A captain on a fishing boat gets to tell his crew when to eat and when to sleep. He can say when they can go to the bathroom, and tell them to do everything they do every second of the day There are good captains and there are bad captains just like with anything, but a bad captain is an especially bad thing because he gets to tell you what to do so much of the time.
My captain was a bad captain. He was so lazy he had the crew doing stuff that we shouldn’t have been doing because we didn’t know how to do it. And he couldn’t get a good crew because nobody who knew what they were doing wanted to work for him.
We were somewhere in the middle of the gulf of Alaska, maybe a hundred miles away from Yakutat. Yakutat’s this little native village you would only ever know about if you’d been there commercial fishing, or if you were an adventurous cold water surfer. They get some world class surf at the right times of the year. I fished with a kid from there for a while. One time I asked him, “hey Gabe man, how long’s your family lived in Yak?”
He looked at me like I was a fucking idiot, like it was an insane question. “Forever,” he said.
“Oh. Yeah,” I said.
It was that kind of a place.
So we’re fishing out of Yakutat and we’re like a hundred miles offshore.
Dewey woke me up the way he always liked to wake us up. He opened the doors to my spot in the aft cabin next to the engine room, and hollered down the fidley, “coffee’s on!”
I jumped right up and got dressed and put my boots and my halibut hat on. Then I scurried up to the aft deck and took a piss off the stern. The seas were looking angry. A wind blew and the clouds were dark and the waves slapped the hull loudly and threw us all over the place. Ominous shit.
I walked into the galley and sat down next to Dewey and poured myself some coffee. “Looks like it’s coming up,” I said.
He kept looking at the little Ipad he had satellite weather services on. He poked a short, fat finger on the screen and he fucking ignored me. He loved to withhold as much information as possible from the crew, especially weather when we were at sea.
I asked again. “Weather coming up today?”
He gave me the stupid over-the-top angry look he gave me all the time to try to intimidate me. He looked like a big slightly fat balding neanderthal.
“Is that a yes?”
“Why do you care?” he said.
“I dunno,” I said. “Why do you care?”
“I don’t.”
“So is it coming up?”
“Yeah it might a little.”
“Okay, thank you.” I said and shook my head. Fuck that guy.
It was always like that. Dewey was a complete moron and the way he kept his power was by secreting away knowledge. He’d never tell us when we were leaving or how long we’d be in town or anything at all related to the plans he was thinking about. He had to do that because none of his crew ever respected him because he was a big angry baby who didn’t know how to be a leader and thought he was better than everybody else because his dad owned the boat. I kept wishing some kind of accident would kill or maim him and I could go home.
I drank my coffee and watched the seas get bigger and I started making breakfast while the younger guys made their way up to the galley and grabbed their coffee and smoked cigarettes. They had hilarious looks on their faces, like sad, angry, exhausted little children. Because we’d been sleeping probably 5 hours a night that trip and working all the rest of the time.
You had to lift up on the handle on the heavy stainless steel door into the bait shed and it always got stuck so you’d have to wiggle with it. I watched the one kid Joey start to have a tantrum trying to get the thing open. He looked like he might cry. Then he finally got it open. He smoked a cigarette and puffed his chest out and tried to make himself look tough. Both the kids were twenty and it was their first time working on a serious fishing boat.
I made bacon and scrambled eggs and hashbrowns and toast.
And then we started hauling gear.
Dewey was up in the wheelhouse, watching us work—his favorite. I looked up at him. “You wanna haul? I think it’s your turn.”
“Nope,” he said, “your turn.”
I hauled up the heavy pots full of black cod. And dragged them on board, all fifty. They were heavy, and I growled and screamed and felt like I was gonna black out pulling the heaviest ones in. It was like reaching over a knee-high railing to do a deadlift. My back was getting all kinds of fucked up.
I looked up in the wheelhouse and didn’t see Dewey, then I saw his head appear and his face was all red. He was doing fucking push-ups up there. It pissed me off so much when he’d let us work and just sit there and do exercises. I wanted to tell everyone in Alaska that he didn’t have hardly any muscles left from fishing because he didn’t hardly fish anymore. And he was only like five years older than me.
I looked up again a few minutes later and saw him eating a bowl of cereal.
Then I looked up a few minutes after that and I saw him reading a book and drinking coffee.
