Copyright 2009, by Don MacLaren
The following story was published in the autumn 2009 issue of the literary magazine
The Write Place At the Write Time. The writing has been copyrighted, so if you wish to use or quote
anything in this story you must properly cite the source, including the
author's (Don MacLaren's) name.
US
Navy Literary Life
I would walk and walk and walk when we were in port – exploring around San
Francisco or Oakland or Berkeley or San Diego…Navy pay was low for an E-2 or
E-3 (a lower echelon enlisted man). But it didn't cost anything to walk if I
was broke, and anyway doing anything outside, away from the Navy was preferable
to being on the ship – broke or not. When I did have money I still walked all
over the place. But I would often stop in a restaurant or a café, where I would
read until my eyes couldn't stay open anymore. Then I would order coffee and
read some more. I would write till I couldn't hold my pen anymore; then I would
go back to reading till I could write again.
I would go to cheap Greek restaurants, cheap Filipino restaurants, cheap
Korean, Polish and Italian restaurants. Chinatown in San Francisco, Chinatown
in Oakland, Japantown – where I had spent my first night in San Francisco
before checking onboard the aircraft carrier
USS
Coral Sea
. I taught myself how to use chopsticks.
I taught myself how to read Shakespeare and James Joyce. I taught myself the
physical layout of the Bay Area and what buses and trains to take to get to
Golden Gate Park, the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley, and the Red Vic Movie
House in Haight-Ashbury. I learned how to read a book standing up at Cody's
Books in Berkeley – in five installments – three chapters at a time. I learned
to stomach the coffee in Zim's restaurant, corner of Market and Van Ness, San
Francisco, open 24 hours; coffee notwithstanding, a good place to be alone and
write and listen to the dialogue coming from the hookers, pimps, homeless,
pensioners and cops that inhabited the place late nights/early morns – much of
the dialogue in the form of soliloquy. I learned to avoid the portals of
McDonald's and Burger King – "through those portals pass souls on their
first step into the bowels of Hades" I wrote in one of my notebooks. I
wrote about the homeless people I talked with in San Francisco and Berkeley, the
mural on the building next to People's Park in Berkeley depicting Vietnam, The
Free Speech Movement, demonstrations, riots, the National Guard, and a hungry
hippy in SF bumming change. The murals on Telegraph Avenue in Oakland and
Berkeley, the murals in the Mission District, the graffiti in Berkeley
bathrooms: "Question: What genocide program took 500 years and 100,000,000
lives? Answer: The genocide of Native Americans by Europeans." "You
think you're alive, but we're really just on Channel 7. Guess what happens when
they change the channel?" A free concert in People's Park on a Sunday
afternoon. A homeless man I'd struck up a conversation with who told me he'd
been raised by wolves. Five minutes later I saw him running wild toward people
sitting on the grass as they listened to a Jimi Hendrix clone smoking a joint
as he played "Foxy Lady" on his guitar and a chick with a shaved head sang. The
wolfman got down on his hands and knees and howled after the people scattered.
Later, I saw the same wolfman in Mendocino in the midst of a soliloquy until he
interrupted his conversation to tell me he remembered me from People's Park and
could I spare some change? A woman on the phone in Mendocino in a bookstore
talking about people's skewed concept of time as I waited and waited to pay her
for
Writings and Drawings by Bob Dylan. Moonies on Market Street. The shipmate
from Virginia with tattoos on his chest, going through people's dungarees in
the berthing area, looking for money; another shipmate and I crossing the
border into Tijuana during one of our port visits to San Diego. He was getting
laid with a Tijuana bargirl while I was waiting for him in the bar downstairs,
drinking beer, watching another bargirl striptease on stage. "Don't tell
my wife," he told me after he was done. Later, we ate lunch and a pretty
waitress served us. "Do you think she understands English?" he asked
me. "Do you speak English?" he asked her. "No," she said.
