Chapter 1: Ike
I arrived in Crisfield Maryland in the middle of February, straight from 9 thrilling weeks of Coast Guard boot camp. Mist hung over the fallow cornfields framing the highways of the Chesapeake Bay. I pulled up to the station at dusk anticipating a guard house and marching Coastguardsmen on the campus of the base. Instead, I drove to what looked like a large house from a government subdivision for people in the witness protection program. The building was gray, with a matching asphalt shingle roof. There were two boats moored up at the dock, and one construction vessel for maintaining the buoys and lights in the bay. There was no sign out front welcoming one to the station. If I hadn’t seen the utility boat and the buoy tender, I would have passed right by the building.
Grover was the first shipmate I saw. He was fresh from boot camp himself. He sat in the watch room, feet up on the radio array, chatting with his mother on the phone. It was one of the strangest things I can recall, this short, dark-skinned black kid speaking in perfect German on the phone. I placed my sea bag on the deck of the station and asked him if he was the officer of the day.
He laughed, then asked me in perfect American English, “You German?”
I got this a lot. With my prominent forehead and the rather cubist cut of my skull, I looked a bit Prussian.
“My grandfather was from Southern Germany, my grandma from München.”
“Yeah, my dad is an Army officer. My mom, she’s from Stuttgart. I was born and raised in Germany. I’m Grover. You need to go down the hall and check in with Petty Officer Hess.”
Grover indicated the long hallway, buzzed me in, then returned to his conversation.
I checked in with Petty Officer Hess. The man was a prick. He moved with and talked with utter confidence about things he knew nothing about. He was angry and ignorant and stupid. All one needed to do is deprive him of sleep or feed him alcohol, and he was a racist epitaph spewing bastard son of a culture that lacked any curiosity about anything outside of the Del Mar peninsula. Hell, even Salibury, with its University and shopping mall was looked at askance. Hess was in the TV room with a few others watching hardcore pornography on the big screen; nothing like flickering lights and a gang bang to get you ready for service to your country. Lingering for a moment I looked at the faces of my shipmates, all transfixed on this woman as she mimicked ecstasy with her voice, her flat eyes looked like someone just told her that the doctor was going to be a few minutes late. I tapped on the door frame and asked to see Petty Officer Hess. The room jumped in unison. The TV snapped back to pro wrestling, which I found somewhat ironic.
“Who in the fuck wants to know?”
Hess was born and raised in St. Michaels, another tiny dot of a town on the bay with quaint lighthouses, bed and breakfasts and rusting trailers. He stood up quickly and I found my boot camp reflex was to lock into the position of attention. This was a mistake, akin to a dog rolling over to display its belly. Hess was an inch or two from my face, so close I must have looked like two people to him, a sort of blurry negative of myself. I gazed across the room finding a particular burrow in the gray cinder block wall I could exploit for the sake of not looking Hess in the eyes. Two other of my fellow Coastguardsmen got up and flanked Hess.
“I smell boot.”
One of his flunkies, a Petty Officer Burrell pushed his paunch into my flat stomach as he got close. I think they must have had spaghetti that night, or pizza. Their collective breath was awful I could smell months of digesting food with each exhalation. I kept looking at that burrow thinking I could will myself into it somehow.
“Where in the fuck are you from…HA-Anus?”
My last name is Haines. He was trying to rattle me.
“Broward County Florida, Petty Officer Hess.”
The words snapped out of me, sharp and clean. I was going to be fine.
“Broward County, where in the fuck is that”? He didn’t wait for an answer. “You know Florida looks like a giant cock all hanging in the ocean out there, what part of the cock is Broward on?”
“Right where the doctor snips you, Petty Officer Hess.”
Two other guys in the TV room started laughing, and Hess gave them a scowl to shut them up. Their gaze fixed back on the TV, watching wrestling with the same expression as the porn.
“I'll bet you're a cocksmoker ain't you?”
“I don't think you're allowed to ask me that question, Petty Officer Hess.”
“I don't need to ask you, you fucking faggot, I can smell the cock on your breath.”
He was agitated, so I decided that asking how he came to know what cock smelled like was a bad idea. Burrell, belched hot garlic and the smell of used dental floss in my face while Hess ordered me to go fuck myself. He then had me toss my sea bag into an empty berthing area where I would sleep and told me to pick a locker and get out of my dress uniform. Hess took the folder that contained my orders and filed it on Chief Hawley’s desk.
