When I was 24 years old, I joined the Navy.
It was during the Vietnam War, so part of the effort was to see that I wasn’t going to be on shore in a combat situation. I went to Officer Candidate School up in Newport, Rhode Island.
The very first part of the tour was in Charleston, South Carolina, which was hot as hell and miserable. But then we heard with great excitement that the destroyer tender I was on, the USS Everglades, was going to Naples and Malta.
A destroyer tender takes care of other destroyers. That’s why it’s called that. And so it means you’re mostly in port at the time. There was a wonderful opportunity to see Europe, and I jumped at it. I didn’t have much choice because that’s where we were going, but I was very excited about the fact that we were going to be going to these European ports.
In Naples, when I first went ashore, it was to Santa Lucia, which is a famous fleshpot. The smell of pizza, charred pizza, was in the air. And sex—for me, I mean, you could sense that there was sex there. I was in the closet. I hadn’t had sex with anybody.
So when we went ashore, some guy came up to me and said, “Hey, Joe, you want to buy flying cock and balls?”
I was afraid that he’d clocked me, that he knew that I would love a flying cock and balls. But it turned out to be this little icon, a little thing you wore around your neck that was a cock and balls and had wings.
The sailors loved them. My fellow sailors loved these things and bought them in great abundance. But I felt like having one around my neck would be like having a scarlet letter around my neck. It was not something I wanted to advertise.
There were also guys there at Santa Lucia advertising “exhibeesh,” which was a sexual show, basically, between a man and a woman, sometimes between a woman and a donkey.
I never went to see them. I can only imagine what that was like. But again, it was sex all around me, but nothing I could partake in.
I heard about them from my men when they returned to the ship late at night, and I could feel the Chianti breeze of their breath on my face as they told me about their exploits. Sometimes somebody would grab my knee for emphasis, and that sent me around the world, really.
During that time, I wrote a lot of letters home. I was a pretty well-behaved young man. Everybody in my family got letters, including my grandmother. My mother saved them all, and they’re now in my archives at the Bancroft Library in Berkeley.
There’s an excerpt I want to read to you about one night I went ashore. It reveals what I liked to tell my parents and what I liked to hide from my parents.
And the reason this is in all caps is that I had recently absconded with the communications typewriter, which types in all caps, so I don’t want you to think I’ve turned into Donald Trump.
Cliff has been gone for about five days. The last night we frequented one of the white hat bars for the sheer laughs of it. This particular one was called the Cactus Club (pronounced “Cockatoose Cloob” by the lovelies who hang around the joint, à la Long Branch, to drum up trade). Two of these adorables plopped their pasta-stuffed buttocks in our laps as soon as we sat down. Dialogue:
Lovely: Hey Joe, buy me drink.
Me: I am very poor. I no can buy drink.
Lovely: You reech. You offeece. Buy me drink.
Me: They are too expensive.
Lovely: Negats, Joe. Buy me drink.
Me: Try somebody else. I am very poor.
Lovely: Hey, Joe, I love you, no boolsheet!
That was sort of the theme of Naples: “I love you, no boolsheet.”
I am going to put in for Christmas leave now, so that I’ll have a stronger chance of getting off. I will get either Christmas or New Years off. That is, ten days or so in December or ten days in January. Since most of the officers live in Charleston and can go home every evening anyway, it seems only right and proper that I should get Christmas off. That remains to be seen I guess.
I devour all the news from home. I miss you all so much and I love you, no boolsheet.
Teddy
Sometimes on my day off I would take the ferry to Capri. I would go with my friend Jim, who was really in it for the girls. I just needed the company of somebody, and Jim was a good one.
Once, during a Revlon festival of all things, we were on Capri at the Hotel Quisisana, sitting there in the sunlight. And Jim made the observation, “Don’t look now, but that’s Faye f*****g Dunaway over there checking us out.”
And it was. The star of Bonnie and Clyde was there, looking very young and pretty. We also spotted George Hamilton and Penelope Tree that day.
Jim was very taken with the girls. And I was kind of distracted by the young men I saw in the square with silver-dollar nipples peeking through their mesh T-shirts. That’s where my mind went.
