Boy at Sea

By Jonathan May

Kenny Roper has seen too many movies about WWI to hang around and be caught in the draft of WWII. If he goes down, let it be in water and not in trenches. He joins the U. S. Coast Guard. He won't have to go overseas, will he? Guess again, Kenny. You're in for a rude awakening, as well as a riotous and raunchy adventure.

"Do you like girls?" he is asked in the examination room. What do they think, he's antisocial? So begins Boy At Sea, a novel that, as the title suggests, is about conflicted sexuality as revealed through the picaresque adventures of a college freshman-turned-sailor.

Kenny meets great guys on ship and on land, but none so intriguing or troubling as blond gunner's mate Blake, stationed aboard the same destroyer escort in the South Pacific.

Kenny's travels take him from Wilmington and other parts of California to New York and Boston, Brisbane, Samoa, the Panama Canal Zone and Alaska.

He experiences the Zoot Suit Riots in Los Angeles in 1943 and the Battle of Leyte Gulf in 1944, but nothing sears itself into his consciousness like his relationship with Blake.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Oct 19, 2005
• ISBN: 9780595813827

Jonathan May

Tom Canford, former member of the U. S. armed services, belongs to The Dramatists Guild, ASCAP, and Publicists Guild of America. He has been press representative on a number of prestigious Hollywood films. He has authored three plays produced in NYC, one in Los Angeles. He lives in Alabama.

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Copyright © 2005 by Tom Canford

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ISBN-13: 978-0-595-36976-8 (pbk)

ISBN-13: 978-0-595-81382-7 (ebk)

ISBN-10: 0-595-36976-6 (pbk)

ISBN-10: 0-595-81382-8 (ebk)

Printed in the United States of America

Contents

C H A P T E R 1

C H A P T E R 2

C H A P T E R 3

C H A P T E R 4

C H A P T E R 5

C H A P T E R 6

C H A P T E R 7

C H A P T E R 8

C H A P T E R 9

C H A P T E R 10

C H A P T E R 11

C H A P T E R 12

C H A P T E R 13

C H A P T E R 14

C H A P T E R 15

C H A P T E R 16

C H A P T E R 17

C H A P T E R 18

A WORD FROM THE AUTHOR

C H A P T E R 1

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WILMINGTON

I’ve seen too many movies about World War I to hang around and be caught in the draft of WW II. IfI go down, let it be in water and not trenches. I don’t swim but I’ll have a life jacket, won’t I? Sharks? Don’t begin.

I’ve had a year of ROTC at New Mexico State, drilled and participated in desert maneuvers, stood at attention after hot afternoon playacted forays in cactus and mesquite. A heat stroke one day crumples me like a gunny sack. Somebody grabs me before I hit the ground. There are embarrassing solicitations for my welfare, a pat on the head, another on the buttocks, the latter especially comforting if a little too lingering. It’s then that I decide on the sea as a way out, the shore-lapping sea.

As friends enroll for sophomore year in college, I enroll, which is to say enlist, in the U. S. Coast Guard. My reasoning is I won’t have to go overseas. I will instead spend the war guarding the American shore and living the stateside life of Reilly.

Monday, September 14, 1942, I’m on the third floor of the Arcade Building in downtown Los Angeles, not far from the hotel where the Coast Guard has put us up for the last couple of nights. Where I’ll sleep tonight is anybody’s guess.

The balcony passageway where we wait in stagnant lines wraps around the empty core of the building, as do passageways on other floors. The lobby with its cracked marble floor is visible below. Jump, you’ll be there in seconds. This rather droll thought is quickly retired. I move away from the guard rail. Its grill-work seems more designed for show than safety. Several stories above is an element-stained skylight.

There are hundreds of us, hundreds yesterday, hundreds tomorrow: enlistees who perhaps like me have chosen to volunteer for the service of their choice rather than wait for a service not of their choice to choose them.

Where will they put us? The word is out that they have no place for us, that some of us will be given liberty until they can figure out what to do with us. The U. S. Coast Guard is woefully unequipped to handle this many enlistees.

