When I was a young buck growing up in the backwoods of Washington State I was reckless, carefree, and ignorant as most young American men are. During my formative years my view of the world was skewed by the many youths in my county I had known that had either died or who had become horribly mangled living just as wildly and freely as I did. I understood at an early age that I was neither invincible nor would I live forever, and as such my personal philosophy between the ages of 17 to 24 was to have as much fun and as many laughs as I could before I was forced to say adios to this old world. Which basically meant I had to be stoned from the time I opened my eyes until the time I closed them at night.

I was at that stage in my life when this story took place. I was 20 at the time, less than a month shy of my 21^st birthday. I had a job as a subcontracted mail carrier, which meant I truly wasn’t an employee of the postal service therefore not bound by their rules and regulations: piss tests, codes of conduct, etc. It was the perfect job for a stoner such as me as my only responsibility was to drive my bosses canopy covered truck over the gravel country roads from a flyspeck of a town in northeastern Washington state up to the Canadian border smoking reefer and a delivering mail as I went. I had two mail routes per day – a morning route and an afternoon route. In between those two mail routes I had a three hour window to do as I pleased. It was great for me because it gave me time to eat lunch, swim in the pure waters of mountain bound lakes, jack-off to nudie magazines that would never be delivered and basically do whatever my stoned self wanted to do.

My mail route took me right to the Canadian Border and on occasion I’d hand the bundle of mail to the Border Agent then with a wink and a smile I’d pass onto foreign soil for my three hour break. On those lunch breaks spent in the country of Canucks I’d promptly speed to the nearest town and load up on bottles of booze before I’d head back down to the land of the free and the home of the brave; because in Canada unlike in the States, the legal drinking age was 19 instead of 21. Needless to say when I crossed the Borders I always had my pipe and my weed with me, not because I didn’t know it was illegal to carry those items with me, but at the time forethought and intelligence were not my best of friends.

It was on one such hot August afternoon of 1999 that I was exiting the great country of Canada when I found out that the U.S. Border Patrol didn’t take none to kindly to the shenanigans of a freethinking, ganja toting, mailman as myself.

I pulled my truck to the stopping point at the Frontier, Washington Border crossing and waited for the U.S. Border Patrol officer on duty to exit his office, collect the mail I had for him and let me back into my country of birth. Outside my windshield the sun was perched high in the royal blue sky amongst wispy cotton-ball clouds. Lush evergreen trees carpeted the surrounding mountains, their treetops swayed in the breeze. A Song Sparrow’s playful melody carried on the light, warm wind that blew through the open windows of the cab of my truck. With my sunglasses guarding red streaked eyes I ran a hand through my hair and waited without a care in the world.

A few long minutes later the on duty Border Agent came to my passenger side window. As per usual I leaned across the seat and said hello while I passed him the bundle of mail. As was unusual he took the mail with one hand and with the other he reached into my vehicle, snatched my backpack from the floorboard which made a dull clink sound and said with a stern, tight lipped face, “Shut off the vehicle and come inside with me.”

Panic, terror, confusion and every other synonym for extreme fright exploded like an atom bomb inside of me. Sweat which hadn’t been on my body only a fraction of a second earlier oozed out my pores. My left hand wrapped tight around the steering wheel. My right hand gripped the gearshift. My left foot pinned down the clutch. My right foot hovered over the accelerator. In the time it took for the blood pumping muscle in my chest to make one palpitation I fantasized about not being a law abiding citizen and instead dropping the hammer and spraying loose asphalt in the Border Agent’s face as I sped south to freedom.

Then he spoke again. That time the Border Agent used a lower tone of voice that was infused with threat and authority. “I said shut off the vehicle and come inside with me.”

I complied.

I reversed the key out of the ignition, exited the truck and followed the man in uniform towards his lone office set on the imaginary line that separates America and Canada.

Inside, the office had the dimensions of $20 a night hotel room. The wood paneled walls were lined with shiny lacquered plaques and officially stamped awards sent from one governmental organization to stroke the ego of another. In the corner the cycloptic red eye of a coffeemaker signaled it was on. Behind the Border Agent’s desk the Stars and Stripes as well as the forest green flag of Washington State were pinned to the wall. Between the two flags a picture Bill Clinton stared at me with lifeless eyes and a plastic smile. With the two of us inside and the door closed behind, the air had the rich, acrid smell of burnt coffee mixed with a hint of dreams that had long ago died.

“Have a seat and remove your sunglasses”, the Agent said. His outstretched hand signaled towards the hard, plastic chair opposite from him.

I complied.

He set my backpack upon the desk between us. The contraband inside made a heavy thump against the wooden desktop. Next he rested his elbows on said desktop, folded his hands together as if in prayer and stared at me in silence examining me. The sweat that had before only oozed out of my pores then flowed freely; my black T-shirt which read:

THE LAB CALLED YOUR BRAIN IS READY sucked tight against my un-muscular frame. I felt the red spider webs over my eyes become redder, to the point I was afraid tears of blood might dribble down my cheeks. His crew cut was dark yellow, the color of French fries fresh out of a hot grease bath. The few thin hairs that passed for a moustache between his nose and the smirk of his upper lip were the same shade. His blue eyes were steely and calculating. Unlike me he was smooth, cool, as if every day he sat in that wooden chair of his and destroyed people’s lives for a living; in retrospect he probably did.  “Let me start by seeing your Driver’s License.”

“Okay”, I mumbled nervously before handing him my picture ID.

The Border Agent held my license up and looked form the small plastic picture of me to the life size version across from him and then back to the small plastic picture. I couldn’t think. I couldn’t move. I was mannequin stiff. If breathing hadn’t have been an involuntary function I probably wouldn’t have done that either.

“Now Mr. Vaught, Do you know why I stopped you today?”

I shook my head from shoulder-to-shoulder and answered, “No, I have no idea.” The words came out only because my brain had forced them out of my mouth.

He reacted to my words by tightening his glare on me. I could almost see the crosshairs in his pupils as he replied. “You have no idea?”

I said nothing.

“Let’s just say that I got a call from someone across the border and they informed me that I should, and I quote ‘keep my eyes peeled’ for you. Do you have any idea why I would get a call like that?”

“Really?” I asked trying to stay as calm and sound as innocent as possible.

I could tell from the smug smile and upraised eyebrows on my opponents face that he was enjoying that particular game of cat and mouse as there was no doubt in either of our minds as to who was the cat and who was the mouse.

“Well why don’t we go ahead and have a look in here then, shall we?” The Border Agent said. Opposite him I sat rigid in my chair. My body leaked sweat. The teeth set in my jaws chattered out an S.O.S. to my brain. Without my consent the Border Agent laid hands upon my backpack. My psyche shouted out to him that we shouldn’t have a look in there, that we should both just call it a day – he should just stay at the Border where he belonged and I should get to delivering the letters, packages and parcels that all the great Americans on my mail route were depending on receiving that afternoon. Alas both of our psychic abilities were nil and he never heard the words that my mind screamed.

He unzipped my backpack and I said a silent prayer to the angel of death asking him to come and take the Border Agent’s life. Sadly as prayers of destruction often go, it went unanswered.

With mock surprise the Border Agent withdrew two quart bottles of Canadian Whiskey and set them on the table. “Well Mr. Vaught, these bottles right here just earned you an MIP. Let me clarify: an MIP is short for Minor in Possession of alcohol.”

When those words left his lips and infiltrated my ears I envisioned three wooden ships, each ship bore a large white sail with bold black writing upon it – one was labeled: MY LIFE, one was labeled: MY FUTURE, one was labeled: MY DREAMS. All three ships swirled round and round the outskirts of a dark, storming, authoritarian whirlpool.

Out of the side pouch the Border Agent produced a velvet bag the size of a small purse from which he extracted my hand-blown glass pipe. He waved it in my face like a judge’s gavel saying, “And this bad boy right here just earned you a Possession of Marijuana Paraphernalia ticket”, after a pause he added, “and it also looks like we’ll be confiscating your vehicle today.”

At that point on my mental movie screen I watched in frozen horror as the ships of my being drew closer and closer and moved faster and faster not only to one another but also to the gurgling darkness in the center of that ominous eddy.

The Border Agent, unaware of my cerebral apparitions, carried on with his task. From the final zippered pocket he took out what I knew would be the coup de grace, a small metal breath mint container. He popped open its lid. His eyes opened wide, happy. Instantly the smell of burnt coffee and the death of dreams was replaced by the sweet, skunky scent of marijuana. “What have we here?” The Border Agent laughed out the words while he picked up the green packed plastic baggy from within. In a ridiculing tone he said, “Congratulations this just earned you a Possession of Marijuana ticket as well as a $10,000 fine.”

Upon hearing that final sentenced I winced as if in pain. For the microsecond that my eyes were closed I witnessed all three of the ships that represented me as they were sucked down, broken and drowned in the axis of that swirling vortex of evil, black, hopeless water.

Before I could retract them the words, “The bags not mine”, shot from my mouth.

The Border Agent calmly put his hands in his lap then looked from the two bottles of whiskey, to the pipe, to the bag of weed, to the gutted backpack on the tabletop between us, then up to me. “Well then, whose bag is it?” He asked enunciating every word slowly, clearly.

“It’s my friend’s bag. I gave him a ride last night after a party and he left it in my truck”, then I topped my lie off with the words, “I swear.”

Again we sat in silence. I tightened every muscle attached to my skeleton to keep myself from jittering. I know I would have sweated if there had been any water left in my body. The Border Agent didn’t jitter, he didn’t need to he wasn’t the one in the hot seat. He simply cocked his head, concentrated his gaze upon me and with an expression that told me he saw clean through my subterfuge of bullshit and asked. “Does this friend of yours have a name?”

Knowing that I couldn’t give him the name of one of my real friends or the name of someone I despised. I simply combined two names of people I had less than rosy feelings for and replied. “Les Williams.”

“Les Williams.” The Border Agent repeated. He then picked up the handset from the telephone base on his desk as he said, “Well if you have a phone number for Mr. Williams we can just give him a call and get this big misunderstanding cleared right up.”

I squeezed my muscles as hard as I could but it wasn’t hard enough to keep my bones from quaking. I opened my mouth to tell another lie but instead confessed. “The bag isn’t my friend’s it’s mine.”

“Interesting”, was the Border Agents reply before he made a few notes on his clipboard. Next he stood up, walked to my side of the desk, pulled me up by the elbow and led me to a small holding cell. The cubicle was the size of a toilet stall at a public restroom and the walls were painted a hideous Pepto Bismol pink. With me inside the criminal waiting room he remarked, “You’ll wait in here until the Sheriff gets up here.” He then shut the heavy steel door and locked it from the outside.

Alone with my thoughts in that ugly, claustrophobic room I sat on the singular aluminum bench that was mounted to the wall and brooded over the self inflicted wound of a predicament I was in. I tied my spirit to the whipping post of naivety and flogged myself with a cat ‘o’ nine tails made of foolishness, fear, shame, self pity, anger, failure, bitterness, misery and disappointment. When my soul was raw and bleeding I switched from kicking my own ass and contemplated what I would tell my parents, then my thoughts drifted to what my parents would tell my five older sisters. As I saw it, life as I knew it was over; any future plans I had had perished as soon as the Border Agent opened my backpack. Laughter exited my throat and filled that small room as I realized that I had just inherited the title of BLACK SHEEP that had been passed down through the family.

How long I was in that cramped chamber I’m not sure. It could have been minutes. It could have been hours. My next memory was of the golden haired Border Agent. He swung open the door to the holding cell and said, “Follow me.” As I followed him into the main office he announced, “Lucky for you we can’t confiscate the vehicle as it’s not registered in your name.”

Unlucky for me was the fact that as I rounded the corner back into the main office. I locked eyes with the very reason the truck couldn’t be confiscated. There on the other side of the room stood the owner of the mail truck, my boss. My boss was a large, sandy haired man who stood a head taller than I. He’d been a football player back in the day and still had the build of one. Though he was round of face at that time he still could have cleaned my clock if he had been so inclined.

At the desk sat the Sheriff, an older man with more salt than pepper on his scalp and who was big in the belly. He was busy transferring information from the Border Agent’s clipboard to pink pieces of paper. The sheriff spoke to me and I spoke back to him. He handed me the pink slips of paper, I signed them and handed them back. What was said and what I signed I haven’t a clue. I don’t even know if he read me my rights. I do know that the entire time I sat opposite the sheriff that my boss crossbowed me with his eyes and I knew it was only the presence of the armed law officers that kept him from doing just that.

When all was said and done the Sheriff unrolled the rear passenger window after he’d placed me in the backseat of his cruiser. Cold steel cuffs snapped tight around my wrists, the only pocket on my shorts stuffed with tickets. The sun was still in the sky. The coniferous trees still danced in the wind. The Song Swallows still harmonized. But the scene had lost all vibrancy and color. Southward bound we went.

         The air was crisp, clean and deceptively cold for a sunny day as dockworkers used the bowlines to secure the Northern Jaeger to the wharf. When the ship was ratcheted tight the deckhands unfolded aluminum stairs, and gingerly rested them on the concrete of the harbor. In no time at all conveyor belts poked out of the belly of the Northern Jaeger, their legs rested on dry land, their brown canvas belts turned in anticipation of the offload. I coughed when the unindustrialized Alaskan air that greeted me was interrupted by the stench of human progress. The wind had blown a burst of black diesel exhaust from the smoke stacks of the ship docked beside us directly into my face. On that note I headed back to the galley just in time to hear Mario yell out my name on the roll call of who was going to be working where and on what shift for that offload.

“Byron Jackson, Ryan Blume, Char-les Vaught and Eduardo Holmes…”

“It’s just Ed, not Eduardo”, Ed corrected Mario.

Mario continued as if he hadn’t heard Ed at all. “Alright all of you need to go and meet Ray down in the fishmeal-hold and start getting that shit offloaded pronto.”

Just like a game of follow the leader I jumped in line and followed my brethren from the galley, through the factory and down to what I guessed had to of been the lowest point of the ship. If I had thought the factory was the belly of the beast then the fishmeal-hold was definitely the asshole of the beast.

“Come on in fellas”, Ray the grouchy old fishmeal technician said before he lit the white cigarette that rested between the grimy blonde moustache and beard on his face.

The four of us; Byron, Blume, Ed and me, we stepped through a cut steel doorway into a room filled with so much bagged up fishmeal we could only stand single file. Now, whereas the factory was a cramped, moist and bitterly cold workspace and the freezer-hold was a deep, ice-laden cavern; the fishmeal-hold was yet another unique microclimate onboard the Northern Jaeger. Immediately the soft flesh on the insides of my nostrils tightened and cracked from the heat and lack of humidity in the room. Not only was the air brutally hot and desert dry it also reeked of fishmeal which had a fishy, dried urine kind of smell. The stench was so thick in the fishmeal-hold it immediately permeated my hair, my clothes and my pores. It wrapped itself around me like an invisible yet horribly smelling second skin. Around us were white plastic sacks about the size and shape of bags of dog food, each bag weighed 80lbs and was filled with dried fish flakes commonly known onboard as fishmeal. The bags were stacked wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling. A thin walkway ran from the door we had passed through to the center of the room where a black rubber conveyor belt cut through the ceiling at a 45 degree angle.

We followed Ray to the conveyor belt as he popped a switch on the side of it with a punch from his fist. The black rubber belt squealed to life as it slowly began to turn on its ball-bearing rollers. “Have fun fellas”, Ray cackled as he walked out past us and back out the walkway into the engine room. I suppose he could have told us what to do but it was obvious.

Around the conveyor belt the four of us stood as if in a heat induced trance and watched the belt turn and turn and turn. Blume’s blood dripping eyeball tattoo on his right shoulder cried tears of sweat down his arm. Byron’s rich black flesh had already begun to dehydrate and turn the color of ash around his nostrils and the sides of his mouth. Ed’s face where it wasn’t covered with bourbon colored hair was as red as the devil’s ass and looked to be just as sweaty too. Me, I stripped out of my thick flannel shirt, wool hat and gloves, down to my steel-toed rubbers, sweat pants and already soaked long-john shirt. I twisted my greasy hair into a bun on the back of my head as Ed broke the silent spell we were under with his soiled baritone, “Well boys, let’s get to the rat killing.”

I slid a bag from the stack onto my shoulder eager to be the first one to christen the belt. In my eagerness my knees nearly buckled under the load. I had been hunched over the viscera table for the past 33 days and realized in that moment that whatever muscle I had built up during the last offload had atrophied back into nothingness. I didn’t fall over though. I strained, gritted my teeth, blew hot air out of my mouth, caught my balance, turned on my heel and tossed the bag onto the rotating rubber belt. We all watched without a word spoken as it was carried up through the ceiling out of sight.

“One down, 10,000 to go” Byron murmured without cracking a smile. Ed began to snicker out of his nose which turned into a hyena’s cackle of a laugh. Fire Crotch and I followed suit and laughed right along with him. Byron was the last to crack up but when he did it was high pitched and awkward and sounded like it should of came from a woman who had the giggles from farting in church. I can’t speak for the rest of them but I didn’t laugh because it was funny, I laughed because it was true and I knew just from tossing that one bag on the conveyor belt that by the end of my time spent in the fishmeal-hold I’d want to willingly crawl into a body bag.

The next few hours were broiling, dirty and sweaty. As we worked on in the hot oven that was the fishmeal-hold I got used to the dried urine fishy smell but the hellish heat and the way the flakes of dried fish stuck to my sweat and dissolved into my pores I couldn’t get used to. There was a point where I wished I had had the courage of my convictions earlier and quit, but I hadn’t and so I suffered on. My only form of solace was one that I sought for comfort anytime I was in an uncomfortable situation onboard the Northern Jaeger and that was this: I might be a poor bastard in a miserable situation but at least I wasn’t alone in my misery. I don’t recall a word being spoken between the four of us during that time in the fishmeal-hold as we couldn’t waste our breath on idle conversation but used it and every drop of energy we could muster on the task at hand. That doesn’t mean we were as silent as salmon. There were a lot of guttural noises made by us, noises usually reserved for power lifters at the gym who are working their demons out. In between those harsh, hoarse, throaty growls we cursed up a storm, which says a lot since we all had filthy mouths to begin with.

At the 11 hour mark Blume turned to me and asked, “Is it that time of the month?”

Confused, cotton-mouthed, and covered in gummy-grime ooze I answered, “No… What?”

“Are you sure about that?”

Blankly I asked, “What? What are you talking about?”

He pointed at my chest. I followed his finger and saw what he was talking about. My once white long-john shirt had turned an orange-grayish-brownish color and it was streaked with red. Instantly I checked my hands, my arms and then touched my face and found the cause of the red. My nose was bleeding, for how long I didn’t know. I had been in such an overheated daze I didn’t realize I was leaking my life’s blood all over myself. Then I looked down at the floor and saw drops of blood all around me in a steady line from where I had been pulling bags all the way to the conveyor belt. I looked up at Ed who slammed a bag on the conveyor belt and said, “Holy shit greenhorn, I was wondering when the hell you were gonna figure out your nose was bleeding. Get you’re ass out in the engine room and get that nose of yours under lock down.”

Immediately I pinched both nostrils shut and stormed out of the fishmeal-hold into the engine room where I shivered as it was noticeably colder than the kiln I had just been in. Steam rose from my overheated body as I unplugged my nose to check the flow of blood as I did so two ample drops of crimson plopped from my face onto my steel-toed rubbers. I re-pinched the broken blood dam that was my nose and walked over to the squat, engine oil coated sink in the corner of the room. With my head over the sink I gazed down at the reflection in the thin layer of oil sheen on the bottom of the basin. I had read once that the French seer Nostradamus as well as the Renaissance era English born occultist John Dee had both stared into bowls of water to divine the future; a technique known as scrying. I thought of those two and the future visions they had had as I stared at my likeness and was shocked to see what stared back wasn’t me. The reflection I saw had haunted forests where eyes should be, a slick, black handlebar moustache around its mouth and fierce wildling curls framed its face like a crown of razor-wire; what stared back wasn’t the image of me, a man, but that of a savage beast. In my parched and feverish brain I thought maybe I was looking through time at my future self. But just as I was getting lost in the reflection a ruby bead slipped from my fingers down into my scrying device rippling the me that one day might be into a thousand ever expanding circles.

I stayed bent over that grungy sink, nose vice-gripped between thumb and pointer finger. Every few minutes when I thought the blood had clotted I’d loosen my fingers one nostril at a time but before I could count to three the waterfall of gore would spill forth just as hard and fast. It seemed it was the nosebleed that wouldn’t end and that prospect both excited and frightened me. It excited me because I thought that if I couldn’t get that to gob up I would have no choice but to leave the Northern Jaeger and go to some kind of specialist on the mainland that could stop the bleeding. It frightened me because if I couldn’t get it stop on my own it would have to mean that I had broken something inside of me and probably a symptom of a more serious problem, or so I thought. 45 minutes had passed when I loosened the finger-clamp I had on my nose and I counted one, I counted two, I counted three, and to my joy and my dismay the blood clots had taken hold and were keeping the flow of blood  at bay. I pulled in a breath of the oxygenated diesel that passed for air in the engine room and breathed it out cautiously just to make sure the blood wouldn’t erupt again and it didn’t. Damn it all, I thought, there goes my legitimate reason to get off the ship.

Back in the fishmeal-hold the bags were still stacked to the ceiling but just under half of the room’s contents were gone which put a smile on my face.

“Where the fuck have you been?” Blume belted out, “Did you have to do, go all the way into Dutch to get maxi-pads to stop your heavy flow or what?”

I scrunched my eyebrows together the way one does when they are confused and answered, “Heavy flow? Heavy flow? Oh you mean my bloody nose. Yeah… that was just an excuse so I go up to the galley and get in on the gangbang the entire crew was having with your mom. I’m surprised you weren’t up there balls deep in the action or didn’t you get the memo?”

“Real funny, real funny well I…”

But before Fire Crotch could say something derogatory about my mom Ed interrupted, “Alright you two little princesses enough with the back and forth. Let’s get a lot less lip action and a lot more bag tossing. We got 10 minutes till the end of this shift let’s make em count.”

When the shift was over we all went to the galley and ate our food. The air in the galley was normally warm and toasty but compared to the heat of the fishmeal-hold it was downright cold. My body was so overworked it was all I could do to keep my eyes open so in order to get to bed as fast as I could I practically swallowed my food whole without chewing. I thought I had been tired before but as I sat there over my plate of food I knew in my heart that was the true definition of exhausted. With the meal in my stomach I zombie-walked up to my bunk, took a shower to scrub the funk from my body, set my alarm and passed out.

After 4 hours of dreamless sleep I found myself back in the fishmeal-hold with Byron, Ed and Fire Crotch to finish what we had started. We all shut our traps, switched to silent work mode and got back to breaking our backs. As we cleared the fishmeal-hold one bag at a time I came to understand that the world was not as automated as I had once thought. Before I would have assumed there would have been some kind of assembly line flanked on both sides by automatons with steel arms, hydraulic hoses and computer chip brains to do that kind of work, but no, it took four men made of blood, bone and flesh to accomplish that task.

When we had stripped the fishmeal-hold down to the bare steel walls the four of us sat in a circle on the metal floor. The three of them lit up victory smokes and I couldn’t resist so bummed one from Byron.

“I thought you quit?” Blume asked.

“I did.” I said as I lit my cigarette and pulled the smoke into my lungs. Inhale. Exhale. That rich nicotine tingle entered my bloodstream and made everything all better. “This one doesn’t count.”

“So what do you miss most about home?” Ed asked aloud to while his blue melancholy eyes followed the smoke that slithered up to the ceiling from the tip of his cigarette.

Byron answered in a soft bass voice that had a mist of nostalgia in it, “I miss my Saturday mornings. Every Saturday I’d eat a breakfast of French toast, two eggs soft-boiled, two strips of bacon, extra crispy, and fresh squeezed grapefruit juice at my favorite restaurant at the top of Queen Anne Hill. Then I’d see Stephan, my barber who would wrap a hot towel around my face before he’d lather me up and shave me with a straight razor.” Byron said as he scratched the rough, nappy beard on his cheeks. “Afterwards with my face clean, soft and properly lotioned I’d go see Soda, my Thai masseuse who would work me over for two straight hours. Oh how I miss those leisurely Saturday mornings. I also miss Scotch! There are times I would happily murder half the crew for three fingers of my deliciously, smoky old friend.” Byron took a drag off his cigarette and looked at Blume.

“I miss sleeping till noon and then waking up to a good old fashioned wake and bake.” Blume said as he flicked the ash from the tip of his cigarette. “When I get off this ship in Seattle I promise you this: I’m going to get so high I ain’t ever gonna come down, no way, no how. I’m gonna make Bob Marley look like… look like… Well look like someone who doesn’t smoke pot at all.”

Not yet ready to spill the contents of my soul I looked at Ed and asked, “What do you miss most about home?”

The icy gravel that was Ed’s voice melted as he responded “I got a woman back in Nevada who understands me better than anyone I’ve ever met and I miss the hell out of her.”

“Oh, your wife”, I said.

“No, no, no, no”, Ed protested, “I don’t believe in any of that cockamamie marriage shit. She’s just a woman, a very special woman to me.”

“Tell us about her”, Byron said. “What’s her name? What does she look like? What does she do?”

Ed continued to concentrate on the smoke that flowed from the tip of his cigarette. After a few seconds of silence he spoke but he spoke in a low tone that suggested he might have been with us physically but his spirit was with her back in Nevada. “Her name is Ruby and she’s as sweet a peach as ever was. She’s got wavy blonde hair that can best be described as strands of gold that runs down to the middle of her back and stops just above a tattoo of a butterfly. Her eyes are big and brown with flakes of green scattered throughout; she’s got the kind of eyes you can get lost in for hours and forget all the troubles of the world. Now she ain’t got the body of a model, but hell neither do I. She does have tits the size of canon balls though which makes up for any of her imperfections. As for her work, well she works on a ranch.”

“Ah a cowgirl”, I said, “I bet her Wrangler butt drives you nuts.”

“It’s not that kind of ranch”, Ed replied.

Blume ground out his cigarette on the steel floor as he fired back, “Well what kind of ranch is it then? What do they raise sheep or goats or llamas or something?”

Ed blew out a long stream of smoke and spoke, “Well boys, it’s more like a chicken ranch.”

“Are you serious?” I asked. “She works on a chicken farm and she calls it a ranch, now that’s funny.”

“It’s not that kind of ranch either”, Ed returned, “they call it a ranch but it’s more of a place where men go to forget their problems by getting lost for a few hours in the open arms and open legs of a beautiful professional lady of leisure.”

Me, Byron and Fire Crotch all looked away from Ed, embarrassed that he was in love with a whore. Not a word was spoken between the four us, the smoke that drifted up from our cigarettes made more noise than we did.

“Me”, I said breaking the long, awkward silence, “I miss everything that’s not here. I mean of course I miss the obvious stuff like beer, weed and chicks but I also miss the things I didn’t even think about before I left.”

“Such as?” Byron pried.

“Like the sun for example. I miss just being outdoors under a hot sun. I know it’s not hot now even in Washington but I miss it just the same. I miss my mom, my dad and I even miss my sisters which is weird because I never thought I’d hear those words come out of my mouth. I miss driving; I can’t wait to climb behind the wheel of my candy apple red 1992 Ford Ranger I had some damn good times in that truck.” I paused for a moment but no one interrupted me so I kept on. “What else do I miss? I miss my porn collection, my hometown. I miss sleeping. Holy shit do I miss sleeping. Now that I think about it I pretty much miss my entire life back home.”

Ed and Fire Crotch nodded their heads in agreement before Byron commented, “Look at it this way Charles, when you get back you’ll see all those things you just told us about with new eyes and you’ll be able to appreciate them like never before.”

“You’re right Byron, you’re absolutely right”, I said as I climbed up to my feet and started to stretch the kinks in my muscles before they cooled and caused even more damage to me. I stood there and twisted my back and forth and popped all the joints I could crack and thought about the conversation we had just shared and to tell the truth I didn’t feel that great thinking about all the things I missed. All talking about it did was open up a hole inside of me that hadn’t been there before. The balloon of optimism I had after getting the guilt trip/pep talk from Charlie, the Nothern Jaeger’s purser had burst. Hatred for my decisions festered inside of me. I was pissed I had come on the Northern Jaeger in the first place. I was pissed I was missing all the things I was missing. I was pissed I had let Charlie convince me to stay. I was pissed about being pissed. In a matter of seconds resentment for the Northern Jaeger filled me to overflowing. Inside my head I began to point fingers and place blame for the situation I found myself in and that’s what pissed me off most of all because I could only blame one person, me. I wanted to punch someone, something, anything. I wished to God there had been one last bag of fishmeal I could have laced in to, to take out my aggression. Instead I bundled those negative feelings up and placed them in my heart to smolder in the ashes of the life that I missed.

With all the things we longed for vented from or minds and hanging in the air like stale smoke, the four of us left the heat of the fishmeal-hold and hobbled up to the galley. As we walked along I felt the liquid in my muscles congeal from the coldness of the factory, my body became tight and inflexible with every step I took. I limped into the crowded, smoke filled galley with a scowl on my face and darkness bottled up inside, all of my positive energy was gone it was no longer. All I wanted to do was to shuffle off to bed and cry myself to sleep but before I could Mario saw me and shouted out, “Char-les, get your ass up on the bow deck and help cast off so we can get the fuck outta Dodge!”

“You got it Mario”, I replied as I headed out of the galley.

Outside the night air was crisp and pure it filled my lungs with freshness and chilled the back of my throat. Dutch Harbor was quiet and serene the only sounds I heard were the gentle slaps of water that hit the side of the Northern Jaeger and the occasional wolf howl that was carried on the breeze. Nature’s work of art which was the sky above seemed to be made of the blackest black velvet with swirling galaxies of sparkling diamonds for stars. In the center of that nocturnal masterpiece was the moon, that milk white orb I remember looked brighter, larger and closer than I had ever seen it. Its silvery reflection shimmered off the surface of the raven colored waters. The change in temperature and scenery pulled me out of the dark space in my head as I was swallowed whole into that moment. I looked down the length of the Northern Jaeger all 337ft of her from end-to-end the moonlight cast a ghostly glow on her bone colored steel. At the nose of the Jaeger I noticed two moving lumps, puffs of frozen air hung just above their heads.

I made my way to them and as I drew near I yelled out “What’s up fellas? What can I do to help?” Two faces that hadn’t seen sleep in a long time turned over their respective shoulders and stared at me with hollow, expressionless eyes. The faces belonged to THE ROCK and Keith.

“How’re you doing quitter?” Keith jeered as he planted a cigarette between his teeth.

THE ROCK pointed his thumb at me and said, “This guy quit?”

Keith struck his Zippo and brought it close to his face, the orange flame did a bee-bop boogies across his chaotic blue eyes before he inhaled the fire into the tip of his cigarette and answered, “Yeah, this little fucker right here quit before the offload.”

Right then I no longer saw the beauty of the Alaskan night I looked at Keith and saw someone who was going to walk all over me if I let them. “Listen here you stupid fucking prick!” I snarled like a rabid pit bull. “You know good and well I didn’t quit. Yes, I was going to quit I admit that, but I didn’t. Charlie talked me down off the ledge and now here I am till the bitter end. So what? Are you gonna keep breaking my balls about this till we get to Seattle or what?”

I stood there with my fists clenched shut and my jaw iron tight. Adrenaline coursed through me and I waited for the worst. The downward pointing edges of Keith’s mouth slowly curled up into a smile as he said, “Whoa. Whoa. Whoa”, and held out the palms of his hands out to me the way you’d use your hands to tell somebody to slow down. “Take it easy killer, I was just making fun. It was a joke for fuck’s sakes.”

“Yo! An unknown voice shouted from the dock. The three of us turned our attention to the dockworker that stood under a yellow streetlight and excitedly waved his arms over his head.

“Alright Keith that means they loosed the bowline from the dock. You pull it onboard and you”, THE ROCK said as he pointed at me. “Pull up the slack that Keith hauls onboard and wrap it around this pole. You got it?”

I nodded my head in an affirmative and said, “No problem.”

THE ROCK then walked towards the aft of the Northern Jaeger as Keith began to tug the bowline on the ship and I began to wrap it onto its storage pole. No more than 30 seconds into the job and I thought my fingers were going to fall clean off my body. The rope was bulky and somewhat stiff from being dragged from the dock, through the icy bay waters onto the bow where the temperature was in the freezing zone. Lucky for me the thickness of the rope was the same diameter as a bottle of wine so finger dexterity wasn’t a necessity. As Keith brought the bowline onboard I held in it the crook of my arms close to my body and walked round and round and round the pole as the frigid hemp rope slid back into place. With the bowline back on board and tied off the engines of the Northern Jaeger rumbled to life and moved us from the dock and out through the darkness of the harbor towards the open sea.

I headed into the interior of the Northern Jaeger ready to warm my numb fingers but before I reached the door leading inside I heard Keith say, “Hey yo, Chucky-boy!” I turned to face him and he said, “It’s not easy for me to say, but I’m sorry for fucking with you. I just really hate quitters is all.”

“It’s all good Keith, it’s all good.”

Keith then followed his apology with a “Kersmackie!” as he let loose the string-tied Gatorade bottle he’d had in his back pocket and bounced it off my forehead with precision.

“You’re a jerk-off, you know that?” I said with a smile as Keith brushed passed me. Inside the ship I stepped into the closest restroom and plunged my frozen nubs for hands under the hottest water I could bear. The water melted my icy-white fingers and made the blood just under my skin throb with pain as if my fingers were about to explode, so I pulled my hands from under the faucet and put them under my armpits to warm them up slowly. In the mirror I caught sight of myself. The reflection that looked back at me wasn’t the hollow-eyed, soulless future version of myself that I had glimpsed in the bottom of that oily tub in the engine room, no that real-time version I saw of myself looked crusted and insane like I should have been king of a cardboard castle under a bridge somewhere or standing on a busy street corner arguing with invisible foes while I clawed at hidden bugs that crawled inside my bones. I wanted to laugh at the ridiculous sight that I was but I couldn’t muster the energy for the belly laugh I deserved. Instead a tear cut a path from my left eye down the withered flesh of my cheek.

