The captain understood my explanations to be altogether too much smart-mouthing and after a twenty-second phone call, I was over at the chow hall in white cotton mess clothes with a little fluffy white hat designed to prevent the quarter-inch hairs of my jarhead from falling into the massive pots and pans the cook’s assistants kept hauling over to the pot shack by the tens and twenties.

The pot shack was a steam room barely big enough for two bantamweights, a box of Brillo pads, and the steady flow of pots and pans. It smelled of hot rancid grease and on the perimeter of the pot shack, where the heat fell from the 110 degree Fahrenheit core range to the 80s and lower, and where the whitish-yellow grease congealed and was smeared all about the floor, it got into your boots, into the cuffs of your pants, on your white apron, on your hands, hair, and face. Where I worked with the pressure washers, the grease atomized and I breathed so much of it through the course of a day I was seldom hungry. The other Marine in the pot shack with me was a grunt from Oxford, Mississippi, larger than myself, and for the first couple of hours all he said to me was “Watch out, goddamn it, and hurry the fuck up! We runnin’ nine mahls behind. Gait the cob oucher ass, boah.” Mississippi had three teeth in his head, the most prominent being the lower left canine, tooth #22 as it is known in the trade. Due to severe gum recession and lack of collateral support, Mississippi’s #22 tooth drifted to the center of his mouth like a tusk. It was about the size and shape of a Bolivian plantain.

My partner had a constant can of Coke going, which he referred to as “sar’dah”; I believe something in that popular beverage’s secret ingredients had stripped the enamel off #22, making it amenable to stains. Mississippi smoked enough straight Camels to color it a kind of Boston Baked Bean brown. To watch Mississippi finger #22 or caress it with this thick tongue was just about enough to put me off the fried rabbit or grilled liver let alone a cold can of ham and limas. He said there was a cavity in it and he liked to keep it wet, like a beached whale, otherwise it hurt like shit. Since he was shy about twenty-five teeth, he wasn’t the world’s best enunciator, and because of his thick southern accent, I was able to ascertain little else of what he said. Nonetheless it took only about forty-five minutes before I was hating him as much as or more than I hated Captain McQueen.