Departure
The engines roar like twin tigers, their massive pistons pumping below my feet as we pull away from the dock, sluggishly cutting through the jet-black water out into the jet-black night under a jet-black sky. The lights of Seattle drift away like a windblown ghost, and the blackness starts eating me up. In the last few seconds I’m tempted to sprint over the coarse steel deck to my stateroom to get my bag, toss it overboard and dive in after it with the intention of swimming back to shore, but I can’t. This is the first tentative step I’m taking as an adult, and in the dark little flesh room behind my sternum, the deepest part of myself, I know that if I flee now I’ll never be able to hide from myself. Almost the entire crew is out on deck, and it’s hard to find a place to stand by myself so I can smoke and listen to my music in silence, but I’ve managed to find myself a spot just behind the prow of the M/V Clear Waters where I can stare out over the oily waves and let Lou Reade play me out, out, out and even further away from our city than we already are. Thoughts of fat snowflakes pirouetting in the bright white halos of light from Central Parks streetlamps and sunlight streaming down Madison Avenue make my heart ache- but I have my own little piece of the city with me, and besides, I’ll be back.
I turn my attention to my crewmates. They stand in small clumps, scattered about the deck in the spaces that aren’t occupied by the two deckhouses, and on the helipad, smoking cigarettes and shouting, hooting in their Styrofoam flip-flops, stressed sweatpants, motheaten t-shirts, glistening monster-energy snapbacks, stainless-steel jewelry, oversized hoodies, and tattoo-riddled skins. For the first time in a long time I feel like the luckiest bastard for miles around. I’ve never been in a confined space with so many people and so few teeth.
“They’re not exactly how you’d thought they’d be, are they?” she says, sidling up behind me and leaning on the blue-painted steel railing that wraps around the entire boat, lighting one of her long, thin cigarettes, white as her perfect teeth, with a silver zippo. Despite the fact that it’s summer and we’re not even out of Washington State yet, my little piece of Manhattan is wearing a fur coat.
“They’re fuckin’ awful. Did you hear that motherfucker Ruskie talking about how he was mad they hired so many wetbacks this season?”
“You know I did.”
“Three months. Three months couped up with these people, I mean jesus for all I know Ruskie and I could basically be sleeping back-to-back.”
She wrinkled her nose at the thought.
“They’re not all as bad as Ruskie. You should try making friends with that foreman, Bradley or something, he seemed alright. We both know you’re good at kissing ass.”
“I don’t want to make any friends. I’m here to work as much as I can so I can walk off this shit bucket with ten thousand dollars. Then you and I can be together. I just need to focus on keeping my shit together and getting as many hours as I can.”
She turns around and lifts herself up effortlessly so she’s sitting onto the railing next to me and leaning out into the darkness behind her, her lean body extended over the waves so she can look me in the eye.
“Babe, you’re not gonna keep you’re shit together if you don’t have anyone on your side. Just suck it up and brown nose a bit, that way you’ll kill two birds with one stone, you’ll get hours and someone will have your back. You’ve gotta let go of this egotistical idea that you’re some kind of dark, surly loner, you don’t do well by yourself. And you’re blonde.”
I put myself between her legs, my waist pushing her black pleated skirt up her thighs and press my forehead into hers.
“But I’m not alone, am I? I’ve got you.” I can tell she’s smiling sadly, even with my eyes closed, just from the husky sound of her voice.
“Oh honey, no.”
“Hey, the fuck you doing?”
I whip my head around to see Bradley’s hulking figure, silhouetted in the orange light from a bulb behind him advancing down the deck towards me. I look down over the railing at the black water, peeling back under the weight of our hull in clusters of glistening white foam. Gone.
“Nothing. Just thinking.”
“Why the fuck were you leaning over the railing that far? If you go overboard I’m not jumping in to save your British ass.”
I don’t even bother pointing out that the water is basically flat, and we aren’t rocking at all. “Sorry, I won’t do it again.”
“I don’t give a shit what you do, I’m just telling you that I’m not jumping in.”
“Alright well it’s a deal then, you won’t save me, and I won’t save you, motherfucker.”
“Hehehe. Nope. I won’t need saving ‘cause I don’t lean over the railing like a fuckin’ retard.”
In my cramped stateroom, already reeking of feet and balls, I take inventory of my supplies and organize everything in a way I think makes sense. The room is essentially the width of my shoulders with enough space on either side to wipe the sweat off my forehead. There are four bunks built into the plywood walls, with scratchy beaten mattresses and thin blankets made of what feels like insulation. Each of the four people in each room gets a draw under the bottom bunk and one of the four built in closets (two on either side of the doorway. When I arrived only top bunks were available- apparently returning crewmembers get priority on the bottom bunks- which literally do not have enough room between mattress and ceiling to roll over. I put my books, underwear, socks, and t-shirts in the drawer beneath my roommates bunk and hang my three hoodies, coat, and green rainslicker on the rack in my closet, tossing my sandals and carton of American Spirits in below and jamming my Carhartt boots in the cubby below that. My toiletries, journal, reading glasses and zit cream go on the small shelf nailed in above the window between the two sets of bunks, along with the book I’m currently reading. I gut my sleeping bag and throw its entrails on the mattress before stripping down to my boxers and a t-shirt and climbing up into my bunk, slotting my sweaty, pudgy body in-between the dirty mattress and mineral fiber ceiling tiles, before sliding the thick blue strip of curtain (suspended on a hacked off piece of bungie cord) up and submerging myself in darkness. I fumble for the small switch in the wall above my head for a second and switch on the flickering bed light, muttering a silent thanks to my mum for forcing me to bring a sleeping bag as I spread it out so no part of me is touching the sandpaper mattress. Unable to fall asleep, I spend a few hours reading, scrawl for a few minutes in my journal and then switch off the light, engulfing myself in darkness.
