by Guy Willard
Then I caught myself thinking: How silly.
But then, so was everything else.
As he fumbled with the keys at the door, I muttered, “No, I don’t like this room.”
“Don’t like it? But why?”
“I just don’t like it, that’s why!” I snapped back, more viciously than I’d intended. He looked hurt.
“Shall we find another room?”
“Yes. Another room.”
He sighed, and we went back down to the front desk in silence. There, much to my chagrin, he began berating the clerk mercilessly over some imagined fault with the room. I felt sorry for the poor clerk who was trying so hard to discover exactly what was wrong. In the end he led us up to another room with Dmitri scowling and fuming all the while. What made it worse was that Dmitri would turn the sweetest, most cloying face upon me behind the clerk’s back, as if we were in complicity.
In the new room, Dmitri made a show of imperiously inspecting it, then turned to me almost submissively for my approval. I nodded, much to the clerk’s relief, no doubt. But even as he ducked quickly out the door with final apologies, Dmitri shot further imprecations at his departing back, warning him never to let it happen again.
“You really gave him hell, didn’t you?” I said.
“You have to be like that with these people. They need to know who’s in charge; it’s part of their culture.”
He suggested we order drinks from room service to relax after our ordeal. I agreed. The cocktail, when it was brought up, was much more to my liking than the ones I’d had back at the bar. Glass in hand, I walked over to the picture-glass window and gazed out at the city.
He hadn’t lied. The view was indeed wonderful. From this height, the lights of the traffic below were like mysterious signals from another planet. The beauty of the sight gave no hint of the frantic pandemonium it actually was. The sky was completely dark now, and columnar searchlight beams wheeled back and forth across it, sweeping the heavens from all corners of the city. I thought of the tanks and troop carriers parked along the perimeter of the airport, by bridges and other militarily strategic spots.
Taking a sip of my Tom Collins, I set my glass down on a side table. It occurred to me that lately, alcohol had become almost a necessary prelude to sex, as if something had to be deadened or killed before intimacy could blossom. Back in high school, sex had always been so spontaneous, and the pleasure I got from it so intense. Since then, layers of experience had deadened those undiluted joys. I looked down at my drink...the pain killer...then picked it up and took another sip.
In the reflection in the window I saw my companion pulling off his shirt and thought: what a big hurry he’s in—all for nothing. I gazed down at the traffic again and wondered how I should break the news to him.
Suddenly I was jolted by the leathery touch of his damp fingers. They wormed their way between the buttons of my shirt and played over my bare chest. Instinctively I recoiled, jabbing my elbow back into his stomach as I whirled around to face him.
“Don’t touch me, faggot!” I snarled.
The surprised look on his face changed to alarm as I raised my fist. In that instant several things happened. A keen, acrid smell stung my nostrils. The cringing, almost begging look on his face disgusted me, but what filled me with revulsion was that somehow I knew—instantly, and without the need for words—that he wanted to be hit...indeed, that he was begging me for it.
A sudden rush of anger keened through my nerves. I saw a flash of pink and felt a stinging pain in my knuckles. I’d punched him. His cheek was red where I’d hit him.
A beatific look lit up his face, a look of deliverance. He dropped clumsily to his knees and began whimpering in a blubbering voice: “No, please, don’t hit me again like that. I didn’t mean to touch you.”
Something like bile welled up in my throat. His servile position, his big, pleading eyes made me sick. A multitude of thoughts crowded my mind at lightning speed: the sweet feeling of surrender as I squirmed blissfully in the arms of a lover...the excitement of rough-housing with a friend, when he twists my arms up behind my back, clamping my wrists together in a powerful grip which makes tears come to my eyes...Andrews in Hong Kong, towering over me, looking down at me with loathing and disgust....
The quivering face before me suddenly completed the picture. This man was a grotesque mirror of my own self. This could be me in a few years. I knew exactly what he wanted because I secretly wanted the same thing.
I was infuriated.
