I’m tired of talking about politics and viruses….So I’m not going to do it tonight.
Let me take you back 26 years…to early May in 1994. The Hillbilly had just arrived back aboard the U.S.S. Trenton from a luxurious ten week vacation in Mogadishu, Somalia. Truth be told, I’d have rather stayed in Africa than got back on that damn ship.
I have to imagine that traveling on a Naval vessel is a helluva lot better today than it was a quarter century ago. In 1994, there was no internet which meant there was no email or Facebook. There were no satellite video feeds beaming television programming down to the ships and no international cell phones. There was no such thing as MP3 audio or MP4 video format back then…Hell, the DVD was still two years from integration into mainstream society. If you wanted to listen to music you had to carry a bunch of Compact Disks with you….if you wanted to watch a movie, it came on a VHS tape which is a comparable in size to a paperback book. Just to put it in perspective, the mail you received was usually three to four weeks old…sometimes older….nope…wait…that’s a different story. Remind me to tell you about the late package some day.
Add the lack of technology with the fact that storage space was at an absolute minimum and you get a recipe for months of monotony. You couldn’t bring a lot with you, and everything back then was bulky. You can put 500 movies on a small hard drive today that is a quarter the size of a VHS tape from 1994. The ship had a book exchange type of library on it…most of us carried a book with us when we first boarded the ship and then exchanged them as time went by. If any of you remember the two Fletch movies that Chevy Chase starred in….well Gregory McDonald wrote ten Fletch books. Go ahead…ask me how I know that.
It probably wasn’t as bad if you were actually IN the Navy. As a sailor, you had a job to do on the ship…you had watches to stand, equipment to fix, maintenance to be completed….the guys in the cracker-jack uniforms always had something to do. For the Marines, though…we were just hitching a ride….it was always mind-numbing boredom, smothered in monotony and sprinkled with little flakes of humdrum. We, quite literally, wore the face off a deck of cards on more than one occasion…and it’s hard to play poker when you have to ask the guy sitting beside you whether your card is a 6 or an 8.
Now…this may come as a shock to you, but bored Marines are notorious for doing dumb shit. I know…it’s hard to believe, but I’ll swear to it. I’m pretty sure “bored Marines doing dumb shit” is the official reason listed in the Naval Doctrine that prohibits the presence of alcoholic beverages aboard Naval vessels.
So…In 1994, aboard the U.S.S. Trenton, spawned purely from absolute boredom…the Phantom Shitter was born.
A good friend of mine…umm…we’ll just call him Danny for the sake of anonymity…lifted a couple fudge brownies from the mess deck one evening. He sat in the berthing area and diligently formed those nearly edible slabs of chocolate nastiness into a perfect replica of a large turd. It’s one of those “you had to be there” things to understand the time and artistry he put in to making that mashed up fudge brownie look like a piece of shit. The look of concentration on his face was absolutely priceless. This wasn’t a child playing with play-doh…Oh, no…this was a master sculptor perfecting his personal Adonis.
This is what true boredom does to you after a while. Danny was a highly intelligent, well read, professional leader of Marines. He wasn’t some adolescent-minded goofball who you’d expect to swipe random deserts to entertain himself with in artistic ventures to replicate the perfect pile of poop. BUT…in his defense, I’ve seen people delve into much less constructive hobbies to beat back boredom. So if he wants to make crap…I figure, let him make crap. Like I said, it was 1994…no internet, no MP3 players, no laptops…nothing to distract you from your boredom. And, well…Bored Marines do stupid shit. Anyway, Danny was critiquing his masterpiece and making some final adjustments when I hit the rack that night.
By the time I woke up I’d forgot all about that art project from the night before. We went along with our normal morning routine and then headed to the mess deck for a quick breakfast. Now…there’s nothing quick about a mess deck on a ship owned and operated by the U.S. Navy. You stand in line for thirty to forty-five minutes to get a plate filled with food you wouldn’t feed your dog back at home. As Danny and I stood in that line the whole mess deck was abuzz with accusation and denial. Seemingly everyone on the ship was trying to identify the dirty bastard who took a crap in the sink of the starboard aft head.
Danny was stoic. He never grinned…Never gave me a wink…nothing. We talked about getting the teams together for weapons cleaning later in the day and made small talk while we waited in that line. Someone stopped and asked us if we’d heard about the turd in the sink and I swear to you he managed to muster up a look of complete disgust, shook his head and said “That’s fucked up” like he had no clue what happened.
He finally broke when we got below deck and I punched him and laughingly called him an asshole. He had no clue it would cause that kind of buzz throughout the ship when he’d decided to place his artwork in the sink in the middle of the night. That buzz lasted for days…it was the great mystery of the week…”who shit in the sink?”
Another week or so goes by and I walk onto the mess deck in sweats and a hoodie. Danny comes up to me and quietly says “I’ve gotta go to a meeting, stash this for me” and hands me big glob of something wrapped up in various layers of napkins. Without question I stick it in the pouch on my hoodie and go on about my business. It could’ve been a kilo of black tar heroin, I didn’t know. Danny needed it stashed…that’s all that mattered. Once I made my way to the end of the serving line and saw the chocolate sheet cake I didn’t need to question what I had stashed in my hoodie any longer.
For the sake of brevity, I won’t recount each and every episode. I’ll just tell you that this went on for the rest of the float. Every week or so, Danny would make a new turd and put it on display in the middle of the night at a location that would offend the hell out of the sensibilities of anyone who would find it…water fountains, desk drawers, the Executive Officer’s (XO) coffee cup (that one was my favorite). And…Make no mistake…Danny became a true artist. Over time he added different mediums to his works of art. Peanuts, kernels of corn…you name it.
I know what you’re thinking….I thought the same thing back then….surely someone will smell the chocolate and figure it out. But when you really consider the circumstances it becomes evident that the person who was charged with cleaning that up was doing everything in their power NOT to smell it. I cannot confirm this, but I heard the XO launched his coffee cup full of Danny’s art into the middle of the Mediterranean, just off the coast of Corfu…so, to my knowledge, nobody ever figured out that it wasn’t cake. I do know for a fact that the Phantom Shitter was never caught….hell, I don’t think Danny was ever a suspect.
Knowing the truth and witnessing the fallout after each and every discovered turd was akin to watching hundreds of people try to solve a game of Clue. It was really entertaining as hell. Everyone…and I mean EVERYONE…on that ship was trying to figure out who the Phantom Shitter could be.
Ya know, that really is the beauty of it though. See….Had Danny kept his first little creation to himself or destroyed it, it would have merely been something that had defeated boredom for him, singularly, for a short period of time. BUT…by sharing his creation he gave the entire ship something to focus on aside from their boredom and the monotony of life at sea.
And that, my friends…is the power of art.