****
I wake up sweating, peeling my clammy back from my sleeping bag to the sound of someone vigorously masturbating in their bunk and Billy screaming his head off somewhere nearby. There is no feasible way to climb down the ladder of my bunk so I settle on sliding my legs out of the bunk and jump down, my stiff ankles clicking in protest as my bare feet make contact with the floor.
“Agh fuck!” The sloppy sounds of hand on spit-covered cock, -definitely coming from the bunk across from mine- halt bashfully. Someone in the bunk below mine rolls over and grumbles something about “fuckin birthday cake” into their pillow, punctuating it with a leisurely fart as my roommate resumes the assault on his penis. After an agonizing march down to my flipflops, I grab my toothbrush and hobble my aching ankles out of the room to the hallway. I realize that Eddie’s hollering is coming from the bathroom, but I desperately need to piss so I walk into what appears to be some kind of hellish combination of a nightclub and a fucking tropical jungle. The entire room is full of hot shower mist, and Eddie’s speaker (adorned with flashing blue-and-red lights) is blaring “X Gon’ Give it to Ya” by DMX .
“EX GON’ GIVE IT TO YAH, HE GON’ GIVE IT TO YA, EX GON GIVE IT TO YA.” Eddie bellows, vigorously scrubbing at something and pounding his bony fist into the wall of the shower. I piss in the urinal, not even bothering to wash my hands or brush my teeth as I make a dash for the door, but I’m too late. Eddie throws the shower curtain open, revealing his pulsating, veiny, emaciated and yet somehow still impossibly muscular, chafed prick of a body, covered in tattoos that look like they were done by a drunk toddler with a sharpie. His patchy-bearded face is a ricus of adrenaline-filled glee, exposing his piss-and-shit colored, rotting teeth, his scraggly pubes almost entirely obscuring his shriveled pink thumb of a penis. He flexes his muscles, and they seem to writhe under his leathery skin with minds of their own, contracting so hard I’m afraid they’ll pop away from his bones and split the skin.
“lOOK at THat ShIT! Isn’T that FUCKIN BEEAUTIFUL?”
“Fuck yeah Eddie, you’re fucking gorgeous!” He grabs his Minnie Mouse covered towel and wraps it around his waist, then begins viciously slathering “Axe” hair gel into his short brown hair, spiking it up so violently I imagine he must be yanking some of it out of his scalp.
“EX GoNE gIVe it tO yAH! YEEEEEEEEAAaaaaH ThAt’s FUcKIN GaNGstAh NiGGA!! AHAHAHA!”
Thankfully the evil bastard seems to have forgotten that I’m still here, so I make my exit stealthily and walk around the hatch to the galley. The galley is the kitchen and the eating area- six long thin plastic wood tables connected to the walls with swiveling chairs on either side (bolted into the floor), a walkway between them, windows on either side (with sheets of tinted plastic to keep the temperature down), an ancient tv hanging up in the top righthand corner and cereal dispensers, bread, peanut butter, jam, coffee, microwavable popcorn, ramen and plastic utensils. I’m shocked to find the entire place is also bursting with the blessed scents of an American breakfast. The stainless-steel steamtable is made up of hotel trays with three different varieties of scrambled eggs, pancakes, two types of bacon, and sausage patties. There are also two pitchers with apple and orange juice. I lean down so I can see into the kitchen where the chef is busy cooking pancakes on the griddle and the assistant is scrubbing dishes in a frenzy of hot water and soap bubbles.
“Hey man, thank you guys, this looks fuckin’ delicious!” I say, piling my plate with bacon, eggs, and pancakes.
“Hey man, you’re welcome. Enjoy!” The galley’s mostly empty except for a few people watching tv- I guess breakfast time is almost over.
Halfway through my meal, Bradley sits down a few seats away from me and starts digging into an almost impossibly large stack of pancakes and bacon, his massive body hunched over the plate.
“Ezra?”
“Yeah?”
“Was that you crankin’ it in our room earlier?”
“What? No! I haven’t even jacked off once since we left, but, when I do, I’m gonna do it in the shower.”
“Maybe you’re not as retarded as your look. Our whole room smells like fuckin jizz now.”
“Bleach and dead fish.”
“Haha!” Bradley laughs with a mouth full of pancakes, some of them falling into his thick blonde beard. “That’s exactly what it fuckin’ smells like. When I find out who it was, I’m gonna punch ‘em in the dick.”
“Top right bunk if you’re standing in the doorway.”
He nods his head “So it’s that old fat Danny Devito looking motherfucker. What’s his name, John Anthony?”
“I have no fuckin’ idea who you’re talkin about, I didn’t even know you slept in there.” I’m already far too full , so I pick up my plate and start walking towards the trashcan.
“I can tell you didn’t grow up poor.”
“What?” I stop behind Bradley, with my plate balanced on my hand.
“I can tell you didn’t grow up poor, ‘cause you’ve still got half your fuckin’ meal on your plate. That’s a waste of bacon.”
“Yeah ok, well who’s gonna eat this then? Starving kids in Africa?”
“Me, asshole, give it here.” I slide the rest of my bacon and eggs onto his plate, but he stops the pancake with his fork. “I don’t want the pancake I already have too many.”
“All right, see you around man.”
“Uh.”
After I sit in one of the deckchairs for a while, smoking a cigarette and watching the vast expanse of water on our port side rush past, I decide to run back to the room and grab my book, but when I catch a glimpse of the laundry lady, I stop in my tracks. The laundry room is in the front of the afthouse, directly across from the men’s toilet, but it’s plastic-wood door is made of two segments like a barn. The top half is open, and someone is leaning over the bottom half of the door.
“Hahah yeahh that’s what I’m talkin’ about girl! You fuckin’ it up with them dirty draws, huh? You gettin’ the bag.”
“Hahaha, yeah I guess.”
“It’s better than processin’, trust me, and watch you’re gonna make more money than anyone else out here, you get good hours man. Anyway, I gotta go get some breakfast, but I’ll see you later beautiful.”
“Hahahah, okay bye!”
