Landscape With Traveler (4 page)

 

13

I

Joined

the

Navy

After I had had my four years of student draft deferment, I still had no degree (saw no reason to have one) and was about to be drafted, so I joined the Navy (largely because of my youthful affection for
Treasure Island).
This was in
1951
, I was twenty-one and my own man.

I was sent to San Diego for boot camp where I made the highest score on the GCT they'd ever had. (It was child's play so I'm not boasting.) This fact, combined with my being the only one in the company who'd ever been to college, put our Chief into a terrible state of awe where I was concerned. It wasn't exactly an advantage, but it turned out to have compensations, too, since uniquely, in my boot camp experience, he at least treated me as a human being, on a rather nice and warm man-to-man basis when he finally figured out that I was not going to hold my brains over his head all the time.

Years later, when I saw the movie
The Last Time I Saw Archie,
a strange little film wherein Robert Mitchum portrays a kind of con-man corporal who somehow manages to inveigle the other soldiers in his company, including the sergeant, into suspecting that he is really a general in disguise spying on the troops, and so accepts the special favors and treatment they give him with a kind of tacit understanding—a perfect Mitchum role!—I saw how I too might have elicited a particular type of response owing to my unique position. However, when the poor scared kid the Chief had chosen as Recruit Company Commander—to show me who was boss!—turned out to be unable to count
1
-
2
-
3
-
4
in anything faintly resembling a marchable rhythm, I was given the honor of the post.

The great advantage of this was that I didn't have to go to bed early, could go down to headquarters and drink coffee and talk at night while my “boys” were all asleep, and I didn't have to carry a gun (I didn't object to its being a gun, but to its weight). Nor was I required to stand watch, except on the last night of training.

They gave me a funny little wooden sword to carry instead of the gun, which was a mistake, since when at our first inspection I was given a real, old-fashioned heavy iron saber, I smartly saluted the Lieutenant with it and it flew out of my hand and over his head, landing on the asphalt drill field in a mighty clatter, disrupting the inspectional silence. None of us could keep from laughing, and it all ended in a great company-wide guffaw, the Lieutenant included. There and then I had the most violent blushing spell I ever had.

The others in my company were a bit wary of me on the whole, until one night they wouldn't stop talking after lights out and a monitor from headquarters caught them at it and made us all pile out and go down to the drill field to march for two hours while the rest of the base slept on.

I was furious at the idiocy of it all and decided to settle the matter quickly. I counted and yelled commands at full volume, surprising even myself at the noise I was making, and the whole quadrangle fairly shook with the echoing racket.

Inside of ten minutes a messenger came out telling me to quiet it down as the officers on duty were trying to sleep and I was waking up the entire base. I told him to explain to the officers that without the benefit of sight (we were drilling in total darkness), sound had to be double to keep the men doing the right things, and began to bellow even louder. Five minutes later we were told to go back to bed, and I was a hero on my second or third night of command.

 

14

On

My

First

Night

as

Recruit

Company

Commander

On my first night as Recruit Company Commander, a boy called Arthur Tarr—all the boys were from the Carolinas and Louisiana, all seventeen or eighteen except for me and Edgar Royale, who were both twenty-one—or “Tarr-baby,” as we called him, came and crawled into my bunk with me and hugged me and nuzzled into my neck. He made no attempt to sneak into my bed, but did it with everyone else's full knowledge, the lights still on, and I, with my great sangfroid as I thought, treated it as though it was the most usual thing in the world.

There was nothing at all sexual in what Tarr-baby did, he just lay there hugging me and talking about things in general and after a half hour kissed me sweetly on the cheek and got up and went to bed. He did this every night and no one paid the least attention to it. Turned out he always did this at home with his father, and I was his new father. It was nice, really. More than nice—it was lovely.

Then there was a kid from South Carolina called Service, who was the sex maniac of the company. The showers were in a large room with tiled walls and ceiling and about six shower heads on each wall. With two at each shower, there would be a minimum of forty-eight men showering at once. Service liked to jack off in the shower room when we were all in it washing, and would try to shoot on one of us, mid much merriment and slipping and scrambling to get out of his way.