It was raining, and the seas were even bigger now. I was wet and cold and miserable alone with these two guys on their first longlining trip and pulling these enormous heavy pots on board and my back was fucked up and I watched my captain sitting in the wheelhouse drinking coffee and eating cereal and reading books and doing pushups.
We finished hauling and I ran back to the galley to start cooking lunch. I got some vegetables going in a pan and then ran out to the bait shed to smoke a spliff.
Dewey came out and started talking shit. “Whatcha doin over there little bitch boy? Little faggot? Little french looking faggot bitch boy.”
I looked the other way.
“Huh? You say something? You say something little bitch? Little Sideshow Bob looking bitch faggot. You fucking stink. You know that? You got the worst body odor of anybody I ever smelled.”
“Dude shut the fuck up.” I said it quietly.
“You can’t fucking talk to me like that. You’re the bitch and I’m your captain. You don’t ever get to fucking talk to me like that.”
I didn’t say anything.
“Huh? You hear me? What are you gonna do? Cry? You hear me little pussy bitch faggot? You gonna cry? You stinky little bitch? You look like a little faggot frenchman.”
I closed my eyes and hit my spliff.
“You know you actually are a bitch right? I’m not joking. You’re a fucking bitch. You’re a little faggy looking french looking bitch.”
I blew smoke into his face, pffffffffff, I kept blowing and blowing until every little bit came out of my lungs. Pfffffffff. I blew smoke all over him.
His face got all red and his watery blue eyes started to bug out and all the gin blossoms he was starting to get in his fat alcoholic face popped like nightcrawlers in a good rain.
“What the fuck did you do that for?” He put his face right in front of mine.
“Cause I’m fucking tired of you calling me names all the time man. I can ignore and I can ignore but you don’t fucking let me. What am I supposed to do? How much do you expect me to take? Fuck that.”
“Fuck you. You don’t fucking get to tell me what I get to say to you. You know you talk a lot of shit for a guy I could literally BEAT THE FUCK OUT OF anytime I want to. You know that right? I could fucking kill you if I wanted to. You wouldn’t be able to do anything about it.”
“Alright man. So fucking do it. Kick my ass. And you can find a new guy who does all the shit you don’t want to do. Or don’t kick my ass, and don’t fucking call me a bitch five hundred times every day. One or the other. I don’t give a fuck.”
He gave me this disgusted furious look and walked back through the galley into the wheelhouse.
I was so angry I hardly noticed that the seas were really coming up now. The wind was howling and the waves were cresting.
We set the gear back out and ate lunch and hauled up another string.
The seas were probably ten or twelve feet. Any bigger than that and you can’t really fish. I was hauling pots and trying to show Joey how to head black cod. He was struggling because his cut was bad and I was trying to teach him and haul pots in and steer the boat at the same time and if I got it a little bit sideways the waves kept coming through the scuppers up to his knees and dragging him around all over the place. He looked really scared.
The other green guy, Hunter, was watching the fifty-five gallon garbage can the line puddled into off the gurdy. It was soft line and just went straight into the can. Each can held three hundred fathoms, or eighteen hundred feet, of line and probably weighed over a hundred pounds. If you didn't watch them carefully in big seas they’d fly around like missiles and fall over and get all snarled up. Hunter was exhausted and spaced out and a can he forgot about flew into him and smashed him into the hatch and they both fell over.
“Hunter, what the fuck. Get your head out of your ass! You gotta pay attention when it’s like this.” I yelled at him. He looked scared too.
Dewey was watching us and watching us all fail and suffer and actually came down on deck for once. He kicked me off the roller and had me go head fish.
He started hauling. I started heading black cod.
Then I heard a scream. Dewey yelled at me to come help. And I looked up and Dewey was running over to Hunter, who was screaming, and had his hand stuck in the winch. I ran over. All the fingers in one of his hands were stuck between the line and the big steel wheels of the roller that it fits between in a little notch. His fingers had thousands and thousands of pounds of weight on top of them and big steel wheels underneath them.
Dewey and I started yanking on the line as hard as we could trying to pull it off the gurdy. We were yanking and shouting. Hunter was screaming and making horrible noises, “AHHH! HELP! AHHH! MY HAND! MY FUCKING HAND! AHHHHHHH!”
“AHHHH,” I screamed and tore my throat and yanked as hard as I could. We couldn’t get the line out. Hunter screamed. Dewey screamed. I screamed.
