A Working Stiff's Manifesto (12 page)

But it seems that Hale got a little carried away with a story, and someone in the Rayford office took notice and actually did a background check, where they found he was wanted by the Seattle police. Not for murder, as it turns out, but homosexual prostitution. The rumor files down the food chain quickly, and soon Jeff, who has spent every waking minute palling around with this self-proclaimed tough guy, is the target of ridicule.

Jeff has to deal not only with the misery of losing his best friend, but also with becoming the butt of every joke on the ship. Jeff owns a gun, for some reason. Billy also owns a gun. Billy, who I was starting to tolerate, becomes braver with his racist views now that he no longer lives with a muscular black man. Every time I enter the room after a shift, I am expecting a cross fire.

The fun finally gets out of hand during the Christmas party, where all these volatile elements are introduced to alcohol. Billy starts the evening off by getting rejected by a Mexican girl, which sends him into a tailspin of rage and depression. He goes off looking for Jeff, and finds him talking to a girl at the bottom of the gangway leading onto the
Rayford
.

“Nigger fag lover!” he screams. I'm not really sure what happens next, even though I'm watching. There is a lot of activity and Billy starts screaming. Two Mexican men come running over. Jeff is pounding Billy's head into a railing, and instead of putting a stop to it, which I am anticipating, the two start kicking him in the ribs. This is not a man who has made a lot of friends during his stay here at Rayford. I finally go down the ramp and say weakly, “Hey you guys, you're gonna kill him.”

They look up at me.

“I think he's learned his lesson,” I say. Billy is nearly unconscious at this point, and the snow all around is spattered with blood.

Jeff snorts and walks off. The Mexicans are laughing and continue stomping on Billy for a few more seconds, then they walk past me as if I'm not there and clamber up the gangway. Billy, bleeding in the snow, starts wailing and sobbing like a foghorn. I'm deciding whether I should carry his blood-soaked smelly body up the ramp when one of the ship's welders, a guy named Tony, comes up behind me.

“Hey man, I'm going into Dutch for a drink. Wanna join me?”

“Sure.”

“Who's that?” He points to Billy, screaming and bleeding in the snow.

“My roommate.”

“The electrician's kid?”

“Yeah.”

We stand over Billy, regarding him with detached objectivity as he thrashes around, wailing.

“Cab's waiting,” says Tony.

The fun has only just begun.

Tony is a welder, one of the guys with his own cabin, and he makes over $80,000 a year. Some mundane skill that could barely pay for a one-bedroom apartment in the Bronx can earn you more money than God in Alaska. The catch is that the welders have to sign a one-year contract because these fishing vessels that are rusting away need an on-site welder at all times, and the companies don't want to be in the position of hiring a new one every few months. The other thing about contractual work is that fifty percent of the wage comes upon completion of the contract. The companies know that if they make the contract challenging, they get about half their welders for half-price, because a lot of them decide they've had enough of Dutch Harbor before their twelve months are up, and beg to go home. So the welders are some of the highest paid men on the island, and most of them, I discover, are going slowly mad.

A year is too long to be up here. I can see how it begins, though. Some guy is happily welding away in Seattle, making his fourteen dollars an hour and living in a nice one-bedroom apartment, when some joker comes up and says, “Hey, I hear that up in Alaska they're paying welders $80,000 a year.” After the disbelief, the guy shrugs and says, sign me up. So the happy welder flies off to Dutch Harbor, dreaming of riches, and three months later he's showing signs of madness after having been locked away on a rusting vessel that requires more welding than he could ever have imagined.

I don't know this when I agree to go out for a beer with Tony. I think of Tony as a nice family man who welds for a living, and he might be a nice change from Jeff and Billy. We are in the cab heading for the Unisea Bar when he pulls out a pistol and says, “Hold this for me.”

“Okay.” I hold his pistol for him. I figure he just needs to adjust his pants or something, then he'll ask for it back, but he's staring out the window as if he's just asked me to hold his wallet.

“Why am I holding your pistol?” I ask after a minute.