Locked away as I was from the rest of the crew in that bathroom I watched in the mirror as the tear fell from my filthy cheek and into the sink. I wasn’t about to ball my eyes out so I forced my mouth into a lunatics smile, splashed water onto my face and blew my nostrils clean of the sad mucous that had accompanied the single tear. It was then, standing there in my filthy state with bloodshot eyes and a smile upon my face of one who is unhinged that I realized that I felt different, not different as in I was a different person but different in as much as I could tell that something in me had changed. My mind quickly scanned my memory banks for the catalyst of the change I felt and my internal REWIND button stopped at the beginning of that offload. Automatically the PLAY button was pressed and I reviewed all that had transpired. I had wanted to call it quits. I had been talked into staying onboard. I suffered the cold shoulder of my crewmates. I decided to suck it up and be positive. I helped clear the fishmeal-hold and in doing so had done the most intense round of manual labor I had ever done in my life. I poured out my desires of the things I missed. I had been ripped on and teased, and rose up to the challenge and defended myself. While I reflected on those recent vignettes of my life I analyzed the felling of change I felt inside and understood with clarity that I was beginning to feel secure with myself. A rush of excited energy swept through my being as I looked at the huge toothy smile reflecting back at me. In that moment, right there under the bathroom’s light with the toilet to my back and the sink to my front, I understood that the transformation from boy to man that I so craved wasn’t final but I was certainly on the right path.

CHAPTER END

Physically unclean but internally fresh I strolled from the restroom into the galley. There hunkered over a plate of food I filled my belly as Newty sidled up next to me and said, “What’s cracking brother? You look pretty fucking chipper for someone who just spent the entire offload down in the fishmeal-hold, what gives?”

Not wanting to divulge the secret of my glow I slapped him on the back and replied, “Newty my boy, have you heard the good news about how Jesus?”

“Shut the fuck up”, he snorted back. “Shit, Jesus or no Jesus I hope you’re ready to feel even better.”

“Oh how’s that?”

“Two reasons:” he said as he snapped his fingers and pointed at me, “Number one, somebody, somewhere must love you because according to the mail list you got some mail.”

“There’s a mail list? I didn’t even know we could mail up here.”

“Duh, it’s posted on the corkboard after each offload. You didn’t know that?”

I rolled my eyes and replied, “Do you think I would ask you if there was a mail list if I did?”

“Good point. Anyways you do have some mail and you can pick it up in Charlie’s office.” Newty said before he hung his head over his food and shoveled it in his mouth.

“Well?” I asked interrupting his feeding session.

“Well, what?”

“What the hell is reason number two in your two point plan of things that will make me feel even better?

Newty shook his head from side-to-side and responded by saying, “Oh, right. Reason number two is Jakey-Pooh sent me a package.”

I cocked my head to one side, mouth slightly open, my eyes riddled with bewilderment. “Okay”, I said slowly.

“You don’t have a clue do you?”

“Nada.”

“Remember last offload, out on the dock when I told you he was going to send up a package?” My silence spoke more than words could of in that moment. “Never mind”, Newty continued, “just know he sent a special package.” He emphasized that sentence with a knowing wink, and in that wink I knew exactly what he was talking about.

“Really?” I asked. “He sent up…” Before I could finish Newty grinned and nodded his head up and down. “When can we open it?”

In between bites of food Newty replied. “We’ll have to wait till we’re out processing again and it’s just the two of us in the room and all our other bunkmates are down in the factory and let me tell you, I can’t wait.”

“Me neither brother”, I said, “me neither.” I inhaled the rest of the plate of food in front of me, left Newty to his eating and went to get the mail that awaited me. I knocked on the doorframe of Charlie’s door and seeing he was away from his desk I let out a sigh of relief and stepped inside. Quickly I sifted through the envelopes on his desk but found nothing addressed to me then turned my attention to the boxes piled on the floor and found a shoebox sized package wrapped in brown paper bags with my name printed neatly on it. It was from my mom and dad. I didn’t hesitate I tore it open the way I had torn through Christmas presents as a kid excited to see what Santa had brought. Inside was a new, silver colored disc-man, a sleeve of AA batteries, a loaf of mom’s homemade apple cake and a handwritten letter from my mom. Giddy, I punched the air with excitement then with my armful of loot I skipped down the hallway to my room.

The lights in my bunk room were already off as I stepped into the warm darkness and shut the door behind me. Inside a calming symphony of bubbling, gurgling snores from my already sleeping bunkmates filled my ears. I’m sure it reeked of stale body odor and sulfurous farts as that room full of sleeping men often did, but as I had just worked an entire offload in the confines of the fishmeal-hold my sense of smell still hadn’t recovered. In the darkness I fumbled open my designated drawer and stashed my armful of goods. Before I had stepped into my bunk room I had all intentions of taking a shower but as I stood there in my boxers in the pitch-blackness and listened to the lullaby of sleep added to the fact that the adrenalin high I had surfed since the start of that offload had waned; I skipped the shower and pulled my not-yet-sore-self into my bunk. Lying in the soft, snug womb of my coffin-like bunk I reached in the crack between my bedding and the steel bulkhead and withdrew my bottle of Nyquil. I knew I didn’t need it but I also knew I wanted it, so I unscrewed the cap and swallowed deep and hard. With half a bottle of nighttime cold and cough medicine wrapping itself around my brain I closed my eyes and faded into nothingness as the Northern Jaeger gently held me in her arms and rocked me to sleep.

I didn’t dream during that sleep period though. It was like at the end of a screenplay where it says ‘fade to black’. As soon as I closed my eyes I was in the void. I was locked in a cocoon of raw, unpasteurized sleep. My mind and my body relaxed into a state of unconscious bliss where there was no longer a me, myself or I. I was nothing and everything all at once. The ‘me’ ceased to exist in this plane of existence. I just was.

CHAPTER END

My eyelids burst open only to see pure black. I blinked and rubbed my eyes and still all was black. ‘Where am I?’ was the first thought to flash through my fog-filled brain. ‘Why is my house rocking back and forth?’ was my second thought. Next the sound of a wet fart rippled through the darkness as the Northern Jaeger rolled heavily to the portside and caused me to bonk my forehead off the steel wall. Immediately the fog that enveloped my brain blew away with the pain in the front of my skull and I knew I was back in reality, back onboard the Northern Jaeger. Satisfied with my conclusion I closed my eyes and rubbed the palm of my hand on my forehead until both the pain and my consciousness were nothing but a memory. As quickly as I was awake I was once again asleep.

The next time my eyes opened it was because I had tried to swallow but couldn’t, my tongue only scraped rough against the roof of my mouth. I lowered myself out of my bunk onto the linoleum below and felt sore, actually sore is not the right word, I felt stiff, withered, dehydrated. My muscles felt like they had dried into jerky during that sleep session. But like a good Alaskan fisherman I popped my knuckles. I twisted my spine. I snapped my neck from side-to-side and then I loaded my mouth with my regimen of feel good pills. With a galaxy of various drugs and vitamins swimming in my stomach I took a shower to wash away the funk of dried sweat and fishmeal that was by that point embedded into my DNA.

In the galley it was business as usual. The tables were peopled by crewmembers who either ate bowls of cereal, played gin-rummy or who chain smoked cigarette after cigarette. On the screen of the black plastic box television secured to the ceiling in the corner of the room Arnold Schwarzenegger told himself to get his ass to Mars. I poured a coffee into a cup with ice and drank it as fast as I could to help chase away the remnants of the Nyquil that lingered in my skull. On the corkboard the new factory jobs and shifts were posted, I checked and as I suspected I was still a viscera technician and it said my shift was going to start in 15 minutes.

“What’s up Charlie-boy?” said a voice as smooth as a jazz quartet on Bourbon Street. I turned to see Raven smiling a full-on gold toothed smile, an unlit cigarette clenched between his teeth.

“Ain’t nothing but the rent Raven, ain’t nothing but the motherfucking rent.”

Raven laughed a thick smoker’s laugh that ended in a wheeze before he composed himself and said, “Atta boy, that’s what I like to hear. Go on and have a seat right here with me.” Raven lit his cigarette and exhaled out his nose as I sat down across from him, then he looked into my eyes and asked, “I thought you told me you was a quitting, motherfucker? I figured by this time you’d be back in Seattle smoking dope and fucking hippie chicks, or whatever it is you longhairs do for fun.”

I didn’t really want to have that conversation with Raven even though I knew I had to. I knew I was guilty of running my mouth and not having the courage of my convictions when it came time for action. So instead of giving Raven a bullshit cover story I conceded and gave him the straight facts of the situation.

“Yeah, about that whole quitting thing… What can I say? You were right. Me and Newty went and talked to Charlie about saying adios to the Northern Jaeger and that smooth talking son of a gun convinced us to say.”

Raven flicked the ash off his cigarette as he said, “I think what you mean to say is that he guilt tripped you into staying onboard.”

I paused for a moment before I replied, “Actually yeah, how’d you know that?”

Raven looked across the table at me and I saw the answer to my question in his eyes. He nodded his head at me with an expressionless look on his face but swimming behind his dark eyes was the look of someone who understood what I had been through. Then he spoke, “Don’t think this old boy hasn’t sat in that hot seat across from Charlie a time or two. I’ve sat there before and I’m sure I’ll damn well sit there again.”

“Yeah Charlie did do a damn good job of guilt tripping us into staying”, I said, “but you know it also helped when he told us that we’d only be out at sea for another 30 days, tops.”

Raven killed his cigarette in the ashtray as he raised his eyebrow s and snickered, “30 days huh? He told you that with a straight face did, he? And you believed him Charlie-boy?”

“Yeah, of course I did. Why wouldn’t I?”

“Believe what you will, believe what you will. Sooner or later you’ll learn that you’ll have to see it before you can believe it. You can’t take that paper-pushing sons a bitch’s word for it. If Charlie tells you we only have 30 days left, you ask him how in the fucking hell he knows that? Does he have a crystal ball? Can he guarantee we will fill our quota and be back in Seattle in 30 days? I think not.” My spirit slumped and so did my shoulders as across from me Raven continued, “I bet he said that to you after he told you how vital you are to the crew and that if you quit you’d basically be shitting on everybody else onboard. Hell, he’s been laying that same line of bullshit on every sorry bastard who tries to quit. 30 days”, he chuckled, “Charlie-boy, I thought you had more brains than that.”

For a few seconds I sat there and rolled over in my brain all that Raven had just said to me and I felt like shit for it too because I knew he was right. Deep down, I knew that Raven was right. How could Charlie promise we’d be back in Seattle in 30 days? Answer: he couldn’t. When Charlie said it to me and Newty it sounded so convincing, I thought, but he could have told us that we’d be back in a week and I would have believed him without question. I sat motionless and felt like a dumbass greenhorn as I realized Charlie had played the two of us like he’d played so many before us. Then something funny happened as Raven stared at me, his eyes wide in anticipation of my rebuttal, my mind let go of the fact I had been lied to and a feeling of acceptance descended upon me, “Well 30 days or not”, I said, “I’m here to stay and that’s the way it is.” Raven didn’t respond he just listened to my words and smiled. “You know”, I continued, “you could of said something to me about that when I told you I was gonna quit down in the factory.”

“I could of, yes, I very well could have, but that would have ruined the surprise. Besides Charlie-boy sometimes you just gotta shit the bed and kick it out which your feet.”

Unsure what ‘shit the bed and kick it out which your feet’ meant I smiled a half-smile and countered, “Fair enough you old Cajun bastard. On that note I bid you adieu good sir. I gotta hit the oilskin room and get ready to let the good times roll.”

CHAPTER END

At the head of the viscera table I stood for that first shift back in the factory after the second offload, I stood and felt happy inside as I waited for the onslaught of fish guts to come my way. I wouldn’t say I missed being in the factory I was just glad not to be in the fishmeal-hold. To hell with Raven, I thought, I’m gonna believe what Charlie said – 30 more days, 30 more days, 30 more days – I repeated in my head. On the opposite side of the table stood Eileen, the flat-faced Eskimo woman who was no doubt taking advantage of her onboard status as a boat wife. She yelled at me but over the roar of the machines I couldn’t hear her. I pointed at my ears and then crossed my hands in an ‘X’ across my chest in the hopes that she would understand my impromptu sign language. Her small eyes blinked with recognition as she waved her hands towards herself in a gesture for me to come around the viscera table to her. I took a look around the factory and saw that no fish were being processed yet so I made my way to her side of the viscera table to figure out what she wanted to tell me. As I got close to her she turned her back to me and walked away from the viscera table towards the aft of the ship. I knew it was only a matter of moments before the factory would once again be alive and I’d be up to my elbows in fish entrails but curious as I was I followed her just the same. We passed the Bader Technicians who anxiously stood at their posts and waited to feed the pollock into the Bader machines that gutted the fish carcasses and sliced off the filets. I followed Eileen to the far end of the factory, back to the sorting area.

The sorting area was where all the fish that got caught in the nets were inspected before they were sent to their fate in the factory beyond. The job of the Sorters was to scan the slick fish corpses that passed on the sorting belt, a conveyor belt made of metal links, and if they saw a fish that wasn’t a pollock they were to toss it into the bins that were across the conveyor belt from them; bins that had a chute in the bottom that sent the unwanted fish to the fishmeal-hold to be dried to a crisp, pulverized to smithereens and bagged up as fishmeal. The fish that did pass inspection were left on the sorting belt where they made their way through the factory to the Bader Technicians via a series of angled troughs and conveyor belts.

When I rounded the corner to the sorting area the four sorters stood in a line leaning against the sorting table not doing a hell of a lot. Eileen waved both hands at me to get my attention and then pointed furiously at the floor. I looked down and jumped back in fear. If I had had to shit I would have shit myself right then and there because what looked up at me from the steel grate floor were the round, black eyes of a seven foot long shark. The sorters at the sorting table saw my reaction and cackled with laughter. Eileen got down on one knee and put her hand on the sharks head to show me it was no longer alive. I did as she did and kneeled beside her. I ran my rubber-coated fingers across its flesh and even through my thick rubber gloves I could feel that its hide was gritty like fine grit sandpaper. Excitedly Eileen moved around to the other side of the shark’s head and pulled its mouth open. Me, I touched its razor teeth with curious-caution in amazement of what I was doing. As I felt the sharp enamel in its jaws I had one of those surreal moments in life where even though I was aware of what I was physically doing it was still hard for me to comprehend. I was astonished that my hands were touching one of the deadliest predators of the oceans who only a few hours before had swam around in the Bering Sea doing what sharks do. Into its dark, dead orbs I peered and I began to wonder strange thoughts about that shark – Did it have a first name, and if so did it also have a last name? Maybe it wanted to die. What if it was depressed and heartbroken and so it willingly swam into the net to end its existence? Do sharks reincarnate back into other sharks or can they be born into human form? What if… – Just as my mind was melding with that of the sharks a sharp whistle cut through the intimate moment I was having with the dead creature. I looked up and saw the shrill sound had come from the man in the bright yellow rain gear at the head of the sorting table who had  ‘#1 Jorge’ scrawled across his back in black magic marker. ‘#1 Jorge’ yelled out in Spanish down the long metal-notched conveyor belt at the three other men who stood there. I don’t know what he yelled at them but whatever he said it seemed to activate the ‘kick ass button’ on the back of their necks because they all started to double-fist-throw fish. As fast as they’d let one fish fly from their right they’d grab another with their left and as fast as they’d let the fish fly from their left they’d grab another with their right. They put the fish flingers at Pike Place Market to shame. Fish after fish after fish smacked with big, wet, fleshy slaps into the steel walled bins across from the sorting table where they slimed down the V-shaped walls and into the chute bound for the fishmeal-hold.

I turned my attention back to the shark, and Eileen, to see the reaction on her face to that circus show I was witnessing but Eileen was gone. Realizing I had better make my way back to the viscera table I hopped to my feet and clomped my heavy steel-toed rubbers as fast as I could lift them back down the catwalk to my post. I stepped into position at the head of the viscera table and couldn’t tell where the innards began and the table ended as the conveyor belt was alive with intestines, livers, stomachs, kidneys, hearts; all manner of miniature glistening insides of varying shades of browns, pinks, oranges and blues. Of course intermingled in that gruesome gallery was our prized possession, roe. I sunk my hands right into the whole fishy mess of it and ripped and pulled the roe sacks free from the rest of the undesirable parts as cold bile speckled my raingear. I moved fast and a faster still, it felt like it had been a while since I had been at the viscera table but I fell right back into the rhythm of it all. The next five hours and change were a blur of quick moving hands and sloppy fish parts. I was so in ‘the zone’ of it all that I was surprised when Juanito, my replacement, slapped me on the shoulder. “Adios”, I said to him before I made my way out of the factory.

From up the steel stairs I entered into the organized chaos that was the oilskin room during a shift change. Wang Warmer pinched a big brown dip out of his chew can and plugged into his jaw. Ed closed his eyes while he inhaled the first drag of a post-shift smoke a moment of Zen on his Harley Davidson face. Blume stood in a gray haze, zipped up his freezer suit and gulped thirstily from his soda can. Keith wrapped athletic tape around his fingers and winced as he closed his hands into fists and flexed. Me, I sat on a bench and slid off my steel-toed rubbers when Newty slid beside me and half whispered, “You ready for this?”

I looked around from side-to-side and said, “For what?”

Newty kept his mouth shut. He just looked at me with his lips pinched together and his eyes wide open, a look that said more than words ever could.

In a low voice I asked, “You mean for the package?”

“Damn straight.”

“Are you sure about this?”

“Don’t worry”, Newty said with confidence, “I’ve made preparations.”

“Okay, then bring it, don’t sing it.” I replied. Without another word spoken Newty drifted off the bench and out of the oilskin room. Excited energy swirled around in my stomach and I couldn’t skin myself out of my raingear fast enough. Moments later my orange rubber raingear was hung in my locker and I was galley bound.

I passed by Newty, he exited the galley, I entered. “Make sure you snag an apple” he said with a knowing nod and a wink, “You know what they say… An apple a day keeps the doctor away.”

CHAPTER END

I don’t remember what was served at that meal or what movie played on the black plastic box television secured to the ceiling in the corner of the room. Nor do I remember who sat where or what witty conversations took place. All I remember is that while the plate of food in front of me quickly vanished into my mouth two thoughts swirled together in my head until they formed a vortex of excited/anxious energy. The two thoughts that electrified me like ball lightning were these: #1 – I was about to get stoned for the first time in over 90 days which doesn’t sound like a long time, but for me as someone who used to smoked morning, noon and night 90 days felt like 90 million years. #2 – There was the risk factor. Getting stoned is not a big deal in and of itself but to do it in secret, onboard a ship in the middle of the Bering Sea and with the full knowledge that the company’s drug policy was one of zero tolerance – meaning that if we got caught in the act or the captain decided to give is a piss test we’d be fired immediately – only upped the ante.

With the plate emptied and the food inside of me I took an apple from the fruit bowl and let my feet carry me to my bunk room.

“Lock the door behind you and stuff this in the crack down there at the bottom”, Newty said as he threw me his towel. I did as was told then sat down on the lower bunk beside him.

“Are you sure this is a good idea?” I asked one last time.

“Dude, I’m sure. Everyone is on the other shift which means they won’t be back in this stuffy cocksucker of a room for five more hours and by then there won’t be the slightest bit of evidence and they’ll be none the wiser.”

“You’re right, you’re right I just got pregame jitters is all.”

Newty used his pocketknife to slice the tape off the package from Jakey-Pooh before he tore through the cardboard to reveal its treasures. Inside the box were a couple of nudie magazines and a can of coffee. Newty handed me the nudie mags to thumb through while he opened the lid of the coffee can. Where the room had been mute of scent only seconds before the whole cabin was then filled with the pungently robust smell of ground, roasted coffee. Newty dug his hand into the soft black coffee grounds and seconds later withdrew a rolled up plastic sandwich baggy. He shook off the coffee, unrolled the wad of plastic, held the open bag up to his nose and breathed in like it was his first breath of life. “Thank you motherfucking Jake, there is a God!”

“Yo, hand me a pencil”, I said to Newty as I held up the Granny Smith apple I had picked up from the galley. Newty handed me a pencil from his notebook he kept beside his bunk and without hesitation I stabbed it clean through the middle of the apple with one punch. With a second thrust I punctured the apple from the top where stem was and stopped when I felt the pencil push through into the hole I had previously made. I pulled the pencil out, put the apple to my lips and blew and sucked and blew and sucked, until I could pull a breath through the apple with ease.

“What do you think?” I said as I tossed the apple to Newty who was still looking at the nuggets of weed with sparkly eyes.

“Nice”, was his response to my handy-work. “Check out what old Jakey-Pooh sent up.”

I took the baggy from Newty and with it in my hands and not even up to my face I could already smell its skunky aroma over the un-brewed coffee which filled the room. With trembling fingers I plucked out a sticky-green-crystal-covered bud and held it to the light to examine it. The bud was the color of the inside of an avocado, if the inside of that avocado had been dipped in powdered sugar. I squeezed the bit of weed between my thumb and pointer finger then held it to my nose and slowly inhaled the magic of the talisman. Its sweet/sour scent entered my nostrils and flew straight to the memory center of my brain where a memory from my past life, my life before the Northern Jaeger came to the forefront of my mind. In the time it took for the synapses in my brain to fire I was pleasured with the memory of my first introduction to marijuana. I remembered standing in the backyard of my parent’s house under a perfectly round moon that was as bright as a flashlight. My friend passed me a soda can he had converted into a pipe and told me to take a hit, hold it in and do a lap around the backyard while holding in the weed smoke. One lap later and I was feeling happy. Two laps later and I laughed uncontrollably. Three laps later and I was so incredibly high I ran my hands over what I thought to be a giant shadowy toucan but realized it was my mother’s rose bush only when I snagged myself on a thorn of reality. The next instant I was in the kitchen pulling a berserker rampage on the refrigerator eating everything I could shovel into my mouth. After that I sat down and watched the live action version of THE JUNGLE BOOK, and thought it was the best movie ever.

“Hello?” Newty said as he snapped his fingers back and forth in front of my face. “Are we gonna smoke that or are you just gonna sit there all night with the weed under your nose and that dipshit look on your face?”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah”, I replied as I steered off the paved streets of memory lane and back onto the gravel roads of reality. I broke off a thumbnail size chunk of the bud and packed it into the bowl which was the hole I had poked into the top of the apple. “Here, you take greener”, I said as I handed the apple-pipe to Newty.

Newty didn’t hesitate he put the apple-pipe to his lips, put lit flame to the weed and pulled the smoke deep into his lungs. He held the ganja smoke inside of himself and with every second that passed I watched as the whites of his eyes shattered red with broken blood vessels. Without letting any smoke escape he spoke to me in a strained murmur, “Dude check this out”, as he held an empty toilet paper roll to his mouth and exhaled. The smoke that poured out from him didn’t have the expected burning weed stench but rather smelled like a load of laundry that had just been taken out of the dryer. When he had finished he turned to me, his eyes so red they looked ready to drip blood and with a grin on his face only a stoner could appreciate he said, “What do you think?”

“Wow that takes me back! I haven’t seen one of those since high school.” In high school me and my friends used to smoke inside of our parents houses and in order to do that and not get caught we would take empty rolls of toilet paper, stuff them with dryer sheets and then when we’d smoke we’d blow our hits through the dryer sheet stuffed tubes and the smoke would roll out the other end smelling like fabric softener instead of reefer.

“I know right.” Newty agreed. “I went and saw Nancy in the laundry room and snagged a pocketful of dryer sheets then went to the shitter and jacked a roll of TP and then with their powers combined I made this little stank killer.” Newty held up the brown tube to the light above and gave it a little shake before he said in a more serious tone, “Just in case light up a cigarette, you know to help drown out the smoke.” I pulled out two cigarettes from the hard pack that was in between us and lit them both, one for me the other for Newty.

Newty handed me the apple, lighter and the toilet paper tube and I passed him my cigarette. “You know man”, I said holding the apple-pipe and the lighter in front of my face, “never in a million years would I have guessed that me and you would be out here getting baked. I don’t even know how many times you and me have sparked up before but if a year ago someone had told me that the two of us would be getting high on the D.L. out on a fishing boat somewhere between Russia and Alaska I would have laughed right in there face.”

“I hear ya brother, I hear ya”, Newty agreed.

“And another thing…” I said.

“Hey”, Newty interrupted, “Are you gonna park on the grass with your motor running or what? If you wanna just shoot the shit you can pass that right on back over here.”

“Hold your horses, hold your horses.” With that said I sucked flame in through the top of the apple and winced when I felt my lungs fill to capacity. I held the smoke in for as long as I could before I blew a thick whitish cloud out the other end of the tube. I laid back on the bunk and felt the uncontrollable smile push my cheeks up towards my eyes as my eyelids became almost too heavy to open. Instantly my thought pattern changed. I was suddenly happy and totally optimistic. The world seemed magical and full of possibilities. My thoughts darted to the outer levels of the cosmos. I was stoned to the bone.

I passed the materials to get stoned over to Newty as he passed the two lit cigarettes back to me. Newty struck the lighter and was about to take a hit when the door handle rattled. Shocked, I sat up and watched the handle on the inside of the room move up and down as someone tried to open the door from the outside.

BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! - was the sound the unknown fist made as it pounded on the outside of the door. Newty looked at me his face pale and frightened.

“Hide it.” I said as I hopped to my feet and walked towards the door on shaky legs while I huffed and puffed on the two lit cigarettes in my possession to try and fill the room with cover up smoke. At the door I turned to Newty.

“Ready”, he answered as he lit a cigarette of his own and began to wave it around like a tobacco flavored incense stick.

“Who is it?” I asked to the door.

“Let me in”, was the reply.

“Who is it?” I repeated.

“Eh Nikolai, I roommate.”

Usually Newty and I were the only ones in our room at the same time. The occupants of the other four bunks worked on the opposite shift so we never saw them. I had only met Nikolai once and that was the first day he came aboard, which happened to be the first time we docked in Dutch Harbor. I knew he was Russian and about 21 same as me, but that was it.

I couldn’t hesitate any longer so I unlocked the handle, kicked the towel back and swung the door open. A wall of cigarette and coffee ground infused, dryer-sheet smelling pot smoke barreled out of the room and into the hallway. Nikolai stepped inside as I shut the door as fast as I could without slamming it. He stood there in front of the two of us his arms crossed over each other, a grim look in his gray eyes made even grimmer by the shaved on the sides, spiky on top haircut he had. Nikolai eyed me first then turned his attention to Newty who sat on his bunk and smoked his cigarette like his life depended on it. The only noise heard in the room was the muffled crackle of the ionized phosphors that came from the light fixture above. “What go on here?” Nikolai asked his Russian accent thick but his English still discernable. “You two… uh… uh…funny in here?”

“No”, I nervously giggled as I took a drag from the cigarette in my left hand only to burn myself on the cigarette that already dangled from my mouth.

Newty piped up and said, “No way dude, what are you talking about?”

I swallowed hard and prepared for the worst.

Nikolai’s face melted from a gargoyle’s grimace to a greasy grin as he laughed and said, “I joke, I kid, I kid, I joke. You two, uh, uh, how you say English”, he said as he pointed at his eyes, “Uh red eye. Red eye, that’s it!” He laughed again and continued, “You two look no good…uh…but I like.”

“What? What are you talking about?” Newty asked.

“I try. I try what you do. Uh” he said as he knelt down and rifled through the drawer underneath his bunk, “I have for to party”, he said as he held up two warm cans of Budweiser.

“Fuck yeah!” I exclaimed as I stuffed the towel back under the door.

Newty handed Nikolai the apple-pipe, the lighter and the toilet tube and Nikolai handed each of us a brain grenade in the form of The King of Beers. The cans were room temperature but I didn’t care, they could have been boiling hot and it still would have been one of the best beers of my life.

“What I do?” Nikolai asked as he eyeballed the toilet paper tube.

“After you take a hit just blow it out through that tube it takes the smell away”, Newty answered.

“Slow, slow I…Uh… no understand. My English know…Uh… little.”

I jumped in at that point and used my best sign language skills to try and clear things up, “You smoke apple.” I said slowly as I first pointed to the apple Nikolai held before I put my left hand in front of my face like I was holding an invisible apple then I moved an invisible lighter round and round the top of the invisible apple with my right all the while I made my lips into an ‘O’ shape and sucked in huge a breath of air. “Then hold in.” I said as I fastened my lips tight together and held air inside my lungs. “Then”, I said as I pointed at the brown tube in Nikolai’s other hand “you blow”, I said as I made a circle with my right hand like I was gripping a handlebar that wasn’t there and blew the breath I held through my hand tube.

Nikolai looked down at the objects he held then back up to me his eyes bright with recognition, “Yes. Yes.” He said as he proceeded to take a hit from the apple-pipe. I cracked open the red and white can of beer in my hand and took a swig. The warm nectarous fizz of hops and malted barley popped as it flowed down my open throat. Three gulps later and I traded the beer to Nikolai for the smoking setup as a frothy burp tore itself out of me. Neither Newty nor Nikolai cared as their attentions were focused on the cans of golden lager in their hands. By the time I had released my next hit from the apple-pipe the beer in my gut had seeped through my stomach lining and rode on the bloodstream highway all the way up to my brain where it made fast friends with the THC that was already partying there.

The three of us smoked and drank without speaking until there was no more weed left in the apple and the aluminum cans were hollow. Sitting there in a stoned/drunk bliss I looked at Nikolai and asked, “I know you’re from Russia, but we know like nothing about you. Where are you from in Russia? Which part?”

“Uh?” was his response.

Then I remembered his English was shit so I thought for a moment and reconfigured my words in the simplest sentence I could to get my point across, “Where you from?”

Nikolai sat for a moment and smiled at his hands with confused amusement like he’d never seen his hands before, then he spoke a few rapid fire sentences in the language of his mother land. He stopped suddenly the white flesh on his cheeks turned pink with embarrassment. He patted his chest and said, “Sorry…Uh…Russian good. English uh…Uh…Uh…Not good. I come… uh, Russia…”, I nodded my head and he continued, “village… uh… in Russia.”

“Holy shit”, Newty blurted out, “How in the hell did you get all the way out here on the Northern Jaeger then?”

Nikolai laughed the laugh of someone who laughs and smiles at the response to anything they don’t understand.

“You”, I pointed at Nikolai, “how get here?” I asked as I pointed to the floor of the room and hoped like hell he understood the words and hand signs I used.

“I… I…. Dutch work, me…Uh now here.”

“Well right on”, Newty said a look of total blankness across his face.

Not wanting to put the effort into another half-delirious quasi-international conversation could be started I snuck a cigarette for Newty’s pack, got to my feet, pulled a sweatshirt over me and said, “I’m heading to the galley”, before I stepped into the hallway without waiting for a reply.

Each way I looked down the narrow hallway it was empty and quiet, except for the low rumble of the engine that reverberated throughout the ship. I walked towards the stairs that led to the galley but the ironic thought of smoking a cancerous cigarette in the fresh, open air made me chuckle so I spun around and walked to the hatch that led to the exterior of the ship. Outside I was immediately sprayed with a mist of salt water. Using the sleeve of my sweatshirt I wiped my face dry then proceeded to light the cigarette I had stolen. Inhale. Exhale. The sun was up on the starboardside of the ship which surprised me but also made the cigarette I was smoking that much more enjoyable. It wasn’t the entire burning glory of the sun but a razor thin blade of sunshine that peaked over the edge of the Bering Sea; it gave off just enough light to color the normally black, starry skies in pastel shades of coral, salmon and violet. I stood there and admired the view for half of my cigarette before my ears became accustomed to the sounds of the outside of the ship. I heard the white noise of Northern Jaeger as it sliced through the sea. I heard the subtle roar of the engines. I heard the whistle of the wind. But on top of all those noises I noticed a sharp shriek-like sound that I couldn’t place. The sound can best be described as the whine from a legion of hungry infants crying to be fed. I looked around from the starboardside to the portside for the culprit of but saw nothing out of place. I then turned my attention toward the aft of the Northern Jaeger and with stoned eyes I looked up and saw the source of the mysterious lamentations. There were a countless number of seagulls that circled above the ship as we steamed along. I stood there and watched them for a few moments and smoked away. The seagulls as I saw weren’t just there to fly overhead and shit on the wheelhouse they had a purpose. They hovered overhead and followed the trail of gore that floated in our wake made from all the unusable fish parts that streamed from chutes on port quarter and starboard quarter of the Northern Jaeger. The seagulls would dive down 40, 50 maybe even 100 at a time to fill their mouths with the debris, then beat their wings hard against the wind until they were once again in their holding pattern above the Northern Jaeger. Beyond the seagulls out on the horizon on the tip of my vision there were specks upon the waves. I rubbed my half closed, red raspberry eyes with the palms of my hands and squinted the specks into focus. The specks were other ships. I guessed they were fishing vessels just like the Northern Jaeger because as I figured no one would take a vacation on a cruise ship to the middle of the Bering Sea. I counted 37 ships.

“Whoa”, I said aloud to myself.

“It sure is something ain’t it?”

Startled, I turned to see Ed leaned against the bulkhead of the ship. His shoulders propped up his body, his ever present Harley Davidson doo-rag tied tight around the top of his skull while his mullet the color of a glass of scotch on a Sunday afternoon gently flapped in the breeze. He blew smoke out of his mouth and let the wind carry it away as he flicked the smoking nub of his cigarette butt overboard.

