CHAPTER 7
ONCE THE TANK HAD BEEN WELDED and sealed up, life on the Rose City returned to normal. There was still another week of Butterworthing to do before we reached Cabinda, but that was all routine now, and the Bosun assigned a number of lesser tasks in addition.
During the second weekend we took a break from Butterworthing and set about putting the final touches on the securing of the ship. Taking Billy and me up to the foredeck, the Bosun concocted a batch of black paint out of diesel crude and fish oil. With this syrupy tarlike brew he had the two of us paint the anchor blocks and fore winches until they sparkled. They did look great for the better part of a week. Then it rained and the Bosun’s brew washed off, running down the deck in great streams, permanently staining everything it chanced to cross.
But we didn’t care. As Billy put it, “I wouldn’t mind swinging a paintbrush for a while—it’d beat the hell outta pushing those goddamn Butterworth machines around!”
Indeed, painting was soon the preferred job on the ship. Out in the cool sea air and the bright sun I could casually slap on the paint and turn my mind off. Nonetheless, even at this menial task I could do no right.
“You don’t have to be no Rembrandt,” the Bosun yelled at me when he noticed my attention to detail in painting the starboard winch. He said it in his friendly, almost fatherly way, but Billy, Bud, and the rest of the crew overheard the remark, and I didn’t hear the end of it for a month and a half. If I could just gut it out till we reached Japan I’d be all right. Until then I hadn’t much of a choice.
Billy’s anger was often compounded by isolated incidents. Like any man on the edge, he could be ticked off by something as trivial as my feet on the coffee table. At one point I had borrowed Jake’s Scotch tape and promptly misplaced it. Jake, never satisfied with anything anyway, was immediately disgusted with me. I turned to Billy in a moment of panic and asked him if he might not have borrowed it out of my room. He stared at me in shock and then, enraged, said, No, he hadn’t taken the goddamn Scotch tape.
It sounds like an absurdist tragicomedy in retrospect, but at the time the incident was symptomatic of the tension among the three of us. Jake felt betrayed by me, and my carelessness served to confirm this. Billy, a paranoid in the true sense of the word, could not believe I had implicated him, drawing him into the arena of suspects. He later cornered me in the corridor and, fencing with his index finger, quietly warned me never to do that again or he’d do something violent. I was beginning to see an unpleasant pattern forming. As each day passed, I would directly or indirectly step on someone’s toes. Each time I did I’d learn a little more about life on a ship. It also condemned me to further abuse. I was starting to realize the absolute need to mind my own bloody business. What you or anyone else was up to was the individual’s concern alone. If you got into a beef with someone, no one else was going to even consider sticking his neck out for you. That was the way of the sea; on shore it was a different matter.
The razzing went on and on: From the hat I was wearing to my complete ignorance of the technical jargon, I was a pathetic joke. But there were moments when I was able to keep myself from wallowing in self-pity or fearing for my physical well-being. While painting the foredeck I got to know Tony for the first time.
It was just Tony, Jake, and me on the bow. There was a decidedly more relaxed atmosphere in the absence of the others. Jake was able to return somewhat to his role as my mentor, and Tony no longer played the role of the Silent Giant. Our friendship began simply enough, with casual conversation as we painted. Unlike the others’, Tony’s tone was inquisitive, not antagonistic. I’d respond frankly enough to his questions about my background without the usual fear of abuse and insult. It soon became clear that Tony himself was no ordinary seaman.
He had originally started as a crew member on seagoing tugs running between West Coast ports and Alaska. Yet while he’d speak of the usual adventures at sea—being caught in raging storms or seeing his best friend cut in half by a snapping cable—he’d also go into long discussions of his love for wine or his last stay in New Zealand. It seems he was simply unable to follow the straight and narrow course, and preferred a life of unknown possibilities.
Our friendship was confirmed by the chance coincidence that his cousin, while a grad student at Harvard, had rented an apartment from a very close friend of our family. Jake looked up now and then, occasionally firing a joke or two into the conversation, but he was clearly skeptical of the whole thing. It made no difference, as Tony was not only a confirmed seaman, he was the biggest man on the ship.
