'The Cherry Boy'

 The below story is chapter 17 of Olongapo, a crime novel I hope to soon publish. 

The Cherry Boy

By Paul Davis

Wilbur Grady grew up poor on a farm in Arkansas. 

His family was deeply religious, and Grady was advised by his father not to let the sins of the flesh and other temptations make him stray from the flock while he served in the U.S. Navy. 

But Wilbur Grady’s father did not foresee the temptations of Olongapo, nor did he see the greed and treachery of John Bland. 

Grady, a shy, soft-spoken young man with blonde hair, did not curse, did not drink, did not take drugs, did not gamble, and did not consort with fast women.   

On the Kitty Hawk’s initial visits to Subic Bay, Grady did not leave the base and go into Olongapo. He enjoyed Grande Island and other base entertainment, but he stayed clear of Olongapo’s bars and bar girls. 

Grady was not a good sailor. He did not adjust well from his sheltered life on the farm to Navy life on an aircraft carrier. He was in a perpetual state of nervousness and that nervousness made him error prone. He fouled up often and he was often chewed out by the chiefs and petty officers, which of course increased his nervousness. Gray failed in nearly every task he was assigned to. Grady even failed to make coffee properly for the message center. 

Coffee was important to us in the Communications Radio Division, as we worked hard on our eight-on and eight off watches, and we were so wound up that many of us had trouble sleeping during our eight hours off watch. Strong Navy coffee helped keep us alert and able when we went back on watch.  

I had the top rack above two other racks in the berthing compartment, which was good as the top rack was open at the top, so I didn’t feel like I was in a coffin. But just above me were pipes for the steam catapult system that launched our aircraft off the carrier’s flight deck. 

During flight operations, the gush of steam that ran through the pipes and the thump of the aircraft launching above me often prevented me from sleeping or woke me if I were already asleep. So when I had to report for my watch, a good cup of strong Navy coffee was essential.  

We had a three-foot high coffee urn in a cubbyhole room in the message center. The low-ranking seamen had to refill the urn with water and make fresh coffee for the officers, chiefs, petty officers, and other seamen on watch in the message center. Once filled with water, the urn was quite heavy and awkward to carry from the head to the message processing center. 

I recall one watch when Grady was assigned to make the coffee. We had a deep sink in the head and several new seamen, including Grady on this day, spotted it and laid the urn in the deep sink and filled it with water. Grady then lifted the heavy urn up and carried it into the message center and made the coffee. 

It did not take long before one of the chiefs gagged on the fresh coffee and demanded to know what numbskull made the coffee. Grady was severely chastised and informed that the deep sink in the head produced salt water rather than fresh water.  

I had been warned not to use the deep sink for coffee by my older shipmates. I was told that the proper but difficult way to fill the large coffee urn with water was to stand in a shower stall and direct the stream of cold water into the urn. 

Grady’s nervousness was further fueled by his witnessing a prank in the message center’s coffee cubbyhole. Chief Hank Newly was a demanding and unpopular chief who often ordered seamen to refill his coffee mug, which we resented. We usually muttered, “Why don’t you get your own fucking coffee” under our breath. 

None of the other chiefs, or even the officers, ever asked the seamen to get them coffee. In fact, Lieutenant James Horn, a cool officer we all liked, said to Newly, “I get up and get my own coffee, so why can’t you, chief?”

Newly just looked at the officer without comment. 

Seaman Matt Svenson was a weightlifter and jokester from Kansas who truly resented getting the chief coffee. The muscle-bound sailor smiled at me, Grady, Greenberg, and a seaman named Mick Stills as we crowded into the cubbyhole as Svenson was filling Chief Newly's coffee mug. 

“Watch this,” Svenson said to us. He then placed the tip of his penis into the coffee in the chief’s mug. 

His jokester’s grin disappeared as he screamed out in pain. Greenberg took hold of the mug before it crashed to the floor. He laid the chief’s mug on a counter and held on to Svenson’s arm. 

“The coffee’s hot, you fucking idiot,” I said as Svenson collapsed against a bulkhead. Stills laughed and Grady appeared to go into shock. Greenberg took Svenson’s arm and told him that he would take him to sick bay.

