Fleet week friend-making

[gordonzola]

Ah, the Blue Angels. Non-Bay Area folks have probably noticed that all of us have written about them this week. They are inescapable. When they fly overhead it’s so loud you have to stop everything and let them pass. Inside or outside. In the car or on foot. On the phone, listening to music or cutting cheese. Probably even during sex but I didn’t have the opportunity to find that out.

I try not to be too cynical, really, but I can’t help feeling that beyond the tourist dollars there’s an implicit warning to the citizens of the Bay Area. "Look you freaks, we can take you anytime we want. And don’t forget it." And yes, I do feel it’s just a matter of time before one of those planes or pilots malfunctions and takes out a city block. Let’s just hope it’s Pacific Heights and not The Mission.

I had my first experience with fleet week when I was a teen-ager. I had just shaved my head for the first time so it must have been about 1982. I had a punk rock attitude but hadn’t quite made the full fashion transition. Mind you, shaving one’s head in 1982, even in the Bay Area, was an invitation to get called "faggot" and having shit thrown at you from cars.

Me and some friends were terrorizing tourists at Fisherman’s Wharf*, something we did periodically. Usually we’d hide in the wax museums and jump out at them when they least expected it. We used to climb up to the rafters in the "Haunted Goldmine"** and jump down behind people until they got wise and put razor wire up there. Though honestly, our shining moment was when we borrowed someone’s motorboat, drove close to shore, and mortared tourists with water balloons from a funnelator*** until the Coast Guard showed up.

Anyways, this time we knew right away that we shouldn’t fuck around with people because everyone at Fisherman’s Wharf was military. The Angels were flying overhead. Everyone, including us, was drunk and many seemed to be looking for fights. I was super paranoid, standing out in my crowd at that time and narrowly escaping a fight at the movie theater the night before because some metal kids didn’t like my haircut.**** Some punk friends in fact, had been attacked the previous night on Broadway outside a show. Luckily the guy in the band Bad Posture, who was like 6’7" and sported a foot high mohawk, came by and scared off the non-punk thugs.

We decide to flee before Bad Things happened. But, too many Meister Braus had taken their toll. "I’ve gotta piss," I said, all 15 year old butch-like, and headed into a crappy restaurant bathroom. Moments later, I heard someone open the door and come up behind me. I assumed it was one of my friends there for the same reason. But when I looked over I saw that it was two sailors. They reeked more of booze than I did. I took that they had bad attitudes as a given.

Cultural revolutions are violent times and that was certainly true of the Reagan ‘80s. Stand out and get beat down. Jumping freaks in a bathroom was a favorite trick of Reagan-ite bullies though, come to think of it, it was probably a time-honored tactic passed down from fathers who beat up hippies to sons who beat up punks and fags. At the Denny’s where my friend worked, she warned us about going to the bathroom alone after a Robert Smith-looking kid got beaten unconscious there.*****

The sailors came up on either side of me and I quickly tried to finish peeing. Zipping up and trying to get away, the guy on my right stopped me. "Hey!" he said. I didn’t realize you could slur a one-word sentence before that moment.

"So, what ship are you with?" he asked, all-friendly-like.

I pointed to the Bay. "Uh, that one over there," I replied and hurried out of the bathroom. Luckily they were drunk and that confused them just enough so that I could escape before they started wondering why I had such short hair if I wasn’t in the military.



*For non-locals, SF brilliantly planned a tourist area within the city where, aside from assorted tourist-workers, no locals ever set foot unless accompanied by out-of-town guests. Sure, it used to be a working pier, but those times are long gone. I must admit though, moving the Musee Mechanique there is tempting me.

**Cheapest wax museum there at the time.

***Big funnel with surgical tubing on both sides making it a super long distance sling shot, basically.

****This is before the big punk/metal crossover. Still punk’s biggest mistake ever, imho. Well, except for Christian hardcore and cry-baby emo, of course.

***** And because people always ask me, no he wasn’t Black. Because if he was, he wouldn’t have been in Denny’s at all. (scroll down just a little). Besides, he was beaten by Denny’s customers not as part of a management strategy. Or at least I’ve always assumed.

