Sex for America: Politically Inspired Erotica (6 page)

girlfriends name of Jennifer or Kelly or Laurie, racks of trophies and medals from rugby and wrestling. We were none of us a nipple beyond twenty-one. There was no reason for us to get along out- side of The Suck. We were shooters, we slept with our rifles.

PFC BROCKNER

My first few years in I had a series of boyfriends. Navy boys. Sea- men, that quirky little cap, the workaday denim and boondockers, and always I’d ask, What really happens on those submarines? One hundred men go down and, a year later, fifty couples surface? An old joke, but I liked the sound of it.

The thing about being a gay marine is you have to be smart about where you put your dick, and when. You go drinking with straight marines in San Diego or Myrtle Beach, and you hook up with women, sorority types from USC or Duke, or local beach girls. And you fuck the women. So even if there is fag suspicion, word gets out that you fuck women, and your platoon mates still call you a mama’s boy and a bitch, but they know you’re not queer because you fuck women. And it even helps to cock block a guy or two, really go after the snatch occasionally, just to be safe. Then, on the weekends you aren’t screwing sorority or beach girls, you go to the queer bars in Santa Monica or Atlanta, or you fly to San Francisco or New York. Or, if you have a navy or civilian boyfriend, you go to his place and you fuck him all weekend, or he fucks you, or however. And you never try to fuck a fellow ma- rine, because you never know. The guy could be queer as you, but you hit on him and he might feel set up, or maybe he’s way deep in the closet, and he blows your cover. And now you are fucked, really fucked, gang-beaten and raped with a broomstick or a fif-

teen-inch flashlight, no lube. So—no happy queer-pink triangles, no rainbow stickers, no “I Love a Man in Uniform” buttons, no Village People or Cyndi Lauper or Bette Midler. Rock ’n’ roll and pussy, escape and evasion—that’s how to be gay and stay alive in the marines.

SERGEANT SAVINE

My regular was Esmeralda. She was a small, lovely woman, not a sneeze bigger than five feet, brown skin like some dirty river, but in that pretty kind of polluted way, the way a woman’s pollution becomes your pollution, her dirt and grime and discarded tires and piss and shit becoming yours, her bad lovers and fathers and uncles and mothers becoming yours. Not a whore with a heart of gold. Just a woman with trouble, lots of it, like the trouble we all have.

After buying Esmeralda two drinks, Thomas’s minimum be- fore you could retire upstairs, we walked to my room on the fourth floor. We had great sex. We drank liters of water, cutting open IV bags full of electrolytes and Ringer’s solution. I drank water out of the shower head while Esmeralda washed my scratched back and love-swollen balls, and I washed her pretty brown skin. We went back to the bed and this lasted much of the night, back and forth from bed to shower, five or six sessions until we heard screaming down the corridor, deep-down screaming, deep down from the nowhere of someone’s being, and I knew it was Cash.

I pulled on my skivvies and ran to his room. He lay on his side, back toward me, still screaming, and the room filled with a vomitus smell of blood and shit, and as I got closer I could see him clutching his bloody ass, still screaming. Blood covered the

sheet, and I thought, Cash got ass-raped, Cash got ass-raped by the Ether Bandit.

The story of the Ether Bandit had been floating around the desert for about three months. We discounted it along with all of the other tales that were just as improbable: the female squid captain who was charged with going a bit beyond duty in the mo- rale department, giving blow jobs for five bucks per; the corporal whose wife had sent him an amateur porn mag that turned out to be her smut debut, the neighbor stiffing her from behind; the Arab teenage girl who ran around the port at Jabal Munifah, defying Mohammed, fucking GI’s for free.

But Cash’s blood and screaming and stink brought the Ether Bandit right down into our little ugly world.

