A Doghouse Tale
Smashwords edition
Text by
Bert Oldenhuis
eISBN 978-616-222-028-9
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Text Copyright© Bert Oldenhuis
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This is a work of fiction and other than well-known individuals and news events referred to for purposes incidental to the plot, all names, places, characters and events are products of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons living or dead is purely coincidental.
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To Mary
who outclassed me by about a million miles or more...
The Fall Guy
If the ship begins to roll, call the Mate,
If the cook runs out of coal, call the Mate
If the Old Man goes to bed, if you see a squall ahead,
If you need the sounding lead, call the Mate.
If the running lights are out, call the Mate,
If your latitude’s in doubt, call the Mate
If the wind begins to howl, if the sailors start to growl,
If the whistle chord gets foul, call the Mate.
If you’re coming into port, call the Mate,
If the midnight lunch runs short, call the Mate,
If the cargo starts to shift, if the workboat goes adrift,
If the fog begins to lift, call the Mate.
If you want to drop the hook, call the Mate,
If you’re looking for the cook, call the Mate,
If you run a light abeam, if the Chief can’t give you steam,
If the messboy has no cream, call the Mate.
If you need the crew on deck, call the Mate,
If the gangplank is a wreck, call the Mate,
If the captain’s on the blink, if a drunk falls in the drink,
If you don’t have time to think, call the Mate.
If the boxes won’t defrost, call the Mate,
If the chartroom key is lost, call the Mate,
If the thermostats won’t work, and the reefer’s gone berserk,
If the nightmate’s got a quirk, call the Mate.
Yes, that’s who the fall guy is;
All the petty griefs are his,
That poor old bird never gets a pleasant word,
That’s why I thank the Lord I’m just a Third.
(Anonymous Kings Point Alumnus)
Chapter 1
April 1964 – April 1968
If you didn’t have any demerits outstanding, if your grades were up to par and if you passed inspection like a good plebe, you could be allowed by the graces of the upper class and academic board to go and work outside the Academy walls and earn yourself ten bucks or so on Saturdays. Mowing lawns mostly, some gardening here and there, a little house fixing for little old ladies in houses that were way too big for them but left to them by their husbands who had croaked while they lived on and on refusing to give up the domain, some garage work, or in Case’s case, toting bales and bolts of cloth in Eugene Stein’s warehouse in Little Neck – a stone’s throw from the Academy but nevertheless far enough for Eugene’s sexy little Italian secretary to come and pick him up outside Vickery Gate.
Her name was Rosanne Rossellini and when she sat behind the wheel of Eugene’s Lincoln, she looked like a ten year old child, not even able to look over the rim of the steering wheel and barely able to drive the sleek black hearse because her feet couldn’t reach the pedals. Case had to crouch in the front seat while she almost had to drive standing up. But she was anything but a child; curves in all the right places, a beautifully sculpted face with a fine nose, coal black eyes and long, black naturally wavy hair. She always wore blouses that drew Case’s eyes like a magnet to her inviting cleavage, and miniskirts that made him want to put his hands between her well formed, muscular but very feminine thighs. He would dream of Rosanne on the nights that he returned from working in Eugene’s warehouse, sometimes beating off underneath the covers after lights out when he was sure that his roommate was fast asleep and he could hear him snoring.
But Rosanne was twenty four and Case was only nineteen – she was an ‘older woman’ in his eyes, an unreachable goal, a woman of the world, experienced, gone through many lovers no doubt with a face and a figure like that, and certainly not interested in what must seem like a naïve plebe in her eyes, a boy who had barely shed the pimpled marks of adolescence. This almost forbidden attraction was mutual Case sensed, and he treated Rosanne from the first day that he saw her with all the respect he could muster while trying to avoid staring at her blouse and fighting the urge to reach for her crotch underneath her always tightly drawn miniskirt. He didn’t know if she had similar feelings for him, as their conversations were always superficial, courteous toward one another, light. Never did they divulge anything about themselves, their past, likes or dislikes, did they have a girl or boyfriend or anything of the sort.
He did ask her out once, about three weeks after they met, that is, three weeks after she picked him up and dropped him off at the main gate of the Academy every Saturday. It was a disaster and he knew then that it wasn’t the age difference between them that had prevented them from exploring the minds and bodies of each other – it was the enormous difference in height.
They went to dinner in a classy restaurant in Great Neck on a Saturday night – she drove her own car then and picked him up at Vickery Gate again because cadets weren’t allowed to have cars. It was a metallic blue Corvette with standard gear shift that she still couldn’t handle after three years of driving it, and in which Case could barely wrangle himself. And it was the first time he actually walked alongside her, because in all the time that he had seen her he had only seen her half standing behind the wheel of Eugene’s black Lincoln or sitting at her desk high up behind the glass wall of the office, while he was toting bales in the warehouse.
They entered the restaurant and he could hear the guests seated at the tables snickering as they walked past. He felt like he was taking his little sister out to dinner – Case in his dress blues and she half his size, holding his hand and walking beside him, dressed in a very tightly fitting shimmering silvery dress even shorter than the miniskirts she always wore and which she constantly had to pull down because it worked its way up her ass as she walked. He hadn’t felt so humiliated and conscious of his height since his junior year in high school and he was sure she felt the same way albeit for her own diminutive posture.
