In The Navy (Sub School), Part 5

Once I got into the new barracks, I made a few friends that wound up being great friends.

First was Joey, who was a short stocky Italian guy. He had a great laugh and used it often, he was really fun to be around. He seemed to be able to bring out the best in anyone. Joey was a few years older than me and was a good person to talk to about life’s ups and downs.

Sub School was a lot of rubbing shoulders with new people and almost every day had a twist, like a game show. It was at least interesting. This was also when I first briefly met Dyke, who I will go on about later. At first I thought him a cocky a-hole and to this day, I expect anyone meeting him for the first time would think the exact same thing. It is a façade.

Joey loved playing Spades and taught me how to play (he had no problem taking my money while I learned, of course, because we always play for overall team points). I still love playing today, but it’s hard to find a good group of people to play with. By “good”, I mean competent. I hate playing with an incompetent partner. I learned fairly quickly and the finer nuances of the game were picked up soon. We had a good core of players and played often, when we weren’t going out to clubs (which meant we were broke).

I know it sounds pretty pitiful, but we would gather aluminum cans from dumpsters or trash cans in the barracks (a valid worthwhile pass time if you were on watch in the barracks and were roaming the halls anyway). We would clean out the cans, which often had cigarette butts in them (nasty business). We got a nickel for each can…so we would need a lot of them to get enough cash to get a case of beer. A few times we bought real cheap wine instead, which I didn’t like at all.

We would play spades till the wee hours of the morning on Fridays and Saturdays if we were house bound. It was always funny to see the play get sloppier and sloppier as time passed each night and we got lit. I was usually less influenced because I was pretty much a lightweight and drank my beers pretty slow.

Since we couldn’t have fridges in the barracks, once the weather got cooler, we would stack the beer in between the window and the outside screen to chill it. More than once in the winter, we would forget about the beer at the end of the night and wake up to frozen shattered bottles.

Going to the clubs was wasted on me, I NEVER liked the crowd or noise. The only real fun was getting the dumbass DJ to play one of OUR tunes (The B-52s Rock Lobster was a favorite). Then we would run up to the dance floor and like a bunch of idiots dance with each other. Gay, but not too gay…..

There is too much lunacy to go into about going out to the clubs in Groton, so I won’t dive into it too deep. I will say we took trips east to Mystic (same place as the Mystic Pizza movie) which was really nice, because it was a more mature crowd over there. Somehow we managed to fit in. There were a few bars peppered between Groton and Norwich (about 10 miles north) that were hit or miss. We fanned out even farther north of Norwich and just found dives and Biker bars. Nothing but trouble there. We never got lucky and to the best of my recollection, no one I was with ever got a number or a date, or got laid from an excursion. Maybe it was just me???

The next of the 3 great challenges was the Dive Tank.