COMING TO CONCLUSIONS

The Autobiography of Peter Tristan Stuart

by

Gene C. McCoy

CHAPTER 1

Part Two

Born in Indianapolis, just eight days before the crash of the stock market in October 1929, the first three years of my life were a swirl of traumatic, heartbreaking events that I am sure left me more confused, doubtful and concerned about whether or not I would survive than I was awed by the love of the people and marvels of the world that surrounded me.

In addition to my mother and father, already present in the home when I arrived were a sister, Betty Jane, age nine years, and a brother, "little Jimmie" age six years. Within my first six months "Little Jimmie" would die of scarlet fever and pneumonia. As the economic depression deepened my father, a heavy drinker, would lose his job, and the family would lose their home. My father's drinking increased, and when I was just three years old he abandoned the family. According to my sister Betty Jane several months passed when they did not know where he was. Jim finally surfaced in California where he was living with his mother and father in Montrose, a small town in the foothill suburbs of Los Angeles. In the Fall of 1933, in the depths of the depression, my mother, 12-year old Betty Jane, and I left Indianapolis for a torturous bus trip across the country. I do have vague recollections of that trip; Betty Jane was car sick during most of the journey, and as we passed through New Mexico and Arizona the bus driver called out "dough-baby houses" each time we passed an adobe construction. We arrived in California on, my fourth birthday, where we were reunited with Jim and became what would nowadays be characterized as a dysfunctional alcoholic family.

At that time my father was working as a sales/repairman in a small radio store which belonged to a man named Harry O'Brien on Brand Boulevard just south of Colorado Street in Glendale. We moved into a small house located on the lot behind my grandparent's house. My memories of this period are a kaleidoscope of dim images; a birthday party on the day we arrived in California: I have photographs of this party; I look slightly bewildered as I stand by my grandparents and the other children who would become my new playmates; a flood during the first New Year's eve and my father working all night to lug sandbags. On New Year's Day Grandpa and I walked to the corner of Waltonia and Ocean View Drive (so named because at that time, beyond the skyline of LA City Hall, one could see all the way to Catalina Island) to inspect the damage. There were rumors that cars filled with bodies had been found in the mud and rubble.

The job at A-1 Radio ended, exactly why I don't know, and my father found work on the New Deal WPA Music Project. It was during this period that I first became aware of a crooked smile and blank stare in his eyes that told me that my father was drunk. I came to hate that look on his face and in his eyes, and as I grew older it terrified me; it was a harbinger of violence.

Jim was a binge drinker, and he would go out every few months for several days at a time. We never knew where he was, when (or if) he would return, but when he did come home in the middle of the night there was hell to pay. He screamed, ranted and raved like a madman. He would sit in a chair talking to himself, insane talk that worked him into a frenzy. Then, he would physically attack my mother. She would scream for me to intervene, and I would jump out of my bed and rush to her rescue. Indeed, he was a madman when he drank, and sometime during the first couple of years that we were in California he was admitted to the State Mental Hospital in Norwalk, presumably for his alcoholism. I recall going to visit him in the hospital; it was near Halloween, and we carved a pumpkin. (Don't ask me how an imnate in a mental hospital had a knife. I don't know.} When he wasn't drinking Jim was mild, distant and sometimes charming. I both loved and hated him, and more times than once I wished he would go away and stay forever, or that he were dead.

I have since learned to separate the alcoholism from the man, and today I have compassion for him. I know that he did his best, and I also know that he worked his ass off to provide for his family during some tough times. I was once discussing our childhood with my sister, and she said, "We always had a roof over our heads and we never missed a meal, Pete," which was true.

Sometime during our first year in California we moved to a high rise apartment in Los Angeles somewhere north of Sunset Boulevard above Chinatown. There was a laundry nearby, and I recall playing with other children, and finding books of matches in the trash. One time my playmates and I built an "oven" from some orange crates, then built a fire under it. We had placed the oven outside in a small walkway between apartment buildings and nearly set the place on fire. It was while we were living in LA that I started kindergarten, and I recall that it was the first time that I became aware of oriental, now called Asian, children. Being so close to Chinatown there were a number of Chinese children in the school. We received milk and cookies for an afternoon snack, then climbed on to shelves to take naps. I recall that I did not like to nap in a strange place. I also believe that I had a hard time getting myself oriented in this apartment building because at least once I walked into the wrong apartment to find a person in bed who was surprised to see me standing in the doorway.

