I had to steady myself on the stool. Sailor conversations that began like that usually ended up in bed.

Did I know where he could find some pot meant you can invite me home if you want. It was as if all these straight boys had read the same script, a sort of three-act play:

Act One: They meet you cute.

Act Two: Motel room, interior. The joint gets passed around a few times and the sailor somehow finds his way out of the demure chair and onto the provocative bed. You talk about nothing much in particular when out of the blue he turns on his stomach and says -- it was usually these exact words too -- Just be gentle, man.

After that, the finale goes off like a shot, followed by a few encores, then a shower, sometimes together, in what amounts to a curtain call.

Some boys, though, needed to bring in an epilogue, a creaky set piece recited from the wings, quite antique and mercifully optional. If it was performed at all it took place on the drive back to the base when the glare of the morning and the scrutiny of the MPs at the checkpoint compelled your sailor to confess that he had never done anything like that before -- at which point you knew you were in the presence of an abandoned male slattern who, though he had no romantic interest in his own sex, had discovered, in the way that boys will, a certain itch located deep in the prostate and, with it, a wild craving to be fucked, regularly, like an animal.

Never mind the talk about gentle. And never mind the hunt for pot, the putative cause of it all.

"I have some joints back in my motel room, " I offered, holding up my end of the line readings. I now remembered his buddies across the bar and knew that because of them this conversation would not have a third act witnessed by the four walls of any Motel 6.

"Oh." He was let down. He explained that he was really looking for a dealer. They had just got in from a long tour of Guam and found their old connection busted. He needed to buy major marijuana. I studied his eyes as he spoke. He had the oblong face of a basketball player, hollowed-out cheeks and a long jawline, too long and horsy to be officially handsome, yet something about the direct gaze made him quite compelling. "...And my buddies..."

"Your buddies can come to," I jumped in gamely. I had lost track of the conversation. Just then there was a racket of rat-ta-tat-tats behind us. The sailors who had been playing pool now manned the arcade shooter and as one brought down the Luftwaffe, the other egged him on: "Get some, get some, get some!"

"My buddies?" The sailor looked at me, confused.

"Yeah, they can come to my motel room too. We'll have a party."

The long face froze. I must have broken some rule of speaking in code to sailors. Perhaps the secondary meaning of the verb to party was a bit bald for this late hour of the night. He smiled warily and began collecting his drinks.

"That's okay," he said. One of the arcade sailors squealed. A whistling decrescendo was followed by a cartoon explosion, and the shooter let out a hoot. "That's the way it's done, son!"

I had to act quickly. "Bad decision, guy. You're going to miss some killer weed -- Hollywood weed! I got this right off the Paramount Studios backlot." The absurdity of extolling Los Angeles product when we were on the border of Mexico was nothing next to my gamble that the magic word Hollywood would ensnare yet another nubile body in its whorey, gold-lame web.

"Are you -- in the movies!" I could almost see the voodoo vines tangling up Prince Charming as he contemplated the slumbering, far-away land where Sleeping Beauty lived amid golden things.

I confessed I wasn't any such thing; I was just a magazine writer who interviewed movie actors. "And that," I added in a frank tone, " is the lowest form of life in Hollywood..." -- knowing exactly how glamorous such admissions sounded. He wanted to know whom I had interviewed. I dropped a few names. I got the feeling he had never heard of Debra Winger, let alone Kim Novak, but Rod Stewart provoked a tiny wow, and when I mentioned TV people he really lit up. In the end, though, he gathered his drinks to his chest.

For an odd moment, he seemed to size me up, then abruptly he brightened. "Well, take her easy."

I watched the sailor stride back to his friends as the dancer came off the platform, wrapping herself in a shorty kimono. The Bellbottoms had warned me not to be too colorful; it frightened off the trade. They themselves cultivated a low-key reserve, a repertory of banal ice-breakers about the weather and the seasons and the time of day. The real pick-up masters even contrived a certain mellifluous baritone, the sort of thing that might calm a small, trembling dog. For my part, color was something I had no choice about. I was, like the land of Oz, in vivid Technicolor and there was no brown in sight.

The dancer went behind the bar, holding her hair up in a bunch, away from her neck. She disappeared in a side room. It was amazing how the atmosphere changed as soon as she was gone. Without a fertility dance to focus them, the men looked about idly. Subtly the lights brightened; the bartender called last call.

The music changed too. During these last calls, the bartender liked to play 8-tracks, usually from the Swing Era. Around the cash register were pictures of pretty USO hostesses in big wartime pompadours, much clearer now in the better light, and a signed glossy of shapely Ann Sheridan, surrounded by uniforms, waving from the back of a train on a bond-raising tour. This note -- of the 1940s -- was always being struck in some way in San Diego. Get hep to that jive, Clyde. The bartender sang along as he snapped open bottles.

"My buddy doesn't believe you."

I turned around. Smiling mischievously, the sailor was back and he had brought his two pals.

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.