Shipwright on the Eureka

DRYDOCK part 8 (The historic ferry boat Eureka became berthed at the National Maritime Museum at Fisherman's Wharf, San Francisco... i visited her a decade after writing this section.)

SHIPWRIGHT COVERALLS AND DUCK BUTTER

Eat, sleep, write, sleep, alarm up long before the sun, there will be no sun, it’s storming, again, to the shipyards, soaked, through the machine shop and up the long stairs to the shop, lockers, motherfuckers readying for another day.

Everything on the Eureka that isn’t soaked will soon be wet from us dripping, wind whipping the “protective” plastic sheeting, rain chasming a million channels of water through every work zone. Wet chill in the air, bones, thoughts. Shop Steward grabs me to work with him. Hey rook, let the veteran show you the lay of the land, errr, sea. Feels good to me, like i mean something here, plus he works slow, which is good in terms of your body, not as much physical stress as the staging crew of my first few work days, and every move he makes eye take note. Time passes slower. Still, every task is a new task to me, so eye’m learning at every step, and who better to teach me than the Shop Steward.

First question: what’s a Shop Steward?

Besides work, there’s always sweeping available for this bottom of the heap Shipwright, for sweeping fills the times of no tasks. But now we’re setting studs, 4’x4’ posts, right into the routed holes i put in the decking. Checking the angles at the tops, every one’s different, this is a ship after all. Me? Lost in the beauty of wrestling a professional size and weight power tool in my hands, a router no less, and surprisingly, i haven’t let the machine hurl me into the water.

But i’m waterlogged just the same, rain spitting down all day.

There’s a difference from the previous days, however, and it’s a difference that grabs my mind like strong pure cocaine. i’m clutching a paycheck for two days work in my hand. Two days! $158.56! They paid me a week early. Only thirty bucks taken out for taxes. The application day, eight hours of paid application, and the near day plus overtime, they didn’t hold back. Yes. i’ve got overtime, even with less than fifteen hours regular time. Can’t believe the rush, me holding a check from San Francisco Drydock, the site of my film, i’m working here, and even though i can no longer walk, i can eat.

Bus off to the Mission district, me on a mission, get me some coveralls and some boots, dammit. And a big fucking burrito, a wet one, haven’t had one of those in years. A ton of mojado, ought to last me week, and i’m ready for another. Swagger up the street like a pirate just plundered a royal barque, christ, i can buy something.

Walking past the hip, new Foreign Cinema restaurant, where the dot.commers can afford lavish dining, where i staggered through two blacker than cool film parties just a week or two ago, reminds me how far i’ve fallen, bringing me to my senses. The Mission’s changing so fast, so much money coming in waves of web funding, and i’m strangely proud to be a laborer, but damn, an elegant meal would be such a treat. i feel so left out, my reality is another world, how the fuck do you think your Lexii, your Monteros, your Acurii, Beemers and Benzes, get here? Wouldn’t be by ship, would it?

Return home with cool new heavy duty Ben Davis coveralls, off-white carpenter style, now i can carry some tools in comfort style, and boots, the most comfortable steel-toed boots i’ve ever owned, padded and bad, well, the only steel-toed boots i’ve ever owned, check out the Shipwright appearing right before your eyes.

Morning far too soon, raining again, but i’ll be drier, and warmer, and my blistered, burning feet won’t hit the ground so gingerly, even with the added weight of steel. i’m protected!

Of course the locker room crew’s checking me out. They’re no fools, they know i only got paid for two days with this check, and they know what Ben Davis and boots cost. Doesn’t take long for them to do the math, they know i spent more than half my meager pay just to be stylin’ this morning. But here i am dressed for success, right before their eyes, derelict shipyard style incarnate. Eye can tell they can tell i’m trying to pull my weight, and i’ve got full on mojado power in my belly.

Beginning to develop a rhythm on these decks, and i’m being broken in to the rituals of the crew. Little rituals; brief meeting in the carpentry shop before the slow amble out to the Eureka, sky always wet and gray reflecting off the oil slicked puddles on the docks, emerging light helping to fuel the day as dawn breaks under the clouds to the East, single file of yellow slickers up the gangway, tool chests opening and the scramble for the good saws and drills, and me setting up what i’ll need for the tasks of the day. i’ve learned to be the proper apprentice to my mentor, grabbing his tool boxes and getting our “shop” set up.

Jim’s the shop steward, union’s representative at the drydock, so being under his wing is protection for the rookie shipwright. My memory of what carpenters do grows every hour, confidence growing with each task completed, especially the heavy ones, where i feel my own strength, not strong like the experienced crew who’ve been working their asses off forever, but damn good for a writer who’s seen no manual labor for twenty-five years.

i’ve got tasks that can be accomplished, hour by hour, and i’m not alone, there’s my guide and mentor, the Shop Steward, giving me a sense that time passes productively, because of my own actions. Certainly a step up for the nearly dead Global Village Idiot. The dampness enveloping the Eureka permeates everything, but part of that’s just that i’ve never been a seaman before, and i’m not used to living on the water. The cascading downpours break only for strong mist at best, cycle of wet work and less wet work, interspersed with plastic sheeting flying off the sides of the boat, enabling rivulets from the most hidden and undiscoverable places to flow all over the work areas, shit it’s wet working on a ship, what did you expect, idiot.

Don’t get me wrong, this is far better than being on the staging crew. It’s real carpentry, at least marine style carpentry, but fuck it’s wet, and i’m wet, and i’m alone, and my life sucks, not counting the brilliance, and the world is wet, and i’ve got to keep hustling my butt so these guys accept me into their fold, and i’m too weird from my son’s pain to make motherfuckin’ jokes with them. At least, with a paycheck, i’m gonna eat.

Duck butter.

No, i won’t eat the damn duck butter. But it’s everywhere, this chemical meant to seal the wood from the ravages of the sea. Every joint exposed to the sea, prime it with some kind of sealant, then smear it with duck butter, who knows what chemical duck butter’s composed of, dangling participle lost amidst the poison, smeared everywhere, does this stuff get through the pores? i rout the deck rail, paint it with sealant, smear it with duck butter, imagining making duck’s milk cream, thick protection against the sea, how can this shit last against the actual sea? But there it is, smeared. Cut the post, approximate the angle of the rail the top of the stud’s gonna join, fill the routs with this thick gray protection against the sea, like that’s possible, and cod knows what it does to one’s genetic code, but there it is, smeared according to both cod’s code and spec.

