Whoring

Bridgette Bardot’s birthday has come and gone, a venerable 74 years old.  Many happy returns of the day, old dear; thank you so much for all those exciting wet dreams coming as they did in my adolescence.

I can but dimly recall snatches of her seminal movies.  They were my first peep at porn; an industry that has erected into every voyeur’s vista, slathered in HD profusion all over the net.

We’ve come a long way, baby, from the forbidden pleasure of chronograph stockings and vulva shots of yore.  Pornography is as pervasive today as corn flakes at the breakfast table.  It threatens to become the new definition for The Law of Diminishing Returns.  Watch enough of it, and you become either bored or jaded, the latter a slithering slide into more and more depravity.

I myself belong to the former ilk.  Thanks in large part to a vasectomy and the withering of my cancerous prostate, the clarion tinkle in my winkle no longer chirps its little song deep down in my loins, 400 times a day.

Don’t get me wrong: I do miss the roar of lust and the slick quick first poke of the penetration, I do I do I do.  But all quiet on the testosterone front has the more valuable effect of releasing my mind for the more important things in life.   What could be more important than sex, you say, with a cluck of incredulity?  Peace and tranquility of mind, my prurient friend, peace and tranquility of mind.

This is probably lost on a lot of you.  You will just have to reach sterile barrenness on your own to gain the proper perspective. You cannot yet know the relief of not acquiring a hard-on in a grocery store, a church or a business meeting.  Standing in front of your girlfriend’s parents with one will become just one more flash of chagrin, a display in the museum of memory.  It will come to be merely a knick-knack on the mantelpiece with no power to haunt you.

In my long ago youth, like the illusion of my own immortality, I could not believe that horniness would peter out one day. 

Soon after the shock of arriving and the calming of my terror at razor blades and vipers, each day at Tien Sha settled down into a dry-mouthed dust of ennui as I had never known it.  The days lurched on, feeding my fecund mind with fantasies of lebensraum!  Living space! And what came to mind?

Any thought, any word, any snapshot, any book, any eight by ten glossy that would stoke the testosterone down deep within and inflame the natural boyhood predication for sex.  To get laid, to score, to get some, to smack off a piece, to wrinkle my winkle, to titillate, to get on, to get off, to mount, to pony down, to cop a feel, to fumble-finger-linger, to snap a bra, to slide hand into panties, to grab, to tongue, to massage, to peel off girdle, hose, shoes, skirt, blue jeans, shorts, blouse, tank top, bikini, bathrobe, nightie, tee shirt.

To seek and get the blessed relief that comes with coming.  Some of you out there (hee hee hee hee hee) I have whispered in your dainty pearl of an ear and said words, introduced images, forbidden thoughts—all for the sole intent of gratification.

The speculated 400 times a day is not far from the mark.  I have heard it alluded to as every 28 seconds waking and sleeping.  I truly wish I could lie about this to you sweet things out there, I do, I do, I do. But what is preface and what is to follow must be wholly undiluted veracity.  I’m fighting for my sanity here.  This is no drill (Geez, I’m just addicted to puns! Regrets.)

Naughty puns are the nervous literary titter of a man who must expose his past to the world.  Let me say this before going forward.  I did go with prostitutes; I had sex for money.

I am not proud of this.  Some guys over there (and over here too) would posh-posh at my tiny stub of memory; but this is on Face Book. I’m not in the confessional pouring out my sins to Father Flanagan, with his kind certitude of redemption and assurances of confidentiality.

Everyone: my children, my ex-wives, my many paramours; shit, all my family is going to read this.  Not to mention friends, colleagues and people I worked with over the ensuing forty years.  But I am committed to doing this; so, this is going down now. (Sorry! One last icky sticky pun!)

The TV series China Beach would have you believe that scoring with a real live American girl in Viet Nam was just as likely as that soda fountain date back in Peoria. We will dispel that silly notion right here and now: there were only three ways to get sex in-country.