“Tell the corpsman in sick bay that you burned your dick getting into a hot shower with a hard-on,” Greenberg told Svenson.

Greenberg and Svenson left for sick bay, leaving me to tell the grumpy chief that Svenson burned himself and was taken to sick bay. I didn’t tell him how or where Svenson had burned himself. The chief grumbled and cursed Svenson. He did not inquire about the cause or extent of Svenson’s injury.

Seaman Alfred Oswald came up behind me and I moved to the side. Oswald was an awkward and odd 25-year-old sailor from Michigan. He had sandy hair, wore thick glasses and had a prominent Adams Apple that rose and fell in his neck like a bobbing apple. We called him “Lee Harvey” after President Kennedy’s odd-ball assassin. 

Oswald had retrieved the chief’s coffee mug from the counter in the cubbyhole after we left, and he handed the mug to Newly. “Here’s your coffee, chief.”

“You’re a real kiss ass, Lee Harvey,” I said as I walked away.

I saw Stills walking about the message center, telling the young sailors that Svenson placed his penis in the chief’s coffee mug. Every time the chief raised the mug to his lips, the young sailors burst out laughing.

“What’s wrong with you morons?” the chief asked. “Turn fucking to!”

Svenson recovered and he happily told all the enlisted sailors his “dick in the chief’s coffee mug” story. I’m not sure if the story reached Chief Newly or not. If so, he didn’t take disciplinary action against Svenson, or ever mention the incident to anyone. But the chief never again asked Svenson to get him coffee.

 

Grady was never quite able to get the image of Svenson’s burnt penis in the chief’s coffee mug out of his mind, which increased his anxiety. John Bland saw an opportunity shortly after the dick in the chief’s coffee mug incident and latched onto Grady. Grady was a trusting and naive young man, so when Bland offered to help him overcome his nervousness and become a better sailor, Grady was thankful. Bland manipulated Grady easily and had him running errands for him and doing some of his work while we were at sea.

I thought Bland was a creep. I recall when the Kitty Hawk dropped anchor in Da Nang Harbor just off the huge American base in South Vietnam. The Kitty Hawk pulled into Da Nang Harbor to hold a change of command ceremony aboard the carrier for the Task Force 77 outgoing and incoming admirals. 

I was leaning over the catwalk watching the activity ashore at Da Nang as well as on the ships and boats that sailed by us in the busy harbor. The sailors on the boats were curious to see the giant aircraft carrier in their midst, and many American sailors on 50-foot Swift Boats and other craft looked up and waved, as did many of the Vietnamese fishermen. I waved back. 

Bland came up and stood beside me on the catwalk. As a Vietnamese fishing boat sailed by, Bland hit the deck and put his arms over his head. 

“What the fuck are you doing?” I asked. 

“I think that gook on the boat had a rifle,” Bland replied as he laid shakily on the catwalk’s deck. 

“You think a Viet Cong guerrilla is going to take on an 80,000-ton aircraft carrier with a rifle? Or maybe you think a Viet Cong sapper is out to assassinate you in particular? You’re a smacked ass, Bland.”

Later, while in Olongapo, I saw Grady and Bland in the Starlight and I just knew that Bland had Grady buying all of the drinks for himself, Bland, and the two bar girls at the table. I’m certain that Bland told Grady one of his sob stories about a family crisis at home that caused Bland to send his entire pay back home to his family, leaving him broke. I’m equally sure that Grady believed Bland’s fairy tale.

The two bar girls appeared to be overjoyed with the ‘Cherry Boy,” as he was buying. Svenson saw the group as he was walking by the table, and he sat down in an empty chair.

“Hey, Cherry Boy Grady. I see you finally come to town,” Svenson said. “And I see you got yourself a Cherry girl too. You know, she’s only had two lovers before you – the 6^th and 7^th Fleet.”

Grady just smiled nervously as the others laughed.

“I hear that some sailor caught VD from your girl,” Svenson said to Grady. “Well, here today, gonorrhea.”