By the time I was ready to start first grade we had moved again, this time to a court on Lexington Avenue in Glendale. I have a class photograph, from Doran Elementary School and, as would be usual of all subsequent class photographs, I am on the end among the short boys. Once again I do have recollections of this period. In school I loved to walk around the classroom to visit with the children and the teacher tied me in my chair. That embarrassed me. I hated the walk home, however; invariably I would have to relieve my bowels about half way home, and I either messed in my pants or went into an abandoned garage in spite of being frightened by the empty old building. The last move of my childhood came in the summer of 1936 when we moved to a small white stucco house at 2916 Mary Street in La Crescenta which became the family homestead.

It was not long before everyone on Mary Street knew that Jim was a drunk. They heard him screaming at night when he returned from one of his binges, and on one such occasion the family car burned up in the driveway. Jim had come home drunk, thought that he had thrown a lighted cigarette out of the window of the car, but in fact it had blown into the back seat where it smoldered, and finally ignited about three in the morning. The widow who lived next door to us called the fire department and the whole neighborhood turned out to watch the spectacle of Jim drunk and raving as the firemen worked to extinguish the blaze.

In the Fall of 1936 I enrolled in the second grade of La Crescenta School, continued there through sixth grade, then went to A.W. Clark Junior High, and finally to Glendale High. I don't think I liked school; I think I was overwhelmed, and I felt inadequate and insecure. I was not a good student, nor was I interested in or good at sports. I was the last one to ever be picked to play on any team. Nevertheless, I learned my ABCs, to read, write and spell, the multiplication tables, addition, subtraction, and long division by the time I finished sixth grade and moved from La Crescenta school to Clark Junior High. At Clark I took an interest in music; I started to take trumpet lessons and enrolled in the band. Our house was just a block away from the school, and each morning I got up early, went to school where I played a bugle call while the flag was raised. That was my only extra curricular activity in my entire life. I started Cub scouts and dropped out. I did the same with Boy Scouts. I never went to a prom or a dance, nor did I belong to any clubs, societies or fraternities. I remember once reading a remark that Mr. Hansen, my wood shop teacher, had written about me: "Pete seems to be depressed most of the time." My mother's comment was, "You're just like your father." I do not know whether I was depressed or not. There is a theory about alcoholism that holds that alcoholics are born with an inadequate endorphin system. Endorphins are responsible for the human's natural ability to fight off depression, stress related discomfort and anxiety, so maybe I was chemically deprived and hence depressed. I suppose by the psychological standards of today I had reason to be depressed. I was frightened by the periodic violence in the home; I sometimes felt neglected in so far as having a parent who would talk to me, take an interest in my emotional well being, and my psychological difficulties which manifested in bed wetting and a stammer. During the first experiments in "camping out" in a vacant lot behind our house I frequently awakened with a wet sleeping bag and had to go into the house in the middle of the night. It was embarrassing, and I don't think it helped my mental health. I had a periodic recurring nightmare that I was being chased by monkeys? If anybody had reason to be depressed it was my mother, but if she was depressed, she never showed it to me. She was vigorous, an excellent cook and housekeeper, loved to work in her garden, and did not smoke, drink or have love affairs. For a while when I was very young she worked as a saleslady in Merton's dress shop on Broadway near the corner of Brand Boulevard in Glendale. For the most part, though, I remember her being at home when I left to go to school; she was always there when I arrived home again waiting for me with milk and cookies, and there were always cookies by the bed at night as well; she said prayers with me at bedtime and taught me to recite "Now I lay me down to sleep...., and God Bless...." She always awakened me with a joke on April Fool's Day: "Pete, get up! Come and see! There's a bear in the yard. There's snow in the yard...." whatever. I always fell for it. She was not interested in PTA, was never a Den Mother, nor did she have many, if any, activities outside her home. She was the one who taught me how to drive a car, took me to the DMV for my driving and written tests, made sure that I got a new outfit of clothes every spring, and went with me to church on Easter Sunday. Most of what I learned as a child I learned from my mother. On the other hand the only thing I recall my father teaching me was how to hold a hammer; he also advised me to read biographies, which I do.

