we were in the Navy, we started to get excited. The offered to give us a ride back to the base
and that’s where our story began.
Karen had the very obvious hots for Steve. She was definitely the better looking of the
two, blonde, short and well-built.
Shaina was taller, skinny and brunette.
She definitely wasn’t my type, but beggars can’t be choosers, so I
decided that Shaina was the one for me.
Steve’s best friend was SN Bob Powell, who was from Cape May Court House,
New Jersey. Steve and Bob went
everywhere together, and it soon became the three of us hanging out at Karen’s
house when we could get off the ship.
Actually, Karen lived with her mom (who was a flag-waving lesbian) but
we were welcome there all the same. We
had a lot of fun hanging out at Karen’s house, and Karen, Shaina, Steve, Bob
and I spent a lot of time together, drinking, partying and just hanging
out. We did things like going to beach
parties and playing putt-putt golf. We’d
go to pool halls and just hang out being goofballs.
Steve and Karen at Karen's house in Long Beach - 1989
One of the more memorable nights involved Shaina’s car and
my face. Shaina drove an early 80’s
Mustang II, and it had a tendency to overheat. Well, one night when we were driving around,
the car began to overheat. I asked her
to pull into a gas station so that I could take a look at it. In an effort to prove my manly mechanical
aptitude, I promptly popped the hood and started looking around under it like I
knew what I was doing. I then decided to
check the coolant level in the radiator.
Mind you, we’d been driving around for two hours in an overheating car,
but I thought the easiest way to check would be to just take the cap off of the
radiator. I reached down and touched it,
and almost burned my hand off – but was this enough of a warning? No – I just used a paper towel as a glove and
began to twist the cap off. About a half
a twist later, the pressure released and the cap shot straight up into the air,
riding on a geyser of boiling antifreeze.
The majority of that boiling antifreeze deflected off of my chest and my
face before it went up into the air, and I stood there, dazed, burned and
embarrassed as hell. I didn’t say a word
though, I just put the cap back on, shut the hood and got back in. I drove her home, told her to put some water
in the radiator in the morning, and caught the bus back to the base where I
spent the next week recovering from the thousands of little blisters all over
my body from the boiling antifreeze.
Yeah, it was dumb but it was one of those things you remember. One of those things that make up the times of
your life. And despite the occasional
attacks of stupidity, those times were some of the happiest that I had in Long
Beach. The way it all ended up was as
depressing as anything else that had ever happened to me. We’ll come back to that in a minute.
A TATTOO
I had managed to avoid getting a tattoo when we were
overseas, and I had sworn that I’d never get one anyway. I lasted only a few months in my
convictions. I began to succumb to peer
pressure not long after we came back to the States. Steve and Bob already had tats, and we found
a great little parlor in downtown Long Beach.
The parlor was actually a very famous one for tattooing sailors, called
Bert Grimm’s. We didn’t know that at the time, we
just thought they had some cool stuff. I
probably went into the shop a half dozen times before I finally made up my mind
to get one. I knew I didn’t want to get
a flaming skull, or a Tasmanian devil, or a black panther, or any of those type
of tattoos. I decided that if I was
going to get one, it had to say “me” and be something I would be proud of. I hadn’t figured out what that was yet, so I
had never gone under the needle. One day
I opened my paper from home, and I saw the picture, and I knew that it would be
my first tattoo. What I saw was an
advertisement for season tickets to University of Wyoming athletic events, but
what caught my eye the most was the large horse and rider logo in the middle of
the ad. It was the state symbol of
Wyoming – the picture we have on our license plates, and it just screamed my
name. I knew it was something I would be
proud to wear for the rest of my life, so I let peer pressure have its way, and
I cut out the ad and headed for the parlor.
The night I decided to get the tat, I didn’t tell
anyone. I just left the ship, got on the
bus and headed downtown. I walked into
the parlor, and found the artist, and sat down in the chair. I showed the guy what I wanted, and he just
kind of looked at it.
“What is this man?”
“It’s the Wyoming state symbol.”
“Oh – okay, whatever.
I just wanted to make sure it wasn’t some satanic symbol or
something”
I just kind of looked at the guy and realized that not everyone
was quite as Wyoming–aware as I was. He
traced the picture out on his transfer paper and asked me where I wanted
it. I decided to put in on my left
ankle, so he shaved off the hair, and laid down the transfer paper, which left
an outline for him to go from. At this
point, I was pretty much terrified, after remembering how much pain my friend
Sam had endured during his tattoo in San Diego.
He fired up the gun and dipped it in the black ink. I gritted my teeth, grabbed the chair and
waited for the pain. He lowered the
needles into my skin and started to tattoo my ankle. It hurt.
Oh man, did it hurt. I found out
later that the ankle is one of the most painful places to get a tat – I wish
I’d have known that at the time! The
whole experience took about an hour, and it was an hour of pain. Actually, my ankle went fairly numb after
about fifteen minutes, but those first fifteen minutes were enough! I wasn’t drunk at all during the ordeal, but
as soon as it was over, and my ankle was bandaged to keep the blood from
soaking through my sock, I paid the man and headed directly for Jack’s. I bought a bottle for the bus ride home, and
headed back to the Fresno, where I quietly went to sleep. The next morning, I got up and showed
everybody my new addition. I was
officially tattooed now – a member of the fraternity – a sailor! I was pretty proud of myself, and it only
took me six months to tell my parents!
My first tattoo - 1989
ANOTHER TATTOO
After my first tattoo, I didn’t really plan on getting
another one. I didn’t not want
another one either and I soon found myself checking out tattoo parlors once
again. It had been a couple of months
since my first piece of art, and one night, Steve, Karen, Shaina and I were
driving around trying to think of something to do. We had no plans for the night, and one of us
threw out
“Why don’t we go get tattoos ?”
We couldn’t find any reason NOT to get tattoos, so down to
Grimm’s we went. We stopped at Jack’s
and bought some beer for the ordeal, then on down to the tattoo parlor. The four of us walked in the shop, and I
decided that I had to show the Shaina how tough I was. I quickly scanned the walls, looking for the
biggest, toughest tattoo I could find. I
spied a tiger, about eight inches high, and three inches wide, and knew I had
to have it. It was sure to impress her,
so I told the man what I wanted and jumped up in the chair. I had them put it on my right calf, so they
shaved my hair off and transferred the design onto my leg, then broke out the
gun. I was sure Shaina was going to be
overwhelmed by my manliness, but instead, she walked out of the shop and hung
out at the car, drinking beer while I had myself marked for life to prove to
her how tough I was! About an hour
later, my tattoo was finished, and it was Steve’s turn.
