by Pete Jordan
The warning about not chopping off one’s face by stepping into the helicopter’s tail rotary wing made a strong impression on me. So did the warning that I should expect to vomit. I hadn’t even considered vomiting. So, for the next few hours, my pacing around the heliport now included worrying about puking in the helicopter.
After four hours of watching everyone else come and go via the blue morning sky, I finally heard my name called. When I ran out to the helicopter, I gave a wide berth to the tail rotary wing. I tossed in my duffel bag and hopped in the copilot’s seat. I strapped myself in, put on the radio headset the pilot handed me—and was still scouting for a good place to vomit when the pilot asked, “All set?”
With control panels on all sides of me, the only reasonable place to upchuck was between my legs, onto the windowed floor of the bulbous front end of the helicopter.
“All set,” I said.
The engine revved and the blades whirled. My gut tightened and I spread my legs wide in preparation for vomit. As we lifted off, I watched the ground drop from beneath my feet. The sensation was so much more surreal than nauseating that I didn’t shower the floor with partially digested popcorn after all.
We flew over the heliport, over the bayou and out over the Gulf of Mexico. We cruised for twenty minutes before the oil rigs came into view along the horizon. As we approached the rigs, I studied them intently, wondering which would serve as my survival camp for the next two weeks.
We passed one platform after another until a colossus came into view.
Oh, no, I thought. Let it be any of them but that one!
On a structure so mammoth, hundreds of rig hands would need to be fed. They’d run me ragged at the sinks. It’d be hell. I tried to psychokinetically veer us toward any of the other rigs, but it didn’t help. We made a beeline for the big rig.
As we got closer, I could see why this rig made a great impression. While the others were single platforms, this rig consisted of three platforms connected together.
The helicopter landed on the roof of the tallest building of the middle platform.
“So where can I find the galley?” I asked the pilot.
“Go down the stairs and someone will show you,” he said.
I took off my headset, put on my hard hat and safety glasses, grabbed my duffel bag and hopped out. Reluctant to break my link with the outside world—with freedom—I held the door open.
“So…where’d you say that galley was?!” I shouted over the roar of the whirling blades.
“Just go down those stairs!” the pilot shouted back. “Now, shut the door!”
I shut the door, ran across the roof and down a few stairs.
Then I stopped. But right as I was considering running back up to the roof, the helicopter revved up and took off. My link with freedom was broken. The Fundamental Rule was broken. There was nothing to do but face the consequences.
Down the stairs, I popped my head through an open door and asked a guy which way to the galley. Go this way and that, he said, down these stairs and those.
“Can’t miss it.”
I followed his directions and found myself out in the middle of the platform, surrounded by cargo containers and huge pipes and assorted industrial junk.
“You passed it,” a voice said. “The door’s back that way.”
A man in a porthole of one of the cargo containers pointed back the way I’d come. So I searched, but couldn’t find a door. Were these asswipes sending the tenderfoot all over the damn rig as a gag? I cursed myself for having let the helicopter leave without me. Then I noticed a handwritten sign scrawled on a piece of cardboard.
KEEP OUT!
THIS MEANS YOU!
WET FLOOR!
—Redneck
The sign hung from what I realized was a door handle. I tugged and pulled and turned the handle every which way but couldn’t get the stinking door to budge. I was too green to even unlock a simple latch. Then, almost magically, the door popped open from the inside. In front of me stood the guy I’d seen through the window.
“Fuck it, son!” he said. “Don’t just stand there playing with yerself. Come on in!”
He introduced himself as Redneck, the galley steward, my boss.
I stepped inside and asked him where the galley was.
“Man, yer standing in the motherfuckin’ galley!” he scoffed.
He had to be putting me on. Even though there was a tiny kitchen, the whole space was barely large enough to be considered a small break room.
“Where’s everybody eat then?” I asked.
“Right fuckin’ there!” Redneck said, kicking one of the two benches that faced a counter along one wall.
Of course, a hundred employees couldn’t fit on those two benches. But since he obviously figured the newcomer was gullible, I played along.
