by Josh Harris
All that Phil had worked so hard for was gone in the time it took to guzzle a bottle of vodka. As hard as all that was, taking him away from the sea might have been the most painful punishment of all.
Phil and Mary rented a house, he got a job doing construction for a friend, and she provided in-home day care. After all that time he had spent as the boss, with men older than he was taking his orders and placing their lives in his hands, he was now just another guy punching a time clock. It was a humbling time for Phil.
It was about a year before his exile on dry land came to an end. Phil’s reliability and excellence as a captain finally overshadowed his personal failings, earning him another boat, The Dominator, a trawler operating out of Kodiak Island off the coast of Alaska.
But just a few months later, in early 1985, his main focus turned back to Bothell after Mary again became pregnant. Again, Phil hoped for a girl. He was so certain that he was going to have a daughter this time that he bought a pink outfit for the baby to wear home from the hospital.
Mary felt that Phil’s yearning for a girl stemmed from the fact that he had fathered a daughter back in high school. Before the baby was even born, Phil had told the mother he would have nothing to do with the child. He felt he was too young for the obligations that came with parenting. As Mary found out years later, Phil had a tough time shaking those feelings.
Mary went into labor on a stormy night in Bothell. As Phil drove her to the hospital through heavy rain, crackling lightning, and powerful winds, he popped Phil Collins’s “In the Air Tonight” into his CD player and turned the volume up full blast.
The first cries Phil heard while waiting outside the delivery room were soft and quiet, reinforcing his belief that the baby was a girl.
Instead, Phil was met by his and Mary’s second son, Jacob Charles Harris, born October 21, 1985.
“Well, I guess I’d better take this outfit back to the store,” Phil said. “We can’t take our son home dressed in pink.”
Any disappointment Phil felt melted away when he picked Jake up and held him in his arms. He couldn’t help noticing that he had another cute, lovable son.
• • •
The money in Kodiak was good, but Phil wasn’t happy with either his crew or his boat. He felt that the crew didn’t give him the respect he was due and that his boat was a downgrade. The Dominator was referred to as a dragger because it caught fish by dragging a net through the water behind it. To Phil, that was a boring operation compared to the challenge of trying to catch crabs by submerging eight-hundred-pound pots in the stormy waters of the Bering Sea.
“This is not me,” he told Mary. “I’m a crab fisherman.”
Would Phil ever get back to that life? Despite his earlier missteps, Phil was still known from Seattle to Dutch Harbor and beyond as a hard-driving captain who was calm in crises and knowledgeable about the sea and the art of plucking boatloads of crab from its depths. And most important of all, he had a reputation for always keeping the safety of his crew his top priority.
All those attributes soon resulted in offers from owners in the crab boat fleet. Phil became a crab boat captain again, working on several ships before winding up as skipper of the Shishaldin, named for the tallest volcano in the Aleutian Islands.
Back on the Bering Sea, Phil was soon living the good life again. And on shore, that meant the high life. He seemed determined to make up for lost party time.
“You know, you’re not too tough to die,” Mary told him. “Your body is a machine, and look what you’re putting into it—junk food, booze, and drugs.”
Phil had more than just his own health to worry about. His addictions were also affecting those around him. But Phil didn’t realize the consequences until it was too late—until after he found himself to blame for a tragedy that would haunt him for the rest of his life.
Back in the summer of 1980, Phil, Mary, Hugh, and Laurie had wanted to go out one balmy evening but lacked a babysitter for Meigon. Steve Skuttle, Phil’s best friend from high school, volunteered to watch her.
In appreciation, Phil handed Steve a bottle of Stoli vodka. Phil had acquired a taste for Stoli after being exposed to it out on the Bering Sea, courtesy of Russian sailors. Phil would trade several pairs of jeans, prized by the Russians, in exchange for a couple of cases of Stoli.
Steve had developed the taste as well, and once Phil and Mary left and Meigon had been put to bed, he proceeded to consume the entire bottle. Upon the return of the two couples, Steve bid them adieu, hopped in his car, and headed for home.