My second tattoo - 1989
My leg hurt like hell and was bleeding like a stuck pig. The bandage covered most of my lower leg, and
all I wanted was a drink. I headed out
to the car to have a beer with Shaina, and as soon as I cracked one open, she
saw Steve get in the chair, so she headed in to watch him. I was pissed, so I started to drink as fast
as I could. Steve got a Tasmanian Devil
wearing a Navy white hat and carrying a mug of beer with the words “Slammin'
Steve” surrounding it on his bicep.
Nice, but very cliché. After
Steve was done, it was Karen’s turn. She
decided to get a tiny teardrop-shaped peace sign on the inside of her
ankle. It was tiny, but it was a
tattoo. I kept drinking all the while,
and by the time Karen was done, I had a pretty good drunk going. Shaina had been drinking off and on since I
had started, and by the time they called her number, she was feeling no pain
herself.
The four of us stood there, trying to decide what she should
get, and where she should get it. She
considered the usual roses, butterflies and rainbows. She finally made her decision, and then she and the artist went into a back room where she could get
her tattoo in a more private place on her body. Steve, Karen and I adjourned to
the car where we drank the rest of the beer.
Finally, Shaina came out of the room, and offered to show us all her
tattoo. She then pulled down the
waistband of her pants and showed us a very fine-lined tattoo of a little peach near her nether regions. We all settled up our bills, then headed out
to get something to eat. About halfway
through our meal we all sobered up enough to realize what we’d done to
ourselves. We all got really quiet and
had a hard time looking each other in the eye, and the evening couldn’t end
soon enough for any of us.
Steve and Karen - 1989
THE BREAKUP
A couple of weeks later, I found out
Shaina had been dating some other sailor behind my back. Karen finally confessed to me that the reason
Shaina had been “sick” and hadn’t been able to come out with us was for the
past week or so, was because she was with this other guy. I had never had a girlfriend before and had
never been dumped before. I wasn’t sure how
to take it. I didn’t really like Shaina,
and really didn’t want anything from her as far as a future went, but it still
hit me like a ton of bricks. I became
very depressed and started drinking a lot (more). Finally, one night, about a week after I had
first heard that Shaina was seeing somebody else, I was hanging out at Karen’s
house with Steve, Bob and Karen when Shaina came over with her new man. I was pissed, and began to drink as much as I
could, as fast as I could. I didn’t say
a word to Shaina, but when she and Bob left to go on a beer run, I was left
alone in Karen’s living room with Shaina’s new boyfriend.
I took the opportunity to tell the guy what a lying,
cheating slut Shaina was, and how she was going to leave him just like she had
done me. I said some pretty mean, nasty
things about her, and to the guy’s credit, he just sat there and nodded in
agreement. I was drunk enough, he
probably figured that if he made me mad, I’d kick his ass. Finally, after about ten minutes of telling
this guy what a bitch Shaina was, Karen burst out of her bedroom, where she’d
been sitting talking to Steve. She let
me have it with both barrels, telling me what an ass I was. I didn’t expect it at all - I guess that in
all my feeling sorry for myself, I had forgotten that Karen and Shaina were
still best friends, and she wasn’t about to sit and listen to me rag on her
friend in her house. Karen
told me to leave her house, and let me know I wasn’t exactly welcome back. I just kind of sat there and stared at her and
looked for Steve to come save me. He
never came out, and never said a word in my defense, so I just stood up,
grabbed a couple of beers and a what was left in a bottle of whiskey, and headed for the door.
I walked down to the bus stop, and drank until the bus got
there. I drank all the way back to the
base, then went and sat on the pier by the Fresno and cried. I’m not ashamed to admit that I cried like a
baby. This was the first time I had
really been rejected by a girl and I think it affected me a lot more than I
realized. From that point on, I held my
emotions in check whenever it came to women, afraid that if I opened my mouth I
would put my foot in it again, and get kicked to the curb. The story of Karen and Shaina had a decidedly
depressing result for me, and the ensuing few weeks was about the most
depressed I had ever been in my young life.
JOHN JECHENOWSKI AND MONTEREY
One of the more interesting characters that made up the Fresno
crew was BM2 John Jechenowski.
Jechenowski was a short little guy from New Jersey who had the most
serious case of L.M.S. (Little Man Syndrome) that I’d ever seen. He was always trying to puff up and act like
he was the toughest S.O.B in the world. Couple that with the fact that he was a
pathological liar, and for some reason, no one ever seemed to take him
seriously. As a result, he was relegated to finding hang out buds amongst the
new guys on the ship who hadn’t been there long enough to realize what a loser
he was. I was one of those new guys.
The biggest reason I started hanging out with Jechenowski
was that he had his own car, a little Subaru Brat. We went bar hopping a few times in Long
Beach, and as long as you could put up with his stories about what a great guy
he was, he’d buy your booze and be your chauffeur. This seemed like an okay arrangement to me,
so I started hanging out with Jechenowski.
Most of our adventures were pretty lame and innocuous, the craziest
being a drunken night out at the “Filipino Bars” in Long Beach. There was also the time that he and I went to
the Horse Races. He had been bragging
about how he had grown up at the track in New York (Aqueduct, if I remember
right) and how he used to make a thousand dollars a day betting the
ponies. I begged him to show me his
secrets, so he took me out to Santa Anita one Saturday. He spent all day making $2 bets and telling
me his scientifically proven methods for winning. At the end of the day, I came out about even,
and he had lost around a hundred bucks.
That was all it took for me to realize that John Jechenowski was full of
shit. Then came the weekend he decided
that we should drive to Monterey to check out the party scene up there.
Monterey, California was about a six hour drive north of
Long Beach, up closer to San Francisco.
The reason we settled on Monterey was that there was a military training
school there where our friend and fellow Frez sailor, Jerry Ford, had gone to
Linguist school. Jerry had been studying
to be a Russian Linguist but ended up washing out of the school. He liked to tell us stories about how great
the parties were on base in Monterey, and how easy the girls were. Well, that was enough for Jechenowski and me,
and we decided to jump in the Brat and head North. It was a weekend we both had off, and we
figured we’d head up the coast after work on Friday and party like Rock Stars
that night on The Presidio (the training base) in Monterey. The drive itself was uneventful. Long, but uneventful. It was a chance to see some of the great
California scenery. My mother had lived
in Monterey for a while, and I had spent a couple of weeks there visiting her
in ’81, so Jechenowski decided that I was the resident expert on directions in
town. Needless to say, we were lost
almost as soon as we got to town. We finally
found the base and located the club with all of the “easy women”. With hopes high, and a powerful thirst, we
walked in.
The club itself wasn’t bad…it was pretty much just your
typical base club. There was a bad rock
band playing in one part, and a small, cramped bar behind that. We walked over to the bar and ordered up a couple
of beers. John soon ran into a couple of
girls and started trying to “work his magic” on them. It was comically bad. He told them some story about how he and I
were on the Navy Rodeo Team and had come to town to recruit new talent or
something. It was hilarious. I mean, I was from Wyoming, and was wearing
my hat and boots, but John was from Jersey.