Small groups are taken into rooms for interrogation and disrobing and probing. We are signing up for the duration, we are reminded. Any problem with that? Duration is a time reference that will remain unspecified for the next three and a half years.

Homesick? I was homesick night before last in Albuquerque. I’ve been homesick since a Coast Guard van picked me up in Las Cruces to drive me north. I mailed a postcard to the folks from Albuquerque. It looked rained on, spotted by tears.

There is an interminable wait for an examining room. This could take all day, somebody grouses. Why, were you planning on going someplace? comes the bright anonymous reply that brings a ripple of laughter down the line.

The guy in line next to me leans against the green calcimined wall. He attempts a failed smile. He looks at me with dropped-dead weariness, or is it cynicism? I smile at him sympathetically. The person next to him is all over the place, fidgety, a wild thing about to be caged, apprehensive yet amiable. You wonder what happened to his buttocks. I mean there’s none there, no definition. The rest ofhim is O. K., but his ass stands out, which is to say it doesn’t. Not here among a plentitude of well-defined bottoms. What wild thing lacks in ass, however, is compensated for by voluptuous lips. He is a little fey, eyes as bright and penetrating as—well, name your simile. His eyes rear up on me like the legs of a shaggy dog. Every now and then he giggles. He seems unable to settle on an attitude. Yet I’m drawn to him. He’s as fascinated as I am by a guy on down the line who holds a cigarette in an upwardly cupped hand next to his ear, rarely taking a drag. Just when you think he’s forgotten it, he moves it languidly to his mouth to spill ash down the sleeve ofhis grey corduroy jacket. He neither notices nor cares.

The noise is a murmur. Priests at prayer or breakfast. Incantation is in the air, a sense of suspended legerdemain, a lifting of spirits onto a sea of aural giddiness.

The morning goes on forever but in retrospect is fleeting. Fleeting glances, fleeting and tentative comradeships, stoic faces, anticipatory faces, shy laughter, smiles. The line of enlistees snakes about the balcony and balustrade to double back on itself. For the most part a nice looking, that is to say socially acceptable, relatively attractive group of guys, many of whom I might wish to be quartered with. Who I’ll get will be a roll of the bureaucratic dice. Most are Californian. From the greater Los Angeles area in fact. There is a look to them. A blond surf look, a white look, not just white as in Caucasian white, as in white like me, but something more. Even the non-blonds have it. I see the same look in their girlfriends and wives, perhaps sisters, who are here in droves to say goodbye and confirm their love and steadfastness.

Do you like girls? I’m asked in the disrobing/probing room.

I don’t recall whether I am asked the question while being explored by far too enthusiastic a finger or afterward. Like girls? The question astonishes me. The import of it escapes me. I am far too young and unsophisticated to recognize the query for what it is. Of course I like girls. What do they think, I’m antisocial?

We are not asked if we have homosexual tendencies. That is a question for another war. If asked at the time, I wouldn’t have known what they were talking about.

My roommate during my two nights at the Rossyln Hotel was the star of last season’s University of New Mexico freshman football team. His name is Tom. He rode the train with me and several others from Albuquerque. He told me our pictures had been in the Albuquerque Journal. I’d forgotten our pictures were taken. I remember somebody yelling, Wave.

As we wait, I notice Tom on the balcony opposite me. We somehow got separated after breakfast. He is sitting in place playing cards with three other guys. He’s wearing chinos and has a sweater tied about his waist. He wears mocassin-type loafers. His left foot is stretched between two balusters, his loafer dangling precariously, half on half off. Be careful, Tom, I call to him, you could lose a shoe. Who cares? he says. I won’t need it much longer.

If his experience is to match mine little does he know.

I never see him again. His division is sent to one location, mine another. He had been presentable as a roommate iflacking the risible personality of the character I shared a room with in Albuquerque. Not just a room but a rickety double bed.

The guy’s name was Cleveland. Call me Cleve. He had a lean, cowboy-type body and demeanor. Not exactly emaciated, but not robust either. He was in the station wagon that drove the two of us from Las Cruces to Albuquerque. He had retired from the Coast Guard, done his twenty years, and now with World War II upon us was in for another hitch.

