Jeff and Charles

Hughes, Eddie, Esteban, me, Christiana, a beauty from 1945, wooden, large wheel room with 6 flat screens, 2 story crew quarters, they make it look easy, 30,000 pounds of halibut. It takes luck, skill, patience, and youth to get on a Kristiana, there are never openings, on the front dock you pitch the fish, you’re spent—in 5 days these men caught enough fish, took enough ice and bait to exhaust 4 men in 2 hours. The boat arrived clean and each coil of line in a neat spool, every tool where it should be, the top deck already smelling of lemon Joy. Getting off the boat in the morning I asked Jeff if he’d be going out at night, and he said he’d be going out all day, so when I ran into him at 9 that night he was lit, one of his crewmatessaying his goodbyes and pleading with Jeff to head back to the boat, at least take it easy, and if neither of the two be safe, and if not even that at least win the fight, and if not that the crew mate asked me to watch his back, and I agreed.

I don’t see what you’re doing here man. What are you, a secret boss? I’d kill to have your out, not to put up with the shit I have to put up with. Fucking accountant. Smart guy like you could do anything. You wanna be a deckhand?...well I..what do you wanna do, huh? Shovel ice from my boat, take your coat off and pitch fish and shovel ice? If I had your smarts, an educated—do you know I’m doing this because it’s the only thing I can do? I’ve worked my ass off to get here but it’s the only thing I can do. You have an out Jimmy, I don’t. That’s what you don’t see man. You have an out. I don’t.

Yeah but you’re just burnt out, man. You’re on one of the best boats out there, best crews. You have a wife and young kid. You make 100k a year. You work 7 months out of the year.

Fuck that, man, you wanna trade? Let’s trade. I wanna see my kid. I wanna see my family. I don’t wanna be a slave.

Do you know how many people think what you do is the coolest thing on earth? You have 5 months free. You’re doing one fo the the last things a man can do. The cube jobs are an even split of men and women. You want a woman as your boss? You want to work with women all day and deal with their shit?

Nah, I don’t want that. But you can also make it work for you, man, use the system, avoid those problems. Be in charge. Be a fucking millionaire, man.

Maybe Jeff wanted an office job in Seattle, something physically easier, a drive home from work and dinner with his wife and young daughter. Maybe he wanted to meet his neighbors and see his parents, bathe every day, not work under anyone, be his own boss. I didn’t think there was a great freedom with an office job as there were many false problems, artificial situations created in offices, many, inefficient, beaurocratic tasks. If a man played with the system and had it work in his favor, he would then be faced with the burden of sustaining his advantage, whether created by his own merit or his own manipulative charisma. At least with fishing, his work was simple and the crew share straight-forward—men either fished well or they didn’t; they were poor deck hands, in which case they would be kicked off a boat, or they were good deck hands, in which case they would prosper or at least maintain a certain percentage share of a catch (which itself would be determined by a certain amount of luck and, to a lesser yet no less relevant extent, regulation of the fishing industry).

The focus of the night began to blur. Jeff had been drinking since noon and it was nearing eleven. I had begun only a few hours earlier but was able to walk steady, unlike Jeff, who was holding himself up on the bar and stumbling about each time we went for a cigarette. A group of rowdy, brawling cannery employees arrived and Jeff gave each one a great bear hug; he outweighted any one of them by 30 or so pounds and his 6’4” stature gave him a certain reach advantage were there to be a contest of fists. He and the tall mohawed cannery worker began to exchange words of belligerence, contempt, and intimidation. I tried to intervene between the two of them, but no one was worried because each man was accustomed to fighting and no one was particularly outmatched, althought the cannery worker was far less drunk.

Nate, Nate, listen here, man, listen here. Here’s what you’re gonna do, Nate. Jeff stared at Nate seriously and intently. We stood to observe the fight. Your gonna crack my back.

Jeff waked up to Nate, turned around, and placed Nate’s arms around his back. Nate tried his best to lift and crack squat and lean and pull and pop and adjust a back in a friendly and violent and proper manner yet despite the force of his effort, Jeff’s feet did not leave the ground, and the crowd stood confused, more alarmed at the failed spinal adjustment than the aftermath of a fight. Jeff laid on his stomach and Nate got on his back with his knees on Jeff’s back and used his fists and full body weight to press the tension between Jeff’s shoulder blades, then working down each side of the spine.

