It was Halloween Day 2013 when I reported to my ship. We were due to set sail the next day. I was supposed to get on board at 2pm the shore agent told me. If you have never been in Oakland Harbor, it’s a fairly confusing place. The idea that I am going to show up at some locked gate and the people will know enough to just let me in and onto a ship, it’s kind of daunting. I told my cab to wait, especially since I had no cell phone, for the assumed rejection, which would take me back to my hotel begging for internet access. Ever had a cab in Oakland?.. it’s a trip, something out of Sanford and Sons, old LTD’s with the doors falling off, and those kinds of browns and greys that no-one seems to paint cars anymore, but that would be a story in it’s self. When I finally got on board, it became apparent that the person who seemed to be “the one who dealt with the passenger” was the first officer, whom we’ll call Mikey. but I had to get to him. All I knew was that I was meeting this ship called Libra. I had two backpacks and some bags of food and gifts. I hoped to hell they knew better than I did what I was supposed to do. In this post Sept 11 America, the security was a bit daunting, a bit Orwellian. I pushed a button outside of a metal turnstile with like 10 times as man bars as I have ever seen before. The whole place looked like the electronics bunker on a firebase in Afghanistan. It was my assigned gate. the Parking Lot was surrounded by what looked like stolen road construction temporary dividers, and there were beat up cars parked willy nilly like a junk yard. Longshoremen drifted in and out, helmets on and a kind of stoned detachment on their faces. I braced myself for incompetence, but they seemed to know who I was, expect me as a matter of fact. It felt like a miracle. No one searched me, they just buzzed me through, and I dropped a 20 on the cabby, the meter having spun up 3 more bucks while I waited. I was told to get into a van.. you see, no one walks through here. it’s a container port.. I would eventually have perspective on these places from 150 feet up on the bridge, stopping at 4 more in my next month, but for now it was an obstacle course out of a video game, but an easy going brother from Oak-town driving the van gave me some crap for not seeing women for 3 weeks in an easy banter that I knew I would miss leaving America, and dropped me off next to one of those moving cranes, literally the line of cranes you can see from the east side of the San Francisco Bay Bridge that inspired George Lucas to design the At At’s (ouch.. turns out that is a myth http://www.slashfilm.com/did-oaklands-cranes-inspire-the-at-at-walkers-the-answer-finally-revealed/ ). There seemed to be movement everywhere.. and the Ship was, well, Huuuge.. it towered over me.. the guy gave me one tip when he dropped me off.. don’t go into land. don’t cross that white line. That night I would break that rule to pace the length of the ship I was about to ride, twice, before I had the guts to get on it for the last time, but he told me in such a chill way I heeded, gazed around me a bit, and looked waaay up the gangplank (maybe 5 stories up) and saw two white balaclavad faces staring down at me, somewhat impassively, but intimidatingly enough if you have ever seen third world soldiers. They both looked Asian, and they both looked like the meant me no harm, but could be all business. They just watched me. I waved, they watched me. I grabbed my lightest backpack, wondering if I could make it up without pausing for air and hit the steps. They were rounded so they would work at any angle. I dug in and hit the top, out of breath, maybe a minute later, with thankfully no stops. The faces, attached to blue work overalls, with white helmets, still stared at me impassively, like something out of Alice in Wonderland. I realized they weren’t armed but I could still feel that kind of binary authority that makes white guys talk fast in third world countries to try to make friends with a kind of decisively small set of options in what seems like a situation with the shoe on the other foot. “I am the passenger” I said.. they stared at me some more, and then the older one, who looked like a southeast asian Sergeant Major, still wearing a white balaclava mind you, turned to the other younger slighter one, and said something in a language I soon learned was Filipean Tagalug. He disappeared into a door. the older one had me sign a book, and he then disappeared down the gangplank for my things, thinking it best I not carry a big pack up it, while I scrambled after him for what was left. There was never any of the deference you might find checking into a hotel. They were crew. This was their boat. He grabbed my pack as a safety measure, and I followed him back up with my groceries I felt like I was dealing with Ghurkas.