The first was whacking it wherever or whenever a moment’s privacy would allow.  Billy Crystal said it best: women need a motivation for sex; men just need a place.

Second is what I call enhanced whacking: rifling through EM-1 Byrd’s desk drawer for his collection of porn; getting hold of a copy of Playboy, Penthouse or Esquire (in a pinch), hiring the Koreans to bring their 8 MM reels of dogs with women, women dogs, all displayed on a rickety portable screen set up on a pusher boat fantail under the starry starry night. This porn film extravaganza was a one-night stand. That was so unfortunate.

The Service Craft Drive-in Movies complete with horsecock salami sandwiches and a river of cold bear was SRO for a single Saturday night.  Thank you, EM-1 Byrd; truly a memorable evening and about the only pleasant thing you ever did for me.  The tale of Byrd for another time. (I am SO sorry again. The puns are sort of a nervous tic.  Can’t seem to help myself.  Sorry sorry.)

One and two being only stop-gap measures, number three was to get the real deal.  That could only mean purchasing the services of a working girl of the night.  That was always a risky endeavor.

The first hurdle to overcome was location location location.  If one was stuck in the barracks or any secure military encampment, smuggling the girls past gate guards and roving patrols was very problematic.

On the other hand, the pusher boat crews had it made.  Their boats were floating apartments—bunks, reefers (both kinds) and air conditioning.  They comshawed window AC units from somewhere and plugged into the power on the pier as soon as they backed in and docked.  Like a frigging yacht club it was: twenty odd boats tied up alongside each other.  Borrow a cup of pontang? Why sure, neighbor!  Come on down and spill a little.

They would hook it across the harbor to the Stone Elephant side, procure the ladies and come back to the pier.  After the party, they would just run them back across.  Night girls!  Thanks for the memories!

One young hapless snipe had an encounter that reverberated for the remainder of his tour.  After finishing up work for the day, tired, dirty and covered in grease, one of the crews invited him below decks for a quickie.  Quickie indeed. He dropped his pants to his knees, climbed on top and almost immediately climbed down again, to wander off to shower and chow.  Thereafter he was known as Six-Stroke by one and all.  I can’t even remember his name any more if I ever knew it.

I too had an ideal location, the hooch.  One Saturday night, the guys persuaded me to host a party there.  The girls were fetched from I don’t know where and we shared three girls (one ‘girl’ had to have been 40) among five guys.  We piled on in turn, on the floor, on my double bed, with the overhead lights blazing away.  This was all done without a scintilla of sobriety amongst the five of us.  The women did not partake and didn’t like the lights either.

That was the one and only party in my hooch.  Two days later, I felt a drip-drip-drip in my skivvies.

Shit.

Off to the clinic to confirm what I already suspected.  I had the Clap. Gonorrhea. In modernspeak, an STD.  The remedy entailed a humiliation to which every one of the sailors on the pier partook.  Most days and nights, we simply hung it out and pissed over the side.  The antibiotic pills turned the urine a bright, almost translucent orange.  Out there in front of God and everybody, the stream of metallic orange spoke like a kindergarten tattletale.

Accompanied by whistles and taunts of ‘nyah nyah nyah NYAH nyah nyah!!!’, the abashed swab had to endure this torment for two weeks, the time necessary to complete the cure.  It was one of those events that nobody cared to relent.  Today it was me.  Tomorrow, it would someone else’s turn in the VD barrel.

This brings me to the next hurdle in the cheesy game of love: venereal disease.  The common Clap was easily treated with medication: take the pills daily until exhausted; easy enough.  Unfortunately, the women had a tendency to self-medicate themselves.  Using inferior black market drugs or neglecting to finish the treatment regime, some could develop a strain which resisted antibiotics.

This turned the merry lark into a far more serious condition.  Healing a resistant strain could render a man sterile…or worse.  There was a strain called the Black Syphilis.  This would not cure and one could lose not only one’s virility, one could end up losing the whole shooting match.  Genitalia literally rotted away until amputation was the only recourse.