After the massage we poured into a cab and Jeff fell directly onto his face twice, stumbling from chair to chair to booth to barstool. The clouds of blur landed upon my horizon and I cannot recall the sequence of the rest of the evening except the following memories: a fat woman told me to leave her table, and I commented on her rude behavior and received an apology for her cursory dismissal. I purchased a sandwich at the Chevron, and then awoke just past eight to go to the breakroom for coffee. I cooked eggs and drank orange juice and wondered how Jeff returned to his boat but wasn’t worried because the man knew his way around bars and harbors. After reading for several hours I was about to leave when Charles, the plant manager, asked me what I was doing, if I was free, and if so, to wait where I was, and oh, did I have a fishing license on me (in my back pack at all times).

We walked with his wife Marge and his small border collie Tiger to his boat, a small craft with two powerful Yamaha 150cc engines. We untied the vessel and motored out, first stopping by one of the plant waste pipes to report its exact latitude and longitude to the EPA, and then down through Ressurection Bay, passing several islands, among them Fox Island, where during WWII the Army had installed gun turrets which did not prevent the Japanese submarine from slipping through. We moored in front of a glacier and looked out to the open sea and chain of islands. We cut squid and baited hooks and dropped our line and jigged. Tiger grew nervous but was brave. It began to rain heavily and rough seas and fog ensued and we determined it was best to head back to harbor. Suddenly, on channel 16, one reserved for Coast Guard emergencies, we heard a local boat, Bad Dog, radio the Coast guard for help. They needed a tow as their main engine was out. Charles motored to the craft and there was a woman and her daughter and husband who were out on their first trip and the man was navigating the small engine cross current, getting nowhere. Charles told the man to head straight (the Dip Shit is gonna waste fuel and get nowhere doing what he's doing) and called in the boat’s coordinates to the Coast Guard. As a courtesy, we continued to keep a watch on the Bad Dog for the next 3 hours, motoring ahead, fishing, motoring to the boat to give navigation instructions, radioing in to the Coast Guard for progress reports, trolling, jigging. I took the helm for an hour and Charles insisted I eat popcorn with my left hand while navigating with my right. A typical long liner goes no faster than 7 knots, but with this powerful boar I took it to 20 knots and she was smooth and agile and jumped over the waves at time. We moored again and I pissed off the side of the boat and sought grey cod off a shelf at about 250 feet. They weren’t biting. By then my feet and legs were cold as I was without my boots and bibs yet we had been fishing in a downpour. We motored back to harbor and set down lines again at the gutpile, yet again, no bites. By then the Bad Dog had made it back to Seward, radioing to us gratefully for our escort and assistance. Year, sure, Clear. We had used some sockeye as bait to trawl and now the fillet was fully defrosted and Charles gave me the filet for my dinner. I was out of oil in the break room, but Sham insisted I fry up the fish with the used oil can next to the burner. It fried up well and made a fine dinner and I was sound asleep by 9 and shoveled 7 tons of ice from a long liner the following afternoon.

