A snipit from my auto biography

[hangover]

And me, I was twenty-two years old, and a disco king. The hundred and twenty women were anywhere from eighteen to forty-five years old. Some were married, some had boyfriends, but there was still a bunch that I had a lot of fun with.
There was about forty women at each school, and Charles (the owner) shuffled me from one school to another because women loved having a man do their hair, and besides, I was one of the best stylists in all three schools. Not only was I having a lot of fun with the girls at the school, but also there were a lot of ladies that would come in and get their hair done by me and ask me out on dates.
One time this babe came in and told the teacher at the front desk that she wanted me to do her hair. I’d never done her hair before, but she was gorgeous. She worked as a cocktail waitress at the Four Seasons Hotel on the south side of town.
She came back to my station and I brushed her hair and then took her back to the shampoo bowl where I gave her a very sensuous massage along with the shampoo. I took her back to my chair and began to cut her hair, just a trim.
While I was cutting her hair, she reaches out from under the shampoo cape and starts playing with my jewels, I about cut her ear off! As I was finishing the coif, she asked me out to dinner. I said sure, but that I didn’t have a car. She said she had one and asked me for my address so she could come and pick me up. She tipped me twenty bucks and a kiss.
She picked me up at my place a 6:30 and took me to this four star restaurant for dinner, and she paid for dinner, I think it was like a hundred dollars for the meal.
Then she takes me to a movie theater to see the movie “Shampoo with Warren Beatty”. But only five minutes into the movie she tells me to pull down my pants. Now we were sitting in the back of the theater, but there were people on both sides of us and in the row in front of us, though not right directly in front of us. I told her that I was crazy, but not that crazy. But she just undid my pants and yanked them down to my knees, and then sat right down on me. She was wearing a skirt and no panties. What an adrenaline rush!
The only thing I remember thinking, was envisioning my picture on the front page of the news paper, being arrested for indecent exposure. But it seemed like everyone around us was either really into the movie, or they were trying real hard to ignore us. So after a few seconds I got aroused, and I surprised her by standing up and bending her over the seat in front of us and drilling her for about ten seconds before I pulled up my pants and told her we had to go to my place to finish. We got out of there without getting arrested went to my flat and did the Crocodile Rock all night.
Two days later she shows up at the school and signs up to be a student. We turned out to be an item. I kept my place, but spent most of my time at hers. She lived on the west side of town over by the Broadmore, It was the rich swanky part of the city. I had at least half my clothes at her place.
She still kept her job as a cocktail waitress because she made between one and two hundred dollars a night working three or four hours, four nights a week.

 

[hangover]

That was from part two, this is from part one......

