Panama Love a short story.

 

The Panama canal is about 51 miles long. Constructed to save the hazardous and longer trip around the infamous Cape Horn. Its an engineering wonder! Made by man to connect the Atlantic sea with the Pacific Ocean it was started by the French in the eighteen hundreds who gave up because of the death rate among workers, which was in the hundreds, it was finished by the Americans in the early twentieth century. 51 miles steeped in blood, surrounded by dense jungle and with islands of humanity where canal workers are habited. It takes about twelve hours to navigate. Along the canal are locks, much like locks on canals for barges, this is because there is a difference in depth between the pacific and Atlantic and the ship must be lowered or raised to the correct level.

The surrounding jungle is dense and forbidding, occasionally American soldiers can be seen battling through the foliage as they do their jungle training there. I imagined myself in the jungle with Che in Bolivia what must it have been like? Strange bugs fly around and exotic birds decorate the trees.

Panama city at one end and St Cristobal at the other provide breaks steeped in sleaze and corruption for anyone who has an interest. Which of course we did. The country was at this time run by the dictator Manuel Noriega. St Cristobal was purely old colonial, Panama city was a mix of modern, colonial and run down barrios.

 

We’d arrived in Panama the day before, needing passage and repairs.

The ship romantically named ACT 4, which stood for “Associated Container Transport”. She weighed 24000 Tons. We all worked for Blue Star Line which carried a kudos in British circles and of which we held a certain pride. She… for all ships are “she” was a large powerful container ship driven by steam. Water turned to steam at 600 degrees centigrade, dry steam, turned to mechanical energy by the pressured steam driving huge turbines which turned the propellors with awesome power. Almost incomprehensible in its mechanical conception. 

 

The heat was oppressive. Everything was sweaty haze and the sea murky and brown dirty water, you wouldn’t swim in it. Although dolphins in the surrounding water provided brief hope. The sharks less so. Local fishing boats provided proof of other life swimming in the murk.

 

The passage of the canal was for tomorrow. The boilers had needed urgent repairs. A soot blower, which forced high pressure steam through a nozzle into the fire box of the boiler which had become stuck and the heat.. 620 degrees Centigrade had caused it to bend and become un extractable. The soot blower inserted into the boiler, rotated and withdrew after injecting steam into the boiler to clear them of a build up of soot, a mechanical phallus weighing over a Ton.

So we had spent half a night and the morning removing and replacing the soot blower. Dirty, stinking, sweaty work. Salt tablets popped regularly as the sweat became saline free to the taste, as our faces melted into our mouths and clothing. Water by the bucket… the junior engineer became anxious and dizzy and feinted, to be taken up top to recover, twat, we were now short handed and still had hours of work to go. 

Fucking girl… feinting! 

 

Ships in those times were macho affairs. Women on board known to bring bad luck. Unless you were fucking. That was good luck of a temporary nature.

Engine rooms smell of oil and steam and sweat. The noise is both oppressive and constant. No ear protectors in those days of self appointed hard men. Full of piss and youth. We were man boys. I was twenty-one. The heat beating us down. 45 degrees Centigrade common. The lighting, fluorescent and inadequate left one with the feeling of a subterranean world of semi reality, alien to the world outside or at home. Not for the feint hearted. And always the noise and heat. Relentless. Hiss of steam. Roar of engines, whirl of pumps.

Our hammers and spanners hot to the touch, slippery in sweat soaked hands. Hard hard work. 

But also a solid humour and camaraderie. We loved one another as men with a powerful respect that transcended mere friendships. 

Arguments were usually settled ashore. Often with fists. It wasn’t unusual for two lads to arrive back aboard with black eyes. Drunk, holding one another up and swearing lifelong fealty after knocking seven bells out of each other. The unwritten rule “what happens ashore…. Stays ashore”.

 

The Barbadian Engine room lads, the crew, were our life savers, especially Zanda who had been a Mr Barbados and provided two mens muscle when it was needed, Zanda was a walking half ton lifting device, a chain block on legs. And when we hit port in Australia and New Zealand his other role of fantasy fuck came into its own. 

He was a beautiful deep black and actually had the socially implied huge dick! Which he was happy to flaunt whenever the opportunity arose. 