Perhaps he was able to conceal his inebriated state, or perhaps, with Phil and Mary focused on looking in on the sleeping Meigon, nobody noticed. But it would have been hard for anyone in Steve’s vicinity on the road not to notice just how drunk he was. He wound up wrapping his car around a tree.
“He basically killed himself,” said Hugh.
Not at first. At the hospital, Steve, though badly hurt, was revived. When Phil was notified of the crash, he ran over to the hospital on foot. When he arrived, Phil learned that Steve had suffered massive injuries, the most severe to his liver.
Hugh soon joined Phil in the intensive care unit, where Phil stood helplessly, devastated by the condition of his old high school buddy. When Phil and Hugh left the room, Hugh witnessed something few human beings had ever seen: Phil Harris crying. His tough-guy persona melted away as his anguish took hold.
Along with the grief, Phil was crushed by guilt. He felt responsible for the wreck because he had provided Steve with the liquor that had led to the tragedy.
When it was time for Phil to head back up to Alaska, he asked Hugh to commit to taking care of Steve in his absence. Anything to ease your mind, Hugh replied.
Steve spent months in intensive care, with Hugh a constant visitor. He continued to keep an eye on Steve after he was released, but there wasn’t much progress to report. With his liver permanently damaged, Steve was never the same.
Nor was Phil, to some degree. He told Steve more than once that he felt he was to blame for the accident. And every time, Steve assured him that it wasn’t the case. But for the next five years, until the day in 1985 when Steve died at age twenty-nine, Phil never stopped apologizing.
“That was the second time I saw Phil cry,” said Hugh. “Steve’s death really had an impact on him. I think it was the first time a close friend of his had died.
“The ordeal with Steve showed me that Phil was much more than this rough, tough crab fisherman, the character people knew from Alaska. He really had a heart.”
The only other time people saw Phil cry was after the death of his grandmother, Grant’s mother, Eleanor Van Noy.
“That was another part of Phil’s life that most people didn’t know about,” Hugh said. “Whenever he would come back from Alaska, he would diligently go over to visit his grandmother. He would get her up and make sure she could still move around. He’d crack jokes and make her laugh.”
Phil was also there for his fun-loving neighbor and friend, Hugh Gerrard, when Hugh was making a genuine effort to escape the clutches of his addiction. Cocaine had long been Hugh’s mistress and alcohol her lady-in-waiting, but in July of 1986, he went into rehab.
“Most of my friends fell off the face of the earth when I became clean and sober,” he said, “but Phil stayed true to me. Party or no party, Phil was a loyal friend.”
While supportive, Phil couldn’t totally stifle his tendency to goad and agitate. He was constantly trying to coax Hugh into taking a shot of booze. But Hugh knew that, if he fell for it, Phil would chew him out for being a weakling and falling off the wagon.
“I was fucked either way,” Hugh said, “but I was more fucked if I took that drink.”
So he didn’t.
Hugh saw other sides of Phil that were never part of his public image. Many times, they would take Phil’s small Bayliner boat out to Puget Sound and just hang out, Phil guiding the boat by the stars. He and Hugh would watch television and talk ab
out all sorts of subjects while fishing for salmon.
Their discussions even included spirituality. While he didn’t consider himself a member of any particular religion, Phil believed there was a Higher Power in the universe, a force that controlled life on earth. He knew he had been lucky in a lot of ways, and he spoke often about how he believed his deceased mother was looking down on him, watching his back and bringing him good fortune.
Mary wished Phil had turned to that spirituality when he was tempted by his addictions. But he at least had the ability to sense when she had had enough. Inevitably, Phil would reach out, even across the thousands of miles of land and sea, to reel her back in as he had reeled in so many fish in his life.
One time in 1985, right after Jake was born, Phil called Mary and told her to turn on the radio. He had dedicated a song to her, “Behind Closed Doors.” And he soon followed that up with another dedication, “When a Man Loves a Woman.”