My playmates during grade school were pretty much restricted to the other children on Mary Street; there was Orville Stuart, no relation, whose mother was divorced from Orville's father and remarried to an Italian. Everyone said he was a gangster; the word mafioso was not known in La Crescenta in those days. Then there were "Junie" (for junior), Barbara and Mary Adele Ellis. They had all been born in Australia, and I was very much impressed by this phenomenon. Their mother was also divorced. She had never remarried and she smoked, so she was a rarity and slightly mysterious woman in those days before Murphy Brown and single parenthood became so popular. The rest of the Mary Street gang included Dale Baker, whose father worked for the LA County Road Department, Ronnie Combs who actually lived on Community Street; Gordon Simms who actually lived on Foothill Boulevard. Gordon's mother had died when Gordon was young and his father had remarried a French Canadian dressmaker who was also considered rather exotic with her French accent. I once asked her to teach me how to speak French. She tried but I don't remember anything she taught me. After that I tried to teach myself Spanish. Finally there were Bob Lind, whose father had been gassed during World war I, and Dale Thompson whose mother was a school teacher; Dale's father was one of the owners of Thompson Brother's French Dry Cleaners in Montrose.

Among my playmates on Mary Street was Vern Johnson, the oldest and the hero of all of us. Vern was the best athlete, the biggest and the strongest. Vern's mother and father were divorced and he lived, along with his sister Clementina, with his grandparents. During the summers when we weren't having rubber gun wars, playing baseball or kick the can we all gathered in Vern's garage to build model airplanes, and" Clem" used to tell us ghost stories as on the long summer evenings we sat around her on the ground in a circle while she was swinging slowly in a tire swing hanging from a huge peppertree in the Johnson's front yard. Vern's father Tron had an auto repair garage on the corner of Mary Street and Ramsdell where my father and other men used to hang out and drink.

There was one particular man named Arno who was a rather pathetic case. He was a Fitzgeraldian character; a natty dresser who wore blue blazers and white trousers he drove a sporty convertible car. His girlfriend Florence was a classy woman who dressed in expensive clothes, and smoked Philip Morris cigarettes, which at that time had a very unique scent. This smell when mixed with the scent of her perfume gave Florence an aura of distinction. Arno went down hill fast with his hard drinking and finally committed suicide in Tron's garage after Florence left him

By the time the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941 I was beginning to go on overnight hiking and camping trips in the Angeles National Forest in the San Gabriel mountains just a few miles from our house on Mary Street. I had expanded my circle of pals to include Don Lorenz, and Doug Touhey both of whom became my camping and hiking companions. Our first major expedition was a backpack trip on an all day hike straight over Mount Lukens to Grizzly Flat. Later we extended our horizons and went into the West Fork of the San Gabriel River, Switzer's Camp, Chilao, Charlton and Buckhorn Flats and Devils Canyon. We all got special permits from the Forest Service that allowed us to carry 22 rifles in the Angeles National Forest, and even though parts of the forest were closed because of the war we were permitted to enter these areas to hunt and trap predatory animals. During this period of camping and hiking I began to define my personality as an independent, self sufficient loner. Being able to plan a several days backpacking trip, and mobilize all that would be required to execute it gave me feelings of self worth that I did not get from my mediocre academic performance in school. I subscribed to Boy's Life Magazine, and dressed the part of an outdoors boy. I wore lace-to-toe logger's boots, Levi jeans, plaid flannel shirts, and Levi jackets. I began to have fantasies of becoming a Forest Ranger when I grew up. My next door neighbor, Ted Montgomery, was a retired Forest Service Ranger, and he encouraged me in this fantasy but told me it was a lonely life. Ted had never married, and when he was several years older he committed suicide in the basement of his house. I hoped that I would have a wife and companion to pass the time with me in my solitary place high atop a hill in a fire lookout tower. In fact, many the nights when I was on camping trips I longed for a companion for my sleeping bag, and these longings became more acute after I had seen the movie "For Whom the Bell Tolls." The idea of having someone like Ingrid Bergman to share my solitude in the mountains in my "sleeping robe" appealed to me. I loved the song "With someone like you, a pal good and true, I'd like to leave it all behind and go and find someplace that's known to God alone.....and let the rest of the world go by." After that movie Barbara Ellis got her hair cut short like Ingrid's was in the film. I had a crush on Barbara and she became the object of my sexual fantasies when I masturbated. One night when we were playing hide and seek I showed her my weenie; she didn't like it and called me a "nasty little boy." I didn't like that. She hurt my feelings. She was not the first girl to hurt my feelings, though. In the fifth and sixth grades I had a crush on Linda Shields. One day I was talking to Linda on the telephone, and she thought I was Gordon Simms. "Who do you like better, Linda?" I asked her. "Me or Pete?" "You, but don't tell Pete," Linda replied. I was sorry I had asked.