They ate, they talked superficially and they kept praising the dishes that were put in front of them. Case paid the bill and they left again. He told her that he had to get up very early on the following morning because he had watch duty and would she please drop him off at the gate. He noticed a relief in her voice when she said that she too had to get up early because she had to go and visit her folks in Connecticut. She raced back to the Academy, thanked Case for a wonderful evening and a great meal and gave him a peck on the forehead like a mother would with her nine year old son.
Case first met Eugene Stein in the spring of 1964, about four months before he would leave on his sea year. It was during the first year at the Academy after he had passed the first six months of humiliation and degradation which sifted the men from the boys. Eugene was Jewish, middle aged, short but not too short, overweight, slightly bald, a large nose, shifty little black eyes and a sense of humor that took some getting used to, but was unsurpassed once Case understood it. Eugene immediately took a liking to Case, perhaps because he was a businessman and saw the potential of cheap cadet labor who would be willing to work his ass off for six hours just to earn enough beer money so he could blow it all at Maurice’s that same night, or maybe because he just liked him.
He was an importer of exclusive textiles. Truckloads of bolts of expensive cloth from Ireland, France, England, Egypt, India and Australia were dumped on the receiving bays of his warehouse during the week and it was Case’s job to put all these bolts in proper sections in the racks; mostly by forklift truck but sometimes by hand. Wholesalers would also come to his warehouse during the week, examine the bolts, feel the texture of the cloth, take notes, make comments and withdraw to Eugene’s office to shake hands with Eugene to close their deals and ogle at Rosanne, Eugene’s secretary. It was also Case’s job to take the same bolts of cloth that he had stored the week before in their proper places and take them out again, laying them on the loading bay in lots so that the wholesaler’s trucks could come and take the loads away during the following week. It was grueling work but rewarding, inasmuch as he indeed earned ten or sometimes twelve bucks in one afternoon which he invariably blew that very same night in Maurice’s. And he had to drink fast because plebes had to be back on Academy grounds by ten o’clock sharp if they didn’t have special permission to stay out later if they were on a date or a special event. In any case, Maurice was off limits for plebes after ten on Saturdays; dates, special events, weekend liberty passes or not.
It was during a slack time one Saturday that he learned of Eugene’s special penchant – he wasn’t a heavy drinker but he collected whisky. Every imaginable brand was in his collection of booze – a rack he had constructed on the back wall of his warehouse reaching from floor to ceiling and at least thirty feet long, filled with bottles of Scotch and Bourbon from all over the world graced the shelves of this rack which was locked off by heavy steel mesh grated doors as if they were priceless artifacts in a museum, which in fact some of them were. It was at this time also that Case learned that The MacAllan was one of the most expensive Scotch whisky’s in the world, with the acme of that brand being the distillate of 1926 and particularly the one of 1940, just before the war started and all the distilleries in Scotland were barred from producing another drop of whisky in the name of ‘war effort’, although Case and Eugene couldn’t possibly think of a reason why stopping the distillation of such a noble drink would contribute to that cause.
He had twenty four bottles of the 1940 MacAllan in his collection and for a reason known only to himself he broke one open, invited Rosanne to join them and poured each of them a drink in a heavy lead crystal tumbler. They tasted the drink of the gods as he put it that Saturday afternoon during a break, they tasted another and then he abruptly put the cap back on and placed the drink of the gods back behind the steel mesh doors of his vast whisky emporium. He asked Case later that afternoon if he could bring another cadet with him for the next couple of Saturdays because he’d made some good deals lately and there was a lot of cloth to be moved.
Most of his classmates were indisposed and unavailable; they had to work off their demerits or were desperately seeking excuses to go out and do anything but manual labor. Mowing lawns was fine, toting bales and pulling loads was for jackasses.
He found a second classman – Jim Carnegie, who once rescued him during a plebe beat five months earlier – and he was glad he could repay him by offering him some weekend work. But he had mixed emotions when he caught Jim two weeks later in Eugene’s warehouse in a dark corner near the thirty foot long rack of whisky bottles nailing Rosanne. Both of them were lying on a rolled out bolt of dark English tweed, entwined in each other’s arms, breathing hot and heavy while Jim’s hand was doing what Case had always wanted to do. Her blouse was unbuttoned exposing her voluptuous breasts and rock hard nipples, while his pants were down to his knees and she was groping with both her hands in his BVD’s trying desperately to release the beast within.
They didn’t see him and he didn’t stick around to see what he knew would eventually happen.
He was nineteen; Jim was two years older. He was six feet six and three quarters inches, Jim was five feet six and had a year at sea behind him. Rosanne was twenty four, sexy, hot to trot, versed in the game of love and five feet one in her high heels. It was a match made in heaven for those two – at least that Saturday afternoon on a bolt of expensive English Tweed. Rosanne and Case were a mismatch from day one. He felt like he did in high school, awkward, gawky, and an absolute fool for having taken her out weeks before, knowing he had grossly overreached himself.
He went to Eugene, told him he wasn’t feeling well, collected his ten bucks and started walking to the Academy. Eugene came after him in his black Lincoln and drove him the rest of the way.