When I got to Fort Hauchuca we had a company commander for the finance office and one for the barracks. The C.O. for the barracks had just graduated from West Point, and was determined to make soldiers out of us. He had us out for hair cut inspection, shoe shine inspection, and every other inspection he could think of, every morning until the end of the month when he didn’t get his pay check. He came in the finance office wanting to know where his check was, but nobody could find his records. Six months later his records were found in Vietnam. No one ever found out who sent them there.
After being in Fort Huachuca a couple of months, I ended up at a bullfight in Mexico where I met my first wife. We were married within two months. We lived with her folks in Tombstone for a few weeks, after our Catholic wedding.
My buddy Manuel took me down to Agua Prieta, a Mexican border town just before I got married for my bachelor party. We went to a bar in Boys town where all the hookers hung out. When we went in, we went to the bar and ordered beers. Right away two girls came up to Manuel and started talking to him in Spanish. They were hugging on him and rubbing his legs, as I tried not to look envious. After a few minutes Manuel asked me if I saw any girls that I liked. I pointed to one that looked kind of hot, and Manuel yelled at her and pointed at me. She came over and started talking to me in Spanish, which I didn’t understand a word of, and started rubbing my leg. I asked Manuel what she was saying, and he said not to worry about it. Then all of a sudden she asked, “You fuck?” I nodded my head yes, and she drug me off the bar stool into a room in the back. When we got in the room she locked the door and motioned with her hands for me to take my clothes off, and she went in the bathroom. When she came out, all she had on was a garter belt and fishnet hose. All I had on was my army issued boxers. She grinned and motioned for me to take them off. Well this was my first time with a hooker, and besides that it was kind of chilly, so when I took off the boxers my manhood was anything but manly. To make it worse, she started laughing. She pulled me over to the bed and started yankin my chain to get it worked up. Finally when there was some stiffness she asked, “OK?” and I nodded in the affirmative. Then she lifted me up and put me on top of her and crammed it inside. She started gyrating and moaning, grabbing my ass and thrusting me in and out of her. I felt like I was plugged into a machine! It was so weird I never got a nut. Eventually she figured out it wasn’t going to happen so she said, “OK?” again and I said “OK” and she lifted me off her, got up went in the bathroom and came out a minute later and motioned for me to put my clothes on and then walked back out to the bar. When I came back out to the bar, I went over to her where she was sitting with Manuel and asked how much I owed her. She said something to Manuel, and he told me that she had said that the first one is always on the house.
Rosie’s parents had an adobe house, with a wood floor and wood burning stove in the kitchen. The living room had a tile floor, but nobody ever spent any time in the living room, we always hung out in the kitchen or on the front porch. That’s where her dad and I spent the weekends with a case of beer. The kitchen and the living room were the only two rooms that didn’t have dirt floors. The bathroom was an outhouse. The shower was two army blankets wrapped around four trees, with a hose attached with wire to one of the trees.
Rosie and I moved into a trailer in Sierra Vista a few months later right outside the fort, cause my 62’ Plymouth convertible lost it’s brakes, and I was afraid I was going to end up AWOL hitchhiking twenty miles to work. After six months of wedded bliss, I received orders to Germany.
The wife didn’t like the idea, so she ran away with some other soldier and moved in with him. None of her sisters or parents would tell me where she was, but I heard from a friend of mine who was dating one of my wife’s sisters, that she was going to come to the trailer and get her things while I was at work.
So that day I called in sick, and was at the trailer when she showed up. We fought and argued and had sex all day. Then finally she told me she was too scared to go to Germany, but if I would just go ahead and go, after the dude she was with got out of the army, in about two months, she would come and be with me. I told her to get screwed, and divorced her.
When I got to Fort Jackson South Carolina for the flight to Germany, the army decided to keep me there because they were giving early outs to draftees in Vietnam, and they needed me to help process them. Three hundred troops a day for five months were getting processed out.
I got over my divorce with another young thing that I met in Columbia, who I got pregnant. I know this is bad, but I don’t remember her name. She didn’t tell me she was with child until three days before I was supposed to go to Iran. Iran!? What the hell is in Iran? Well, I wasn’t going to rush into another marriage, so I took her to my mom’s house in Manassas, and told her I’d send her money till I got back from Iran. My mother the hypocrite, gave up drinking when she got married, and became a Republican, ended up getting my girlfriend an abortion within two weeks.
The only thing in Iran was a communications depot for the U.S. embassy. No finance office, all their records were kept in Germany. So since they spent all that money sending me there, they turned me into a Teletype operator.
In all, it took forty of us to keep the depot going. We lived in a Persian mansion with a garden, a pool, a gatekeeper, and a cook.
When I arrived at the Tehran airport, a gorgeous Iranian girl came up to me and introduced herself, her mother and brother and sister. She said her name was Ashi, and told me she wanted to be my friend, because she wanted to learn to speak English. But hell, she could already speak English better than me.
But a week later I decided to go for visit. Man, was that a good decision. She and her mother treated me like a king. They waited on me hand and foot. I guess her father died, of what I never found out. But they must have been pretty well off, cause they were always buying me gifts and they lived in a nice house.

 

[BecauseIKnow]

Ha Ha Ha Ha! Bullshit!

 

[hangover]

Ha Ha Ha Ha! Bullshit!

Yeah, I know. I'll have to list it as fiction if I ever publish it, because nobody will believe it. And I haven't even shown the real juicy stuff yet.

 

[BecauseIKnow]

Ha Ha Ha Ha! Bullshit!

Yeah, I know. I'll have to list it as fiction if I ever publish it, because nobody will believe it. And I haven't even shown the real juicy stuff yet.

Just admit it's fiction. We understand your desire for sex fantasies.

I'm sure there are other people like who enjoy reading these kind of tales.

Publish it for them.

 

[hangover]

Just admit it's fiction. We understand your desire for sex fantasies.

I'm sure you'll get a big laugh out of this part.....

