Life Take One

I lived in forward birthing where no one should be made to live. It was no bigger than a walk-in closet, a coffin basically, designed for six low-ranking crew members. The night of my first patrol the sea was so rough that each time the ship hit a wave, the bow would plummet and I’d find myself in midair, for just a split second, my face plastered to the above bunk in a free fall. That was the same day I learned about my seasickness, and it would become the gnawing misery of my life for the next two years, like a slow grating death.

     Pretty much all I did around the clock was puke, sleep, and make my rounds. Sometimes I’d throw up so much that eventually I wouldn’t have anything left in my stomach. Then I’d have dry heaves, which hurt way more. Sometimes I’d sit there for several seconds, stomach muscles contracted tightly in agony, waiting for something to come up. The sooner I puked the sooner I’d get relief. During the dry heaves I’d be lucky to get even a trickle of stomach acid, which seared my throat and left a sour taste in my mouth. As long as the ship was rolling or pitching my body would try to vomit. The bow dropping was what really did me in. I felt like my guts and brain were being sucked out like I was imploding.

     After some time I got a rack in aft birthing, which made my life a lot more tolerable. I learned how to keep from throwing up. When the seas were rough I remained in my rack, but when I was on watch I sat at the most stable part of the ship, which was on the engine room floor right by the generator panel. I also avoided acidic foods and ate more basic ones, like yogurt, bread, and ice cream. I ate a lot of ice cream. Once, I ate some spoiled chicken teriyaki. Threw it up. Quite a few times I drank a tall glass of orange juice trying to rehydrate myself. Threw it up too, like a geyser. More than once I threw up my morning cup of coffee. The headaches I had from going off caffeine were imperceptible compared to how badly I ached being underway.  Hell, I even threw up my cherry-flavored sea-sick medicine when I was really new to the ship. I started to associate cherry flavor with being sick so much that months later if I smelled something cherry I got nauseous.

    The XO finally got me a house with two other guys on Whale View Court overlooking the ocean. It was a huge step up from living aboard the ship for the last six months with people coming and going as they pleased, always asking what I was doing. I lived there with two seamen, one named Ernie Dupray from Santa Cruz and another from Hollis, Oklahoma named Gary Franco. Franco was a border-line alcoholic. Whenever I was working on a piece of machinery, Franco would walk up with a straight face and say sarcastically, “Petty Officer Morgan, are you qualified to be working on that expensive equipment.” I’d tell him, jokingly, that I wasn’t and that I needed to get off work so I could ride my bike. I always felt constrained by the Coast Guard. My time was their time.

     Dupray and Franco made excellent roommates. I always had someone to do things with. Franco was my bar buddy. We once hit half a dozen bars in one night. Dupray was my outdoors buddy. We went running in the redwoods together. It was fantastic to live with the two of them, at least when we weren’t at work. Sometimes the Coast Guard seemed to get in the way, and I certainly planned on getting out after four years. I was pretty sure Dupray was going to get out. However, I think Franco was going to stay in for twenty – a lifer.

     Franco and I would go to the bar and he’d get blurry-eyed drunk and start yelling out slurs. One of his favorite things to say when he was amped up and ready to party was, “Go kick it live.” He’d yell it. Franco was a great guy though. He was mild-mannered and would do just about anything for you, when he was sober. Sometimes when he got drunk, he’d black out and not remember how he got home.

     We spent a lot of hours on the job. After working all day we often got called out at around one or two in the morning to tow in a fishing boat that had broken down. Their reduction gear or steering would fail, or something like that. I began to feel like I was in the towing service. Unbelievably, I used to throw up on nearly every trip. Sometimes I wanted to die; I was so sick and exhausted. Dealing with sea sickness late at night when my body was supposed to be asleep made it even harder. My head always throbbed and my sense of balance got completely out of whack. Our ship was stocked with sea sick medicine, which I used for the first few months hoping I’d somehow learn to cope with the pitch and roll of the ship, but it was a losing battle.

     We were instructed to take a cocktail of drugs, two pink pills and one blue pill. The blue pill was a downer and combated the queasy feeling, but it made a person terribly sleepy. Since we had to be awake to stand watch, we had to take two uppers as well, the pink pills. It didn’t seem right taking an upper and a downer together like that, but supposedly that was the only way they’d work. Some people abused them. Don Aberson, who I usually relieved for watch, always took a blue before bed while sitting on the mess deck listening to music. He was kind of a junkie. He always got the eight-to-midnight watch, which was the best night watch. He’d pencil himself in for it; he was the chief’s little buddy. “Time to take my bedtime cocktail,” Aberson would say before drifting aft. Sometimes I was on the verge of total collapse, and all he could say was how he was feeling pretty good on the blues and ready for sleep, the bastard.

