The Great Beer Case Challenge
Excerpt from “Somewhere Near Centerville,” a new novel by James Tressler
With the arrival of summer, the evenings grew longer. The perpetutual greys and fog of the coast lifted, and from the hillside, you could see far down and out to a brilliant, bright Pacific.
We could sit in Ravel’s with the windows open, and the sunlight wouldn’t fade until almost ten o’clock. When the guys who worked down the hill in operations were working their four-day, twelve-hour shifts, you wouldn’t see them. They were sleeping when they weren’t at work.
But then they had their off days, and that’s when Ravel’s room was really the place to be. I usually finished around five o’clock, so when I arrived the guys were already well into a case of beer, the music blaring, the talk at full steam. This was also the year the Bulls were chasing their third NBA championship. I have a vivid memory of Game 5 of the Bulls-Knicks series (Marv Albert shouting, “Smith stripped! Smith stopped! Smith! Smith! Smith blocked! Smith stopped again!”), and all of us afterward raising our beer cans to celebrate the Bulls and to lament the demise of the Knicks, and especially the unfortunate Charles Smith.
There were those weekends when I was in town running around with Seamus, or with Jada or whoever, and the party went on without me. That’s how I missed out on the Great Beer Case Challenge.
All bases have their stories, myths and legends. At Centerville, there was the tale of two radiomen, Chase and Ledger, who while living in these same barracks sometime back in the distant 1970s, had reportedly consumed a case of beer each day after work, for a knee-buckling total of thirty cases in a single month. This “record” had stood for nearly twenty years, according to base lore.
Well, Ravel and Frank, like the rest of us, knew about this record. That summer, they set out to beat it. The time seemed ripe, from all angles.
“Why, what the hell else are we doing around around here these days?” Frank demanded. “The Cold War is over, boys! We won! It’s time to crack a beer and celebrate, like proud Americans. Let the downsizing begin!”
Ravel was listening, nodding. You could tell he and Frank had already been over this.
“That’s right, that’s right!” Ravel threw in, raising an index finger ceremoniously. “The base is closing. We’re doing fuck all. Frank and I have decided: it’s time to chase the record.”
“Thirty one!” Frank enjoined. “We’re going for thirty one!”
“Just like Roger Maris,” Ravel added.
“Who’s Roger Maris?” somebody asked.
“Ah, come on! You know, the guy who broke Babe Ruth’s single-season home run record of 60 home runs. Roger Maris! He hit 61.”
“Das’ right, das right!” cried Frank, adopting one of his drinking voices. “Chase and Ledger, you’re goin’ down!” He rose his beer can high and bellowed. “Chase and Ledger!”
“Chase and Ledger!” Ravel joined in and they clinked beer cans.
I wasn’t around that much at that point, so I only caught the great beer chase in snatches. Personally, I couldn’t imagine. I mean, a case of beer between two guys comes out to twelve beers per day each. That was possible, I supposed, on their off days. But what about during their shifts?
“We’ll just have to double time,” was Frank’s response.
During the next couple weeks, the empty, vanquished beer cases began to pile up against the back wall. They mostly drank Budweiser because it was cheap and light. We kept track the same way you keep track of the baseball: calculating the number of home runs (finished beer cases) versus the number of days left.
By the middle of June, they had consumed an astonishing eighteen cases, so were well on pace to break the record. But the pace was grueling. I don’t know how they managed to keep going. We all marveled at their determination.
At times, the wear and tear began to show. Ravel in particular looked haggard. Some mornings he’d be unable to get out of bed and it was only because of Detroit Frank’s valiant efforts that he was able to be roused, slip dismally into his uniform and make it in time for work.
“We’re a team!” Frank reminded us. “We sacrifice for each other! We leave it all on the floor!” Well, there were plenty of beer cans on the floor, for sure.
One day the barracks manager, an easy-going fellow from Memphis named Rudolf, made a routine inspection. Appalled by the sight of the beer cans and the growing mountain of cases, he was on the verge of calling the master-at-arms and reporting an incident. But we all were friendly with Rudolf, and when we told him about the chase for the record, he seemed to relent.
“Y’all crazy!” was all he said, shaking his head and left. “Just make sho’ you get rid them beer cans! The master-at-arms will be all up in my ass she find out!”
Rudolf was right. The master-at-arms was a formidable woman, very severe, and on the side of the old school chiefs. If she knew about the drinking in the barracks, let alone the chase, she’d have Ravel and Detroit Frank standing in front of the captain for sure.
Standing before the captain, or “captain’s mast,” as it is officially called, is a serious matter. We all shuddered when we thought about Modesto Tony, the guy with whom I’d had that memorable weekend in San Francisco a few months before.