Joey watched us and looked fucking horrified.
Hunter screamed so loud I still hear it ringing in my ears sometimes and pulled with his free hand on his stuck wrist and leaned all his weight and pulled his fingers out of his glove and free. The glove stayed stuck there under the line. Hunter kept screaming and shaking uncontrollably and he held his hand like it was a dead bird.
Dewey looked at me and he looked fucking terrified and he said, “go take him into the galley and get him cleaned up. We gotta get this gear on board and get out of here before the seas get worse.”
“The seas are gonna get worse tonight?” I looked at him like what the fuck.
He didn’t say anything. His face was all white and drained of blood.
Hunter was already back in the bait shed taking his rain gear off. I ran back and helped him. He wouldn’t stop screaming. “Ahhh. Ahh. AHHHHH.” He had tears all over his eyes and his face looked like a wild animal.
We went into the galley and I had him run his hand under cold water to wash off all the blood so I could get a look at the damage. His fingers looked like nasty dirty old red vine licorice sticks. All the skin had ripped from his middle knuckles to the nail on every finger and all his fingertips were jet black and they were all twisted at fucked up angles.
I puked.
He kept screaming and screaming.
He puked too.
I was freaking the fuck out and got him some water and had him sit down. He kept screaming.
I ran back out on deck and told Dewey Hunter’s hand was super fucked up.
“I think we gotta take him into town. He’s hurt bad.”
“Fuck,” Dewey said.
“Where’s the medical kit?”
“In the aft-cabin in the cabinet across from your bunk.”
I ran back to get it. And then I ran up to the galley. I thought his finger bones were all probably broken into a million tiny pieces. I looked for painkillers. There were bottles of oxycodone and hydrocodone. I opened them up and they were full of all different kinds of little pills like aspirins and antacids and stuff like that. Junkies and derelict crew had raided all the good stuff over the years. I had him eat an aspirin.
Hunter started to go into shock. His face was all covered with snot and slobber and ferocious tears. He kept screaming and screaming.
He could hardly talk but he was trying to tell me something between the screams. “Ahh, I. Ahhh. I can’t. I can’t. Ahhhh. I can’t move my arm.”
“What?” I said.
“Can’t….ahhhhh! Can’t move my arm.”
The whole arm with his fucked up hand on it was locked up and he was staring at it and focusing and screaming and trying to move it.
I told him to just try to relax. I asked if I could get him anything. He asked for a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.
I made him a peanut butter and jelly and he stuffed it into his mouth covered with snot and slobber and tears and chewed while he kept screaming.
He told me he couldn’t move his legs.
I told him to try to relax.
I ran back out on deck and helped the guys haul in the rest of the gear.
Then we ran back and found Hunter back there still slobbering and screaming and we carried him across the deck and down the fidley into the fo'c'sle and lifted him into his bunk. It was fucked up.
. . .
We took him in to Yakutat where they don’t have a hospital but they do have a very nice clinic. It took us ten hours. Dewey and Joey and I traded wheel watches the whole way. Then they napped and I went to the clinic with Hunter for five hours, and then rode in the police car with him to the airport so he could get sent out to a hospital in Anchorage.
Then the cop dropped me back off at the boat and I made breakfast and woke the guys up and then we went back out to pick up the rest of our gear. We traded wheel watches the whole day. We got out to the grounds at night. We fished all night long on almost no sleep. We hauled three strings. Each one takes about four hours. The last string we hauled up Dewey never came out on deck. And I didn’t see him in the wheelhouse. I was deliriously tired and emotionally exhausted and I was fucking furious. I knew for a fact he was sleeping in his bunk.
He’d left his speaker on deck playing his horrible music.
I turned it off.
“Oh thank god, man,” Joey said. Joey’s favorite band was Gun’s and Rose’s. Dewey’s music was that bad.
We finished hauling in the last of the gear. Two guys with three seasons of experience between the two of us. It was so fucking unsafe.
Usually when the last of the gear is on board and the trips over, the captain immediately takes off as fast as possible to the port we’re gonna deliver at. But we had all the gear on board and nothing happened.
I went back into the galley and looked in the state room and saw Dewey asleep in his bunk.
“Gears all on board,” I said. I yelled it. This was fucked up. I was pissed.