“Yeah”, I replied, “it sure is something.” We stood there for a few seconds and listened to the squawk of the seagulls while I inhaled the last few drags of my cigarette before it expired. To break the silence between us I decided to start a conversation. “I saw the most bad ass thing today.”

“Oh yeah, what’s that?” Ed replied his eyebrows wrinkled together.

“I saw a gnarly old shark carcass down in the factory by the sorting table. You should have seen it, the thing had to of been seven feet long and its teeth, oh shit, its teeth was like a mouthful of steak knives. Man, I’m telling you it was one of the coolest things I have ever seen.”

Ed rolled his eyes, shook his head with disgust and made a pfffff sound. “Well if there’s one thing us humans have perfected over millions of years of evolution besides stupidity and that’s how to rape the oceans for all their fucking worth.”

“What?” I asked his statement having caught me off guard. “I mean I guess so”, I said, “I never really thought about it.”

“Well you don’t have to think about it. You’re part of it. You’re doing it right now. Hell, we all are”, he said as he placed another white cigarette between his lips. “See all those ships out there bobbing up and down on the waves?” I nodded. “Well they’re doing the exact same goddamned thing we’re doing. Tossing nets in the ocean and hauling back schools of fish, entire species without discrimination.”

“I never thought about it like that.”

“You think we’re gonna be able to do this forever?” Ed asked as he put fire to the brown tobacco tip of his new cigarette and sucked in deep.

“I don’t know. I guess so.”

“Well we’re not”, Ed replied coldly, “in a few years, maybe a decade or two we’re gonna fish these waters clean out of everything, and for what? So some asshole in Tokyo can have fish eggs on top of his sushi. So some dog-faced Catholic in Boston can eat cheap fish on Fridays.”

Trying my best to be optimistic and lighten up Ed’s buzz-kill conversation I said, “I’m sure we won’t over fish these waters. I mean we have conservation laws and shit like that for a reason. Besides humans are pretty crafty I’m sure we’ll be fine.”

With a look of disgust on his tired face Ed said. “Us humans are gonna do like we’ve always done and destroy every damn thing in our path till there ain’t nothing left to destroy but ourselves.”

“For fuck’s sakes, Ed”, I barked, “why don’t you tell me how you really feel? If we’re out here raping the oceans like you said we are, then why are you a part of this whole operation?”

Ed blew nicotine exhaust out his nose, looked at me with eyes that begged for forgiveness and grumbled slowly, “Money”, as he unbolted the hatch and walked back inside.

Maybe it was the way Ed had growled out his answer to my question. Or maybe it was the look of unfulfilled redemption in his eyes. Or maybe it was the 37 ships I had spotted around us. Either way, I sank down on my heels with my back against the bulkhead and contemplated the conversation we’d just had. Still a little bit stoned I watched the black dots that were actually factory trawlers backlit by the fading sun and I thought about my own motives for being out there. I wondered if Ed was right. Were we really raping the oceans, and if so was the money I’d be getting as well as the right to call myself a man worth the price that the planet had to pay? Thoughts of blood money and a dying planet sailed aimlessly through the raging ocean of my mind until those thoughts shipwrecked upon the rocky shores of Karma. A few years before I had read about the concept of Karma, and even though I didn’t know all the ins and outs about it it still resonated with me the way no other religious idea had. Would my soul be stained by this act of fishing in Alaska, all because I wanted to become a ‘man’ and make money in the process? In giant-sized letters the words RAPE THE OCEAN flashed across my mind’s eye over and over. Maybe Ed was right, I thought, maybe us humans will destroy everything in our path. By that time the sun was nothing more than a memory. I took a drag off my cigarette, but it was dead so I flicked the fiberglass butt overboard and headed back indoors. In the warmth of my bunk I nodded off and dreamt of the dead black eyes and the sinister, saw-tooth sneer of the shark staring up at me from the cold steel floor.

CHAPTER END

There was a thunderstorm of death and destruction in my heart as I pulled on my brown steel-toed rubbers in the oilskin room. My brain was tired and melancholic. Before I had smoked pot with Newty I’d looked forward to it because I knew it would help me escape the reality of the Northern Jaeger and also help me to sleep. However the conversation I had had with Ed up on deck marinated with the sour thoughts of the dead shark I had seen in the factory and had put my unconscious mind in a state of unrest and unease that translated into me getting shit for sleep and having nightmares of the dead shark when I did. Mario’s big voice poked around the corner of the locker along with his big belly before the rest of him did interrupting my dark thoughts of greed, self destruction and crescent shaped dorsal fins.

“Char-les”, Mario squelched as he rubbed his 55 gallon gut and clenched his jaw like he was holding his bowels in. “I got a new job for you.”

I sent a prayer straight up to God that the job he had in mind for me didn’t entail anything to do with his beer gut, but the way he massaged it I wasn’t sure.

“What’s up Mario? You don’t want my skills on the viscera table no more?”

“No muchacho. I need you on the candling table. I need you to be on scooper duty. Franklin, that pinche Eskimo cabron, with those big fucking coke-bottle glasses that cover half his face, you know who I’m talking about, right?” I didn’t but I shook my head up and down like I did. “He quit over some bullshit about being too tired to work and now he refuses to leave his bunk. I told him to stop being such puta, drink some coffee like the rest of us do and get down in the factory. You know what he say to me?” Mario asked as his eyes flared up in anger for a moment before they flickered back down in a look of pain, his hand moved around in circles on his belly the entire time. “He say to me to go fuck myself. Me, he say that to me and he just rolled back over in his bunk. Can you believe the nerve of him?” I shook my head from shoulder-to-shoulder in disbelief, although I could very well believe the nerve of him. “So”, Mario continued, “I need you to take his place on the candling table. You think you can handle it?”

“Does the pope shit in the woods?”

Mario’s face went blank of expression as if that question touched him deep down inside. “I don’t know? Does he?”

“He does if he’s got to shit in the woods.” I said with a smirk.

Mario laughed through his teeth which produced a whistling sound like steam leaving a tea kettle. “You’re all right Char-les, now get your ass down in the factory and replace Trang, pronto. Vaminos! Vaminos!”

I knew people listened to music on their portable CD players during their shifts in the factory and even though I was brain-dead that was the first shift I had remembered to bring my new Discman with me. I had noticed before what Mike Reid had done to his headphones and so I did the same. Mike had broken the speakers free from the headset and jammed them into a pair of plastic earmuffs that way your ears got nothing but the music while the mind rotting noise of the factory was blocked out. Physically I was there, but my brain gauge was on empty and I hoped as I left the warmth of the oilskin room for the cold, wet factory floor that the music I was saddled up with would help me keep on keeping on for the rest of that shift.

The candling table was a conveyor belt about 2ft. wide x 10ft. long and like every other conveyor belt in the factory it came right up to my pubes, which meant the only way I could work comfortably was to take a wide stance otherwise by the end of that shift the hunch on my back would’ve given Quasimodo a run for his money. The actual conveyor belt itself was made of a white, thin, translucent material from which a light shone up through from underneath; the purpose of which was for fillets to flop onto one end of the candling table while fillet inspectors around the table, three on each side, stared down at the fillets that passed underneath and inspected them for worms, discolorations and defects. The fillets that didn’t pass inspection were removed from the belt and dropped into a trough on the side of the table which carried the faulty fillets to the surimi turbines. The fillets which did pass inspection would be carried along to the end of the candling table where the scooper would then scoop up a pile of 10-15 fillets with a plastic handled aluminum blade reminiscent of spackle knife and stack the wet, fleshy morsels into a basket. When the basket was full the scooper would take three Goliath sized steps over to the scales, hand the full basket to the scale technician, grab an empty plastic basket and hustle back to their station at the end of the candling table before any inspected fillets slipped over the edge of the rotating plastic belt.

I stood back a for a minute or two before I tapped Trang Dang out, just to get the hang of my new job and like watching a professional skateboarder on the X-Games, Trang made it look so easy. If he can do it I sure as shit know I can do it, I said to myself before I fumbled around with my thick gloves and hit the play button on my Discman and let THE PIXIES rock their way into me. I touched Trang lightly on the shoulder. He spun around, slapped the handle of the blade into the palm of my left hand and he was gone.

“See you in six.” I said to his back as he walked away.

Then I was on. In two breaths the fillets started to pile up on my blade. They were speeding along the conveyor belt on both the left and the right hand sides of the candling table so I had to alternate my blade position to catch them all. My hands moved quickly as I got into the cadence required to scoop the fillets properly and I was pleased with myself to know that I could adapt to a new job so quickly. But as I was patting myself on the back for doing such a great job I glanced up and yelled out, “Oh fuck”, as I saw that the basket I had been filling up was about two fillets from overflowing.

I high-tailed it over to the scale, slid my basket onto the weighing machine, grabbed another basket from a stack beside the scale and jammed back over to the end of the candling table. However as fast as fast could be I was not fast enough. As if in slow-motion I watched as about seven fillets spilled over the edge of the rotating belt. When I hit the end of the candling table I hopped right back into position and glanced up very quickly before I focused and began to scoop up the fillets coming at me. I hastily looked back down at the fillets on the conveyor belt not only because they rushed towards but because I saw six pairs of eyes that burned with hatred for my mistake.

Not wanting to get that death-look from the others working on the candling table again I concentrated and hustled. For the next six hours with CD on repeat in my Discman I released control and went under the influence of the music. I skillfully scooped fillets as THE PIXIES were ‘Digging For Fire’. I filled the plastic basket with precision as I was hit by ‘Wave Of Mutilation’. With haste I handed the baskets off to the scale technician as I questioned ‘Where Is My Mind’, and with a slight of hand quickness I snatched empty baskets and placed them to be filled as the wad of curls that stuck out from the back of my head swung back and forth to ‘Debaser’. Every song became my three minute anthem. For those six hours I pledged allegiance to the United States of THE PIXIES. Every guitar riff, every drumbeat, every lyric moved my body onward. I had just bounced back from the scales empty basket in hand when I felt a tap, tap in the middle of my back. Over my shoulder I saw Trang. He moved to the left of me and watched on with a stunned look on his opened mouthed face. I glimpsed over to see him and saw that his opened mouth had shifted into a big smile as he looked at me like my brain had officially melted out my nostrils. I didn’t pay him any attention though I just grooved to the music in my headphones and kept on scooping up fillets. Finally I saw a break in the fillets coming down the line and so I slapped the scooper into Trang’s orange gloved hand as I sang out, “This monkey’s gone to heaven!”

Out of the coldness of the factory and into the warmth of the galley I stood in line to get some food. No longer absorbed by the music in my headphones and not engaged in the chatter of the crewmembers around me my psyche retreated back to the downer conversation I had had with Ed nine hours before out above the aft deck. Once again the simple sentence ‘RAPE THE OCEANS’, was alive in my thoughts and just as quickly as it had beamed bright like a neon sign in my mind’s eye it had also deflated my spirits. I went from feeling good from having had a great shift in the factory straight down to the seventh level of hell. Instantly my appetite was null and void and I had no desire to be around people which was pretty tough to pull off onboard the Northern Jaeger. I stepped out of line, put my plate back in the stack of plates and headed to the one place I knew I wouldn’t see another person – the shower room.

The water was hot and scalded my skin from the color of paste to that of one cent bubble gum, but I liked it, I needed it. The water not only cleansed my flesh but also helped flush away the thoughts of doom that were the remnants of Ed’s words to me. We might all be here for money that was true, I thought, and yes we probably were raping the oceans. Had someone told me that before I signed on I probably would’ve signed on just the same. For the simple fact that I didn’t learn lessons from people telling me what was good and bad or right and wrong for me whether it be a preacher, a policeman, the president or my parents. I learned from what I did, what I saw. I learned from experience. I knew that thinking for myself and coming to my own conclusions about reality was one jewel of manhood I already wore in my crown. I had to see those 37 ships out on the Bering Sea and hear the self-disgust in Ed’s rough voice to understand what raping the oceans really meant. Back home I would have thought that ‘rape the oceans’ was an amusing euphemism or the title of new punk band but what I saw in the factory and out there on the sea had changed me.

A gurgle-gurgle sound rose up from the floor. I looked to the drain in the center of the shower and saw it was choked with a wad of my hair so I pulled the matted, wet clump to clear its throat and as the hole in the floor greedily drank down the water that had accumulated an epiphany stepped from the shadows in my head into the light for me to see and understand clearly. Ed was right, if we humans didn’t change our ways we would overfish the Bering Sea and leave nothing but legends of how bountiful it once was for our grandkids. I also knew without a doubt that my working on the Northern Jaeger wouldn’t stain my soul because like everything in life it’s the intentions behind the actions that count. As far as I could tell the intentions I had of making money and gaining manly insight were about as genuine and non-malicious as I could muster. I knew that if I was making a mistake I would certainly learn from it and that was the most valuable lesson of all. Satisfied with myself and the conclusions I had reached I dried off and left my thoughts of doubt and fear in the shower room and headed back to the galley because by that point was I was wicked hungry. As I tied my wet hair back into a ponytail and walked down the hallway another thought, a small thought, a quick thought but a thought just the same, blew through the temple of my mind. That thought was this: What if I’m just bullshitting myself to get what I want?

CHAPTER END

The next three weeks onboard the Northern Jaeger we caught and processed fish nonstop as if the gods of the sea had given us their blessing. We filled the freezer-hold in that time and began our steam back to Dutch Harbor to offload in that port made of the dreams, debts and desires of Alaskan fishermen.

We had six hours until we reached port and my shift was off while the opposite shift had to clean the factory. I had been excited before on the Northern Jaeger but that time was different. It was different because the tally sheet that the captain kept posted in the galley for the crew to track the progress of our quota said we had reached 100% of our overall quota. That meant we were about to offload for the final time and then steam back home. Needless to say I couldn’t sleep. I wanted to and I knew I needed to, to be rested for the offload but I was just way too excited. I don’t know which ran faster my imagination or my heartbeat both seemed to pound hard and keep me awake. I couldn’t help but think about all the partying I was going to do when I got back to Seattle. I lied in my bunk and fantasized how about the whiskey I would drink, the weed I would smoke, the strippers I would see, the concerts I would go to, all the fun I would have! The more I thought about getting off the ship the more stoked I got. The more stoked I got the harder it was for me to sleep. I knew I had to pump the brakes on the runaway train in my head before I ended up not sleeping a wink. I tried to clear my mind but I couldn’t. I tried to close my eyes and count as high as I could till I drifted off but that didn’t work either. I thought of the bottle Nyquil I had tucked in between my mattress and the steel bulkhead but I didn’t indulge because I knew if I swilled some back I’d be zombie tired for the offload and I didn’t want that. I tossed and turned for a few minutes longer before the answer to the riddle of sleep came to me. It was an answer so obvious I was surprised it hadn’t been my first course of action as it had always been the one thing that had worked to cure my restless mind and make me fall fast asleep. I needed to blow a load, loosen my loins, free my seed; I needed to orgasm and there was only way to go about that.

Slowly I inched open the curtains of my bunk and looked. Outside of my bunk the room was dark I saw no light escaping from behind either Newty or Nikolai’s curtains. Then I held my breath and listened carefully to the sounds of the room. All that came back to my ears was the dull hum of the Northern Jaeger’s engines and the occasional hissing noise of air escaping nasal passages. Out of my bunk, and with all the ninja skills I had at my disposal, I slithered my way down onto the floor. My feet warm against the cold linoleum I knelt and gripped the handle attached to Newty’s designated drawer and gingerly pulled it open inch-by-inch as not to make any sudden noises. With the drawer fully opened I brailed my way through his belongings until my fingertips ran across the unmistakable feel of a glossy magazine cover. I set the magazine free from the drawer and placed it beside me on the floor then just as carefully as before I pushed the drawer back into place. In one smooth and silent motion I stood up tossed the magazine on my bunk and stealthily followed suit. A wink later and I was wrapped inside of a fantasy world. The music in my headphones deafened my thoughts, the magazine was propped up against the bulkhead split open to a hardcore secretary/boss scene, my sweatpants were nowhere to be found and in that all consumptive moment with me on the verge of blowing a galaxy sized load as I pumped my rock-hard cock through my lubed up fist that was it, there was nothing else. That is until in my line of sight down past my feet on the edge of the darkness where the foot of my bunk butted up against the only curtain-less bunk in our room popped Blume’s freckled face. I looked at him, his blue eyes wide with shock – mouth open. He looked at me fully naked except for the headphones on my ears with a fistful of greasy cock. Flustered, embarrassed and dumbstruck I pulled off my headphones, tossed the magazine on my boner and shouted the only thing that came to mind, “What the fuck are you doing here?! You… You..You’re supposed to be cleaning the factory!”

Blume hopped from his perch on his bunk back into the darkness of the room “We’re done, we did it already the factory is clean. I was just coming up to get a pack of smokes. I didn’t know you’d be up here putting on a show.” Blume said as he laughed himself out of the room and into the hallway.

My hard-on was gone, frightened out of me. In the aftermath of getting caught tugging my meat I laid still and listened to see if either Newty or Nikolai had woken up, but they hadn’t. I pulled the magazine off myself and I couldn’t help but snicker as the spread leg secretary on the page had an oily dick-sized shadow on her body. For a brief second I worried that Blume might tell the crew about what he’d just caught me doing but that thought exited my mind as quickly as it had taken root because I remembered that not only was Blume a shy talker but he was also the one person who I knew that hated to talk about anything sexually related. As I felt that I was in the clear from both getting tattled on by Blume and from waking up Newty and Nikolai I still couldn’t sleep so I opened the magazine to a new pictorial and finished what I had started. With my mind at ease and the floodwaters of my loins released I switched off my bunk light and laid in the blackness of the room and just as I felt consciousness begin to leave my body the wide-eyed look of horror, disgust and jealousy on Fire Crotch’s face spirited its way through my dreamscape the way a fog rolls in off the ocean.

CHAPTER END

I awoke to a feeling of non-movement which meant the Northern Jaeger was secured to our designated dock space in Dutch Harbor. The first thought through my mind was how relieved I was that Charlie the ships purser had been right, he had told me 30 more days and there we were a mere 33 days later back in Dutch Harbor. Into the galley I went as I rubbed my eyes in search of caffeine. While I sugared and milked my coffee I heard Mike call out to my back, “Hey Chuck, what’s happening?”

I turned from the coffee pot to Mike who had just lit a cigarette and was blowing out the first drag, “Not much just getting ready for ‘the final offload’” I sang out to the tune of Europe’s 80’s classic The Final Countdown.

The galley was alive with the usual pre-offload buzz. Each of the tables were fully occupied by my shipmates who ate, smoked and drank coffee by the pint. The cigarette smoke in the air had to of outnumbered the oxygen molecules two-to-one. Nancy slid in beside Mike at his table. On the black plastic box television strapped to the ceiling in the corner of the room a mulleted Jean Claude Van Damme asked a woman to close her eyes and trust him before he snatched a rattlesnake from a tree, punched it on the head and bit off its rattle.

“Hey have a seat, man”, and I did I sat in the three-man position opposite Mike and Nancy as he went on, “I heard you got in a fight last night.”

“What was that?” I asked Mike. “Sorry I was watching Van Damme fuck that snake up. What’d you say?”

“I was saying I heard you got in a fight last night”, Mike said louder as he nudged Nancy with his elbow. “I heard you beat the shit out of him too!”

Me, I sat there confused about the fight he spoke of when Nancy leaned forward, blew smoke out the side of her mouth and joined the conversation. “Who’d you get in a fight with?”

I opened my mouth but before words could escape Mike shouted out the answer to his own question or rather the punch-line he’d been itching to shout out the whole time, “His dick! Chuck got in a fight with his dick!” The whole time he said that he smiled an asshole’s smile I wanted to punch off his beard covered face as he jacked off an invisible cock in front of himself.

I hadn’t taken a sip of my coffee yet so my brain was still in that – the lights are on but nobody’s home stage. But when Mike’s joke hit my ears my memory imploded back to the sight of Fire Crotch’s surprised face and I felt red all over my body. It was the shade of red that only comes from being embarrassed on a sexual level. The kind of red that Bill Clinton was when he told the American public that he hadn’t had sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky, the kind of red that Hugh Grant was in his mug-shots after getting popped by the fuzz for getting a blowie from a prostitute. It was the same kind of red that Michael Jackson would had of been in the courtroom as he was being accused of child molestation if he hadn’t of been caked under so much makeup. Yeah, it was that kind of red. My hope that Blume would’ve either been too embarrassed or too shy to tell anybody about catching me in the throes of self pleasure instantly proved to be a false hope.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah”, I said before I gulped down half of my cup of coffee and tried to kick-start my brain to figure out a way to handle that situation. About two long seconds later my brain was powered up and zipping through a file cabinet full of ways to deal with the scenario. I was about to deny the whole damn thing and say that Blume was full of shit but a little voice deep down inside of me told me not to do that, it told me that had I done nothing wrong, that I was a human being with free flowing hormones and carnal desires and that neither being naked nor masturbating was anything to be ashamed of. In fact the little voice told me I should feel liberated and proud. So I sat up tall, wiped the sweat from my brow and said to Mike, “Go ahead and laugh it up I have nothing to be embarrassed about, besides you trying to tell me you’ve never jacked-off before?

“Of course I have”, Mike said as he knocked the ash from the tip of his cigarette, “the difference is I just don’t whip it out and spank it in front of my roommates.” When he said those words I immediately understood just how fast on the Northern Jaeger a story could go from zero to fucked up.

“You what!?” Nancy exclaimed.

“Yeah, this guy…” Mike said as he pointed at me.

I cut him off instead. “Oh hardy fucking har”, I balked. I might of just had a self-dignifying revelation about my body but I wasn’t about to let the facts of the story get warped any further from the truth. “I don’t know what kind of nonsense you heard but I was not in the middle of the room waxing my boner for all my roommates to see. I was…” I let my defense drop as Nancy and Mike both chuckled at my expense. I took a drink of my coffee and waited for their laugh-track to subside. A minute passed and I said rather irritated, “Are you two done? Are you through?”

After Mike took a drag off his cigarette to help quell his laugher he said, “Ah lighten up, will ya?”

“Geez Louise”, Nancy retorted, “don’t be such a sensitive cock stroker.”

I thought about where I was, what had happened and who I was talking to and as my frown turned upside down I said, “You’re right, you’re right I definitely deserve to have my balls broken for that incident. But just to set the record straight I wasn’t in the middle of the floor pulling my pud I was…”

Mike exhaled as he butted into my train of thought, “Yeah, yeah we know what happened. I just wanted to give you a hard time.” He exhaled and the words came out of his mouth like smoke signals.

Nancy looked through me like a window and said, “What the hell has gotten to that boy?”

I turned my neck and saw Wang Warmer standing in the doorway that connected the galley to the hallway. He wasn’t wearing his offload uniform of dirty sweatpants and a filthy sweatshirt he wore dark jeans, a fresh black t-shirt and clean sneakers. He had even shaved his usual growth of facial stubble and gone to the trouble of using gel to spike up what little hair he had left on the top of his head.

“Where do you think you’re going there?” Mike asked. “You know that offload is gonna start in about 10 minutes, right?”

“I think what you mean to say is that offload is gonna start in about 10 minutes for you fools, but not for this kid”, Wang answered back as he sat in the fourth seat at our table and plunked his right hand down on the center next to the ashtray. “This right here is my ticket back home, baby!”

“What?” I questioned.

Wang shifted his gaze to me and got his dig in. “What’s up Sir Strokes-A-Lot?” I rolled my eyes in response as he got back on topic, “see my middle finger here all bandaged and taped up so nice?”

“Yeah so”, I said

“This bandage on my most favorite of favorite fingers means I can’t work no more. It means I get a one way ticket back to Portland. It means that by this time tomorrow when you all are breaking a sweat from offloading this bitch, I’m gonna be breaking a sweat from boning my old lady. That’s what this means!”

I narrowed my eyes in disbelief and asked, “Are you joking around?”

“No”, Nancy breathed heavily, “he ain’t joking around. If anybody gets fucked up while we’re processing the company policy is to get the injured party off the ship and back on land, and depending on how bad the injury they’ll either airlift them off the ship or if they’ll live the captain waits till the next offload and then dumps them off in Dutch.”

“Preach it sister, preach it!” Wang hollered, “And we’re back in Dutch right now!”

Mike crushed the nub of his cigarette in the ashtray before he asked, “How did you manage to do that to your flip-off finger?”

Wang smiled a twisted tooth smile while he answered the question, “On that last shift in the factory I was loading fish into the Bader machine when all of a sudden the ship did one of these”, he said as he shifted his shoulders up and down and side to side, “and I lost my footing so I had to grab onto anything I could to keep my balance, which would have been fine but my glove got caught in between the belt and the machine, and well, the next thing I know it squeezed and nipped the tip right off of my ‘fuck you’ finger. It was gruesome, I tell ya, blood came pouring out on all the fish and got all over the Bader machine. It was not cool.”

“Damn”, Nancy said.

“How much of your finger did you lose?” I asked.

“I’d say about a quarter to a half”, I thought he was going to say inch but instead he replied, “Centimeter.” Nancy, Mike and myself all simultaneously burned Wang Warmer with our eyes and he definitely felt our vibe as the next words out of his mouth were, “Well I better get cracking on my packing. Peace”, he said as he stood up, “I’m out!”

With Wang out of the galley Mike voiced what that three of us were thinking, “What a dickhead.”

“Please tell me the he’s going to get his pay docked or fined or something like that?” I asked.

“Nope not one single penny”, Nancy replied, “since we’ve finished our quota he’s gonna get all his pay and since it’s a medical leave of absence the company picks up the tab for his flight back home.”

I heard the words that Nancy said but my mind was in an alternate universe where I was the one with the missing a half centimeter of finger. A universe where I was the one who had just told Nancy and Mike that I was going to peace out and go back home. A universe where I was packing my bag and getting ready to sit in the airport lounge and drink as much Crown Royal as I could fill my belly with while I waited for my flight back to civilization. When my fantasy bubble burst I was left with the sourness of jealousy in my head. That motherfucker, I thought, I’m sure he probably snipped the end of his finger off on purpose.

While I stewed about Wang and his leaving the Northern Jaeger I turned my attention from the blank faces of Mike and Nancy to the goings on in the galley in an attempt to distract myself from the hateful thoughts that haunted me. Racial segregation might have officially ended in the United States in 1967 but on the Northern Jaeger in the year 2000 it was alive and well. The Mexican majority sat with themselves, all were engrossed in the ass kicking’s Jean Claude Van Damme dealt out on the screen of the black plastic box television that was strapped to the ceiling in the corner of the room. The Asians sat playing a card game, which card game I don’t but they seemed to be very excited about it. Byron and Raven, the only two gentlemen onboard the Northern Jaeger that were of African descent, sat at a table locked in conversation.

I turned back to Mike and Nancy who sat with their mouths shut tight, their eyes vacant. “Is it just me or did that story he just tell us about how he sliced his finger sound like total bullshit?”

“I was thinking the same thing.” Nancy said as she killed her cigarette in the ashtray. “I mean I know down in the factory that your footing can get a little loosey-goosey from time to time, but I also know that there are plenty of things to grab onto within arms reach that don’t have moving parts.”

Mike nodded his head and joined in, “I mean I’ve never worked as a Bader tech but I’ve been around Bader machines and seen them in action plenty of times to know that there’s no fucking way you can get a big old fat gloved finger caught where he said it got caught.”

“Yeah and to have it only cut a tiny nip off the tip of his finger and do no rel permanent damage, I mean come on that just seems a little too convenient to me.” I added.

Mike looked at me with his forehead furrowed as one hand rubbed his beard and questioned, “What are you trying to say, do you think that son of a bitch cut his own finger?”

I began to answer but my words were overpowered by Mario as he walked into the center of the galley and read off his list of who was going to work where during that offload. Our conversation was as dead as the lifeless cigarettes in the ashtray as the three of us shut up and listened for our names to be called. As it turned out I had the first five hours off to rest up before I was supposed to report to the freezer-hold. I didn’t wait for Mario to retract that statement and tell me he’d made a mistake. I split from the galley as fast as fast could be and headed dockside to get solid ground beneath me and to make a few phone calls. Outside  the confines of my floating house of pain I was momentarily blinded. There was something in my eyes I hadn’t seen for so long I had almost forgotten about it entirely. It was the noon day sun in all its round burning glory. I squeezed my eyes shut as I trekked onward to the phone booth and with the sun warming me up inside my flannel I thought to myself, what a great way to start the final offload.

With the glass door pulled shut and the plastic phone in hand I pulled out my calling card and dialed my parents’ number. I was stoked to talk with them I couldn’t wait to hear their voices and tell them that I was coming home. The phone rang and rang and rang and rang but I got no answer. No worries, I thought, I’ll just call someone else I know but then I realized I didn’t have my little phone book with me and there was only two other phone numbers I knew by heart. I dialed the first number, that of one of my best friends, Willie. My ears were greeted not by his friendly voice but by an annoying beep-beep-beep which meant his line was busy. Not one to let that bum me out I hung up and dialed the other number I could remember that of one of my other best friends, Rex. The phone rang twice before he picked up.

“Hello, this is Rex”, he said in a very serious, very monotone voice.

“What’s up buddy?”

“Who is this?”

“I’ll give you a hint you poop-stain”, I replied as the sun filtered through the glass and heated the flesh on my face. “Last fall we ate shrooms at the Orin Rice Barter Fair. All night the two of us melted into the seats of my truck while we listened to BLACK SABBATH over and over again, chain smoking cigarettes and tripping balls.”

“Oh shit!” Rex shouted his voice raised a few decibels from the sullen businesslike tone he answered the phone with back to the relaxed boisterous voice I had known him to have. “What’s up Bob Marley-Charlie?”

“Not much NOFX-Rex, not much at all. You know, I’m just up here in Alaska just doing the damn thing.” I was happy to find that Rexs’ voice didn’t have the same emotional effect on me that my mom’s had had. Partly because I was feeling positive as it was the final offload, partly because the bright solar globe in the sky seemed to me a great omen, but mostly because I was talking to someone who I considered to be my little brother (not by birth but by friendship) and I didn’t want to lose face.

“How are you, man? How’s Alaska? Did you catch crabs yet?” With his last question he snort-laughed out his nose and into my ear.

“Ha-ha-ha very funny, no I didn’t catch crabs. As for being up here, it’s about as good as can be expected for having to work my ass off on a fishing boat out on the Bering Sea. I’m not gonna lie to you and say it’s been all peaches and cream up here because it hasn’t. A lot of the times up here it sucks a giant elephant cock, but you know I just try to keep my head up with a smile on my face and keep on trooping on.” As I rambled on I looked out the glass of the phone booth and marveled at how quickly my shipmates had begun to offload the product from within the Northern Jaeger. I hadn’t even been off the ship more than 10 minutes and already dog food sized bags of fishmeal and 50lb boxes of frozen fish were being pulled off of conveyor belts and stacked onto pallets. “Enough about me though. How the hell are you? How’s Seattle been treating ya?”

“Oh man, I love it over here!” Rex howled with delight. “I don’t live in Seattle. I live in Everett which is just north of Sea-town, but whatever. There is always something going on over here; I mean concerts, party’s, dude it’s a blast!”

“Are you working or anything or just chilling?”

“Oh yeah I almost forgot to tell you”, Rex beamed through 2,000 miles of telephone wire. “I’m working at Roto-Rooter.”

“You’re a fucking plumber now?” I asked dumbfounded since the Rex I knew was one of the laziest people I had knew when it came to manual labor.

“Fuck that!” He answered back. “I work in the call center. I take the service calls and schedule the plumbers.”

“Right on.”

“Oh man, I got some news that’s gonna blow your mind. You’re never gonna guess what it is!” Rex said and from the excitement in his tone I pictured him with a huge shit eating grin under his hooked nose.

“Let’s see”, I replied as I scratched my scalp and thought about what news he could tell me that would ‘blow my mind’, “You won the lottery and are gonna take me on an all expense paid trip around the world?”

“I wish.”

“You’re gonna set me up with a hot Asian chick with big titties and who loves to swallow when I get back?”

I could almost hear him roll his eyes as he said, “Nice try, Charlie, nice try.”

“All right”, I conceded, “What is it? What are you gonna tell me that’s gonna blow my mind?”

With pride he said, “I have a girlfriend.”

“What? Did you just say you have a girlfriend?”

“Yeah, I met a chick and she’s all mine now! It’s fucking awesome!”

For a few long seconds I stood there in the glass phone booth and watched the offload in progress as his words soaked into the spongy part of my brain. Rex was right that statement did in fact blow my mind. The reason it shocked me so is because Rex had never had a girl in his life before. It’s not that he didn’t like the fairer sex it’s just that every time a young lady had been interested in him and he in her he’d always managed to find himself delegated to the dreaded ‘friend’ category faster than he could pop a chubby. After I caught myself being the guilty party of an awkward silence I said, “Right on, buddy”, before I hit him with a fast barrage of questions. “What’s her name? What does she look like? Tell me about this chick? Does she have any slutty friends?”

“Her name is Sarah and she’s awesome, man. She’s super cool and fun and the funny thing is she reminds me a lot of you.”

At that confession I pulled the phone away from my face and looked at the hunk of talking plastic with a screwed up face, “She what?”

“Wait, wait that came out wrong I mean she doesn’t look like you or anything but her personality reminds me of you. She’s a really funny, chill person who gets along with everyone she meets, that’s what I meant when I said she reminds me of you. We get along really, really well and it’s just fucking awesome!”

“That’s excellent I’m happy for you.” I was about to switch topics and tell him I was coming back to Seattle when I remembered he hadn’t answered all my questions. “Hey what does she look like?”

“She’s got blonde hair, big chi-chi’s and a beautiful smile.”

“Oh sweet!”

“Sweet, sweet beat your meat”, Rex replied as he always had every time I had ever said the word sweet.

