From Midnight til Dawn
St. Croix / June 2002
The bosun set the cable watches as soon as we tied up outside
of Christiansted on St. Croix. It was about 8 p.m. on a Wednesday this past
July and I drew the noon to midnight shift, which meant several hours of
coiling fiber-optic cable in the hold of the Atlantic Guardian before
hitting the gangway.
The Guardian, a British ship with an American crew, would
soon sail to repair a section of a Florida-to-Italy cable about 260 miles
southeast of Bermuda. If I was going to do anything on St. Croix, where
I’d never been, it would have to happen between midnight and noon.
First, there was a couple of kilometers of cable to spin into
the tanks from a big pan on the dock.
Global Marine, which owns the Guardian, hires shore gangs
at the St. Croix cable depot and this usually means as many young Rastas they
can round up on short notice.
“They were already high as [expletive] when they came up
the gangway,” said bosun Chris Kalinowski. “And then they took
everything they could shove down their pants from the mess hall. But I knew if
we pushed them too hard in the tank, they’d walk.”
It was down in the tanks - doing hot, simple labor with kids who
didn’t give a hoot about coiling cable beyond the few bucks they were
making - that I finally understood a genre of music I have loved for years.
Not reggae.
The blues.
In my former life as a newspaper reporter, I chased bluesmen
such as Muddy Waters, Willie Dixon and J.B. Hutto with a single question: What
is the blues?
“The blues,” said Muddy in 1978, “comes from
slavery days when you had to turn the kettle up high and sing down low.”
All these years later, jogging in circles in the hold of a ship
docked near colonial sugar plantations, I finally saw the blues
conceived as it had been in Mississippi a hundred years ago: out of the sweat
of the lower castes.
Grinding and mindless, the work brought forth music from the
shore gang.
“Lay it on the outside,” they bellowed. “Lay it
on the inside.”
Their voices bounced off the bulkheads and echoed up to the deck
where cable designed to handle six million channels of traffic kept coming,
kept coming, kept coming until the bewitching hour when I didn’t have to
care that it was still coming because shift was done.
Wild night was calling.
After a quick shower, I caught a $10-a-head van ride to downtown
Christiansted with some shipmates and stared out at twinkling lights on the
mountains and the flourescent glare of gas stations and the K-Mart.
I was looking to grab a cheap hotel room and wake up near the
beach in the morning, but the night clerk at the Best Western - annoyed at
having to answer the door after midnight - lied and said the place was full.
My bunkies were headed for cold beer and sympathetic
conversation. As bosun’s mate Mark Wain of San Clemente likes to tell the
ladies: “I’m not out here for the money or the adventure. I go to sea
for the social prestige . . .”
I joined them at Club 54 on Company Street, but knowing of too
many sailors who’d been around the world without seeing more than their
reflection in a gin mill mirror, soon broke ranks.
Believe it or not, there are many things a sailor can do in port
that aren’t in the handbook of cliches.
My friend Kassim, a messman from Yemen, inevitably finds the
local mosque where he is welcomed by fellow Muslims as a long-lost brother and
treated to a home-cooked meal.
Some guys go snorkling, the rare bird might visit a museum and
many immigrant seamen pick up household items at the dollar store to send back
to Honduras.
Back in 1976, when I first sailed after high school, I’d
pass up crew visits to the brothels of New Orleans - “it’s been
the ruin of many a poor boy . . .” - in favor of nice girls at the
public library.
But outside of New York City, how much diversion is there
between midnight and noon, especially when the taxi driver has warned against
walking around by yourself?
By the time I was wandering wee-hours Christiansted with a
notebook in my pocket and a bookbag on my shoulder in the middle of last
summer, the Virgin Islands murder rate for 2002 had reached 23, an estimated
five times the per capita average of the United States and almost twice as much
as last year.
Blood in the streets as the local government reports a current
revenue shortfall of $40 to $50 million and a rise in the property tax while
the corporate base shrinks.
“It’s quite obvious,” said Atlantic
Guardian captain Danny Wilson, “that things are closing down.”
But I had to see for myself and parted company as my shipmates
were working on their third round.
The manicured lawn of the 250-year-old Danish fort near the
harbor looked inviting and I took a turn or two around it, sitting for awhile
on benches divided by arm rests designed to keep vagrants from stretching out.
