A Working Stiff's Manifesto (17 page)

I enjoy thirty seconds of rest and inactivity while the
Killoran
chugs over to the next pot. John stands on the deck with a hook, throws the hook around the buoy, which is just a big rubber ball, and reels it in. He hooks the buoy rope around a winch, which hauls in the whole line in a matter of seconds, pulling the pot up from the deep. If it goes too fast, the pot could slam into the bottom of our boat, which is not good. So this is a job for someone who knows what they're doing.

John is a little quick with the winch and the pot bumps the bottom of the
Killoran
.

“John! You fucking idiot! Watch my boat!” Despite the fact that the whole crew knows what they're doing, and works fairly well together, the skipper calls us each fucking idiots at least once an hour. As a new guy, he expects nothing from me, so I get it less than the others. I see now why the guy who quit before me “couldn't take it.” Boris tells me that compared to other skippers, ours is benign.

We pull up another half-empty crab pot, dump the crab out onto the deck, shovel them down into the hold. I rebait the pot, and splash, back down it goes.

Because we work eighteen hours on and four off, I lose track of time. I have no idea how long I've been out here. I wake up sometimes in the dark and go to bed when it's light out. I'm pulling watch, which involves sitting in the bridge looking out the window, and trying to keep myself awake by seeing if I can figure a way to find the exact date.

Every one of us has to pull two hours of watch every other day, so instead of four hours of sleep we get two. Obviously, it's very difficult to stay awake when you're alone in a quiet, dark cabin and exhausted beyond words, so there's a little device that beeps every twelve minutes to wake you up. The beeping is loud, and I've been dead asleep every time it's gone off. This time I'm determined to stay awake for twelve whole minutes.

I dig around on the bridge to try to find something like a logbook that keeps records of the date. Nothing. I guess the skipper takes them to bed with him. I look at the Loran, which is some kind of navigational system in which I was given a ten second training course, and I notice that it has a date on it in the lower right hand corner. I figured I've been out here nine days. In fact, it's been sixteen.

The skipper wakes up and comes onto the bridge, tells me we're going to take it easy today. Everybody but me, that is. As I'm in charge of the simplest thing on the boat, the bait cans, I have to get a hundred or so bait cans ready while everyone else sleeps in.

I head into the freezer, where I find cod and blocks of herring, which I smash apart with a sledgehammer. I pack the pieces into the little plastic bait cans, then put the lids on. Dawn is coming and everyone else on the boat except Boris, who is pulling watch, is asleep. My fingers are frozen and seawater keeps splashing over the bow, soaking me. Herring oil runs all over the deck. Cleaning it up will be another of my jobs. I stagger around like a robot, my mind blank. I don't even think of getting back any more, or about how much longer this is going to last. I just think about the next ten minutes, and when is the next time I get to sleep.

The cook on board is a Thai named Keno who can't cook for shit, but he thinks he can. He dumps a quart of soy sauce and ginger on everything and then overheats it, so for the past two and a half weeks, I've been eating nothing but burned seafood with an Asian flavor to it, which everyone else on the boat seems to like.

We are sitting in the galley and the boat is rocking, and my shitty meal is trying to slide away from me, and I throw my fork down. “You need to learn how to fucking cook,” I tell him. I get up and toss my meal in the trash, and he lunges at me.

We tussle around in the galley for a few seconds before we are pulled apart. We all sit back down. I get a box of Ritz crackers out of the pantry and eat those instead, the powder building up in my dry mouth. Nobody looks at each other. The break ends and we pull our rain gear back on and head out onto the deck in silence.

When the last pot in the string is pulled up, the skipper says quietly over the loudspeaker, “Okay guys, clean up.” It's not an order I've heard before, and I look over at John, who shrugs.

“Clean up the deck,” he explains. “We're going back to Dutch Harbor.”

“But the hold's not full.”

“He's given up on this trip,” Boris says. “The first crab we caught have been down there two weeks already. They'll be dead if we don't take them in soon. Besides, when guys start fighting, it's usually time to go back.”