I wanted more specifics about what she looked like but I figured if he had wanted to give them he would of so I segued into the reason for my call. “What are you doing in about a week from now?”

“I don’t know smoking bowls through the red ripper, fucking off, you know the usual. Why?

“Well I was wondering if you know if it doesn’t throw a wrench in your busy schedule if you could maybe…. Pick me up from the port of Seattle?”

“No shit!” he yelled.

“I shit you not.” I replied.

Still in disbelief at the words that came out of my mouth he asked. “You’re gonna be back in Seattle in a week, for real?”

“Count on it. This is our final offload and then it takes about seven days to steam back so yeah, like I was saying. I wanted to see if you could pick me up in about a week.”

“Of course I’ll be there it’s not even a question. I mean how many times did you haul my ass around when I was living up on Mingo Mountain at my mom’s place? I owe you a lot more rides than I can give you, for sure I’ll be there.”

“One more thing”, I said as a forklift with a pallet of frozen boxed fish that resembled a giant brown sugar cube wrapped in cellophane hoisted heavy on its forks whizzed by my line of sight, “Can you roll a fatty and bring it with you when you come get me?”

“Consider it done and done. The crazy thing is I was thinking that before you asked for it. I guess great minds think alike.”

“And so do dirty ones”, I replied with a chuckle.

“Speaking of getting stoney baloney I need to get cracking so I can blaze up before I have to go in for my shift at the call center. Take it easy man. Hey is there a way you can get a hold of me before you land in Seattle?”

“No sweat”, I said. “I’ll send you an email with all the details a couple days before we dock. Take it easy and have a good one.”

“Yeah you too”, he said before he hung up on his end and I was left alone in the phone booth. I thought about redialing my parents but decided I wouldn’t as that was the final offload and I would be back on the mainland in about a week or so. Back towards the Northern Jaeger I went. My steps lighter, freer. The sun somewhat hot by Dutch Harbor standards had my crewmates on the dock red-faced and sweating. They had all stripped down to t-shirts, their flannels tied around their waists as they lugged the bags of dried piss smelling fishmeal on their shoulders and carried the 50lb boxes of frozen fish in their arms. I walked up the gangplank past the site of their labor with a smile branded on my face as I raised the pointer and middle fingers of my right hand to my brow in a two finger salute to the good work they did.

Back inside the steel body of the Northern Jaeger my eyes adjusted from the sunlight back to the false electric lights above. In the galley I ate a quick meal by myself then headed to the comfort of my bunk for some shuteye before my first shift of what would be the final offload. A few hours later I woke up before my alarm, eyes wide open, excited and happy. I leaped out of bed as chipper as a songbird and knew no matter how good I felt I had better not start a shift of any kind without pain killers, vitamins and cold medicine so I tossed down the small handful of pills and capsules down my throat and slid into my freezer gear – insulated jumpsuit, boots, hat and gloves. At the square mouth of the freezer-hold the icy air that wisped up in waves looked harmless and benign compared to how menacing it had looked to me upon my very first offload. For a few moments before I descended the ladder into the wintery depths below I watched the frosty fingers of air curl upwards with the same wonder as someone watching a genie escape its magic lamp to grant wishes to its new master. In other words I no longer saw the freezer-hold as an enemy that needed to be loathed and feared I saw it as a small step back to get what I wanted; to get me back to Seattle, back to being young and free, back to reality – true reality that is, not the un-reality that I found myself in.

At the bottom of the ladder I pulled in a big breath of the arctic air and felt the boogers I hadn’t realized that were in my nose freeze as hard as gravel to my nose hairs and the tender flesh on the inside of my nostrils. Upon exhale the invisible breath I had drawn in came out ghost white. I stood upon the top of a pyramid formation of boxes that I imagined looked like one side of a Mayan temple as the boxes formed a solid base at the bottom and cut away in a step-like pattern until it reached where I stood just below the ladder.

Without a word spoken between them my crewmates below rambled along to the rhythmic clomp of their steel-toed freezer boots and the steady solid sound of the heavy boxes as they made contact with the rotating canvas conveyor belt. The usual banter that was accompanied with an offload was gone. From my vantage point all their faces looked pale and expressionless and the way they shambled about silent and white-faced reminded me of the zombies from George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead.

As I climbed down the frozen boxes of fish I wondered why everyone seemed so glum. I knew it was our final offload but was I the only person who wasn’t going to miss the Northern Jaeger? On the ground floor with the rest of the muted crew I shouted out, “Yo, who needs to get replaced! I am here to relieve someone of their freezerly duties.” My words came out in gusts of white steam which stayed suspended above me for a few moments like words spoken in a comic book.

From out of the crowd of dark freezer-suited figures a short, plump person dropped their 50lb load onto the belt and bolted towards me. As the fleshy person neared me I made out the only feature that wasn’t bundled up in insulated clothing and that was their eyes, small horizontal eyes, they were the eyes of Eileen. “Good game kid”, I joked as I patted her on the back, “now get topside and let me get in there and do some damage.” Eileen didn’t respond she rushed past me, hustled her herself up to the top of the makeshift staircase of frozen product and up the ladder and out of the freezer-hold she went. Fresh and eager are the words I would use to describe how I felt. Unlike all the sulking faces of my half-frozen crewmates down there I felt chalked full of positive energy as I snatched up my first box of frozen fish and cradled it in my arms. I deposited the frozen fish onto the conveyor belt then raced past everyone else and grabbed another box and hot-footed it back to the rotating canvas belt. As I was going for 50lb box number three I heard the words that Ed had spoken to me during my first offload echo inside of me – conservation is key, conservation is key, conservation is key – and not wanting to incur the wrath from any veterans of the Bering Sea down in the freezer-hold with me I took my energy level down a peg or two and fell into the meandering zombic rhythm that everyone else was in.

“What’s up ROCK?” I asked as we passed each other, me on the way to pick up a 50lb box and he on the way to deposit one. THE ROCK didn’t respond with words he grunted a guttural caveman grunt and slammed his box onto the belt so hard it made the other boxes on the canvas conveyor belt jump. I didn’t ask what that he meant by that response it was obvious he was, as well as everyone else down there, pissed off about something.

I fell in beside Raven and said “What’s happening?” as I pulled a box from the angled wall of 50lb boxes of frozen fish.

Raven turned to me his eyes like bottomless pits, his moustache frosted with ice; his mouth pinched together like a sphincter he said harshly, “Not a goddamn thing, Charlie-boy, not a goddamn thing.”

At that I declined trying to spark a conversation with THE ROCK or Raven or anyone else for that matter and just focused on getting boxes onto the conveyor belt and out of the freezer-hold. Even as fresh crewmember filtered in to take the place of those who needed to be relieved still not a word was spoken. I found it eerie that no one wanted to talk on what should have been a time of celebration as it was our final offload and all. Hell, I would have preferred to of had my balls broken about getting caught masturbating than of endured the silent treatment that had been enforced, but as I had no choice in the matter I zipped my lip, jumped into the foxhole of my mind and let my psyche wander through the corridors of my past because the present was too damn depressing and the future was something that was out of my grasp. Six silent hours later and the man who had worn the raingear with the words ‘#1 Jorge’ scribbled across his back tapped me on the shoulder to take my place while I went to the galley and ate. Up the staggered staircase of frozen boxes I went which at that time was less the side of a step pyramid as it had been when I had first arrived and more of a wonky wall of 50lb rectangle boxes. I was midway up the ladder between the freezer-hold and the factory when the ship canted from side-to-side and I heard someone shout – Look the fuck out – from my perch I looked down on the Winnebago high wonky wall of boxed, icicled fish as it teetered on its own weight before it leaned over too far and crashed onto the wooden floor with the sound of a thunderclap in a cathedral. Upon impact the boxes became 50lb projectiles as they shot out in every direction and skidded across the floor at high velocity. Everyone that was in harm’s way scattered, dodged, dived, jumped and to my amazement avoided getting taken out like pins in a bowling alley. With the momentary chaos avoided I continued up the ladder towards the warmth of the upper decks. I poked my head out of the mouth of the freezer-hold and it wasn’t the salty smell of the ocean or the usual smell of fish that greeted me but the choking, acrid stink of burning metal as leather clad and box helmeted engineers took the factory apart piece by piece with plasma cutters and metal grinders. Still on the ladder of the freezer-hold I ducked my head below into the frozen, scentless air, took a deep breath and held it in as I pulled myself up into the factory and raced to the stairwell that lead to the oilskin room.

My heavy steel-toed freezer boots made a dull crunching noise on the corrugated cardboard laid upon the floor for the offload as I looked around the galley for a place to sit and eat. To my delight a conversation was taking place at the table of Keith, Byron and Nikolai, and as I sat down I heard Keith say definitively, “… and that’s why I love girls who work at fast food joints.”

“Hold up, hold up, hold up”, I repeated. “What are you talking about?”

“Mr. Keith here was just informing us of his obsession for the ladies of the fast food and beverage industry”, Byron said most eloquently as an unlit cigarette bounced between his lips with every word spoken.

“What?” I asked.

Nikolai pointed a long Russian finger across the table to Keith and said in his best broken English, “He…Uh….want to be girl who… who…Uh…. Mcdonald’s work.”

“Kersmackie”, Keith yelled as he activated the idle empty plastic bottle tied to a piece of string that sat in front of him and plunked it over Nikolai’s skull. “Is that what you got out of it? Did you hear a single word I said?” Nikolai looked awash with confusion, his lips apart his eyes brown and blank. “What I was saying”, Keith continued, “As you joined the butt end of the conversation, is that I have a thing…”

“You mean to say you have a fetish”, Byron interrupted.

“A preference, a fetish, a thing, a fucking whatever you want to call it; I just really like chicks that work at fast food joints. It’s not because they’re mostly under age or the fact that they can hook me up with shakes and burgers, or even because their hair smells like French fries like this assholes guessed.” Keith said as he nodded at Byron. “It’s because of those sexy ass uniforms they wear.”

I looked at Keith with my forehead wrinkled and my eyebrows crunched together and said, “Sexy ass uniforms, are you kidding me?”

“I am not kidding you man, I tell you whenever I see a ripe young chick with polyester pants stretched tight across her ass and a grease stained polo shirt on I get a hard-on.” He punctuated his sentence with the exclamation of the word, “Kersmackie”, as he popped me right between the eyes with his tethered plastic bottle like he was cracking a bullwhip.

“Wow, that’s pretty awesome Keith. I’ll never look at chick working a drive thru the same way ever again.” I replied.

“I couldn’t agree with you more”, Byron said with a flick of his lighter as he lit the cigarette parked in his mouth.

Nikolai sat at the table and listened intently to all that was said before he remarked, “McDonald’s girl…Uh…I…Uh…a like too.”

“Right Nikolai, right on”, I said, “Speaking of McDonald’s chicks makes me think of life on the mainland. Are you boys all ready to burn down half of Seattle in a blaze of glory when we get back next week or what?”

The three of them: Byron, Keith and Nikolai all looked one to the other before they turned their collected attention towards me. For a few seconds the three of them stared at me with their mouths half open unable to find the words to put to their thoughts.

“Okay”, I said slowly in response to their blank faces.

One of Keith’s shining blue eyes opened bigger than the other as his half open mouth melted into the creepy smile of someone whose brain had tipped the scales from sane to insane.

Nikolai tightened his thin lips together into a neutral facial expression then turned his attention to the black plastic box television that was secured to the ceiling in the corner of the room.

Byron looked from Nikolai to Keith then blew smoke out in a long slow stream before he spoke to me. “I assume that by you saying that, that you did not hear the news.”

“What news?” I asked.

Byron continued, “It appears that you must be the only person onboard that thinks we’ll be going back to Seattle after this offload.”

I felt an uneasy feeling bubble up in my stomach the same uneasy feeling that comes with the onset of squirty shits or upon hearing the words ‘we should just be friends’ from the girl you want to bang. Cautiously I asked, “What are you trying to say?”

“Where were you after the offload began?” Keith questioned.

“I used the telephone on the dock and then I got a little bit of sleep, why?”

Byron pulled a deep drag off his cigarette before he answered my question through a discharge of smoke. “Mario made an announcement probably about the time you were in the phone booth. He told the crew that out of the company’s fleet of factory trawlers that the Northern Jaeger had been chosen to go out for one more freezer full. Though not for pollock this time, we will be fishing for yellow-fin, and not the tuna but a bastard of a flatfish.”

I looked around at the three of their faces for a hint of mischievousness before I said, “You guys are fucking with me right?”

“I’m sad to say”, Byron replied. “This is the truth. It looks like we’ll be out for probably about another month.”

“Seriously?” was my one word response.

Keith rubbed the stubble on his chin as he replied without a hint of joke in his voice or on his face, “As serious as a heart attack.”

When his words hit my ears I was dazed, for a good 30 seconds the data processor in my head had no thoughts and I couldn’t conjure up any response to what I had been told. When my brain came back online it all made sense to me. I then understood the long faces and silent brooding atmosphere of the crew down in the freezer-hold. Even the wall of frozen boxed fish that crashed to the floor in retrospect seemed like an omen of that revelation. To say I was stunned, disappointed and deflated would be an understatement. With my appetite gone and my inner self unable to formulate words I picked up my plate, dropped it off to be washed and walked out on the bow deck to get some fresh air and deal with the fact that I would have to suck it up for another month. Outside the warm sun had been replaced by a cold dark sky and lonely silver moon which I felt reflected my attitude marvelously. I had forced myself to have a positive attitude since I had had the talk with Charlie the ship’s purser before the previous offload. My positivity was relative to the fact that the Northern Jaeger would only be out for 30 more days and I had counted on that but as the truth was revealed that I had been lied to, my high spirit crashed hard and fast. I felt like I had been floating down to reality strapped to my parachute of positive energy and having heard those words that Byron spoke it was like having someone cut the strings to my positive parachute sending me plummeting to the ground. I stood in the cold and watched the workers on the dock under orange street lights as they hustled and bustled to pull the endless stream 50lb boxes and 80lb bags that spewed out the side of the Northern Jaeger and stack them onto wooden pallets. I turned from the action on the dock and looked out over the bay of Dutch Harbor. The black waters, a canvas of infinite proportion, reflected the stars above and I felt crushed. I felt betrayed. I felt negative in every sense of the word. I tried to repeat the words: be positive, be positive, be positive – but the words faded into the overwhelming negativity I felt inside. I wanted to quit all over again. I thought about marching into Charlie the purser’s office and telling him he was a good for nothing goddamned liar and that I wanted to be on the first flight back to Washington sate, but I didn’t. I stood in the black of night; the bitter Aleutian winds stung the exposed skin of my nose, cheek and ears. I was empty of sunshine and positivity, my very being was cut open, exposed and bleeding to the world. I wasn’t sure if I could deal with the bullshit for one more month. Then without warning or even a second thought something inside of me changed as easily as if I had manually flipped a switch in my brain. It suddenly became clear that the only way for me to deal with this negative turn of events wasn’t to combat it with positive energy, because positive energy builds upon hope and unfulfilled hope leads to despair. My only choice was to give in to the dark side, release myself into the void; I had to find my strength from the negative energy that surrounded me. The act of giving up hope and expectations would be my only salvation. It was a radical thought but right then as I was fresh out of ideas it made perfectly logical sense. There on the bow deck with the crew offloading on the portside and the demon dark waters to the starboardside I nosedived to the bottomless pit within and found laughter, an insidious laughter but laughter just the same. I laughed at the situation I found myself in. I laughed at the silly reasons I was out there in the first place; to become a man and to make money. I laughed at myself for wanting to be macho. I laughed at having to fill the freezer-hold one more time. I didn’t laugh a jolly, good-natured laugh but a cynical laugh reserved for maniacs in an asylum. I laughed to keep from crying as it was the only way I could maintain what frayed bits of sanity I still grasped onto. As I let go and laughed myself into oblivion I felt a warmth swell up inside of me, the warmth one feels when one makes a conscious decision to no longer be bound by the framework of normality and release themselves to the darkness of their mind.

Renewed as I was I headed back inside the Northern Jaeger down once again into the frozen heart of the ship. The rest of that offload went by in a blur of me pulling boxes from their stacked position and placing them on the canvas conveyor belt which towed them out onto the dock. The hostile silence no longer bothered me and neither did the fact that we we’re going out for one more freezer full. I was in a headspace where they could have told me that we were going to be out to sea for another 10 months and I wouldn’t have minded at all I would have merely giggled a crazy man’s giggle and slipped a little farther into the abyss.

APRIL

With March but a fevered dream, within a distant memory, within a horrifying hallucination the offload in Dutch Harbor was over and the Northern Jaeger was back out on the Bering Sea doing what she was built to do.

I was geared up from the feet up in my orange rubber raingear as I walked down the steel stairs that led from the oilskin room to the factory when I heard music. It wasn’t just any music I heard it was the unmistakable tinny brass horns, powerfully strummed guitars, rollicking voices and squealing laughter of mariachi music. The music was loud and cheerful and reminded me of every Mexican restaurant I had ever eaten at. As I walked along the portside catwalk I noticed that the engineers had mounted stereo speakers throughout the factory and instead of taking the factory apart as I thought they had done during that last offload they had actually reconfigured it for yellow-fin season. Gone was the viscera table and candling table and roe inspection table, replaced by a belly height conveyor belt that traced the walls of the factory. In front of the belly high conveyor belt that wrapped around the factory there were four metal bars that made a shelf of sorts, it ran parallel to the entire length of the conveyor belt not unlike the metal bar-shelf you’d set your tray on in a cafeteria. Above the conveyor belt and the cafeteria style bar-shelf at about shoulder height was another metallic shelf upon which aluminum trays were stacked. Since there was no designated place for me to be as before in the factory I found an empty space in front of the conveyor belt and posted up next to Raven. The new gig that everyone found themselves doing was this: on said conveyor belt ugly roundish flatfish (yellow-fin) whose flesh had the same coarseness as an emery board and whose color was more shit-brown than yellow moved along at a slugs pace while the crew stood around and packed them into aluminum trays, when the trays were full they were also placed upon the conveyor belt to be taken off down the line at the plate-freezer area. The job was new and fun for about five minutes then the monotony took hold and didn’t let go.

“Have you ever done this before?” I asked Raven.

“About four years ago now I was part of one of the lucky crews that got to go out for one more run of yellow-fin.”

“What’s up the music?”

“My guess is”, Raven said with a heavy sigh, “this is their way of rewarding us. We get music, woo-woo-woo, big fucking deal. You know what the captain would do if he really wanted to reward us?”

I shook my head in a negative fashion as I said, “Nope.”

Raven cleared the phlegm from his throat with a loud painful sound of forced air pushed through his windpipe and continued. “If he truly gave a shit about us and wanted to reward us, the crew, he’d tell the company to stick this yellow-fin quota right up their ass. Then he’d turn this big bastard around and head back to Seattle full steam ahead.”

“Why do you say that?” I asked as I layered ugly fish upon ugly fish in an aluminum tray, “I mean fuck it, money is money right?”

“Money is money that is correct sir, but when the money you speak of is mere pennies on the dollar then I tell you what, it ain’t worth your time and it sure as shit ain’t worth my time.”

“Pennies on the dollar?” I asked.

Raven turned to me, the dark flesh of his face moist from the damp factory as he laid his wisdom upon me, “Damn Charlie-boy, you really don’t know shit about shit do you?” I didn’t answer as Raven continued. “I didn’t stutter and I know you ain’t deaf. You see these sons a bitches”, he said as he punched the fish that lay dead in the tray in front of him, “aren’t worth a damn. For this whole freezer full we’re about to fill we’ll be lucky if us, the crew makes an extra $600 or $700 a piece.”

“Bullshit”, I said as I placed my tray full flatfish on the yellow-fin covered conveyor belt and snagged an empty tray.

“It’s no bullshit”, Raven replied. “I wish it were but it ain’t.”

“Then why the hell are we out here if it’s so not worth our time?”

Raven didn’t speak for the length of time it took him to fill another tray and send it down to the freezer-plate technicians then he pointed at the fish on the conveyor belt as he spoke, “I have two reasons for ya”, he said with enough force to overpower the trumpet solo that blasted throughout the factory, “Number one: somebody must find some value in these ugly ass fish, and Number two: everybody has to eat shit once in a while so you better tie your napkin around your neck and grab your knife and fork because right now its our turn.”

I chuckled when Raven said that as it only reinforced the dark epiphany I had had on the bow deck during the previous offload. I felt that from the moment I had committed myself to the opposite of positive energy that my mind had honeycombed into different sections of my personality in order to cope and right there at that moment in time I was living through the honeycombed section labeled: FUCK IT, as nothing mattered to me anymore. Reality, real reality, the reality of manhood and home and friends and girls with big, big titties and sleeping in and getting stoned no longer existed. That reality had been replaced by a bad dream, a monotonous, never-ending bad dream but a dream just the same and like all dreams I knew that one day I would wake up.

The next few hours of that first shift in the factory processing yellow-fin my body moved on robotically as I let the music be the catalyst for my inner self to roam outside the confines of the ship to the infinite possibilities beyond. No longer did I have expectations or goals, I was freed, and as I worked onward to the pulse of the Mexican music my only regret was that I hadn’t released myself sooner to the void that was within me all along.

It was a harsh sound that brought me back to the moment, the sound I heard was a barrage of heavy dull thumps. The thumps began at the far end of the factory where the conveyor belt began and they moved down the line like rolling thunder until it reached me and I saw what the cause was. It appeared we had had a recent haul-back I knew that because the ugly shit-brown yellow-fin on the conveyor weren’t dead, they wiggled around and were very much alive. The heavy hitting sound I had heard was the frustrations of an entire crew of fishermen as they used balled up fists to beat the life out of the flatfish that passed by on the conveyor belt so they could be packed into their aluminum caskets. I thought it was a tad on the barbaric side until I had half a tray packed with those bastard fish and they flipped and flopped and spilled all over the metal grate floor in an explosion of aquatic life. That little incident was enough to piss me off, so I too began to punch, whack, smash and crush the small skulls of those unlucky fish. As I did so I felt myself sink further into the honeycombed section of my mind labeled FUCK IT down deep into a subsection called THE FIEND CLUB it was there I was able to not only justify but also enjoy what I was doing to those worthless fish.

Hours later at the end of that shift I walked out of the factory with Raven by my side as he said to me, “Goddamn Charlie-boy, I didn’t say anything to you when you was doing it but you sure as shit seemed like your mind had cracked back there, the way you was smiling away and beating the daylights outta those yellow-fin.”

I looked down at the carnage on my gloves and on my raingear then to Raven I said with a grin, “Well I’m already guilty of helping to rape the oceans so what’s the big deal if you add some assault and battery charges to my list of crimes against nature?”

Raven’s response was to roll his eyes before he said, “Oh lord, you have lost your marbles boy. You are officially bat-shit crazy.”

That night in my bunk before I closed my eyes I reflected on that first shift down in the factory processing yellow-fin and the words that Raven had said to me. I thought about all the fish I had pulped with my fists, and as fucked up as it sounds I tried to have empathy for those fish and remorse for how I had treated them but there was none to be found. As I had given in to my shadowy side and had turned the light off within I decided that instead of trying to go against my new nature and sympathize with those ugly bastard fish that I had better find the humor in it, kind of like the negative version of seeing the silver lining in every cloud. The humor came to me in the form of the opening lyrics form Ozzy Osbourne’s Crazy Train, Crazy, but that’s how it goes…, which made me smile. And as those lyrics blew out of my head they were replaced by another random phrase, ‘you can never go home again’, a phrase I rolled over and over again in my head like a lullaby. I knew that statement to be true just from the short period I had lived in Seattle then had gone back to my hometown and had to come to terms with the fact that my hometown was where I had grown up but it was no longer my home. In my bunk, eyes closed on the ledge of wakefulness and sleep a single question was written on the chalkboard of my subconscious, a question which pushed me over the edge into the darkness of dreamland, that question was this: Just as I can never go home again, What if by me delving into the darkness within I am never the same again?

CHAPTER END

The first week of yellow-fin season was promising as we had full nets for every haul back and both of the 12 hour shifts in the factory were able to process the entire time they were down there. Unfortunately even though we were busy it didn’t raise the spirits for myself or the crew. And just as the pollock had thinned out when we were processing them so did the yellow-fin.

After seven days of processing we were hit by a springtime storm that in days of old would have served as an omen for fishermen to go home because they had angered the deities of the sea but to our modern way of thinking it was just an act of Mother Nature that we had to endure in order to finish our quota.

I was in the factory when the storm hit. We had run out of fish and as per usual we had to clean the factory before we could go up to the galley. My bucket of sudsy water was in one hand and a stiff bristle brush in the other Mario came to me and said, “Hey Char-less, there are plenty of people cleaning the conveyor belt. I want you to get down there”, he said as he pointed a fat orange gloved finger at the metal grate upon which we stood, “in the crawlspace and clean up any fishes that are down there, comprende?”

“Si senor, no problemo”, I said in my best high-pitched Speedy Gonzales voice. Mario just smiled and walked away as I dumped my bucket of bubbles and maneuvered myself into the crawlspace below. Beneath the metal grate floor I could only move about on my hands and knees as I scurried along on in my search for forgotten fish. Above me the crew splashed and sprayed water unaware I was underneath their feet. I successfully dodged the water that fell through the metal grate floor as I collected the rotting fish that had gotten wedged underneath the surimi turbines and the Bader machines. For me it was fun to be below crawling along on my hands and knees if for the only reason that I had never been down there before, and in all honesty I had never even noticed the crawlspace for all the times I had walked above it. I had a bucketful of foul smelling, mushy fish when the bow of the Northern Jaeger rose up steadily before it crashed back down. Now up top on the metal grate flooring the crew merely shifted their weight from leg to leg or grabbed the nearest solid object to hold on to, but I, being below on the true floor of the factory didn’t have that luxury. The floor was slick and wet and when the bow rose up I and my bucket of decayed meat slid towards the aft of the ship as we were simultaneously hit by a mini tsunami of cold, soapy, salty water. Yes, I wore my orange rubber raingear but being on all fours as I was and in the direction I faced gave the water direct access to my dry parts as it rushed up the legs of my raingear all the way up to my belly before it retreated back into my steel-toed rubbers as gravity pulled the bow back down. At the same time I was hit by the rogue wave I watched the bucket I had filled with the spoiled fish tip over and spill its disgusting contents on the floor in front of me. I shivered inside my raingear as I grabbed my bucket and crawled as fast as I could to the nearest exit point, the whole time the bow went up, down, up, down, up, down. At the same time I was pulling myself up and out of the crawlspace Mario yelled out for everyone to head up to the oilskin room. Buckets and stiff bristled brushes dropped to the metal grate floor as well as hoses that streamed water that was barely above freezing as the entire crew in the factory rushed up into the oilskin room to wait out the storm.

The oilskin room was crowded with fishermen and cigarette smoke. The benches that cut through the middle of the room were full and those like me who didn’t have a seat stood around with our backs against the lockers. We couldn’t go up to the galley because we hadn’t finished cleaning the factory and we couldn’t finish cleaning the factory until we cleared the storm. Our only choice was to wait, a stalemate between man and the forces of nature. Together we rocked and rolled to the rhythm of the angry sea while everyone around me pounded nail after proverbial nail into their coffins with each cigarette that they lit. The seconds ticked by on the clock that was mounted above us but for me time ceased to exist. I began to grasp the Catholic concept of purgatory. I felt as if I had stepped into a place out of time and space where the neither sun nor the moon ever rose and the minutes bled together into the trough of eternity. As for conversations there were none, there just wasn’t anything to say or be said. To say the mood was grim would be an understatement.

After a few hours of collective silent brooding, Ed who sat on the edge of one of the wooden benches dropped his cigarette between his steel-toed rubbers and spoke aloud not to any one particular person but to everyone in the smoke filled room. “You know this, this camaraderie that we have right here is only found in a few places.” He said as popped a fresh cigarette into his mouth then struck his lighter and inhaled the flame. “All of us here we’re bonded together in a way that no one else will really be able to know or even understand. Sure we’ll be able to tell our friends and family what it’s like out on the old Northern Jaeger; the months we all spent trapped in the factory breaking our backs and losing our minds just so we could pack the freezer with fish and fill our goddamn quota. But no matter how good we tell the story or how well they listen they just ain’t ever gonna know what we went through out here. That is of course unless they’ve done time or been in a POW camp, then they might be able to sort of relate but this here is something special, something unique we’ll all take to the grave with us.”

At that moment I felt it. I felt the brotherhood I was now a part of. I was damn glad I hadn’t quit earlier. I was even glad in a twisted nightmare sort of way that we had been tasked to go out one more time to fill the freezer. I knew deep down inside that Ed was right that what we were doing and experiencing was unique and special and that even though it was hell on my body and on my mind that a part of me would miss the Northern Jaeger and the trials and tribulations that came with being onboard her. As the ship crashed through the storm and I inhaled the nicotine infused air of the oilskin room I felt a change in my soul and knew that I was no longer a greenhorn. The transformation was tangible for me. I was one of them.

CHAPTER END

The storm lasted for three long days during which that special feeling of brotherhood and uniqueness had vanished as quickly as it had appeared. I still knew I wasn’t a greenhorn and for that I was proud but those feelings I had had of missing the Northern Jaeger after I had gotten off went the way of a turd down the toilet.

After we cleared the squall we spent about a week trolling around the Bering Sea catching and processing small schools of yellow-fin when we could. Our days during that week went like this: we’d process all the fish we had and that would keep us busy for about two hours then we’d spend another two hours spit-shining the factory until it sparkled and the remaining eight hours of our shift we’d naturally spend up in the galley eating, drinking coffee and watching movie after movie through a nicotine haze. Thanks to Ed I no longer saw time spent in the galley as a relaxing reward but as one more obstacle that stood between the un-reality I found myself in and true reality.

At the beginning of each shift before I’d report to the oilskin room to get outfitted in my raingear I’d check the yellow-fin quota posted on the corkboard in the galley to see what our progress had been in the previous 24 hours. It was during that time that I understood the definition of the word frustration; for nothing was more frustrating for me than to be trapped onboard a factory trawler in the Bering Sea and to check the progress we’d made only to see that the freezer capacity had rose from 20% full to 21% full. Yes, I understood the word frustration but since I had previously abandoned all hope the frustration only fueled my darkened disposition.

After seven days of increasing the quota by 1% per day the sea gods began to smile upon us and once again I found myself back in the factory for full 12 hour shifts and I loved it. The mariachi music would blast through the stereo speakers that were mounted throughout the sea-bound-sweatshop as my shift of 50 or so crewmates and I stood hip-to-hip along the conveyor belt that encircled the factory. All of us wore identical uniforms of brown steel-toed rubbers and orange rubber raingear and as we all stood along the conveyor belt that encircled the factory, we each one of us moved in unison as we packed the yellow-fin into their respective aluminum coffins like we were animatronic characters in a theme park ride. During one particular shift I stood in between Newty and Mike and I was glad I did because I soon found out that I wasn’t the only one whose mind had slipped off the edge of the known map into uncharted mental territory.

“Hey”, Mike yelled over the raspy sound of the blown stereo speakers, “check this out!”

I glanced from the tray of dead fish in front of me over to Mike as I did a double, triple then quadruple take. Mike stood there with a stingray hugged close to his chest the white under belly of which faced towards me. Seeing him hold that once living animal I didn’t have the same reaction of fear and amazement as when I saw the dead shark, instead I thought it was funny. It wasn’t funny because he held the diamond shaped cadaver of a sea creature in his arms, it was funny because the stingray had a limp cock that hung out its midsection and was long enough to swing freely between Mike’s knees.

“Holy shit!” The words erupted from me in the form of uncontrollable laughter. I hit Newty on the arm and said, “Hey, look at this!”

Newty didn’t look up he merely barked out loud and clear “What?”, like I had interrupted his contemplations of the universe.

“Look at Mike”, I yelled back.

Newty blew out his lungful of air in a huff before he looked from the tray in front of him to Mike. Then he nearly pissed himself with laughter. “Jesus Christ”, Newty roared, “That is a huge dick. I had no idea a fish could make me feel so insecure.”

“I know, right?” Mike shouted back. “Yeah these fuckers are hung like…”

“Put that fucking thing down you numbskull!”, came a shrieking shout from our backs. The three of us turned on our heels to see the fires of hell blazing in the smoky blue eyes of Erin the QC. She was a short, punk-rock kind of gal but her voice, her eyes and her temperament made her a force to be reckoned with, and none of us wanted to be reckoned with. “Do you see anyone else fucking around down here? No, you sure as fuck don’t so before I write the three of you up put that skate down and all of you get back to work!”

Mike tossed the limp body back onto the conveyor belt with a thud as the three of us turned our attention back to the yellow-fin and began to pack the trays that were in front of us. “Goddamn”, Mike wisecracked loud enough for Newty and I to hear over the Mariachi music, “somebody needs to get laid.”

“Why did she call it a skate?” I asked as I watched the skate be carried off down the conveyor belt. “I thought that was a stingray?”

“Because it is a skate not a stingray”, Mike replied.

“What the hell is the difference”, Newty questioned.

“Fuck if I know. They look the same to me.” Mike answered. Down the line I watched as a freezer-plate technician pulled the skate off the conveyor belt and tossed it into a trough that fed into the fishmeal-hold.

For the rest of that shift in the factory I stood in line and mindlessly, monotonously pulled those bastard-ass yellow-fin off the conveyor belt and layered them into the aluminum freezer trays while the Mexican music droned on and on and on at a volume that certainly aided in my hearing loss.

Lucky for me by that point in the seemingly endless voyage of the Northern Jaeger to rape the oceans I had perfected the art of letting my mind drift and wander aimlessly like a nomad through the apocalyptic landscapes of my mind while my body went into autopilot and accomplished the task at hand.

