Khristophorous, you asked (edited)

by Billectric

Posted to Utterances on 2004-01-25 17:09:00

about the Navy. Here are some ramblings that I wrote a while back. Someday I hope to put all this in a book. I’m sure it needs editing because I wrote it fairly fast without going back much, just to get it down.
It’s a lot to wade through, but be my guest.

I’ve wanted to be a writer as long as I can remember, but got side-tracked when I joined the Navy in 1972 on the spur of the moment. After the standard testing, they tried to give me a clerical job but I wouldn’t have it. Instead I worked at the air terminal at the Naval Station in Rota, Spain, towing and fueling jet airplanes while on duty and running wild in Spain, Morocco, London, and Greece the rest of the time. I didn’t get much writing done at the time, but now I’m making up for it with gusto. I don’t like to give specifics about my past escapades, preferring to let my stories speak for themselves with some blurring between reality and fiction. I live in Jacksonville, FL with my wife, son, and toy robot.

NAVAL STATION ROTA SPAIN

We’re in a room with black lights and posters and state-of-the-art stereo equipment blasting the best rock music, better than I’d ever heard it before. I have to tell you about the barracks we lived in. This was no war-time thing, we had it made. There were eight buildings lined up side by side and each building was called a “barracks” and they were three floors high with about 16 rooms to a floor. This was at Naval Air Station Rota, Spain, where I was stationed.

It just so happened that the air maintenance crew was sharing a barracks with the hospital corpsmen and other support crew, like photographers. You had the rough and tumble Crash Crew boys, always ready to rescue a pilot in a burning plane, partying with the deck-apes like me (I towed the jets in & out of the hangar and hooked the big fuel nozzle up to them for fuel) and the medical guys and the rest. The medical guys turned out to be really cool.

See, the Naval Hospital had a different Commanding Officer than the rest of the base. He asked that his people not be inspected without warning because some of them worked nights and they saved lives, etc. so leave them alone.

So the corpsmen, or “cor’men” as I called Jim the Cor’man, were free to decorate their rooms like they did back home, or back in college, whatever the case may be.

Jim and Antly had the coolest room. There was an actual wavey nylon parachute framing one half of the ceiling and draping down on two walls. Antly had made aluminum foil plants & flowers and had them hanging from other half of the ceiling like an upside garden. This was all illuminated in black light and of course there were the typical black light posters of Jimi Hendrix, Ten Years After, and War up on the walls, and one of those big, round wooden spools that used to be for cable or something, on it’s side like a communal table (wine bottle covered with multi-colored melted wax candles as they burned down, one by one, building and building the safe home hippie vibe shared with ash trays, metal plates for grinding hashish, different types of chairs collected from who knows where, a small refrigerator against one wall, full of beer and wine and cheese and “ice water” and some chocolate. Two walls, we all painted.

One night Antly and Jim had us all over to paint the walls that weren’t covered by the flowing parachute. We had these “glow-under-black-light” paints and some paint brushes and listened to Pink Floyd, the Firesign Theatre, and Led Zeppelin, and whatever – We painted an underwater scene on one wall, with fish, seaweed, octopus, crabs, coral reefs, all different glow in the dark colors. On the other wall, an outer space scene. Saturn with its rings, Mercury, Mars, Earth, the moon, the Milky Way and A couple of rockets, oh . Bless the artists… I was part of it, it looked really good, fell asleep 12 hours later we were tripping and smoking hash; tripping and drinking, painting and tripping. this was some good time.

We always partied. Hash was $30.00 an ounce, or a dollar a gram. That was just a rounding-off thing we did because an ounce isn’t exactly 30 grams.

Someone would have those rectangles wrapped in aluminum foil, not much bigger than a zippo lighter, and that was an ounce of hashish. This was Spain, near Morocco.

Somebody said, “I need five grams.”

And the guy would open the foil. Hold the hash tightly between his thumb and forfinger, tight to make heat, and slowly work it back and forth until it was pliable like clay, and break off a fifth of the little brick. Guy’s been doing it so long he knows what five grams is.

But still, he weighs it in the scales; cool fancy scales he bought in Tangier, Morocco, and hell, it was about five grams.

“Here, man.”

“Thanks, man, here.” and hand him five bucks.