It was a not-a-pretty-picture to which we were inured by virtue of our immortality.  Of course it couldn’t happen to me?  It was something of a deterrent, however, and I disregarded the danger for the sake of my need only five times in-country.  There was a sixth time, but that will be the topic of R&R in Hong Kong.

Some people were at it several times a month.  This is difficult enough for me to reveal with only five turns at bat; I sometimes wonder what full disclosure would bring for the satyrs who were our shipmates?

‘Oh hi, honey! Great to be back in the world! I only caught the Clap six…no, seven times; but the docs say I’m completely on the road to recovery!  Gosh, I missed you!  Can we make love now?’  How do you think THAT is going to play in Peoria?

One last hurdle to blissful consummation: we were in a fricking COMBAT ZONE.  The field of operations was the whole of Viet Nam, large parts of Cambodia and most of slender Laos.  Every doddering papasan, every enigmatic black-toothed mamasan, every kid on a bicycle and every whore on her back was the potential enemy.  There were no sticky ID badges (Why, hello there! I’m field Major Yun of the People’s Third Artillery Brigade!); no way to tell the gamers apart.

In late January to early February, the Vietnamese celebrate New Year’s by the lunar timetable of the Chinese calendar.  They call it Tết Nguyên Đán, or simply, Tet.  The first inkling I had of this was from watching my friend Earl. 

Earl was short on his second tour in-country. 

Suddenly, he began wearing his flak jacket night and day. “Earl, what is the deal, man?” He gave me a flat stare with no pretense at humor, “This is Tet, Corky”. And not another word uttered.  I guess he figured that no further explanation was needed.

Bobby Oertling was another one.  He had spent last year down in The Mekong on the river boats (won a Bronze Star for that).  He wasn’t toting his armor, but he did start packing his .45 around.

Sheeyut.  Some big deal?  I had neither sense nor experience to give me a clue.  Last year, I wasn’t exactly tuning in to the War at six o’clock like some soap opera.  I had a vague notion of the ’68 Tet Offensive, but most of that came from briefly visiting a frat brother hospitalized at Wilford Hall.  He had been a Marine Lieutenant fighting in Hue. He got shot in the throat, but survived his wound.

Frosty had connected with some Army dude who said he knew where a great whorehouse was on the Stone Elephant side of the Son Han River.  On the next Saturday night, the three of us took the ferry across, followed this dude down back streets and finally entered this endless maze of narrow alleys, barely wide enough for two people to pass abreast. Deeper and deeper, we tagged behind Tonto into the bowels of the city.  Finally, we heard the loud drunken noises of a lot of soldiers whooping it up.  In the near blind stupor of another Saturday night on the town, I had no idea where we were.  A thought flashed by, that we were going to need Tonto to lead us out of here, or we were going to be stuck in a whorehouse; unfortunately, our guide matched our level of stupefaction.

We negotiated the fare and got on with it.  I was soooo drunk that night.  Frosty and I did two girls next to each other on woven bamboo mats. Through the entire livelong bang, the girls conversed in low tones through the mosquito net divider, as if they were sitting in a salon somewhere, getting their nails done.

We finished fast and got out of there.  We traced our trail back to the ferry and got the hell onto our side of the river.  How I found myself in my hooch in the morning remains an unsolved mystery.  I never saw Tonto again.

Tet is a national holiday, but more importantly it is a time for family.  G-2 later purportedly discovered that about 4,000 NVA regulars had slipped into Da Nang over the holidays. There, not for warfare; there for family.

It was providence for Frosty and I that those battle-hardened troops chose not to foul their own nest, by disposing of two drunken American sailors screwing their little sisters for a lark on the town.

The danger Frosty and I had risked for an unfulfilling rut in the night.  The less I dwell on that, the better off I’m going to be.