Another Bullshit Night in Suck City (10 page)

(1979)
An endless haze, waiting for yet another boat to appear on the horizon, the work in and of itself nothing to look forward to, the boredom nearly unbearable. The boats can dock as late as ten at night, which means we’ll work until two, three. We’ve been at it since morning—lolling around, getting high, hiding out—until finally the captain radios in that he’s passing the last buoy. The pier boss finds us, shakes us out of our hiding places, assigns jobs—two lumpers with pitchforks in the hold, knee-deep in slime and ice, shoveling fish into a basket; another on deck above, a gloved hand on the line, feeding the basket through the hatch; another on the pier manning the winch, tipping the overflowing basket onto the culling table; another two at the table, sorting round from flat; then a couple on the two-wheelers, slamming an empty box onto the scale, waiting until the cullers slide the fish in, then icing the box, nailing down the lid. The captain writes the weight on the lid with a wax pencil, marks it in his book, we swing another box on top, stacking them four high, eight hundred pounds of fish total, then haul it all off to the walk-in freezer. I started that August, working the two-wheeler, a year to the day after I drove my motorcycle off the road, and after three months I’m bored silly, mostly from the endless waiting.

It had taken the better part of the year to recover from the motorcycle accident. In the weeks after my spleen was removed I spent my days before the television or outside in the sun, in either a chemical or a marijuana haze, depending on what my friends brought me. I lost a lot of weight, hovering below one-twenty for a while. Near the end of August my brother was readying to return to college for the fall and I’d forgotten to apply. He was getting the house ready for the winter, working in the crawl space, fiddling with the furnace. As he passed me on his way out to the garage, he muttered,
Why don’t you get out of that fuckin’ chair, help out?

As I turned my head away he coldcocked me, scraping a handful of keys from my jawbone midway down my neck. He walked out as I pressed my hand to the wound.

It was true I needed a job, needed to do something, get some direction. Most of my friends were starting college, town was emptying. A few weeks later I began working for a cleaning company, a franchise with bright yellow vans. I was given a set of light blue polyester shirts with my first name embroidered over the pocket, sent into strangers’ houses with buckets, solvents and rags. I was unable to leave my hometown. I wanted to stay close to Mary. I wanted to keep an eye on my mother.

Once I started working my mother decided I should pay rent—three hundred a month plus food and utilities. Phil, one of the friends I’d gotten drunk with at Dreamwold years before, would come home some weekends from school and we’d drive to boatyards and get high. On one of those nights we decided to live on a boat the upcoming summer. We found a thirty-one foot Trojan for a few hundred dollars, a ruin that everyone said would never float again. It took three months to fix her up, inventing a version of carpentry as we went along, and we launched her into the North River that June. After a year of meat and beer I’d gained back most of my weight.

My mother’s back together with an old boyfriend, Liam, who this time around is working at the fish pier in Plymouth. Ten years earlier, when they’d first been together, I thought Liam looked like Tom Jones, but then each of her boyfriends reminded me of someone on television. Liam’s now in the business of smuggling drugs. It isn’t hard to figure out. He disappears for two or three months at a time down to South America on “fishing trips.” Not since Moby Dick did anyone fish that long. I ask my mother if he’s a drug smuggler, and she denies it in such a way (
What makes you say that?
) that I know it’s true. That summer I tell her I’m bored with cleaning, that I want to work with Liam at the pier. I don’t say it but I see myself working my way up the “Organization,” making a run to Colombia. Simple mathematics. It could finance college, if I ever go, and if not it would still be better than any of the jobs in restaurants and banks I see my mother drag herself to day after day. It is, as far as I can see, the only way out. Besides, I have nothing against marijuana. My mother, though clearly torn, sets it up. Liam drives me for my first day of work and introduces me around. On the way down he tells me that I’ll hear a lot of bullshit around the pier, not to believe it all, to just keep it to myself, and I understand.

Tony, Liam’s best friend, owns the pier. A year earlier the Mob had rented it out for the weekend. Late at night they docked a boat laden with marijuana and unloaded it. Tony and Liam had been running together since schooldays on Winter Hill, a tough part of Somerville. As kids they’d stolen cars, then graduated to heavy equipment—earth movers, backhoes, cherry pickers—and set themselves up in the construction business as low-level tough guys. Owning the pier was the latest venture, but the only illegal activity they had come up with so far was bringing in mercury-tainted swordfish from Canada, which was banned in the U.S. and so brought a decent price on the black market. The weekend they rented out the pier to the Mob, Tony and Liam sat in a car and watched what was happening, deciding right then and there to enter the big time. Red and the Goon, two henchmen from the Winter Hill days, were with them. Armed with shotguns (easy to keep in the trunk of a car, you could be a hunter), they kicked open their doors, four doors opening at once like in a twentieth-century western, walked up to the head mobster, sitting in his own car overseeing the unloading, and kidnapped him. They brought him to the fish house and held him there at gunpoint for two days, demanding a million dollars. As unlikely as it seems, they got it, and overnight took over the business of bringing drugs into the East Coast. Tony owned the pier, the boats, the trucks, the drivers, the mechanics, the legit business front, and he’d just proven himself fearless. Liam’s girlfriend (my mother) worked in a bank, which eased the flow of thousands of dollars daily. “Laundering,” it’s called.

Within a year Tony’s gang is awash in cash. Liam made two successful runs, more were planned. They let go of the other, lesser criminal activities and focus on smuggling. Charismatic and generous, Tony’s charm allows him to avoid capture over the next few years, as he has a few cops and a judge in his pocket. I begin unloading fishing boats under the watchful eye of the DEA, who camp out full-time on surrounding rooftops, filming.