“Didn’t like what you saw?” he asked after an embarrassing period of silence.
“What do you mean?” Case asked him.
“I saw it too you know – Rosanne getting laid by Jim – I know you like Rosanne, she told me about the date you had, you two just didn’t match up.”
“I know Mr Stein, I know – I just feel so … I don’t know how.”
“Young?”
“That’s close enough,” Case said, “I still have a lot to learn I guess.”
“Don’t worry about that too much – you will. You know what the worst part of it is?”
“No, what?”
“They’re screwing on my twelve dollars a yard Tweed! How do you like that? I’ll have to cut off at least six yards from that bolt. I’ll take it out of Rosanne’s pay.”
He laughed when he said it, Case laughed with him but he knew that he wouldn’t.
When he dropped Case off at the gate he gave him a hundred bucks. Case was flabbergasted and asked him what this was for.
“I’m gonna hire myself a fifty year old ugly eunuch to tote them bales and pull them loads – one who can keep his hands off Rosanne anyway – she’s a good kid and I don’t want to lose her yet. You cadets are good workers, strong and cheap to boot, but horny as hell and that’s understandable, being caged up in that Academy of yours. Rosanne is my protégé you know – I have no children and she knows the business like no other. She’s got a set of brains in her head that’ll get her places in this world. She found ways of saving me a bundle of cash – not entirely kosher, but it works –she knows the ropes and all the ins and outs already and she’s only twenty four. Must be the Italian blood in her. I’m gonna make her a partner after a couple of years – give her a chance to buy me out later on.”
Case looked at him for a full minute before answering.
“So this is good-bye I suppose,” he finally said, “and this is sort of a severance pay.”
“You might say that. It wouldn’t be a workable situation anymore don’t you think? You’re leaving on your sea year assignment in a month or so, and with a sexy little bitch like Rosanne around and having seen what you saw, you’d only be frustrated as hell for the next couple of weeks anyway. So yeah, it is severance pay.”
“Well, thanks Mr Stein, I really mean that – and you’re right, it wouldn’t work anymore. Say good bye to Rosanne for me.”
“I will Case, I will. Send me a postcard once in a while when you’re off on one of your many trips.”
Case said he would, stepped out of the car and went back to his battalion.
But he never sent him a card, nor did he have any contact with him again until he called him nearly five and a half years later from Colombo proposing the deal of a lifetime.
Someone retched in the hall. Case could hear the poor sucker stumble and fall, utter a stream of wails and curses, get up again and feel his way to his room. By the sounds outside the door, he knew that it must be well past midnight when the lights in the main halls of the Doghouse would be out except some dimly it emergency lights at either ends at the stairwells. He could just make out the time on the luminous dial of his alarm clock – two a.m. – ‘Christ’, he thought, ‘I’ve been trying to get to sleep for three hours’.
He’d been in the Doghouse for well over a week now but under the circumstances it was all he could afford. A hundred dollars eked out of his now totally depleted savings account at the Seamen’s Bank for Savings, plus the few bucks his mother gave him before he left home would have to do for another two weeks until he could return to the Academy. Steamship office assignment they called it – it amounted to nothing more than going to the offices of an American steamship company in full uniform, along with one or two of his classmates who were unfortunate enough to have picked the same billet and listen to a succession of individuals telling the exciting story of how they slaved at shifting paper from one pile to another, answer telephone calls from equally bored individuals at the other end of the line, or make remarks to one another about the miniskirt so and so’s secretary was wearing today.
He was assigned to U.S. Lines, one of the most prestigious shipping companies in the nation; their flagship the S.S. United States having won the blue ribbon for the fastest Atlantic crossing by a passenger liner some years ago and their freighters plowing the North Atlantic from New York to all ports of call in Western Europe.
The office assignment was part of the Academy curriculum for the first class year and it was something that had to be done and suffered through. The report on this assignment and the subsequent report of the office mentors on his performance and enthusiasm all contributed to his overall academic standing. Most of the cadets however saw this as an extension of their summer leave – three weeks in the City – be it New York, Boston, New Orleans, San Francisco, Seattle or wherever the Academy saw it practical and fit to assign them after taking personal and practical preferences into consideration. For him and for most of his classmates it was a necessary evil and a free lunch every day aboard one of the ships of the company he was assigned to – they always had one or two in port.
A hundred bucks! More than enough for a month – especially when he was used to living on the ten bucks a week he made doing odd jobs on weekends during the years he’d been in Kings Point. A hundred bucks! Live it up – this is prime time; September nineteen sixty six, splurge!
He splurged and took a room at the Soldiers, Sailors and Airmen’s Club on Lexington Avenue.
Even though the Academy had arranged for free lodging for cadets at the Seamen’s Church Institute, he chose to go to the Soldiers, Sailors and Airmen’s Club – for a hundred and some bucks he could afford a little luxury. Besides, it was a lot closer to the U.S. Lines offices and he could sack in a little each morning, saving him the hassle of the uptown subway traffic at seven AM every day. But for a dollar and a quarter a night he couldn’t expect the luxury that he had assumed would become him by paying for a room instead of free boarding at the Doghouse.
