A Captain's Duty (4 page)

I did call a few times from around the globe, and I always used the same opening line. Andrea would be asleep and she’d pick up the phone and I’d say, in this low, Barry White voice, “Is your husband home?”

And she’d say, “No, as a matter of fact, he’s not.”

“Good. I’ll be right over.”

I don’t know when that started, but it became our private joke.

But it was the letters she really loved, especially the ones where I’d get all romantic. I wrote in one that “I miss the inside of your arms.” How could she resist that? And in another, I said, “I’ll be seeing you in the moon.” I explained to Andrea how the full moon was always good luck for sailors, and when I looked at one, I thought of her sleeping under it thousands of miles away. So the full moon became ours, a way to be in
touch with each other. And when our children were young, they would all look up at the clear Vermont night sky and the kids would shout, “Look, it’s Daddy’s moon.” And Andrea would say, “That’s right.” And Mariah and Dan would look up at the moon and say, “Good night, Daddy, wherever you are.” Andrea did anything she could to keep me connected to the kids’ daily lives.

I’d always loved kids. One of my jobs before joining the merchant marine was working with schizophrenic children and I’d really enjoyed it. “Dealing with kids is good preparation for dealing with crews,” I told Andrea. And it was true. I even instituted something called the Crying Room on my ships, a little mediation club for crew members who were having problems with each other. I’d write and tell Andrea about every session, how one guy would come into the Crying Room and yell, “He pulled a knife on me!” and the other sailor would say, “Only after he swung at me with a wrench!” I’d listen patiently and nod and let the guys get their frustrations out. At the end I’d say, “Let’s shake hands and get back to work.” Not every captain does that, but I felt it made for a better ship.

When I left for the sea, Andrea always posted a picture of me on the refrigerator, along with a photo of “Daddy’s ship.” Next to it, there was always a list of questions for Daddy that I’d have to answer when I got home. But most of all, we had the full moon to share. Andrea cherished it because it always brought me close to her.

W
e were scheduled to depart Salalah on April 1. I woke up at five a.m., checked the weather, and then began my morning routine. I walk the entire length of the ship every day, to check for dents, leaks, anything out of the ordinary. The shore gantries had loaded the last container and we’d paid the departing crew, signed on the new members, brought aboard our supplies—food, new videos, and fuel—and were ready to sail. By six thirty a.m., I was on the bridge, drinking my first cup of coffee and looking out at the sun already burning the surface of the water. The boat was a beehive of cranes, men, and swinging containers in constant, frantic motion. But the seas were calm, with this great big sun hanging just over the horizon and a haze of mist just beginning to dissipate.

When you’re a sailor, you return to an ancient rhythm. The sun tells you when to get up and when to go to bed. It bookends your day with these incredible sunrises and sunsets. I couldn’t wait to get out on the water.
This is why you go to sea,
I thought, as I looked out over my ship. I knew that every day on the water would be different. It always is. The sea would never look the same, its color changing from a granite black to vivid blue to an almost transparent green. Men go to sea for a lot of reasons—for the chance to work in the open air, for love of the oceans, because their father and their grandfather did it, or because they think it’s easy money (it’s not). But if you don’t like mornings like this, when the whole voyage is ahead of you, you might as well stay home and go to work in a factory making toasters. When you’re a seaman, leaving port always reminds you why, despite the danger and the boredom and the loneliness, you wanted to be one in the first place.

As we got ready to depart, I was up on the bridge talking with the port pilot, who would guide us out of Salalah harbor. The pilot called out, “Dead slow ahead,” and the third mate answered, while I watched the RPMs on the engine, wanting to keep it well under our maximum. Within half an hour, we’d cleared the harbor, dropped off the pilot, and were gliding out of Salalah into the glassy Indian Ocean.

Every time I left a port, I thought about how I’d gotten into this profession, how unlikely it was that I’d become a sea captain. If it hadn’t been for a sailor who wanted to meet some girls and have a good time, I might never have even heard of the merchant marine. In fact, growing up in Winchester, Massachusetts, outside Boston, there were plenty of people who doubted I’d get farther than the corner bar.

My main problem was that I was a little wild. My nickname in high school was Jungle, and I have to say I earned it. My friends and I would occasionally end up in bars in the rougher parts of Boston or Cambridge and sometimes have to fight our way out. Once, in the early seventies, my buddies and I had a few beers and were roaming around Boston when we came across this huge group of people. “Carnival!” we thought in our stupor. We waded through the crowd until we got to the front and realized we were at a Mau Mau rally where a militant loony was preaching revolution. When the speaker saw us, he just froze. We were lucky we made it out alive, but it was just another night for the boys from Winchester.