Grady didn’t know how to react to Svenson’s taunting and old jokes, so he continued to smile nervously as the other sailors laughed. The bar girl next to Grady took offense and she flicked a lit cigarette at Svenson and said, “Fuck you, sail-lor.”

Svenson chuckled at the irate bar girl, and he got up from the table and went to the bar. He returned to the table and offered Grady a hard-boiled egg. I suspected that the egg was a balut, a fertilized developing duck egg that Filipinos considered a delicacy but nauseated most Americans. I tried to stop Grady from cracking open the shell, but I was too late. Seeing and smelling the duck embryo made Grady physically sick and he threw up on the floor.

Svenson, Bland and the bar girls laughed. Grady didn’t laugh, nor did the Filipino who came out with a mop and bucket to clean up the mess.

“You might say that Grady’s had a premature ejaculation,” Svenson said.

“You’re an asshole, Svenson,” I said.

At some point in the evening, Bland and Grady slipped out of the Starlight and left the two bar girls behind. I suspect that Bland didn’t want to pay the mama-san for taking the girls out of the bar early, as he was notoriously cheap, even when it was Grady’s money they were spending. Bland later solicited a street prostitute for Grady’s first tryst.

The following day back on the carrier, Bland told the other sailors that Grady had his first piece of “poontang,” and how much the young virgin farmer loved it. What Bland did not say was that he took some of Grady’s money and bought heroin, which he had convinced Grady to take to overcome his nervousness by being with a woman for the first time.

According to Lorino, Olongapo had nearly pure “smack,” and the strong heroin caused a user to become addicted to it very quickly. 

After another long line period on Yankee Station, we pulled back into Olongapo.

I saw Bland and Grady hurrying to get off the ship and into Olongapo. Some of the sailors laughed after Svenson said, “Grady got him a taste of that good Olongapo pussy, and now he can’t wait to get more.”

What I didn’t know at the time was that for the entire line period Grady had been injecting heroin. Bland convinced Grady that “shooting up” heroin would help him with his chronic nervousness.

Bland and Grady were anxious to get into Olongapo so they could score more heroin to satisfy Grady’s growing addiction. Bland did not do heroin, but he graciously offered to buy the drug for Grady. Knowing Bland, he inflated the price for the heroin and overcharged Grady, keeping the additional money for himself.

The heroin Grady took did help to calm him down, but it didn’t help with his poor job performance. In fact, being on heroin made him an even worst sailor.

I saw Grady in the head stumbling around and I asked him, “Are you on drugs?”

Grady admitted to me that he was shooting up heroin and he explained Bland’s encouragement, believing that Bland was helping him. I warned Grady that Bland was a cheap con artist, and he was using him, but I don’t think Grady believed me.

I was pissed at Bland, and I told Hunt about it. Hunt and I were in the head talking about Bland when he walked in. Hunt punched him square in the face and Bland fell against a bulkhead, his nose bloody.

“You’re a piece of shit, Bland.” Hunt said and he and I walked out of the head.    

 

Later, while on watch in the message center, Grady nodded from the heroin and fell out of a chair. He could not be revived, so he was carried to sick bay. The doctor diagnosed that Grady was a heroin addict. The doctor also discovered that Grady had Gonorrhea. Grady was put on report. Grady was to be issued a general discharge and plans were made to fly him off the carrier and to Subic Bay for his processing out of the Navy once he was cured of his venereal disease.

Grady, like me, was 18.

Over the course of only three months, Grady went from a teetotaler to a full-blown heroin addict. And he went from an innocent virgin to getting the clap from having sex with a Olongapo street prostitute.

Grady came to me to say goodbye prior to his flight off the carrier.

“I don’t know what to do,” Grady said to me. “My family disowned me. I got me no money and I know I’m gonna need some more smack when I get to San Diego.”

“You need a smack in the mouth,” I said. Grady smiled sheepishly.

“When you get to San Diego, check in with the Veterans Administration and get placed in a rehab center. Get clean and sober and start your life over.”

“Good advice, Davis. Thank you.”

“And don’t ever, ever come back to Olongapo.”