The girls fought for his attention and he was well known to enjoy it and availed himself at every opportunity for “Raas man white pussy is good, but I tell you man, Barbados girls black pussies burn with desire”. “Can’t beat black pussy man”. 

The only thing we had going for us as pallid white men, apparently, was oral sex which the Barbadians we’re notorious for their dislike and reluctance to commit to!

The Barbadian crew had a constant battle with oil and soot keeping the Engine Room clean. Thankless back breaking work. Always something was being painted, washed or polished. I never heard them complain.

 

James, not so much “Mr Barbados”, a sensitive sort of guy and a lovely lovely man, full on Rasta, ate his nuts and trained his dreadlocks, got on with it, and when he’d done he’d be on the forecastle with an eight inch spliff paying homage to his religion. But he was a grafter when he had to be. He and I bonded over a love of reggae and ska. A frowned upon relationship, Officers and crew don’t mix outside toil.

Which summed us all up… Graft when we had to, and it was honest graft. Work hard, play hard the team saying.

 

The relationship between officers and crew was a constant source of angst, friendships between classes, for that was the perception, was frowned upon even derided and in the extreme hated. An issue I could never resolve satisfactorily and which often brought me into internal conflict. Sometimes the abuse was racist and the conflict became more external.

 

Boiler suits were soaked. Wet, could be wrung out, they just provided protection from sharp edges and hot pipes. Although we all sported burns of varying degrees. It could be dangerous and we carried no doctor. We’d lost a shipmate, a fourth engineer who accidentally opened the wrong valve and cooked himself in superheated steam. His flesh fell from the bones. He was due to get married at the end of the trip! 

The second officer, Tim, Hackneyed face and narrowing shoulders.  Having attended a course could inject an orange and apply bandages! No one trusted him to do either successfully. He was a foppish product of the boarding school system and was an aloof character with pretensions of early captaincy. He never achieved it, He was overcome by psychosis when he “needed” to go home and couldn’t, smashing up the control room with a sledge hammer to facilitate early discharge. It pissed me off at the time as I had a great deal of work rebuilding those control systems which he’d destroyed, he was seen as part weak, a let down and betrayer. It didn’t pay to dwell too much on home. No one discussed mental health, you could either hack it  or you were weak.

 

The following trip a sixteen year old deck cadet hung himself from the awning of the swimming pool. He’d sat in the officers bar and tied the knot in front of us but knot work was part of his training and we made no connection. His body was too high to support. I still remember the noise his body made as we cut him down and he fell to the empty steel pool deck. We all wandered if tying the knot in public was a cry for help we missed. I recall the difficulty of lifting his body from the bottom of the eight foot deep pool. Its difficult to reconcile such obvious manual labour with the compassion and pain we all felt. The ships food chiller was emptied and the body bag placed inside to be landed at the next port to be flown home. We carried his weight with us for quite a long time afterwards. 

It could be a delicate, dodgy life. There were traps hidden in the corners. A darkness sitting just out of sight. Bloody to the mind.

Everyone should read Albert Camus’ “The Myth Of Sisyphus”!

“There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy. All the rest - whether or not the world has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories - comes afterwards. These are games.”

 

In clear areas we worked in shorts only. The dirt, soot, oil, general grime would permeate everything anyway. We were all young, the Chief Engineer of course seemed ancient, at forty, to us. The second engineer was about thirty and the rest of us were between eighteen and twenty-five, we were all fit and tanned. Eight of us made up the engine room officers compliment. 

Within our close bond and physical fitness we would have made a pretty, homo erotic fantasy together, or in the days before the banality of boy bands we may have looked good on the walls of the secretaries secret corners. 

The work finished without anymore feinting. The boiler was warmed and fired up… the new soot blower tested. As we sat about in puddles of sweat and hoped for all being well. It was known that shutting down a boiler, these “Foster Wheeler ESD threes” to name them, was a dodgy thing.. Sometimes things didn't start again! 

 

“Fucking stroll on. Alls well. Alls going…” 

“Say fuck all.. Yer gonna jinx us you cunt!” 