You had to be pretty rugged to survive in Boston in the sixties and seventies. I grew up in a neighborhood with its share of
milquetoasts and bookish nerds. But it was also full of guys who were throwbacks to a different era, guys who had no problem smacking you in the face as a way of testing what you were made of. And I didn’t flinch. I was known for being someone who didn’t back down from a fight. If you were soft, you stayed in your room until it was time to go away to college.

Some of my tough-mindedness goes back to my paternal grandparents, I’m sure. They lived in the Fidelis Way projects in Brighton, which was a tough area then and still is today. They’d come over from County Cork and arrived in America just in time for the Depression. Those dark years had affected them deeply. My grandparents probably didn’t have that much more growing up in Ireland, but what amazed me was that they made everything and wasted nothing. They made their own soap and their own bread and their own curtains and they probably took a shot at making their own clothes at one point. I was one of eight kids, four girls and four boys, and my brothers and sisters used to hate going to Grandma and Grandpa Phillips’ house. There were no second helpings at dinner, so you’d better eat what you got because there wasn’t going to be anything else. I seldom saw my grandmother smile.

It’s funny. I never thought of it at the time, but seeing how hard my grandparents had worked just to survive must have sunk into my brain. They’d built a life from the scraps the world had given them. One thing that my family never lacked was a work ethic, and in them I saw where it had begun.

My mother was from West Roxbury, then a pretty well-to-do part of Boston. Her parents were both teachers and she brought to the family the belief that you get an education, no
matter what. I wasn’t much of a student but at least she made me into a reader, someone always interested in improving himself. Beyond sticking my nose in a book every chance she got, my mother was the proverbial glue that held the family together. She was a warm and sympathetic person, curious about everything—if I had a problem, I went to her. Andrea says my father was the wind in the sails and my mother was the keel. She kept the family balanced. Without her, we would have been thrown to the sharks for sure.

My father was more typical of the Irish-American men of that time: he did things for you but he didn’t exactly smother you with affection. He was as tough as they come: six foot two and barrel-chested with the Phillips short legs and long torso. He was a big sports guy, having played football and basketball at Northeastern, where he met my mother. My father proved his love by going out and working like hell. You wanted that
and
a hug every night, too? Go talk to your mother.

Dad wasn’t a great communicator. I loved him but he was very hard to please. “Do it right, do it once, or don’t do it at all” was his motto, quickly followed by “you horse’s ass.” It seemed that no matter what I did, his response would be, “You can always do better.” That infuriated me at times. Yeah, but what about a little credit now for what I did right? I learned how to do things right from my dad. I wanted to prove myself to him, but I wanted to do it my way.

My dad believed that, when it came to us kids, the best defense is a good offense. In the mornings, he’d scream at us to get out of the single bathroom we all had to use. “You’re going to be late for school!” he’d yell in his deep, booming voice. We were so terrified we’d whittled our bathroom time to the
absolute minimum. Then we’d grab our books, race out to the street, and meet our friends for the long walk to school. Two minutes later we’d see my father driving by. He worked at the very same school we were going to, but he’d never so much as turn his head as he passed.

My friends would say, “Hey, isn’t that your dad? Why isn’t he picking us up?”

“You don’t want to know” would be my answer.

It was like growing up with Vince Lombardi in a bad mood.

My philosophy was always a blend of my dad’s intensity and my mom’s caring. She took the edges off, but in many ways I’m just as tough-minded as he is. You
can
always do better. I hate to admit it, but the old man made his mark on me. With certain exceptions. My dad never once told me that he loved me or that he was proud of me (though I knew he did and that he was). I tell my kids I love them all the time. You learn what to inherit and what to leave behind.

I was a wise-guy kid. I’d meet teachers who on the first day would shake my hand and say, “Oh you have so much potential!”
You don’t even know me,
I thought. And even though everyone knew my parents as teachers, I didn’t go in for education very much. My dad taught business and math and served as the assistant football coach and the head basketball coach at the high school near our house and my mom taught fourth and sixth grade in Massachusetts and New Hampshire schools, but I was lurking near the bottom of every class, just doing enough to get by. For me, school was a place to ogle girls, play sports, and see my friends. Sort of like church, with sports.

Rebellion came naturally to me. I couldn’t fake an interest in things that didn’t interest me. Plus I knew I had other abilities: I was tough, I was a hard worker, and I knew how to learn.

But I always felt like I was a very lucky guy and life was going to take me to some interesting places. Even my teachers sensed that. One day, my French teacher, Doc Copeland, went around the room and said, “Joey, you’re going to make an excellent bricklayer. Mary, you’re going to be a housewife. Joanie, maybe an architect.” When he came to me, he stopped and said, “You’re going to do a lot of traveling.” I was happy with that.