The guys leaves with a sack of presumably clean laundry slung over his shoulder, so I move from my post awkwardly standing in the hallway and take his place, leaning over the door. Immediately my face is hotter than any other part of my body- the room is like a fucking sauna. There are eight laundry machines, three on each of two walls and two on the back one beneath an open window with a fan propped up on them. The laundry lady is gorgeous, though she’s more of a laundry girl, probably around my age.
“Hey!”
“Hi! What’s up?”
“I’m Ezra, I’m just sorta wondering how this whole thing works, do we just drop our laundry off whenever? Also I don’t have a bag.”
“I’m Carmen, and no you fucking do not. There’s a schedule on the wall there” she gestures to her left and I notice a chart taped to the wall “we do it by room, you have two laundry days a week. And here I’ll get you a bag.” She darts over to a cupboard and pulls out a bag made of white netting, flicking back her sweaty, long black hair as she hands it to me. “Here, write your name and your room number with this.” She hands me a sharpie. I write “Ezra” and “14” sloppily on the orange tag, noticing a just as messily scrawled tattoo of a mermaid on her inner wrist, dithering slightly over a barcode of thin, glistening white scars on her brown skin. I want to ask her when her shift goes until, but I can’t muster up the courage, so I just say thanks and walk away down the hall.
Later that night, I’m sitting in a plastic deck chair reading in a light from a lamp when Bradley comes and folds into the deck chair next to me, with a cigarette dangling limply from his mouth.
“What’re ya reading?”
“Nightmare Alley. It’s like a noir about a magician, it’s really fucked up. I think it was written in the 1950’s or something.”
“Sounds cool, I like noir. You read a lot?”
“Yeah, I’m a writer. I mean, I haven’t had anything published but I want to.”
“Nice.” Bradley pulls out a thick book with a torn cover and yellowing pages and sits back, the legs of his deckchair scraping across the steel deck as the entire thing bows under his weight.
“What about you man, what are you reading?”
“Journey to the End of the Night.”
“Huh, never heard of it. What’s it about?”
“It’s a French World War One book, it’s hilarious, really dark humour.”
“Awe sick man, that’s my type of humor. I don’t fuck with the French, but I’ll admit they’ve got good senses of humor over there.”
“You can borrow it when I’m done if you want, it’s really fucked up.”
“Thanks, I might take you up on that. Same goes to you with my books, by the way.”
A few minutes go by filled with the sounds of our pages turning, the ocean rushing past, the roaring of the engines smothered by sever layers of steel, somebody walking past in their flipflops, rapping under their breath.
“So, why are you here then, if you’re not fuckin’ poor?”
“Well I dunno, I don’t know any other way of saving ten grand over the summer. I’m starting school in New York and I want some starter money to get an apartment and shit.”
Bradley shakes his head matter-of-factly. “You’re not gonna walk off this fuckin’ boat with ten grand, I’ll tell you that much.”
“Really? Fuck. How much does the average processor make?”
“You’d be lucky to get eight. Really lucky. How come you’re moving to New York? I grew up in New York.”
“Oh shit, so did I.”
“I thought you were a limey.”
“I am, but I moved to New York when I was like… twelve so I feel like I’m from New York.”
“You’re a fucking redcoat as far as I’m concerned limey.”
“Hahah yeah yeah. So where’d you grow up?”
“Well it was like upstate New York but not far from the city, so I spent a lot of time there, and I almost moved there before I joined the marines. It’s a good city.”
“Fuck yeah it is. It’s my favorite place in the world. You were a marine?”
Bradley nods. “Yup, six years.”
“You fight?” I pull out a cigarette and light it, the smoke drifting away towards the stern of Clear Waters.
“Iraq.”
“Shit, how was that?”
“Fuck you think?”
“Alright, alright I dunno I guess I just haven’t met anyone who was in the army before.”
He shakes his head in frustration and incredulity. “I wasn’t in the fuckin’ army, I was in the Marines. Jesus, how old are you?”
“Eighteen.”
“Fuck, I would a guessed you were at least 22. So what, you just get outta high school and come straight here?”
“Yeah. People usually guess I’m older, it’s the beard.”
“Hah. There goes twenty fuckin’ dollars.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well me and some of the guys made bets on how long some of the newhires are gonna last, and I had twenty dollars on you makin’ it just ‘cause you’re so fucked up lookin’, but I didn’t know you were eighteen. You are one fucked up looking son of a bitch, especially for an eighteen-year-old, you know that? We usually get a coupla kids like you that just graduate and come straight here but they hardly ever make it to the end of the season.”
“Hey, you’re not one to talk motherfucker, you look like a fucking Viking fucked warthog and it shit you out!”
“HAHAHA! That’s the best compliment I’ve gotten in years! I sorta’ am a Viking, my family’s all Norwegian immigrants.” It makes sense, with his long, scraggly blonde beard and ponytail and icy blue eyes, one of which is slightly lazy and always lolls towards his temple like an infant’s oversized head.
“Don’t you have to pay all your room and board if you quit before we stop working?”
“Yup. Twenty dollars a day total out of your paychecks, but they mail it all back to you if you quit early, and you gotta buy a flight.”
“Well the free room and board is like, the only thing that makes this bullshit worth it, isn’t it?” Bradley nods, sucking in a lungful of smoke.
“Yup.”
“Then fuck you, asshole, I’m staying.”
“Hahah, all right, we’ll see. Anyway’s, where’d you grow up in New York?”
“Well, I lived in Queens with my mum, but I went to high school on the Upper East side like right by Central Park, so that’s sort of my neighborhood. My friends and I dicked around at like Saint Marks too, so I was there a lot. Mainly Manhattan.”
“Why the fuck were you going to school in Manhattan if you lived in Queens?”
“I had a scholarship to a private school.”
“Awe fuck, that twenty dollars really is gone.”
“How about this, if I make it to the end of the season I get to slap your big ugly fuckin’ mook as hard as I want, and if I quit vice versa.” Bradley leans over and takes my hand in his big, sweaty, meaty one.
