Things that are funny on.., p.1
Things That Are Funny on a Submarine But Not Really, page 1
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Copyright © 2025 by Yannick Murphy
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.
Cover design by Erin Seaward-Hiatt
Print ISBN: 978-1-64821-135-5
Ebook ISBN: 978-1-64821-136-2
Printed in the United States of America
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For Hank
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Yannick Murphy’s stories are inspired by her three children’s service in the Navy—her son, a retired submariner, her eldest daughter, currently an officer on a nuclear submarine, and her youngest daughter, who is also active duty. Yannick Murphy’s novel is a work of fiction, blended with her children’s stories from overseas phone calls and underway emails. She wishes to thank not only her children, but ALL submariners out there who have ever silently patrolled our seas for our safety, or who are still patrolling them, under the depths, in their steel tubes, even while you read this.
Thank you to Cora Markowitz, Stephan Zguta, and Louisa, for making it make sense.
Contents
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Things that are funny on a submarine, but not really—The other radioman named Baitz who lives in South Carolina and thinks North Carolina is in the North. The XO who hates my bucket hat with the printed cherries on it but would rather me wear that than the one that says Bigfoot Is Real. The swim call we have where no one swims, but instead we sit topside and smoke, and Baitz tells us the story of how he was beat to shit as a boy, and Tintin tells him if he were our son, we’d beat the crap out of him too, and Baitz tells us that’s why he loves us. The gay guy Manning who tells me I’m fat, and he’d never do me, and I’m actually relieved for once to be fat. The exercise bike we have that is in such a tight space you have to lean your head to one side in order to use it, so you always look like a dead man in a noose. The “Would You Rather” game we play, and Grenadier says he’d rather be with all of us on the boat than at home with his wife who used to be a stripper and wears more clothes to bed than she ever wore stripping. The stupid Mafia accents we decide we’re going to talk with the entire underway. The fucker who stole my headphones, even though I bought them in bright pink so no one would want them.
On the surface, our boat pulls email. My father sends me an email telling me I should really go to college when I get out of here. I wonder if there’s a shit-ass college for me out there. Is there one that admits students with high school grades more like their shoe sizes? Besides, what if I can’t keep my mouth shut and I say something snarky to an officer and get the Big Chicken Dinner, aka dishonorable discharge? 4I won’t get the GI Bill, and I won’t be able to pay for college. I hope I can just stay squared away and not get into trouble before my separation date in a few months.
My mother and father always ask me where we’re going on the boat, like I could really tell them. I tell my mother she’s probably some Russian spy because she always asks me where we’re headed. I tell them that lately we’ve been doing an exercise where we’re constantly being pinged by sonar for over a week round the clock, and I still can’t get the song “Pretty in Pink” by the Psychedelic Furs out of my head because we just watched five ’80s movies in a row and Pretty in Pink was one of them.
At night, Grenadier’s gentle snoring across my rack reminds me of waves rolling onto a pebbled shore. Every day, at some point, when we’re close enough to the surface to receive transmissions, Grenadier runs up to me wanting to know if he got an email from his wife, Maya. When there isn’t one and he looks upset, I tell him what the fuck, Grenadier, you don’t even want to be with her. He just looks at me and says, “Fuck you, Sterling.” I’d walk away, but where do you go when you’re nut-to-butt packed into a 360-foot-long tube of metal? Instead, I sit with him in the radio room and ask him what’s eating him. He rolls his eyes, but I’ve seen him do this before, and what usually follows is a kernel of truth.
“Maya’s seeing somebody else,” he says.
I figure he doesn’t know for sure, so I say, “Did she tell you that?”
“She doesn’t have to,” he says.
“Now you’re psychic and system light,” I say—system light meaning he barely passed his quals and doesn’t have extensive knowledge of all the boat’s systems.
“Fuck off, I’m system heavy compared to your fat ass, I’m system megaton,” he says.
“Point being, you’re not even home. You’re here with me in this big steel tube of dumb, so how would you know if she’s cheating?” I say.
“You’ve never been in a relationship. What do you know? You remind me of Candy Love. You talk shit nonstop,” he says. He’s right. 5He knows I’ve never had a girlfriend. It’s something the guys on the boat found out about me early on when we were in sub school spending our days watching endless PowerPoints about systems and spending our nights hanging out in the hallway of the barracks baring our souls to one another while eating microwave popcorn. I went to sub school a month after I graduated high school. The guys in sub school wanted to know if it was because a girl dumped me that I signed up to serve. I told them I never had a girlfriend, mainly because I was pimply and fat, and that it was more like my parents dumped me. They gave me some choices, and staying at home wasn’t one of them. College or the military or go live on my own and get a job. I told the guys I joined the Navy because I like submarines. Which is true. Grouse all you want about how awful life is on a submarine, but watch one from a distance broach the surface, it’s a thing of beauty and gives me goose bumps every time. It’s amazing how subs stay submerged for so long and don’t end up looking like a crushed soda can.