Went to a movie with my sisters and cousins that summer. Went to the bathroom in the balcony to smoke a cigarette, because couldn’t smoke in the lobby at age eleven. Started to light up, when a Catholic priest walked in. To avoid a lecture from him, I went to the down stairs bathroom to smoke. I lit up, and in walks the priest. He walks over to the urinal and pulls out his ten-inch shlong, standing so I could see it. After peeing, he comes over to me and asks me for a hit off my cig. I hand him the pack and tell him to have one. He lights his with mine, grabbing my hand to light his. He asks me if I’d ever had a blow job. Being ignorant, I tell him I didn’t own a car. He starts telling me what a blow job is. I’m so scared, I run two miles to my grandma’s house. My mom beats me for leaving my sisters and cousins.
Two months later, a friend with alcoholic parents was getting beat so bad by his dad, he was going to run away from home. I had heard about a preacher that lived a couple blocks from my aunt. This preacher was married with two little daughters. We went and told the preacher about my friends’ problem. My buddy ended up moving in with the preacher.
A few days latter, my friend and I were romping through the woods, when we came upon a two story brick building. We went inside and found the whole building was full of musical instruments. We went back and told the preacher what we found. He told us to take him there.
When we got back to the building, I went up to the second floor to check it out. When I came back down, the preacher and my friend had gone down to the basement. I went down there and found my buddy lying on the cement floor with his pants to his ankles, and the preacher was standing over him ejaculating on his back. I ran home and told my mom. She beat me, and told me never to see my friend ever again. Never found out what ever became of him.

 

[Mr. H.]

I'm too hung over to read it.

 

[hangover]

I'm too hung over to read it.

Avoid hangovers, smoke pot.

 

[hangover]

I had another friend Norman that I met when I first got to Gunnison. He was one of the few friends I had. Gunnison was a bunch of redneck ranchers, and they didn’t like newcomers any more than Enterprise Alabama did. Norm was from a family of eleven kids. I taught him how to play guitar right after I moved to Gunnison. He picked it up real fast. Within a month he could play almost as good as me.
When we got in high school, we heard about electric bananas in a song, and thought we’d try to get high on them during lunchtime. We dried them out in the oven, then crushed them up and smoked them in a pipe. Or I should say I smoked them, cause he chickened out. I don’t think they did anything to me, but I didn’t let him know that. I pretended to be really tripped out on the way back to school, and started acting all crazy, and telling him I thought I was growing a horn out of my head like a unicorn. It scared him pretty bad, he ran off to school and not long after that quit hanging out with me, and started hanging with his old redneck friends he’d grown up with.
Oh, I almost forgot about Louise. Louise was a girl that was born on the same day as I was, in the same hospital. My mom and her mom were friends till my mom divorced my real dad and moved to Germany with her second husband. Supposedly Louise and I even shared the same diapers. But about the time Louis and I turned fourteen, Her mom and dad somehow found my mom and came to Gunnison to visit from Missouri where they lived. Louise and I became boyfriend and girlfriend that week, and then had a long distance relationship for three years. We wrote love letters to each other, but that is as far as it ever got.
I got a job on one of the ranches one summer, stacking hay. They’ve got these tractors that drive around backwards with a big fork on it that collects a bunch of hay. Then they drive over to the stack where there is another fork that the tractor pushes the hay onto. Then that fork lifts it up and over onto the stack. I had to stand on the stack, and when the hay gets dumped, I had to even it out on the top. That was the most miserable job I’ve ever had. I’ve got hay fever so bad it made my eyes swell shut. And no amount of allergy medicine would make it so I could breath.
A few other friends and I used to go camping out at Hartman Rocks, even in the winter, in the snow. Found out years later they used to dump Uranium tailings out there. All the high school kids used to have keggers out at Hartman Rocks on Friday night. Back then the drinking age was eighteen, but most of us weren’t that old. Cops never came out and busted us though.
At age 15, I saw the movie “Easy Rider” and knew from then on that I was destined to be a hippie. I think I decided that just to spite the rednecks in Gunnison. Might as well give them a good reason not to like me.
In 1968, one of the guys at the gas station filled up a hippie van with water in their gas tank. They broke down a few blocks away on Main Street. These hippies were traveling from New York to the Monterey music fest, but decided they weren’t going to make it in time, so they walked into the real-estate office and bought a house.
They also rented an adobe house that only had a bathroom, kitchen and living room, about 600 square feet total. They turned it into a head shop. That really freaked out the rednecks in Gunnison.
These hippies turned out to be my really good friends. I spent all of my time with them at their house and the head shop. They turned me on to pot. It took me three times before I got high, or at least till I realized I was high. They tried to get me to do Orange Sunshine (LSD), but I didn’t try acid until three years later.
We had a water balloon fight once, where half of us had the house and the other half had the head shop as our command posts. We were raiding each others posts and met on Main Street, throwing balloons out of the cars at each other. Then they raided us at the head shop. We thought we were ready for them. We had a big trash can full of water balloons on the roof. When they came up we blasted them good, until we ran out of balloons. Then they came up after us with the garden hose. They caught me right at the feet, just when I was about to jump off the roof. When I slipped off, I broke my arm. Mom wouldn’t take me to the doctor till the next day.