While I worked on and on during that shift I thought about Wang-Warmer and him being back in Portland and I imagined him at a bar sitting down to have a pint of something dark and heady from the Deschutes Brewery with his crooked smile and the thin tuft of hair on the top of his skull. But the thought of him off the Northern Jaeger enjoying himself seemed a little too saccharin sweet and so I tossed some vinegar on it to appeal to my dark nature. I rewound the scenario and then placed him getting off the plane in Portland, a dip in his mouth and gin and juice induced smile on his face. The beauty of thought is that I could make him do whatever my evil heart desired and I did. I had him slowly opening the door to the apartment he shared with his girlfriend, now I didn’t know if he had a girl back home but it was my invented storyline and for the story’s sake he did. With the lights out Wang-Warmer drunkenly crept his way through his apartment to his sleeping girlfriend. Then with the sneakiness of a cat burglar he opened his bedroom door and flipped on the light switch but to his surprise instead of finding his girl curled up asleep or watching TV, he saw her on bended knees with another dude’s cock in her mouth. That vision made me laugh out loud.

“What’s so funny?” Newty asked.

I was caught off guard by his remark because I was vaguely aware that I had laughed, but to me I thought the laugh was of a low volume only loud enough for me to hear, which was the unlucky side effect of escaping into myself is that sometimes I’d react verbally to what I saw in the looking glass of my mind.

“Oh nothing”, I replied, “I was just thinking about that crooked toothed peckerhead Wang-Warmer.”

CHAPTER END

I was born in Texas and at the age of seven my parents moved to the wilds of the Pacific Northwest where I was raised. I grew up the youngest of six kids and the only boy to five older sisters. Ever since I was a kid I’d always felt I had to prove myself a man, not just to my family but to the world. I’d hazard to guess that I felt that burning desire to prove myself more than other boys my age because I was the youngest child and the only son to my father. For me that gut-felt, urgent wanting to prove my manhood was tangible I had always felt it buried inside of me, a seed waiting to free itself from the confines of my being. As a boy I remember wanting to be a man, not just a grown up but a man, a real man’s man. Even as a kid I knew that age wasn’t what made a man, a man. I knew that from watching the way that the men who’d married my sisters acted and treated my sisters and the kids they had fathered. I understood that even though I was still very much a child, compared to them, in a lot of respects I was more of a man at 10 years old than they could ever hope to be. I saw their examples and realized that being a drunk, a bible-thumper or an ignorant-wannabe-rodeo-cowboy-piece-of-shit didn’t make you a man; it only made you a drunk, a bible-thumper or ignorant-wannabe-rodeo-cowboy-piece-of-shit.

I didn’t want that from my manhood. I wanted to be a man with wisdom in his eyes and libraries of stories written on the creases of his face. A man who wasn’t afraid of challenges and who was always ready for any and every situation, I wanted to be a man of respect and wherever I went I wanted to be the most interesting man with the most colorful past.

My first positive thoughts on what a man should be like were formed by my

father. My father has always been a strong man and one to choose his words

carefully. He doesn’t speak much but when he does you want to listen. You want

to listen because there are no idle words that leave his mouth. Each sage-like

word he utters has been steeped in years of wisdom. My father also has an air of

authority about him that everyone who has ever been in his presence

acknowledges and respects. To this day I have yet to find that quality in anyone

else I have met. My father was not my only positive manly influence though as

I’m also the byproduct of American pop-culture of the 20^th century so my vision of

being a man was also formed by the heroes I saw on the silver screen – John

Wayne, Kurt Russell, Gary Cooper, Sylvester Stallone, Gregory Peck, Arnold

Schwarzenegger, Harrison Ford. To me manhood meant to be strong in all

situations, cocksure, decisive, responsible for my actions, adventurous, unafraid,

able to command respect with as few words spoken as possible, and never was I

to shed any tears no matter what the circumstances – men didn’t do that. On top

of all that it I learned that to be a man you also had to play hard to get with the

ladies because they love that shit. Or is it hard to want? I have often gotten the

two confused. Unfortunately there wasn’t a handbook to read or a roadmap to

follow when it came my time to become a man. It was a mystery I had to solve on

my very own.

At the age of 21 I was a boy inside the shell of a man with shoulder length hair. By that point in my life I had done all I knew possible to further my journey towards manhood or what I thought being a man consisted of. I had hair on my balls. I had voted. I had a driver’s license. I had hunted and killed a buck. I had graduated high-school. I had lost my virginity. I had started smoking cigarettes. I had quit smoking cigarettes. I could legally drink alcohol. I had even eaten psychedelics, multiple times over, in the hopes of expanding my consciousness and attaining the key to the door within me marked Manhood. On paper I was a legal American adult and according to my checklist of manhood I was well on my way to becoming a man, but just because I was legal and had slashed goals off a list I still didn’t have that undisputed knowing that I had crossed the threshold out of boyhood into the land of man.

While driving home from my first weekend spent in the Stevens County jail I was half-way through a joint when a fully composed thought bulleted its way from the ether into my skull as stoned thoughts often do. That very thought was this: I hadn’t done anything great with my life and I truly didn’t know who I was as a human or what I was capable of and until I remedied that situation I would always be searching for the meaning of manhood. In short I hadn’t tested myself or gone on any adventures. Sure I had already lived more than most growing up where I had and the way I did. I had camped in forests, fished in glacier fed creeks, hunted on mountain tops, out-ran police on back country roads, gotten into fights with local pecker-heads, grown marijuana secretively in the woods, jumped off bridges into fast flowing rivers, partied under the stars around bonfires and basically enjoyed the birthright of independence I was entitled to as an American. I had known the freedom and pleasures of being a wild country boy and loved every second of it but I hadn’t been on any real adventures. I classified an adventure then as I do now. It had to involve travel, danger, the unknown, risk and reward. Little did I know that less than a month after I had that moment of stoned self-realization my craving for challenge and adventure would be heaped upon me by someone most unexpected.

“Chuck”, I heard my mom’s voice reverberate up through the floorboards from the kitchen below my bedroom, “You got a phone call.”

“Yeah mom, be right there.”

“It’s a girl!” Mom said excitedly with a shiny grin as I took the phone from her dishwater wet hands and walked into the living room for some privacy.

“Hello”, I said into the receiver.

“Guess who?”

I’ve never been good at guessing who people are on the phone and that time was no different. “Is this Lisa?”

“Nope”

“Andrea?”

“Guess again.”

“Mindy?”

“Nada.”

“Kelly?”

“Seriously, you don’t recognize my voice?”

“I wish I did. I totally suck at guessing.”

“Yeah you do. It’s me, it’s Jamie.”

My brain scrambled through the rolodex in my head but I was still coming up blank. I knew four Jamie’s – Two I had gone to high-school with. One I had gone to Sunday school with as a kid and the last Jamie was a girl I had worked with earlier that year at the Pacific Science Center in Seattle.

“Let me clear things up”, she said, “I’m the coolest Jamie you’ll ever know.”

Out of all the Jamie’s I knew there was only one who was so cocky. “Say no more”, I said, “I haven’t seen you since I quit the science center. What’s it been… like five, six months?”

“six.”

“How the hell are you?”

“Thirsty”, was her reply.

“Oh okay. Well where are you?”

“I just pulled into a parking lot of a grocery store called Hite’s.”

“Hite’s! Hite’s! You’re in town? You’re in Kettle Falls!?”

“I am. I am. I just rolled into town about five minutes ago. Why don’t you come meet me and we’ll get a few frosties in us and play some stick while we shoot the shit.”

“Cool, cool. I’ll be there in 20 minutes.”

“See ya”, she said before she hung up.

When I pulled into the parking lot she was easy to spot as she stood outside of her truck puffing a cigarette. She looked at me and flashed her devils smile as the wind whipped her wild curly hair around and made it look like a mass of blonde lightening. That windy November afternoon over beers and games of pool she filled my head with tales of working on fishing boats in Alaska, stories of excitement and of making big cash. When I told her I was game and I knew my friends Newty and Blume would be too, she said she could easily put in a good word for us and get us hired.

One week later the three of us Blume, Newty and I were at an interview in downtown Seattle inside of a windowless room the size and shape of a public school classroom. I was freshly shaven with my hair slicked back and braided into a ponytail and I wore my Sunday best which consisted of polished black leather loafers, black slacks, white button-up shirt and black tie – because my dad had once told me that for interviews I needed to dress for success. I stepped through the door where the interviews were to be held and immediately felt the sweat from my armpits soak through my white shirt. In that room sat 36 other men, men with thick beards and thicker bellies, men with scars on their faces, tattoos on their knuckles and calluses on their palms, each wearing ratty t-shirts and jeans with holes in the knees. Some guys looked like they had woken up and come to the interview straight out of bed as they had on sweatpants and dirty old long-john shirts. I realized right then and there that their dad’s hadn’t given them the same advice mine had. Newty, Blume and me sweating profusely, spotted some free chairs scattered throughout the crowd – two in the front row and one in the back. The room full of potential fishermen had a musky smell, one of burnt tobacco and coffee sweat. To some it might have reeked but to me, having quit smoking cigarettes only two months before, I felt a tingle of craving when I first smelt the nicotine tar that lingered in the air. Newty and Blume quickly made their way to the two seats in the front and I timidly made my way through the crowd to the chair in the back. I didn’t dare look up as I could feel all the eyes of the room were on me. Finally at the plastic chairs in the back of the room I planted myself, rubbed my palms on my slacks to dry the sweat and waited my turn. A few nervously sweaty moments later a short, round, bottle-blonde woman with thick black eyebrows came through the door, sat in the front of the room and began the interviews.

Instead of calling us individually into another room to be interviewed, the woman conducted what I found out to be called a ‘group interview.’ She sat in the front of the room with her back to the crowd and one at a time she called the name of the interviewee who would then sit across from her, facing her and the other men in the room waiting their turn to be interviewed. While she began her interviews the men around me shook hands, slapped backs and talked shop like old teammates at an alumni game. I sat there in silence and felt alone in the crowd as I repeated calm, cool, collected in my mind while the backs of my knees started to trickle sweat down my calves wetting my socks. The interview woman conducted a few quick interviews before I heard her say,

“Charles Vaught”, in a scratchy voice that sounded of a night spent on bottom shelf vodka, cheap cigarettes and shit-faced karaoke.

“Right here”, I answered, my voice squeaky and dry. I swallowed the last drops of saliva I had and answered in a lower tone, “Right here.” She waved her hand for me to come and sit in front of her. Calm, cool, collected, I repeated in my head, calm, cool, collected. I might have had those words on repeat in my brain but I was anything but that. My stomach was doing flip-flops. I was sweating through my Sunday clothes. I hadn’t eaten any breakfast that morning for fear of barfing it right back up. I sat down in the chair as instructed by her hand gesture and felt my legs shake rapidly inside of my slacks. I felt the sweat spots under my arms grow larger as they dripped down the sleeves of my shirt and licked at my elbows.

“So Charles”, the interview woman said raising her thick eyebrows in unison furrowing her forehead, “Tell me about your past work experience.”

I straightened my tie for no apparent reason as I answered, “I’m no stranger to hard work, as you can see from my application there I’ve done a lot of manual labor jobs.” At that point I felt the white flesh of my face flood red with blood as I bit my lower lip and looked from her to the floor to keep from laughing.

Newty and Blume sat behind the interview woman and both began to flip me off one at a time. They were nonchalant at first using their middle fingers to scratch their chins then as they could see that wasn’t distracting me enough they kicked it up a notch and both gave me double birds along with googly eyes and curled up lips like they’d sat on the toilet and sniffed some kind of crazy glue that had frozen their faces during mid-shit.

I breathed out my mouth a long slow breath as not to burst out laughing. Calm, cool, collected, I repeated in my head, calm, cool, collected.

“Okay”, the interview woman said, “Would you like to elaborate on that?”

“Sure”, I answered keeping my eyes locked on the interview woman’s hands as she wrote on a clipboard, me not daring to look up. “I’ve bucked bails, mowed lawns, picked St. John’s wort, cut firewood, washed dishes, dug trenches, weeded gardens, laid sheet-rock, planted garlic, shoveled snow, painted fences, help build houses. I’m pretty much no stranger when it comes to any kind of hard work.” At that moment I made the mistake of glancing up at the interview woman’s face for a second or two. Just over her shoulder Newty and Blume had elevated their game by pushing out their cheeks with their tongues while at the same time they pumped their fists beside their faces simulating a blow job. I was caught between warring emotions I was pissed off but at the same time I thought it was hilarious. Without thinking I shouted to the two of them, “For fuck’s sakes guys! Can you assholes knock it off?” With the anger out of my system I tore out an uncontrollable laugh that started in my belly and echoed throughout my body. In a vain attempt to muffle the laugh I kept my mouth shut but it only it made the laugh ripple out of my nose and sound like a cross between a pigs oink and rolling thunder. Quickly I remembered I was still in an interview and so composed myself and concentrated my gaze back on the interview woman purposefully relaxing my eyes and blurring my vision so I wouldn’t have to see the faces of the other men in the room. “You should have seen them”, I protested. I felt my white collared shirt soaked with sweat suck tight against my back, “Those guys…” I let it drop just wanting to get the interview over with, convinced in my head I had just screwed myself out of a job by cussing the way I did.

Un-amused and unfazed by my outburst the interview woman rumbled with authority to the crowd at her back, “Gentlemen, settle down. Now where were we Charles”, she said in her bullfrog brogue as she scanned the clipboard in front of her, “Oh yes, What is it that really motivates you to want to go on a commercial fishing vessel for months on end in the coldest and harshest sea on the planet?”

“What motivates me?” I repeated the question out loud. Convinced in my head that I had already blown the interview, I answered honestly, “Money. Money is what motivates me, money and the challenge of it all. That’s what motivates me.”

The interview woman laughed out the words “So money and the challenge of it all, eh? Is that it?”

Caught off guard by her laughter my brain scrambled for a response until these words found their way out of my mouth. “Yes mam, that’s it.”

“All right then. Have a nice day Mr. Vaught.”

With the interview at a close I shook her hand and peeled myself off the plastic chair leaving a damp spot where my back had been pressed up against it. I walked from the room with my head low between my shoulders, my feet dragged along the floor and carried me along. I just knew that I had cursed my way out of a job. No one says fuck or asshole out loud in the middle of an interview and still gets hired, I thought. I had never had a formal interview in my life until that one. Before, with all the other jobs I had ever had I was just hired on the spot. There was a need and I filled it. But that interview for the fishing boat was not only my first official interview but in my eyes was the worst interview possible. I was pissed at myself for losing my shit the way I did because I knew in my heart of hearts I wasn’t going to get the call back.

How does the saying go? Don’t count your chickens before they’re hatched. Well if that saying were ever true it certainly was then. Two weeks later I got a call from the interview woman telling me I was hired.

JANUARY

    My adventure began on January 1^st, 2000 when I first set eyes on my future mistress of the sea. She sat in dry-dock in the Port of Seattle, a steel leviathan patiently waiting to be unleashed upon the deep. A glorious hunk of metal she was, all 337 feet of her from bow to stern. Her steel hull was painted a dark navy blue almost black/blue while the main deck and captain’s wheelhouse were in contrast a stark white. She was a surimi-factory-trawler, which meant she could catch – process and freeze fish all while steaming through the frigid waters of the Bering Sea. Her freezer-hold was 60 yd. long x 20 yd. wide x 30 yd. deep and when full could hold up to 2,403 tons of frozen fish. Compared to other surimi-factory-trawlers she was neither petite nor enormous but midsized. In the coming months she would be my mother, my lover, my teacher, my home. She was my ship, the Northern Jaeger.

I wasn’t alone when I embarked on my Alaskan fishing adventure for money and manhood. Two of my childhood friends, who just so happened to be first cousins, Jason Newton and Ryan Blume were with me. Jason was a fellow longhair hippie who in the 2^nd grade I had nicknamed Newty, because as a kid one day I was reading the TV Guide and as it listed not only the movies for the week but what the movies contained such as language, violence and nudity, it hit me that Newton could be shortened to Nudity as a play on his last name. But children being children, Nudity eventually became Newty as it rolled off the tongue much more smoothly. Ryan was a ginger kid with pale, freckled skin and bright orange hair. His nickname should have been Fire Crotch but instead we just called him Blume. Admittedly not the most original name but thatt’s what we called him. Like me, Newty and Blume wanted to make a load of cash and were ready to push themselves to the limit to do it.

Under cold, gray Seattle skies Newty, Blume and myself, legged it up the gangplank and boarded the Northern Jaeger ready to light the fuse to the firework show. This was our first real time away from home. After high-school the three of us had lived together in Seattle but while we were there our parents, random relatives and friends could come see us at their leisure. This was different, by committing to this we’d be out of contact with our families and the rest of the human race for the next five months.

We stood on the front deck of the Northern Jaeger empty except for us and the duffel bags by our sides. We each felt for the first time the steel deck below our feet and the salty seaside air on our faces.

“Wow”, I said, feeling a rush of excitement course through me, “I can’t believe we’re here. We’re actually doing it!”

“I know man”, Blume agreed a schoolyard grin across his freckled face. “I can’t believe it either.”

“Boys, this is gonna be something we’ll always remember”, Newty added.

It was then with the three of us standing there taking in the peaceful, virginal moment that we were greeted by an old codger who wore bubbly glasses that made his eyeballs bulge out from his face. The old man had a mustache under his nose that resembled a fat blonde tarantula and a cigarette wedged into his dirty smile. “Welcome aboard the Northern Jaeger boys”, he greeted us with an accent that resembled the dry, creaking sound a wood floor makes. He flicked open his Zippo and lit his cigarette before he continued, “My name’s Ray. I’m the fishmeal tech”, he said as he blew a lungful of smoke to the wind, “I’ve been expecting ya. Now who’s who?”

“I’m Jason”, Newty answered, “This is Ryan and he’s Chuck”, he said pointing at me.

“Nice to meet ya fellas”, Ray announced as he shook each of our hands. “Now go ahead and store your shit in room 216, then find your way to the dry-goods store and get kitted out with your raingear and such” He paused and inhaled a drag from his cigarette, “I can see from the looks you’re giving me you don’t have any cash nor know what to pick up from the dry-goods store neither. Well don’t worry about paying for your shit, it comes out of your paycheck automatically and the clerk will have a list of things you’re gonna need. Once you boys are all set, toss your loot on your bunks, put your rubbers on and come and see me in the oilskin room.”

As Ray spoke I heard his words and understood them because he spoke in English but he used the words fishmeal, raingear and oilskin which were just as foreign to me as if he had said something in Croatian or Balinese. There was one word though that Ray spoke which instantly brought a funny image into my mind.

“Rubbers”, I giggled out loud picturing me, Newty and Blume in the oilskin room, whatever the hell that was, standing in front of Ray wearing nothing but rubbers on peckers.

Ray apparently didn’t see the humor in the word rubbers as I did. He twisted his wrinkled face and growled like a rabid dog, “Yes son, your rubbers! Not condoms nor jimmy hats but rubbers! They’re your goddamn steel-toed rubber boots boy. Are we gonna have a problem hippie?”

Taken aback as I was by his no sense of humor I stammered, “N…N…No sir, we’re not. We’ll put on our rubbers and come see you immediately.”

We left Ray on deck, did as was told and wandered through the ship until we found our room. We found room 216 on the 2^nd floor of the ship, it was a small room that was to house six men as there were six bunks stacked two high against three of the walls. Each bunk was about 7 ft. long x 2 ft. wide x 2 ft. high. I tossed my bag on the top bunk in the middle of the room and pulled myself in to see what the bed felt like. The mattress was thin but firm and each bunk had a curtain that separated it from the center of the room as well as one curtain at the head and one at the foot of the bed to block the view from the other bunks. My bunk however didn’t have a curtain at the foot of the bed but I didn’t worry because Blume called dibs on the bunk to the foot of mine and Newty picked the bunk directly under Blume’s. The boys unpacked their bags as I lay on my back and wrote with a blue magic marker on the white steel above where I would sleep.

“What the hell are you doing?” Blume asked.

“I’m writing words to motivate me. That way these are the first things I see in the morning and the last things I see before I go to sleep.”

“Well smart guy”, Newty said sarcastically, “why don’t you enlighten us with your words of wisdom.”

“Alright, well I put: WHAT DOESN’T KILL YOU MAKES YOU STRONGER. MONEY! MONEY! MONEY! ONLY THE STRONG SURVIVE. And, EYE OF THE TIGER.”

“Eye of the tiger?” Newty asked.

“Yeah, Eye of the tiger”, I replied. Newty and Blume both looked at me with puzzled looks on their faces. “You know eye of the fucking tiger, like the theme song from ROCKY III.”

“Hey, whatever works for you man.” Blume added.

We left our bunks and wandered around till we found the dry goods store and got kitted out as instructed. Wearing our steel-toe rubbers we clomped our way down the hall. Our boots were made of a thick brown rubber and heavy on the steel. Each step we took echoed in the emptiness of the ship till we finally found our way to the oilskin room. The oilskin room was basically a glorified locker room for fisherman with lockers lining all four walls and two sets of wooden benches running down the middle. Ray sat on one of the benches taking long pulls off his cigarette and letting the smoke slowly drift and curl out his nostrils. The cigarette Ray had smoked outside hadn’t fazed me because the smoke was lost to the wind but we were indoors then and the smoke had nowhere to escape it just trickled up slowly from the red tip of his cigarette towards the light. For a few seconds there was no Ray, there was no Newty, there was no Blume, there was only me and the delicious smoke that filled the oilskin room which sent tingles of temptation through my brain.

“Ah! Glad to see you ladies decided to make it”, he said as he rose to his feet, “Follow me and let’s get this shit-party started.”

We followed Ray and his trail of gray smoke through a doorway on the opposite side of the oilskin room down a narrow stairwell into the intestines of the ship. At the bottom of the stairwell I went from craving a cigarette to absolute repulsion. My stomach bubbled with disgust as my sense of smell was assaulted by a wicked aroma; an unforgettable scent of briny seawater, pungent gear oil and rotting fish, and mixed in with those lovely smells was the smoke from Ray’s cigarette. I took a few deep breaths hoping I would get used to it before the bubbles in my guts rose into my throat and came out my mouth.

“This is the factory, boys. Right here is where the magic happens” Ray said with a slight smile as he flicked the burning cigarette nub over his shoulder. “I’m gonna give you a quick tour of the place you’re gonna get to know intimately in the next few months, so pay close attention.” The three of us followed Ray as he walked ahead. “The area to your right” Ray announced pointing to three unidentifiable machines that stood about 6 ft. high and 12 ft. wide with empty slots that looked made to fit trays. “This is the plate freezer area. Once the pollock have been processed they go here to be frozen before they go down below to the freezer-hold to be stored until offload.”

“So pollock is the kind of fish we’re gonna be catching?” Blume asked rhetorically.

“Give the kid a fucking gold medal.” Ray said as smarmily as he could.

Ray then turned his back to us and continued down the steel grate walkway. “And this” Ray said as he slapped the side of a horizontal tube about 10 ft. long and 2 ft. in diameter. His slap on the side made a dull, hollow metallic sound that reminded me of a gong being hit with a wooden stick. “This is what we call a surimi turbine. You see, all the shitty pieces of fish that we can’t process like the heads, bones and fillets that don’t pass inspection they get tossed to the side and then those discarded pieces travel through a maze of chutes and conveyor belts till they finally get dumped in up top there. Inside of here they get pummeled and smashed and twirled around and mixed with sugars and what not and then when the process is over the concoction squirts out down here”, he said kicking at a round pipe that came out the end of the surimi turbine, “it comes out usable and somewhat edible as something we can sell.” Newty, Blume and I all nodded our heads up and down in agreement even though we didn’t have a clue what the hell he was talking about. Not waiting to see if any of his teachings had gelled in our memories Ray heel-toed it further down steel grate walkway. “This area here”, Ray said nodding his head to the right as he put another cigarette between his lips, “this is where the real money is made on the ship. This long son of a bitch” He said with a snap of his fingers as he pointed towards a conveyor belt that was about 22 ft. long x 2 ft. wide, the belt of which looked to be made of a thin PVC material. “is the viscera table and that short table right beside her”, he continued with a bob of his head towards another conveyor belt about 10 ft. long by 2 ft. wide which looked to be covered in a belt made of butcher paper or some other kind of thin material, “is called the candling table.” I stood next to the longer conveyor belt, or viscera table as Ray called it and took note that it came up to just past my pubes. “Any questions?” he asked. “Good”, he barked out before any of us could answer. Ray lit the cigarette that dangled between his lips, cleared his throat with a loud hrrrrmph! Then he spat out a muddy colored ball of goo and walked on ahead of us. He stopped at a stairwell that led below the factory floor and said, “Okay fellas the tour is over for today. There’s more to show you but that’ll come later. Right now I need one of you to help me down in the fishmeal-hold. The other two need to report to the engine room and see Solomon, he’s the chief engineer”, he blew a stream of smoke out the side of his mouth, looked directly at Blume and continued, “Which one of you boys is coming down to the fishmeal-hold with me?”

With a look on his face that said ‘help me’, Blume looked first to Newty, then to me. We both dodged his look by staring at our rubbers before Blume replied sheepishly, “I’ll go with you.”

“Good. Good.” Ray said with a slap on his shoulder. “Now you fellas”, he said looking at me and Newty, “go up on deck, head to the stern and go down the stairwell on the port side of the ship. That’s where the engine room is and that’s where you’re gonna meet Solomon. Ryan my boy, you come with me.”

I looked at Newty and he looked at me with our eyes wide and our shoulders up next to our ears, each of us shook our heads with a, ‘I have no idea what he just said’ look on our faces.

“Wait, where are we supposed to go again?” I asked.

“Shit! You boys are as green as you are plum fucking stupid.” Ray laughed through a cloud of gray smoke, “Here’s your first goddamn lesson onboard the old Northern Jaeger. The bow is the front of the ship. The stern, or aft as some folks call it, is the ass end of the ship. The starboardside is the right hand side and the portside is the left hand side of the ship. You can remember that”, he said as he counted out 1,2,3,4 fingers on his left hand, “because port has the same number of letters as, l-e-f-t”, again he counted 1,2,3,4 on his fingers, “Comprende?”

“Oh… yeah… right”, Newty replied slowly his voice tarred and feathered in sarcasm, “No problem Ray. We’ll definitely remember that.”

“Glad to hear that longhairs I’m damn happy you two learned something today. Because”, Ray said while he pinched off the red-hot cherry of his cigarette between his fingers, “the next lesson I teach ya I’m gonna send you an invoice. My time and my know-how ain’t cheap. Come on Ryan” he boomed, “let’s get down to fishmeal-hold.”

Up on deck it was wet. The sky seemed to be one massive grey cloud but the rain didn’t fall from the sky as much as it just hung in the air, the moisture clung to our ponytails in beads of water and wetted our flannel shirts.

“This way”, I said as I pointed to the aft end of the ship.

“Did you get everything that crusty old bastard said?” Newty asked.

“No dude, that shit was confusing me. I just nodded my head and hoped that old cocksucker wouldn’t ask me any questions.”

“Yeah, me too.”

“I have a feeling we’re gonna figure it out pretty damn quick though. I mean we have to.”

We reached the only doorway at the stern of the ship and Newty said, “After you”, as he held the door open for me.

“Thanks buddy.”

“Don’t mention it. I always open doors for my bitches”.

“Well it’s a damn good thing I’m a son of a bitch then”, I snickered back.

Down a skinny stairwell we went each step just big enough to rest the heel of our brown steel-toe rubbers on. We landed in the engine room which was as big as a barn. The steel walls were painted white and stained with copper colored rust spots. The air was raw with diesel. We stood there for a moment each of us taking in the engine room for the first time. To the left of us were two rectangle shaped engines mounted to the floor each one painted the color green usually reserved for ARMY vehicles. The twin engines were roughly the same dimensions of a station wagon and complete with exposed pistons, belts and other moving parts I didn’t know the names of. The wall to the right was lined from floor to ceiling with gauges, meters and dials each one red, green or yellow.

From behind one of the Engines stepped a man who was massive in size and dimension. At first glance the Goliath sized man, his skin the color of a dirty penny, his ponytail bushy and black, he looked to be a fierce island cannibal with his tribal tattooed, billy-goat sized forearms crossed over the keg of beer that passed for his belly. Then he opened his mouth, “I’ve been expecting you!” The large man thundered. “I see Raymond has sent the other longhairs to be with their own.” He exploded with laughter at his own realization, which sent echoes throughout the engine room. The large man wiped tears of joy from his eyes and continued. “My name is Solomon and what are yours?” He asked sticking out his massive paw for us to shake.

We introduced ourselves as Solomon put a menthol cigarette between his big teeth and offered the pack to us, “Smoke?”

“Sure”, Newty said as he fingered one out.

“No thanks. I try not to smoke”, I said. “I actually just quit not too long ago.” Which was true 3 months earlier on my 21^st birthday I decided I would go for a run because as I saw it I was a young buck and in the prime of health. I ran 50 yards before I was doubled over, red faced and wheezing. At that point in my life I had been a pack a day smoker for 5 years. Right then with my lungs quivering to take in oxygen I knew I had to quit.

“You say that you try not to smoke now”, Solomon said as he lit his menthol, smoke wafted upward from the tip. “I have a feeling that you will be smoking soon, very soon.” He puffed on his cigarette with eyes half closed, a look of contentment on his face as he continued. “Jason and Chuck, is it? For the next two weeks before we leave Seattle you will be reporting to me. There is a hell of a lot to do to get a vessel like this prepared for a season out on the Bering so we’ll be working from six o’clock to six o’clock until we steam out.”

“What all do we need to do?” I asked as Solomon let the smoke drift from his mouth the way I imagined a person’s ghost left their body upon death.

Solomon flicked the ash from his cigarette then answered, “We’ll start by cleaning the engine room and then work our way up through the ship cleaning as we go. Next will be the factory, then the galley and bunk rooms and finally the wheelhouse.” Solomon pulled more smoke into his lungs after he had answered my question and for the first time since I had quit I felt a tinge of jealousy that I was no longer a smoker as he made it look so cool.

The two weeks that followed were some of the most boring of my life. I wanted to get to fishing. I wanted to see Alaska. I wanted to test out my sea-legs and feel the rolling of the ship as we steamed through the churning Pacific. I wanted adventure and money and I was getting neither. My days were filled with mopping floors, dusting brass, cleaning windows, wiping the walls free of stains left by cigarette smoke. Those two weeks for me couldn’t have gone any slower. If it’s true that time flies when you’re having fun then I was having a shitastic go of it because time was moving as quick as frozen mud for me. I started a countdown for our launch date the same way as a kid I had a countdown for Christmas day. At the end of each shift I’d sit in the empty galley and cross off days from the calendar that hung on the wall. Each day marked with a thick black X was one day closer to what I wanted, what I needed, what I craved, what I was there for.

On January 15th the rest of the 110 person crew boarded. The hard faces of the men and women that made the Northern Jaeger what she was showed up at the Port of Seattle with their gear in tow. They weren’t inexperienced cherries like us they were salty veterans of the sea each and every one of them. They stood on the dock with wool shirts pulled over work-riddled bodies, cigarettes dangled from their lips; their flesh was worn and creased like leather that’s cracked under the sun. They were there to live to see the end of another season and collect a paycheck, that’s it. That was their job. For them it was just the beginning of a very long day at the office.

A rainbow of humanity was represented in the faces I saw: Samoans, Mexicans, Vietnamese, Russians, Africans, Japanese, Eskimos, Brazilians, Norwegians, Filipinos and a sprinkling of good old American dirty white boys.

I looked around at the melting pot of people that made up the crew of the Northern Jaeger and felt excited but at the same time a little out of place. I was excited to finally have the crew on the ship and to get underway but I felt a little out of place because for the first time in my life I was a minority. You see I grew up in Kettle Falls, Washington a white-bred town close to the Canadian border which at the time had a sign on the outskirts that boasted a population of 1,500 people and 1 grouch. A place where the only time you saw people of another race was on your television screen and there I was onboard the Northern Jaeger getting ready to live and work in close proximity with all kinds of peoples.

As I stood there a rare ray of sunshine peaked through the Seattle skyline which set my thoughts to drift, the way random things tend to do. I thought back to a conversation I had had with Jamie some eight months earlier in Seattle. It was the conversation where Jamie sold me on the idea of working on fishing boats in Alaska in the first place.

“So how much money do you think I can make?” I asked her.

“My first time”, Jamie said as she took a sip from the frosty can of beer in her hand, “I made 30 grand.”

I swallowed hard as not to shoot beer out of my nose before I shouted, “Holy shit! $30,000.00!”

“Yeah $30,000.00”, she said coolly.

“That is fucking awesome! So how does all this work? I mean does everybody get $30,000.00 or what?” I asked as I popped the top of the beer I had just retrieved from the refrigerator.

“It breaks down like this.” She said. “We have a quota of fish that we have to catch and process before we can call it quits, so in theory, we could be out there for as little as one month or up to six months. It just depends on how fast we can catch them. Once the freezer hold is full we offload in Dutch Harbor and then head back out to sea. While we’re out processing more, the fish we offloaded gets auctioned off and then the profits get split between the crew according to rank.”’

“What do you mean, rank?”

“Well the captain and the key-crew get the biggest share of the profits and then it gets filtered down the food chain by time spent with the company.”

“How do I get to be key-crew?”

Jamie laughed as she answered, “You don’t, at least not your first time out. The key-crew are the higher-ups; the engineers, the cook, the purser, the QC’s, the foremen, the captain, people like that.”

“So let me get this straight”, I said, “I can make 30 G’s on my first time out?”

