Fragments.
Jun. 14th, 2005 08:07 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
saltdawgNow that I'm leaving, I'm going to foist the unfinished fragments that I wrote shipside upon y'all. Same content. Different takes, I suppose. Of course there is more to say, but as I said: these are fragments. Take #1: Leaving the tug wasn't the heart wrenching experience that leaving the research boat was. I simply packed up my essentials and left with a couple of handshakes and I’ll see you later, man. I’ll see ‘em later all right. As my new ship passes the tug on the river or over at big bend. I’ll see ‘em later when they realize that the real place to be is over here on the ships. I said good bye and drug my tattered sea-bag out to wait for a cab by the security check point at the entrance to the ship yard, and any vestige of sentimentality about the ol’ tug was rapidly eroded as I saw the faces of the workers coming to “fix” the tug, the barge. Any sentimentality dissipated when I realized just what a clusterfuck I was escaping.
See, the thing was that I wasn't even supposed to come over here. Our ordinary was supposed to come over here. He had gone crying to the office about how he wanted to sail on one of the ships while the tug and barge was in dry-dock. That big baby. And I cursed him for not thinking to go crying to them first. But then the miracle happened. Well, it wasn't so much a miracle as incompetence. See, we all call him the ordinary, but really he does hold his AB ticket. He holds the ticket, but is still so very green that nobody can remember. He’s got the sea-time, and he passed the test, but that doesn't mean that he knows anything. It doesn't mean he actually retained any of the information he absorbed to pass that test. So when the office tried to call him up to the big leagues, they told them that he only had an ordinary ticket. So the office picked me instead.
And the shit on the tug was really getting thick. The first five days of this hitch we were stuck in tampa, and the first mate spent the whole time at home. The captain played video games and slept, leaving neurotic mate to brow-beat and hector us to death by repeating what the voices in his head were saying into the radio mic. And by the time we left, well, I’ll just tell you this: I reached the point of no return with that boat way back in the fall, but I’ve been so deliriously happy when I’ve been on the beach that I would forget and neglect to do anything about the situation when I had the chance. I was delirious with happy, and booze. Lets not forget the booze. Anyway.
So the thing is that this is the ship that I was supposed to join two years ago. When they put me on the tug just until a position opens up on one of the ships.” A promise made when I was still trusting and naive enough to believe that this company would be any different from any other. That they would actually care about their employees. But they don't. So I learned not to care too much about them. Only, the tug fleet is really tampa-centric and it was hard to escape the “office is watching” mentality. Things are different out here on the ship. I could smell it as soon as I came up the accommodation ladder from the launch.
And as soon as I came up the Accommodation ladder the lil’ feller met me with a handshake and a manly shoulder banging back slapping (three times) hug. And then he introduced me to some of my new shipmates. I was overwhelmed and exhausted. I hadn’t had any quality sleep in a couple of days, and it was so odd being on a ship this big. Although the tug/barge unit I was on was much larger than this boat, the separation between the tug and the barge makes much more of a difference than I believed. When we were light, the barge was a good thirty foot clamber up the pigeon holes from the tug. When we were light the barge was OURS, the deck crew that is. On an actual ship like this there is no demarcation like I am used to. In any case I was quickly taken to my room and told to turn to as soon as I put on my work clothes. My stateroom is both filthy and Spartan, but huge and luxurious in its own way. For one thing I have an actual bed, without a bunk over my head. And most importantly, I have an honest to god desk where I can sit and look out my very own portlight, forward towards the direction we are headed… And I have a head that I only share with one other guy.
