Later, I signed up with the Royal Navy for the minimum hitch —12 years. I was assigned to an anti-aircraft carrier and our first port of call was Malta. On shore I became friends with a drummer in the Royal Marine band who asked me one night if I wanted to earn some money. He knew an American oil executive who required his services. The marine was in his full dress uniform, complete with white helmet and gold braid. I agreed to go along with him.
The American told us that he liked to be beaten up by people in authority. Then he undressed and got under the shower with just the cold water on. He started masturbating and turning blue. Meanwhile, the drummer began hitting the fellow with his drum sticks and shouting, “Stop that wanking!”
My friend's uniform was soaking wet, and the man in the shower was getting terribly beat up. But he loved every blow. I could hardly believe what I was seeing. We were paid 50 pounds for our trouble and later did that sort of thing quite often. I became a sadist for hire, catering mainly to wealthy American and Dutch oil people who lived on the island.
During this time I also lost my virginity with an innocent young girl whom I picked up somewhere. Compared to what I had already experienced, I found the sex quite boring, really. It was not until our ship docked in Greece that I discovered what I had been missing.
Athens was the capital of degradation in the Mediterranean, attracting perverts like a magnet. To get extra drinking money a lot of us sold our blood. On one occasion we met some nurses who asked us to a party. It turned out to be an orgy, with everyone involved in something called the hump square. In this arrangement four men and women lay at right angles to one another, and on top of them would be another layer, and then another—16 people in all, a gyrating square, with each person screwing or blowing someone else.
These nurses told us some incredible tales about how they used to make love to dead men in the morgue. They had a chemical which they injected into a cadaver's penis, making it hard. When we expressed disbelief, they opened their handbags and showed us their real-life dildos—rock-hard penises and testicles which had been surgically removed from their owners. These nurses—about a dozen in all—lived together in a big house and took a lot of drugs, which they stole from the hospital.
In Athens I also met a man at a pub who invited me to come around to his flat. In his bedroom was a trapeze swing. He excused himself and reappeared 10 minutes later dressed in an Edwardian smock.
After handing me a heavy croquet mallet, he sat on the trapeze and urged me to hit him every time he swung toward me.
At first I just gave him a few gentle taps. But he really wanted me to knock him off the swing. So I began whacking him as hard as I could. After unseating him, I got paid. But there was no sex between us.
Another sordid place was Lalinea on the Spanish coast near Gibraltar. This little town was famous for its circuses, complete with jugglers and clowns. But the animal acts all involved bestiality, usually with burros. It was a very bawdy spectacle. The audience coaxed one performer on by tossing coins on stage which she picked up with the lips of her vagina. We amused ourselves by heating the coins first with a match, just to give her a little charge.
One of my mates was a fellow named Soapie. In Turkey we met a Dutchman who hired us to accompany him to his rooms. While he lay on his bed, Soapie and I stripped nude and put on crash helmets. Then we had to “chase” one another around the bed on “motorcycles,” going “Vroom, vroom, vrooooom!” Our host loved it when we overtook one another. But again no sex took place except for his solitary onanism.
One of my weirdest experiences occurred in Catania on the Sicilian coast. A Russian circus was in town. A group of us went to see it and afterward became friendly with some of the performers. The fire-eater was a woman who paid us a great deal of money to treat us to her very unusual brand of fellatio. First she smeared our genital areas with thick layers of Vaseline. Then she applied a flammable gel and lit it. My mates and I stood in a row sporting these great flaming penises, while she put an asbestos shield on her gums and gave us head. When we came the air was filled with the bizarre smell of smoking, burning semen. She obviously enjoyed herself, but I personally did not find the blowjob all that hot. Rather I mostly thought about the money I was getting and worried about not catching on fire.
Nearly as strange was my encounter with a British admiral's wife in Hong Kong.
I met her in one of the local clubs and sensed right away that she was a little odd. This woman was about 45, quite attractive and with impeccable social credentials. But she kept saying to me, “I know you're the adventurous type. I'll bet you're looking for something a little different.”
