Chapter 3: Life on the Mississippi

I don’t describe things much, anyway, but even if I did, describing 1972 New Orleans would involve lots of adjectives and adverbs. Eating and drinking were all anybody cared about. You could have a better meal at a sandwich joint in New Orleans that you could have in a four star restaurant in New York. Parasol’s, Acey’s Pool Hall, Central Grocery. Best meals I ever had. I was there to try to break into the poker business, though, and I didn’t have much success. Hank/Donnie said to look for the fathers of debutantes and deckhands. In my rusted-out ’60 Plymouth Valiant and welder’s clothes, I figured I wasn’t going to be meeting many debutantes, but I tried. I went over to Tulane and wandered around for a few days. It was an obviously ineffective strategy. Those Newcomb girls were so far out of my league that no amount of self-deception could persuade me I had a chance at meeting their fathers.

Finding a job as a deckhand was surprisingly easy. I went down to the wharves and hung out with longshoremen and stevedores for a few days and got directed to the Russo Towboat Company just uptown of Audubon Park and all those streets that weave around it.

Russo was a junkyard. Everything was rusted, like it was about to fall apart. I asked the first fat man I ran into who talk to about getting a job and he pointed to a shed made of corrugated metal built on top of telephone pole stilts. Home office.

When I got up the steps I was in the break room with a lot of guys smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee who looked at me waiting for me to say something.

“I wanna apply for a job,” I said, after a pause.”

“Got your ABS card?” the least threatening of them asked, after another pause.

ABS card? What the hell was that?

“No,” I said. Since I didn’t know what it was, it was unlikely I had one.

“Then you want to talk to Scotty. Two doors down that hall on the right. Name's on the door. Scottie Herrold.”

“Thanks,” I said.

I went down to Scottie's office and the door was open. He asked me a lot of questions that seemed to suggest that there was no reason in the world that anyone would want to hire me.

Let me, the narrator, interrupt the narrative here. I’m having a hard time with this. There are interesting stories from this month about Mr. Murphy, welding, being a deckhand, how cold it is on the Mississippi in January, and all kinds of other things, New Orleans is a book of its own. But I need to get to a story about a poker game, so all that local color is dispensed with forthwith. Fuck.

So I got assigned to a harbor tug called the Melissa. All the Russo tugs were named after female members of the Russo family. The crew who worked on the boats just accepted it that the boats they worked on had wimpy names. It was part of their lot for being poor. My assignment to the Melissa wasn’t a permanent berth; I was just assigned to her because one of the regular deckhands called in sick. Or stoned. Or sleepy. Or just too fucking indifferent to show up for work.

In the tug yard universe, there weren't many classifications. There was a stratum of management people whose jobs didn’t really matter, at least not to us. They could all tell us what to do, and we did whatever they said. Then there were these four or five highly skilled guys. They worked full time in the yard weren’t looking for berths on tugboats. Mr. Murphy was one, a machinist of the highest caliber, a man who could weld, lathe, and machine anything you needed out of metal. There were three or four mechanics who were geniuses who could fix anything, plus one who pissed the others off. Ivy was his name, a mechanic who had been trained at some earlier point in life as an electrician. He expected to be paid extra when he did electrical work, and the only time I saw the workers and management united was when they disagreed with Ivey on this point. There were a few other journeymen around the lot, but skill wasn’t always obvious. So the yard had six or seven guys who knew what they were doing, mechanics and machinists and carpenters, working at any one time. Those skilled people stay in the yard for the whole workweek. At the same time there are fifteen or twenty other guys working in the yard, helping the skilled guys and sometimes learning from them, or going with the mechanics to fix problems on tugboats. We were called yard dogs. Sometimes yard dogs stick with the machinist or the welder they’re working with. Sometimes they move on to be deckhands.

I got sent to the Melissa because one of the regular deckhands didn’t show up.

A tugboat has a crew of four: a captain, an engineer, and two deckhands. The captain steers, the engineer keeps the engine running, and the deckhands do everything else. Nobody played any kind of cards on tugboats.

On tugboats that stay in port, there are three types: three, five, or seven day boats. The number refers to the number of days they stay out. On a three day boat, you’re on the boat for three days, you’re at home for three. You get paid a shitload of money for the three days you’re working, but then you aren’t paid anything for the three days you’re off, so it evens out. Captains make the most, then engineers, then deckhands, who are pretty much riff-raff. Deckhands can grow up to be engineers or captains, but most don’t.