So I turn to. I meet more people who’s names I manage to forget before they even say them. I’m concentrating on their faces, trying to read what kind of sailor they are. Trying to see just what kind of salt they have crusted in their crows feet. So I’m given a rapid tour of the deck, the lil’ feller is trying to get the bo’s’un to get me up in one of the huge cranes, but it’s raining. So we make our way forward to the fo’c’sle and eventually get around to the only task at hand for the day, standing a six foot “JoBox” upright and sliding it up against the tool cage. And then I kind of stand around listening to overbite and grady talk about some whore in Barrenquilla. Overbite tells us how he fell in love with her and how they wanted to open a whorehouse together, and the rapid unravelling of their scheme and their relationship. Natch.
NONSEQUITeRS:
• Uncertainty about where to sit in mess/hierarchy of seating
• Tour of useless information
• Second mate/thousand yard stare/safety orientation
• Captain’s office
• File cabinet
• Watches/geoff until 2000
• Trying to sleep, lil’ feller rousts me/flashbacks to things I forgot about the anderson
Day two
I turn to at 0740. Meet the bos’un and crew in “tally room” which is pretty much an office for the deck crew. We proceed up into the foc’s’le and start putting heavy hatch parts in the jobox until our break at 1000. I spend my break on the mess deck reading the times picayune, and I notice that nobody really talks to each other. Overbite and Grady are still carrying on about the whore, but the conversation is virtually verbatim from the day before. Even though It’s superficial, I can tell that these guys have a little more savvy about them than most of the folk I’ve sailed with over the years. They understand sarcasm, which gives me hope. After our break, we head back to the foc’s’le where the bos’un tells me to wire wheel the rust off of all the steel boxes we just emptied the heavy metal parts out of. And I remember that he told me that I “could do that in the bos’un locker back there” meaning, by the stern. So I wheel the first box back there on a dolly and set about finding the gear I needed to get the job done. And I finished three sides of the box before anyone checked up on me. Now I know that I was given that job for a couple of reasons, the first being that wire wheeling something is a lot more labour intensive than these fellers are used to, and the FNG always gets the shitty jobs. I know in my heart of hearts that they were all sniggering behind my back, only I actually enjoy wire wheeling more than is healthy for any given job-related task. Anyway, I had three sides finished by the time the bosun came aft to check up on me, and quickly pointed out that I really shouldn’t be creating so much dust in a small space like the bosun locker. Now, I recognized that the dust would be a problem as soon as he told me to do it. That’s why I remember that he told me. Anyway, what he really meant was that I should do the job outside, by the bosun locker. And I looked like an asshole. That’s one of the problems I have working with southerners, they have certain speech patterns that elude detection by my Yankee ears. They say things like “that hold needs swept” or, “the hatch needs dogged”. What I hear is “That hold has been swept” or “I needed to sweep that hold out on my watch” NOT “please sweep the hold out” You dig? Anyway the whole thing came down to my inability to understand southern dialect. Which I dwelled upon until I broke for lunch, which I jammed into my mouth in the space of seven minutes and hid in my room. I’m starting to develop strong panic reactions to the mess deck. I talk to the girl for a half an hour and get ready for the afternoon of wire wheeling. And just before I go out on deck, I am in the head pissing, tracing out the piping for the head itself while I’m waiting for it to end, and I realize that the piping is just on the other side of the bulkhead from my head mate, whomever that may be. Nobody has introduced me to any engineers. Where the engineers on the tug were miserable and made my job that much more unbearable, the engineers here seem to hold the deck in such disdain that there isn’t any interaction. But then again, there really isn’t much interaction here at all. I’m also quickly learning that because I have a watch partner, and the mates perform a majority of the actual work I was responsible for on the tug, I will seldom be alone. Which is bad enough, but despite any savvy, these guys are not interested in having anything resembling a real conversation.