“It’s a deal you fucking limey bastard. Hahaha. Shit, you’re alright kid. You remind me of me when I was your age. I remember being really angry, but eventually all that rage is just gonna turn into sadness.”
That night, in my bunk, my woman visits me, my perfect creation. She’s waiting for me in the darkness that blesses my coffin when I slide the curtain closed, wrapping her long, slender arms around my midriff, breathing a cold nor’easter wind, the wind that howls down Manhattan’s avenues in the winter onto my neck and dispersing the cloying, thick air that fills my stateroom. One by one the thousands of glimmering lights of New York’s skyline and flicker on, glossy skyscrapers glistening in the blackness. Zoom into one of the lights, and we’re sitting in a kitchen with glass walls on the East River, the twinkling, shifting cityscape spread out beneath us like a random scattering of golden sequins. She’s sitting on my lap in a long velvet dress, resting her head on my shoulder as we look out over our city. I’m filled with a sense of warm belonging and triumph as I hold her and my cook sweeps the remains of our dinner away from the table, pours me another glass of scotch and leaves for the night. “Come to bed”, the velvet slides over my lap as she stands up, the pearls on her neck glittering in the light from our chandelier. As she leads me to the bedroom, I take one last look over my shoulder at the sprawling network of streetlights and kitchen windows beneath me, knowing that all of this can be mine. Three more months and all of this…
“Unfh!” Someone grunts, and in the (now switched on) bright white light of our room I can see the silhouettes of two people standing through my curtain.
“If I have to wake up to the sound of you playing with your shriveled sweaty dick or smell your jizz again, I’m gonna take a shit in your bed.”
I peer out around the curtain, my eyes tearing up in the light, and see Bradley towering over a short, morbidly obese hispanic man with thick glasses and a semicircle of tufty white hair around the back and sides of his head, hunching over his testicles with his soft, sweaty face twisted in pain.
“Do I make myself clear, shitheel?”
“Yes! Aghhhhh…”
Bradley glances at me briefly with his crazy, bulging blue eyes, the lazy one more off course than ever, and then slumps into his bunk beneath me.
“Good.”
I smirk to myself and roll back over in my bunk with my back to the curtain, and roll over onto silken sheets, throwing my arm over her…
***
We make climb up along the Canadian coast, carving our way through a series of masterfully rendered oil paintings of incomprehensible beauty, leaving a trail of smog in our wake. Towering, monolithic mountains covered in bristling pine trees with jagged, snowy peeks underneath bruised and bleeding sunsets watch us as we chug through the annals and crenulations of sea water that fill river-sized gaps between a smattering of forested islands and the Canadian wilds. I ask Bradley to give me work- I am hungry to start stashing away checks, to start being able calculate how much money I’ve made so far and fantasize about what I can spend it on. Work is hard to come by, though, and they’ve already hired people to do odd jobs (factory technicians, chefs assistants, deckhands, engine oilers, etc.) so I only get a few hours here and there when they really need help. Jacob, the second foreman who also doubles as a first mate, spits thick-brown dip spit onto the steel deck and hands me over to the factory technician, Jackson saying “this young man is just eager to work.” This is my first real descent into the factory- I spend a few hours for a few days in a row being Jackson’s bitch, crawling underneath large steel machines with interiors like the complex, chaotic viscera of cybernetic insects (miles of textured blue conveyer belts, hundreds of small triangular razorblades which spin so fast in their sockets they turn into a flickering chrome funnel, small greasy engines slotted into mishapen cavities, riddled multicoloured wires and detachable pieces). I hand him the tools he asks for, memorizing their names as we go and listen to him rant.
**MAKE THIS ABOUT THE GUY WHO WANTS TO FUCK CARMEN***
He’s only in his mid-twenties, but his round face is covered in awful tattoos and his two front teeth have almost completely rotted out of his head. Still, there’s something magnetic about him, he has a devious, chaotic charisma that somehow seeps out of his blackened, stinking smile.
“I just come out here so I can earn enough money to not do shit except shoot heroin in my dead grandpa’s basement for a good part of the rest of the year. Pass me that ⅜ ratchet. That’s ¼, Jesus Christ you’re useless.” I rummage quickly through his sack of tools- it’s covered in tiny shimmering flakes which he tells me are fish scales. Finding the correct ratchet, I plonk it into his greasy, sweaty palm which is protruding from the underbelly of a “Ryco Machine” which apparently guts fish. “Thanks.” There’s a moment where the only sound from underneath the machine is a rapid clicking as he unscrews a bolt, and then his hand reappears and hands it to me: “don’t fucking lose that or I’m gonna stick this ratchet up your ass. You ever tried shooting heroin, Ezra?”
“No, but I’ve snorted it a couple times.”
“Haha. Waste of dope. Shooting it is way better, you should try that next time.”
“Thanks asshole, I’ll keep that in mind.”
“Hahaha, good shit. You know how I can tell you’re into drugs and shit?”
“How?”
“You’re a smart guy, like me. And smart guys like us are always fuckin miserable. You know what solves fuckin miserable, Ezra?”
“Heroin?”
He cackles “Fuck yeah heroin! I love that shit. That’s the only reason I’m out here, man. I can be out here for three months and earn enough money to sit in my room and do heroin for the next six. It’s genius. I’m a fuckin’ genius.”
“Yeah, yeah you’re a fucking genius. So what, you’re just gonna shoot heroin until you die?”
“Pretty much, bro. Not much else to do, I’ve already got everything I want, I’ve got a house, I’ve got a nice car, I’ve got friends, and I’ve got heroin. I’d offer you some, but you can’t fucking have any.”
“That’s okay man, you keep that dope. So you’re telling me you don’t want anything else? Don’t you have like family or friends or something you want to like help out?”
“You know what? Fuck those people. I worked my ass off to get the knowledge I needed to do this typa work. You know what they pay me to be out here? Enough to make you cry, bro. I don’t owe anyone shit, just ‘cause my mom fucked my dad and ended up shitting me out on accident. You’re gonna learn that over the next few years, kid. Nobody owes anyone shit.”