Clean sheets and towels was the only positive thing that could be said for the room. For the rest it was a cramped space of no more than six by ten feet, further stuffed with a plain wardrobe, a washstand with a cracked mirror and faucets that were loose in their fittings and rattled when he opened either one, a small desk and chair and a murky window overlooking Lexington Avenue. Trying to get to sleep there was a feat in itself. Shutting the window in this insufferable summer heat would soon devoid the room of breathable air, but leaving the window open invited flies and mosquitoes.
And then there was the noise. The din of the never ceasing traffic, the sirens of fire trucks, police or ambulances fighting their way through the congested streets of New York and passers by shouting their woes into the night.
On the first day at the U.S. Lines office, he was met by the receptionist – a queer doubling as Boy Friday who was always so glad to see cadets from Kings Point in their lovely uniforms come and visit the offices. He was ever so glad to show him around and introduce him to the proper people – all of them friends of his and all of them queer – until Case’s mentor, a tall grey haired man with heavy horn rimmed glasses that were so big as to hide half his face rescued him from being shown off to the entire complement of queers in the office.
At six feet eight inches, slender, twenty one years old and looking it still, Case would have been a prize catch for a queer – a certain amount of innocence radiated from his face – the innocence of youth that attracts queers and dirty old men. A rather large nose was the only feature that stuck out of an otherwise normal, somewhat ruddy face. At least “ruddy” is what it said in his continuous discharge book. Ruddy; what a word! The clerk at the US Coast guard who filled in the information in the blanks probably guessed his complexion from the black and white photograph stapled in it – he indeed looked like an American Indian with a crew cut on there.
Stitch was at the office too. His real name is Richard Bostitch, but everyone called him Stitch. Stitch was a classmate and nearly as tall as he was, except that’s where the similarity ended. Stitch was blond, blue-eyed, had a generally washed out look about him that characterizes fair haired and light skinned people. But he was just as slender, skinny even, with large, wide ears protruding from his head. He looked ridiculous in his dress khakis that he had chosen to wear on his first day at the office, the brim of his hat seemed to be perched on top of his head like a ten inch lid precariously balanced on the six inch opening of a jug.
Stitch followed the book always, never deviated from the norm, did what he was told, had a proper upbringing in New England somewhere, respected his parents and teachers in grade and high school, went to Sunday school and later to church on Sundays, followed orders from his superiors when he entered the Academy as a plebe, even if it meant that he had to brush out the heads with a toothbrush if a second classman such as that little prick Badoux got it in his sadistic little pea-sized brain to assign such duties. He would probably sail the required three year stint after he graduated, find a boring job somewhere after that, marry an average looking woman, have the proverbial average two point something kids and live in New Jersey in an average house till he’s seventy six point something years old. It was no surprise therefore that he lived in the Doghouse, just as the Academy had suggested to everyone on steamship office assignment in New York.
After having gone through the motions of the first day at the office, which actually was a foraging expedition for a free lunch aboard the S.S. American Challenger docked alongside the pier just outside the office building, and ogling the mini-skirted long-legged secretaries, Stitch suggested they go to the Doghouse. He’d met some people there and they could all go out someplace in the neighborhood and have a meal and a Schlitz or two.
He awoke in the Soldiers Sailors and Airmen’s Club the following morning at nine with a splitting headache, twenty dollars lighter and absolutely no idea how he got home the night before, only vaguely remembering a place called the Blarney Rose buried somewhere in the canyons of lower Manhattan, faces of two men in their mid twenties sitting on either side of a rough wooden table strewn with overflowing ashtrays, tin plates with half eaten pastrami sandwiches, empty beer glasses and peanut shells, and all of them spinning the incoherent yarns that only drunks can spin, with Stitch at the head of the table donned in his dungarees, smoking thick cigars, telling tall tales spiked with four-letter words and downing pitchers of Schlitz as if he was the old man of the sea himself.
One fifth of his fortune shot in the first night. A couple of days later where the visits to the U.S. Lines office became shorter and shorter till some days were only lunch visits to whichever ship was in port and a courtesy tour by one of the mates, and where the get-togethers with Stitch and his friends became longer and longer and the funds had dwindled to less than fifty dollars, he checked out of the Soldiers Sailors and Airmen’s Club, picked up his duffel bag and guitar case and took the subway downtown to check into the Doghouse on South Street. Free board thanks to the Academy, but he had to pay for his own meals. Fifty dollars for ten days, that’s a fin a day less subway fare to and from U.S. Lines – he would have to hoof it from the forty-second street exit to the pier then, leaves four dollars and seventy cents a day for meals. Should be enough, he thought.
He’d never stayed in the Doghouse before, having heard enough about it to steer clear of it. However, his dwindling funds made him swallow his pride, pick up his duffel bag and take the subway from Lexington Avenue to the South Street exit. A brownstone Rococo building dominated the scene. It reminded him of the old passenger terminal of the Holland America Line in Rotterdam, small windows in neat rows but with ornately carved frames and windowsills and with the black grime of years encrusted on the façades. A lighthouse light was propped on top of one of the roof corners as an afterthought and gave it its identity and a more nautical tint. This then was the Seamen’s Church Institute, or better known to one and all as the Doghouse; home away from home for seamen in between ships, or a place to stay for ex-seamen hanging around looking for old shipmates, or hopeless alcoholics who couldn’t ship out anymore on medical grounds. They were Ordinary Seamen, Able Bodied seamen, bosuns, deck hands, day men, oilers, wipers and stewards – salt of the sea and backbone of the Merchant Marine. And Kings Point cadets on steamship office assignment in New York during the first weeks of September.