We're going back. Just like that, it's over.

As we head back into Dutch, the skipper takes every opportunity to tell us how disappointed he is in all of us. “I've never had a trip like this before,” he says. “You guys all over each other. Fighting like a bunch of jailbirds. Just a bunch of lazy bastards. You make me sick.” He goes on like this for a good while every time we have a meal. The first time, I was hurt by it, because I've pretty much poured my heart and soul into this fucking miserable job for the past three weeks; but now I just tune him out and imagine how damned good it's going to be to lie down in the bed at the Seattle Youth Hostel and get off this fucking boat and out of fucking Alaska. I'm thinking about having a beer in Pioneer Square while I watch him tell me how worthless I am.

“You don't know shit about crab fishing,” he finishes.

No argument there. I'd been pretty clear about that when he hired me.

After he has gone, Boris shrugs and laughs. “He doesn't like it when we don't catch a lot of crab,” he tells me. “He's a sweetheart when the pots are full.”

“Fuck him.”

We're pulling into Dutch, and I'm in my bunk packing my things into my duffel bag, when the skipper comes in. “You and Boris go into town for food,” he tells me. “Then we're going back out tomorrow morning.”

“I'm done,” I tell him.

“Your contract says one shipment. We've only got half a shipment on board.”

“Boris told me two weeks. I've done that and more.”

“I don't know what Boris told you. You signed a contract.”

Before I came aboard the
Killoran
, I signed a contract with tiny print that, characteristically, I didn't bother to read. It was longer than the Constitution. After I'd finished the first sentence, where I saw my percentage listed at one-third of one percent of our total catch, I just signed.

“Just pay me what you owe me.”

“You only get half of .3 then.”

“Sounds good.”

“Get off my boat then,” he says.

“Not till I get my check.”

He turns and walks out.

An hour later, he comes back with a check—$438.

“You've got to be fucking kidding me.”

“It's all there,” he tells me. He's expecting this argument, and he's got a copy of the contract with him, and a copy of the check the processing company wrote him. He pulls out a calculator and some receipts. I look at the check and realize that I've also been billed for the gas that the
Killoran
has used, and the food we've eaten. After deductions, that's all I've got left.

“You charged me for the food that fucking excuse for a cook made me? If I knew I was paying, I'd have cooked it my damned self.”

The skipper shrugs.

“It wasn't a good trip,” Boris tells me when he sees my check. But he can't really take my side because tomorrow morning he'll be back out there again. And I can't complain to the authorities because if I stick my head in the courthouse, I'll get carted out for blowing off my community service.

I shake Boris' hand and head off to the Dutch Harbor airport.

I'm on a plane heading out of Dutch, and I can see the snowcapped mountains of Alaska below. I feel like a prisoner out of jail after a lengthy sentence, on his way back to rejoin the world.

So I got fucked, but it happens. It happens a lot. There's nobody there to stick up for you. A long time ago, before the Depression, the labor movement was a group of courageous men standing in front of armed Pinkerton Guards with nothing but an idea—that they should be treated fairly. Now it's a bunch of Italians burying each other in stadium cement. When you're fucked, you're fucked, and if you complain you're a crybaby.

That's the thing about sticking up for the poor, you can get rich doing it. Then you're not poor anymore. Then who do you stick up for?

Look at the Soviet Union, a country founded on the notion that people who work for a living should be respected, cared about. It didn't do well. Now that one social experiment is used as a cautionary tale for anyone who thinks that people who work for a living have rights. It is almost a rationale to not respect your workers, to piss on them any way you can, to promote the highly successful capitalist ideal. Hey, I think I'll keep the money for your plane ticket. Why? Because the U.S. is still around and Russia went to hell. You don't like it, go stand in a bread line in Moscow.

I'm walking through the Seattle airport, and I can see a skyline, buses, highways, women, all things I haven't laid eyes on in quite a while. I'm walking from the gate when I notice Little Jimmy coming in the other direction.