Tony got mixed up with some people at Club West one night. They invited him to a party somewhere in Eureka. During the party, someone gave him some speed. Since he had already been drinking and needed to drive back to the base, Tony had snorted some, thinking it would sober him up for the long drive.
Unfortunately, the next week he got called in for a random drug test. It was just bad luck. Everyone’s number could be called up at any time (the tests were part of the Navy’s Zero Tolerance policy). Anyway, Tony failed the test.
I still remember the day he got called before the captain. The master-at-arms brought Modesto Tony into the admin building, and as they passed by, Tony looked really ashen, scared. I felt really bad for him, but there was nothing anybody could do, so I just pretended to look busy with paperwork when they passed.
The captain really had no choice. The Navy’s policies were very clear on the subject of drugs. I typed up the report from Tony’s chief supervisor, in which Tony was dismissed as a lost cause. “I tried everything,” the chief wrote. “I tried talking to him. I tried being his friend, and then finally, the hard chief, all to no avail.”
Tony was busted down in rank, given forty-five days’ base restriction, forty-five days’ extra duty until his discharge papers arrived. He was not allowed to leave his room except for meals and to report for the extra duty. Each day we’d see him in gloomy coveralls scraping paint, scrubbing floors, and any other shit detail the master-at-arms could find for him.
The sad fate of Tony was a depressing subject at Ravel’s. We were all very young, so we just naturally assumed that his life was over.
“Man, what is he going to do?”
“He’ll never be able to find a job!”
“Kicked out of the Navy! Game over!”
We hated the master-at-arms, we railed at the Navy and its policies. We said, “Poor Tony, why did he take that speed, the dumb bastard?” over and over.
Sometimes I’d see Modesto Tony on my way to the admin office, but I mostly avoided him. What happened to him scared me, or should have. He knew all about my adventures with Seamus, and my weekends in Eureka and Arcata. If he’d wanted to, he could have told the master-at-arms everything. I could have been called in for a test, and been right there in the same boat with him.
But he didn’t say anything. He just kept his head down, and stoically went about the shit work that was assigned to him, and each evening returned to his restricted barracks room.
Finally, the discharge papers arrived from Washington. Modesto Tony was a free man. The last night we invited him up to Ravel’s for a going away party. Tony was dressed in regular clothes, and was working on a goatee, for which we congratulated him, somewhat enviously.
“Oh, that’s just the start!” he said. You could tell he was putting on a brave front for us, so we wouldn’t see how scared he was. “Soon as I get back to Modesto, I’m gonna grow my hair down to here!” He indicated his shoulders. “Then I’m gonna light up a big, ol’ reefer! Start myself a band!”
“Yeah, yeah!” we call chimed in. “You’ll be bigger than Nirvana!”
“Just think,” Tony went on. “Someday, when I’m performing in front of fifty thousand people, I can say, ‘You know, I got kicked out of the Navy!’”
“And look where you are now!” we all said, picturing it. Or trying to.
Truth be told, we all had similar dreams. Dreams about all the great things we were going to do once we got out. We had it all planned out, our future glory. Later on, when we did get out, we found that things were not that simple and easy, that we would have to start all over again.
We built up our lives back in the civilian world as having been all great, but like most young people who join the military, our civilian lives had for the most part been desperate, disjointed.
That’s why we were in the Navy to begin with. I for one had done a year’s probation for shoplifting at a mall. I was what they called a “troubled teen,” with no concrete ideas about college. Joining the Navy was probably the first positive step toward any kind of future that I had taken.
The same was more or less true for the other guys, though I never asked much about their lives back home. We all had joined the Navy as a way out of our hometowns, with the same vague ambitions of “seeing the World,” getting money for college. The Navy, as we saw it, was just an irksome stepping stone from our blurry pasts to our still painfully indistinct futures.
That last night we got Modesto Tony good and drunk, and helped him take all of his uniforms and remaining military equipment downstairs to the parking lot, where he unceremoniously dumped them in the big metal trash can.
“Well, that’s that!” he said, wiping his hands in a great gesture. “So long, Uncle Sam! So long, Centerville Beach! As James Dean would say, ‘Live fast, die young and leave a good-lookin’ corpse!’”
The next morning was Monday. Modesto Tony was supposed to check out at noon. I had to go to work, but I heard later on that they had a hard time rousting Tony. He had crashed on the floor at Ravel’s, and when the morning came, the reality of it all hit him hard. “Where am I gonna go?” he kept asking. “Where am I gonna go?” Ravel conveyed all this to us later on.
“Oh, come on, Modesto! You’re gonna be great! I kept telling him that.” Ravel shook his head. “Finally after about an hour of just sitting on the floor, just staring up at the ceiling, Tony gets up and says, ‘Well, I guess it’s now or never!’ And I helped him take what little he had with him down to his car.”
