Shipmates (unfinished)

Bergman crept out of his room in the middle of the dog watch. He walked softly through the passageway past the cabins of his sleeping shipmates. When he reached the Turk’s unlocked door he slipped inside.

The men awoke to the awful sounds of shrieks and curses. They peered out of their cabin doors and stared at each other. Then they closed their doors and there was a series of clicks as they locked them.

The Turk was fat, fat enough that his vitals were shielded from the stabs that scored his body. When Bergman’s room was searched a handwritten list was found. On it were the names of the Jewish steward, the Turk (Mohamed Osman) and the wiper, who never lost an opportunity to proclaim his atheism.

In the glassy calm waters off the Celebes, on an American gas tanker, Bergman had tried to restage the Crusades. He got a long sentence in a federal prison and the Turk settled with the shipping company for a million dollars.

When merchant seamen gather in bars and swap stories, they skip the mundane. They don’t talk about quiet, untroubled shipmates and peaceful voyages. When I think back to my time in a three month long, boot camp-style seamanship school — although I had a pretty good time there and made friends — what stands out in memory is the kid who was kicked out when he was caught fucking the CPR dummy. Not to mention my classmate escorted off campus by two FBI agents. He was using the school as a lay-low after robbing a bank.

Racists, religious fanatics, atheists, communists and fascists; it’s amazing how men who should be at each other’s throats can usually get along pretty well. On my first ship one of the deckhands had a stunning tableau on his back, a multi-colored tattoo that depicted a KU Klux Klan gathering. A blazing cross was surrounded by hooded figures and a circular insert on his shoulder featured a Klansman holding a noose.

The illustrated man brought very few clothes on board. Whenever he washed them he tramped around the crew’s quarters wearing only underpants and displaying his artwork.

What really astonished me was how the black crewmen perceived all this. They were amused. “Aw, that’s just Steve,” one told me. “He’s harmless, maybe wrapped a little too tight.” Steve was a grouch, but no grouchier with the brothers than anyone else.

One of the few times I saw racial animus was on a beat-up old tanker running from New York to Puerto Rico. The ship’s owners had just started distributing VHS tapes for crew entertainment. One was the movie Mandingo.

Mandingo is a very forgettable film starring the boxer Ken Norton and some lightweight actors. Somehow James Mason was signed on. The story deals with a black slave in the antebellum South having an affair with the pretty, blond plantation owner’s wife. The actress playing the wife showed a little tit, hot stuff back in the seventies.

The crew on that ship was from Norfolk, Virginia. This was a really backwards town: only a dozen years earlier the city shut down all its schools rather than comply with federal desegregation orders. While I was reading in bed one night my black roommate came in looking agitated.

“What’s up, man?”

He filled me in. One of the white deckhands had declared that Mandingo was too inflammatory (he didn’t use that word) and would cause unrest among the black crewmen. He locked the tape up in his room. The Brothers were outraged and real trouble could break out. The movie vigilante’s friends were not enthused about his cause. They waited on the sideline to see what would happen.

Word reached topside. Crew business coming to the attention of the Captain is a serious breach of protocol. We always tried to work out problems below on our own.

The Captain called a crew meeting and scolded the redneck provocateur. The video was returned to the lounge and for weeks it was played over and over — the Brothers made sure to get their point across.

Ritter, a chunky, redfaced man in his fifties, was an electrician on one of my early ships. He was a South African Boer, a stiff-necked apartheid man. This was back in the dark ages of South Africa, when Mandela was still locked up. Ritter had definite views on how the world should be run and for some reason he shared them with me when we worked together.

“I don’t say that homosexuals should be killed; I’m not a fanatic,” he told me. “But they do need to be locked up forever.”

There were four tables in the crew mess. Ritter wouldn’t eat with black shipmates. The Brothers picked up on this and made sure at least one of them was sitting at each table during meals.

The black cook stopped leaving left-overs in the galley. Ritter lost weight. He quite the ship soon after the starvation campaign began and trudged down the gangway, a bitter apartheid martyr.

Merchant Marine trainee officers are called cadets. They attend one of several maritime academies in the US. In their late teens or early twenties they are usually high-spirited young men eager for adventure.

The crews prank them unmercifully. We tell them to go fetch a left-handed wrench, or else stand by on the bow to spot the mail buoy — this in the middle of the Atlantic. My favorite jape was when the captain told the cadet that he had to scare off birds that were roosting on the booms and rigging before we reached port.