Wooden benches lined the small park in front of it; wino’s populated the park and occupied many of them. A distinct smell of cheap rot-gut wine permeated the air and became stronger as he approached the entrance, but once inside, the smell of strong disinfectant almost knocked him off his feet. Despite this cover-up he could still smell faint whiffs of urine, sweat, stale beer and cigarette smoke. Judging from the clientèle in the lobby it was no surprise. Like zombies they were; about ten disheveled men sat, stood, walked, lounged, staggered or swayed their way around or just leaned on the nearest thing to them, saying nothing, staring at nothing with an occasional grunt or a loud scraping of a throat indicating that they were still alive. The receptionist was no exception. He handed Case a key after he had shown him his Z-card and written his name and number down in a dog-eared log book. Not a word was spoken or even exchanged. The zombie nodded his head in the direction of the elevator across the lobby as an indication that Case had to go there for further instructions, which he did like a zombie as he sauntered across the hall to an open elevator door. The oppressing summer heat and the typical stench that all old buildings seem to ooze were enough to make anyone lethargic.
A zombie in the elevator slowly came to life, clanged the cage doors shut and yanked the heavy brass lever hard right. It seemed to take forever to reach the tenth floor and even longer to adjust the cage so that the doors could be opened. He nodded towards a direction down the hall, dragged the duffel bag out of the elevator cage and handed Case the strap. He disappeared again into his domain and shut the doors behind him.
It was a room with a view. It overlooked Battery Park, the buildings on the Battery, the Staten Island ferry landing and all of New York harbor from as far South as Staten Island and Verrazano Narrows, to the Statue of Liberty and the docks across the Hudson in Hoboken and Weehawken, New Jersey beyond it to the West. The Verrazano Narrows Bridge was still under construction and all that he could see of it were the two pylons and the connecting cables in a sagging arch between them. One bridge deck had been completed a year earlier but it looked so disproportionately thin compared to the rest that the suspension wires looked like the loose hanging bead strings of a fly-curtain.
To the North and only about a block from the Doghouse was an enormous excavation pit. Hardhats could be seen everywhere, machinery was digging and drilling in a cavern so deep that he couldn’t even see it from his vantage point on the tenth floor. The sounds of building and construction which indeed form the permanent audio backdrop of the City were coming from the pit and contributed to the lower Manhattan picture of continuous hyper activity and economic growth. Site of the New World Trade Center it said on the signs.
A frayed chord with a fixture and a bare light bulb seemed to be the only source of illumination in the room. There was no washbasin. He tossed his duffel bag into the over sized wardrobe and didn’t even bother to unpack it or hang out his dress-blues which were becoming a drag to carry around because he would only wear them for a few hours per day when he went to the U.S. Lines office. The rest of the time he wore his dungarees, the look and smell of which by now were blending in nicely with the atmosphere he had just come into. A sagging mattress on a rusty frame served as a bed. A roughly folded pile with a blanket, sheets, a pillow and a towel was placed on a rickety chair next to the bed. A ripped window shade, nondescript linoleum tiling, swirling dust balls on the floor and cog webs in every corner of the ceiling completed the inventory.
The room was directly above the building entrance and underneath his window he could make out the winos, banded together in cliques or sleeping on a bench under an old newspaper. Empty bottles lay scattered here and there and people moved aimlessly in and out of the Doghouse.
The Staten Island Ferry was just coming into her slip – cars started to move. Two uniformed seamen were taking down the flag at the Battery Station Coast Guard building – Evening Colors. Boats, ships, tugs and barges moved in all directions in the harbor. A string of garbage scows with a cloud of seagulls over it was slowly being pulled by a tug out of port to dump its daily load of debris from this vast metropolis on the edge of the continental shelf in the hopes that it would disappear forever beneath the waves – like sweeping dust under the rug but then on a grander scale.
Three days later he was down to his last twenty five bucks. Fifteen had gone towards the purchase of two tickets to the Broadway show “Fiddler on the Roof” for Friday night. With any luck his mother would have sent him a care package along with some money at Katie’s address, along with a card for his twenty second birthday. If not, it would mean belt tightening until he could return to the Academy where he wasn’t supposed to show up until two weeks later on a Monday at morning roll call – 0800 sharp.
Katie was a girl he’d met during his second class year. Totally knocked over he was by this demure little girl of sixteen. His classmates accused him of robbing the cradle, but he didn’t care – Katie was his first, his last, his one and only and there was nothing in the world he wouldn’t do or get for her. She was a petite brunette, light as a feather and with the face of an angel. The product of a red haired green eyed hot tempered Irish mother named Maureen and an equally hot tempered pseudo Italian father with the name of Hector Kovacs, who belied his Hungarian roots by continually faking an Italian accent. More than once Case was witness to spectacular fireworks in Katie’s house when there was a clash of these two characters. The fact that Maureen’s mother lived in the house didn’t help matters any, although Case couldn’t possibly see how a sweet old lady like Mère could possibly be the catalyst to these explosions.
