The Voyage of the Rose City

by John Moynihan

  There was one outstanding celebration, on the night of Thursday the eleventh. Billy, Spider, Pete, Charlie, and I gathered forces in Ned’s room. I had lent Billy my box while he was recovering, so he brought that along to listen to his Frank Sinatra tapes. Billy didn’t like rock and roll; he liked the crooners.

  The six of us raged on uninhibitedly. Tony made a special guest appearance and stole the show. He did his trick with the cigar, making it disappear in his mouth and bringing it out again and again until it was piping hot. That was when he swallowed it. The boys were so amazed they insisted he repeat the performance three more times, with cigarettes. He received a standing ovation.

  Billy decided to return to work; he was sick of being sick. However, the Chief wouldn’t let him, consulting with the Second in secret. Billy drove his point home, though, and got his way.

  This issue settled, the Chief and the Old Man created a new controversy by refusing to sell the crew any more of the beer we had broken our backs loading in Japan. I asked the Chief what the beef was. He rolled his eyes.

  “Are you kidding, with the performers we got on this ship?”

  I shrugged. We had a week or so to go and this guy was still looking for a way to regain the manhood he lost to the Bosun on the deck in Osaka Harbor. Miguel and Charlie were able to keep us supplied for a few days, but it wasn’t enough. We had gone through Ned’s thirty cases in a week, and we needed more.

  Billy did the weekend’s work with no trouble. He said nothing to the Chief, and the Chief said nothing to him. In the meantime we had passed through the Mariana Islands, over the Mariana Trench, and past a silent, dark Asunción Island.

  Monday morning things returned to normal. The Chief called Jake and me up to the wheelhouse while we were on standby and had us give the bridge a complete cleaning. We were used to his new game of making us go out on lookout the instant the sun set and not knocking us off at dawn until the sun was fully risen, but this was ridiculous. He had calculated correctly, however. Billy and Jake started to bitch and swear. They accused the Chief of harassment.

  The Chief smiled sarcastically and with a condescending pout replied, “Oh, is that so? Well, that’s too bad.”

  Billy lost it and started screaming at the mate. The Chief had been waiting for this and immediately knocked Billy off watch, a bad new black mark in the log.

  When Jake and I finished, I took over the wheel and Jake went down to Billy’s room, where the two of them planned a “tragic relapse.” As soon as I was relieved, they had me wake the Second again and tell him of Billy’s condition. It was an Oscar-worthy performance. Jake stood by Billy’s bed, holding his hand and shaking his head. Billy looked as though he were at death’s door, so weak and pale was he. I thought I heard violins and a woman’s voice cry out “Tara!”

  Petty bullshit on a ship overwhelms. Bud is completely alienated by all.

  Well, the Bos called a special meeting reprimanding us over the noise last night. Hypocrites. To think they never did it. I skipped it. Fuck that.

  Found a mangled bird (in various pieces) by the door to the forepeak next to the carcass of a humongous beetle, two inches long. A few days before on the flying bridge I found an odd amalgam of fleshy remains, including tiny fish embedded in it. Today I saw the shriveled remains of a flying fish. So be it.

  —9/12/80

  Ten daze. Been getting too much shit from the old-timers.

  —9/13/80

  The Chief’s pissed off because no one is working overtime this week. The reason for this is that instead of allowing us to project our work for the last few daze they wanted us to hand in our OT sheets plus next week’s guaranteed, and work on a supplementary work ticket. Taxes and delays. Also, they want to hold us for the coming Coast Guard inspection. Well, we’ve all refused. They tried to get the other departments to do it, but they also refused.

  —9/15/80

  We were, in effect, on strike. Things had reached the point where it didn’t matter how much money we might lose; we wanted to make the officers look bad. Tony and I were asked to stop all but required work, and we complied. The Bosun and the Chief had a long talk about this, but from what I could tell, Dave paled. Maybe he was keeping his cool because of Billy and Ned, who were both in serious trouble with the Coast Guard, but it could also have been that he didn’t have it in him anymore. He was such a great guy, always there with a smile and a song, but I’d come across him sitting alone in the mess, breaking his diet in the middle of the night.