“Those goddamn birds came on in England and we’ll be in Belgium this afternoon. Do you have any idea of the trouble we’ll be in if we break quarantine and bring foreign animals into that country?”

We watched from the bridge and laughed ourselves sick as the kid scurried around the deck, screaming at the gulls and menacing them with a long pole.

One lucky young cadet was assigned to a cruise ship that made weekly circuits of Hawaii, with a port stop at a different island each day. Every week brought a new crowd of young passengers.

A cohort of Catholic high school girls guarded by two stern nuns boarded in Honolulu. The girls were in a festive mood — the trip was their reward for good grades and impeccable behavior.

All hell broke loose the second night out at sea. A gang of a half-dozen girls, spearheaded by the nuns, were rampaging on the officers’ deck, pounding on doors and screaming, “Jamie, Jamie, where are you, we know you’re here!”

The captain, chief mate, chief engineer, head steward and other worthies poked their sleepy heads out of their cabins and tried to make sense of the deranged females yelling and beating on doors.

It turned out that one of the girls had been chatting with the cadet and a tryst was arranged. She slipped out of her stateroom when she thought her roommate was asleep. The roommate sounded the alarm and the posse -jealous little vixens lead by their enraged guardians — made their way to the officer’s deck.

Jamie was in the cadet’s bed, paralysed with terror, as the screams and pounding resounded through the officers’ quarters. The cadet and his bed got a good soaking from the poor girl’s involuntary reaction.

Jamie was frog marched back to her room and the next day the nuns and the captain came to an understanding. The captain informed them that unfortunately, because the age of consent was rather low in Hawaii, the young man could not be criminally charged.

“However, let me assure you that the boy will be kicked out of his school and then blacklisted from the maritime industry forever. His life is over. The disgrace will follow him forever. He will pay a heavy price for this outrage.”

The nuns got less than they wanted — the boy wasn’t going to prison — but they were somewhat mollified by the kid’s ruined future.

Later that day the captain sent for the cadet.

“Listen, asshole, these passengers will be off in Honolulu next Saturday. Just lay low and stay in your quarters till then. The steward girl will bring you your meals. And give her a good tip for cleaning up your room. It stank like a ginmill urinal.”

In the confines of merchant marine vessels you will find cheap bastards who rival millionaire bag ladies for meanness. They range from Puerto Rican deckhands who religiously mail home their allotments of soap and toilet paper to $30,000 a month captains who haggle with Bombay pedicab drivers over a $2 fare.

The average skinflint sailor is a middle-aged, unmarried man who still lives with his mother. She cooks for him and makes his bed. When his mother’s nagging becomes too onerous (“find a wife, I want grandchildren”) he ships out again.

Charlie was a jolly, fat little man who sailed entry rating. The day I signed on Charlie’s ship I noticed something out of the ordinary. I was in the crew lounge, leafing through some magazines when I saw that many had whole articles or brief passages cut out. I asked somebody about it. “Oh, that’s Charlie.” “But why does he do it?”

It turned out that any publication that Charlie could get his hands on that mentioned Jews, Jewish sounding names, Israel, the Holocaust and international banks was subject to his deft scissors.

“But why does he do it?”

Charlie had a project, an important one. Eventually there would be an accounting, a grand tribunal that would get to the bottom of the International Jewish Conspiracy once and for all. That’s when Charlie would come forward with his scrapbooks bulging with evidence.

As twisted and vile as all this sounded, I immediately realized the essence of Charlie’s little hobby. It was free. It cost him nothing. While his shipmates drank, gambled and whored away their money, Charlie’s wages, untainted by vice, went straight into his bank account.

Eddie sailed second mate. His ship was owned by a company that paid top wages. Eddie made twenty-five thousand a month.

Eddie expanded the definition of parsimony to infinity. After he split the seat of a cheap pair of chino work pants, Eddie relentlessly tried to get compensation from the company.

“Those pants cost you fifteen dollars. Stop trying to make a big deal out of it, Eddie,” the Captain told him. Eddie wouldn’t let it go. At ship’s meetings he called the torn pants a safety problem.

He went too far when he raised the issue with foreign officials in port one day. “Motherfucker, I got Jap shore people asking about ‘sprit pantsu’! I’m gonna fucking kill you, Eddie!”the captain roared.

While working with Eddie I got some insight into his personal life. Every few years, after careful analysis of real estate trends, Eddie sold his home and moved his family to a cheaper area. He did this so many times that the government investigated him for money laundering. When I sailed with him, he was living in a small Colorado mining town. The mines had been closed for fifty years.