Eye don’t know what it does to the bay, but i know i’m accomplishing the fucking tasks. One stud, next stud, next stud after that, guess that makes me a stud, so what am eye doing working here. Most of the time i’m working too hard to remember i’m a writer. Nail the studs, remember these are four by fours, and it’s raining like we’re building a fucking ark, but it’s only a historic ferry boat, and the rest of the crew seems to be lining up to make the management accepted walk back to the lockers for lunch, cribbage, and novel ways of using the sum total of all adjectives, motherfucker, in decidedly non-literary context.

Then more of the same. Such is the life of the derelict, even the well-paid ones.

Thank Poseidon the afternoon is shorter than the morning, for soon i’m cleaning the duck butter off my hands, neck, coveralls, and getting ready to walk home, if my overused legs will make the subtle climb. No fuck, there’s gonna be a real paycheck coming next week, so i’m gonna hang with some of the guys at a shipyard bar, not the Hell’s Angels one, i ain’t fallen that far, and i’ve already spent far too many hours drinking there, research for the script. How much can one drink if the bar opens at six AM but you’ve got to be ready to walk out on the docks at six-thirty, six-thirsty.

And there she is again.

Can’t be much over twenty-one, why would one show her navel to fucking shipyard workers, again, what grace behind the bar, have i been working that hard amongst the totally male machines and tools and chemicals and why do they call these absolute male technologies that ply the sea female, huge steel and duck buttered wood, and Caskey’s like the dolphin goddess come ashore to tend bar in the middle of the day to those hardy souls who keep the fleet alive. Hair curled like grecian pottery reflected, pouty smile like she actually knows something, my cod, i’m repeating myself again. She greets the steward like she knows him, looks at me like she can recognize a ray of intelligence amidst the driftwood, or even remember a few days ago, and again i’m so self-consciously aware of how much like a dockworker i appear. She is waves of melody and rhythm, the real curves of the sea, she is the antidote to duck butter, she is the smile that melts the hardest of days, she is the surprise, her wetness pleasing against days of wet horror, my aching body forgotten, awash in her beauty.

Shouldn’t be drinking, the early horn will sound far too early tomorrow, but she’s the fairest sight i’ve seen since the rains came. There’s something in my eyes that fires her, she knows i ain’t your average shipwright, hell, she probably doesn’t even know what a shipwright does, though she serves them after work day after day, helping to drive away the daily horror. Curves, eyes, navel, slinking behind the bar, give me a reason to be alive. There are no docks in my mind now, all gone, staging gone, duck butter gone, heavy soaked wood gone, curved ship gone, steel gone, gone are the pains of the body not cut out for these docks, gone is every thought but the beauty that allows the human to emerge from the poisons, the muscles set against the steel, the weight moved, the hard task accomplished, gone.

Caskey.

The name conjures ancient Irish ceremony, conjures elixirs drunk in revelry, rolls off the tongue like waves of ritual to hold back the sea. She can’t hold me back, suddenly my world of harsh pain, strength to make the sea safe for commerce, not that i’ll see the fruits of such commerce, she’s got me believing i’m still alive. Am eye? Lost at sea, aquameridian blue, broun fellini horn navigation alive again against duck butter day, life alive, in a fucking shipyard bar, one moment of this might be worth it after all.

Give it back, i’m so tired and it disappears in an instant. Bleary transformed, pain transformed, hours of hard muscle transformed, in a glance the world doesn’t exist, there is no duck butter.

Hip hop jazz and the docks disappear.

Try as i might, she won’t go to dinner with me that night, which is good as i couldn’t afford her saying yes. But that kiss upon leaving the bar was the sweetest moment of the past several months.

Again the alarm calls far too early, again rain, shipwright automaton priming the espresso machine, pulling hard on the steam lever, press that dark energy from those exquisite beans, pack a lunch and coffee, coveralls and slicker, but the boots still feel like comfort despite the cotton packing on my bleeding blisters. Shuffle off through the gray wet for another round of take your punishment, with dignity.

But i’m beginning to get the hang of it. Learning to make the best of it, even beginning to have some fun. Hanging off the staging at an impossibly awkward angle, no way to get the proper leverage to guide and control the router, intimidating router, trying to make the routs just the right size, me want no fuck-ups to repair, so me struggling with this one. Shop Steward says, “Do you want us to get you something to stand on?” “No thanks , i’d rather grow a few inches, gimme a minute.” All the crew within earshot breaks up, wondering where the hell this dork’s coming from, but they’re warming to me. Steward chuckles at that one the rest of the day, as the sun struggles to break apart the clouds for a few hours.

Aching body shuffles home, satisfied to complete another paid day, tempered by the absolute fatigue, i’ve made my first week. Blisters. Muscles barely respond to brain commands. Bath. Nap. Too tired to dream.

Phone rings, the Photographer’s going up on the roof for some Friday beers with his brother and their father, who also live in my loft building. How about hoisting a few? Long time neighbors, deepening friendships. They’ve started a technology company together, and have spent much time sailing the oceans. Particularly the father and older brother, the sea’s in their blood. Standing on the roof, beers in hand, heavy clouds reflecting broad bands of strong setting sunlight, sunlight glinting off the while-hulled Mercy in the distance, drydock buzzing with the daily sounds of the swing shift, it’s easy for us to fall into seafaring stories. Their yacht Simpatica’s in New Zealand currently, i’ll bet they miss it, though they’ve been there recently. They probably find it hard to believe that i’m working at the shipyard, my feelings entirely. The father tells me the Mercy, stunning centerpiece of our rooftop deck’s horizon, huge white hospital ship with huge red crosses so it won’t be subjected to enemy fire, used to be an oil tanker. What? Cut it in half, cut a fucking ship in half and lengthen it by adding a section amidships. That probably explains why the ship’s got a vibration problem, necessitating that incredibly sculptural giant screw propeller, the scimitar-bladed kind used on submarines to cut detection, and in this case, to cut vibrations at speed. Eye tell them stories of my days on the Mercy, they tell me sea stories, we’re forging a new bond, on the horizon the common unifying vista, shared sea visions, every day in view, the Drydock.