Crisfield is probably the worst place for a single person to live. It is a small, deeply religious town of crab fisherman and crab fisherman with the occasional crab fisherman that moonlights as an entrepreneur during the off-season. These businesses were as follows: the IGA grocery store where locals picked up groceries and did not seem appalled by the fact that the floor was always sticky. Ubiquitous seafood restaurants – most of them specialized in serving crappy crab cakes to the few tourists that were shanghaied into town. There were two standout restaurants in town when I lived there; the absolute worst Chinese food restaurant in the world and the third worst pizza place in the United States. There were a few bars and a pretty decent seafood place, but you couldn’t eat there unless you were a local, and if you were in the Coast Guard, forget it. The crabbers hated us. So much so that an effigy of our Chief was tied to one of the pilings that marked the entrance to Smith Island, a small island of yet more crab fisherman that inhabited the Central Chesapeake, a stuffed Coast Guard flotation suit was full of bullet holes and set on fire.
Several of my colleagues were originally from the Chesapeake Bay area. Hess and Burrell, who represented the leadership when Chief Hawley and Petty officer Jaines weren’t here. Jaines was from the Chincoteague area, and was tolerable. He had been in the Coast Guard for almost fifteen years and had lived in Seattle, San Francisco, Miami, and Port La Vaca, Texas. It was clear that he had been affected by his time abroad while aboard ship, and he was an affable, if not absent, leader. It was rare for the Coast Guard to station so many people so close to their home towns. I theorized this was some unwritten policy because being locals, they could better understand what other locals were saying on radio dispatches.
Most bay natives had this thick, Old English type of accent. It sounded like speaking Gallic with a mouth full of rocks. Whenever I had to answer radio calls I would often ask to have things repeated because I could only pick up a few nouns, like boat, and motor, and crab. I would listen for key verbs, like sinking, burning or drowning, to make certain whoever I was talking to was not in danger. Most radio traffic went something like this:
“Coasguard, mumble jargon, mumble, spittle mumble jargon, old ass word, boat.”
“Vessel calling Coast Guard, this is Coast Guard station Crisfield. Say again, over.”
“Coasguard, slower mumble jargon, mumble, spittle, tongue twisting verb that I am certain does not exist in the lexicon, boat.”
“Vessel Calling Coast Guard, this is Coast Guard station Crisfield. Say again, your message was unclear, over.”
There would be more mumbling where, if I was fortunate, I would determine the vessel’s name, at which point I would tell the poor, salty crabber to standby while I would go and fetch one of the local translators. The translator would walk in to watch room and say something like…Oh, that’s the Jennie Mae, She just wants a radio check on channel 81.
Within a month, I had fallen into a sort of nautical rhythm. Grover and I shared an off-base apartment in Salisbury, a town about fifty miles north of Crisfield. All of the single Coasties lived in Salisbury in the same apartment complex with every other non-married Coastguardsman on the Eastern Shore. Salisbury wasn’t bad. It had a University and a movie theater in the mall. There was English’s, a phenomenal fried chicken place, and a few taverns here and there. Downtown had a used record and book store where I would spend a lot of my free time. It was a pretty boring disengaging sort of life.
Grover and I would carpool into the station, arriving at around 7AM. We would meet with the other crew that had been on duty for the last few days and pass on the information between the crews. Then, Hess would give us our daily assignments while the chief and Jaines would make sure that the work actually got done, and would administer the occasional exam to a shipmate that was ready to fly solo on one particular job or another. Mostly though, they drank coffee.
In the afternoon, after Chief and Jaines left, we would get underway and patrol our little section of the Chesapeake. In the winter, this was like patrolling Mayberry. The water, a flat, matte brownish gray, was devoid of much boat traffic. We would practice towing, navigation, piloting, orientation or whatever Hess and Burrell could think of. Hess, a terrible instigator, would moor up at the public dock on Smith Island, within sight of the headless and bullet-ridden effigy, then get out and stretch his legs by peering into the low decked work boats that bore the names of crabbers’ daughters on their sterns. The crabbers hated this. When Hess would approach, the percussiveness of his boots would set the fishermen chatting on their decks into a stern silence.