There was an Oddfellows lodge there whose members included the mayor and police chief. Eddie joined and would sedulously nurse a single beer for the evening.

One night a serious matter was discussed by the Oddfellows luminaries. There was a crime wave ravaging this peaceful little town. All the area vending machines selling soda, candy and chips were loaded with strange, foreign coins and emptied of merchandise.

Eddie nodded sagely as the police chief promised the mayor that somebody’s hide was going to get nailed to a barn door.

Eddie’s ship made regular runs to Indonesia. The currency there had blown out against the dollar and a coin the same size and weight as a quarter was worth a little less than three cents. Rolls of these coins could be easily obtained in Indonesian banks.

Only Eddie’s incipient diabetes halted the vending machine reign of terror.

Ratliff’s story began around four hundred years ago in the Virginia settlement of Jamestown. American children learn at an early age how rough life was for the English colonists. Their survival depended on hard, unstinting work from everybody.

What’s less known is the fate of the people who couldn’t cut the mustard. The shirkers, the whiners and the shit stirrers. The seventeenth century get-over-guys. They got the boot and had to set out into the wilderness of this inhospitable land. They got short shrift from the Indians they came across. After tossing the outcasts a few dead squirrels and some ears of corn, the Indians invited them to keep moving.

The Jamestown rejects ended up in a malarial flood-prone area now known as the Bristol Swamp. There must have been women among them; if they didn’t thrive, they at least multiplied. The Bristolmen never forgot how the world had treated them and succeeding generations bore a fierce resentment towards outsiders. Tax collectors were known to disappear there and although they were nominally Virginians, they did not rally to the Bonny Blue Flag. This was not from pro-union or anti-slavery sentiments. Confederate army pressgang recruiters came to the same ends as revenuers — a shallow grave in Bristol Swamp mud.

A Bristol Swamp cemetery might have several hundred graves and only three or four last names inscribed on tombstones. Bristolmen are known for their distinct features: long, pointed noses, jug ears and protruding adam’s apples. Incest doesn’t bring out the best.

A Bristolman leaving the Swamp and making a life elsewhere is not unlike a rat sprouting wings and taking to the skies. At sixteen, Ratliff found himself in Norfolk. Maybe he had dishonored a female relative. People in the area bordering the Swamp joke that a Bristol virgin is a girl who can outrun her brothers.

Norfolk is a busy seaport and when Ratliff wandered there the US was deeply involved in the Korean War. Any male with at least one eye and three intact limbs was signed up on the spot and hustled aboard the ships carrying war materiel to the Far East. Ratliff found a home.

A seaman who stays on the same ship year after year without any time off is called a homesteader. These days the practice is discouraged by unions and shipping companies. A man with no life ashore leans towards mental derangement.

The homesteaders were a curious bunch. They usually had no family ties. They rarely went ashore when their ship was in port and spent almost nothing in the slop chest, the ships commissary. When they died and finally went down the gangway on a stretcher, there was a lot of confusion over who ended up with their money, the fruit of brutal self-denial.

Consider the consolations of going to sea. Your ship ties up in Alexandria and you can get shore to see the pyramids. When you dock in Piraeus, the Parthenon is a short cab ride away.

If fleshpots are more in your line, there are the fabulous ports of Manila and Pattaya. When you find yourself in Valparaiso, you understand why Byron’s sailor grandfather was so impressed with the women of that fine town.

The homesteaders were having none of it. Going ashore meant spending money and masturbation is free.

Ratliff was my watch partner on my first ship. We carried coal to Alexandria, Egypt, a battered, old whore of a seaport. I was entranced with my first foreign port and spent hours wondering through neighborhoods that seemed frozen in ancient times.

Ratliff eyed me narrowly. “There you go, just like all the other young’uns, can’t wait to spend those good US dollars.”

Ratliff didn’t talk much but I heard enough to understand his philosophy, one of extreme frugality. He had been on my ship for the past seven years. Before that he lasted eleven years on a tanker. Between the two vessels was a layover of three months. When I asked him about that time off, he muttered, “them people ashore don’t know shit.”

We ran into a North Atlantic hurricane that winter. The old ship shuddered and rolled fearfully. No one was able to sleep for days. Not far from us a Russian freighter went down with all hands in the monstrous swells.

Eventually the sea calmed down to the point that we could go on deck and repair the battered cargo gear. Ratliff, his hands full of tools, had his leg caught between a hatch and a threshold lip when the ship rolled and his leg was broken.