The fort leads to an abbreviated boardwalk that hugs the marina
and a strip of restaurants and bars, all closed on a late Thursday night except
for a joint called Stixx blasting premonitions onto the deserted waterfront to
the tune of Black Sabbath’s “Paranoid.”
What I would have given for a cup of coffee in a quiet booth at
an all-night diner. Alas, the draw in my pocket was good for nothing but
pacifying a mugger.
Up for 18 hours but too stubborn to hop a ride back to the ship
as the bars closed, I kept rolling, determined to see things I’d never
seen before. The night air was muggy, the breeze slight and the steps leading
to a hotel swimming pool unguarded.
I found a cushioned bench near the snack bar and laid down,
trying to ignore the mosquitoes and the scurrying of small animals behind the
woodwork, worried that if I took a dip I’d be found out and lose my bed.
A few moments later, a group of drunken kids showed up - boys
and girls who didn’t want the night to end - and I perked up,
eavesdropping from my hidden corner.
For more than an hour - in the way that drunks repeat things
three times in a row - the girls threatened to go skinny-dipping.
How could I get up and leave without spooking them?
How could they tease those poor boys without going through with
it?
The kids left with their clothes on and I soon followed, tired
and restless and wary, ducking behind columns of municipal buildings on the
near empty streets to avoid any contact but not nimble enough to sidestep a
one-legged beggar shouting at the moon.
In another age - certainly when I’d started sailing as a
teenager with dreams of becoming a writer and the hunch that one-legged men on
the skids held secrets a writer needed to know - I would have bought him a
bottle and parted with a dollar for the privilege of his conversation.
But those days are gone and I doubt I could have gotten a word
in edgewise between him and the moon.
Down on the next corner fidgeted a thick, middle aged woman who
kept calling out: “I am woman . . . You want woman? I am woman.”
Trust me, it wasn’t Helen Reddy.
Dodging errant jalopies, I disappeared down an alley toward the
boardwalk where the benches aren’t divided, stretching out with my bookbag
beneath my head the way the freight train hobos used their shoes for a pillow
and wondering how far I was from daylight.
Trying to sleep with one eye open, I was suddenly more
compassionate to the plight of the homeless than I’d ever been on half-ass
volunteer gigs at Catholic Worker soup kitchens.
I eventually drifted off to the rhythm of sailboats bobbing in
the darkness, spinning back a quarter-century to my first ship, an aging Puerto
Rican bucket called the Mayaguez that shuttled containers between Baltimore,
San Juan and New Orleans.
I conjured the bosun, a gray sea dog who looked like a cross
between a Latino Spencer Tracey and a Latino Barney Rubble and took his
medicine out of a tin can: rum for his head cut with milk for his ulcers; a
steward who’d let me use his typewriter to bang out my primitive short
stories and the old man, an crusty Norwegian who once barked down at me from
the flying bridge because I stupidly had my foot on a bow line as we were
shoving off.
And then it started to blow a gale, rain coming down in a stiff
wind that blew sheets of water over my reveries. Soaked, I managed another
agitated hour of cat-naps and then, to quote Muddy once more, roosters crowed
for the break of day.
Many, many roosters.
Not quite awake and certainly not alert, I took to the streets
again for my first good look at St. Croix, which, in the flinty cracks of gray
light, reminded me of newspaper photographs of Cuba. I passed butchered cars
sitting up on blocks, boarded-up bodegas of pastel concrete, open air barber
shops and strutting chickens that scattered as people made their way to work.
In the midst of it all, standing on an opposite corner, was a
small, beige dog with a contemplative countenance.
I stared at the pooch, some kind of bastard chihuahua, and it
considered me in return until a taxi van pulled up, obscuring the dog. Time to
go, I decided, enough time left for a decent snooze in my cool, dry focsle
before the next watch.
I asked the hack to take me to the container port and was told
to hang around until he’d made a few more runs. The van sped away to the
sound of shrieking yelps. The dog had been under one of the rear wheels,
haunches flattened.
Round and round went the dog on his front legs, nobody around
but me to watch as life ebbed out of him, each turn a bit slower, each yelp a
degree fainter until it moved no more.
I left the dog in the street to look for breakfast. In a few
hours, I’d be back down in the tanks, spinning.
the end
MEMOIRS OF A
BALTIMORE TUGBOAT MAN
Abe Lincoln at the Cat's Eye Pub... Thames
Street
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