That night. Now that was something else. We’d stumbled into this little shithole of a bar, a real dive. Five bucks at the door got you a bottomless cup of their house punch – “all you can drink” until five in the morning, or until you finally keeled over and passed out face down in a puddle of the stuff.
Tasted like something scraped out of a back-alley still – pure sugar cane and cheap, gut-stripping rum, the kind that guaranteed you’d be pissing syrup and shaking for a week if you didn’t die of diabetes first. But Christ, it was strong. A few of those ladlefuls, and you were well and truly fucked, blind to the world and ready for anything or nothing at all.
That was one of the ways those joints had to get their hooks into you, bleed you a little drier. Sometimes, they’d have a girl stashed under a table, just out of sight. Then the mama-san, usually some leathery old bat who looked like she’d smoked a million cigarettes and swallowed all the bad news in the world, would lay out the rules for her little game.
She’d cackle, teeth like old tombstones, “Alright, boys! Guess who’s gettin’ his cock sucked!”
Simple enough. You point out the lucky bastard you figured was getting the phantom blowjob down there in the shadows. If you nailed it, he had to buy everyone’s drinks. Pick the wrong guy, and the tab landed on your sorry ass. The best part? Every damn sailor at the table had to act the part, groaning and squirming like their soul was being sucked right out through their zipper.
A weird, grubby little ritual. Who the hell knew what was really going on down there in the dark, under that sticky table? Maybe something, maybe nothing. Just another con in a town built on ‘em.
Then there was my personal favorite: the ping pong catcher. I was a goddamn champion at that. Some young thing would get up on a makeshift stage, squat down, and load herself like an old Civil War cannon with a fistful of ping pong balls. Then, with a surprising amount of precision, thwump, she’d shoot one out. Your job was to catch it in your mouth. You did, you got a free beer. I think I snagged twelve free San Miguels that night. Big, cold, delicious bastards. I was flying, drunk as a skunk, blacking out here and there. For a while, it felt like heaven, or the closest I was gonna get.
Then came the grand finale, their last act in bleeding us dry. She’d have us stack up a pile of those peso coins on the filthy floor. Then she’d squat right over them, a little wiggle, a smirk, and poof – the goddamn coins would vanish, right in front of your booze-soaked eyes. Like magic, only dirtier.
A moment later, she’d waddle over to a rusty metal bucket in the corner. You’d hear it clear as day: bing, bing, bing, as the coins hit the bottom.
That sound, that was us. That was how we felt as the night finally died. Like we’d hit the bottom of the goddamn bucket ourselves. Empty, used up, and knowing it was time to crawl back to the ship.
Curfew hit like a hammer. We were way too far gone, the ship a distant, sober dream. No way in hell we were hoofing it back.
So we piled into some beat-up taxi – me, Taylor, and that loudmouth kid from Michigan crammed into the back, Goodman riding shotgun. Four of us, a tangled mess of limbs in that yellow tin can, reeking of the house punch and whatever cheap thrills we’d managed to sniff out. Still babbling, half-coherent, about the wreckage of the night.
The driver, just some local face in the dark, probably heard it all a thousand times. He chimed in, casual as you please, with the standard line: “So, you boys get lucky? Find a good woman?” Like it was all just part of the goddamn tourist package.
But me and Goodman, we just shook our heads in the dark of that cab. “Nah, man, not tonight.” Goodman, always having to add his two cents, mumbled something about liking them “fresh, not too many miles on the odometer,” or some other weird, slick shit he probably thought sounded cool.
The taxi driver, he picked up on it. Maybe he figured we thought we were too good for the usual lineup, the girls working the strip. Or maybe he just sensed we were chasing a different kind of buzz that night, a different brand of poison. I don’t know.
But the driver, he wouldn’t let it drop. Kept digging at us, pushing, especially Goodman. Like he had a personal stake in our goddamn sex lives.
By the time we hit the pier, everyone tumbled out, except the driver leaned in. “Listen,” he said, voice like gravel. “You want fresh? These women here, they ain’t fresh. I get you fresh.” And Goodman, goddamn him, he just nodded and stayed in the cab as it pulled away into the darkness.
Back on the USS Nimitz, that floating grey purgatory. Soon as we cut loose from port, we were sucked right back into the usual grind, the glorious goddamn hamster wheel of our naval careers. Just more bullshit, different day.
I didn’t see Goodman for nearly a week. They had us buried in different departments, different corners of the same steel trap. Then I bumped into him at the gym, surrounded by the usual stink of sweat and desperation.
He looked guilty as hell. Couldn’t meet my eye, kept his gaze fixed on the deck plates like they held the secrets of the universe. Finally, he pulled me aside, his face all tight and sallow. He had that look, the one a man gets right before he tells you he’s just buried a body, or that the clap finally caught up with him.
And then he spilled it, the whole rotten story.
That night, after they’d dropped us off, the taxi driver hadn’t taken Goodman to some dive bar or cathouse like we figured. No. The sonofabitch had driven him to his own damn house, family asleep down the hall, for Christ’s sake. Woke up his own daughter, his own flesh and blood.
Goodman mumbled something about her being “quite a bit younger, but not underaged,” whatever the hell that was supposed to mean. Said she wasn’t like the usual bar girls, just looked… normal. For twenty bucks, American, the driver let him have her. Twenty pieces of silver for his own kid.
Goodman said the walls were paper-thin, that every sound must have carried. Said he felt the booze churning in his gut, the pressure of the whole goddamn night, the driver waiting. He told me, his voice all hollow, that it was the sickest, most fucked-up, awkward moment of his entire life. Something that would dig its claws into him and gnaw, forever.
I looked at his face then. Yeah, I believed him. The poor bastard was already haunted. And then he finally choked it out, the whole rotten story.
Yeah, you could try to dress it all up with some deep thoughts, some “life lessons.” Mutter about how it showed you women were just slabs of meat on the butcher’s block, and men nothing but walking bank accounts, good for a withdrawal and little else.
But that’s mostly bullshit. The common thread in all those rotten stories, the gut-truth of it, was always simpler: what people will do for money. And the kind of power you could swing when you were the one holding the bills.
As for me, the only permanent trophy I dragged out of that muck was this goddamn ring of sores around my mouth – yeah, turns out I was a real ping-pong catching champ, a regular gold medalist in gutter games. Ah, eighteen. Dumb as a sack of hammers back then, and twice as eager to get smashed to shit.