  The other old-timers were becoming seriously tedious. I had long since taken to eating at the boys’ table, and during the idle hours we would sit in the lounge while they hung out in the mess. Charlie called them a bunch of old hens, the way they cackled. The stories that were so amazing the first time around were excruciating by the fifth telling. It was as if they spoke through a phonograph that kept playing the same record over and over. You could predict when a certain episode was going to be told by the one that came before it.

  Jake, in particular, was acting like a bedbug. Even the old-timers noticed the change. He darted around the house talking to himself and had a wounded-animal look in his eye. We called him “The Little Red Rooster,” after the old blues tune. What his problem was we could only guess, but it certainly needed curing—there was no question about that.

  On Tuesday the sixteenth we crossed the date line and returned in an abstraction to the world of Monday the fifteenth. I got a kick out of this, and the clocks advanced an hour. And before I could say “That’s deeper than whale shit,” the company handed us a surprise: We were going to be paid only once for Tuesday the sixteenth.

  It didn’t matter that, because of the date line, we had had two Tuesday the sixteenths; according to the calendar and the books, only one day came at a time, and so we would be paid only for Tuesday the sixteenth. It’s a wonderful life.

  Time passed and the confinement was increasingly hard to take. Tony invited me to stay with him for a few days at his home near Seattle. I accepted heartily and made plans to take off from there, traveling down the West Coast and over to New Orleans by train. It was pipe dreams like this that kept the mind from suffocating.

  The third mate took over for the Chief on watch one afternoon. At first I’d thought he was a jerk, but over the months he turned out to be a decent guy. Like Joe, he had never bothered to upgrade. He liked having only a minimum of responsibility.

  It was a quiet day and we were still headed in a straight line for Puget Sound. The Third turned to me: “I don’t want to blow steam up your ass or anything, but you’ve done a hell of a job.”

  I was very startled by this. I thanked him with a silent nod as we went on.

  “You don’t cop an attitude of ‘This is my first trip, so fuck it, etc.…’ And don’t let those assholes down below get to you.”

  I then realized how little he really knew about life before the mast. I hadn’t any choice but to perform to the best of my abilities. They would have kicked my head open if I hadn’t. Not only that—his arrogance toward the crew was unacceptable.

  The next morning he and the third engineer came up on the bridge drunk out of their minds. The Third leaned over the console. “Don’t let those assholes down there influence you. They’re all a bunch of derelicts.” His eyes were bloodier than the new morning sun.

  The Chief took over for him and covered it all up. But heaven forbid if a crewman was unable to function due to intoxication.

  Channel fever. There were only two days to go, and we had to have a drink. Billy and Ned decided on a great plan: While the third engineer was on watch, we would sneak into his room and steal his beer.

  We returned after a few minutes with a six-pack. We drank it, but it wasn’t enough. We looked at one another and knew we had to get more.

  The third mate was on watch. He lived on D deck with the rest of the deck officers. One floor below were the officers’ lounge and the engineers’ cabins. Above was the bridge.

  We
climbed like three ninjas up the outside staircase. Billy stood lookout in the inside stairwell, while I covered the back. Ned’s job was the tough one: He had to sneak down the hall, slip into the third mate’s room, and fill a garbage bag full of beer. There was only one hitch: The Old Man was up at his desk, typing, with his door open, only fifteen feet away. No matter—we wanted beer, and we wanted it now.

  Ned crept down the hall and noiselessly opened the door and closed it behind him. I could hear the Captain’s typewriter clacking away. Ned was staying in there a long time. Too long.

  The Old Man stopped typing and grunted. I froze and listened to my heart thundering. He started typing again but there was still no sign of Ned. Billy slipped down the hall and was about to investigate when Ned emerged with a king’s ransom. We took off out the back door and down the outside stairway. Billy burst in on C deck by mistake and we panicked. I leaped over the railing and slid down a pipe and into a hatch that led to the engine room. The feats of prowess one can perform when scared are tremendous.