He was wearing some type of designer jeans and
plastic-soled Dingo boots. The straw hat
he was wearing went out of style in the late 70’s, and here he was, trying to
convince these girls what a rodeo hand he was.
I just turned away from him and drank…heavily. I don’t know what kind of luck he had with
them, I just know that I drank a LOT of beer that night, and never talked to a
single girl.
It was soon obvious that despite Jerry Ford’s hearty
endorsement, the Base Club was dead. We
cut our losses and left. We weren’t sure
where to go from there, so we just headed downtown. We knew that there had to be some good bars there. I was still underage, but I had talked John Sorby
into giving me his Minnesota Driver’s License before we left the Frez, so at
least I had an I.D. We found the bars
downtown and made a beeline for the first one.
The bouncer at the door just laughed at my pitiful excuse for a fake
I.D. and waved us off. John and I
weren’t ones to give up easily, so we tried the next bar down the block. To my amazement, they let us in! The bar was good sized, and there weren’t a
whole lot of people there. The biggest
thing I remember was that the band was AMAZING!! They were a bunch of middle-aged white guys
playing some of the funkiest R&B I had ever heard, AND they had a kick-ass
horn section! I ordered a beer and took
a seat up front by the stage. John was
still scoping the room for women, but I had long since given up the chase, and
was just sitting there digging on the band.
The next thing I knew, the drunk at the table in front of us
was screaming at us and threatening to kick our ass. I couldn’t really understand much of what he
was saying, but the gist of it was that he was an ex-con, recently released
from jail, and he thought that John and I were cops who were trying to hassle
him. The guy wanted to kick our asses,
and his wife/girlfriend was doing all she could to keep him in control. She finally just asked us to leave so he
would calm down. John started to argue
with her, asking why the Hell WE should have to go, but one look at the rage in
the guy’s eyes, and I knew that this wasn’t a fight we wanted any part of. I grabbed John by the arm and led him out the
door. He kept jawing at the guy all the
way – it was like a little Chihuahua yipping at a bulldog – I should have just
let him go and watch him get his ass kicked, but I’d have felt a little bad
about that. We left the bar, got in the
Brat and found us a cheap, seedy motel for the night. We were still alone, about half drunk, and
half looking for a fight. A dismal end
to a night that started off with such great promise.
Saturday morning found us in a cheap motel in downtown
Monterey, hungover and hungry. We went
and found breakfast somewhere, and then took off to go drive around and see the
sights of Monterey. We went down to the
Wharf, and then over to see the big carousel and the shops by Cannery Row. We decided to go out to Big Sur and Carmel,
but first, John had a stop to make.
Evidently, Jerry had given him the name and number of some of the folks
that were going to school there when he was there, and John decided to call them
and see if he could hook us up with any of them. Jerry’s friends, to their credit, were fairly
friendly to us – considering the fact that they didn’t know us from Adam, and
we were just friends of some guy they had gone to school with eight months ago. But, as you would imagine, none of them
really felt like hanging out with us, and pretty much just told us that there
was nothing going on that night, and we would be better off just seeing what
was going on out in town. I was kind of
embarrassed to be bothering them like that, so I just followed behind John and
didn’t say much. Once Jechenowski was
done trying to find a party, we left and headed up the road for Carmel. We drove around Carmel and then made a quick
trip up to the breathtaking coastline of Big Sur. By the time we finally got back to Monterey,
it was close to dinner time. We were
sitting at a stop light and noticed two girls in a truck next to us. John started trying to talk to them, but the
light turned green and they turned off into a grocery store parking lot. Not one to take defeat lightly, John cut
across three lanes of traffic and swung in behind them. The gals were as surprised as I was, and when
he started talking to them, I figured that they were going to call the cops on
us or something. You could have knocked
me over with a feather when John invited them to dinner, and they agreed!
We found a Chinese restaurant somewhere and sat down to
eat. The two gals were in their 30’s,
single, overweight, and not terribly attractive – but they were with us, and
John was pretty sure that he was going to get laid, so he invited them to go
dancing after dinner. They agreed, and
after some direction-asking, we found the one country bar in the area and
headed out. The bar was WAY out in the
sticks, and the parking lot was full of Mexicans and Harleys. Not exactly a place to take a lady on a first
date. I thought the gals were standing
awfully close to us for just having met us, but now I realize that it was only
in fear for their lives that they did that!
My fake ID worked, and the band wasn’t bad, so we danced a little and
drank a little. It was a very painfully
awkward date. By now, John had focused in on the smaller of the two, and she and he decided that we should all leave the
bar and head back to the Motel. The gal sitting next to me didn’t have to be asked twice to leave.
We took the two cars – John and his date in his and the other girl and me
in theirs.
We drove to the girls’ motel, which was on the other side of
town from ours, and the girl I was with and I went in. John and his date took off for OUR motel to
go do their thing and left the two of us alone.
The girl and I walked in and kind of sat and looked at each
other, wondering how long John and the other girl would be gone. After about an hour of painfully forced small
talk, in which she tried to lay out a hundred reasons why she WOULDN’T sleep with
me, we just turned out the lights to go to sleep. They had two single beds in their room, and
we each took one and crawled under our respective sheets. She spent another hour telling me about her
boyfriend and how she couldn’t cheat on him.
I just let her talk, not wanting to tell her that I had NO intention of
trying anything with her anyway. She
talked for another half hour or so, and I was at the point of either going over
to her and just crawling in bed with her, or telling her to shut the Hell up so I
could get some sleep, when a pair of headlights pierced the front window. It was John and the other girl, coming back
from their little rendezvous. She came
in the door and looked at her friend with the most exasperated look on her
face. I jumped up and got my jeans on
and thanked them for a wonderful time.
The gal I’d been talking to gave me a big kiss and handed me a piece of
paper with her phone number on it and told me to call her “any time”. I was completely confused now! Completely confused and TOTALLY 19! I left the room and went out and got into
John’s car and listened to his completely false stories about how he got lucky
with the other girl. I had to laugh as
he was telling me, because I had seen the look on her face when she walked back
into her room – it was definitely not a good one! John and I soon made it back to the motel and
turned in for the night. So far we were
0-2 in Monterey. My luck was still the same as always!