Amiable. I like him. My first impression is that he’s what my sisters and I would call a hick, but it turns out he’s more self educated than that. He’s got a vocabulary that sounds incongruous when tossed off in his aw shucks drawl. He uses words not normally heard around the old corral. I’m not uncomfortable sharing a bed with him. He’s just a character, probably the first of many I’ll be thrown in with. I hope to see more of him.

He lies on one side of the bed and chain smokes. I don’t smoke. I’ve tried a cigarette now and then, and sometimes smoke if one is offered but I don’t buy or carry cigarettes.

And, oh God, the hairy tales he tells of what lies ahead for me in boot camp.

I hear them as dire and urgent warnings, catch the first bus back to Las Cruces.

Just a fleeting thought. I haven’t enough money for bus fare.

Cleve introduces me to Chinese food. I know chop suey only from movies. To me chop suey and chow mein are exotic cuisine. I can’t wait to write home excitedly with the news: I’ve had chop suey! Cleve tells me the dish didn’t begin as a concept but as a desperation-hour conceit, a fanciful concoction thrown together by an unheralded, harassed, understocked Chinese American cook who improvised the dish on the spot out of on-hand ingredients when there was nothing else to serve an unexpected influx of hungry customers. Probably in San Francisco, probably the Barbary Coast..

I never see Cleve again either.

At last the standing, the waiting, the inching forward, the probing and questioning come to an end. We are divided into groups of ten to fifteen people. My group is assigned to the Wilmington Coast Guard Base. I know nothing about the base, but judging from reaction it seems to be a choice assignment. I don’t even know where Wilmington is. Two station wagons take us there in less than an hour.

The base is the former Wilmington Yacht Club, converted and newly commissioned for use as a Coast Guard dispatch station, located in the Wilmington yacht basin between Long Beach and San Pedro, a water inlet opposite Terminal Island where shipyards and the Long Beach Naval Station are located.

Our driver tells us we’re in luck. At Wilmington we’ll be in what wags call the Hollywood Navy. The duty is cushy, the liberty generous: one night on, two nights off. There are always celebrities on base, guests of Chief Petty Officer Rudy Vallee who conducts the 11th Naval District Coast Guard band which is filled with professional musicians, all men who have enlisted with the understanding that they’d be stationed at Wilmington with Rudy Vallee.

The kid I share a seat with is named Roberts. He asks me, Who’s Rudy Vallee?

I look at him slack jawed. Is he kidding? He truly doesn’t know Rudy Vallee?

Hi, ho, everybody, says someone in imitation ofVallee’s trademark salutation.

I give Roberts a brief run down. The singer led a band that was big in the late 1920s, the Connecticut Yankees. He was the Bing Crosby ofhis time. Rudy is a staple of radio, his voice one of the most recognizable on the airwaves. He discovered Alice Faye. He’s been in movies. I just can’t think of any. The last GoldDig-gers, maybe. Never heard of Rudy Vallee? Where has he been?

Rudy puts on a swell show in the recreation building Monday night, the driver tells us, and, guys, you’re doubly in luck, this is Monday. Your first night in the service and they throw you a floor show.

A guy in the back quips, He’s taking us to Ciro’s.

The Hearst beach house, says another. Cabanas.

Laugh, guys, says the driver. You’ll see. Always three or four guest stars.

Oh, sure. This has to be bullshit.

Well, yes. And no.

The recreation building is roughly twenty yards from the entrance gate to the base. We congregate in front of the building after we are checked in and issued ID cards and await assignment and escort to where we’ll bunk. The building’s doors are open. We hear a portion of the rehearsal for tonight’s show. The Merry Macs are singing, four variously pitched transporting voices giving lift to troubled spirits as mine surely are. They are singing The Hut Sut Song, just like on their hit recording. The Merry Macs are an exhilarating and comforting grace note to a trying and anxious day. I expected to march into the fascist boot camp described by the chain-smoking joker in Albuquerque. Instead, voila! the Merry Macs.

The base is an inverted L. The entrance gate is at the short end of the L, along with the recreation building, combined officers dining room, private kitchen (in a separate building), and administrative offices.

The barracks are in the long end of the L, as is the mess hall.