Take# 2:
We passed by the western tip of Cuba sometime during the day today. I was probably hosing down the decks, hosing off rotting grain and coal at the time. I was hosing the decks down and not really quite sure how to feel, as if I really ever know how to feel. The thing is that it’s become official. We got the letter last night that this boat is my new, permanent, boat. The letter said that my old captain told the office that I would be missed on the tug. I will be missed and I’m going to miss her, miss them too. I’m going to miss and be missed, but it turns out that the circumstances were really beyond my control, out of my hands anyway. I’m a victim of my own particular skills, trapped into something that I actually looked foreword to because of my reputation. It wasn’t clear to me that I wasn’t in any position to chose my fate in this matter until the letter came in. See, I never actually told anyone that I WANTED to stay on this ship permently, officially, at least. I was planning on having a talk with the captain about the minutiae of the deal today. That is until he handed me the official document last night. See, the way it went down is this: we put the tug and barge into drydock and they didn’t need three AB’s for the duration and needed to farm some people out. Over here, on the ship, they have been having problems keeping good crew. So, the lil’ feller, who has an ear or two at the office requested that I get put on this ship just before the tug went into the yard. Only thing was that I thought that this whole trip was about me evaluating weather I wanted to be over here or not, when in fact it was really all about the crew here evaluating weather or not they wanted ME. I guess I passed muster. And I know that I would have probably chosen to stay over here any way. My tolerance for any given vessel, any given job, any given commitment, seems to end right around the two year mark. And I reached that mark on the first of April. Here I sit in comparative luxury, pining away for me ol’ mates on the tug. I sit pining, forgetting just how much I’ve wanted off of that tub for almost a year now. Forgetting about all the bullshit that had me fuming and swearing my head off just a few short weeks ago. It’s the lack of choice in the matter that really gets me. The lack of control over my fate, when I believed that I was really in the drivers seat for a change.
In any case, things here ain’t so bad. In fact, comparatively, I’m settin’ in the tall grass over here. There are twice the number of AB’s. I get a substantial raise in my pay rate. The accommodations are better. The food is better. And most significantly, I’ve become a trusted shipmate nearly seamlessly. I’ve been here less than a month and already I find myself enough at ease to act like my self, cracking wise and cutting to the quick, even in situations where common sense and past experience tells me to keep my head low. Over here, the texture of the crew is different. Over here there is none of the hazing that I wrote about before. Sure I had to pull the shittiest jobs and pull the ‘worst’ watches for a couple of weeks, but once we hit the second port in Colombia there was a crew rotation and we got two guys totally green to the company, and so, as far as I can tell, because I’ve been with the company for two years, they all pulled me in a little closer to their breasts and the two FNG’s are doing the shit work. Now, I’m standing the gravy watch, the 8-12 with the bos’un. And boats seems to have taken a shine to me because I don’t complain, and will sit there in (apparent) rapt attention to his endless, monotonous litanies about Barbecues he’s thrown and exactly what he cooked and for how long and how much beer everybody drank and the brands that each and every one of his cousins, brothers, friends, army buddies prefer. I sit there and look like I’m paying attention because the more attention I pay, the less actual work I have to do. That, and it is all he really wants to do anyway. Like lorette says to Zack in “Down By Law” “all anybody wants in this world is to get jerked off a little…”
But there is the rub. The days are so fucking long over here. The days are tedious and long because there are so many of us out there on deck that there aren't really any PROJECTS for us to work on. Just little five minute jobs here and there and then a whole lotta work trying to look busy the rest of the time. It’s always more work to look busy while you are fucking off that it is to actually do a job. Out here at least. I don’t have the privilege of playing solitaire on the computer when nobody’s looking. So that’s part of the rub. There is more rub, of course. Like I’m happy to be able to hang out with the Lil’ Feller again, but I can’t because he’s the chief mate and I’m just an AB. People were suspicious when I came on-board, suspicious that I was his bitch and snitch, but after he reamed me out a couple of times, and I told them a couple of mildly embarrassing stories about him, their fears were put to rest. So the rub in this department is while he’s my friend and buddy, his people skills as a boss are bottom of the barrel. And just as I want to put a little distance between us, he holds me to a higher standard and reams me over shit that he’d blow off otherwise.
