basil heatter
HARRY
and the
BIKINI
BANDITS
CHAPTER 1
JEZEBEL WAS A BEAT-UP OLD BUCKET. SHE looked as though she had been launched sometime before the turn of the century. As a matter of fact she had and, with her hogged sheer and her sails that had once been used to cover hayricks, she now looked ready to sink. But somehow Harry had kept her afloat.
About the all-girl crew. There was only one left when I arrived. If there was very little that was right with the boat, there was certainly nothing wrong with Miss Wong. With her long black hair and beautiful breasts, she was a regular Playboy centerfold. She wore an orange nylon bikini consisting of about as much material as would have filled a shot glass. Stretched out on the cabin top, she was a sensation. A couple of dozen guys stood on the pier gazing down at her with open mouths and tongues sticking out like dogs chasing a bitch in heat.
But the peaceful scene was broken by a volley of curses from inside the cabin. Something small and hairy shot out of the companionway and plastered itself to the mizzen mast. It hung there yammering.
I thought at first it was a very small man and I wondered how this beautiful Oriental had succeeded in shrinking Uncle Harry to the size of a football. Then I saw that it had a tail and was in fact a very small monkey.
After the monkey came Harry. He is a lot bigger and about as hairy. His face and head and shoulders and chest are covered with this kind of like red pelt. I guess the only time he cuts his hair is when he can’t see anymore, and then he kind of hacks it off with some old tin shears or something. He has long arms and sloping shoulders and kind of bandy legs, all of which make him look even more like a gorilla. When I first saw him I thought he must be the ugliest man in the world.
Harry is my old man’s younger brother, but if there is any family resemblance, it certainly escapes me. My father is as bald and clean shaven as a nut. And about as warm. Especially on the subject of Harry.
Because he is so hairy I had to look twice at Harry to realize he was absolutely naked when he came through that hatchway after the monkey. I mean that is the kind of man he is. He doesn’t give a damn. A kind of grunt went up from all those guys on the pier.
The Chinese lady didn’t even bother to look.
“I’ll have that monkey’s nuts if it’s the last thing I do,” he bellowed.
She didn’t move a muscle for the longest time while he kept glaring at her with his big hairy balls hanging out there in public. Finally she removed her sunglasses and sat up in one smooth motion and said, “Calm yourself, Harry. And do put your pants on. We don’t want to be busted just yet.”
At the sound of her voice the monkey let go of the mast and landed on her shoulder. He nestled there while Harry glared at both of them. It seemed to us spectators on the pier like a kind of Mexican standoff, and we could hardly wait to see what would happen next. It was Harry who gave way. He reached behind him and dragged out a pair of denims torn off at the knees and yanked them up over his hips.
“Hi, Uncle Harry,” I said.
He looked at me like he wanted to do the same thing he had threatened to do to the monkey. Then he sort of smiled. One thing about him; he is very changeable.
“Is that you, Number Three?”
“Yessir.” I said.
“Well, flag your ass and come aboard.”
He calls me Number Three because my name is Clayton Bullmore Third. It drives Harry wild.
CHAPTER 2
MISS WONG EXPLAINED IT TO ME. I MEAN about Harry and the name. It turned out she had been a psych major at Radcliffe before she dropped out to go sailing with Harry, and so she knew about such things. What she said was that any man who would name his kid Clayton Bullmore Third was simply reveling in his own self-hatred. I nodded like I knew what she was talking about and said I didn’t know the Chinese were so interested in psychiatry. She said the Chinese had, in fact, discovered psychiatry—like almost everything else—and that was where Freud stole most of it. It seems there was this Book of Ho which explained it all a couple of thousand years ago, and it was perfectly evident that at some point Freud had read Ho. I mean all this business about motherfuckers and all.
I didn’t really see what it had to do with my name.
She gave me a nice smile and said, “Where do you come from, Clay?”
“Peckinpaugh.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Nebraska.”
I don’t think that meant much more to her than Peckinpaugh.