The Chief Mate helped Ratliff into the tiny ship’s hospital and improvised a cast. While this was going on the Steward took the opportunity to inspect Ratliff’s room. Ratliff never allowed anyone inside.

Ratliff’s quarters were neat and clean, completely bereft of personal touches like photos and posters. The mattress was a different story.

“It was filthy, like five generations of gypsies was born and died on it,” he reported. The steward broke out a new mattress and threw the old one over the side.

After the Chief Mate cleared him, Raliff hobbled to his room and let out an anguished scream that could be heard on all decks. He found the Steward and while choking him, demanded to know where the mattress was. After learning it went over the side, he dragged himself up to the bridge and threw the helmsman away from the wheel. He started to throw the ship into a radical turn before he was tackled by the captain and the watch mate.

Ratliff begged the captain to turn the ship around. The captain adamantly refused and had Ratliff escorted to his room.

Ratliff disappeared that night. The cast on his leg must have taken him straight down.

Years later I told the story to a friend who was a bit of a dilettante commie. He said Ratliff’s life could be explained by examining it through a Marxist lens. Something about extreme alienation of the worker from the product of his labor. The mattress stuffed with the man’s life savings was a potent symbol of the illusions that the proletariat entertain when they devote their lives to joining the ranks of the bourgeoisie.

I think Blake had a better answer.

Some are born to sweet delight

Some are born to endless night

A criminal record — with the exception of a drug conviction — is no hinderance to a man getting his seaman’s documents (being caught with a single joint can mean a lifetime ban). Other, heavier charges like larceny and murder are treated cavalierly by the Coast Guard, the enforcers of merchant marine policies.

The killers I sailed with weren’t so bad. They tended to be men who’d taken a life in a jealous rage or a drunken bar fight. They did their ten or fifteen years — the further south the prison the harder the time — and resumed sailing.

No matter what they were like before prison, afterwards they were the same. Quiet and suspicious. Low energy. Prison had sucked something vital from them.

Jack was an able-bodied seamen in his early sixties. He took a long sabbatical from sailing by spending time in a California prison, ten years for manslaughter. Jack took no shit. In prison a man can’t let anyone get away with even a petty slight, otherwise he is a punk. I saw Jack get into a fracas with a deckhand a third his age. The kid made a joke about Jack’s bald head and then zap-zap-zap, two jabs and a right cross, almost too fast to track, and the kid went down. Jack was reticent about what he had done to get put away, but he gave me a clue that it involved some sort of an in flagrante delicto affair. I asked him if he really had killed somebody. “Fucking right. And I should have wasted the bitch, too.”

I’d rather sail with a murderer than a thief. Thieves are never reconstructed, even after doing a long stretch. They never seem to lose that quasi-sexual urge to steal, not much different than what drives a degenerate gambler.

El Gallo sailed steward assistant — dish washer and pot scrubber. He was a scrawny little man with a baby face and a passion for latin pop music and dancing. El Gallo wasn’t his real name, of course, it was his nom de guerre. He belonged to a Puerto Rican terrorist organization that planted bombs in New York bus station lockers and anywhere else that seemed like a soft target. Among other duties, he eliminated suspected informers and extorted protection money from small businesses. El Gallo inhabited a nexus between underworld and underground. The other Puerto Rican seamen were in awe of him.

He was quite the lady’s man. He was generous with the casa girls throughout the ports of Latin America and there were stories that he had inspired knife fights between jealous putas.

I sailed with El Gallo on a beat-up old tanker running to Central America. The first day I met him he pulled up his shirt to show me several bullet scars on his torso. After a shootout with police he somehow got out of prison after only a few years.

The steward was well aware of his assistant’s colorful reputation and washed dirty dishes himself if El Gallo decided to sleep off a bender.

When a bottle of rum went missing from my room, I knew who filched it. I saw El Gallo ladling out drinks to his cronies in the crew’s lounge and he laughed when he saw me. I had a choice: call him out on deck or forget about it. The spindly little man wouldn’t last very long in a fist fight, but fists weren’t his style. He carried a long, narrow switchblade that he called Esmerelda and I had no doubt that some dark night Esmerelda would be buried in my back if I flattened the little thief. I let it go.

Years later I learned the coda to the El Gallo legend. He was stumbling through a South Bronx neighborhood in the early hours when a garbage truck hit him and he went flying. The city settled with his lawyer for seventy thousand dollars. One of his pals told me what happened after that. “He never had any real money, man, so now he could cop all the coke and junk he wanted. Every time I saw him there was less and less of him and one day there was nothing”.

