A Working Stiff's Manifesto (15 page)

“What the fuck's the matter with you? We're trying to sleep.”

Despite the pain, I can still feel embarrassment. “You gotta help me get out of this bunk. I'm cramping up.”

The guy shakes his head, disgusted, but hops down and helps me out of the bunk. He dumps me on the floor and crawls back under his covers.

I lie on the floor for a while, trying to relax my muscles. Now I have freedom of movement, it's a lot easier, and after a while, I drift off to sleep on the floor.

The supervisor comes in and taps me awake with his boot. “We need you for a kick shift,” he says. “We let you off early, so we're bringing you on again early.”

Kick shifts are extra half-shifts, which everyone is required to work from time to time. My turn is now. I sit up, test my legs. There's slight pain there, but I have control of them at least.

“Where you want to work?” he asks. He has a clipboard in his hands. “You did a good job pushing fish. Want to go back there?”

“Sure.”

So I'm back in the fish room, with my rubber fish shovel. Now I know what to expect, I can pace myself a little better. After each load of fish, I stretch, try to relax. There is a bar in the ceiling by one of the corners and I can do a pull-up on it when the fish are coming down so that I don't get buried alive. This is obviously the bar's purpose, but no one has bothered to explain this to me. I keep an extra pair of gloves handy so I can double-glove when the perch come down and not get pricked to death. Once I learn a few tricks like this, the fish room becomes my home.

Toward the end of the two-week trip, I see myself getting out of the shower one morning and notice that I have built up pounds of muscle on my shoulders and biceps. I look like a bodybuilder. I discover the first of the fish room's benefits. The second is that no matter what else I am asked to do, it's always an improvement on what I'm doing now. The fish room is considered to be the worst job on the ship, and there's a certain status that goes along with it. Thus, when our hold is full and we are coming back into port, I am given the easiest of the off-load jobs—helping the fishermen repair nets on deck. I get to see Dutch Harbor come into view, our first look at land in sixteen days, and the misty mountains and little shacks that dot the landscape are a beautiful sight.

As with every trip, there is a crew exchange. The crew members who have finished their three-trip contract file off and say their good-byes, and we get fresh meat—new kids straight off the plane. College kids giddy with the idea of working in Alaska run around on the deck, marveling at the mountains and the giant fishing cranes, cracking jokes and struggling to pay attention as the supervisors take them through the initiation process. These kids are less than one day removed from the world, a world I realize I have all but forgotten. A world of restaurants where the customer is always right, where there are coffee shops on the corner, designer clothes, MTV, $150 sneakers, and everybody drives a car, where more than a minute in the shower every day is a reality.

I'm gonna love watching 'em squirm.

Since my hire on the
Royal Golden
, I haven't seen much of Chris, but the supervisors have taken to him, just as I did at Rayford. He is offered the job of freezer foreman for the second trip, and asks to have me on his crew. This means that I get moved out of the fish room and the job is given to one of the new kids.

The freezer is money for nothing, a walk in the park. All I have to do is stand in a giant freezer hold, wearing something that looks like a space suit without the glass face mask, and stack boxes that come down off a conveyor belt. Chris and I are alone down here in this hold, which is quiet except for the humming of the refrigeration unit and the
whoosh
of a box coming down the belt every five seconds. We have some good conversations about everyone in Alaska's favorite topic—what we're going to do with all the money when we get home.

“I'm going to start my own business,” he tells me. “I figure about ten thousand ought to get it going.”

“Doing what?”

“I don't know.”

“Sounds like a winner.”

“What are you going to do, smart guy?”

“No idea.”

“Sounds well thought out.”

“Fuck you.”

“Fuck you.”

I figure Bill Gates was having conversations like this before he came up with Microsoft.

To kill the monotony of walking back and forth with boxes, Chris and I invent a game. We put our faces over the slide in front of the conveyor belt and hold them there for as long as we can, pulling away at the last second before a sixty-pound box of frozen fish creams us. The one who can leave his face over the belt for the longest wins.