“Where is your gear, Number Three?” Harry said.
I showed him my knapsack. Not really a knapsack, more like my sea scout seabag.
“That’s all you’ve got?”
“Yessir.”
“Good lad.”
He turned around and went below. Miss Wong put on her dark glasses and went back to sleep. The monkey lay down beside her with one little black paw inside her bra. Since nobody seemed to have anything useful for me to do, I went to look at the bowsprit.
You ought to know that despite the fact that I am from Nebraska I am not by nature a plow jockey. I mean I have always had like a very big thing for the sea. Maybe I get that from Harry. One thing for sure; I don’t get it from my dad. As far as he is concerned the only thing you should do about the sea is to stay as far away from it as possible. That feeling is probably a result of his war experience. It seems he joined the Coast Guard to beat the draft. After just two hours on board some kind of a patrol boat on Lake Michigan he was so unbelievably sick they relieved him of sea duty and sent him to a recruiting station in Kansas. He finished the war there and I guess did all right. In those days he had a kind of rangy, square-shouldered build, and in the pictures of him standing in front of a recruiting poster he looks real salty. I guess that despite his own feelings on the subject he still managed to persuade a lot of farm boys to go to sea.
I mentioned seabag. You wouldn’t think there would be sea scouts in Nebraska, but there are. We messed around in a leaky old rowboat that we named Ticonderoga after that World War Two aircraft carrier. On Sunday mornings we would put on our uniforms and go rowing around the lake. Not a lake really, just an artificial pond that belonged to Mr. Thingpen. Old Herman Thingpen hated the water too, but someone had told him if you wanted a lake all you had to do was call up the government and they would build you one free. He didn’t want the lake, but he could never pass up anything free. So they came out with a bulldozer and dug it out for him. It was only about three feet deep and so muddy you could almost walk on it. The only things that could live in it were bullfrogs and mosquitoes and snapping turtles. We never could figure out where the turtles had come from. They got to be as big as roasting ovens and were as ugly as hogs. People used to say they could drag down a full-grown dog.
But it was the only water we had and so we used it. We would row around the lake and holler out stuff like: “Now hear this! All hands with big feet lay up to the quartermaster!” Or: “Now hear this! All those who have not already done so do so!”
In addition, we studied the Bluejacket’s Manual and learned to splice, whip, and tie bowlines, and the difference between sheets and halliards and port and starboard. Also the Inland Rules of the Road, and what lights should be displayed by a tug going astern with three barges. You might say it was useless, but you never know.
So when I picked up the paper and saw the picture of Uncle Harry and his boat, the sea fever hit me. It happened also to be the day of my seventeenth birthday and I was feeling my oats.
The picture was datelined New York, and it was distributed by one of the big news services. I guess it was picked up by our local paper because Harry was probab
ly the only former resident in the whole history of Peckinpaugh to have his picture in a New York newspaper. If dad hadn’t recognized him, I would never have known him because he was wearing a beard and an earring in his left ear, and he was calling himself by another name. He had dropped the Bullmore and was now calling himself Captain Harry Hook.
“Probably beating out his creditors,” Dad sniffed.
Anyway, in the picture he was sitting on this old tub wearing ragged shorts and a big straw hat. In his lap was a cat, and clustered around him were five girls who looked just about naked. Actually they were wearing bikinis or something, but you had to look twice to make sure. From the story that went along with the picture you got the impression he had made the girls pay for going to sea with him. They were secretaries or airline hostesses or whatever, and he had sold them on the idea of investing in the voyage.
The caption read: “Seagoing love-in. Captain Harry Hook, who declined to give his home port, resting at City Island, New York, before embarking on a voyage to the Bahamas with his all-girl crew. The captain said that after reaching the Bahamas he might very well continue on around the world if the fancy so strikes him. When asked what had given him the idea of traveling with so remarkable a crew, he answered, ‘Is there any other way?’ His vessel is aptly named Jezebel.”