Sunday was much more of the same – sightseeing and not doing
much of anything. We did manage to find
an Army base and spend some time 4-wheeling on the tank trails. Around lunchtime, we decided to head back to
Long Beach, and set off down PCH, toward L.A. and home. We did make a quick stop in Bakersfield at a
restaurant shaped like a hot dog for dinner, but that’s about all I remember
about the trip. It was a pretty useless
weekend, but at least it gave me a chance to get out of Long Beach and gave me
another story to add to my rapidly-growing collection. John Jechenowski was only onboard the Frez
for a couple more months, and around the time he left, we heard that he was
getting busted for lying to the payroll department. It was something about how he had told the
Navy that he was married with four kids back in Jersey. None of us had ever heard him talk about a wife,
so we all figured that it was just a lie to get more money on payday, and they
had finally caught him. I don’t know how
true that was, but knowing John Jechenowski, it didn’t seem too
far-fetched. It takes all kinds I
guess. Jechenowski was just another in
the bizarre cast of characters that kept the Fresno afloat.
THE CAMPING TRIP
During the spring of ’89, a bunch of us decided we’d take a
weekend and go on a camping trip. We
planned to go up to the Big Bear area, where there were lots of campgrounds and
forested areas. The ringleader of the
trip, BM2 Arian, was my “homeboy” from Cheyenne, Wyoming. He was my boss, and about five years older
than I was, but we got along well. We
decided to meet at his house one Saturday morning, then head up to the
mountains and camp. I immediately
reached back into my Eagle Scout past and began to plan the trip down to the
gnat’s ass – equipment to be requisitioned from the base rental shop, menus to
be made, and schedules to be planned.
The other guys laughed at my organization, but I thought it was a
necessary part of camping. I was not yet
used to their “two cases of beer and a blanket” method of roughing it. Not only did I plan the meals, but I also
planned the times we’d eat and what chores each of us had to do – from cooking
to cleaning to putting up the tents. I
had temporarily forgotten that this wasn’t a Boy Scout camp out, it was a bunch
of guys hanging out in the woods. Man,
what a geek!
We went over to the base sporting goods rental shop on
Friday and procured the gear (tents, coolers, etc.) that we’d need. Saturday morning found us at Arian’s house,
where we quickly raided the grocery store to stock up on our food needs, then
we piled into the cars and headed the four hours up into the mountains. I was not prepared for “California Camping”
when we got there. I was used to
Wyoming, where we would backpack into the mountains, and not see or hear
another person for as long as we wanted to.
In California, you camped in a designated spot next to a hundred other
wilderness lovers and told your friends you were really roughing it. Just down the road from where we decided to
make camp, we found a friendly little Mom and Pop liquor store, where we stocked
up for two days’ worth of fun in the sun.
By the time we made it to the campground, it was around dinnertime. We got the tents up, and started making
dinner, and it became apparent that my schedules and menus were about as useful
as tits on a boar. I got all bent out of
shape at the guys who were eating whatever they wanted, and not following the
schedule. Dammit – this was a
campout! What were they doing having
fun? I had a lot to learn. The weekend
went by quickly, and we all ended up getting drunk. I seem to remember there being a fight with
some other campers, and having a confrontation with some Park Rangers, but the
details plumb escape me at this point in time.
We made it back to the Fresno late Sunday night, and I had learned yet
another valuable lesson in life – you don’t necessarily have to be anal about
everything you do. Sometimes it’s better
just to go with the flow and enjoy yourself.
Every little experience I had taught me something, and this one was no
different.
P.B.S.
As a member of Deck Department on the Fresno, I was pretty
much expected to live up to everyone’s expectations of a deck sailor (affectionately
known as a “Deck Ape”) – namely, I was supposed to be a raging, tattooed drunk
with a bad attitude who cussed like a truck driver. I tried my damndest to be All That I Could Be
and fit in, but there was just some part of me that wouldn’t let go
completely. When we got back to the
States after Pac, and stand down had ended, everyone kind of went their
separate ways when it came time for liberty call. We didn’t hang out together like we did
overseas, and that was to be expected.
Every group seemed to have their own hangout, and Deck Department was no
different. Deck’s favorite hangout was a
little bar called P.B.S. that was about 10 miles or so from the base. P.B.S. was a sailor bar that had been a
favorite of the fleet for years, judging from the ship’s ballcaps they kept
hanging from the ceiling. It was a small
place, with just enough room for the bar, a couple of pool tables and a row of
booths along the walls. There was a
picnic area out back, but we never got there when it was light outside, so we
never got to use it.
I was still 18 when we came back from West Pac, so they were
a little hesitant to let me tag along when the gang went to the bar they
affectionately called “PuBeS”. The first
couple of times they took me (“they” being Stans, and a couple of the other
BM’s), they never asked to see my ID, so I just became part of the Fresno
gang. After a while, they got used to
seeing my face, and no one ever questioned why an 18-year old was buying
tequila shots for all of his friends.
Our favorite night to go to PBS was Thursdays, when you
could get 50 cent tequila shots. We’d
walk up to the bar in threes and order ten shots apiece, then race to get them
down. The loser bought the next round of
ten, until all three of us had bought a round.
This was at about 7:00 at night, and we’d stay and party until closing
time after that. Needless to say, there
weren’t many sober nights spent at PBS.
There was another bar across the street from Pubes, and we would run
over there to have a couple of shots of something called ‘Smurf Piss’ from time
to time when things got slow at Pubes.
There was also a Laundromat sitting kitty-corner from the bar, so there
were many nights when we’d load up our dirty clothes, and spend the evening
doing laundry and drinking. It’s a
wonder none of us ever got run over trying to cross that street between PBS and
the Laundromat.
My drinking career at PBS came to an end one night when the
bar was unusually busy. Most times, it
was just the guys from the Fresno and a couple of other old drunks in the bar,
but this night, for some reason, there were about 40 guys in there. I walked in with the rest of the Fresno crew
and we started drinking – hard. About an
hour later, I walked up to the bar and ordered up a beer. Some guy sitting at the bar started giving me
a hard time, and told the bartender that she better ask to see my ID. The bartender had been serving me for a
couple of months, and she didn’t want to know if I was legal or not. The guy just kept on egging her on, and
finally, just to shut him up, she asked to see my ID. I was in complete shock – what the Hell
should I do? I had never been busted
before! I froze and stared at the two of
them for a second. And then I ran. I took off out of the door of the bar and
hightailed it down the street. I ran
until I found a bus stop, and then I jumped on the bus, looking behind me all
the way for the flashing lights of the cop car I was sure was chasing me. The cops never came, and the next morning,
Stans pulled me aside and told me that I had probably better not come back to
PBS for awhile. He told me that he’d let
me know when it was cool to go back. He
never told me anything, and I have never been back to PBS. Damn shame, too – it was a lot better to hang
out in there than it was to hang out with the bums in front of Jack’s Liquor
store.
