The Voyage of the Rose City

by John Moynihan

  And that was that. You couldn’t change his mind, but you couldn’t help liking him. His sea stories aside—of which he had by far the most and the best—you could listen to him for hours as he sang his ribald limericks and songs. It was one of the ways he kept the crew in a good mood, and their minds off the work and their homesickness.

  His finest song:

  For forty days and forty nights

  They sailed the broad Atlantic.

  And on the shore they spied some whores

  And went into a panic.

  They partied hearty with those girls

  On that island off the map,

  But when the weeks went by, and they all set sail,

  They wound up with the clap.

  Of pain and misery each sailor he did talk,

  And wanted nothin’ but the pain

  To leave ’is ’urting cock.…

  They were psychological chanties that kept the rhythm going.

  Saturday the twelfth the seas had calmed down enough that we could go back out on deck. It was as if Mother Nature had given us a two-day reprieve so we could work overtime at the premium rate. A month had gone by, and in theory the trip was a third over.

  The air was crystal, and the sun shone down warmly through the still chilly day. It was nice to get outside after four days inside. The Bosun put us to work cleaning up the rusted steam pipes with fish oil and scrapers. I worked the starboard side, Billy and Bud the port. That morning on watch the Chief had asked me to note the bearing of a ship that was passing us. When Billy came up to relieve me I told him that there was a ship bearing 120 degrees.

  He looked at me and, scowling, said, “I don’t give a fuck what the ship’s bearing. What the fuck? That’s not my job.”

  The crew was not responsible for navigation, so he used this as an excuse for another opportunity to give me more hell. Sure enough, as we fish-oiled he told Bud the story, and they both laughed.

  After an hour a jet plane buzzed the ship.

  “Hey, Monahan, what’s it bearing?” Billy yelled.

  I kept looking down but mumbled, “He’s bearing his ass.” Pretty pathetic, but it was the only thing I could think of at the time.

  Billy turned to Bud. “What did he say?”

  “He said, ‘He’s bearing his ass.’ ”

  “Right, Monahan. You’ve got a long row to hoe. Yeah, a long row to hoe.”

  That became his motto, and he repeated it to me at least twice a day for the next three weeks.

  In the same afternoon, we passed our first South Seas islands: Mauritius and Réunion. They were picture-perfect manifestations of the archetypal tropical paradises. Mauritius, the first one on our route, was a serene vision of lush forests covering the rolling hills, basking in a wash of soft rain clouds that obscured its uppermost peaks. I couldn’t help idealizing it—it was too perfect. An island in the sun true to my dreams.

  Watch the next morning was bizarre. On lookout I noticed an increase in the number of shooting stars. They aren’t uncommon at sea, where the absence of lights and pollution brings out constellations you never knew were there. In the Southern Hemisphere it was even more spectacular, as the Southern Cross leads a host of celestial bodies not found in the heavens of the north. But that night there was a veritable shower of shooting stars. Then from out of the night a huge fiery meteorite exploded into view and crashed into the sea with a roar. There was an omen.

  Later, when I took the wheel, the Old Man came up onto the bridge. He did this occasionally, sending the Chief into a nervous panic. I minded my own business, staring off vacantly, pretending not to listen to their conversation. Then the Old Man turned his attention to me.

  “So how’s the hippie business doing? You were born ten years behind your time.”

  I looked at him. What in the hell did he mean by that? He kept on with his monologue.

  “They’ll take all the fun out of pot when they legalize it,” he said, and then made other references to San Francisco and Flower Power.

  What was going on?

  I was eventually relieved and went down to the lounge with an uneasy feeling. Even so, I couldn’t help being amused by the Old Man’s corny lines.

  In the lounge there was only Miguel. Ned and Pete were in the kitchen, silently preparing breakfast. Miguel sat up in his chair and gave me a concerned look.

  In a confidential tone he spoke to me.