When I got to the Melissa she was tied up at the Desire Street Wharf and I had to climb down the ladder embedded in the cement wharf to the deck of the tug. I had a vinyl suitcase with a change of clothes and a toothbrush and climbing down that ladder suitcase in one hand was semi-daring. I’d never done this before so I wasn’t sure what to do when I got on board. I opened he cabin door and Warren was lying on the couch. Warren had a bad reputation on the Russo lot. A long-term deckhand, he was also a twice-convicted murderer, having done two life terms at Angola. Parole rules were different in 1972. He killed his second wife with a hammer.

“Next time, drop your suitcase and come on down,” said Warren.

“What?”

“Drop your suitcase from the top of the wharf. You have the right kind. Soft. Won’t nothing break in there if you drop it from the top of the ladder. Then you can use both hands to climb on down.”

“Thanks,” I said. There was an enormous blast from a horn overhead.

“That’s Cap’n Clark,” he said.

“Huh?”

“Cap’n Clark’s wondering why you didn’t come talk to him when you got on his boat,” Warren said.

“So he’s honking the horn at me?” I asked

“Yeah. You better go on up and see him.” Warren never took his eves off of the Sid Caesar Show. He never laughed, but he didn’t look way, either.

I worked my way up to the pilot deck. I opened the port and was about to introduce myself to Captain Clark, an extremely old and extremely portly man, but he barked at me first.

“What are you doing on my boat?” he demanded.

“Scottie Herrold told me to report here,” I said.

“Well, those portside boys can say what they want, but when you come on the water, you ask the Captain’s permission to come aboard. You got that?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Wash off that window.”

“Yes, sir.” There was nothing in the pilot house to wash windows with, so I slid down the rails to the crew deck, where Warren the murderer was still watching Sid Caesar.

“Where are paper towels?” I asked.

“Did he vomit?” Warren asked.

“No. He just wants me to wash the windshield, I think.”

“There are paper towels over the sink and Windex in the cabinet next to the trashcan,” he said. I gathered them and headed back upstairs.

I cleaned his windshield, but Captain Clark had already decided he hated me. I was on the Melissa for the next several weeks, and he constantly delighted in waking me up and keeping me busy. He would make me chip paint when it was raining. The windshield was never clean enough. Even so, somehow I got permanently assigned to the Melissa.

I want to tell, but will forgo, to story of how Warren threatened to kill me because I got spaghetti sauce on his raincoat. It doesn’t move this narrative forward, but would nevertheless have been a good story.

One night I was tying up an Itoman container ship down at the anchorage. Warren didn’t like me any at all, but by that point he left me alone, and I was handling most of the deck duties by myself. I was trying to throw a lead line up onto Itoman’s deck to draw up a cable when a bag came sailing down from the ship’s deck and landed about fifteen feet to my left on the fantail. A black plastic garbage bag. I wasn’t sure what to do. My hands were full. Warren appeared out of nowhere and picked up the bag.

“What the fuck?” I asked, sensibly.

“Those Japanese, they throw their garbage on our boats,” he said.

I asked just a few questions and Warren mentioned that it would be very easy to elbow a fellow deckhand into that narrow space between the tug and the ship on a dark and rainy night.

Oh well.

Next time I was in port I asked Scottie Herrold if he could explain and he said “Son, if you can learn to look the other way, there are all sorts of things you might learn as a result.”

So on the night of November 17, 1972, I was chipping paint at the stern of the Melissa wondering where the poker games were going to show up and then Scottie showed up. This is odd. Scottie doesn’t show up on a boat, he stays at home office. The only other time he’d come out with us was that time we’d brought back a tug from Mobile, but I think he had a girlfriend of some sort in Mobile.

So weird as it was, we were tied up over in Algiers and I was chipping paint when Scottie shows up with another deckhand, Johnnie, who is a hell of a nice guy and the brother of Spike, whose wife gets him there each week for his seven day ride, dead drunk, but then he sobers up a little. Johnnie is this long tall skinny kid with long blond hair who can call a coin toss every time. I mean 100% of the time. I tested this hundreds of times over months. He never missed once. But he says it’s not anything supernatural, he can just see the coin as it lands. Really, 100%.

