"Jesus, I wish I was there," Slob said, shaking his head merrily. "Bet you run into, like, Frank Zappa and John Travolta every time you go to a Ralph's."

"Come visit me, guy."

"For real!"

"I have a swimming pool, cable television..."

"Copa-fucking-cetic, man!"

Cable TV, at the time, was more common in sports bars than apartments. As for the swimming pool, well, it was about the size of a jacuzzi, a gruesome blue eyeball plunked down in the middle of a very public center-court that all the apartments looked out on.

"I’ll sleep on the floor!" Slob was ecstatic.

"Oh, don’t worry about that, " I assured him. "I do have a couch...it’s a little small..." Right! A bruiser his size would just about clear the far end of it before his legs dangled over the armrest. "...but I'm sure we can work something out -- between the two of us."

He held my gaze for a moment, then started to babble about what he thought Hollywood would be like. I was about to spin out more tawdry tales of Z-list celebrities seen at car washes when a peevish voice came from the bar. "So which is it!" Doc eyed me critically. "First you say the Hulk is on steroids, then you say he’s not."

"All I know is the guy is humongous in person. But hu-mong-ous! And, Gary you'll love this," I looked down into the dreamy face, which rose up to meet me with effortless beauty. "Ferrigno says he sometimes feels like Marilyn Monroe! No,I'm not kidding! It's true! Says people think he's just a body. Says he can't go to a football game without the crowd recognizing him from the other end of the stadium. The body is that uniquely big!"

Gary laughed goofily, all the fine symmetries in his face collapsing into a momentary preadolescence.

"And he gets crazy fan mail from women -- and men too, by the way -- who want to see every inch of that body, who want the pants to rip a little higher here, a little lower there."

Slob pulled up a stool. " What about that Sweet Transvestite guy?" He hunched forward. "Does he dress like that all the time?"

"Sweet trans--? You guys have seen The Rocky Horror Show!"

I was amazed. The film, a midnight-movie phenomenon, had just come to San Diego and attracted an audience of mostly marginalized kids -- rockers in leather, punkers in makeup and a ka-jillion gay boys in the garters and bustier of the film's star. The sort of straight-ahead boy the military appealed to had not yet caught on to the gender-fuck humor of this anti-authoritarian spoof. I could only imagine what the three sailors must have looked like in the audience, with their raw, exposed scalps and winter-white skin.

"Doc took us." Slob said. "Doc knew all about it," Gary chimed in.

Doc reared up to his full height as if in answer to a challenge. And before noticing anything else, I was again knocked out by his aristocratic bearing, his sense of command. He reminded me, oddly, of a lead dancer, who through posture alone conveys a lion-like assurance and majesty.

"Rocky Horror Show -- wow!" I said admiringly. "You're pretty hip, Doc." Then I saw his face.

"I read some article about it," he said tightly, keeping his eyes trained on Gary. "That’s all." His gaze slid over to me -- cold, predatory. "In Penthouse magazine," he added pointedly. The insolence in his tone was unmistakable. "You ever read Penthouse?"

"I’ve written for it." Doc seemed to be making some point –- though what that point was I didn’t quite get. Yet.

Gary, meanwhile, was talking over the both of us, trying to get my attention. He got up now and stood in front of me. If he had been bashful and floor-gazing at first, he now bubbled over with chat, telling me how "neat" he thought the Horror Show was. Not cool, not hip -– neat.

In many ways, Gary, with his cute Ricky Nelson looks, was like the word itself. A sweet teenage superlative left over from the 1950's. The term still thrived throughout the Southwest in the soft-spoken rhetoric of pastors, coaches and high school principles. I could picture Gary working after school at the food court in a mall or riding long distances at night in a bus with his team to compete in divisional wrestling championships.

I could imagine, too, what an ultimate boy's adventure the peacetime navy must seem to him. "Join the Navy," the posters read, "and See The World." A classic come-on for a classic boy -- the World with all its sexy promise of the exotic and strange, of what the air-conditioned Sunday sermons called The Flesh and The Devil.

In The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Gary had found these promises fulfilled: The Halloween atmosphere in the theater, the umbrellas that opened on cue, the Time Warp dance in the aisles, -– it had all been so damn neat. I nodded along with him and every time I did he became more effusive as if his opinions were finally being authorized by an expert from Hollywood. He shot a proud look over at Doc but Doc was having none of it. The tall sailor eyed me sourly as he nursed his beer.

"... And there was this one chick," Gary was saying. "-- I mean, I think she was a chick..." But I was already lost in the mechanics of his face, unable to follow the drift, hearing only the be-bop on the 8-track, the words of the song overriding all else.

A woman is a woman but a man ain't nothing but a male...

It was a male voice, slurred, coarse, racing alongside a barking saxophone. And there I was, racing right along with them, my head bobbing in time.

...but a man ain't nothing but a male...

"Don’t you think?" Gary looked at me expectantly.

The only good thing about him...

"Oh yeah." I agreed, if only to the song.

...is he knows how to jump and wail.

"Definitely."

A form loomed up in the distance and all at once the little guy spun around. "Quit it, Doc!" he cried, tossing away the spider fingers tickling his sides. Doc smiled crookedly, but there was nothing playful in his attitude. Suddenly everything turned wintry as the lights came up. "We're closing, fellas."

I turned to the big blond. "Listen, I have some terrific dope back at my motel room."

"Doc, he's got hash!" Slob jabbed a hitchhiker thumb excitedly in my direction.

"We've got a morning review, Slob"

"I'll drive you back to the base."

"He'll drive us back to the base," Gary echoed.

Doc crossed his arms, glancing glacially down at the pretty sailor like a long-faced schoolmaster about to chastise a barefoot country child. "Do you really want to get written up with another UA?" He was referring to an Unauthorized Absence. "Do you really want to knock out all our liberty for a month?"

"But we'll get back in time, man. He'll --"

"Gary -- !"

"Craig -- !"

"Uh-oh." Slob leaned into my ear. "First names. Watch out."

© 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.