It's only a matter of a few boxes before the inevitable happens. Chris is nearly knocked unconscious, and I get a bloody nose. Boxes keep coming down the slide as we are trying to reorient ourselves. The boxes roll along the belt, then plop off onto the freezer room floor, piling up at the end of the belt.

“Oh God, my head,” Chris groans.

I think I've broken my nose, but it doesn't hurt that much, and I get up and move around. Chris has been pasted. He tries to stand but the room is spinning on him, and being in a hold of a ship that actually is spinning doesn't help. He lets loose some vomit on the floor, which freezes into a rock.

I try grabbing a box or two and stacking them myself while Chris gets his bearings, but he's not coming around. A few more boxes
whoosh
down the slide and along the belt while I watch him try to stand again.

“I'm going to put you up on the lift. Make 'em stop the line for a minute. We'll say it was an accident.”

“No. They'll cut my percentage.” He tries to stand again.

Whoosh. Whoosh
. The pile of boxes at the end of the belt is getting out of hand. We'd better say something soon or the supervisors are going to be pissed.

“I'll be okay, I just need a minute,” Chris groans.

I grab a box, and run over and stack it, then another, working double time. I jog back and forth with the boxes, trying to take two at a time. There is ice on the floor and the boxes are heavy and hard to grab. We start hitting some rough sea and the floor of the freezer hold starts moving up and down, sliding the boxes around. It's hard to walk, let alone jog, but I do my best with it. After a few minutes, there are only a few boxes lying by the belt, and I kick them all, soccer style, over to the stack while carrying two others.

Chris is able to stand by this point. He watches me work for the rest of the hour and we go up at break time and tell the supervisor that he slipped and fell.

“How come you got a bloody nose?” the super asks me suspiciously.

“I fell too.”

“Were you two fighting down there?”

“Hell, no,” I say angrily enough to deflect further questions. He eyes us warily.

But Chris is screwed. If someone gets legitimately injured on a percentage boat, he's dead weight. The company prefers that anyone with a legitimate injury stay in their cabin, so that the other working crew members can't lay eyes on his uselessness. Injured people are required to eat at their own mealtimes, after the working crew has eaten, effectively ostracized from the bunch. The purpose of this is to discourage people from claiming an injury. The company has the hope that no matter how badly you hurt yourself, you carry on with it and don't let them know.

Quitters receive the same treatment, but almost nobody quits outright. Quitting is usually accompanied by claims of a dozen suddenly remembered ailments, blown knees, carpal tunnel syndrome, claims that a relative has been in a car accident, and on and on. Because no one is ever 100 percent positive if a claim is false, it's assumed that anyone with an injury claim is lying. So Chris, who was a great worker with a real concussion, is treated like dirt. Now he has to spend a week and a half sitting in a bunk room, waiting for the hold to fill up so he can go home.

For my sins, they send me down a new kid to help in the freezer.

I'm upset about losing a friend who I enjoyed working with, but I'm even more upset after meeting William. He's the whiniest kid I've ever met. Some people should never have come to Alaska in the first place. He doesn't care about anything but going home.

He's been on the boat for less than a week and already the supervisors have moved him to three different jobs, trying to find something for him that he won't whine about. He's whined about all of them. Give the supervisors credit. They do try to find a niche where everyone works their best; but with William, they've given up. The kid isn't going to work out, and they've tossed him down in the freezer with me so they won't have to look at him.

I take it as a challenge. I'm gonna turn this kid around. By the time I'm through with him, he's going to love these boxes, he's going to protest when they tell him to take a break. This is my freezer and down here we work or we freeze.

William has the unusual habit of sitting down between boxes, which seems to me like a huge waste of energy, as the boxes for each of us come only ten seconds apart. The result is the same as doing a squat thrust between each box. This is his personal form of protest, sitting, his way of saying he wants a break; but all it is accomplishing is making him need one even more.