***
***
Approximately a week later we begin our journey across the Gulf of Alaska. Captain tells me that it’s the only real time in our voyage that we won’t hug the coast- making our way along Alaska’s armpit would add at least another week and a half to our travel time, and we’d have to stop and refuel. I’m sitting on a stack of “totes” (which Bradley tells me are folded stacks of the massive cardboard boxes we’ll use to pack frozen salmon) covered in coarse blue tarp, watching the tree-lined coast of Southern Alaska drop away from us as we advance into an vast expanse of blue water with my feet dangling over the edge, with Clear Water’s frothy wake trailing away from me in the vast expanse of deep blue water behind us. Beneath us, rigged to the railing behind the afthouse, an American flag flutters. The totes are piled up about ten feet high on the helipad, which is also the roof of the afthouse, where the majority of the unimportant crewmembers sleep (including myself). Behind us rises the two story, hulking mass of the forehouse, which is also laden with all kinds of unfathomable equipment, also ensconced and tied down in a fluttering mass of tarpaulin. Over the past week I’ve managed to get a better grip of my surroundings through tentative exploration. Essentially, the deck serves every basic need of the crew- the afthouse comprising of twenty-four staterooms for processors (the factory workers like myself who are mostly new hires and make up the majority of the crew), a men’s bathroom and the cramped laundry room where the laundry lady does her work.
The foreword house, taking up the frontmost part of the deck, has two floors: the bottom one is mainly the galley (eating area and kitchen) where people sit around watching movies during the day, along with a few staterooms for higher-ups, which I assume are far more luxurious. On the second floor, they’ve managed to cram another 16 staterooms (this is also where the women’s rooms are) behind the bridge and the purser’s office. Between the afthouse and the forward house is the hatch (chained off) , which is essentially two pieces of cut-and-painted steel covering a large square hole in the ceiling of our factory, which can apparently be lifted away with the two massive black cranes on either side of it, the crab-like arms of which are currently laid on top of the wooden (painted) deck lockers lining either side of the boat. The bases of the cranes also serve as doored-off entryways to the staircases, and steel bulkheads for the filthy black exhaust pipes to climb up. Our skiff (small, motorized boat) is currently on top of these removable steel doors, wedged in between dull, gray steel girders with wide V-shaped divets cut into them for the bottom of the boat to slot into, and tied down with three lengths of heavy chain. At the bow (the foremost portion) there is another, smaller hatch which leads down to storage. It’s probably the largest open space on the deck, and this is where a large portion of the crew can be found pacing about, looking out over the sea or doing push ups in sultry displays of idle boredom. Below the deck, down an impossibly steep set of rusted steel stairs is the factory, a completely alien expanse of insectoid steel machines crammed into the foreword portion, with a wide empty space below the hatch. Even further down, on the bottom most floor of the Clear Waters is the deafening roar of the engine room, where I’ve only been permitted to go once. The boat is 225 feet long in its entirety, and everything we need has been crammed in with a disorganized, frantic practicality, resulting in almost endless levels of compartmentalization. I can’t imagine it would be possible to understand the entire thing even in the three months I’ll be spending aboard.
Carmen is sitting next to me in her bleach-stained clothing, her long black hair blowing in the wind behind her in silky black streamers, the bright Alaskan sun gleaming in the lenses of her sunglasses as she looks out over the ocean and sucks away at a Newport, her smoke joining the black smog that is being coughed out from the two exhaust pipes on either side of us.
***Make this conversation about Eddie, NOT politics***
“Hey” I say after a few minutes of silence. She just came and sat next to me while I was listening to music.
“Sup, Ezra?”
“What could possibly be up? All I have to do is sit around and smoke all day, this place is like a fucking zoo fulla caged animals. I can’t wait until we get there so we can just start working.”
“Hah! You know I work twelve hours a day, seven days a week, right?”
“Hey listen, I’ll fuckin’ trade ya. It’s sexist that the laundry people are both women anyway, I’m the youngest one aboard.”
“Fuck no, after the past week I’m not trusting any of the guys on this boat with my panties. Probably wouldn’t trust many of the women, either, to be fair.”
“Shit, have those assholes been giving you trouble?”
“I mean mostly it’s just the usual shit, you know? Telling me I’m too cute to frown so much and shit. I can put up with that. But that guy Sal, man? He’s a fucking trip. He keeps coming to my room and knocking on my door and shit.”
“Jesus, I can’t imagine. It must be awful being a woman out here. You should talk to captain or Daniel or something about it.”
“They won’t do shit.”
“Nahhh, I feel like cap’s a nice guy, right?” Our captain is a tall, burly old man with a white pencil mustache and only eight fingers, but he’s always bouncing around cartoonishly, clapping people on the back and offering up words of encouragement.
“You know he doesn’t believe in climate change?”
“Haha, what?”
“Yeah, he was telling me about how he thinks it’s all like liberal propaganda the other day. And I overheard him telling chief about how he used to fuck “teenie bopper” hookers back in the day.” I look at her, my jaw hanging open. “I’m telling you man, everyone is a fucking creep!”
“Fuck dude, I’m so sorry. But hopefully it’ll get better when we start working, right? I mean it’s like twelve-hour shifts, surely he won’t be able to follow you around all the time.”
“Yeah, I guess…”
We sit in silence, listening to the drone of the rumbling drone of the engine and the frenetic flapping of the tarpaulin as rocky strip of land in the distance slowly swims away from us into the horizon.
“So how’d you even find out about this job, anyway?” She leans back, staring up at the sky through her sunglasses as she exhales a plume of smoke, as though asking the heavens for an answer.
“One of the recruiters just walked up to me when I was walking out of a Wall-Mart and started talking to me. I’d just lost my job and my parents relied on my money, so I thought, fuck it. And here I am!” She grins at me sarcastically, throwing her long, thin arms wide open like a jester in the kings court, having just made a fool of himself.
