A Working Stiff's Manifesto (11 page)

“Let's get the fucker.”

“Right on.”

Sure enough, I get back from lunch and my gear has about ten pin pricks in it. We are all gearing up to walk back to the slime line, and the little Filipino fellow walks past me without saying a word. While people are pulling on their rain gear all around me, I rear back and thump him on the head. He falls forward, then springs up, enraged. He is about to charge me when Mike grabs him from behind. The whole thing is spontaneous, but it looks beautifully choreographed. Mike is holding him and I rip into him, pummeling away at his ribs and face for about five seconds, then I stop, Mike lets go, he falls to the floor, and we both step over him.

As I am walking away, I notice a group of Filipinos who were too surprised by the speed of the whole incident to step forward and stop it. I am aware of their eyes as I walk back to the slime line.

I am packing crates again, this time with two Americans standing next to me, when I get a tap on the shoulder. It is Rick, the line supervisor.

“Take your rain gear off, get a coat, and go topside. Help with the loading.”

I leave immediately. I peel off my gloves, my now worthless rain gear full of tiny pin pricks, my boots, all the plastic and rubber crap issued to me the moment I got off the plane, deducted from my first paycheck. The gloves I toss in a big metal glove bin. The rain gear goes in the trash. I am aware that the Filipinos are still watching me as I walk out.

Topside there is fresh air and none of the factory noise—the air compressors, the forklifts, the constant whirring of the hydraulic lifts. It is actually a nice day, I am surprised to see. Working down in the hold and sleeping down below decks, it is possible to go for days without seeing sunlight. We are allowed to leave the ship when we are not on shift, but no one really has the energy. Straight to the mess and then straight to bed.

Hale and Jeff greet me on the foredeck. “What's going on, man?”

“Not much. What's going on up here?”

“Taking a break,” Hale laughs. He and Jeff have just been sitting on the rigging, listening to the sounds of the bay, with the factory noise filtering up from below. “Hang out with us a little while.”

I sit on a pile of boxes and look out at the bay, hundreds of seagulls flying around, pecking the water for the waste products of crab processing.

“Watch the seagulls,” Hale says, pointing. So I stare at a crowd of seagulls milling around on the surface, picking bits of waste out of the water with quick head thrusts. I'm not sure what I'm looking for. Suddenly, a sea lion silently shoots up from below, grabs one, and submerges again before I am really sure what I have just seen.

“Whoa,” I say.

“Isn't that cool?” Hale and Jeff are alive with excitement.

“That fucker must have eaten about ten of them so far. And they just sit there and take it.”

The rest are down below, sweating, chafing, ready to kill each other, splashed with water, inhaling crab steam, while these two jokers hang out on the deck and watch wildlife. “Is this what you guys do all day?”

“Naw, man. We're gettin' busy in a bit. We gotta load that freighter.” Hale points to an ancient Korean rust bucket pulling up alongside. “Wanna help?”

“Sure.”

“We'll be ready to go in about an hour. In the meantime, just hang out.”

I sit on the deck for a few minutes, and guilt starts to set in. Those guys are down there, begging for a break, their feet soaking, their knees pain wracked from standing still for hours on end. Who am I to have been rescued from it? Who are these two, to never have been through it at all? The Filipino woman I spoke to before break will work her whole contract without getting an easy shift. Her English is no good and she isn't big enough to work an off-load.

But for now, it feels too good to be dry, and topside. I lean back in the rigging, which is as comfortable as a hammock, and begin to doze. On the clock.

After an hour or two, I am woken up and we start loading. The stacked pallets of fresh, boxed, and frozen crab are taken up to the foredeck on a hydraulic lift. There I attach a rope around the pallet and hook it to the crane from the Korean ship. Then it is hoisted over to their deck, where it is unhooked, and the crane comes back. Ten or twenty Korean laborers break the pallet apart and load the boxes into their hold.

All my job entails is hooking the rope and giving the Korean crane operator the thumbs-up. I also have to make sure we don't go too fast, dropping too many pallets on the Korean ship before they can unload them. Primarily, I'm in charge of the rhythm for the whole off-load. It's an easy enough job. It is a wet and windy day, but the beautiful scenery, the barren and forbidding mountains overlooking Dutch Harbor, make it a pleasure to be outside.

