Queer Ulysses

by Guy Willard

  “Hello, sailor.”

  We looked around. One of our classmates, Evan, had come up to join us at the counter. “Pull up a stool,” I said. “The fun’s about to start.”

  “What’s going on?” he asked.

  “We’re waiting for Mona to show up. Tonight’s the night Roger’s going to make his move on her. What with a live band and everything, he’s finally gonna ask her for a dance.”

  “Oh? Well, looks like you’re too late. I just saw her heading off-base with a couple of instructors.”

  “What?” Roger looked crestfallen. Our instructors were veteran enlisted men in the Navy, mostly chief petty officers, who fought for the plum job of instructing new enlistees. With so many women now joining up, teachers could expect to have a few perks to go with the job.

  Evan looked almost grim as he relayed this information. “Yeah. Looks like she’s gonna get her dream sheet choice.”

  All of us had filled out dream sheets, listing the places where we wanted to be stationed upon graduation. Few of us would get our first choices, of course, but those who graduated at the top of their class would have a good chance. It amazed me how many of the guys yearned for shore duty instead of a ship. Normally, only men who had put in a lot of sea duty could qualify for assignment to a land base. But because Waves weren’t allowed to serve aboard combat ships, it was a foregone conclusion that they would be stationed ashore somewhere, the only question being which base they would get.

  For this, the Waves earned the contempt of many male sailors—for they were taking away from them the coveted shore duty posts, few in number as they already were. On top of that, it was a well-known fact that some Waves slept with their instructors for good grades…and apparently Mona was now among their number. No doubt the temptation to use her sex to procure the duty station of her choice had been too much. If she graduated with the top grades in class, she would be almost guaranteed to get it.

  Roger let out a long breath. I felt sorry for him even though I’d been kidding him about his crush on Mona.

  “Well, Rog, looks like you really need a drink after that one, huh?”

  He looked straight ahead at the bottles lined up against the wall behind the bar, then picked up his drink and downed it. “Yeah. I think I’ll have a double this time.”

  “Make that two,” said Evan to the waitress.

  “Don’t tell me you have woman problems, too,” I said.

  “My only problem is that my woman’s not here with me.”

  “Didn’t you see her on leave?”

  “Sure. But two weeks flies by just like that.” He snapped his fingers and reached into his pocket to pay for his drink. He was still in uniform. Though Roger and I usually changed into civvies as soon as we came back from the mess hall, some of the others never seemed to change out of their uniforms. “If only I had Debbie here right now, oh.” He brushed his hand lightly over his crotch. “God, I miss her. Just the smell of her letters is enough to get me hard.”

  I laughed. “Remember when one of the guys got a letter from his girl with a couple of her pubic hairs taped below her signature? That was hilarious.”

  He turned to me. “And you? Do you miss your girlfriend, too?”

  Without hesitation I gave the ready answer I’d used since boot camp. “I joined this fucking Navy to forget about her, and that’s just what I plan to do, let’s put it that way.”

  He chuckled understandingly. “It’s one of those situations, huh?”

  “Yeah. Breaks your fucking heart, right?”

  “No, come on. Tell me about it. What’s the story?”

  “Oh, I told her I wanted a serious relationship, but she wanted to stay just friends. The same old shit.” I tried to sound world-weary, but the truth was that it felt good to be telling someone about my heartbreak, even in such an elliptical manner.

  “That really sucks,” he said sympathetically. “You know, women are strange sometimes.”

  “Yeah. My sentiments exactly.”

  “You can’t live with them, and you can’t live without them.”

  “I hear you.”

  Suddenly, I missed Brett terribly. For the longest time, I thought I’d succeeded in forgetting him, what with the culture shock of boot camp, and then studying hard in A-school. But now for some reason, I felt a keen longing to see him again.

  “Listen, guys, I just remembered a phone call I have to make.”

  They turned to me with knowing looks. Roger grinned. “Looks like you didn’t do a very good job of forgetting her, Bill.”

  “I guess not.”