“I could never stay mad at Phil,” Mary said. “He’d get angry quickly, yell and say a bunch of stuff he’d later regret. But he never stayed mad at anybody very long. And if you apologized, he’d always forgive you.”
Phil was a loving dad, but he was hardly a conventional father. From the time Josh was around four, Phil, after going out with his buddies and returning around 1:00 a.m., would wake his older son up, set the groggy-eyed youngster on the couch, and flip on the TV.
Josh was grouchy, of course, as any four-year-old would be after being awakened from a dead sleep. But Phil would solve that problem by pulling out a large package of candy he had brought home. He would invite Shane and Meigon to join in as well, but at two, Jake was too young to enjoy the kiddie party.
Josh distinctly remembers watching old reruns of Alfred Hitchcock Presents with his father until 3:00 or 4:00 a.m., two kids munching on their candy, one four years old, the other a sea captain acting like a four-year-old.
“It would drive my mom up the wall to see that,” Josh said. “She would be so mad. ‘Don’t get the kids all jacked up on candy,’ she’d yell. It was a wild time.”
And a special time for Josh, because with Phil out at sea so much, every moment he got to spend with his father, even in the middle of the night, was something to treasure.
While Phil often had unusual ways of showing it, he thoroughly loved his two sons. They in turn brought both him and Mary great joy, but Jake, in his early years, was also often a source of concern.
As a newborn, Mary recalled, “He cried so softly that you could barely hear him.” And as he grew into a toddler, Jake was silent much of the time. At first, Phil and Mary thought he might just be slow to speak. But when he became three, then four and five, his vocabulary at any given time still consisted of only a word or two. His parents began listening to others who wondered if the problems ran deeper than just shyness, perhaps involving a learning disability or some brain defect.
Ultimately, Phil and Mary found, to their great relief, that Jake was simply a very quiet soul trying to find his comfort zone in a very loud family.
One early spring evening as a heavy rain fell, Phil and Mary took the boys out to dinner. It may have been a wet, bleak night outside, but in that restaurant, the cloud that had long hung over Jake was about to disappear.
When the waitress asked Jake, then five, what he wanted, Josh, as he always did, ordered for his brother, asking for a tuna sandwich. But as he did, Jake cleared his throat and, as if a dam had burst, a torrent of words came out. “I don’t want that,” he said forcefully. “I’m tired of that crap! Give me a hamburger.”
Three jaws at the table dropped, quickly replaced by three smiles. Finally, the littlest one had joined the family.
Phil loved being a family man, but not enough to totally give up his dark side. He still clung to booze and he didn’t hide his drinking problem from his kids.
“We would watch him wake up in the morning,” said Josh, “and immediately pound down half a gallon of vodka without taking a breath. I could just hear the gulp . . . gulp . . . gulp.”
When Phil did finally catch his breath, he would realize there were two wide-eyed sons watching him.
“Here’s a hundred bucks,” he’d tell them. “Go get some lunch.”
Then Phil’s head would plop back down on his pillow, his eyes would slam shut, and he wouldn’t be heard from again all day.
“My dad was out of control,” said Josh. “He was always partying.”
• • •
In 1986, Phil and Mary bought a house in the May’s Pond area of Bothell, a two-story, 3,400-square-foot structure, and the days and months that followed were, in Mary’s words, “the happiest time of my life.”
Her son Shane came back to live with them. With Shane, Meigon, Phil, and their boys all under the same roof, Mary’s home was complete. Mary took charge, redecorating the house, filling it with new furniture, and brightening up the garden with new plant life.
There were family barbecues spiced up with a Phil Harris specialty, his “Bering Sea butt fucking sauce.” There were long football afternoons that always drew large, boisterous crowds to watch the games. And there were parties, of course, but they were tame in comparison to the wild affairs of the earlier years.
The genesis of the new atmosphere in the Harris household was Phil’s decision to finally deal with his addictions. Seeing how Hugh had changed after rehab and feeling the responsibility that came with an expanding family, Phil agreed to seek treatment for drugs and alcohol. He checked into a rehab center in Port Angeles, Washington, where he stayed for three months.
