I Won't Be Home for Christmas
McGrorty, Michael J.
Michael J. McGrorty I Won't Be Home for Christmas The author vas spending his Christmas Eve thousands of miles away in a foreign land, scrubbing dishes and surrounded by drunken sailors. Then...
...we shook hands and then he pulled an envelope from his coat...
...I had just about reached the table when I looked up at the party of men...
...Besides, there was nothing else to do but go back to the depressing barracks and get more depressed...
...I watched the taillights of his car disappear around the corner of the building before I opened the envelope...
...This is for you," he said...
...He gave the same hell to every other man in the division—for drinking, for fighting, for any of the pastimes sailors took to when they became sick of being stranded overseas, ashore, for months on end...
...Pipes, radiators, and ceilings all leaked rusty water, and my favorite amenities were the giant biting centipedes and the shower heads, which switched at random from ice water to live steam during one's ablutions...
...Then things really got depressing...
...Like a lot of young sailors, I had problems with overseas duty...
...Inside was a large wad of bills and a note: Had a lucky night...
...I've never seen the place so packed, and Hal gets off in half an hour...
...But I didn't have to...
...I was not supposed to be seen 'by the patrons lest some off-duty ensign view an enlisted man and die of insult...
...Just to get money for some damn books, I'd be busted a stripe, and they'd take off two months' pay...
...The other gentleman was a Japanese fellow who responded to the name Tosh and nothing else...
...gether, simply dragging the glasses through hot water and then tossing them down on the trays...
...A lot of my friends drank, while others used drugs...
...Only the hard drinkers were left to usher in Christmas Day...
...On most nights Tosh had cursed through his entire vocabulary before half an evening's work, which was something like two thousand glasses, not to mention beer pitchers, jiggers, shakers, and blender parts...
...Listen," he told me, "just serve this tray of drinks to those guys over in the far booth, and then take your break...
...I didn't wait for 26 The American Spectator December 1995 an answer...
...George smiled broadly, and I expected him to begin reminiscing about ice skates under the Christmas tree...
...George was mixing about ten drinks a minute and looked like he was going to unravel...
...By eleven o'clock I was pouring simple drinks for the waitress to deliver, and rushing so much I'm sure everyone got a double...
...George looked at his watch...
...And I was stuck ashore, in old barracks that were no more than a wretched old pile of sticks, built by the Japanese long before the Second World War...
...Take this and buy Mahan's Sea Power, and don't ever let me see you in here again...
...We The American Spectator December 1995 25 weren't even allowed to breathe the rarefied air that emanated from the Officer's Club, much less scrub the glassware for money...
...I don't know who was more surprised, but they had to be less concerned than I was...
...George appeared through the steam with a sandwich, a draft beer, and his extra-worried look...
...I had never done anything wrong before, and though I was trying very hard not to give in, at last the full weight of it crashed over me...
...He closed and locked the door, then we walked around to the front of the building, the new ice crackling beneath our shoes...
...The tray held ten drinks, brandies and shots of bourbon, and balancing it was harder than it looked when the waitress did it...
...Nobody," he said...
...It hardly matters now, but when I was 19 it seemed a terrible thing, an unfair condition imposed upon an already homesick young sailor thousands of miles from home...
...Michael J. McGrorty, who lives in Los Angeles, is writing a novel based on his Navy experience...
...The place couldn't have had ten people in it, five of whom were my friends from the Packer, now playing draw poker around a bottle of bourbon...
...Both of us knew I wouldn't...
...The other two inmates were a religious fanatic who prostrated himself and begged the forgiveness of Jesus at all hours of the night, and a drifty old boatswain's mate who, I swear, never bathed in the months of our acquaintance...
...By midnight, when the waitress left, a good many of the revelers had gulped their last Old Fashioned and headed out to the taxi stand...
...I had something close by to divert me...
...Behind him the first thick flakes of a heavy Christmas snow were falling...
...To call the accommodations spartan was to offer extravagant praise...
...But I took the risk because I needed cash to buy books...
...E ven with Tosh it had always been hell keeping up with the work, but by myself it was a nightmare...
...When the expressive power of his ten or so expletives had been exhausted, Tosh would ramble on in his own language, most likely cursing me and his fate...
...And so they were...
...That Christmas Eve I got to work at 5 p.m., pulled on a white apron, and stole a look around the end of the long bar to gauge how heavy the action would be...
...If I had been on a ship things would have been different...
...Instead of the snug galley of the Packer we were to have our Christmas Eve supper among the general horde of civilians, Marines, and Army personnel at the base cafeteria, a spot closer to Woolworth's than the Waldorf...
...It was 1975, and my ship, the USS Packer, a destroyer escort, sat nursing melancholy in the grimy fastness of a drydock, trailing wires and hoses from the places her insides had been...
...He simply stared at the center of my chest and said softly, "Mack, go get us a deck of cards:" / hated officers, but I especially hated Vander, who always took pleasure in tearing up my leave chits and screwing me around whenever he got the chance...
...There were no decorations in the shop windows outside the base gates, and the only cheer to be had in town on Christmas Eve was the same cheer available any other night: a lethal mix of plum wine and gin known as Mojo, for which the smoky dives of Yokosuka were justly renowned...
...You're so far behind it doesn't matter now...
...Most looked like they'd just completed their Christmas call home at the phone exchange next door, and if you've ever done that you know what I mean...
...Just do the best you can...
...After a while it became difficult to face evenings and weekends among my fellow sailors, and soon it was impossible...
...You listen to half a dozen people, among them your girlfriend, tell you how much they miss you as your dog barks in the background, and some liar using started to take hold...
