Chapter 15: Porn Stars

We were getting burned out again. After our payday disbursements I brought up an idea that had been circling the drain. "Guys, how would you like to get paid to get laid rather than pay for the service?" Many, many ears popped up. "Once through the straights Istanbul isn't too far from here. If we get medical cards that prove we're healthy we could market ourselves as sailors just off an extended journey that wanted to get laid in the worst way ... I'd bet money that we'd be paid scale to hump a bunch of Russian sweeties and make films out of it." The vote was definitely 'Aye'.

We sailed for Istanbul and I made a few phone calls. Once we had our health cards we were set. We fucked, shucked, sucked and screwed until we couldn't get it up any more. The publicity photo of all of us naked, relaxing, smoking cigars with drinks in our hands and fucked-out actresses laid out over our laps got framed and mounted over the mess table in pride of place.

The Portmaster in Istanbul had cargo for us, and we sailed south through the Suez Canal, and down to Djibouti. From there we were sent to Dar es Salaam, and across the Arabian Sea to Sri Lanka. Then we went onward to Bangkok, Taipei, back to Hong Kong, Manila, Brisbane, Cape Town, Karachi, Bahrain, Doha Quatar, Alexandria Egypt and Lisbon Portugal.

It had been three months. We were pooped. I informed the Portmaster that we were unavailable until further notice. Some wit, (or rather, half-wit), who had contacts with the Portmaster's office, had some broadsides printed up, reading: "Hide your wives! Hide your daughters! They're back in town!" Our nude picture with the performers that we'd worked with draped over our laps filled the bottom of the broadsheets. They were posted fucking everywhere. I got propositioned more times that a three-dollar trollop.

A few looked pretty good and ... well, let's not go there. I'll just say that college girls can be such adventuresome souls, when traveling in packs of three or more. If I'd died "hors d'combat" it would have taken a team of morticians working in shifts to get the smile off my face. I carefully pulled down one of those broadsides and had it pressed between panes of glass and mounted on the mess-room wall. I was sure that we'd all look at it and smile, occasionally.

We caught a couple of national match soccer games and screamed ourselves stupid. I found an enormous luthier school, and bought a wonderful new guitar. I'm afraid that I am a heathen. I stayed with nylon strings for my day-to-day instrument. However, I bought a fine work of art with brass and steel strings that I'd have to work my way up to. I could see much, much more guitar practice in my future.

Chris and I spent an afternoon with beers in one hand and manuals in the other working on the radar. We tried it one last time before taking a break and got a 360-degree multi-color plot out to the horizon. Holy shit! It worked! Now for the next stage. Thank God and the government printing office that there was a list of compatible fire control systems in an appendix to the setup manual. With a little work we might be able to get it to display differential cloud velocities, thus highlighting vortex activity, hence showing cyclonic air masses. Wouldn't that be the shits? Our own home-brewed hurricane detector. Since it spewed so much power, we'd have to keep all crew inside when it was running; but, during a storm that was moot.

I contacted a bonded cleaning service to steam clean all the carpets, clean all the heads, wipe down all the surfaces in engineering, wipe down the passageway walls, clean the crew's mess and the salon. It was nice to have a superbly clean vessel again and not have had to work for it!

I've mentioned the owner's suite a few times but I haven't described it. A six-foot-wide passageway passes over a trap housing the elevator shaft, then the passageway constricts to three feet wide. A full-sized hatch on the port side is followed ten feet later by a hatch on the starboard side, just before a stairway that climbs to a dog house on the roof. The top deck hatches lead to a large bedroom to Starboard and a salon to Port.

The bedroom shared one side with a huge bathroom. The bathroom was half consumed by a big soaking tub, with seats and a shower head.

The other side was taken up by a combination salon/office. There were bookshelves, computers, a color ink-jet printer, a wet bar and a short-wave radio. A sat phone sat on a shelf above the desk, with a data tether to the computer. A thirty-eight inch LCD monitor hung on the wall behind the desk, and a blue-ray DVD player sat on another shelf. A few paintings decorated the walls and the floors were covered by several Persian rugs. A large couch and an overstuffed chair with a big square ottoman at its foot furnished the room's interior. Two windows filled the side wall, and two more filled the rear wall. A passageway to the bedroom lay below the stairway. It was smaller than a shore-side apartment but if I didn't like the neighbors I could move!