Stitch was in equal dire straits but one of his drinking buddies had told him where he could get soup, bread and spaghetti every night for free. Some outfit organized these handouts for the winos, bums and wretches that populated lower Manhattan at night and Stitch and Case were grateful for the information and the organization organizing these food lines. The man also told him also that he wouldn’t be caught dead in one of those food lines. Before he himself was down and out enough to stoop that low, he shipped out on as an Ordinary on a Victory ship going to Viet-Nam. His other buddy had more luck and took a job as AB on a C3 to the East coast of South America. With a simple “See you around sometime, mates” they had picked up their duffel bags and left for greener water almost on the same day.
The lady ladling out the food in the soup line looked a little surprised to see two clean-shaven and apparently healthy young men mixing with the likes of Doghouse zombies and derelicts that slept on gratings and park benches, but she filled their plates with heaps of spaghetti, watery tomato sauce and an ever so tiny meatball without any questions. Another, much older woman named Eva - Marie doled out thick slices of course, brown rye bread. From her they learned that their Blarney Rose buddies were practically part of the household in the Doghouse and all the flop houses in lower Manhattan
“Homeless they are boys, homeless.”
“They got a feeder and a home now, Eva- Marie. They found themselves a ship and shipped out.” Case informed her.
“Hell, they’ll be back after a while. They’ll sail across half the world but they always come back here.”
“The things you find out when you don’t have a gun …” Stitch said, quoting a line from an old Gunsmoke episode. He quoted this line whenever a situation called for it. Like now.
Long wooden tables and benches filled the old hall of a building that had long been written off and was probably overdue to be razed. A much larger hall in the back was the shelter portion with what must have seemed like hundred beds, where the homeless and desolate could have a place to sleep for the night if they so chose, although in this summer heat most of them preferred to sleep outside on their own private park bench.
Meals were eaten in silence, each individual staying individual by maintaining as much distance between themselves as possible with only the smacking and slurping sounds occasionally disturbed by a “salt”, “ketchup”, indicating a need for these by a smacker or slurper. Stitch and Case were the exception in that they sat opposite one another and had subdued conversations on how best to finish off the office assignment report with the least amount of effort, which runs they would like to sail on once they graduated and which of the office secretaries they’d really like to nail if they had a chance. They concluded that their chances with the secretaries were zero; all the best chicks were either spoken for or were banging their bosses. The leftovers were dogs.
Living two lives on the edge of despair and abject poverty wasn’t at all easy – reporting to the US Lines office in the morning in full uniform and living the life of a bum in dungarees in the evenings. In the morning Case saw some of the same men from the soup and spaghetti shelter again. Their gagging, coughing, spitting and gargling sounds reverberating in the washrooms which graced every corner of the giant square which the halls formed on each but the first floor of the Doghouse. They would spit blobs of slimy sputum into the washstand, more often than not missing it completely, and they’d blow their snot with a forceful shot out of one of their nostrils while holding the other one closed. Teeth, insofar as they had these, were brushed with a frayed toothbrush that he wouldn’t even have used to clean underneath the ridge of the toilet seat during his plebe year, even if that little prick Badoux had ordered him to, and they shaved their three day stubble with rusty razors down to a one-day stubble – the blade simply couldn’t pull it anymore after weeks of use. Fingers were used instead of combs and brushes and clean underwear was something out of a distant past for the most desolate amongst them, the stains in front and back of their shorts betraying days if not weeks of continuous wear. T- shirts or tank shirts which once must have been white were sweat stained and the same drab grey as the once white stucco walls in the washrooms and halls. The smell in the washrooms at seven AM was as could be expected after visits during the night from drunks puking into or next to the toilet bowls, urinals stuffed with toilet paper so they wouldn’t flush anymore which didn’t stop anybody from pissing into them so that they overflowed and left big puddles of urine and water under them. They might just have well have pissed against the wall.
But poverty broadens horizons and Case washed, shaved and showered along with the Doghouse crowd just as he would as if he were in the locker room after a game of basketball.
The evenings in the Doghouse amongst the doling seamen, the bums, the zombies, the emaciated and worn out, homeless vagrants, the winos and other dregs of society, were most educational – if nothing else than to have shown them the other side of life which, despite their dire financial status, they knew they would only be living briefly. The subconscious knowledge that they were not destined for an existence of despair like these poor bastards gave them the confidence and courage to sustain the temporary discomforts of the Doghouse lodgings and the soup and spaghetti lines.
A lady in distress in Lower Manhattan, a good looking one at that, about twenty three or twenty four, one with a new Pontiac convertible but with a flat tire, offered Case five bucks one evening for having changed it for her. He refused the five bucks and sent her on her way with some ridiculous chivalrous greeting saying that it was his pleasure to change the tire for her. It wasn’t. It was hot outside, the setting sun was still burning on his back, and the jack was not secured properly so that it gave way as soon as he tried to loosen the nuts on the wheel, nearly crushing him as the car crashed back on the asphalt. One of the nuts bounced out of the hubcap in which he had tossed it, and rolled in a storm drain, he broke two nails of his right hand so that he was now sure that he couldn’t play his guitar for a couple of weeks at least until they grew back to proper playing length, and he ripped a hole in his dungaree shirt. As soon as she had driven off with a last warning that she’d have to drive slowly and carefully and go to the garage first thing in the morning to get the lost wheel nut replaced, he let off a stream of curses, directed at himself for being such a sap, a weakling, a pushover for a nice figure, long legs, a cute face, big eyes, a Colgate smile and the soft, pleading voice that all women seem to be born with to convince suckers like him to do their dirty work for them. He was just offered a fortune and he let it drive away. Asshole!