     Once, we were on a seven-day patrol with our ship doing eight knots against twenty-foot waves. It was too dangerous to turn the ship around for port since we might capsize when our ship was broadside, so we had to ride it out. It was early in the morning and I had been on watch for two hours, suffering like usual. I had puked several times already and between rounds I sat in the galley with my head drooping. There was no one else awake down below, just me against the dim red lights, which only made the nausea worse. Feeling like a ghost ship, it rolled, the lights flickered, and the bulkheads creaked. I decided to lie down on the floor for a few minutes. I didn’t see the harm and figured I’d hear if anyone came down the ladder. To me there was no difference in waiting sitting up or lying prone, but they didn’t take too kindly to someone sleeping on watch. The place I laid my head was right below the gun rack for the nine-millimeter pistols. At one point, I thought if I had the key to that rack I might have blown my brains out to end my vile misery.

     Lying down was a huge mistake. I immediately passed out. Before I knew it, I woke up and was lying on the mess deck floor in a filthy pool of water that had gushed in from the chain locker up forward and possibly the wastewater tank. It had the stench of sulfur and rancid food so foul that it made my nasal passages burn. I was supposed to monitor the chain locker when we were in rough seas and pump it out if it got too full, but I had pretty much given up by that point. One unspoken rule was to finish your watch so others could rest for their own one. I should have woken someone up.

     The officer of the watch came down and saw the water and me lying incoherently and woke up the chief, who then came rushing into the galley. “What’s going on Morgan,” he yelled. “Where did all this water come from?” I looked around, with blood-shot eyes and a haze in my head. I couldn’t think straight.

     “It must have come from the chain locker,” I said.

     “No shit. Why didn’t you pump it out a long time ago? You want us all to go down.”

     “I think I’m dying chief,” I said; so maybe they’d go easy on me later. Maybe I really was dying. I couldn’t see the light at the end of the tunnel in all this struggling; only pain and my life being squandered.

     “I don’t give a rat’s ass. Now get the chain locker cleared before we sink.” Just then Aberson stormed onto the mess deck from back aft, his shirt hanging out and his boots untied. He had been woken up too and was kind of the whiz for any problems in engineering. He was a little tyrant too, but he knew the ship inside and out. He went right for the chain locker. It was completely full.

     “We got big trouble Chief,” he yelled. “The water’s coming in from the vent.” Then he rushed back to the engine room and turned on the pump for the chain locker and started pumping it out the side of the ship. I managed to get to the chain locker and monitor the draw down while puking into a plastic bag. When it was empty I stumbled back to the engine room to tell him.

     I was in a world of trouble. The chief and the XO weren’t too impressed by my watch-standing abilities, and even the captain made a brief appearance to scowl at me. The fuckers sat me down on the mess deck the next day and had an informal hearing about what happened. “We thought you being a petty officer, you’d have more skills,” the XO said. I didn’t tell them that in school I had rarely studied; I partied too much. They ranted on, the chief and XO taking turns at me.

     “I have a whole list of infractions,” the XO said.

     “If someone hadn’t come down when they did, we would have sunk for sure,” the chief said. He wasn’t the smartest man in the world and used Aberson a lot to make himself look good.

     “Not sure what we’re going to do with you,” the XO said.

     “Send you to an ice breaker, then you’ll see what trouble is,” the chief said scornfully. I started feeling like they were berating me instead of just telling me what my punishment would be. Being so strung out on seasick drugs, I about flipped out.

     “What are we doing out here?” I blurted out. To me it seemed like a bunch of lifers floating around on a metal tub in the dark and power of the sea where we had no comprehension what could happen. “We don’t belong out here for chrissakes.”

     The chief glared at me with a gushing sigh. The XO was more humane and sat listening. After a few seconds the chief spoke sternly. “We’re out here to save lives, you understand. If we weren’t here people could lose their lives.”

     “What people,” I yelled. “There’s no one here. It’s just the dark and the waves, and me puking every fucking day. I could lose my goddam life; we all could lose our lives.” The XO stood up and put his hand on my shoulder to calm me down.

