A Working Stiff's Manifesto (10 page)
“We're going into Idaho tomorrow,” he tells me. “I'll drive from now on.”
The next day in Idaho, I see what happens when truckers drive themselves too hard. We are coming down a seven percent grade that goes on for miles, and I see rescue workers pulling a tractor trailer out of a ravine. Brake failures on these steep hills and windy, dark roads have killed more than a few drivers. A few miles on, there is another wreck, obviously fatal. I wonder, what was the last thing they thought as they went flying off the road? Were they thinking about the money they were making? About their logbooks? About wives or children? And then it all just turned to pure terror.
It is starting to get dark, and starting to snow. I look out the window for a while, staring at the clouds of moisture coming from the truck in front of us. If there's an ice patch, that guy'll hit it first, we'll get some warning. Jim doesn't seem concerned. He is just staring straight ahead, sunglasses on.
“It's almost dark,” I suggest helpfully. “Maybe you could see better without the sunglasses.”
He looks at me and nods. “I'll take 'em off in a little while.”
I sit there quietly. The roar of the diesel engine and the hissing of the tires on the wet pavement is making me sleepy.
“If I fall asleep, you're gonna stay awake, right?”
Jim laughs. We'll either crash or we won't. Either way, I won't be a factor. I crawl into the sleeper and doze off.
We drop off in Seattle, our final load, and the truck is empty.
We await further orders from the Omnitrax.
Nothing happens. Jim calls the head office, and we discover that nobody is moving out of Seattle for at least a few days. This means we have some time off, which is always nice, but for at least a few days there is no money to be made.
To Jim, I am no longer a helper. I am a hungry mouth to feed. When I am working seventy hours a week, it's not a problem to pay me $500 a week, but when I'm sitting on a bed in a motel on Interstate 5, I'm a bad investment. At this rate, I could suck his bank account dry in a matter of days.
I tell him not to pay me, just to lend me money until we get busy again, but he insists. Then he examines his bank statements again, and breaks out in a sweat. Then he tells me not to worry about it, that everything is going to be fine. Then he calls the office again and they tell him there's no one moving out of Seattle, but as soon as they get a job, they'll let him know. We get a bill from the motel for four days, almost $200. Poof, there's all the profit from one of the moves up in smoke. The unspoken reality of the situation is obvious. If I wasn't here, Jim wouldn't need to be staying in a motel, he could live in his sleeper and shower for five dollars a day in a truck stop.
“I'm going into town,” I tell Jim on the fifth day. I wander into downtown Seattle, a city so progressive in its treatment of the homeless that homeless people have flocked here from all across the West. They pester me at the bus stop, at the deli where I stop in for a sandwich, and as I walk down the street. They are everywhere. If Jim drove off before I got back, I'd be one of them.
I head down to Rayford Seafoods, which hired me to work in Alaska back in college. It's a ramshackle office that belies the huge profits the fishing companies make.
“Are you looking for processors?” I ask the girl behind the counter.
She wordlessly hands me an application. I fill it out, the usual shit. My hobbies, where I went to grade school. I put “the moon” for grade school and “compulsive masturbation” as my hobby and no one notices.
She puts the application in a pile without reading it. “The plane leaves tomorrow morning for Dutch Harbor. Can you take a drug test at 3
P.M.
?” I gather I've been hired.
They'll hire me on nothing but a drug test. That's Alaska work for you. They just don't care. They fly you up to Alaska at their expense, but if you don't finish out the contract you sign, they won't fly you back. They'll let you die in a snowdrift before you're allowed near the plane. It doesn't matter to them if you're wanted in five states, if you've quit your last thirty jobs, if you're homeless, an alcoholic, whatever. Get on the plane to Dutch Harbor and show 'em what you got, and if you don't, you're a dead man. Apparently, it does matter to them if you've smoked pot recently, or at least they pretend it does, because I am given an address where I can pee into a cup.