 

Chief is smiling, “get yourselves up top lads there’s beer for you”.  The Chief, George was a legend, a Geordie who was as well known for his fighting as his drinking, until the failure of a kidney turned him into the temperance worlds dodgiest fan boy. And temperance does seem to attract a fair percentage of hypocrites. If there was an argument George would generally tip in with “tak im behind the boiler and punch fuck out of im”. Leadership qualities for times long gone. Face flushed and ruddy nosed he stalked his engine room looking for malingerers and problems we hadn’t spotted. His face was lived in, craggy and attractive in a strange way. His own description being “you don’t get a face like this eating ice cream”! It turned out he was the last of a generation as younger men were promoted and brought “new” ways to the job.

 

George however was not a hypocrite. He was a sober and committed none drinker until two Sundays in every six to nine month trip we did. These days were not written on a schedule or didn’t seem to meet any criteria we could ascertain. He just awoke, and thought, “fuck it lets get pissed”. 

His rum consumption then rolled along linear to his argumentative, truculent manner. If you’d pissed George off during the voyage, you’d better hide, in fact if you hadn’t pissed off George you’d better hide. 

Suddenly we went from the biggest bunch of Saturday afternoon “we demand a half day” shirkers to weekend work enthusiasts, in one casually tipped lunch time spirit glass he changed. But generally there was no escape as he’d come looking for “my lads”. I was a favourite as I also had rough workman like background.. Trawlers and ship repair were almost as working class as the coal mine he served his time in, so we got along ok. I also was, sadly, able to throw a punch in those days with accuracy and will. The gold I wore on my epaulets and rings on my best blues marked me as officer, I didn’t feel it.

My nickname on all the ships I sailed on, because it followed me like a loyal hound, was “Oddball”. I was told fairly often I was strange, which I didn’t mind, fuck, I felt strange. Or a stranger. 

 

I believe he also enjoyed my existential view of the absurd. The pointlessness of loving a machine and the lack of commitment to the norms of life aboard when they challenged my personal beliefs. I could argue with him and often did despite others revering him as the god of the Engine Room. He loved the mechanical with almost autistic causality. I think my beloved Camus whispered in my ear. Telling me nothing mattered it was all a passing illusion, of the absurdity of life, or maybe it was the PTSD I’d be diagnosed with after earlier adventures.

It also helped I had been the youngest person ever promoted to Chief Electrical Engineering Officer in the companies one hundred and twenty year history. He called me “wiz kid” which I felt good about but decried publicly! 

 

I used to call him Effe, which was what Castro enjoyed being called by his men, meaning “Chief” in Spanish, and I also jokingly called him a lackey of the imperialist neo fascist system, which he enjoyed for its irony, he had taken the promotion and big bucks. I didn’t fear him as others did. I have always been starkly honest which I believe he respected. He certainly respected my brutal honesty and told me often.

So come drink day I was sought out as a compañero. And to be fair I could hold my own in the bar, although he exerted his right by seniority to choose the music… Cassettes in those days… I used to get lairy when he played his bloody Neil Diamond… I was a Clash and Sex Pistols guy. An unrepentant punk rocker. Who also loved Dylan and Neil Young, Robert Johnson and Joan Baez. 

 

I was also infinitely more preferable for George to the new breed of young engineers. The five “O” levels three ‘A’ levels minimum, must include English, maths and a science subject, which he saw as sucking the life out of engineering. He was right in so many ways too. These young lads didn’t like the grime, the work. They wanted clip boards and linear graphs. Gleaming white work clothes.

He preferred lads with a basic love of the mechanical. Maybe they had stripped down their fathers Honda fifty and discovered a affixation with the smell of oil and turn of spanner.

Finally as the ships Chief Electrical Officer in all my grandiosity, which included a sub electrical officer whom I was supposed to train up, I intimidated George. He was the master of all things engineering, except the mysterious world of electrics… electronics he was especially wary of, viewing it as a particular type of magic that only the Japanese or Germans could master.

I was pretty good, so I had him really.

 

“Jeez.. Don’t fuckin touch that Chief!”

“What… why..”

 

At which point I would mime a minor nuclear explosion and he would become very interested in the latest fuel figures, which was, Colin’s, the Third Engineers problem. The cost of fuel, heavy oil the death knell of these ships eventually. But that was to come.

Colin was your arch-typical scouser and a close friend. I’d stayed with him when an indiscretion with a girl whose fiancé was a Royal Marine Commando, led to a minor legendary local man hunt with me as the hunted. So I beat feet for Merseyside to stay with Colin and put myself a few miles between a beating and the need to defend my honour. Which I spectacularly lacked. The Marine eventually found his way to prison. He assaulted and robbed the doorman at a local working mans club. Turned out he had gambling issues he needed to feed!