And getting blitzed.

And cold. So off to the Sea Star, shipyard bar par excellence, cheap drinks, personable bartendress, friendly with the correct amount of sex appeal, glad to see her regulars, and we’re beginning to fly in one of the last bars in San Francisco where one can legally smoke. Elder brother Tom’s brought cigars, and they’re buying drinks, since i won’t get paid for another five days. Surrounded by shipyard drinkers, even the medic who gave me my drug test tips is here, we’re flying, sea stories at the Sea Star, race eight of the America’s Cup contender’s finals on the tube, sleekest, fastest ocean sailing boats in the world, winner will likely spend a hundred mil, but damn they’re fast, i can almost taste the salt water, surrounded by the sea, and men who ply the sea, or at least work on the ships who ply the seas, and we’re brothers in tales and adventures.

i forget i don’t have a real life, i forget every muscle aches, i forget how much i miss my son, i forget how much i miss Tha Oner, i forget i’ve got to be back at the drydock in just a few hours. Me been so disciplined, but now, ohhh fuck.

This alarm’s the worst one yet, and somehow i figure i better get to the docks even though it’s already an hour and a half past first whistle. My bubbly personality staves off the reprimand for arriving so late, at least i’m there and ready to work, bleary, shaky, head nodding. My boss has seen this a thousand times, there’s no hiding it from him, or the crew, but i force myself to work as hard as i can to overcome my transgression. Two strong cups of dark double espresso on waking helped, but the day’s getting slower and slower, and it’s harder and harder to keep busy. And it’s raining, so i’m wet, and chilled. But i’m not alone. Overheard: “Where’s Leon? Won’t be in today, he threw a shoe.” What a phrase, threw a shoe, evoking what hobbles a thoroughbred to describe why a shipwright’s previous evening’s drinking habits prevents him from attending to his workday tasks, or even showing up. My crew mates are experienced derelicts, master shipwrights and master drinkers. Without their humor i’d never get through the days. My respect for these guys grows daily, despite hating that i must work with them. Threw a shoe indeed. But i didn’t, eye worked.

Sleep comes easy for one who worked an entire day hung over at the drydock.

Laughing at the remembrance of the time i was so tired i climbed the fake stairs right next to the real ones, all the way up, ‘til they stopped going nowhere, suspended in space, spare stair going nowhere, and i had to climb down and back up the right ones to get to the locker room, where all the ex-bikers on the crew laugh their asses in my face.

Of course, the morning alarm comes too early, again. It’s a fucking Sunday, a raining fuckin’ Sunday, and here i am packing a lunch, putting on the same clothes underneath my coveralls that i’ve worn all week, for i know the foulest body odor i reek is but a meteorite in the cosmos to the overpowering chemical olfactory delight of this seaside shipyard factory. Duck butter, and kerosene to wash it off, and there’s no way, despite every precaution, that gobs of this shit isn’t leaching into the bay i love.

But i also love hating the walk to the yards, morning after morning in the rain, walking before the sun rises, to layer 6.39 of the most ingenious purgatory devised for humans, Dante’s Drydock, just punch in at the gate, walk through the machine shop, climb the stairs to the lair of the shipwright, hear the first “motherfucker” of the new day, put on your brown hardhat, strap in your tools, and make sure you stay focused enough so you won’t get fired. Another day, another fifteen eighty-four an hour to breathe this shit, while saving the Eureka from sea rot, so generations to come can see how their forefathers took their railroad cars across the bay before civilization built the bridges that make San Francisco both famous and beautiful, the Eureka, my new home for a good part of every day, seven days a week, she’s a sturdy one, back in the day bringing these “new-fangled” automobiles, burn those fossils, romance of progress, catalytic converters haven’t even been conceived yet, autos across the Bay, autos that gave people Henry Ford’s version of freedom, in the old days Eureka first carried train cars across to Suasalito, how the fuck do they get train cars on a ferry boat, no, the Eureka evolved to bring personal transportation devices across the Bay, and i’m walking to the docks to refit her, while i’m trying to figure out how to refit myself.

At my age.

How many times does one have to reinvent oneself to stay current with the ever floating demands of the universe? But i’ve no time for such weighty concerns. Today there’s no Shop Steward to guide my motions, “threw a shoe,” must be more common than i knew, today i’m given the task to move the staging enough to get the main deck window headers routed and installed. First time i’ve got a task that’s my responsibility, and it’s a good thing i haven’t thrown a shoe in over thirty hours.

Except i’ve got Izzy helping me.

Now Izzy’s got a heart of gold, i can feel it already, but when God gave out brains, Izzy thought he said trains, and signed on to refit the Eureka. Plus he just doesn’t care about his performance, probably doesn’t understand the concept, he’s just logging the hours until he’s not working, when something different happens, most likely. This lack of professionalism, so essential to elevating ex-derelicts to the ancient order of shipwrights, translates into always having to borrow other people’s tools, not being able to make the same measurement twice, being able to discuss seventeen different ways of achieving the results necessary, never being conscious of his effect on the outer world, which outer world consists of me, the rest of the crew, the damn ship on which we work, and the actual task we’ve been asked to accomplish. Plus he leaves duck butter and epoxy on every surface within a fourteen meter radius, meaning my coveralls stick, my hands stick, my tools stick, and my brain sticks, to everything that doesn’t even have duck butter on it, though the duck butter is now in every pore, in every nostril, in every thought, of any action i take, might take, might ever contemplate taking, to accomplish my tasks on this purgatorial locambus.

Don’t you just hate it when your ass sticks to the job?

Spare you the details. Suffice to say that having a competent partner would have made for a better day. Eye’m tired of discussing the subtleties of job performance with him, i’m tired of being judged by his work, which even if i’m not, i believe i am, ergo i am, so fuck, i’m trying to add another two dollars an hour to my pay by becoming a full-fledged duck butter pledged shipwright, at full shipwright’s pay, and i’ve got crew laughing at me and Izzy for the Marx Brothers routine we’ve fallen into. Not to mention sticking to the fucking ship from the fucking duck butter and epoxy that’s cementing my relationship to my job.