Drug testing is hilarious stuff, the last stand in America's mad love-hate relationship with drugs. I'd definitely prefer a pilot or a surgeon who wasn't high on something, but testing them every six months won't catch them anyway, or it might reveal that they've smoked something six weeks ago while on vacation. I'm sure the high has worn off by the time they sit in the cockpit or pull on the surgery gloves, which means that the testing itself is basically irrelevant.
What drug testing accomplishes is to strike fear into the hearts of bank tellers, meat packers, assembly line workers, desk clerks, football players, and fish processors. It's a great eliminator. The words “WE DRUG TEST” tend to keep out the riffraff, people who know they'd fail. My advice to those people is, try it anyway; they probably just dump your pee down the toilet and tell you whether you passed or failed, based on whether they liked you or not. I've smoked a joint on my way to a drug test and passed, and I've been clean for months and failed.
I take a bus over to the “clinic,” a shack with a surgical table and a toilet. These people are sparing no expense in the war on drugs. They're hiring people who walk through the door without reading their applications. How demanding can this screening process be? Alaska work is like law school. They'll let anyone in, then weed you out later.
As we are milling around in the lobby, waiting for the bus to take us back to the city center, one girl anxiously asks the receptionist when we'll find out the results. That's always an act of genius. Why doesn't she just say, “Look, when do I find out if those Golden Seal tablets really work?” The receptionist tells her they won't let us on the plane at the airport if we've failed. Our pee has already been flushed, I'm sure of it.
Myself, I've spent so much time with Jim lately, who is drug-free because his company tests randomly, that I'm clean either way. More importantly, I've been polite to everyone. I know I'll pass.
I head back out to Highway 5 to tell Jim I just signed on with a fish-processing company and am flying to Alaska tomorrow morning.
“You didn't have to do that,” he says, his eyes aglow with relief at seeing the last of me. He can check out of the motel now, throw all his stuff back into his sleeper and live in a parking lot. His future just got a lot brighter. Every day without work doesn't need to send him into a panic anymore.
“I appreciate your helping me out,” he says.
“Likewise.”
We shake hands, wish each other luck. I head down to the Seattle Youth Hostel with about twenty dollars left in my pocket. The homeless shadow me as I go out and spend half of it on beer.
Five hours later I am at the airport.
Rayford Seafoods in
Dutch Harbor runs its whole operation out of a disused World War II LST that sits in chilly Iliulink Bay. The LST, which used to carry men into battle, has been converted into a crab-processing boat. Crab fishermen bring their freshly caught crab up to the boat and they are pumped on board, still alive. Here, the processors, of whom I am one, grab them and pull their legs off or blast their guts out with a water hose. Then they are boxed and frozen and sold to the Japanese.
Every crab caught in these waters is going straight to Japan because Americans won't pay high prices for fresh crab. Japanese buyers wander around while we are working, grabbing our arms to prevent us from pulling too hard on the crab legs, showing us how not to bruise the meat. Their manner is always abusive and rude. Sometimes, after a brief instruction session from a Japanese buyer, workers spit or blow their noses on the crabmeat before shoveling it off into the freezer.
The place where we work is a giant warehouse, the former hold of the ship. Windows and doors are open everywhere, allowing the cool, damp November air in. We bundle up. There is also seawater flying everywhere, and the cooking steam from the tons of packed crab legs that we drop into boiling vats produces a foul and abrasive odor that clings to our clothes and hair. Because of the wetness and smell, we wear plastic outer garments called rain gear.
The shifts are sixteen hours long, so a tiny pin prick sized hole in your rain gear can let enough water in over the course of a day to completely soak you by half-time. If you're working wet, you're one miserable bastard. Your clothes chafe against your skin, you're cold, and the wetness keeps expanding. By the time you take off your gear at the end of the shift, that same pin prick can let in enough water to completely fill your boots. So we try to keep the pin pricks down to a minimum.
I'm getting off work after my first shift, having just been flown in from Seattle that morning. There was no orientation, no ceremony. The crab are coming in and Rayford Seafoods isn't playing around.
