There was 20 or so of us who came to NY to open up my employer's NY bunker operations, 15ish or so years ago. Not a one of us LIKED New York, mind. But a little pay bump, an opportunity to be out from under the thumbs of the Maritrans Mafia, the office staff who came over en masse from a failed company and treated anyone not from their bankrupt employer's rolls as, if not second class than... with the same attention a parent with a favorite child pays to their other children. NY was, lol, a new frontier. And, like wine, the surviving Maritrans Mafia mellowed as age and time scythed through their numbers until something approaching parity... distance making the heart grow fonder, maybe.
The core group of tankermen is down to just a half dozen of us.
Seperately, the 4 tugboats who came with us have their own Originals, but crewing on tugs is transitory, a few years on any one tug being normal, just as it is with tankermen. The skillset required to be a ports of NY/NJ tugboat operator is arguably among the most challenging in the US, so people come and go, but usually not too far.
... and don't tell any of the tug guys I said nice things. The ego on many of them is shocking, just shocking, considering that some of them are savants; retards with neurotic cognitively dissonant God Complex personalities, like you'd see on a surgeon, but one living with a micropenis...all wrapped up in a person whose mouth hangs open when they have to think.
Some, not all. Some are also genuinely great guys, and smart AF. Some are merely good guys. But maritime work is a meritocracy, and some damn good sailors are just bad human beings.
I'm aware that I'm a hypocrite to judge, which is why after losing 30ish or so IQ points between 30 years of fuel vapors and mental atrophy, I don't care. I know I'm an obstinate midwit now.
Well, point of all that digression is that one of our best tug deckhands Mike, a cheerful athletic guy that many of us originals truly liked, and who was perhaps the most prolific trainer of GOOD deckhands (and it takes time and effort to make a deckhand trainee into a good deckhand) passed away at his galley table down in Philly, where he transferred last year to be closer to his home in rural MD.
I guess he sat down at the galley table, it being a quiet evening, and him saying he wasn't feeling great, and when the captain came down to the galley for coffee a little later, he was gone.
Peaceful, apparently, but still a dick punch. Mike was a genuinely good guy, very positive and always trying to lift up the people around him. Single, a confirmed bachelor, but social and gregarious at home and at work, he was 62, coached lacrosse, and played on an adult league himself.
62 is my partner B's age. He and Mike got along especially well.
Christ, it's never the assholes who drop off early, is it?
Now, tugboaters and tankerman share a deep and abiding affection for the sound of their own voices, so we've all been talking about Mike this week as we come and go. 62 is young to go. Not absurdly young, but still. I'm a bit young yet at 51 to be classed into old fartdom, but it's not the years so much as the years at sea. Us old farts are shook.
There's a split between the younger and older mariners. Was it a good passing, inasmuch as any untimely death can be? To us older guys, it seems the idea of having a quick kip sitting down at the galley table to pass the time when you're feeling peaky, and not waking up, well, that seems an OK way to go. To the younger guys, dying at work is horrible regardless.
Perhaps it's a matter of how much in your mind you define yourself as a mariner, I dunno. Generally among the older sailors you don't mind the work; it's familiar, a living; it's what you do and to a point it's who you are: when home you talk different, wear shoes, lay in the dark listening to nothing but your tinnitis, and by day you try to force in enough effort to both see to your obligations and enjoy yourself too, if there's time. For that reason, Jack ashore, at least among my peers, is a little standoffish by virtue of unfamiliarity as to our surroundings, until you pour some booze into him or the tension of not being in the confined uncomfortsble environment he's habituated to by virtue of time finally wears off, at which point overindulgence in some form is the rule, not the exception.
To the young, the work is what you do until you can get back home. We all start that way. To the experienced, being home sets you right, but going back to work isn't funereal, merely sobering, in a spiritual sense. And often literal.
I'm one of the most well-married people I know. My marriage defines me in most ways...and part of that admittedly has always been partially attributable to the absences. My wife and I, when we're together, are still passionate like newlyweds, despite middle age. We still routinely gross my kid out, in an innocent way, if he's quiet and comes into the kitchen and finds us kissing like two silly teenagers... my time home, severly limited, is for family, for celebrating, hopefully, and for support.
My wife will always be nonplussed when friends and associates, especially other Brazilian women (who can be catty AF), will say they're jealous of having a husband who's gone more than half the time, as being alone half the time is a weight on her shoulders that is NEVER not brutal. I mean, shitty day, upsetting news, illness, car accident whatever, it's on her. My kid as a teen- that was on her too, easygoing as he is, he wasn't always a jewel. But however tough it is, it's also good, and we like it. It suits our personalities... and if it weren't for Inappropriately Hot Foreign Wife, I'd... well, I'd be like Mike. And that makes me sad just to write.
bI feel bad, thinking about such a good dude, with just us assholes out here, his friends and shipmates, to mourn him. Just us, to mark his passing.
I am grateful to God Almighty for my life, and am pretty good about remembering to say and mark my gratitude as I can.
It sucks Mike's gone, man.
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