     “Now take it easy Morgan. No one was hurt,” the XO said.

     “We all knew when we signed up we might have to risk our lives,” the chief said. I knew he was right. They tried to talk reasonably about our mission; about saving lives, stopping drug smuggling, and keeping the coast secure, whatever that meant. I got sick of people using the word secure all the time.

     After they finished talking they both stood up to go. “Maybe you should think about your duty a little more,” the XO said while I stared down at the table. “You’re going to have to get qualified again, or we’ll have to demote you.” They only put me on a sort of probation, which in a way I was sorry for. At that point I wanted out; I wanted the sea sickness to be over for good and get on with my life.

     The chief had me clean out the sewage tank. This was my punishment, even though they called it a disciplinary action. I had to put on some coveralls and wear a respirator so I wouldn’t poison myself. With a putty knife, I scraped stalagmites off the ceiling and the fecal layer off the walls and dropped them into a bucket to haul out. The stuff was pretty solidified and not as foul as I thought it would be.

     Franco came by on his way outside to paint the fantail. He put his hands on his hips and stared at me until I looked up and saw him. “Petty Officer Morgan, what is it you are doing down in that hole,” he said.

     “Beats the hell of me,” I said. “Trying to become a lifer I guess.”

     “Does anyone know you’re down there?”

     “I doubt it.”

     “Are you qualified to be working on that slimy crap?”

     “Get a move on seaman,” I laughed. “You’re holding up progress.”

     “Okay, okay, yes sir. I understand sir. I’m moving on sir.” Franco always made me feel better. In a way I had dodged a serious bullet for falling asleep on watch. I wasn’t getting kicked out, which deep down I didn’t really want. And nobody died.

    After a few months I got a new supervisor named Arthur Linley, who was one rank above me and who I’d work with the most closely for the remainder of my enlistment, besides a fireman, who was one rank below me. Linley replaced Aberson and was a welcome relief to his arrogant personality. On patrols Linley was always reading a book when he wasn’t on watch. He was the only crewman I ever saw reading anything that didn’t do with the Coast Guard. The first time I saw him lying casually in his rack he was reading This Side of Paradise. Not only was Linley a great sailor, a hard worker with integrity, but he had a multifaceted intelligence that extended well beyond the work place. “See that,” he said one night on patrol while we were standing on the deck taking in a calm evening, which was rare. “It’s always north in the sky and never changes,” he said. “If you don’t have a compass, look for the North Star. It could save your life.”

     We also got a new electrician named Rusty Pope, who also stood engineering watches and out ranked me by two pay grades. He usually exaggerated his status aboard the ship. One night when Franco and I ran into him at the bar he was telling a woman that he had a crew working for him, which technically he did. He mainly did the electrical jobs alone though, while Linley, the fireman, and I worked on the mechanical parts of the ship. What I liked about him most was that he always patted me on the shoulder when he knew I wasn’t feeling well. “How you doing buddy,” he often said. He never complained, he never raised his voice, and he never looked down upon anyone, I mean never.

     I started using a stronger drug to help me cope with my sea sickness. It came in a small round patch, which I wore behind my ear. This was one powerful drug, and was supposed to be related to the same drug in truth serum. The only trick was that it had to be applied a few hours before it was actually needed. It took that long for the drug to take effect, but when it did, ahoy, watch out. It doped me up so much that my nausea was suppressed. The drug made me feel lousy, but it was better than puking my guts out day and night.

     A few times we’d get called out in the middle of the night, and I’d quickly put on the patch before leaving Whale View. A few times I’d get to the ship and the patrol would be canceled for some reason. Sometimes it’d be a broken vessel that got its engine started again. Other times it was just the captain running a response drill. I’d rip off the patch and hope it hadn’t taken affect, but most of the time I’d spend the rest of the night doped up and stupid, and the next morning I’d feel like I had been hit over the head with a baseball bat. Too much of the drug could make me feel queasy and wobbly on land, like a reverse effect; like I belonged in the sea with the whales, which in their evolutionary history used to live on land, like people. Sometimes after a really long patrol when the seas had been tumultuous and I had been doped up the entire time I’d start to feel okay. Then when I finally got back on land at our pier, it felt like it was moving like I was back on board floating over massive waves again.