It turned out that she was a contortionist. She brought me to her room, and while I waited, she boiled an egg—-a
soft
-boiled egg. After undressing, she bent over backward, putting her head between her legs in such a way that it was just below her anus. Next she inserted the egg—open at the top—into her cunt. Then I stuck my cock into the yolk and she would lick it off. So this went on for some time—I dipping into this warm runny egg, then lowering myself so that she could lick it off. Finally, I came. But I refused when she asked me to dispose of the rest of the egg with my mouth. I was only 19 and not yet into oral sex.
Hong Kong was also famous for its brothels. But I never went to any of them to buy a woman. Never once in my life have I ever paid for sex. It simply was not necessary, what with all the women about who wanted to pay me. Also there was a surplus of good-time girls who worked by day as clerks but due to overcrowding had no place to go at night except to a cardboard shack. So they were always available as companions to sailors who had saved up a lot of money for shore leave.
Since we were easy marks for thugs, we usually traveled in groups of four or more. Usually we hired a limousine. But we were always more interested in getting drunk than in getting laid. We went to brothels to drink, despite the exorbitant prices. One night we visited a brothel called the Rooftops. When a fight broke out among some of the customers, my mates and I escaped to the top floor to avoid trouble with the naval police. Getting caught would mean an end to our shore leave. Yet we found ourselves trapped. The cops had arrived and were charging up the stairs.
Now this floor was essentially a collection of cubicles—all occupied and divided by rice-paper screens. So we just tore through these dividers. It was like a scene out of an Oriental-style Keystone Kops movie. Above the din of the police rushing up and the gang of us screaming and laughing was the contrapuntal sound of tearing rice-paper and then an
“Aargh!”
as we stepped across the backs of the Johns. We smashed through 12 walls in all and completely wrecked the place.
On a sordid note, Hong Kong also had a pub called the Chewbath where little girls aged seven or eight sat below the tables, out of sight of the customers. No sooner would you sit down for a drink than you felt your trousers being unzipped. To me, this was depravity beyond the pale—on a par with buggery. My friends and I waved the children away or gave them money just to get rid of them,
but
other men went there specifically for that purpose.
Perhaps I should again emphasize that we were no more than sexual animals at this time, unrestrained by morality. Yet we looked on sex as something we did only for money or a laugh. Some of our nonsexual adventures may illustrate this point. For example, one night aboard ship we saw a movie starring Jack Palance called
Ghengis Khan.
So the next time we got shore leave—this was also in Hong Kong—we had a Ghengis Khan night. If a rickshaw driver smiled at us, we punched him in the face. At a restaurant, whoever felt like going to the bathroom just stood up and pissed on the table. We had a live-rat eating competition. The winner swallowed down six live baby rats and their mother, with blood and muck running down from his mouth, and washed the lot down with cider. He became “anima of the night.” In all, we were a right-wing, very racist, arrogant group—but we were very much stags, too. Homosexuality was joked about, but to screw your mate was just never done.
Also we were terrible alcoholics and supplemented our beer on shore, or aviation fuel on shipboard, with a variety of drugs. To help pay for these luxuries my mates and I made five porn films in Hong Kong. In one of them we played Hell's Angels, dressing up in leather jackets and taking part in a gang bang. With sailors like us, it was no wonder Britannia no longer ruled the waves.
Singapore was much like Hong Kong, though I saw there a sight I will never forget. One of the bars we visited featured a gorgeous Eurasian girl who sat in a glass tub and masturbated herself with a live trout. It was quite a large fish—perhaps a five-pounder—and eventually she actually maneuvered it until only its tail was sticking out of her cunt. The trout fought furiously to escape, but she allowed withdrawal only after she came. This woman was also able to put a magnum of champagne up her vagina until only the cork showed. Then she would pop it.
By far the most inventive lovers in the Far East are the whores of Thailand—attractive, doll-like women, who were sexually imaginative both on the grand scale and in small details. The most amazing brothel I ever visited was one in Bangkok where each room created a fantasy environment. For example, one room resembled a train compartment with scenery “moving” past the window. Another was a fish-and-chips restaurant, and yet another a laundry. So a customer who always wanted to ravish a waitress could fulfill his wish by having her on a tabletop. You could actually eat at this restaurant, too; and adding an edge to the experience was the fact that some “customers” were paying voyeurs.