When I was growing up, my father had me watch all his favorite submarine movies. It was how we spent time together when he wasn’t with my little sister. They’d do stuff like go running for miles on our logging trails, which I never wanted to do because, as it turns out, my leg muscles get their panties in a wad whenever it involves carrying my belly around at a fast clip. Sometimes I’d rent bad submarine movies just to get my father to drop whatever he was doing so we could watch them together. I’d even rent foreign subtitled ones no one’s ever heard of. My father would get excited just watching the submarine sailing on the water in the opening credits. He’d scare me and suddenly shout, “Goddamn, look at how beautiful it is! Do you see?”
If he could have, if he didn’t have terrible eyesight that makes him hold a book so close to his nose it looks like he’s snorting up the words instead of reading them, and if he didn’t have a history of kidney stones that when he passes one makes him writhe and scream on the bathroom floor like someone turning into a werewolf, he would have joined the submarine force himself. It was his dream. I joined the sub service because I knew it was his dream, and he’d admire me. Did it 6work? It did. From the moment I enlisted, I was getting slaps on the back and him saying how proud he was of me. The only problem was, when I got in the Navy, and hated all the tedious work, and the long watches, the dream turned out to be more like a wakeup call for me to try and get out of the Navy without humping the bunk. I don’t want to get masted for somethi
Now, in my mind, I run through all the nicknames of people I know on the boat, or people we’ve been with to boat school, and Candy Love, the name Grenadier mentioned, is not one of them.
“Is that your imaginary little friend?” I say to Grenadier.
Grenadier says, “He was a dude from Jaro City from back home when I was a shorty. Every weekend, when we’d spot a stain, and we’d be all rowdy-dowdy on the stain and shaking him down so we could lick his wallet, lick his watch, or whatever, Candy Love would be sitting in the fucking car trying to duck down so we wouldn’t notice. If the police came, we’d all run back to the car and drive off. While we were getting out of there, Candy Love would pretend like he had been in the fight with us and shake his fist out like he hurt it beating the stain.”
“What’s a shorty?” I ask.
“Shorty’s an underage dude who can do the hard crime and not get the time,” Grenadier says, leaning back in his chair so that his head is hitting against the computer screen. Doing so reveals his coffee-colored neck. It also makes his Adam’s apple stick out so far it looks like he’s got one of the submarine’s planes wedged inside it.
“What’d you have to do?” I ask.
“Shit, a lot of shit. Killing and shit. I was with the shit,” he says.
For a second, I imagine I’m teenaged Grenadier having to shoot someone for the first time while standing in a vacant lot in Jaro City. 7That’s something I’ve been doing my whole life. Imagining what it’s like to be someone else. Maybe I’ve done it all these years because I’d rather be anyone else than me. Anyway, I’m Grenadier for a moment. It’s snowing. I’m freezing cold because my hair is a short ’fro, a nearly bald ’fro, and I’m not wearing a hat. I’ve got the guy up against a building, with the gun pointed at his chest. Off to my side is an OG telling me to shoot the fucker already. My skinny legs are shaking uncontrollably. The OG off to the side won’t stop yelling. To make the yelling stop, I shoot over and over again, with my eyes closed, until the bullets run out. When I open my eyes, I’m relieved, because the dude isn’t standing against the wall anymore. I think he’s run off. I don’t see him until I look down. He’s slid onto the ground. The fallen snow is turning red from the blood. I can’t hear anything. The gunshot’s made me deaf. The OG off to the side grabs me and makes me start running. I want to stop, I’m throwing up, but the OG pulls me along. The vomit goes onto my coat, my jeans, in between the laces of my coke whites….
“That must have sucked,” I say, remembering I should say something instead of reliving a memory of Grenadier’s that he never had.
“It did, so don’t fucking tell me how I know if Maya is cheating on me or not, because I know she’s been being a fucking thot. When you’re with the shit, you have got to be on high alert, always paying attention to the smallest shit that don’t seem right. You heard of sixth sense?” he says.
“Yeah, sure,” I say, swallowing. I’ve got a sick taste in my mouth, like I really was Grenadier for a while and shot someone, and I’m tasting my own puke.