  I quickly downed my drink and headed for the main entrance. There were a couple of pay phones next to the cloakroom counter. Stationing myself before one of them, I picked up the receiver and held it in my hand for a moment. Then, before I could change my mind, I dialed.

  I stood there listening to the dial tone. It sounded seven times. I had decided to wait for ten rings, then hang up. It was picked up on the eighth ring.

  “Hello?” A woman’s voice answered, Brett’s mother.

  “Hello?”

  “Who is this?” she asked.

  “Bill.”

  For a moment, my name didn’t seem to register with her. And then she became animated. “Bill! Where are you?”

  “I’m on a Navy base in Diego.”

  “I can’t believe I’m actually talking to you, Bill. It’s so good to hear from you. Brett told us you’d joined the Navy and we were so surprised.”

  “How’s everything going, Mrs. Marshall?”

  “Fine.”

  “That’s good. Is Brett in?” I almost couldn’t say his name.

  “No....” Her reply was slow, too slow. I wondered if Brett had told her about me. What reason had he given her for my sudden disappearance from his life? With a slight laugh, she said, “He’s at the library studying. You know how he is.”

  “Yeah. I guess that’ll never change.”

  “So. How’s life in the Navy?”

  “It’s all right. It’s different, as you can imagine.”

  “We think of you all the time. Is there anything you need, anything we can send you? Books? Music?”

  “No thanks. I can get just about everything I need. The only thing I can’t get is privacy, but I guess I’ll get used to that.”

  “Listen, why don’t you come visit us sometime when you have the chance? We’d be so happy to see you.” Her voice sounded so eager—so eager to end this conversation.

  “Sure. I’ll drop in sometime. Tell Brett hello for me, will you?”

  “Of course. He’ll be so happy to hear that you called.”

  “Thanks. Listen, someone else wants to use this phone. I gotta hang up now.”

  “All right. You take care of yourself now, Bill, all right?”

  “Sure. I will.” I paused, uncertain of what to say. “Well, good-bye, I guess.”

  “Good-bye.”

  I hung up.

  We learned of our first duty stations on the last day of class. Though our orders wouldn’t officially be handed out to us until after graduation, one of the instructors had given us sneak peeks at them.

  As soon as I learned that my ship was a frigate home-ported in San Diego, I rented a car to drive over to Thirty-Second Street to get a look at it.

  According to one of the instructors who had a friend onboard, it was scheduled to depart on a WestPac cruise in two months. It had only recently come out of dry-dock, and had in fact just returned from its shakedown cruise.

  Thirty-second Street was the home of the Pacific fleet, and wasn’t very far from Naval Training Command. I’d been there once, for fire-fighting class, during boot camp. The base was rather spread out, and had a desolate, empty look to it. Besides the shipyards and warehouses, there was really not much to it.

  As I drove along the seemingly endless lines of piers, I was amazed at all the ships I saw: destroyers, troop carriers, supply ships, minesweepers, fleet tugs. Almost every pier had s
hips docked at it, sometimes two or three deep. And the activity going on all over the place was dizzying: trucks being unloaded, working parties passing supplies hand-to-hand down long chains, platforms slung over the sides of ships with sailors on them busily chipping paint, applying red lead, or slapping haze-gray paint onto the hull.

  This was the real Navy: sailors in worn-looking dungarees and faded blue work shirts, their white dixie cup hats perched casually on the backs of their heads, cigarettes dangling out of their mouths, walking with a swagger, many of them unshaven. The working uniforms we wore back at the base for our classes now seemed much too clean by contrast. Though I’d been in the Navy for several months already, and was a bona fide sailor, I knew that no one could be considered a real sailor until he’d served aboard a ship.

  I pulled up before a group of sailors at the head of a pier. Though it wasn’t knock-off time yet, many of them were already in civilian clothes and heading toward the gate. I’d called fleet information on base to learn the number of my ship’s berth, and had been told that it was docked at Pier 27, but had no idea where that was. I rolled down my window and asked for directions. One of the sailors pointed over his shoulder and kept walking.