I brought my hand down in a slap, twisting that ugly face around. He offered no resistance, no retaliation, just a steady stream of blubbering pleas. I felt sick. Balling my hands into fists, I began pummeling him blindly, frantically, and heard the slaps and thuds of soft flesh. It felt like dough. My knuckles started to get warm but I couldn’t stop. I was like a machine impelled by some outside force to go through these motions. Each slap of skin against skin was something that had nothing to do with me, was something completely outside of me. As sick as I felt, I enjoyed this grueling session. A release of some kind flooded me, heightening my awareness, a heady, intoxicating feeling which was an exact counterpart to that other physiological release, laughter.
He finally dropped to the floor and a gush of blood shot out from his nose, staining the carpet. I kicked at his inert body and didn’t stop until I was physically unable to continue anymore. My blind fury had drained out of me and I leaned over to catch my breath. The harsh sound of my panting was the only sound in the room—the only sound in the whole hotel, for all I knew. I was bathed in a clammy sweat and my heart rate was incredibly high.
The naked torso on the carpet quivered once. The towel was still draped around its neck.
“He’s dead,” I thought, and gazed around me in a daze. Everything looked clean and sharp-focused, as if I were seeing a picture taken with a high-resolution lens. I thought of the cameras in the wall. Without a moment’s hesitation, I headed for the door. And then I halted. On the bed lay a wallet, thick with bills. I grabbed it and quickly rifled its contents, pulling out the bills and stuffing them into my pocket before tossing the wallet aside.
And then I was running down the empty hallway. No one was about. Where was everyone? Hadn’t they heard the commotion? I jabbed at the elevator button several times but couldn’t wait for it to come up. I pictured its doors opening upon a cop or a hotel employee. I rushed to the stairs and bounded down them two, three steps at a time. The loud rasping of my breathing echoed in the concrete stairwell, drowning out every other sound. I felt like a trapped animal.
As I dashed out into the lobby and hurried past the checkout desk, the clerks cast strange looks at me. At the front entrance the uniformed doorman bowed to me automatically as I tripped rapidly down the steps to the street below.
It was still quite busy, and I searched frantically among the beeping cars for a taxi. I wanted to get as far away from this place as possible.
An arm hooked itself around my elbow and I whirled around angrily to come face to face with a shocked-looking man astride a bicycle. He backed away from the fury he saw in my eyes.
“What do you want?” I asked, thinking he was a plain-clothes cop.
“You like girl?” he said. “Want fucky-fucky tonight?”
I almost laughed in relief. A bicycle pimp.
He still looked scared and uncertain.
“It’s okay,” I said. “You just scared me, that’s all.”
“You go short-time?” he asked cautiously.
I nodded, and without another word, followed him.
Singapore
We were entering a region of eternal summer. Here near the equator where the climate was sultry and muggy, a fine spray seemed to hang perpetually in the air, infecting us all with a sensual languor.
I was up on the signal bridge clad only in cut-offs, as were most of the guys who had to work outside. Using the high-powered binoculars bolted to the deck (which we called the “big-eyes”) I s
canned the shoreline of a tiny island off the east coast of Borneo. These were the tropics of my daydreams, thatch-roofed houses perched upon stilts over the water with, just below them, dugout canoes moored to wooden palings. How often had I fantasized about living in a grass-roofed shack with some lovely brown-skinned island boy, lazing my time away on the beach or splashing nude in a cool lagoon?
Suddenly I heard steps on the deck behind me and turned around to see Senior Chief Russell, the gunners’ chief.
“What are you doing up here, Doc?” He peered at me suspiciously with his glazed-looking eyes. Strictly speaking, he wasn’t my supervisor so he had no right to harass me like this; and this wasn’t even his workspace. But Chief Russell was well known for giving the young guys on board a hard time. I hated the playful pokes in the chest he always gave me—they really hurt.
“Just checking out the scenery, chief.”
