I’ve gotta tell ya…it’s funny to be writing about things that happened twenty five years ago. If truth be told, when I perched myself behind the keyboard the night I last posted, I didn’t intend to write that story…I got side tracked in the memories of all the different shit that happened that year and when I finally got my focus I was writing about the fallout of tactically placed brownie art.
There are just a lot of little side stories that occur during a deployment…especially a shipboard deployment. There are so many personalities crammed into such a tight space that it makes for a bunch of odd situations. Toss in chronic boredom and the smart-ass nature of me and my cohorts and well…it makes for a lot of entertaining stories.
SO….let’s go back to 1994 aboard the U.S.S Trenton. The last thing the battle group does before coming home from the Mediterranean is stop off in Rota, Spain for what they call “wash down”. There’s a little Naval Base there and all the ships dock for a few days and everything…I mean EVERYTHING…gets pulled off the ship and thoroughly cleaned and tediously inspected before it goes back on. I guess the theory is to try to avoid bringing European, African or Asian cooties home with us.
After wash down, we’re back on the boat for seven to ten days to cross the Atlantic and get our asses back home. That seven to ten days is beyond boring. All your equipment is sealed up in Rota before it goes back on the boat and then staged to make the disembark as quick and painless as possible when you get to your home port. You can’t get to any of it….no unnecessary weapons maintenance for a couple hours every day just to break up the monotony….no hours of inspecting equipment just for the sake of inspecting equipment. You have nothing to do except wait to get home.
I happened to be in one of the last groups of guys back on the boat in Rota. The reason behind that escapes me, but it’s irrelevant. I ran into Elvis (Not the one you’re thinking of) as I on my way to the berthing area and he was headed to evening chow…so I just turned around and walked up to the mess deck with him.
As we stood there in that lethargically slow moving line, cramped together with seemingly every other breathing creature on the vessel, Elvis asked me if I’d got to call home while I was ashore. I told him I had called home and then asked him if he had heard the news.
SO…let me just stop for a second to remind you that this is the mid 90’s. There’s no internet, no smart phones, no Satellite TV on the ships. There is not a single woman on the ship…it’s all guys. Elvis and I spent six months watching grown men trading baseball cards, trying to one-up each other in their deals. It may be hard to believe now, but in 1994 Baseball Cards were a BIG DEAL and there was A LOT of money tied up in those cards. The whole crew on the USS Trenton that year was really baseball centric.
Anyway….I ask Elvis if he’d heard the news. Elvis naturally asks “What News?”…and the next words out of my mouth set the whole ship ablaze for the next week. There was no plan to say what I said. I just started bullshittin’ and ran with it. It really was beautifully executed on my part though…I’m giving myself credit for that. Had I said it too softly, not enough people would have heard. Had I said it too loud it would have seemed like a con job. Through the din of that mess deck, I gauged the noise and simultaneously calculated the proper volume to reach just the right number of ears….and the chosen statement wasn’t only believable, it was highly likely…it couldn’t really be doubted…and seeing as I’d got the news right before I got on ship and we were basically blind and deaf to the world for the next few days, it was unverifiable. It was the perfect storm…It was just beautiful…as far as bullshit goes, it was a fuckin’ masterpiece.
What? Calm down, Sally….I’m getting there. This damn quarantine has made y’all impatient.
So…I winked at Elvis to let him in on the gag. Then I told him that I had just been talking to Mom from the payphone on dock RIGHT BEFORE I got back on the ship…and while we were talking a newsflash came across the television at Mom’s that said “Pete Rose Shot Himself on the Steps of the Baseball Hall of Fame”.
Elvis played into it for a couple seconds by asking questions and before long the story was set…Charlie Hustle walked onto the steps in front of the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown dressed in his Cincinnati Reds Home Uniform, reached inside his red warm-up jacket, drew a pistol and subjected himself to high velocity lead poisoning in front of hundreds of onlookers.
Okay….Know this: Whether the word “Dick”, “Shithead” or “Asshole” just went through your mind….I’ll guarantee you, I’ve been called worse. Hell…Actually, I’ve been called worse today.
