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We have our own images of ourselves and our fellow workers as diverse as the characters that generate them. I am known as Big Red, and I've worked ships for fifteen years, along with Flugo, the Commander, Strong Arm Louie, the Old Ranger, Crazy Jack, Moanin' Jack, Drugstore Larry, Bicycle Larry, Shovel Mouth, and Hardrock. All of them are good storytellers, and every name has a story. Some are veterans of the Big Strike in 1934 or the sociopolitical causes that are a part of our union history. They all taught me that progress and change are not products, created by wizards with T-squares, but processes.
My work is the movement of cargo, but I function as a person not a piece of machinery. I do not prostrate myself before progress or accept my work style's increasing routinization as an inevitable ago, criticized those "good." Sophocles, over two thousand years and the amassing power concerned only with the machinations of "goods":
But rule over men, not over a dead city!
Ships are only hulls, citadels are nothing.
When no life moves in the empty passageways.
(Oedipus Rex, Prologue)
The technocrat, computer printout in hand, might evaluate the sail as an archaic, outmoded means of propulsion. But the involved vision of the artist portrays it as "Canvas wings beating down the sky."
We went to a bar. Discussed new dimensions
for the writing of words and making of books.
Shuffled thoughts like cards, and suddenly
he threw the deck out.
"We're still building pyramids for the Pharoahs."
He was getting weepy. I looked where he looked.
New buildings going up, old crumbling piers.
Men hauling lines and rigging gear on ships.
A huge crate was landed on deck.
"Still building pyramids," he flew on.
He downed another drink, popped a pill for
his stomach, and joked from the tension and
incongruities of working for a wage, working as a poet.
Sky falling into the bay.
Buildings contradicting the heavens.
He took another pill.
"Man," he said, rolling his eyes, swilling a drink,
"I must be the only hippie in the world
who has to take anti-acid pills."
No one has seen the captain in weeks, and there's a rumor he doesn't even exist. I caught sight of him once, shooting into his quarters. Large bandage on the right side of his face reminds me of the Van Gogh self-portrait with mutilated ear. The other rumor is he was a U-boat commander in World War II. He has a torpedo build, but I think it all stops there. The strongest and craziest of all the lunatics on board is Calvin McNaught. Fortunately, he took a liking to me early on. Says he's a fallen Catholic from "Upper Ireland, the Occupied Part." A hurler's build— agile, strong, fast, lady-killer, body of granite, angular-cut face under curling black hair.
lmao
Nils is wrecked, blasted out of his socks. He wants me to drink with him. The cycle was starting on me again, the beautiful spiral descent. Booze, sorrow over Pilar, self-pity, night and fog, terror, rats in the hold gnawing on the lines and sniffing around the KoolAid. And we are still in port. At this rate I might be in Chile by next winter. Since it's summer there during our winter, I wanted to see Pilar now. The magic words "Have another drink." Fifteen men on a dead man's chest, and all that bullshit. Christ, the times we had stumbling around San Francisco together. She in a floppy hat, like some Impressionist painter had put her together, or Levi's and socialist meetings. I never understood why she dragged me to so many diff'erent socialist groups and meetings. Pretty soon I think I became the test animal. A real worker, get him, dissect him, find out why he's the backward brute he is. And Pilar with those green eyes, flashing, black, shining hair. Her Spanish mother, Andalusian anarchist; Irish father, longshoreman and veteran of the 1934 general strike. Pilar was tall but still wore the stacked heels like shorter women, and this cast her thin hips and round ass into a sensual waddle. Her skin brown, but not like the beer-bottlebrown of the South Americans and Mexicans who lived near us.
unexpectedly moved by this
Pilar, if I could be there, I'd take both of us to the Andes, as high up and far away from the sea as possible. Watch the summer color, bring music off the wind through a flute, bring life to both of us. If you wanted, I'd marry you; your slender hips and tall, slim body. Hold on to the earth away from the tides. Let go of my seed. See summer flowering on the plains.
Now you are a memory. Sailing. A thousand ideas turn around you. You are at the center of me. Ideas go slipping through my fingers. You stay. I take you with me in this heartland of the winter.