I know that my earliest experiences must have been nothing but loneliness, pain,fear of abandonment, and an unconscious sense of being deprived of the basic human need to be respected, understood and taken seriously. Nevertheless, I was a survivor, and at a very early age I wanted to work. My first effort to earn money at about ten years old was at George Vilmer's little Gilmore Gasoline Station on Foothill Boulevard. I asked George if I could wash windshields for tips from the customers. He said yes, but in a few days he let me pump gas, and said he would pay me 20 cents an hour. The Gilmore station had the old fashioned gas pumps with glass tops that required refilling by a hand pump, and I loved the job; when George opened his new modern Texaco franchise on the corner of Foothill Boulevard and La Crescenta Avenue he took me with him. I was thrilled. I don't remember why I left George, but after that I worked for George Pesta in a Beacon Station, and as a stock clerk and soda jerk at "Pop" Stafford's La Crescenta Pharmacy, also as a mechanic's helper in an auto repair garage; I delivered the Ledger and Los Angeles Times newspapers, hustled magazine subscriptions, sold Christmas cards door to door, and I mowed lawns and washed dishes. What ever recognition I missed out on at home, or from girls, I made up for in my work. All of my employers thought I was great. My hobbies aside from my outdoor activities were making model airplanes, cars and trains, and reading. One of my favorite books was Toby, the story of a young boy and his circus monkey; I cried at the ending when the monkey, Toby, dies. Then there was T-Model Tommy, the stories of a young man who makes a success in the trucking business starting out with a Model T Ford, then later in '32 getting a V-8. I also liked the adventure stories of Howard Pease, whose young heros all went to sea.

The war years from 1941 to 1945 for me and most of my playmates on Mary street were easy. The most difficult thing I ever had to deal with was coming of age and wanting to own and drive a car during gas rationing. For Vern Johnson things were not so easy. Vern got drafted and ended up in the infantry in Europe. I wrote V-Mail letters to him as well as to my cousin Jack who also was in the infantry but in the Pacific. Money became more plentiful as my father found regular work, and during two summers we took a small house trailer to Redondo Beach to be near where my father was working on an aluminum plant in Torrance.

I both liked and disliked these summers. On one hand I enjoyed the beach, but I missed my friends in La Crescenta and the hiking and camping that we did together. I took up surf fishing and fishing off of the pier in Redondo; I got a job of sorts working on a small fishing boat that ran a string of set lines off Redondo and Manhattan Beaches. I finally had to give up the fishing boat because I got seasick as we drifted while pulling in the set lines.