They walked me in through a bulkhead door and a regular door to a hallway. Outside the boat was slamming and moving as containers were dropped on board by the huge cranes, but finally the reassurance I was expecting. I entered a big office and meeting room, and there was a giant of a man in a blue uniform with sweater, some stripes on his shoulder. Later on he would usually be in day to day clothes as with most of the officers when they were in the super structure, but we were in port, and he was dealing with bureaucrats all day, and that meant uniform. This was Mikey, the first officer, officially the number two guy, although he shared that level with the Engineering officer, and he spoke english with an accent but without a major fault. He was maybe 6’5″, and a bit chubby, although he more than once assured me that it wasn’t all fat, and it was possible to believe him. He wasn’t only huge, he had been a muscle head, but now had a bit of the chub of a man in his late 30’s who worked and had a family and couldn’t keep up with the rigors of vanity when he had what he wanted.. well almost. he wanted to be a captain, but short of that: wife Check kids Check good job by Romanian Standards check a bit of authority… ditto.. check. I was a bit too bewildered to take too much in.. I was on this colossal machine, almost too bit to be believed, and this guy was being as cool to me as he knew how to be, with a bit of ego, but could tell he was smart enough to have an ego, and he was explaining some things to me while trying to be authoritative while gauging me for potential friendship as he figured out I was actually a year older than him while he acted like second in commands always do.. busy, harried, annoyed, but strangely helpful.
There are jokes in the army about Majors. it’s the rank with no authority.. a year ago you were a captain and you had 200 hungry fighting men working for you, and if you can wait 6 or so years, you will be a lieutenant colonel, and then you might have 800 hungry fighting men below you, but majors are always kind of sanguine, always kind of annoyed, and they are always number 2. This guy is the XO, basically a Major. There is another study about monkeys that said that the monkeys that take to rape are always the ones that are never given authority in the pack.. they are always defeated but never killed by the alpha monkey, and they get frustrated and eventually, well, take matters into their own hands… Mikey made it clear to me in our first conversation that he was already qualified to be a captain, there were just no boats ready yet.. it was the kind of aside the majors say.. the kind of statement that says “I know you think I am the guy who just brings the captain coffee but I seriously am a big deal around here.” which only makes you want to ask them to bring you coffee, but you don’t, because in some funny way they are asking you for sympathy, and letting you know that they see you as kind of a big deal (“if you can afford to get on this ship, you must be someone.. it ain’t expensive but it ain’t a Priceline trip to Paris with a Lets Go book under your arm”) and so are they since they run this monstrosity and are a bit worldly, so it’s mutual.
I am giving Mikey shit, but a secret I held onto the whole trip was that I liked the guy.. he was alright by me.. he tried hard but had to hold onto his dignity, which when he was 25 he would have muscled you into respecting, but now that he was older and actually kind of getting to where he might really become a big deal, although the kind of big deal who knows he should be a big deal, he knew he had to wait for it when he was used to just getting it and he knew it was maturity, but Mikey wanted to just pound it into you, but most guys like that are meat heads, and Mikey, after some 16 or 20 years at sea with his thoughts, was no fool. The reason I kept it a secret, other than because I try to play the cagey east coast american prick, is that I could tell that Mikey was my unofficial minder, and he didn’t want me kissing his ass any more than I wanted to condone anyone having any power over me whatsoever in the middle of the damn pacific ocean. I had lived through 8 years of George Bush’s America, and the last thing I wanted was anyone telling me what to do for my own good anymore. He got that just by looking at me, seemed to respect it instantly, and to be the kind of guy who also hated rules, but there were rules, a very short list.
“Mr. Thomas, there are very few rules. You will never go away from the super structure without closed toed shoes and a helmet, and you will always call in and out to the bridge when you do so they know where you are going. If you are just wandering, no problem, tell them that, but try to tell them something.. when you get back, call them again and tell them you are back. There is officially no drinking on board, and you aren’t supposed to bring more than two bottles. When you want to see the Engine Room, I will bring you down there the first time since it is a bit confusing. we can do that any time” That appeared to be it. Not bad.. “There will be a safely briefing later.” That ended up being kind of fun, with me picked to slide into the crazy Gumby looking cold water survival suit in front of 6 germans.. He took me to my room, which proved massive. He was friendly, even managed a smile, welcomed me aboard, and told me one thing: go and come as you please, the gate will expect you, and they will call you a van whenever you want it.. be back before we pull the gang plank up at 8am.. I kind of blinked.. that was it.. I am almost free of CONUS, and it’s Halloween and I can go hang with a buddy in Berkeley and buy a bunch more random crap to stay busy before I leave. I just have to get back here by 8am.. I already feel like a sailor, like I am in some forbidden mysterious new world, and I am already getting shore leave.