 

So there we were, Panama, at anchor, boiler repaired, and George decided to fall, no, to throw himself off the wagon!

 

“Hey.. Are ya there ya electrical twat… gan doon here an ave a wee dram, ye nah, ya alreet, aye champion! Teenah fuckin Turnah.”

 

ASHORE

 

And we are off! 

I donned my favourite Hawaiian shirt.

Come two in the afternoon a bum boat with skinny local sailor lads came alongside. Tanned and smiling, keen for U.S. Dollars. A shore run was in the offing. That meant rum and girls in any particular order. Preferably for some both together. After haggling  a price for the trip ashore we were all happy with we clambered down the swaying gangway into the bum boat. 

A wooden affair, certainly seen better days, patchwork worn blue paint, not inspiring in its sea worthy aspect, we didn’t care. Its engine growling we navigated Panama harbour, stopping at other ships along the way to collect brethren from various vessels anchored in the harbour.

Slowly the boat filled with seafarers from around the world. Brits, Indians, Lascars, Pakistanis, Russians, Scandinavians, Malay and Poles, all thrown together in a melange of excited child like commonality. At one stage the most beautiful girl in the world arrived.

 

Blond haired blue eyed and a smile that illuminated the firmament. Off a Russian cargo boat, I headed over to introduce myself and found my way immediately blocked by two huge Russian sailors, unsmiling and unappeasable. The girl and I shared a smile but it went no further. It was only later I discovered the Russians and Poles, products of the great proletarian experiment were only allowed ashore in tightly corralled groups supervised by a political officer… lest they be polluted by the very thing I had in mind. U.S. Dollars and a free will being the unstated enemy. 

 

The Barbadian crew never joined these runs ashore, saving their money and buying piles of white goods and TV’s in the States. We all flew to New York to join the ship. And returned home from New York after two round voyages which took in most East coast American ports, Panama, New Zealand and Australia. A total of six to nine months. We worked seven days a week with afternoons off on Saturday and Sunday, workload permitting.

I did wonder upon the pathology of what “home” actually represented when ones home was a steel box for nine months. The ramifications on relationships both on and off the ship. It was said we were “Board of Trade” acquaintances forming close friendships with people you may never see again as we were distributed to other ships after each tour of duty. What represented friendships? Where did our lives lead with such constant uncertainty of relationship? 

 

Never the less we slowly plodded our way around the harbour smothered by diesel fumes and increasing concern as the boat became heavily loaded by its mass of seagoing humanity, we eventually found ourselves at a rustic wooden pier. And so discharged to the delights of Panama itself! Never saw the blond beauty again. 

 

Panama in the seventies and eighties was a place where anything went. It was awash with marijuana and Pablo Escobars cocaine with a huge red light district and a lot of slums. There was great wealth staring great poverty in the face and ignoring it!

Most of us were drawn to the sleazy side of the city. A real mix of the worlds detritus. Bars run by ex seamen from all over the world, we were pulled to the “Blue Star” bar owned by an ex seaman from our company who made us very welcome. He’d married a local girl he’d met in one of the bars and set up the Blue Star Bar. Some of us knew him from previous visits. 

The red light district was a run down barrio of bar after bar with broken streets and lost souls that it was easy to crash and burn on. It covered maybe a square mile and was heaven and hell depending upon state of mind and willingness to embrace in its commitments.

No one went anywhere alone if they could help it as muggings and stabbings were common even with machine gun toting federalistas wandering the streets. There was death on these streets and I loved it!

 

Two years later was walking alone in St Christobal and a young lad stepped out to my front and said “give me your money”. His accent was Spanish, tinged with American, probably learned from talks with American soldiers. He held a knife, broad, looked like a kitchen knife. I looked back in his eyes and said “fuck off I’m broke”. I had $200 U.S. But I wasn’t giving him it. He looked surprised, a little lost and maybe a little embarrassed. We stood in deadlock for a short time maybe seconds maybe minutes then he just turned and walked away. I felt an amazing rush and smiled all the way to my hotel.