THE HO CHI MINH TRAIL
On occasional nights, I would go hang out with the guys from
engineering. A lot of these guys liked
to hang out at a string of bars they called the Ho Chi Minh Trail. These bars were predominately owned by
Filipinos living in the States, and they had tried to recreate the feeling of
the P.I. bars over here, right down to the Filipina bar girls who tried to get
you to buy them girl drinks all night. I
never did ask, but I guess the old barfine system was still in place. Unfortunately, in the States, they call that
“prostitution” and it carries a jail term with it. I never bothered to find out if it was really
true or not. I only spent a couple of
nights on the Ho Chi Minh Trail. I
thought it was pretty lame, really. I
decided that I’d wait until we got back to the P.I. and go to the real P.I.
bars. I just found something really sad
about guys who were trying to live in the P.I. in the middle of L.A.. Besides, I could never reconcile in my head why they would call it the Ho Chi Minh Trail, which was Vietnamese, when the bars were owned and operated by people who were obviously Filipino. Once again, my obsession with the minute details ruined the fun.
THE BANDSTAND AND THE SILVER BULLET
Two other favorite haunts amongst the Fresno crew were the
Bandstand and the Silver Bullet. These
two were country bars, and I was always more than willing to go when I was
invited. The crew who hung out here were
the ship’s “hicks” – guys like MR3 Pulling, EN3 Benton, SN Arrington, SN Sorby,
SN Hickersham and the rest of the hat and boots crowd aboard the Fresno. I tried my best to blend in with this crowd,
but I didn’t really get to spend lot of time in either of these two bars. It was quite a trip to get to either of them,
since the Bandstand was out in Anaheim, and the Silver Bullet was in
Paramount. There were a couple of the
guys who had trucks, so on nights when we felt like braving the Southern
California traffic, we’d just load up in the bed and head for the ol' waterin’
hole. Jon Sorby even tried to alter my
ID card one night, so I could get in for sure.
He took a green grease pencil and tried to color over the “70” on my
birthdate, and using a ball point pen, he attempted to replace it with a
“67”. As you can imagine, it looked
awful, and fooled no one. The bouncer
was feeling nice that night, and he let me in anyway, but he told me I’d better
get a good fake if I expected him to let me in next time. Sorby gave me his Minnesota driver’s license,
and I used that for a while – the funny thing is it worked, despite him being 6
inches shorter, 50 pounds heavier and five years older than me – not to mention
the fact that he was nearly bald! Any
port in a storm, I guess. It worked, and
I didn't argue. It was hanging out at
the Bullet and the Bandstand that I began to accept the fact that I really was
a hick from Wyoming, and nothing more. I
had tried to cover it up – had tried since high school – but to no avail. I gave in and bought some boots, a pair of
Wranglers and a hat, and I felt “at home” once again. I still couldn’t two-step, but I could sure
drink a lot. It was Sorby’s favorite thing to get a fifth of peach brandy
and drink it in the truck before we went into the bar. The bar was really expensive, so you had to
have a primer, or you’d end up broke before you ended up drunk.
Another one of the best reasons to hang out
with these guys was Kenny Arrington.
Arrington was a kid from Oklahoma who had been a former “Mr. Teen
Oklahoma” body builder. He was a really
good looking guy with a great bod, and the gals were drawn to him like moths to
a flame. It was great to go out with
him, because the girls would damn near fall over themselves to get to him, and
since we were his friends, they’d talk to us, too. I never did score on any of these girls, but
the attention sure was nice. We always
kind of felt like remoras to Arrington's shark, but nobody really complained
about playing second fiddle in that band.
SN Arrington and I - Mother's Bar in Sunset Beach, CA - 1989
Hanging out with these guys also gave me one of the biggest
scares I had in L.A.. We had been
drinking pretty hard one night, and by closing time, I was on the verge of
passing out. I managed to stumble out to
the parking lot and I fell into the bed of Arrington’s truck, where I passed
out cold. After closing time, the guys
left the bar and went to a civilian friend of theirs’ house in a neighborhood
in Anaheim to party a little longer.
They were nice enough to carry me into the house, so I didn't have to
spend the night in the bed of a truck in a random neighborhood, but I was
oblivious to all of it. All I know is
that I woke up in the morning on the floor of a someone’s house I didn’t know,
in a neighborhood I'd never seen before.
I guess that the guys left the house after the party was over, and they just
left me passed out on the carpet. To
make matters worse, my glasses were laying in the bed of the truck, where they had fallen off after I passed out. The people
who owned the house must have gone to work or something as well, because when I
woke up, there was nobody there. I
looked around as best I could without my glasses, and I had NO idea who’s house
it was – nobody in the pictures looked familiar, and there was absolutely
nothing that looked remotely like anyplace I’d ever been before. I couldn’t find the telephone, and spent a
very frustrating hour trying to figure out where in the hell I was, as the
panic began to set in. Finally, the
phone rang, and I followed the sound to a cabinet where the phone was hidden. I waited until the answering machine had
picked up the call, then I grabbed the handset and dialed the ship.
When the Messenger Of The Watch finally answered, I screamed
“Give me Arrington!
Or Sorby! Or Hick! I don’t care – get me anybody”
The voice on the other end laughed and I heard whomever the deck sailor on watch was say,
“Hey – it’s Pete!
He’s alive!”
Then I heard Jon Sorby’s voice – “alright man, hang on. I’ll be there in a little bit.”
About an hour later, Jon pulled up in Kenny’s truck. As I opened the door, I looked in the back and
there were my glasses! I put them on and
got in. Jon was laughing at me and told
me that the house belonged to some friends of his, and everyone thought it was
a great joke to leave me stranded there because I had gotten so damn
drunk. I guess it served me right, but
it sure was a scary couple of hours. I’d
like to say that it taught me a lesson about getting that drunk, but it
didn’t.
Another vivid memory I have of the Silver Bullet was the
night I went there with EN3 Doug Benton, Jon Hickersham, and the gang. We were having a great time drinking and
watching the girls dance (this was still in the days before line dancing –
thank God!), and we were starting to get a little tipsy. I had been talking to a gal that was a
regular with our group. I think her
girlfriend was trying to date Kenny Arrington or something. Anyway, I was trying to impress her with my
“worldliness” when I told her how much that bar reminded me of the Cowboy Bar
back in Laramie. She kind of looked at
me funny and said –
“Hmm. I went to UW
for a couple of years and spent a lot of time in the Cowboy – this place is nothing
like the Cowboy!”
She had called my bluff.
I had never been in the Cowboy -
I was barely out of high school when I left Laramie, and they actually check
ID’s there! Then the kiss of death – she
asked me how old I really was. I kind of
looked at the ground and mumbled
“Eighteen”
“Eighteen!” she yelled, “you’re just a baby”
and then she started laughing at me. After that, none of the girls that hung
around with our group would have anything to do with me.