Decades after his death, sailors in the San Juan union hall speak of El Gallo with reverence and dread.

There aren’t radio officers on ships anymore. Automated electronics replaced them. But while they lasted they were the best of all seagoing jobs, with superb benefits. They didn’t work in port, so they were the first down the gangway and the last to come back. They made handsome wages, equivalent to second mate pay. There was only one per ship, so they ran their own department, outside of the chain of command and answerable only to the captain. Their normal posture during their eight hours on watch was sitting in the radio shack, listening to dits and dahs over headphones while reading a paperback novel they picked up from the officers’ lounge.

So why were so many of them so damned batshit weird, even weird by deepwater sailor standards?

I didn’t get the real story about Alvin until after he left the ship and a small army of shipping company lawyers and government officials tried to impose order on the chaos he left behind.

Sparks — all radio officers are called sparks — was a slight, meek man who spoke very little, but when he did his words had a certain impact. “Here”, he said, holding a forkful of tuna casserole under the captain’s nose, “doesn’t this smell like urine?” The captain subsequently ordered that sparks would have his own table in the officers’ messroom.

We ran to port towns in South America on that ship. In the streets of Paita, Peru, I saw sparks strolling down the main street followed by a noisy crowd of small children and barking mutts. They dogged his heels and screamed with laughter whenever he turned to face them. Across cultural and language barriers they somehow knew there was something profoundly not right about the man.

We could hear sparks muttering to himself in the radio shack at all hours. The man never seemed to sleep. Finally, he locked himself in his quarters, which adjoined the radio shack, and refused to come out. We were on the homeward bound leg of the trip. We later found out that while the captain pleaded and threatened to get sparks to open his door, a blizzard of radio messages was going out to the FBI, the CIA, the DEA, the Coast Guard, the US Maritime Administration and various other government entities. Sparks was being poisoned by gas pumped into his room via the air conditioning. His food was tampered with. At odd hours he heard satanic chanting outside his door.

When we reached port sparks was hustled off the ship by Federal Marshals while our hapless Captain was grilled by company lawyers. Why, they wanted to know, why was this man in fear for his life? Why was he harassed to the point of a nervous breakdown? Eventually a more complete picture emerged. We found out that Sparks lived a rather peculiar life ashore. He was the sole male in a lesbian, vegetarian commune somewhere in rural West Virginia and he was the factotum, a combination handyman and cook. He bankrolled the place and whenever the women couldn’t stand him anymore they sent him back to sea.

This Sparks was an outlier, but far from unique.

Irvin sailed in the deck gang. He was one of the last of a nearly vanished tribe — an American blue collar jew. Irvin was a man in his sixties, barrel-chested with a full head of salt and pepper curly hair. For some reason he took me into his confidence.

“I’ve never been in love. I’ve had a lot of women but none of them really meant much.”

The steward had sailed with Irvin for many years. “Irvin was a cop in Baltimore. He’s got a lot of connections there. What he likes to do is befriend a young couple down on their luck. He fronts them money, buys them clothes and treats them to fancy restaurants. When he has them softened up, he takes them to the movies and finger fucks the girl while she’s sitting next to her husband.”

Irvin and I were shipmates back when AIDS really started to mow down dope-shooters and gays. Our seamen’s union took a lot of hits. So many that the obituary column in our monthly newspaper stopped printing cause of death.

It was supposed to be a secret that bosn Frank had AIDS. Poor Frank didn’t look good. He was skinny and slow to speak, but I thought he might have just been a garden variety alcoholic. The chief mate caught on because Frank was required to submit a list of drugs he was taking. The mate recognized them as medicines that were proscribed for AIDS, although they weren’t very effective. The mate was a nervous, garrulous type, not one to keep secrets.

“That man belongs in a cage”, he mumbled once as Frank passed by us on deck. Soon the everybody was in on Frank’s secret.

Irvin decided this was a good opportunity to play a gag. A couple days before arriving at a US port, from god knows where he got ahold of a cheap, tent-sized dress and a mophead he used as a wig.

“Frankie, come here, big boy, I want some more cock” he crooned in falsetto while sashaying down the passageway of the crew’s quarters.

I’m pretty sure Frank got the virus from mainlining junk, but Irvin’s nasty prank caused him to quite and find a lawyer. He got a settlement from the shipping company a few months before he died.

Irvin was very upset about getting fired. “Some people just can’t take a fucking joke”, he muttered to me as he trudged down the gangway.