PFC BROCKNER

After a West-Pac and six months on Okinawa, I re-upped with a guarantee to stay two years on the island. I dated Taro. I loved his yellow skin, his little rice ass, so hard to enter but, once inside, like fucking a wildflower: Seaside Daisy, Cocklebur, Hairy Hon- eysuckle. His parents owned a bar in Kinville, where I drank for free. They considered me a nice American boy who befriended their lonely and forlorn son. I was not a nice American boy. Their son was neither lonely nor forlorn, just queer and closeted. The same deal applies in Japan as the States—you have to keep up straight appearances. Taro and I would occasionally hit the whore- houses with the guys in my platoon, Taro scoring deals with his Japanese. The mamasans and papasans were all Japanese, and the girls were Flips, up from the bars in Olongapo or Angeles City. Taro and I would buy the same girl, go up to her room and drink

beers with her, tell her to make some noise. We’d spank her and talk loud-nasty, pinch her nipples and pull her hair.

He’d never had sex when we met, and it took me six months or more to talk him into ass sex. I started with fingers. I thought he’d never allow my cock in there. And then a navy friend of mine gave me an idea—ether. He’d tried it before with a virgin boy- friend and it worked well—“Open him up when he’s passed out and, sure, he’ll hurt for a few days, but then he’ll be fine.” This navy guy gave me a jar of ether and told me to use a folded-up skivvy shirt. Just dunk it in and cover Taro’s mouth and nose, and within minutes I’d be inside.

SERGEANT SAVINE

Cash continued to scream. I tried talking to him, patting his back, telling him to calm the fuck down, calm the fuck down. None of this worked. So I slapped him, I slapped him hard, and he looked at me like he was looking through a sniper scope, and I saw far- away death in his eyes, the bewilderment of pulling the trigger and taking away a life from one thousand yards, turning a human head into pink mist. And he asked me, What the fuck happened, What the fuck happened?

Esmeralda entered the room, and I told her to talk to him while I went downstairs.

Thomas didn’t have enough whores for all of the guys shoved into the basement. Some line platoon grunts and a few platoons of pogues from the 6th Combat Service Support Battalion had shown up, and they were all out of hand, ass-drunk and throwing shit around, carrying the women on their shoulders, making them strip on top of the amps, breaking empty whisky bottles against

the walls and on the deck. I saw my platoon mates across the base- ment, trying to stay out of the mess. If we’d been stateside and there had been more of us, we would’ve been kicking ass on the pogues. Fighting marines hate pogue marines more than they hate Fly Boys or Squids or Army Dogs.

You’re either a fighter or you aren’t. And if you aren’t, then bring me my hot chow, my field showers, my water, my mail, my ammunition, and shut the fuck up. The difference is easy to dis- cern. Pogues always have shiny boots and clean fatigues, and they smell fresh, even in the field, they smell like they just walked out of a goddamn bathhouse in Naha. Fighters are always dirty—maybe it’s been a month or more since the fighter took a shower besides from a canteen, and the fighter doesn’t shave every day, and the fighter doesn’t carry any extra pounds. And you look in the eyes as well, because that’s how you really know. Even the fighter who has never killed, the fighter who knows he will someday, you can tell the difference. The fighter’s eyes are set back in the sockets, like lava waiting in the mouth of a volcano, and in the eyes, when you look closely, there’s a cinema of war going on in them. Inside the fighter’s eyes you’re watching a film of people watching the fighter’s war film. The audience is full of the fighter’s family. The first row is full of his mother, fifty replicas of his mother, straight across. And behind her, the father, and then on down the entire family, to friends, former teachers, coaches, priests or preachers or rabbis, so the theater is full of people watching the fighter’s war film. And the very last row is full of replicas of the fighter. The replica fighters are in dress blues, ribbons and medals, sitting with proper military posture, back straight, hands in fists resting on knees. The replica fighters are blindfolded. Each time the fighter

kills an enemy, someone in the audience dies, one of the mothers, or fathers, or one of the replica fighters. And the audience, except for the fighter, is weeping the entire time, and they reach up to- ward the screen. No, please, no, you are killing us, you are killing yourself. But the fighter cannot hear the voices; the fighter does not see the film.