 

[hangover]

Three months after we moved to Gunnison, my mom divorced her second husband. The welfare department makes my mom, my sisters and me go to counseling because mom seems to be having a nervous break down. These shrinks send me to the nut house in Pueblo for tests, and decide that I should be sent to a boys ranch for six months, to help me grow up.
That worked well. I learned all about drugs and circle jerks, and how to fight. Mom never came to visit me the whole time I was there, but my grandma did. She had gotten married again to a real nice guy named Bill. And they would come up on the weekends every once in a while, and get me the hell out of there for a couple of days. And Bill would always give me a few packs of cigarettes to take back with me.
When I got out, mom was dating a guy less than nine years older than me. He was a college kid and a real juicer, but so was my mom so that was a good match. My mom and my aunt used to get drunk when we were in Colorado Springs, and have some knock down drag out fights with each other. I’m surprised they didn’t kill each other. Rednecks can’t have a good time without getting into a fight and getting bloody.
A month later I turned thirteen and got drunk for the first time with some friends at a gas station. I got so trashed on beer, Jack Daniels and burgundy wine, one of the guys drove me home and dumped me on my bed, and told me that if I came back to the station he was going to kick my ass. I couldn’t even get off the bed, and blew chunks in the trash can he had set by my bed. Mom came home from a picnic with her new beau and my sisters. She asked what was wrong with me, and I told her I had the flu. She knew, but didn’t beat me cause I wouldn’t have felt it anyway.

 

[hangover]

But luckily prostitution was legal when I was in Tehran, so I didn’t have blue balls for all that time. There were three classes of hookers. The low class girls were fifty cents to two dollars. They were down in the old part of town, called Shalayno. There were buildings a solid block long, with doors every fifty feet apart, with anywhere from one to twenty girls in each door.
The first time I went down there, I had only been in Tehran about three days. And another soldier from Puerto Rico had only been there two or three days longer than me, and he was dying to go check it out too.
We took a cab about 11pm, not knowing the place closed down around midnight. As soon as we got out of the taxi, these two Iranian guys came up to us and said they knew what we wanted and that they would show us some good ones. Juan was ready to follow them, but I didn’t like the idea. But rather than be down in that strange place by myself, I went along.
They took us down an ally, and then into a door. As soon as we were in, they bolted the door, with only a staircase in front of us to go up.
At the top of the stairs were two old women. One was about 70, weighed about two hundred pounds with only one tooth and what looked like gangrene in her left eye.
Lucky for me I was the first to the top of the stairs. I took one look at her and grabbed the 80-year-old hunchback with no teeth, and dragged her into the bedroom. Believe it or not, she gave me the best hummer I’ve ever had to this day. I paid her eighteen cents in American change, and she thought she had become rich.
Puerto Rican Juan came out of his bedroom with his pants to his ankles, and shuffled over to a sink and scrubbed his member like it had been contaminated with a toxic substance, which might have been the case.
We usually went down to Shalayno once or twice a week, because of this one little beauty who had a grandmother that would run all the Farsi (Iranian men) out when we showed up. Grandma would pull out her hookah and smoke black hashish with us and tell us stories in the Farsi language while we waited our turn with her granddaughter. She was a real babe that knew her way around a staff. She cost a hundred ryals, a little over two dollars. There were four of us that were regular customers.
The middle class girls were a lot of fun. They were just like the New York hookers, with all the makeup and miniskirts and fishnet hose. They hung out in the new part of town, up by the fancy hotels. We would have to drive around until one stepped out on the street. And then there would be ten to twelve cars full of Farsi men that would just stop their cars in the middle of the street and start bidding on her. But because we were the rich Americans, all we had to do is toot the horn and they’d come running to us. She’d hop in, but then we had to drive like maniacs until we ditched the ten cars of Farsi, cause they wouldn’t just give up. They would drive up beside us and try to offer her more money, but it never worked.
Once we ditched them, we would take her back to the mansion. Sometimes we’d get a dozen of them all running around the mansion naked, and have orgies. They would stay all night and do us all for a thousand ryals, thirteen dollars each.
The high-class ladies were usually French or Swedish in a penthouse suite with dinner and Champagne, three thousand ryals, thirty-nine dollars. I had one, once a month whether I needed it or not.