“Oh okay. It sucks that you have to earn money for your family. Don’t they work too?”
“Yeah, they both work, but neither of them have a degree, and my little sister Mary, she’s autistic. She can’t speak or anything, and it takes a lot of resources to take care of her, you know? And resources cost money. God, I miss her so much! Look,” she pulls out her phone and shows me her screensaver, turning up the brightness under the midday sun. It’s a picture of her holding an adorable little girl with short cropped black hair and a butterfly hair clip, grinning a big gappy smile at the camera. “I’m the only one in the whole world she’ll let take a picture of her. She’s the only reason I’m out here.”
“Wow, that’s really sweet. She’s adorable!”
“Yeah, she’s such a funny girl. She hates the smell of apples, because she choked on one once when she was like three, so now anytime anyone eats an apple she makes a really mean face at them. We’ll be like just sitting on the bus and someone will be sitting across from us eating an apple and she’ll just sit there staring daggers at them it’s so funny haha.” Carmen stares out over the ocean, smiling placidly as the whole time as she speaks, drifting off into her own imaginary world of memory. Her New York is her little sister- such a small dream. How does it keep her going? I feel a jolt of guilt at the shallow selfishness of my own desires.
“What about you?”
“You mean why am I out here?”
“Yeah, how’d you find out about this job, and why’d you come?”
“My cousin works for Alaskan Catch and he told me about Clear Waters. I’m just here so I can earn enough money to move back to New York and go to school.”
“Oh yeah? That’s cool! Do you know what you’re gonna study?”
“Hahah you’re funny. It’s crazy that I’m supposed to be deciding what I want to do for the rest of my life now, y’know? I don’t even know how to fucking like buy food in a supermarket or tie a tie properly.”
“Well, what are you interested in?”
“I write. I want to write books. But creative writing degrees are useless.”
“Why are they useless?”
“Because, if you write a book that publishers think are gonna sell, they’ll publish it. And besides, I want writing to be a side job.”
“Well then what do you want your main job to be?”
“I don’t know, but I know I wanna be rich.” I can tell she’s rolling her eyes behind her sunglasses.
“Why?”
“What do you mean why?”
“Why do you wanna be rich?”
“Because” I stutter “so I can buy my mum a house. Pay for my little sisters to go to college. So I can raise my kids in the best way I can when I’m ready to have them.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, really. I don’t want them to do this kinda shit!” I gesture at our surroundings viciously.
“Okay, okay. I’m just saying, you’ve gotta really want your mom to have that house. You’ve gotta really want that shit. Because that house and that money’s gotta come from somewhere, and probably you’re gonna be taking it from somebody else.”
“I mean, that’s not necessarily true. Plus, somebody’s gonna take that house if they can anyway. Somebody’s gonna make that money, so it might as well be me, right? That’s just the way our system works.”
“It’s take, not make dude. Money doesn’t just appear.”
“Yes it does! We literally print money all the time, that’s what that is, that’s what our economy is.”
She shakes her head disbelievingly. “Did you vote in 2016?”
“No, I was too young.”
“Ok, ok, but let me guess, you hate Trump.”
“Yeah of course, but what the fuck does that have to do with it?”
“Just think about it. Who would you have voted for if you could have voted for any of the candidates, like including the primaries or whatever?”
“Bernie! He’s the only one who actually means anything he says.”
“I agree, I voted for Bernie. I voted for him because he’s the only one who’s actually gonna take on those pharmaceutical fucks that raise the price of my dad’s pain meds and give my little sister the healthcare she needs. He’s the only one who’s gonna take the power away from those motherfuckers on Wall Street and give people like me some.”
“I agree with everything you’re saying! I hate the 1%, I’m probably further left-wing than you, for fucks’ sake, but that doesn’t mean I’m a bad person for wanting to earn more money than my parents!”
“If you hate the 1%, then why do you wanna be one so bad? That’s the problem with you liberal, feminist, white boys, you’re just jealous that you aren’t the ones who get to go around in thousand-dollar suits and treating people however you want. You’re only liberals ‘cause you aren’t conservatives yet.”
“Oh, fuck off with that shit.” I stand up on the totes, fists clenched, fuming as the wind rushing along the boat from bow to stern fills up the front of my hoodie like a sail. “Just because I want to make my life better doesn’t mean I’m the fucking Wolf of Wallstreet. There aren’t many good thinks about this goddamned country, but one of them is that it’s an actual fucking option for us to cross the wealth divide!”
“It’s not an option for me. And it’s probably not even an option for you either, no matter how much you want it.” She doesn’t even look over her shoulder at me as I tower over her, calmly flicking her cigarette in a tumbling arc over the American flag into the ocean.