That was the first time I’d seen fishnet T-shirts. They hadn’t come to the States yet, as far as I know, and it was a novelty to see them. I went from there to fantasizing about these young men up in their rooms, stripping naked and getting on with it.
And I was not getting on with anybody. I felt it. I felt the absence of sex and love in my life. It was a hard time, really.
After Naples, we sailed into Malta. I’ll never forget that entrance into the city, into Valletta. Everything was sort of sandstone-colored and all of one piece. It looked like some sort of old lithograph. It was amazing.
Malta had all sorts of attractions for me that weren’t sexual, that were just the visual nature of that beautiful place.
I was assigned my first-ever cabin mate. I don’t know how it happened, but a Greek ensign was allowed to room with me. His name was Giorgos.
I got a lot of teasing in the wardroom from the other officers, who were saying, “Oh, you know about those Greeks, Armistead. You better watch out for them. Don’t drop the soap.”
Well, I had some hopes about that. But it was pretty obvious very early on that Giorgos was as straight as they come.
But he was also Greek, and he had an adventurous quality to him. When I told him how much I loved Zorba the Greek, the movie, he offered to teach me the sirtaki, the dance that was in Zorba the Greek. We’ve all seen that done.
And so I had the opportunity to stand with him, arms against each other’s shoulders, and do this dance. That was probably the closest I got to any tactile relationship with a man at that point.
There was a delicious freedom in this, of course, because it was all right, even manly, for men to dance with each other.
Alan Bates and Anthony Quinn did the dance in Zorba the Greek. And it was many years later that I discovered that Alan Bates himself was queer. So I was always getting in on the news late.
One night in Malta, Jim and I took a taxi to the far end of the island, where we saw in the headlights of the car these old ladies in what looked like mourning garb. It was a haunting scene.
It seemed very common for women to be in a perpetual state of mourning, just as I was in a perpetual state of longing.
My theme song was this haunting gypsy tune that seemed to be in every alleyway. For a long time I thought it was something local and unheard of. It sounded like something out of Malta.
It was only after I left there that I discovered it was “Those Were the Days,” sung by Mary Hopkin, and that it was a worldwide hit.
I approached the captain when I was put in charge of the cruise book, which is the equivalent of a high school yearbook, really, and told him that I wanted to name the cruise book Those Were the Days.
He was all for it because—well, I left out the part about “Was that lonely woman really me?” and emphasized the line “We’d fight and never lose,” which sounded sufficiently military to please the captain.
We dug up a copy of the book not long ago, and there it was.
The song was really an anthem for me at the time. There was this wistfulness, and the way in which it spoke to my own longing without really addressing it officially.
By the time we got back to Charleston, life settled into rotors on the deck and cheerleaders and water welcomes—the things that I had been doing before—and I felt really kind of empty.
I knew that something had to change in my life, and I knew what it was. I knew that I needed to lose my virginity.
I’d like to read you a letter that I wrote home at the time. It’s apropos of nothing, but I think it’s kind of funny. And it’s about the beginning of this.
About four days ago I shaved off a mustache of two months. It was a magnificent creature which curled up at the ends and was intended as a Christmas surprise for me family. It was light brown, with red overtones, and bore a disquieting resemblance to a dormant centipede.
I shaved it off because:
* It began to feel like a dormant centipede.
* Every night at the wardroom movie the boatswain would yell: “Move over Maupin, your mustache is in the way.”
* I developed a nervous habit of twisting it at the ends like a silent film villain, whenever a major crisis arose.
All of the ensigns on the ship have tried this little experiment, but there is only one mustache left now. He is being very stubborn about it, but I think he’ll give in any day now.
I have only one picture of myself wearing the contraption—one taken of me and Cliff by a street photographer at a sidewalk cafe—but that one was taken when it was only three weeks old.
I started to cut it off in one hunk and mail it to you so you could tie a blue ribbon around it or something like my baby locks, but after examining the residue I decided that the idea was somewhat macabre.
The next time I talk to you, I’m going to tell you about my second tour of duty, which was in Vietnam—on shore in Vietnam.
But thank you for coming along to hear about this, and I do appreciate it.
It’s nice spending time with you.
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