Eye’m so flustered i even fuck up the rout to one window header, and only half my nails are driven in straight, and since they’re galvanized, they’re next to impossible to pull out, given my relative newness to performing feats of strength.

But we put in the window headers for the aft quarter port of the main deck, counting the two headers i cut perfectly but couldn’t place because the staging was in the way, and removing the staging would mean rebuilding the entire three decks of walkways, and we were weeks away from that, at best, so hiding in the wheelhouse for an hour before the day’s last whistle seems to be the proper course of action, it being Sunday.

At least there were doughnuts this morning. Life is so good, and i can look forward to doing this again tomorrow. Perhaps i’ll even pack a duck butter sandwich. Takes me ten minutes past leaving time to clean off my tools, which i swear he’ll never borrow again.

Eye awake on my downstairs daybed, naked, didn’t even take a shower, how tired is that? And the sun’s still out, it’s still Sunday, and i don’t have a life outside the shipyards...

Perhaps i have one in Deutschland? The phone rings, Karin’s calling again from her village between Cologne and Dusseldorf. Somebody out there truly cares about me, we’re trying to conquer the physical distance between us, phone and emails, years after our brief affair.

Me flying to see her in a month, using my leftover ticket from an previous incarnation as a windpower pioneer. This is only the first week i pay for my own food, but she says i don’t need to bring any money. Somehow me assume this will all work out. Priorities.

The novel combination of exhilaration and fatigue powering my return from the dead begins to fade into drudgery. No question that a strong element of writerly excitement accompanies my romantic descent into the shipyards, and being placed on the Eureka crew is a boon, perhaps fated, that allows me to stay on here in the drydock. I know if i had to continue servicing the Mercy’s engine room, or some other foul hold, i’d never make it. But here on the Eureka, i’m surrounded by work that taxes my strength while giving me ample opportunity to renew my acquaintance with valuable carpentry skills, as remarkably fulfilling as the time is exhausting. Work on the Eureka’s a long step removed from the poison environment of a huge ship in the docks. Feels great to be apart of refitting San Francisco maritime history.

Though the blisters on my feet keep bleeding, my new steel-toes are so comfortable i can get through the morning with hardly a limp, and even the shorter afternoon sessions don’t produce too strong a hitch in my gait. The carpenter’s coveralls make walking around with tools much more convenient, as tools in their proper place make an easier load. There’s even a strange satisfaction that comes with having a slot for the carpenter’s pencil, and me beginning to be confident marking my measurements. Me take great satisfaction at finishing something i began, and believe i’m a fast learner. Some of these skills are, after all, only buried by twenty five years of telephone deskmanship.

Me still have me first big check coming in a few days, and there’s nothing like a wallet full of hundreds to make a man feel like a man. Just thinking about Tick, pulling out his wallet to show me, amidst a money slot full of the strangest collection of tattered papers and cards i’ve ever seen, as if any of those scraps could possibly be worth stuffing into a billfold, to proudly display the money left over after a full night’s carouse, and to remind me of the character of the working class that you’d barely find in some office, as he tells me if i need anything to tide me over, it’s mine. My respect for this derelict crew grows stronger by the hour, particularly as i begin to see the progress on the transformation of the Eureka from an aging and decrepit relic to it’s rightful place as a memorial to another time.

Reader (Obviously he meant the ones still here. Ed.), try to imagine my mornings, reaching the foredeck about twenty minutes to seven, after the heavy, tool-laden shuffle from the locker room to the gangway at the end of the pier. Check out the cluster of not yet awake, usually wet shipwrights around the tool chests, lining up to grab favorite power tools and stored tool belts, boxes and buckets, likely pulling extension cords from some other station before anyone notices they’re missing, milling around with labored morning jokes to buy a few more minutes of not working, then quietly disappearing to the day’s work stations, leaving me virtually alone where i’m working the starboard bow maindeck, wondering what happened to the extension cords i so carefully rigged yesterday. Me wander past the gangway, past the four foot high black iron windlass coiled with the docking rope, out onto the bow, staring at the skyline of San Francisco emerging from the dark, brooding daybreak. For a brief moment the sun overtakes the distant eastern hills, shining on the horizon beneath the black clouds filling the sky, gathering for another day of rain, but in that momentary slot of brilliance, eye forget the pains that brought me here. These morning breaths, sacred relief from the trauma my life’s become, eye treasure. i’m taking shape here, somehow, refitting me own being.

The ballpark in the distance also takes shape, as the seats are piled up against the gray concrete slopes of the upper deck, waiting to be installed. Me turn to face the day’s work, labor which prevents me from sliding back into the morass of contemplating rampant oblivion, me focused on accomplishing the next labored task, the simple action that brings me one step closer to survival. Me want to be a success here in drydock. Me want the crew to know i’m a shipwright.

By the end of the day me want to forget i’m a shipwright.

There’s few satisfactions known to man as strong as sweeping your badge, the one with the goateed shipwright photo laminated into reality, punching the time clock and ambling past the guardhouse gate toward some unlikely destiny away from the yards.

Worked eight straight days before throwing a shoe.

Muscle aches fading quicker at the end of each day now.

DOT.COM? DRYDOCK ÜBER ALLES, EXCEPT BASEBALL (DRYDOCK REVERIES)

Strange mixture of too much time thinking of everything under the sun, brilliant brain flux of your standard issue Gobal Village Idiot, and too many tasks demanding such rhythmic repetition the brain thinks of nothing but the next swing of the hammer, the next cut of the saw, the next carry of the load, the next eyeball measurement or reading the tape, twice to get it right, marking off the cut with growing satisfaction.

Every so often i’m here on the foredeck, staring out at the city eye love, watching it die. Here i am making $15.83 an hour to put my life on the line, and there’s tens of thousands of snotty kids with no perception of reality’s worldline, pulling down many times my pay just to set up a web site in this hyperventilating hyperworld, whose effect on this city is completely devastating. So much money’s come into town in the past few years from the dot.com frenzy that the city’s irrevocably changed. Very little for the better.