See, the thing was that I wasn't even supposed to come over here. Our ordinary was supposed to come over here. He had gone crying to the office about how he wanted to sail on one of the ships while the tug and barge was in dry-dock. That big baby. And I cursed him for not thinking to go crying to them first. But then the miracle happened. Well, it wasn't so much a miracle as incompetence. See, we all call him the ordinary, but really he does hold his AB ticket. He holds the ticket, but is still so very green that nobody can remember. He’s got the sea-time, and he passed the test, but that doesn't mean that he knows anything. It doesn't mean he actually retained any of the information he absorbed to pass that test. So when the office tried to call him up to the big leagues, they told them that he only had an ordinary ticket. So the office picked me instead.
And the shit on the tug was really getting thick. The first five days of this hitch we were stuck in tampa, and the first mate spent the whole time at home. The captain played video games and slept, leaving neurotic mate to brow-beat and hector us to death by repeating what the voices in his head were saying into the radio mic. And by the time we left, well, I’ll just tell you this: I reached the point of no return with that boat way back in the fall, but I’ve been so deliriously happy when I’ve been on the beach that I would forget and neglect to do anything about the situation when I had the chance. I was delirious with happy, and booze. Lets not forget the booze. Anyway.
So the thing is that this is the ship that I was supposed to join two years ago. When they put me on the tug just until a position opens up on one of the ships.” A promise made when I was still trusting and naive enough to believe that this company would be any different from any other. That they would actually care about their employees. But they don't. So I learned not to care too much about them. Only, the tug fleet is really tampa-centric and it was hard to escape the “office is watching” mentality. Things are different out here on the ship. I could smell it as soon as I came up the accommodation ladder from the launch.
And as soon as I came up the Accommodation ladder the lil’ feller met me with a handshake and a manly shoulder banging back slapping (three times) hug. And then he introduced me to some of my new shipmates. I was overwhelmed and exhausted. I hadn’t had any quality sleep in a couple of days, and it was so odd being on a ship this big. Although the tug/barge unit I was on was much larger than this boat, the separation between the tug and the barge makes much more of a difference than I believed. When we were light, the barge was a good thirty foot clamber up the pigeon holes from the tug. When we were light the barge was OURS, the deck crew that is. On an actual ship like this there is no demarcation like I am used to. In any case I was quickly taken to my room and told to turn to as soon as I put on my work clothes. My stateroom is both filthy and Spartan, but huge and luxurious in its own way. For one thing I have an actual bed, without a bunk over my head. And most importantly, I have an honest to god desk where I can sit and look out my very own portlight, forward towards the direction we are headed… And I have a head that I only share with one other guy.
So I turn to. I meet more people who’s names I manage to forget before they even say them. I’m concentrating on their faces, trying to read what kind of sailor they are. Trying to see just what kind of salt they have crusted in their crows feet. So I’m given a rapid tour of the deck, the lil’ feller is trying to get the bo’s’un to get me up in one of the huge cranes, but it’s raining. So we make our way forward to the fo’c’sle and eventually get around to the only task at hand for the day, standing a six foot “JoBox” upright and sliding it up against the tool cage. And then I kind of stand around listening to overbite and grady talk about some whore in Barrenquilla. Overbite tells us how he fell in love with her and how they wanted to open a whorehouse together, and the rapid unravelling of their scheme and their relationship. Natch.