“Stop sitting down between boxes,” I tell him in my gruffest voice. “You're wasting your energy.”

“You're not a supervisor,” he sulks, shuffling over, stacking a box, then shuffling back and sitting down for three seconds before his next box comes down the chute.

“You're making yourself tired,” I say. “You need to stay on your feet.”

“Who're you? You're just a guy who works in a freezer. You're not a supervisor.” He sits down again.

This goes on for about fifteen minutes, and he eventually runs out of what little energy he has. I take a box, and when it's his turn to take a box, he just lets it fall off the end of the belt.

“That's your box,” I tell him, getting my own.

“I just need to sit down.”

I stack my box and another of his falls. “Dickhead, pick up your boxes! This isn't break time!” I've never worked with anyone before who has achieved his level of apathy. I'm not giving up. He's my personal experiment, and I'm going to turn him into a finely tuned, box-stacking machine. “Get your box!”

He sits and stares. I walk over to him and put my face in his face. “Get your box! Get your box! Get your box! Get your box! GET YOUR GODDAMNED MOTHERFUCKING PIECE OF SHIT BOX!”

He gets up and wordlessly gets back to work.

I see a glimmer of hope. I am the warm-hearted but tough drill sergeant and he is the hopeless private who I am going to whip into shape.

“How's pussy-boy?” one of the supervisors asks me when we come up from the freezer.

“He's great. He kicks ass. He's a regular fireball.”

“You're kidding, right?”

“No. He's a good worker.”

The supervisor eyes me warily again. He no longer believes anything I say. He shrugs “Okay, you keep him.”

“Suits me.”

The next shift is no different, perhaps even worse. William sits down between boxes and starts letting the boxes drop onto the floor after about an hour. I don't have the energy to scream at him again, so I try reasoning.

“Look, you're stuck here,” I tell him. “You signed a contract. It's only nine weeks. Nine weeks of your life, all you gotta do is stack boxes. Then you go home with five thousand dollars. Think about the five thousand dollars, man. Think what you're going to do with all that money.”

He sits and stares.

“Where do you live?” I ask him.

“Oregon.”

“Got your own place?”

“I live with my dad. He's an asshole. He keeps throwing me out.”

“Five grand, man. You don't have to take any of his shit anymore. Five grand, you get your own place. Five thousand dollars. You could have women eating out of your hand. Five grand. Think of it.” I'm getting myself pumped up, imagining all the fun I'm going to have when I get out of this shithole freezer. William isn't talking, so I tell him about my plans, which come to me as I talk. I'm going to put down a security deposit on a beautiful inner city apartment and buy furniture and get cable hooked up legally and sit on my ass all day on my new leather couch and watch bad television. I'm going to take beautiful women out on dates and walk along the river with them. I'm going to find a job, a nice job that I can stand where I work with people I like, doing something satisfying, something that makes me feel good about myself, while I'm making enough money to pay my bills and maybe save a little extra every month. If you've got five thousand dollars, you have the time to actually look for something decent. I tell William all this and realize that I'm becoming carried away with my own enthusiasm.

“I quit,” says William.

“Fucker quit,” I tell the super.

“He what?”

“He quit. He wants to go sit in his cabin until we get back to Dutch.”

“I thought you said he was a fireball.”

“He started to show some promise. I might have exaggerated.”

“No shit.” The supervisor rolls his eyes. “I'm gonna send you down someone else. I don't want his head smashed in and I don't want you to make him quit.”

“Fine. Give me someone worth a shit this time.”

“I know what I'm gonna do with my cash,” Little Jimmy tells me. Little Jimmy is my new partner, a hyperactive, energetic non-stop-talker who is everything William was not. He's been on the
Royal Golden
for seven contracts, which is nearly a year of his life. He's covered in tattoos and he seems to have a permanent nosebleed, which others tell me is from cocaine binges between each of his contracts. The bleeding nose makes him a bad bet to put around uncovered fish, so he pulls freezer duty, which he doesn't like.