But that’s not the important point of the story – the
important part is Doug Benton. Doug was
a big ol’ boy from Texas. He was a lot
of fun and we got along very well. He
didn’t have a lot of success with the ladies either, and the two of us liked to
laugh about our suaveness, or lack thereof.
Well that night, Doug spotted a little brunette sitting at one of the tables
in the back of the bar. She was sitting
with what looked like her parents, and Dave kept staring over at her. I kept egging him on
“C’mon Doug – go get her”,
But he wouldn’t budge.
Finally, after more than enough Coors Lights, Doug said
“Alright, that’s it – here I go!”
With that, he walked over to her table and asked her to
dance. You could have knocked me over
with a feather when she said yes. The
two of them danced the next couple of songs, and then he walked her back to her
table and came back to where I was standing at the bar. Doug looked at me and said,
“Pete, I just danced with the gal I’m gonna marry”.
I laughed at him then, but the joke was on me – just a few
months later, I was in the church as the two of them said their vows and walked
down the aisle. There are little
miracles that happen every day, and that was one of them. I’m just proud to say that I was there to see
it, and it let me know that there was still hope out there for me!
FOURTH STREET
Fourth Street – dear old Fourth Street. The center of depravity for the underage
alcoholic in Long Beach. I’m not sure
how we first discovered the string of dive bars on Fourth Street – I think it may
have been Jerry Ford who led us astray that first night. Regardless of who was the leader, the rest of
us followed along more than willingly, and we made visits to Fourth Street a
regular part of our drinking activities.
I don’t really remember the names of any of the four or five bars we
frequented, except for one – The Mecca.
Don’t ask me why I remember The Mecca, but something tells me it has to
do with a 350-pound Native American woman my friends liked to call “Fat Moon
Rising”. We'll get back to that story.
Fourth Street was a typical inner-city neighborhood. There were old corner groceries and run-down
apartments lining the streets. About six
blocks from our bus stop, there was a collection of seedy, run-down bars. Ordinarily, none of us would have been caught
dead in any of these rat holes, but there was one big advantage – they never,
EVER asked to see our ID’s! We drank
without impunity for months at those Fourth Street dives. Sooner or later, most of the underage guys
from the Frez made their way down to Fourth Street.
The core group who hung out here was myself, Jerry Ford,
Steve Haulin, Bob Powell and Dion (Downtown) Braun. We were joined at times by Mike Derkins and
Mitch Barris, Matt Munderson, Jon Hickersham, Kevin Toomer and Shawn
Mumbley. It became a regular gathering
spot for the Deck Department youngsters.
Many of us had never been in an inner-city area like this before, and it
became painfully obvious to any of the locals that we just didn’t belong. I seem to recall one night when Jerry Ford
and Shawn Mumbley tried to cure me of my “rubeness”. We were walking back to the bus stop after a
night at the bars, and we found ourselves in a pretty rough section of the
neighborhood. We were getting the evil
eye from more than one onlooker, and it became clear to us that we were being
sized up for something entirely unpleasant.
Jerry was a tough-looking white kid who had grown up in LA, and Shawn
was a big black kid who had grown up in Detroit, and they both knew what to
do.
“Just walk bad, man!”
“Walk bad?” I asked.
“Yeah, walk with an attitude – like this…”
Jerry and Shawn began to strut like they were badasses and
belonged there. I was at quite a loss –
I had no idea what to do.
“C’mon man, walk bad, or we’re gonna get our asses
kicked!”
I tried to imitate Shawn’s limp and Jerry’s attitude and
ended up looking even dumber than usual.
The two of them tried to correct me – numerous times – and finally said,
“Oh screw it – let’s just run!”
And we did. All the
way to the bus stop. So much for my
career as an inner-city tough guy.
Tough Guy Lessons aside, our typical Fourth Street Night
M.O. was to take the bus from the base to the stop on Ocean Boulevard by the
Convention Center. Then we’d walk over
to Jack’s Liquors and buy a pint or a 40-ouncer, then we’d head out toward the
bars. We’d walk in and order a couple of
shots then head on over to the next bar and repeat the sequence until we were
drunk, but not so drunk we couldn’t make it back to the bus stop before the
last bus ran at midnight. The trick to
hanging on Fourth Street was learning exactly where that point was. My inability to find the good side of that
point lead to my introduction to Fat Moon Rising.
It was a typical Fourth Street night – we were all feeling
no pain and starting to raise a little Hell.
For some reason, a couple of the Engineers were with us that night – EN3
Benton (before he had met his wife) and MR3 Pulling. It was getting close to time to make it back
to the bus, and we were all feeling no pain, when IT walked into the
bar. IT was a butt-ugly 350 pound
Indian woman with her butt-uglier 150 pound sister. I remember one of the guys sitting at our
booth yelling “Eclipse!” as she stood in the doorway!
She was not attractive to say the least. We kept drinking, and somewhere around the
twentieth drink/shot/beer/whatever we were drinking, Pulling and Benton told
me,
“Hey Pete – dude, I think she’s checkin’ you out!”
I looked over in a
drunken haze and saw the big woman looking me up and down and smiling at
me.
“C’mon man – go talk to her”
For some reason, this suggestion made a lot of sense, so I
wandered over and struck up a conversation.
Later, when we were back at the ship, Derkins, Barris and Munderson told
me that they’d bought a bottle of tequila and tried to drink her pretty, but
they just couldn’t do it. Well, the
night stretched on and on, and pretty soon the only people left in the bar were
the two girls, myself, Pulling and Benton.
The bartender told us it was closing time, and I knew we were screwed,
because the last bus back to the base had run about two hours ago. We stumbled out of the bar and headed toward
their apartment. About a block away from
where they lived, the girls told us that their landlord didn’t allow men in
their building, so we couldn’t go there.
We all stood there and looked at each other, and finally Benton said,
“Hey, let’s go to the beach”.
The idea made sense at the time, so we headed the four
blocks to the shore.
When we got there, Benton, Pulling, and the fat girl’s
sister all headed over towards the marina.
There were lots of boats tied up to the piers there, and they said that
they were going to go find one to sleep on.
The only problem was the eight-foot high fence. Evidently, it wasn’t a problem for them, as
Pulling and Benton climbed it and headed off to find a boat to sleep on. They later told me that they found a really
nice sailboat, climbed aboard and slept in the cabin. They got off lucky. I was left alone with the big girl. We sat on the beach for a while and watched
the ocean. I was drunk, but not too
drunk to not know where this was headed.
I wasn’t really sure that I wanted to go there, since I had only been
there once before, and we all know how that turned out. After about an hour of inane small talk, I
was afraid the booze would wear off before I would get finished with the task
at hand, so I suggested we move our little party up to the lifeguard
stand. We climbed the ladder up to the
lookout area, then we sat and talked some more.
About ten minutes later, she turned towards me and said
“So, am I gonna get laid or what?”.