The early days was innocnece. Later it got nasty. Narking and shit. But the first year was paradise and the Navy was taking care of me. I grew up a lot there. I was a young nerd when I got there. I loved music, though, and those Bose speakers, man…

By day we were like a well-olied baseball team out on that flight-line in the sun… that tarmac. Those “shacks” were lined up, each ready to fix jets (Electric, hydraulic, mechanical, structural). If you were an electrician, for example, you hung out in the electrical “shack”. I wasn’t a specialist; I was in the “line shack.” I towed the jets from the flight line into the hangar and when they were fixed, towed them back out. Sometimes I directed the jets as they taxied from the runway to the flight line using wide arm motions to guide them into the right spot to shut down. I did minor maintenance like fueling, checking & adding oil and hydraulic fluid, draining samples of the fuel from the jets into mason jars—you spin the liquid in the jar to make sure there is no dirt or debris floating in there and if checks out okay, you write the date on the jar lid with a grease pencil, and besides that, I
Later when I was stationed at the Naval Station in Jacksonville, FL the pilots used to bring us Coors.
This was back before you could buy Coors Beer in the East. But this is when I was in Florida, later, after Rota. The pilots flew jets to Yuma, Arizona just for practice. They landed there and took off and came back to Jacksonville, FL and I met them coming in. I stood out on the flight line and “waved him in” by raising and lowering my arms until the jet taxied up to the right spot and – Boom – You cross your arms above your head; that means stop. The pilot sees and stops gently. Most of the pilots are only five or six years older than me. They went to college and ROTC and the Naval Academy or something, and became commissioned officers, Ensigns and First Leiutenents, and they could fly. They bought cases of ice cold Coors Beer in Yuma and brought them back in their Av-Bays, which is a panel in the side of the plane. I had the screwdriver to open the Av-Bay. I was assigned to a certain pilot. So he and other pilots gave us cold Coors beer. It was hot out on the tarmac so we appreciated the beer. We didn’t drink on duty, but as soon as we got done…

Now let’s go back to Rota, Spain. Downtown Rota. The Sangria Shack and the speed and motorcycles and the girls.

There was the time we camped out at a beach in Trafalgar, one of THE most mystical, awe-inspiring trips of MY life.
A breeze blew and the hash pipe glowed. Sleeping bags on a blanket on the beach. Me, Jim the Cor’man and Walt the Photo guy. We had a little cassette tape player with fresh batteries.
We were listening to the group WAR, the song “Four Cornered Room” – the music stretched and billowed around our inside-out heads like sacred moaning bolt-rhythm blues for Allah, yes; and the wind magic beach sand illuminating moon;

We could see the Rock Of Gibraltar in the distance, out in the ocean. And the lights of VErY dIstant sHips… offf, away, far…who were they and what were they doing? Fishermen? Military? Commercial? Private citizen? Who knew?

God, this is one of the Zeniths of a life lived like mine.Look out there. It’s the Rock of Gibralter. Oh, and ON the ROcK – LiGhts a’Plenty!

Yeah, Gibralter was salted with a multitude of dot lights.

The whole thing beautiful, grasp it, grasp, no breathe ~~breathe~~ this in. Look at my friends! They are digging it Big Time. Smile Jim. “Damn, man, damn.” Smile Walt. “oh, wow…I love this…”
Smile me, “There must be a God!”
“Why do you say that?”

“I don’t know.”

NIGHT OF HOWLING
It was was nighttime in 1974 and I was in the barracks where I lived on the Naval station in Rota, Spain. The NIS (Naval Investigative Service) were bringing the dope dog through the barracks for a surprise inspection. There were two NIS agents wearing suits and two Shore Patrol officers in blue uniforms with badges and the dog.

My two friends, Jim the Cor’man and Walt the Photographer, and I stood at one end of the long hallway of the second floor, having just entered thru the door to the stairwell, and saw the group of dope inspectors walking almost at the other end of the hall, their backs to us.
Either Jim or Walt reached up and flicked off the lights. All three of us began howling loudly through the darkness as a warning to all who may be concerned:

“ARRWOOOOOO! ARRWWOOOOOOOO! WOOF, WOOF! ARRWWOOOOOOOO!”

One the NIS agents shouted, “Jesus Christ! Who’s got a flashlight? A flashlight!?”

The three of us bolted out the door, laughing and running down to the first floor.

I guess the cops finally figured out how to operate a simple light switch that was on the wall right beside them.

They walked into the first floor lounge indignantly where several people were playing pool or watching TV. I looked at Jim The Cor’man and burst out with a half-muffled laugh.

They took me in for questioning. Perhaps my Moroccan neck beads, tie-dyed shirt, and blue-jean work dungerees (which made me “out of uniform”) made them suspicious.
The older NIS agent, in his suit and overcoat, said to the younger agent, “Take him in and let him know who we are.”
Whatever that meant. I never knew if he meant to intimidate me or to show me they were the “good guys”, or what.

They took me to an office in their building and questioned me. “Who was howling? Was it you? You saw who did it! Why did they do it? Who was it? Was it you? Well, you laughed; you know something about it? What does it mean? Why? Who? What?…”

I told them, “I don’t know. The lights were off. I couldn’t see. I only laughed because it seemed funny at the time. I didn’t do it. I don’t know why someone did it…” etc.

They finally let me go. I returned to the barracks and we celebrated and I was nick-named “Baroo Billy” for howling like, “BAARRRRROOOOOOOOOOOO!!”
Later my nick-name was changed to Billy the Electric Boy because I looked like a kid and played fast, loud electric guitar at the base “coffee house”.