A Working Stiff's Manifesto (16 page)

“I'm gonna take it to Tahoe and put it all on one round of roulette. Double or nothing, baby.”

I cringe to hear this. I'm not exactly the world's best money manager, but having spent four months at Rayford and two weeks in a fish room, the thought of watching a ball bearing bounce into a red hole making me broke again is almost heartbreaking.

“Don't do that,” I plead.

He shrugs, as if I have a better plan. “Well, what're you gonna do?”

“Put a down payment on a nice apartment.”

He nods wisely. “Nice apartment. Whatever. I got a plan.”

“That's not a plan, you idiot.”

“Hey, fuck you. What're you, my mother?”

“You're just killing yourself to give your money away to casino owners.”

“And you're giving it to landlords.”

I don't say anything. He's right. “I'll tell you something about money, man,” he says. “You either got it or you don't. You and me, we don't got it.”

I'm not sure I like being grouped in with him. I'm not down here for my next coke binge and five-minute stand at the roulette table. I'm here to make a life, start a life, get some options for a life. Put some distance between myself and the guys begging in the street.

But Little Jimmy can stack boxes like a whirlwind. It's hard for me to keep up with him as he keeps running back to the belt, and sometimes he grabs my box as well as his own.

“Once you've learned to eat shit, you realize it don't taste so bad,” he says. That's a beautiful motto for life. I want to give him some advice, to set him straight about some financial management issues. Hard as he works, he should be going somewhere, building something. But he doesn't care. He has all this energy, all this commitment, and it's going to add up to nothing. He'll wind up in the same boat as William, who is upstairs lying on his fat ass reading comics, imagining the sweet homecoming when his abusive father picks him up at the airport.

“You can't throw it all away at roulette,” I tell him again. “That's stupid.”

“Not if I win.”

“If you win you'll just play again until you lose.”

“Right on. Now you understand.”

It wears on me sometimes. It wears on all of us, but some days are worse than others. Some days you crawl out of bed and the rocking of the ship makes it hard to put your pants on and you just want to get back under the covers and sob. Your nerves are like raw cut flesh, screaming in pain and annoyance at any touch, any mention of your name. On days like this, toward the end of the trip, we stand in the breakfast line and stare blankly as we spoon food onto our plate, sit silently as we shovel it down. Even Little Jimmy is getting exhausted enough to be quiet. I shrug into my freezer suit as the others shrug into their rain gear. Not even the guys coming off shift are saying much.

My hands are like claws from grabbing the boxes, and every morning the muscles have to relax all over again. The first half hour is the worst, my stomach still heavy from the breakfast food, mind still numb from sleep. On days like this, and they're mostly like this now, it's good to work with Little Jimmy, with a guy who's been doing it long enough to do it blindfolded and who's always ready to pull his weight.

About an hour into the shift, I miss a lock. When we stack the boxes, we have to make the boxes on every fifth row face a different direction. This row is called a lock, and it makes the stacks more stable. If every row was stacked the same, by the time they were fifteen or sixteen high, they would be like a load of unmortared bricks, ready to tumble every time the ship took a turn. Jimmy points out the lock to me, and I have to scramble to replace it. Then I miss the next one, and he gets pissed.

“Come on, man,” he yells, annoyed. I make a mental note to keep counting the stacks, but my mind keeps wandering. In my determination not to miss a lock, I put one in on the fourth row.

“What the fuck's the matter with you?” he starts screaming. This seems like an overreaction to me, so I tell him to calm down.

“What do you mean calm down. Can't you count to five?”

“Fuck you. Get over it.”

“You're a fucking retard.”

I'm about to walk over and pound him when the conveyor belt shuts off. We look at each other, both thinking the same thing. Mechanical failure. Every time something shuts off, we all have the same glimmer of hope. Mechanical failures mean unscheduled break time.

Usually when stuff shuts off, it's just a minute, and then it starts back up again. Of course, we don't want the thing permanently damaged because then we don't make as much money. But the odd twenty-minute break now and again is a rare blessing.