“We just have to stop off and get some shit from this Filipino guy. I'd rather you had the gun in case they try anything on me.”

“Okay.” I'm not sure what “shit” means or what “try anything” could indicate, but I think it might be best if I had the pistol because I'm the most rational person around. I don't have a holster, and I certainly don't want to de-ball myself by shoving it into my hip pocket, so after we get out of the cab I find myself walking around with it in my hand.

This doesn't seem to bother Tony. He likes having a gun-wielding sidekick. We climb the ramp of another processing ship and he turns to me and says, “Wait here. If you hear anything, come in with that thing firing.”

“Sure thing.”

He enters a room, and through the door, before it closes behind him, I see a group of Filipino men lounging around on bunks. It is a ship's watertight door, so even if they are strangling Tony, which they appear too lazy to do, I wouldn't be able to hear a thing. I hang around by the ship's rail, taking in the night scenery, watching a gentle snowfall over the bay.

This is probably a drug deal, and most likely will be a quietly successful one, but Alaska allows people's imaginations to run away with them. Instead of being a tired welder who wants to score some coke for a Christmas bash, Tony has decided he's an underworld operator. He's got his sidekick outside the door, “packing,” waiting for the deal to “go bad.” I've become an actor in his little play for the evening. What I wanted was a few beers, a good conversation, maybe to run into one of those rare creatures in Dutch Harbor, a woman. Now I'm caught up in another manufactured drama. The long hours, the lack of women (only one person in ten is female), and the transient nature of the work all lend themselves to an idea that we are living out some macho fantasy. Teenagers come here to make money for college and wind up swigging Wild Turkey straight from a bottle, standing shirtless on a mountaintop, recounting imaginary exploits with sex-starved cheerleaders. I'm just about to walk down the ramp and go home when Tony opens the door, gives me a knowing nod, and we're off to the pubs.

A good percentage of the cab drivers in Dutch Harbor are pretty Filipino women, and they often have a side business giving blow jobs. The cab driver who picks us up this time is beautiful, and Tony starts inquiring about the possibilities.

“Some of the girls do that,” she tells him, “but I don't. I have boyfriend.”

“One hundred dollars,” Tony tells her. “That's twice the going rate.”

She laughs, but doesn't agree.

“One twenty-five.”

“Thank you, but no.”

“How many rides would you have to give to make one hundred fifty dollars?”

She waves at him, trying to get him to stop talking, but he persists. We pull up outside the Unisea Bar and I make to get out, but Tony turns to me and says, “I'll meet you inside.” I shrug, hop out, and go inside, order myself a beer. Through the glass door, I can see him still debating with the cab driver. Finally, he gets out and the cab drives off.

“Fucking bitch,” he tells me. “Let's shoot some pool.”

We get involved in a pool game with two Mexican fishermen, for twenty dollars a game. We win the first one, then the second, and Tony starts taunting them. He calls them both “Pedro” and talks to them like Speedy Gonzales, in a nasal whine with a bad Mexican accent. “You meesed your shot, man,” he says every time one of them muffs a chance. Then it is Tony's turn, and he scratches on the eight ball.

I pull ten dollars out of my pocket and hand it to one of the Mexicans. “Don't pay him, man,” Tony tells me. “They bumped the table.”

“Come on, Tony. We lost.”

Tony starts walking away, not ready to cough up his ten bucks. One of the Mexicans cracks him in the mouth with a pool cue, and a tooth comes flying out and lands on the green felt of the pool table. I'm looking at the tooth while they continue to pummel him. Nobody else in the bar gives the scene much attention. This is an hourly occurrence.

“The piece, man, pull out the piece!” Tony thinks I should start shooting these men because they got mad when he tried to cheat them at pool.

I utter my superhero tag line, “I'm outta here,” and walk toward the door while the Mexicans continue to whack him with cues. I step outside and enjoy a cigarette, and thus end my association with Tony the Welder. The nice family man who welded for a living.

That's how it is up here. Everyone is fucked up, and those who aren't soon will be. The mayor should figure out how to say that in Latin and make it the town motto. Or better yet, “Dutch Harbor: What fatal flaw in your character made you wind up here?”

