Even now, twenty years later, sailors stay in my mind as white figures moving through the darkness of San Diego.

The streets were flooded with new recruits on the night I am remembering. All about me they moved in a glittering stream.

I was on an "exploratory" -- one of my first visits, trying to pick up sailors, often content just to watch from a distance. But tonight so many of them were swinging down the street, calling to their mates, that it was like being at a carnival.

Clearly they were celebrating something.

In and out of pinball arcades, I followed first one group then another, patching the story together. It seemed several companies had finished basic training at the same time; now everybody was downtown for the innocent pleasure of a drunken night -- just to be boys again, just to shed the high seriousness of the Final Review, with all the flags waving on the parade ground and their instructors standing in a line, those barking drill captains who for the last 14 weeks had ripped them down individually so they could raise them up on the last day as a single unit, merged body and soul with their buddies.

Trouble was these new recruits had picked up a bad habit of sticking too close to one another. No sooner would I strike up a conversation with one at a cigarette machine then two of his pals would pull him away to the foosball table.

The whizzing and buzzing and bell-ringing in the arcade served as further distraction. It was like being on Pinocchio's Pleasure Island, where all these hayseeds had turned into wooly donkeyboys, hee-hawing after the rude delights of hunting and killing, in safe video-game format. In such an atmosphere, a subtle innuendo, a leading question, a lingering look was lost in the Funland clatter.

In any case, an invitation home would have been premature. I hadn't even gotten a motel room yet. Coming off the freeway, I intended to make a quick pass of the downtown when the wave of white put me in park. On the sidewalk, I became one with the busy stream of boys. It was odd to see all those immaculate bellbottoms downtown. These new graduates must have hopped on the Liberty bus without much forethought.

Few sailors, in 1980, would have gone off base in uniform. Walking around with shaved heads was bad enough! How the sailors hated their military haircuts, hastening to flip open wallets and produce graduation photos of themselves in limp shoulder-lengths, this is the real me, charmingly unaware of how completely the base barber had scalped them into vintage queer bait. Really, was anything ever more intoxicating them those damn whitewalls -- as sailors nicknamed the expanse of scalp that ran straight up to the temple before it met the first fuzz-line of hair? All they knew was that they had a hard time meeting "women", their naked heads marking them quickly, and from blocks away, as indentured teenagers, out of step with their civilian peers.

The beautiful girls they longed for -- the surfer blondes from Mission Beach, the neat princesses peddling through Balboa Park -- saw the situation pragmatically. Sailors were too transient to build a dream on, too easily shipped out to Subic Bay for long, faithless tours of the Philippines. Sailors were from hick towns, a lot of them, without much education and few prospects beyond the military. It was a home truth handed down from San Diego mother to San Diego daughter: sailors were just not boyfriend material. Even during World War II the USOs tended to be helmed by the pretty girls of other cities.

In many ways, the clocks had stopped running in San Diego on some long-ago New Year's Eve in the 1940s. That was an era when the navy was known, without embarrassment, as "the white service," meaning all Caucasian. It was a myth, of course, but not as much of a myth as it is now.

In the decades after the War, when military integration had become the law of the land, San Diego continued to collect a predominantly fair-skinned navy from the Southwestern states, keeping its crown as the Ultimate Sailor Town precisely because myth tended to survive in this sleepy border town longer than anywhere else and in ways that only on special nights, like this one, flared suddenly, stunningly into the light.

I looked about me. Down the street the waves kept cresting, sailor boy after sailor boy, the topless places at the bottom scooping up uniforms in dizzy white eddies. It was a hallucination out of the past. Summer crackerjacks had turned the streets into a foamy white sea -- but it wasn't just the uniforms. It was the sailors themselves, the rawness, all at once, of their youth, the starkness of their exposed scalps -- it was this that gave them a certain...white...remove, as if an order of flat-footed Seraphim had fallen from some clean place in the sky and now rooted about in the hellish glamour of rosy bar light and blue cigarette smoke.

© 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.