The lift door opens and a super sticks his head down. “You guys come up here,” he says. “Break time.”

We look at each other and smile, high five. Some days you just can't handle it. You just weren't meant to be there. Some days you get a little relief. We sit in the galley eating cookies and chatting for four hours while electricians walk back and forth and curse. Some of us even put our heads down on the Formica tables and nap. When we hear the hydraulics start up again, there's only about an hour of our shift left.

“We lost a lot of time, so we have to work a kick shift to make up for it,” the supervisors announce. But no one cares. We got a break. We got a little time off when we weren't expecting it. It was beautiful.

The hold is full, and we're heading back into Dutch, and my contract is over. Your last trip, they don't make you off-load. They use the new kids coming aboard to replace you to do that. The idea is that after nine weeks at sea, it's hard for you to keep your mind on your work if you're about to get a check for five grand and a plane ticket, so they just bid you farewell.

One day out of Dutch Harbor, the super tells us there is a meeting for all the personnel who got hired on in Dutch.

“Let me get right to the point,” he tells us. “The company isn't paying your plane tickets home.”

We all stare at him in shock. The company has only agreed to pay the plane tickets of the people it flew up here. As we all flew up with a different company, they're under no obligations to pay our ticket back to Seattle. So my five grand has become thirty-five hundred.

“I know it's wrong, because you guys all did a great job,” he's telling us, but the rest is just corporate blather. It wasn't his decision, we all know. If there's no legal obligation, there's no obligation. It's the way the world works.

I shrug. It's over. I lasted. I wanted five grand, but I'll take what I got.

“We're still going to put you up in a bunkhouse,” he tells us. This is a tradition, apparently, to let the guys who have finished their contracts party it up the day before they catch their plane. We get a bunkhouse to ourselves, and we're on our own to get liquor and anything else we can find.

We're too tired to argue. What good would it do, anyway? We shuffle out of the galley for a final shift of cleanup.

I'm packing my stuff, a duffel bag full of dirty and ragged clothes, and a Mexican guy I've been bunking with for three weeks comes in, excited, and motions for me to come with him. I follow him up onto deck, out into the sunlight, where the processors are hardly ever allowed. He points off the bow.

There, I see a whale's tail splashing the surf. It's enormous. It seems like the tail alone is about the size of this ship. The ship follows alongside for a while, and I see fountains of seawater come out his blow hole. The Mexican, who I've never talked to before, and I, stand there and watch the whale for a few minutes until the ship turns off. There was no reason for him to come and get me. He could have just stood here and watched the whale on his own. Sometimes people are like that.

On the other side, Dutch Harbor comes into view. I'm going home.

The bunkhouse is a squalid shack on the wrong side of a town that doesn't have a right one. The road leading up to it is frozen mud, which would be a rough ride even for a tank. But there are beds. Real beds.

I sit on the side of my bed, in a room with five others, and the room feels like it's moving. After weeks at sea, my body has become so used to continual movement that it makes me slightly queasy to be completely still. Landsickness. I stand up to go to the bathroom and the level, stationary floor catches me off guard, and I have to walk slowly.

When I come back to the room, there is a fisherman there, talking to the guys lying on the beds. “You can ask him,” one of them tells the fisherman, pointing at me. “But none of us are interested.”

“You want a job?” the fisherman asks me.

“I'm worn out,” I tell him, but just out of interest, I ask to find out what I'm missing.

“Crab fishing. Five thousand, two weeks. Whaddya say?”

I look around the room. All these guys have said no already. But five thousand for two more weeks? Then I look at my bed. It looks good.

“What boat?”

“The
Killoran
.”

I've never heard of it. Don't know why I asked, but now he thinks I'm interested. “I don't know how to crab fish,” I tell him. “Never done it before.”

“That's okay. We just need one more deckhand. We'll train.”

They'll train. In a classified ad, that's English for: we suck to work for, and nobody with any experience will hire on with us. Who knows, maybe up here it's different.

“What happened to the last guy?”

“He quit. Couldn't take it.”