By the summer of '44 I had completed Junior High school and in the Fall of 1944 I enrolled in Glendale High School which was another major change in my life. In La Crescenta I had been within walking distance of school, but now I had to take a school bus to Glendale, some eight miles away. The campus was large, there were many new kids to meet from other Junior High Schools, and I did not make the change easily. I felt more inadequate than ever, but I did get a girl friend from Glendale. Her name was Gail McDonald. We went steady for a couple of months, but she told me one night that she wanted to play the field, but that we could still be friends. That was just another rejection for me and I almost expected it. I was not heart broken. Early in 1945, the last year of the war, I saw an advertisement for young people to work during the summer in Yosemite National Park for the Yosemite Park and Curry company which at that time had the concession for operating all of the park facilities. I answered the ad, and got a call for an interview. I got myself dressed up, took a bus to LA and had my first serious job interview. I was fifteen years old.

My interviewer was impressed with my interest in outdoors stuff, and said that after my first year as a Houseman in the valley, I could be considered for a Trailman's job in some of the camps in the high sierra for work in subsequent summers. When I left the interview I was hoping and praying that I would get the job. I could just see myself handling a string of pack horses and mules up in the high sierra. My prayers were answered. I got the job in Yosemite, but I blew my first big opportunity. This was the first time I had ever been away from home and on my own. Moreover, it was the first time I found myself out in the world competing with strangers. Even though I was placed in a tent for living with two other boys, I was pretty lonely. They seemed to me to be better than me, from good, functional families. They were boys and girls who played tennis and talked of plans to go to college at Stanford, Cal Berkeley or SC. I met and liked one girl named Marge who lived in Berkeley. Her father was an executive with Pacific Gas and Electric, the big California utility company. I was ashamed to tell her about my family,and what my father did for a living.

One night I went for a walk by myself down by the Merced river and ran into a couple of sailors. They had a bottle of rum they were passing between them and they offered it to me. I had sipped beer, and sneaked drinks at home, but this was the first time that I remember drinking enough to get really drunk. I got sick and threw up. I went back to my tent. I was already in bed when the other boys came in and tried to talk to me. I faked being asleep, but they could smell the alcohol. "He's drunk,"one of them said, and within the next few days I left Yosemite and went back home. That was probably the first time that I ran away from an uncomfortable situation, but as I look back on my life I have come to the conclusion that it was the first of many times that I would try to run away from not only difficult situations but also from myself.

During the rest of that summer of '45 I worked with my father as an electrician's helper, and I got a taste of just how hard construction work can be, and just how hard he had worked most of his life to support me and the rest of his family. During the first weeks of August 1945 we were working at wiring blast fences on the P-38 flight line at the Lockeed Aircraft plant at what is now Burbank Airport. We received news of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings, and each day we thought that the war would end. Finally on August14, 1945 the war did end. It was VJ day. Vern Johnson came home from Europe. My cousin Jack came home from the Pacific and stopped to visit with us on his way home to Indiana.

In September I returned to Glendale High for my sophomore year, but I was not in a frame of mind to settle down and study. I still felt small, insignificant and alienated on what seemed to me the big campus. Moreover, my head was full of the war stories I had heard from Vern Johnson and Jack. Somehow I and a group of other borderline delinquents heard that at sixteen years old one could "join the Merchant Marine." One day we cut school, and went down to the harbor at San Pedro where we learned that one could, indeed, go to sea at sixteen but it required going first to San Francisco where we would have to get our Seamen's Papers and join the Sailor's Union of the Pacific. On my sixteenth birthday in 1945, along with Steve Ashenfelter, I again left my home in LaCrescenta. Steve and I boarded the Coastal Daylight train for San Francisco where we eventually got our seamen's papers, SUP Union permit, and out of the union hall signed on the William C.C. Claiborn, a rust bucket Liberty ship bound for Japan. Ever since that time I have been on my own in a world that has been frightening and violent, but nevertheless full of excitement and adventure.