     We were getting called out in the middle of the night at least twice a week to tow in some broken-down boat on top of our regular work schedule. This went on for a couple of months and the crew was getting pretty irritable. I told Franco one day, “This job is taking years off my life.” Some of the boats we towed in weighed one hundred fifty tons. It was no small potatoes, that was for sure. If you screwed up, people could die. The deck crew had to hook up a three-inch-diameter line to the broken vessel. There was always a danger of the line parting and whipping back and killing someone, like a howitzer. One of those lines could slice your legs clean off.     

     About a year and a half after I was stationed on the ship we got a mayday call from a fishing vessel sinking fifty miles off the coast. We had done a lot of tows by now, too many to remember, but never this far out, and never in such violent seas. For a ship this small, the waves were real hummers. The strong winds made their crests steep and curled. We were instructed to keep our survival suits with us at all times in case we capsized. I was thinking hell, what have I gotten myself into now?

     We didn’t know what we we’d find when we got on scene. We only knew that a fishing trawler called the Tasha Mara was going down fast with three people on board. Crashing over thirty-foot waves, our ship could only do ten knots without sustaining damage and rendering the crew incapacitated. But we had to get there by the time the Tasha Mara sank and the men were forced into the frigid water.

     I was fortunate not to have the first watch in such conditions. I stayed prone to keep from getting sick as long as possible. Rusty had the watch. He was durable as hell when it came to dealing with rough weather. After his second engineering round he stumbled back to aft birthing and sat at the table under the red lights looking haggard. His body swayed with the roll of the ship as he sat there, silent and head drooping as the engines droned and vibrated. He looked like a shell of a man, like a ghost in the ruddy gloom. “You all right Russ,” Linley asked, his voice emanating from some invisible space. You couldn’t really see the people in the bunks because there was too much of a shadow. They were like corpses.

     “Oh yeah,” Rusty said like he always did. “I’ll be fine. Get some rest.” Then he got up and stumbled back out the hatch. That was the last thing I remembered until about an hour later when we were nearing the Tasha Mara. The officer of the watch ordered all hands up and to their emergency stations. Rusty came back, touched our shoulders and shook each of us a little. We often couldn’t hear the loud speaker since half of us wore ear plugs to dampen the noise of the engines.

     “Daniel, we’re almost there, time to get up,” he said. I moaned in horror, my senses twisted and foggy. The motion of the waves often put me in a coma, especially at night. I didn’t feel like getting out of my rack. I was only twenty-three, but I felt like a feeble, old man. I also felt drugged, depressed, and achy all over, with some heaviness pressing on my head that I thought might make my capillaries burst. I wanted to stay in my rack until the ship moored up to the pier, the engines shut off, and the rescue mission over, but they’d probably demote me if I didn’t get up. I made my way through the engine room to the mess deck while trying to maintain my balance. It was a huge effort to keep from falling down when the ship was jerking around.

     The engineers didn’t really have an emergency station. Our job was pretty much just to make sure the engines ran. I sat waiting and swaying on the mess deck with the cook, who was even sicker than me. His arms were sprawled out and his face plastered to the table where we ate, sticking there with his sweat. Each time the ship rolled, his arms slid across the table leaving greasy ooze marks. “You okay, Allan?” I asked, attempting to give a little sympathy, but in my horrid state, I was mostly pretending, going through the motions of being alive.

     “Oh,” he moaned. “Yeah, I’m okay.” He didn’t look okay.

     When we got to the scene the vessel had sunk, but we found two men floating free in the waves with strobe lights shining and their emergency beacons attached to their life jackets. Franco spotted them from his lookout corner in the pilot house. The bridge watch stander’s only job was to look out the window and watch for things, nothing else.

     We pulled alongside them and immediately they climbed aboard using a cargo net we deployed over the side. The third man wasn’t able to help himself. We found him a little farther on floating in a life ring. The XO ordered engineers not on watch to the aft deck to help with the rescue, which was Linley, the fireman, and me. He always gave us the shit jobs. The rest of the crew was too busy trying to control the ship.

     Linley grabbed the life ring with a boat hook and pulled the man to the side of the ship. This wasn’t easy considering the high waves and the rocking of the ship. We had to time the swells so we could grab the man and haul him aboard before he bashed into the side of the ship and crushed his skull. It was the only way. The captain wouldn’t allow anyone to go out in the small boat. It would have been suicide. Remarkably, Linley and I grabbed the man on the first try and pulled him over the railing quickly.

