I suppose

 that the few times in dealing with E-3s and below like I do from time to time at Camp Perry it would be a lot easier and truthful to simply say I am a 61 year old married monogamous guy that is fairly temperate in his habits, which I really am in real life.

Of course, that would be the easy way out.

It is a lot more fun to create the illusion that I am a 61 year old wild-eyed party animal that is responsible for teaching Charlie Sheen how it's done.

I think that I might have posted what I did to three young Marines at Camp Perry the year I turned fifty and they teased me about being a half-century old.

If I haven't posted it, I'll tell you in brief.

Because I didn't have to shoot in the afternoon I went downtown and pled my case to the headwaitress and bartender to fix things so I looked like a hollow-legged whisky drinking stud and they did.

I took the trio to dinner and the meal was constantly interrupted by women coming over to hand me a drink (iced tea in an on the rocks glass) and ask why I hadn't let them know I was in town.

I actually got more than I bargained for when the town drama queen strutted in pouring out of a little blue dress and sat down on my lap and chided me for not calling her up when I got to town.

She also turned the cherubic faces of the three Marines beet red whan she said that she hoped I hadn't started taking viagara since the last year because I was wild enough without it. She said the last time I was in town I had left her sore for a week.

Then she poured an entire on the rocks glass of iced tea down my throat.

She was an amazon of a woman, over six feet tall barefoot wearing 5 inch heels and had a pair of 1952 Caddy bumper bullets on her chest along with the biggest head of flaming red hair I have ever seen.

She missed her true calling. She should have gone on stage and I confess it had a damned hard time keeping a straight face and playing along with such a talented actress. She deserved an Academy Award for that performance.

Their eyes popped out of their skulls when she showed up.

Of course the best part was when they got back to camp and started running their mouths.

"Don't you be goin' drinkin' with Mr. Piccolo! He'll have you all messed up in about ten minutes!" one said.

"Just don't try match him drink for drink! He'll have all the women over your table!" said one of the others.

The senior NCOs knew the three of them had been had. The next day a grinning Master Gunnery Sergeant came up to me and asked me what I had done to his younger guys. He knew it was a sham of some sort. You don't make senior NCO by being that easily fooled.

I suppose the three young guys figured it out a few days later.

The truth is that I knew none of these women and while I was grateful they helped me with my little charade in truth I knew I was leaving Camp Perry to come home with a clean conscience. When you consider the whole show was put together by a bartender, waitress and headwaitress in such short order it is nothing less than amazing.

Still it was fun to pull the wool over the eyes of a trio of youngsters.

Incidentally, one of the women had handed me a napkin with a phone number on it. When I got back to camp I thought I should call her and thank her but the joke was on me. The number was for the Port Clinton police department.

I will admit that I do like a good con and likely if I had put my mind to it I might have wound up as one of those guys that gets everyone else to support their lifestyle. Although one of my favorite movies is 'The Sting', I'm too honest to rob anyone.

However, pulling the wool over the eyes of a trio of youngsters probably taught them a few things. They likely learned to show a little more respect to an older guy. After they finally figured out they'd been had they likely learned to slow down a bit and think.

I'll give the three guys credit because they didn't try and match me drinking, though. They were responsible enough not to get toasted the night before they were scheduled to shoot.

I suppose it isn't all directed to young Marines I meet from time to time. Once on an internet forum someone asked how hard sailors partied. If I recall I was about 55 at the time.

I told him that when I got off of the boat and hit the parking lot I usually downed a half-rack of Heineken, a pint or two of Jack, three or four tooies, six nebbies, five hits of chocolate mescaline, a handful of mushrooms, six or eight quaaludes, a couple of joints, a dozen hits of sunshine and sniffed a couple deep sniffs of ether. Any more than that and I'd need a designated driver.

In seconds I received a back channel message from someone offering to help me get into rehab.

I often wonder what he was thinking. If you look at all of that stuff and divided it by two and fed it to a pair of elephants they would both likely be stone cold dead in seconds. For another thing it is common knowledge that sailors are under the DOT random urinalysis program and there is a zero tolorance policy.

In addition to this, you also have to remember that companies in my business keep a pretty good eye on employees. They are not too likely to put an irresponsible drunken wildman in charge of an expensive piece of equipment. These people are not stupid.

I always wonder why people don't stop to think for a second. Does the answer make sense?

I teach people my line of work from time to time and the first thing I teach about calculations is to look at the answer and see if it makes sense. If you come up with an answer that you are putting 10,000 barrels of cargo in a 5000 barrel tank it is obviously wrong.

Same holds true to other things. There is no way a 170 pound 50 year old guy can pound down 12 or 14 double Jameson's in and hour or so and not simply keel over. That's over a quart of hard liquor!

It's also pretty unlikely that he can walk into a restaurant and be greeted by six or seven babes, either. When you see that it just HAS to be a set-up.

Still, I have to admit it is a pretty funny trick to pull on a trio of unsuspecting young Marines. After all, there's no use letting logic and facts get in the way of a pretty good lesson.

Besides the looks on their faces were priceless.



To find out why the blog is pink just cut and paste this: http://piccoloshash.blogspot.com/2009/12/my-feminine-side-blog-stays-pink.html