Finally, inevitably, my turn came to be the target, but I coolly stood my ground and when the crucial moment came I just reached out and delicately pinched his long foreskin closed (he was most extraordinarily uncircumcised) so that nothing could come out of it. The look on his face!! The room burst into laughter.

This was considered a most witty thing to do and has, I guess, long since passed into local legend, as they never tired of telling anybody and everybody how Reeves had outwitted the mad masturbator. It served further to enhance my reputation for cleverness, and had the positive result that he never tried to spray me again—or anybody else as I remember, though he continued his showery pleasures for us all to see.

 

15

Edgar

Royale

Was

a

Very

Good

Sort

Edgar Royale was a very good sort, a Cajun who'd rather drink even than screw. As I said, he was, like me, older than the rest, and more a man of the world. He'd been screwing and drinking for at least five years, so didn't have to talk about it like the others.

In fact, he was a very practical fellow, and—since we had no such thing as liberty to go into town during the two months of basic training—began to pay me extravagant compliments on my ass. But I had given this a try long before with a high-school friend and the pain was such that it gave me a spasm in my colon and I beshat us both, so I wasn't about to give it another go, much as I liked Royale. Actually, I had tried it even before that disastrous time, back in seventh grade with my best friend, and the only lubrication we could lay our hands on was a jar of Mentholatum, which instantly froze our desire.

I believe he really was a bona fide sex maniac—he thought and talked of nothing but sex—he had, indeed, been given the choice between the Navy and prison for rape—and our watch together was no exception. He beat around no bushes, but as soon as we took up the watch he came right out and asked me to suck him off. I declined, of course (knowing whom and whom not to suck off), and he spent the next two hours cock-in-hand, trying to persuade me, offering finally to return the favor. He'd even do me first if I didn't trust him to carry out his end of the bargain.

Since I was so firm in my refusal, he allowed as how he'd settle for my just jerking him off, but I said since he did that perfectly well himself—as everyone in the area well knew—he didn't need me. Another hour passed in a hassle over this. Finally he was begging me with actual tears in his eyes just to touch his cock, which, still hard and throbbing, he kept pumping with his hand. Well, I did, and at the first touch—pow! I had a handful. I thought that would finish it, but he spent the next hour thanking me and only wiped and put his cock back when our relief arrived at
8
a.m.

 

16

We

Loaded

into

Greyhound

Buses

and

Headed

East

Our basic training finished, we loaded into Greyhound buses and headed east for “boot leave,” and then to our new assignments. There
was an hour layover in Tucson for supper, and Royale and I (being from Louisiana, we fancied ourselves gourmets) decided the bus station restaurant was a step down even from Navy food and set out in search of something more suitable to our palates and high spirits. We ended up in some really awful-looking ranch-style restaurant with wagon wheels and cow skulls all over the place, but the food was great. Of course, we missed the bus.

I told the dispatcher what had happened and he started yelling his head off at us, calling us all the names he could think of and ending with, “and now you missed the goddamn bus!” I never could figure out why he was so mad. Royale's Cajun blood began to rise and he was ready to punch the guy in the face, but I told Royale very firmly to cool it and let me handle the situation. So I pulled myself up, eyebrow (one only) and all, and said in the most stilted “East Coast” style I could muster, “My good man, you really must believe me when I tell you we are aware of the lamentable fact that we have missed, as you say, ‘the goddamn bus.' But that being a fait accompli, we now find ourselves in need of your assistance in determining a course of action to remedy the situation.”

As an usher I'd seen so many movies with Cary Grant or Bette Davis, etc., that I had no trouble in stringing together endless diatribes in that manner. Well, the man was so nonplused and thereafter so totally cooperative that he immediately phoned ahead to have our seabags taken off the bus. He couldn't have been nicer, in fact. Royale was impressed beyond words, talking about my amazing triumph for the rest of the evening, though, having witnessed the scene in the showers, etc., this shouldn't have surprised him that much.

The next bus was two hours away, so Royale dragged me to a bar. I told him I wanted an ice cream soda, but he wouldn't believe I was serious. In fact, I hardly ever lie, but people rarely believe what I say. Strange. Perhaps that's why I'm writing all of this down. It's one thing to hear someone tell you something, but it's quite another to read it. For some reason the written word is ever so much more real. Well, in the bar Royale downed a huge amount of whiskey and got totally drooling drunk inside a half hour. Less even. Then he drank some more.