“Yes sir”, Jamie said with authority, “You sure as hell can but let me make one thing perfectly clear just because I’m a chick don’t let that fool you, it is some hard work out there and trust me there are going to be days you’ll want to put a bullet in your brain as opposed to getting out of bed. I’ve seen some big, muscle-bound tough guys who thought they were all bad ass, who could run their mouths like nobodies business talking shit to everyone”, then she audibly blew air out of her nose and continued “but, but”, she repeated, “at the first offload those same loudmouth ass-queens quit like broken little orphan girls. In other words it takes more than muscles and a big mouth to make it through a season.”

“Lucky for me I don’t have shit for muscles”, I joked.

Jamie laughed then added, “You know you got to have a certain mentality to make it but if you can suck it up and stick it out you’re gonna come away with not only 30 G’s but with a whole grip of stories you can tell your grandkids.”

The conversation faded the way water evaporates from hot concrete. Back in reality with the crew moving all around me I understood that I might be in the minority but it was nothing to feel uncomfortable about because onshore we might all be from different places on the planet and speak different languages and have different colors of skin, hair and eyes but onboard the Northern Jaeger we were all united as one, the fabled brotherhood of man. We were all there for a myriad of our own personal reasons but regardless of why each of us was on the Northern Jaeger, there was one overall motivating factor that united us all; and that was to make BIG money!

As quick as the crew boarded, found their bunks and stowed their gear we all set in motion as an organic machine intent on leaving port. People moved up and down the gangplank manhandling crates of food into the kitchen. The steel cables of the colossal cranes on the bow deck screeched and strained as they slowly let down steel rectangle machines into the factory. On the aft deck, the deck hands had the nets used to catch the fish un-spooled the length of the deck, mending holes with twine and twelve inch plastic needles that looked like tent stakes.

Me, I was in the fishmeal-hold getting my first taste of life on the Northern Jaeger.

I stepped through an oval door into a steel walled room. Ocean air filled the empty steel room and gave each inhale a moist, salty flavor. Around the room stood a few other men some smoked cigarettes but the majority squatted on their heels and blew warm air into cupped hands.

“Yo! What’s your name?” A man with a high forehead and watermelon sized biceps yelled to me as he walked towards me from across the empty room.

“I’m Chuck”, I shouted, at the same time a rumbling crane mounted on the dock began to lower a pallet through an opening in the ceiling above me.

“I’m Tony but everybody calls me THE ROCK.” he said as he stepped in front of me. We clasped hands the way men do to greet each other and prove worth through a handshake. He squeezed. I squeezed back. A vein on his handshaking arm bulged. I tightened my grip and squeezed right back not so much to prove anything but as to keep him from breaking the bones inside the flesh glove I call my hand.

He released the vice-grip he had on my hand and said, “Good grip.”

“Right back at ya”, I said as I felt the blood pulse back into my fingertips. “So Why do they call you THE ROCK? Is it because your guns are as big as his”

“No, it’s because THE ROCK is my 2^nd cousin and I can do this”, he said as he pointed to his right eyebrow which he jacked up high on his mountain of a forehead, ‘The People’s Eyebrow.’

“Heads up”, THE ROCK said, “That crane is lowering a one ton pallet of sugar. And just because it’s strapped to steel cables don’t mean you’re safe underneath it. Always stay clear of loads. That is unless you want to get smashed flatter than a can of used assholes.” I didn’t want that so I stepped out of harms way while THE ROCK waved his hands over his head up through the hole in the ceiling and made eye contact with the crane operator signaling him to stop as the pallet gently rested on the steel floor before us. THE ROCK unhitched the cable fasteners from the pallet, waved a pointed finger towards the crane operator in a circular motion, a signal to lift the cable out, then hefted two cloud blue bags of sugar one on each shoulder and bellowed out, “Let’s get this unloaded fellas!”

Wanting to make a good impression I followed THE ROCK to the pallet and pulled one of the bags onto my right shoulder. “Fuck”, I shouted as I did a quick crab shuffle back and forth and side-to-side to regain my balance. The bags were each as big as a bag of dog food and didn’t look too heavy but as I steadied myself I saw printed on the side of the bag 80 lbs which was more than half as much as I weighed at the time. Making a quick u-turn I followed THE ROCK and piled my bag on top of his.

Most of the outsides of the bags were gummy to the touch from sugar that had leaked on them during their transport to the Northern Jaeger. When those bags touched the bare skin of my hands or my neck they felt sticky like cotton candy residue. About half way during that shift a bag tore open on my shoulder sending a shower of sugar cascading down the collar of my shirt where upon contact with the sweat on my shoulder blades it trailed down my back in streams that seemed to glue me and my shirt together. I had seen bags break on a few guys before me though and they just kept on plugging away without bitching about it, so I did the same taking solace in the fact that at least I wasn’t alone in my misery.

We were down there for 12 hours unloading pallets and stacking bags of sugar. I’m not sure what else got loaded on the rest of the ship during that time but by the end of the 12 hours I knew there was no more sugar to be loaded on or at least no more room for sugar to be loaded on as we had filled the fishmeal hold from floor to ceiling leaving only a thin passage from the door through the center of the room. It was then THE ROCK announced we were ready to shove off and that if we wanted to see Seattle one last time we had better get topside in a hurry. At that I left the sugar fortified walls of the fishmeal hold and headed up onto the aft deck.

Under the cloud covered night sky the Northern Jaeger drifted slowly from the dock while the engines churned and gurgled and moved us through the black waters of Puget Sound. From where I stood on the bow deck I could see the Space Needle lit up white against the night, surrounded by the orange glow of downtown it was a beacon of all things familiar. I stayed in the cold, night air until the lights of Seattle winked out as the ship cut a northward path through the darkness. Then and only then did I go inside and pressure wash off the granulated sugar which had become rock-candy on my skin.

The next seven days were spent en-route to Dutch Harbor, Alaska. “Dutch” as it’s commonly known is a fishing port on Unalaska Island which is itself one of the Aleutian Islands that make up the western leg of Alaska. It literally is the edge of America. During the voyage the crew worked 24 hours a day preparing the ship for the upcoming season. In order to accomplish this feat we split into two shifts, each shift worked 12 hours on/12 hours off. There was the day crew and the night crew but to tell you the truth I didn’t know if it was day or night, there were no windows onboard where I was at, I never went on deck for fear of being washed overboard by rampaging swells and every other meal served in the galley was breakfast.

During the steam up to Dutch Harbor I worked my shifts with a group of leather tough individuals I dubbed Team Quicksilver. Team Quicksilver was a four person squad of tree planters from Bend, Oregon who all signed up for the fishing boat together. When Team Quicksilver wasn’t out on the Bering Sea catching fish they were tramping through the vast wilderness of the Pacific Northwest replanting trees in areas damaged by forest fires. The team consisted of Michael who I affectionately called Wang Warmer behind his back. He was the victim of too many teeth in too small of a mouth, too little hair on too big of a head and too many hours of gangster rap. Keith, the wild man of the group had long, frizzy black hair down the middle of his back, blue eyes the color of insanity and a cracked smile because of the gap between his front two teeth. Keith always kept an empty plastic Gatorade bottle tied to a string on his person. He’d swing that empty bottle around and around bounce it off people’s heads when he wanted to punctuate his sentences. Then there was Mike, a rowdy wannabe DJ who wore a carpet of brown stubble on his face, headphones permanently hung from his neck. He was constantly moving his hands on an invisible turntable, mixing the beat for the crowd in his head. And to round out this lawless band of tree planters was their outlaw queen, their very own Calamity Jane. Her name was Nancy; a tough talking, hard living, long legged woman with stringy hair the color of an Ohio wheat field, high cheek bones that gave away the native blood running through her veins and a smooth sweet tea Texas accent that had some bass in it from smoking too many packs of Marlboro Reds. That was team Quicksilver and they spoke English which meant we were friends by default. Each shift I was stationed in a different part of the Northern Jaeger with the members of Team Quicksilver putting the factory together one piece at a time. It was from them that I heard about the glories of seasons past, money made and lost the hard way and about boat wives as they were called.

I remember standing in the plate freezer area handing tools to Keith who was under a conveyor belt wrenching away when I asked, “I’ve heard you use the term ‘boat wife’ a few times in the last few days, what the hell does that mean?”

“Hand me the ¾ inch socket”, Keith replied.

I handed him the socket he requested and asked again, “What in the hell is a boat wife?”

Keith chuckled to himself and said, “A boat wife? Chucky-boy boat wives break down like this. You see all these dudes onboard have wives and girlfriends back home but when they get out here and are deprived of pussy for more than a month or two they tend to go a little stir crazy, only you know, the really horny version of stir crazy and once that sets in they’ll pork anybody they can poke their peckers into.”

“Are you kidding me?” I asked in astonishment. “All the chicks I’ve seen onboard are nasty as hell I wouldn’t toss em a bone even if I was whiskey drunk and blind to boot.” Keith slid out from under the conveyor belt and torpedoed me with his crazy cobalt eyes. I then remembered that Nancy was Keith’s old lady and realizing that I had just tied a noose around my neck with my own tongue I backtracked my last statement. “I meant all the chicks are nasty except for Nancy. I mean… I mean…”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah I know what you mean and I agree with you. But I also have to admit the whole boat wife gig is a pretty good racket for most of these chicks seeing as they ain’t lookers on the mainland and out here they’re goddesses surrounded by an all you can eat buffet of burly, horny men.”

After six days at sea with the factory all put together I finally got a chance to take a load off. Into the galley I went, to eat a tuna sandwich and find someone to shoot the shit with. The tables in the galley were crowded with fishermen who lit new cigarettes with the burning stubs of their old ones and played hands of rummy or spades while ROBOCOP blasted the scum of Detroit with his hand-cannon from the black plastic box television strapped to the ceiling in the corner of the room. I scanned around, spotted Newty through the deliciously thick smoke, grabbed a sandwich, a cup of coffee and sat at his table.

“We’re doing it baby”, Newty said with a grin as he chomped on a bite out of his sandwich.

I bit off a big chunk of my own tuna sandwich and washed it down with a gulp of coffee. Setting my cup on the table I said, “I know man, one more day and we’re gonna be in Alaska. This is crazy! It all seems like some kind of weird dream, you know? Can you believe that just a few days ago we we’re in Seattle? I mean if someone had told me a year ago that me and you would be right here, right now I would have said they were full of shit.”

“I know right”, Newty replied through a mouthful of tuna and mayonnaise. “I can’t believe it either. I wonder what…”

The thoughts from his mind to his mouth were cut off as the bow end of the ship lifted up tilting me and everyone else onboard before it slammed down with a crash. It took a total of five seconds for that to transpire but in that amount of time my stomach had rocketed up into my throat and then dropped like an elevator with its cables cut back down to my toes. I grabbed the sides of the table with both hands to brace myself and looked across the table at Newty, his eyes looked square – framed by his heavy eyebrows, his mouth was clasped shut, the vigor of his face had gone as gray as the smoke that filled the room. The two of us sat looking at the brown liquid in the cup on the table between us move with the motion of the ocean. The ship rose up on a wave. The ship crashed down the other side of a wave. Up. Down. Up. Down. Up. Down. A feeling of excited dread flooded my body. I closed my eyes and breathed out my mouth as I felt more air in my lungs might solve the queasy feeling that had overcome me. I recalled the feeling in my body as the same feeling I had felt when I had ridden the rides at the fair when I was a youngster only this ride wasn’t timed a by half-stoned carnie with prison tattoos. This ride just kept on going. Up. Down. Up. Down. Up. Down. With every breath of smoky air I pulled into my lungs the harder it was for me to resist the urge to spew the contents of my stomach on the floor. I repeated in my head – be strong, be strong, be strong. No words were spoken though as both Newty and I were doing our damndest to keep the few swallows of tuna sandwich in our guts where they belonged. I however was more successful at that venture than Ol’ Newty was. I’ve always had a strong stomach so after few minutes of me breathing deep, white-knuckling the table and telling myself to be strong – I was good. I wasn’t great but I was good. The only struggle I had was with the substantial cigarette smoke that invaded my every inhale but even that wasn’t enough to make me lose it. I can’t say the same for Newty though as he’s had a weak stomach for as long as I’ve known him. When we were teenagers he was always the first one to puke when we’d go out drinking or when we’d eat mushrooms, and right then being tossed about on the angry seas while trapped inside the floating ashtray that was the Northern Jaeger, well that didn’t treat him none too kindly either. Up. Down. Up. Down. Up. Down. After a few more bouts on the nautical roller coaster Newty dropped his sandwich on his plate, slapped both his hands over his mouth and ran head first out of the galley for the toilet.

The next morning I was on the bow deck thankful to be once again on calm waters. The predawn sun hadn’t risen above the horizon yet as the Northern Jaeger dropped anchor and docked in Dutch Harbor. The landscape was bathed in mute blacks, grays and whites set against the endless royal blue of the sky. From where I stood as the bitter wind blew against my face Dutch Harbor looked to be a frozen black rock sprinkled with ice and snow that rose from the tear colored waters. The island looked abandoned, desolate and lonely; a place where the soul of Eleanor Rigby as the Beatles sang about would wander with the wolves. I didn’t lose myself in thoughts of Dutch Harbor for too long though, as I headed back into the galley to warm my hands and get in on whatever meal was being served.

Inside the galley I ate breakfast while a gang of people huddled around the corkboard pegged to the wall.

Alone at a table over a plate of over easy eggs sat Wang Warmer so I asked him, “What’s going on over there?”

“Yo Chucky-boy, this is where we separate the shit from the heels.” He took a bite of his runny eggs and repeated, “The shit from the heels.”

“What?” I said with confusion running wild through my brain and all over my face as the words that came out of his mouth meant jack and shit to me. “What does that even mean? The shit from the heels, I don’t even know what the hell that means!”

With a mouthful of yellow and white he replied, “You know the shit from the heels, the shit from the heels, son.”

Irritated I said to him, “Can you just give me a straight answer? I have no fucking clue what you’re trying to tell me. Speak English brother I know you can do it, it’s our native tongue.”

“Oh come on Chucky-boy, you telling me you ain’t down with my jive?”

I rolled my eyes and replied, “Whatever.”

“Alright, alright, alright”, Wang conceded, disappointed I hadn’t deciphered his shit from the heels riddle. “Here’s what’s going down. On that piece of paper everyone’s checking out on the wall over there you’re gonna find out what your job will be in the factory and what shift you’re gonna be on. These new shifts ain’t gonna be like those sweet-ass 12 on, 12 off we worked on the steam up. They got us working six hours on, six hours off.”

“That doesn’t sound too bad.”

Wang Warmer didn’t say another word. He loaded his mouth with more runny eggs and chewed, looking at me with a tight smile and tight eyes, the way someone looks at you when they know a secret that you don’t.

I abandoned our conversation and pushed my way through the bodies to get to the cork-board. The list was broken up by shift, then by name and lastly by job title. I found Blume and Newty’s Christian names first. Blume was to be a plate-freezer handler while Newty was to be a fillet inspector. Finally I spotted my name under the second shift at the bottom of the list. My job title was something called a viscera technician. “Viscera technician”, I repeated under my breath, “viscera technician”. I must have done something right, I thought, because I was officially a viscera technician. In the very back, back, way back of my head; back behind all of my other thoughts I knew that being a viscera technician had to be tied to the viscera table Ray had pointed out to me, Newty and Blume on our first day on the Northern Jaeger, but as my mind works I forgot about that flicker of a memory and began to dissect the two words staring at from the page pinned to the corkboard: viscera technician. Viscera meant fuck-all to me so I let that word slide and concentrated solely on the word technician. Technician, to me equaled important. Technician equaled professional. It meant to me a job that would no doubt require my mental prowess and technical skills as I would be the technician of the viscera. I pictured myself sitting down at a keyboard and monitor typing away, figuring out solutions to the issues related to viscera. 15 hours later found me down in the factory rummaging through fish innards, and as their gut juice ran down my face I understood that technician is just a fancy word you tack on to the end of a shit job.

CHAPTER END

Before my first shift in the factory began I stood in the oilskin room geared up from the feet up. My brown steel-toed rubbers covered my feet. Neon orange rubber coveralls and matching rain-slicker protected my legs, arms and torso. On my hands were rubber gloves and not the thin rubber gloves used to protect your hands when washing dishes but rubber gloves about 2 centimeters thick and insulated with wool lining to keep your fingers from freezing to icy nubs on your body. To top off my ensemble I wore a black doo-rag tied across my head to keep my long hair out of my face.

Around me in the oilskin room other fishermen slipped into their own brown steel-toed rubbers. Others popped pills and swished them down with chugs of soda. Others took long, slow drags from their cigarettes, in a ritualistic way before the shift began. Me, I balled up one fist and pounded the open palm of my other hand and then repeated the process with the opposite fist to hand. I was ready. I was stoked. I was ready to go down into the factory to kick some ass on my first shift as a viscera technician. I didn’t even know the meaning of a viscera technician but I was ready to open up the throttle and giver her hell! I knew one thing for sure, it was go time. At the bottom of the stairs that led from the oilskin room to the factory floor I stood for a moment in awe as crewmembers made their way past me to get to their respective posts. The first thing that struck me about the factory was the noise. I had been down there plenty since I had first boarded the Northern Jaeger in Seattle but that was the first time that I had been in the factory when it was fully operational. The various conveyor belts and machines throughout the factory hummed, pumped, rolled, squeaked, belched, squished and formed a solid platoon of mechanical sound in my ears. The catwalk that ran along the portside of the factory was a jam-packed two-lane highway and the loud talking fishermen were the vehicles. One lane was for shiny new cars heading into the factory, the other were dirty, tired vehicles heading to the warmth of the oilskin room. Out of my imagination and back into reality I snaked my way through the blinding steam coming from the plate freezer area and followed the train of raingear wearing fisherman along the gunmetal gray catwalk.

When I cleared the amped up swirling and gurgling noises made by the surimi turbines before me was a long, white, crotch-height conveyor belt: the viscera table. There were five people around the viscera table, three on one side and two on the other. It was easy to spot the man I was supposed to swap out with as he was the only one who wore wet, slop covered raingear. Juanito looked up from the conveyor belt and rushed towards me with a big grin on his mustachioed face. I knew his name was Juanito because just like everyone else had done to prevent someone from thieving the rain gear from their lockers he had scrawled his name all over the orange rubber in permanent black magic marker. Juanito was a slight Mexican fellow who had a bushy moustache and one lazy eye that looked sideways at the world. I raised my hand for a high-five and he slapped it in a friendly fashion as if we were tag team wrestlers and he had just tagged me into the ring.

“Yo Juanito, get the hell out of here! I’ll see you in six hours!” I yelled over the metallic roar of the working factory. I didn’t have to tell him twice. He shot from the viscera table and disappeared into the recesses of the factory like he had a bottle rocket up his ass. I turned my attention to the empty conveyor belt that rotated in front of me. Standing across from me was a pudgy woman with sharp eyes and a face only a drunk with 11 beers in his gut could love. I judged from the ink scribbled on her rain gear that her name was Eileen.

As the empty vinyl conveyor belt sped by below my waist, I shouted across to Eileen, “So what are we supposed to be doing?” She stared back at me with a full-mouth grin and giggled between her teeth. I wasn’t sure if she didn’t hear me or she couldn’t understand me but a giggle wasn’t exactly the answer I was looking for. Before I could ask again it started and I soon understood why she had giggled in reply and nothing more.

What I thought had been loud before wasn’t when compared to the metal-on-metal clanging and banging that blasted out from the unknown machines beyond the viscera table. Not only was the factory explosively loud but the floor began to shimmy and shake as if it were alive. The steel grating upon which I stood vibrated under the pressure of the machines at work. My toes chattered inside of my steel-toed rubbers. My hips shivered in their sockets. My fillings felt like at any moment they would rattle right out of my teeth. My brain bounced off the walls of my skull like a marble in a tin can. I looked from my hands rapidly, uncontrollably knocking against the edge of the conveyor belt to the head of the viscera table where a gate lifted up and out poured piles of intestines. Not just one or two sets of fish innards but thousands of sets of fish guts, enough to fill the entire width of the two ft. wide conveyor belt about six inches deep. I watched in stunned horror at all of those internal fish organs as they slimed and slurped their way down the viscera table in my direction. It dawned on me right then and there that my job as a viscera technician wasn’t going to be nearly as technical or brain-centric as I had once envisioned. Not having had any warning or prior training I watched my fellow viscera technicians and quickly learned what I was supposed to do. Our job was simple. We were supposed to separate the roe, the testicle shaped egg sacks of the female fish, from the rest of the fish’s insides. To accomplish our task we pulled the unwanted innards into a trough on the side of the viscera table and left the roe on the rotating vinyl belt where it would continue its journey through the factory. I felt a little uneasy at first with the feeling of cold, slippery organs at my fingertips but I quickly got over it. My mind went blank of all thoughts of how disgusting it was and how many schools of fish were now dead before me. The task at hand became my only focus. I hunched over the viscera table like a DJ getting ready to mix a sloppy set, plowed my hands wrist deep into the entrails and used the patented wax on/wax off motion made famous by Ralph Macchio in the The Karate Kid. The only difference being I wasn’t waxing a canary yellow 1959 Chevrolet Convertible I used that motion to pull roe sacks from the jiggling mass of internal organs that rotated in front me. A few minutes into the carnage that being a viscera technician consisted of and my orange rubber raingear was covered with stomach sauce from all the fish guts. Small bits of pollock made their way from the conveyor belt onto my face and clung to my cheeks and forehead. Vapors rose from the contents on the viscera table that were invisible to the eye but not to my nose. The vapors didn’t carry the sweet, clean fish smell I used to associate with the fish being thrown about at Pike Place Market nor the freshwater lake smell I remembered from the fish I had caught and cleaned in the past. The smell stung my nasal passage and gripped tightly onto my nose hairs with each inhale. If I wasn’t afraid of how that pungent smell would taste I would have breathed out my mouth but as it was the vapors were bitter and salty and at the same time metallic. Covered in wet pollock flecks, choking down breath after acrid breath and vibrating like a vibrator with fresh AA’s, I began to question if going fishing in Alaska was the best choice or not. Quickly though, I had to shake off the doubtful thoughts and move as fast as I could because the flow of guts onto the table had deepened up to mid-forearm.

Beside me a fist smashed down onto the passing innards splattering the stink juice onto my locked lips, which took the whole of my constitution not to vomit in response. “What the fuck do you think you’re all doing!?” The owner of the fist screamed out like broken glass in a blender. Startled, I looked up to see Erin my Q.C. or Quality Control expert as the owner of said fist. “We’re getting a lot of motherfucking guts on the roe table and not enough clean roe. Party time is over! All of you move your fucking asses as fast as greased fucking lightning!” Erin was a pale woman with stabbing blue eyes, a shaved head and a piss poor temper. She was someone I thankfully had brief but memorable moments with.

I heeded her words and moved my hands with a quickness. My thought pattern became like static on a television – meaning all thoughts of future and past slipped away and all that was left was white noise. I no longer thought about the feel of the JELL-O-like temperature and texture of the roe mixed with the guts. Nor did I hear the earsplitting racket or feel the mechanical earthquake made by the factory machines. The stink-taste of the pollock insides fell silent from my taste buds as well. I was in a zone with just me and the roe that needed to be freed and there was nothing else.

Fully engaged at the viscera table and having no way to track time, that first shift in the factory seemed endless. Finally After what seemed like days the replacements started to dribble in one at a time. Juanito, the viscera technician I had tagged out earlier, was the last to show up. I had almost thought he had forgotten about me. My head was tucked down between my shoulders, my back was bent like a bow, my hands were shifting in circles removing guts from roe when I felt a tap, tap, tap on my shoulder. I turned to see Juanito give me a thumb’s up and a smile, his good eye looked at my face while his lazy eye was fixated on some point outside of my peripheral. I couldn’t return the smile afraid fish splatter would drip from my lips into my mouth so I tried to reciprocate the friendly gesture but my hands were statue stiff in the shape of a “C” from the past 360 minutes of continuous movement. I simply nodded my head in acknowledgment and hobbled out of the factory for the oilskin room, beaten.

CHAPTER END

FEBRUARY

The next two weeks out on the Bering Sea I caught a glimpse into what my future would behold as we, the crew, caught and processed pollock in shifts of six hours on, six hours off, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. We worked tirelessly because the mass thought process onboard went like this: the faster we caught and processed our quota of fish the faster we could go home, sleep in our beds, screw our brains out and spend the dollars we had earned, nothing more, nothing less. I however was in the minority as I wasn’t just there to make money. Yes, I wanted cash like the rest of them but I also wanted to answer the riddle inside myself of what it meant to be a man and at the time I believed that by diving in balls deep and enduring the challenge for all that it was I would unlock some secret vault of stored knowledge inside myself.

With each six hour shift in the factory I adapted and learned from my fellow fisherman the ways of how to survive down there. I plugged my ears with latex earplugs to dampen the brain pounding noise of the machines. I wore a bandana over my nose and the lower half of my face bandit style, not so much as a fashion statement but to help filter the fumes coming up from the viscera table and to keep the little morsels of Pollock guts out of my mouth. I stood with my legs wide apart as to reduce how far I had to hunch over the viscera table.

As my body evolved into being a master of the viscera table my mind evolved as well. The first few six hour shifts in the factory I concentrated on the roe and the guts in front of me because since I was still a rookie I wanted to do it to the best of my ability. Once the physical movements of being a viscera technician were programmed into my muscle memory I found I no longer needed to concentrate on the job at hand and was then able to let go of present reality and set my soul free to wander in and out the unmarked doors of my psyche while my body worked on robotically. Working as repetitively as I was and to keep time moving in a forward direction I vividly conjured up scenes of my life to keep myself occupied. I brought to mind all the parties I had gone to; every single beer I had shotgunned, keg stand I had done, every fight that I had seen. All the teachers and classes I had had whether they be Sunday school, public school or private school they each reflected in front of me as clearly as if I were looking in a mirror of my existence. I thought about each of my friends and remembered specific details tied to how we had met. I remembered the two girls I had had sex with and replayed and replayed and replayed those scenes over and over again. I looked back on all the times I had gotten stoned and was able to bring to mind every single bowl I had smoked and who I had smoked it with. I played back all of my Christmas’ past spent with my family, every birthday I had shared with my mother. With each shift I’d review my life from a different vantage point and every time I was thoroughly amazed at how my imagination fully occupied my time in the factory.

My six hours out of the factory were spent in two places; the galley and my bunk. As tired as my body was my brain never seemed to rest. I attributed that to the fact that I worked six hours on, six hours off, which sounds good in theory but in cold, harsh reality actually worked against, not only me but the rest of the crew. I was still spending the same amount of time working in the factory during a 24 hour period as if I had worked 12 hours on, 12 hours off, but I was unable to get sufficient rest during the six hours off seeing as during that time I had to eat, shower, unwind and by the time I’d close my eyes I’d have to get up in two hours to be back in the factory. Really I was getting four hours of sleep during every 24 hour period and it was dogshit sleep at best. During my sleepy time I’d close my eyes and hope to dream of long legs, big tits and lakes of beer. But instead I had nightmares of the factory – the smelly, cold, cramped factory.

Apparently dreaming of the factory is so common there is a name for it; sleep-working. Of course dreams being dreams my sleep work was far more unrelenting than real life. I dreaded going to sleep because as soon as my body was relaxed and my brainwaves slipped into that timeless dimension where dreams are made, I would be alone, hip deep in a river of steaming fish entrails. Headless voices would scream at me to move faster, move faster, move faster and I did. The vision of my hands would blur in my mind’s eye from moving so fast as if they’d been zapped by lightening. There were times I would wake up in the darkness of my bunk out of breath practically drowned in sweat. I worked harder in my dreams than I did in real life. Once I awoke surprised and in pain, the blood in my left hand throbbed hot just under the flesh of my knuckles. Seconds earlier I had been engrossed in a sleep-working dream and I deduced from the way my hand felt that I must have been moving my corporeal hands along with my dream hands and in doing so I had punched the steel ceiling over my bunk.

I might have been kicking ass as a viscera technician but my time spent in the factory was taking its toll on my immune system. I found out the hard way that being exposed for 12 hours a day, seven days a week to near freezing temperatures in a constantly moist environment while simultaneously breathing in toxic intestinal fumes was not what the human machine was made for. I acquired what was known as the factory flu. I was congested, full of mucus from the bottom of my lungs to the tip of my nose and every time I coughed I made a hacking sound like when you try to start a chainsaw that’s out of gas. Out at sea everyone got the factory flu to varying degrees. It made no difference if a person had a little princess cough or full-blown pneumonia no one could call in sick or take a day off and no one had sympathy for the weak or those who whined about their sickness either. Your only choice was to pull on your steel-toed rubbers and be tough. There were times I’d stand over the viscera table and my body felt like it was being operated by a hollow ghost, my thoughts would drift outside of me to an empty lot barren of all positivity and I’d have to cheer myself up. To do just that I’d pull up a mouthful of lung butter from the deep recesses of my lungs and launch it onto the quivering roe on that passed before me as a silent ‘fuck you’ to the fish for getting me sick.

Throughout those first 21 days onboard the Northern Jaeger my youthful body constantly felt like that of a crotchety old man as my lungs were a never-ending spring of mucous and my neck, shoulders, wrists and hands were bent and aching. After each shift I’d lie in my bunk and my whole being would feel raw as if every mental, physical and spiritual nerve ending was naked to the salty world and just before my consciousness would drift off into the ether I would ask myself, “Self”, I’d say because that’s what I call myself when I speak to myself, “Is the price you’re paying really worth the prize?”

Each time I awoke I’d open my eyes to my alarm, turn on the light in my bunk and the first thing I’d see were the inspirational words I had written above my head. WHAT DOESN’T KILL YOU MAKES YOU STRONGER. MONEY! MONEY! MONEY! ONLY THE STRONG SURVIVE And, EYE OF THE TIGER. Then I’d remember that what I was putting myself through was exactly what I had wanted. I was there by my choice and nobody else’s. I was purposefully putting myself through that experience because I wanted to have a moment of enlightenment where the meaning of being a man was clearly defined, that and make a load of cash. After the blink it would take for those thoughts to process in my cranial computer I’d say aloud, “Self, it sure as hell is worth it.” In the next breath I’d tear myself from of the comfort of my warm bunk and begin the counterattack for the battle of dominance of my body from the factory flu that infested me. With my feet on the cold linoleum I’d wipe the sleep from my eyes and start the offensive by popping four Ibuprofens, two Dayquil gel tabs, some multi-vitamins, a couple 1,000 mg vitamin C tablets, some caffeine pills and wash it all down with a big pull from a bottle of codeine laced cough syrup. With all those vitamins, minerals and chemicals absorbed into my system I’d get dressed and be ready for another day on my path to self illumination.

CHAPTER END

After 21 days of processing the freezer-hold was full and the Northern Jaeger was back in “Dutch” for our first offload. Exhausted, I laid in my bunk and stared at the words I had written on the ceiling of my bunk at the start of my adventure when Newty walked into the room. I hadn’t really seen him or Fire Crotch since we had steamed out of Seattle as it always managed that we found ourselves on opposite shifts.

“What up longhair?” Newty asked with his greasy Jesus length hair hanging in his face as he held out his hand to be slapped

“Not much Jesus Christos”, I replied with a slap of palm to palm.

“I just checked the schedule in the galley and we’re going to be on the same damn shift for a change, Mario’s shift. It says we’re to start out in the freezer-hold, so make sure to put on your scarf, your mittens and your little booties and I’ll see your pansy ass down in the galley.”

“Alright you filthy cock-knocker, I’ll meet you down there.”

Out of my bunk and on the floor I downed my feel good chemicals for the shift then slowly inched my way into my freezer costume. Before I left the room I glanced in the mirror that was secured to the back of the door. Black steel-toed freezer boots, check. Black thermal jumpsuit, check. Red wool hat, check. Black insulated gloves, check. Stupid drugged out grin on my face, check. I was complete and ready to rock.

In the galley I met Newty who sat at a table playing cards with Raven. There were a few other crew members in the galley getting a last bite to eat or one more smoke inside of them before their shifts started.

“Howdy-do fellas”, I said in a trumped up Southern accent. “Ya’ll ready to get this shit offloaded?”

Raven looked at me from behind his dark roasted eyes and replied, “Oh Charlie-boy, the question is, are you ready?”

“Sheeee-it”, I said, “I was born ready.”

“Muthafucka”, Raven laughed with a big grin, “You have no idea about the pain you’re about to get in to.”

Raven was the color of milk chocolate and he had a large crooked nose that looked to have been broken and set a few times. He wore two gold hoop earrings in his left ear and a diamond stud in his right. He was a Cajun from some backwater toilet bowl in Louisiana. He smoked Marlboro Mediums and his voice sounded the way crawfish jambalaya and a shot of rum taste. He looked like he’d be right at home dancing around a fire covered in chicken’s blood casting voodoo spells.

“Yeah, you have no idea”, Newty chimed in.

I shook my head with squinted eyes as I replied to Newty, “Shut the fuck up. Like you fucking know what you’re talking about. You’re just as much of a tenderfoot as I am.”, to Raven I asked, “What can we expect offloading to be like?”

Raven took a deep drag off his cigarette contemplating my question for a good 30 seconds before he answered. “Boys”, he began as he forced smoke out of his large nostrils, “you think you’ve had it rough this last month, what with working your asses off on the steam up to Dutch and those last three weeks out on the Bering, but truly that wasn’t shit…You see the factory was test for your minds, your sanity, to see if you could take it. This offload right here will be a true test for your young bodies, your stamina. If you can make it through that, well hell, after that comes the test for your very soul”, he said with twisted eyes and a cocked smiled as he drug out the “L” in soul like it was made out of saltwater taffy.

“What?” Newty asked his face registered a look of confusion.

