Somebody high up, one of the chiefs, wanted acoustical tiling on the bulkhead of the rehearsal spaces. I suspected it was Master Chief J.J. Connor, whose office was on the second deck, directly above the saxophone section.
MU1 Doyle Church was in charge of the working party.
I was the working party.
"Why me?" I asked Doyle as he showed me the tools and stack of tiles.
"You're the junior man." This was true. I was the leading seaman of Navy Band San Francisco; in fact, I was the
only seaman.
Doyle handed me a putty knife and pointed to a can of dark brown gunk next to a pile of acoustical tiles. I was aghast. My leading petty officer expected me to do menial work, the sort of low-skilled, high-mess labor generally performed by janitors and convicts.
And seamen.
The thought of working was intolerable. I am a Mullen, a special race put on the earth for a special purpose. Mullens do not perform manual labor. We are idea people, thinkers, not doers.
"Doyle," I said. "You'll get in trouble if I put up these tiles."
"Me? You've got it backwards; it's
you who will be in trouble if you
don't."
I shook my head. "You just don't understand," I sighed.
"What's to understand? A petty officer tells a seaman what to do, and the seaman does it. What have I missed?"
"The obivious," I said. "If I do this work, I'll screw it up. Royally. You'll be p.o.'d at me, sure, but still, you'll have a crappy job on your hands." I jerked a thumb at the overhead. "And Master Chief Connor will be p.o.'d, too." I thought for a second and added, "But not at me."
"Who will J.J. be p.o.'d at?"
"You," I said. "Think it over: I warn you that I'll screw up this job, but you bullheadedly go ahead and make me do it. When I'm finished, it looks like hell, and J.J. goes ballistic. Now, ask yourself: who does J.J. blame? The moron seaman who, everybody knows, can barely clean a toilet? Or the career-minded petty officer who used poor judgment in assigning a difficult task to a worthless bozo like me?"
Doyle pondered the situation.
"Prove to me that you're incompetent," he said.
"Let's see," I said, sticking the putty knife into the can of tile glue. "I guess I use this spatula thingie to get the brown gooky stuff." I yanked out the knife, catapulting globs of dark brown goo onto the bulkhead, my dungarees and the carpeting. "Then I put it on one of these white tiles."
"Be careful," Doyle said. "That's the front of the tile."
"Whoops, too late," I said, applying a generous dollop of brown, pasty glue to the wrong side of the tile, creating an object that looked like a turd on a serving platter.
"Let's put it here," I said, smooshing the nasty object against the bulkhead, waist-high at a rakish 32-degree angle to the horizon.
"That was sort of fun," I said as I reached for another tile.
"Stop," Doyle said, taking the encrusted putty knife from me. "I get it."
"What the hell is this mess?" came a gruff voice from behind. Master Chief Connor's eyes swept across Doyle and me, settling on the lone, crooked tile, which popped off the bulkhead and fell face down on the deck.
J.J. looked at the putty knife in Doyle's hand. "Church, who taught you to put up tiling?"
"Well, actually, master chief, uh,-"
"Give me that," J.J. said, taking the putty knife from Doyle and dipping it into the can. "Here's how it's done." He applied a thin layer of glue to the back of a tile like a master chef spreading goose liver jelly on French bread.
"I see," Doyle said, reaching for the tile.
"No, let me show you," J.J. said, bending down to slide the tile squarely into the lower left-hand corner of the bulkhead. "You have to start at the edge and work horizontally in rows."
I took one pace backwards.
"And don't use too much glue," J.J. continued, reaching for another tile.
I took another pace backwards.
"You can apply the glue straight to the bulkhead, if you're careful," he said. "That's how we did it back in ComNavCruDesRonLantMedPac."
At least that's what I think he said. By this time, I was sliding out the door, and Doyle wasn't far behind me.
I've always thought that my remarkably high sense of self-esteem was a morale-boosting plus for the Navy. It certainly was true in this case.
I, of course, got out of doing actual work, a skill I would later develop to magnificent proportions.
J.J. Connor got the satisfaction of passing along his hard-earned skills to a new generation of sailors.
And most important, Doyle got the right man for the job.