My stint as an ordinary seaman was an initiation into the manly pleasures of drinking in the bars along the San Francisco Embarcadero, the thrill of "taking my trick on the wheel" of a Liberty Ship, and the pleasure of belonging to a crew of men who ate, slept, drank, lived and worked together. It was also my introduction into the magic of sex and women. One afternoon I called Marge, the girl I had met and liked in Yosemite, and she invited me over to her house in Berkeley. Compared to my tiny stucco house on Mary Street Marge's home was a mansion. Set high up in the Berkeley hills overlooking the bay it was surrounded by trees. It was appropriately furnished, and I was so impressed or intimidated by the elegance that I never called Marge back. Something instinctive told me that Marge was in a class beyond what I could aspire to. I was in San Francisco about two months when I had my first sexual experience with a woman. Following a tip we had gotten from a doorman in a dive in the Tenderloin North Beach district, a whole gang of us went to a hotel on Broadway just above the Embarcadero. I was scared as hell as I waited in the darkened room for the woman. I even thought of running away, but I waited and fretted. Finally she came into the room, slipped off the house dress she was wearing and lay down on the bed. I went to the bed, and lay beside her. I was limp as a wet noodle. "Your first time?" she asked softly. "Yes," I squeaked. "Relax," she said. "I'll help you." I did relax, she did help me, and I lost my virginity in a San Francisco whorehouse when I was sixteen years old. I was very lucky; we all had sex with the same woman, and when we were about a week out to sea all of the gang except me came down with a "dose of the clap."

The Bo'sn on the Claiborn was a man named Gus Bartlett, and he was the archetype of a seafaring man. About thirty five years old, Gus was broad shouldered and all muscle. His torso and arms were covered with tatoos, and on his big muscular chest was a full rigged sailing ship with the words "Homeward Bound" tatooed below it. He was impressive and a strict authoritarian. We were about three days out to sea; I had been taught how to steer and take my "trick on the wheel." The two able bodied seamen on my watch and I were in the crew's mess eating lunch prior to going on our 12 to 4 part of the day watch. Gus came in the mess hall and told "Whitey," one of the ABs, to split the wheel between him and "Slim," the other AB. Gus had something he wanted me to do, he said. At twelve o'clock I reported to Gus, and he took me out on deck to the winches by the cargo hatches. The beds of the winches were a mess; full of grease from being slopped with oil during the cargo loading, trash, cans and bottles, they smelled as though the stevedores had used them as toilets, which they probably had. "Junior (my nickname) when a bo'sn tells you to do something, you don't ask questions or argue about it. You do it. An ordinary seaman is less than shit," Gus said softly. "Do you understand that?" I swallowed hard and stared at him. "Yes," I squeaked. "The other day when I told 'Zombie' (my buddy Steve's nickname) to clean the heads everyday, you argued that all of the ordinaries should clean the heads," Gus said. "Junior, on this ship, I decide what everybody, especially ordinary seamen, are going to do and when they are going to do it. Do you hear me?" "Yes, sir," I squeaked again. "Now then, you see them winch beds. I want you to clean everyone of 'em, and there are ten of 'em, so as you can eat out of 'em." He handed me a bucket, a broad scraper and a bottle of kerosene, then turned on his heel and left me staring at the greasy mess and the vast expanse of sea. There was no place for me to run or hide. It took me about a week to get the winch beds cleaned. One day Gus came in the crew's mess and told "Whitey" and "Slim" that they should again split the wheel watch with me. Gus never said another thing to me about the incident, and that day I was glad to get my hour and twenty minute "trick" on the wheel again. I had learned to respect and fear authority, and to keep my mouth shut. After a torturous winter crossing during which we sailed through blinding fog and a horrendous pacific typhoon, that caused us to shake, pitch and roll we arrived in Japan during the week between Christmas and New Year's eve of 1945. The war had been over for less than four months, and the occupation forces were still getting organized, trying to find the men's room, so to speak, but the geisha houses were in full swing, catering to the war weary troops who had come up from the South Pacific islands.


We were tied up and discharging cargo at Yokohama Central Docks when a Duty Driver from the Tokyo Motor Pool came on board to get a cup of coffee and warm himself up. He had driven a VIP from Tokyo to Yokohama, and on his dead head trip back to Tokyo he had picked up one of our crewmen at the Red Cross Canteen and had given him a lift out to the docks. A light snow was falling as I stood at the head of the gangway and watched them climb out of the jeep. The three of us walked through the passageway to the crew's mess where I poured coffee for all of us and sat down at the table with the driver, a freckle faced corporal from Texas.