“There were no drugs or alcohol around after that,” said Mary. “Everything was wonderful. Only close friends came by, but nobody else from the old crowd because there was no drinking, no coke.”
How did Phil get his kicks in those days? No longer by causing mayhem, just observing it. There was a hill near the house and, in the wintertime, snow and ice would make it extremely hazardous for motorists. On days when the weather was particularly bad, Phil would position himself at the bottom of the hill to watch the inevitable car wrecks.
His kinder, gentler side came out when he discovered Bottles, a homeless man who lived in a cardboard box behind a local supermarket. Phil was constantly bringing the old man care packages of coffee, soup, hamburgers, and assorted leftovers.
One brutally cold Christmas morning, as the family celebration whipped into high gear, Phil’s eyes suddenly went wild.
“On no, Bottles!” he said. “I hope he hasn’t frozen to death.”
Phil rushed over to Bottles’s makeshift shelter with hot food, a sleeping bag fit for arctic conditions, and a bottle of Crown Royal to enable the poor man to better celebrate the holiday.
Phil had made a major turn. The ensuing five years were smooth sailing, but Mary knew better than to expect only calm seas ahead.
Sure enough, one day in 1991 as the family was packing for a trip to Disneyland, minus Phil who was up north fishing, there was a knock at the door. There were two men standing there, asking for Mary. She didn’t know them, even when they identified themselves as former crew members on Phil’s boat, but she still invited them in.
“What do you want to talk about?” she asked.
“Your husband,” replied one of the men. “Just thought you should know what a bastard you’re married to.”
The other man handed Mary a large manila envelope containing twenty-five letters.
“This should be self-explanatory,” said one of the men, “unless that’s the kind of marriage you have. In that case, maybe you and I should get together, too.”
“I don’t fuck the crew,” replied Mary before kicking the pair out.
The envelope sat there. She took a deep breath, opened it, started reading the letters, and the tears began to flow.
“I was in shock,” she later said. “I was looking at love letters to Phil from the ship’s cook, a woman named Susie. I thought we finally had a perfect marriage, but he had been having an affair
with this woman, who worked in the galley, for a year. How could I not know this?”
As Mary kept reading, the phone rang. It was Phil. He was in a great mood, calling to say he’d be home in a few days. Not knowing how to react, she hung up. He called back a few times, only to wind up with a click and a dial tone each time.
There was a phone number on one of the letters. Calling it, Mary discovered she was speaking to Susie. Mary invited her over and they talked all night. Before she left, Susie asked if she could leave a note under the wiper blade on Phil’s car. That was fine with Mary.
When Phil returned home, Mary wasn’t at the airport. When he pulled up to the house in a cab, she could see fire in his eyes.
“What the hell is going on?” he asked. “Why did you keep hanging up on me?”
Mary tossed him the envelope. Phil looked at it but didn’t speak.
“Please tell me this isn’t happening,” Mary said. “Why, Phil? Do you love her?”
“No, I don’t,” said Phil. “How did you get this?”
“A couple of your crew members, who you apparently fired, decided to make a special trip over here,” Mary said, “to personally deliver this and then make a pass at me.”
Mary told Phil about his girlfriend’s visit to the house.
“She wanted me to let you go so she can have you,” Mary said. “Because, according to her, you think I’m such a bitch. Is that what you really think of me?”
“No,” insisted Phil, “you’re the only woman I’ve ever loved.”
Mary wasn’t buying it this time.
“You love how I make you look,” she said, “what I do for you, the home I keep. I spend every day and weekends with the kids. I sit by the phone for days waiting for your call. My friends make fun of me and call me the Stepford Wife because I try so hard to be perfect. After thirteen and a half years, I deserve better than this.”
Phil asked for one more chance.
“No, you can’t have it both ways,” Mary said. “Not at my expense. I need you to leave for a while so I can think.”