“Bullshit, if you really think that you’re fucking lazy and you aren’t focusing on the long term. You could be alive for another seventy years, that’s a long time to-”
***
“Whatever man.” Carmen strolls past me, carelessly walking over the totes and
crouching like a cat before she lowers her lanky body down out of sight “good luck with that”. The sky is turning golden as the sun falls in slow-motion towards the ocean, and I sit down on the tarp again, cross-legged, putting my headphones in. After a while, the boat begins to sway slightly, and as the sky turns a thousand beautiful shades of necrotic, the boat begins to sway slightly, and after an hour we are truly rocking. The waves have turned from sky-colored, glistening ripples to larger dark swells as though rather than being pushed along by steady gusts of wind there was some kind of monolithic, incomprehensible disturbance down on the ocean floor forcing them up to the surface. I shudder at the thought, and lie on my back to try and ease the queasiness that’s beginning to throb its way up my throat. I don’t feel like going to down to my sweaty, scrotum-reeking cabin. Honestly, I don’t feel like anything. Above me, the stars are starting to appear in the inky black sky. Unchoked by fog, they shine brilliantly, brighter than I’ve ever seen. It’s breathtaking- a massive expanse of twinkling, silvery brilliance in an unending sea of darkness. It reminds me of New York in all its beautiful, devastatingly lonely glory. I All of my friends have abandoned her- they’re on their tours of Europe or lengthy stays in the Bahamas, drinking and eating their parents’ bank accounts with abandon as I lie sea-sick and shivering on a stack of tarp-covered cardboard boxes and staring up into the night sky. I wonder how long it would take any of them to hear about it if we got hit by a freak storm and this tiny world of cold steel and throbbing bodies was swallowed up by the Bering Sea. I think of them sunning themselves like fat lizards on the beach and slurping at bloody marys whilst my body, pressed against the ceiling of my stateroom thrashes violently in the icy seawater and I shit myself like an animal as Clear Waters makes her descent into the blackness. In my last moments, would I think of them? Would I think of New York? Would I think of being a famous art dealer or a stockbroker sitting in my art-deco apartment overlooking the East River? No. My last thoughts would be like an animal’s, desperately searching for a way to save myself regardless of the consequences, because that’s what people are, in the end- animals. No matter how much meaning we pump into our existence, in the little black core of our brains, the part we don’t like to think about, the part that’s been there for million and millions of years, there’s only shitting out copies of ourselves and doing our best not to die, and everyone else in the entire world can rot in a hole as long as we manage to get that done. Not a new thought for me, just one I think it’s good to keep in mind.
“It’s beautiful.” She says, her warm breath melting the frigid skin of my chest as she speaks into it.
“What do you mean?”
“That endless struggle of gnawing, scratching, fucking, and scrabbling in the dirt, it’s beautiful in a way. That’s what you artists’ problem is, I think- no artist ever has a problem talking about or painting or composing how beautiful the stars are, because they aren’t experiencing it. You romantics are always mourning how violent and ugly and alienated the world is, but when you really think about it the stars are the same. They’re just giant nuclear reactors billions and billions of miles apart floating in a frigid, meaningless sea of dust and emptiness. There’s none of your “humanity” up there, and there’s none down here either, but they’re both beautiful in the best way. Humanity is just this explosion of meaningless, brutal beauty, blood and guts and teeth and nails and cum, it’s fucking amazing. I feel like no one ever talks about that enough- how beautiful violence is.”
“You’re right.” I smile at the milky way above us and pull us tighter together as the boat rollicks and rolls in the darkness.
“I know I’m right, I’m a part of you, silly. That girl, Carmen, she seems really sweet but she’s not going to make it the whole season, watch.” She snuggled into my chest deeper exactly how I’d always imagined a real girlfriend would, pressing her nose flat into my chest. “She hasn’t got anything to drive her. She hasn’t got a me.”
“Yeah, actually you’re right. She kinda reminds me of me when I was like fifteen and I had nothing to work for. Just like, kinda being carried along by the current.”
“Yeah definitely- she doesn’t seem like as much of a fuck up as you, though.”
“Jesus, what the fuck, dude?”
“Hey, we both know it’s true, but it’s okay. This is how we’re fixing it, babe. If we can’t get into or pay for ivy-leagues than we’re just going to have to start out from the fucking bottom with a few hundred grand, right? Just please keep that in mind, honey. This is our best goddamn chance at really being together, ok? So just stick it out, for me.”
“Yeah, I know. I know that.”
“Ok.” She kisses my forehead lightly with impossibly soft, ethereal lips. “We’re really rocking now, you’d better get off these totes ‘cause if it rocks any more you probably won’t be able to climb down without snapping an ankle.”
“Shit!” I stand up, realizing I’d forgotten how high up these totes were from the bottom of the helipad. Dropping down onto the scattering of miscellaneous steel equipment and chunks of factory plastic carelessly tossed up here is going to be a truly dangerous endeavor, especially in the dark. As I wobble my way over to the edge of the totes my arms outstretched, I hear someone at the stern screaming something incomprehensible into the wind. A few seconds later people seem to be shouting all over the deck, though it seems to be focused on and moving towards the starboard side, so I give up on my dignity and drop down on all fours to crawl like golum over to where most of the commotion is coming from. I peer over the fluttering tarp, the stream of hot, odious black exhaust gushing through the air a few feet over my head as I crane my neck to see what’s going on below me. Everyone has crowded over to this side of the deck, I’m half surprised that we haven’t tilted under their weight, and the narrow walkway between the afthouse and the railing is chocked full of crew. The first actual words I make out are Eddie shrieking:
“iT’s a FuCKiN WHAaAlE!! And stabbing at the air frantically with one pale, scrawny arm. I look out over the ocean, and suddenly my heart stops. There is a massive shape thrashing violently in the waves some distance off, its hulking form black against the midnight blue water. It rolls and writhes in the waves, throwing deluges of brine into the air with its glistening black tail. Eddie is right- it’s a whale, and it looks as though it’s fighting off some kind of poltergeist, it’s massive body disappearing beneath the waves beneath an explosion of foam only to blast out and up again, spinning and squirming in the air in an undeniable expression of agony.
“What the fuck? What the fuck is it doing?” Someone shouts from the deck. Everyone has their phone out, some with the LED flashlight on to try and highlight the grim sight before us.
“It looks like it’s having a seizure or something!” I’m only able to pick up small snippets of yells over the deafening drone of the engines carried up from our belly by the long metal exhaust pipe. People are jostling and bumping into each other with the rocking, and I watch Eddie suddenly fold his long bony form over the railing and spew a stream of vomit into the ocean below. The boat suddenly pulls a hard right, and I realize that we’re circling the whale now, keeping our distance as it twitches its last death throes in the half-light. The shouting dies down and everyone watches in rapt silence as the whale goes under one last time and the ocean swallows every trace of its existence. A few seconds later it’s as though the wale was never there. People start to break away, a large number of them heading to their rooms, presumably to discuss the horror they just witnessed and try to sleep away their seasickness. That leaves me marooned on the tarp, thinking about the dead whale. I lie there on my stomach, staring out into the expanse for a good while before I crawl over to the edge of the totes and look down.
