Rub up: Musings of a Navy Corpsman

Prologue: BLACK TOOTH:

He was missing a tooth on the upper right side of his jaw. When he smiled or grinned we could see a big, black hole there, and so we called him Black Tooth. He had an ancient look to him—a face that came out of the history books from every country where fighting was endemic. It was the leathery face of a crude, backwater soldier who had been conscripted from the farms or the urban slums but had stayed in the military after the war because that was the only thing he knew how to do. In fact, the military was the only place he was capable of getting a job anymore. He looked like he always needed a shave and was slightly—sometimes more than slightly—wasted or hungover. He was an alcoholic who always had a painful, hungry look on his face while he was sober and waiting to go on his next bender. If you saw him coming out of a dark alley, he would give you quite a start, even if he was in uniform. His dark, unshaven complexion; short, squatty frame; bowed legs; and unsteady gait presented a very scary picture, indeed. And if he spoke to you his deep gravelly voice alone would almost knock you over.

Yet Bill Jensen—or Wild Bill—was a gentle soul with that alcoholic’s sense of humor that ingratiated him to everyone around. You couldn’t help but smile through his homespun stories about whores or girlfriends—he rarely distinguished between the two, and most were probably fictitious anyway—and all the wild drunken exploits he had while on liberty. In fact that’s how he came by the nickname Wild Bill. He never went on liberty with anybody, or maybe it was that nobody would go with him. Either way, he would always somehow make it back to the ship, sometimes carried by sailors who knew him, all messed up and as ugly and foreboding as ever.

He was only a seaman first—a deck ape—even though he had been in the Navy forever. He was probably only in his thirties, but he looked like he could have been anywhere from fifty to seventy years old, depending how hungover he was. His favorite stories were about his family. It might seem hard to believe just looking at him that someone somewhere might have cared or still cared about him, but he did have a family. In particular, he frequently talked about a young nephew who was living down South. I’m not sure if it was a sister’s or a brother’s son, but Black Tooth did seem to enjoy the kid. One of his favorite stories about his nephew—I don’t think he ever referred to him as anything but “my nephew”—involved the kid starting to shave in his late teens.

Black Tooth would often tell this story to us while watching the younger sailors—or younger-looking sailors like me—shave. He would snicker and make fun of the fact that our faces were so much smoother than his own. Black Tooth’s face looked like Popeye’s archrival Bluto after a bad day of having it out with the one-eyed sailor. In his smoker’s raspy alcoholic voice, Black Tooth would say to us, “Your face is just like my nephew’s—smooth as a baby’s ass. When I tell my nephew that his face is like a baby’s ass he says to me, ‘just rub up, Uncle Bill. See, it’s not that smooth; just rub up.’” And Black Tooth would take his hand and rub up on his cheek where it sounded like he was rubbing sandpaper. He would chuckle and we would all smile, of course, and make nasty comments about how ugly old Black Tooth was and how nobody would ever want to look like him. But for his nephew, rubbing his own cheek like that and feeling the hint of facial hair was the promise of good things to come.

And I guess that’s what life is all about—the promise of things to come, hope for the future and whatever promise of good things the future might bring—including a future of something as mundane as the ability to grow a beard. For Black Tooth, good things was getting a shot of cough medicine from me—elixir of terpin hydrate, which consisted mostly of 95 percent ethyl alcohol. He would come into sick bay with a fisted hand in front of his mouth, faking discomfort and then he would sputter, “(cough, cough…) Hey Doc, you got something for this?” I would give him a shot—sometimes a double—and he would leave with a smile on his homely, weathered face, his black tooth staring at me. And you could see in his eyes: “rub up, Uncle Bill; just rub up.”