The events of that night I might have already detailed in this blog, and if I haven’t, maybe I will, but it was a fun night, with some surprises, and a beautiful blonde California girl gave me a ride back to the ship which was a heck of a way to go, dropping me at yet another security gate where despite it being 2am and Laotians drag racing 100 yards away, they knew who I was, and got me back onto the ship. I passed out to wake up the next day with my fate sealed. The Gang Plank was up and we were slowly pushing off of shore. I ran up to the bridge to watch the show as they had specified, and it was a neat one. The boat was so big that the pilot had brought along two assistants with a gps system just to get us out of the channel by the port. There were also two coast guard guys to watch them, since no one really knew how this boat could make the turn in a turning basin they had just specifically widened for us, between the port and the Old Alameda Naval Air Station, famous for Mythbusters experiments I had explored once by car buy now found myself towering over from a perspective I had never even imagined. supposedly we had 10m of fudge on each side. 20 meters might seem like a lot but remember, we were 362 meters long. As I looked down, Tug boats looked like toys, and we seemed huge compared to even Treasure Island and Downtown San Fran. I kept an eye out for a buddy that I thought might come out in his sailboat to wave me off, but he ended up sleeping late and having to go directly to work, so no dice, but as we inched under the SF Bay Bridge, I had my second Mikey encounter.
It was a beautiful day, cloudless and maybe a bit hazy, but perfect as a big city day can be. I had discovered the flybridge.. yup.. I can go anywhere.. this is awesome.. as long as I don’t get in the way. As we approached the bridge, I had been told it would be close.. that if we had miscalculated the tide, we might run into the side of the deck of the high span between SF and Treasure Island, a stretch I had recently ridden on the back of a friend’s scooter, just a few years earlier on my motorcycle, a similarly terrifying experience since it’s just grate and 180 ft down to the cold waters below. Why everyone decided to end it on the Golden Gate I am not sure.. it seemed like this would do the job, but the traffic moved faster.. it was just a bit less, sacred..
Anyhow, so as we approached the bridge, the big bridge, I was on the fly bridge, the one on the boat that sticks out on either side of the indoor bridge, so you can look directly down to the water.. it’s the widest part of the boat by like 2 ft on each side, and exposed to the elements like a big balcony, and I could tell Mikey was keeping an eye on me the way a father watches a 10 year old.. it’s not a close watch, but it’s a put those damn scissors down I caught that kind of watch. The whole crew was busy but the captain had the pilot telling him what to do so Mikey had just me to watch.. and he acted busy and had binoculars in his hand, but I could kind of feel it.. like a brother who mom told to watch another brother. I felt like Corey and Corey in Goonies, and he was Josh Brolin, seeing what I would do. As we got closer to the Bay Bridge,however, there was this excitement, and I knew they had brought the three masts down just to make sure we cleared it and I got this rush, like holy crap, you could almost touch the bridge from underneath. There is one more staircase to the roof of the bridge, and it goes to something called “The Monkey Park”. I would learn that name in a second.. for now, I saw a way to go higher, just 10 ft higher, and that seemed to make the thrill of gliding right under that bridge I had just scootered over clutching my buddy while we both shivered after he rode to oakland for while being filmed from a car I was in with a typewriter strapped to his 200cc just 4 days earlier all the more fascinating. I bolted for the stairs, but Mikey caught me.. “Mr. Thomas.. no.. no going up there.. that’s the monkey park.. the radars.. they can.. shorten your life considerably”.. I didn’t say anything.. backed off.. watched the Bay Bridge go by.. wow.. literally 30 ft over my head if that, but in the back of my head.. yup.. he’s my minder…
He was obviously right..radio waves wasn’t the only issue with the monkey park.. if we weren’t under way with enough speed, the emissions from the stack, which ended at the same height, could give you carbon monoxide poisoning in seconds.. There was enough cylinders cranking below me to squeeze the volume of a city bus into burning crude bunker oil with almost every revolution of the propellor. People had died just doing maintenance near them I would later find out. Sometimes a down gust would catch me coming up the outside staircases and I would have to pause to just exhale the heavy oil stench.. it wasn’t like diesel, sulfuric.. it was like a moldy asphalt smell.. like a burning road. But Even though Mikey was right, I still kind of gave him my best white boy in the prison yard stare. Like alright dude.. what’s it gunna be.. you gunna bug me the whole trip? I tried to look just a bit threatening, and a bit wounded.. but he is 6’5″ like I said.. he turned away like it hadn’t happened, but he wasn’t insulting either..