“Yeah, okay,” I said.
Acting as the official welcoming committee, the rig clerk arrived right behind me. He instructed me on what to do in case of an emergency.
“If there’s an explosion,” he said, “run to whichever platform isn’t burning.”
Explosions? Burning platforms? The company rep hadn’t warned me about any such calamities.
After the rig clerk’s brief speech, he handed me a sheet of paper and told me to sign it. A single paragraph stated that the signer knew how to swim and that the company was not responsible if the signer drowned. I read the paragraph several times as the pen remained poised in my hand.
“What’s wrong, can’t you read?” the rig clerk said. “Just sign it.”
I looked at him and said, “No one told me I needed to know how to swim to be able to work out here.”
The clerk and Redneck exchanged looks. I got the impression that the clerk wasn’t about to show me an instructional video on how to swim; he was different from the nice fellas at the heliport. So I went ahead and signed the paper.
Redneck (he insisted on the name) then introduced me to the other galley hand, who was busy mopping the kitchen.
“Cuz,” Redneck said, “show your partner to his new home-away-from-home.”
Though working this job meant breaking many of my rules, it didn’t break them all. The rule about working a short distance from where I slept held true here. Cuz led me about thirty paces across the platform to another cargo container—our quarters.
Sandwiched inside were two sets of bunk beds, four lockers and a bathroom. I put my duffel bag in the lone empty locker, threw my jacket on the bed beside it and asked, “So Cuz, how long you been a galley hand?”
Before he could answer, a voice from the bunk below mine screamed, “Get the hell outta here!”
We scrambled for the door.
“And turn out the damn light!”
Outside, Cuz said, “You just met Cookie, the night cook.”
Back in the galley, Redneck doled out the job assignments.
“Pete, you’re gonna be in the galley with me, working the dishes,” he said. “Cuz, you’re the BR.”
“What’s the BR?” I asked.
“The BR’s the bedroom hand,” Redneck said. “He’s the motherfucker that makes all the fuckin’ beds and cleans the fuckin’ bathrooms—does all that housekeeping bullshit.”
Making beds? Wait a second! There’d been a fifty-fifty chance that I could’ve gone through all that trouble, traveled all that way and broken the Fundamental Rule just to end up making beds?! Shuddering at the thought of how close I’d come to failing to rack up Louisiana yet again, I praised my good fortune.
My job instructions from Redneck were simple: “As long as you keep them fuckin’ dishes clean, there ain’t a motherfucker on this rig who can give you shit.”
Kinder words I’d never heard.
After a brief tour of the little bitty kitchen, Redneck showed me my sinks. I stepped up and assumed my preferred dishing stance, legs spread wide like Sonny had taught me. Looking straight ahead, I saw heaven. Above the sinks, right at eye level, was a porthole that
looked out at the Gulf of Mexico’s endless expanse. Though there wasn’t much to look at—a whole lot of sea, a whole lot of sky and dozens of rigs off in the distance—the small window already put me at ease.
My gaze out the porthole was broken by Redneck’s saying, “Eh, Pardner…eh, Pardner.”
I didn’t recognize my new nickname.
“Eh, Pardner,” he said, “you don’t fuckin’ cuss much, do ya?”
“No,” I answered. “Not really.”
“Well, fuck it,” he said. “I’ll have to motherfuckin’ cuss for the both of us then.”
And he did.
Then it was time for lunch.
I expected the cramped, two-bit galley to be mobbed, like the mess hall in Alaska had been, when the mealtime horn would blow and four hundred fishermen and cannery workers would storm in. Here, though, there was never any rush.
Redneck explained that despite the three platforms’ being attached, the crew was actually pretty small. The middle platform—where the galley was—stood over a drilled well that was pumping oil back to the mainland. Most of the crew worked in alternating twelve-hour shifts drilling a well under the platform to the south of us. The northern platform was still being built, though only a half-dozen guys were working at it. Altogether, there were about thirty people to be fed. Because their meal times were staggered, never more than five or six workers were in the galley at any given time. This meant there was always something for me to wash but never a hurry for me to wash it.