© 2024 Paul Davis  

'Officer Mack'

 Officer Mack

By Paul Davis

Back when I was a teenager in South Philly in the late 1960s, some of the boys on our corner at 13^th and Oregon Avenue hated cops. 

South Philadelphia is the hub of the Philadelphia-South Jersey Cosa Nostra organized crime family, and these teenagers were the sons and nephews of the mob guys. 

I recall that “Crazy Joe” Villotti, the nephew of a Cosa Nostra capo, or captain, refused to go with us and see the film Goldfinger. 

Villotti asked me, “Isn’t James Bond a cop?”   

“No,” I replied. “He’s a British secret agent, a cool spy of sorts.” 

“Yeah, he’s a fucking government guy, so I don’t want to watch the fuck.” 

But for most of the boys on the corner, like me, we saw that there were two types of cops. There were “cool” cops and “prick” cops. 

The cool cops were generally tough guys who could afford to be lenient and understanding at times, while the prick cops were weaker men who we believed made up for their feelings of inferiority by acting stern and officious at all times. 

Police Officer Thomas T. Mack was a prick cop. 

Mack, a short and muscular 30-year-old, began dating Marie Saccone, the attractive elder sister of Chick and Stevie Saccone, two of my friends on the corner. 

Their father was a mob associate and a big-time bookmaker and loan shark. But despite their father being an illegal gambler, Chick and Stevie didn’t hate cops the way Villotti and some others did. 

Mack asked to be transferred to the 3^rd Police District to be closer to Marie. He patrolled Oregon Avenue, a four-lane wide street and major thoroughfare in the predominantly Italian American neighborhood in South Philadelphia. 

He often stopped at JP’s Luncheonette at 13^th and Oregon Avenue for cigarettes and coffee. He would then come out and gab with Stevie, whom he treated like a younger brother. 

Chick would walk away, as he hated Mack. He hated Mack, not because he was a cop, but rather because he thought Mack was a phony and an asshole. 

Mack’s friendliness with Stevie and the other teenagers on the corner ended the day Marie dumped him. 

That very night he arrested Stevie and two other teenagers for drinking beer on the corner. And from that night on, Mack declared war on us. He harassed us nearly every night. We all hated Mack.

On a Mischief Night before Halloween, Mack pulled up on the corner and shouted through his open passenger window for us to get off the corner. 

“Yes, Sir,” we replied in unison. And in unison, a half dozen of us tossed a half dozen eggs at him through his passenger window. We then took off running but not before I saw the furious look on his face and his cap knocked sideways with egg yolk dripping down his face from the cap’s brim. 

I was laughing madly as I ran away from the corner. 

Mack went crazy and zoomed around the streets hunting us. I ran home after throwing my egg at him. My mother asked why I was home so early, and I told her I was tried and wanted to go to bed. 

Officer Frank Grant was a cool cop. We never would have thrown eggs at him. 

Grant stopped into JP’s nearly every night for a sandwich and a cup of coffee. Grant, a tall, gangly man in his late 20s, told funny stories to the owners of JPs and us. 

I recall him telling a story about a drug raid on an abandoned house in the 3^rd District. 

The district captain saw white powder that lay on a sheet of brown paper on the floor in the corner. He wet his index finger and dipped his finger in the powder and tasted it on the tip of his tongue. 

“Is this heroin,” he asked.

He again dipped his finger in the powder and tasted it.

“Is this heroin,” he again asked.     

One of the officers told the commanding officer, “Captain, I think it’s rat poison.”

The captain froze for a moment and then told the officer to drive him to the hospital.

Like many cops I’ve known over the years, Grant was a fine storyteller. When years later I read and enjoyed Joseph Wambaugh, the LAPD detective sergeant who became the best-selling author of The New Centurions, The Choir Boys, and other classic cop novels and nonfiction books about cops, I often thought of Grant. 

Another thing that endeared us to Grant was that he hated Officer Mack and often mocked him. 

One night as I sat alone with Grant at JP’s counter, I told the officer that although my Uncle Bill was a police captain, and my father, a WWII Navy chief and Underwater Demolition Team (UDT) frogman, was a strict law & order man, I hated Officer Mack. 