  I drove in the direction he’d indicated. Sure enough, I soon saw a sign indicating the pier number, but the jumble of ships docked there was baffling to me. I checked the piece of paper in my hand again to confirm the hull number of my frigate, then searched for it among all the ships. I spotted it, docked outermost in a nest of three. It looked newly painted.

  I gazed at it. This would be my home for the next two years or—if I didn’t re-enlist—for the remainder of my hitch. I felt strangely emotional at this first glimpse of it. Though I wouldn’t be able to check in onboard until I had my orders in hand, curiosity had impelled me to come out here to see it beforehand. I looked at the sailors onboard, busy at their various tasks, telling myself that these would be my shipmates, and that I would soon be getting to know them better. I wondered which of them would become my special friend. One thing I knew for sure from all the stories I’d heard about the lack of privacy onboard: I would certainly have to bid farewell to any sex, at least for a while.

  At this thought, I felt a sudden panic, as if I’d only now realized that I would be entering a new phase of my Navy career. Compared to the prison-like confinement aboard a ship, my life in A-school seemed like a paradise of freedom. I thought of some of the stories our instructors had told us: about being cooped up on a ship for months on end, getting so seasick in a storm that you couldn’t eat for days, the lack of space and privacy, crazy captains who made life miserable for the crew.

  I almost envied Roger, who had gotten orders for a United Nations base at Keflavik, Iceland. He’d put in for shore duty in Europe, but had mixed feelings about what he’d ended up with. The women, of course, had all gotten shore duty, and Mona, not surprisingly, had graduated at the top of the class. Almost all the men had gotten orders for ships, many of them on the East Coast, at Norfolk, the home of the Atlantic fleet.

  Our vacation called “A-school” was over now, and we would finally be facing the real Navy. During the latter half of our instruction, we’d been involved in on-the-job training in naval hospitals as well as civilian hospitals in the city. And toward the end, we even had to stand shifts. It had felt like being a real corpsman after all the classroom instructions and practice drills, but we’d been told by the old hands that what we were doing wasn’t real corpsman work, that we were still only playing at it. Only when we were aboard a ship and were part of the crew, with assigned jobs and a specific niche in the order of things, would we qualify. I’d been getting tired of hearing this litany, and was looking forward to going to sea, but this glimpse of the real Navy made me feel once again like a neophyte.

  I backed the car into a parking lot and turned around, heading toward the main gate with no particular destination in mind. After a while I found myself driving down Broadway, having come there almost by instinct. I gazed idly at the people walking along the sidewalks, many of them sailors on liberty. How many of them were off the ship I was going to? And then suddenly the name of a certain bookstore came to me. I’d overheard some guys in the barracks mention an adult bookstore where they’d seen “fag magazines.” I had made a mental note of the store’s name and filed it away in the back of my mind, with no particular intention of ever going there. But now, for some reason, I felt the urge.

  I parked the car on a side street and headed up to where the place was supposed to be. After a brief search, I found it tucked away in a recessed vestibule, a sign above the door depicting a lewd-looking snake wrapped around a juicy apple out of which he had just taken a big bite.

  As I pushed open the glass-paned door, a tiny bell attached to it tinkled. I stepped inside. The store was much cozier than I’d thought, with one short aisle leading straight back, bordered by bookshelves. Lining the shelves were rows and rows of gaudy magazines with titles like Hot Nurse, Teenage Nympho, and Bosom Buddies, wrapped in cellophane. The sight of all the rich, creamy pink flesh on the covers was almost overwhelming. There were no customers in the store as I entered, and the bald, middle-aged proprietor sitting at the back merely shot me a glance before turning his attention back to a tiny television set with its sound turned down low.

  I felt very self-conscious. This was the first pornographic bookstore I’d ever entered, and there was something very distasteful about it. The mere fact that I was here signaled that I was looking for something to masturbate to, and my pride rebelled at this. In my mind, porno magazines were for unattractive middle-aged men, or for overweight, pimply boys who couldn’t get any girlfriends.