Seems strange that i participated in the world’s first online community, The Well, a decade and a half ago, part of the new cyber frontier, and now me reduced to bottom of the barrel labor on the ships that freight the computer chips, memory boards, advanced plasma screens, for a world that has no idea where it’s going, while the denizens of that exploding cyberworld actually believe they’re on the cutting edge of a vast new world. They talk about the new economy, about the new business structures, as if they don’t see that their entire world is built on a scaffold of butter, which probably will melt into a rancid pool... a fetid place to learn to swim. If i spend too much time realizing i was there on the cutting edge, that i could well have successfully grown not one but two internet startups by now, with a vast personal fortune to spend on my heart’s desires, i’d go far beyond the bend. We understood the vision in front of us, we all knew we were part of the beginning of a sea change in the way the world communicated, with so much promise for the democratizing of the entire globe, we knew strong peace and high vision were just around the corner, utopia staring us in the face, and i watched as the net became horribly commercial, submerging the promise, subverting the vision. Standing on the deck of the Eureka, i know that the promise of a wired world is real, i still believe with all my brain, but just as surely as i’m relearning how to hammer nails, i know that until the back of the corporate dictatorship is broken, we’re nowhere.

The greed flowing over the city is palpable. You can taste it so strongly that you’ve got to spit into the bay just to keep from swallowing it. Such small minds making such big bucks. Me with a mind encompassing the entire globe, stuck in the fucking shipyards, where if i work a shift and a half every day for the next year, i might become solvent again. At least i’ll have kept my loft, but i’ll be dead, and won’t get to enjoy it. Write not another word, just because i’m here living out a future screenplay. Kick me in the ass.

Luckily, me rout out the deck rail, got another stud to cut, seal, plaster with duck butter, set, nail ‘er. And it’s always so pissin’ wet, rain every day, plastic sheeting all over the sides of the Eureka keeping out some of the rain, but most everything’s soaked, when the rains are hard streams meander over the decks, dripping from the deck above, making the scaffolds slippery, and there’s no end to it. Then it just pisses, time for things to dry up a bit, and just as things begin to dry out, hard rain slashes again, plastic sheeting flies into the wind, me scrambling up the scaffolds, tying down every corner i can get a grip on, rain sliding off my hard hat into the space between my glasses and my safety glasses, making it impossible to see, but i’m only four stories over the Bay, and i’m already soaked, so makes no difference if i fall or not.

At least i found another thermos, and i’m bringing double strong coffee, and the Coleman keeps it hot most of the day. Funny how there’s no coffee breaks at the shipyards, you’d think coffee would be the lifeblood out here. Management has a coffee machine way over by the main toolshed where you feed money in, get something foul out, bearing no resemblance to coffee, and with no power to keep you moving through this tough day. Every well-funded dot.com startup has their supercharged chip-controlled espresso machine stashed near their table hockey ping pong hoop dream lounge.

There’s sometimes self-chosen breaks where you must wander to the toolshed for another, or better tool, drill, ratchet, or to replace broken bits, or you need a sawzall, and you shuffle off, glad to get away from the ship if just for a change of scenery. Dockworkers float by on their cobhouse bicycles, hardhats of different colors signifying which skill they work, maintenance, electrical, sandblasters, painters, riggers, god knows what else, and the ubiquitous white hardhats of management, purveyors of slop coffee where coffee should be the lifeblood. Probably justified, because you couldn’t open a thermos for more than a few seconds, without ingesting some of the foul particles of a shipyard full of who knows what floating between every molecule of real air, much less leave a cup o’ joe around for a few minutes.

But how can you keep going without a decent jolt?

You force yourself.

Tha’s working at a dot.com shop that’s been in business for almost four months now, and they’re planning to go public in the spring, just a few months away. How sane is that? What kind of world allows such blind obedience to greed that every law of history conveniently gets forgotten over and over again? Do they truly think they’re creating real value, when all this wasted investment capital came from the opening of the market to day traders knowing they’re about to become the next retired at thirty success story in Red Herring, and artificially stimulating the boom, unable to comprehend the corresponding bust? She’s surrounded by these power wonks of the digital future, raising insane amounts of capital for what looks to all with eyes to see like a glorified advertising market, for a product which barely exists yet. There’s no there there, isn’t there. So why am i nearly evicted, while all these snots take over every illegal live-work building spoiling San Francisco for decades at prices so inflated you could choke, every restaurant reservation at every restaurant raising it’s prices to match the Nasdaq, twenny-something Idaho gameboy (Product placement. Ed.) digerati throwing down twenties to tip at every once great dive bar now home to the wired wizards of digital whoredom, taking every parking space that was contemplated for the next hundred years. Why do you need an urban assault vehicle just to move your cell phone from one location in real space to another?

Wish Tha could see me on the deck, thinking through the end of this civilization, dreaming of the new one that will rise from the ashes to take it’s glorious place, shining, as if all the hippie dreams of all the continents finally begin to become reality, as if our lives were worth something after all, as if all those hours of dedicated pursuit of enlightened vision meant something after all, as if our vision of harmony was the real value in the world, instead of this soon to be dead digital crap masquerading as value.

Who’s going to repair your SUV’s when your insane rents have driven out all the repair shops? What will you do when the grid goes down, and you can’t power your fucking digital reality?

Standing on the foredeck of the Eureka, overtaken by hallucinations, i can see the floating wind ships taking shape in the yards, wind ships designed to harness the vast winds over the oceans, to make enough hydrogen to get us off this poisonous oil addiction which lubricates liquid death over every aspect of society. Over twenty years ago, first arriving in San Francisco, that vision of windmills floating all over the ocean sparked my beginnings in the world of commercial windpower. There’s so much intelligence in that vision, such logic, i hurt in my gut realizing this world is so far from understanding how to get out of this mess, much less that we’re even in a mess. Will probably take a series of Oil Wars to wake everyone up.

Tha never understood what this vision meant. She couldn’t fathom that we’re in a real mess, so how could she understand the value of intelligent solutions to the problem of poison energy supply. That this dependence on poison underscores a huge hole in the collective mindset of civilization, must be far too big a stretch for her to conceive. If she could, she wouldn’t have left me here in the yards, struggling to begin to pay back her support for the past year, feeling the insane horror of not being able to work in my created career. Lost in the yards, dreaming of floating wind ships harnessing the natural power which circumnavigates the globe, so alone eye can barely breathe, heart breaking every moment i step above the immediate task. If she could have understood, she would’ve known that her gift in keeping me afloat over the past year was a brilliant leap of faith, in keeping with the strength of our now destroyed love. Instead, we share nothing anymore, and i’m a cast off barrel of solvent, rusting on the shore.