A week later we arrive at our destination. The Clear Waters chugs her way into a bay composed of two flat, muddy embankments, each half the length of a gaping river mouth. The crew all convene at her bow in their motheaten clothes, looking out over the water at a massive steel ship, easily twice her size with two cranes fit for city construction poking out from her decks. A few men crawl about her deck, unwinding blue ropes, each the width of Carmen’s midriff and getting ready to throw them over to us as we pull in alongside them.
“Why are we tying up to these fuckers?” I ask Bradley, standing next to him as the deckhands scramble recklessly about our decks, catching ropes and wrapping them in winding figure eights around the thick iron pegs which jut out all along the starboard side of our deck.
“It’s a reefer. See those ten dudes up there?” Bradley says, gesturing up at the deck of the Alaskan Reefer which now looms a good six or seven feet above us. “That’s the entire crew. This whole boat is a big ass freezer to store all the fish we process.”
“Jesus. How much fish are we planning on processing here?”
“ Put it this way, we’ll be here for at least a month before these guys have to go and drop the fish off somewhere and we meet them somewhere else, and we can process two million pounds of salmon in 24 hours if we need to.”
“Fuck off.”
“Hey I’m not fucking with you man. It’s fuckin’ absurd.”
“Fuck me. Do we process that many fish regularly, though?”
“No, that’ll probably only be the norm at the peak of the season here. It’ll take a while to get started, we’ll be off-again-on-again processing and cleaning for the first couple of weeks probably, might not even get fish for a week depending on what those slippery little bastards decide to do.”
“A week?” my heart sinks at the prospect of another whole week wasted earning little to no money. Bradley was almost right though, we wait for another five days before a boat arrives. We spin like a pair of dancers with the Alaskan Reefer as the tide flows in and out, so that the muddy banks, the river and the endless expanse of ocean can never be trusted to occupy the same space on the horizon as they did before. The sun circles us like a hungry vulture, leaving us only a few hours of blissful night before everything is lit up again by even gray light which seeps in through the gray cloud cover. After the first day, impossibly small fishing boats appear. Each one can’t have room for more than three crewmembers, and they’re all painted white, trailing a long line of bobbing white buoys behind them to denote where they’ve laid their nets. Soon, the entire bay is dotted with them like a dark brown shirt dotted with little flecks of whipped cream.
I spend most of my time begging Bradley for work, sleeping, writing and talking to Sal, who gives me a couple of hours of work when he can. Then one knight, I wake up to the sound of someone pacing up and down the hallway, clapping loudly and shouting “ LETS GOOO LETS GOO, WE GOT FISH PEOPLE, SHIFT 3 AND SHIFT 2 UP AND AT ‘EM”- Bradley and I are shift two.
I slide along my belly and drop out of bed, throwing on some sweatpants and my boots, shamelessly sitting my boxers in Bradley’s bunk as I pull them on. The entire stateroom is lit up by some kind of impossibly bright light outside of our grime-smeared window, which I realize is the Odin’s Eye’s floodlights when I step outside onto the deck, still blinking away sleep. The Odin’s Eye is a “tender”- which Bradley describes as essentially a giant, rusty blood bucket. She collects all the fishermen’s catches, fills her gaping belly with their corpses and comes to us to have her stomach pumped. I look down at her deck, a good ten-feet below us, rocking far more than us in the water, the entire center of the deck a square cavity full of dark liquid, with thousands and thousands of little bodies, glistening in the light from floodlights and deck lamps like coins at the bottom of a well. There’s a massive plastic tube, ringed with thicker bands of plastic like a whale’s trachea, which has been lifted from our gaping hatch and suspended over Odin’s Eye by a rope tied around one of our crane’s clamps, arking from us down over into Odin’s belly, the contents of which it is sucking up ravenously and pumping down into the factory. More like a blood transfusion than a stomach pumping, I suppose.
“Get down here you dirty limey bastard!” I look over my shoulder to find Bradley, standing next to the afthouse in his black raingear with his face soaked in something. “I’m gonna teach you how to pin!”
“Fuckin’ whaat?” I call back over the incessant drone of the pump. He rolls his eye “just get the fuck down here!” I follow him around the afthouse, entering the starboard fiddlyroom and heading halfway down the impossibly steep set of steps to the breakroom, where raingear hangs from every possible section of the walls and ceilings, the neon orange of it all almost blindingly. I find my hook (number 49) grab a pair of grey wellington boots and jam my feet through my overalls, rolling them up past my ankles, then tentatively edging my way down the rest of the stairs to grab my two sets of gloves, punch into a pair of elasticated sleeves and waddle into the halogen-lit factory floor. Its full of processors standing around in their orange raingear- bright neon drops in a mass of grey and white pipes, machines, shoots, etc. “Hey!!” Bradley gestures violently to follow him as he makes his way deeper into the factory, near the back of the boat. I follow him, brushing the heavy plastic of people’s raingear as I pass the slime line- a long table with spoons attached by clear plastic hoses and a yellow-stained white conveyor belt down the middle. Next, at the very back of the factory there’s two large square machines, between which there’s a waist-level V-shaped shoot at which John Anthony (who really does look like Danny Devito) is standing, a blank expression on his face as he stares at the wall behind me. I edge past him, but the next, much larger machine completely cuts off the path, so that I can just squeeze my way far enough with my back to the wall to see Bradley standing on the other side of it. “Go back and climb over the gutter!” He says, so I edge my way back along and tell Danny Devito to shift his carcass so that I can hop over to the other side of the machines. Eventually, I’m standing next to Bradley at a steel conveyor belt made out of sort of square chain links that don’t link, with rows of three pegs sticking out of it in diagonal lines.
“This is the pinner, you pin fish to it, it decapitates them there-” he gestures to his right and I look over at a large triangular blade through a wire cage a few feet away, jutting out from the machine. “Then it sends the fish to the gutter. Here.” He reaches over to his right, where there’s a large
Marlon Labovitch 