It was a great picture and I wanted to show it around, but Dad tore it to shreds and stamped on it. I told him I considered that a childish reaction and for a minute I thought he would try stamping on me too. But if the idea went through his mind, he dropped it. I’m three inches taller than Dad and haven’t yet got my full growth. Last season I played right guard for the Peckinpaugh High Huskers, and we had a pretty solid team and went undefeated to the state finals. I was named All-State. I weigh 185 pounds now and will probably go 200.
So he just glared.
“I suppose you have some cockeyed idea that your Uncle Harry is cute,” he said.
His voice was as usual—angry. I can hardly remember when he wasn’t angry. I don’t know why. I mean his insurance business is good and you would think he would smile once in a while. But he’s pretty uptight. Possibly he is suffering from sexual frustration. Mother has been dead a long time now, and just what the hell does he do in a town like Peckinpaugh? He has a secretary, but she is built like those pictures you used to see of that old-time fighter Two-Ton Tony Galento.
“I don’t know if he’s cute or not,” I said, “but you’ve got to admit he has pizzazz.”
I knew I would drive him up the wall when I said it.
“Pizzazz! Oh he’s got pizzazz all right, whatever the hell that is. But I can tell you one thing. If he’s got pizzazz he’s got nothing else!”
I didn’t think that was true. I mean he had a boat and a cat and five beautiful girls. And he was smiling.
“Why do you hate him?” I asked.
“Who says I hate him?” he growled.
“Well, here you are tearing up newspapers and getting all red in the face just because you see his picture. You wouldn’t exactly call that brotherly love, would you?”
“My relationship with him is my own affair,” he said in a frosty voice.
“Just as you say.”
“And don’t be snotty, young man. I can still paddle you if I have to.”
“Yessir.”
You can see there was not much point in arguing. Anyway it didn’t really matter, because in my mind I was already composing the letter I would send to Uncle Harry.
CHAPTER 3
SO I WROTE HIM A LETTER. I FIGURED HE probably threw his mail away without opening it, but I took a chance anyway. I told him about having seen his picture and how much I admired a man who was living a free, independent life in this kind of stifling society in which we were all imprisoned and how I had to get out of Peckinpaugh one way or another and if he would just let me sign on for a cruise I would scrub bilges or climb masts or paint bottoms or anything else that needed doing. He hadn’t seen me since I was twelve, so I went on about how I had grown some since then, now being six two, etc. I concluded by saying that I’d had some nautical experience, although I didn’t say where or when.
A month passed with no word from Harry, and I had about given up. Then the answer came. It was mailed from Beaufort, South Carolina, and was written in pencil on a piece of brown paper torn from an A&P bag. All it said was: “You must be out of your mothering mind. But it would be worth it just to bug your old man. Meet me Miami.”
Right away I ran off a travelogue in my mind. December in Miami. Golden beaches and girls in bikinis. Life at sea with Captain Hook. Back the jib and ease the main. Rolling down to Rio. Yeah man.
I had been saving for six months to buy an electric guitar but I parted with that idea without a tremor.
It was the most exciting thing that had ever happened to me, and I had to share it with someone so I told Mary Ann. Mary Ann Mobley, that is. I’ve known her since we were in the third grade together. That was the year I had the chicken pox and she got it too. It certainly gave us a lot in common, and I suppose we were what you would call childhood sweethearts. After that it seemed natural that as we got older we would pair up at parties, dances, hayrides, proms, football games, and snowball fights. Sometimes I asked a different girl to a movie and sometimes Mary Ann went with a different guy, but not often. We were going steady but not making out.
We were at a drive-in movie in her old man’s Buick the night I told her. She listened to me without saying anything except that her face got kind of small and cold.
“Well?” I said.
“Well, what?”
“Haven’t you got anything to say?”
“What is there to say? I mean you’re not discussing it, are you? You’ve already made up your mind. So that’s that.”
I don’t know what I had expected from her but I couldn’t help being a little disappointed. I guess I had expected some kind of scene. This way I was relieved. But a little disappointed.
