I stared at her as the meaning sank in. Although the music was still playing, I escorted her back to her seat without a word.
She looked up at me, angry now, her voice becoming harsh. "I wasn't enjoying the dance anyway," she said. "Besides, you smell like diesel oil."
Fuming, I returned to my seat and looked at the expensive pineapple shell filled with watered-down rum in front of me. I grabbed the drink and sipped the miserable mixture until our waitress stopped by and placed change on the receipt tray from the forty dollars I had handed her. Before I had a chance to reach for the tray, her long blond hair passed in front of my face and the money was suddenly gone.
Marc caught up with me as I stormed out of the nightclub. "Hey, bruddah, you okay?" he asked.
"I'm okay! I'm just fine! One gal's playing around on her husband. Another steals our money. These people don't care that we're working our tails off for our country."
"Wait a minute," Marc said. "Those are probably just a couple of losers. I'm sure we can-"
"Besides, the gal I was dancing with told me that I smelled like diesel oil."
He looked at me and smiled. "She said that? Really?"
"Really."
"Well, my girl was much more polite. She told me that I had a 'curious' smell. A mixture of something strange with something else strange. I noticed she didn't want to dance too close, either"
"We showered," I said. "We tried to get clean."
"We can't smell that bad. I used plenty of soap and after-shave lotion."
We both agreed that there was little promise for a midnight tour of the Viperfish and that the entire evening had been about as much fun as blowing the sanitary tanks. Declaring a major defeat for the military, we drove back to the Enlisted Men's Club of Pearl Harbor. We found a couple of comfortable chairs, listened to some superb music, and became obliterated in the company of Old Granddad until the early morning hours.
The next day, Captain Gillon announced that a swimming pool would be built on the topside deck of the Viperfish. After we stopped laughing, he explained the problems of rotating a gigantic submarine when she is barely moving through the water.
Throughout our sea trials, it had been apparent that the submerged Viperfish was unable to turn efficiently in a small space at slow speed. Handling like an airplane, with the responsiveness of her control systems dependent on speed, she was sluggish and lethargic when she slowed to less than three knots. To resolve this problem, the shipyard workers built a hump on top of the original hump. The double-humped submarine looked even more bizarre than the original. The lower hump was part of the primary bat-cave structure; the new hump was simply a bow thruster, or water diverter, that had been designed to squirt jets of seawater out of either side of the hump. This gave the Viperfish a jet assist, so to speak, to improve her turns at slow speed. To force the water through the openings, a huge motor, which looked like a fat cannon, was welded to the front of the hump and aimed straight ahead.
Because the motor was so large, the wires connected to it were enormous. The electricians became excited about what kind of monster circuit breaker could be used to turn it on and off. Their stress levels increased when they thought about the huge motor's load on the electrical system, a load that might dim the lights and leave us without enough power for anything else. The captain therefore decided to test the thing before going to sea again by using shore power from gigantic cables stretching from the pier.
Because the motor was in the air on the top deck and water was necessary for the test, we needed a pool.
The shipyard workers descended on the Viperfish again. Several hours later, a high circle of boards surrounded the bat-cave hump and the bow-thruster pump. The captain asked me to coordinate communications with the electricians after the pool was filled with Pearl Harbor water; I donned earphones and a microphone, and soon we were ready for the test.
"Are the electricians in the engine room ready?" the captain asked.
When I called down to the electricians, they were near the circuit breaker and ready to turn it on. "Yes, sir, ready to go!" I called out.
The captain inspected the pool a final time, and I noticed several crewmen from nearby submarines gathering at the edge of the pier to watch the test.
Finally, the captain was ready. Standing back from the area, he joined the Special Project engineers nearby and ordered, "Energize the thruster motor."
"Turn on the thruster motor!" I shouted into the microphone. In the distant bowels of the ship, I heard a loud thumping sound of the huge circuit breaker closing. The motor jumped as it came to life, blasting water out the sides of the diverter system. Water from the pool was sucked into the motor system as jets of water blew out the wooden sides of the pool. Several of the planks fell overboard, as others were swirled inside the pool and headed for the motor.
"Turn it off! Turn it off!" the captain hollered.
"Turn it off! Turn it off!" I called to the engine room. The motor ground to a halt just before one of the bigger planks was sucked into its blades.
I waited next to the demolished pool while the captain and engineers conferred about the test results and the near destruction of the motor. After considerable arm waving and debate, they finally decided that the energy consumption, the noise, and the motor's cumbersome inefficiency outweighed any potential benefit that might allow the Viperfish to make smaller turns. The electricians removed the cables, and the shipyard workers removed the planks and what was left of the swimming pool. For reasons never clear to me, they left the bow-thruster pump in place. For the next two years, we cruised around the ocean with a pump on a hump, both of them good for nothing.
We finally began loading supplies for the shakedown voyage across the Pacific Ocean to Seattle and San Francisco. Between loading more garbage weights and working on my seemingly endless qualifications, I took some time off to surf the then uncrowded waters at Ala Moana and spectacular Sunset Beach on the north shore. I used a long board and surfed as often as possible. The biggest problem was trying to protect my skin (now totally white as the result of three weeks spent under the ocean surface) from the bright tropical sunlight.
My evenings were free for steaming in Honolulu, and I took advantage of every minute. Thoughts of the upcoming submerged isolation fueled a compelling need for social adventures. Marc and I quickly recovered from our misfortunes in Waikiki. With vigorous scrubbing and the passage of a week or so, our residual submarine smell slowly faded and ladies once again enjoyed dancing with us.
Before leaving Oahu, we propelled the Viperfish across Pearl Harbor to a "deperming" station, where we spent a full day wrapping the boat's superstructure with electrical cables. It was nasty work in the hot Hawaiian sun, but morale was extremely high. Everybody worked enthusiastically to lower the thick wires into the water and pull them up on the other side of the boat until she was fully wrapped in wire.
After the final cable was pulled out of the water and bolted to the high-voltage generating station, we were all drenched in sweat and our hands were black from the rubber insulation around the cables. We were ordered to leave the immediate area so deperming could take place. This process used current generated by massive voltage to remove any magnetic fields in the Viperfish that could trigger the detonation of underwater mines. Because most of us still had no clue about our upcoming mission, any consideration of going into mine-infested waters was something that nobody wanted even to think about.
I packed more fruit into my bunk locker, stuffed in another box of cigars, and tucked some John D. MacDonald novels among my clothes. Most of us would wear the same dungarees or the new lint-free overalls called "faboomer suits" for a week at a time, so stocking fresh clothes was limited to one change per week. The trip to the mainland would take about a week. We each needed only three pairs of underclothing, dungaree shirts, and pants, in addition to dress blues, a black silk sailor tie, and a clean white sailor hat to wear during liberty in Seattle and San Francisco.