Once we were off work duty, though, Tony would disappear, and I was again left to my own devices. It’s not just their isolation from civilization and their wives that causes seamen to be such a lonely lot—it’s also their isolation from one another.
On June 26 we crossed the equator almost exactly at 0° latitude, 0° longitude. The second mate, whose job it was to plot our course, didn’t have the imagination to steer us half a degree to the east so the crossing would be exact. A day or two later, while on watch, he realized he could’ve done it, and giggled moronically. No matter, really; I was happy just to have crossed the equator in a ship. Now I could get that gold earring in my left lobe, according to the old pirate tradition. (The right lobe signified you’d been in a shipwreck.)
Having crossed the equator also meant we were very close to arrival in Cabinda. I looked closely at the map of the world in the mess just to see where exactly Cabinda was, anyway.
A small nation on the lower west coast of Africa, Cabinda is separated from its parent country, Angola, by a thin strip of land belonging to Zaire (thus affording it access to the sea). A former Portuguese colony, the tiny nation, because of its associations with Angola, had been taken over by the Cubans. But business is business, and while we may not have had any diplomatic recognition of the ruling government, their oil was very much on the minds of American corporations.
Morning lookouts were lasting longer now that we were in the tropical zone. Daylight saving time and the summer season had kept our watch light enough so that lookout was unnecessary for the most part. Alas, we were headed south, and as the days grew shorter, the lookouts grew longer. By the time we reached Cabinda, on the morning of June 28, it was still almost completely dark at six a.m.
Six a.m. was also the hour the Chief called all hands to make ready for docking. The day before, we had struggled over the damn gangway again, this time putting it back on the side of the ship even though we were cruising at 16 knots. Any one of the crew could’ve fallen overboard given an unexpected lurch. Now it was time to break out the lines once again and prepare to drop anchor.
We began on the stern. Stepping out onto the main deck, I was surprised to find it was suddenly light out. The orange glow of the dawn illuminated the mirrorlike surface of the sea and filled the sky with a soft pastel glow.
The crew was excited to go ashore at last, even if it was, in their view, “a shit port.” The Bosun came up to me at one point and began sniffing the air, explaining that there was a different quality in the air as you approached land. As for the rest of the crew, their only thoughts were on the whores and the liquor they were dying for.
Then there was the discussion of how we were going to get ashore. The word had come down from the bridge that the company would not supply us with a launch to go back and forth from the ship (which would be moored a mile offshore, pumping the oil from “submarine” lines floated out from the refinery) and that visitors were discouraged. It was up to us, then, to contract a local sailor to ferry us ashore. It was a typical move on the part of the Captain: Do the absolute minimum for the crew; or, in other words, make a show at abiding by the union contract, and then make like the rest was out of his hands.
Billy led the forum on the logistics of the evening’s partying. He pointed out everyone in the room (carefully omitting me) and assigned them not a job but a state of drunkenness into which the assigned was to indulge. One of
the boys was a cadet, an officer trainee from the Massachusetts Merchant Marine Academy. He was still a kid in many respects and shared the energy and attitudes of “the boys.” Not yet an officer, but still a cut above the riffraff. Billy accepted him as a cast member anyway.
There was work to be done first, and the Bosun set to breaking out the lines. As usual, he worked the winch. There was no objection to this; not only was his heart weak, the bosun of a ship didn’t have to go out on deck at all if he didn’t want to, and most didn’t. Dave Martin was a notable exception to this rule.