The sweat was glistening in the creases of his puffy red face.
“Better get your eyeful now, wog, while you can still see,” he growled with a sinister smirk. He was hinting at the initiation rites awaiting me and the others when we crossed the equator tomorrow. “Get back to work before I tell your first class that you’re screwing off during working hours.” He chased me off the signal bridge.
For the past few weeks there had been secret meetings and mysterious preparations going on among those members of the crew who’d already crossed the line. They were called “shellbacks” to distinguish them from the “pollywogs” or “wogs”—those sailors unfortunate enough never to have crossed the equator. Darkly hinted warnings and threats had hovered in the air for days now about the ordeals in store for us. Navy tradition decreed that shellbacks held absolute sway over pollywogs on the day the ship crossed the line, regardless of rank. (Not even our pollywog captain would be free from persecution.)
I took all this blustering for what it was, a traditional build-up for some silly, harmless initiation rites. Remembering boot camp, I felt safe in assuming that despite all these sinister warnings, no harm would come to anyone. It was nothing more than a morale-building change from the drab routine of underway cruising...a bit of fun and color. I even began to look forward to it.
The next morning I was awakened by the sound of loud thwacks. Over the ship’s 1MC, instead of the usual “Reveille, reveille. All hands heave out and trice up!” came this variation: “All right, you slimy wogs. It’s time for you to wake up and have some fun!” The lights glared on and I was treated to the sight of three shellback crewmates dressed in ridiculous get-ups as pirates and hangmen, brandishing cut-off lengths of fire hose or “shillelaghs,” with which they pounded the deck with all their might, adding the noise of their yells to try to arouse terror in us. But we took it all in the spirit of the game, giving the expected feeble groans of protest and willingly falling in line. They forced us down onto our hands and knees, and in that position, marched us all the way to the mess deck where we were treated to a breakfast of raw oysters and scrambled eggs dyed green.
After eating this, we were driven—still on our hands and knees—by these hose-thwacking Furies from one end of the ship to the other. Finally we were lined up and ushered one by one onto the forecastle where we were sprayed down with a fire hose.
All of this was accompanied by a constant stream of abuse from the shellbacks (“Crawl, you filthy, slimy wog!”) but none of it was actually intended to hurt. In fact, the more popular members of the crew had to put up with the most abuse. But this abuse never got physical. The scary thwacks of the shillelaghs never fell upon a person. If they did—as when someone was singled out for his “rebellious” behavior—they always fell lightly upon the butt.
To me it had all the elements of a play-acted sadism: the loud and harmless smacks, the stream of verbal abuse, the subservient position of the initiates. There was a heady sexual aspect to the whole thing, and I doubted if I was the only pollywog that day who sported a secret erection as he enjoyed living out his fantasies of sexual submission.
Certain pollywogs had been put on a “black list” for special punishment, and these had a shellback assigned to them to ensure added misery. For some reason I was one of them. The shellback assigned to me was a chubby, bespectacled first class sonar tech who’d been paying close attention to me for some time now. But I’d consistently ignored him, and apparently he wasn’t going to let my snubs go unpunished.
In a ridiculous travesty of a macho stance, he glared down at me on my hands and knees and lisped, “You’re on my list, wog.” And I knew I probably was: the long list of boys who’d spurned his advances. There was a fevered gleam in his eyes as I glared defiantly up at him. In a fit of pique, he brought his shillelagh down on my butt with firm, even strokes, and those strokes communicated a secret message of frustrated love which tingled through my nerves.
As the day went on, the sexual aspects of the initiation ceremony became embarrassingly apparent. The morning was highlighted by the selection of one boy from each division to be represented in a beauty contest whose winner was to become “Neptune’s bride.” These boys were hustled away to secret rooms where chief petty officers, their hands trembling from something perhaps more than coffee shakes, skillfully applied make-up and dressed their living dolls with the finest care.