I hemmed and hawed for a minute, then closed my eyes and
went for it. It was awful. Really, really awful. I willed myself to be finished in record
time, then looked for an easy escape. My
mind was blank as I tried frantically to find a way to get myself out of
there. I was about to just jump off the
stand and run, when a voice from underneath the lifeguard stand said
“You two done yet?
I’m cold – I wanna come up”
It was her sister.
Evidently, she couldn’t make it over the fence with Pulling and Benton,
and she had sat and waited for us to finish up so she could come sit with
us. She then climbed up to where we sat,
and snuggled up on my left side, as her sister sat against my right, and they
fell asleep. There I was, sitting on a
lifeguard stand on Seal Beach, surrounded by two drunk, ugly women, one of whom
I had just had really bad sex with, and the other, her uglier sister. I was in Hell – and I couldn’t figure out a
way to get back to the Real World.
The morning sun came soon – but not soon enough for me. The instant I heard a bus go by on the street
behind us, I woke up the girls, and told them it was time to go. They woke up and asked if I would walk them
home. Chivalry ain’t dead yet, so I
agreed. As we headed back across Ocean
Boulevard towards their apartment, they saw a little café opened for
breakfast.
“C’mon, let’s go eat!”
They drug me inside.
I was pretty hungry, and the menu looked pretty good. As the waitress walked up, I suddenly
remembered that I only had about five dollars in my wallet, so I went for the
$1.99 toast, egg and water. The two
girls weren’t quite as concerned about finances, and they went hog wild. Soon, plates of pancakes and eggs and sausage
and two huge omelets came to our table.
I sat and ate my piece of toast and egg in silence, hoping to God that
they had enough money to pay for it all.
As we finished eating, the waitress brought the check – it was close to $17.00
– about twelve bucks more than I had. I
turned to ask them how much money they had, when the excused themselves for the
restroom. I sat and watched as they two
girls left the table, walked right past the bathrooms and headed straight out
the doors and into the California morning.
I was dumbfounded – I was twelve bucks short on the tab and had no idea
what to do next. I had never dined and
dashed before, but there was a first time for everything! I left one of my one-dollar bills on the
table as a tip for the waiter, then walked towards the door. I slapped the rest of my money on the counter
by the cash register and sprinted for the door, then on to the bus stop. I didn’t stop or look behind me until the bus
reached the main gate of the base. I
never again went into, or even walked past, that café, and I wish I could say
the same about Fat Moon Rising.
Unfortunately the saga continued some months later. Depressing, really.
BELMONT SHORE AND THE BAYSHORE SALOON
Occasionally, we’d decide to go uptown with our drinking. When we were feeling rich and socially
acceptable, we’d catch the bus down to the small beachfront town of Belmont
Shore. The bars here were college kid
hangouts, and much higher class than those on Fourth Street, There were a lot
of college girls who hung out here, and we always looked forward to spending an
evening getting stinking drunk with the upper crust. There were five or six bars along Ocean
Boulevard as it ran through Belmont Shore, and our favorite was the Bayshore
Saloon. The Bayshore was a small, rustic
little place and was a very comfortable, homey type of bar. The best thing about the Bayshore was their
House Special drink – “Shoot The Root”.
A Shoot The Root was a shot of root beer schnapps in a a lowball glass
full of beer. You drank it like a
boilermaker – you dropped the shot into the beer, then you tipped it up and
slammed it, shot glass and all. It
tasted like root beer and gave you the best belches ever! We would drink round after round of Shoot The
Roots at the Bayshore – we couldn’t get enough.
The problem with them was that they were sneaky. Shots of beer and schnapps don’t seem like
something you could get too drunk off of, but believe you me, about an hour
later, you were lucky if you could hit your butt with both hands. Shoot The Roots were the main contributing
factor to me jumping out of a moving car on Ocean Boulevard.
It’s a long story, but suffice it to say that it began as
most did – with an overabundance of alcohol and a lack of time management. Basically, I got too drunk to remember to
catch the last bus back to the base again.
The problem with missing the last bus back to the base from Belmont
Shore was that to catch the first bus to the base in the morning, you had to
walk four miles down Ocean Boulevard to the bus stop in front of the Long Beach
Civic Center. When you were drunk as a
skunk, it was a really, really, really long walk. That particular evening, I had closed the
bars down in Belmont Shore (with the help of MR3 Pulling’s expired Texas Driver’s
License), and I had stumbled the majority of the four miles to the bus stop. I had just sat down on the curb to collect my
bearings to make the final push to the stop, when a car pulled up in front of
me. The driver was a large black guy,
and I thought I’d seen a base sticker in his window. He asked me if I needed a ride back to the
base. I agreed and climbed into his
car. As I shut the door, he tore off
down the road towards the base. I looked
over at the driver and noticed that he couldn’t have been in the Navy – he was
much too heavyset. He had a soft jazz
station playing on his stereo, and the smell of the car told me that he had
been smoking pot.
I was starting to get really uneasy and was trying to figure
out how to get out of the car. About
then, the guy asked me what I’d been doing that night. I told him I’d been partying. He asked if I’d gotten lucky. I told him I had, and that I was really tired
and ready to get back to the base. He
then looked me right in the eye and said –
“You know, I give really good head, if you’re not too
tired”.
That was it – I knew I wanted out – now! As I asked him to let me out, he hit the gas
and started to run the red lights on Ocean Boulevard. I had no idea what he had in mind for me, but
I was sure I wouldn’t like it. I saw a
car coming across an intersection in front of us. The guy driving me had to slow down to avoid
hitting him, and I used it as my chance to get away. We were still going 5-10mph, when I threw
open the door and jumped! I bounced and
rolled along the street for a little bit, then got to my feet and ran like I
had never run before. I didn’t look
behind me to see if he was coming, I just ran like the wind. I ended up turning down an alley behind a
bank building and hiding behind their dumpster.
Terrified and shaking, I fell asleep, and that’s where I woke up the
next morning, hung over, bruised, scraped and bleeding, curled up behind a
dumpster in the alley. Oh well, it was
better than being raped by a 300 pound gay black guy, I guess.
THE CITY CENTER MOTEL
When we couldn’t get into the bars, and we got tired of
drinking at the base club, and we were feeling rich, we would go get a room at
the City Center Motel in Long Beach. The
City Center was just barely a notch above the “pay by the hour” type
motel. It was not the type of place that
would complain about a bunch of drunken 18-year olds raising hell in one of
their rooms. I can remember a few weekends
when none of us had duty, that we would hole up in a room at the City Center,
and save for a few beer runs to the grocery store across the street, we
wouldn’t leave until check out time on Sunday.