At the age of 24, after spending 563 days in Royal Navy brigs around the world, I was discharged. For the first time in my life, I felt at sea. I took 12 jobs in as many months. And I got married to a very straight British girl. Making love to her was the strangest sexual experience of all because I was still green when it came to “normal” sex. For seven years I had sailed the seven seas, witnessing and sometimes tasting every possible perversion. I found conjugal intercourse boring—the most perverted form of sex of all—because no money was involved. Our divorce was inevitable. Now I have remarried and lead an ordinary life. Yet I cannot shake the notion that I am still the biggest pervert of all. Whereas other men grow progressively kinkier in their bedtime habits, I have followed the reverse path. Sex has become a once-a-week routine. Obviously I enjoy it. Yet, I also find myself growing increasingly unsexual. I got the sea out of my blood, and no longer act like an animal in a restaurant. But no marital invention can rival the erotic novelties of my youth. At the age of 38 I am sexually washed up.
ONE NIGHT IN BANGKOK
By Leland Street
I stood under the shower and let the steaming water pour over my body. It was my first encounter with hot water in three months. I was living and working as an English teacher in Songkhla Refugee Camp in Southern Thailand. When I felt too ripe to live with myself I had to bathe in the Gulf of Siam or douse myself with a bucketful of icy well water. But now I was getting steam cleaned.
Songkhla was a narrow strip of beach, bordered by barbed wire and crammed with 10,000 Vietnamese boat people. My job was to teach them enough English to survive their first weeks in America. So for eight hours every day, I conducted classes in a thatched hut that doubled as the Buddhist temple. It was hard work. It was good work. But mostly it was hot work. By mid-morning the temperature was well into the 90s and my wet shirt clung to me like Saran Wrap. But my students—old men, pregnant women, young children—never seemed to break a sweat.
I was checked into an air-conditioned Bangkok hotel room for a long weekend of R&R. During the war, Bangkok tended to the carnal needs of thousands of lonely GI's. More recently, droves of European tourists were drawn to Asia's Sin City by its legendary beauties and the promise of exotic sexual adventure. But just then my wildest fantasy was to park myself in front of that air-conditioner and sleep for two days. And then sleep some more. Maybe if I got ambitious, I would wander down to the pool for a cool plunge. But in the meantime, the hot water gushing against my shoulders felt just fine.
When I finally emerged from the bathroom, the icy air grabbed my chest. It felt good. There was a bucket of ice and a quart of bourbon on the bed table. That looked good too. I moved to the window and drew a two-inch wall of drapes between me and the midday glare. The room plunged into darkness—a cool dark cave. My body found the bed and I fell dead asleep.
Some time later I heard a persistent pounding on the door, I pulled the blanket over my head and tried to dive back into that blackness.
Rise and shine somebody called, a voice from the hallway.
It was Rick, a young doctor from the city who was also staying at the hotel that weekend. The bedside clock read 12:45.
“It's after midnight, you clown.” I shouted into my pillow. “Let me sleep.”
“But it's the witching hour in Pat Pong.”
Of course I had heard about Pat Pong, Bangkok's red-light district. Everyone in Thailand had a Pat Pong story to tell. Beautiful contortionists who performed amazing acts, three-on-one massages, kinky sex shows. I had not been laid in months, but watching a woman peel a banana with her cunt lips was not my idea of a good time. The health factor also gave me pause. There were two V.D. clinics for every massage parlor in Bangkok.
Rick seemed to read my mind. “In case you're worried, I brought a batch of penicillin from the camp infirmary. C'mon now, Doctor's orders.”
“You can tell me all about it at breakfast,” I called back.
I tried to go back to sleep, but I had company now. As I stared into the darkness I saw her deep almond eyes, and if I reached far inside my mind I could almost touch her. Lé Chi was a student of mine in the camp, and just thinking of her then made the blood rush to my groin.