Nightfall comes around four o'clock in the afternoon, and we work until well past midnight. When the hold of the Korean ship is full, the sailors come over onto our ship and offer us a tour of their boat. Apparently, this is some kind of courtesy. All the off-loads involve a quick boat tour, I am told. I walk around for a while on a ship that makes ours look like the
Queen Mary.
Their living quarters are more cramped and claustrophobic than I could have ever imagined, rust is on everything. I look into their sick bay, where I see the cutting edge of Korean surgical equipment, a rusty knife hanging from a string. Then they offer us warm sodas, which we accept, because unopened Korean Coke bottles have collector's value.

“We don't have it so bad,” I say to Jeff and Hale as we clamber back aboard the
Rayford
. “Those poor guys live like animals.”

“You should see the Russian ships,” Jeff tells me. “That's nothing. One of the Russian sailors was saying that sometimes their companies don't even feed them. They have to break open the crab boxes to eat if they run out of food.”

We go down into the galley and have a late meal. Burgers, french fries, rice, all kinds of Asian delicacies as the cooks are Filipinos. I load up on carbohydrates and settle back, bloated, like an old man after a Thanksgiving meal. In the galley, we have cable TV from a satellite station, and I watch half an hour of CNN before heading to bed. It's good to be an American, even on the bottom rung.

I soon find out that there's a price to pay for not laboring in the factory.

I'm not working the deck crew, I'm being welcomed into a brotherhood. There are things going on here that I'd rather not know about, and I'm no longer able to just mind my own business.

“If something happens to me or Hale,” Jeff asks me one day, his voice full of drama. “Would you back us up?”

I'm not sure what I'm being asked. I imagine he's asking me about natural disasters, falling into the icy water or being attacked by a sea lion. “Of course,” I tell him.

He looks at me as if he can't really believe me, the overlong stare of someone who wants you to understand the gravity of a conversation, like a lover seeking commitment. He's creeping me out. “Do you know what I mean?” he asks again.

“Uh, sure.”

He is not satisfied. He wanders off with a new and clearly lower opinion of me. I already sense that there is some kind of criminal venture going on aboard this ship, something that involves the off-load crew, and if they want to tell me about it, fine. If not, that's also good. I'll decide whether I want to get involved based partly on what little conscience I have left, and partly on the plan's feasibility. But as I live and work with them, it's going to be hard for them not to include me.

Later in the day, while I am tying ropes on the foredeck, I meet a rough, overweight older man with the drawn skin of a heavy drinker and the rumpled appearance of someone who has slept under a bridge. He wears a black windbreaker, torn in places, which has the name of an Anchorage tittie bar emblazoned on the back in faded red letters.

“Jeff or Hale around?” he asks. He has a voice like a chainsaw.

“Haven't seen 'em in a bit.”

“Where the fuck they go?”

“Couldn't tell you.”

He waddles off.

A few minutes later, Jeff and Hale come back.

“There was a guy here looking for you a little while ago.”

“What did he look like?”

I describe him.

“Did he seem pissed off?”

“A little bit.”

This freaks them out. They ask me ten questions about the guy, mostly concerning his attitude and mental state. Did he seem this way, did he seem that way? The encounter was too brief and insignificant for me to remember the type of detail they need, and they become annoyed with me.

“You need to pay attention,” Jeff tells me.

“Maybe the next time you guys wander off you can tell me where the fuck you're going,” I snap. They look at each other, curious, then back down. I'm usually quiet and polite, at least by Alaskan standards.

Hale explains, “That guy makes about five million dollars a year.”

“He looks like a street person.”

This amuses them, a little bit. They laugh harder than necessary to let me know that all is well between us again. I laugh too. Oh, what fun we are having.

These guys are nuts.

I'm surrounded by crazy people, and I deal with it by pretending not to notice. Thus, when Billy the Klansman, our fourth roommate, starts ranting at me one afternoon when I come back on break about how we should send all black people back to Africa, I nod and smile. He then cranks up a Guns n' Roses tape, and when Axl Rose screams the word “niggers,” he turns the volume up louder, then back down again when the n-word is complete. He looks at me conspiratorially. I nod back and smile. My main complaint with Billy the Klansman is not his politics (we work so much that I hardly ever have to see him) but his bathing habits. This boy showers less than once a week, and the smells emanating from his bunk are starting to fill the whole room.