 

The bar was a shambling mix of the overly gaudy and the downright run down. Girls were employed to work as whores in the back rooms and draw custom into the bar. Scantily clad and wearing the worn look of someone who’s seen a bit to much of life and use/abuse. Some were from Columbia were it was common practice for the girls from poor families to go abroad and work the bars to earn enough to make a dowery before marriage. Thus increasing their prospects of snaring a better husband at home. They trafficked themselves out of poverty.

 

I have always been drawn by the outside of society, its underbelly, and felt very at home. Casual relationships made real by the shortness of time. Lost loves disappearing in a heartbeat of a mindless carefree staring of semi drink blind eyes and shortness of breath. 

I also had girls/women in New Zealand, Australia and the States who fulfilled the role of temporary girlfriend. Meals out and dancing, music and sex, understood relationships with a balance mutually agreed. Guiltless and guileless. No mindless, breathless motions performed in back rooms with rotten history. Usually intelligent women, hopefully with a love for literature and art. My life started at eighteen when I discovered Philosophy and literature, the Beat generation came first… Ginsberg's “Howl” Then Camus and Jean Genet. Graham Green, Britain's greatest living author at the time. Metaphysics, existentialism and Jack Kerouac “On The Road” mixed with the blues, Robert Johnson selling his soul at the crossroads. Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Neil Young. Punk rock followed. I sold my soul to Joe Strummer and Patti Smith. 

 

The bar smelled of smoke, staleness and dry, worn, untreated wood, from which it was mostly constructed. I loved it for its reality and poverty and fight. The wooden floor bore scars of years of abuse, knots standing proud of carelessly tampered planks with nails bent and crookedly placed as temporary repairs revealed the paucity of the bars existence. The walls were painted badly in scenes of tropical islands, blue water, sand and palm trees. The paint was pealing.

There was no “Banksy” here.

The implication of sex was overwhelming as was the need to drink, to be a part of its beauty and ugliness. I gave myself willingly to all of it. Music came from a beat up cassette player behind the bar and played all types of music, some Spanish some modern, whatever was at hand. Sometimes returning punters brought music and left it as favour to the owner a classic scouser called “fast Eddie”. 

Sometimes we danced and pranced to god knows what. Sometimes with the girls who ground their bodies against us in parody of sexual acts. The atmosphere was heavy with humidity and illicit temptation. I felt at home immediately and loved being awash in the filth and falsehoods promised by the emotion crushing reality. I felt safe. It epitomised how the outrageously abnormal can so quickly become the norm. 

We took seats worn and battered by a thousand others who had trod these broken paths. Nothing was linear, all was worn into shapes by body contact and violence. It was beautiful at the same time as showing life's pointless attempts at direction. 

 

The girls circulated offering fornication and blow jobs, drinks and marijuana, cocaine and kisses. Panama was awash with coke from the Colombian cartels in those days, my drug of choice. Mountains of snow in all that heat! It was pure, not yet arriving in the hands of those who would dilute it with milk powder, or whatever else to fatten profits. Marijuana was too obvious and the risk of stigma from straight backed hypocritical ship mates too easy. Neither did I want my senses dulled by the herb.

Plus I could take coke feel good and still drink. The girls provided all, perching on our laps and whispering their wares into our ears like sirens of the underworld. Each one exciting like a new first date. Lots of peroxide blonds, tight shorts and short skirts. Breasts pushed up and out. Or sometimes just out. A tempting caress. “You wanna go fuck”? “Twenty dollars and I’ll give you a good suck”.

I enjoyed the attention but never went “out back”. Happy to pay for drinks and drugs, both cheap, and feel the closeness of the company on my lap, I liked to talk… hear their stories until they became bored or had to circulate to a new pair of knees to perch on and whisper words of love and desperation. 

They after all had a living to make.

If you moved a girl on yourself without good reason to allow another to assume her place the girls joined both hands and mimed flapping motions whilst saying “you butterfly”. This wasn’t a good thing and represented bad form. So obviously it was important to make that first choice wisely. Some of the girls aged between eighteen and thirty were girlish in presentation, giggly and some very beautiful.

All men can be actors, all locations a stage. The real and the unreal blurred as we reinvented ourselves to suit the location.

 

I picture Hemingway sat in the corner alone with a shotgun and a beard laughing with us drinking jack neat and writing notes, Joe Strummer and the Clash played a soundtrack in my head. 