All buildings are painted a de rigeur camouflage, a slate blue grey.

Before we reach the barracks we walk past the infirmary.

In its former life as a yacht club the base was one of the locations of Preston Sturges’s The Palm Beach Story, a film featuring Claudette Colbert, Joel McCrea, Mary Astor and—oh yes! Rudy Vallee.

I am assigned to a barracks directly across from the mess hall. When he’s on base Rudy Vallee sleeps in my barracks. On the other side of the mess hall is water, the Wilmington basin and San Pedro Bay. Not exactly opposite but a short distance away are shipyards. All day and all night we will hear the clangs, bangs, booms and other noises attendant incessant drilling, hammering and blowtorching. At all hours in weeks to come we will hear the fanfare of ship launchings.

I have dinner my first evening on base with the Merry Macs. That is, the three guys and girl in the group are seated at an adjoining table with Mr. Vallee. I don’t immediately recognize RudyVallee. He’s wearing dark glasses. The food is served cafeteria style. You push a stainless steel compartmentalized tray along a ridged metal shelf and are served by those on duty behind the counter. Our cups and bowls are heavy industrialized china. I am impressed with both the quantity and quality of the food. I wonder why, if for food alone and not other considerations, one would want to eat off base. In days and weeks to come I will wonder at the prodigious waste. My first Sunday dinner, typical of all dinners, is served in the middle of the day: turkey, mashed potatoes, dressing, gravy, some sort of lettuce and tomato concoction, a semi-cranberry sauce (semi because I can’t figure out what else is in it), bread and butter, olives, pickles, celery filled with cream cheese spread, milk, cream puff and vanilla ice cream. All very good if basic. But the turkey dinners come with such rapidity that the novelty wears off. We fear we’ll be burned out on the traditional holiday bird by Thanksgiving. We are allowed to return for refills. Trays are so filled to overflowing the first time around that few do. More likely, one-fourth of the first serving is thrown away.

If the base is generous with food, not so with sleeping accommodations.

I am assigned a bed, actually a cot, with a bare mattress. There is no bedding, no locker. No bedding, no clothing, no shoes, no skivvies, no money. Who do you complain to? To each other, that’s who.

I am offered an all-night pass to sleep off base which would mean I’d miss the Merry Macs. I turn it down. Many don’t. Those who live in the greater Los Angeles area jump at the offer. I have brought very little money with me. I am told I will have to buy a Blue jacket’s Manual. Sure, with what? I have a dollar bill and change. Maybe I could afford a hamburger. A deluxe hamburger at home costs ten cents. At a hamburger stand near school, it’s five cents for a thin patty of beef, a bun and mustard. A hotel room? I didn’t expect to be in need of money. What do guys in my situation do who aren’t from the area, I grouse to a not unsympathetic petty officer. Find somebody to shack up with, he says, dryly. Sure, in my week-old underwear with an empty wallet. Welcome in any bed in the city, right? Have I told you about my socks? I am afraid to wash either socks or underwear in the latrine. I am told that if I hang them up to dry they’ll be stolen. Clean socks and underwear are at a premium. I call home for money. It comes two weeks later, the day after my first modest receipt of Coast Guard cash.

This is the pits!

I’m told that I’m on port watch.

Great. What does it mean?

It means I have liberty on alternating nights. The port simply designates which nights. Port, starboard. The beginning of a long love affair with tar terminology. In my present circumstances, the whole thing’s meaningless. How can I go anywhere? The irony is, due to circumstances, I can have liberty any night I want.

Bob Crosby and his band are playing in Long Beach. Loving to dance as I do, I’d be there every night if I had the money.

I feel reduced to peering through windows like Stella Dallas.

On the subject of dancing, my maternal grandmother (who came to live with us a few months after my mother died when I was thirteen) thought dancing a sin.

No shit?

Of course I didn’t even think in such terms then, let alone speak them, let alone to my morally corseted grandmother. It puts needless temptation in a man’s way, said she. Was this a biblical or folk say-so, or did she know from personal experience? Still, I had no idea what she meant. Oh, maybe vaguely. She had to spell it out for me. I can’t remember her exact words but I got the picture and still have it. If a boy holds a girl in his arms he gets a hard-on.