At lunch that day, nearly all the rig hands spoke with Cajun accents. Occasionally, they lapsed into French, which made it difficult for me to follow the conversation. One topic I could make out was whether the Company Man—the rig’s head honcho—had stopped at the bordello on his way to the rig earlier that morning. Conventional wisdom held that when the Company Man visited the bordello on his way offshore, he was tolerable. When he didn’t, he was an ass.
When the Company Man finally came in for his lunch, Redneck wasted no time asking, “How was the cathouse?”
The others paused from their meals to hear the Company Man’s answer.
“Aw,” he grumbled, “I didn’t have time to mess around with that this morning.”
An uneasy silence hovered in the galley. Then one of the rig hands started telling a joke about Pierre and Clotilde that soon slipped into French.
During lunch, a grinning rig hand approached this plongeur and asked, “How’s it going, brah?!”
“Okay.” I shrugged and then resumed washing the dishes and looking out the porthole. He stood there for a moment as if waiting for something, then grew irritated and stomped away.
“What’s that quiet-ass motherfucker’s problem, Redneck?” he asked.
“He likes looking out that fuckin’ window,” Redneck told him. “What can I say?”
I didn’t understand. I was keeping the dishes clean, just as Redneck had instructed. Otherwise, all I did was look out the porthole and mind my own business. Why would anyone have a problem with that?
Over the next couple of days—and after several similar encounters—I finally realized what my job entailed. After gritty shifts of roustabouting and roughnecking, the rig hands expected the galley hand to act like a court jester and provide comic relief. They wanted to be greeted in the galley by a witty remark or a joke, maybe even a song and dance.
What they got instead was me washing dishes and staring at the sea. Well, that was their tough luck. If I’d wanted a job shucking and jiving for diners, I would’ve become a waiter long before. My mission was to dish—and dish I did.
When I was done with that first day’s lunch dishes, I swept and mopped the galley, tossed the garbage in the massive hydraulic trash compactor and fed the contents of the slop bucket to the Billy Goat—an industrial-sized disposal that ground up the organic trash and spat it into the Gulf.
Because the crew was so small, there wasn’t much BR work for Cuz to do. So that afternoon, like every afternoon that followed, Cuz stopped by and we peeled the mountains of shrimp that were prepared for every meal.
When I asked why he was working as a galley hand, Cuz said that after three years in prison for drug trafficking, with no other job opportunities upon his release, it’d been his parole officer’s suggestion. There were so many other parolee galley hands, Cuz said, it was widely assumed that parole officers received kickbacks for providing the company with fresh recruits. This new information answered my question about who braved the isolation and crummy pay to galley-hand on the Gulf. But at the same time, it raised a new question.
“What are you doing here?” I asked. “You should be out having fun, enjoying your freedom.”
“Aw, it’s no big thing,” he said. “Besides, being out here keeps me outta trouble.”
Naively, I assumed “trouble” meant returning to a life on the streets, running with a gang and selling drugs. I’d come to learn it really meant juggling six different girlfriends and fiancées, each of whom believed she was his one and only.
My seven a.m. to seven p.m. shift ended just as Cookie’s began. When he appeared in the galley, I apologized for having disturbed his sleep earlier.
“This your first day on a rig?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I said.
“Well, the first day is the worst and all the rest are just the same.”
The next morning, during breakfast, some of the Cajun crew members teased Redneck by claiming they were rednecks, not him.
“You ain’t fuckin’ rednecks,” he protested. “Y’all’s just a buncha Cajun coon-asses!”
In the middle of all the bickering, Cuz stepped into the galley and listened for a minute. Then, in all sincerity, Cuz—a black man—asked Redneck, “What is a redneck anyway?”
Redneck exploded. “I’m the only real fuckin’ redneck on this whole motherfuckin’ rig!!”