But in a way was glad he did what he did – his good deed for the day so to speak.
He told Stitch about it later during dinner at the soup and spaghetti shelter and Stitch agreed with him.
The bit about his being an asshole that is.
Karin Brown graduated from Marymount College in the top ten of her class. Small wonder because she also was valedictorian of her high school back in Yonkers where she lived with her mother, a dominating woman prone to fits of outrage at the drop of a hat for the most insignificant things that upset her life and with whom she had a love – hate relationship. Love because she was her mother, and hate because she interfered with her life to the point of trying to gain total control of it. Her father had left when she was ten, after he and her mother had a horrendous row which was the culmination of a seemingly endless series of arguments that had dominated her conscious life. Other than a special delivery package on her birthday and at Christmas time, and a card saying that he loved her and always thought of her, she hadn’t heard of him or seen him since.
She was sure that if she saw him now, she would hate him for not having made any attempt to contact her or attend the major milestones in her life. She couldn’t blame him for running away, but she blamed him for leaving her with her dominating and frequently fulminating, selfish and jealous mother, who was constantly breathing down her neck but conspicuously absent during these same major milestones. Her mother wasn’t at her high school graduation because she had gone for a week to Las Vegas with one of her flings, and the graduation from Marymount fell on the same date as a convention she just had to attend with her boss at the City Bank branch in Yonkers where she worked.
Karin was glad when she finished Marymount; toyed with the idea of going for her Masters in Business Administration at the downtown campus of NYU but abandoned the idea soon after she landed a job as secretary to the Managing Director of T.J. Stevenson & Co., an impressive title for an impressive sounding company, but as it turned out, she was just a typing clerk and gofer in a dingy little office on the fifth floor of the Maritime building on Broad Street working for a middle aged, horny, cigar smoking dirty old man named Davenport.
But the pay was good and the hours were reasonable; Davenport was lenient with her working hours allowing her to come in late and leave early as she saw fit. She was a trinket he could show off whenever he had visitors, having her fetch coffee, tea, cigarettes, water or whatever for the ship officers who were sent here from the union hall and were to be dispatched to the company’s ships lying in New York, Norfolk, New Orleans or ports on the West Coast.
Her canny sense of observation had led her to make the necessary arrangements to secure her position – she bought three piece suits, tight fitting blouses and sweaters, miniskirts, glossy pantyhose and expensive high heeled shoes. It pleased her boss and his stream of visitors immensely to see this smart and sexy eye catcher fetch them gallons of coffee, see her type out their names and particulars on quadruple carbon forms in the ancient Olympia typewriter while they stood behind her stirring their coffee and looking down her blouse which she had buttoned up just high enough to leave a lot to the imagination.
Horny but harmless, she thought, and she soon discovered the law of the jungle that is downtown New York; it wasn’t brains that got you anywhere, but good looks, big tits, a nice ass, long legs, sexy tight fitting clothes, high heels and a bright smile.
And these assets got her a free tire change on the way home from work one night. A young man, good looking, tall and obviously a Navy man from the looks of it, dressed in dungarees with his name stenciled just above the left shirt pocket came to her rescue after she noticed that she had a flat tire on her brand new Pontiac convertible. She was stranded on South Street with traffic whizzing by her, but he came out of nowhere, put the car on the curb, changed the tire and sent her on her way. She flashed her smile and offered to pay him five bucks for his trouble, but he refused.
She knew he would.
She never gave the incident a second thought until she went out to lunch several days later on one of the mysterious errands that Davenport sent her on, meeting a man called Ross – ‘don’t ask me for his last name Karin,’ was Davenport’s message to her as he sent her on her way on this drop-off – to share a hot dog with him in a nearby snack bar. The only thing she had to do was to give him an envelope – inconspicuously and preferably under the table while they were eating as were Ross’ instructions when he finally arrived out of breath at the designated place. They exchanged the usual courtesies, she slipped him the envelope, they ate their hot dog, drank their Coke and Ross was off again as fast as he had come, leaving her sitting on her Formica table smoking the cigarette which she had just lit.
A young man in dungarees came into the snack bar, ordered a hamburger from the fat man behind the counter, counted out his change as if he had just emptied his piggy bank and paid for his meal. No drink. From the way he had just counted out his money she thought he probably couldn’t afford it. He looked around to see where he could sit, found all the tables occupied and finally came to her table, asking her if he could sit down.
“Sure, I’ll just smoke my cigarette and then I’ll leave,” she said as she motioned him to sit down opposite her.
He sat down and began wolfing down his hamburger as if he hadn’t eaten in a week.
“Hungry?” she asked after having observed him for a minute.
“You might say that,” the young man answered just after he’d taken a big bite out of his hamburger, “my name is Richard Bostich, but everyone calls me Stitch.”