What does that say about me, I wonder? For me, like most of us, it is the panic-ridden quest to stay afloat that brings me up here. The fact that I live on a boat that actually appears to be sinking is merely coincidental irony. Dutch Harbor offers the opportunity to make money while keeping your expenses at a minimum. Say what I like about my waterlogged room, it is free, as is my food and electricity. Every dollar we make up here goes to us, not to landlords or utilities or bill collectors. That is the real freedom, and it's a freedom that a lot of us can't handle.

Two drunk fishermen come up to me as I am peacefully puffing my cigarette, watching the snowfall.

“Hey man, you work on the decks at Rayford, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Our bunkhouse is down near Rayford, and we're too drunk to drive. Can you help us out? It'll save you cab fare.”

“You just need a ride back?”

“Yeah.”

One of them hands me the keys and we climb inside a battered, rusted, red pick-up. I haven't been in a car in months, and I like the feel of it. I drive off carefully through the snow while the fishermen laugh raucously with one another, recounting events from what was obviously a wild evening.

Within seconds, blue lights are flashing behind me. I'm getting pulled over by a cop in Dutch Harbor on Christmas Eve.

“Don't worry about it,” one of the fishermen tells me. “I've got three DUIs, and this cop knows my truck.”

“Great. Thanks for mentioning that earlier.”

The cop shines the flashlight in on us, looks around the cab. “Step out of the vehicle, sir,” he says to me.

I step out.

“Can I see your license?”

I hand him my truck driver's learner's permit from North Carolina, the only thing I have handy. They're good for three months, and mine has expired. “What's this?” I start to tell him, but he ignores me and has me start the nose-touching and alphabet-reciting of a drunk test. I hop around on one foot for a few seconds.

“How do you know Tom?” he asks.

“He just came up to me, asked for a ride home. His bunkhouse is near my ship.”

He asks me more personal questions about where I work, my social security number, and so on. Finally he lets me go.

“That guy's a cocksucker,” Tom tells me when I get back in the truck. “He's always hassling me.”

I drive back to Rayford, park the truck, and go to bed.

The next day, I'm lying in bed when the chief electrician, Billy's father, comes in and asks to talk to me.

“What's up?” He looks serious.

“I wanted to thank you,” he tells me. “For saving my son's life.” He extends a sincere hand to me and I shake it. “Billy told me the story of what happened.”

The last I saw Billy, I left him screaming and bleeding in the snow while I went off to get a beer. By not actually helping to kill him, I have become the Florence Nightingale of the ship.

Then two police officers come in behind him, the two who arrested Hale a few days ago. “Mr. Levison?”

“Yeah?”

“This is a notice to appear in court four days from now. You've been charged with driving without a license.”

“You're charging me with driving without a license?”

“Yes. We expect you in court or a warrant will be issued.”

“You're kidding.”

They leave, after tossing an official looking piece of paper on my bed. I can now define irony. During an evening in which I witnessed two felony beatings, a drug deal, firearms possession, and public drunkenness, I am told to appear in court for giving someone a ride home.

Dutch Harbor is like the third grade when the New Age substitute teacher showed up. Nobody is really in charge. But the Dutch Harbor police, I soon discover, have a habit of grabbing one turd a week in the sea of shit that is their town, and trying to make an example of him. Thus, gay prostitute Hale is flown all the way back to Seattle to stand trial, and ride-giver Iain is jerked away from the deck crew for an entire day to face the music. Their philosophy is, you gotta start somewhere.

On the good side, there are my coworkers' reactions. Far from endangering my position with Rayford, having cops come on board and toss a writ at me makes me something of an outlaw legend. I discover that most of the deck crew already knows about my fistfight with the Filipino who sieved my rain gear, and being pursued by armed men for a minor driving offense has only added to my mystique. Thus, I am asked about it by almost everyone. “What did the cops want?” It's hard not to embellish. By the time I'm through mildly adjusting the facts, I'm a Robin Hood type wanted in thirty states for trying to save the rain forest.