A Working Stiff's Manifesto (14 page)

“I want to make ten grand, and I don't want to be up here forever,” he tells me. I like his determination, and his logical grasp of the work involved. Most of the rookies come in expecting great wealth, failing to take into account the toll the work takes on their bodies and their psyches. “Yeah, I'll stay here a year, then I'll get twenty-five thousand,” they always start out, not realizing that people who've been here a year without a break have usually gone half-mad. Then they start talking about all the wonderful things they're going to buy. Depending on who they are, these things range from bags of cocaine to brand new sport-utility vehicles. Then, two weeks later, when reality has set in, they're in the clinic complaining that they have carpal tunnel syndrome so they can get a medical and a free trip home.

Chris is different. He's only nineteen, but he has a better grasp of reality than most of the older people I'm working with.

“You mind if I take off for an hour and see if I can find another ship that's hiring?”

“Go ahead.”

This becomes a daily event. Whenever there is nothing to do, Chris is off to find a better job. In the hopes that he'll find one for me too, I let him go.

One afternoon, I see Brian walking off the ship with a duffel bag. “Gonna catch my plane,” he tells me. “My knee. It just gave out.”

“I hate when that happens.”

Later, one of the girls in the office tells me that Brian's parents had called the company insisting that they send Brian home immediately. He had been calling them every day, collect, from the satellite phone, and they had just received a $4,000 phone bill. The “nice things” he wound up paying for were six hours worth of long distance conversation.

Chris returned from his daily mission. “There's a ship leaving,” he tells me. “Paying percentage. They need two more processors for a three-trip contract. They're leaving in two hours. Wanna go?”

I mull over this career decision for a second or so. “Let's do it.”

I head down to my bunk, shove all my possessions into a duffel bag, and go up to the front office to tell them where to forward my paycheck. There are no tears of farewell. I've already lasted significantly longer than most processors.

We take a taxi out to the
Royal Golden
, where Chris has found us a job, and I see the boy has done well. The ship is spotless—no rust anywhere, no creaky doors, no water on the floor. The office staff actually wants me to do paperwork, and there's a real check of my ID and a few questions. In Alaska, this is akin to the three-month background check usually associated with getting government jobs. I am hopeful that they don't go so far as checking my name with the police, who are expecting me to show up any day for community service. And as the
Royal Golden
heads out to sea, I stand on the deck, watching Dutch Harbor get smaller, and imagine frustrated cops standing on the docks cursing. So long,
suckahs.

I haven't been out to sea in a while, and the first thing I remember is that I get viciously seasick. I spend the first two days of the first trip rushing back and forth to the bathroom and vomiting. The other thing I realize is that if you are being paid a percentage of the catch, hours mean nothing. You don't punch in and out, and the company isn't saving money by having you not work. So everyone has to be busy all the time. Between bouts of vomiting, I'm expected to pitch in and clean the galley, scrub pots, clean the processing room, move boxes in the freezer, and any other menial job that comes up. After about two days of this, I finally just blow off a shift and crawl back in bed, where the supervisor finds me.

“What're you doing in bed?” he asks.

“I keep puking. I just needed a few hours of rest.”

“Fuck,” he says, shaking his head, obviously disgusted with me. He walks out. I can take his disgust at this point. I just need to be left alone.

Chris doesn't get seasick, and soon becomes the golden boy of the new-hires. He attacks every menial job eagerly and is soon sitting at the supervisor's table at the mess. The supervisors look at me each time I walk by, and I know the look. It's that “He's not going to work out” look I often gave the new-hires at Rayford.

By the third day, we get out to the fishing grounds, and my body is adjusting to the rolling of the ship. I'm starting to feel a little better, and I try pitching in more, try to sound enthusiastic when given an assignment. When the fish start coming in, I spend my first shift on the slime lime, packing mackerel, but it's difficult to distinguish yourself doing tedious, repetitive work. A few days go by, and I'm still getting the looks.