  “You know that big fat motherfucker Frank?” Frank was the other QMED, whom no one seemed to notice but his fellow old-timers. “The other day he come in here and see your coat on the hook there, and he grab it and throw it on the ground. If I knew you better I’d tell him to pick up the motherfucking coat or pow! Anyway, I thought you should know.”

  My stomach contracted at the news. Here we go again—new cast, same old program. Twenty days to go, twenty days to go …

  Taking on seas once again. I slept in this morning, woke at noon and got usual shit from Billy, then worked in the passageway. Fixed the fluorescent lights in my room and restarted Gor. Ah, yes …

  —7/14/80

  Each day, I suppose, will get better, but for now I feel that real fear—claustrophobic helplessness. The paranoia that threatens to seize me is for now unconsummated (may it always be so), as no real harm has been done to me yet. Verbal abuse reigns for now. I am alone and entrapped with no friends and many enemies. Today Billy on watch came over to the window and flipped me the finger and then began, but was unable to finish, what startled me as a VERY SERIOUS reprimand for too much, or rather prolonged, clowning. “You can’t do that on a ship,” etc., etc. It’s a DEADLY serious business, and I fear that I continue to step on people’s toes. Granted, a lot of the shit I get, especially from Billy, is because I’m green, but more particularly because they know I won’t, and can’t, talk/act back. The trouble is that in responding I all too often hit many wrong chords so that the situation worsens. Catch-22—damned if I do, and damned if I don’t. I’ve got to find a real neutral ground. They go out of their way to remind me I am not like them … I am now dangerously alienated. I’ll have to assume that when Joe searched my room it made me all the more open for their target practice. Cabin fever.

  —7/15/80

  I was not a happy man.

  CHAPTER 9

  WITH THE EXCEPTION OF Saturday and Sunday we had been forced by the stormy seas to remain inside the house for a week and a half. The Chief, realizing we were losing a lot of overtime, put us to work in the main passageway, scraping and painting. It was a relief to get back to the mindless drudgery again.

  Tony and I went to work sugieing the pump room. As it turned out, we had a great time. There is a therapeutic nature to cleaning things, and I got perverse pleasure from making the greasy walls and machinery glisten. Tony and I were becoming friends in the real sense of the word. His scolding the other day had been given in good faith. As Charlie said after he’d chewed out Spider, “That’s what friends are for. You can yell at ’em and it won’t make any difference.”

  Even Billy was in a better mood. He came into the pump room and sized up my work. “Looks good. Now that’s the first thing you’ve done right.” I could dig it, even though the son of a bitch wasn’t giving me credit where credit was due.

  Passing Diego Garcia gave us the opportunity to hear English-language radio for the first time in weeks. Being for the most part from Philly, most of the crew had been into boxing at one point or another. The overriding issue on the ship when we first tuned in to the army radio station that night was who won the Gerry Cooney–Sugar Ray Leonard fight. Our champion, the Bos, had it pretty much figured on Cooney. He’d met ’em all at one point or another: Joe Louis, Dempsey, and so on. It made him sick to see that the loser of the fight could clear a million.

  “Jeez, back in the old days those guys’d fight for peanuts.” Cooney won.

  I saw a nebulous glowing (phosphorescent) blob float past us tonight. But earlier I was—while on the same evening watch—
talking in dialogue to myself ’bout free will and the idealism of youth (where did it go, what was it, etc.) when I heard an uncanny and displaced cry, as if gulls of a singularly reptilian nature flew overhead. And in the afternoon I beheld a double rainbow so near you could almost touch it—but you can never grasp a rainbow. What should all those colors do?

  —7/16/80

  Ah, yes, ah, my …

  —7/17/80

  Well, today Tony informed me there was a flying fish on the portside, so I duly picked it up. The crew, to my somewhat startled amazement, was cheerfully enthusiastic, and Joe particularly encouraged me to stuff and mount it. Jake came up with a plan for a board for it, and some shellac. It rained all day today, and we stayed inside.