I joined the rest of the platoon. They were all fairly well drunk and had each already gone upstairs with a girl, so they were happy, too. And they seemed not too pissed off about the pogues. There was Aerosmith or some crap coming through the amps, and they could barely hear me, so I signaled them into the corridor. I told them about Cash, and Professor puked, I don’t know if because he was so fucked up or from the idea of being ass-raped. We double- timed up to Cash’s room.

PFC BROCKNER

I used the ether on Taro, and he was angry and hurt for a few days, and he threatened to kick me out of his life, but I told him I’d tell all to his parents, and he calmed down. And that’s how I fucked him from then on, with help from the ether. I missed the noise, the noise of fucking is sometimes the best part, me in the man’s ass and him jerking off at the same time, coming at the same time. But I made my own noise and still we gave each other head without the ether, and head is of course always pleasant.

I knew that I would never stop using the ether. Ether equaled power. As a marine, power surrounded me. The power of rank, of weapons, of machinery. The power of violence. One fist of iron, one fist of steel, they told us in boot camp, mean green killing machine: born to fight, trained to kill, ready to die, but never will.

But I had no power. I’d lost rank in the States after I fucked up an overhaul on a five-ton engine, and I barely qualified with the rifle and pistol, and I had nearly drowned in the pool. I changed air filters and windshield wipers and kept the logbooks. The ether would be my power. Let them have their guns.

When Operation Desert Shield started, I knew my unit would be deployed. We were part of the Expeditionary Unit for the 3rd Ma- rine Division. We were en route on the tenth of August and staged at the port at Jabal Munifah on the twelfth, a classic clusterfuck, jarheads living in tents that Division had acquired from the Bed- ouins. Inside a tent where you’d expect a harem and ancient Mid- east sex action, with grapes and palm fronds, instead you’d find jarheads swatting flies and drinking Evian or San Pellegrino.

And the enemy over 150 clicks away, raping and killing in Ku- wait, but still we were assigned guard duty with weapons locked and loaded, so every few days some idiot would be cleaning his weapon, forget to unload, and shoot himself in the thigh or nail his buddy in the back of the head.

My platoon guarded the Port Authority tower, and this worked well for me. The tower had air-conditioning pumping through it all day, and the lounge area was equipped with a fully stocked wet bar. The two guys running the port were Brits. They didn’t mind us hitting the bar after duty. So of course we would. Drink- ing Cape Cods and Absolut martinis up was a pleasure we hadn’t expected. The bathrooms were fixtured in gold, and the showers, outfitted with three or four spigots and a bench, could’ve fit ten people easy. It was a queer bathhouse waiting to happen right in the middle of the desert.

I started sleeping with one of the Brits, Simon. He had bad teeth and he drank way too much scotch. I don’t see how a single boat made it through the port during his watch. He spent much of his time quoting Samuel Johnson and T. S. Elliot, swaying with a bottomless tumbler in one hand and the microphone in the other, pausing between directions to ships to wink at me or smile his brown, broken-up teeth. But we were great lovers. He insisted that he wasn’t queer or even bi. He opposed screwing whores, and the Saudi women were untouchable. He’d screwed the wives of a few of his co-workers, but those situations never ended well. I would call him a straight fag as I entered him from behind.

My sergeant noticed I spent my off-duty hours in the tower, and he asked questions about my friend Simon, so I implemented evasive action. Word had it that a navy captain sold blow jobs for five bucks apiece. I tracked her down and covered her for my guard team, all twelve of us plus the sergeant. I brought her up to the lounge at the tower and she sucked us off, Simon and his co- worker Thomas as well. After everyone dispersed she asked for a drink, so I made her a Cosmopolitan. After three or four Cosmos, she started touching my knee and laughing with her neck quirked sideways, her pretty, long fingers wrapped around the sweaty stem of her drink. She wanted to seduce me, and she told me so. I lied and said I had a wife back home, a wife who didn’t mind me get- ting blow jobs but nothing more. She wouldn’t stop with her sexy routine, and told me not to worry, that it wouldn’t cost anything, and soon she had her uniform off except her panties. She said, If you’re not going to fuck me, at least watch me masturbate.