Before Raven could answer Mario, the portly Mexican foreman walked in the galley and growled to everyone sitting down with half full coffee cups and newly lit cigarettes, “All right cabrons, vaminos! Get your asses where you need to go; either outside, the fishmeal-hold or the freezer-hold! One thing’s for sure she ain’t gonna offload herself! Rapido! Rapido! Vaminos! Vaminos!”

The three of us stood up from our table and walked out of the galley and down the hallway towards the oilskin room. Along the way our steel-toed freezer boots crunched on the cardboard that had been laid down to protect the linoleum during offloads. Our every step sounded like we were stomping on deep fried ants. From the doorway leading out of the oilskin room we clomped down the stairs into the factory past the plate freezer area to a square hole in the floor.

“Let me guess”, I said as frozen air ominously drifted up from the cavity, “That leads to the freezer-hold?”

“Yes Charlie-boy, that right there is the freezer-hold.” Raven flashed me a gold toothed grin and continued, “Think of it as an icy vault and the frozen fish as our cold hard cash.” He chuckled at his clever simile then patted me on the back and added, “Down the ladder boy, newbie’s first.”

The layers of my gloves were so thick I couldn’t close my hands around the ladder’s rungs. I sort of bounced down the ladder in my clonky steel-toed freezer boots, hoping I wouldn’t fall into the tundra below. Down in the giant deepfreeze the air was sharp, dry and as cold as tombstone in a blizzard. I felt my lung tissue crystallize with each guillotine breath I took. Cold mist formed a silver haze around the lights, giving everything a nightmarish glow. The floor and walls were covered in brown 50 lb. boxes. Each box was about 24 in. x 15 in. x 4 in. and had two white plastic straps wrapped tight around them. The contents of the boxes were printed on the outside in 3 in. navy blue bold type. They read such facts as: The date and time of being frozen, the name of the ship the fish were caught and processed by and just exactly what was inside, whether it was Grade AAA Pollock Roe or Grade C Pollock Fillets. The boxes were stacked tight and filled the 2,180 cubic meter freezer hold from the floor to the light fixtures. A conveyor belt cut a threadlike gap through the boxes. I stood there motionless taking in the scene not sure what to do. Raven slid down the ladder the way firemen do, his feet and hands lightly gripping the edges. He hit the landing pad of boxed frozen fish with a thud. I looked up at the square hole expecting Newty, but he didn’t follow.

“Where’s Newty?”

Raven spit between his boots with fury, “Mario that tubby piece of shit muthafucka, he sent Newty to work outside on the docks. Outside Charlie-boy, outside on solid muthafucking ground! He knows good and goddamn well I hate the freezer-hold and I ain’t no rookie neither muthafuckin’ Mario…”

“So, what should I do?” I asked, interrupting his verbal vomit.

“Charlie-boy, Charlie-boy, Charlie-boy”, Raven muttered as he shook his head, “Don’t just stare at the damn thing with a stupid look on your face and your dick in your hand. Get on your belly and ride the conveyor belt till you find a dugout big enough for you to get in on your hands and knees, then crawl in that space and start putting boxes on the belt. Then”, he said the tone of his voice greasy with sarcasm, “don’t stop till this whole muthafucka is empty, that’s all there is to it.”

I did as instructed and laid down on my belly on the canvas belt. It pulled me along at the speed of a carnival ride built for 4 year olds, which is very slowly. I lay my head flat against the conveyor belt as I passed under the light fixtures to avoid shattering them with my face. It was tight, narrow and frozen. As I was towed down the conveyor belt, the ass-bitingly cold air filled my lungs and I had a moment of panic as this thought sunk its dreadful claws into my brain: What if the boat rocked back and forth and the 50 lb. boxes of frozen fish surrounding me slid off each other and collapsed on me? Before I had time to entertain fantasies of being trapped or crushed by the massive amount of frozen fish that surrounded me I rolled off the belt into a cubbyhole just big enough for me to be on my hands and knees. I scuttled around to face the conveyor belt just as Raven passed by.

“Get to work”, he yelled as he flipped me off with 2 big insulated middle fingers.

“Yeah, yeah suck on this”, I snapped back as I grabbed my crotch. With Raven out of sight I blew my dripping nostrils one at a time and watched in childlike amazement as my liquid snot froze instantly to the boxes it landed on. Laughing to myself I started to heft boxes onto the rotating conveyor belt. 50 lb. box after 50 lb. box after 50 lb. box. I moved at NASCAR speed trying to clear out enough space for me to stand. Under my layers I was a forest fire. In 10 minutes I was drenched. My hands inside my gloves made a squish sound each time I picked up a box from sweat that was soaked into the fabric. Steam rose from my body like water tossed onto a bed of hot coals. Despite my body’s temperature gauge being buried in the red I plugged away one 50 lb. box at a time.

“Easy there greenhorn, take it nice and easy”, I heard a croak of a voice say. Surprised, I looked up to see a head peaking through a hole in the box wall between my cubbyhole and the next. The head that scoped me out had a Harley Davidson doo-rag that covered its head, a silver cross dangled from its left ear and a handlebar moustache the color of a whiskey sunset drooped down the sides of its mouth. “I’m Ed”, the head said.

“I’m Chuck”, I replied, “nice to meet you.”

“Yeah”, Ed said in an abortive tone, “Listen let me give you some advice. For starters you don’t want to use up all your energy so soon. You’re gonna spend the next 12 fucking hours down here so conservation is key and second off, hell, you’re gonna make the rest of us look bad so take it down a notch Tonto, this ain’t no race.” Ed turned his face away from the hole in the box wall between his cubbyhole and mine and I heard him mumble into the frozen air “Fucking greenhorns…”

My first 15 minutes in the freezer-hold were exciting and new because I wasn’t in the factory hunched over the viscera table, but after that I was over it. I took Ed’s advice and fell into a rhythm of picking up one box and walking over and placing it on the conveyor belt, at what I called a Goldie Locks pace, not too fast and not too slow either but a pace that was just right. By the end of the first hour I had cleared my space in the freezer from a cubbyhole to the size of a bachelor apartment. With the passing of the third hour all spunk had left my body. I still had three hours left before lunch and already my lower back was moaning and wailing. My biceps felt that any moment they could seize up. I had slowed myself from a Goldie locks pace into a groove, a slow children at play kind of groove, but a groove just the same. Despite the pain I was in and how slow I was moving I didn’t complain to anyone, not because I didn’t want to but because I knew no one would have cared. We were all in the same boat and empathy was the one thing everyone had forgotten at home. I realized that we’d broken the seal of the sixth hour when I looked up the staggered steps of boxed frozen fish and up top at the ladder that lead to the factory came fresh crewmembers down to relieve us for a meal break. I had just placed a box on the conveyor belt when to my back I heard.

“What’s up Stinky Nuts?”

There is only one person on the planet who could ever affectionately call me Stinky Nuts and I turned to greet him.

“Not much you greased up butthole”, I said to Blume as we bumped fists. “How the hell you been? I almost forgot you were onboard. I haven’t seen your ass since we left Seattle.”

Blume and I had been on opposite shifts and even though we shared a room I never saw him. When he was working in the factory I was asleep and when he was asleep I was working in the factory.

“Good man, real good”, fluid dripped from his nose while he spoke and froze in midair before it bounced off his boot like a diamond , “I got a little seasick at first but once I got my sea-legs I was all set.

“Dude, what job are you doing in the factory?”

“The factory, hell, I’ve been down here filling up the freezer-hold this whole time. This right here”, he said with a cheeky smile and open arms, “is my playground. I’ve been stacking these frozen bastard boxes from day one. You should see this place when it’s empty. It’s got wooden floors and would be a pretty badass place to throw some hoops up on each end and play some ball.”

“Now that would be something. Can you imagine shooting some hoops when the ships in a storm?” For a second the two of us were silent as we thought about just that scenario before I interrupted “Let me ask you a question.”

“Shoot.”

“Do you ever get used to heaving these 50lb boxes around?”

“No”, Blume replied his voice low and serious, “I don’t think anyone could ever get used to lifting these fuckers around. At the end of every shift my body feels like twice ran over dogshit, it’s all I can do to climb the ladder topside and crawl into my bunk. The only thing keeping me going are pain pills, coffee and knowing I’m gonna be rich when I get off this floating hell hole.”

“I hear ya brother. I hear ya”, I replied as the words billowed from my lips in puffs of white.

“Listen Stinky Nuts, you’re cutting into your eating time by jabbering away to me. So get up in the galley, take a load off and get some grub. I’ll still be here with bells on when you come back.”

Never being one to have to be told twice I said adios and scaled the ladder with squirrel-like agility ready to put some fuel in my tank. With a plate of food in hand I looked for a seat in the filled up galley which was segregated as per usual. The Mexicans sat with the Mexicans. The Vietnamese sat with the Vietnamese. The Norwegians sat with the Norwegians and so on and so forth. Raven saw me with a lost look on my face and waved me over to sit with him and Byron, the only two African Americans on the Northern Jaeger.

“How you holding up Charlie-boy”, Raven asked as I sat down.

“I’m doing a lot better now that I’m out of the freezer-hold and having a bite to eat. But I just keep on keeping on, that’s what I do.”

“Sheee-it Charlie-boy”, Raven replied with a grin. “That’s what I like about you, you don’t let this bullshit get under your skin like some other members of the crew.”

Raven was wrong. I wasn’t good I was just barely keeping on. I had lied. My body felt the way you’d feel after going over Niagara Falls in a wooden barrel. Sitting in the warmth of the galley I was already feeling the affects of those first six hours in the freezer-hold. I felt pain in muscles of my body that I didn’t even know I had. But I didn’t say a word about it as I still had another six hours to go before the end of the shift.

“Charles”, Byron said, “do you think you might come back out to do another season?” Byron was the most out of place person on the Northern Jaeger as he spoke with an educated tongue and was far more sophisticated than anyone else onboard. I remember when he boarded the ship in Seattle he wore a fancy black suit like he was attending a business meeting rather than boarding a fishing boat bound for Alaska.

“There is no way you’re ever going catch me out here again. When my feet touch the ground in Seattle all you’re gonna see from me is two big middle fingers and my hair blowing in the wind. I am never coming back out here I guarantee it!”

“Famous last words my young friend, famous last words”, Byron said as he took a bite of cupcake. “You sound exactly like I did during my first offload and that was… let’s see, this is my 10^th, no 11^th, wait no my 10^th season out here.”

Surprised I said, “You’ve been doing this for 10 fucking years?”

“No I’ve been doing it for 10 years, not 10 fucking years”, Byron corrected. “Let me break it down for you about how it works for most newbies on the ship, and I’d wager to say it will work the same for you as well. You see you’re going to get off the ship in Seattle with more money than you’ve ever had access to in your whole life which you will promptly blow on liquor, drugs, loose women or whatever your particular vice may be. For a few months you will be the life of the party, wherever you go it will be wine, women and song. Then one day you’ll go to the ATM and find your bank account drained dry and being as such you’ll come back to the Northern Jaeger only to do it all over again. I’ve seen it happen 100 times and I’ll see it happen 100 times more. Young men come out with the intention of one big score and never coming back but the temptations of the land keep them returning to the sea. It’s a vicious but necessary cycle. I know of what I speak because I speak from experience.”

I pondered his words as I ate my food then replied. “Maybe you’re right Byron but I’m gonna try my damndest never to come back out here.”

After I finished my lunch I went out on the bow deck to escape the thoughts Byron had planted in my head as well as to get some fresh Alaskan air. Outside the tops of the black rock mountains surrounding Dutch Harbor were covered in white powdery snow. I looked back on shore and watched with fascination at the process that was taking place. The men lined up one at a time to remove the 50lb boxes of frozen product that seemed to flow without end out of the three conveyor belts that stuck out of the side of the Northern Jaeger, and place them onto pallets. When the pallets were full one of the men would wrap the pallet with an industrial sized roll of plastic wrap before a forklift would scoop it up and wheel it away to the cold storage warehouse. While I watched the unloading process unfold on the dock a northerly wind blew across the deck and with it, it blew away my fascination with the scene at hand so I headed back down to the freezer hold for the second half of my shift.

The next six hours went by faster than the first six. Once my muscles were again in motion the pain subsided, that doesn’t mean the boxes got any lighter or the work got any easier. I merely slipped back into my groove and paid no attention to anything but the task at hand. I’d pick up a 50lb box of frozen fish, walk at a medium pace to the conveyor belt and place it on the belt.

Rewind.

Play.

Repeat.

By the end of my first 12 hour shift we had cleared out about half of the frozen fish from the freezer-hold. I was weak and delirious. I had thought that being at the viscera table during my factory work was tough on my body and yes, yes it was but I had just went from being hunched over a pecker height conveyor belt for six hours at a time to working a straight 12 hour shift moving 50lb boxes of frozen product. The way I struggled up the ladder to get out of the freezer hold amazed me. Every rung up that frozen ladder was a test of my stamina and willpower. 12 hours earlier I had entered that ice covered room a somewhat spry 21 year old but leaving I was anything but. 12 hours down there had transformed me into a creature of suffering; a beast of burden. Walking through the empty factory the muscles of my body felt limp like a jellyfish washed up on shore. It was a good thing my shift was over because even if I had to keep moving boxes out of the freezer hold I don’t think my body would have complied. It wasn’t until I reached the galley and smelled the chili being served that my brain realized that I was in need of nourishment as my empty belly felt as if it were touching my spine. I knew I had five hours to eat, shower and sleep before my next shift began. I also knew that those five hours would possibly be my only chance to get some dry land under my feet and to call back home. The thought of getting on dry ground and calling people who loved me motivated me to wolf down two bowls of chili as fast as I could and get off the Northern Jaeger. I descended the gangplank and for the first time I felt Dutch Harbor under my feet. It had been over a month since I had last had solid, unmoving earth under me, so I wobbled back and forth for a few seconds until I got my bearings. Standing there on the dock with the ship to my back I closed my eyes, leaned my head back and took a deep breath of the pure unadulterated Alaskan air as elephant colored clouds looked down from above.

Right then a sharp honk startled me. I opened my eyes to see Wang Warmer sitting on a forklift nudging the front forks into the slits on the bottom of the wooden pallet before him which was stacked into a cube shape of 50lb boxes. “What up muthafucka?” Wang yelled out from his mobile throne.

“Nada”, I replied, “Now that I’m out of the freezer and my feet are on dry land I’m just hot-damn dandy. How are you doing?”

“I’m just hoping I don’t get pissed on by those dark rolling clouds.”

“Yeah, good luck with that. Hey, I hear there’s phone booth out here. You know where it is?”

“It’s over there, yo”, Wang said with a nod of his head as he pressed the lever and lifted the pallet off the ground.

I looked out to the bay where his head nodded and saw only the two colors that dominated my field of vision: the deep, majestic blue of the Bering Sea and the gray almost black clouds that looked to be made of nightmares.

“Not out there, muthafucka, over there!” Wang shouted pointing a bone thin finger towards the end of the dock where the dock met a paved road.

“Thanks pal”, I said to Wang’s back as he had already spun the forklift around and headed away from me. In line for the phone booth I stood patiently waiting my turn when something cold and wet smacked the top of my head. I touched the top of my head with my fingers and craned my neck up towards the sky, more out of instinct than out of rational thought, just in time to catch the full slushy payload of those gloomy, grey clouds. After a few cold, wet minutes the phone booth door folded open and out stepped Juanito my Mexican counterpart from the viscera table.

“Hola, mi amigo”, I said as I held my hand up for a high-five. Juanito didn’t reply and he didn’t return my high-five. He didn’t even look at me, at least not with both of his eyes. He glanced at me and walked past without a word spoken. But in that glance his face registered a look of pain with his mouth screwed into a trembling frown and water on the verge of spilling down his cheeks. He had the look of someone who just found out that his wife had gotten pregnant by his brother. I didn’t ask why he was so sad and he didn’t volunteer the information. He limped back to the ship as I stepped into the glass box and shut the door. Inside it was moist and warm from the flow of bodies that had been in and out of there all day. Names, phone numbers and random one-dimensional stick people were fingered into the steam covered glass. Calling card in hand I dialed the required codes followed by the memorized number of my parents’ phone and waited.

“Hello?” My mom answered.

I didn’t expect this reaction but I was overcome with emotion at the sound of her voice. Being my mother’s only son and also being born on her birthday we’ve always shared a special bond. Hearing her answer the phone wringed my heart of all the layers of tough guy hardness and smart ass remarks and left only her soft-hearted little boy. I stood there unable to articulate words.

“Hello, is anyone there?” She asked.

I swallowed the lump in my throat, drew in a breath and let it out slowly as I replied, “Hey mom” in as cheerful of a voice as I could muster not wanting to give away the wave of feelings that coursed through me.

“Chuck, is that you!? Are you okay?” She said in her concerned mother tone.

“Yeah mom, it’s me. Everything’s fine. I’m just tired and I miss you. That’s all.”

I closed my eyes and pulled up a mental image of my mom standing in the kitchen, her dyed auburn hair beginning to gray at the roots pulled back into a ponytail, flour on her hands and on her magenta sweatpants from baking pizza crusts and oatmeal cookies. I imagined steam rising from a pot of tea on the kitchen table as snow silently drifted down outside the kitchen window.

“I miss you too Chuck but everything’s going to be fine, just fine”, she replied, “You’ll be back in no time at all. Just you wait and see.” Her words acted as a comforter and swaddled me with love.

“How are you and Dad doing?” I asked as a forklift whizzed by with a pallet heavy on its front arms. From the driver’s seat of said forklift THE ROCK reminded me where I was as he held up his pointer and middle fingers in a ‘peace sign’ and lapped his tongue in between his two upheld fingers, which is sign language for eating pussy. I put a gloveless middle finger against the glass in response.

“Oh you know us and the exciting life we lead.” She said. “Me and your dad have just been up to our usual playing Skip-Bo every night just like we always do and between me and you I’ve been whooping him too”, as she said this I pictured her with a proud smirk on her face, the one she always gets when she brags about beating dad at cards, “Dad grilled steaks last night and let me tell you they were delicious. Oh and our water pipes froze again. Looks like the Lord wants us to go without water one more winter, but it’s okay because he gave us more than enough snow we can melt and we can always go to the fairgrounds and take a shower if we need to.”

“No water?” I said, thinking how funny it was that my mom thought that the act of the pipes freezing was a direct result of God’s will instead of deducing the real culprit: poor plumbing. “Well that’s no good. But it’s happened before and I’m sure you two will manage. How’s the rest of the family doing?”

“Oh let’s see. Cathy is doing good her and Dave have started marriage counseling. Her kids are doing fine. Your niece Amra went and got herself pregnant by some boy up in Northport. I haven’t heard from Donna or Karen in a few weeks. I guess it’s like Dad always says, no news is good news. Suzanne got a job with an insurance company and she starts back to night-school in the spring, and Cheryl and Austin were up here last weekend and of course me and Austin went sledding.”

“I bet that was fun.”

“Oh it sure was but it was cold too. I think this is the coldest winter we’ve ever had up here. Cold and dry, so dry the snow we’ve been getting this year has been fine and powdery. Me and Austin nearly froze our hind-ends off out there. You see we have a crack in the front of the sled…”

As I listened to my mom talk on about going sledding with my nephew it brought up my favorite sledding moments. In a blink I was seven years old trudging my way through hip deep snow with my sled in tow determined to reach the steepest part of the pasture and sled for the first time. Then I was 10 years old at my friend Jesse’s nighttime sledding birthday party. The sled run had a crust of ice so we used runner sleds to shoot down into the darkness. I had yelled out from above to see if the track was clear and thought it was until I ran over Jesse’s older brother with the steel runners nearly breaking his ribs. The last flash from my past saw me at 18, drunk and sledding down the road in front of my parents’ house to the bonfire below Bircher’s curve where my friends had plunged cases of Busch Light into the snow drifts to keep them nice and frosty. The rapid succession of my memories faded as my mom said, “I sure wish you could have been here to sled with us.”

“Yeah mom, I wish I could have been there too.”

“Enough about me how are you doing up there in the great White North?”

“Mom, I’ve been working my ass off”, I usually didn’t cuss when speaking to my folks but I was in a weakened state and had let it slip before I could correct myself. “Yeah it’s been crazy up here. It’s a lot more than I had bargained for that’s for sure. I’ll just leave it at that” I stopped myself right there as I didn’t want to go into all the gory details so as to keep her worries about me to a minimum.

But she pressed on for details, “Oh come on Chuck, what’s it like up there?”

She asked for it so I shot from the hip and gave it to her straight. “Well mom, you wanna know what its like? Here goes: I work 12 hours a day, seven days a week. My 12 hours of work are spent in the belly of the ship down in the factory which is loud, cold and smelly. My job is to hunch over a conveyor belt as fish guts pass by and tear the roe sacks from the guts. When my shift is done I leave the factory get some grub, hit the shower, then go straight to bed and that’s where the real fun begins. You see what little piss poor sleep I do manage to get I’m usually dreaming of the factory. And I wish I could say that they were pleasant dreams but they ain’t. The dreams I have, dream is actually the wrong word as they’re nightmares about the factory where everything is running on crazy steroid speed. I know now that I won’t be getting a decent night sleep until I get back to Seattle so I’ve adopted the motto – I’ll sleep when I die. Oh yeah and  when I wake up sweating from my factory nightmares my body is so sore and beat down from the previous shift I have to take a fistful of pain pills and cough medicines just to jumpstart my bag of bones so I can go back down in the factory and do it all over again!” I took a breath and realized I had just vented all the pent up feelings I didn’t even realize I had had about working on the Northern Jaeger. It was when she had asked me what it was like that she had unknowingly pulled the keystone out of a damn holding back the lake of hateful, evil, angry water and me being that water flooded my poor mother with a vengeance.

“Oh Chuck”, she whispered I could tell mom was holding back tears by the quiver in her voice. “I had no idea. You know you can come home whenever you want. I don’t want my baby boy up there killing himself for nothing. I think you should come home.”

After opening the floodgates of my mind to her and dumping all the hidden hatred I had deep inside combined with me being in the physically weakened and mentally diluted state I was in, I was actually on the cusp of agreeing with her and calling it quits when a robotic voice interrupted our conversation.

-You have thirty seconds remaining on your calling card-

“Mom, did you hear that?”

“I did.”

“That means I gotta get going. And mom I just want you to know everything’s gonna be fine. I just needed to vent to somebody and you just happened to be that somebody.”

“Alright Chuck, well just know I love you and I’m praying for you.”

Before I could reply the call was terminated by the keepers of the calling card.

I said the words, “I love you too mom.” into the silent plastic phone in my grip. I placed the phone back in its cradle then collapsed in the phone booth, mentally and physically exhausted.

Knowing that people were waiting patiently for me to exit I wiped the tears from my eyes and cheeks and walked back to the Northern Jaeger, back to my floating dominatrix to willingly receive more punishment. The brooding gray clouds that dumped their sloppy flakes on me as I walked back to the ship perfectly reflected my mood.

Wanting to turn my sour mood around I saw Newty working on the dock so I yelled to him, “What’s up pillow-biter?” He was dressed in a red flannel shirt and was humping boxes onto a waiting pallet. His ponytail was wet with flakes of snow.

“You know me”, he said with a smirk, “I’m just kicking ass out here dockside! Mario sent me out here instead of sending me down to the freezer.”

“No shit”, I replied, “tell me something I don’t know. You’re lucky you’re not in the freezer-hold at least out here you get some fresh air.”

“Fuck”, he said as he picked another 50lb box off the constantly moving conveyor belt and turned towards the pallet, “I wish I was in freezer. Out here you gotta keep moving seeing as there seems to be an endless supply of fish coming out of there and a limited amount of muscle out here. I’m nonstop hustling back and forth I don’t have time to beat my meat around.” He placed his box of frozen fish onto the pallet, turned on his heel and hot-footed it back to the conveyor belt as sloppy slush began to fall harder and faster from the sky above.

“All right studs, you try not to have too much fun out here I’m gonna go get what little bit of sleep I can before I got to get back down in the freezer-hold. Take it sleazy.” I said as I threw him a peace sign

Newty laughed and said, “I take it any way I can get it. Oh wait, one more thing.”

“What’s up?”

“I got a call through to old Jakey-Pooh and he said he’s gonna mail us a treat that we should get by the next offload.”

Having peaked my curiosity I asked, “What’s he sending?”

“It’s a surprise, a welcome surprise but a surprise.” He returned with a raise of his eyebrows and a quick smile as he turned his attention from me and back to the endless stream of 50lb boxes pouring from the side of the Northern Jaeger.

With the steel deck back under my feet I wormed my way through the inner workings of the Northern Jaeger. Passing the clock hanging in the galley I saw I had less than three hours before I was once again needed in the freezer-hold so I skipped the shower and climbed my soured sweat smelling body straight into my bunk. In the warm darkness with my eyes and my aching body fully relaxed I was one breath away from drifting off to the land between the living and the dead when directly above me through the steel hull of the ship I heard a monstrous grinding of gears. To my ears and my sleep deprived imagination it sounded like a giant rusty robot squealing with every movement of its robotic limbs. In reality it was the grinding gears of the massive crane on the bow deck loading supplies onboard the Northern Jaeger. I wrapped my pillow around my head but to no avail so I hopped down from my bunk and stuffed some of the ear plugs I used for my factory shifts into my head, set my alarm and soon sleep swallowed me whole.

What the fuck is that? I thought. I opened my eyes in the darkness and laid there for a moment thinking that the noise I heard must have been part of a dream I didn’t remember having. Then it happened again, I heard a rapid succession of muffled thumps followed by another and another. I pulled back the curtain of my bunk and saw a shadowy outline of someone big and the noise I heard was their fist pounding on my open door. I heard the figure and for a brief time thought I was going slightly deaf when I remembered I had earplugs in I quickly removed them. Then the voice rang out loud and clear and I recognized it as Mario’s as he said, “Rise and shine! Char-les Vaught?”

“Yeah”, I mumbled, “I’m up. I’m up.”

“Hey Char-les”, I loved the fact that he couldn’t say my name as Charles but instead called me Char-les, “Guess where you’re gonna spend your shift this time?”

Rubbing the seeds of sleep from my eyes I replied, “I don’t have a clue Mario, How about you just tell me where the hell I’m gonna go.”

He let out a wheezy snicker through his teeth which was painful to the ears as he said, “Back to the freezer man! Be down there in 20 minutes”, Then Mario, my Tijuana alarm clock flipped the lights on and was off down the hall to rouse the next crewmembers from their sleep. I dropped to the floor and my knees nearly collapsed from under the weight of my body. I was sore from my toenails to the split-ends of my hair. I felt battered as if someone had smacked me about with a 2×4 while I had slept. Kneeling on the cold linoleum, even before I put my clothes on, I filled my mouth with my pre-shift regimen of pain killers and cold medicine. With wretched slowness I then pulled the freezer suit inch by inch over my body. Every zipper I zipped, every button I buttoned, every Velcro strap I strapped echoed with pain. Fully geared up I walked from my bunk on shaky legs and felt like the living embodiment of the Jimmy Buffet song – My head hurts, my feet stink and I don’t love Jesus.

In the galley I sucked down two cups of coffee as fast as I could stand. Almost immediately I felt better as the caffeine sped up the melding process of the over the counter drugs in my gut. My eyes opened wide, alert, awake. The pain pudding my legs had been just moments before firmed back into sinewy walking sticks, I could once again walk with ease. My crippled back and arms re-poured themselves into my vital 21 year old frame. And my brain began to tingle and pulsate like I had an invisible halo twinkling around my skull.

I descended the ladder back into the freezer-hold and was amazed at the beautiful sight I saw. The damn thing was three quarters empty. I walked up to Blume with a grin on my face like I had just grown my first pubic hair and tapped him on the shoulder.

“What’s crackin’ culo?”

He snapped his head around and assassinated me with a look that would’ve re-killed Kennedy.  “Fuck off”, was all the reply he could muster. I didn’t bother with a witty rebuttal I let it slide. Blume limped away favoring his left foot.

Five hours later and I put the last 50lb box on the conveyor belt and waved goodbye as it was carried from the depths of the Northern Jaeger out onto the dock. The freezer-hold was empty, fin, complete, the end. It was a glorious sight. In my eyes it and in that moment in time the bare floor and walls of the freezer-hold looked better than Salma Hayek’s erotic snake dance in From Dusk Till Dawn.

With all of the product successfully offloaded and the bowlines cast off the Northern Jaeger steamed away from the safety of Dutch Harbor and back into the salty black waters of the Bering Sea. Wrapped in my blankets in the warm womb of my bunk I was beat down, broken and bruised. I wanted sleep and a hell of a lot of it at that, so I opened a fresh bottle of Nyquil and emptied half of its thick liquid contents down my hatch. Lying in the darkness waiting to sleep the sleep of the dead I had mixed feelings of both joy and a creeping dread that I couldn’t quite place my finger on. I began to analyze my feelings and remembered the words Raven had spoken to me, ‘this offload right here will be a true test for your young bodies, your stamina…’ I chuckled to myself about how right he was and I was happy to be done with that offload and even more stoked to know that we had already filled a third of our quota. I thought of my mother and the tenderness in her voice. As my breath ebbed and my pulse decelerated I felt my body succumb to the sedatives that flowed freely in my bloodstream. It was then I heard in the temple of my mind the next important sentence from that conversation I had with Raven in the galley, ‘After that comes the test for your very soul.’, and all at once I understood where that feeling of creeping dread had originated, but before I could delve into such an eerie and esoteric question consciousness left my body.

END CHAPTER

Back when I was in high-school I used to hang out with Sam & Judy. They were the cool parents in town and just so happened to be the parents of my friend Kelly. Sam had had a hard but colorful life. He worked long, hot, splinter filled hours in his woodshop where he made quality custom cabinets in the tradition of the Old World in an age ruled by IKEA quality products. Judy, was a beer swilling momma who was loud, tenacious and had heart made of diamond studded 24 karat gold. She ran the local burger joint the way Wyatt Earp ran Tombstone, Arizona, all was good unless you crossed her then all hell would break loose. What made them cool wasn’t the fact that they lived the life of a country song waiting to be written but that they treated us kids who were all 17 years old and up like adults. They drank beer and whiskey with us. They sold us weed and let us toke with them around the dining room table. They listened to our problems and told us about there’s and when they gave us words of advice and wisdom we listened, at least I listened.

There was one northeast Washington summer afternoon in particular where the last orange rays of the sun had slipped behind the mountain across the river. A party was going on, not to celebrate any special occasion other than we’d all lived to see another weekend. Sam was standing there watching the pallet he’d just lit in the fire-pit get eaten by flames alternating between the Miller High Life he had in one hand and the menthol cigarette he puffed on in the other, when he blurted out a random bit of knowledge under his breath barely loud enough for me to hear. “There’s no rest for the wicked.”

I thought it sounded like a nice little quote that rolled easily off the tongue or maybe something a pirate would say as he nudged someone off the plank with his cutlass. That is to say I never really understood what that statement meant until I came back to the land of the living from my Nyquil induced coma, went down to the galley only to realize I had slept for 18 hours and had only 15 minutes before I was to be back in the factory at the viscera table. That’s when I realized full and well what that simple sentence meant when I found myself saying those exact same words under my breath only for me to hear, “There’s no rest for the wicked.”

In the oilskin room I slipped into my raingear as my fellow shift mates performed their pre-factory rituals. Keith smoked his pre-factory cigarette all the way down to the brown filter as was his style. Mike clipped his black foam headphones into the red plastic earmuffs and reloaded fresh batteries into his Discman. To my left was Byron, he sat thumbing through a dog-eared copy of The Unbearable Lightness Of Being while intermittently glancing at the clock secured to the wall. Wang Warmer’s cockeyed face bobbed up to the top of the stairwell from the factory below. Through foggy glasses he hollered at the first English speaker he saw and it was me.

“Yo! Chucky-boy”, he called out as he pulled off his orange rubber glove and loaded his lower lip with a wad of chewing tobacco pinched from a can he kept hidden beneath his raingear. He spat brown juice into a soda can he took from his locker then continued, “So what’s the good word?”

Caught off guard I said the first word I was thinking of and since I was thinking of a B.L.T., bacon is the word that left my mouth. “Yes Wang”, I said with more authority, “bacon is the good word.” Although I had not a clue what the good word was nor what he was really trying to ask, bacon seemed like as good an answer as any.

“Bacon”, Wang guffawed launching bits of shredded nicotine into the air as he did so, “That’s muthafuckin’ right! Word is bond, son. Word is bond!” He shouted hitting his palm against his chest twice before offering it to me. I slapped his hand palm to palm the way grown men do to greet each other. Then I rattled off a question before he said anything else I couldn’t translate without subtitles.

“I haven’t seen you since you was living the good life up on that forklift on the dock. How you been? Life been treating you good?” I knew it wasn’t original but it was the best I could think of.

He nodded his head up and down as he replied, “I’m doing all right”, but as I looked at him he didn’t look all right. His face seemed bonier than usual. Under his eyes the skin was swollen and the color of an eggplant, not like he’d been punched but like he hadn’t slept in a few weeks. Hell, even the few sprouts of hair on the top of his head looked bushwhacked. As I looked at him I was reminded of something my father used to say when he would see someone who looked a little rough around the edges. If my Dad had seen Wang right then and there he would have said that he looked rode hard and put away wet.

Mike stepped through the two of us on his way towards the stairwell and looking at Wang he said what I was thinking, “You look like seven types of hardboiled shit.”

“Yeah, your momma”, Wang quipped as Mike headed down into the factory.

Wang turned his attention back to me but I cut him off at the pass before he could spill anymore gibberish my direction. “That first month went by pretty quick all things considered. How long do you think it’ll take us to fill the rest of our quota?”

“I’m thinking, judging from seasons past” he said as he swallowed which caused him to tighten his face into a tense grimace complete with squished up eyes and rectal pucker mouth before he coughed and spat into the can he held. “EwwwI hate it when I accidentally swallow my dip. Where was I?”