I kind of hoped he and I would shoot the shit and become buddies.. we were the same age, both of us had seen a lot for our age, and his English was really good, and he had a philosophical side. It happened a few times.. he ruled that first office, the huge one, on the main deck.. always checking bilges and refrigeration systems on the ships big interactive dashboard system, sending email messages to headquarters in Marseilles.. If others were around, I got advice, authority, bragging, kind of the big brother treatment.. “Ah Mr. Thomas, you have no idea how important all this is, my job, this ship, this bilge. i can save thousands of dollars and even days just by setting it right, but no one appreciates me..” but if we were alone, the chiller Mikey came out. He loved movies, and that meant american movies, and he finally just divulged to me that he kind of loved american culture. When I am home, I hardly identify as an American anymore.. not after the Bush years. It just seems in bad taste unprompted, a bit too Toby Keith instead of Kris Kristofferson. The way Europeans look askance at patriotism, I have begun to, but when I travel, I can get into United 93 let’s go mode.. you know it… with or against us.. if you have ever had a foreign official treat you like shit just because you are an American, you become immensely patriotic. it’s happened to me more than once.. oh, huh.. sorry american, yours was the last passport I processed.. it has nothing to do with my government using your country as a straw man while they rob their people blind.. have a nice day. When Americans travel, they divide people into American Haters, Neutral, and American Likers. Mikey admitted to me that he was obsessed with a TV show called I think The Black Donneleys and that he was working through one of the middle seasons as we sailed. He loved the show and what it displayed about American culture and just the honesty of it. He was kind of telling me he knows america well because he watched this show, that he get’s us. He thought it took place in boston. My brain jumped onto this reflexive issue I have. Now I am 50% Irish American from two cities, Chicago and New York, where my ancestors arrived 115 years ago on both sides. Both my Mother and Father were exactly half Irish. I have marched in the St Paddy’s day parade with my dad’s home county, my grandfather allegedly kept a keg in the basement through prohibition, and my father always had at least a keg’s equivalent in cases in the bottom of our pantry ( I used to crawl on top of them to steal cookies), my great uncle was a Chicago cop and got offered a scholarship to play for Knute Rockene at Notre Dame in the 20’s but had to take a pass because he had like 9 brothers and sisters to support, I have spent 3 weeks as a reporter in Belfast, been inside the headquarters of Sinn Fein on Andersontown Road which like 10 people on earth can claim, have met Teddy Kennedy, seen Chappaquiddick and Hyannis, have even had a meeting with Billy Bulger (yup, a full on sit down meeting), I am named after two apostles, knew a member of the Westies by the time I was 15, and my pubic hair is red, and even though I don’t sound like Matt Damon in Goodwill hunting when I interact with normal Americans that don’t think freckles are a sign of racial superiority, I hate that I am always asked to prove my Irishness amongst other Irish Americans: “Well officially there were 7 alcoholics in my family, but if you count our setter, there are 8!”. If I started drinking right now, I would never stop without handcuffs.. there’s your answer. and I might kick your ass in the process. I assumed the show was about Boston Irish (it turns out it’s about New Yorkers, Hell’s Kitchen, like Sleepers and State of Grace), which always get’s under my skin because A. I’m a Yankees fan and when you are a Yankees fan, Boston Irish are provincial misfits.. like rednecks without black people to bully (unless you call resisting school busing under Brown V Board of Ed and the Civil Rights act bullying). and B. I am sick of Boston Irish getting all the attention as the true Irish.. OK, so the music is good.. I’m a sailor and I lost my leg… but seriously, there are just as many white catholic hooligans in Cleveland, they just don’t pretend that robbing liqueur stores qualifies them for the PIRA.
All this flashed through my head in an instant, like man, the damn irish thing.
