0800 4 JUN 91
Four days and a wake-up.
The Top Gun Gazette announces “4 days and a wake-up.” Wolfpack Pers is crowded with cruise boxes. CMC has the gall to pack his personal belongings in boxes for lower ranks to hike up to his office in the Top Gun hangar back at Miramar. YNCS puts his in another cruise box at Hawaii, flies home. “The offload working party is to wear dress whites.” The Admiral says put in a claim but doesn’t say when funds would be reimbursed. “We’ll look sharp.”
I remember Billy. Years after I’d lost him, I found a color negative that I’d taken of him in his front yard wearing my shirt, his neck and half a shoulder naked. He was thirteen. White-blond, straight bangs, with a slight curl at the end. I took it in to a camera store and blew it up to 11” x 14”. Then framed it, stared at it, and finally tried to have sex with it. I hope it doesn’t go that way with Sweet Pea.
Pre-staging everything in the hangar for offload. A final insult in Wolfpack Personnel: Graham's Career Counselor’s ashtray smolders on a shredder. He hurls it straight to a bulkhead.
Real high khakis are gods. Enlistees: peons, serfs, pukes, children to be seen, not heard. If you talk back to a tyrant in the Navy you will suffer. Tyrants are a dime a dozen.Alas, no more Sweet Pea. The most beautiful thing to happen to me in 15 years. One young man opened up enough to become confused and to confuse me. I leave him tomorrow, take four days off and go on leave ten more days. Then he goes to sea for two weeks, followed by terminal leave. We never kissed. I never told him straight forward that I loved him. But I never got so close as to ruin it, either. Maybe the mystery will live forever. End Of Cruise separates the man from the boy. The same cruise that brought us together.