I went back out and finished putting everything away. I was so exhausted and angry I felt like crying. My voice was all shaky and emotional and I was freaking Joey out.
When Joey and I were finally finished with everything we went back to the bait shed and took off our rain gear and Dewey came out and pointed at me and glared at me and said, “you got first watch.”
I took first watch and he went back to sleep. Dewey took second watch and Joey took third. So I was confused when Dewey woke me up for my next watch and I got up in the wheelhouse and we were all three there.
“Whose watch is it?” I said. I was so tired.
“Yours,” Dewey said and gave me his intimidation stare.
“Then why are we all here?”
He didn’t say anything. Joey didn’t say anything.
I stood there and waited. Then I said, “why are we all here?”
Dewey was pissed off and trying to pretend like he knew what was going on but he had no idea what was going on. Joey was quiet. He looked like he had something to say.
“Did your watch just end Joey? Don’t you wanna go get some sleep?”
“It’s the middle of my watch but Dewey told me to wake him up when we got here because we’re going around this point.”
I looked at Dewey. “So why am I here?”
“Uhhhh,” he said.
“I don’t know why he woke you up, I guess,” Joey said.
I looked at Dewey, he wouldn’t look at my eyes. “So it’s not my watch?”
“Uhh guess not.”
“So I can go back to sleep?”
“I just said it’s not your watch.”
I stormed back to my bunk but I was so angry my heart was beating like a little piston and I couldn’t sleep so I rolled a spliff and went back up under the bait shed to smoke and slammed the fidley doors when I went up.
Dewey ran out. “You can’t be fucking slamming shit and acting like that. Fuck you. That shit doesn’t fly with me. You have a terrible fucking attitude.”
“Dude, I didn’t fucking say anything to you. Obviously I’m pissed off. I got no sleep and I watched you sleep when we worked and took first watch and you woke me up for no reason. My bad for slamming the doors but I’m fucking pissed off.”
He stormed away.
. . .
Months went on like that.
Hunter had surgery in Anchorage and started to be able to move his fingers again. He’d never fish again though.
We got a new guy and then he quit. Then one of Dewey’s friends came out with us and he quit too. So we got another green twenty year old and this crazy Russian guy called Paul and we went out West to Dutch Harbor.
I’d told Dewey a couple months before that I was gonna go to France with some of my buddies in September. He was furious. He told me it was fucked up and nobody ever leaves in the middle of the season. I told him I was sorry but that’s the way it was gonna be. I was out in September.
We got out to Dutch Harbor in the middle of August.
Everything is kind of surreal in Dutch Harbor. It's this horrible eeryily beautiful place full of ugly things and ugly people. It has this quiet sad beauty about it. But it's a hateful place. We got there and tied up right next to this Seattle boat we knew called the Sunward.
The guys on the Sunward were real degenerate hicks. They had tons of guns and loved shooting any wildlife they saw and smoking meth in town and drinking liquor in the mornings and going to the bars to harass the few local women around. I did my best to keep away from them.
But this meth head Joe on there kept coming onto the Republic to bullshit. I was okay at ignoring him. The crazy Russian guy, Paul, though, did not like Joe at all.
“This little man with the alien eyes took my cigarettes,” he said. “I’m going over there and rip his fucking legs off.”
“Paul man, maybe you should just ask for them back? That dudes been fucked up for days,” I said.
He growled this terrifying growl and stormed off to go oil his guns.
Paul had these twin white submachine guns that looked like they were straight out of a video game stashed under his bunk. He called them his babies.
Paul was a scary guy.
He had prison tattoos on his shoulders and knees. He said after his family escaped the Soviet Union right before it collapsed they moved to Eastern Washington and within a year he was in prison. He was seventeen. I figured if he spent ten years locked up when he was seventeen he’d probably killed somebody.
One time Paul got really drunk and he showed me the stars on his knees. “These,” he said, “these are not things you get. For you you have to give. These you have to earn.”
“What did you have to do?” I didn’t want to know but I asked him anyway.
“Ohh little buddy, let me just tell you something,” he made fists out of his massive hands and looked at them. “These fists.” He raised his fists in front of both our faces and stared at me deeply with his watery bloodshot eyes. “These fists. They do not sell. But what I do I give.”
I didn’t know what that meant but it was fucking scary.
Joey overheard and started laughing.