NOW….I could’ve kicked over a 55 gallon drum of jet fuel on that mess deck and dropped a match and it wouldn’t have had nearly the impact that story did. While waiting in line no less than a half dozen people stopped by and asked us if we’d heard. By the time we got to the serving line it was the ONLY thing being talked about. When I turned from the serving line to find a seat, there were grown men sobbing like little girls who’d just had their doll taken away from them.
At that time, the story was beyond being just merely believable. Pete had been out of the league for five years and his first attempt at reinstatement had been denied just a few months before. Every baseball fan LOVES Pete….myself included. Every baseball fan thought then (and thinks to this day) that Pete being black-balled from the Hall of Fame is a travesty. For Charlie Hustle, baseball was life…his entire identity was intertwined with baseball. It really wasn’t too much of a stretch to think he’d end it all in that kind of dramatic fashion.
The response to that story was absolutely nuts. Oh…an unintended side effect: I accidentally fluctuated the market too…the value of Pete Rose trading cards on the USS Trenton increased tenfold in just minutes. That part of it I kind of felt bad about…a lot of people got screwed in deals pretty quick that night having no idea that they were basing their trades or purchases on bogus information.
NOW…The closer the ship gets to the United States the quicker the mail comes in. The newspapers the pony express brought us were only a couple days old and everyone was trying to scarf them up to have a piece of baseball history in their possession. Everyone figured out Pete was still alive quick enough. So my little firestorm only lasted a few days.
That however, is not where the story ends.
As you get close to the U.S. coastline you can start to pick up radio stations that actually speak English. There were always a few guys out on the weather decks with transistor radios waving antennas around trying to pull in some sort of entertainment from the mainland.
We were set to dock in Moorehead City, NC on June 20th. Once we’re two or three days from the port they stop bringing mail to us and just forward it to our home units. What was happening on June 17-20 of 1994? That’s right, folks…The O.J. Simpson white Ford Bronco no-speed chase, the murder scene, the arrest….the whole muddled mess.
Here’s what’s interesting…those guys with their transistor radios were picking up the stories about the Brown-Simpson/Goldman murders and all the details involving O.J. Simpson…hell, if you can remember back that far, that story was the ONLY thing on the news at the time. Those transistor radio guys would try to tell everyone what was going on and NOBODY believed them because of the bullshit Pete Rose story from the week before. Hell…I didn’t believe it and I’m the asshole that started the Pete Rose story.
Ya know…I was 25 when all that happened. I’m still learning…I hope to always be learning something…but back then life’s lessons were coming at me in droves. The ability to manipulate people starved for viable information was one lesson I learned on that deployment.
Think about all the trouble I caused just by telling one bullshit story while standing around in a slow moving line. I caused heartache. Financial fortunes were shifted through the trading card market. I caused skepticism in the word of fellow humans. That was just one guy talking to another loud enough that maybe four or five others could hear him.
Now…consider the power the mainstream media has. When they decide to toss a bullshit story out there, they’re saying it loud enough for hundreds of millions to hear it….hell, with today’s technology it’s probably more like billions. World markets fluctuate. Public opinion shifts. Criminal investigations are influenced.
The people of this planet are hungry for viable information in order to make informed decisions…but in many cases the information we’re given is no more reliable than the conversation Elvis and I shared that day back in 1994.
The difference is this: We have the ability to verify what we’re told today. We really need to treat everything the network news tells us like those sailors treated the guys with the transistor radios…with skepticism.
Put the work in, Friends. Verify your news through multiple sources. Take the time to read and learn before you let yourself believe what you’re being told. Don’t get your knickers in a twist when you hear something that upsets you until you’ve verified the truth. At the very least…don’t pass on information that you can’t verify as accurate.
Hell…I’ll make it real simple. Just do this for me…every time you hear something that pisses you off and start to tell someone else or post something on social media…before you do it, stop and remember this one simple thing…Pete Rose is still alive and well.
I’d hate to see you guys get screwed on a 1964 Topps #125….or worse.