  I waited ten minutes before going to Ned’s room. I knocked and Billy unlocked the door. It was incredible. Ned had stolen dozens of cold beers. He explained the delay by saying that when he opened the refrigerator and saw it filled with nothing else he stood in awe for a minute and a half. He wanted to take the whole thing.

  We drank into the wee hours. They were the best beers I’ve ever tasted.

  The last night the steward finally rounded up a poker game. A table was set up in the lounge, and as people came off watch the crew sat in. The steward was the master. He flipped the cards and made the right bets with great élan. But everyone at this game was as smooth as 007. They knew all the lingo. They slid their cards to the edge of the table and barely cracked them to see what hand they had. No one thought twice about losing two hundred dollars in a hand. This was real poker, and they were out to play.

  I watched.

  Five hours later we entered Puget Sound. Jake worked the wheel for the first hour, but eventually someone had to relieve him, and that somebody was me. I came onto the bridge just as we passed into the Sound proper. The Old Man was due up at any minute and the Chief warned me that it would be touch and go: It was foggy, there was a lot of traffic, and we were sailing with a pilot—he had boarded earlier—who kept a close eye on things. He also told me to repeat the commands as I executed them.

  The bridge was tense. The only light came from the broken radar and the compass. The Old Man arrived wearing his uniform and his master’s hat. He grunted and had the Chief fill him in. There was a new light on the bridge now: the Captain’s cigar. The Old Man took position with his binoculars at the front of the bridge and peered out the window.

  “Ten degrees right!”

  I followed through in silence. The Chief poked me, and I remembered: “Ten degrees right.” The ship moved ominously to the right, and I jerked the wheel twenty degrees left and stopped the momentum. In a moment she was straightened out on the new course. There was no margin for error.

  “Five degrees left!”

  “Five degrees left.”

  This continued for half an hour, until the radio barked we were headed for fishing nets and had to move fast. The Old Man couldn’t wait for the pilot to plot a new course and had to improvise on the spot. He barked out a new order. I followed up and he shouted another. It went back and forth as we shifted course midway up the strait and weaved in and out of ships and sandbars.

  We had made it with no problems. The Old Man got her on a new course and told me I could put her on auto for a while and take a cigarette break. Jake came up and took over. I had passed my final exam.

  I sat down on a couch in the lounge. We were back. Dawn was rising and we could see the States out the starboard windows. I lit up a Djarum and inhaled deeply. It was all over. We could go home now.

  My God.

  CHAPTER 16

  Epilogue

  THE OLYMPIC MOUNTAINS that surround the town of Port Angeles rise from the edge of the Sound in a series of sheer cliffs bathed in floating mists. It had been 103 days since we’d seen America. Throughout the ship there was relief. After helping the company executives climb aboard from the launch, I waited in the lounge for my mail. An hour later the Bosun handed me a packet of letters and I ran eagerly up to my room to read them.

  In the corridor of B deck I came across Charlie and Billy. Billy was staring out the window, clutching a letter and saying nothing. Charlie put an arm around him.

  “Hey, what can you do?” Charlie said in a low, compassionate voice. “From the sound of it she was going to leave sometime. No marriage can last forever.”

  I slipped by them silently and closed the door to my room. Poor Billy; what a hell of a welcome home.

  That night I had a dream.

  I am outside on the stern of the Rose City. It is night and the wind howls with a desperate urgency. Billy is with me, and we start running.

  In a storeroom are dozens of six-foot-long wooden boxes. Billy and I start grabbing them and throwing them off the stern and into the water. Each time I run back to the storeroom I pause. The Voices have returned. They call from out on the bow, this awesome power. I face the wind and stare at the bow. If I leave the well-lit stern and go down the dark deck to the forepeak I will have it. The Voices promise—not nirvana, exactly, but some great awareness, a psychic perception. Perhaps even omniscience. In the gales, on the bow, in the dark they call, but I am too scared to go.