Then her face sort of crumpled up, and there were tears on her cheeks. The tears sparkled in the hard blue light from the movie screen. She was wearing a parka hood trimmed with white fur, and when her face got small and kind of folded-in on itself she looked about twelve years old.
All she said was, “I’d like to go home, please.”
Jerry Lewis was capering around on the screen like a monkey with fleas. He had never seemed unfunnier. The remains of a cold hamburger and chocolate shake lay on a paper plate between us. It was all pretty depressing.
“But what about the rest of the show?” I said.
“Damn the show. And damn you too.”
So I took her home. When we got to her house she jumped out of the car and ran in and left me sitting there with my mouth open.
I put her old man’s Buick in the garage and walked home. It was a clear, cold night, and there was a three-quarter moon shining over the dead com stalks. A bunch of kids in an old jalopy went by yelling something. They seemed to be having a hell of a time. I waved back at them, but I couldn’t put much life into it.
I thought about the two big games we still had to play that I would not be in, and how Billy Grindlemayer would be subbing for me. I thought about the hayrides they would all be on Christmas Eve. And I thought about how tomorrow morning at dawn I would be thumbing rides down that long lonesome road to Florida. To snap myself out of it, I tried humming a few of the capstan songs the sailors used to sing when they were squaring away before the Trades. “Rolling Down to Rio” and “Whiskey for my Johnny” and “Fare Thee Well My Bonny Lass.”
But I only felt foolish.
CHAPTER 4
“YOU’LL BUNK AFT,” HARRY SAID.
He was in his bunk, reading Thoreau. A yellow cat lay on his belly. I looked aft to where he had pointed, but all I could see was a rusty old one-lung engine that looked ancient enough to have been the original model for Robert Fulton. Was I supposed to sleep on that? But then I observed a little space behind it, and by gettin
g down on my hands and knees I could see a beat-up-looking mattress kind of stretched out in the bilge.
“Not exactly the new Queen Elizabeth,” said Harry, “but at your age what’s the difference?”
“I’ll just stow my gear.”
I crawled aft, leaving half-an-inch or so of scalp hanging from a rusty nail. I staunched the flow of blood with a handkerchief and wondered what it would be like in that hole with the engine going. I decided, if it was all the same to Uncle Harry, I’d sleep on deck.
“I want to tell you about this cat,” Harry said when I crawled out. “Her name is Scotty and she is one great little cat.”
Scotty rolled a yellow eye in my direction. I could tell right off she hated me.
“Only thing is she has fits now and then,” Harry said.
“What kind of fits?”
“Tearing blue fits. When a fit is on her you’d better stand clear. She’ll mess you up worse than barbed wire. What brings it on more than anything is cheese fondue. Don’t you ever give this cat any cheese fondue.”
“No sir.” What was cheese fondue anyway?
“As for that goddamn monkey…”
“His name,” said Miss Wong, descending the companionway steps, “is Ho.”
“I’ll make shark bait of that animal,” vowed my uncle. “About a size double-O hook ought to fit him nicely.”
“I wonder what size would be right for you, love,” said Miss Wong with a sweet smile.
“The main thing you have to remember about that monkey is don’t ever bend over while he’s anywhere within jumping distance. That’s the randiest monkey in the world. Right now he’s trying to screw this cat. One of these days she’ll claw his bloody balls off.”
She said something in Chinese. Whatever it was Harry appeared to understand. He responded with a lewd grin.
We ate our dinner under a ragged hunk of canvas spread over the cockpit. Miss Wong wore blue jeans torn off very short and one of Harry’s faded old cotton handkerchiefs knotted behind her shoulders. Her navel peeked out of her rounded tummy like a kumquat in a dish of heavy cream. What we ate was called a Jezebel Special. I had watched her make it. She dipped slices of baloney into a mix of English mustard and eggs. Then she covered the slices with cracker crumbs and fried them in deep fat. When they were done she served them on toast covered with a sauce made by adding cream to the original glop.
Harry & the Bikini Bandits Page 1