     We dragged the man over by the crane where we’d be safer from the waves sweeping across the deck. Then we tied ourselves off with some rope. The man’s face was cold and pale like a card board cut out. I was sure he was dead, but Linley started mouth to mouth. “Do chest compressions,” he ordered. I had never done them on a real person, just on a dummy in training. I would have let someone else do the job, but there wasn’t anyone else, just the fireman, but he was too busy tying us off and puking. I think I broke some of his ribs. I could hear them popping as I pressed down, which made me hesitate. “Keep going,” Linley shouted. After about three minutes we got a pulse. He started breathing for a short time. I couldn’t believe it. He seemed to have come back from the dead.

     We stopped CPR and monitored the man for a few seconds with the intent of carrying him into the ship to warm up. “Jesus, he’s alive,” I said while Linley had his head down listening to make sure the man was breathing. Then the man vomited on Linley’s face. He wiped once to get some of it off and then turned the man over on his side so he wouldn’t choke on his own puke.

     “I got to clear his airway,” Linley said, and then he stuck two fingers into the man’s mouth and scooped out most of it. I felt as queasy as a mother fucker and wanted to pass out, but Linley kept yelling at me. “Hold him damn it, hold him.” The fireman had tied himself off and was lying on the other side of the crane, useless like I usually was.

     “Get yourself inside,” I told him. Then I forced myself to help hold the man still while the waves pummeled our ship. His eyes were rolling back. I watched the fireman make it inside. We were about to take the man inside so Rusty and Dupray could work on him. They were our medics. Then he started seizing, his body wrenching up off the deck shaking. I tried to hold him down so he wouldn’t injure himself, but he was too strong. “He’s going to break his goddam back,” I said over the roar of the storm. Rain was blasting us and rolling down my cheeks in streams.

     “We have to hold him,” Linley said. Then the man went limp again and we continued mouth to mouth and chest compressions in the bitter, biting wind. We couldn’t get a pulse anymore, so we dragged the man into the upper hallway out of the weather and Rusty came up and shocked him with paddles. He couldn’t revive him either, even after several attempts. The fireman took over the watch so Rusty could keep working on him, but after an hour it was obvious the man was dead. The captain came down from the bridge.

     “That’s it Captain,” Rusty said. “He’s gone.” The captain looked a little disturbed, but he kept his composure.

     “All right then. Let’s pronounce him dead,” the captain said and then went back up to the bridge while Rusty noted the time.

     I had only seen one dead body before and worried about my own precarious mortality. Who knew what was lurking down the road? “What do we do?” I asked.

     “We got to put him in a body bag,” Linley said.

     “Really, he’s dead?” I asked.

     “Yeah, dead,” Linley said. I felt like throwing up.

     Over the roar of the engines and the sea, we had to shout if we wanted to say anything, but mostly we were speechless.

     I looked at the dead man’s face, etched with a permanent grimace of pain. The body was ghostly white and stiff, with glossy eyes, and covered by a long, black beard.

     “I got to throw up,” I said.

     “Okay, I’ll wait,” Linley said as Rusty turned to go resume his watch from the fireman, who could barely function now. Then I stuck my head outside and puked over the side of the boat, and a swell came and made me sway. I grabbed the rail to steady myself. “Let’s stuff him inside and get this done.” We slid the bag around the man and zipped it up. The last thing I saw of him was his hollow eyes staring back at me. Days later, it would haunt me in my dreams at night.

     We arrived back at our pier just as the sun was coming up, its orange glow radiating over the flatter water of the harbor. We moored up and stored gear before leaving. I was sitting on the dock, my head throbbing, trying to adjust to the steadiness of land before heading home. Funny, it didn’t feel right. I sat as most the crew disembarked. Then Franco came by and sat down next to me on the curb. I was exhausted as hell. He had this shitty grin on his face, like nothing could get him down. Not even the backward equilibrium you felt while you were trying to switch back over to land. “You ready to go kick it live,” he said.

     “What? Now?”

     “Yeah now. This is life take one boy. You got to live the life you got. You saw what could happen.” I rubbed my aching forehand pondering that. Then I stood up and looked at the waves breaking over the north jetty across the harbor, a hint of the oceanic fury that lay beyond. Despite our troubles and pain, hell, we had to live man, live. That was Gary Franco’s motto, and that was probably the most important lesson I learned in four years.

     “Okay,” I said. “Let’s go.”