 

[hangover]

So I ended up saying goodbye to my Persian sweetie. And I think that day she wanted to consummate our relationship, but after all that time it didn’t seem right, knowing that she just wanted to, so that I would send for her and tie the knot. Still wasn’t ready for that again. But I gave her my mom’s address, cause I didn’t have one in Belgium. She wrote to me twice a week for five months without hearing from me, because mom was such a racist she didn’t forward her letters to me. Mom still hates anyone that ain’t American, and even a lot of them, if they’re not white.
So I hop on this 747 headed for Belgium. Actually it was going to Frankfurt Germany, where I had to catch another plane to Belgium. But there was this dude coming from India with 50 grams of Nepalese temple balls in his shoe. I was going to do that, but chickened out. Anyway, he offered me a two-gram ball, and I ate it. A few hours later I still wasn’t feeling anything, so I asked him if the shit was any good. He gave me another gram, and I ate it. Twenty minutes later the first ball hit me just when we started descending into Frankfurt.
It was great until I had to run from one end of the airport to the other, while carrying a duffel bag, a brief case, and a guitar, because my flight was leaving in five minutes. Frankfurt airport is as big as LAX.
By the time I got on the plane, things were spinning so bad I felt like I was in a blender. Then they started the engines, and it wasn’t a jet, it was a propeller plane! It felt like we were taking off for like fifteen minutes, and I was starting to feel kind of green. Then they did take off, and all I could do is grab the airsick bag and heave my guts up. And everybody on the plane was staring at me, and their faces were melting and becoming deformed.
When we finally leveled off, I stumbled back to the washroom and cleaned the puke off my face, went back to my seat and passed out. I don’t remember another thing until the next morning. But I had to get off the plane in Brussels, go to the train station and catch the train to Shape Headquarters. I don’t speak German, and I don’t speak French, but my guardian angel came through for me again, cause I woke up the next morning in this beautiful French hotel with a giant feather bed and continental breakfast, for two dollars.
I swear, I tripped my ass off the whole day like I was on some really good shrooms. Can you imagine reporting to my new C.O. while tripping balls? It was like something out of a National Lampoon movie.
First thing he did, was snatch my 201 file out of my hand, look at it for about ten seconds, then look up at me and then start yelling, “Where’s my salute?! And you are supposed to say specialist Hangover, reporting for duty, sir! And what kind of name is Hangover? Well?” Try to do and say that without a smile, while seeing rainbows shooting out of his ears and mouth.
Somehow it came out the way he wanted, but it didn’t satisfy him. He growled, “I don’t like you Hangover. And it’s going to be my mission to make you miserable.”
Couple of days later I was late to work because my alarm clock was still being shipped with a bunch of my other stuff from Iran , and nobody woke me up. Two weeks after that I was called in to the C.O.s office. He handed me transfer orders to Hielbroughn Germany. He told me he had found just the right hellhole for me. I didn’t think it could be any worse than Generals Dreamland, so much for thinking.

 

[tinydancer]

Interesting. An autobiographical section.

I was 15 years old when I met Alice Cooper.......

I think I'll leave that till later.

 

[hangover]

Interesting. An autobiographical section.

I was 15 years old when I met Alice Cooper.......

I think I'll leave that till later.

Did you see him stomp those baby chickens with his golf shoes on?

 

[tinydancer]

Interesting. An autobiographical section.

I was 15 years old when I met Alice Cooper.......

I think I'll leave that till later.

Did you see him stomp those baby chickens with his golf shoes on?

I was backstage. Vince never stomped a chicken.

 

[Sunshine]

Ha Ha Ha Ha! Bullshit!

Yeah, I know. I'll have to list it as fiction if I ever publish it, because nobody will believe it. And I haven't even shown the real juicy stuff yet.

I suggest you learn how to spell 'autobiography' before you try to publish.

 

[hangover]

Ha Ha Ha Ha! Bullshit!

Yeah, I know. I'll have to list it as fiction if I ever publish it, because nobody will believe it. And I haven't even shown the real juicy stuff yet.

I suggest you learn how to spell 'autobiography' before you try to publish.

OMG! It's the typo police! Please don't taze me!