But here I find myself in the good situation I guess of wondering whether I have to defend my Irish Cred to this Romanian Sailor in the mid Pacific who for some strange reason can speak with intelligent authority about American Subcultures, but I get to cross his intentions off the list.. he may be my ball buster, but he’s an America Lover ( if we had had internet, I might have been able to Google the show and realize it was about New York and I wouldn’t have even been butt hurt, but other than sending emails, they said actual internet surfing on the high seas was 6 months away, and I was glad to be on before it)… I speculate now that he was a teenager when they kicked out and killed Cauceuscu and the wall fell. I can understand if he has some blue jeans appreciation, but this was like discovering he was a bigger Boss fan than me. But if Hajjis decided to storm the boat to roast some American Corrupter, I knew who the Seargant Al Powell was to my Detective John McLean.. it was my home boy Mikey. Like I said, the ‘let’s roll’ instincts, they kick in.. I nodded, and let my Irish furor settle, my Anti Boston hooliganism.. maybe I suppressed it, and now you have to read it, but he was being kind, trying to let me know that “He get’s where I am coming from.” and it made sense to take it at face value.
So I knew I had an ally in Mikey, but I also kept my distance.. I knew at some point, he would drop the boom on me for something.. It happened in our first stop in China, Fuqin. By the time we had crossed the Big Puddle I had gotten used to boat life. I had become adept and climbing ladders, moving about the ship, and exploring it’s nether reaches. Mikey even taught me about the bilge and the rest of the doodads on the computer, in addition to my countless bridge tutorials and boson’s walk arounds etc. so I was almost starting to feel like I could said the dang thing. There had been one day where the seas were so ferocious (30 ft waves and spray shooting over 100 feet up) that they banned me from deck which I again acted butt hurt about like a teenage girl, taking it out on the new weight system, but I had had no other tangles.. When we went to Fuqin, I was the only one to go ashore. I brought back two cases of beer for the crew and some Chinese candies, after an awkwardly funny day in town which I detailed in an earlier post (Fuqin’ A). I felt like a real victor having gone ashore, like Marco damn Polo since it was such an obscure part of china, and when I came back on and tucked the beer away in the crew lounge, I went back on deck to search for the Germans on the aft deck to gloat (I think this is when it happened.. it could have been in the misery called Xiamen, but I think it was in Fuqin). They were working hard but were always up for a bit of my sarcasm which I would tailor to their north sea chagrined dry palate . I was feeling cocky, just feeling good, so I went back the way I was.. light jacket for the late fall chill of northern China, flip flops and, whoops, no Helmet. So not a big deal right.. after 2 or more weeks, I should be able to avoid all the things that might hit my head, even in the tight staircases that lead down to the aft deck, but what I am not mentioning is that we were unloading and loading.. those huge cranes were going back and forth overhead.. now again perceptively scary, but not really since if things are falling off those cranes, you got bigger things to worry about, but then there were the Longshoremen. OK, so those containers piled 6 high.. they can actually be piled 15 high, you just don’t see the bottom 10 under the deck, but then there are these metal clamps that they use to hold all but the top few together. When the ship docks.. it isn’t just crane operators and truck drivers making it all happen. about 20 or 30 laborers come on board to clamp it all together, and whether they are from Oakland, Fuqin or Hong Kong, they are usually from the wrong side of the tracks, and I started to understand why when I came up the gangplank that the two Fillipeanos, who would later become friends, looked like Burmese soldiers with their safeties off. These guys are known to crawl all around the ship trying to steal stuff. In addition, if the bosun doesn’t supervise them, they toss the clamps onto the deck with a bounce from 30 feet up, and over time it makes the steel on deck start to rust and decay, so that once a year the guys have to sand and repaint the walkways where these 5 pound clamps and poles are always bouncing bouncing bouncing.
So I had walked right under all this activity, containers whizzing over my head, with no helmet and no closed toed shoes.. I had, however, remembered to call in I think. I go down, shoot the breeze, maybe help drag around a few 3 inch thick wires, and brag about Chinese food, the cool temple the town had forgotten about but I found, and seeing women for the first time since we left Russia. When I get back, someone summons me to the big office. I had forgotten the CCTV, pointing in both directions down the circumferential walkway from the superstructure, and there is me day tripping through all this chaos. He happened to be watching.. like the father of a 10-year-old, and yup, busted.. He was stern albeit respectful.. maybe a little raised voice in that Eastern European way that isn’t really anger so much as concerned frustration.. in the context of his culture, it isn’t like being yelled at, it’s more like a loving smack on the back of the head… There were never any threats or punishments, but maybe in the back of his head, it never occurred to me until now, there was some risk averse corporate dictate that said I was to be left ashore with a ham sandwich and a note explaining if I did something like that more than once.. given some of the things I did do, it seemed unimportant, but a bit flagrant, but Mikey did treat it in a way that never made me resent him any more than I might resent any authority with the regularity that I do, but it was one of those things that got in the way of me and him just being dude and dude.