Apparently these chiefs had stowed on board all the necessary items from the very start of the cruise: cosmetics from their wives’ vanity tables, cast-off dresses donated by their daughters, and sexy lingerie bought or wheedled from prostitutes all over the Pacific.
After they shaved the boys’ legs, the chiefs began working their magic, using bikini panties, girdles, garter belts, nylon stockings, padded bras, and bedroom wigs. When they were done, they paraded their lovelies one by one onto the flight deck, where the “girls” were greeted by the delighted cheers of the onlooking sailors.
I listened to the joking comments around me and overheard more than one guy confess to an astonished admiration. Most were startled at how attractive these boys had become by using the same tricks that girls accomplished with make-up. I saw from the fevered gleams in their eyes that, under cover of this charade, they were giving way to the dormant desires which sleep in every male. Joking about the length of time we’d been out at sea—to set their minds at rest—they openly commented on how pretty some of the boys were. The feminine dresses making such thoughts “acceptable,” they momentarily allowed life-long inhibitions to melt away and acknowledged an attraction to boys in one of the few ways allowed by society.
I myself felt that the boys were degrading themselves. However, from the looks in their eyes, I could tell that some of them enjoyed it all: the attention, the wolf whistles (to which they answered with seductive waggles of their butt,) and perhaps even the humiliation.
None of the boys camping it up were among those sailors suspected of being homosexual. If someone like Kyle Roberts or his friend Brad Trinkle had been selected, it would have betrayed the clean, innocent fun this was meant to be. But I noticed that the boy chosen from each division was almost unerringly the one who had caught my eye as being the cutest; at least my standards of beauty didn’t differ radically from most heteros’.
The grand finale of the day’s festivities was a massive mock torture chamber set up on the flight deck. We had to endure this last hurdle of humiliation before we could be elevated to shellback status. I joined my fellow wogs in the waiting line and, when my turn came, crawled past the corner of the helo hangar to meet the fate which awaited me.
First, two kinds of machine grease were smeared all over my face and body, then rubbed into my hair. Then flour was thrown all over me. After that I was dragged before “King Neptune’s throne” on which was seated the fattest and ugliest man aboard, Senior Chief Russell, clad only in his shorts. Next to him sat the lovely beauty queen wearing a tinsel crown. I was forced to kneel before them both and humbly beg to be considered worthy enough to enter King Neptune’s realm. By way of answer, Chief Russell grabbed m
e by the head and shoved my face into his fat, protruding belly which had been plentifully smeared with grease. Somehow I felt he was being much rougher than necessary with me. I recalled his sinister warning up on the signal bridge.
Once past this, I had to traverse a long chute into which had been dumped all the garbage from the ship’s galley for the past two weeks. But even before I could crawl into it, someone thrust a raw oyster into my mouth, with the warning that I would be checked at the other end to make sure it remained in my mouth. If it wasn’t, I’d have to do it all over again. The vinyl tunnel, I found, was liberally lined with the puke retched up by those who couldn’t make it on the first try. I closed my eyes and scrambled all the way through to the other end with the slimy gob in my mouth. Someone was standing there blocking my way out but I fought past him. And as I spit out the oyster, the command’s senior CPO—Master Chief Smith—shook my hand and congratulated me, welcoming me into the official ranks of shellbacks. The ship’s sprinkler system was on and I enjoyed a blessed washdown.
I hadn’t found the ordeal difficult at all. In fact, I’d been quite excited by the keen sexual pitch of the whole thing. How much more effective the rites would have been if we’d all been naked! I tried to imagine what the initiation rites must have been like in the old days before the Navy officially sanctioned them, hence taming their character. Neptune’s bride was probably really a bride in every sense of the word, being enjoyed by every sailor on board, from the captain on down.
I rushed down to my compartment to peel out of my besmirched clothes, then went up to the showers to wash away all the muck on my face and body. In the privacy of the shower stall I reveled in the warm, cleansing jets of water, and then sought relief of another kind, with the palms of both my hands slick with soap.