Red State Hero

Chapter 13 The Hummer

Chapter 13

THE HUMMER

Tommy and Daniel both ended up in LaSalle working at OWENS ILLINOIS where they stacked boxes of beer bottles onto shipping pallets.  On Saturday nights when their pockets were full of cash Tommy would say, “Let’s go out and raise a little hell.” 

And for the first time in his life Daniel did just that. 

   He drank a little bit and f---ed a lot; at least he practiced f---ing trying to count to five hundred before he came.  He practiced short strokes and long strokes, fast strokes and slow strokes.  He knew that sex was like the trumpet, if you practiced enough you would get the hang of it.  The girls didn’t complain and he got a little bit of a reputation as a really cute kid who never talked; but Tommy was a drawback in all this—being not so cute and very talkative.  And so Daniel, after some weeks, decided that he should separate his endeavors from Tommy’s.
   They did agree upon one thing—they would both take out Louise, “the hummer”.  This Marilyn Monroe look-alike was notorious.  She liked her boys in two’s and three’s and naturally every young male without good sense gave her a ride.

   They took her to the park and they both “knew her” in the Biblical sense.  Then after a break for lunch and burgers and fries and cokes they took her into the woods behind the baseball diamond where they both “knew her” again.  At the end of a parade of moans and groans and sighs and giggles and gasps and shrieks and laughter and other sounds, which we shall not recount, she was smiling broadly and said, “God, I’ve never climaxed so much in my life.”

   When they took her home she ran into the house and came back out with a platter of cookies and said to them, “Thank you, thank you so much.  I’m glad I was able to have you.”
   But there was a downside to this called “the crabs”.  An army of critters that infested both of their pubic hairs, critters they could not rid themselves of.

   We should have let her blow us,” Tommy said, “That’s where she got her name “the hummer”.  She always hums when she gives head.”But it was too late, lice powder didn’t work.  They took to safety razors and ended up looking like two harem eunuchs.  This did not interfere with their next act which was to raise their right hands, stand in front of a recruiting officer and join the Army.  Daniel did this with a forged birth certificate, courtesy of his mother’s first cousin, the County Clerk of Wayne County.  Both he and Dorothy’s brother, John, agreed that Daniel would be better off in the Service.
   Tommy and Daniel ended up at Fort Riley, Kansas.  It was not the exotic destination they had hoped for but rather more of the same Midwestern dreariness.  They were assigned to different units and didn’t see that much of one another until Basic Training was finished.  But on the first weekend after Basic Training they made the most of it and on a trip into Manhattan, Kansas.  Tommy paid cash for a used 88 Oldsmobile and on the first test run he drove it off the highway onto a wheat field and spun it round and round on the recently harvested shards.  At one point, he ran it aground on a hump in the middle of a tractor road.  It took hours using the hand-cranked jack to shift it out of this position.

That night they double dated two high school seniors after the Manhattan, Kansas High School prom.  Daniel’s date, the homelier of the two girls, was so hot for him that she gave her all in the back seat of Tommy’s Oldsmobile.  Tommy was not so lucky, something he was not accustomed to, and he sulked all the way back to base.

This was their last weekend together before Tommy was shipped out to Germany where he was stationed near a small town in the Schwarzwald named Aschaffenburg.  They wrote to one another and Tommy, who had become a cook, measured out the cost of pussy in foodstuffs.

“You can get laid here for a pound of sugar or five pounds of flour or two dozen eggs or a couple of oranges or bananas; but chocolate will buy all the pussy you can handle.  I’m so glad I’m a cook.”

In Korea where Daniel ended up, pussy was strictly cash and carry.  Cooks who traded food for snatch could end up very badly in a war zone.