The tall sailor pushed the little guy forward. Embarrassed, the kid looked away.

I almost had to look away myself.

The boy was a doll-faced bantamweight in a clingy knit shirt that showed the proud pecs and stacked shoulders of a high-school wrestler. A delicate vein stood out clearly in his neck, pulsing off a wave of sickly-sweet cologne.

"Ole Doc here is fooling with me the way he always does," the kid said with a good-natured poke; the tall sailor was trying to constrain his arms. "He says you're a movie star!"

"I said -- Gary! -- that he hung out with movie stars." The tall sailor shot a gleeful look at the third sailor, a big boy, who hung back a bit watching the byplay.

"Quit it, fool!" the kid raged, blocking another attempt to pin down his arms. He turned back to me expectantly.

"Your friend is not such a fool as he looks," I told the boy. "If anyone here is a movie star..." I took in the dreamy Ricky-Nelson-ish face, squared off in its military flattop, "...that would be you."

The kid blushed crimson... "Aw, shit."

I was relentless. "You look like the dreamboat cadet in a West Point epic." The tall sailor leered down at his buddy, delighted by so much embarrassment. So the tall sailor, who had seemed so personable at first, was a bit of a brute, and a bully. It was time to put an end to this. "The truth is I'm a magazine writer," I said. "And I don't hang out with stars. I spend an hour or two interviewing them and then I write about it. They sell their movies and I pick up a paycheck."

"Doc, you dumbass!"

"Doc?" I looked at the tall, long-jawed sailor in wonder. "Are you a corpsman?" Corpsmen were frequently nicknamed Doc, being the dispensers of first aid on a ship. And though my question was innocuous, the sailor bristled. "We're sonar techs," he announced huffily. Now it was his turn to squirm. Apparently, he was not totally unfamiliar with the secret life of male nurses.

He had the same reaction to corpsmen that the Bellbottom Brigade did. They scorned navy nurses as members of a notorious gay rate (though several of them had been corpsmen themselves.) Boiler techs and SEALS were also said to belong to gay rates, though those job classifications were more muscular -- and therefore undercover.

The Bells explained the caste system as a product of science rather than their own uptight malice. On entering the service, recruits took a battery of aptitude tests, and gay sailors tended to pile up in certain work categories, the defining quality of which was a job that required meticulous detail checking.

As long as the rate hid its homosexuality under an outer shell of grim officiousness, the Bells -- like the Navy itself -- would overlook the flawed male impersonators who otherwise degraded the uniform. Corpsmen, on the other hand, who tended to be concerned, nurturing -- and entirely too comfortable in their gay skin -- could never pass the Bell's inhuman muster. It was attitudes as deformed and self-defeating as these that made the Bells fascinating to me, but it was strange to find such touchiness in an actual, fresh-faced sailor.

I watched him now as he knocked back his beer, theatrically raising it like a trumpet. "And they call you Doc because...?"

" -- because Ole Doc here goes on the drug runs," the third sailor broke in. "The man brings home the meds." He was a big bear of a boy with blond eyebrows, who, contrary to all outward signs, introduced himself as Slob. (In fact, he was as shaved and spotlessly clean as the other two.) When I asked him what sonar techs did, he and humpy little Gary answered in unison "We listen!"

Cupping a cigarette in his paw-like mitts, Slob lit up and explained: Week after week they were cooped up in a submarine, listening to sonar waves bounce off the continental shelf with big headphones on that made their heads sweat and their ears ring.

Life at 27 fathoms was a dull and deadly business, and if it weren't for Doc, Slob said, they'd go squirrelly. Doc always came up with the best games and the coolest pranks. He was in charge of the group's grass, making sure it lasted to the end of the voyage, as unmoved as a judge by birthdays and special pleas, measuring it out in small, regular doses. Doc did everything like that. Just in the last week, his careful strategies had led them to a big tournament win. Doc was now the top Dungeon Master on the sub, where the dice-game Dungeons & Dragons was a kind of religion. Slob cast an admiring glance over at the bar.

Leaning away from us, Doc studied our conversation in silence, his long jaw tensing from side to side like a student working out a math problem.

"Did you really talk to that Hulk guy?" Gary pulled up a stool.

He was referring to Lou Ferrigno, the novelty star of the current TV season, a musclebuilder who burst out of his clothes whenever the show's real star lost his temper and who in the past month had given a hundred throw-away interviews that no one would ever put on a resume -- unless, of course, they wanted to impress boys barely out of their teens.

"How big is that guy -- really?"

"Well, Gary..." He was looking up at me steadily from under his flattop, all upturned features and large, believing eyes. Suddenly I lost it. I felt this heat-radiating grin come over my face and knew it would keep getting bigger and dumber unless I looked away. I glanced up at the bar. Doc was tossing down a handful of nuts, a dark look on his face, his eyes never straying from Gary.

I made a point now of aiming my comments over Gary's head, to the equally enthusiastic Slob. "Lou Ferrigno is...like all the steroids money can buy stuffed into a Speedo."

"I knew it, I knew it, I knew it!" Slob went into a little war-dance. "Didn’t I tell you that guy was a doper."

"Well, that's the gossip," I admitted, "but then it would be, right? Hollywood is a jealous place."

© 2004 Nightcharm, Inc & John Calendo. All photographs © 2004 Nightcharm, Inc & Steven Zeeland All rights reserved. No part or portion may be republished or reprinted in electronic or any other format, in any language, translation, or version, without express permission from Nightcharm, Inc., except brief passages which may be quoted in a review.