I did get some color from him. His family in Constanta. the regular jokes about married life. His dream to own a restaurant on the beach, if he didn’t already have a stake in one. But we did keep it light in case the old minder/mentee thing came up again. I went about my rounds.. read a book, watch a movie, go for a walk, say hi to folks, learn something new about the ship, take a nap, eat, lift weights and repeat. One funny thing I could have don with Mikey would have been to fill up the pool.. I alone had discretion over the pool. it was the size of a postage stamp, on the same floor as the gym, kind of a utility floor towards the bottom filled with closets, food stores, and emergency stuff. They told me a few times that I could fill it at any time, but it would be seawater, and they do it when they are in the tropics, but up here.. Eh as a Romanian might do as his shrugs his shoulders and puts on a mock frown, it’s cold. I thought about filling it and just floating in a gumby suit as a kind of weird meditation and survival training. Me in my postage stamp pool, 10×10 insulated from the world half way across the pacific. floating in a neoprene suit.. that’s a dissimulation chamber if I ever could dream of one. I finally got mike to admit they might be able to run it through some pipes near the engine and warm it,but it never got past that.. it was my major prerogative as a passenger for a bit of fun, but when we got to China, with stops every other day, life became kind of exciting again, watching the fishing boats, sometimes 50 at a time, bob by.
At our next port, Xiamen, I got butt hurt.. the Ship agents got jerked around by the Government, maybe looking for bit of Baksheesh, and I stood there ready to go ashore for what turned into hours. The crew told me about two hours in that this part of China has no sense of humor, that I should wait until southern China where there is commerce and they like westerners, not try to get off here. I was a bit insistent, it became a thing of pride for me, that American sense of rights that had long about been bred out of surviving Romanians, and they finally called me to tell me I could disembark at something close to 11pm.. I went downstairs out of curiosity, but I was livid.. There was this town of 10 million, and I had never even heard of it before. A buddy of mine years ago had once made the comment to me that there are 100 towns in china with a population of more than a million that you have never even heard of before, and here was one of them, and we had paraded past it as we docked, and the captain had talked about how most of the bridges in town had appeared in literally the last few years, all these works.. the town was just exploding. I wanted to see it, but now it was 11pm, and we sailed at 8am.. we had arrived hours earlier.. where they kidding? that kind of indifference seemed so intolerable to me.. so superior and unreasonable. When I got downstairs, the young ship agent put a piece of paper in front of me. It was one I had seen before, and I had been told I didn’t have to fill it out again in our last port, that I was techincally in china and didn’t have to do any more but come and go as I pelased until I checked out before going to Hong Kong. I told him this. He said the customs agents insisted. I told averted my gaze and just walked out, stormed towards the elevator, just having had enough.. he chased me back to the elevator, and said”You are american, I want to go to America!” Almost pleading to me.. I am sure I was the first American he might have ever met..”My country is horrible.. they do this to us, run us around and abuse us..My brother goes to Harvard.. I want to go to!” I stopped.. the elevator had arrived.. I am deciding what to do.. this didn’t seem the time for a Crimson moment.. Ah Harvard.. tut tut.. my chum Dagwood is in the class of ought 6! I didn’t know what to say to him.. I wanted to look at him and say “grow some balls. if you hate it, change it!” but I am not sure I said anything.. I went up and went to bed, and when I woke up, we were halfway out of Xiamen harbor..with relief.
I kind of blamed Mikey for this a bit, for not going to bat for me.. The guys told me earlier that day that if you want to go on one of these ehips, don’t go on to see the land.. do a cruise ship.. do this to see the sea.. they said this was more common than I realize, and it always pissed off the western passengers. I had just watched Mr. Roberts in my room, and as comical as it was, Mikey became the Captain played so famously by James Cagney. it’s absurd because Mikey as first officer likely had 300 things to do that day as we ported, least of which was to convince the chinese not to ignore my request to come ashore, and he likely had gone to bat for me, but this port seemed to have a reputation for this kind of stupidity. The whole movie hinges around Cagney’s character denying his ship shore leave for a whole year, so that when they do finally get ashore, they go so nuts that it causes riots in that kind of good natured 40’s broadway way. That would come a few nights later in Chiwan, a night worth waiting for, but my pent up frustration led to me doing a silent protest of sorts. I showed up at Mikey’s room the next day and handed him my watched Copy of Mr. Roberts from the Barnes and Nobles on Santa Monica’s third street promenade (two blocks from where they took down Whitey Bulger, I might add). I told him it was a good movie, gave it to him, and kind of walked off. I wonder if he ever even got to it, or if for me he had becomes Cagney, if only comically, but he took it and I got some funny satisfaction, some weir phyrric victory in my now quite alone american head.