It was not long before he was spinning a yarn about the geisha houses, and after a lot of questioning, mostly from me, he gulped the last of his coffee and stood up. "Hell," he said. "I cain't tell y'all what them places is like. Come on with me, and I'll jest show'em to you." I jumped up from the table, ran to my fo'c'sle, grabbed a jacket, then met the driver at the jeep. I climbed in beside him and we took off for Tokyo.

It was snowing hard now. We drove for more than an hour and I was completely lost by the time we turned off a narrow country lane into the garden of a large rural estate where we parked the jeep. After pulling off our shoes at the door, we entered one of the several buildings standing inside the wall surrounding the garden.

The air was filled with the smells of incense and wood smoke from the braziers that burned in the tatami covered rooms. We walked down a corridor, along the open rice paper doors, looking into the rooms where kimono clad women sat giggling, eyes cast downward, around the braziers. While it may be a cliche, I felt like a "kid in a candy store," with all of those beautiful women just waiting to be asked to go to bed wi th me. We walked through all of the buildings, and there must have been two hundred women, finally we stopped in one of the rooms where a "Mamasan" and two young girls were seated on the floor sipping hot saki from small porcelain cups. The youngest, a tiny fragile girl, maybe eighteen years old, poured a small cup of saki and kneeling before me handed it to me. She sat down beside me and gestured for me to drink. I sipped the clear warm liquid and felt the rush of the alcohol hitting my system.

The lights became softer; her face became more beautiful and her soft brown skin more radiant between the oval arcs of shinning black hair hanging softly around her cheeks. I sat, legs crossed, looking into her eyes for several minutes, then she reached out, took the cup from me and placed it on the table, and held my hands in hers and together we sat there, silent and staring into one another's eyes. We must have passed five or ten minutes that way before she slipped my hand inside her kimono and placed it on her breast. It was small and firm, and the nipple was erect. A flicker of desire sparked in my loins, and with one slow, liquid and unfettered movement she was on her knees, then standing, tugging gently on my arms. I shook my finger from side to side to indicate no. I pulled out my wallet to show her that I had no money. "Me presento you pom pom," she said.

I stood up and followed her to another room. She slid the rice paper door closed then turned to face me. Untying the sash of her kimono she let it drop to the floor then came to where I was standing. She unzipped my jacket, and slowly, one button at a time, unbuttoned my shirt and pulled it off. Then she was on her knees again, in front of me, and with the same slow movements was unbuttoning my Levis. Her hand was inside my underpants, massaging me, and then her mouth found me. In and out she took me to the edge of delight then gestured for me to lie down on the silk comforter spread out on the tatami matting. I wanted her but she was not ready. She had more to teach me about love and loving.

I lay naked on the comforter while she rubbed my body with a rough, hot, steaming towel that had been impregnated with a light perfume that smelled of spring flowers. Her hands were rubbing and stroking my body with scented oil; finally she lay down beside me, and I lost all sense of time and space. We slept and made love intermittently during the night until finally, I awakened to the first light of dawn filtering through a stained glass window. I had no idea where I was in relation to my ship and the Yokohama Central Docks; the duty driver was gone and I spoke no Japanese. I felt a brief moment of panic as I recalled the stories I had heard of an occasional GI being found murdered by a still angry, unpacified population.

I pulled on my clothes and from outside I heard the unmistakable growl ofa GI six-by-six truck sputtering in the chilly dawn. I kissed my lover goodby and rushed out to where the truck was warming up. My life would never be the same again. I had been initiated into the fraternity of man. I was a card carrying member of the human race. Not only was I no longer a virgin; I was a man of the world. I had been seduced by a woman. When we completed discharging the cargo the William C.C. Claiborn was given to the Japanese so they could get their troops home, and eventually restore their merchant marine. The ship was stripped of her guns, and classified radar gear, and one day a Japanese crew came on board. The American crew was taken off and sent to an army repo-depo to await a troopship to take us home.

Gene McCoy © July 1998

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