What would my son understand of me in the yards? Will he ever comprehend the hollow knife in my gut his distance drives so deep? Yo Buck, what do you make of your old man wearing the brown hardhat of a shipwright, here in the shipyards that keep the tankers afloat, a failed writer unable to do anything to help you through your time of great trial, barely able to find my own center, and keep going in a world so far out of balance it doesn’t hear your cries of pain. Can you see me carrying the load, scarfing the joint, routing the deck rail, refitting this queen of the Bay? Can you feel that every shuffling step i take in these steel-toed boots is my attempt at finding a path back to you, at giving you the health you deserve, at making a world fit for your brilliant talent?

Lonely on the foredeck, unable to know which direction holds the path, just knowing i’ve got to get back to work.

At least i don’t have to sell my drums, my son, the drums i’ve been saving for you to put in your studio, the drums with the craft of times long forgotten, with a sound so rich you with all your digital magic couldn’t recreate, or if you could, you couldn’t add the sensual pleasure of looking at the smoky wine mahogany shells while you struck the heads creating your beats. (He’s still got them. Ed. If they’re still under the garage. Ed-2.) If i just get up for another day, i’ll keep getting paid, and somehow that’s going to drive away the oblivion whose unrelenting face i stare into every day. Every task i finish here, sends the oblivion just another step back into the dark singularity of its heinous birth.

My beloved son, can you comprehend your father here in the shipyards, day after day, wrestling with the fates, certain i’ve got what it takes to get my life back... and in the meantime, write this dynamic Drydock script. Hear me laughing, laughing over the incessant throbbing hurt, as even eye begin to comprehend that my times at Drydock will result in such a dynamite script. Remember how the first time RaSoul heard the booming bass of the shift horns, he immediately wanted to record the deep richness for a track? Me wanted to contrast the genetic-engineered, fiber optic future with the hot arc welding and cold steel of the Dogpatch shipyards where i’ve lived the last ten years, and here i am, drinking of the life itself. This ain’t no, Hi, i’m Nicolas Cage, and i’m going to be playing a shipwright in my next film, and i’d like to spend a few days watching you work. This is me, my life on the line, soaking up the sordid ambiance of a day on the docks, day after day, life on the line, aching and proud.

And sore.

This film is writing itself, and eye can’t help but smile the smile of every live writer in history, every writer alive in truly living, from the gut. Standing on the foredeck of the Eureka, i imagine some twenty years younger Hollyweird exec telling me my script doesn’t capture a working class environment strongly enough, and me busting his jaw, in super stop motion, one crack at a time. Rumi and the Dalai Lama are sitting on the cap rail, legs dangling over the Bay, pointing at me, and laughing, no, splitting their sides at how much i’ve forgotten, how far i’ve fallen. Like busting the jaw of any film exec would ever get a film made, not to mention i’ll be reincarnated as a mercury-poisoned carp, but i’ve been listening to too many motherfuckers day after day on this boat to care about whether i’m remembering the path to full illumination, or whether i’ve gone to full looney nation, like the rest of this insane reincarnation of the death of the Roman Empire.

What’s the difference between a boat and a ship? You can put a boat on a ship, but you can’t put a ship on a boat. See what eye mean? Work here is so hard even that one passes as a joke, one of the only ones i’ve heard that doesn’t involve sex with family members, or sucking on primal appendages. A drydock floats and is huge, so that makes her a ship, and since the biggest ocean queens slide in her steel docks for refitting, i guess you can put a ship on a ship. See how illuminated i’m getting?

Find myself praying for a market crash. Know it’s going to be painful, that people will be hurting, but also knowing that people are already hurting, that civilization hurts, that we’re stretching the life support capacity of the skin of the planet, in ways that are so immediate it’s not visible to the dot.com hordes smothering that brilliant city in the distance. We’re going under, Readers, me just in the advance, and you do nothing to make it right. How is it you don’t understand?

Why don’t you listen to the heroes amongst you?

Joe Kane, deep in the Amazon jungle, walking with rainforest tribes barely removed from a life immersed in a world view so distant from your comprehension, you call it primitive. He’s lived right here in Dogpatch, documenting the invasion of the oil companies scouring the forests for the last precious drops of poison you need to power your urban assault vehicles, power your internet, power your jet-setting sun-setting lifestyle, why don’t you listen to him? You searching for the next marketable super hero, why there are real heros walking amidst you, and you’re so blind you can’t tell the difference between some manga animation and a writer putting his life on the line. Joe Kane, writing in Savages (Product placement, read the damn book, Ed.), spinning his adventures deep within the distant lands, distant times of the Huaorani, as they try to defend their homeland from the ravages of oil development. He’s a hero, on a heroic quest, and you can’t even understand there’s a problem needing to be solved.

Don’t you be getting on me for another screed either. You know that i’ve spent twenty years trying rational, logical arguments, to convince society it’s time to shift its understanding, immediately, all to no avail. We told you about global warming, and you responded by accepting the media crap about a diversity of opinion, when all that diversity was just a couple of oil company paid shills lying in the name of cash-perverted science. They would have no power in their lies if it wasn’t for you being so busy pursuing the trappings of material success that you forgot your children’s lives were on the line. Me calling for war, not violence, but war, war of power, power of the vote, power of the wallet, power of voices raised against the horror, power of unified intelligence, taking back the high road of sane vision. There’s no time left for rational argument, polite social discourse, differing opinion. There’s only time left for action, action in the name of bringing spirit back into society, reflected in the energy systems that drive all of modern culture. Me ranting because you won’t. Me tried every stop on the path to discourse, getting nowhere.

Your lives will be better when you break the chains of your dependency on fossils fuels. Period.

But we won’t get to that glorious future by debate any longer. Now there’s only time for screeds, ripped from the breast of visionaries alive enough to live the future, with vigor.

