The Golden Bear
The drinking began that night in a thatched-roof, open-air bar, fifty yards into the jungle, 200 miles south of Manila. The place had a dozen wooden tables on a dirt floor, each with a kerosene lantern and three or four bamboo chairs. A couple more lanterns hung from the rafters, swinging slightly. The bartender was a big Chinese guy with a shaved head, bare-chested except for a filthy leather vest. I think my shipmates called him Han or maybe Hung. A half-dozen whores, barefoot in cocktail dresses, oozed among the crowd, about evenly divided between the ship's crew and local stevedores. One of the stevedores had a monkey that stole peanuts o the tables. Barely seventeen, I struggled to look like I'd been in places like this all my life. Meanwhile I forgot to breathe.
The whores headed for the American seamen and their dollars. My self-appointed guide to this world was a giant of a man named Roy, who worked in the engine room. He slipped a girl he called Lucy a ve-dollar bill and she sat on my lap, pulled down the top of her dress and pressed her left breast against my face. I was paralyzed. Roy and the others roared with laughter.
»Gotta get your nerve up, man, then your dick,« said Roy. With that, I downed a half-dozen rum and cokes in a very short amount of time. Lucy - and the bar - faded from view. I have no memory of what happened next. Roy told me later that I'd passed out and he'd all but carried me back to the ship. I missed not only the chance to end my virginity but also a pitched brawl with the stevedores that had trashed the bar and put two crewmen in the local hospital.
The crew was punished over that fight. I think Roy was docked some pay. My head throbbed like the ship's turbines and I couldn't look at food for a day and a half. Getting blind drunk and then hauled from a dockside brawl was not the introduction to manhood I'd had in mind. Still, part of me was pumped, thinking of the stories I could tell at school.
But I'd say now that a bigger part of me was scared by the world I'd landed in that night and by my incompetence to deal with it.
It was the summer of 1959. Three weeks before, just after my junior year in high school, I'd sailed for Southeast Asia aboard a freighter named the Golden Bear. I was the youngest member of a crew of 36, and this voyage was the first even remotely adventurous thing I'd ever done. Standing against the rail, watching the hawsers splash into San Francisco Bay, feeling the deck shudder with the rst thrust of the engines, my throat was so dry it hurt. The trip was a deliverance, a stroke of fortune in a teen life I was sure was unmatched for misery.
I was skinny, had a face full of pimples, and, after a sudden spurt to six-four, I was so uncoordinated I regularly stumbled going up the stairs. At St. Robert Bellarmine High School in Tacoma Washington, I put the chalk lines on the football field but never played on it. I won debate trophies, not girlfriends. The »in« crowd never invited me to their parties unless their mothers made them do it. I hung out with other social misfits and defended myself from real or imagined taunts by burying myself in books. Sitting, dateless, in the stands on Friday nights, watching classmates with padded shoulders and muddy uniforms do battle, listening to the cheers, I would have given anything to throw just one touchdown pass.
The revenge I swore for my humiliations was nonviolent. Someday all the bullies and jocks would be flipping burgers or selling washing machines when they'd see my face on the cover of Time magazine and be forced to contemplate their own miserable, unachieving lives. The anger that began in high school pushed me for decades. It also left a dark residue that time and growth have never fully cleansed. I don't go to high school reunions.
The good thing about Bellarmine was the Jesuits who ran it. They made calculus and Homeric Greek exciting. They let me teach myself chemistry at home, taught me how to write and to speak in public, and steadily forced me to value all the things I could do well. It was a Jesuit who told me I could win a national essay contest - and demanded that I enter. The prize was a six-week trip to the Far East aboard a freighter. All I had to do was write 750 words about the Port of Tacoma.
I won - then almost didn't go when the sponsor told my parents I'd be going as a member of the crew. My Catholic mother feared that hanging out with seamen in exotic ports for six weeks would bring the »near occasions of sin« a little too near. I argued that her fears were groundless - and fervently hoped that they weren't. I finally talked her into letting me go.
And why shouldn't she trust me? For seventeen years my whole life had been about doing everything right. I wasn't born in Tacoma - I stepped out of a Norman Rockwell painting there. I was an altar boy, an Eagle Scout, and turned in homework early. I never broke a law or missed a piano lesson. At a time when other kids were questioning authority, I found purpose in obedience. I anticipated commands before they were given. I fed on the praise of parents, teachers and priests because it gave me a sense of accomplishment when little else in my nerd-world did.
I didn't see then the price I would pay for following the rules as closely as I did. Blind obedience may have been the only way I saw to make my life work as a child and teen - but the pattern it left slowed my capacity to think on my own, and to gain the courage to nd and live a meaningful life. Had it not been for that summer on the Golden Bear, the delay would have been even longer.