The usual crew here was Haulin, Powell, myself, Downtown
Braun, Darkbull and Luster. We would go
get a couple of cases from the store (I usually got elected to buy because they
said I looked the oldest – I just think it was because I was dumb enough to do
it) Then we’d sit in the room and get drunk and argue over who was tough enough
to leap from the second story balcony into the pool below. I myself never saw anyone jump, but the rumors
ran wild that Steve Haulin once took the plunge. We never did too much during these weekends,
with the exception of the weekend we locked ourselves in the room with a few
cases of Budweiser and tried to memorize the phrase written on the top of the
label. Three beer runs later, we had it
– and to this day I can still recall it - “This is the famous Budweiser
beer. We know of no brand produced by
any other brewer which costs so much to brew and age. Our exclusive beechwood aging produces a
taste, a smoothness and a drinkability you will find in no other beer at any
price.” Scary, huh?
One of my other big memories of the City Center was the day
we were sitting in the room drinking and watching old “CHiPs” reruns on
T.V. We knew that they filmed a lot of
movies and television shows in that area, and we had seen hundreds of scenes of
Ocean Boulevard before. But on this particular
episode, as we watched from inside the motel, Ponch and Jon turned off of
Ocean, and chased the bad guy right into the parking lot of the City Center
Motel! It was incredible – the hotel we were sitting in was right there on the
T.V. in front of us! One of the guys
threw open the window to look out and see the TV crew, and we all looked – even
though we knew the show had been in reruns for ten years! Funny what TV does to ya, huh?
THE LONG BEACH GRAND PRIX
During early spring of ’89, one of the biggest yearly events
in Long Beach came to town. It was time
for the Grand Prix of Long Beach – a CART race that brought thousands of people
to town. They closed off the streets
around the Convention Center and brought in huge temporary bleachers and
concession stands as the Indy cars took over the streets. It was pretty cool to watch the
transformation. It took them about a
month to put it all up and by the time it was race day, it was hard to
recognize our old stomping grounds. I
really wanted to go to the race, but I couldn’t find anyone to go with me. I had been a huge race fan all of my life,
and I had never seen Indy cars race in person.
It seemed as though nobody else on the ship shared my enthusiasm. I had finally made up my mind just to go by
myself, when Steve Haulin and Bob Powell decided they’d go with me.
Race day came and, as usual, we were late leaving base via
bus to get there. By the time we got
there, they were about to drop the green flag.
The overflow seating bleachers where our tickets were, were absolutely
crammed. There was no place to sit at
all. We walked around and around and
couldn’t find anywhere to sit. I was
used to going to old stock car short tracks where you can see all of the action
from anywhere, but this was different.
At a road course, you have to sit at one of the corners or on a
straightaway and that is all of the race you get to see – two seconds of a
bunch of cars flying by at 150 mph. It
kind of sucked, and I was really disappointed.
Bob, Steve and I ended up just waking around the course and catching the
occasional glimpse of the cars as they went by.
We walked through the pit display areas and looked at the car haulers
and stuff, and then we checked out the concession stands and souvenir booths. I can’t tell you who won the race (a quick
check of the archives says it was Al Unser, Jr.) and I don’t even remember if
we stayed around for the end of the race.
Bob and Steve were bored from the outset, and I can’t say I blamed
them. For as much of a car racing fan as
I was, I was severely disappointed in my CART racing experience. At least I was there…I guess.
STANDING UP FOR MYSELF
A few months after we had come back from deployment, and not
too long before we went into the shipyards to get ready for the next one, I had
an experience that radically changed my attitudes for life. It was a relatively small episode to the
casual observer, but for me, it was one of the most influential happenings in
the shaping of my adult personality.
It happened one morning in the head right above First Division
Berthing. I had gone up there to take
care of business after reveille and found the head full of “the Brothers”. Now I had never really had any problems with
the black guys on the ship before, but I do admit that I found their constant
threats and posturing to be annoying and downright intimidating. Most of the time, one-on-one, I didn’t have a
problem with any of the black sailors on the Frez. But it seemed like when you got more than two
of them together, they took on a group attitude that ran decidedly against the
white guys. It was a real “safety in
numbers” type of thing – if they outnumbered you then they would threaten you
and make fun of you and just generally try to make you feel like crap. It worked on me – I was very intimidated by
the large groups of black guys. I guess
that growing up in Wyoming, where less than one percent of the population was
black, really didn’t help matters much.
I did go to my Junior Prom with a black girl, but she didn’t act
anything like these guys did. The majority
of the black guys in the Navy come from lower socioeconomic backgrounds and
have a very different outlook on life than your typical middle-income white kid
from Wyoming. Everything was different –
the walk, the language, the attitude, everything. I was having a hard time getting used to it
and blending in. That morning in the
bathroom taught me everything I needed to know in dealing with my
African-American shipmates.
I walked into the head that morning amidst the cigarette
smoke and the constant trash talk from the brothers, and I stepped up to the
urinal to do my business. I was doing a
pretty good job of ignoring them until Ricky Sudley started up. Ricky was a little punk – about 120 pounds
and all mouth. He hadn’t been onboard
very long and I outranked him by a couple of paygrades. He started chipping in and talking smack
about me, when something inside me snapped.
I had taken all of the insults I could take, and I finally lost it. I turned around and stared straight at him –
“You want to do something about it, Ricky? You think you can take me? If you’re that damn tough, then let’s go –
right here right now. Otherwise, leave
me the Hell alone!!”
I stood there, shaking, and staring him down, waiting to see
if he’d move. If he’d have come at me,
I’d have torn into him. He probably
figured his homeboys would jump in and help him, but as he looked around the
room, all of the other guys just kind of looked away as if to say,
“Hey man, this is your fight.”
Ricky didn’t move, and didn’t say anything. I continued to stare him down and said
“That’s what I thought.
Now get the fuck out of my way.”
And with that, I walked past him, out of the head and down
to the berthing area. I was shaking like
a leaf –couldn’t believe what I’d just done.
I had actually stood up for myself and let them know I wouldn’t be intimidated
anymore. It was the first time in my
life I had ever done that – the first time I didn’t take things lying down and
the first time I had not played doormat.
And it felt good! Damn good. From that point on, I knew that if I was
going to get what I wanted in life, I had to stand up for myself and let people
know I was a force to be reckoned with.
It took me a couple more years to get the process down pat, but this was
where it started. This was the first
step on my journey to becoming a “real” man.
Funny thing was, that after that morning, I didn’t get nearly as
much crap from the brothers anymore.
Word got around quick about what I had done. When I saw how much easier things went for me
after that, I couldn’t believe that I hadn’t done it sooner. Oh well, you live and you learn, and school
was definitely in session.
There was a lot to learn, as the Fresno was headed into the shipyards for her refit to get ready to head out on another deployment. The stories about being in the yards are in:
Part Six - The Shipyards
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