I'm sent to the slime line to process. Processing at sea is essentially the same as processing on land, except that the
Royal Golden
is a fishing boat and we catch the fish we process. For each trip, we have orders to fill. On this trip, Korean buyers have asked us to catch mackerel and pack them in-the-round, or uncut, which is easy work. The hard part of processing is the gutting, which involves grasping the fish and working with it, wearing out your hands. But with the mackerel, we have no gutting. We merely have to catch the mackerel, then fit them into small trays and stuff the trays into a blast freezer. After three hours, the trays are broken out, slammed against a metal shield that dislodges the frozen mackerel in neat squares, and they are packed into cases. The cases are then banded and sent down into a freezer.

I'm on the slime line for about an hour on my second processing day when I get a tap on the shoulder, and the supervisor tells me he's got a job for me. That's usually not a good sign, but I'd rather do anything than stand still and process. He takes me to a room with stainless steel walls, and a big hole in one wall where a giant funnel leads to a conveyor belt.

The supervisor hands me a shovel. “When the fish come in,” he tells me, “push 'em onto the belt.”

“Okay.”

He points at a red button on the wall. “That's the panic button.”

“Panic button?”

“Yeah. Try not to use it.”

“Okay.” He leaves. I'm off the slime line. Back here, in this nice quiet room by myself, I've got the best of everything. It's almost quiet, I've got some privacy, I can even sing to myself if I want. And all I have to do is push fish onto a conveyor belt and not use the panic button.

I look around the room. On every wall there is a panic button. People must panic a lot down here.

Then a hydraulic motor slides the roof of the room back, and I'm looking at the sky. I can hear the deck crew shouting to each other and I tilt my head back to feel the rain in my face. I see darkening clouds, and I'm admiring the purple hue of the sunset when a large net is swung directly over me by a giant crane, blocking out the sky. The net is full of fish.

One of the fishermen on deck sticks his head over my hole. “Stand in the corner!” he screams.

“WHAT?” I can barely hear him over the noise of the hydraulic motors and the sea.

“Stand in the goddamned corner! Get out of the way!”

I realize what is going on just in time. I leap back into the corner just as the net opens and dumps several tons of fish into the room. I am suddenly chest-high in fish, and most of them are still moving. Then the roof closes again and I am in a dark room full of live fish.

There is nothing else to do, so I start pushing the fish toward the hole.

After about twenty minute of pushing, I've got the fish level down to my waist. The fish down this low are mostly dead, killed by the fall or the pressure of having tons of fish on top of them for so long. This, combined with the fact that I can now move most of my lower body, permits me to get my legs into the shoveling and the second half goes easy. By the time I am walking around picking up the last of the fish off the floor and tossing them through the hole in the wall, I'm feeling pretty pleased with myself.

Then the roof slides back again. I leap back into the corner.

Another netful of live fish, still flipping seawater off their tails as they crash into the room. This time, the shipment comes up to my neck. I can barely move, and I can feel the pressure of all the fish making it hard to breathe. I suddenly see the value of a panic button, though I can't imagine how you could use it if you actually needed it, as your arms would be under fish level.

I try wriggling my way up, and after about three or four minutes, I'm on top of the pile of fish, gasping for air. Some guy sticks his head through the hole and yells, “Hey are you gonna push these fish through or what?”

I sit on the big pile of fish and start pushing them through with my feet. This works pretty well for a while, but my legs get too tired to move after a bit so I find the shovel, stand on a pile of fish, and start shoveling. This goes okay until my back gets tired, so I sit down and use my feet again.

The guy sticks his head through the hole. “Slow down, man, you're killing us.”

Okay, that's nice. I can slow down for a bit. I realize there are people sorting the fish on the other side of the line, and I must have been backing them up. I try to find a nice rhythm. I get enough fish out to start using the shovel, and before I know it, the fish room is empty again.

The roof comes back, the net comes into view. The fisherman looks down at me. I am panting. He laughs.

“Next load is perch. You know what that means.”