“Ay Joey, listen to me,” Paul said. “Listen Joey, okay. Understand me. Don’t ever fucking giggle Joey. Okay. Don’t ever fucking giggle. It’s not funny. Funny is when motherfucker is right there.” He pointed at the deck and threw his cigarette down and stepped on it.
Joey stopped laughing.
Paul went somewhere else to go drink more vodka.
That night he got into an argument with his girlfriend over the phone. She was back at his home in Eastern Washington with his kids. Paul was catastrophically drunk and convinced she was cheating on him.
I was smoking weed with Joey and the new green guy Toma when we heard Paul shouting into his phone. “I know you are cheating on me you fucking bitch. Don’t you fucking say a word to me bitch. I fucking cut you off from everything. No bank account. Nothing. You are fucked now you fucking whore.” He hung up.
We followed him down into the fo’c’sle. He was sitting on a bench down there weeping. He looked at us when we came down the ladder.
“Fellas,” he said, “tonight I lose everything. Everything.” He kept weeping.
“Aww Paul man, it’ll all work out,” Toma said.
“You do not understand what it is to lose everything,” Paul said. All the veins in his neck were bulging out. He put his hands on his head and stood up and made wild eyes. He grabbed the sides of the tops bunks on either side of the peak and tried to shake the whole boat.
I looked at Toma and Joey. It was getting pretty freaky.
Paul got on his hands and knees and started praying in Russian and weeping. We just stood there and watched him do it.
He got up and pulled one of his babies out from under his bunk. He opened a case and pulled out the crazy little murder machine. He put it in Joey’s hands.
“Joey, because of my religion I cannot do what I have to do right now. I cannot do it. Joey, you are my friend. I trust you. You’re my little buddy. Joey, I need you to take my little baby there and kill me. I need you to kill me Joey.”
Joey was so scared he started crying. “Paul, I dunno man. I can’t kill you. I can’t fucking kill you.”
Paul was weeping profusely and screaming in Joey’s face, “I need you to kill me little buddy.”
Joey was crying.
Toma and I didn’t do anything.
“Kill me Joey. You have to kill me. If you don't, I don't know what I will do. There are things I could do, I can see myself doing them.”
Toma and I left. We went up the ladder to the main deck and got Dewey.
“Paul’s down there losing his mind super drunk with his guns out trying to get Joey to shoot him.”
“He’s what?”
“I know.”
“What the fuck.” Dewey went down into the fo’c’sle. It took him a couple of hours to get Paul to drink enough to be happy again. Then we got him to smoke some weed and he had to go to sleep.
When Dewey came up from the fo’c’sle, I said, “hey Dewey, when we getting out of town?”
“I dunno,” he said.
“No idea? I just kinda gotta know cause the trip’ll probably be close to two weeks and I gotta be out of here in a little more than two weeks.”
“Oh yeah. Uhhh, well, I guess we’ll probably be in town for at least another week or two because it looks like there’s a big storm coming through.”
“Okay,” I said.
“Okay,” he said.
The next day I called the airport and they told me that if I didn’t get on the flight that was leaving in the next two hours there wouldn’t be another flight for weeks because of the storm.
I went back to the Republic and packed my shit up. Dewey was screaming at me the whole time. I packed my sack and I went to the airport and I bought my ticket to freedom. Nine hundred and forty seven dollars and worth every penny.
I flew all night through nightmarish turbulence. The planes from Dutch Harbor are small. It shook and rattled and the oxygen masks fell down and mine hit me on the head. Some of the luggage containers flew open and peoples bags started bouncing and flying around. People were screaming and crying and praying. Lots of people had their eyes closed. And lots of other people had their eyes wide open like goats on a chopping block. They all screamed screams of mortal terror.
I was there with them but it was like I was hearing everything with someone else’s ears and seeing everything with someone else’s eyes. Like I wasn’t really there at all. It didn’t feel like it was happening to me. All these people around me were so terrified and I wondered what they thought about. I wondered what they had in their lives that they were so terrified to lose. I thought about if the plane crashed what would happen. I wasn’t sure I’d die. I wasn’t sure if I could die even if I wanted to because most of the time I wasn’t sure if I was really alive. I thought if the plane went down that would be okay. But if it made it to Seattle and landed there would be a whole heaven of possibilities and new worlds for to find.