Comments

[vestalvixen.livejournal.com]

Mmm, fleet week. I think we get the Tall Ships which isn't quite as good. And loads of Naval officers, but their uniforms make them look like scary nurses.

You continue to tell the best stories ever.

[defenestr8r.livejournal.com]

Two years ago during fleet week I was at Hamburger Mary's and saw a group of sailors go stumbling by in their clean and pressed white uniforms. Being so used to San Francisco, I just assumed that one of the gay bars was having a sailor themed costume night. It wasn't until I saw them harassing some girls that I realized that they weren't in costume, or even gay...yet.

[dcart.livejournal.com]

You had more fun with your tourists than I ever did. From 9th grade on, we tried to spend as much time in Panama City during March and April as possible. You could sell drugs at an exhorbitant markup and had a decent chance of at least making out with some tourist chick. And that's about all we ever did with tourists.

I can only recall getting in one actual fight with tourists, though we certainly offered provocation often enough. While it's not exactly a bastion of haute couture now, in the 80s Panama City was so incredibly redneck that it was really wise for those of us with anything approaching a punk or alternative look to travel in packs.
The one tourist fight I recall happened only, I think, because the rednecks that started it with my friends underestimated how many of us there were.

[incendiarymind.livejournal.com]

We actually have the "Air & Water Show" in Chicago during the summer which is like a smaller version with a slightly more civilian overtone but it's exactly the same. It's as if the flyovers are saying, "look how easy this is, aren't you glad we're around to make sure it's only us flying over the city?"

[pantryslut.livejournal.com]

At the Denny’s where my friend worked, she warned us about going to the bathroom alone after a Robert Smith-looking kid got beaten unconscious there....And because people always ask me, no he wasn’t Black.

I'd really like to see a black guy who looked like Robert Smith. Seriously. I think I'd fall in love.

[jwz.livejournal.com]

we borrowed someone’s motorboat, drove close to shore, and mortared tourists with water balloons from a funnelator

OMG, that's fucking awesome! I'm pretty sure that shit would get you deported to Guantanamo today, though.

So I was wondering, and maybe you know. When these drunk-ass sailors come streaming through the streets in uniform, is that because they are required to, or they don't have any other clothes, or because the chicks dig it? Cause I'd assume they'd want to wear normal clothes on their night off...

Also, when they're barely propped up against a wall slurring "hey baby" to each and every woman who walks by, does that trick ever work?

[substitute.livejournal.com]

I've been in SF during Fleet Week and I liked it. I'm such a complete airplane geek that even the noise and the military despotism don't bug me. I'm the one yelling WHEEEE because it's a fast plane!

My troubles with punk identity versus the world could easily be summed up by the Vandals' song "Urban Struggle", because it's all about the nightclub I went to here in beautiful Orange County.

[superchones.livejournal.com]

Damn! That is some kinda luck avoiding a military beatdown. Fleet week=fights for sure. For some reason in high school we used to get extremely wasted, go down to Broadway and make fun of sailors.

Hey the haunted goldmine is GONE! It's been replaced by something more expensive. I snuck in under the ticket window years ago and ran around hiding and dodging the staff and security guard but of course we got busted when the exit led to the tourist trap shop.


So the musee mechanique is really there now? Sadness. Even Fort Mason is preferable to the Wharf.

[beelavender.livejournal.com]

Heh heh. I grew up in a county with six military installations plus the local death metal rednecks. The kids on the bus tried to set my hair on fire in the seventh grade. I was telling my thirteen year old about all of our youthful misadventures (rural versions of the same stuff you describe) last night and she was astonished - it is so far out of her frame of reference she thinks my stories are some kind of urban myth or something. But in fact, it was a really horrible decade.

I live in the flight path of the Blue Angels when they come to Seattle - they buzz so low across the neighborhood the windows rattle. I usually leave town for a few days.

[just-a-chick-03.livejournal.com]

Happy Birthday!
XOXOXO

[greasyspoon.livejournal.com]

Whaa - it's been your birthday allll day and I didn't know?

Happy birthday sir!

[slutbunwalla.livejournal.com]

The blue angels kicks in that old PTSD real good. Of course so does the SI ferry crash...

[elementa.livejournal.com]

Happy Birthday!!

only a few hours belated...not bad!