I had wanted to giggle but didn’t.

Even at age thirteen I had held many a girl on a dance floor and never experienced tumescence. I’d only recently learned what a hard-on was, a story to tell to the nations except I’m not sure the nations want to hear it. But you mean some guys did? On a dance floor? As Little Orphan Annie would say, Gloryosky!

Or would that be No shit? Hardly. Not in those days.

At the country club in Las Cruces to which my family didn’t belong but to whose junior dances I was often invited, I felt compelled to concentrate on the music, the steps, the moves. Girls were there for moves on the dance floor, not off it. Although many were led off to cars between dances, I didn’t have a car so I didn’t lead any off. Although one led me off one evening to a remote bench in the moonlight.

You guys got your own country club here, a chief petty officer tells us one morning at roll call. Don’t screw it up and you can stay here for the duration.

The duration of what? Our nights without bedding?

The CPO laughs, assuring us that Small Stores will issue our bedding and clothes to us in a couple o’ days. Always a couple of days. Stretching into infinity. We’ve heard it before. He says that none of us who came to the base on that memorable September 14th, the day of the Merry Macs, will be going to boot camp.

Come on!

No, true.

So much for the concentration camp scare handed me in Albuquerque along with the chop suey.

We’ll be stationed on this base permanently, we’re told. That’s the upside. The downside, there’ll be no ratings above seaman for any of us. No raise in pay, no school, no trade, no respect. School seems to be the only avenue to respect, stature, money.

What didyou do during the war, pop? I was a janitor.

The details we’ve had so far are galley duty and head duty. The toilets are heads. You clean the toilet, you’re on head duty. In the galley you might mop the kitchen, you might peel potatoes, you might hover over a contraption that emits steam and noise and water and pushes dishes, utensils and trays along a conveyor and through a hood. They come out the other end ostensibly washed. At least they’re hot.

We might be rookies but we’re not fools. We know that the minute somebody gets a wild hair we’ll be shipped out of Wilmington on a whim and a whimper that will be our own. With johnny mopping our only training, our auspicious ratings will be Captains of the Head, and we’ll forever more have to endure leering asides such as, Crawl up in my bunk, I’ve got some head duty for you.

New recruits come in daily, some in the morning, another motley crew in the afternoon, rarely to stay with us more than two nights, and they are all issued bedding! They are shuttled out as fast as they’re shuttled in. Catalina, San Francisco, Seattle, Santa Barbara, San Diego, up and down the coast. We remain. A mystery why we are the chosen few, also the chosen few not to be issued clothing or bedding.

My first night on base is a frightening one, a lonely and cold experience. The barracks are empty. Well, virtually so. I’m alone on a bare cot surrounded by other bare cots. There are guys sleeping here but damn few. Where is everybody? Flown the coop, that’s what. I am lent a blanket and a pillow without a pillowcase by someone more fortunate than I who has liberty for the night and the means, meaning uniform and money, with which to enjoy it.

I sleep in my clothes which are becoming rank. These are the clothes I left home in. It is chilly. I’m from high desert country. It gets chilly in Las Cruces too at nights, but this is a different kind of chill. Foggy, damp. There is noise, distant noise to be sure but steady, insistent. I have difficulty adjusting to it, and to the chill and lack of bedcovers. It will take me days before I can mentally block the all-night clamor of our shipbuilding neighbors, Cal Ship and Kaiser, two separate entities for all I know, but what do I know, they could be one and the same.

I pick up information on the run. I don’t know how accurate any of it is. We muster for the launching of the Booker T. Washington at Cal Ship. Marian Anderson is to sing the National Anthem. Sure enough she does. As far as we can tell she does. She and Cal Ship and the Booker T. are too far removed for any of us to swear to the accuracy of it. We stand at attention listening to a dreadful transmission of a woman singing something patriotic. We see bird-like figures standing as rigidly at attention as we. We see a boat go down a ramp and go splat. Company dismissed.