We played the inevitable scene in the toilet with me holding him to keep him from falling in (and his neckerchief, too, to keep it clean). At first he couldn't make it and just kept spitting and gagging so I had—at his insistence—to stick my fingers down his throat a few times to get him started. Even now, I can feel in my mind the sensuous hot, wet softness of his tongue and throat.

Once he got going, he puked his bloody guts out, a monumental, epic vomiting session the likes of which I've never seen anywhere else (except maybe the time I ate thirty or forty kourabiedes—those great Greek cookies made out of nothing but ground-up almonds, butter, and sugar—and topped that with three big plates of spaghetti!). Royale was a little Vesuvius in full eruption, heaving and groaning and spewing out an amazing quantity of dinner, wine, whiskey, and unidentifiable slime. It was terrifying to watch and feel him—by now I was holding him around the waist from behind—wretch, rearing like a wild stallion before each regurgitation. I really thought he'd die from a heart spasm or something. It left him so weak he had to kneel and hug the toilet for a few minutes before I could get him back on his feet and clean him up. He was still drunk as ever and weak besides, but I lugged him over to the wash basin, stood behind him, and while he leaned over and propped himself up as best he could I reached around and washed his face for him, got him straightened up, and combed his hair.

I was half-carrying him out when he decided, naturally, that he also had to piss. So I pulled him over to the urinal. He tried his best, but as soon as he let go of me or the wall to undo his pants he'd fall over—flat out on the floor the first time—so finally he held onto the plumbing while I got in back of him and unbuttoned all those Navy buttons and pulled out his cock and aimed it for him, praying that no one would come into the men's room.

I've unbuttoned a few flys in my day, but this was one of the weirdest things I've ever done. Going through all the motions, with the buttons, pulling out the cock and pointing, I almost pissed myself until I realized (I was a little drunk, too) that it was Royale's cock instead of mine. There was a funny surrealistic stretching of time, probably a combination of my own tipsiness and the fear that someone would come in and see us in our innocence and misconstrue the whole thing.

It gives one an odd, good feeling to handle a friend's penis with no thought of passion. One can give rough treatment to an erect, demanding cock, but unexcited it feels so tender and trusting, so unbelievably soft and vulnerable as it cuddles in your hand all humid and warm that it seems infinitely delicate. I was afraid I would hurt Royale's as I stood holding it, feeling the strong flow of his urine pouring through it, feeling it move softly with its final squirts, then milking it and flipping off the last few drops before tucking it back inside and buttoning him up. I felt no more sexual interest than I feel when bathing a baby boy. I felt instead a deep tenderness toward this man who had given himself over to me—dare I say put himself into my hands. I was aware of him sexually, but on another, almost theoretical, plane. There was a lovely sensuality in our contact. But the overriding feelings were of sympathy and tenderness.

It seemed he was pissing for hours, but at last we were out in the cool Arizona night. I dumped Royale on a bench and went to get us some containers of coffee to try to sober him up a bit before we had to get the bus. To no avail, and as a result he was still so drunk they wouldn't let us on the bus. Again he wanted to make a fuss, but I led him away, and then he started crying, sobbing on my shoulder that he was ruining my leave, that not even a brother would be so good to him (which got to me, brother-searcher that I am), hugging me and kissing me and drenching me with tears and drool.

So we went sadly and wobbly back to our park bench where Royale slept for two hours, his head on my shoulder, till another bus came and we successfully faked our way past the driver. It was now about one in the morning. Royale slept some more as we started rolling along, but then got sick again and I had quickly to open the window and shove his head out or we'd have had a scandal and likely got thrown off in the middle of the desert, or so I thought at the time. Luckily, all the passengers were asleep—those to the rear of us on our side with closed windows, thank goodness—and we escaped detection.

We changed buses in Houston, me to go to Brownsville, where my family had moved after I left for boot camp, and Royale to Louisiana. We had breakfast in the bus station this time, and that was the last I ever saw of him, still thanking me with tears in his bleary eyes. I love you, Royale, wherever you are!