As we labored and the day grew lighter, small ships could be seen where there had been none only hours before. One such vessel pulled up alongside and, via a shaky rope ladder, our pilot climbed aboard. The pilot’s job is the most elite in the Merchant Marine, his rank exceeding that of captain. The pilot’s test was a very simple one, as Tony (whose ambition it was to become one) explained to me: They give you a blank map of the harbor you’re testing for, and you have to fill in every depth, hazard, tide, time, and temperature that affects the region. Understandably, pilots were treated with deference when welcomed aboard, and were often presented with a number of gifts (especially pilots from Third World countries), which the captain had in waiting for just such occasions. A well-treated pilot meant a quick and safe passage into the harbor and a good word to the customs officials. Our captain, however, didn’t like the practice of giving away company property and gave a skimpy gift to the Angola pilot, who was understandably insulted by this miserliness. The pilot had to specifically ask for cigarettes and the like, and when our gracious captain refused we immediately gained a bad reputation in port.
And the work went on. I was glad to find the hauling of the lines was not killing me, as it had on the first night. Out of the blue Tony turned to me and said I was doing “a real good job.” He also told me to slow down a bit and work in stages or I’d burn myself out and start hurting. I was amazed; it was the first encouraging thing I’d heard since I’d boarded the ship.
I looked up from the work at one point and suddenly realized we were surrounded by offshore oil rigs. It was no small wonder why the Cubans were liberating Angola: This particular oppressed nation was fabulously rich in “black gold.” The rigs dotted the horizon as far as one could see, looking almost like toys. As we made our way through this maze of rigs, they grew in number. Each rig, suspended above the sea by what seemed impossibly slender support beams, let off a dark oily trail of smoke from its tower. Great tongues of flame licked the sky as they burned off the deadly vapors that came up with the crude, a grim reminder of our recent folly in the tanks.
Then I saw it: the hazy green-gray coast of Africa, at last within our reach. Past the multimillion-dollar oil complexes, where the local tribes beat out Agrico, and mercenaries could stake out entire lands for their own.
The lines broken out, we turned in for breakfast. Before long the Bosun called me. As an ordinary and the man with least seniority, I was to go out with him to the bow and drop anchor. In the then silvery morning—before the hot equatorial sun had a chance to burn off the night’s mist—we stood in the quiet wind. The ship slowed down and came to a halt. The Chief joined us with his walkie-talkie and leaned circumspectly on the rail. As always there was the threat that the Captain would be watching from the bridge.
As was his way, the Bosun explained in detail the process of dropping anchor. When the word comes down from the bridge you pull the pin, a weighty, two-foot bar of hardened iron, and let the chain drop a specific number of “cholks” (units), depending on how hard the current and how deep the water. Each cholk is ninety feet, the link that marks the end of a cholk being clearly painted in white. When the pin is pulled the chain whips down the hawse pipe with awesome force and speed.
The sun rose hot and bright. The tropical air shimmered with a buzz across the bay. We could barely make out the buildings on the shore a good mile away. If we were going into town tonight we were going to have a hard time of it; we could also make out the barbed-wire fences and pillboxes of the Cuban soldiers who strutted up and down the docks with regimental precision.
Upon our arrival we were greeted by both the government and the oil company. The government’s hello was in the form of two fighter bombers that jetted over us on a number of passes and a helicopter that circled overhead as we pulled into the bay. The oil company sent over an expensive European-made launch filled with Portuguese executives and their entourage of natives from every former Portuguese possession except Angola. Shrewd politicking, no doubt.
For some reason the executives didn’t trust the gangway and preferred to climb the thirty feet to the deck up the rickety rope ladder the pilot had come aboard on. Thus it was twenty minutes before the first exec gained the deck and greeted the Chief. The Captain awaited them in the air-conditioned bridge, where they soon retired.
The Africans were another story altogether. Unlike their bosses, who dressed in polyester leisure shirts and patent-leather loafers, they coveted their American blue jeans and T-shirts. The T-shirt, however, had to say something on it. It didn’t matter if it read PROPERTY OF THE DALLAS COWGIRLS or NUKE THE WHALES, so long as the slogan distinguished the shirt as a genuine American product.
The next step in the docking procedure was raising the submarine line and hooking it up to the manifold. The hard work was only just beginning.