  I continued browsing among the racks without touching any of the magazines. As far as I could see, they were all aimed at heterosexual tastes. I was beginning to wonder if the information I had was wrong.

  Just then the bell attached to the door tinkled again as a man entered. He glanced at me with a questioning look, but I turned away pretending to be interested in Sweet Sexteen. He walked straight to the back of the shop and when I looked in his direction again, he was gone. He seemed to have disappeared.

  Then I noticed a doorway just behind the proprietor’s chair. There seemed to be another room in a recess farther back. Curious, I continued to browse, all the while moving steadily closer to that mysterious doorway. When I got there, I stepped through it without hesitation.

  To my astonishment, unlike the outer room, this one was full of men jamming the narrow aisle. Some of them turned to look at me as I entered, their eyes openly interested. But others were more furtive, their faces discreetly lowered. I continued my pretense that I’d come in here by accident, walking down the aisle for a quick tour of the place, merely glancing at the magazine titles.

  They were all aimed at gay men: Stud for Hire, Service Man, Dude Ranch. Some magazines seemed to specialize in men wearing leather, or military uniforms. Others hinted of sadomasochistic delights. Still others featured only men with “uncut” meat—uncircumcised penises. It was like being in a candy store filled with every variety of sweets I’d ever yearned to taste. But then my euphoria was abruptly darkened by a vision of military policemen barging in, sirens wailing, lights flashing, handcuffs clapped onto my wrists...the brig...a dishonorable discharge.

  Suddenly one of the men stepped right in front of me, blocking my way. He turned to look at me and his eyes were like holes into his soul, where I could read a blatant hunger, a bottomless abyss of insatiable desire. Out of the corner of my eye I saw two or three others turn their heads toward us. These men seemed to me like zombies, silent, furtive, and forsaken. It was scary.

  I stepped around the man and walked toward the doorway to the outer room. But just as I reached the proprietor’s little niche, I grabbed one of the magazines on display nearby and plopped it down onto the counter.

  He rang it up without looking at me, almost without taking his eyes off the tiny TV screen. Slipping my purchas
e into a plain brown paper bag, he accepted my money and handed back the change.

  I picked up the bag and walked quickly through the outer room, headed straight for the entrance, emerging onto the street with a feeling of relief. Getting into my car, I started up the engine, put it into gear and sped out of there as if making my escape.

  Though I’d bought the magazine, I knew there was no way I could take it back with me to the barracks. I still didn’t know what had prompted me to buy it. With one hand on the steering wheel, I slid it under the car seat, worried that someone I knew might ask me for a lift.

  Leaving the downtown behind, I turned north, heading up the coastal highway. When I’d been driving for about twenty minutes, I spotted a large, empty-looking parking lot on a rise overlooking the sea. It apparently belonged to a supermarket which was closed today. I pulled onto it and slowly cruised around until I found a quiet spot facing the sea. There were no other cars parked nearby. I almost had the whole place to myself.

  I cut off the engine and listened to the ticking sounds the car made as it cooled down. The muffled roar of waves came up from below. Across the water was Coronado Island, where the naval air station was located.

  Reaching down under my seat, I pulled out the paper bag, slipped the magazine out and saw its title for the first time: Hot Shots. There was a photo of a very attractive young man on the cover, his half-open shirt revealing a well-muscled chest. I peeled the cellophane wrapping off the magazine and opened it up at random. At the first photograph I saw, I felt my eyes glaze over. A very good-looking boy, about twenty, was standing outdoors in some western desert. He was completely naked but for a pair of chaps, his body tanned a deep brown all over. Behind him, mesquite was blowing along the ground. He was turned slightly to the side, perhaps so his erection could be seen in profile.

  I turned the page. This time he was turned around with his back to the camera, bent over slightly. With both his hands, he was spreading apart his butt cheeks so that his anus could be seen. I felt my stomach go weak. I began flipping through the whole magazine, stopping at pages which caught my eye, erect penises in aching close-up, or young men in pairs, in threes, engaged in orgies of sucking and fucking. Everything was shown in unblushing detail....