  —7/18/80

  They had been telling me about flying fish for some time now, but so far as I was concerned they were aerial myths. So it was with a mixture of doubt and excitement that I sneaked out onto the sea-washed deck to retrieve the lifeless carcass of the fish. The day before, Billy had been chosen to brave the storm and run out onto the deck to save the life preservers before they were swept overboard. It was actually a very scary moment; the ship was rolling more than the usual thirty degrees, and he had to make it back before the next wave crushed him against the bulkhead or washed him overboard. He rushed back into the house wet and bedraggled, asking, “Why weren’t you watching for me?” We had been hanging out in the passageway. “That last one almost got me.” As he spoke, a torrent of water crashed up against the house and shattered. Night or day, the ship’s struggle against the ocean echoed through the house. At times the waves hit up to the third story. But today it was relatively peaceful, calm enough that we could venture out on deck between waves (which were hitting on a fairly regular basis, so that we could time it) but not so calm that we could stand outside for more than five minutes without getting our asses smashed against the cargo lines. In any event, I found the fish, a silver-blue thing not more than six inches long, floating in a pool that had collected on the deck. Poor bastard; it must have died an excruciating death: Its mouth was frozen by rigor mortis in an expression of horror, wide and gaping, a desperate attempt to get that last breath of air.

  Miguel was the first to help. I’d brought it into the lounge, where the crew looked at it with interest. I hadn’t a clue as to what to do with it, so Miguel took control. Waddling over to the kitchen sink, he washed it thoroughly. Then he whipped out one of the kitchen knives lodged in the butcher’s block with an expert’s finesse. It twirled in his hand like a butterfly. In one slick movement he slit open the belly and cleaned out the guts with his thumb. Rinsing the carcass out in a stream of cold water, he handed it to me before I knew it was done. I then understood he was a master chef.

  I next took it up to my room, where I applied the taxidermy techniques I’d learned while working for the National Zoo. Having pinned the fish onto a piece of stiff cardboard, I stuffed it with a generous amount of cotton wool and placed it inside the chimney stack (it had two compartments that opened up), where the excessive heat of the great diesel engines below would dry it out.

  Pleased with my handiwork, I returned to my duties. I had noted that according to the noon position we were fast approaching the equator, and I began an experiment in oceanographics. I proceeded directly to the toilet, which I shared with Eddie in the next room, grasped the handle firmly, and flushed. It was a success: The water drained out to the left. In a word: counterclockwise.

  Well, this morning I saw twice the dusky white form of a bird flying. Also, part two of my scientific experiment: The water by 4:30 this afternoon was spinning counterclockwise. This fact is supported by the findings of a comparable investigation. Two weeks to go. I steered through a zero-visibility storm today.

  —7/19/80

  That afternoon watch was quite something else. We’d been outside for two days now, but only on the stack deck; it was still too dangerous to go lower. And as anticipation of Japan increased, so too the crew got to speaking to one another. Out the window of the bridge I could barely see the ship rippling in the storm. Even a hulk as great as the Rose City buckled when lost in a fog-bound sea in the last throes of a typhoon.

  It was my turn at the wheel when the storm got bad. They called Billy up for lookout even though it was still light out. For some reason the officers were drawn up to the bridge by the storm. I had long since switched to manual, and I silently kept to the course while they gathered about me. It was, to say the least, an interesting conflagration, er … constellation.

  First mate, third mate, captain, me, second mate.

  By now my ability to work the wheel was up to standard. That’s another way of saying I could do it with the entire assembly of deck officers around me and not make a mistake. It was actually very simple once I got the hang of it. That wasn’t much comfort, though. In two days we were going to reach the Straits of Malacca. As an ordinary, I was not permitted to steer while we were in the channel, but the others, except for Joe, were going to have to guide this time bomb through the treacherous waters off Malaysia and Indonesia, in this weather, without the help of radar. The Old Man was not going to listen to reason. We were going to do it, the Southeast Asian pirates armed with army-surplus grenade launchers and heat-seeking torpedoes be damned! There were orders, and that was that. Tough fucking luck if we cracked up on a sandbar; he was better paid than the whole lot of us.