 

[hangover]

Beth and I had Thanksgiving at the Lochsa Lodge a few weeks after we got moved in at the Ranger Station. Old Gus and his son Don owned the place, and good people. It started snowing that day and didn’t stop until June!
Jeff came and visited from Virginia that winter. He was in a classical guitar quartet that he had a concert with in Seattle. So after the concert he came and spent a week with us in the tundra. We played a lot of music and went to the natural hot springs which was ten miles down river from the Forest Service station.
The Lochsa River ran down the pass and then joined up with the Selway River. About ten miles down river from Powell Junction there was a footbridge that crossed the Lochsa. Then it was about a mile and a half hike up the mountain to Jerry Johnson hot springs. The snow was deep as hell in the winter, but there was so many people hiking up to the hot springs that there was a nice trail packed down.
Getting up to the hot springs, you had to hike next to this stream through the forest. Then when you got there it opened up into a clearing where there were about a half a dozen small pools that were built up with river rocks next to the stream. The hot water came up from under the ground into the pools. And in the winter, when you came into the clearing, you could see all this steam rising from the pools.
One time after Jeff had went back home, I hiked up with my dog Jet, and when I got to the clearing I saw this naked woman standing beside one of the hot pots. There were three others in the pool, but when the naked woman saw me she put her hands on top of her head with her fingers outstretched and kind of waved at me like that. So I did the same thing back at her. Then she pointed across the creek. Then I saw this moose lying in a hot pot across the stream. How cool is that? Hot tubing with a moose! Another time that I was up there some idiot tried to run the moose off, and the moose chased him up a tree and kept him there for over an hour.
In the summer, the hike up to the hot springs is a lush rain forest with all kinds of yummy Murell and Shantrell mushrooms. You can easily pick a pound or two on the hike up to the hot springs. Just be careful not to confuse a poisonous toadstool that looks a lot like them.
There was another hot spring about seven miles farther down river from Jerry Johnson, but it was on the north side of the highway. And it was about a two-mile hike up a canyon. The trail wasn’t very well defined and a little tougher, so there weren’t as may visitors. There was only one pot that held about eight people at the most. It was kind of in a crop of boulders about twenty yards up the side of the canyon.

 

[hangover]

This happened twenty years earlier......