“Back to work, brother,” he says, and laughs as he walks by me. But his laugh is coarse and mirthless and he doesn't wave.

I check into the Seattle Youth Hostel and enjoy a beer, the beer I have been fantasizing about for seven months. I look around at the people at the bar, a mixed crew. How many of them are happy in their work? How many of them are happy with their mates, for that matter or their apartments, or their pets? Is it all just a series of compromises, finding the best possible alternative at the time?

There's a Special Forces training center near here, and I wind up talking to a Green Beret sergeant who has just been lost in the jungle for thirteen days. He's having the beer he was fantasizing about for the last two weeks.

“I realized something about life while I was out there,” he tells me, after I have told him my tale of Alaskan woe. He stares at me unsteadily through cloudy eyes as I wait for the words of wisdom. “Drinkable water.”

“Drinkable water?”

“Drinkable water.” He nods sagely, looking at his beer. “As long as you've got drinkable water, you don't have any real problems.”

This is the kind of opiate-of-the-masses shit that's everywhere now, on bumper stickers, on little pamphlets that people used to leave for me in lieu of a tip when I was waiting tables. Somewhere there's a nineteen-year-old girl who just got pregnant or a father of three who just lost his job. They think they've got real problems, and I bet the taps in their kitchens are running fine. But I'll give this guy the benefit of the doubt. After a near-death experience, you can go around saying crap like this for a little while. He falls off his stool and they throw him out.

I chat with a girl who is a marketing rep for a company that sells beeswax. She tells me about all the uses for the product. Apparently, it's in almost everything, and she won't rest until they start making cars out of it. She has energy and enthusiasm about her job, but I know that if I meet her again a year from now, she'll be excited about her new job, which will be selling something else. “What happened with the beeswax?” I'll ask. “Oh, I found something better. Now I'm CHIEF marketing rep for a company that sells mink dung.” She has the business mind-set, the ability to get excited about anything, and beeswax is just the focus of today's enthusiasm. The important thing is her position in the company.

I wish I could have that blinders-on approach to my work. It would make everything so much easier. Just go to work, work, and go home; and it doesn't matter what you spend the day doing, as long as you're moving up in the company. Making cars, selling beeswax, gassing Jews. A job's a job.

That's how you move up in the world.

Maybe I'll give it a try.

T
HE
I
NTERNET
-B
RAINWASHING
D
EATH
R
AY

Back in the
world, with money.

While I was away, it seems the entire world has changed. The Internet has saved us all. When I went to Alaska, there were poor people, unemployed people, people stuck in dead-end jobs. Now everyone is running their own booming Internet business.

I learn this while I'm on a date, dating being something I can actually afford to do now, at least for a little while. This girl has a job managing a website that provides advice for men who want to go out on dates, and she is the female voice. She writes articles about what kinds of flowers to get, where to go, how to make the woman feel comfortable, what current movies are a good choice—all basically common sense advice for people who don't have any of their own. The website is getting thousands of hits a day, making millions of dollars, and shares of it are on the stock market, where their value is soaring.

People are actually investing in a website that tells them what to do on a date. The old notions of investment have gone out the window, along with courteous service, and our ability to make ships and cars. It is no longer necessary to have skills or materials to become a millionaire. Now you can just type some clichéd advice into your computer and have people pay you to look at it.

I try not to sound disrespectful as I ask her questions about her job. I certainly don't want to make her uncomfortable, as I'm in the presence of a dating expert. I ask her where she gets the information she dispenses. She must be going out on a nightly basis to be as well informed as she is.

“Actually, I hardly ever go out,” she tells me, without a sense of irony. Maybe she's just telling me this so I won't think she's a slut, or maybe in order to be an Internet expert, one doesn't even need knowledge of the subject of their expertise. This is marvelous. A whole new wave of business, lacking function, skill, and wisdom. Brave New World, here we come.