Shipyards my ass. Will eye ever regain me sanity? Who cares, me got window header support blocks to cut and nail, cut and nail, but eye can’t shake thoughts of real heroes.

Mark Hertsgaard, a hero risking torture in some primitive Chinese prison, for wandering into a industrial zone of such high pollution he might be doing permanent damage to his system, just so he can bring you the story of another act of surfacide to the skin of our Mother. Earth Odyssey, his publishers call the book, as if putting your life on the line in the name of environmental truth is some travelogue with a message. Sneaking into an industrial washout leaking torrents of permanent poison into the river is no travelogue. Why aren’t you listening? “Within seconds we saw ahead of us a broad stream of bubbling water cascading down the hillside. The astringent odor of chlorine soon attacked our nostrils, and once we reached the streams edge the smell was so powerful we immediately had to back away. Downstream, where the factory’s discharge was emptying into the Jialing, a frothy white plume was spreading across the slow-moving river.” He risked his life to tell you that, and you’re blindly believing that the NASDAQ hasn’t finished it’s monumental mesmerization of all of you. Here’s a writer spanning the globe to document the horror inflicted on the source of all of our lives, at great personal peril, and you can’t stop buying tickets for Schwarzenegger movies about the perils of absolutely nothing.

Want some logic? “By 1997, the world’s forests were, for the first time, losing more carbon than they were absorbing.”

Really got you where it hurts, right, or must we wait for the Bubble to Burst?

Hertsgaard traveled to war zones in Africa, documenting the human devastation of drought, pestilence and war, much of it with roots in environmental destruction, again, with his life on the line. He tracked poisons in Eastern Europe, and the devastation of the Danube. He went to the far reaches of distant america, to the Hanford nuclear reservation, where radioactive particles, like the Indians before them, are isolated in desolate ignorance from reminding you that they’re still alive, and will be for hundreds of generations, if you don’t make life uninhabitable for any of us by then. He documented that in China, where the coal that’s twice as destructive as the other fossils is burnt unchecked, in vast quantities, 1.9 million people a year die from the effluent. In case you’re wondering, that’s a statistic from those radical environmental activists, the World Bank.

Are you beginning to catch my drift?

Who cares about coal pollution in China, i mean, we’ve got the entire Pacific to keep that shit away from us. Guess again, for not only does everything affect everything, but here in the US there are scores of coal plants fouling everything under the sun, grandfathered against sane environmental law by the efforts of fat lobbyists with fatter wallets, all at your expense.

Logic my ass. If i work hard enough, with some accuracy, perhaps i’ll be allowed to cut and install the window headers themselves. (He was, Ed.)

Oil is somewhat related to transit policy, for easy mass transit as performed wonderfully throughout Europe would lessen our dependence on the killer greatly. But there is no real transit policy, other than equating autos with the inalienable right to bear arms against nature, against the pursuit of your happiness. From Hertsgaard, “In what must rank among the great corporate crimes of the century, General Motors secretly joined with Standard Oil of California, Firestone Tire and Rubber, Phillips Petroleum, and Mack (Truck) Manufacturing in 1932 to form National City Lines, a phony front company whose modus operandi was brutally simple: buy up rail and trolley lines in cities across the land, then shut them down and tear out the tracks. National City Lines eventually closed approximately one hundred streetcar systems in some forty-five cities, including New York, Baltimore, and Los Angeles. At the time, Los Angeles boasted one of the finest transit systems in the country. While its trolley and rail lines were being shut, a replacement network of so-called freeways - highways that were anything but free to the unwitting citizens whose taxes paid for them - was being built. It was a classic case of carrot and stick. As mass transit options narrowed, Los Angeles residents turned increasingly to private automobiles. Widespread auto use in turn propelled the city’s geographic sprawl to where living without a car became difficult indeed. The profits gained from such skullduggery were incalculable (the scam essentially secured monopoly status for the automobile within the US transportation system), but the punishment was next to nothing - when a federal court convicted GM and its co-conspirators of antitrust violations in 1949, the fine was a mere $5,000.”

Do you think things have changed?

Of course, you were already roused to action against the hegemony of corporate dictatorship because you saw this story dramatized in “Who’s Afraid of Roger Rabbit,” where an animated rabbit makes light of this travesty. But you won’t take a look at today’s version of global skulduggery, NAFTA, FTAA, and the WTO, where democracy’s subverted in the name of capital, behind your back. You let them obviate the need for government, you destroy a generation of environmental law, and several generations of labor law, so corporate entities can have a more profitable life? You let them allow corporations to have human rights, all for more advanced digital television?

With new In Vitro TIVO, you can pause life before it begins.

Do you understand why i give up on rational logic?

Strange, these are the joys of my current life. Too tired after a day at the docks to do anything but turn the page, and perhaps craft a few pages of my own, i’m stuck looking out over the vista of modern civilization, just as i spend my days looking out over the vista of this beautiful Bay. What does it take to make a hero? Bruce Willis?

Was Woody Harrelson a hero for grabbing his hi-tech harness and shimmying up a tower on the Golden Gate Bridge to hang a sign for all you commuters, “Hurwitz, Aren’t Ancient Redwoods More Precious Than Gold?” Couldn’t help thinking about that, as right now i’m hanging off the Eureka cap rail, belted for the first time in my life, not counting the myriad climbs up wind turbine towers where i wore the belts but never used them, now roped to the boat giving me enough leverage to take this huge shoulder drill and two-foot bit and drill out the bolt holes to capture the cap rail to the superstructure, what fun, hanging out over the Bay like super elf, did you have as much fun as this, Woody?

Please pardon me for laughing, but you guys actually might consider George Dubya Bush as a viable candidate for President. This puppet front for oil interests is as transparent as the screen for some Balinese shadow play, and you’re letting the media guide you into considering him an actual candidate. My sides split from the incongruity of it all. There’s no way he could actually be a real candidate, could he? You wouldn’t actually go so far as to elect an oil president, would you? You’re too intelligent for that, for you remember that his father sent a half million young adults, some would say kids, what with the maturity level of america these days, a half million living breathing laughing wondering sleepwalking souls, into the desert, to protect the bastion of democracy, Kuwait. Or did you forget that? And did you forget that Dubya made a killing by selling his drilling rights just before the war, or did you not even pay attention enough to know that? americans can’t be so stupid, could they?