Next to me, as I take off my rain gear, is an angry Filipino, flipping through the sheets of wet yellow-and-orange plastic to find someone else's rain gear. Our names are written on the gear in black marker. He finds what he is looking for, looks around quickly, and sticks it several times with a pin. Then he drops the pin on the floor and walks off, not looking at me.
Someone has pissed him off. Someone else's battle, not mine. I want to mind my own business and get to bed. I hang my gear on a hook and climb the stairs up to the bunk rooms.
The bunk rooms are similar to what I remember from old movies of German prison camps, except in
Stalag 17
there wasn't always an inch of water on the floor. Also, in
Stalag 17
they had windows, and we're below decks. It's impossible to change your clothes without splashing your pant legs and soaking your feet, and when the lights are out, which is when anyone is sleeping, the room is blacker than a coal mine. And because we're on shift work, there's always someone sleeping.
The first morning, I forget about the water and put on my last pair of dry socks while still in my bunk, then soak them through the second I touch down. Then I try blundering over to the sliver of light that sneaks through the door to the passageway, or head, or galley, or whatever the hell they call a hallway on a ship, and bang my knee on something. So, my second day, I stand on the slime line with a swollen knee and wet feet for sixteen hours.
My roommates are a nineteen-year-old Klansman from Seattle, a muscular black man, and a white guy named Jeff who likes to start trouble. All of them own guns. I get finished after my second day and stumble up to my bunk to find Hale, the black guy, cleaning a pistol. Billy the Klansman is sleeping and Jeff is sitting on his bunk sharpening a hunting knife. Billy has drawn shut the curtain across his bunk. Jeff mimics throwing the knife into Billy's bunk, and Hale points the pistol and silently mouths, “Bang!” They look at each other and smile.
“How was work?” Hale asks me, as I crawl into my bunk and take off my pants.
“It's over.”
“You like butchering crab?”
“Not much.”
“You're a big guy. We got other jobs here.”
“Like what?”
“Loading boxes in case-up.” Case-up is a dream job compared to most of what Alaska offers. The work is physical, but I much prefer that to the standing still and monotony of conveyor belt line work. Best of all, it is dry. The crab are already cased by the time the boxes come down to case-up. The case-up crew packs them into freezers or, even better, loads them onto a Japanese freighter, which means you get to work outside. I've only been here two days and figured case-up jobs went to people who'd worked here for months, even years.
“You want a case-up job?” Hale asks.
“Hell, yeah.”
“I'm the supervisor of the deck crew,” he says. “I'll talk to Rick tomorrow.”
The next day, I'm standing on the slime line when the Filipino woman next to me smiles at me. “What is your name?” she asks.
I tell her, and we chat for a while as we pack the crab crates. She has been in America for six months and is trying to learn English, and she asks me to teach her some words for various things. Chatting, even in tortured English, makes the time go by quicker. We break for lunch, and I go up to the lunchroom and sit at the Americans' table, which is fairly small, and she walks by and smiles at me.
“You'd better watch out,” one guy tells me. “Don't be talking to her.” This guy, who I know as Mike, is a big, bearded bear of a man, a truck driver from Seattle who has lost his driver's license after a drunk driving conviction. He's up here for a year, until he gets it back.
“Why not?”
“Her husband's crazy. He works down on the slime line too. He'll punch holes in your rain gear if he sees you talking to her.”
“Just talking?”
“Just talking. I was teaching her some English last week, and I came back from break and my gear was all punched full of holes. Just a theory, but I think that's what happened.”
A Filipino walks by, looks at me, the same fellow I had seen punching holes in the rain gear the first night on the boat, and I nod to Mike.
“That him?”
“That's him.”
“He did punch holes in your gear. I saw him do it.”
Now this guy is pissed. “Why the fuck didn't you say something?”
“To who? I had just gotten off the plane. I didn't know what I was getting involved in.”
He shrugs. “Guarantee you, when you go back to work after lunch, you got holes in your gear.”