Two days later we made it out to Colorado and had a job on a seismic crew as soon as we got there. We worked for about a month and then decided to head down to the beaches of Texas for the winter.
Everything was fine till we got to Vanhorn Tx., then we couldn’t catch a ride out of that stinkin town. The next day the sheriff drove up to us and told us that there was a freight train coming through town, and if we weren’t on it when it left he was going to arrest us for vagrancy.
Lucky for us, the engineer on the train was a real good Joe. I told him that if we didn’t get a ride on the train, the sheriff was going to put us up in the Iron Bar hotel. He gave us a ride all the way to San Antonio, through the Big Bend. Man, what beautiful moon lit night that was! The engineer let us ride in the second engine. Next morning, coming in the rail yard, the engineer slowed way down so we could jump off the train. He would have got in a lot of trouble if they had found out he gave us a ride.
From San Antonio we hitched on down to Corpus Christi, where Dean got a job on a shrimp boat. The boat only needed one header (employee that pops heads off of the shrimp). So I headed down to Brownsville and got on a boat down there.
When I got to Brownsville, I went to the docks and just started asking different captains if they needed any help. I was as green as grass, didn’t know the first thing about it. Usually there is only three on a boat, a captain, a rig man (the guy that works the nets), and a header. The rig man usually helps the header, while the captain trolls the boat with the nets down. The boat I got on had a full crew, but the captain hired me on as an apprentice. He told me to meet them at this certain bar that evening. I met them at the bar and we had a real good time that night, got good and drunk too.
Next morning we met at the boat then went to the grocery store and bought two thousand dollars worth of groceries, beer and whisky. We got on the boat, went and filled her up with fuel and headed for the coast of New Orleans. The captain was a Coon-ass (slang for Cajun), so he knew the waters off New Orleans real well.
The boat we were on was a steel hull freezer boat, so we could stay out on the water for up to two months without having to come into port. Most boats were iceboats, so they could only stay out for ten to fourteen days. Man, I wished I had got on one of those kinds of boats. We were out on the water for six weeks without touching land!
Those guys were nice dudes until they ran out of booze, then they turned meaner than snakes! They finished the hooch about the second week. Then I turned into the slave of the boat. I got every nasty job there was. I thought at one point they were going to throw me overboard. It was then I realized nobody knew I was out on that boat with them.
In those six weeks, we went through three storms where the waves were twenty feet high! There was more than once, I didn’t think I was going to make it!
One night we were trolling (shrimping is done at night from sun down to sun up), and the gulf was smooth as glass. You could see the full moon on the water. We had just dumped the nets on the deck, and were starting to pop the heads off the shrimp, when the captain came back and yelled at us to get those damn nets up now! Before we could get the nets up, the waves were crashing down on the deck of the boat! The waves were twenty feet high, and rocking the boat like it was a toy. We had to dump the nets on the deck along with the stuff that was already on the deck. Then we had to shovel everything back overboard. The railing of the boat only comes up to about knee high, but there is a shoot to shovel all the dead fish back overboard when you get done separating the shrimp out of the pile that is dumped on the deck. But the storm was too severe to get the shrimp, we just shoveled it all back overboard. And as we’re shoveling all this stuff back into the sea, there are twenty or thirty sharks eating it faster than we can shovel it! They eat it so fast, they make the water foam! And the boat is rocking side to side, so that water comes over the top of the railing! And as I’m shoveling, the rig man yells at me, that if I fall out I’m just shark food cause they won’t have time to save my ass! As the boat rocks over to my side, I could actually reach out and touch the shark, that’s how close they were! There was so much water coming on the deck, we just had to give up shoveling stuff back overboard and go and drop anchor and ride out the storm. Next morning I was the one that got to clean the back of the boat. There was dead fish strung from hell to breakfast. The other guys just went to bed. I finally got done around one in the afternoon. Then I went to bed and had to get up four hours later.
We got up around 5pm, the rig man was the cook of the boat and made dinner. Then we would pull up anchor and start trolling. Just drop the nets overboard and troll around in big circles for about three or four hours. Then pull up the nets and dump them on the deck. Then me and the other header would sit on these three legged seats that set three inches off the deck, and start popping heads off the shrimp and putting them in laundry baskets. The rig man would put the nets back overboard and continues trolling. The rig man has a smaller sample net that he brings up every hour to see how full the nets are getting and to see how many shrimp are being caught. The nets are dumped on the deck about three times a night, and it makes a big pile on the deck that has all kinds of stuff in it. Everything from garbage, to stingrays, to sharks and fish and eels, and of course shrimp.
One morning we dumped the nets on deck just about sunrise, and it was a big haul. Some of the shrimp weighed a half a pound. Even the rig man and captain were on the deck helping pop heads, when all of a sudden a sea serpent (sea snake) slithered out from the pile. It was huge! It was longer than the boat was wide, it stretched all the way across the deck! It’s head was about the size of a football. It had fangs over an inch long! The captain grabbed a gaff (a long pole with a hook on the end) and opened a shoot on the side of the boat and the thing slid back over into the sea. The captain told me that if it had bit me I would have been dead before I took two steps. We finally got back to port in Brownsville the day before Christmas Eve.

 

[hangover]

The year before I met my wifey...