“Corina,” she said, “no last name.”
She had used Corina again; like she did in college. Karin was so common, so everyday like. Corina was so much more sophisticated, so continental and debonair – at least that was what one of her boyfriends had told her on their first date during her freshman year. She dumped the boyfriend but kept the name and called herself Corina from then on.
Karin Brown was her Jungle name – couldn’t very well change that on all the employment application and tax forms or all the other official forms that she had to fill in and sign after she entered the jungle from the safe haven of the Marymount campus.
“All right, Corina with no last name, what is a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?” Stitch asked, laughing as he spoke this corny line.
“I work nearby, for a shipping magnate – very big company,” she lied. “Are you in the Navy?”
“No, cadet, Kings Point – ever hear of it?”
“Oh sure, I went to a tea-dance once at your Academy when I was a freshman – nice little place.”
“Nice little place? It’s a federal Academy you know.” Stitch said; he was clearly insulted.
“I didn’t mean to be degrading – it’s just that when I went there I just saw the inside of one of the halls – a bit austere if you ask me. The guys I met were on their toes and cringing from their upper classmen like dogs that were constantly being beaten, and when I asked them how they liked it, everyone said that it sucked.”
“That’s because you met the plebes who were in their indoctrination period – cooped up inside the Academy walls for four months and all the rules and hazing they had to go through during that time – sure they said it sucks; I said it too when I was a plebe, but once they become upper classmen and outside the Academy walls they sing a different tune.”
“Like you’re doing now I take it?”
“Yes.”
“So what’s a nice upstanding cadet doing in a place like this on a normal weekday sunny September afternoon in downtown New York when he should be attending classes or marching around in his nice uniform on the Kings Point campus?”
“Steamship office assignment – a three week stint in U.S. Lines’ offices trying to get a grasp of what’s behind the romance of sailing.”
“But their offices are way up town.”
“I know – I’ve seen it all in one week. We’re staying in the Doghouse here around the corner – me and a classmate of mine – free room, no board and we’re running low on funds but we can’t report back to the Academy in another week or so.”
“Doghouse?”
“Seamen’s Church Institute – that building over there with the lighthouse on top.” Stitch said, pointing out of the window towards the Doghouse.
“Is your classmate as tall as you are?” Corina asked, suddenly remembering the same dungaree outfit she had seen a few days ago on the young man changing her tire.
“Yes, slightly taller even, why?”
“I just wondered, he may be the one that changed my tire a couple of days ago – I offered him some money, but he refused.”
“Small world – yes, it was him, because he told me about it – that he changed a tire for a beautiful lady in distress and she had offered to pay him five bucks. He thought himself a sap, falling for a flashy smile and a cute face, and I called him an asshole for refusing to take the payment - sorry.” Stitch apologized for this last remark.
“No matter, I’ve heard worse.”
They talked some more until Corina noticed the time and left in a hurry back to her dark and stuffy little office. But not before Stitch had arranged to meet her the same time tomorrow right here at this table. She said she couldn’t guarantee it but she would try. He knew she was lying and was just making a polite getaway. He decided not to mention anything to Case about his chance meeting with the beautiful lady in distress that he had helped out a couple of days before. He went back the next day with some money he bummed from the Doghouse chaplain.
She was there.
Stitch had found a new funding victim for them. An Episcopalian chaplain named Flanagan who was permanently attached to the Doghouse as counselor and spiritual guide for its tenants, of which they formed a part of the complement. He was a relatively young man, late thirties, tall, handsome, well built with broad shoulders, small waist, a dark complexion caused by years of exposure to the elements and a permanent shadow of a very heavy beard. He had listened to the plight of both of the cadets which they exaggerated immensely for extra pity points and he’d loaned them five bucks each but made them sign a promissory note for that amount. He also let them use the gym on the top floor of the Doghouse which was available for a small fee for all tenants but rarely used by them. He also gave them another address where instead of spaghetti and soup they could get a regular meal with meat, potatoes and vegetables for nothing if they mentioned his name, but they couldn’t stay there for longer than it took to eat the meal – they needed the room afterwards to convert it to a shelter. This was a welcome change from the daily evening fare because they were at the point where the spaghetti with the rubbery meatballs was coming out of their ears.
Riches beyond belief! Five bucks! It provided the necessary funds for subway tokens so that they didn’t have to jump the turnstiles every time. They could even down a Schlitz at the Blarney or buy a hot dog with ketchup and relish once in a while at the hot dog stand in Battery Park. And of course for Case, phone calls to Katie in Roslyn Heights, so he wouldn’t have to go through ten or fifteen attempts of fucking the phone – a trick he used at the Academy to call anywhere in the country for nothing: put a nickel in the slot and as it fell, hit the return button as hard and as fast as possible and the line would open. This didn’t work every time, you had to make at least five attempts and hit the button at the proper moment and with the right amount of English. The phones at the Academy were well worn and honed to the point that some of them worked even at first try, but the ones at the Doghouse were tight and stiff, the machined edges of the works inside the coin return were sharp because the tenants didn’t know about it, so that every time he made a call, he had to try it at least a dozen times before it caught and he got the dial tone and his nickel back at the same time.