Sitting in a topless bar, thinking about boys.

Two sailors playing pool, dowdy workmen having beers around the bar. It was a slow night in San Diego -- and that was exactly what I wanted.

I had been around the block a few times at this point, had sailors in motel rooms and on the reclining seat of my car. I made it my business now to befriend what I called the Bellbottom Brigade -- sailor chasers, often ex-sailors themselves, who were experts at the game. One of the Bellbottoms was complaining in my ear.

This shithole never happens, he told me. Every fag thinks because Jimmy's is in the shadow of the Servicemen's YMCA, it'll be wall-to-wall squids. Jimmy himself even jerry-rigged a platform and hired a topless dancer to compete with the dives on J Street. But except for those two rinkydinks racking up pool balls and that one guy down there -- he pointed to a blocky, shapeless sailor of about 30 sitting under the dancer -- nothing.

Smitty screwed out his cigarette in the ashtray. He had been hitting the arcades and bookstores, he said, since "twenty hundred hours." Downtown was dead.

As obsessions went, Smitty had one of the most complete. He talked as much as possible in military jargon, had a watch cap jammed down on his head, and had acquired, so severely, the GI haircut that his eyes looked crammed together, and a little crazy. Also he hated gay men -- a sentiment common to the Bells, though usually more submerged. Talking to Smitty was a little like getting drenched in cat spray.

He got up, scraping his stool. He would check out "the head" one last time and then it was "adios, pardner." Hunching up under his cap as he passed the pool table, Smitty gave each of the sailors a hard look, then paused at the men's room expectantly, his crazy walleyes still burning into them. Finally, he shook his head, declaring in this way, that Saturday Night was officially fucked.

Actually, there were two schools of thought on that. One was that downtown San Diego was best on payday weekends when the squids would be running around flush with cash; the other, that payday was the worst time, if your objective was to find a lone sailor, wandering moodily about with just enough cash for a few drinks, looking for something to do.

The lone sailor watching the dancer was a case in point. A bit plain and already getting dumpy, he was nevertheless available. Now see him as the spic-n-span recruit he was 10 years ago, facing the same low-key weekend. The golden girls of San Diego avoid him. He has nothing going on a Saturday night except the company of his buddies, and his buddies are untested friends, met only weeks before in basic -- as impulsive as he, as flighty, as open -- in the right place and at the right time -- to suggestion.

Walking a deadened downtown, the lone sailor finds little more than the bland welcome of merchants, the nod of a bartender that he probably calls by name but who couldn't tell him from the next haircut. Then he walks into a place like Jimmy's, and what does he get? Well, look at her: A dancer with pert little cupcake breasts, staring straight ahead into space, not even bothering to sway that G-string close to his face for a tip, just going through the mechanics of a frug with the sort of expression that says I think so little of your attentions, boy, that I have to empty my mind just to be here.

On such nights, San Diego becomes a paradise of restless boys, and the legends of the lone sailor get rewritten and updated (though the story never really changes) by members, official or otherwise, of the Bellbottom Brigade.

Not long after Smitty hunched his way out the front door, three sailors came in, horsing around and shoving the little guy in the middle to take a seat under the dancer. The other two joined him and after a few words, one of the boys -- he had done most of the pushing and was obviously the leader -- approached the bar, still full of mischief.

He was a well-made specimen with terrific posture, dressed in the usual off-base attire -- jeans and a narrow western shirt . For a military boy, his jeans had an unusually snug fit, squaring off his box nicely and showing a high, buoyant ass as he turned to order the drinks.

He came up right next to me, so close that I was staring directly into one of the marvels of the San Diego sailor -- a small tender ear, redder than the rest of him.

Ears were the first to burn under these postcard skies. Unaccustomed to a summer that lasted the entire year, sailors could be seen laying out in Balboa Park every Sunday, pecs and curvy biceps on long, careless display. Then abruptly the work of the sun would be interrupted. Back on base, back in uniform, back below deck, the rest of the sailor stayed white. Classically, the San Diego sailor had a half-burnt look, separating him even further from the tanned populace of a brown city.

And I was staring straight into the enflamed emblem of his isolation -- a marvelously small, marvelously scrubbed ear that was as pink as the inside of a seashell.

"How's she going." The boy had turned to find me watching him. He was smiling.

"Oh, she's going." I tried to be smooth. "I'd say she's about a half hour away from closing this bar and locking up Saturday night for good." This amused him and he tipped his bottle to his forehead in a salute. Checking to see if the bartender was out of ear shot, he leaned in confidentially. "You wouldn't know where I could get some -- um pot around here."

Fantasy run amok? Try some...

© 2004 Nightcharm, Inc & John Calendo. All photographs © 2004 Steven Zeeland & Nightcharm, Inc. 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.