Grant laughed and said most of the 3^rd District cops also hated Mack.       

Although we had some tough guys on 13th and Oregon, like my older brother Eddie, Joe Villotti and the Saccone brothers, we were more of a party corner, as we hosted various crews of pretty girls that hung out with us 

But the street gang blocks away at the corner of Dalton Street and Oregon Avenue, called the “D&O,” was a crazy crew of violent, drug dealing teenage hoodlums. 

The D&O street gang hated Officer Mack even more than we did. Like us, Mack rousted the D&O teenagers for no reason other than hating them. True, they were hoodlums, but Mack often went overboard, roughing them up after handcuffing them. He then threw them out of his patrol car without even bothering to arrest them.

I suspect that because he was rejected by a beautiful Italian woman, Mack hated Italians. He called the D&O boys and the 13^th & Oregon Avenue teenagers “dagos” and “wops.”

But the D&O teenagers fought back.

I heard Mack went batshit crazy when he drove down Oregon Avenue and saw that the D&O boys had spray painted on the side of a building in very large letters, “OFFICER MACK BLOWS.”

The painted message was the talk of the 3^rd District cops. Mack was widely mocked by his fellow officers.  

One night Officer Mack pulled up to 13^th & Oregon, jumped out of his car, leaving the driver’s car door open and the patrol car running. He dashed into JP’s and shouted to the dozen or guys and girls on the corner, “Be off this fucking corner by the time I come out, or I’ll lock up all you up.”

I saw his patrol car door open and the car running, so I seized the day and jumped into the driver’s seat and took off. I drove across Oregon Avenue and jumped the curb of Marconi’s Park. 

I looked for, but could not find, the siren. As I drove through the park wildly, I glanced in the rear-view mirror and saw Mack running and shouting like a crazy man across Oregon Avenue, his service revolver held up into the air.  

I put on the brakes halfway into the park and jumped out running. I ran right into the beefy arms of a Fairmount Park Police Officer, who twisted me around and handcuffed me. He held me for Mack. 

Mack came up huffing and placed his service revolver back in the holster. He took out his “sap,” a short steel rod covered in black leather, and he slapped the sap across my knees. 

The pain was awful, but the worst thing was that I could not clutch my aching knees, as my hands were handcuffed behind my back. I leaned down as the Park cop held me.  

The Park cop asked Mack if he wanted to arrest me, and Mack said no. 

“Do me a favor and drive the kid down to the river and let the punk walk back home.”  

I had to walk from the river on Delaware Avenue and Front Street back up to 13^th and Oregon with swollen and throbbing knees. 

But it was worth it, as I was the talk of the corner that night and Thomas Junior High School the next day. Everyone thought I was a cool guy. The wild hoodlums from the D&O slapped me on the back and called me a “crazy motherfucker,” which was a high compliment from them.

Grant came to JP's the following night and told me that I was lucky that Mack didn’t arrest me or shoot me. He said that Mack was probably hoping no other cops would hear that a teenager stole his car.

But the Park cop hated Mack and he called a friend at the 3^rd District and told him the story. The cop in turn told all of his fellow 3^rd District officers. Mack was ridiculed once again.         

Some months later, Officer Grant came into JP's and told me that Mack was fired for beating the son of a South Philly councilman. According to Grant, Mack cuffed the Italian American politician’s teenage son and beat him as he held him against the side of the patrol car. 

The son was a what we called a “square” kid, and what the adults called a “nice Italian boy.” He was a good student who didn’t drink beer or smoke pot on the corner with us. 

We didn’t know why Mack singled him out. Mack handcuffed him and threw him against the side of the patrol car. He slapped the teenager in the face repeatedly and delivered a severe punch to the teenager’s stomach. 

The noise and flashing lights on the patrol car drew the attention of several neighbors who called 911 and reported the brutal treatment of the teenager. 

The councilman called the captain, who then ordered an investigation. Mack was subsequently fired. He also faced assault charges from the District Attorney’s office.

“Good riddance,” Grant said.

I laughed and said, “So even in South Philly, there’s some justice.