  Billy and I keep tossing the boxes into the water. I could have IT if only I brave the walk to the bow. But I hesitate, afraid.

  Then Billy is gone. I’m outside, on land. I fall to my knees and start digging, searching desperately. I have a mental image of a dead man’s hand sticking up out of the earth, and I must find the body.

  Then I wake up.

  I didn’t remember falling asleep. I was still fully dressed and all the lights in my room were on. I shivered and realized I was covered with a cold sweat.

  Just then the Second, followed by Joe, entered my cabin through the bathroom door. Joe poked the Second. “You see, Mate? I told you he was asleep in his room.”

  They looked at me nervously.

  “Are you all right?” the Second asked.

  I stared at them, confused, still shaken from the dream.

  “We just got a report that you were drowned. The Coast Guard is dragging the river for your body.”

  I stared uncomprehendingly at the two of them. “What are you talking about?”

  “The launch pilot just found Billy in the water, clinging to a pier. I guess he tried to kill himself. When the ambulance took him off to the hospital he was screaming, ‘John Monahan is dead! He’s drowned! He’s dead.…’ ”

  The room fell silent.

  I sat up slowly. The two events, my dream and Billy’s suicide attempt, corresponded exactly. Billy had been in the forty-degree water an hour before they pulled him out with a fishing lance. I shivered at what might have happened if I had had the courage to meet the Voices on the bow.

  In a shaky voice I told the two of them about the dream.

  Again the room fell silent. Eventually a stunned Joe spoke up: “That’s fucking … why that’s fucking psychiatric!”

  Dedicated to the crew of the Rose City

  Young Man At Sea

  A NOTE FROM ELIZABETH MOYNIHAN

  JOHN MCCLOSKEY MOYNIHAN was born during a blizzard in Syracuse, New York, on February 15, 1960. He was named for an exceptional person, Mark McCloskey, familiarly called Grandpa Mac by our three children. When he was a child John’s favorite food was bread, his favorite comic strip was The Phantom, and his favorite hat was a deerstalker.

  After kindergarten at John Eaton School in Washington, D.C., John spent one tumultuous week at P.S. 113 in New York City before arriving at Central School in Middletown, Connecticut. He endured another move and six dreary weeks at the Agassi School before transferring to six happy years at Buckingham School in Cambridge
, Massachusetts. He spent two amazing years at the American International School in New Delhi, returned to Cambridge for one semester at Browne and Nichols, then went on to high school at Phillips Academy, Andover. On his first call home from Wesleyan University he said he was blown away because in his class he had met someone from every school he’d ever attended.

  After Wesleyan he worked on the Boston Herald but decided not to pursue a career in journalism; instead he moved to New York, earned his M.F.A. at the Tisch School at NYU, and became a freelance animator. He considered moving to Los Angeles but found it hard to leave New York, though he loved traveling the world, which he did frequently, usually by unconventional means.

  John was blessed with enormous talent, intellectual curiosity, a creative sense of humor, and many friends. Although his marriage ended in divorce and he had no children, he was beloved by his nephew, Mikey, and Zora, his niece. They called him Uncle Black Jack and loved his pirate games—a name and games quickly adopted by his friends’ children as well. He was always creating scenarios and drew his close friends and family into the game he made of life. He was a prolific letter writer and could compose an entire short story on a postcard.

  John was a generous and sympathetic person, and his life and career had exciting highs and steep lows, but in his last few years he found his ideal anchorage in Sydney, Australia. He had finally cracked the immigration code and was awaiting his resident visa when he died suddenly on October 15, 2004. He had hoped to be in Sydney by Christmas, so on December 20, 2004, his dear friend Steed Hinckley and I, accompanied by a wonderful group of John’s Australian friends—or mates, as he called them—sailed to a cove he knew well on the edge of Sydney Harbor. At 151°E by 34°S we released his ashes on the gentle waves, his last voyage.