There are three households in Long Beach with whom I have ties. My first week in the Coast Guard without bedding establishes a pattern. I spend a couple of nights with one household, a couple of nights with another. I spare the third household. I’m issued bedding on Thursday after I’ve been away from home for over a week and on base one day less than a week. I’m still wearing the socks and underwear I left home in.

The Elders and the Bixlers are from Southern Illinois, where I was born and lived until the age of seven. Cassie Bixler was my sister Nora’s first grade schoolteacher in Carrier Mills. She still calls me Kenny Joseph. My name is Kenny Joseph Roper, not Kenneth Roper as repeatedly referred to at roll call.

Rose and Rex Elder double-dated with my parents. Much of my time with them is spent talking about my parents. The Elders live in downtown Long Beach in a comfortable brick house with porch and swing on a shady street within comfortable walking distance of the so-called pike, the city’s seafront amusement area frequented by sailors.

The bedroom I sleep in has wallpaper roses. The room is permeated with fragrance of lavender that emanates from little pillowettes on the bed. The pillows are extravagantly large, the bed a solid four-poster. The sheets are hope-chest white. It’s like sleeping in a well-appointed mortuary. The air feels unused. The quietness is spectral.

Rex Elder has a quarterback’s head, his face as ruddy as a lumberjack’s. His nose strikes you as bulbous but perhaps isn’t. His countenance is benign and sweet. He owns and manages a profitable pool hall and saloon on the pike, a favorite hangout of sailors and those in pursuit of a sailor. Unless the weather is bad the entire front of the building is thrown open to provide a view of sailors in their whites bent provocatively over the edges of snooker tables or sprawled on top of long legged stools at the massive bar where draft beer is the drink of choice. Sailors, pool tables and draft beer are not the only sell. There are slot machines as well as a codgers corner where card tables are crowded together and ringed with spittoons and festooned with ash trays. There is a profusion of smoke, a shuffling of cards, the clanking of chips, much talk. A large screen for the projection of movies is set close to the sidewalk to attract passersby. Rear projection is a concept new to me. Although televison is unknown to us, this would compare to a large television monitor. B movies are projected on it. I’m not much of a pool player despite the attractiveness, subjectively speaking, of the pool room ambiance, so I move on to explore the pike’s other amusements and rides.

A female fortune teller sits on a stool on a raised platform a few doors down from Rex’s. Blindfolded, she works with a man who circulates among the crowd they have attracted. I’m impressed with what I hear. The crowd is impressed. How much? I ask the circulating man. A quarter minimum, he tells me. We’ll accept more if we please you. I have borrowed five dollars from Rex. I guess I can blow twenty-five cents. The man asks me to give him something personal to hold so that he can telepathically communicate the object’s vibrations to the fortune teller. An ID, say. I give him my new ID. The blindfolded woman concentrates as the man speaks to her, none of it revealing, as far as I in my naivete and lack of experience can tell. She speaks.

I see a young man soon to go into a branch of the service.

About to? I’m already in. The man holds my Coast Guard ID. However, I’m wearing civilian clothes. How do you telepathically transmit ambiguity?

It is a branch of the service connected with water, she says. A young man with a great talent for musical composition who is going to do great things with that talent.

Mercy!

Where did she get all that? I’m of course thrilled, in awe ofher abilities. I want nothing more than to be a songwriter. Have I babbled to the man about my ambitions? Maybe I have rattled on a bit. But don’t tell me. I want to believe in magic, bask in the glowing prognostication. I don’t want to know about tricks of inflection, phrasing, hand signals, see-through blindfolds. Why shouldn’t a blindfolded fortune teller on the Long Beach pike foresee the future I envision for myself?

When I get back to the base that night I discover I’ve lost my ID. You need it to be admitted to the base. Luckily, Carole Lombard’s brother is on duty. He knows me. A guy named Peters. He admits me, but says he’s obliged to report me to the CPO on duty. The CPO is nowhere as sympathetic as Peters, nor as personable. He tells me it will take three weeks before I’m issued another liberty card, and until I get it I will be confined to the base. Three weeks? Without bedding, mattress, sheets, pillow? Still in the clothes I came in wearing?

Next day I go to the office of the commander and tell my story to his yeoman. I relate the story