“You were just talking about seasons past.”

“Oh yeah, yeah, yeah I’m thinking that based on seasons past that we only have a month, maybe a month and a half tops. I’m thinking we’ll be back in Puget Sound by the end of February middle of March.”

“Really”, I questioned. “You think?

“Yeah Chucky-boy I do. I’ve been doing this bullshit for the past five years and I’ve never been out on the Bering past the middle of March.” We both looked up at the clock.

“Well that’s my cue”, I said grinning from Wang’s prediction, “it’s time to strap on the old strap-on and get to the viscera table”, and down the gunmetal grey stairwell I went.

During the first week and a half of our second voyage the spirits of the crew were high as we still reeled from the rush of the first offload and from the fact that we had been catching fish aplenty. We caught enough pollock to be able to process every hour of every day with no downtime. We processed half of the freezer hold’s capacity in the first eight days alone. I remember feeling extremely happy and full of optimism. I just knew it was going to be a breeze, no problem. Of course I had already been fantasizing about how I was going to spend my money and the stories I was going to tell when I got back to the mainland. The crew was busy; the crew was focused, most importantly though the crew was in high spirits. We still worked harder than sweatshop kids in Cambodia sewing together Nikes. And we still had the general attitude of those on a chain gang along Alabama’s Interstate 10 but we were happy. Unfortunately as the saying goes – All good things must come to an end.

END CHAPTER

I woke up before my alarm and blinked in the darkness. Belly juice sloshed back and forth in my gut, water in an overfilled balloon. I didn’t know which direction we were heading but I could tell the Northern Jaeger was steaming into the wind, not because I could see but because with the cresting of each wave I’d slide down my mattress till my feet touched the other bunk then as the ship descended the other side of the wave I’d slide the opposite direction my head stopping at the reverse end of the bunk.

For the first four hours of my shift in the factory that day the weather and the sea made friends mildly rocking the vessel from side to side. Then, like a sucker punch to the kidneys, a storm slammed into the Northern Jaeger putting her ballast to the test.

Around the factory we, the crew, stood at our posts holding onto anything without moving parts to keep our balance. Our sea-legs worked overtime. Hell, so did our sea-stomachs. I looked down the length of the viscera table, the roe sacks, livers, intestines and other various glistening fish parts shook like thundering JELL-O. Me and the four other viscera technicians seemed to have it together, all except Eileen, the woman of Eskimo descent who left a lot to be desired when it came to the beauty department. She looked at me, then down at the passing roe as the Northern Jaeger shuffled up the side of a wave and bee-bopped down the other. Then as if she had been tapped on the head by the wand from her fairy gag-mother, Eileen grabbed the side of the table with one orange rubber glove and put the other wet glove over her chalky round face just in time to block the liquid projectile that exited her mouth. Vomit sprayed between her thick orange fingers like chunky water through a broken lawn sprinkler. Eileen let go of the table and ran out of the factory and because the Northern Jaeger was listing heavily Eileen ran with the gait of a drunk on St. Patrick’s Day – two steps to the left, two steps to the right, crossing her feet as she went. As the ship pitched back and forth in pendulum motion we worked onward for the next four minutes posting up with our legs and grappling with one arm to stay in place while our free hand scrambled to work. Mario, the factory foreman shut down the factory after one rather violent crash of the waves sent tens of thousands of dollars worth of roe to the floor.

For five days the factory was shut down as the entire ship was nothing more than an aquatic teeter-totter. Up and down. Up and down. Up and down. The bow would rise, the bow would crash. Stomachs flipped, stomachs flopped. We were caught with our raingear down around our ankles in Mother Nature’s cycle of abuse. We couldn’t catch or process fish until we cleared the hostility of the storm and without work as a distraction from our monotonous situation the crew had no choice but to sit in the galley to eat, chain smoke and watch the best that Hollywood had to offer.

The first day of our forced captivity seemed like a vacation. The whole 110 person crew lounged either in their bunks or in the galley and it gave us all a chance to rest our bodies and get some much needed sleep. On day two, I was in the galley watching Indiana Jones punch Nazis on the black plastic box television strapped to ceiling in the corner of the room when Ed, who I had briefly met in the freezer-hold, sat opposite me.

“Hey, Ed, right?” I asked.

“Yeah”, he replied as he put flame to the cigarette dangling from his bearded mouth.

“I’m Chuck we met in the freezer-hold. You told me not to move the boxes so fucking fast, remember?”

Ed sucked slowly from his cigarette as he nodded his head in an affirmative fashion. He exhaled downwards and the smoke bounced off the table and I pulled it into my lungs and savored it.

I felt a little uncomfortable at his nonverbal answer so I tried like hell to keep that dead conversation alive, “This downtime is pretty nice.”

“You think this is nice?” Ed asked, his ashen eyes locked onto me like a pair of heat seeking missiles.

“Uh yeah, I mean were not in the factory and I’m always happy about that.”

“Goddamn greenhorns”, Ed laughed out not really as a ha-ha-ha funny kind of laugh but as a series of verbalized huffs.

“What? What do you mean goddamn greenhorns? Aren’t you happy to have a bit of time to spend resting and doing absolutely nothing?”

“Let me ask you this”, Ed said, “How do you think we get paid?”

“By catching fish.”

“Yes, yes but what are we trying to do by catching fish?”

“Process them”, I said cautiously.

“Yes, yes, process them is correct but what else?”

“Shit, I… I’m not…”

Ed cut me off before I could answer. “We get paid when we fill our quota and you see how it works is we don’t get off the ship or get money in our hot little hands until we fill our quota. What that means is, it don’t matter if we’re out here for six days, six months or six fucking years we don’t go back until our quota is filled. So every Goddamn day we spend out of the factory is just one more day not filling our quota! So if you like sitting here jacking your meat around then be my guest.” At that Ed crushed the life from his cigarette and walked away.

After he told me that I climbed in my bunk to sleep but couldn’t as I saw the downtime for what it really was. Not catching fish went from being a blessing to a curse in the time it takes to finish a cigarette. I felt something I hadn’t felt in a long time. I felt frustrated. I was no longer happy about being out of the factory. I wanted to go to the wheelhouse and scream and curse at the captain to steer us out of the storm and back into fertile fishing waters. Then doubt, like a lasso wrapped around my thoughts and pulled tight. I began to question why I was there in the first place. Is this really what I have to do to become a man? Is this all worth it? The remembrance of the conversation with my mom blew like a feather in the wind through my mind and I wished with all my might that I was back there with her and dad, frozen water pipes and all. Thoughts of mom, dad and the farm padded the inner sanctum of my mind and allowed me to drift off.

Five days later the Northern Jaeger emerged from the storm unscathed and ready to process some pollock. I was relieved to be back down in the thick of it with my hands buried in intestines on the viscera table if only for the fact that I was once again able to switch off my mind and concentrate on my job. The captain seemed to have taken us to where all the fish were hiding because everyone was back in the factory filling the freezer-hold as fast as the nets could haul up the fish. I felt anxious and giddy, excited to be off my butt and working again. At that golden moment in time I was invincible nothing could stop me or my good mood. That is until I heard the rumor that some poor bastard from our sister ship the Northern Eagle had reached his expiration date. He didn’t die a hero’s death. He didn’t die of foul play. He died simply because it was his time to go. I was chilling in my bunk after my first shift back at the viscera table when I herd the news.

“Dude, did you hear what happened?” Newty asked as he walked into the room and blew cigarette smoke towards the light in the center of the room.

“I don’t know. What are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about the guy that died. You hear about that?”

“A guy died? Stop bullshitting me”, I said pulling a wood handle brush through my shoulder length tangles, “That’s not even funny to joke about.”

“Who’s joking? I’m being serious I heard some dude really died.” I leaned over my bunk to see Newty below on his. His hair spread out and framed his face, his brown eyes stared at me wide and sober, a lit cigarette firmly lodged between his two unsmiling lips.

“Okay so who was it?” I questioned still unsure whether he was full of shit or not.

He took a drag from his cigarette and in the silence of the room I heard the faint crackle of the gunpowder used in the cigarette papers as the smoldering tobacco burned its way toward the filter. He exhaled, “I don’t know his name but word on the ship is he was a viscera technician just like you.”

“I can go ahead and tell you that rumor is bullshit. I pretty much know all the gut-slingers on both shifts and I guarantee nobody’s died.” I said struggling to pull the comb out of my knotted mane.

“That’s because he didn’t work on the Northern Jaeger. He was on our sister ship, The Northern Eagle.”

Seeing as it wasn’t a bad joke or some kind of prank I asked, “How did he die?”

“Newty blew out a cloud of nicotine smoke then continued, “According to my sources the Northern Eagle is about a week behind us on their quota and they were on the tail end of that same storm we were battling through. Apparently It was also their first shift back in the factory after offload too when that poor old bastard died, I heard he was 63. Anyways I guess he went up to the oilskin room during the middle of his shift to take a leak and when he finished his business and was coming back down the stairs to the factory he fell down those slippery cocksucker stairs and by the time he’d hit the bottom that unfortunate son of a bitch had broken his spine, true story.”

“No fucking way!” I exclaimed, “Just like that?”

“Fucking way, man just like that.” Newty replied with a snap of his fingers for dramatic effect. “On that note this boy scout needs to get some shut eye.” He added then pulled his curtains shut.

I pulled my curtains shut too, placed my brush in the small crack between my mattress and the bulkhead and laid there in silence. I didn’t want to think about his death anymore but at the same time I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I replayed all the facts Newty had laid out – age 63, male, viscera technician, fell down stairs, broken spine and each time I did I found what disturbed me most was the fact that Newty hadn’t given me his name. From that my mind extrapolated a scene of a cemetery dripping with fog; full of tombstones and slabs of granite and mausoleums all with names, dates and words of inspiration chiseled into them. Through this gothic scene an old woman dressed in black searched in vain to find her husband for he, the nameless man, was buried in an unmarked grave. Not wanting to dwell on that scene I decided I would give him a name and I did, I called him Julio Hernandez. I didn’t call him that because I despised Latinos just the opposite in fact. I gave him the name of Julio Carlos Hernandez because I pictured him as a jolly, potbellied old man with silver hair, kind eyes and a bright smile. With a name and a face to give the victim of that tragic story my mind finally pumped the brakes and drifted off to the rocking motion of the Northern Jaeger.

Back in my hometown I had grown up with death. Not as if death was an old childhood pal I used to play soccer with but its presence was just as tangible. By the time I was 21 I had known eight teenagers in a town of 1,500 who had died; some by car accident, some by hunting mishaps, and still others who’d had enough and said adios to this cruel world by swallowing a shotgun. Each of their deaths made me feel black and numb as if I had frostbite in my soul, Julio’s death churned up those dormant feelings of emptiness inside me.

It also made me think of another spinal injury related death, that of my old friend Eddie, the first of my friends to enter the eternal mystery. Six years earlier at the age of 15, Eddie and a few buddies had been getting loaded while they ripped around in a 4×4 truck on one of the thousands of back country roads that crisscross Washington State, having fun the way country boys do. I don’t know if Eddie was driving or he was a passenger but regardless the driver lost control of the truck and flipped the rig launching Eddie out of the cab breaking his back and taking his life in the process. I never forgot hearing about his death and I never will.

After I heard of Julio’s death I couldn’t erase it from my mind no matter how hard I tried, despite the fact that I had never met the man and he was part of another crew altogether he was still a fellow brother of the sea. Being as such a feeling of mourning overtook me which left my spirit and my mind with open, dripping wounds about my own mortality. Add to that that the nets had once again thinned out so the days spent out of the factory began to outnumber the days spent in the factory and I began to feel like I was in some sort of floating prison camp. At times I wondered if maybe I had died on New Years day and this was my mind’s interpretation of Hell. Out of all the factors having too much downtime was the real killer because it gave my brain time to do more than just react to the situation at hand. Sitting in the smoky chamber that was the galley watching movie after movie after movie a seed of a question that had been planted began to sprout inside of me. It started out innocent enough with me asking myself: What am I doing here? But what began as a tiny question during an extended period of downtime blossomed into my own personal mutiny.

             MARCH

After a full 33 days at sea with the freezer-hold at maximum we began to steam back to Dutch Harbor. Not a moment too soon as far as I was concerned. I was pissed. I was homesick and I had worked myself up into a whirlwind ready to quit and get the hell out of there. But like most things in life if it sounds easy in your head it’s bloody murder trying to pull it off in reality.

I soon found out that quitting a position is more difficult on a seafaring vessel than on land. I couldn’t just walk away and say fuck it. There were procedures to go through, paperwork to fill out, and financial arrangements to be made and plane tickets to be bought. First and foremost I had to go see Charlie, the ship’s purser. A purser is basically the office manager of the ship and every ship at sea has one. Charlie also wore the hats of ship’s medical doctor and therapist, though I doubt he was trained for either physical or mental healing.

On what was to be my last six hour shift in the factory before we docked in Dutch Harbor my fellow crewmates and I, armed with either buckets of sudsy water and stiff brushes or hoses that gushed out water that was just above freezing scrubbed the factory clean leaving no surface untouched. The goal was to give the factory the equivalent of an enema. We were to wash away all the bits of pollock that were caked on the conveyor belts and the splattered fish innards that had wrangled their way into the moving parts of the many machines until the entirety of the factory sparkled like an ad for dishwashing detergent. The flowing water and industrial grade cleansers had me breathing deep as they cleared the factory air of its normal fishy and greased machinery stench.

Me and Raven walked around with buckets and brushes in hand and made sure we looked a lot busier than we actually were, the whole time I had a smile on my face reminiscent of a dog who has just shit on his master’s carpet.

“Charlie-boy, what the fuck are you so happy about?” Raven barked as he acted like he was scrubbing the candling table, “You’re smiling like a virgin who just popped his cherry, what gives?”

“Well old buddy, old pal”, I replied as I too pretended to scrub the opposite side of the candling table, “I hate to tell you like this but I’d rather you hear it from the guilty party than second hand through the grapevine. I’m out of here today this is it.”

“Boy, what the goodness gracious goddamn hell do you mean you’re outta here? Tell me you’re just bullshitting old Raven. Tell me you ain’t quitting Charlie-boy.”

“Sorry man, but I’m sure as shit quitting. There ain’t no way I’m staying out here any longer. I’ve had it, I’m done.”

Upon hearing my confirmation of quitting Raven’s face changed. His eyes narrowed. His mouth tightened which made the lines and wrinkles on his face stand out and become apparent. He looked betrayed and at the same time sad like he had just watched his mom give me a blowjob.

“Don’t do it.” He said in his slow burning Louisiana hot sauce accent. “I’m serious don’t do it. You WILL get fucked by this company. They hate quitters more than I hate Russians. If you think they’re gonna let you walk away with any money you can think again. They have ways of making people stay and not getting your money for early termination of your contract is one of them.”

“Whatever. Don’t be trying to pull your voodoo bullshit in trying to make me stay. I know I’ll get my money maybe not as much as I had wanted but I’ll still get it, I’m not worried. Your just jealous because while you’re gonna be busting your ass unloading the freezer-hold one 50lb box at a time I’m gonna be sitting in the airport getting whiskey drunk and eating chicken fingers.”

Raven’s stern face melted back into a soft, gold toothed grin and he said, “Believe what you will Charlie-boy, believe what you will.”

While Raven spoke I looked over his shoulder and watched Trang as he spotted a crab scurrying across the viscera table. In one fell swoop Trang snatched up the crab with both his orange gloved hands, cracked it open the way you would a dinner roll and sucked down the liquidy insides as he made a noise like he was slurping hot soup from a spoon.

After the shift I left the factory with that image in my mind and headed back to my bunk to gather my things. To my surprise Newty was there packing his belongings into his duffel bag.

“What’s up killer? What are you doing?” I asked.

Newty stood up and said in a defeated tone, “Yeah I’ve been meaning to tell you this I… I’m quitting. I don’t give a fuck anymore. I’m getting a one way first class ticket to Splitsville. I just can’t…”

“Are you fucking serious?” I asked interrupting what was no doubt to be his list of reasons why. Newty nodded his head solemnly. “Well cheer up buckaroo I’m quitting too!”

His head shot up erect and his mouth opened into a grin, “Seriously?”

“Yeah man, I’ve been thinking about it all during this last trip.”

“Me too”, Newty practically shouted. “Shit, I had no idea you were thinking about getting the hell out of here.”

“That’s because I didn’t want to talk about it with anybody until I was actually going to do it.”

“I hear ya. I hear ya”, Newty agreed. “You know we have to go talk to Charlie, right?”

“I do indeed. You wanna go talk to him now? You ready to do it to it?”

Newty shrugged his shoulders as he said, “Uh…Yeah I guess now is as good a time as any.”

We headed down the hallway; me with a nervous grin plastered on my face, Newty looked serious with a furrowed brow and matching frown. I was excited and frightened all in the same breath. Tense energy flowed through my body with each progressive step I took. The palms of my hands became itchy and moist as if wet ants danced across them. Tremors of anxiety traveled up and down my spine. I felt my stomach twist in upon itself forcing a bit of acidic juice up my gullet singeing the back of my throat. The last time I had felt that nervous was when I was 15 and my then girlfriend was leading my by the hand down to her basement bedroom to assist me in losing my virginity.

Newty and I stopped in the two-tone grey hallway before Charlie’s door. Beside the door was a plastic laminated sign that read: PURSER’S OFFICE in bold black font. My hair was a bit on the greasy and unruly side so I quickly gathered it up and twisted it into wad of curls on the back of my head tying it off with a rubber-band before I knocked loudly on the doorframe.

“Come on in!” Charlie said to us as he waved us in. “Have a seat”, and we did. Charlie sat opposite us in his leather chair. He smiled warmly before he sipped from his coffee mug the whole time sizing us up from behind his barbwire blue eyes. “So what can I do you for?”

“We want to quit.” Newty said bluntly. I sat there in silence, my heart pounded in my ribcage, my body wrapped in a coat of nervous sweat.

“Oh really”, was Charlie’s response. He took another sip of coffee then reached for a notebook off the shelf above his head and wrote something down. “And why exactly do you want to quit?”

Newty turned his head my direction and with eyes wide signaled it was my turn to speak by moving his eyebrows in Charlie’s direction.

I can do this, I thought then I remembered the words that went through my head some five months earlier at the interview for that job in downtown Seattle – calm, cool, collected. After a long, uncomfortable, blood-pressure-rising moment Charlie asked again. “So do you want to tell me why you want to quit or should I guess?”

“Well”, I blurted out, “We’re ready to go home. We’re ready to go back to Seattle. We’re tired of working ourselves to death. We’re tired of being sick all the time from the factory flu. We’re just plain tired of being tired. Honestly we just want to go home.” I finished my monologue and looked back at Newty with those same wide eyes he’d looked at me with and moved my eyebrows signaling it was his turn to chime in.

“Yeah, what he said. That about sums it up.” Newty added bobbing his head up and down in agreement. I stared at Newty and thought, that’s it? That’s all you have to add? I had hoped he had had a whole quitting speech prepared but I was wrong.

Across from us Charlie’s warm smile dissolved into a face mute of expression. “Is that it? Is that all? Is there any other reason you two gentlemen want to hit the road? Give it to me now if you’ve got it.”

Neither of us replied and I can’t speak for Newty but right then it was all I could do to keep from crawling out of my skin. My mantra of calm, cool, collected had exited my system as quickly as it had entered.

Charlie continued, “Let me tell you boys something and this might come as real shock to the both of you. No one onboard this vessel wants to be here.” He let that sink in as he drank another mouthful of coffee. “Everyone onboard, including me, wants to be home fucking their ladies and getting piss drunk till they can’t see straight. Do you know why they all just don’t up and quit? Don’t answer that because I’m getting ready to tell you why. It’s because they all know that by quitting they’ll be fucking over each and every member of this ship that’s still onboard.” Pointing a stiff finger at us he continued, “By you two quitting you’ll be making the whole damn crew work harder than they would because they’re the ones who’s gonna have to pick up your slack. You might be thinking ‘It’s only the two of us, how much difference can we make?’ Well let me tell you, you make all the difference. The more hands we have the faster we can process our quota and the faster we process our quota the faster we can all go home. Besides I’ve caught wind that we’ll only be out for maybe another 30 days longer. I’m sure two strapping young lads like yourselves can stick it out for one more month. That is unless you two boys are really just a couple of… pussies.” As if on cue Charlie sat there with his steaming mug in his hands and just stared at us. I assumed to let his words of guilt and pressure seep in. That was a hell of a speech, I thought. I wondered how many times he’d said those exact words to potential quitters. I had never thought about how my actions would affect my shipmates, that whole time I had only been concerned with my own well being and not everyone else’s onboard. Since Charlie put it in perspective of how valuable I was I began to reconsider my decision, that and I hated being called a pussy. “Then there’s the issue of your money”, Charlie continued. “Remember those lengthy contracts you signed before you boarded in Seattle? The contracts you obviously either didn’t take the time to read, or you read and didn’t understand. I’ll make it easy for you boys I’ll fill you in on the fine print. The agreement you signed said that by self-terminating your contract that you would be docked half the pay you have earned and then out of the money that is owed you comes your plane ticket from Dutch Harbor via Anchorage back to Seattle.” Charlie spun around on his chair, pulled a spreadsheet up on his computer typed a few keys on his keyboard, then spun back around to us and carried on. “If my calculations are correct, and I know they are, that leaves the both of you going back home with nothing but the shit between your ears and each of you owing the company 63 U.S. dollars.”

Newty and I looked at each other and without a word spoken between us we reached the same conclusion. “You know Charlie”, I said, “I don’t think I’m going to quit today. I can stick it out for another month.”

“Yeah, me too”, Newty replied.

Upon hearing that Charlie’s mouth went from a lipless line across his face to a full-on smile. “That’s what I like to hear boys. I’m glad you’ve decided to stay. You only got 30 more days you can do it”, Charlie ended his sentence with a life affirming thumbs up and a twinkle in his eye.

“Sounds good to me”, Newty agreed.

We left Charlie’s office and headed to our bunk room. I was trying to wrap my head around Charlie’s miraculous ability to spin bullshit into cotton candy when Newty said, “Dude, I can’t believe he just talked us into staying”, as he pulled two cigarettes from his pack and offered me one. It had been six months since I had quit, but right then my nerves were shot and I caved.

“Yeah I can’t believe we let him talk us into it either but you know he is right. We’ve already been out on this son of a bitch way too long to just split and screw everyone over, us included. Besides it’s only 30 more days. We can do it.”

“I know, I know only 30 more days. You’re right”, Newty said with a new found confidence, “we can do it!”

“Hells yeah we can do it!”

As we strolled under fluorescent light down the hallway Newty put a flame to his cigarette and lit mine as well. Inhale. Exhale. The sweet sting of my old friend nicotine hit my lungs which caused a euphoric earthquake to rumble throughout my being. I was instantly reminded of the first cigarette I actually inhaled at the age of 16, a Marlboro Red if memory serves, and the light-headed nicotine rush that followed.

With the cigarette clutched between my fingers I told Newty as we reached our room, “Hey, I’m going to go down to the galley and get a cup of coffee. Nothing goes better with a cigarette than a steaming hot cup of caffeine.”

“I don’t know about that I think a whiskey on the rocks goes better with a smoke than a cup of coffee.” Flicking the ash off his cigarette he said, “I’m just saying.”

“Very true my friend, very true but I don’t have a bottle and I know you don’t either so I’m gonna head down to the galley. You want anything?”

“Nah, I’m cool. I’m just gonna be up here unpacking my shit and maybe napping.”

The Northern Jaeger was still three hours from Dutch Harbor, so with the factory cleaned the crew had nothing better to do than sit in the galley and rest before another torturous offload began. Men who’s faces hadn’t felt the touch of a razor in months sat shoulder to shoulder in front of smoldering ashtrays, they played gin-rummy and watched the 1996 inspirational film, STRIPTEASE, on the black plastic box television secured to the ceiling in the corner of the room. The exhaust from all the lit cigarettes hung above the crowd the same way smog hangs over the San Fernando Valley. With a cup of coffee in one hand and a smoke in the other I walked into the scene and everyone stopped what they were doing. Conversations broke off in mid-sentence. Every head turned on a swivel to gawk at me. All 110 pairs of eyes burnt holes through my chest. They looked at me as if we were in Hayden Lake, Idaho and I’d walked into a Nazis for Christ rally dressed in matching rainbow latex beret, hot-pants and stiletto heeled go-go boots. Not one of them was watching Demi Moore’s bouncing boobs on the television set. All eyes were glued on me. The collective grimace everyone shared told me Raven had blabbed to everyone about my plan to high-tail it out of there. Right then I knew without a doubt what someone must feel like before they spontaneously combust. The blood inside of me was nervous and hot and felt like a nest of lava-wasps were buzzing through my bloodstream. I wanted to shout out to everyone that I wasn’t quitting I was gonna stick it out but my mouth wouldn’t open, and even if it did I was so on edge I doubt I could have made my voice work. I looked at Raven and he looked away and focused his attention on the ribbon of smoke that drifted up from the tip of his cigarette. I walked through that tough crowd a leper looking for a place to sit. If there was a free spot someone would slide over and take up two spaces or move their jackets to fill the free space. I had underestimated the time it would take for the news of my early departure to spread throughout the ranks of the Northern Jaeger and from the looks of it, it spread like wildfire and they took none too kindly to it. I quickly sat down in a free seat at the table peopled by Team Quicksilver before they had time to fill it.

“How’s it going”, I said to the table as I slid in beside Keith. Everyone at the table turned and looked at me each of their lips curled up over their teeth in a snarl.

“Kersmackie!” Keith shouted as he hit me in the face with an empty Gatorade bottle he’d tied to a string. “It’s going good you fucking quitter.”

Wang Warmer looked away in silence and spat into his plastic cup.

Mike crushed out a cigarette in the overflowing ashtray at the center of the table and said, “We hear you’re quitting. I guess you Washington boys just can’t hang with real men. Next time you decide you want to play fishing boat you should wait till your balls drop.”

“Muthafucka…” Wang mumbled under his breath visibly upset by my appearance.

“You know some people just aren’t cut out for this kind of work. I don’t blame you for hitting the road. If I could afford not to be here I’d quit too.” Nancy said with the sound of compassion in her voice before she dug out a cigarette from her soft-pack and lit it.

I took all of their snide comments and bullshit remarks on the chin before I opened my mouth and replied to their verbalized disgust. “Well guys, I hate to break your hate bubble but I ain’t quitting. I mean I was going to quit, don’t get me wrong I totally was but it all turned to be just a fart in the wind and just like a fart in the wind I made a little stink and then poof it was gone, carried away, there weren’t no substance to it.”

“Was that before or after you saw Charlie?” Keith asked before he added a “Kersmackie!” and bounced the tethered bottle off my skull again.

“It was after.”

Team Quicksilver had nothing more to say to me. It didn’t matter to them that I hadn’t actually quit. The thought had crossed my mind and I had acted upon it; even though I hadn’t followed through, in there eyes I was still guilty as charged. Mike stuffed another cigarette in his mouth and lit it. Keith twirled his bottle round and round over his head like a lasso. Wang Warmer brooded, his lower lip puffed out, full of tobacco and resentment. Nancy turned her mouth into an ‘O’ and blew smoke rings above my head.

With my own cigarette down to the butt I pointed to the pack on the table and asked, “Can I have one?” No one replied so I took that as a yes and helped myself before I refilled my coffee cup and walked out on the bow deck.

. The sun rose behind the Northern Jaeger and made the dark waters ahead shimmer purple and sapphire. On the horizon a speck of black and white which was Dutch Harbor stood out in contrast atop the unusually calm waters. I stood alone on the bow for an hour lost in my thoughts before I came to the conclusion of what I had to do. I had to earn the trust of my shipmates back that’s all there was to it. I needed to suck it up and deal with the situation I had purposefully put myself into. I decided that I wasn’t going to let the rest of the crew get me down no matter how much they broke my balls about trying to quit. I was going to work harder, with a better attitude and have the mindset of a team player no matter how shitty it got. With my mind at ease I saw that we had entered the bay of Dutch Harbor and I got fired up. The good thing about being looked down upon by the whole crew was that I couldn’t sink any lower the only direction I could go was up.

I come to and I wipe my face with my hand. I’m outside and it’s bright, damn near blindingly bright. In the sky above, the sun is blazing directly down from its twelve ‘o’ clock position cooking my flesh from white to red. The sickly sweet smell of cheap booze and spilled beer mixes with adrenaline and elation. I turn my head from side to side and I’m not alone. I’m standing in the middle of a chaotic battle. Men, women and children pack the streets, so much so it’s difficult to maneuver. Those same men, women and children are all armed with guns and those guns are all pointing directly at me. I’m armed to. I raise my weapon to my shoulder and fire. Man in the face! Woman in the face! Boy in the face! Girl in the face! I’m ruthless. I pull the trigger without remorse, without regret. I couldn’t give a damn about any of them I only care about me, my friends and the bar we’re protecting.

Right about now you might be asking yourself, Where the hell I am and how the hell I got in a pickle like this? Well I’ll tell you. I’m on Bangla Road in Patong Beach, Thailand and I’m participating in the wildest water-gun fight on the planet. This is Songkran.

Songkran is a week long holiday in April where the entire country of Thailand shuts down to party for the Thai new year. It’s generally celebrated in a fun and peaceful fashion with people splashing water on other people’s heads. 2554 years ago the celebration might have began like that and for most people it still is like that. But for me and my friends who have high velocity water-guns that shoot water so fast it stings the skin combined with drunken military tactics, it’s a warzone and everyone who isn’t part of our crew is an enemy who deserves to get the sunglasses blasted clean off their face.

Songkran for me, started a few days earlier when I hoofed it all across Patong under the skin cancer causing sun going from street vendor to street vendor in search of the best of the best water-gun. I found it as I was walking by a street vendor that sells all manor of crap to bloated tourists with sunburn-lines and two weeks vacations. As I passed said shop a scrawny girl with copper-toned skin and a half moon smile held up a water-gun and blasted a fat stream of water 30 feet out into the street. Some say love at first sight is bullshit, well I call bullshit on their bullshit because with one glance I instantly fell head-over-heels in love… with the water-gun that is. I haggled over the price with the small shop girl, the way you do in Thailand, and went home with the water-gun slung over my shoulder ready for what I had been told would be the best day of my life since I discovered the secrets of my boner.

By 11:00am the morning of Songkran I was loaded and so was my water-gun. Out of the apartment building with concrete underfoot me and my neighbor were rollin’ and patrolin’ our way down the narrow backstreets to Bangla Road. The usual buzz of people going to and fro was absent. The lady selling grilled delicious fish down the block, gone. The grumpy old bastard who sits day-in-and-day-out smoking cigarette after bloody cigarette in his rocking chair, gone. The little brown baby with her big brown eyes and innocent smile who runs down the street in her diapers to hug my legs and call me Choc-o-lat, gone. What was left was a bird’s song on the breeze and a feeling we were being watched… and we were. With our water-guns at the ready we passed between two porches that set next to the street, it was there we we’re ambushed. Out of hiding jumped 5 Thais ranging from 8 to 20 years old with buckets of ice water, puny water-guns and a water-hose. In the time it takes to squeeze a trigger we retaliated. As soon as the water fight had begun it was over. Our guns were empty. Their guns were empty. Everyone was laughing. After my first taste of what the rest of the day had to offer, my ‘pumped level’ blasted clean through the stratosphere.

A few minutes later and my neighbor and I hit the complete pandemonium that was Bangla Road. Bangla Road is what is known as a walking street in Thailand. It’s a street about a 1/2 mile long and on both sides of the street are open air bars packed side-by-side-by-side-by-side. On a walking street you’ll find any kind of bar or club you fancy whether it be bar-girl bars, lady-boy bars, strip clubs, dance clubs. If your looking for a party in Thailand a walking street is where its found. Usually walking streets are places you only visit with a belly full of beer under the cover of darkness. On Songkran that wasn’t the case, well at least not the bit about being under the cover of darkness. Bangla Road was crammed with people. Every bar was overflowing with drunk, wet, half-naked bodies. The streets and sidewalks were one in the same as the human traffic jam clogged it up. I estimated about 30,000 people on Bangla Road that day. To say it was crowded would be a massive understatement.

Me and my neighbor stepped through the crowd our shoulders back and our heads high blowing loads of water in everyone’s face we walked by. We didn’t discriminate – man, woman, child – targets one and all. 3/4′s of the way down Bangla Road, right in the thick of it, we found the Honky Tonk Bar, the rowdiest bar of them all. This was our headquarters from noon to after sunset. Our routine went like this: we’d buy beers, slam the beers we bought, refill our our tanks with water and then rally the troops to go attack neighboring bars. We’d then fall back to our bar only to repeat the process all over again. During the attacks on other bars my neighbor would give one special target what we termed ‘The Bucket Bomb’. My neighbor had acquired a small bucket the size and shape of a child’s sand pail which he’d fill with water and then give it a crow-hop-windmill swing directly in a targets face. Jubilation!

During one of our refuel and refill sessions between bar-attacks I sat on a plastic covered stool at the bar with an icy beer in my grasp watching all the happy people, smiling and soaked to the core and I had this revelation, well maybe not a true revelation or an epiphany but more like a hope, dream or desire. It was this: I wished deep down that all future wars could be fought just like that.

Many hours and thousands of gallons of water later with the sun put to rest beyond the horizon I stumbled home and thought about what I had just participated in. For me Songkran was like the rush I felt on the 4^th of July of when I was 8 years old and I got to light my own fireworks added to the joy I felt when I was 10 years old on Christmas morning and I found out Santa Claus had left me a Nintendo under the tree multiplied by the square root of the bubbling arousal I felt in my 14^th year when I kissed my first girlfriend under an apple tree. Songkran for me was the sum total of all the days before innocence was lost forever.