 

We had young lads with us, cadets in training to become officers. One, Charles, was a confirmed Catholic. His father, something important in his local church. He was an innocent to all around him. I watched as he slowly bartered his soul for cheap pleasures. I wandered if he knew that he had lost. If he knew it was irredeemable or if he believed absolution could come later? I knew it never would. His world was coloured by darkness and obscene light now. 17 years old, we should have saved him but we laughed at his loss as the girls calling him “cherry boy” took him “out back” for a free bee fuck. We cheered his downfall. I met him again four years later, drunk and high talking sex and debauchery. I felt guilt but tempered it with the knowledge if it wasn’t us it would have been others in some other desperate place. 

 

I watched as other men/boys went into small, smelly back rooms containing a mattress and a chair. No showers here and transactions were mean and ultimately desperate. I had no need here. I couldn’t conceive of any beauty in the mechanics of the sexual acts without some kind of love to bind. Mental love could be enough, the mind a sensual organ. It was little different to masturbation. At least a temporary love would have made me see some worth. But I could see none. This wasn’t a place of dreams. Watching the return of the girls, all smiles at the U.S. Dollar transactions I could only see and sense false satisfaction upon the visage of recent visitors. Almost an embarrassment. I was happy with cocaine and rum alongside my voyeuristic interest in shattered hopes. Some attacked calling me gay and a coward, but I laughed these muggings off with ease and confidence. Strangely I felt no shame or guilt, no sense of exploitation. The girls looked and acted happy. Was I naive? They were also steeped in god and cheap imitation perfume, all wore crucifix and often crossed themselves, an act incongruous? Or did it ward off evil spirits of men who saw only meat? I had and have no god, but saw the devotion in others and sometimes envied it.

I loved the desolation. Revelled in the debauchery. Inhaling it all. Dreading its end. 

 

There were two drinks, beer and rum. Occasionally whisky, labeled Johnny Walker but in reality rebottled cheap shit from some back street booze entrepreneur. I stuck to white rum. The front of the bar had holes kicked into it by anger or revery or both. Everywhere swathed in smoke of all kinds. The air conditioner was broken. So still we sweated in the humid closeness of the bar.

 

At some stage of an eight to twelve hour drinking binge one of two things happen. You crash and burn or as happened to me my mind was crushed, and crushed some more, and still crushed until it became as hard and sharp as a diamond. All is clarity, even the incomprehensible makes some sense. The executioners face is always hidden. But… I could see the ones with blood in their eyes who were doomed to permanently follow this path until their corpse lay rotting in the gutter. Life to dust in a bottle.

 

As Blue Star officers in “The Blue Star Bar” we received preferential treatment from Fast Eddie, a fifty something ex steward who had married a local whore and settled down into the business with ease. He was both happy and sad, alternating between laughter and shared reminiscence and the struggle of life, inevitable to his chosen trade. Behind the bar was a silver revolver with wooden handles and a baseball bat.

In a corner were British seamen from other ships. They angered me singing sea shanties romanticising the reality of our hard sometimes dirty trade. I approached and told them to shut the fuck up such was my grasp of the existentialist absurdity of our chosen existence. Drunken, high, bravado but heartily and freely given sentiment. I really didn’t care. 

 

Take yer shanties and shove em.

Take yer white foam flying.

Take yer fair winds blowing.

Take yer furrows following fucking freely.

And shove em.

 

Yer songs about masts and sails

and rolling, rollicking singing and fun in gail’s.

Phoney fallacious frigging fantasy folklore.

Unreal figures dancing and prancing.

Shove em. 

 

The truth is filth and fury

lacking in glory longest days worked,

alcohol, drugs and syphilis.

Rampant masturbation, 

And loveless connotation,

So take your romantic notions

and fuck em.

 

Ive lost more shipmates to alcohol

then to vagaries of romance.

Ive seen more marriages broken

kids from families merely token.

So take your ideas and shove em. 

 

Ive been in hurricanes and ferocious seas

and people spew and break their bones.

Others drown there aint no Davey Jones.

There aint no dancing and tunes on the fiddle

Young lad can’t abide 

so lonely commits suicide.

Men going to war for broken means

getting killed for monies dreams.

Your romancing bollox is just a disease.

 

Ships owned by uncaring twats.

And when your castaway….

it aint on a pacific island 

with a new chum called Friday,

its being put on the dole to rot without pay.

So take your unrealities and shove em.