Ravel laughed.
“You know the funny thing? He wanted me to go with him into town. Said we could stop at the Palace or something and have a few beers. I was like, ‘Man, I got a shift today!’ So Tony just shook hands and was all, ‘Well, see ya’ around!’ And he just drove off, that was it.”
Tony’s departure was still fresh on our minds as Ravel and Frank pursued Chase and Ledger’s record. We tried to keep Rudolf’s warning in mind, but after a few beers, caution was usually discarded along with the fresh empty cans and cigarette butts.
We were always listening to music, and with the music came discussions, arguments, about all the new bands, the ones that had come along the past couple years.
Detroit Frank insisted that we were all bandwagoners for liking all the Seattle bands. He refused to be a bandwagoner, and instead we ought to be listening to obscure groups like Soul Coughing or Flop.
Ravel liked all the new bands, but he was also really into ‘80s groups like Bauhaus, Love and Rockets, and New Order. He and Arizona Chuck used to have these long, rambling discussions on Ian Curtis, and it was through them that I was introduced to Joy Division and songs like “Love Will Tear Us Apart.”
Down the hall from Ravel’s, a group of young black guys had their own sort of tavern, hosted by a really tall, athletic guy named Derek. You could hear them blasting songs like Boyz 2 Men’s “End of the Road,” Dr. Dre, and Snoop Doggy Dog. We liked each other, and occasionally we hung out together, but most of the time they had their scene and we had ours, only with different soundtracks.
Sometimes when we went into Eureka on the weekends we’d run into Derek and his crew at Club West, dancing with the local girls and looking sharp with their fade haircuts and slick silk suits. Not many people of color lived in Eureka, and Derek told us that sometimes people would approach them on the street and just want to touch their faces.
I was in and out a lot, especially on the weekends, so I didn’t always keep track of Ravel and Detroit Frank’s pursuit of the record. But it happened sometime after the Bulls beat the Suns for their third NBA title. We were watching that game, and then suddenly there was this big celebration. Ravel and Frank were holding up this empty cardboard Budweiser case, waving it around like a Lombardi trophy.
“Ladies and gentlemen, we have a new record!” Ravel announced triumphantly.
With great ceremony, they added it to the top of the pile, which by then reached all the way to the ceiling. Thirty one empty cases. It was quite an achievement.
“Of course we never could have done it without you guys,” Ravel conceded. I guess we had helped, especially the last couple days, although we hadn’t thought much about it, all caught up in the basketball championship. A Polaroid was taken of Ravel and Frank, the two new record holders, posing in a relaxed way at the foot of the beer cases, both of them holding up beer cans and flashing proud smiles.
Word of the new record got round quickly. The black guys from down the hall even came in, dubious at first, then stunned at the sight of the beer case mountain.
“Damn, you guys are crazy for real!”
“Look, check it!”
“Day-yamn!”
Evidently, the master-at-arms found out too. A couple of days later, Ravel and Frank were summoned to her office. From what they told us later on, the master-at-arms had done a spot inspection while they were at work.
“I hear you guys have been drinking in your barracks,” she said, in a dry, matter-of-fact way.
“No, ma’am!” they both answered.
“Then what, may I ask, is this?” She whipped out the famous Polaroid.
“She had the Polaroid?” we asked, stunned.
“Oh, we were so busted!” Ravel groaned. “She made us throw out all the beer cases, said next time we would be in front of the captain.”
They got off with a warning, plus one weekend of repainting the doorways of the barracks. The rest of us got a case of beer and sat in the grass outside. Even the always serious Omaha John got in on it. “Paint that doorway, sailor!” he shouted at Detroit Frank. “Up and down, Ravel! Long strokes! I want those doorways ready for the Second Coming of the Lord!”
After that, we still drank in Ravel’s room, but kept things a bit quieter, and there were no more attempts to set new drinking records. But at least they had managed to achieve the magic number – 31 cases. Count ‘em, folks! 31 cases. Move aside, Chase and Ledger, make way for Baltimore Ravel and Detroit Frank.
There are a lot of things we preserve in this life. Whole museums the world over are filled with the dusty sandstone statues dating back to the Phoenicians, pyramids built by the pharaohs, the teeth of George Washington, the hair of Mozart, and so on, But in Centerville, not one monument remains of Ravel and Frank’s great beer run, and that’s just too damn bad. I may have missed out on some things, with all my comings and goings, but I asked the other guys. You can take their word for it. With a little help from their shipmates, Ravel and Detroit Frank drank every single drop.
*
You can purchase Jame’s new book here.