After our crazy night in Chiwan, to be detailed later, we all woke up to watch the slow journey down the pearl river just a few miles to Hong Kong harbor. There was a festive mood. Even if you don’t know about the history of the Pearl River, the opium wars, and the opening of China not once but twice, the second time just where we had been by Deng after the death of Mao, it was still triumphant to come into Hong Kong which we had passed just two days before. We passed under more bridges and past the airport, and the men were excited, knowing that Hong Kong was an inviting place. Mikey was on the fly bridge, same as me, taking it all in, and he was smiling and laughing with the rest of us. The germans were finally taking time off, their project done, and were up on the bridge taking photos, and we had an extra captain and Crew Chief who had joined us from france to do some training with the bridge crew on Harbor Operations. There was this buzz on board, up on the bridge, like we were in friendly waters and we felt like we were all on a walk in the park together. It was the first time I could tell that Mikey’s hawk eyes weren’t watching me. I was no longer new. That day the Germans and I went in and explored Kowloon after some Customs formalities we had to attend to independently on Hong Kong Island. by the time I got back to the boat, the night I was supposed to disembark, it was close to 9pm. Mikey saw me struggling to pack and let me off the hook: “Mr. Thomas, you don’t have to leave.. you can keep the room another night.. we don’t care, we are happy to still have you, as long as you make it off the ship by the time we push off at 8, it’s no worries..even if you don’t” The ship was going to Shenzen, then back to Long Beach. Shenzen was another half day deal, so if I overslept, I could have just about taken a subway back to Hong Kong. I could tell he meant it, but at that time I gain acceptance, that’s always the time I end up leaving. I was dreaming of the bath I wanted to take at the Intercontinental, while I watched the ships go by in the Harbor. Even though what he was saying made total sense, I wanted to get in and take that bath, be on land, be anonymous again and cruise the places where I had met Anna Koren, fallen in love with the old wooden Harbor Ferries, and seen the tallest man in the world. Little did I know how much 23 million mainland Chinese visitors a day had changed the Hotel Scene in Hong Kong since my last visit in 2009, and that I would end up at the Chunking Mansions that night (if you know anything about Honk Kong, you know what a drop this is!) with every good hotel booked solid or twice the price it had been when I was last in Hong Kong. But at that moment is made sense to slip off before the morning rush, with no traffic between me and my assumed bed.. with no stress. I could picture a nice goodbye on a sunny deck, as they went one way and I went the other, but goodbyes are awkward. I passed through the mess halls, dropping exotic foods I had saved since SF and Fuqin in the crew fridge and saying good bye to all in passing. I think when I got to the door I tried to give Mikey a bit of a hug, or maybe it was just a handshake.. he was huge, no doubt about it, but kind of a sly teenage character in reality, and walked my way down the gangplank and to a cab at the gate, the formalities of the other ports, even in America, dropped in the everything goes world of Hong Kong commerce.
He is likely a captain by now, and I bet a good one. he’s plenty smart, and his physical stature makes him the kind of guy who will naturally get acceptance despite his youth. Being in charge has likely let him relax a bit with his role and enjoy the scenery and I hope he keeps his appreciation of the good old US and A..I bet he still watches his movies and sagas, and keeps up, like so many Yuppies in America and I guess worldwide, with the series he watches. Underneath I could tell the guy might have been just as shaped by the humor or Friends or How I Met Your Mother as any other middle class American guy, and he would have been a football player had he grown up in the states, and retained that big guy who is nice to little guys as long as you don’t cross me attitude, but as much as I should dread that globalization, dream of him being something exotic and unfathomable, it was kind of nice, even if we never smoked cigars and really settled in, knowing that Mikey was on board, and might have my back if it came to it, like some mick cousin from Hells Kitchen. I hope he get’s that restaurant, and if I even stop into Constanta, I vow to go in search of it, maybe look him up. Sounds like a good life to me.. On the sea, then by the sea.. Good on ya Mikey.