"I love you," he said. With her blush she betrayed that she was
lying. She did speak English. Back on the ship sleeping in fits and starts
while at sea, General Quarters – a drill in which we have to man battle
stations – interrupting the little sleep time we're allotted. Quotes by Herman
Hesse, quotes by Norman Mailer, quotes by D.H. Lawrence, quotes by Henry
Miller, quotes by Boris Pasternak, quotes by Abraham Lincoln and Jesus of
Nazareth. Passages from the
San Francisco Chronicle,
National Geographic,
The
New York Review of Books,
TIME magazine, the small press and student newspapers
of the Bay Area. My sexual fantasies, perversions, obsessions compulsions,
hang-ups, fears and frustrations. All this and more I dutifully recorded in my
notebooks.
Some
of the books I read were Allen Ginsberg's
Howl,
Jack Kerouac's
On The Road,
Anthony Burgess'
A Clockwork Orange,
Walt Whitman's
Leaves of Grass,
Edgar Allan Poe's
Tales and Poems,
Jonathan Swift's
Gulliver's Travels,
Aldous Huxley's
Doors of Perception,
George Orwell's
1984. In
addition to these well-known works of literature, I read books by rock musicians:
Bob Dylan's
Tarantula
and
Patti Smith's
Babel. I also
re-read William Burroughs'
Naked Lunch
– three times.
*
I read
The
Outsider
by Colin Wilson
and in it Wilson describes the Russian dancer Vaslav Nijinsky keeping notebooks
in which he wrote anything that came to his mind, trying to transcend through
his writing, and writing like a madman. Indeed, Nijinsky did go mad – or at
least that is what society labeled him. But I admired him for having the
courage to be different from what was expected of him, and tried to emulate his
writing technique. The French poet Arthur Rimbaud said that a poet becomes a
seer by undergoing a compete derangement of the senses. All of this I tried to
do – in my writing and in my life away from the ship.
I probably wrote more prolifically my first year in the Navy than I ever had in
my life. In Radio School and since being stationed on the
Coral Sea
I had filled up several notebooks. At
first I used the light blue Navy notebooks sold in the Navy Exchange on base.
Then I began to buy spiral notebooks in stores off base and write in them. I
didn't really have time to organize my thoughts and write essays or stories. As
I mentioned, I tried to follow Vaslav Nijinsky's method of writing anything that
came to mind. Jack Kerouac and the Beats said one should write without editing,
letting one's mind run free and wild. William Burroughs said one should not
concern oneself with storytelling or plot. Life does not move in a linear
fashion, he said, and neither should one's writing. "There is only one
thing a writer can write about: what is in front of his senses at the moment of
writing," was a quote from Burroughs that I wrote down at the beginning of
one of my notebooks. Much of the writing came out as garbled gobbledygook, but
some of it was worth keeping and there were times it was humorous. I liked to
think of what I wrote as intense. Most of what I wrote I called poetry, but
there might not have been a name for it.
*
The
Coral Sea
was
scheduled to begin a deployment to the Western Pacific in November 1979. In the
military you are allowed 30 days of vacation per year, which is called
"leave." I took ten days leave, and decided to spend five days in
Michigan, then return to Northern California and spend a few days in Mendocino,
a small town and artists' colony on the coast, north of San Francisco.
*
I collected all my precious writing and the 40 or so books I had bought and
read since being stationed on the
Coral Sea, put them in my Navy issue seabag and
checked it as baggage for my flight from San Francisco International Airport
through to Grand Rapids. When I got off the flight in Grand Rapids I found that
my seabag had not arrived, and I reported it as missing to the airline. I also
found that a group of Iranians had taken over the US embassy in Tehran.
After
a few weeks, when I was out at sea, I opened a letter from my mother. "The
airline says they can't recover your seabag and that it's probably stolen," she
wrote. It was like reading that my future wife and child had been stolen.
I
put the letter back in the envelope and sat on the deck, in front of my locker,
with my head in my hands. Meanwhile the
Coral Sea
steamed toward the coast of Iran and prepared itself
for war.
Copyright 2009, by Don MacLaren