During the two hours of happy hour at the enlisted men’s club
While I was in sub school situated in the rolling hills
Just down the road from Electric Boat,
Drinks were a quarter apiece
And the local girls turned us down flat
And it was either that or bad pornos in Groton,
So we bought doubles two at a time,
To ease our anguish or pass the time,
Even though the legal age was twenty-one,
But I guess they didn’t care,
As long as we appeared sober on duty
Where we learned to drive boomers,
An apt name for ballistic missile subs
if you think about it,
On simulators through simulated seas.
And they made sure we could sort-of swim
And put out fires and plug leaks,
Which is a good thing to know, I guess,
When you’re under water,
But since we weren’t under water
And had no chance with the girls,
Maybe because of the doubles,
We were young and stupid, after all,
We concentrated on pornos and the cheap drinks,
And appearing to be sober at a moment’s notice.
We were supposed to practice
Escaping a sunken submarine
In a fifty foot high water tower,
But there was a fire in it
So we never got to practice
What we had to do to prevent the bends
And exhaling little pink bubbles from burst lungs
In the event we tried to hold our pressurized breaths.
After all that,
With two weeks leave,
Three of us crossed the Appalachian Mountains
In January,
In a rattle-trap, International Harvester Jitney,
A short buss
That would only do thirty uphill,
Leaking oil almost as fast as we could pour it in
Through the access in the cab
While driving through a Pennsylvania blizzard,
On the way to Illinois,
Heat provided by a lit roll of toilet paper
In a one pound coffee can
Soaked in sterno producing an oddly greenish flame,
Verly little heat, and fumes,
We attempted to corral with a tarp spread waist level.
I did say
We weren’t that smart.