Billy is a skinny nineteen-year-old acne-ridden kid from Seattle who hates everybody else on the ship. He hates Mexicans and Filipinos and blacks and American Indians, the four groups that make up ninety-five percent of Rayford Seafoods' workforce. He hates Jeff because Jeff is always hanging around with Hale, who is black, and he calls him “nigger-lover” behind his back. He hates his father, who brought him up here, because he brought him up here. He hates women because they won't sleep with him, or even talk to him, because all he talks about is how much he hates everyone, and he doesn't shower.

Billy's father is the boat's electrician, and Billy is supposed to be learning the trade. Half the electrical wires on the boat are under an inch of water and short circuits are so common that we hardly notice anymore when whole rooms suddenly become as black as a coal mine. Most of us have learned to carry around Zippos. The minute we hear a sizzling sound coming from behind the walls, we reach for our lighters and try to continue what we were doing. Like most people, Billy has a love-hate relationship with his job, from which the love has mostly gone.

“This job FUCKING SUCKS!” he screams one day as he enters the room. He rants about the hopelessness of trying to find and replace all the rusted-out fuse boxes, waterlogged wires, and damp connections all over this half-sunk vessel. Oil seeps through half the cracking rivets; seawater seeps through the other half. Sometimes tiny fish even get through the cracks, and they swim around in the bowels of the ship where Billy spends a lot of his time. He is close to crying as he describes this to me. I don't care. Alaska work is like that. Not pleasant. At least he gets to move around the ship, not get stuck on the slime line doing the same thing for sixteen hours at a stretch. When Jeff and Hale enter the room, he goes quiet, thankfully, and draws the curtain on his bunk and lies there.

Billy doesn't hate me because I treat him like what he is, a scared, weak little kid. I listen to him whine as long as it doesn't cost me anything. I tell him to take a shower and take his sheets to the laundry, and on occasion he does it. Unlike everyone else, I don't wish him harm. I just wish he would disappear.

When Billy's whining, I figure he isn't dangerous since at least he's trying to communicate. He's too scared of Jeff and Hale to insult them to their faces, and Jeff and Hale don't want trouble with him because his father is the chief electrician and could have them fired off the boat and sleeping in the snow within minutes. So there is a delicate balance, and sometimes there are innocuous conversations about music or home. Billy likes G n' R, Hale likes rappers, Jeff likes heavy metal, and I listen through my curtains as they debate the points of each. Sometimes it seems as if we could all just get along, like Jesus and Rodney King suggest.

All of a sudden the police kick the door in and officers in bulletproof vests are pulling my curtains back and pointing pistols at me.

“Let me see your hands,” one of them screams. I show him my hands.

“Is Hale Jeffries here?”

“Who?”

“What bunk is he in?”

“Who?”

“Here he is,” says another cop. “Here he is.”

Their voices are excited and scared. “Get up!” One cop is screaming. “Lie down!” screams another. “Let me see your hands!” they shout in unison. There is a loud thump as they drag Hale from his second-tier bunk and dump him on the floor like a sack of potatoes. Then they stand him up and handcuff him, and walk toward the door.

“You!” one of the cops says, pointing at me. “You pull a stunt like that again, you're going to jail!” All I know is that thirty seconds ago I was half asleep in my bunk. Then they file out.

The room is quiet. Nobody wants to be the first to speak. Jeff gets up and closes the door, so it is dark again.

We're still working. We still need sleep. Crab is still coming in. After a few minutes of silence, I drift back off to sleep.

And here's how the inevitable trouble starts.

Hale, a muscular, tough-talking black street kid from Seattle, has spent the last few weeks talking shit about all the people he wasted and robbed while he was with a Seattle street gang. It sounded like bullshit to me, but I certainly wasn't going to call him on it. I didn't really care. Alaskan relationships are as substantial as meetings on a bus. You meet, bullshit them, then, when your contract is up, you go back to the world where you take up your life, most likely a different life from the one you have been describing to your Alaskan coworkers for the past five months. For example, I work with an illiterate drunk named Mo who tells me he went to Harvard, though another worker recognizes him as a frequent cohabitant of the local drunk-tank in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho. It doesn't matter. No one's doing background checks. As long as he doesn't start insulting anyone's intelligence with the Harvard stories, we all just let it go and expect the same courtesy with our own bullshit.