NONSEQUITeRS:
• Uncertainty about where to sit in mess/hierarchy of seating
• Tour of useless information
• Second mate/thousand yard stare/safety orientation
• Captain’s office
• File cabinet
• Watches/geoff until 2000
• Trying to sleep, lil’ feller rousts me/flashbacks to things I forgot about the anderson
Day two
I turn to at 0740. Meet the bos’un and crew in “tally room” which is pretty much an office for the deck crew. We proceed up into the foc’s’le and start putting heavy hatch parts in the jobox until our break at 1000. I spend my break on the mess deck reading the times picayune, and I notice that nobody really talks to each other. Overbite and Grady are still carrying on about the whore, but the conversation is virtually verbatim from the day before. Even though It’s superficial, I can tell that these guys have a little more savvy about them than most of the folk I’ve sailed with over the years. They understand sarcasm, which gives me hope. After our break, we head back to the foc’s’le where the bos’un tells me to wire wheel the rust off of all the steel boxes we just emptied the heavy metal parts out of. And I remember that he told me that I “could do that in the bos’un locker back there” meaning, by the stern. So I wheel the first box back there on a dolly and set about finding the gear I needed to get the job done. And I finished three sides of the box before anyone checked up on me. Now I know that I was given that job for a couple of reasons, the first being that wire wheeling something is a lot more labour intensive than these fellers are used to, and the FNG always gets the shitty jobs. I know in my heart of hearts that they were all sniggering behind my back, only I actually enjoy wire wheeling more than is healthy for any given job-related task. Anyway, I had three sides finished by the time the bosun came aft to check up on me, and quickly pointed out that I really shouldn’t be creating so much dust in a small space like the bosun locker. Now, I recognized that the dust would be a problem as soon as he told me to do it. That’s why I remember that he told me. Anyway, what he really meant was that I should do the job outside, by the bosun locker. And I looked like an asshole. That’s one of the problems I have working with southerners, they have certain speech patterns that elude detection by my Yankee ears. They say things like “that hold needs swept” or, “the hatch needs dogged”. What I hear is “That hold has been swept” or “I needed to sweep that hold out on my watch” NOT “please sweep the hold out” You dig? Anyway the whole thing came down to my inability to understand southern dialect. Which I dwelled upon until I broke for lunch, which I jammed into my mouth in the space of seven minutes and hid in my room. I’m starting to develop strong panic reactions to the mess deck. I talk to the girl for a half an hour and get ready for the afternoon of wire wheeling. And just before I go out on deck, I am in the head pissing, tracing out the piping for the head itself while I’m waiting for it to end, and I realize that the piping is just on the other side of the bulkhead from my head mate, whomever that may be. Nobody has introduced me to any engineers. Where the engineers on the tug were miserable and made my job that much more unbearable, the engineers here seem to hold the deck in such disdain that there isn’t any interaction. But then again, there really isn’t much interaction here at all. I’m also quickly learning that because I have a watch partner, and the mates perform a majority of the actual work I was responsible for on the tug, I will seldom be alone. Which is bad enough, but despite any savvy, these guys are not interested in having anything resembling a real conversation.
Take# 2:
We passed by the western tip of Cuba sometime during the day today. I was probably hosing down the decks, hosing off rotting grain and coal at the time. I was hosing the decks down and not really quite sure how to feel, as if I really ever know how to feel. The thing is that it’s become official. We got the letter last night that this boat is my new, permanent, boat. The letter said that my old captain told the office that I would be missed on the tug. I will be missed and I’m going to miss her, miss them too. I’m going to miss and be missed, but it turns out that the circumstances were really beyond my control, out of my hands anyway. I’m a victim of my own particular skills, trapped into something that I actually looked foreword to because of my reputation. It wasn’t clear to me that I wasn’t in any position to chose my fate in this matter until the letter came in. See, I never actually told anyone that I WANTED to stay on this ship permently, officially, at least. I was planning on having a talk with the captain about the minutiae of the deal today. That is until he handed me the official document last night. See, the way it went down is this: we put the tug and barge into drydock and they didn’t need three AB’s for the duration and needed to farm some people out. Over here, on the ship, they have been having problems keeping good crew. So, the lil’ feller, who has an ear or two at the office requested that I get put on this ship just before the tug went into the yard. Only thing was that I thought that this whole trip was about me evaluating weather I wanted to be over here or not, when in fact it was really all about the crew here evaluating weather or not they wanted ME. I guess I passed muster. And I know that I would have probably chosen to stay over here any way. My tolerance for any given vessel, any given job, any given commitment, seems to end right around the two year mark. And I reached that mark on the first of April. Here I sit in comparative luxury, pining away for me ol’ mates on the tug. I sit pining, forgetting just how much I’ve wanted off of that tub for almost a year now. Forgetting about all the bullshit that had me fuming and swearing my head off just a few short weeks ago. It’s the lack of choice in the matter that really gets me. The lack of control over my fate, when I believed that I was really in the drivers seat for a change.