I digress. When Scottie shows up he has this purple ticket and he says “Captain Billy gave me this ticket to his private party and I knew you’d want to go, so we’re going to put Johnnie here onto this boat and you can go home.” Captain Billy was the owner of the company. I’d never met him and knew nothing about him except that he was rumored to be fucking his secretary.

What was going on was that something was going to be thrown over one rail or another that they didn’t want me to see, of course. They didn’t know me, and they did know Johnnie. Asking Scottie questions seems to have limited my career.

“I really want to work this shift. I’m poor,” I said.

“Not gonna happen,” said Scottie.

“I understand that, but you have to understand that I need to get paid,” I said.

“I’m sending you to a party,” he said.

“I need a paycheck,” I said.

“Okay. A full day,” he said.

“Fuck that. A full berth, through Tuesday. And the purple ticket.”

“Got it. Get out.”

I got.

The purple ticket got me into an Uptown party I didn’t really like. Lots of well-dressed boys and girls my age drinking more than they could hold were doing lots of stupid things.

“Hey,” said a beautiful young girl. “Why aren’t you partying?”

“Not used to this kind of party, I guess. I’m a country bumpkin.”

“Well, country bumpkin, what brought you to New Orleans?”

“Honestly, I was looking for a card game.”

“Ah, shit,” she said. “You look cute, but you’re just another one of those.”

“Of what?” I asked.

“Gamblers. Card game’s in the back. Third door on the right, I think. Tell my father I said ‘fuck you.’” She stormed off.

Third door on the right I could follow.

I found it. There were about six men in their fifties and sixties with cigarettes and drinks sitting around a table. They looked up when the door opened, then looked back down dismissively. They didn’t give a shit about me. There were stacks of bills everywhere, and there was no way to know how much money was on the table.

“Can I play?” I asked.

Prolonged silence.

Somebody eventually ooked up. They were supposed to be there to make sure their daughters weren’t getting into trouble. "Hundred dollar ante, boy. You got that?”

“Not on me, but close,” I said. They all looked up at that. I was a skinny kid with long curly hair and under dressed for a Rex Crewe party, and they all knew without asking that they didn’t know who my father was.

“How old are you?” a cigar smoking Scotch drinker asked.

“Over eighteen,” I said.

“I’ll be glad to take your money boy,” said a tall skinny man in a smudged seersucker suit and Panama hat. Maybe 85 years old.

The Valiant was right around the corner, so I pulled $4,000 out of the shoebox and went on back. They’d pulled up a chair for me and I sat in it. Everybody else had drinks. I was looking around to see if there was a glass of water when a card landed in front of me. I looked up, and everybody was looking at me.

“Ante,” said the old guy in the hat.

“I forked over a hundred bucks. The game was something peculiar I’ve never played since involving 5, 7 and 9 cards, and I can’t remember how it worked. I didn’t understand it at the time. Nevertheless, I seemed to be doing okay and I kept bumping the raises, and it turns out I won.

The thing is, I won $2,800 dollars on that hand. On a game I didn’t understand. $2,800 might be chump change for the bankers and lawyers at the table, but I wouldn’t make $2,800 out of a week of pool playing in Wadley or Anniston, and the bankers and lawyers were far less likely to try to jump me afterwards. I thought about getting up then and walking out, because you should always quit while you’re ahead, but I didn’t.

Let me interject here that that may be the only time I ever bet on a card game I did not understand. Never do that. Certainly not for serious money. I wanted in on a big stakes game, they dealt me a card trying to fuck with the new guy on a really strange game, and the cards liked me. But don’t ever count on that kind of crap. The laws of probability are laws in ways the laws of the State of Louisiana can’t dream of. The laws of probability are all math—there’s no legislature involved.

I’d like to have a good poker story, for you, but I don’t. Eventually the old men around the table realized I was doing well. After that they figured out that I was the only one at the table who neither smoked nor drank, and they offered whiskey and tobacco repeatedly. I didn’t bite.

Really, I’d like to have a good story for why it is, but I don’t. I won $80,000 in that card game. $80,000. What the fuck do you do with $80,000?

Time to leave.