I've got no idea what it means, but it doesn't sound good. It isn't. A load of bright red fish come slamming down into the bin, and every one of them has a thousand spiny splinters across its back. I try to wade into them and the red quills rip into my rain gear. I'm getting poked all over. I can't push the fish because the spines go through my gloves. I can't sit on the fish and kick them out because the spines go through my ass. I'm in a room full of needles.

Finally, I lose my temper and start slamming the fish through the hole, screaming at the top of my lungs. There's no other way to end this. After about twenty minutes, I've got enough of them out to use the shovel, so the last half goes a lot easier. When the load of perch is gone, the roof opens up and the fisherman is laughing.

“Last one before break,” he tells me. “This one's mackerel.”

Mackerel. Sweet, oily, smooth, unspined mackerel. Last time I was pushing mackerel, I didn't know how good I had it. I struggle with the mackerel, shoveling armloads through the hole. Fuck 'em if I'm going too fast, this is the last one before break. Let them go faster. I can feel the muscles in my arms, as well as my legs, cramping up now. When I bend over to use the shovel, my back is burning. The fucker who took me off the slime line wanted to kill me. That's what the looks meant. They tried to bury me in a fish pile, and if I lived, I'd have the most miserable job on the fucking ship. Fuckers. I love this shit. More mackerel through the hole. More, more, more. I am nearly prostrate when the last of the mackerel have gone through, and I hear the bolt on my door sliding open. I turn around and stand up straight, like I have just returned from a walk in the park. Kill me, will you.

The supervisor is looking at me. He bursts out laughing. “Those perch'll get you, won't they?” I look down at my rain gear. I'm covered all over in red needles, like a giant red porcupine. My gloves too. I reach up to scratch my nose and nearly poke my eye out.

“Take a break,” he says. “You did good.”

“You smell like fish,” Chris tells me in the galley. “I mean, I know we're working with fish, and most of us smell like fish, but you
really
smell like fish.”

The gentle rocking of the ship doesn't bother me anymore, except when I'm trying to sip my coffee. I keep spilling it down my chin. Then I realize the ship isn't doing it, my muscles have just started freezing up. I'm banging a cup of hot coffee into my own face, and the more I try to control it, the worse it gets.

“Easy, easy,” Chris says, reaching over, taking the coffee from me. “Are you all right?”

Despite myself, I'm having a fit of giggles. I'm losing it mentally too. Then my legs start to take on a life of their own, knocking up against the table. I'm losing control of my own body.

A different supervisor is walking by, sees me convulsing at the table. “You pushing just now?”

“Yeah.”

“First time?”

“Yeah.”

“Go take a hot shower. Miss the rest of the shift.”

It's a rare order. Nobody ever gets to miss the rest of a shift, not on percentage work. Everyone is getting the same percentage, so we're all motivated to make sure each other pulls their own weight. But I don't see what function I could possibly perform now, having developed some kind of palsy. I go up the stairs to the shower.

There are six showers for 180 processors; three showers for the twelve women on board and three for the men, 168 of us. Because we are divided into two shifts of ninety, I wake up and go to work with over eighty individuals using three showers.

Average shower length is about a minute. Nobody adjusts the water temperature; we just hop in, run soap over ourselves, and hop out. That was the way at Rayford too. But now I'm off shift while my group is working and the other is sleeping, and I have three showers to myself.

This is the stuff that makes life worth living. A half hour, a hot shower, the water soaking my battered muscles as I listen to the thrum of the hydraulic motors in the processing room below. I have privacy; I have heat. No one is on the other side of the shower door, waiting, for the first time in five months. I step out of the shower, and steam is coming off my skin. I crawl into my bunk and sleep, the first fully relaxed sleep of my stay on the
Royal Golden
.

It's short-lived. I wake up after about an hour, with my muscles cramping up again, only now I'm in a narrow bunk with an opposite shift worker above me. These bunks are three high, and I'm in the middle one. The more my leg cramps, the more I try to move it around to ease the pain, and the more it cramps. I can't get out of the bunk because I've only got two feet of space to work with. The pain is agonizing, and I start yelling, and the guy above me sticks his head down into my bunk.