Oral Sex

The title of this ramble reflects something that happened to My Old Man. In 1958, at the age of 52, he suffered a major coronary thrombosis, which very nearly killed him. He was in the cardiac ICU for six weeks, and later on the ward for a further two months. During that time, he'd gotten to know the cardiologist fairly well, and when he was to be released to go home, the Doc had a list of things My Old Man was to do and to avoid. Jokingly, after all the serious stuff, the Doc said, “Bilke, you'll have to give up half your sex life.” My Old Man looked at him and asked, “Which half, Doc, thinking about sex or talking about sex ?”

I began to realize that most doodlebuggers' sex lives amounted to talking about it, for the most part.

When I first broke out in the doodlebug field, I was sent to Southwest Louisiana [Lafayette], and shortly after that, I was transferred to Tyler Texas to a hotshot crew.

We were working out of Texarkana, staying on the Arkansas [wet] side. One night as we sat around our neighborhood bar, the waitress brought a round of beers, and said, “You boys work in the oil patch, don't you ?”

She was a lady “of a certain age” who looked as though she'd been “rode hard and put away wet” way too many times.

One of the guys asked her how she knew where we worked. She replied, “You all are all alike - do your drilling in the barroom and your screwing in the field.”

One of the guys protested that he'd had plenty of women, and she looked at him with a trace of pity in her eyes. She said, “Sonny Boy, if you had a sandpaper hand and a wooden dick, it wouldn't be any bigger around than a toothpick.”

Shortly after that, I was sent overseas. There, we were stuck in a camp in some forsaken place for about ¾ of our lives, and I found the same sort of “oral sex” going on.

Here are a few vignettes to illustrate:

Party Manager walks into the mess hall at breakfast one morning, and asks, “Hey, is today Tuesday ?” Someone with a calendar watch says that it is indeed Tuesday. Said party manager replies, “Well, shit ! Last night was my night to jack off, and now I'll have to wait until next Monday.” Several of us are sitting around the table in the mess hall, swapping lies, and someone says of another of the guys, “Saddest moment of Joe's life was the night he woke up with a hard-on and both his arms were asleep.”

I worked on a crew on the North Slope, where one of the guys was bald as an egg. It was typical “male pattern baldness” -- little fringe of hair above his ears, and that was it. One of the guys walked in while he was eating breakfast, rubbed his hand on the guy's head while grabbing his crotch, and said, “Damn ! Your head feels just like my wife's ass.” The bald guy reached up, feigning surprise, rubbed his own head, and said, “Damn! you're right. I'd never noticed that before.”

Another day, in a tropical country, one of the guys walks into the mess hall at breakfast time. One of the others notices he looks a little peaked or tired, and asks, “Couldn't sleep last night ? You look a little rough...” The guy replies, “No I didn't sleep worth a damn. I had a wet dream.” The others made various comments, after which he said, “Yeah. I'd have had another one if I hadn't fallen asleep.”

I worked with an amiable giant of a guy once, not a mean bone in his head, and a good thing because he was over 2 meters tall, and was about 100 kg. of muscle and sinew. Once again, it was breakfast time in the mess hall, and when we got there, he was already there, and looked as if he'd been there a while. Someone asked him why he was up so early, and he replied that, “I had a hard - on so big that it took all the slack out of my skin and my eyes popped open. I couldn't get them closed again, so I just got up and came to breakfast.