“Well, I have it. I have the fucking seventh sense too. I got ’em up to a hundred, thanks to Jaro City,” he says, now standing up and pounding the bulkhead with his fist, but when you pound a steel wall, all it does is make your hand bounce back. If it were me, I’d be clutching my hand and groaning. But Grenadier’s always been the King of Pain, and he doesn’t flinch. He just stands there with his fists at his sides, then he inhales deeply and exhales deeply, three long times. 8Finally, he takes one last big breath and holds it forever until he then lets it out slowly like he’s leaking.
“Maya taught me that,” he says.
“How to punch a wall?” I say. My smart mouth never pulls chocks.
“No, you bent shitcan, how to breathe and relax. She’s into that shit, she practices it,” he says.
I nod, realizing Grenadier joined the Navy to get out of Gang Land USA.
“What happened to Candy Love, he join the Navy too?” I ask.
“Nah, fucker snitched, got some of our homeys arrested so he could get some drug charges dropped, then went Chair Force,” he says, and then we all get to make fun and talk about how lame the Air Force is for the next half hour.
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Captain ups the O2 for mando field day. While having to clean the radio room, I play loud rap music and we all dance around, feeling great because finally we can breathe. Then I play Rodeo—Four Dances by Aaron Copland, which is what my dad always liked to play when I was growing up. Tintin, whose real name is Kowalski, likes it too and tells everyone to shut it and listen, and so they do. Tintin has a cowlick just like the cartoon character Tintin. It always sticks up, even when he hasn’t showered for weeks, and his hair is heavy with grease. I’ve known Tintin since sub school. On the first day in class, I answered some sub question right about what’s a Crazy Ivan. I knew from watching all the submarine movies with my father that a Crazy Ivan is a series of sharp turns the sub makes to evade a hostile. Tintin told everyone I was the smartest guy in the school, and because Tintin is Tintin, everyone believed him. I tried to tell him I didn’t know anything, and that in high school all I did was sit in the student lounge and play video games, but it didn’t matter. Word spread fast. Tintin had ordained me the smartest out of all of us.
Guys paid me in cigarettes to show them my answers on the tests we took in class. Even now, on the boat, guys just throw trivia questions at me for fun. “Hey, Sterling,” Baitz says while wiping the computer screens with a cloth, “who was Alotta Fagina in Austin Powers?” That’s easy. We’ve watched Austin Powers during movie night on our last underway at least four times.
10 “The Italian secretary,” I say. But if they asked me what the capital of Italy was, I couldn’t be sure. It’s the useless stuff I know, but hey, it’s the useless stuff we can’t get enough of.
Now, more often than before, when guys are bored, they want me to tell them stories. Stories I’ve told before about me and my family. About the time my father nearly cut his finger off in the wood-splitter, about the time when we went on a family snorkeling vacation in Panama in a boat, and we were stranded because our motor hit a whale’s back, then my father started passing a kidney stone at the same time. The guys on the boat want to hear the story about the time the heavy snow on the powerline cut the electricity, so my father went out with the shotgun and tried to shoot the snow off. They want to hear about the calls I went on with my father, the veterinarian, to treat horses and cattle. The time we pulled out a newborn calf, but it was dead, and all we pulled out were the legs that had broken off from the rest of the body that was still inside the mother. The time a horse fell into its water trough and got stuck, and we used a rope and the truck to help pull it out. When I tell the stories, the guys on the boat laugh at all the same parts they laughed at before, and they want to hear more, and if I forget to tell one part of the story, they remind me and make me add it back in.
Suddenly, we hear the general alarm go off. It’s a fire drill. We stop cleaning and run to our positions. I’m a rapid responder manning a hose and putting out a fire simulated by a string of red LED lights sticking out from the bottom of the clothes dryer. After a while, I’m relieved by Tintin, who’s wearing an SCBA, so I run back aft to escape from the heavy simulated smoke when I see another fire in crew’s mess, so I route another shit-ass hose to that fire and start fighting it, but then when I’m relieved from that fire, I’m told I died. But the COB compliments me for saving the ship. So now everyone starts calling me Dead Man, and for so long I haven’t had a nickname, and then I get stuck with Dead Man, which, if you try to tell people is not your nickname, they just call you it more. Not even Tintin can keep everyone from calling me Dead Man, even though he went around 11telling people he’d cut off their tongues with the saw blade on his Leatherman if they didn’t shut up. I don’t say jack and hope that Dead Man fades away.