Redneck was always moving and always talking. As he cooked, he paced frantically and babbled constantly. His nervous energy was attributed by everyone (himself included) to the seven years he said he spent as a CIA mercenary in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War.
He grew especially agitated when he and I were alone in the galley and I stood staring out my porthole.
“Goddamn, Pardner, say fuckin’ something!”
If I had nothing to say, I’d usually just curse for his amusement.
“Fuck it,” I’d say.
“You got that right, Pardner—fuck it.” He’d laugh. Then, after further contemplation, he might add, “Motherfuck it.”
When Cuz was around, he and Redneck would discuss one of their favorite topics: ways to kill a man. Between Redneck’s experiences in Southeast Asia and Cuz’s experiences in street gangs and prison, they had no shortage of anecdotes and tips to exchange. Another of Redneck’s favorite topics for discussion was sex with farm animals. Raised on a farm in the South, he was quite knowledgeable about the subject. And Redneck wasn’t shy about sharing this information.
Sometimes, when I interrupted my daydreaming at the window, it was hard to decipher exactly which of his favorite topics Redneck was discussing.
“You just sneak up behind ’im and get your arms around his fuckin’ neck like that and that fucker’s all yours….”
For hours on end, I stood at the sinks and stared at the dozens of oil rigs scattered across the watery plain. I wondered if the galley hands on those platforms—no larger than a dot in the far distance—were staring out their portholes back at my rig, which, to them, was also nothing more than a dot in the distance.
A hundred feet below my porthole, the water sloshed up, down, back and forth as a parade of porpoises, fish, seaweed, stingrays, driftwood and jellyfish swam and floated by. Sea birds soared past on a fixed course to some unseen destination beyond the horizon.
My porthole was my salvation. When Woody Guthrie worked as a dishwasher on merchant marine ships transporting troops to Europe during World War II, he once wrote about his view from the ship at anchor off
the coast of Sicily: “I get to see lots of pretty hills and scenery out of my porthole while I’m washing my dishes. The good part of it is that the ship keeps swinging around on its anchor chain and the mountains and hills and the beach and the shore line are always changing.” Though my view never changed and offered nothing as exciting as hills or beaches, I cherished my view as much as Woody had his.
Whenever I felt anxious or considered leaving, I’d have Cuz tell me tales of rigs where he’d previously galley-handed. On some rigs, the crews numbered over a hundred roughnecks and roustabouts. That meant a twelve-hour shift in the galley was spent washing dishes for twelve straight hours. Cuz never had a free moment to stare out any portholes or to sit around and chat. His horror stories served as the perfect pep talks to discourage quitting.
Another lifesaver was my evening stroll. Though I’d initially feared the three-platform colossus, the fact that the platforms were connected was a blessing. It gave me the opportunity to wander, something a single-platform rig couldn’t provide. From the middle platform to the northern one, the bridge spanned precisely 320 paces, or about one-sixth of a mile. Every evening, like a caged rat, I paced several miles as the sun set over the Gulf.
Another source of entertainment was playing with the hot-tub-sized hydraulic trash compactor. I’d toss cans of soda or a bucket or whatever happened to be lying around into the compactor to be squished. I’d wait eagerly for the giant metal plunger to slowly rise to reveal a new mangled mosaic at the bottom.
Or I’d feed the Billy Goat, which, by chewing slop and spewing it into the water, was actually feeding the marine life in the Gulf. Some folks feed squirrels and pigeons in the park for kicks. Me, I fed ground-up chicken bones and half-eaten steaks to the fish in the Gulf of Mexico.
The Billy Goat got more than just slop-bucket leftovers. I also fed it plenty of edibles that hadn’t yet been cooked or served. Every other day, the rig’s crane plucked a big metal box of groceries off a supply boat and set it down on the platform beside the galley for me and Cuz to unload. Because the galley only had one tiny pantry, one freezer and two refrigerators, our challenge was to find room for all the incoming food. Redneck’s solution was to have us feed the “old” food from a couple days before—Tater Tots, breakfast cereal and whatnot—to the Billy Goat and the happy fishies.