Like Gore is an answer, great enviro that he is. Wonder what his vote would have been if he were a justice sitting in judgment on GM?

Why is the baseball season so far away?

How i miss the travels to the ballyard, where for a few hours the great american game keeps reality at bay, where for a few hours we can all bask in the glory of an american valhalla, game of the gods, invented here, soon to be gifted to the world, the diamond sutra of sports, mixing ballet, athletics, and chess, with a smattering of psychological warfare for effect. Me must keep working the docks, but though i keep putting it off, there’s no way i can begin to have a life again if i don’t sell my season seat at the soon to be opened ballyard.

Don’t wish to think about that, better write somethingelseanything, sell my left arm before eye sell my seats. The unfolding drama of the long season, rising and falling like the great theater of the ages, captivates and soothes, even a soul as conflicted as mine, here on the foredeck, staring into the rapidly completing new ballyard.

The skies continue to rain down on the Eureka, soaking everything and everybody, and don’t think just because we’re already on the water that such continued rainfall isn’t dampening our spirits. Me so waterlogged i’d sink if i fell.

The sounds are the rhythm of my days. Deep-throated horns from the docks, marking the passage of measures in the day’s drydock symphony. Honking bells from the cranes, keeping everyone aware of its movements. Run over by a crane, i’d hate that.

Pardon me, please pardon me for capping on you so hard, for being so egotistically arrogant about my arguments and your stupidity. You know i don’t mean it, right, this is just a lover’s quarrel, you love my writing so, my fevered state of mind, bringing pulsing blood life to you, and you know i love it that you actually bought this book, and even more wondrous, you’re still here. So forgive me my delusions of relevance, and my high-handed, brain-addled laser bursts, just please remember my anger at still having to fight this fight after thirty years of calling out from the wilderness. You know i could dramatize all your successes during that time as well, and you should be proud of them, why, we’ve moved so far from where we were as a civilization when i was a mere firebrain of twenty, awake anew to the joys of the emerging cosmic consciousness rampant across the sixties. Just please understand, we ain’t moved near far enough, or fast enough, or wise enough, to get where we can legitimately believe we’re not killing our children.

The days blur. Window headers and frames. Cutting and notching. Studs, routing and installing. Threading the twenty foot tension rod ends, up in the mill shop. Turning the threader, two hands rolling, and dousing the threads with cutting oil, aromatics of poison. Installing the tension rods in the ancient wheelhouse, home of the giant paddlewheels, paddling the ferry across the Bay so long ago, now stopped forever. But at least when we finish you can see them, monument to a technology long past it’s prime, outdated, surpassed by newer, more lethal methods of moving the stuff of civilization. What a thrill, clambering up and over the giant wooden paddles, held together by the steel that forged this nation, precariously finding a place to purchase a foothold, so me and Darryl could tighten up the wheelhouse, keeping it from falling off the side of the boat.

The anger blurs. The insane rise of NASDAQ; the invasion of the dot.commers and their blind belief in the profitability of the web; the travesty of scores of illegal live work buildings rising amidst the last remaining areas of industry, setting up conflict for years, just check out anywhere in Dogpatch or the Mission; the destruction of a way of life in this once great city as the artists, always a step away from abject poverty, are evicted by boomtown rents; and just to the west, looming over the Bay, the first construction of the emerging genetic engineering capital of the world, just a few Dogpatch blocks away, where the mad scientists who do things just because they can, without thinking through the consequences, prepare to make the greatest changes to every species since the sacred helix first began to propagate, at what cost, who cares? The over-arching greed, the blind pursuit of material pleasure, the denigration of the arts, no, the stupefying of the arts, the death of a vibrant city, swallowed up in snarls of SUV traffic, circling like vultures upon the parking carcass of wounded lives.

Such anger and frustration, i can’t write, can barely shipwright.

Staying late tonight, working half a second shift, with Chris, the hero of the ferry’s refitting. When thousands of tourists climb aboard the Eureka after she’s back at her berth at the Maritime Museum, no one will know of the focused labor provided her by the unstoppable Chris. Reputed by a somewhat jealous crew to be one of the top joiners around the Bay, Chris let me work with him for extra hours, where i discovered what shipwrighting was all about. Here i am, working on a joiners’ crew, and i don’t even know what a joiner is, though i guess it’s someone who joins something, probably together, as this is, after all, marine carpentry. Tonight me learn what scarfing a joint is, because eye scarf my first joint. If you cut part of a ship away, because it’s rotting, and leave the parts less ravaged by the sea, you’ve got to join the new with what you maintain. Chris wants me to join two pieces of margin board together, and damn if after a mere hour and a half, the two weirdly-angled pieces actually fit together. Glued and clamped, we’re ready to install them. It’s a labor tough enough for the two of us, i can’t imagine how he usually does this all by himself, which he does. But there’s the margin board, snug in its place, held by clamps awaiting bolting. You can imagine my satisfaction, for while my life shows only marginal signs of refitting, here’s the margin board in place on the Eureka, correctly refitted.

Meanwhile he’s cutting out every single deck joist to just beyond the rot, cutting fresh lumber to join at the proper angle, and setting them in one after another. People, if you’re ever walking the passenger deck of the Eureka, don’t forget that this world of poisons is also populated by workers like Chris, keeping alive an ancient craft, he is from Europe after all, France i believe, where he began to learn the skills in keeping ships fit for the sea, and as you wander the deck, reflect that if it wasn’t for him and his craft, you’d be soaking in the Bay, staring up at the gaping hole in a rotting deck.

My growing confidence a small satisfaction for me, but real.

Can barely swing a hammer by the end of this extra half shift, but he lets me watch, telling me the only reason i’m here is so the boss can go home, as there must be someone else with him or he can’t stay late. Me take the cash, and the gracious lessons. Can’t imagine what he must be thinking about my fumbling efforts to prove shipwright worthiness... but hell, the margin board i built actually fit.

Back home, soaked again, still can’t believe i’m enjoying this spin around Dante’s Drydock. Guess when you hit bottom, you’re satisfied it can’t get no worse. Wish eye could lift my arms.