...At ten-thirty Hal went home to his wife, leaving George and me in charge of a smoky den housing a couple of hundred free-spending, mostly homesick drinkers...
...All of them laughed all of them, that is, except one, Lieutenant Vander, my division head and the man who'd have to write me up...
...Inside half an hour I was behind, and by six o'clock I was bailing like mad against a rising tide of highball glasses...
...Drink it all at once," he said...
...I read books—as many as I could get my hands on, losing myself in them the minute I could get to some quiet spot away from the piers and drydocks...
...George sighed deeply, pulled two cigarettes from a crushed pack of Luckys, and handed me one...
...So I kept working...
...the cooks lay on a tremendous banquet that extinguishes homesickness beneath the labors of digestion, and the Old Man kicks in a cigar for all hands...
...But he only pushed his cigarettes toward me and asked, "What will you do now...
...As I wiped my eyes on my apron, George's voice echoed in the stairwell: "The cards are under the safe...
...He offered a ride but I declined...
...On a busy evening the Officer's Club used an You listen to half a dozen people, among them your girlfriend, tell you how much they miss you as your dog barks in the background, and some liar using your voice assures them that he's doing just fine, 7,000 miles away...
...From time to time George would look in on me, offering a hard glance that let me know they'd be serving Manhattans in coffee mugs if I didn't hurry up...
...Goodnight Mack, happy Christmas...
...I hissed at him, "To hell with it—give 'em back the same dirty glass and I'll start pulling beer...
...For a long time I'd been moonlighting as a dishwasher at the Officer's Club...
...I shared a cell with three other men, one of whom had once tried to throw me out the third floor window while drunk...
...A. E. Vander, Lt...
...I had two years left on a four-year hitch that I'd begun to regret signing up for months earlier...
...I'd just managed to get a handle on the glassware when George shuffled around the corner and said, "Come on out now, nearly everyone's gone, let somebody else finish...
...George rang the last call, then pulled out a dusty jug of cognac from under the counter...
...There was nothing holiday-like about it...
...By this time nobody in the house would have known if I were an enlisted man from the Soviet Navy...
...By seven I had given up drying altoget the money...
...Out in the lounge the low hum of early evening had been replaced by the rumble of animated conversation as the drinks astonishing amount of glassware, especially since policy dictated that each round be served in a fresh glass...
...I searched the drawers, looked on the shelves, beneath the ledgers, everywhere, but there were none...
...Most decided to take their chances with the Mojo...
...I was a petty officer third class, but in a few days, after Vander busted me, I'd be a seaman again, and likely be discharged that way...
...This meant that another young gentleman and myself worked like hell in a recess back of the bar in order to keep the drinks flowing...
...The look in his eyes told me that he wasn't asking my opinion...
...I hadn't the slightest idea...
...They were five division officers from the Packer...
...I was supposed to have a break at ten, but there were trays stacked up to the ceiling and no relief in sight...
...Now he'd have a clean shot at me...
...I crept upstairs to the office to look for some cards...
...Tears ran down my face...
...U.S.N...
...0 The American Spectator December 1995 27...
...His English vocabulary was limited to a handful of curse words...
...Already the place was filling up, mostly with junior officers, single men who had no families to go home to and no reason to do anything but celebrate over a few drinks with friends...
...I was supposed to get off at midnight, but the club would be closed on Christmas, and I didn't want to leavea ton of dishes for my replacement...
...Unfortunately, the base library seemed to have stopped making purchases in the late fifties, and the extant collection leaned heavily toward gothic romances and "historical" novels in which runaway slaves and French buccaneers injected themselves into the subject family's gene pool...
...I turned out the last lights as George waited on the back steps...
...an evening spent rinsing cigarette butts out of beer mugs got me forty dollars in cash, an excellent return compared to my $400 monthly pay...
...I asked who was replacing Tosh tonight...
...I owed my employment to the fact that base management had decided to avoid the expense of dishwashing machines in favor of cheaper hand washing...
...There was only one drawback: Enlisted men like me were forbidden to work on the base...
...Aboard ship it doesn't matter whether you're sailing the Pacific or moored along the Nile, they make a big deal out of the holidays...
...Look, why don't you come out and do the glasses out at the bar after Hal leaves, and maybe help with the register...
...They regarded me as odd...
...George shooed me into my cave and told me that Tosh had been fired the night before—he'd flung his ten favorite words at Hal, the other bartender...
...Look," he said, "let's get this place shut down, then you come and see me next week sometime...
...The stuff burned downward like a falling meteor and produced a feeling like you get from hearing a distant train whistle at night...
...Failing that, he sent the furniture instead...
...T here is no Christmas in Japan...
...Here," he said, "take a break...
...His lighter clanked shut like a prison door slamming...
...From a corner of the room somebody's division officer rendered a loud, flat version of "Silver Bells," while a fighter pilot at the bar wept into his Rob Roy recalling Christmas mornings back in Ohio...
...In order to read decent books I had to buy them, and so I worked washing dishes to your voice assures them that he's doing just fine, 7,000 miles away...
...But I wasn't on a ship that Christmas...
...After a few moments, George, one of the two bartenders, caught me scanning the crowd and motioned me back into the scullery...
...He poured each of us a tremendous slug...
...I took a moment to sneak a smoke in back, but George called me out front as soon as I'd sat down...
...What began as a foreign adventure gradually turned into a lonely exile...
...I read the note three or four times, then walked home through the cones of snowfall cast by the streetlights...
...All at once we ran out of everything but snifters...
Vol. 28 • December 1995 • No. 12