In any case, things here ain’t so bad. In fact, comparatively, I’m settin’ in the tall grass over here. There are twice the number of AB’s. I get a substantial raise in my pay rate. The accommodations are better. The food is better. And most significantly, I’ve become a trusted shipmate nearly seamlessly. I’ve been here less than a month and already I find myself enough at ease to act like my self, cracking wise and cutting to the quick, even in situations where common sense and past experience tells me to keep my head low. Over here, the texture of the crew is different. Over here there is none of the hazing that I wrote about before. Sure I had to pull the shittiest jobs and pull the ‘worst’ watches for a couple of weeks, but once we hit the second port in Colombia there was a crew rotation and we got two guys totally green to the company, and so, as far as I can tell, because I’ve been with the company for two years, they all pulled me in a little closer to their breasts and the two FNG’s are doing the shit work. Now, I’m standing the gravy watch, the 8-12 with the bos’un. And boats seems to have taken a shine to me because I don’t complain, and will sit there in (apparent) rapt attention to his endless, monotonous litanies about Barbecues he’s thrown and exactly what he cooked and for how long and how much beer everybody drank and the brands that each and every one of his cousins, brothers, friends, army buddies prefer. I sit there and look like I’m paying attention because the more attention I pay, the less actual work I have to do. That, and it is all he really wants to do anyway. Like lorette says to Zack in “Down By Law” “all anybody wants in this world is to get jerked off a little…”
But there is the rub. The days are so fucking long over here. The days are tedious and long because there are so many of us out there on deck that there aren't really any PROJECTS for us to work on. Just little five minute jobs here and there and then a whole lotta work trying to look busy the rest of the time. It’s always more work to look busy while you are fucking off that it is to actually do a job. Out here at least. I don’t have the privilege of playing solitaire on the computer when nobody’s looking. So that’s part of the rub. There is more rub, of course. Like I’m happy to be able to hang out with the Lil’ Feller again, but I can’t because he’s the chief mate and I’m just an AB. People were suspicious when I came on-board, suspicious that I was his bitch and snitch, but after he reamed me out a couple of times, and I told them a couple of mildly embarrassing stories about him, their fears were put to rest. So the rub in this department is while he’s my friend and buddy, his people skills as a boss are bottom of the barrel. And just as I want to put a little distance between us, he holds me to a higher standard and reams me over shit that he’d blow off otherwise.
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what ship?
Date: 2005-06-14 06:41 am (UTC)I remember the Anderson is research ship
and Guzzle was the tug... just curious which one this is.
Re: what shisp?
Date: 2005-06-14 06:54 am (UTC)Re: what shisp?
Date: 2005-06-14 07:31 am (UTC)(and smuggle a bottle of absinthe back for yours truly...)
no subject
Date: 2005-06-14 10:29 am (UTC)So when you say this is your permanent ship, how permanent is that? Will you be there a few years, indefinitely, or is permanent only permanent until the wind blows you in a different direction?
no subject
Date: 2005-06-14 11:40 am (UTC)The story of My Highly Motivated Life.
no subject
Date: 2005-06-14 02:58 pm (UTC)Fragments? I Call that "Top Shelf Material"
Date: 2005-06-14 04:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-06-14 08:26 pm (UTC)Glad you got a good posting too; hope it works out!
no subject
Date: 2005-06-16 10:15 pm (UTC)