Steve McQueen - Marc Eliot [8]
Early the next morning, Steven found himself on the SS Alpha. When it left New York, the ship headed to the West Indies to pick up a cargo of molasses. At first, Steven was excited about his new life as a sailor, but the romance of it quickly turned into a nightmare. Being the new hand, he was assigned the dirtiest of jobs—swabbing the deck, cleaning the heads, garbage detail. He hated all of it, and on top of that the ship itself was a rotted hulk. It caught fire at sea and had to stop for repairs in the Dominican Republic. It was there that Steven jumped ship and disappeared into the tropical night. “Taking orders still bugged me. I decided to become a beachcomber and live the free life.”
He resurfaced as a towel boy at the most notorious bordello in the country, where blond-haired, blue-eyed boys were in short supply. The working girls, especially, couldn’t get enough of him. Now this was a job he really enjoyed, especially when nobody seemed to mind if he helped himself to the merchandise whenever he wanted. All the girls loved him.2
But after eight weeks he’d had enough even of that and was ready to return to the States. In Port Arthur, Texas, he quickly found work on an oil rig before he quit that job to sell “golden” pen points in a small traveling carnival, a two-ring set-it-up-and-break-it-down affair. Whenever a customer bought a pen point, he also received a free pen-and-pencil set. “The whole thing was worth, at most, twenty-three cents, and we got a dollar for it. My pockets rejoiced but my stomach couldn’t take it and soon I said, ‘Stevie boy, it’s time to shove.’ ”
He left the show in Ottawa and found work there briefly with a lumber company as a “hijacker,” climbing tall trees and sawing off the upper branches. From there he drifted back down to the Carolinas, where he met a well-bred southern girl whose family was from Myrtle Beach. Her name was Sue Ann and she was young, sweet, and willing. Steven blissfully spent his seventeenth birthday in the comfort of Sue Ann’s arms. He wanted to stay with her forever, he said, but one day not long after, he upped and enlisted in the United States Marines. Private First Class McQueen, Second Division of the Fleet Marine Force, was initially stationed at Camp Pendleton, forty-eight miles north of San Diego, California.
In the aftermath of World War II, when most of the wartime recruits had opted for civilian life, only the hard-core vets who had seen it all were left. These marines were tough, hard, strong, and mean and didn’t take shit from anyone, especially pretty-boy enlistees they considered still wet behind the ears.
Assigned to boot camp on notorious Parris Island, Steven got off the train, bent over to pick up his bag and was greeted with a drill sergeant’s bullet-studded swagger stick across his ass. When he complained, he was marked a troublemaker and assigned to sand decks with a brick in his so-called spare time. He did it until his hands bled. He also had to march through swamps and sleep on a bed covered with twelve loaded guns.
Things were rough for him until someone noticed that Private McQueen looked like he might be a scrapper and slapped a pair of gloves on him. He was assigned to fight the ugliest and biggest marine in the camp. Not surprisingly, it was a one-sided bout. Steve went down ten times and got up nine before giving in (the other guy eventually wound up in Leavenworth Prison because of his penchant for punching out officers). For Steven, the loss was a victory: he had proved his toughness and marked himself a true marine. After that, things got a little better for him.
On his first weekend pass, he met up with Sue Ann and turned it into a two-week vacation in bed, until he was arrested by the MPs for going AWOL and thrown into the brig for forty-one days (twenty-one for going AWOL, twenty for