  There was an air of foreboding in the mess. It was as if we had all signed on for combat duty and the coming danger was pulling us all together. And if by chance we made it through the busiest sea channel in the world in typhoon season without radar in one piece, then to hell with the Old Man and his company. We’d be home free for “yang pussy.” And liquor. And fresh food (our stores were running out).

  Like the man said: “Terra Firma. The more firma, the less terra.”

  Saw some dark birds on the bow. Well, tomorrow we enter the Straits of Malacca, and bid adieu to the Indian Ocean. ’Twas rough all the way across, that’s for sure. People keep saying how long it feels since we first got on; yes, I suppose it does … but this week spirits are good—I ain’t been getting shit too much, and am in fact getting along …

  —7/20/80

  Today we entered the Straits of Malacca and saw both land and many vessels. But an extraordinary event took place in the morning lookout. I was on the starboard wing sitting on the bench, surveying casually the two-toned darkness of the sky and sea. All of a sudden I looked out to my right (starboard) and saw this big ol’ fuckin’ white bird sailing right up to me 1–2 yards away, the light having only just hit it then. Freaked, I instantly ducked and promptly hit my head against the rail, receiving a small quarter-inch cut on the bone between my eye and my left temple. While the mate patched me up, the bird swirled around overhead in the thick and muffled darkness. Odd stuff, eh? So tonight I … received commissions from Joe and Tony. The Bos found another flying fish, which I duly stuffed. Used wire this time. We’ll see.

  —7/21/80

  It was the first injury on the ship (the QMED’s hernia not qualifying). Alone in the dark of morning lookout, I’d found myself attacked by a seagoing dive-bomber, a vicious apparition of white death bearing down on me. Dazed from my wound, I walked through the bridge and into the bathroom to clean the blood off my face. Billy noticed something was not quite right and came over to see what was up. When the story came out, none of us could help laughing, and tales of my adventure with the Killer Sea Gull resounded through the passageways of the Rose City.

  As for the flying fish, let’s just say that my first endeavor was not a failure by any means, but it did turn out looking like a dried prune with wings. The drying in the stack deck took about three days. I mounted it on a fresh piece of cardboard. Then, when all was in readiness, I applied Jake’s shellac, which he had surreptitiously appropriated from the machine shop. The result was a stiff, if not preserved, specimen of Exocoetidae, suitable for framing.

  The others
were impressed with my handiwork and wanted a similar specimen for their own. Jake wanted one for his son, whom he talked about in mixed tones; Billy sought one for his three-year-old daughter. It hadn’t occurred to them to save something so uniquely seaman-like as a flying fish for future posterity before. It was a novel idea, and they liked it.

  With the second one I added some steel wool nabbed from the mess to keep the fish from shriveling up as the first had. I also monitored its progress in the stack more closely, since the arid conditions within had dried out the first specimen too much too soon.

  In the lounge that morning Charlie figured out the expenses of running the ship. It took more than two million barrels of oil a year to power the Rose City, and they were slowing us down to 13 knots to “save energy.” How many tankers did the company have out to sea? And how much did they really care about energy conservation if they were making their crews operate under such substandard conditions?

  When we entered the Straits of Malacca, on Monday, July 21, the weather was clear, and we were back on deck. At first there was a flurry of seagulls. Then the finches and sparrows appeared on deck. Before long the telltale wakes of other seagoing vessels ran in courses parallel to our own. We had reached civilization. There were sapient beings here, not just sea and sky.

  We rounded the corner into the Straits sometime after noon. I’d been crashed out in my bunk when I woke up to a flurry of ships and islands. Unlike the smooth silhouettes of the South Sea Islands, these were rough-hewn. They shot straight up out of the water, and then mellowed into round, rolling jungle. It was as if a mason had smoothed off and planed away the circumference.