As I’ve mentioned before, our equipment was primitive at best. The boom had to swing out over the side of the ship and drop so the cable and hook attached to the winch (the only mechanization) could reach the workers who waited by the pipeline in a boat below. Once they managed to secure the line to the hook, the winch slowly labored to raise it up to the level of the manifold. This was all relatively simple enough, but there was then the problem of bringing the pipeline to the manifold and hooking it up. While we tugged away at the boom, the Africans tried pulling the pipeline into the ship by a series of complicated ropeworks that ended up having little or no effect.
The main difficulty was our trouble communicating with the workers. The only word we had in common was amigo. They knew no English, and we knew no Portuguese. As a result, it ended up taking us two very long and grueling hours to hook everything up. This added to the crews’ already simmering tempers, and there was a second line to hook up. Fortunately for all involved, this was accomplished in less than half an hour. We seemed to have figured out a system.
Our work done for the moment—the engine room and Spider the Pumpman taking over now that all systems were go—we took a break, staring out at the town we feared we would never reach. I sat on the port rail and soaked up the sun.
Billy, who was walking around with a particularly angry look on his face, noticed me and yelled at me to get down. I looked at him and mumbled that I was only sitting on the railing. I thought to myself, What the fuck is he giving me such a goddamn hard time for?
“Did you ever hear of something called a ground swell? When you’re in shallow water the ship could list violently, and you’d fall off and bust your fucking head!”
He turned his rage away from me after a while and started talking to the others about the vodka he was looking forward to on shore that night, and the party they were going to have. I got off the railing, trying to keep my cool. He was right. He was also being a bastard about it.
As the oil filled the tanks it was time to open the black market for business. Those workers who didn’t have any immediate duties began plying us for our jeans, T-shirts, cigarettes, and, most important, our Playboys. In exchange they offered various trinkets from the countryside, or so they said. To me it looked like your basic hotel tourist fare. Ivory amulets and figurines, ebony and other wood carvings that had an oddly oriental look about them, and other junk. I was tempted to pick up something. The Chief had paid us all an allotment prior to our arrival in case we did get ashore, and the money was burning a hole in everybody’s pocket.
As it turned out, the most desirable item they
had to offer was pot. One of the workers, who spoke more English than the rest, approached me with a confidential air behind the house. Wondering what was up, I pursued the conversation, and yes, in fact, he was selling marijuana. Despite my fear of being thrown into an Angola death pit, the romance of the situation was too much to miss out on, and I agreed to buy half an ounce of rich green grass from the heart of the Congolese jungle for ten bucks. We agreed to meet in fifteen minutes in the laundry room, where the switch was to be made. I was also to give him a Playboy and as many T-shirts as I had.
I nervously made my way back to my cabin. Throughout the house the workers were scouring every nook and cranny for everything they could find, flitting around with garbage bags full of soap, sheets, towels, magazines, and whatever else they could get their hands on. Anything that had been left out prior to docking was gone in a matter of minutes.
In my room I secured the money and picked out a couple of T-shirts and a Penthouse. Locking my door, something I did anyway, I made my way down to the laundry room. It was not so much the Angolan authorities that worried me; it was the rest of the crew. I already had to cut my hair because it was too long for the likes of the crew, but if they found out I smoked pot I was probably in serious trouble.
My man was there at the appointed time and place. We greeted each other in hushed tones and waited until we were sure all was clear. When we were both sure, I pulled out my ten dollars and handed him a plastic bag that contained the shirts, some soap and towels, and the magazine. He looked at the merchandise with care. It looked bad for a moment; he wanted more. I held my ground: This was my turf, and I had what he wanted. As for the pot, I could take it or leave it. He stared coolly into my eyes, betraying no sense of treachery, and then slowly reached into his cheap pseudo-European-style bell-bottoms (circa 1967) and pulled out a fist-size bundle of newspaper. He opened it up, and there was the stuff. I eyeballed it carefully—this joker had better not try to pull a fast one. It seemed legit, and the deal was made. I made my way back upstairs to my room and stashed the stuff in the ventilation system above my bed. Outside, in the hall, the Bosun was bitching that someone had left the linen closet open and half the sheets had been lifted.
The Voyage of the Rose City Page 6