Sports was the biggest thing in my life, growing up. I had three brothers, and I wanted to beat them at games just as much as they wanted to beat me. You competed against your friends at Bogues Court, the local basketball pit. Your street competed against the next street in games where the only fouls were the ones that drew blood. And your school lived or died by who won the big football game against your rival.

It was an atmosphere that bred a certain mental toughness. I learned about life, about leaders and followers, by playing sports. Hell, I learned
everything
by playing sports. One of my favorite athletes was Larry Bird, who was born average and made himself into a superstar athlete by sheer mental toughness. That’s something I respected.

I played football, basketball, and lacrosse in high school and I was just average in all of them. Sophomore year, I caught the football coach’s eye and he took an interest in me. Coach Manny Marshall would see me in the school hallways and he’d come up to me like I was on the verge of taking the team to the state championship. “Oh, how’re you feeling today?
Drink plenty of milkshakes, you’ve got to put on more weight. Oh, you don’t have to go to gym, don’t worry about gym, I can take care of that. How you feeling? Feeling strong?” Junior year, I was out with mono and after years of being obsessed with sports, I realized there were other ways of having fun—namely, partying. But Coach Marshall still zeroed in on me every time he spotted me. “Don’t tell anyone else,” he’d say. “But you could be captain next year.”

I wasn’t good enough to be the captain. I hadn’t played all year. I didn’t deserve the title.

Coach Marshall expected me to fit his system, which required players to live and die by the score. He couldn’t understand the fact that I enjoyed myself whether we were winning or losing. “Why are you grinning?” he’d yell at me. “Because I’m having fun?” I’d answer. For him, football was a religion and if I was laughing with my friends when the team was losing, then I must be the Antichrist. I went from being his star prospect to riding the bench. I even quit the team before the final game of the season, against our archrival Woburn, just because the sport had stopped being fun. I watched the game as part of the band, where I played saxophone. I’d made the band leader deliriously happy: “It’s the first time someone’s told the football coach, ‘Sorry, I can’t play because I have to be in the band.’” Coach Marshall hated me after that.

I guess I did have something to learn about being part of a team.

I loved sports, but I bucked against the restrictions. It was the same with basketball. The JV coach called me and a guy named Gunk Johnson after a practice early in the season and turned to me first and said, “Phillips, I’m not going to play you
because your father didn’t play me when I was a student. And Gunk, I’m not going to play you because I don’t like you.” He thought he’d run us out of there. When the coach asked us what we were going to do, Gunk and I looked at each other and then I said, “Coach, we’re gonna stick.”

That was my motto: I’m gonna stick. Especially if you try to push me.

I guess right then you’d have pegged me for the merchant marine. Every guy I met in the merchant marine had stories like that. We weren’t the kids who made class president. We were the guys who rode beat-up motorcycles to school, played the offensive line, and drank in the Fells, the nearby woods where all the kids hung out. We went our own way. We were the square pegs someone tried to smash into a round hole and said, “Nope, not gonna do it.”

In 1975, I was well on my way to fulfilling my detractor’s prediction that I wouldn’t do very much with my life. I’d had a few jobs, working as a security guard at Raytheon, shuttling checks to the Federal Reserve from the local banks, and driving a taxi. I was a hack in Arlington, a town north of Boston. It didn’t have much of a future, but it was colorful. One time a guy I’d never seen before jumped in my cab, gave me an address, and told me he had to go in and get the money. I pulled around back, expecting him to try to pull a fast one on me, but within a minute a woman came screaming out the door and jumped in a car, followed by this maniac. He jumped in my cab and screamed, “I’ll give you twenty bucks if you can catch her.” It was clear to me that the man and the woman were caught up in some wild domestic drama—which I never got to the bottom of—and I’d suddenly landed in the middle
of it. I hit the gas and we went through the streets of Arlington like the chase scene from
Bullitt
. Finally I pulled even with the woman and saw her terrified face through the window. That’s when my fare yelled, “Run her off the road!” Apparently, he thought I was a hit man, not a cab driver. I pulled over, collected my $20 for catching her, then threw him out of the cab.

I learned a lot. It’s a tough job and you can’t go by the book; you have to use your imagination. But I had no real direction, no real plan for myself in life. I’d gone to the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, mainly because my parents were both teachers and wanted me to give college a shot. I’d studied animal science, because I wanted to be a vet. But one class, in which I had to use a slide rule, told me I wasn’t cut out for college. I dropped out after my first semester, the victim of too much partying, too many girls, and not enough hitting the books. If there was anything wild going on at that campus in the fall of 1974, I was probably around it.