My hands are moving to grab my stuff. I'm looking at them, as if they have lives of their own. My hands have already decided to go. I'm still burning about having to pay my own plane ticket back, and this will make up for it.

“Let's do it,” I say.

After four days on the
Killoran
, I realize I have finally done it. I've found the worst fucking job in the world.

I've managed to find something that combines everything unpleasant in life with a low paycheck. This is going to be a low paycheck because I signed on for a percentage, and we're not catching any crab. Up until a few days ago, the Bering Sea was full of opilio crab, so I'm told. But the season has been dragging on for a few months and the waters are getting fished out.

The horrible thing about crab fishing is that you have to work just as hard to catch one crab as you do to catch a thousand. There are about fifty or so large steel frames covered with netting called crab pots on our deck. These crab pots, which are about seven feet by seven feet, weigh hundreds of pounds. We slide them across the deck up against a device called a dog, which has metal clamps that hold it fast while we put a bait can inside. Then we hit a hydraulic switch on the dog and the pot gets dumped to the bottom of the Bering Sea. All this gets done at breakneck speed, so that the skipper doesn't have to keep stopping the boat.

The idea, of course, is that the crab will smell the bait, crawl inside the pot, and be trapped. A few days later, we go back, pull up our pots, and pull tons of crab up onto our deck. This isn't happening. Most of our pots are nearly empty. Some of them have a few dozen crab inside, but none are full. If we were filling every pot, we could fill our hold in the two weeks I was promised, but at this rate, we're going to be out here for a month at least.

I've been royally fucked. But I'm on a crab boat 100 miles out in the Bering with four other guys. Going back isn't an option.

Quitting and sitting in my cabin isn't an option. I know because I asked. Crab fishing is the option, and it isn't going well.

The first thing about crab fishing is that there are about a hundred different ways to die when you are doing it. Nobody will insure crab fishermen, I'm told, because we're simply not a good risk. Up to five percent of them get killed or injured every year, which aren't much better odds than combat. The deck is usually icy and the steel crab pots can fall on you, which is the most common way to die. Before sliding the pots, we hook them to a crane, but if the boat rocks a lot while we're moving, the crane doesn't help much. Sometimes, when the wind gets up, the pot can whip around like a seven-hundred-pound steel tetherball, looking for something to smash.

The other big danger is falling overboard. The water is cold enough to kill you in about a minute, and the seas are rocky enough to sweep you hundreds of feet from the boat in just a few seconds, making recovery impossible. Once you're in the water, you're done. And aside from losing your balance, which isn't that hard on an icy, pitching deck, there are a dozen ways to wind up in the water. (See crab pot, above.) Also, if someone accidentally hits the hydraulic switch on the dog to drop the pot while you're placing the bait cans, you go down with the pot. Or, you can have your feet wrapped up in the buoy strings, which are the ropes attached to the buoy that identify the pot once it is in the water. The pot drags the ropes down with it, so it's a good idea to steer clear of these ropes when you're dropping pots.

Boris, the fisherman who hired me at the bunkhouse, has seen people die all these ways since becoming a fisherman three years ago. I ask him about the people.

“They were new guys,” he tells me. Then, remembering how long I've been here, he hastily adds, “and they didn't listen.”

I listen intently. Mostly, I listen to the skipper screaming at me, telling me what an idiot I am.

“What the fuck are you doing?” he screams over the loudspeaker from the bridge. “What the FUCK DO YOU THINK YOU'RE DOING?” I'm trying to pull crab out of the pot, where they are clinging to the net, and I know that if you pull hard, you break their legs off, which causes them to emit a poison that kills the other crab. Therefore, you have to be gentle with the little guys.

Boris, who is an experienced fisherman who knows how to deal with the skipper's outbursts, motions for me to leave the crab in the pot. “Don't worry about it,” he tells me kindly. “It's just one crab. We'll get it next time we pull up the pot.” He hands me the new bait can and I hook it inside the pot, jump out, and John, the engineer, hits the switch. Splash goes the pot.