 

Ive sailed every sea and ocean

And I’ve never seen the emotion

of  jolly shanties and rolling breakers.

Ive seen wales and albatross 

and freezing icebergs. 

But none of that is worth a lump

When yer mates arms ripped off in a pump.

 

Ive worked in engine rooms 

Where great machines trade.

At 45 degrees of the Centigrade. 

And boilers with steam

Where I heard my mates scream

as burns covered their bodies.

So take yer weird notions noddy. 

 

Sleepless nights in heavy weather

working hard to keep it together.

Exhausts lagged with asbestosis 

Cleaning chemicals to cause sarcomas

and cheap booze to bring cirrhosis.

With isolation to promote psychosis

Ive seen all that and you can 

shanty for shit and shove it. 

 

I received a torrent of abuse back and named killjoy yet I refuse intimidation. My own shipmates bring me away, George telling me to sit down and lighten up. I was already light and perfectly happy, comfortable with my statement. But I did return to my own shipmates, with no guilt or apology. The party went on.

 

People came and went. U.S. Soldiers stationed in Panama occasionally stopping by, the girls loved this as they shamelessly doubled their prices for the dollar rich Americans. Leaping off cheap British laps and heading for the pot of gold. So the drinking carried on. Lots of laughter, and some introspection. Seafarers on long trips are often subject to introspection. Tinged with sadness and a sense of loss. We were going away for up-to nine months in those days. Which leaves lots of time to think and doesn’t suit everyone. Many of the men visiting the back rooms with the girls had relationships at home which surprised but didn’t distress me. Their choice, right or wrong.

The drinking was steady and relentless. No one was spared and people fell by the wayside vomiting or falling asleep only to awake and continue with the revery. George sat and oversaw the goings on, both paternal and friendly but careful not to overstep an undrawn line between him as ships Engine Room overlord and comrade. No matter how much he drank he was able to do this. Partly I expect because of our inherent respect for the man. He had innate stature.

 

Eight hours was all we had, and it passed too quickly. Later to seem a blur. Planned shopping left undone for the sake of drink and licentious company. Yet really “company” remained us, we, the lads. I don’t know if we’d escaped at all the confines of the ship. We’d just been transported to a different setting. 

The leaving took ten minutes of handshakes, hugs and last minute gropes. The girls trying to squeeze that last dollar from our pockets before we left. The owner shaking hands and throwing arms around new found temporary comrades. I thought I detected a wishfulness in his demeanour, they say the sea never really leaves you. Perhaps he pondered his days of docking and camaraderie wistful and tinged with sadness.

 

Walking the broken streets was a messy business. Some fell and splashed into the dust and broken paving. My arm around the junior engineers arm to steady him, or me, we dodged holes and peered into bars we had missed. They all looked the same yet were different. The same girls, scars and antipathy coloured by false promises of bon homie and the blind company of false love. 

 

Somehow, I never know how, we returned to the jetty and waited for the boat to leave. We sat quietly waiting, slowly sobering, always saddened by the end of a rare run ashore. Slowly the boat amassed passengers, I looked for my blue eyed blond and saw no sign. Foolish. 

We cast off as a Scandinavian seaman vomited over the side. There were some barely able to walk, others showing little sign of drink. Some had obviously been shopping and not visited the delights of the barrio, the slum area as we had. One sporting a Panama hat! I wandered how he’d look back in his German homeland wearing it?

The boat was awash with laughter, regret and I’m sure not a little guilt hovering like a shadow over those whose infidelities would scar their minds in the times to come.

We sat together, never leaving a shipmate alone was the rule and we slowly lightened up, laughter at our antics gradually regaining prominence in our minds. Stories already begin to interweave tall tails with the reality. Exploits to recall over and over across the bar at sea.

I felt lost returning to my cabin and uniform with its gold stripes and medal ribbons, my steward who cleaned and ironed for me, the other world. 

 

The stories we would tell already awash in our psyche.

All were now exhausted. The work and drink, lack of sleep finally taking its toll. And breathing the exhaust fumes again we wound our way back “home” for thats what it was to us and would remain so for the next six months. These stories would sustain us in the isolation of long trips and more alcohol for now and years to come. 

Camus said…“The world evades us because it becomes itself again. That stage scenery masked by habit becomes what it is. It withdraws at a distance from us.” So true.