The pier boss, Dex, sleeps in his car, and his car never moves. Parked facing the harbor, overlooking the pier, he shoots up, drifts off. The pier is in an abandoned industrial yard, near where the Pilgrims landed. Dex isn’t dumb, he’s been to a few semesters of college—real college, not the “college” everyone else gets sentenced to. Maybe in his mid-thirties but he looks ancient—the teeth, junkie teeth, few and fewer, and he doesn’t seem to care. He sleeps in the clothes he wears to unload the boats, caked with gurry and fish slime, he sleeps a lot. We all stink of fish, but Dex has given up on any pretense of even trying to clean up. Waiting for a boat to appear on the horizon, we hammer together fish boxes, “coopering,” it’s called, and for those few hours we call ourselves “coopers.” As the fall drags on, fewer and fewer boats come in, so we cooper more and more. By the end of October we have hundreds of boxes, stacked taller than a man. I spend my time building elaborate mazes from the stacks of boxes, with hidden paths leading to a central room I disappear into to get high, read, sleep. Most of the job consists of learning how to hide, of how to appear busy, of killing time. In this way it’s a continuation of my twelve years of public school. Hiding seems the point of everything.

I’m going nowhere, and not very fast. The monotony of being perpetually high and trying to look busy is worse than cleaning houses, so I decide to quit, but before I can I’m taken aside by Keith, the electrician. Known as the “Professor,” Keith knows my mother, always asks after her. He takes me out to lunch and offers me a job as his apprentice. Officially Keith’s the electrician for the boats, for the fish house, and he looks the part—wears a tool belt, messes with boxes sprouting medusas of particolored wire—but it’s a front. High up in the Organization, he maintains the radios that keep in touch with boats that aren’t going out for fish, the type of boat that Liam goes out on. He calls the radio the “Mothership.” Working for Keith means that I’m moving up the ladder. On the surface I’m learning a trade, which I need, and at the same time I’m being ushered into the big time, the big money. This is good, this is the plan—electricity can be my front.

One of my first jobs is to spend a week in Tony’s trucking yard, burning documents behind the building in a steel drum. Keith checks up on me once a day, to make sure I’m pulverizing even the ash, scattering it. I know I’m being filmed as I do this, Keith points out the telephone worker strapped to the pole directly across from the yard, waves to him. But no one ever approaches me, and in three days all the records are dust. It’s some kind of test, to see if I can handle the conceptually illegal before being offered a shot at the real. I’m then moved back to the fish pier, to rewire the boats in ways that had nothing to do with fish, simply making them comfortable for longer trips. Boats still come in, fish are unloaded and in the fillet house fish are cut and packed and shipped out. But no one believes this is the real money. After that weekend, with the kidnapping and the tough-guy stance, Tony never uses the pier again, not for drugs. The drug boats now unload in Portland, Maine, a washed-up port at this point in its history, off the map. Red and the Goon haul the marijuana down from Maine in eighteen-wheelers. Sometimes, if it’s the season, they stash it in a load of Christmas trees. This all comes out later. At the time I just know, along with the FBI and the DEA, that something’s happening.

Sometimes Keith sets me up in the morning hanging fluorescent lights in the fillet house, then disappears for the day. He expects me to hang maybe one light a day, if that—as long as I’m set up to look like I’m working. Some have real jobs—the cutters, the drivers—and my pristine status draws some resentment. One morning Joey, just released from prison after ten years for killing his wife’s lover with a shotgun, comes up to me with a shovelful of ice as I’m on a ladder, contemplating a box full of wire. Keith insists I work with the power on, says I can’t be an electrician if I’m afraid of electricity. I’ve been shocked countless times, showered with sparks, held screwdrivers as they melted in my hand. Joey looks up at me and smiles, dumps the ice into Keith’s toolbox, then stands there with the shovel over his shoulder. I look at him, at the ice, shrug. I’ll spend the day drying off Keith’s tools.

Everyone who works for Tony is broken down in some way. Almost weekly the local papers allege he’s a drug kingpin—to say you’re on his payroll isn’t something to crow about. But I’m learning a trade and he pays cash. My mother and I are closer at this point than we’ve ever been. Something about the both of us working for gangsters, the details left unspoken, binds us together. We both hope the money will transform us.

Some days Keith tells me to go to his house, into the bedroom closet, to a shoebox filled with cash, count out five thousand, meet him in a bank parking lot. I begin to understand that this is one way he spends his days—driving from bank to bank, depositing cash, laundering it clean. I imagine soon I’ll be tapped to do something only someone on a motorcycle can do (I’d bought a bigger motorcycle after the crash, blaming the wipeout on my smaller bike), something fast and low to the ground. A run.

In January, two weeks before the resumption of classes, I get a letter from the University of Massachusetts, telling me I’ve been accepted, a full ride—all I have to do is sign my name. I can’t even remember applying—maybe it was done during my senior year of high school, in conjunction with the SATs, a cafeteria full of us signing up for the public university, like a Moonie wedding. It turns out that despite the carousing my grades put me in the top ten percent of my class, at a time when higher education is still considered a right. I’m torn about going, in part about leaving my mother alone, in part because I don’t want to lose my footing in the Organization. The carpenter, who recently moved out on his wife and two kids so he can sit outside a tent in the state park under a kerosene lamp each night and kill a bucket of beer in peace, just looks at me and rolls his eyes when I mention that I’m thinking of not going.
Don’t be an asshole
, he tells me,
you have your whole life to work.

Two weeks later, hungry to learn after two mind-numbing years, I’m sitting in a classroom, wrapping my brain around
King Lear—Who is it that can tell me who I am? Does Lear walk thus? Speak thus?
I hold on to my job with Keith, going home every other weekend and holidays. If there were an opening on a boat I’d leave school in a heartbeat.