I packed up my stuff in the car and headed south that day.
I drove in the snow all damn day. When I got to Albuquerque that evening, there was a foot of snow on the ground and still snowing. When I left Gunnison that morning, I only had sixty dollars to my name. But I was sick of driving in the snow, so I went in a bar and had a beer. A waitress took a shine to me and gave me a burger. She ended up buying one of the pups for twenty bucks, and let me sleep on her couch that night.
Next day I made it all the way to Dallas Texas where some old codger at a gas station gave me a tank of gas for one of the pups. I sold two more pups going through Louisiana the day after that for twenty dollars each.
On the third day I made it to Tallahassee Florida with only one pup left and no money. Luckily there was a carnival in town. They had a hole (a job) for me in one of the joints, it was the balloon bust game. I worked that ten-day spot and make a thousand dollars. One of the other carnys’ took the last pup for twenty bucks.
Instead of traveling with the carnival, I went to Jacksonville Florida where I got a job on a land survey crew as a rodman. After two weeks of wading through swamps full of snakes, huge spiders and mosquitoes, and living in my car, I figured the carney life wasn’t so bad after all.
I headed on down to Cocoa Beach where I got another job on another carnival. This time I worked in the cat rack, where the marks (chumps that wasted money playing carnival games) knocked over these stuffed animals that looked like cats on a rack.. Knock over three cats and you win a fifty cent stuffed animal. Knock over three more and you can trade it in for a seventy-five cent stuffed animal. Knock over three more and you get to trade it in for one worth a whole dollar. And it only costs two dollars for each three balls. So by the time you’ve spent fifty bucks, you’ve got your girlfriend a seven-dollar teddy bear. But you’re a hero in your girlfriends mind, sure. But hey, it’s the business and we gotta eat too. We did ten days in Cocoa and then went and did a ten-day spot in Tampa before closing down for the winter. That was three days before Christmas.
From there I drove all the way down to Key West. There is a hundred miles of little islands called the Keys on the way between Miami and Key West. I spent Christmas day on the beach in Key West, and had Christmas diner at Sloppy Joe’s Bar. Sloppy Joe’s is supposedly where Ernest Hemingway used to hang out. I saw the Super Bowl at Sloppy Joe’s a month later. Miami got beat by the 49ers and the whole bar cried.
I got a job at the docks popping heads off of shrimp. Instead of the shrimp boats hiring a header, these iceboats only had a captain and a rig man. The boat would unload at the factory and there were twenty of us that would stand at these long tables and pop the heads all day. I think I only got paid twenty-five cents a pound. It wasn’t enough to get a room, but it was warm enough to stay in the car anyway.
Sun set at the ocean liner docks was cool. There were all kinds of street performers working for tips. Jugglers, magicians, acrobats and musicians. I even played guitar a few times.
One thing I didn’t know until I got down there was Key West was a gay hang out. Even the mayor was gay. It didn’t bother me, it just meant less competition for the ladies on the beach. Didn’t really notice many lesbians, the gays were mostly men.
When I first got down to Key West I was going to try to catch a ride on a boat to Jamaica. I met a sweet little twenty year old on the docks that was going to Jamaica with her parents on a sail boat that they owned. They were going to give me a ride, but the day before we were going to ship out a civil war broke out in Jamaica. I decided not to go. But the war only lasted a couple of weeks. Besides, I hadn’t given any thought to what customs would have done about my dog. And the guy that said he’d let me park my car in his yard was kind of sketchy.
The cops kept giving a hard time for sleeping in my car. I’d drive to the next key up to camp, and the State patrol would hassle me too.
One day the water hose in my car gave out on the bridge coming back into Key West, and the only thing I could do is keep driving till I got across the bridge. It warped the head on the straight six engine. But thanks again to my guardian angel, this guy that owned a lobster boat business twenty miles east at Big Pine Key. He said he’d help me fix my car if I’d come and work for him on one of his lobster boats. Hell, I was sick of poppin heads off of shrimp for slave wages anyway.
The guy owned two boats and a thousand traps. There were three others that worked for him. He had a 120 foot three bedroom house trailer that he let us stay in, and all the lobster and seafood we could eat. I was the new guy, so I had to sleep on the couch. Better than the back seat of the Javelin.
Lobster boat fishing is a fantastic job. The boat is an eighteen-foot fiberglass hull with an outboard motor. On the port side of the boat (the left side) near the stern (the back of the boat), is a trap puller for the gaffer. The Captain drives up to a buoy and the gaffer takes his gaff (a long pole with a hook on it) and grabs the rope attached to the buoy with it. Then the gaffer puts the rope on this wheel on the puller, which pulls the trap up on the boat. The trap looks like a wooden crate with a hole in the top. When the trap gets on the deck the gaffer reaches in the trap with a gloved hand and grabs the lobsters and tosses them in a huge box next to the puller. Then the gaffer tosses the trap back over board and the captain drives to the next buoy. The buoys are about a hundred yards apart. The operation is repeated all day, very simple. If the seas are ruff you can’t go out. Those small boats won’t handle waves over four feet.
There wasn’t a tv in the trailer, so I started doing a lot of reading like the other guys did at night. I read On the Road and The Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac. I also read the first two books of John Varley’s trilogy.
One night a couple of the guys went into Key West to party. I read till about midnight and then fell asleep. At 2:30 in the morning I was awakened by these two voluptuous breasts smothering my face. Man, what a great way to be woke up! I didn’t want to open my eyes, I just started caressing her body with my hands. She was totally naked! I felt down her back to her butt, what a nice butt. But when I got down to her left leg there was only a stump! She was a motor cycle chic that had lost her leg in a wreck! But other than that she was gorgeous. And this chic was a nympho! She pulled a train on all four of us. You could put her stump on your navel and do her sideways! After she did us all, she broke out her three foot dildo, and had us take turns ramming her! That damn thing was almost as big around as a baseball bat! And she took all three feet! Wow, what a woman! I’m just glad I got to go first.