Chief Hawley, and Hillary Clinton were the two most hated people on the planet for these crabbers. Hillary, I cannot explain, but there were enough Rush is Right and Impeach Hillary stickers plastered on the work boats to give the impression that she was not welcome among the crabbing set. Chief Hawley burned in effigy, that was personal.
During a boarding, basically a safety inspection by Coast Guard, Chief Hawley boarded the boat of one Richard A. Smith, Mayor of Smith Island. The Mayor, late already to some appointment or other at a mainland bar, was not happy to see a bunch of gun-toting kids in orange snowsuits poking around on his boat. He started complaining, loudly. The chief asked the mayor to be quiet, to which the mayor asked for the Chief’s information and threatened to call his Congressman, his Senator, hell, he was going to take us to the Supreme Court if necessary. One of my shipmates, a kid named Pierce, spilled the mayor’s coffee on the deck causing the mayor to completely lose his executive composure.
The mayor was suddenly darting toward the chief, a stream of filth exiting his normally prayer-book mouth. Chief Hawley ordered the mayor to step back, to which the mayor told chief Hawley to not so politely go fuck himself. The chief then pepper sprayed the mayor and cuffed Mayor Smith on the deck of his own boat. We then impounded the vessel and towed it back to Crisfield with the screaming, handcuffed, mayor seated on our quarterdeck. Hess was only flaming the hatred these people already had for us. I always elected to stay on our 41’ utility boat while the boys went about pissing off the locals.
My non-participation in the subjugation of crab fishermen to our authority was another reason, other than my suspected homosexuality, I was separated from the others. I don’t think my shipmates personally disliked me, in fact, I think if I were able to read their minds, I would find that I wasn’t a part of their daily thoughts at all, except when it came time to hand out the shittiest work at the station. Grover and I were called “yard niggers” by Hess and Burrell. The worst tasks on the work detail were always gleefully given to us each morning. If the dumpster needed scrubbing, because it was dirty, Grover and I would get scrub brushes, degreaser, and the pressure washer and crawl into the smelly green box, an especially pleasant way to spend a hot July afternoon.
We accepted the moniker with a sense of personal pride. Grover never indicated that it bothered him in the least that we would be sent to dig ditches for the new irrigation system, or clean out the gutters in the early Spring. To be honest, I think they could have called us anything they wanted, as long as we avoided Hess and Burrell. We even joked about getting Yard Niggers tattooed on our arms, but better judgment got the best of us. Grover and I spent all of our duty time together. We ate meals, in the galley together, were often on the same boat crew, and other than sleeping, pretty much were inseparable.
At home, things were different. Grover would see his dad in DC for the weekend. I would lurk around coffee shops and the bookstore in the mall ordering and reading the most pretentious literature I could find. Grover and I had little in common other than the fact that we were yard niggers. He had far more in common with our shipmates than I did. Grover liked the pop country that they would listen to while washing the boats. Grover liked NASCAR and was really a melanin-hogging version of the others.
On duty, we were the best of friends, but at home, we rarely saw each other. Grover would get side jobs, painting or building sheds and the like, borrowing tools from his friends, neighbors and shipmates, borrowing my truck to haul lumber and supplies to his job sites. He was an industrious fucker in his spare time. Me, I would eat fried chicken, run a few miles through the neighborhood and read.
In August, Grover was transferred to the other duty section. This meant we would never see each other. Our schedules would directly conflict, no more carpools, no more yard niggers, we would each be in the apartment by ourselves on our days off. It did mean good things for Grover though. He would now be under the command of Petty Officer Huddle, a plump North Carolinian with an egalitarian quality about him. Huddle led subtly, asking his men to do things for him rather than assigning tasks in relation to how well he regarded you. Grover was a bit put off at first, he had a number of things to settle at home, and having to spend 125 hours at the station was going to torpedo a number of his projects.
Huddle gave Grover a day off to take care of things but that going to be a few days into the week. That didn’t work out for one of his projects. Grover pulled me aside after hearing the news about the shift change and asked me to finish a side job he had painting the rectory of the local Episcopal church. He offered to split the cash with me, and threw in a couple of movie passes. I agreed. Oh, I also had to pick him up on his day off so he could get his car. I guessed that was what the movie passes were for.