Sweet Delphinium

Upon the fall of night I rode my bicycle to the Breeze to play some pool with the prospect of female companionship, as I had recently met a twenty one year old Austrian girl a few weeks earlier, there had been romance between us (we had fucked in the filthy outback, my roommate grumbling about the stench of her pussy mid coitus, her leaving in the night, scared of the gravel, fish scales, bundles of line: it would have been a dirty shed for a lawnmower, yet two men slept and a twenty one year mountain rescue adventurer laid awake, staring at the duct tape covering the particle board ceiling, wondering if all fishermen lived in such conditions), and the feeling of female companionship was something I had lost and often longed for in my days among men, days spent carrying the burden of fish, fresh yet dead, their temperature (cold), the timing of their death (1-2 days for salmon, irrespective of its species, 3-5 days for black cod and halibut, 1-5 days for pacific cod), their capture, their internal organs, how they live to spawn and how, as many see it, how their reason for being—the spawning, the sperm and the egg, the fertilization of eggs spread into the river: men call these eggs ‘roe,’ and the Japanese, specialists in identifying what is to them ‘fresh,’ high-grade roe, evaluate this still birth, this displacement of the salmon’s reason for being, more mechanical, frenetic and calloused men stand over the refrigerated saltwater bins and speak about the similarities between men and women of the human race and their apparent counterparts in the ocean—“We all eat, consume water, work, have sex, and die. That’s about it.”—and the same man spoke about these fish, these creatures who are seen only after their recent death, as protein sources, no different than a body builder would speak about quality protein and his whey powder, one must not simply question the judgment but the sanity of such a man—indeed such a man believes his vision, his informal analysis, to be quite coherent, yet the man has already, as we have witnessed above the refrigerated saltwater bins amidst the hum of the sorting belt, bins open and filling and soon filled with hundreds of thousands of ‘pinks’—a short name for the momentary glace at the lives but certainly not the world of these fish—likened men and women, with their general goals, habits, and patterns, their key characteristics as this man sees men and women (his fellow men and women?; or perhaps some general vision of a globe, of an earth—a scientist, perhaps?) as roughly being the same as salmon, only differentiated by their shape, environment, their noises—why wouldn’t such a man see other humans as a protein source, or at least a configuration of protein to be used as machinery?, call him evil, or, generously, call him insensitive, but why not call him crazy?, why not say that the man does not see what is living in the ocean but what is only ‘freshly’ dead, that he might as well be a hog farmer were it not his supposed love of fish “Look at that pink, what a beautiful, beautiful fish, aren’t you a beautiful fish? (he brings the pink salmon close to his face, and speaks) “If you were a woman, I’d marry you," and indeed it would be his third marriage, or “She spawns her eggs out there and all the guys have a go at her”—not quite at her of course, but at her eggs—he has taken great meaning from the womb of woman, he has culled her for her egg sack, had her for a product—sujiko, for example, or ikura, as another—

The first time I saw her it was her companion who took me with her youth, her sweetness, her glasses, she was a Ranitzstava and her friend, her friend was a Ralitca, the spelling not quite the same in English but the transliteration identical and the Bulgarian spelling the same, the same as my perfect woman, the one who I had abandoned and ruined,that night I told them both my perfect woman was Bulgarian, I hadn’t ever recovered from her or what I had done to her, and, and the night grew blurry, rather than my being concerned for the love of this replacement, I reached for a wall, found an openening, discovered the expanse of outside, I wandered from the bar and walked towards the ocean and found my rest in a park shelter and slept on a picnic table, how I leave my Ralis standing, hopeful, heartbroken, bitter, poison. 

Two weeks later, dancing to local-sung music, I encountered the two again, but they were new to me. Ranitzstava had grown deeply in beauty and I fell deeply in love with her, the girl in the glasses, but again she spoke of her husband and she meant it, there was the Ralitca, again, but this time with her long hair, her long black hair to her buttocks, and I spoke her name twice, and she said she was to leave in a week and why didn’t I come with her to Veliko Turnovo, the great capital of the Bulgarian empire, the town I knew with Ralitza and her high school class, why not come with her, 23, come with her, give her a child, find something right in Bulgaria, find a woman who loves me, right in front of me, she said, come with me, maybe it didn’t work the first time, but I am your Ralica, here is my Facebook, look, I am your Ralica, I could not stand and the room blurred again, do not hit the floor, again the outside, on my bicycle swerving back and forth between the mountain and the sea and between the shrouds of cloud covering the harbor.

In the morning I was manic as I spoke in the hold pitching black cod and halibut, I was manic that I could pitch fish despite my sleepless, alcohol filled night, my hands no longer ached because my heart hurt throughout, let the tote fall on me, let me go as Felix, I threw the fish into the totes and the buckets, the skipper said I was the “fastest fish pitcher on earth,” I pointed to Hughes, crouched under the hold, throwing fish my way, and said “No, that guy, you’re looking at him,” we finished the boat and we sat with Gil and I drank three cups of coffee and read the paper.