Navy Portsmouth Part IV

The time spent at Portsmouth Naval Hospital wasn't only hot wax and red rubber balls. I only had duty one weekend out of four, so other weekends were mine. The Navy provided a transportation service from the Norfolk/Portsmouth area to cities close by and one of those cities was Washington DC.

I had never been to Washington. Living all the way down at the end of Florida sort of restricted your travel options when there was no money. Thanks to the Navy, I could get to DC on a bus for a couple of dollars and stay at the YMCA at a reduced rate for a couple more dollars leaving the only expense as food. This was a pretty sweet deal.

The bus would leave Friday afternoon and bring me back Sunday afternoon so I took advantage of that for weeks on end. I got to go everywhere, sometimes with friends, sometimes alone. To exemplify the exuberance of youth, those friends and I decided not to wait for the elevator in the Washington Monument but to walk up the stairs instead. We definitely took the elevator down, up was bad enough.

The YMCA was located at 17th and K Streets quite close to the White House. I didn't know it at the time, but it was only a few blocks north of the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) Building where I would be spending some time later in life.

I have one clear memory of DC on a Sunday morning when it had snowed. The snowfall had frightened everyone else in Washington to stay indoors. But this was only maybe the third time I'd seen snow and everything was deathly quiet and empty so I walked all the way down the mall and up the steps of the Capitol. You could still do that in those days. It was quite a scene looking at the snow on the mall and Pennsylvania Avenue from up there, it stays with me till this day.

I really enjoyed those trips to Washington, actually I still like going there. But there were other trips around the surrounding area with one of my friends. 

For the purposes of this blog-ette, we shall call this friend 'Tim'. Not just because I probably never knew his first name, but for the sake of confidentiality.

Tim was insane.

He was a messenger for another division of the hospital, but we would run into one another dropping off stool samples or whatever. Yes, it was a crap job. Tim was one of those overly handsome, gregarious, magnetic types that could talk people into doing practically anything. He liked me because his baloney didn't work on me.

Tim was in the outpatient psychiatric unit because of... reasons. He kept telling me it was all a ruse to get himself out of the Navy although that was a pretty tough sell. But the boy could talk. Oh, my goodness. He talked one of the doctors we met into loaning him his car whenever the doc was on weekend duty. So some weekends we drove around Virginia and North Carolina hanging around in local colleges and sleeping in the car.

But it was cold one night and Tim said, "Just follow my lead". Yes, a line right out of a movie where terrible things are about to happen. When we drove into the next small town we went directly to the jail. We walked in like we owned the place and Tim spoke to the Sheriff saying something like, "Hi, we're poor sailor-boys, can we sleep in your jail tonight?"

Apparently, this was not an unusual request in some quarters, because the Sheriff said, "Sure, but I will have to lock you in." This was not a problem, so we had a free, warm place to sleep and he even fed us breakfast in the morning. Every now and then, you bump into a culture you never even knew existed.

One day Tim didn't show up at work and after making a few discreet inquiries, I found him as an inpatient in a locked psychiatric ward. 

Even though he wasn't allowed visitors, I used what I had learned about talking from Tim and got in anyway. Naturally, he insisted it was all part of his plan to get discharged. But, it turns out that Tim was insane.

And then immediately after this, Doctor Davis told me the Hand Board was about to make their decision regarding my fate.